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Roderick

Feminism

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The was the most difficult of the Feminist Frequency episodes for me to watch. I know intellectually that women are casually treated like sex objects in basically all media, but since I'm able to select what I watch/read/play, I've been able to avoid a lot of the more gratuitous examples of this over the years and only ever hear about it secondhand. The clips in this video absolutely astonished me, because it's been so long since I've willingly exposed myself to this kind of thing. I had no idea that so many modern games have topless women as set decoration. It was so disheartening for me to see scene after scene of awkwardly rendered women fondling themselves in front of the camera. The worst though were any of the clips of NPC sex workers propositioning the player character. There's nothing more unsexy about a dead-eyed game woman flatly offering to sleep with you (for a reduced price player, because you're so much more handsome than her usual clients!!). And the Red Dead Redemption "Dastardly" achievement actually made me feel sick to see.  

 

My experience with games is so atypical and I'm grateful for that. It saves me from having my opinion on the value of games be poisoned by this utter trash.

 

Yeah, I made it through about 10 minutes before it became too much for me.

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I feel like talking about this kind of thing is veering into 'climate change' or 'fossil fuels' territory, the topic is so huge and pervasive that you can keep discussing it (see 174-page count) but the big companies that peddle murder simulators to the masses don't seem to really care much about it. It's like Argobot says, I've grown out of it and am starting to actively dislike and avoid those kind of games, not being a giddy teenager anymore and all, so I don't like to engage in discussions like this because in my experience the medium of games is so much broader, and that's hard to communicate to someone who doesn't have that experience.

 

I'm not saying let's forget about it, since obviously if the opinion of the masses is eventually swayed the game developers will have to obey them and start thinking about smarter better games, but I don't see a huge difference that I can make personally, so I figure it's better to just carry on and make good non-gender-biased games myself and let the heavyweights fight over tits and guns.

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The obvious answer to that argument is that if everyone thinks that way, The Man will never notice that the percentage of the general population who is bothered by this stuff is rising.

 

Ideally, everyone would convey their reaction, positive or negative, to public statements (artistic, political or otherwise) as directly as possible to those making them, in a civilised (I'm trying not to preclude emotion) and cogent manner.

 

I'm as guilty of this as anyone, partly through being English and not wanting to make a fuss, partly through not being confident that my opinions and awareness are strong enough to carry an argument through, and partly laziness. Also, you know, the internet. Brrr.

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So the latest Tropes vs Women is a straight up gut punch.  I'm kinda shocked at the level of misogyny that is empowered in games that I have quite enjoyed, and in some cases haven't even been aware of the bullshit that could be done in game. 

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As with a lot of campaigns that evolve from twitter sprees, I agree with what the goal here is in theory, but I have a lot of problems with its implementation. Too often it feels like the solution is focusing on the end result of a much larger, much more complicated problem. Things like this create a lot of noise, but accomplish little and end up crowding out actual valuable conversations on these issues (because complicated issues require complicated responses that just don't fit in with twitter culture). This site also has a weird twinge of self-promotion and self-congratulation that I do not enjoy.

 

Personally, I feel that the Idle Thumbs podcast has demonstrated numerous times that they have a very thoughtful response to a lot of these issues and I don't believe that they need to prove anything by participating in something like this. The conversational format of the podcast would make any transparent nods to diversity fairly awkward if the guest didn't mesh well everyone else. That's why Danielle works so well as a guest; her personality lends itself well to the Idle Thumbs structure. 

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I am not entirely sure what the actual valuable conversation is that's being crowded out here. I don't think the existence of this campaign is making it particularly difficult to talk about entrenched sexism here, for instance, and I see a few names on the list that will force action (Anthony Burch, for instance, will force basically any future Borderlands panels to have women, which means they'll need to have influential women at Gearbox, which hopefully means we won't get another Duke Nukem game). But the idea of this pledge (which isn't a new idea by any means) is that it forces the people booking panels to evaluate their process for picking people to be on panels, and the lack of diversity amongst people they're comfortable with. Basically, this reaction. (Just noticed that the same person here seemed to trigger both Klepek's reaction and this pledge.) Increasing the visibility of women (and minority cultural backgrounds) working in the game industry and having opinions also has a measurable effect on future representation (the ol' Lt. Uhura effect), so it's worthwhile as a goal in and of itself.

 

Making a transparent nod to token diversity isn't particularly great, but then that opens the question of why the pool of people a panel organiser or podcast host knows that might have a good rapport (a result of familiarity more than anything else) is so gender-skewed. As Klepek and the Thumbs and Steve with Tone Control have proved, you can be firmly in favour of equal representation and still drop the ball, because when it comes to people you actually know it's still mostly people who look like you. It can be painful to acknowledge that latent sexism in your own thinking because we tend to think of sexists as other, bad people instead of basically everyone, including everyone in this thread.

 

I'm also reminded of John Scalzi's similar pledge a few years ago to not go to cons that don't have harrassment policies, because he was a successful sci-fi author at that point and could afford to be choosy. I think there's inherently going to be a whiff of egotism around these kinds of pledges because the whole point of them is for people with privilege to throw their weight around. (That said I'm looking at that list and there's very little chance anyone's inviting Aaron Diaz onto a video game panel. There's a few people on there that I know might not seem like they go on panels, but do, like Nich Maragos.)

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I can't tell if you're making the argument that idle thumbs "dropped the ball" by being hosted by males.

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I think there's inherently going to be a whiff of egotism around these kinds of pledges because the whole point of them is for people with privilege to throw their weight around. (That said I'm looking at that list and there's very little chance anyone's inviting Aaron Diaz onto a video game panel. There's a few people on there that I know might not seem like they go on panels, but do, like Nich Maragos.)

 

That's one of my problems with this whole thing. It has a very "look at me" attitude with nothing to back it up with.

 

The problem here is that there just aren't enough women in prominent games positions and that's what needs changing. Focusing on panels is kind of like focusing on the last part of the problem. Yes, I do agree that organizers should strive to be more inclusive and yes I do realize that there are already a number of talented women who deserve recognition for their work, but I also realize that at times there just might not be enough women available for organizers or podcasters or whoever to pull from. The progression for changing culture won't be changing panels leading to more women working at games studios; it'll be the exact opposite.

 

And as an aside: Part of my real life job was organizing a week-long training program designed to encourage young women to seek out leadership positions. I am a white woman and so was the majority of our organizing staff. We agonized over finding a diversity of speakers (women in leadership positions) and it was struggle. Sometimes that was because as white women, our network of talented people to pull from was predominantly white, and sometimes it was because it was honestly difficult to find minority women in those kinds of positions. That's sad and frustrating, but we did our best to be as diverse as possible and were fairly successful. But having gone through this exact process so recently, I can greatly sympathize with organizers who experience a similar frustration. Even when you have the best intentions, sometimes you won't be able to successfully do all that you can to promote better representation.

 

The heartening part of this story is that from the applicant pool of young women who applied to the program, we had absolutely no problem in selecting a diverse group. There was a sizable number of talented young women of color who applied and participated. Seeing that, seeing a large number of amazing young women from different backgrounds made me so hopeful that the next few generations will have a shift in the demographics of women leaders so that the idea of struggling to bring in more diversity to your events won't even exist.

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I can't tell if you're making the argument that idle thumbs "dropped the ball" by being hosted by males.

 

I don't think Merus is making that argument. I think he might possibly be making the argument that Idle Thumbs took over a hundred episodes and almost five years to have a female guest who wasn't an interviewee, and the shitty part about an institutionalized culture of sexism is that I didn't even realize it until I had to read his comment again to respond to yours.

 

There's no blame in this, but it is a weird thing that we should all work on.

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Idle Thumbs also isn't a panel or something that has guests every week or anything like that. The point behind initiatives like this is to keep the "old boy's network" from just inviting a bunch of dude friends to everything and reinforcing the sorts of trends in the industry that keep women out of the spotlight at places like GDC and PAX. Idle Thumbs doesn't even put people in the spotlight in the first place. Tone Control, meanwhile, goes out there and seeks out developers to interview, so it's definitely an issue when it just so happens to only seek out dudes, ever, at all.

Speaking as someone in an industry that is both quite sexist and also working to fix that, I can say I totally support the "I won't appear on any male only panels" thing - lots of people in my industry are doing it and the concerted effort to get women into conferences and so on is definitely helping. I think the gaming industry definitely needs to be aware of this thing too. The idea that it's too hard to find women to be on video game panels strikes me as a little unlikely - surely there are some women out there you can find to talk about any given thing. I've only been interviewing women for my "Subjective Reviewer of the Month" thing on Objective Game Reviews and although it hasn't been quite as easy as it would be if I were interviewing dudes, it's not like it's been impossible.

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I can't tell if you're making the argument that idle thumbs "dropped the ball" by being hosted by males.

 

I could probably make that argument, but Idle Thumbs has a very long history that's important to the podcast network it became. The gender bias in the heyday of adventure game sites was far more pronounced, and the idea that games had any kind of social responsibility was a laughable idea. Expecting Idle Thumbs to be formed according to the standards of today is not an argument I'm going to make!

 

The guest list, though, is pretty much a sausage fest (I'm not counting the snippet we heard during the second death of the podcast with Whitney Hills, nor am I counting people involved with the Idle Thumbs news site as guests, but I am counting future hosts who were introduced first as guests):

  • Brad Shoemaker
  • Chuck Jordan
  • JP LeBreton
  • Max Schaefer
  • Erich Schaefer
  • Mac Walters
  • Chet Faliszek
  • Ron Gilbert
  • Sean Vanaman
  • Christina Norman
  • Tom Francis
  • Derek Yu
  • Bennett Foddy, who never gets interviewed about Cut Copy for some reason
  • Kirk Hamilton
  • Evan Lahti
  • Olly Moss
  • Shawn Elliott
  • Ryan Davis
  • Danielle Riendeau
  • Jeff Green
  • Zack Johnson
  • Nels Andersen
  • Greg Kasavin
  • Will Smith

All of these people are friends, people who you get along with, and people you want to cast a pod with for an hour, and that is fine! Having friends is not the problem here.

 

The Idle Thumbs podcast network is also a good example of what I'm talking about. We have Idle Thumbs/the Book Cast, TMA, Dota Today, Terminal 7 and Tone Control. All of the hosts of these shows are people you can vouch for.

 

Here's the problem: why are these people the people you can vouch for, that you made friends with? If you were making friends entirely randomly, you'd expect them to resemble the population they were drawn from: half men, half women (one quarter Chinese). That's not what's happening here; without thinking about it, or intending to, you've got a list of friends that mostly looks like you, instead of a list of friends drawn from the population of people who are cool people. Cool people who do not look like you were excluded without you even meaning to.

 

I want to reiterate that this isn't an attack or an accusation. It is a systemic problem.

The problem here is that there just aren't enough women in prominent games positions and that's what needs changing.

That is a problem, but I disagree that it's so bad that it's not achievable to have a majority of panels with at least one woman on them. Part of getting women in prominent game positions is making the positions they're already in prominent; forcing there to be room for them has this kind of effect.

Regarding your example about the conference: the distress you felt that you felt obligated to have more representation but you didn't know anyone is the point of the exercise, as it's supposed to highlight that you're smart and aware of this kind of thing but there's a lack of diversity in the professional circles you're drawing from. It's trying to force the problem upstream, because it's fighting against a problem that's made up of a thousand perfectly reasonable decisions.

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Official Nintendo Magazine UK made a preview writeup criticizing Senran Kagura Burst 2 for its fanservice. XSeed's sales production coordinator responds in the most tasteful way possible.

 

 

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Official Nintendo Magazine UK made a preview writeup criticizing Senran Kagura Burst 2 for its fanservice. XSeed's sales production coordinator responds in the most tasteful way possible.

 

It would do any public-facing company a lot of good to have a fifteen-minute delay imposed between any Twitter or Facebook posts. It would help keep people from getting stuck in a rage-post feedback loop.

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That wasn't much of an article, so I can understand why some might be upset.

 

On the other hand, that was a hell of a response and I can understand why everyone would be upset.

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Does anyone mind explaining how the term "fanservice" is being used here?  I don't follow that sort of media, so I'm unfamiliar with the term.

 

 

Hatsuu on the game's boobs and the clothes tearing off, and why that's not offensive.. http://hatsuu.tumblr.com/post/57682499509/at-first-i-thought-senran-kagura-burst-seemed-really

This is part of the research, btw, he links in response to the review.

 

soft-quotes:

 

You can rest assured, women aren't put in compromising sexual positions!!!!!  Their restraint is pretty incredible, right?  You know who's a cool guy?  Takaki-san, the producer.  He's a self-proclaimed pervert, but unlike most perverts, he has an incredible attention to detail, and needs to control every position the women are in.  I admire his hard work and focus.  Let me tell you about the dressing rooms.  You can make their boobs jiggle, but, like, they're not naked, geez.

 

I am barfing all of my lunch on everything.

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