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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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wow you really got a lot out of these posts that no one said

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wow you really got a lot out of these posts that no one said

 

Maybe I did overreact a bit to these two

 

Japan's definitely lagging behind on the progressive metric, whatever that might be.

 

As I said in IRC: I, for one, frequently fondle the breasts of my action figures. *horf*

 

 

You know what's sad? The fact that Quiet actually looks or might actually be an adult is kinda progressive by Japanese game standard's now.

 

I can't even remember the last time I saw a game with an adult woman from Japan.... :^/

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I believe what I said to be 100% true.

 

But also no one said any of this

 

Yep, it gets uncomfortably 'nationality-bashy'.  We went from 'some japanese developers' to "yeah Japan is mad sexist lol look at that regressive culture"... like the fuck, when do 'some developers' represent entire culture in one batch like that guys, come on.  Feel free to point out specifics like feelthedarkness did but let's dial it back on "lol Japan" bits.

 

I mean I know you've seen my posts in the anime thread. I've been playing Japanese games since I was three years old. I lived in Japan for six months. I know more about Japan than any other country besides America. I like Japan a lot. I would live there if I could justify it without having to work in the typical Japanese work environment.

 

None of that means I can't criticize.

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Sorry, that post just really read like 'lol Japan' to me cause there was zero specificity in regards to 'progressive metric' so I just assumed it to be snarky comment on how they are inferior, and Tanukitsune's post also just gave me that vibe really strongly because it implies that it's getting hard to find adult women featured in Japanese gaming industry, which just reeked of pedophilia accusation.

 

 

I mean I know you've seen my posts in the anime thread. I've been playing Japanese games since I was three years old. I lived in Japan for six months. I know more about Japan than any other country besides America. I like Japan a lot. I would live there if I could justify it without having to work in the typical Japanese work environment.

 

None of that means I can't criticize.

 

Yes I have and that's why I suggested 'dialing back' and without naming names cause I would agree that there are some problematic industry wide practices in Japan that very well deserve criticism... but just not in overtly broad form of addressing 'Japan' as a whole with very little specifics cause then it's barely a criticism, and getting closer to making fun of nation as a whole.

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It is a snarky comment because I am a snarky person.

 

And Tanu's post, while maybe misguided or misspoken, comes from a very real place. Japanese geek culture has a large problem with sexualizing young girls, between loli and siscon and what have you. And it's not like it's a niche thing. It shows up in all kinds of places.

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It is a snarky comment because I am a snarky person.

 

And Tanu's post, while maybe misguided or misspoken, comes from a very real place. Japanese geek culture has a large problem with sexualizing young girls, between loli and siscon and what have you. And it's not like it's a niche thing. It shows up in all kinds of places.

 

Oh yes there is wider 'development' of such market in that industry.  I wish it was phrased as such, just not in a way that strongly implies that it's the only noteworthy feature of the said industry.

 

And I love you Twig for all of your snark.  It just worried me this instant that it was perhaps getting too 'bashy' cause of really broad target.  I probably did overreact but hope that you now see where I am coming from and why I read those as such.

 

<3

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It's all good! No harm done. Sorry for the awkwardness.

 

I don't want to speak for Tanu, but I think it's safe to say he never meant it to be offensive, either.

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Yeah, I didn't mean to offend Japanese culture at all, but has anybody here about Japan's "Christmas Cake Syndrome", a very real thing?

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I love Christmas Cake*, because nobody ever gets it until you explain the metaphor.

An unmarried woman in her late 20s is called a "Christmas Cake"

Because nobody wants one after the 25th.

 

 

*From a wordplay perspective. The concept itself, of course, is very problematic.

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Yeah, I didn't mean to offend Japanese culture at all, but has anybody here about Japan's "Christmas Cake Syndrome", a very real thing?

 

Yeah, like CLWheeljack, I love it from a wordplay perspective, and I also generally like it in anime, where it's almost never played entirely straight, but it's an awful thing to label a woman. Still, the same concept is definitely present in Western cultures, but like many examples of "extreme" Japanese bigotry, it mostly boils down to them having a specific word or phrase for it that can more easily be called out than a media culture that starts ignoring women in their late twenties unless they're willing to transition to "mother" and/or "businesswoman" roles.

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Brianna Wu did some data-mining of /r/KotakuInAction and found what everyone expected her to find: it conforms almost perfectly to the 1/9/90 rule, just with a somewhat heavier burden than usual carried by a few creators and respondents. That means that #GamerGate's frequent gesturing at KIA's ever-growing subscription rate is meaningless to the point of irrelevancy, at least with regards to their claims of representing the majority (or even a substantial majority) of gamers. At the outside, roughly twelve hundred threads were created by six hundred users, most of them their only thread, and six thousand users responded sixty thousand times, again most fewer than five times. That's the face of #GamerGate, not the thirty four-thousand subscribers to the subreddit (many of which may be deleted accounts or the same user on different devices anyway).

 

Also, I learned that the Quinn/Gehr/Raytheon/Lifschitz congressional conspiracy from a couple months back was complete bunk, even if it was admitted the ridiculous chain of influence they were proposing. The CEO of Gehr and Quinn's boyfriend's father are two completely different people with the same name, which is apparently enough to power #GamerGate for a week anyway. Ethics!

 

I really hope you're right about them not playing it straight. 

 

They do. Off the top of my head, Kurosawa Minamo from Azumanga Daioh, Kuroi Nanako from Lucky Star, Katsuragi Misato and Akagi Ritsuko from Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Taeko from Only Yesterday are all explicitly called "Christmas Cakes" as a way of showing how those characters push up against and don't conform to the stereotype, which seems broadly considered as old-fashioned and outmodeled. The teachers from MahoromaticToradora!, and Puella Magi Madoka Magica are the only anime of which I can think wherein it's played straight, although they all have a disturbingly mean edge to them that points to some unresolved personal and/or cultural tension.

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This proves nothing as to the modes of digital representation. It doesn't prove that gamergate draws on a vast army of supporters, nor does it prove that at its core, it's only just a few agitators.

 

Numbers are irrelevant — the cultural suicide is there for us to watch. The withdrawal of e.g. academic interest is real. So are a heap of other destructive effects.

 

The interesting thing is of course the repeated statement that "gamergate is winning" (or recently even "gamergate may have already won"). I find that sentence so strange. If the perceived flaws in the industry have been ironed out by gamergate's heroic actions, why continue with the heroic actions? If gamergate is about protecting game designers from "SJW" influence, and if the "SJW" influence is a vast dystopian conspiracy, wouldn't we assume that "the price of freedom" principle applies and gamergate would have to continuously watch over their protected territory, never reveling in the security of total victory? Aren't we facing more of a communist scare scenario in the future, with fingers pointed at "the SJW" in gamergate's own ranks?

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This proves nothing as to the modes of digital representation. It doesn't prove that gamergate draws on a vast army of supporters, nor does it prove that at its core, it's only just a few agitators.

 

Numbers are irrelevant — the cultural suicide is there for us to watch. The withdrawal of e.g. academic interest is real. So are a heap of other destructive effects.

 

The point, at least for me, is how utterly unremarkable KIA is, in virtually every respect. Its levels of contribution and spread of discussions are the same as an online community focused on genealogy or model trains. There's literally nothing in the data to suggest that its segment of #GamerGate is unique in any way, let alone that it's a revolutionary social movement only just draped in the clothing of your average online community. Like you said, it's neither a vast army nor a band of brothers, just some people on the internet. Again, nothing particularly revelatory to most of us, but considering how often #GamerGate trots out its whole "we're secretly special" delusion time and again, it's worth having some data to back such common sense up. If KIA represents Gaming Militant, then so does every online community to its respective constituency, and of course the latter's not true at all.

 

The interesting thing is of course the repeated statement that "gamergate is winning" (or recently even "gamergate may have already won"). I find that sentence so strange. If the perceived flaws in the industry have been ironed out by gamergate's heroic actions, why continue with the heroic actions? If gamergate is about protecting game designers from "SJW" influence, and if the "SJW" influence is a vast dystopian conspiracy, wouldn't we assume that "the price of freedom" principle applies and gamergate would have to continuously watch over their protected territory, never reveling in the security of total victory? Aren't we facing more of a communist scare scenario in the future, with fingers pointed at "the SJW" in gamergate's own ranks?

 

We have always been at war with Eastasia, I'm guessing.

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I don't agree that academic interest is withdrawing, at all. It continues to grow and, if anything, Gamergate provides an amazing phenomenon worthy of study across fields.

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I don't agree that academic interest is withdrawing, at all. It continues to grow and, if anything, Gamergate provides an amazing phenomenon worthy of study across fields.

 

A merely destructive cultural phenomenon — scarcely related to the art and craft of games, prospects of storytelling, emotional impact, which are the more worthy field of study. :mellow:

 

What interest academia has in games today seems, to me, to be more of a prematurely archeological one. As in, the contemporary witness/historians of the cultural suicide. Not that it shouldn't be documented... :oldman:

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A merely destructive cultural phenomenon — scarcely related to the art and craft of games, prospects of storytelling, emotional impact, which are the more worthy field of study. :mellow:

 

What interest academia has in games today seems, to me, to be more of a prematurely archeological one. As in, the contemporary witness/historians of the cultural suicide. Not that it shouldn't be documented... :oldman:

 

I couldn't possibly argue that it's not destructive (and horrifying). It IS related, though, to the place games hold in our society, their value within popular culture, conceptions of relations between individuals and groups, representations of race, religion, language.... We have barely started utilizing video games as part of cultural study in the manner that we do film and music (themselves fields with acres of space to grow).

 

I'm an historian, and historians are only really beginning to get into games now. The archaeological interest in games has gotten a lot of press recently, but it's one facet of a wider spectrum. What work has been done has been led by people interested in narratology, the activity of play as an aspect of personal/social experience and so on. There's TONS left!

 

Anyway, none of this is to be snarky. I completely understand where you're coming from, and we had the conversation much earlier in this thread about GG allowing people that don't like games anyway to just write them off, but I do believe strongly the field is growing.

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It's hard to really gage the impact this might have on academia across different fields and different universities in different parts of the world. My impression, based both on my own experience and what I heard from other undergraduates, PhD candidates, teaching assistants etc. in various places, is that the frequently commented upon trend of the humanities ever so slowly opening up to games does exist. There's a certain reluctances still, because academic institutions are always reluctant to any kind of change, and the constant battle for an ever smaller pool of funds doesn't help, but on the other hand there's almost a certain level of prestige attached to dealing with something modern like that. Some professors are glad to have that kind of feather in their cap, even if they don't know enough about the subject itself to be of any further help, as is the case for one of my friends, who's both glad to get to write about what he likes and also struggles with having to write his thesis without any real guidance.

 

Maybe GG changed some of that, and maybe interest in games is decreasing in certain of the many, many areas of academia, but I'd still be hesitant to say that GG is the cause of that change in this case, because the movement is primarily an expression of cultural issues that were already there long before GG became a thing. And if the interest of certain institutions depends on them remaining ignorant of the shady parts of this culture, if they need to be tricked into accepting this as a field worthy of study, then it would seem that the issue isn't that GG made it any less worthy, but that it reveals whatever half-truths people have been telling to get them interested. On the flip side, me talking about GG actually made the local Gender Studies apartment very interested in video games, since they suddenly learned that how actively a feminist/anti-feminist discourse is being negotiated there at the moment.

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I agree, it's a double edged sword. There is stuff being written that isn't.... well it isn't all that good. We're in a weird space now, too, where you have a semi-academic field gathering on the edges of popular writing on video games. In theory this fits into open source journals and the like, but in practice there are plenty of pitfalls.

 

On the other hand... DIGITAL HUMANITIES is a nebulous idea showing up in academic CVs all over the country. I've never considered myself active in digital humanities but here I am, getting involved. Mainly because I like video games and want to talk about them, and I am a historian and so there are certain things I want to write about. Also, there are certain things I'm trained to write about. You need both of those things, to start.

 

I've had the same experience talking about GG in with scholars interested in popular culture. It's a fascinating manifestation of dynamics and conflicts we see in plenty of other areas of our society.

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So it's been month's since I've gone to KiA, but Gorm linking it above got me to browse around.  And, I mean, nothing there should surprise me anymore.  And yet...there's this thread about Black Widow action figures (because Actually, it's about...)

 

 

 

Maybe it has to do with the Avengers audience being primarily male, and the young males won't buy a female spy toy?


That's one part of it. The other part is that essentially every toy store and toy department is gender segregated. There is a girl's aisle and a boy's aisle, and the superhero action figures are always in the boy's aisle. Girls will typically never enter the boy aisle and vice versa.

 

The thing that feminists will never come to terms with is the reality that that small children are intensely committed to gender segregation. Children, especially children in the age group to which these toys are marketed, are in the middle of a process of identity formation. They are shaping their gender identity, and toy play is a part of that gender identity.

 

Boys play with toys as part of imagining and trying out male gender roles. They are imagining the men who they will eventually be. Thus, a boy want Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and the Hulk because these represent different concepts of masculinity that he can model and develop.

 

Black Widow is a girl, and thus implicitly an inappropriate gender role model. Her only purpose in toy play can be to model interactions with women -- but were talking about boys in the 8 to 12 age range, i.e. boys who are too young to have developed a serious interest in girls. And that's why toys of female characters are poor sellers amongst boys.

 

It also works in reverse largely. That's why Ken dolls are much harder to find than Barbie dolls, and 10+ different version of Barbie are released for every version of Ken. I've known many girls with Barbie collections, and never met one who had more than one Ken. I think girls are slightly more likely to buy a male doll only because girls are more likely to role-play romantic/family interactions with their dolls. Each of their Barbies has a unique personality, representing the many ways of being they can imagine for themselves, but they only need on Ken because to them, he is just a cipher -- a generic "man" to act against and react to.

 

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So it's been month's since I've gone to KiA, but Gorm linking it above got me to browse around.  And, I mean, nothing there should surprise me anymore.  And yet...there's this thread about Black Widow action figures (because Actually, it's about...)

 

God, that makes me intensely angry, because some of it is true, but only because kids are so heavily socialized to be that way. I don't have any children in my life, but the most cursory observation of those that friends and strangers have let me know that kids will play with and develop a preference for anything. It's only the policing of adults as individuals and as a society that makes them aware of what things are good toys, what things are bad toys, and what things aren't toys at all.

 

That whole section about aspirational play is total shit, though. What male gender role is being modeled when boys play with dinosaurs, eh?

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Been discussing this elsewhere. Hot Toys makes one ridiculously expensive Black Widow action figure after another, and sells like crazy. So here, the problem may not be that "boys don't buy BW action figures". The problem may be that acquiring the likeness rights for Mrs. Johannsen are significantly more expensive than those of Mr. Evans – we won't have to discuss who's in better business.

 

Just a theory though.

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The thing that feminists will never come to terms with is the reality that that small children are intensely committed to gender segregation. Children, especially children in the age group to which these toys are marketed, are in the middle of a process of identity formation. They are shaping their gender identity, and toy play is a part of that gender identity.

This kind of stuff is bizarre. Don't they realize they only go to the boy/girl aisle because people tell them they should? The kids aren't the ones making the choice, it's the adults and societyadsgljnsjg why am i explaining this edit: what gorm said

 

anyway whatever some Japanese game dev was chased out of gorbogerlgelr by some assholes because he couldn't speak english very well and yeah that happened

 

http://roninworksjapan.tumblr.com/post/118636752511/the-reason-why-we-leave-gamergate-part-1

 

I can't help but feel this guy probably was misguided and didn't really understand what he was getting into, what gg actually stands for. Or maybe I'm just hoping, because I feel bad for him being attacked for basically being Japanese.

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Been discussing this elsewhere. Hot Toys makes one ridiculously expensive Black Widow action figure after another, and sells like crazy. So here, the problem may not be that "boys don't buy BW action figures". The problem may be that acquiring the likeness rights for Mrs. Johannsen are significantly more expensive than those of Mr. Evans – we won't have to discuss who's in better business.

 

Just a theory though.

 

Not a great comparison, since Hot Toys are "collectables" targeted at adults rather than children, and similar-scale figures of the other Avengers go for a similar price.

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