I dunno how people get it in their heads that every section of the world was isolated until recently.
I remember reading somewhere that the average person didn't travel more than a few miles away from their home community in their entire lifetimes until the modern day. I'll admit when I started hearing about how there were PoC in Europe during the Middle Ages I was kind of shocked for a bit.
Your average person was a farmer before the industrial revolution. There was a lot of trade but I imagine it didn't involve your average person moving around.
I think it's always worth remembering that there's not really a secret to be unlocked here. Every community is unique but what we're seeing in the gaming community and have been for years is textbook Reactionary action following a raise in profile of accurate criticism about the community. That's not new, it's a documented phenomenon, and we've seen it for a long time. It's nothing special or out of the ordinary in the sense that it absolutely tracks with previous reactionary communities.
Ultimately its not the "meanness" of the criticism, it's not the tone, it's not about setting arbitrary standards of fairness, its about the reactionary desire to 1) prevent change to one's comfortable experience of their community environment and 2) to keep out those who would change it. And therefore there's no real way to say "hey gamer culture is by and large extremely misogynistic" that will ever satisfy the ever moving standards they set for acceptable discourse because it's merely an attempt to get the criticism rejected, to prevent change.
Now, do I think that we could probably put stuff better and reach out to affect change in the viewpoints of more people if we engaged in less point scoring? Yes, and that's true of life in general! A group of wildly diverse people will inevitably be made up of individuals who are imperfect and not always making the best tactical choice in their dialogue, but that's not really a big problem. Yes, it'd be good to articulate ourselves better, of course it would, it always would for everyone.
But the other side's problem is that they're fascists. Culturally reactionary, misogynistic, racist, neofascists. And so yeah. "The Left" (a uselessly broad term IMO) gets brought up on how they call fascists fascists, but the fascists are the actual pressing issue. We should try to be tactical. We should try to have a good impact in our dialogue. Where we don't that does not make us responsible for other people's vileness and we cannot expect or demand that people always use the words we might want. We gotta accept that and move on to the actual problems.
First of all, it’s ridiculous that a game that appeals to women, or that even has female characters, is framed as belonging to the ‘the left’ when women make up more than 50% of the population.
I don't believe that's actually happened.
Secondly, I’d like to hear from people who feel that the status quo in gaming is just fine why they’re so against more equality in gaming. How, precisely, would it be damaging to play as non-white or non-male character?
It... wouldn't? If given the option I pretty commonly play as a woman. FemShep best Shep. My WoW characters were a dead-even split. I'm really looking forward to the new Wolfenstein.
The argument I've been trying to make is not "you shouldn't have better representation in games," it is "telling people who like games that don't meet your exact criteria for representation that they are, apropos of nothing, disgusting misogynistic racist shitlords living in their mother's basement" is probably not actually going to get people to agree with you, and will cause some percentage of them to actively oppose you.
"disgusting misogynistic racist shitlords living in their mother's basement"
Literally no one has said this.
I'm pretty sure I quoted earlier in this thread a post someone made that described "mom's basement dwelling losers".
Also, why is it always the mother's basement???
Because it's more humiliating that they are depending on a woman, the assumption the divorced mom's will fill the role caretaker and custody, and coastal, suburb centric view of american culture, even though most folks live in places where they don't build basements or they are not in a single family home.
It benefits no one to respond to a person as a reaction to some other nameless third party.
I think this is, to me, the crux here. We have multiple people, in multiple threads, across the span of time I've been active on these forums, discussing these issues, doing exactly this.
Boiled down (and being reductive), we have had this discussion a dozen times.
"Games have a representation problem."
"Yeah, but also feminists think that if you play a game with a male protagonist saving a woman that you're misogynistic trash."
"No one here has said that, no one ever says that."
"Yeah, but I bet someone said it, and it's causing feminist messaging about gaming to fall on deaf ears!"
And, I want to reiterate, that we have a record of this very thing happening in the Anita Sarkeesian debacle. Her entire message was "the continued use of these unexamined tropes is harming women," and that got spun into "Anita thinks if you play the games she talks about, you hate women!" and dominated the discourse for years. If you don't believe me, this is easily searchable by looking for "Anita Sarkeesian response" on Google and digging into it.
And this is, to bring it back to the alt-right and gaming, a way of recruiting people to be amenable to alt-right messaging. If you establish Feminists (or The Left, or Liberals, or Progressives) as the Enemy who is coming to take away the Thing you Like, and sprinkle a dash of "and they are looking down on you for liking it!" then you find easy allies, who are also more likely to put up with you saying weird things about race because, hey, at least you're not one of those evil Feminists who wants to destroy video games, right?
This isn't even idle speculation, this is documented in the manifesto of the New Zealand shooter, and all over the alt-right internet. It's something Steve Bannon and Yiannopolis actively employed during GamerGate, and that is also documented.
This is why, Monwyn and others, a lot of us are frustrated and exhasperated when you fall back on "somewhere, on the internet, a feminist has called someone a misogynist for playing Mario!" because it's a tired argument that misses the point and shifts the discussion in a way that allows alt-right messaging to slip in, even if you don't mean it, since you've now forced the discussion away from the subject and into talking about whether or not feminism is a monolith. You've forced posters here to make some feminists into enemies who can be ignored and have intentionally or not, weakened the discussion about problematic elements in the gaming community by making it into a pissing contest about which community is worse, instead of thinking about what to do about the very real, very dangerous, elements in our community.
We can laugh, but literally a few hours ago a poster made multiple threads calling out a celebrity, got reprimanded and banned, and made an alt and threatened a female moderator with violence.
So, I'm not really keen on hearing arguments that the Left's messaging is using the wrong tone, or being too uncivil.
First of all, it’s ridiculous that a game that appeals to women, or that even has female characters, is framed as belonging to the ‘the left’ when women make up more than 50% of the population.
I don't believe that's actually happened.
Secondly, I’d like to hear from people who feel that the status quo in gaming is just fine why they’re so against more equality in gaming. How, precisely, would it be damaging to play as non-white or non-male character?
It... wouldn't? If given the option I pretty commonly play as a woman. FemShep best Shep. My WoW characters were a dead-even split. I'm really looking forward to the new Wolfenstein.
The argument I've been trying to make is not "you shouldn't have better representation in games," it is "telling people who like games that don't meet your exact criteria for representation that they are, apropos of nothing, disgusting misogynistic racist shitlords living in their mother's basement" is probably not actually going to get people to agree with you, and will cause some percentage of them to actively oppose you.
"disgusting misogynistic racist shitlords living in their mother's basement"
Literally no one has said this.
Also, why is it always the mother's basement???
Because of the image of a misogynist living off of the work of a more successful woman who is disappointed in him.
It benefits no one to respond to a person as a reaction to some other nameless third party.
I think this is, to me, the crux here. We have multiple people, in multiple threads, across the span of time I've been active on these forums, discussing these issues, doing exactly this.
Boiled down (and being reductive), we have had this discussion a dozen times.
"Games have a representation problem."
"Yeah, but also feminists think that if you play a game with a male protagonist saving a woman that you're misogynistic trash."
"No one here has said that, no one ever says that."
"Yeah, but I bet someone said it, and it's causing feminist messaging about gaming to fall on deaf ears!"
And, I want to reiterate, that we have a record of this very thing happening in the Anita Sarkeesian debacle. Her entire message was "the continued use of these unexamined tropes is harming women," and that got spun into "Anita thinks if you play the games she talks about, you hate women!" and dominated the discourse for years. If you don't believe me, this is easily searchable by looking for "Anita Sarkeesian response" on Google and digging into it.
And this is, to bring it back to the alt-right and gaming, a way of recruiting people to be amenable to alt-right messaging. If you establish Feminists (or The Left, or Liberals, or Progressives) as the Enemy who is coming to take away the Thing you Like, and sprinkle a dash of "and they are looking down on you for liking it!" then you find easy allies, who are also more likely to put up with you saying weird things about race because, hey, at least you're not one of those evil Feminists who wants to destroy video games, right?
This isn't even idle speculation, this is documented in the manifesto of the New Zealand shooter, and all over the alt-right internet. It's something Steve Bannon and Yiannopolis actively employed during GamerGate, and that is also documented.
This is why, Monwyn and others, a lot of us are frustrated and exhasperated when you fall back on "somewhere, on the internet, a feminist has called someone a misogynist for playing Mario!" because it's a tired argument that misses the point and shifts the discussion in a way that allows alt-right messaging to slip in, even if you don't mean it, since you've now forced the discussion away from the subject and into talking about whether or not feminism is a monolith. You've forced posters here to make some feminists into enemies who can be ignored and have intentionally or not, weakened the discussion about problematic elements in the gaming community by making it into a pissing contest about which community is worse, instead of thinking about what to do about the very real, very dangerous, elements in our community.
We can laugh, but literally a few hours ago a poster made multiple threads calling out a celebrity, got reprimanded and banned, and made an alt and threatened a female moderator with violence.
So, I'm not really keen on hearing arguments that the Left's messaging is using the wrong tone, or being too uncivil.
Yeah, everyone here is their own person. Nobody speaks for anyone else; people just occasionally agree.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I dunno how people get it in their heads that every section of the world was isolated until recently.
I remember reading somewhere that the average person didn't travel more than a few miles away from their home community in their entire lifetimes until the modern day. I'll admit when I started hearing about how there were PoC in Europe during the Middle Ages I was kind of shocked for a bit.
The majority didn't. Because they where mostly farmers.
Traders, Sailors, Soldiers, Brigands/Thieves and Aristocrats aka Player protagonists and people they would interact with however did travel. Often more extensively then most people realize.
There was a POC community in Britain in Queen Elizabeths I Reign. It was big enough that people commented on it. The Mongol Horde of Khans sent spies at least as far as Paris and London. They only stopped invading Europe because the great Khan died and the army leaders had to return for the election of the next one. A small incident that probably saved Western Civilization. There is also genetic evidence that a portion of Iceland's population descends from a Native American Woman brought back from America during the Viking Settlements there.
And that's just Europe.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
Meanwhile you responded to Janson with, and I'll quote again "disgusting misogynistic racist shitlords living in their mother's basement" despite neither her saying and or anyone else here saying anything of the sort.
The argument I've been trying to make is not "you shouldn't have better representation in games," it is "telling people who like games that don't meet your exact criteria for representation that they are, apropos of nothing, disgusting misogynistic racist shitlords living in their mother's basement" is probably not actually going to get people to agree with you, and will cause some percentage of them to actively oppose you.
This is the quote in question. Arguing that I am attributing your pull-quote to Janson is bad-faith bullshit. It is, explicitly, me restating my thesis. I am genuinely at a loss as to how you could read that and believe that I am attributing those statements to her.
The Mongol Horde of Khans sent spies at least as far as Paris and London. They only stopped invading Europe because the great Khan died and the army leaders had to return for the election of the next one. A small incident that probably saved Western Civilization.
Well damn, if only the their leader hadn't died maybe the age of European colonialism would have never happened.
No one is saying "Gamers are alt-right," or "disagreeing with feminist critiques of gaming makes you alt-right."
The position of many people in the thread seems to be the latter, based on...what seems to be unsubstantiated rumors and the idea that someone on the left could characterize opposition to games criticism as alt-right. And, following up on that, is a lot of comments that the Left needs to watch their tone, lest they alienate allies.
I reject this notion, because I think there's no tone that could be used that wouldn't be taken that way. I agree with @Solar here, and point to Sarkeesian as an abject example. She approached this entire thing as levelly and neutrally as possible, and the uproar was incalculable.
What the Left (nebulously) is saying is vastly different than "games are alt-right, and gamers are alt-right adjacent," despite what people hear or invent that they heard.
What we are saying is that gaming has an alt-right problem. Members of the alt-right are actively courting the gaming community, and finding fertile ground. Alt-right terrorists are citing high-profile gamers as inspiration for their motivation. We need to be asking why that is and what we can do about it. I reject the idea that the answer to these questions is "because feminists were too mean, or didn't use the correct tone."
Of course, as I said above, there are two things that happen when you say "The gaming community has an alt-right problem." First, people interpret that incorrectly as "all gamers are alt-right," and then actual alt-right influencers fan those flames, telling these same people that "yes, see? The feminists don't like you, because you play games. They want to take away your games. They are the Enemy!"*
How do we combat that? I disagree the answer is "feminists need to watch their tone," because we saw this happen with Anita- she had the perfect tone, and this still happened.
| Zinnar on most things | Avatar by Blameless Cleric
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Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
Monwyn, I went back over the thread a bit and I think the disconnect is you are quoting and responding to people here, but are arguing against what people are saying elsewhere on the internet.
Yes, some people are dicks. Some of them have progressive viewpoints. So what?
If you want to argue with them, then go argue with them. No one here wants to be a stand in for that.
Meanwhile you responded to Janson with, and I'll quote again "disgusting misogynistic racist shitlords living in their mother's basement" despite neither her saying and or anyone else here saying anything of the sort.
The argument I've been trying to make is not "you shouldn't have better representation in games," it is "telling people who like games that don't meet your exact criteria for representation that they are, apropos of nothing, disgusting misogynistic racist shitlords living in their mother's basement" is probably not actually going to get people to agree with you, and will cause some percentage of them to actively oppose you.
This is the quote in question. Arguing that I am attributing your pull-quote to Janson is bad-faith bullshit. It is, explicitly, me restating my thesis. I am genuinely at a loss as to how you could read that and believe that I am attributing those statements to her.
This is how quoting someone works.
When you quote a person you are presumed to be responding to them.
You quoted someone then railed against something they didn’t say. No one in this thread has said “disgusting misogynistic racist shitlords living in their mother's basement” but you justify saying that as a response because someone, somewhere said it.
I won’t continue this. Just understand that when you quote people you should respond to what they said, not what you’ve seen stated elsewhere.
The final thing, I want to mention, is that I actually don't know the answer to the questions I posed.
Why are alt-right ideas finding purchase in the broadly defined "gaming community"? Why did the Steve Bannons, Milos, and Shapiros of the world find that "gamers" were amenable to their bullshit?
Why does Youtube suggest alt-right videos after watching video game tutorials?
Why is the community not interested in policing these people out? Why don't we speak up against toxicity in our community?
How do we combat all of this? How do we make this hobby safe and inclusive for everyone, and stop letting them shelter people who are a hop, skip, and a jump away from actual Neo-Nazis?
The final thing, I want to mention, is that I actually don't know the answer to the questions I posed.
Why are alt-right ideas finding purchase in the broadly defined "gaming community"? Why did the Steve Bannons, Milos, and Shapiros of the world find that "gamers" were amenable to their bullshit?
Why does Youtube suggest alt-right videos after watching video game tutorials?
Why is the community not interested in policing these people out? Why don't we speak up against toxicity in our community?
How do we combat all of this? How do we make this hobby safe and inclusive for everyone, and stop letting them shelter people who are a hop, skip, and a jump away from actual Neo-Nazis?
I'd guess because it's a lot easier to complain everyone else is wrong and you shouldn't have to change. This seems to be the core of alt right ideology.
The final thing, I want to mention, is that I actually don't know the answer to the questions I posed.
Why are alt-right ideas finding purchase in the broadly defined "gaming community"? Why did the Steve Bannons, Milos, and Shapiros of the world find that "gamers" were amenable to their bullshit?
Why does Youtube suggest alt-right videos after watching video game tutorials?
Why is the community not interested in policing these people out? Why don't we speak up against toxicity in our community?
How do we combat all of this? How do we make this hobby safe and inclusive for everyone, and stop letting them shelter people who are a hop, skip, and a jump away from actual Neo-Nazis?
I default to education for every social issue. Exposure therapy may be minimally effective, but critical thinking skills are impartial to anything but a consistent and valid interpretation of verifiable facts.
Find a way to get everyone to audit their own beliefs in the self interest of their careers and general self empowerment. Implement education and assessment of this skills base at every school/work milestone. Then try some other paradigm if that doesn't work.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The final thing, I want to mention, is that I actually don't know the answer to the questions I posed.
Why are alt-right ideas finding purchase in the broadly defined "gaming community"? Why did the Steve Bannons, Milos, and Shapiros of the world find that "gamers" were amenable to their bullshit?
Why does Youtube suggest alt-right videos after watching video game tutorials?
Why is the community not interested in policing these people out? Why don't we speak up against toxicity in our community?
How do we combat all of this? How do we make this hobby safe and inclusive for everyone, and stop letting them shelter people who are a hop, skip, and a jump away from actual Neo-Nazis?
I default to education for every social issue. Exposure therapy may be minimally effective, but critical thinking skills are impartial to anything but a consistent and valid interpretation of verifiable facts.
Find a way to get everyone to audit their own beliefs in the self interest of their careers and general self empowerment. Implement education and assessment of this skills base at every school/work milestone. Then try some other paradigm if that doesn't work.
Okay, so how do we do that? How do we do that as a community?
| Zinnar on most things | Avatar by Blameless Cleric
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Misogyny is the gateway to fascism and gaming has historically been a misogynist space populated by disaffected young men, who are also the at-risk population for fascism
It works in gaming because there are more gamers predisposed to those ideas than there are, say, cinephiles (where movies like TLJ and Captain Marvel make a billion dollars) or sci-fi/fantasy readers (where the Sad Puppies lost). Gaming culture is toxic and either unwilling or unable to reject the alt-right element, unlike other mediums which have been able to reject them.
I dunno how people get it in their heads that every section of the world was isolated until recently.
I remember reading somewhere that the average person didn't travel more than a few miles away from their home community in their entire lifetimes until the modern day. I'll admit when I started hearing about how there were PoC in Europe during the Middle Ages I was kind of shocked for a bit.
Your average person was a farmer before the industrial revolution. There was a lot of trade but I imagine it didn't involve your average person moving around.
King Arthur had a Moorish knight, Morien, as one of his Knights of the Round Table in stories from the 13th Century. Clearly the idea that people moved around wasn't that alien.
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
The final thing, I want to mention, is that I actually don't know the answer to the questions I posed.
Why are alt-right ideas finding purchase in the broadly defined "gaming community"? Why did the Steve Bannons, Milos, and Shapiros of the world find that "gamers" were amenable to their bullshit?
If I remember this right, Bannon was a gold farmer in . . . WOW, I think? And saw a group of angry dudes with some money and a lot of frustration about how they perceived the world had wronged them, and was convinced that they were his foot soldiers in his attempt to bring down western civilization (paraphrasing).
Why does Youtube suggest alt-right videos after watching video game tutorials?
Why is the community not interested in policing these people out? Why don't we speak up against toxicity in our community?
I'd guess, in order: The engagement algorithm, because it's "just games" (not really wanting to engage "politically"), some folks do but not enough because plenty of geeks (and plenty of men) have suffered enough abuse and been told to "put up with it" that they've just internalized a wall of "doesn't matter" even if it does.
How do we combat all of this? How do we make this hobby safe and inclusive for everyone, and stop letting them shelter people who are a hop, skip, and a jump away from actual Neo-Nazis?
That's all way more difficult, because we don't solely control the spaces we inhabit, but we can work to encourage those that do to give us the tools to negate the power of the alt-right by muting their voice. Especially in America, the attitude is that the First Amendment allows anyone to say anything and you can't do jack about it, but it just lets them say anything they want; it doesn't hold them free from repercussion. As just one example, something in voice chats that would scan for repeated use of slurs and auto-muting people might be a thing? It's a single example, and it's only "off the top of my head".
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
Monwyn, I went back over the thread a bit and I think the disconnect is you are quoting and responding to people here, but are arguing against what people are saying elsewhere on the internet.
Yes, some people are dicks. Some of them have progressive viewpoints. So what?
Presumably some people here know people not-here and see things that happen not-here and we shouldn't tolerate bad behavior elsewhere just because it happens to not be here.
Like I mentioned it further up-thread and it got passed over but I genuinely wonder if the disconnect is due to The Algorithm directing us to shit that pisses us off because it drives engagement, because the "how dare you disagree with my hot-take" shit is, if not endemic, than at least not uncommon on my feeds
Misogyny is the gateway to fascism and gaming has historically been a misogynist space populated by disaffected young men, who are also the at-risk population for fascism
It works in gaming because there are more gamers predisposed to those ideas than there are, say, cinephiles (where movies like TLJ and Captain Marvel make a billion dollars) or sci-fi/fantasy readers (where the Sad Puppies lost). Gaming culture is toxic and either unwilling or unable to reject the alt-right element, unlike other mediums which have been able to reject them.
Comics have similar issues for similar reasons.
This is still an assertion we need to dig up! Why are gamers more predisposed to misogynistic ideas? Is it because (as feminists etc have said) because the media they consume is full of these ideas (essentially, the Sarkeesian argument)?
Why, historically, has gaming been a space where misogyny is allowed to grow?
The final thing, I want to mention, is that I actually don't know the answer to the questions I posed.
Why are alt-right ideas finding purchase in the broadly defined "gaming community"? Why did the Steve Bannons, Milos, and Shapiros of the world find that "gamers" were amenable to their bullshit?
Why does Youtube suggest alt-right videos after watching video game tutorials?
Why is the community not interested in policing these people out? Why don't we speak up against toxicity in our community?
How do we combat all of this? How do we make this hobby safe and inclusive for everyone, and stop letting them shelter people who are a hop, skip, and a jump away from actual Neo-Nazis?
I default to education for every social issue. Exposure therapy may be minimally effective, but critical thinking skills are impartial to anything but a consistent and valid interpretation of verifiable facts.
Find a way to get everyone to audit their own beliefs in the self interest of their careers and general self empowerment. Implement education and assessment of this skills base at every school/work milestone. Then try some other paradigm if that doesn't work.
Okay, so how do we do that? How do we do that as a community?
I'd look at lessons learned from the meta-analysis on exposure therapy in people with bias (cross applying it to any other therapy) and design a protocol, then seek funding. Educate myself with all the information out there on prior work to see if my proposal has already failed. Enlist the help of people who actually know how to impart critical thinking skills, and run k-12, college, and business pilot programs. And for fun, get federal funding to design a game that could augment these skills.
As far as I know, it's a new tack on an old remedy for a different problem. The proposal being made, the bottlenecks are money, time, and personnel.
Edit: oh, sorry, community intervention is not my cup of tea. Your guess is as good as mine.
Paladin on
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
Misogyny is the gateway to fascism and gaming has historically been a misogynist space populated by disaffected young men, who are also the at-risk population for fascism
It works in gaming because there are more gamers predisposed to those ideas than there are, say, cinephiles (where movies like TLJ and Captain Marvel make a billion dollars) or sci-fi/fantasy readers (where the Sad Puppies lost). Gaming culture is toxic and either unwilling or unable to reject the alt-right element, unlike other mediums which have been able to reject them.
Comics have similar issues for similar reasons.
This is still an assertion we need to dig up! Why are gamers more predisposed to misogynistic ideas? Is it because (as feminists etc have said) because the media they consume is full of these ideas (essentially, the Sarkeesian argument)?
Why, historically, has gaming been a space where misogyny is allowed to grow?
Could it perhaps be in part that gaming logic accepts a central conceit divorced from reality that we fail to address due to the abundance of more obviously salient and concrete factors, like abject examples of misogyny?
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
Misogyny is the gateway to fascism and gaming has historically been a misogynist space populated by disaffected young men, who are also the at-risk population for fascism
It works in gaming because there are more gamers predisposed to those ideas than there are, say, cinephiles (where movies like TLJ and Captain Marvel make a billion dollars) or sci-fi/fantasy readers (where the Sad Puppies lost). Gaming culture is toxic and either unwilling or unable to reject the alt-right element, unlike other mediums which have been able to reject them.
Comics have similar issues for similar reasons.
This is still an assertion we need to dig up! Why are gamers more predisposed to misogynistic ideas? Is it because (as feminists etc have said) because the media they consume is full of these ideas (essentially, the Sarkeesian argument)?
Why, historically, has gaming been a space where misogyny is allowed to grow?
I personally point to the days where video games had to be marketed as a toy in the aisles of specifically boy or girl separated toy markets and when they went with boy, the marketing skewed to act as if it was a totally male act. I don't know if board/card/TTRPGs had this same effect happen. It felt like, though, my entire life growing up geek dudes were told that dudes were all geeks, girls don't like geek things, geeks are losers who can't be manly, etc, and I think that, regardless of that even then being obviously untrue then, it has filtered to now.
Basically, I think it's a misogynistic space because geeks were told it was so, and thus made it so. Perpetual, self-fulfilling prophesy.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
Misogyny is the gateway to fascism and gaming has historically been a misogynist space populated by disaffected young men, who are also the at-risk population for fascism
It works in gaming because there are more gamers predisposed to those ideas than there are, say, cinephiles (where movies like TLJ and Captain Marvel make a billion dollars) or sci-fi/fantasy readers (where the Sad Puppies lost). Gaming culture is toxic and either unwilling or unable to reject the alt-right element, unlike other mediums which have been able to reject them.
Comics have similar issues for similar reasons.
This is still an assertion we need to dig up! Why are gamers more predisposed to misogynistic ideas? Is it because (as feminists etc have said) because the media they consume is full of these ideas (essentially, the Sarkeesian argument)?
Why, historically, has gaming been a space where misogyny is allowed to grow?
I personally point to the days where video games had to be marketed as a toy in the aisles of specifically boy or girl separated toy markets and when they went with boy, the marketing skewed to act as if it was a totally male act. I don't know if board/card/TTRPGs had this same effect happen. It felt like, though, my entire life growing up geek dudes were told that dudes were all geeks, girls don't like geek things, geeks are losers who can't be manly, etc, and I think that, regardless of that even then being obviously untrue then, it has filtered to now.
Basically, I think it's a misogynistic space because geeks were told it was so, and thus made it so. Perpetual, self-fulfilling prophesy.
I've heard this argument before (specifically from Rachel Weil, owner/operator of the FEMICOM museum). I think it has some legs, but I don't think it explains the full range of problems. Maybe it does. If it's true, what do we do about it?
Misogyny is the gateway to fascism and gaming has historically been a misogynist space populated by disaffected young men, who are also the at-risk population for fascism
It works in gaming because there are more gamers predisposed to those ideas than there are, say, cinephiles (where movies like TLJ and Captain Marvel make a billion dollars) or sci-fi/fantasy readers (where the Sad Puppies lost). Gaming culture is toxic and either unwilling or unable to reject the alt-right element, unlike other mediums which have been able to reject them.
Comics have similar issues for similar reasons.
This is still an assertion we need to dig up! Why are gamers more predisposed to misogynistic ideas? Is it because (as feminists etc have said) because the media they consume is full of these ideas (essentially, the Sarkeesian argument)?
Why, historically, has gaming been a space where misogyny is allowed to grow?
IMO because it's been a male-dominated space since, like, the 1980s and because it's status within society attracted a lot of disaffected and anti-social young men who linked up with each other over their common outcast status which only became even worse as social media (and I'm talking like 1990s social media) became a thing and they could slowly link up and reinforce each other and become fiercely protective of what they view as "their thing".
Misogyny is the gateway to fascism and gaming has historically been a misogynist space populated by disaffected young men, who are also the at-risk population for fascism
It works in gaming because there are more gamers predisposed to those ideas than there are, say, cinephiles (where movies like TLJ and Captain Marvel make a billion dollars) or sci-fi/fantasy readers (where the Sad Puppies lost). Gaming culture is toxic and either unwilling or unable to reject the alt-right element, unlike other mediums which have been able to reject them.
Comics have similar issues for similar reasons.
This is still an assertion we need to dig up! Why are gamers more predisposed to misogynistic ideas? Is it because (as feminists etc have said) because the media they consume is full of these ideas (essentially, the Sarkeesian argument)?
Why, historically, has gaming been a space where misogyny is allowed to grow?
I posit that it's due to the marketing style of the 80s focusing on tribalism as a means to increase engagement. The marketing effort for games in that era was aimed at young white straight boys/men who perceived themselves as outcasts of society with the hopes that they would be more willing to pay money to play games rather than to do anything else. Toxic masculinity tropes such as a focus on violence, appeals to manliness, excessive appeals to sex, and aversion to femininity all came into play when it came to these advertisements, pushing out young women and older people. This all set the stage for gaming to be a place where misogyny was not only allowed to grow, but was expected to grow in the hopes that it would foster greater sales. Games themselves became full of these ideas as a consequence of this due to the marketing teams insisting they start being made that way, rather than them starting out originally misogynist and the marketing being formed in response.
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CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
"Why games" is an interesting question. Though I don't think it was just games, this fertile alt-right ground was found in several communities - the athiest community, the science fiction book community. I don't know for sure, but it really seems like the central core of these ideas was birthed in 4chan. Certainly we have documented evidence that Gamergate had it's genesis there. And 4chan has been extremely effective in spreading its ideas to the larger internet through secondary channels like reddit.
Maybe games was an easy target because that audience has a large likelihood of being online at any given time, and is used to having the industry cater to them exclusively (for the last 20 or so years, anyway, I grew up in the 80s and do remember a time when games were marketed to everyone and even my mom played on the Atari from time to time).
Some have suggested that the fear from childhood that someone else has control of your games (parents, politicians) and that fear continues into adulthood could be a factor. Another possibility - I'm sure we've also all seen geeks act like a simulated minority (talking about the Big Bang Theory as "geek blackface" was popular for a while. I think I might have even fallen into using that term before I realized how gross it is), and maybe that "minority-hood" plays a role: the feeling you're trying to oppress me by saying my games need to change.
Peace to fashion police, I wear my heart
On my sleeve, let the runway start
"Why games" is an interesting question. Though I don't think it was just games, this fertile alt-right ground was found in several communities - the athiest community, the science fiction book community. I don't know for sure, but it really seems like the central core of these ideas was birthed in 4chan. Certainly we have documented evidence that Gamergate had it's genesis there. And 4chan has been extremely effective in spreading its ideas to the larger internet through secondary channels like reddit.
Maybe games was an easy target because that audience has a large likelihood of being online at any given time, and is used to having the industry cater to them exclusively (for the last 20 or so years, anyway, I grew up in the 80s and do remember a time when games were marketed to everyone and even my mom played on the Atari from time to time).
Some have suggested that the fear from childhood that someone else has control of your games (parents, politicians) and that fear continues into adulthood could be a factor. Another possibility - I'm sure we've also all seen geeks act like a simulated minority (talking about the Big Bang Theory as "geek blackface" was popular for a while. I think I might have even fallen into using that term before I realized how gross it is), and maybe that "minority-hood" plays a role: the feeling you're trying to oppress me by saying my games need to change.
As Astaereth points out, this didn't really happen there, unlike with gaming. The Sad/Rabid Puppies kinda got their asses shoved out the door right quick. Part of this was their avenue of attack on the community ran through a much smaller more connected group (ie - Worldcon) but a big part of it was also that they were outnumbered.
I think when you look at that in contrast to, say, Gamergate you can see a real underlying difference.
PS - the concept of gaming as a simulated ethnicity is, imo, a really good thought construct to bring to the issue because it does help make sense of a lot of what is going on
I think "why games" because the marketing efforts in the late 90's/early 00's started trying to codify capital-G "Gamer" as a lifestyle, so people started internalizing that concept and making it part of their identity, making it that much more personal when the thing they love so much gets criticized. I don't remember any such effort codify the consumption of media as part of one's identity for any other male-targeted hobbies.
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
Misogyny is the gateway to fascism and gaming has historically been a misogynist space populated by disaffected young men, who are also the at-risk population for fascism
It works in gaming because there are more gamers predisposed to those ideas than there are, say, cinephiles (where movies like TLJ and Captain Marvel make a billion dollars) or sci-fi/fantasy readers (where the Sad Puppies lost). Gaming culture is toxic and either unwilling or unable to reject the alt-right element, unlike other mediums which have been able to reject them.
Comics have similar issues for similar reasons.
This is still an assertion we need to dig up! Why are gamers more predisposed to misogynistic ideas? Is it because (as feminists etc have said) because the media they consume is full of these ideas (essentially, the Sarkeesian argument)?
Why, historically, has gaming been a space where misogyny is allowed to grow?
I personally point to the days where video games had to be marketed as a toy in the aisles of specifically boy or girl separated toy markets and when they went with boy, the marketing skewed to act as if it was a totally male act. I don't know if board/card/TTRPGs had this same effect happen. It felt like, though, my entire life growing up geek dudes were told that dudes were all geeks, girls don't like geek things, geeks are losers who can't be manly, etc, and I think that, regardless of that even then being obviously untrue then, it has filtered to now.
Basically, I think it's a misogynistic space because geeks were told it was so, and thus made it so. Perpetual, self-fulfilling prophesy.
I've heard this argument before (specifically from Rachel Weil, owner/operator of the FEMICOM museum). I think it has some legs, but I don't think it explains the full range of problems. Maybe it does. If it's true, what do we do about it?
I mean, I don't think it explains it by itself, but I think that's how the seed was planted. The whole "gross icky girls" thing, at least where I was growing up, transferred partially to geek things, though by high school it was obvious to me that women were total geeks too. Like, everyone playing at "the Magic table" though was dudes. No gals even stepped up to try, and that's I think the reason. I also surmise that as gamer spread into other areas and cross-pollinated with comics and other geek things, a strange sort of melding of the misogyny in all of those areas. I mean, academics was still seen as a "dude's domain" when my sister was getting her masters in history, how dare she. Comics was the origin of the "fridging" issue that survives to this day. Games held their own trope hold-overs that sort of came from . . . everything else. And then it seemed to fester.
I really don't know what caused the festering. I think in part it was the video gaming being marketed as boy toys crap, I think it was all these other literary, academic, comic, etc fields filtering their misogyny on down, and I think it's also the current inherent learned behavior of folks making games in their late 40s to late 50s, which wasn't really past a lot of the more serious garbage. And then they started passing that down to folks in their 30s and younger as the world was changing and their hobbies were opening up and they just wanted a space that was theirs, I think.
Again, this is supposition based on my life experience.
And I think that gamer isn't the only place that it gestates, but gamers have grown into a media where their "opponent" is largely unknown. There's the old joke of "no women on the internet". The default assumption of malehood, the feeling of betrayal (and emasculation) when your opponent takes off their metaphorical helmet and says "I am no man", if you will. I think that feeling that the digital space isn't a real space, but is also a space to . . . hide, maybe? Has pushed some of the more virulent and angry positions in a direction that person-to-person contact makes more difficult?
I do think that online gaming has helped to distill a very specific kind of misogyny.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
Another possibility - I'm sure we've also all seen geeks act like a simulated minority (talking about the Big Bang Theory as "geek blackface" was popular for a while. I think I might have even fallen into using that term before I realized how gross it is), and maybe that "minority-hood" plays a role: the feeling you're trying to oppress me by saying my games need to change.
I remember one nerd news site basically agreeing with the "The Big Bang Theory is geek blackface" position, but disliked the specific term "geek blackface" so much that they held a contest for an alternative term (I don't remember what the winner was).
I used to ignore the hate towards The Big Bang Theory until I had multiple people compare me to characters on that show, and even then I wasn't bothered that they were making fun of characters who were nerds so much as I was bothered they were making fun of characters who, for example, lived with their mothers, had Aspergers', had severe social anxiety, etc.
Hexmage-PA on
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CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
As Astaereth points out, this didn't really happen there, unlike with gaming. The Sad/Rabid Puppies kinda got their asses shoved out the door right quick. Part of this was their avenue of attack on the community ran through a much smaller more connected group (ie - Worldcon) but a big part of it was also that they were outnumbered.
I think when you look at that in contrast to, say, Gamergate you can see a real underlying difference.
Honestly, for as much trouble as they made, I DON'T think Gamergate was the majority in the games community. They were - and still are - very loud and obnoxious, but they were outnumbered. I think the problem was that the studios with the power to say, "if you are a member of this group, we don't want you playing our games", that there was no solidarity among the people who knew gg was full of shit & had the power to do something about it.
Peace to fashion police, I wear my heart
On my sleeve, let the runway start
I think "why games" because the marketing efforts in the late 90's/early 00's started trying to codify capital-G "Gamer" as a lifestyle, so people started internalizing that concept and making it part of their identity, making it that much more personal when the thing they love so much gets criticized. I don't remember any such effort codify the consumption of media as part of one's identity for any other male-targeted hobbies.
I think the 80s was when lifestyle marketing really started taking off so that might be the difference?
As Astaereth points out, this didn't really happen there, unlike with gaming. The Sad/Rabid Puppies kinda got their asses shoved out the door right quick. Part of this was their avenue of attack on the community ran through a much smaller more connected group (ie - Worldcon) but a big part of it was also that they were outnumbered.
I think when you look at that in contrast to, say, Gamergate you can see a real underlying difference.
Honestly, for as much trouble as they made, I DON'T think Gamergate was the majority in the games community. They were - and still are - very loud and obnoxious, but they were outnumbered. I think the problem was that the studios with the power to say, "if you are a member of this group, we don't want you playing our games", that there was no solidarity among the people who knew gg was full of shit & had the power to do something about it.
I think they were large enough in comparison to the puppies to actually make a real move and not get pushed down and out right away. Rather then getting stomped on they just kind of relaxed and became part of the general scene.
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
I mean, let's remember the Mighty no. 9 ad that features the line “And make the bad guys cry like an anime fan on prom night,” which I swear sounds like such a shitty early 90s line, all excluding the fact that anime wasn't really big enough for a line in such an ad. More likely they'd have used "comic book fan" or "D&D nerd" even. They were obviously trying to ape an old marketing ploy, and it reflects badly on the marketing of the time, but also to now where folks thought that would be okay to use as marketing again. I swear marketing itself is the cause of so many of the world's ills . . .
It's also indicative of how readily one geek fandom will cannibalize another to appear more "manly", which reinforces the idea that a lot about this is concerned with a specific concept of manhood. I have been labeled a wuss, sissy, pussy, wimp, and more for my near-strict adherence to playing games on Easy if available because I have nothing to prove and everything to gain. Some games even use easy to infantilize or insult the player should they chose such a difficulty, reinforcing the "man competes, that's what he does" mentality.
Like, there's just a lot of toxic masculine elements that got hyper focused on to try and sell and promote games even in their infancy that really lends itself to hating women as a byproduct.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
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Your average person was a farmer before the industrial revolution. There was a lot of trade but I imagine it didn't involve your average person moving around.
Ultimately its not the "meanness" of the criticism, it's not the tone, it's not about setting arbitrary standards of fairness, its about the reactionary desire to 1) prevent change to one's comfortable experience of their community environment and 2) to keep out those who would change it. And therefore there's no real way to say "hey gamer culture is by and large extremely misogynistic" that will ever satisfy the ever moving standards they set for acceptable discourse because it's merely an attempt to get the criticism rejected, to prevent change.
Now, do I think that we could probably put stuff better and reach out to affect change in the viewpoints of more people if we engaged in less point scoring? Yes, and that's true of life in general! A group of wildly diverse people will inevitably be made up of individuals who are imperfect and not always making the best tactical choice in their dialogue, but that's not really a big problem. Yes, it'd be good to articulate ourselves better, of course it would, it always would for everyone.
But the other side's problem is that they're fascists. Culturally reactionary, misogynistic, racist, neofascists. And so yeah. "The Left" (a uselessly broad term IMO) gets brought up on how they call fascists fascists, but the fascists are the actual pressing issue. We should try to be tactical. We should try to have a good impact in our dialogue. Where we don't that does not make us responsible for other people's vileness and we cannot expect or demand that people always use the words we might want. We gotta accept that and move on to the actual problems.
Because it's more humiliating that they are depending on a woman, the assumption the divorced mom's will fill the role caretaker and custody, and coastal, suburb centric view of american culture, even though most folks live in places where they don't build basements or they are not in a single family home.
it's kinda gross
I think this is, to me, the crux here. We have multiple people, in multiple threads, across the span of time I've been active on these forums, discussing these issues, doing exactly this.
Boiled down (and being reductive), we have had this discussion a dozen times.
"Games have a representation problem."
"Yeah, but also feminists think that if you play a game with a male protagonist saving a woman that you're misogynistic trash."
"No one here has said that, no one ever says that."
"Yeah, but I bet someone said it, and it's causing feminist messaging about gaming to fall on deaf ears!"
And, I want to reiterate, that we have a record of this very thing happening in the Anita Sarkeesian debacle. Her entire message was "the continued use of these unexamined tropes is harming women," and that got spun into "Anita thinks if you play the games she talks about, you hate women!" and dominated the discourse for years. If you don't believe me, this is easily searchable by looking for "Anita Sarkeesian response" on Google and digging into it.
And this is, to bring it back to the alt-right and gaming, a way of recruiting people to be amenable to alt-right messaging. If you establish Feminists (or The Left, or Liberals, or Progressives) as the Enemy who is coming to take away the Thing you Like, and sprinkle a dash of "and they are looking down on you for liking it!" then you find easy allies, who are also more likely to put up with you saying weird things about race because, hey, at least you're not one of those evil Feminists who wants to destroy video games, right?
This isn't even idle speculation, this is documented in the manifesto of the New Zealand shooter, and all over the alt-right internet. It's something Steve Bannon and Yiannopolis actively employed during GamerGate, and that is also documented.
This is why, Monwyn and others, a lot of us are frustrated and exhasperated when you fall back on "somewhere, on the internet, a feminist has called someone a misogynist for playing Mario!" because it's a tired argument that misses the point and shifts the discussion in a way that allows alt-right messaging to slip in, even if you don't mean it, since you've now forced the discussion away from the subject and into talking about whether or not feminism is a monolith. You've forced posters here to make some feminists into enemies who can be ignored and have intentionally or not, weakened the discussion about problematic elements in the gaming community by making it into a pissing contest about which community is worse, instead of thinking about what to do about the very real, very dangerous, elements in our community.
We can laugh, but literally a few hours ago a poster made multiple threads calling out a celebrity, got reprimanded and banned, and made an alt and threatened a female moderator with violence.
So, I'm not really keen on hearing arguments that the Left's messaging is using the wrong tone, or being too uncivil.
Because of the image of a misogynist living off of the work of a more successful woman who is disappointed in him.
Yeah, everyone here is their own person. Nobody speaks for anyone else; people just occasionally agree.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The majority didn't. Because they where mostly farmers.
Traders, Sailors, Soldiers, Brigands/Thieves and Aristocrats aka Player protagonists and people they would interact with however did travel. Often more extensively then most people realize.
There was a POC community in Britain in Queen Elizabeths I Reign. It was big enough that people commented on it. The Mongol Horde of Khans sent spies at least as far as Paris and London. They only stopped invading Europe because the great Khan died and the army leaders had to return for the election of the next one. A small incident that probably saved Western Civilization. There is also genetic evidence that a portion of Iceland's population descends from a Native American Woman brought back from America during the Viking Settlements there.
And that's just Europe.
This is the quote in question. Arguing that I am attributing your pull-quote to Janson is bad-faith bullshit. It is, explicitly, me restating my thesis. I am genuinely at a loss as to how you could read that and believe that I am attributing those statements to her.
Well damn, if only the their leader hadn't died maybe the age of European colonialism would have never happened.
No one is saying "Gamers are alt-right," or "disagreeing with feminist critiques of gaming makes you alt-right."
The position of many people in the thread seems to be the latter, based on...what seems to be unsubstantiated rumors and the idea that someone on the left could characterize opposition to games criticism as alt-right. And, following up on that, is a lot of comments that the Left needs to watch their tone, lest they alienate allies.
I reject this notion, because I think there's no tone that could be used that wouldn't be taken that way. I agree with @Solar here, and point to Sarkeesian as an abject example. She approached this entire thing as levelly and neutrally as possible, and the uproar was incalculable.
What the Left (nebulously) is saying is vastly different than "games are alt-right, and gamers are alt-right adjacent," despite what people hear or invent that they heard.
What we are saying is that gaming has an alt-right problem. Members of the alt-right are actively courting the gaming community, and finding fertile ground. Alt-right terrorists are citing high-profile gamers as inspiration for their motivation. We need to be asking why that is and what we can do about it. I reject the idea that the answer to these questions is "because feminists were too mean, or didn't use the correct tone."
Of course, as I said above, there are two things that happen when you say "The gaming community has an alt-right problem." First, people interpret that incorrectly as "all gamers are alt-right," and then actual alt-right influencers fan those flames, telling these same people that "yes, see? The feminists don't like you, because you play games. They want to take away your games. They are the Enemy!"*
How do we combat that? I disagree the answer is "feminists need to watch their tone," because we saw this happen with Anita- she had the perfect tone, and this still happened.
*Paraphrased, not literally this
Yes, some people are dicks. Some of them have progressive viewpoints. So what?
If you want to argue with them, then go argue with them. No one here wants to be a stand in for that.
This is how quoting someone works.
When you quote a person you are presumed to be responding to them.
You quoted someone then railed against something they didn’t say. No one in this thread has said “disgusting misogynistic racist shitlords living in their mother's basement” but you justify saying that as a response because someone, somewhere said it.
I won’t continue this. Just understand that when you quote people you should respond to what they said, not what you’ve seen stated elsewhere.
Why are alt-right ideas finding purchase in the broadly defined "gaming community"? Why did the Steve Bannons, Milos, and Shapiros of the world find that "gamers" were amenable to their bullshit?
Why does Youtube suggest alt-right videos after watching video game tutorials?
Why is the community not interested in policing these people out? Why don't we speak up against toxicity in our community?
How do we combat all of this? How do we make this hobby safe and inclusive for everyone, and stop letting them shelter people who are a hop, skip, and a jump away from actual Neo-Nazis?
I'd guess because it's a lot easier to complain everyone else is wrong and you shouldn't have to change. This seems to be the core of alt right ideology.
I refuse to believe it's because "feminists were mean".*
*I.e. "The reactionary left drove people to the alt-right."
I default to education for every social issue. Exposure therapy may be minimally effective, but critical thinking skills are impartial to anything but a consistent and valid interpretation of verifiable facts.
Find a way to get everyone to audit their own beliefs in the self interest of their careers and general self empowerment. Implement education and assessment of this skills base at every school/work milestone. Then try some other paradigm if that doesn't work.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Okay, so how do we do that? How do we do that as a community?
It works in gaming because there are more gamers predisposed to those ideas than there are, say, cinephiles (where movies like TLJ and Captain Marvel make a billion dollars) or sci-fi/fantasy readers (where the Sad Puppies lost). Gaming culture is toxic and either unwilling or unable to reject the alt-right element, unlike other mediums which have been able to reject them.
Comics have similar issues for similar reasons.
King Arthur had a Moorish knight, Morien, as one of his Knights of the Round Table in stories from the 13th Century. Clearly the idea that people moved around wasn't that alien.
If I remember this right, Bannon was a gold farmer in . . . WOW, I think? And saw a group of angry dudes with some money and a lot of frustration about how they perceived the world had wronged them, and was convinced that they were his foot soldiers in his attempt to bring down western civilization (paraphrasing).
I'd guess, in order: The engagement algorithm, because it's "just games" (not really wanting to engage "politically"), some folks do but not enough because plenty of geeks (and plenty of men) have suffered enough abuse and been told to "put up with it" that they've just internalized a wall of "doesn't matter" even if it does.
That's all way more difficult, because we don't solely control the spaces we inhabit, but we can work to encourage those that do to give us the tools to negate the power of the alt-right by muting their voice. Especially in America, the attitude is that the First Amendment allows anyone to say anything and you can't do jack about it, but it just lets them say anything they want; it doesn't hold them free from repercussion. As just one example, something in voice chats that would scan for repeated use of slurs and auto-muting people might be a thing? It's a single example, and it's only "off the top of my head".
Presumably some people here know people not-here and see things that happen not-here and we shouldn't tolerate bad behavior elsewhere just because it happens to not be here.
Like I mentioned it further up-thread and it got passed over but I genuinely wonder if the disconnect is due to The Algorithm directing us to shit that pisses us off because it drives engagement, because the "how dare you disagree with my hot-take" shit is, if not endemic, than at least not uncommon on my feeds
This is still an assertion we need to dig up! Why are gamers more predisposed to misogynistic ideas? Is it because (as feminists etc have said) because the media they consume is full of these ideas (essentially, the Sarkeesian argument)?
Why, historically, has gaming been a space where misogyny is allowed to grow?
I'd look at lessons learned from the meta-analysis on exposure therapy in people with bias (cross applying it to any other therapy) and design a protocol, then seek funding. Educate myself with all the information out there on prior work to see if my proposal has already failed. Enlist the help of people who actually know how to impart critical thinking skills, and run k-12, college, and business pilot programs. And for fun, get federal funding to design a game that could augment these skills.
As far as I know, it's a new tack on an old remedy for a different problem. The proposal being made, the bottlenecks are money, time, and personnel.
Edit: oh, sorry, community intervention is not my cup of tea. Your guess is as good as mine.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
This one, at least, I have an answer for: Youtube suggests alt-right videos after literally everything, it's not specific to gaming
Actually, literally everything, up to and including explicitly anti-fascism videos
Then we come back to the core problem.
If these videos are being suggested to everyone, well first of all, ew, but second of all
Why are they finding purchase within the gaming community?
Could it perhaps be in part that gaming logic accepts a central conceit divorced from reality that we fail to address due to the abundance of more obviously salient and concrete factors, like abject examples of misogyny?
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I personally point to the days where video games had to be marketed as a toy in the aisles of specifically boy or girl separated toy markets and when they went with boy, the marketing skewed to act as if it was a totally male act. I don't know if board/card/TTRPGs had this same effect happen. It felt like, though, my entire life growing up geek dudes were told that dudes were all geeks, girls don't like geek things, geeks are losers who can't be manly, etc, and I think that, regardless of that even then being obviously untrue then, it has filtered to now.
Basically, I think it's a misogynistic space because geeks were told it was so, and thus made it so. Perpetual, self-fulfilling prophesy.
I've heard this argument before (specifically from Rachel Weil, owner/operator of the FEMICOM museum). I think it has some legs, but I don't think it explains the full range of problems. Maybe it does. If it's true, what do we do about it?
Though anti-fascist ones seem obvious, they're referencing alt right and fascist youtubers and there's going to be a lot of overlap of keywords.
IMO because it's been a male-dominated space since, like, the 1980s and because it's status within society attracted a lot of disaffected and anti-social young men who linked up with each other over their common outcast status which only became even worse as social media (and I'm talking like 1990s social media) became a thing and they could slowly link up and reinforce each other and become fiercely protective of what they view as "their thing".
Maybe games was an easy target because that audience has a large likelihood of being online at any given time, and is used to having the industry cater to them exclusively (for the last 20 or so years, anyway, I grew up in the 80s and do remember a time when games were marketed to everyone and even my mom played on the Atari from time to time).
Some have suggested that the fear from childhood that someone else has control of your games (parents, politicians) and that fear continues into adulthood could be a factor. Another possibility - I'm sure we've also all seen geeks act like a simulated minority (talking about the Big Bang Theory as "geek blackface" was popular for a while. I think I might have even fallen into using that term before I realized how gross it is), and maybe that "minority-hood" plays a role: the feeling you're trying to oppress me by saying my games need to change.
On my sleeve, let the runway start
As Astaereth points out, this didn't really happen there, unlike with gaming. The Sad/Rabid Puppies kinda got their asses shoved out the door right quick. Part of this was their avenue of attack on the community ran through a much smaller more connected group (ie - Worldcon) but a big part of it was also that they were outnumbered.
I think when you look at that in contrast to, say, Gamergate you can see a real underlying difference.
PS - the concept of gaming as a simulated ethnicity is, imo, a really good thought construct to bring to the issue because it does help make sense of a lot of what is going on
I mean, I don't think it explains it by itself, but I think that's how the seed was planted. The whole "gross icky girls" thing, at least where I was growing up, transferred partially to geek things, though by high school it was obvious to me that women were total geeks too. Like, everyone playing at "the Magic table" though was dudes. No gals even stepped up to try, and that's I think the reason. I also surmise that as gamer spread into other areas and cross-pollinated with comics and other geek things, a strange sort of melding of the misogyny in all of those areas. I mean, academics was still seen as a "dude's domain" when my sister was getting her masters in history, how dare she. Comics was the origin of the "fridging" issue that survives to this day. Games held their own trope hold-overs that sort of came from . . . everything else. And then it seemed to fester.
I really don't know what caused the festering. I think in part it was the video gaming being marketed as boy toys crap, I think it was all these other literary, academic, comic, etc fields filtering their misogyny on down, and I think it's also the current inherent learned behavior of folks making games in their late 40s to late 50s, which wasn't really past a lot of the more serious garbage. And then they started passing that down to folks in their 30s and younger as the world was changing and their hobbies were opening up and they just wanted a space that was theirs, I think.
Again, this is supposition based on my life experience.
And I think that gamer isn't the only place that it gestates, but gamers have grown into a media where their "opponent" is largely unknown. There's the old joke of "no women on the internet". The default assumption of malehood, the feeling of betrayal (and emasculation) when your opponent takes off their metaphorical helmet and says "I am no man", if you will. I think that feeling that the digital space isn't a real space, but is also a space to . . . hide, maybe? Has pushed some of the more virulent and angry positions in a direction that person-to-person contact makes more difficult?
I do think that online gaming has helped to distill a very specific kind of misogyny.
I remember one nerd news site basically agreeing with the "The Big Bang Theory is geek blackface" position, but disliked the specific term "geek blackface" so much that they held a contest for an alternative term (I don't remember what the winner was).
I used to ignore the hate towards The Big Bang Theory until I had multiple people compare me to characters on that show, and even then I wasn't bothered that they were making fun of characters who were nerds so much as I was bothered they were making fun of characters who, for example, lived with their mothers, had Aspergers', had severe social anxiety, etc.
Honestly, for as much trouble as they made, I DON'T think Gamergate was the majority in the games community. They were - and still are - very loud and obnoxious, but they were outnumbered. I think the problem was that the studios with the power to say, "if you are a member of this group, we don't want you playing our games", that there was no solidarity among the people who knew gg was full of shit & had the power to do something about it.
On my sleeve, let the runway start
I think the 80s was when lifestyle marketing really started taking off so that might be the difference?
I think they were large enough in comparison to the puppies to actually make a real move and not get pushed down and out right away. Rather then getting stomped on they just kind of relaxed and became part of the general scene.
It's also indicative of how readily one geek fandom will cannibalize another to appear more "manly", which reinforces the idea that a lot about this is concerned with a specific concept of manhood. I have been labeled a wuss, sissy, pussy, wimp, and more for my near-strict adherence to playing games on Easy if available because I have nothing to prove and everything to gain. Some games even use easy to infantilize or insult the player should they chose such a difficulty, reinforcing the "man competes, that's what he does" mentality.
Like, there's just a lot of toxic masculine elements that got hyper focused on to try and sell and promote games even in their infancy that really lends itself to hating women as a byproduct.