Is #GamerGate misogyny posing as concern for ethics?

[Gandalf]

That sucks. At my old MtG card haunt, we had more than a few girls/women show up to play. There was only one guy who ever gave them shit, but he was a fucking degenerate all-around. He almost got ran off for grabbing a girls ass when "she was totally in to me, I swear." He quit showing up after he scammed some kid out of a few rares and said kid's dad showed up and kicked the shit out of him. Hilariously, not one person would back his story up to the police because he was such a shit-stain. This was mid 90s though.

You still see a lot of that, even if it's less obvious. Female gamers get lots of condescending "helpful advice," and other things based on the sheer assumption that if they must not really understand what they're doing. When they win, then comes the wonderful gender based insults and accusations that they must have just been lucky, or their opponent made a mistake.

Lots of people can accept that women play games. Not a lot accept that they can be good at them.

[Darmalus]

@Broomstick: That is simultaneously disgusting and insanely childish. What was that, the He-Man Woman-Haters Club?

@TheFenix: Why aren't people who play mobile games and shit real gamers? Who decided this? It'd be like if baseball fans decided they were the only sports fans and everyone else wasn't worthy of the name.

Unfortunately the statistics on gamers are painfully vague, with only age and gender being reasonably concrete. Apparently 30% of female gamers play "violent video games" but that term covers everything from CoD to Silent Hill. I honestly wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a significant female CoD player base that behaved like my last girlfriend: vaguely masculine l33t sp34k user name, abstract avatar, never uses the chat and quietly slaughters the other players. Considering the cesspit voice chat usually is on these games I wouldn't talk or listen either.

[AniThyng]

@TheFenix: Why aren't people who play mobile games and shit real gamers? Who decided this? It'd be like if baseball fans decided they were the only sports fans and everyone else wasn't worthy of the name.

[PC master race parody]Because mobile games are dumbed down even more than peasant console games, duh. You filthy CASUAL![/PC master race parody]

Also - arguing that [sport x] is not REALLY a sport is a thing. Is bowling a sport?

[Eleas]

Men arbitrating what's 'real' and 'true' in culture to keep out undesirables (i.e. women and minorities) is a well-understood phenomenon that has happened before. This is just the latest instance, but the mechanics of it are no mystery.

[Guardsman Bass]

That Arthur Chu essay was really good. It covered similar ground to an Amanda Marcotte essay on the "girl power" bands of the 1990s before a backlash in the late 1990s/early 2000s (the same one that targeted Lilith Fair and led to the Limp Bizkit shitfest at Woodstock '99).

Man, just generally there was some shitty stuff from the 1990s and early 2000s that I had forgotten about.

[Eleas]

Agreed. And those happened as part of a whole. That's easy to overlook when the pattern isn't acknowledged, which is, I think, the reason why the idea of structures is so unpalatable to the élite.

[AniThyng]

This excerpt from the article struck me as uniquely relevant to this board...

Just like, reaching dizzying heights of absurdity, the incredibly nerdy Star Wars fan debate over exactly how many clone troopers there were in the Clone Wars became a reason to send threats, abuse, and screaming ranting videos to the one woman writing Star Wars books, eventually leading to her quitting the franchise. (Five years later, all that’s left of the shitshow is a brief but nonetheless surreal paragraph in her entry on the Star Wars fan wiki. But yes, trust me, it really was that bad.)

[Darmalus]

This excerpt from the article struck me as uniquely relevant to this board...

Just like, reaching dizzying heights of absurdity, the incredibly nerdy Star Wars fan debate over exactly how many clone troopers there were in the Clone Wars became a reason to send threats, abuse, and screaming ranting videos to the one woman writing Star Wars books, eventually leading to her quitting the franchise. (Five years later, all that’s left of the shitshow is a brief but nonetheless surreal paragraph in her entry on the Star Wars fan wiki. But yes, trust me, it really was that bad.)

...it means you will get flamed, threatened and screamed at for real terrible writing as well as made up issues?

[AniThyng]

This excerpt from the article struck me as uniquely relevant to this board...

Just like, reaching dizzying heights of absurdity, the incredibly nerdy Star Wars fan debate over exactly how many clone troopers there were in the Clone Wars became a reason to send threats, abuse, and screaming ranting videos to the one woman writing Star Wars books, eventually leading to her quitting the franchise. (Five years later, all that’s left of the shitshow is a brief but nonetheless surreal paragraph in her entry on the Star Wars fan wiki. But yes, trust me, it really was that bad.)

...it means you will get flamed, threatened and screamed at for real terrible writing as well as made up issues?

I dunno. Let's try this word substitution game and see if it works (apologies to Gandalf)

You still see a lot of that, even if it's less obvious. Female SF writers get lots of condescending "helpful advice," and other things based on the sheer assumption that if they must not really understand what they're doing. When they publish a novel, then comes the wonderful gender based insults and accusations that they must have just been lucky, or their publisher made a mistake.

Lots of people can accept that women write SF. Not a lot accept that they can be good at them.

[Eleas]

How much did we see of the actual harrassment she faced? The GamerGaters have their version of events, which frankly doesn't make sense unless one considers "some wimminz are just crazy and need to back out of our club house" a compelling argument. It strikes me that we view Karen Traviss in much the same way.

I personally think she should have held off on the Mando worship, but otherwise I can't say she's written nearly as crappy stuff as Paul Davids and Hollace Davids, or Kevin J. Anderson, or the guys that wrote Jedi Trial. Which of those received threats? None of them.

[Darmalus]

I dunno. Let's try this word substitution game and see if it works (apologies to Gandalf)

You still see a lot of that, even if it's less obvious. Female SF writers get lots of condescending "helpful advice," and other things based on the sheer assumption that if they must not really understand what they're doing. When they publish a novel, then comes the wonderful gender based insults and accusations that they must have just been lucky, or their publisher made a mistake.

Lots of people can accept that women write SF. Not a lot accept that they can be good at them.

You've lost me. Fans will flame and hate authors who do things poorly or just things they don't like, the guy who killed Chewbacca got death threats too as I remember. What does that have to do with advice?

[AniThyng]

I dunno. Let's try this word substitution game and see if it works (apologies to Gandalf)

You still see a lot of that, even if it's less obvious. Female SF writers get lots of condescending "helpful advice," and other things based on the sheer assumption that if they must not really understand what they're doing. When they publish a novel, then comes the wonderful gender based insults and accusations that they must have just been lucky, or their publisher made a mistake.

Lots of people can accept that women write SF. Not a lot accept that they can be good at them.

You've lost me. Fans will flame and hate authors who do things poorly or just things they don't like, the guy who killed Chewbacca got death threats too as I remember. What does that have to do with advice?

You'd note that it's not merely advice, but "condescending "helpful advice"".

Read this thread and see if it's familiar

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=128198

It even has a gendered insult, as well as assumptions that she doesn't really understand what she's doing.

[Darmalus]

You'd note that it's not merely advice, but "condescending "helpful advice"".

Read this thread and see if it's familiar

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=128198

It even has a gendered insult, as well as assumptions that she doesn't really understand what she's doing.

Considering the culture of this board, do you think those same posters would have hesitated to say (in an alternate universe) that Kevin Traviss was a limp-dicked blithering idiot with a Mandalorian fetish who had no idea what he was doing?

[Eleas]

Considering the culture of this board, do you think those same posters would have hesitated to say (in an alternate universe) that Kevin Traviss was a limp-dicked blithering idiot with a Mandalorian fetish who had no idea what he was doing?

Yes. Because we've had tons of crappy SW and Trek authors, but the only ones consistently meriting words on their sexual prowess/preferences/identity have been women. I'm not saying this is intentional, I'm saying we're part of a culture in which that dichotomy exists; we simply treat men and women differently -- and, frequently, women harsher.

[Vendetta]

Um Assassin's Creed has basically none of what you're talking about. There's like one mission to rescue a female in the series and she's a pregnant pirate, who historically got pregnant to get out of hanging. It has also had 1 Arab, 2 "white" (although tell an Italian he's the same as an Englishman and see what happens), a Native American, and a freed Black slave as protagonists. You can complain that women aren't really involved, but then if they were people would complain that it promotes violence against women.

It's also the series where they decided that having a female avatar for Unity's coop mode (of four faceless characterless mooks) was "too much work" so they didn't bother.

(Also I recall most of the female characters in Assassin's Creed 2 were prostitutes and one of the main mission hubs was a brothel where women would fawn over the player character and by proxy the player for being teh awesomes).

Nintendo tried this with their least popular of the Holy Trinity (Metroid) and ended up missing the mark so much with Other M, they would have just had a boring Metroid game had they cut all the drama bullshit and released a Metroid corridor shooter. Instead they ended up with insulting, cringe-worthy, and boring.

Consider Metroid in relation to your argument about how they would have to "explain" women in combat (they wouldn't, btw, Halo has female marines and spartans and no-one cares.) It wasn't until they tried to "explain" it that they descended into drivel.

[Darmalus]

Considering the culture of this board, do you think those same posters would have hesitated to say (in an alternate universe) that Kevin Traviss was a limp-dicked blithering idiot with a Mandalorian fetish who had no idea what he was doing?

Yes. Because we've had tons of crappy SW and Trek authors, but the only ones consistently meriting words on their sexual prowess/preferences/identity have been women. I'm not saying this is intentional, I'm saying we're part of a culture in which that dichotomy exists; we simply treat men and women differently -- and, frequently, women harsher.

I'm not sure any of those authors were as prominent and tweaked this boards pet peeves quite so hard either.

I agree on the insults, though. Male specific and general purpose insults lack any real bite to them while female specific ones still sting. Why that is might make an interesting sociology paper.

[Eleas]

I'm not sure any of those authors were as prominent and tweaked this boards pet peeves quite so hard either.

I dunno, though. Kevin J Anderson was the one who actually fucked the legitimacy of Star Wars as plausible Sci-Fi. With Darksaber, he produced the most damning evidence against Turbolaser firepower the SW debate side has ever seen. Annnnd... crickets. Vector Prime? Salvatore killed Chewbacca. He ushered in a (in some quarters) truly hated period of the Star Wars EU. Annd... hatred for the Yuuzhan Vong, not for Salvatore. Nobody found out where he lived, nobody even mentioned him on a personal level, other than saying he was a shit author (well, that was me).

There are double standards here large enough to produce their own gravity field. There's even papers measuring the degree of hate levied toward women making such waves as opposed to male ones. Those numbers aren't even close to being equal.

I agree on the insults, though. Male specific and general purpose insults lack any real bite to them while female specific ones still sting. Why that is might make an interesting sociology paper.

It's made a ton of them, and it's paved the way for the type of conclusions we've reached in this discussion and that surround GamerGate. And the scope of it goes far beyond the question of whether some insults sting more than others.

[The Romulan Republic]

I read that Salvatore got threatened. In fact, Darmalus mentioned it in this thread.

[DaveJB]

I dunno, though. Kevin J Anderson was the one who actually fucked the legitimacy of Star Wars as plausible Sci-Fi. With Darksaber, he produced the most damning evidence against Turbolaser firepower the SW debate side has ever seen. Annnnd... crickets.

Not exactly. A lot of people still regard KJA as the absolute worst author ever involved with the Star Wars EU, even though he hasn't written anything more than the occasional short story since around 1997 or so. Compare that to, say, Vonda McIntyre, whose novel The Crystal Star came out at around the same time as Darksaber and got if anything an even WORSE reception. Yet hardly anyone ever talks about her nowadays, and those who do tend to regard her writing style as just being a poor fit for Star Wars, rather than her being unable to understand the franchise because of her gender. I think with Traviss it's a combination of her work being more recent, and the habit she had of publicly attacking fans who didn't like her work.

Nintendo tried this with their least popular of the Holy Trinity (Metroid) and ended up missing the mark so much with Other M, they would have just had a boring Metroid game had they cut all the drama bullshit and released a Metroid corridor shooter. Instead they ended up with insulting, cringe-worthy, and boring.

The weird thing is that Fusion and Zero Mission also delved more into Samus's character and backstory, and both handled it absolutely fine, even though they had the same lead developer (Yoshio Sakamoto) as Other M. Between that, the game's atrocious controls and the incredibly cack-handed nature of the "authorization" system, it's enough to make me wonder whether Sakamoto was high on something during the game's production.

[Broomstick]

I honestly wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a significant female CoD player base that behaved like my last girlfriend: vaguely masculine l33t sp34k user name, abstract avatar, never uses the chat and quietly slaughters the other players.

Until recently, that was the norm. Also, women frankly posing as men, that is, more than "vaguely" masculine name, he-man avatar, never uses chat.

I think World of Warcraft was the first on-line RPG where I dared to show up as an obviously female character.

I remember when in-game chat first started to get popular. A lot of women avoided it. The guild I was in was pretty adult and open-minded, but every once in awhile we'd get someone maintaining that we can't have the women in the raid, they just weren't good enough, or insisted they couldn't be tanks, that healing was the only acceptable role for a woman, frank shock that someone they'd seen playing and thought an excellent player was female, accusations that a woman was borrowing a boyfriend's/husband's toon... at this point it's pretty much died down in what I play and those still of that mindset are seen as aberrations.

I also thought it was hilarious the way guys who took out female toons reacted initially in WoW - yes, guys, we weren't exaggerating about the harassment! It did open a few eyes. Also a certain amount of gay panic in assholes who couldn't comprehend that a male player might have a female toon. A couple of them actually tried to get Blizzard to make it a bannable offense for someone to play a character of a different gender and they were entirely up front about no wanting to accidentally hit on a guy in a girl suit. THAT got a laugh from everyone sane.

At this point the creepers have gotten it through their head that a sizable number of girl toons are operated by guys.

In-game chat also lead to revelations like that cool player you like to go on missions with is actually a little old lady old enough to be your grandmother, or the macho tank is, yes, a guy but he's got five kids and does gooey baby-talk with the toddler. Or, true story, the guildmistress of a guild composed entirely of female toons is actually a hetero man... no, people, only the TOON has to be female, we don't care about what gender the player is. That caused a few brain cramps when a woman got all upset about that.

It's funny what gender and age bias comes out of the woodwork. If we ever get in-game video (I actually sort of hope we don't) we'll have the same brouhahas over race, I'm sure. (OMG! Elmo is voiced by a black man? You have black voice actors doing white characters, white voice actors doing black chracters, Asian voice actors doing everything? Bart Simpson is actually a WOMAN?!?)

[Broomstick]

I agree on the insults, though. Male specific and general purpose insults lack any real bite to them while female specific ones still sting. Why that is might make an interesting sociology paper.

I dunno - why does n***** have more impact than "cracker"? Racial insults directed at white people don't have nearly the impact as those directed at black people, at least not in the US. It has a lot to do with which group has historically had the power and which group has historically been abused.

[salm]

I also thought it was hilarious the way guys who took out female toons reacted initially in WoW - yes, guys, we weren't exaggerating about the harassment! It did open a few eyes. Also a certain amount of gay panic in assholes who couldn't comprehend that a male player might have a female toon. A couple of them actually tried to get Blizzard to make it a bannable offense for someone to play a character of a different gender and they were entirely up front about no wanting to accidentally hit on a guy in a girl suit. THAT got a laugh from everyone sane.

That´s funny. Back in the 90s I did some web design work for an Unreal Tournament Clan and played with them a couple of times (I was useless compared to them, though.). All of the clan members were male in their teens or early twenties and all of them used female characters because the hitbox was smaller which gave you an advantage. If I remember correctly most regular UT players used female characters for that reason.

[Spekio]

Snip.

It still happens. I have friends overseas whom I play Dota with, and when I play on american servers (that have decent ping for me, for some reason) I see brazilians get flamed all the time. So, due to having a noticeable accent, I only type.

On Brazil servers I played with a guy whom is from Portugal, really nice guy, got mocked just for his accent.

The GF, when she occasionally plays, forgoes voice chat because my god there are some creeps.

It's the GIFT.

[Eleas]

Not exactly. A lot of people still regard KJA as the absolute worst author ever involved with the Star Wars EU, even though he hasn't written anything more than the occasional short story since around 1997 or so. Compare that to, say, Vonda McIntyre, whose novel The Crystal Star came out at around the same time as Darksaber and got if anything an even WORSE reception. Yet hardly anyone ever talks about her nowadays, and those who do tend to regard her writing style as just being a poor fit for Star Wars, rather than her being unable to understand the franchise because of her gender.

That's the thing though: Vonda McIntyre didn't try to upset the apple cart. That's what all these women also have in common. Particularly Traviss, who dared to question the Jedi (I happen to think she was wrong, but I don't want her head over it).

I think with Traviss it's a combination of her work being more recent, and the habit she had of publicly attacking fans who didn't like her work.

That's my question though: did she actually attack first? It's hard to see from within the situation, after all.

[Eleas]

I read that Salvatore got threatened. In fact, Darmalus mentioned it in this thread.

Fair enough. The thing is, the bar is still lower for females, although I don't know that it's quite as bad in the Star Wars community as it is in gaming or tech.