Aram Zucker-Scharff

Trolls drive Anita Sarkeesian out of her house to prove misogyny doesn’t exist:

Earlier this week, feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian posted the latest in a series of crowdfunded videos called Tropes vs. Women, devoted to aggregating and analyzing games that portray women as…

FFS

“”Yes, developers and journalists like Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian speak loudly about feminism and equality, but it’s not to attack self-involved lunatics like Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini. It’s because they actually stand for something – for people to behave like decent human beings and treat each other with respect – as opposed to rallying against viewpoints that aren’t compatible with Middle Ages-era opinions about gender and equality.””

– Video Games, Misogyny, And Terrorism: A Guide To Assholes.

Once again, I will not negotiate with terrorists.:

ohdeargodbees:

Ok, let’s try this again.

This has nothing to do with games and is not a matter of legitimate public interest, but is simply a personal matter. I would hope and request that the games press be respectful of what IS a personal matter, and not news, and not about games. This is explicitly about…

The crap that is being sent to Zoe Quinn is complete and utter bullshit. The internet’s reaction to these allegations being leveled at her (by which I mean Reddit, 4chan and related) is terrifying. Even if every allegation about her was true (which I very much doubt) the scale and vehemence of her detractors are totally out of proportion to the issue at hand. 

The way the allegations are being perpetuated and the accompanying personal attacks on her are completely unethical and vile. Any possible actual ethical question is completely negated by the methodology of the accusers. 

I 100% support Zoe Quinn in this. Even if, let’s say, everything her accusers say is true, 0 of the fault would lie with her. The journalists involved have certain ethical responsibilities that are part of their professions, those ethical responsibilities are theirs, ones they receive upon taking up their particular professional mantles. Ones that should be checked and supported by their editors and bosses. They aren’t applied to the subject of a journalistic report or beat. The ethics are theirs to uphold, not Ms. Quinn’s. If there was an ethical breach (and I am going to assume that there was not, because that is the fair way to consider it) then the fault and blame lies with the folks who have a professional responsibility to ethical reporting, not with the subject of any such reporting. A private citizen may do what they wish, with whoever they wish. A journalist may not. 

That little tangent into the ethics of journalism aside, the reaction to the allegations against Quinn have been mostly vile and so considerably overwrought (as the reactions were, and continue to be, to her work) that it deserves to be considered as abnormal. I believe that abnormally terrible behavior lies in some pretty terrible sexism. For that reason alone, Quinn deserves our support. The work she has done and continues to do in order to defeat that type of thinking is vital.

I won’t link to any of the awfulness here. For what little my support is worth, I support Zoe Quinn and her work.

True-ish Grit:

overthinkingvideogames:

If you were to anthropomorphize the contemporary American mainstream video game, it would look, I think, a bit like a harrowingly male, shaggily haired, extremely confident 18-year-old capable of any number of astounding displays of strength or agility. Smart, too, in his way. Not incurious about things outside the realm of his immediate experience so much as oblivious to them. All the same, this young man has potentially interesting things to say. Most of us would be willing to listen, too, but for the fact that his breath smells like peanut butter and he’s wearing a Boris Vallejo T-shirt.

Despite the yada yada of video games’ growing cultural prominence, the amount of money they make (and lose), and the simple reality that maybe no creative medium has ever moved further faster, most people don’t take video games very seriously. I realize this comes as a shock to precisely no one who doesn’t play video games. Sometimes the fact that games are written off as adolescent nonsense bugs me. Sometimes it doesn’t, because a lot of games — a lot of great games — are adolescent nonsense. And sometimes I think that the worst thing to happen to video games would be for them to get taught widely in schools¹ and reviewed in The New Yorker. As the novelist and critic (and gamer!) John Lanchester once wisely noted, “Respectability is a terrible thing for any art form. People wrote better novels when the cultural status of the novel was contested.”

On videogames in (North) American culture.