TheKasp said:
Entitled said:
I always found that Jimquistion video very hypocritical, because it wasn't really GAMERS who created The Sarkeesian, just as it wasn't really gamers who created this current "fake geek girl" moral panic either, but the video game media pundits from news sites and blogs, just like and including Jim Sterling.
It's not "people" who knee-jerked, it was the gamer media elite that grabbed the most excessive post that some random idiot wrote, and turned it into a straw man for their rants about how mysoginist gamers are.
They are not much better than Fox News, who would look at some random school shooter owning video games, and then start airing dozens of debates about The Controversy of how gamers are violent, then by the time the whole media is full of the buzz that they created, here already is a controversy as gamers are trying to react to it.
Well, on this I disagree. Sarkeesian went to this amount of fame just because of the reactions towards her cause - disregarding how justified she is in it - and the reactions were mostly to be found on YT, 4chan and every gaming forum. The conclusion that it was the gaming community is not that far-stretched.
It's not far-fetched, but ultimately, it's still wrong.
Youtube, 4chan, and similar sites are hate machines by their very structure. They gather anonymous masses with zero moderation, and there are so many commenters that only single sentence, extreme, shocking posts will have an effect. They are inevitably attract the kind of people who enjoy this, and drive away the people who don't.
How many misogynist posts did you see on The Escapist? On any community where posters have a reputation to uphold? Maybe some, but I think, significantly less than you would even in mainstream American society. If anything, nerd gamers in general tend to be progressive egalitarians
The flash game is just another example of that problem. Ok, so there is some 25 year old car mechanic from Burlington, Kentucky, (just made that up), who really hates Sarkeesian, and expressed this by throwing together a flash game. He sucks. But why did Destructoid, The Escapist, The Huffington Post, Forbes, Boing Boing, and dozens of other sites feel important to report on this, and put it into a frame of "gamers" attacking her?
Of course, most people who comment on Youtube and 4Chan are assholes. And yes, a number of them are gamers, so when there are gaming relate news on these sites, they will comment on them. But in the end, what 4chan's gamers think of Sarkeesian tells us more about the 4chan community, than about the gamer community. Mixing up the two is as disingenuous, as quoting the Ku Klux Klan to see what the American Right thinks about President Obama.
Assholes exist. Somewhere. But if you, as a journalist, blow it out of proportion, and talk about nothing but this for weeks, and generalize as if it would be a serious problem all over our comminity, that can be exactly as manipulative as talking about a school shooter for weeks, to keep an atmosphere of moral panic, as if your children would be in the danger of going postal right now.
It's the same with these "fake geek girls". To pretend that there is an "outrage" against fake gamer girls all over the gaming community, journalists intentionally have to create the atmosphere that everyone is in danger, that if your debate partner disagrees with the journalist, he might very well be one of them outraged mysogynists.
