Flash Game Makes Players Beat Up "Tropes vs. Women" Creator

[C2Ultima]

"This campaign isn't about misogyny going on in games, so let's punch this ***** in the face in this game I made."

Wait, what?

Great argument there "Bendilin".

 

[runic knight]

Shes been using it to make the 'gaming community' look like a great evil.

They do that themselves just fine haha.

But none of that is what I'd consider hard evidence. It's pretty much just theorycrafting.

Actually, it looks more like a court case. I mean come on, Means, motive, confession of the accused, alibi timetables... It is pretty compelling, especially since she made use of the reactions received. Someone spammed that over there and started the hate machine rolling, and as people here have said, she stands accused. Treat it like a trial.

Also, the community doesn't do a lot to do that, merely a dishonest misrepresented vocal minority of a minority of asshats. I sincerely doubt that a community consisting of well over 200 million in america alone has been very well represented by a youtube video getting less then 200 thousand views (not segregating for gamer/non-gamers, so it isn't even 200k gamers) and was spammed all over 4 chan. By her or by someone else, you can't deny it was spammed and there was an obvious reaction. And you can't deny that the asshole of the internet is not a good or fair representation of any group except trolls in general. You want a feel for the community, do it right. Field for an unbiased random selection instead of scooping up a number of asshats (some who probably came because of trolling for the sake of trolling, men's rights assholes, and shear pissed off douche-bags who don't play games but feel like posting anyways).

 

[Smeggs]

The fuck is the matter with people?

Couldn't just make a shitload of "Get back in de kitchen" jokes and be assholes like normal? Nope, instead they have to make the gaming community look even more like a bunch of sociopathic homicidal freaks than the media already had older misinformed people believing.

Just leave it be. When the videos finally come out everyone will have a definitive answer. If the videos are extremely in-depth and non-biased with a lot of research then obviously the money did its job and all who donate can sit on their high-horse as they stroke themselves off for a job well done. If the videos are biased as fuck from a female perspective and have basic info in them that withdraws a collective "DUH" from everyone watching it, then everyone who was against the kickstarter can continue being a bunch of assholes and many "I TOLD YOU, MORONS!" Will be had all across the land.

Honestly, the money has already been sent, there is no reason whatsoever to complain right now.

 

[Kahunaburger]

so of course he is going to stick his fingers in his ears and deny her any faults.

Actually, I haven't ruled out the possibility of her posting stuff on 4chan or w/e, I just haven't seen any convincing evidence yet. I think that one way or another /v/ was taken for a ride, but based on the evidence at hand it's most plausible that it's something they did to themselves. She certainly gave the YouTube commenters enough rope to hang themselves with, which I classify less as a "fault" and more as "hilarious."

It is very hard to convince people they have been scammed when they think they are helping a good cause.

Yeah, what is with those sheeple and having a different opinion from you? Why doesn't everyone understand that things you don't like are scams T.T

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

From an evolutionary standpoint men have always been the competitors needing to be stronger and more able to fight and survive while women tended to survive best through passivity, that's evolution for you.

If you actually think that is the reason I think you are kidding yourself. There is no reason to think an athletic woman would be any worse than a guy in that situation.

Men have physical problems as they get older too. But that's besides the point since there's only once aspect of biology the devs were considering and it involves jiggle physics.

Nice work butchering up the post, which was an offside comment because you said something patently false and I called you on it. Since women lose bone density, joint cohesion and muscle tone at a faster rate then men women aging would be at a disadvantage.
I agree men can age while women can't. However the same could be said for the real dating world. Salt and pepper hair is seen as an attractive trait to most women, it could simply be called objectifying men with traditionally sexually attractive appearance.
However i also assume you are simply trying to construct a strawman as you could not argue that they don't try to push traditional sexually attractive features of men to similar degrees to women or that you are attempting to argue that a poorly written game demonstrates sexism with poorly written characters, while a well written game dosn't because it is well written.

Spoiler: Sorry but in no way are men sexually objectified in gaming short of Bioware RPGs. They simply arent designed for women to be attracted too. Women are not attracted to huge muscly guys like Kratos. That's a power fantasy for men.

If you won't accept reality then I guess we will have to agree to disagree. I think even the most stringent of manly male gamers would back me up on the fact that the women in soul calibur are hypersexualised. It's simply a fact unless you are just trying to be willfully ignorant.

My mum is 60 and still goes to the gym. She is reasonably fit. I don't think if Ivy was 60 she would be way worse off than my mum having been a martial artist all her life.

Look up Augusta Pate who earned her blackbelt at 70 years old

 

[Kahunaburger]

Methinks, perhaps, when a specific thread transitions from tinfoil hat conspiracy about troll-baiting to anthropological defenses of sexism, it's time to put our keyboards down and move on to something more constructive.

Hey, man, I'm totally gonna have a rational discussion on the internet about anthropology and gender on a gaming website! That's a reasonable expectation, right? Ha... aha... T.T

(Haha if only it were so easy to derail bad threads with academic discussion...

Prima: Mass Effect 3 really rustles my jimmies.
Secunda: Cool, but what do you think about the relevance of Kierkegaard's "leap to faith" to religious SF characters like Ashley?)

 

[Treblaine]

as upset as i am i will say this. atleast she was beaten up in virtual reality rather real life.

To be honest, i'd like to see the first episode of this Tropes VS Women and THEN make my opinion. as for the current reaction.......i still think i'm asleep and this didn't really happen.


......or it did happen and the person who made that flash game has their electronics taken by Jim Sterling's hammer. and by taken i mean broken into tiny bits

I don't know why you should look forward to her video. Uwe Boll makes bad movies, why would you look forward to his next one?

Her analysis of Bayonetta consists of saying it is sexy therefore it is bad with no explanation WHY it is bad. Then she says it is to blame for women getting unwanted groping on Japanese subway trains... with absolutely no explanation how a fictional depiction of a woman who is never shown being sexually touched leads to sexual assault. The only link is male heterosexuality.

It's nonsense.

This adds nothing to the discussion. This totally fails as a discussion, this only works as an ignorant one-sided lecture where she never engages with any of the criticism. And she clearly reads everything, but cherry picks the trolls. Chose your own straw-man.

She doesn't like Bayonetta being sexual... but she can't just be frank that that is her personal preference, she has to make up nonsense about how this causes sexual assault without looking at the actual circumstances of those assaults, she just jumps to conclusions.

http://www.destructoid.com/interview-anita-sarkeesian-games-and-tropes-vs-women-230337.phtml

In a game that totally defies all laws of physics she complains about her wearing high heels and not wearing trousers. She doesn't actually give an objective reason why she can't just wear underpants, I don't see anyone objecting to how female Olympic athletes wear pretty much only swimsuit-bottoms. Why should a female have to conceal her legs? Is this Saudi Arabia?

Now I never said I'm looking forward to it. So please, stop with the dozens of reasons that i can go on any random site to find.

What I meant was I'd like to see what opinion she has before i disagree with it. How can you judge something you haven't even seen? and by that i mean her Tropes VS Women.

Now, to be fair, after i commented i checked some of her videos. there are things i disagree with. but really this is the equivalent of a religious YT video saying how gays are the spawn of nazis or another Zerowolf64 rant video. and i know my stance when it comes to Sarkeesian. However I can't really judge what she will eventually say on women in video games UNTIL I ACTUALLY SEE IT. Its like a film critique wanting to judge a bad movie but hasn't seen it so he wouldn't really be sure its bad or not.

In short, not looking forward to it but want to see it for someone else's opinion.

So, you don't need to bombard me with info that i've already looked up.

"To be honest, i'd like to see the first episode of this Tropes VS Women and THEN make my opinion."
"Now I never said I'm looking forward to it."

Forgive my misunderstanding, I didn't know I had to, ah, read between the lines so much. Maybe you should read between the lines of what I said.

"not looking forward to it but want to see"

I don't know what to make of that. Seem like a semantic contradiction.

You say I don't need to bombard me with things you've already looked up, but just before that you implied you looked at her videos for the first time after you had commented. Are you making a "jury's still out" fallacy? George W Bush did that when he said "the jury was still out" on evolution, when the matter had been settled for over a century, he was ignoring all the information available to him. There is plenty of material out there to demonstrate her acumen for critiquing sex and gender in video games, there is no need to wait the months (or years) before she makes a Tropes vs Video Games video (she is bound to no timetable, she can take as long as she likes).

I'm not judging her as a person, I can't, I've never met her. But you and I and anyone else with internet access can judge her by her ability to competently discuss this subject as she has said a LOT about this.

I can judge her project by the very premise she goes into it with the stated premise on her kick-starter video, and of her critique of video games in particular and of other forms of media. She has such an established trend of poor critique, how anyone can be expectant rather than just hope for a miraculous complete 180-degrees change in approach is beyond me.

I struggle to find anything to agree with, she goes in with such a blatant conformational bias, she does not follow the evidence, she has her pre-determined conclusion and forces the evidence to fit her prejudice. Like forcing wrong puzzle pieces together to fit the picture she jumped to conclusion it was of. She is just amazingly amateurish in her logic, though she dresses it up in fancy terms her argument is essentially "sexy women cause sexual assault". Which is outrageous, rapists cause rape, not a woman wearing a short skirt. She endorses segregation and apartheid as a solution to sexual assault rather than simply enforcing legal laws and basic societal ethics of opposing disturbing interaction.

You can have an opinion on her work BEFORE her final Tropes vs Video Games project is finished. She has said plenty already.

 

[rbstewart7263]

She endorses segregation and apartheid as a solution to sexual assault rather than simply enforcing legal laws and basic societal ethics of opposing disturbing interaction.

That one I missed. Got a link?

hes speaking of her video reguarding bayonettas ads on subways where she links the ads to increased sexual assaults on subways and then heralds the segregation of genders on subways as a way to curb incidents.


heres the video in question.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgLw8tChxX4

sorry that ones more a response to her video lmao um here it is in its lack of bias(aside from anitas bias)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbihPTgAql4

 

[Kahunaburger]

The study i posted also points out genetic traits such as our surviving female ancestors having lighter and more frail skeletons relative to their earlier ancestors, showing how the "rugged skeletons", the ones the article associates with neanderthals, are a less desirable trait, this would be consistent with a female role farther form dangerous physical work. It would also be consistent with modern women having lighter musculature thinner bones and greater risk for bone and joint issues that started this conversation.

This is why people shouldn't do the just so story thing w/ evolution instead of sticking to conclusions that are supported by the data. When you start saying stuff like "I think that women are smaller than men because women didn't have to do manual labor and size got selected out" you have moved beyond the realm of science and into the realm of pseudo-science. (Also the realm of "did you think that women in hunter-gatherer societies and starving agrarian villages spent all day doing needlepoint?")

You are also using an abstract, a heavily oversimplified version with NO ACTUAL DATA LISTED, as your source. Talk about grasping at plausible explanations. I would much rather take the men with doctorates word for it that they can understand the data of their own research than your understanding of an abstract.

No, I'm actually taking about the paper itself (there's no pay gate, which makes me very happy from a free access to information standpoint), specifically the genetic findings and the factors discussed as possible causes for the genetic findings. If you read the entire paper, you will notice that the empirical data stops at "the male population has historically had a higher attrition rate." Later discussion of why that attrition gap exists is not empirically verified and is generally not discussed as such.

It's actually a really interesting paper, and I would advise you to read it, both because the paper's findings are interesting, because it gives you a really fascinating rundown of the factors that might be behind the genetic data (they don't just discuss their pet explanations, very much to their credit), and because it's a good example of what I'm talking about re: the difference between drawing conclusions from evidence and making speculations that are consistent with evidence.

The study you are citing is not only 20 years older than the one I posted

And? How has our understanding of anthropology changed in the last 20 years that would change our interpretation of this paper in a relevant way?

but it is cited in papers that specifically refer to the system of gender roles surviving into today's culture:
http://dornsife.usc.edu/wendywood/research/documents/Wood.Eagly.2002.pdf
and ones that refer to "egalitarianism" as equal but different, wherein men hunt and women gather. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/28530/1/0000327.pdf

Hey, that's more like it. The John Speth paper is definitely a worthwhile read, and it's certainly important to differentiate between an understanding of hunter-gatherer societies as relatively egalitarian and non-hierarchical and the assumption of perfect egalitarianism.

The second paper was actually one of the ones I was hoping you'd find. It's a good source for many of the things we're discussing here, including sexual dimorphism, biological, social, and economic factors in gender roles, competing theories of gender roles, cross-cultural gender role variation, cross-cultural variation in the gender division of labor, cross-cultural variation in extent of patriarchy, and so on. Bonus: it's not behind a pay gate! You should definitely read it.

Neither of which disproves that there WAS variance in the gender role but the existence of that variance in no way disproves that the most successful system was that of specific gender roles and in fact some of the conclusions support it.

You can make a better case that the recipe for our species historical success is our flexibility. For an extreme example, if you transplanted me and a bunch of my co-workers from DC to Inuit lands and we tried to establish a society where we hold the same economic roles we do here, we'd all immediately starve/freeze to death ("okay, interns, y'all are going to find some roots, tubers, and seaweed. Communications guy is going to work on our tribe's social media, and the research team is going to work on an article on how to build an igloo because it's really fucking cold. Legal team is going to draft up some amicus briefs in case we have to take our environmental practices to court. Executive director is going to catch seals, then distribute the meat among paid staff members. Sorry, interns.")

Our species' main trick is finding smart/creative ways to survive in different contexts, and you're not going to find a societal system that functions efficiently in all environmental/economic contexts, as discussed in Wood & Eagly paper. The social roles that made sense to someone in 4,000 BCE Mesopotamia are probably not going to help you figure out who to hire, either. ("Okay, Ekur, this clay tablet and your references say that you have a mighty spear-arm but that you are also literate and well-spoken. That's very impressive, and we're prepared to hire you as a communications fellow on the spot. Would you be interested in a starting salary of ten shekels and a cow per month?")

You refereed to the study as: re: how Homo Sapiens Sapiens operates in a hunter-gatherer environment. Searching for this minus one "sapient" yielded nothing, as did searching for it verbatim, it shares only a couple of words with the ACTUAL study you are using as the basis of your argument which gives me a near impossible task of figuring out what you are actually referring to.

"Homo Sapiens Sapiens" is just the Latin name for the only surviving subspecies of human, i.e. all of us. I'm referring to the significant observed diversity in social roles by gender. One of the studies you cited (the Wood & Eagly one) has a pretty in-depth treatment of this, and I highly recommend you fully read it. If you're interested in how significant variations in hunter-gatherer lifestyle can play out in different contexts, I'd recommend reading the Wood & Eagly paper, then looking at traditional social roles in the Inuit, !Kung, and Aeta cultures. (Of course, many modern Inuit, !Kung, and Aeta live very differently from the traditional lifestyles.)

 

[Kahunaburger]

She endorses segregation and apartheid as a solution to sexual assault rather than simply enforcing legal laws and basic societal ethics of opposing disturbing interaction.

Please don't appropriate language invoking civil rights when discussing why you think women in Japan shouldn't get the option of a non-groping subway car. (Unless you think separate restrooms/locker rooms are segregation and/or apartheid.)

 

[Odbarc]

This 'beat up woman' flash game is actually a long lasting genre of game that included many hot or recent celebrity icons.
This ONE particular one isn't any more or less satire or interesting as any of the others that preceded it.
No one cared when it was "Beat up Rhianna as Chris Brown" the week after she got her ass kicked.

It's just not actually that relevant or interesting.

Was it JimQuisition that said that murder (in real life) is worse in real life practice but celebrated in games and movies, ect? That stark contrast shows (to me) that a game is just a game. A story is just a story. None of it actually deserves any more attention than any other subject matter and trying to give it special treatment is anti-equality and I'm terribly against that.