Is ganking girl gamers a bad thing?

[Devil's Due]

Having played WoW since Vinallia and other MMOs (SWG, DDO, SWTOR) for many years now, I can only sum my feelings with one famous phrase:

"If it's Red, it's Dead."

There are no exceptions to this list, any enemy player I find will be destroyed regardless of gender. This message has been brought you by an Agent from the Imperial Intelligence Agency. For the Empire!

 

[lacktheknack]

...that's not seriously the actual title of the article, right? You know what really makes my faith in humanity drop?

That. As if the overly dramatic title was bad enough, we have the broad, inaccurate and sexist definition of rape to get me really offensive. Somebody should tell the write of the guy who was tied up and raped for days on end by a woman who was feeding him Viagra.

http://imgur.com/a/y8jII

Three guesses as to whether that was a real article or not.

As I stated three posts up, /v/ does not like Patricia Hernandez.

I know it's in extremely poor taste to laugh at rape jokes, but I laughed really quite hard at "Maybe if I had noticed that my name was close to 'patriarchy', and had changed it, maybe I would not have suffered all those rapes".

To make up for it, I laughed harder at the "My Growing Collection Of Severed Penises" poem.

 

[Gatx]

simply, ganking girl gamers is not a bad thing, but what this guy does is just depressing.

not only does he specifically target woman and actively tries to ruin their fun in the game, he reasons its ok because the girl in question was an attention whore. he completely contradicts this with his strategy of how to find girls in the game. "girls love to do secondary professions" so he tells you to look for them at beaches (where they are fishing) "girls love to raid, but the high level raids are beyond them" so you should look at lower level raids (or easyer ones i think, im no WoW player).

he says he does this because they are attention whores that con lonely men out of their money, but he 'teaches' you ways to find random woman in the game...

and then i could talk about the stupidity of thinking all girls like cooking and fishing in WoW, which he literally says, or all girls love to raid. and the almost sickening arrogance of saying that the harder content is too difficult for girls really pisses me off. hell the one fanatic girl gamer i know (a rl friend) kicks my ass at pretty much everything she plays, although that could very well say more about me

When I was watching this I was thinking that he was referring to "gamer gurlz" or whatever the actual term is, which specifically applies to "attention whores." There are people are annoyed that people out there self-identify as geeks who actually aren't. You'll remember all those debates we had a while back about "fake gamer girls", and then there's the general disdain for the Big Bang Theory for not being a "true representation" of "geek culture."

Also maybe it's not intended to be serious? It sounded tongue in cheek to me. Didn't bother to go through his other videos to see if that was really the case though so I could be wrong.

 

[somonels]

Because ganking/harassing men is socially accepted behavior.
Because when it's directed toward a certain group of people it is only more heinous.
Because stream griefing is soo heinous.

Kotaku...

Escapist... forum

 

[Ryotknife]

Didn't know the word 'ganking'. Is this another of those things where somebody misspelled 'ganging' and everybody else lol'd so it stuck, like 'pwn' instead of 'own'?

OP: It's asshole-ish and a bit creepy but what're you gonna do, this has been happening for as long as people have been playing against each other.

ganking pretty much means ambushing/unfair fight. It is a pvp battle that is very lop sided before the fight starts against someone who is not expecting a pvp battle.

As for the topic at hand, ganking in general is a creepish thing to do. Im all for world pvp (I remember my escapades in Stranglethorn Vale), but im not a big fan of unfair pvp battles. People are sometimes ganked because of their faction, guild, fictional race, class, and many other reasons.

 

[Brad Shepard]

I dont give a shit if you are a guy/girl/straight/gay/bi/trans/mutant/dog/soda can given sentience though magical farts, if you are in the opposite faction and you come into my home turf, you are getting shanked with a blunt spoon. Besides, I dont know if the person is a girl or not, I know of guys who pick girl characters for stupid reasons, as in "I would rather look at a girl's ass for 109u41024 hours of this game and not a guys"

Well heres the thing bud, if you are looking at the ass and not the game, YOU ARE PLAYING THE GAME WRONG! If you want to pick a chick or a guy for stats/classes, whatever, i dont care, if thats your preference, i still dont care, but dont try to justify it with some sort of ass backwards excuse (See what i did there?)

and PLEASE dont get me started op Patrica, she is like that drama queen in high school that just wants to start shit when she is bored.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

It's nowhere remotely similar to rape, which seems to be the underlying premise...

Of what? The joke picture created by /v/? Which has been referenced 3-4 times on this very page as being a photoshop and not an actual article?

That's the only thing in any of this referring to rape.

I know it's a Photoshop. The OP addressed the comparison to rape, and I used my intuition, whether wrongly or not, to infer that the Photoshopped article is the only reason the OP would compare ganking to rape, considering they disagree with the comparison anyway.

 

[Frotality]

giving special attention to females being ganked is the real sexism here, it shows that we still feel female gamers need to be treated differently. it might sound bad, but one youtube idiot does not a social norm make, and quite honestly online multiplayer between males does tend to get that vitriolic, so i dont believe there is any real malice in it... specific to females at least. PvP servers exist as catharsis, to kill and be killed by needlessly cruel douchebags whose only advantage is that they started paying for the game before you and are a higher level.... its a brutal way to play, but its supposed to be, and it is rewarding when your the one stalking newbs to kill because they just so happen to be there.

not that there isnt certain social issues at play, just not really sexism. trash talk adapts itself to the victim, and if its a female then its gonna sound sexist, but it isnt, just good old fashion douchebaggery.

 

[rbstewart7263]

Back when I played WoW, this was a long ago, we use to like heading into PvP zones like Strangalthorn Vale and have a blast murdering each left and right and getting murdered back. But it seems like - at least from this video and an article from Kotaku, that it is just about as similar as harassment.

0.o

Now if a person does it for the sole purpose because the opposing player is a female. Then that dude has issues. But to call ganking similar to rape... well. I think you're starting to miss the point of video games in general, especially competitive ones.

Now ShrineNI, the guy that made video on how to go around finding gamer girls is an asshole. I got that idea after watching his videos. But then again what he's doing in the end - killing female players - isn't exactly what I call as harassment because EVERYONE does that in WoW to each other all the time. At least they did before the game was turned carebear but I'm not going to talk about that.

Hell, I remember being singled out by certain players in WoW many times when I'd quested in certain areas over a course of a few days. So was I being stalked too? I mean, if you don't like being ganked, games like these have PvE servers where you can't be "harassed" if you feel ganking is harassment.

I don't know, I guess what I'm getting at is is this a case of white knighting where gamers are taking a matter like this way too seriously just because some douchbag likes to single out female players. Or not?

If the guy was singling out female players and sending inappropriate messages to them. That there is definitely harassment by all its definition. But in a game where players stalk and murder each other all the time, is it wrong to do it then?


http://kotaku.com/5972869/faith-in-humanity-slowly-depleting-this-jerk-and-his-supporters-find-joy-in-harassing-women-gamers

Also I want to note I found the link to that article on Moviebob's blog The Overthinker. His opinion was less than favorable. Pretty much going so far as to make the man out to be the scum of the earth. I say the guy has issues, he isn't "evil!" lol:
http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.com/2013/01/i-dont-want-to-game-on-this-planet.html

DUDE!!! I CRACKED UP WATCHING THIS!!!! I dont think its a serious vid like a call to arms against women or anything.LMAO

 

[thespyisdead]

and here i thought it would be a genuine question... as people have mentioned, saying this shit, is like putting a bunch of signs, followed by taping gaming off, which all say "no women allowed"

 

[Toxic Sniper]

For every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction.

The correct course of action is to start an account and use it to exclusively seek out and gank male gamers. Equality for all!

(Ganking is stupid)

 

[Siege_TF]

There are no girls on the internet, except at the porn sites. In this case I'd think both parties are at fault, one for demanding recognition because they are on one side of the gene pool, and the other for stalking them for that reason alone. In FFXI I referred to everyone as the gender of their character, and didn't care when people referred to me (a guy) as female because I was playing a Mithra; I wasn't intending to meet up and have sex with anyone I met which (gasp!) meant MY GENDER WASN'T IMPORTANT.

 

[Jessta]

while I don't think it's really gender specific I do think ganking someone in WoW who is to low a level to stand a fighting chance is sort of a dick move, when those zones were made it was with the thought that a level 30-40 could still do a moderate amount to save themselves from a level 60 but a level 61+ is an entirely different story because of the way the power level in that game increases exponentially from expansion to expansion in order to make people feel more obsolete if they don't have the newest one (That's why you can start getting next expansion stuff a couple levels before max)

I mean it's not really competitive gaming if the other dude doesn't stand a chance because of some arbitrary number system in the background.

 

[maninahat]

giving special attention to females being ganked is the real sexism here, it shows that we still feel female gamers need to be treated differently.

No, it shows that females are being treated differently, and that the article is just calling attention to the problem. The supportive comments in the guy's youtube videos, along with the sum of all the other bullshit discriminative behaviour in gaming, demonstrates that this is more than just one guy being a dick. It helps to have people alert us to individual examples of this kind of prattery, as it serves to discourage it in a broader sense.

not that there isnt certain social issues at play, just not really sexism. trash talk adapts itself to the victim, and if its a female then its gonna sound sexist, but it isnt, just good old fashion douchebaggery.

Calling women "attention whores", stereotyping and criticizing their play style, stalking and harrassing them...that is sexist, discriminatory behaviour. If a woman was doing this same thing to men, it would be sexist too.

 

[maninahat]

Calling women "attention whores", stereotyping and criticizing their play style, stalking and harrassing them...that is sexist, discriminatory behaviour. If a woman was doing this same thing to men, it would be sexist too.

No its not, on the basis that attention whoring is a unisex past time.

In the video, he is clearly directing his criticisms at "girl gamers" not "unisex WoW players". In isolation, you can divorce the term "attention whore" from gender and use it to refer to men too (ignoring that "whore" is obviously a gendered term, traditionally used on women). But that isn't what the gamer is doing, so why are you even arguing that point?