Jimquisition: The Wacky Harassment Blame Parade

[Jimothy Sterling]

The Wacky Harassment Blame Parade

A bunch of game enthusiasts harass a woman online. Everybody starts blaming people. The victim, mostly. That, and alien creatures who are totally not real gamers.

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[Kitsune Hunter]

Good video as usual Jim, but to be honest, I'm kind of disappointed, I was expecting the top ten shittiest games of 2013, I wanted to see you tear Colonial Marines and Ride to Hell apart, oh well

 

[Eamar]

Thank you so much! I've been trying (and failing) to put these sentiments into words for a while. As ever, Jim does it better than I ever could.

 

[Jimothy Sterling]

Good video as usual Jim, but to be honest, I'm kind of disappointed, I was expecting the top ten shittiest games of 2013, I wanted to see you tear Colonial Marines and Ride to Hell apart, oh well

That was always planned for, and is coming, Monday 30th.

 

[Mangod]

I don't know what's more depressing, the harassment of female game devs because they had the gall to be born female, or the fact that everyone else is too bloody spineless to tell the harassers to go crawl back under their rock when this shit happens.

"Oh, but they'll accuse me of 'White Knighting'"! Big whop. "Grow a thicker skin" and to hell with their neanderthal insults. Stand up for what's right, damn it!

 

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

The comments are going to be interesting.

*Grabs a bag of popcorn*

That kind of behaviour is toxic, but I am not sure as to how one should fight it, the most I do is say "What the fuck?" and tell my friends to shut up when say stupid misginystic/homophobic, etc. shit, but I feel that it would take more than that to convince the "gaming community at large" to stop acting that way.

I'm just not sure how.

 

[Dragonbums]

This is what I've been saying.

When people go out of their way to say "Don't feed the trolls"

Why would you put X game on Steam anyway

And (here is my favorite) "Who the hell would play a game about depression anyway? It doesn't belong here."

These are basically comments that take all responsibility of action off the people harassing others, to the people harassed in question.

Better yet is when people try to cover it up and say "Well this game has a female dev and she isn't being harassed" Of course she isn't. She isn't harassed because she isn't the face of the game, or a high up prominent member of the game.

That's what a lot of these harassment's have in common. The women in question is either in a prominent position on the team, they are the sole producer of said game, and/or they contributed a large part of the game.

I'm' pretty sure when we found out who Mass Effect 3's ending was written by the man at worst got nasty messages on whatever board they browse on. No where did I hear about threats to his self and significant others in real life.

Jennifer Hepler? Shit, it got so bad that they found her phone number and threatened to behead her kids. That's on top of the nasty comments she got. For what? Something that she said in an interview not even the games themselves.

It's basically passive agressive apologists trying to hide up the stinky shit that festers in the gaming community, and it always blows up in their face.

 

[Dragonbums]

The comments are going to be interesting.

*Grabs a bag of popcorn*

That kind of behaviour is toxic, but I am not sure as to how one should fight it, the most I do is say "What the fuck?" and tell my friends to shut up when say stupid misginystic/homophobic, etc. shit, but I feel that it would take more than that to convince the "gaming community at large" to stop acting that way.

I'm just not sure how.

Think of it like this, decades ago it was alright to call any person of color derogatory slurs out in public. Eventually people stopped taking that shit by telling those people to fuck off and eventually no one would dare say those words without serious repercussions. We wouldn't be where we are today if for every person that said "don't call this person a X" we had 4 more say "Don't pay attention to those racists" or find excuses for why that person in particular deserved that slur.

 

[Church185]

While I agree that it is terrible these women are being harassed for simply being born the wrong gender, I can't agree with the rest of this video. I'll verbally support the developer till I'm blue in the face, but I'm not going to throw money at a project simply because the creator was harassed by trolls and crazy people. Stuff like that could be too easily staged. That isn't a point made in the video, it is just something I wanted to bring up. I also don't see anything wrong with simply denouncing the people harassing these women and moving on either. Just because I don't take the time to police the internet, doesn't mean that I'm contributing to this behavior or that I condone it. These devs don't deserve to be harassed, but you paint the gaming community with a wide brush that I don't appreciate.

 

[Ninjamedic]

While I agree for the most part of the video there is always one thing that I always think when I see videos like this:

What do you expect the reasonable majority of us to do other than just say "Of course they're arseholes"? It would have been nice to suggest some positives we could do other than just contribute to the echo chamber.

 

[Combustion Kevin]

If anyone harrasses her by phone, she can just hand over her phone history to the police, they just fucked themselves right there.

As for the harrassment campaign, how do you combat people who take enjoyment out of your outrage?
I'm starting to think this has little to do with her being a woman per se, but rather, a convenient angle to go with, if she were a gay man the harrassment would be just the same, only with different slurs, the key component is exposure.

She stands out, her game concept is quite unique and she is a woman in the industry, online trolls don't usually just throw darts on the greenlight page and harrass whomever it may land on, they go for what catches their eye, there's nothing she can do about that, and nothing she can do as soon as it really gets going, it's just shitty people being shitty without having to justify or answer for it.

 

[Eamar]

That kind of behaviour is toxic, but I am not sure as to how one should fight it, the most I do is say "What the fuck?" and tell my friends to shut up when say stupid misginystic/homophobic, etc. shit, but I feel that it would take more than that to convince the "gaming community at large" to stop acting that way.

I'm just not sure how.

That's actually a pretty good start though. No one's ever going to change the whole gaming community single-handed, but if we all call out that one guy we know who can be a bit of a dick sometimes, be that online or IRL, collectively that can make a difference.

I'd also argue that just being more vocal in our opposition to this crap, as Mangod describes, would help. If these assholes are the minority, let's make damn sure they come across as such and their comments/actions are vastly outnumbered by positive ones. Make them feel unwelcome, and for the love of god make it obvious to anyone looking in that these people do not speak for the rest of us.

 

[Jupiter065]

A community is judged by the worst shit it tolerates, and as such the gamer community deserves all the scorn it gets.

 

[Little Duck]

Could we do a metroid with this. As in, create a game that blows everyones mind then release then end credits 1 month later and reveal it was developed exclusively by women.

 

[ConanThe3rd]

You know what? Yes, we need to expose the lesser parts of the gaming community but that means we call an even playing field. No, I'm not saying Zoe Quinn deserved the abuse she got.
However, as the two popped up on screen, the implication is that Dina (Mighty No. 9 CM) and Ms. Sarkesian have nothing to answer for, that they are similarly two individuals who were attacked because of their gender and as such case closed, nothing to see here, go away.

It's irresponsible to palm off blame to victim, it's also irresponsible to not fully investiatie the act and it's conception and automatically assume it's the fault of one side.

 

[Jimothy Sterling]

While I agree that it is terrible these women are being harassed for simply being born the wrong gender, I can't agree with the rest of this video. I'll verbally support the developer till I'm blue in the face, but I'm not going to throw money at a project simply because the creator was harassed by trolls and crazy people. Stuff like that could be too easily staged. That isn't a point made in the video, it is just something I wanted to bring up. I also don't see anything wrong with simply denouncing the people harassing these women and moving on either. Just because I don't take the time to police the internet, doesn't mean that I'm contributing to this behavior or that I condone it. These devs don't deserve to be harassed, but you paint the gaming community with a wide brush that I don't appreciate.

You didn't disagree with a single thing in my video. You seemed to agree with it all, then made up new arguments to disagree with.

I didn't tell you to give the dev money OR police the Internet. Just maybe show some support, or at the very least, shut up as opposed to trying to make sure your *own* back is covered by trying to draw a line between "real gamers" and the harassers, as if the harassers don't talk about games online just as much as the rest of us and contribute to the exact same wider community.

That's what this episode was about. Not about policing or financing, but about - at the VERY least - not instinctively looking out for number one when somebody's been victimized.

 

[Grace_Omega]

All of this bullshit just makes me so angry. And you know what I find the most frustrating? The bystanders on the sideline who will insist, as case after case piles up and more and more incidents like this occur, that there isn't a problem and we should all stop talking about it.

No, there is a problem. *You're* the problem.

 

[upgray3dd]

You know what? Yes, we need to expose the lesser parts of the gaming community but that means we call an even playing field. No, I'm not saying Zoe Quinn deserved the abuse she got.
However, as the two popped up on screen, the implication is that Dina (Mighty No. 9 CM) and Ms. Sarkesian have nothing to answer for, that they are similarly two individuals who were attacked because of their gender and as such case closed, nothing to see here, go away.

It's irresponsible to palm off blame to victim, it's also irresponsible to not fully investiatie the act and it's conception and automatically assume it's the fault of one side.

Umm... Harrasment IS always the fault of one side. That's kind of part of the definition.

 

[DrOswald]

A community is judged by the worst shit it tolerates, and as such the gamer community deserves all the scorn it gets.

The problem with that is that we don't tolerate it. In fact, one of the big points Jim makes is that people go out of their way to attempt disown people who do this. Just because it exists doesn't mean the gaming community at large tolerates it. But the fact is that we cannot stop it. The best we can do is call out the idiots who do it.