Personally I find the persona grating, but I can tell more often than not when Jim is taking the piss. When he does tackle more serious issues though, and he gets on his soapbox, it troubles me, because I'm not entirely sure about where the persona ends and personal opinion begins, and I'm not sure the goofy stuff he says for laughs isn't just a slightly hyperbolic version of what he really thinks.
Though I wouldn't really care to argue the point at all if people weren't taking him seriously.
Take a good look at the most recent Anita article. Hell I would even suggest taking a look at the comments section of Jims Vertigo video.
Some users on the Escapist act just like that asses at /v/ board. Only difference is that they doll it up with words and phrases that won't get them banned from this site in 10 posts.
And, Jim, gamers are angry at Anita because she's lied about her views and motives, manipulated a group of people for money, selectively edited footage of videos to suit her narrative, makes people pay to see her "sources", removed her college thesis to hide her bad research methods, and making up her entire gameplay footage segments of others' "let's play" videos without crediting them, and is promoting herself as a representitive for women and feminists for money at the expense of the entire gaming community who gets labled "anti-woman" at the least for disagreeing with anything.
Not because she's "A woman who dared to talk about video games", as you say, it's because she's WRONG. She's been proven to be misleading for the purpose of self-promotion, but the gaming media and people still treat her as some leader of women's rights.... in video games, and pretend women weren't gamers of some type for 40 years. She has the money to make a game she wants, but doesn't go beyond a short animatic. Everything has to be someone else's job.
Also, those developers chose to be purchased by the mega-publishers at some point, so I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for them when they talk about "it came from above".
There is time for logic, but there is also time for passion. You come across as someone who likes to think that they're "higher" than others. Whether you like it or not, a lot of people getting upset about something can do a lot of damage to a person--even if they try to play it off like you do. When people get really loud a lot of people hear, and that can lose a company a lot of money. Capcom is in the ditches because everybody knows how much they suck and they're not shy of telling everyone they know. However, I just wish we'd use some of our power on people who REALLY deserve our full rage: Congress. In summary, I like it when a lot of people come together with a purpose of telling someone they're full of shit.
A time for passion? Maybe in art or the bedroom, but not in the business world. I can't think of anything less passionate than Economics.
I keep seeing this correlation being drawn between people getting angry and things changing but I don't see a whole lot of reason to believe that anger was the cause, and I think that bears further examination than we give credit for.
If I have to write an example: The decision by Capcom to charge people extra for characters and costumes that were already on their Street Fighter 4 disc (I'm not entirely sure how this worked, I may be wrong) that the customer bought made people angry, but why did it make people angry? Well, maybe it doesn't make sense to charge someone for something they already bought. But do we have to call Capcom thieves or anti-consumerist and rage at them and at each other for it? Is "Venom" really the best response? No, just refer to the law on consumer rights and physical/digital property. If they've broken the law, you have a case, if they haven't, you have an opinion - maybe even an educated opinion that you're free to express, mind you - but Capcom has no obligation to listen, and getting angry at them isn't going to change their opinion if people will continue to buy on-disc DLC.
I think we should spend more time examining the bad decision making, why things didn't work and what could be done better, rather than how we feel on the subject. I think we should, whenever possible, try reaching out to our fellow gamers with reasonable arguments not steeped in personal values or perspective, and as always continue to vote with our wallets in order to inform pubs and devs of what we really want in the only language most of them understand, allowing them to sink or swim as the consumer base sees fit.
EDIT: Oh, and don't presume to know how I feel about myself in relation to others, because I actually feel the opposite way: My personal feelings are of so little value, I will not presume that other people share them, and I will try to appeal to a common logic rather than assert that my perspective is the dominant one.
Love and Kindness, mkay? Mkay. You silly Emperium of Man gene-modded soldiers, pshaw.
Jokes aside, I think Jim's right. There's a difference between voicing your displeasure in a way that allows those receiving it to actually put your criticisms to some use and, you know, just braying as loud as you possibly can in the hopes that being offensive enough is going to scare the recipient into changing whatever needs to be changed.
Being angry is tolerable; it's being obnoxious about what makes you angry that's feeding the perceptions of toxicity in the gaming scene.
I mean, consider Jim's apparent role models, the Sith. Oh, they're angry, alright. Are they obnoxious, though? Nope. The Sith do not throw temper tantrums, and there is no galaxy-wide imageboards where you'll find junior Empire soldiers trolling the Rebels. The Sith *hone* their anger. They hone it for nefarious purposes, but they do control it.
In comparison, for every decent argument I heard during the ME3 debacle, there were a few dozen voices going "GRAAAAH, SCREW YOU BIOWARE, YOU'RE A BUNCH OF POOPYHEADS, I HAVE NOTHING TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE DISCUSSION BUT I REALLY NEED TO SHOW THAT I CAN BE ANGRIER THAN THE PREVIOUS POSTER!"
That's a shame, and this is, largely, the biggest problem we have to find a way to solve. Everyone needs to be equally empowered if things are going to change or if hot-button issues are going to be discussed adequately.
Meh whatever. I get the "stop being unreasonable dicks to people", I'm not disagreeing with that idea Jim. My problem is no matter how accurate and mature anger is focused on a company doing bad things, it still means fuck all if people keep on giving them their money. We can vote EA worst company of the year all we want, but what's really going to get their attention, bad publicity that we all know they have dump trucks full of money to spin with their own public relations people, or a big empty space where those huge piles of money coming in used to be? Case in point, the "Cupcake Incident".
As I've said before many of we gamers act like lemmings with credit cards and continually buy into the hype and buy any old shit mainly out of fear of missing out on something cool, or just because we are looking for our next fix to chase away boredom. Usually to our own mass disappointment. Maybe if we tried addressing that vicious cycle we could nip quite a lot of this toxic negativity in the bud.
A fair point.
Jim and others have said so as well. We can't just ask that the Publishers and Developers change.
We have to as well.
Don't know what you mean by bringing up the Cupcakes. Everyone expresses anger differently, but I'm not sure many people give out cupcakes when their mad.
Or do you mean that it was ineffective?
Psychobabble said:
Also I'm very sick of seeing the double standard when it comes to who can criticize what. You seem to feel it's okay to rage at Cooper Lawrence for "talking made up scare mongering bullshit." But it isn't okay to say the same of Sarkeesian due to some extremist trolling assholes, when she is just as guilty of the same behavior. I say rather than focusing on the extremist death threat assholes, like you and the rest of the gaming press always seem to do, how about for once you try to speak to the sane and rational MAJORITY of game players who would actually listen to what you have to say without trying to gnaw your face off. Because the sooner we stop letting our discussions be motivated by the actions of a minority of idiots, the sooner we can start talking to each other like adults.
In Cooper's case, she said things that weren't true about a game she hadn't played.
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2008/01/26/cooper-lawrence-i-misspoke-about-mass-effect#.UlxWaqgo7wo
In Anita's case, she said she was going to talk about sexist tropes in video games.
The whole cupcake incident was about where angry fans sent Bioware a bunch of cupcakes with A B C on them in protest for not liking the ME3 ending. Bioware turned around and very publicly donated the cupcakes to a charity for disadvantaged children, turning what was a public fan shaming into a PR boon. Now why that annoys me is Bioware, a massively rich company, got praise for giving away something they got entirety for free, and deflected what many felt was truly deserved blame.
And on Anita Sarkeesian, I'm sorry but we will just have to agree to disagree. I feel she is a charlatan who expounds opinion as scientific fact, based on the most tenuous of actual research.
Now I actually agree with the argument that women are under and miss-represented in the gaming culture, but I find her way of going about trying to explain and solve it not only disingenuous but also horribly patronizing towards women.
So while I feel that women do indeed need a voice in the gaming culture, I vehemently disagree Sarkeesian is the one for the job. And thanks to the mental defectives that made threats against her, and the people who happily equate ANYONE who criticizes her methods and viewpoints as one of the aforementioned mental defectives, it is now impossible to have a rational and mature discussion about her, as unless you kiss her sainted ass you are immediately branded hater. Hope that explains my point of view.
The thing about the ME3 ending is depending on opinion of the person the "other guys" got what they wanted, for the problems with the ending can be considered extremely subjective depending on what the player wanted to see. Thats is why I think it wasn't really mentioned unlike the SimCity disaster, Diablo 3, or Aliens: Colonial Marines were, because its very easy to point at the problems of those games for they are on a technical level, while there are people that say they are fine with the ending to Mass Effect 3 (I am including the Extended Cut in that statement), while there are people that probably would never be happy with what BioWare could or would want to program into the game.
Nope. No one deserves rape threats, but you know what the difference between her rape threats and everyone elses rape threats are? She used those threats to gain money. While other people ignored them because it's the internet.
She deserved to have games made about her being punched in the face?
You can't win against the White Knights and the Feminists.
None of them listen to what you say or will take your words way out of context.
Right now I am the guy that says rape threats are 100% okay because I referred to the toxic response in general and did not list the specific toxic replies I approved of and disapproved of. It's best to strawman the other's position with extreme hyperbole than to admit to the fact you donated money to fund a glorified clip show which was ripped from the internet for about 50%.
It's hard to admit the fact that you basically donated money to someone so they could mismanage it into random game shopping, barely in depth commentary and gross misrepresentation of the games featured in the show which on top of that consist of stolen footage (because that's what it is when you don't credit people). Now we just wait for the first guy who says I am so sexist because I mentioned she wasted the money on shopping and that is a female stereotype, just wait someone will claim that.
The positive side of this Sarkeesian debacle though it that more intelligent people came out of the woodworks to tear her videos to pieces. It's kind of like the Prequels to me, the reviews and replies are worth the production of the crappy original material.
Bullshit. That's Ayn Rand philosophy right there: objectivism. You think it'd be better to take feelings out business? People like you believe that they only reason people get upset is because you, just you, get screwed in the end. Well maybe I'm angry on principle. Maybe I hate their guts and the way they only view people as glue to keep a machine going. If it was just you who was unhappy with Capcom's games you wouldn't really raise a fuss over them, but because we know everybody else is unhappy it allows us to justify our anger.
The way you view things is very cut and dry, very boring, very absolute. Logic is the basis of your moral philosophy but because of that you have no reason to do anything besides personal gain. You have no imagination to see innuendo, or how a metaphor can be both true and false. Passion is for life, not just for sex or art. Art is objective and because of that anything can be art, including life. So make living an art. I'd rather die as a human than live as a robot.
You're being awfully presumptuous about me, and I'm not sure I like your tone, but I'll try to make corrections where I can.
I don't personally subscribe to objectivism, I don't find Ayn Rand particularly interesting. I also don't see things as absolutes, and that's actually why I prefer logic. There's a lot of moral grey areas, opinions become very divided, feelings get hurt and personal tragedy moves people more than facts do. I realize perspective can warp reality, distort the truth and make people see things that aren't there. That's why I'd rather appeal to reason than emotion, but I understand perfectly why some people rely on those emotions for inspiration.
Argument entirely bereft of feeling is meaningless (even a good scientist who uses only empirical evidence pursues their field of study with a love of discovery or hope for the future), but an argument overly charged with emotion is exactly how we get the misfires Jim talks about in this video. When people are blinded by rage or anger they come up with this venom and begin indiscriminately passing it out without first trying to examine who's really at fault.
when people talk about this subject, I still keep thinking back to that time a bunch of people got fired over a bunch of social media shit flinging, and ultimately I wonder if anything useful came out of that situation
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You silly Emperium of Man gene-modded soldiers, pshaw.
