Prove to me that the Gaming Community Excludes Women

[Erttheking]

Yeah but Total Biscuit turned off all the comments for his videos too, and the Nostalgia Critic took let's play footage from other people in his "are game's art" videos. Yet they haven't been getting massive hate crowds.

Totalbiscuit provides other open forums for people to discuss his videos, Anita does not.
Nostalgia Critic did not get payed $150K to make his "Are Games Art?" series and did not make assurances that he would play every game he featured. Anita did.

He used to. He recently closed those too.

Fair point there though.

 

[Thorn14]

Some folks did an experiment where they played online games on XBL, while occasionally playing pre-recorded lines over the chat. Just innocuous things like "Hello everyone", "nice job", "good game" and so forth.

Some of the voices they used were male, some were female.

They found that female voices consistently received negative or hostile responses from the other players more often than male voices. This difference was observed regardless of the skill with which they played. So a skilled player who spoke with a female voice and did well at the game still copped more hostility than a skilled player speaking with a male voice.

No, I do not have the link to the experiment, nor can I be bothered looking it up. Feel free to disbelieve me.

I've also seen this kind of thing in my own anecdotal experience too. I used to run platoons in an outfit (it's like a guild or clan) in Planetside 2 (it's a shooter-MMO). I would be dealing with groups of between 10 and 50 players at a time. Generally speaking, everyone got along fine. There was always a bit of bitching going on behind people's backs, but it was kept suppressed. The only times I saw people get directly hostile was when some of our few female members had the temerity to speak up in the chat channels. They didn't do anything wrong or rude or provocative, just regular gameplay communication. Just a female voice along was enough to provoke insults, taunts and rude questions ("So, just how saggy are your tits?") from guys who would otherwise act politely.

Personally I don't understand how anyone with a functioning set of senses can miss that gaming in general has a bit of an issue with women.

Is XBL really the best place to prove something though? I mean, you could argue "XBL is a hive of misogyny and racism" and you'd probably be correct, but not all gamers go on XBL, or at least use mics. The PC Community for example is much more inclusive, I'd argue.

So here's a question, not calling this right or wrong, but what do you call it when gaming is becoming more and more expensive to make, so the AAA publishers want the safest made game possible, and publishers find the consistently largest and safest demographic to be the young-20-30s male for their games and then move to appeal to them?

Lets say the safest demographic for smart phone games are older women, does catering to them imply sexism?

Oh and Mars, just something from your previous post I wanna adress. You say the only detractors of Gone Home are people who hate LGBT themes or never played adventure games?

I find that quite disingenuous, I am a fan of adventure games and I found the game too short for its price, its themes nothing really that special, let alone worth all the praise it got, and the adventure itself pretty lackluster. I don't care if it explores that kind of theme, I just wanted a good game, and I didn't find it that good, especially for the price tag it offered.

 

[Thorn14]

Its not any different than any other place. You propose PC gaming, but not all gamers game on PC, nor use mics. Additionally, there was this posted at the bottom of the first page:

http://nms.sagepub.com/content/15/4/541

And not all gamers game on XBL or use mics. I find XBL to be a den of 12 year olds and dudebros.

Its the publishers' own fault that games are so obscenely expensive nowadays. Bloated budgets directed almost entirely at visuals, unwillingness to reuse assets (see: Assassin's Creed Unity), obscene advertising budgets. They made their bed, and now they have to lay in it.

It is, AAA gaming is a dying beast if you ask me. I'm not saying its a good or bad thing, but the point is if you're trying to make money, you go for the largest demographic you can reliably get. Business 101. I'm just saying that is what they have to go about doing now.

I will agree on the price point - no way could I ever recommend it for a whopping $20. At most, $10, but I'd really say just wait until its $5 on Steam sale. As regards for not finding it good, fine, but thats not the majority of complaints about the game. The majority of complaints aren't "its a bad adventure game", the majority of complaints are "its not a game".

I won't lie, I have called it not a game at times, but I'm not particular. I place gameplay first, I consider TWD more of a visual novel with QTE than a game too. We can argue semantics but thats just me. Gone Home had just so little things to do in it, I just fail to see how it could get such AMAZING reviews for what I considered a boring story that's only worth was it explored a topic not very explored in gaming.

 

[Ushiromiya Battler]

Depression Quest - not a game.

Well, it's not really a game is it? It's more a visual novel.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.


I feel the gaming community is more inclusive than people believe it to be.
There will always be idiots and trolls, you'll just have to learn to live with it.

Anyways, more diversity in games? Go for it, maybe I'd finally start playing AAA games again.

 

[TaboriHK]

I can't believe in 2014 I'm still reading people straight-faced use words like "feminazi." It's humiliating. This thread is humiliating. I can't believe that my preferred pastime has its own equivalent of holocaust deniers. And in 2014! Just embarrassing, guys.

 

[Irick]

Is XBL really the best place to prove something though?

Its not any different than any other place. You propose PC gaming, but not all gamers game on PC, nor use mics. Additionally, there was this posted at the bottom of the first page:

http://nms.sagepub.com/content/15/4/541

I've seen this study passed around a lot... or rather the abstract, but the study itself is paywalled so I can't really address it as an academic. Unfortunately, I can't engage this as any more definitive than an opinion without access to the specifics of the methodology.

So here's a question, not calling this right or wrong, but what do you call it when gaming is becoming more and more expensive to make, so the AAA publishers want the safest made game possible, and publishers find the consistently largest and safest demographic to be the young-20-30s male for their games and then move to appeal to them?

Its the publishers' own fault that games are so obscenely expensive nowadays. Bloated budgets directed almost entirely at visuals, unwillingness to reuse assets (see: Assassin's Creed Unity), obscene advertising budgets. They made their bed, and now they have to lay in it.

Agreed. The resource race is ridiculous, and it killed iD :<. Advertising is also an issue, as is the huge corporate endeavors that AAA games have become. I really do think that the big publishers are pushing themselves closer and closer to another games crash.

Oh and Mars, just something from your previous post I wanna adress. You say the only detractors of Gone Home are people who hate LGBT themes or never played adventure games?

I find that quite disingenuous, I am a fan of adventure games and I found the game too short for its price, its themes nothing really that special, let alone worth all the praise it got, and the adventure itself pretty lackluster. I don't care if it explores that kind of theme, I just wanted a good game, and I didn't find it that good, especially for the price tag it offered.

I will agree on the price point - no way could I ever recommend it for a whopping $20. At most, $10, but I'd really say just wait until its $5 on Steam sale. As regards for not finding it good, fine, but thats not the majority of complaints about the game. The majority of complaints aren't "its a bad adventure game", the majority of complaints are "its not a game".

The definition of a game is an interesting concept. I don't think we can say anything is or isn't a game, because to me gaming relies more in the mindset. I really recomend The Grasshopper: On Games, Life, and Utopia. It introduces this concept of the luciary mindset. It's pretty formative to my personal definition of gaming.

Nostalgia Critic did not get payed $150K to make his "Are Games Art?" series and did not make assurances that he would play every game he featured. Anita did.

For the record, not having recorded the game herself does not mean she didn't play it. She was supposed to have played hundreds of games, correct? Do you really expect somebody to record thousands of hours of footage, as well as paying for all of that, and then sifting through the thousands of hours for a twenty second clip? How about for the games where you can't even replicate an event without having to go through hours of the game to get there because the game lacks a traditional level system? You can't skip ahead to a clip of a clip of a game you want to use in a video like you can with a movie, you have to play through hours of gameplay, and if there's no level system, you'll have to go through the game again up to that point again. Its literally adding dozens, if not hundreds, of hours to her effort in making the video series to record the events she's referring to herself. Given how much effort and time it would take to get as many clips as she uses when she could just borrow an already recorded instance of it, I think its reasonable to allow her the ability to use game footage that isn't specifically recorded by her

While I think she should have asked for permission to use the LP footage, it was well within fair use not to, and the fact that she did use LP footage means nothing about whether or not she actually played the games.

So, first off, it's fairly standard methodology for games reviewers to use lets plays and other footage in their reviews (mostly because we are all lazy bastages). So, personally, I've got no problems with her on that regard, however (and this is a big however) I do think that people who use lets plays or other people's footage should attribute them. If we consider video games art, and I do, and if we consider the player to be part of the game, which I do, then we must conclude that the player's interaction with the game makes a unique experience which is possible to plagiarize. As an academic, even with her fair use claims (which doesn't protect against copyright infringement, but is a defense that one must argue in court) she still should, as a matter of integrity reference her sources.

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

Even in games they can't reject as "not games", they find other reasons to object to the inclusivity. See: Bioware romances. I never heard anybody complain about them before Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2, but once they're including non-heterosexual romances, all of a sudden, it "ruins" the character to be romancable by the same sex in somebody else's completely separate playthrough because the character being romancable by both genders just ruins it because... reasons. HMMMMMMMMMMMMM...

That's something I read now and then and I am really confused.

I just played Dragon Age: Origins and had a lesbian relationship. As far as I know, gay is also possible. The same with Mass Effect 1 (I'm not sure about that one) and 2.

Did they get a backlash because of this? I don't think so. All I heard was that ME3 had a shit ending (nothing to do with relationships) and DA2 being a shit game in general (also nothing to do with it).


So, how can it be used all of a sudden if it was possible before? People who say that have obviously never played a Bioware game before.

What the hell are you talking about? Have YOU ever played these games you're talking about?

This was such a huge deal that the people actively involved in making these games actually had to start speaking out about it. As for ME1 you can't have homosexual relationships outside of Female Shepard and Liara, a character outside of the constraints of a gender binary and yet codified for the audience as female. If you romance her and Kaiden he even comes straight out and says something like "Yeah okay monogendered, only we both know she's a woman".

In Mass Effect 2 you could romance Liara if you were Female Shepard again... and that's it. Unless you count Kelly, which guess what? Can't count as a Love Interest because you can't even get the appropriate achievement if you choose her. No homosexual romances for Male Shepard in either instance, not until Mass Effect 3. You couldn't even have a romance with a meaningful character in a homosexual capacity unless you'd saved Kaiden, played both ME1 AND ME2 (or had the genesis DLC's) and had him continue on into that game.

As for DA2 the reason there was backlash on that surrounds mostly Anders as well as the fact that all the LIs were romanceable by either gender. The thing with Anders that skeeved people who were prolly a little insecure was that he would flirt with MHawke even if the player might have indicated interest elsewhere. Literally one conversation where you go: No thanks and then you move on. No other instance of them throwing it in your face and yet the Bioware forums BLEW UP about it. Guys grossed out and not okay with it... really indicating some troubling things about those said individuals.

 

[Silence]

Then I stand corrected and it is indeed troubling.

I played all of these games as female, and except for ME2 had all of my characters in a lesbian relationship (please don't question that).

I have not read the Bioware forums and also haven't read all entries in the wiki, so I didn't know about that.

Still, I thought you could date Zevran is a male in DA:O? Or can you not?

?: Just now reading the other quote. Asari-FemShep was denied to be lesbian? The fuck. Why would they even say that.

 

[MPerce]

I.....have no idea how to respond to your question.

For starters, your thread title is extremely confrontational and doesn't really relate to what you actually ask of us. Not a good start.

Also, who the hell are the "mainstream gaming press?" What exactly is a "high profile" game? What constitutes a "backlash?" Who gets to decide what a "well-written character" is?

I feel like any response I give that doesn't fit what you want me to say (which seems to be, "Gee whiz, I guess the the media has been making up all this misogyny stuff. Gaming culture is PERFECT!) can be easily shot down since your post is so broad.

So instead, I'll jump to the heart of what I think your post is addressing:

Yes, gaming culture has some hang-ups with women, and it has since its inception. Anyone who denies that is very silly. Things have certainly gotten much better and continue to do so, but it's still a problem worth addressing.

Ethics in the gaming press is also an issue that, like misogyny in gaming culture, has been a problem for awhile, but has gotten much better as both the press and the industry it covers have matured. But I don't think it's near as big of a problem as GamerGaters seem to think it is. I don't think there's a conspiracy within the press to promote certain games, or push a political agenda, or "destroy gamers," or whatever else GamerGaters think is going on (it seems to change depending on who you ask).

The worst ethical breach I've seen is that the press gets too chummy with developers sometimes. I can't get worked up over that. It's like thinking the NFL has an agenda against waitresses because LeSean McCoy didn't tip somebody last week. That's a douche move, but there are more important things for me to get mad at the NFL about right now.

So I look at the two sides of GamerGate: the presumed majority that want better journalistic ethics, and the very loud minority of disgustingly sexist assholes who have upgraded from writing rude things on Twitter to committing felonies. I focus my attention on the latter, because they represent an actual problem in the industry. The former are some well-meaning folks making a mountain out of a molehill.

 

[BillHamp]

But this is more of a problem with developers. As far as I know, women are quite underrepresented in the dev community. This shows. Very few games have a female PC(in games where you can't choose gender) compared to generic McWhiteguy. I can think of a dozen games that fit that mold, but only a handful of female PCs. It's like developers don't expect men to be able to relate with a female character. Yes, there are some things men just won't get, but I've yet to see a game feature menstruation or pregnancy as game mechanics. All the rest can be understood.

I find this particular sentiment to be a straw man at best. Where is it written that because women or men make up a certain portion of the population, they must make up that same proportion of every occupation? Women and men have different interests and thus pursue different avenues in terms of career. To say that women are "underrepresented" is to suggest that there is some active mechanism that keeps them out of games and that it isn't personal choice? Did anyone stop to consider that perhaps all the women who want to be in gaming and have pursued the means to get in are already there?

I think this is where people really find problems with individuals like Anita Sarkeesian. They attack men in the gaming community with blanket-labels of misogyny, and suggest that they are actively keeping women out of gaming. Yet, Anita is perfectly free to develop a game and market it to see if it flies. The problem isn't that "men" don't want Anita to develop a game, the problem is that "men" don't want Anita telling them that they are holding her back in the world of gaming, that they are holding other women back in gaming, and that they need to stop enjoying the games THEY enjoy and start enjoying the games she says they should so that it can balance out some imaginary notion of "representation."

 

[WhiteNachos]

With the recent #Gamergate controversy, many opponents have claimed that the backlash to Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian and their supporters has been because straight, white, cisgender male gamers want the gaming community to exclude any other demographics.

[citation needed]

Especially for Anita. I'd be surprised if she said anything of the sort. It's especially weird because one week, the narrative is that feminists don't care about anyone else and next, it's this sort of thing. I'm starting to think Anita Sarkeesian is like one of those things in Harry Potter that morphs into whatever you fear the most.

He said supporters of Anita claimed that, not Anita herself.

I've seen it though, mostly from people pretending that 'oh we're only getting backlash because we more want more people to be game protagonists other than straight white men'. Can't name any specifics.

 

[Vault101]

I just played Dragon Age: Origins and had a lesbian relationship. As far as I know, gay is also possible. The same with Mass Effect 1 (I'm not sure about that one) and 2.
.

mass effect was originally supposed to have gay relationships (Ash and Kaiden) but they chickend out EXCEPT they still allowed you to romance Liara as Femshep

because "technically" Assari aren't female [footnote/]but lets not kid ourselves...if it looks like a hot women its a hot woman[/footnote]....[b/]and that just makes it worse[/b] because they allow you to do a "pseudo" lesbian relationship but not an "actual" one

 

[Dizchu]

I can't believe in 2014 I'm still reading people straight-faced use words like "feminazi." It's humiliating. This thread is humiliating. I can't believe that my preferred pastime has its own equivalent of holocaust deniers. And in 2014! Just embarrassing, guys.

I don't like the term feminazi but I think it's worth pointing out that the term, while it was originally used by right-wing idiots to describe any activist for women's rights, is these days used mostly to describe the extremists. And don't deny that there are extremists. There are feminists out there that are absolutely vitriolic towards transgender people. There are feminists that actually want female superiority. However these kinds of feminists are thankfully not common in this discussion.

The kind of feminism that is getting a lot of attention is the hyperbolic "media propagates widespread misogynistic ideals" kind. I'd argue that sexist games, film and literature are the result of sexist individuals, not the other way around. By focussing on the negative rather than the positive it is spreading a very bleak message to potential game developers, both male and female. My kind of feminism supports constructive criticism and the celebration of good role models and female representation. It doesn't require overly basic assumptions

But this is the problem. The discussion is currently targeting low-hanging fruit. Issues like gender identity, patriarchal culture, heteronormativity etc. are being overlooked because a certain game has strippers or boobs or shitty writing.

 

[Dizchu]

I feel like any response I give that doesn't fit what you want me to say (which seems to be, "Gee whiz, I guess the the media has been making up all this misogyny stuff. Gaming culture is PERFECT!) can be easily shot down since your post is so broad.

The topic title was meant to be an invitation for opposing points of view however given the nature of a lot of the discussion around gender topics these days, I can see why it seems like a self-indulgent "I'm right and you're wrong, let me show you why you're wrong" kind of boast.

Gaming culture is far from perfect. But it isn't a completely lost cause either. I admit that the question was somewhat rhetorical and in retrospect needlessly brash, but it was because of my extreme skepticism of such a simplistic assertion. I don't believe for a second that gaming culture as a whole excludes women and minorities, maybe it has fewer good representations of them but that just means that there is more nuance to the discussion than many would like to admit.

Yes, gaming culture has some hang-ups with women, and it has since its inception. Anyone who denies that is very silly. Things have certainly gotten much better and continue to do so, but it's still a problem worth addressing.

I agree. I think this is due in part to the internet, which allows more egalitarian spaces for discussion. Publishers and executives however have more often than not grown up in times where gaming was much more male-dominated, which is where I think much of the problem lies. The people who actually develop and play these games tend to be either opposed to their ideals or apathetic.

Ethics in the gaming press is also an issue that, like misogyny in gaming culture, has been a problem for awhile, but has gotten much better as both the press and the industry it covers have matured. But I don't think it's near as big of a problem as GamerGaters seem to think it is. I don't think there's a conspiracy within the press to promote certain games, or push a political agenda, or "destroy gamers," or whatever else GamerGaters think is going on (it seems to change depending on who you ask).

Gamergate is a problematic "movement". One of the strengths it has is its plurality of different points of view, but I think it is one of its weaknesses too. Many people affiliated themselves with it because they were women, LGBTs and ethnic minorities that didn't want to be "spoken for" by journalists. But at the same time, they're taking sides with genuine misogynists, ridiculous conspiracy theorists, right-wing extremists, etc. It's frustrating to say the least.

So I look at the two sides of GamerGate: the presumed majority that want better journalistic ethics, and the very loud minority of disgustingly sexist assholes who have upgraded from writing rude things on Twitter to committing felonies. I focus my attention on the latter, because they represent an actual problem in the industry. The former are some well-meaning folks making a mountain out of a molehill.

That's a pretty reasonable analysis of the current situation. However I'd rather not focus my attention on the assholes because it's what they want. Depriving them of a reaction would make them less willing to cause a shitstorm. Or more willing to commit something worse, in which case such an action would (hopefully) be large enough to compromise their anonymity and get them arrested.

 

[TaboriHK]

I don't like the term feminazi but I think it's worth pointing out that the term, while it was originally used by right-wing idiots to describe any activist for women's rights, is these days used mostly to describe the extremists. And don't deny that there are extremists. There are feminists out there that are absolutely vitriolic towards transgender people. There are feminists that actually want female superiority. However these kinds of feminists are thankfully not common in this discussion.

The kind of feminism that is getting a lot of attention is the hyperbolic "media propagates widespread misogynistic ideals" kind. I'd argue that sexist games, film and literature are the result of sexist individuals, not the other way around. By focussing on the negative rather than the positive it is spreading a very bleak message to potential game developers, both male and female. My kind of feminism supports constructive criticism and the celebration of good role models and female representation. It doesn't require overly basic assumptions

But this is the problem. The discussion is currently targeting low-hanging fruit. Issues like gender identity, patriarchal culture, heteronormativity etc. are being overlooked because a certain game has strippers or boobs or shitty writing.

There's no excuse for using the word "feminazi" in 2014, and you shouldn't expect to be taken seriously if you do. Dance about it how you like.