Burnouts3s3 said:
There's been a lot of debate recently concerning social justice and video games. What I want to know is how will this change anything, business wise.
Feminism has been around for a long time and feminist critique of mass mediums, such as television, radio, movies, music, stage, has been around for even longer. The other mediums are aware of the accusations of sexism and objectification, but sexism and objectification still run rampant. People still make money off of it. So, what's the harm of letting journalists say what's wrong with it in social justice terms.
Even if a work of art is considered harmful or 'bad' or 'not helping', what can criticism do to stop the work from being produced or published? Even if people are aware of its ill effects, won't people consume it anyway? People know that fast food, alcohol, drugs and Michael Bay movies are bad for you, but they're still in business (and I say this as a person who enjoys Michael Bay films. Oh, c'mon, I thought that forest fight in Revenge of the Fallen was sweet).
In the end, what happens? Isn't it more likely that the critics will say their word, the consumer will still consume en masse of the product and at best all that's changed is a token representation or a disclaimer waving responsibility or lip-service will be provided?
What harm will it bring to a business?
Well, the real issue here comes down to media control. While the left wing denies that they have a media stranglehold, the bottom line is they control far more media than the right wing by a substantial margin. Sure you have your Rush Limbaughs, and your Fox news, but far more networks and left wing personalities out there that are given platforms. When you get down to a smaller scale and look at things like websites, again you see very little representation from the right wing side of the spectrum. To put it bluntly when is the last time you've seen a game/geek culture site that spins right and has people producing their own versions of people like Jim Sterling and Bob Chipman, being just as offensive from the other side of the equasion? What's more as the right to free speech does not currently apply to private platforms, and the "equal time" doctrine has long since passed, it means that you see a lot of political censorship going on by private site masters and those with mod powers who shut down dissenting voices.
The thing is that whether people want to believe it or not, the country is pretty well balanced between right wing and left wing. Yet right now the right wing not only can't freely express itself, but it has to deal with being insulted constantly, portrayed as some kind of whacked fringe minority, and other things.
To put it in context, let's take gay rights and inclusiveness in gaming as an example. You go all over the internet and you'll find pretty much every site out there talking about how these are good things, and largely speaking in support of things like Bioware being forced to inser the gay relationships into "Hutt Cartel" and adding gay male options to Mass Effect. It's very easy to think nearly everyone thinks this way, because that's what everyone seems to be saying, and obviously that means that anyone who opposes that must be a fringe loonie, right? That's because you have one political point of view largely controlling everything. You see justifications like "hate speech" and the like being used to morally justify (legal justification is not currently required) censoring other points of view. Along with the attitude that "since I am clearly right, nothing more needs to be said, since no negotiation or discourse on this subject is appropriate in my mind". Or basically saying "Free speech means the right to freely say what I agree with". The right wing seems to be fairly laid back, but every once in a while you get an attack piece, people respond, and then the banhammers come out and it shows the true colors of the entire thing.
One thing to understand also is there is a sort of "old boys" network involved in this to an extent. Basically if you pay attention to the whole thing you'll notice a lot of people involved in games journalism and certain kinds of game development all know each other, and indeed help each other get into the media. This means you wind up with a whole cadre of people that all wind up reinforcing the same belief structures, and all styling themselves as crusaders try and shut people out. To put things into perspective, Bob Chipman mentions that he knows Anita Sarkeesian and can even consider her a friend, and has aquaintences in common with Zoe Quinn. Is it any surprise which side he's on? What's more when you start following these trails around (I simply mention this one because Bob said it himself) you'll find you don't need many steps to in an equivalent to the old "Degrees of Kevin Bacon" thing to find a connection between one person involved in this and another, and probably won't even need to use something nebulous to tie it together. So while it's not a conspiracy of people plotting some kind of SJW takeover, there is a sort of hardwired trend that puts everything on one track.
In part this applies to the recent fights because when Zoe Quinn was attacked the media rallied to her defense, and that shouldn't surprise you because they all probably knew her, or share some of the same aquaintances with her at least. There was not going to be anything impartial about it. Likewise the political direction it was going to take was pretty obvious because nowadays you need to be something of a SJW and fit in with that crowd to get your foot in the door.
Things in part exploded because a lot of people are just frankly sick to death of it. Geeks who don't agree with SJWs, aren't pro-gay, or at least don't want to watch two gay dudes make out in their video games, don't believe there are valid feminist issues in gaming, and similar things are not exactly rare, but they can't call a site without running into someone like Jim Sterling flaming them over the inclusion of gay options in ME3, or people talking about "radical conservative fringes" and how "anyone who disagrees must be a scared old man" or any one of a million other things which range from passive aggressive to outright offensive, and then being banned if they dare respond, or represent another point of view. The Escapist is actually a pretty good site in not pushing things too far, but it has had it's share of moments like the whole "White Guys Defense Force" forum bloodbath, and I think it lets some of it's features go a bit too far as I've said before. The problem is less here (as you can tell I can type this) than more of a general one that exists through this cosm of the internet. On a larger scale it also applies to the mainstream media, which left wingers of course won't agree with (and of course when it favors you, why say there is a problem?) but that's a whole different cup of tea and works out a bit differently. Basically when you start getting right wingers doing shows like Colbert and Stewart and slamming the left wing, and as many right wing networks as there are left wing ones, then we can talk about how it's balanced.... but as I said, that's increasingly off subject.
To pull a "Godwin" here and drop Nazis into the equasion, uber-fascism tends to be good when it's doing what you want and targeting people that you dislike or think is a problem. Basically if the majority of the media out there reinforces what you want to think, and produces statistics and studies to reinforce themselves without serious opposition, that's easy to get behind. However it's just as unfair for those being oppressed and on the receiving end as it would be if they were doing it to you, and really the mechanism by which this kind of fascism-like oppression comes from, governmentally or private, doesn't much matter, what matters is of course the reality. Free speech is NOT the "Freedom to say what I agree with". See, ideally I do not believe anyone should be able to control free speech even on private platforms (even though this is not a legal reality right now) and that the laws have not caught up with the information age, given that when the laws were created it was unthinkable that private citizens could command this kind of informational power and control. Ideally I'd say just make it a free for all, we're not there yet, so we have to deal with what's out there.
Right now I do not think the SJWs are about to be forced out, this is just one explosion, and it's not big enough, but give it time. People need to understand, when you ban critics those people don't cease to exist, they are still out there, and just get angrier, especially if it all started with you insulting them or belittling their beliefs (which on a lot of big social issues are not going to be uncommon, after all if there wasn't more than one side they wouldn't be big issues, they would have just been resolved quickly and quietly).
