Senate Let's Talk: Feminism

You've said a lot about how she won't engage in 'reasonable discussion' but haven't been specific at all what exactly the 'reasonable discussion' is. What exactly is the problem that you have with the game?

 

When I say reasonable discussion, I'm mainly suggesting re-opening her comment sections on Youtube and other social media and actually moderating them by having the vitriolic BS and genuine threats being deleted and reported and allow the actual critiques and inquiries into her points stay in order for her to actually seem at least somewhat credible.

As for Depression Quest, there have been games I've seen on Newgrounds with more work put into them than that one. It's shameful.

 

So, you expect her to weed through a ton of threats, looking for some "reasonable discussion"? Come on,man. You've clearly never dealt with harassment and the anxiety it causes.

 

Yeah, why should she have to expose herself to that at all? Why you're so fixated on having to get your critiques in at the expense of her own mental health is really baffling.

 

Yeah, he keeps dodging the question.

 

Don't worry, I wasn't dodging it, I just missed it entirely. Uugh, mobile.

anakinfansince1983 Are you saying that all of her negative feedback thus far has been nothing but death threats and rape threats? That there are so few genuine critiques that I actually have to supply evidence? OK, I can. I'll link some on the thread when I get the chance.

True Sith She does work with others on Feminist Frequency so she would, by no means, be managing anything alone. Plenty of teams do this on Youtube already and I don't find it out of the realm of possibility for her.

By the way...her mental health? Really? She's a grown woman with a cause she believes in. If a person 15 years her junior has experienced these same sorts of things (as well as many others) and wisely chose to consider them as such, I think she'll have enough self-respect to not let petty threats disturb her to the point of insanity and have her critiques be responded to by rational human beings.

 

I'm going to stop you right there. The comment sections on YouTube are proverbial for not being a place for reasonable discussion. A participant in a discussion shouldn't have to pull double-duty moderating comments; reasonable discussions are best done on moderated sites.

You're going to have to be a little more specific. Is it unfinished in some way? Does the gameplay not make sense? Does it crash all the time? What 'more work' should she have put into the game?

 

Well, there was a hell of a lot of freezing and stuttering for a game in which the "gameplay" is almost entirely composed of clicking on hyperlinks. I even checked my PC to see if it was having issues. I tried using more complex titles to see if I would get the same results. No such luck. It was actually that bad. Then there's the story and dialogue, which felt whiny and annoying.

Also, I forgot to mention the ridiculous amount of grammatical errors.

 

That's something, certainly... although I also pulled up a review by someone that was thorough and also disliked the game (and the creator), and they admitted there wasn't much in the way of bugs.
In any case, technical errors are something you report, not 'discuss' - and certainly if Bethesda can't fix even a small percentage of the damn bugs in F4, I'm not going to come down hard on an indie developer for it.

Again, we're veering away from 'reasonable discussion'. It's not your cup of tea - I get that. But I've always seen people commenting that praised the game for its portrayal of depression.
I've seen similar statements made about Gone Home, Kentucky Route Zero, and The Stanley Parable. The idea, it seems, is "I don't like this type of game and neither should reviewers", and if the reviewers praise it... well, there must be a conspiracy of some kind.
And I am an amateur game designer - while I haven't released anything (nor am I likely to, as I do it for my own amusement), I have to say that if you posted 'Your story and dialogue feels whiny and annoying' in response to me, I'd probably not bother responding to you further.

 

Yeah, that was my opinion. However, there is evidence regarding the grammatical errors. You'd think that something that was greenlit on Steam and makes money from purchases on the site would have been proofread AT LEAST. That seems quite reasonable. So much of it is text, anyway.

 

Or maybe because she's actually received tons of rape and death threats, which she has.

That's a legit reason to shut down any discussion. I certainly wouldn't be having any discussion after that.

Because you're saying she should have to go through the effort to actually block it, instead of just cutting it out altogether.

In order to block it, she has to read that **** first. Who wants to go through that? I wouldn't.

Why should she have to subject herself to that at all?

To read precious counterarguments?

Yeah, no. She doesn't have to allow comments on her Youtube videos, no one does. She shouldn't have to wade through the huge number of inevitable harassment, rape threats and death threats just so a few people can have their precious voices heard.

You want to respond to one of her videos? Make a response video. I don't know much about Youtube, but I think that's a thing.

Okay, tough guy. Give yourself a big pat on the back. How much do you bench? Better be at least 250.

I highly doubt you've been through anything close to what she has. You've had all your personal info, your address and such, posted online with invites to attack you? You've had someone say they're going to kill your parents, naming your parents and their address?

You are no one, you are anonymous. There's no way you've experienced the sheer volume of attacks she has.

If I had to go through what she did, yeah my mental state would be pretty messed up.

And, again, you end with a desperate need for people to be able to respond to her.

She doesn't have to defend her arguments.

I'm pretty sure Depression Quest has been completely free on Steam for over two years. Pretty sure it was free to begin with. It's pay-what-you-want.

 

Yeah, no. She doesn't have to allow comments on her Youtube videos, no one does. She shouldn't have to wade through the huge number of inevitable harassment, rape threats and death threats just so a few people can have their precious voices heard.


CT-867-5309

I'm coming in from outside this discussion, but this reminded me of what Jessica Valenti wrote in Sex Object, her most recent book. She wrote that in every talk she does, the first comment/question is always from a man.

She doesn't owe anyone anything. Not answers to questions, not validation, nothing. She's free to step away at any time. No one is entitled to anything from her.

Talos156

 

It is. And as of Jun 2015, Steam started their 'no-questions-asked' refund policy if you play the game less than 2 hours anyways. (I used that for my preorder of Arkham Knight).
There has been truly unfinished games - using the old 'get in one the beta' dodge, and then never updating - that Steam has completely pulled from being sold.

I guess the good news is that the Gamergate folks haven't been able to do as much damage as the Sad Puppies did to the Hugo Awards? Then again, that fight's not over - nominating authors that don't want to be on their list, especially outspoken ones, was probably not the brightest idea.

 

I believe Arkham Knight had one of the worst releases of an anticipated AAA title since Colonial Marines. The fact that the performance was as bad as it was (especially compared to Arkham Origins) which people were saying was the worst in the series.

The Arkham Knight's identity was also really predictable, ESPECIALLY if you read comics.

As for what I did after Depression Quest, I just got rid of it. As far as choice and text-based stuff goes, you can find better things. Even in the vein of story-based games. The hype it generated was mainly due to controversy and nothing else.

 

So according to Gamergate Zoe Quinn used sexual favours to solicit good reviews for.....a game she had released for free. Some top sleuths there.

 

Hey, guys. I just thought I'd step away from this thread for a bit and I wish to apologize. I, of all people, really shouldn't have been recommending contingencies and solutions that are pretty much impossible. Youtube's comments section is essentially rotten to the core. There's no saving that mess. Same for Twitter. Especially when I despise the site for it's incredibly brief character limit (you're definitely right, Darth Guy, I hate it as well). Also, I shouldn't have compared my experiences (no matter the severity of said comments) to hers because hers is indeed fundamentally different and I was being intellectually dishonest for doing so. Unlike her, I am not a public figure. It was a ridiculous statement on my part.

As for GamerGate, I don't know why they were using the tactics they used. on Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkeesian. Honestly, their arguments are easy enough to disprove due to the fact that they use information that is poorly representative of the gaming industry's reality (regarding things like the games industry and STEM fields) and they use logic that is pretty flawed. In fact, I think a lot of their arguments don't really have a proper foundation to lie upon. However, all that being said, I do not think that they should have experienced what they did. That is not something I feel I would advocate under any circumstances, morally (because it's pretty crappy behavior, this is obvious) and logistically (because it solves nothing). Even back then, I found it to be horrid behavior and the reason I despised it so much was that it creates this polarized atmosphere that transforms the general atmosphere around discussing her into a complete minefield. Like what occurred here. As someone who rarely participates in Internet drama and someone who is interested solely in somebody's arguments, I really don't have any clue if she gave sexual favors for a good review if it was free (that certainly reflected the final product, I'll tell you that) and I have no clue about anything else other than their content. To be frank, while I was looking for proof (anakinfansince1983 waste of effort on my part as well. I was 10 minutes in and I just didn't want to do it anymore), I remembered why I didn't care about that aspect of them in the first place: because it was exhausting. I mean, I haven't revisited this garbage in years, you guys, it was something I wasn't in the mood for looking through again. If I couldn't, I can see why she wouldn't either. Empathy helps in this case and I completely forgot to include it because of my frustration with her arguments. That was a complete oversight and my part and something I feel bad for doing.

However, there is one thing I don't agree with and that is the statement that she doesn't have to justify anything due to the sheer severity of her worst critics. By the way, I think the term "worst critics" applies here, the people who assailed her with misogynistic statements and death/rape threats are awful. With that being said, I think that if I should take her seriously as someone who criticizes an industry (even if it's centered around games, it's still an industry that is very lucrative and affects many people's careers), she must be far more professional. Presenting content in games out of context and including logic that is completely flawed from the ground up are actions that do not have the level of professionalism required when you are making allegations of sexism and promotion of violence. That is a serious thing. Also, I'm not saying she should be doing this in the comment section. Not now.That was a huge mistake on my part. Again, attempting to convince people (and myself) that doing it is possible was the wrong thing to do. There is one place she can do that though. Her videos. That she is given money to create by others. Thousands of dollars. Despite that, nothing has improved. She even begins to delve into Jack Thompson levels of melodrama and moral panic in her "gripping social commentary" online with things like the Doom 2016 trailer saying, "It's really troubling (and depressing) that the #BE3 is enthusiastically cheering for bodies being ripped apart". Do you see what's wrong with this statement? Taken out of context, for all you know, she could be talking about ACTUAL BODILY MUTILATION. She doesn't even begin to take the distinction between fantasy and reality into account. It's a fictional representation of a fictional being getting cut in half with a chainsaw. A lot of this kind of rhetoric also applies to her allegations of sexism in games like Grand Theft Auto. She cries foul when women die in the game even when you can literally kill anyone on the street randomly. It makes no sense at all. Showing a picture of a female NPC being murdered in a game where everyone is fair game and there is no point system for killing civilians (or anyone for that matter) is entirely meaningless. The Grand Theft Auto series' entire appeal is doing whatever the hell you want. And as for the characters in GTA V, for example, saying that the female ones are poorly represented when mostly every character in the game is like that is rather ineffectual. Rockstar's most well-developed game, in terms of story, has always been Red Dead Redemption, not the GTA series. So, that's my piece.

 

The reality is, she doesn't have to justify her opinions, period. She didn't break any laws. She didn't do anything that needs justification. She has her freedoms just like everyone else. She can choose to try to justify herself, or not. That's up to her, not you or anyone else.

It's not really about critics or anything else. The worst of her critics are all the reason needed not to bother, even though she doesn't need a reason in the first place.

Whether you agree with that or not, doesn't matter. It's reality.

You can say she has to justify her comments, but then she can go right on not justifying her comments, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it, nor should there be. If you try to do something about it, try to force her to justify herself using attacks, harassment, or any kind of coercion, I think you're overstepping your bounds, big time. You can request, but you can't really demand, and if you insist and pester, I think you'd be in the wrong.

I get wanting someone to justify their arguments, especially if it was on, say, a discussion forum like this one. I get it, it can be very frustrating, depending on what is said and how it is said, and I'm guilty of that, too. I was wrong, I was way too hostile and demanding, and honestly I felt kinda bad about it after, and tried to back off it. Ultimately, no one has to justify their arguments. You may not like it, but ultimately what you like or don't like doesn't matter (in this case). You don't have to take those arguments seriously or respect them, either, so it goes both ways. They don't have to give you their time, and you don't have to give them yours.

After someone presents a crappy argument and then doesn't bother justifying it, you can point out that it's a crappy argument. But you shouldn't demand they justify themselves. I mean, you can try, but I think you'd be in the wrong, and they can just ignore you, as they are free to do.

Here's an idea. Don't take her seriously. You don't have to.

There are lots of people I don't take seriously. I don't bother demanding that they defend their arguments, I just go straight to not taking them seriously, if I find their arguments as flawed and indefensible as you seem to find this person's.

You can say that, you know. You can just say "I don't take this person's commentary on games/gaming seriously, because her points are terribly flawed". I don't think anyone would call you a "misogynist" or anything like that for saying that. If they did, I wouldn't take them seriously. JoinTheSchwarz, the Comms Admin and Community mod, said he's not a fan of Sarkeesian and dislikes her writing, and that went over fine. Because that is fine.

 

Btw, when I said

I meant demanding someone justify themselves. I got really hostile and nasty.

I did it in this very thread, I think, with someone I find particularly obnoxious. He consistently drops a bunch of comments seriously critical of, and insulting to, feminists in this very thread...and then bails without defending or even explaining those comments, every single time. It's drive by posting, it's obnoxious, especially on a discussion forum such as this, especially the way he does it.

But I felt bad about it, particularly about being nasty and unwelcoming. It was wrong, and I'll try not to do it again.

Just wanted to clarify that, because I don't think I was particularly clear in my wording.

 

Jesus. Really? That just blows my mind completely.

 

Yeah, I've never heard of that, an unconscious woman referred to as a buffet.

I don't know how anyone could say that with any sincerity. It honestly triggers my gag reflex.