aluminiumtrioxid

Because these are things she actually says in the video? She has huge problem with maintaining a consistent message, it seems. At any rate, the tone and major points were very different from the occasional rational gem. "Mostly bull****-ish, with the occasional rational gem" is a pretty accurate summary of her work, as I've probably said earlier. Having some experience with liberal arts majors, I've had plenty of opportunity to train myself to automatically tune out bull**** and only pick out the good points, so I guess that shapes how I see her work. Someday, but right now railing about how she doesn't do something she hasn't set out to do strikes me as... irrational.

That's not what her Kickstarter pitch was about. Wouldn't it be akin to OE promising us an IE game successor, then delivering something that has nothing to do with it mechanically... oh wait.

Because these are things she actually says in the video? My chemistry teacher used to say "everything's poisonous in sufficiently large quantities - even fried chicken". I guess the truth is somewhere along those lines. Also, she doesn't want less of them, she wants more of the alternative. Big difference.

...No? Also, that was kinda cheap, but whatever.

What? you're just confirming what I said, either we are misguided and ignorant or aware and misogynistic. She just tried to fit us into her schema, guess which of the two you are if you like sexualised women in games? Could you please quote where she offers that particular dichotomy? Because my reading is that according to her, a/ games where the only meaningful game mechanic is the use of violence are more prone to using iffy tropes as an emergent quality arising from said game mechanics (as opposed to, say, the misogyny of the developers), and b/ while playing these games explicitly won't make anyone sexist, they will subtly influence one's view on gender roles when provided with the exclusion of alternatives. (Actually, this viewpoint is fairly well-supported by research, which I don't get why she didn't point viewers to.)

So I guess all those "Gamers are dead" articles describing us as neckbeards and the horrors that come out of Leigh Alexander's mouth were about Parcheesi enthusiasts. They all share the same politics and the same views, just look at some of Anita's tweets regarding gamers and what she thinks of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toa_vH6xGqs#t=1195

Have some pink, y'all. Cherry trees are cool. JFSOOC's left out my personal favorite picture snapped of Salar de Tunupa: Blue lava, color's due to burning sulphur gases. My research didn't manage to turn up what kind of sulphur gas are we talking about, even though I was keen on gaining geek cred by flaunting my l33t chemistry sk1llz. Let's not forget the Glass Beach, where the shards of glass bottles dumped into the ocean got smoothed over by... erosion, I guess, then washed out onto the shore: Finally, I have no inane comments to add about this one:

Ms Sarkeesian does have a point: The point is, say the right lies loud enough, and hate the right demographic of people and you'll go far. What I was getting at is that there is obviously a market for what she does, a subset of gamers who feel that sexism is a problem currently in the industry who will support her because however bad she is at calling attention to this problem, nobody else is doing it. Here's a radical idea: wanna have her completely humiliated, crushed, and silenced forever? Do what she has set out to do, but actually do it right! She is bad at it! The only reason for her popularity is the lack of valid alternatives. Start churning out actually valid feminist critique of games, and everybody wins: you don't have to listen to her badly argued points, while those who like having gaming examined from a feminist viewpoint will also be overjoyed for being able to consume well-argued feminist critique

Guess what, all of the mainstream media is sexist, because the society we're living in is sexist, and the society they live in impacts creators. Somehow, there is this notion that "when feminists say XY is sexist, they imply you're a horrible human being if you enjoy it". It's the root of a lot of hostility that could be avoided by making it clear that liking problematic things doesn't say anything about the consumer's character. That's surprisingly accurate, actually. But isn't the group of manchildren endorsing sharing and politeness an all-around nicer company than the other group holed up in their treehouse? You are patently wrong! Allow me to quote myself. I'm not seeing why those two goals would be inherently opposed to each other. Why can't we have both? This has actually left me perplexed for quite some time: basically what all of us want is more mature games, with a stronger emphasis on story, NPCs who feel more real, more player freedom where "freedom" doesn't mean "more options to do random ****", but a more thorough and realistic examination of the consequences of actions you can take - none of these stand in any inherent opposition with... a desire for stories free of the established (often sexist) tropes, a more diverse cast of NPCs, and a distaste for violent solutions being the optimal ones. These two subsets of goals actually enhance each other, for chrissakes!

Yes, yes, whatever. Mainstream gaming is still incredibly dull and dumb (for the record, I don't consider Obsidian to be a part of the mainstream), and I believe you would be among the firsts to agree with me on this statement, had I made it in a different context. As for Sarkeesian's popularity... for all the screaming and flailing and dismissiveness of her detractors, she does have a point. A point she often doesn't manage to get across, but there are limits to what you can expect from liberal arts majors, after all.

And for me, this is the crux of the matter. Are her videos ill-researched, pointing out the obvious, and ultimately well-meaning but stupid? Yes. But they represent something more: she is treating video gaming as an art form that has responsibility, that's worthy of analysis, worthy of criticizing, however inane that criticism may be. She doesn't want to censor games, she's trying to open an academic discourse about them. Any of you wishing if your favorite pastime was treated like real art - this is it. This is how it looks like. Her work's a sign of times changing, of video gaming being taken seriously, a promise of the label "gamer" not being associated with "hormonal teen" anymore. But how do we react to this, to her saying "hey, games are, in some respects, stuck pandering to people mentally and emotionally stunted on the level of adolescents, and we can do so much better"? Exactly like a teen would react to pointing out that his/her favored [insert whatever "cool and adult" stuff here] is actually fairly immature. We're acting like insecure kids who either react with aggression (the harrassment guys), or launch into elaborate tirades desperately trying to prove that she's wrong, she must be (the Thunderfoot brigade), or sulk like a sullen teen, dismissing her outright (most of you, actually). Gamers at large are doing everything but the grownup thing (either owning up to the fact that it is childish while pointing out that intensely trying to leave all childish things behind is the opposite of adult behavior, or owning up to the fact that it's childish and working towards creating something better in addition to, not instead of the current selection). The truth is, journalists at Kotaku and RPS and whatever ****ty sites they were putting their stuff up on were wrong. Gamers aren't dead; they're exactly at the same place they were 15 years ago. And that's a lot more depressing than any bull**** they've made up. Because it's true. Edit: TLDR: she's an idiot, but an idiot who was treating gamers like adults and video games like "a grownup thing". She was wrong to do so.

I'm aware of that, I'm just leery of the elements of Gamergate who treat her weighing in on their side of the debate as Ultimate Proof that they're right. Also, her opinion on gaming is even less informed than Sarkeesian's, so there's that.

Here's the thing, I don't believe he "owned up to his mistake", I believe he's running damage control because he feels backing the gamergate people is useful to him at the moment, and will resume being a dickwad as soon as it becomes more convenient. Again, I fully admit the possibility of being blinded by my bias against right-wing journalists. As to which site wrote what, I'm absolutely ignorant on the matter, given that the only reason I visit any major gaming site is to read the excellent Shamus Young's weekly column. It's quite likely that you're right. Edit: how the hell is it possible that I can't refer vulgarly to excrement, but "dickwad" is okay?

Didn't the Escapist go out of its way to please us and instate a code of journalistic conduct in light of recent events? I'd value that more than this opportunistic little piece of ****'s admission. Then again, I fully admit my bias against anyone writing for a right-wing publication intent on waging "a 30 front war [of propaganda] seeking to fundamentally transform the nation".

Ah, Volourn, always so eager to jump in and demonstrate an utter inability to interpret written text. Sadly, while I'm quite sure many people would actually pay for the privilege, I, personally, am not into arguing with subliterate trolls, so I'll have to pass on this opportunity to engage with your... contributions to this topic. But thanks for enriching us with your unique viewpoint anyways.

By the way, if we're talking about journalistic integrity... Our friend Milo there, writer of the utterly inane "game journalist mailing sites are THE DEVIL" article, who, based on quotes like "the video game community is perhaps the most inclusive, gender neutral and colourblind on the internet" holds our little community in quite a high regard, apparently didn't shy away from blatantly ****ting on video gaming culture in his article about Elliot Rodgers (read: when doing so was convenient for his anti-feminist agenda). So, erm, yeah, let's keep in mind that while he hates us less than he hates feminists, according to him, games like Counterstrike, Halo and World of Warcraft "are the classic frustrated sociopath’s pastime", and Rodgers' (School Shooting Guy, for those who forgot) "twisted view of the world was assembled piecemeal from the games he immersed himself in". Sorry. Had to gloat about that for a bit.

I fail to see how someone giving a lower score to a game they find racist is bad and unprofessional, but whatever. I am, however, a bit sad that it took sacrificing a woman's right to privacy to kick off a movement looking into journalistic ethics, when actually well-argued articles like this have been available for all to read since 2012.

And what shall I do if I believe that this whole gamergate business has an admirable goal but an ass-backwards way of trying to accomplish it, and in the end, it will only hurt the integrity and independence of games journalism more than it contributes to it?

So there was unprofessional behavior on behalf of a person who has no journalistic qualifications and works for a website that, according to the Reuters, scores 15 out of 100 on an independent journalism test (or so I've heard). Whoopty-****ing-doo. I still believe that Grayson's sex life is small fries compared to the industrialized corruption going on with the big publishers, and focusing on that detracts from the real issue.

As far as I'm aware, "a conflict of interest is a set of circumstances that creates a risk that professional judgement or actions regarding a primary interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary interest." Primary interest here being "the unbiased writing of games reviews", secondary... I don't know, let's assume "continuing to have sex with Zoe Quinn". Unless Grayson is obligated to write about any of Quinn's games, I see no inherent conflict between these two.

I'm pretty sure that's not how conflicts of interest work.

Yeah, major damage to games journalism is good. It just strikes me as counter-productive to strive for that goal not from the perspective of digging into the dirty laundry with big publishers and reviews being bought off and developers' livelihood (see: Fallout New Vegas) depending on scores assigned by incompetent hacks like Grayson, but from the angle of "oh my god, an utterly insignificant indie developer had sex with a journalist who didn't review any of her games EVERYTHING IS RUINED FOREVER".

Well it wouldn't, had that thing actually happened. What did happen, however, is that she (according to a butthurt ex) had sex with Grayson (who, based on his PoE articles, is a talentless hack, but that's beside the point), who then proceeded to review a grand total of zero of her games. The only context where Grayson even mentioned Quinn's name was reporting on the Game Jam trainwreck, which didn't have that much to do with her, actually.

Given that those tweets come from August 19, way before this whole thing has gotten blown up into this lovely piece of insanity and was solely about Quinn's sex life/censorship of topics discussing Quinn's sex life, I'd say pretty much any decent human being would've been on Quinn's side. If you judge objectively and impartially based on the information available back then, the only reasonable conclusion you could reach is "okay, maybe let's not give the ****-shaming internet mob a platform to do their ****-shaming on".

I'm just weirded out at people acting as if this was the straw that broke the camel's back when there is nothing in there that proves anything being organized.