Drama in the indy gaming biz ?

[Malcador]

Saying that "gamers are misogynist" is in any way the quintessence of the articles I read is nothing but gross falsification. In those articles, nobody says that. It is not implied either. What is being said is that a hardcore group that used to be the dominant market is losing its importance and that the individuals who belong to this group are angry about that, and that this anger manifests itself in different ways.

Well, think about that, they are still slurring a large swath of people - the 'hardcore' as they define, which used to be the largest group and probably still is a big group - as Bad Men as it suits them. Hardly a good step off, and generally enthusiast excuses for press snarking at their audience is a poor approach.

 

On the Twitter front, some lady named Jenn Frank got "chased out" by trolls or something, Burch and Walker so far are in a tizzy. This is getting funnier by the day

Edited September 4, 2014 by Malcador

[Amentep]

For developers to be asking that. They should because it's a cheap and overdone trick, and for that specific example the world would not be worse off. But they shouldn't be intimidated to 'be inclusive' when they don't want to be. Not everything has to be targeted at everyone and if they want to make something that's just pure and base male fantasy they should without fear of the mob.

I may be naive, but I think as long as you can show that you put logic in your design decisions you shouldn't be afraid to try something that may be perceived negatively by any specific sub-group because you can at that point justify what you've included as a deliberately thought out choice.

 

Not a cabal of women and not any hyperbolic feminazi regime obviously. And they won't necessarily succeed any time soon. But a hostile atmosphere in the media where content is nitpicked and games get bad publicity for bull**** reasons by overcompensating social justice types where people aren't just weary of the aforementioned strip clubs but ironically enough even of complex and flawed female characters.

 

I'm a big fan of a free for all. Want female centric content? Create a demand for it but don't police what others have.

And that's the thing, ultimately it isn't police-able, that was my point. The market will look out to tap parts of the market that aren't currently being served when it thinks they can make money out of it. That will always be in a capitalist model.

 

 

It's exactly what they are doing. First they say how bad the gamers are and then later on "clarify" that they are only talking about small group of gamers, but the connection has already been made: "all gamers are bad".

 

It's a basic trick, but if you can't see it then you can't see it.

Which gets back to my comments about labeling things being bad and it is an argumentative technique to dismiss people who disagree with you (Oh, you don't like what I said? You're a GAMER!)

[Oerwinde]

Which gets back to my comments about labeling things being bad and it is an argumentative technique to dismiss people who disagree with you (Oh, you don't like what I said? You're a GAMER!)

This is a really common tactic of the SJW crowed. Just yeaterday reading comments at io9 on the casting Dwayne Johnson as Black Adam, as there was speculation he would be playing Shazam. Several people were then advocating for the casting of a black actor for Shazam, just so they could yell at "racists" who denied they were racist but just "want it to stay true to the comic". Immediately dismissing the opinion before it was even stated. I kinda hope this kind of garbage dilutes the meaning of words like racist and sexist so that people don't take it seriously anymore.

[Blarghagh]

Yeah, even I really dislike the jerks who make the "gamers are all bigots" argument. I've been called an SJW here once or twice, so that must be saying something.

 

They are incensing others, who might have taken their side and become a force for good and change, against them with their condescending attitudes as well attracting the bigots because their arguments are so nonsensical easy to take apart. Saying all gamers are bigots is like saying all muslims are terrorists - it's demonizing hate speech and it lowers them to the same level as the very worst bigots and makes it harder for anyone who sincerely wants to help further equality and remove toxicity to get their say in.

 

I cannot imagine someone saying something that truly dumb without it being clickbait so they can get attention. They are not in it for the people they claim to be defending, they are in it for the attention, the pats on the back or the negative comments. Cartoonist Tom Preston, for example, is doing it for no other reason than to give exposure to his name and his comics so he can make more money and it annoys me to no end because it means the next time I bring up an actual issue, more people will just shrug it off and nobody who actually wants to help will be able to get through to anyone anymore.

[Malcador]

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/09/gamergate_explodes_gaming_journalists_declare_the_gamers_are_over_but_they.html

[Fighter]

Everyone will be expected to shut up now because of the harassing asshats and the guilt by association angle the media types are pushing. Shut up or you're complicit. No one will talk about anything which means the amount of asshats will not lessen.

[Meshugger]

^TRIGGERING LANGUAGE

 

Please remove the phrase "asshat", the feelings of my avatar are in jeopardy thanks to you.

[Fighter]

Everyone will be expected to shut up now because of the harassing asshats and the guilt by association angle the media types are pushing. Shut up or you're complicit. No one will talk about anything which means the amount of asshats will not lessen.

 

EDIT: TRIGGER WARNING!

 

Huh, can't edit that post.
 

Edited September 4, 2014 by Fighter

[Meshugger]

[triggering intensifying]

[Longknife]

*****TRIGGER WARNING****

 

 

 

This feminist movement is beans!

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

I find your sarcasm offensive, sub-human male. I'm going to write a "Death of Meshugger" article now.

[Fighter]

Triggers... Guns have triggers... The word trigger triggers.

[Amentep]

Roy Rogers had Trigger.

[aluminiumtrioxid]

^TRIGGERING LANGUAGE

 

EDIT: TRIGGER WARNING!

 

[triggering intensifying]

 

 

*****TRIGGER WARNING****

 

Triggers... Guns have triggers... The word trigger triggers.

 

 

Real witty there, guys. I hope you realize you're making fun of a convention which exists to protect victims of abuse from having to relive sometimes really traumatic memories at the opportunity cost of taking about half a second of your time to gloss over it if it doesn't concern you.

[Malcador]

SQL Triggers are dangerous, and should come with warnings.

 

Real witty there, guys. I hope you realize you're making fun of a convention which exists to protect victims of abuse from having to relive sometimes really traumatic memories at the opportunity cost of taking about half a second of your time to gloss over it if it doesn't concern you.

A relatively new concept to me, only noticed it maybe 18 months ago, stupid Reddit. It is a bit weird to see it in some cases, so mocking it's overuse is fine. I guess those jokes were a trigger for you ?

Edited September 4, 2014 by Malcador

[Meshugger]

Real witty there, guys. I hope you realize you're making fun of a convention which exists to protect victims of abuse from having to relive sometimes really traumatic memories at the opportunity cost of taking about half a second of your time to gloss over it if it doesn't concern you.

 

 

Why of course we are malevolent lot that only seek to further destroy the lives of people that have suffered from Shell Shock. I can absolutely guarantee you that we are not under any circumstances targeting people that try to abuse the good nature of others with trying to shut them up. Not at all.

[Longknife]

 

Real witty there, guys. I hope you realize you're making fun of a convention which exists to protect victims of abuse from having to relive sometimes really traumatic memories at the opportunity cost of taking about half a second of your time to gloss over it if it doesn't concern you.

 

 

 

While this is a considerate intention, I ultimately find the whole thing rather....stupid.

 

Why? Well the fact of the matter is it's unreasonable to expect the world to know about your personalized trauma. I was horrendously depressed about three years ago due to circumstances I bet no one could POSSIBLY expect, nor do I expect people to know how to avoid reminding me of that time. It would be unreasonable of me to expect people to cater to this; no, instead? Instead that was a time of my life where my depression was literally crippling, to the point where just going outside was difficult. I need to be able to cope with that moment and get over it. I need to be able to look at that time in my life and say "yes that was traumatic but I have to live on and keep going," because depression is this sort of cycle where it feeds itself; if you give in to one portion of the cycle you can fall into the whole thing all over again.

 

 

So while yes, let's say I know someone who was raped, yes I should be courteous and avoid bringing up anything rape-related around her, but at the same time, the reality is people DO report on it, people DO include it in art, people DO use the word liberally when goofing around in various ways, and if she cannot handle that, that itself is a problem. I'm sorry for what she went through, but she needs to be able to move on to an extent. Trust me, I know how heartless that sounds and by no means is moving on easy. If I had the attitude of "just stop crying and move on already," by all means, punch me in the mouth. But no, I'm saying that for as hard as it is or as insensitive claims of "you need to be able to move on," there is a sense of truth to it in the sense that you'll cease to be functional if you let one trauma haunt you all your life. You need to move on, for YOUR sake. It takes time for sure, but it needs to happen.

 

 

 

 

 

  Overall, you will NOT convince all of humanity to provide "trigger warnings!!!" It's just not happening. A trigger is inevitable, so the only way to handle it is to face them and LEARN to handle them. Yes, friends and family, be courteous and avoid triggering your loved ones.

 

But strangers on the internet...? There's a reason feminism is so unpopular. The unpopularity is exactly due to things like this. Hell, you know what I associate feminists with? The ****ing Spanish Inquisition, because if you don't believe their moral code they'll order you to get it, kill you or torture you. Make no mistake, idealists are generally kind hearted, but extremist idealists? Omfg now there's a group of people that can get a lot of **** started. I would MUCH prefer a bunch of traumatized people learn to face reality and learn to cope with their trauma (however difficult that may be) to having a bunch of ****tard crusaders running around punishing anyone they deem not sensitive enough.

[Longknife]

OMFG I GOT AN IDEA

 

 

Let's just put a Trigger Warning in front of every single game ever. Then they might all go away. C:

[Fearabbit]

 

Saying that "gamers are misogynist" is in any way the quintessence of the articles I read is nothing but gross falsification. In those articles, nobody says that. It is not implied either. What is being said is that a hardcore group that used to be the dominant market is losing its importance and that the individuals who belong to this group are angry about that, and that this anger manifests itself in different ways.

Well, think about that, they are still slurring a large swath of people - the 'hardcore' as they define, which used to be the largest group and probably still is a big group - as Bad Men as it suits them. Hardly a good step off, and generally enthusiast excuses for press snarking at their audience is a poor approach.

 

I just don't see it that way. I mean I'm really only talking about those articles linked there. There's lots of hate on all sides, to be sure. But those articles - the Kotaku article basically asks "where is all this hate that we're seeing here coming from?", and they try to find an explanation for that.

Look at it from this perspective and you don't have journalists who snark at their audience anymore. They see lots of people who are full of hate, and these "lots of people" are the ones they want to talk about. Frankly I don't care too much about the semantics if the context is clear (which it is in my opinion).

 

This kind of outrage over the words used in an article, which ignores the context, is what people actually kind of hate about the "feminist movement". I certainly don't like it one bit. Yes you can always find justifications for being outraged, but I'm not a fan of taking political correctness to the extreme, no matter what the topic is.

Or to put it in neckbeard terms, "I find it very ironic (yes so so ironic) that the very people who belittle the feminist movement for their supposed censorship of both ideas and words should choose to use the same techniques in their oh so important fight for justice."

 

...anyway. Comparisons have been made to calling all muslims terrorists and stuff like that. I think the more appropriate comparison is simply politics. You have the liberals and the conservatives, you have people like Stephen Colbert and Bill O'Reilly taking the piss out of the other group and being very inconsiderate about from the point of view of the victims. This is really the exact same situation - gaming has been made political, and there are "liberals" and "conservatives" here as well.

So a large part of the gaming press is liberal, and they're catering to a liberal audience. Meanwhile there are almost no big conservative gaming sites, and people don't feel represented anymore because lately, the differences have become more apparent.

 

I mean, that's really all there is to it, right? I don't know what the solution to that is, though. Maybe the conservatives (and the moderates) should organize and get some influence themselves. But the liberals aren't going to go away, and telling them to stop being so liberal won't work.

[Blarghagh]

Trigger warnings make you that angry? I welcome them myself. I mean, as alum said it takes about five seconds to write or ignore. I don't require them, but I appreciate them if they are present (when actually needed). I don't see the big deal. I'm not sure why people showing consideration is a cause to get angry.

 

Of course when people are going to start requiring them, then it's a different issue.

[Longknife]

Trigger warnings make you that angry? I welcome them myself. I mean, as alum said it takes about five seconds to write or ignore. I don't require them, but I appreciate them if they are present (when actually needed). I don't see the big deal. I'm not sure why people showing consideration is a cause to get angry.

 

Of course when people are going to start requiring them, then it's a different issue.

 

 

It's not the trigger warnings themselves that are problematic. Those are, in and of themselves, 5 second warnings.

 

The problem is that as we've seen, some of the very people who would think to write them are also the very people who would start acting irrationally aggressive and hateful because someone ELSE didn't think to write them. Just because someone didn't write them doesn't make them a criminal that deserves punishment or poor treatment. They may lack foresight, they may disagree with you on how to deal with trauma, they may have a philosophy of never censoring the truth of a situation or the reality while merely reporting facts, they may not even recognize a potential trigger in what they're saying.

 

The concept itself is fine. When the concept ceases to be a nice courtesy and becomes something that's EXPECTED in the sense that certain individuals flip **** and cause more drama if someone forgets to write one? GTFO.

 

 

 

 

In a nutshell:

 

I am becoming convinced putting Anita Sarkeesian in a room and asking her to study and/or explain Nietzsche or Hegel would be exceedingly entertaining, because she and people like her seem unaware those two or people who follow their style of philosophies exist, or consider those philosophies to be absolutely 100% wrong and evil.

Edited September 4, 2014 by Longknife

[Fighter]

The problem with Trigger Warnings imo is that your imagination is maybe worse then most content people demand it is used for. Which is sometimes stupidly benign things.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

All these trigger warnings are triggering my triggers.

[aluminiumtrioxid]

 

 

Real witty there, guys. I hope you realize you're making fun of a convention which exists to protect victims of abuse from having to relive sometimes really traumatic memories at the opportunity cost of taking about half a second of your time to gloss over it if it doesn't concern you.

 

 

 

While this is a considerate intention, I ultimately find the whole thing rather....stupid.

 

Why? Well the fact of the matter is it's unreasonable to expect the world to know about your personalized trauma. I was horrendously depressed about three years ago due to circumstances I bet no one could POSSIBLY expect, nor do I expect people to know how to avoid reminding me of that time. It would be unreasonable of me to expect people to cater to this; no, instead? Instead that was a time of my life where my depression was literally crippling, to the point where just going outside was difficult. I need to be able to cope with that moment and get over it. I need to be able to look at that time in my life and say "yes that was traumatic but I have to live on and keep going," because depression is this sort of cycle where it feeds itself; if you give in to one portion of the cycle you can fall into the whole thing all over again.

 

 

So while yes, let's say I know someone who was raped, yes I should be courteous and avoid bringing up anything rape-related around her, but at the same time, the reality is people DO report on it, people DO include it in art, people DO use the word liberally when goofing around in various ways, and if she cannot handle that, that itself is a problem. I'm sorry for what she went through, but she needs to be able to move on to an extent. Trust me, I know how heartless that sounds and by no means is moving on easy. If I had the attitude of "just stop crying and move on already," by all means, punch me in the mouth. But no, I'm saying that for as hard as it is or as insensitive claims of "you need to be able to move on," there is a sense of truth to it in the sense that you'll cease to be functional if you let one trauma haunt you all your life. You need to move on, for YOUR sake. It takes time for sure, but it needs to happen.

 

 

It's a completely reasonable position, but healing happens at its own pace, and there are timeframes when it's just unfeasible to expect someone to move on; likewise, there is no way to predict when someone will read an article, or blog post, or whatever. "Consumers of your stuff who've been raped three days ago" might seem like a small subset of readers, but I'm leery of anyone who considers a half-second long feeling of mild annoyance worse than effectively unavoidable, lasting, considerable emotional turmoil just because the latter only affects a very, very small percentage of people.

 

I mean, utilitarian ethics may teach us that given a sufficiently large number of beneficients, torturing a child to death in order to prevent an extremely large number of people from ever having hiccups is good and moral, but guess what, then I'm not a utilitarian.

 

 

 

Real witty there, guys. I hope you realize you're making fun of a convention which exists to protect victims of abuse from having to relive sometimes really traumatic memories at the opportunity cost of taking about half a second of your time to gloss over it if it doesn't concern you.

 

 

 

  Overall, you will NOT convince all of humanity to provide "trigger warnings!!!" It's just not happening. A trigger is inevitable, so the only way to handle it is to face them and LEARN to handle them. Yes, friends and family, be courteous and avoid triggering your loved ones.

 

But strangers on the internet...? There's a reason feminism is so unpopular. The unpopularity is exactly due to things like this. Hell, you know what I associate feminists with? The ****ing Spanish Inquisition, because if you don't believe their moral code they'll order you to get it, kill you or torture you. Make no mistake, idealists are generally kind hearted, but extremist idealists? Omfg now there's a group of people that can get a lot of **** started. I would MUCH prefer a bunch of traumatized people learn to face reality and learn to cope with their trauma (however difficult that may be) to having a bunch of ****tard crusaders running around punishing anyone they deem not sensitive enough.

 

 

I've never met anyone who expected others to plaster any remotely objectionable content with trigger warnings. Seriously, nobody I know wants this. (And I'm fairly convinced I know a lot more people who self-identify as feminists than any of you.)

 

Another useful purpose they serve: if you see that someone has included detailed trigger warnings you find absurd at the start of an article, you can close it with good conscience, because you can already know that whatever their point is, you will disagree with it anyways (therefore saving you the time it would've taken to read the thing in its entirety).

[Amentep]

Real witty there, guys. I hope you realize you're making fun of a convention which exists to protect victims of abuse from having to relive sometimes really traumatic memories at the opportunity cost of taking about half a second of your time to gloss over it if it doesn't concern you.

Okay so total side note, I know the conversation got all different while I composed a lengthy, serious and heartfelt post that I ultimately declined to post and threw away, but since when can't comedy be directed at...well anything?

 

It was clear Meshugger was being (or attempting to be) funny in his post (apologies to his avatar, I guess, if I misread that situation) and that there was a dogpile in the humor. I understand that people feel differently over the importance/lack of same in real trigger warnings, but...

 

This is really the exact same situation - gaming has been made political, and there are "liberals" and "conservatives" here as well.

So a large part of the gaming press is liberal, and they're catering to a liberal audience. Meanwhile there are almost no big conservative gaming sites, and people don't feel represented anymore because lately, the differences have become more apparent.

 

I mean, that's really all there is to it, right? I don't know what the solution to that is, though. Maybe the conservatives (and the moderates) should organize and get some influence themselves. But the liberals aren't going to go away, and telling them to stop being so liberal won't work.

I'm not sure I agree that the dichotomy is based on politics, per se (but will admit that I may be wrong) but a moderate and reasonable middle besieged by radicals on either side of it that are fighting each other and dragging everyone else into it. And I don't think those radicals necessarily fall into easy liberal/conservative labels.

Edited September 4, 2014 by Amentep