> is the DFEH out of line, or is the industry just that broken?
No chance DEFH is out of line.
The tech industry is strongly biased in the favor of white men in my opinion and video games even more so, considering women playing video games only became socially acceptable a few years ago. It's still common for men to talk down to women on video games, to the point where the overwhelming majority of women do not use voice comms or make their gender known.
Think about all those men complaining that a video game _dared_ have a female character or even more so, a non-conventionally attractive one gasp. That was in 2018... That's the _average_ person who is making a video game.
> considering women playing video games only became socially acceptable a few years ago.
... In Saudi Arabia?
> It's still common for men to talk down to women on video games, to the point where the overwhelming majority of women do not use voice comms or make their gender known.
It's common for men to talk down to men on video games too ("talk down to" is a very mild phrasing). Turns out there are a lot of jerks who play video games, and for $reasons they tend to skew male (but we're still talking about a tiny minority of men; this isn't an indictment of men; the predictable "10% of m&ms are poisoned" rebuttal is inherently sexist, racist, etc).
> Think about all those men complaining that a video game _dared_ have a female character
I'm not sure which game you're talking about, but I suspect you misunderstand the criticism. There have been thousands of female video game characters going back to the dawn of the industry. Many titles which prominently feature female characters have done very well (e.g.., Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy, etc). I'm guessing there has never been significant controversy because a video game featured a female character, though no doubt there has been controversy about specific characters (e.g., Battlefield 1's and Battlefield V's wildly disproportionate emphasis on female WWI and WWII combatants) or about the cringe deployment of token diversity characters.
> biased in favor of white men
There's not even good evidence that CS is biased in favor of white men. The only "evidence" is that the demographics skew toward white men, but that's almost certainly minimally related to bias in the field because
1. There are tons of Asians (male and female) in the field as well
2. Demographics remain relatively constant despite a much more welcoming environment and a decade-long push at all levels of the pipeline to incorporate more women and non-whites
3. Women achieved near gender parity in law and medicine without any similar concerted effort during a time when the fields were overtly hostile to them
4. The countries with the most gender equality have more stereotypical occupational demographics, including women in tech
"it's common for men to talk down to men on video games too"
This is very tone deaf.
I have spent probably thousands of hours playing games (with a mic) and the % of times I've been "talked down to" is very small, and it was never because of a natural property about me (that I'm male, etc).
Literally every woman that I've played with who has used a mic or otherwise presented themselves as female has faced vitriolic harassment (and/or sexual harassment) for no reason other than that they were female. I've been in lobbies with them and suddenly see men becoming -far- more judgemental and critical about the female player's ability/skill than usual. This is why a lot of women don't use mics at all or otherwise identify themselves as female in online games.
The "talking down" (or just general random toxicity) that men sometimes face from other male players is not even remotely comparable.
I think the poster's "talk down to" was more referring to the general "shit talking" people do in games. Even if you have a generic username and never speak, people will talk crap, be a jerk, or whatever. Even games that provide built in messages can get converted into trash talk (Rocket League, Overwatch, etc.). Having something "identifiable" just lets trash talkers switch from "you're terrible" to something else.
Well, sure, those things exist. What I'm getting at is that the % of it that happens purely because I'm -male- (or another natural property about me) is basically zero. Either they're just being belligerent in general or they perceive me to be underperforming (rightly or wrongly).
Whereas when I play with women who e.g. use a mic, very frequently it's like a switch gets flipped and people start being weird, overtly sexual, or just flat out insanely critical of every little thing the female players do. If we start losing the round (in e.g. Overwatch), they start blaming the female players unfairly, etc.
Obviously this is all anecdata but from everyone that I've spoken to it's a very common experience, hence most of my female friends just eschewing the mic entirely or only playing with specific groups instead of general matchmaking.
> a switch gets flipped and people start being weird, overtly sexual, or just flat out insanely critical of every little thing the female players do
I have no doubt that this occurs and I've even intervened in that type of behavior before; I think I hold more toward the "Greater Internet F---wad Theory" [1]. People will act like jerks and attack you for whatever traits you have. Adults trash talk 12 year olds; 12 year olds trash talk adults.
I'm not saying people should grow thicker skin, but rather that we haven't really figured out a way to NOT have trash talking. Maybe collaborative style games over competitive, but even then, those require interactions and communication, which leads us back to Penny-Arcade.
The difference between "squeakies" is everyone was a squeakie at one point. It's basically an internet right-of-passage whether that is right or wrong.
Regardless, all squeakies get to stop being squeakies eventually. Women don't get that option. Women don't get to grow out of being women or being harassed for who they are.
I mean, I don't disagree with you that having a thick skin on the internet, but it's unfair that men get to make women feel unwelcome in online spaces simply for being women.
There's a large chasm between friendly teasing and harassment.
> every woman ... has vitriolic harassment faced (and/or sexual harassment).
I experienced being treated differently when I was playing a very attractive Blood Elf Warrior in World of Warcraft ten years ago: a fellow adventurer would continually give me gifts (valuable in-game items).
The third time this happened I realized he wasn't being generous—he was courting me! I had to come clean.
I messaged him, "Dude, I gotta tell ya: I'm not a girl in real life."
"You're not?"
"No, I'm a balding man in his mid-forties."
Long pause, and then he replied, "I gotta take a cold shower."
I never heard from him again, but he seemed like a nice guy who was trying to get a girlfriend by doing nice things for her, and I hope he found what he was looking for.
Aren’t all blood elf warriors equally attractive? Assuming any given female blood elf warrior is actually a female IRL needs a major reality distortion field.
You'd be surprised how many folks fall into this distortion field though (and I fully agree with how silly this is). It's enough such that my partner and many of her female friends only play female avatars in private games.
> 'm not sure which game you're talking about, but I suspect you misunderstand the criticism. There have been thousands of female video game characters going back to the dawn of the industry. Many titles which prominently feature female characters have done very well (e.g.., Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy, etc). I'm guessing there has never been significant controversy because a video game featured a female character, though no doubt there has been controversy about specific characters (e.g., Battlefield 1's and Battlefield V's wildly disproportionate emphasis on female WWI and WWII combatants) or about the cringe deployment of token diversity characters.
My point is that there is any controversy when there is a game where the female main character is not explicitly sexualized. You are absolutely right that there are beloved female main characters, but they are almost always shown and viewed in a sexualized manner rather than as a human being.
And yes, there are definitely 'sexualized' men (God of War) but they never seem to be explicitly in there as sexual objects rather than as part of the story. Like, if you took Lara Croft out and replaced her with a red square, would that game be regarded as the same? Probably not.
People legit get mad about Aloy (Horizon Zero Dawn) being unattractive and "looking manly". Maybe not a massive controversy, but enough that I, someone who passively follows video game news, know about it.
I agree thought that my original post was poorly worded and not specific enough about my perceived reception of female characters in video games. I was trying to incorporate "female main character" and "unattractive female characters" into one point and failed.
> I agree thought that my original post was poorly worded and not specific enough about my perceived reception of female characters in video games. I was trying to incorporate "female main character" and "unattractive female characters" into one point and failed.
Fair enough, thanks for acknowledging as much. :)
> You are absolutely right that there are beloved female main characters, but they are almost always shown and viewed in a sexualized manner rather than as a human being. And yes, there are definitely 'sexualized' men (God of War) but they never seem to be explicitly in there as sexual objects rather than as part of the story. Like, if you took Lara Croft out and replaced her with a red square, would that game be regarded as the same? Probably not.
Even still, Lara Croft seems like every bit as much a "human being" as the average male main character? And I don't buy your "red square" example--it's not like you could replace any of the ripped shirtless dudes in various video games with a red square and have the same experience either.
I actually believe that female characters are probably sexualized a bit more often than male characters, and male characters are regarded as objects of violence quite a lot more than female characters. But if there is a loser here, it's not obvious to me that it's the female gender.
What is wrong with sexualized characters anyway? It's escapist entertainment. Are men now forbidden from enjoying attractive women in media? Absolutely don't harass people or discriminate, but this posture against sexualized characters is weirdly puritanical, especially considering the long history in games of non-sexualized, empowered female protagonists.
> What is wrong with sexualized characters anyway?
The answer probably heavily depends if you ask an US American or a Frenchmen. Same with bro culture, that I don't see intrinsic in tech and much more a product of other influences.
There's also an infamous (at the time, anyway) shot of her in Other M. Of course, if you're familiar with the story it's obvious that there's nothing like sexual objectification involved. It makes perfect sense that she's on the floor unconscious in the Zero Suit with her ass pointed directly at the camera, because she was just attacked without warning by a man who she's uncharacteristically submissive toward.
People also got mad about Tifa's bust size apparently being reduced to a more realistic level in FF7R. It's nuts that we just kind of accept this as a culture.
We also accept a whole lot of impossibly jacked shirtless dudes but there's barely any public outcry against this. Even worse, video games are extraordinarily violent (I play lots of FPS games, so I'm not criticizing fans of violent games per se) and anyone concerned about the effects of violence on society is lambasted as a pearl-clutching conservative parent from the 1980s.
Both absolutely true. However, regarding overly jacked dudes, there is no history of women in gaming culture harassing developers for putting a beer gut on the male protagonist of a video game, nor any talk about "bulge physics" or whatever the equivalent of "jiggle physics" would be.
I think that speaks to the relative paucity of women in "gaming culture" rather than the purity of women. Were there a concentrated community of female gamers, I wouldn't be surprised if they levied such complaints (consider for example any of the commentary on male Olympic divers in predominantly female circles).
I was thinking about that after walking away for a bit.
I don't _hate_ sexualization of characters. Like, totally. Let's make sexy characters that we all adore, but let's not make it a default where female characters _have_ to be sexy.
I am all for the ridiculous boob sliders or boob physics or whatever, I think it is just that there is an expectation in video games that a female character has to either be sexy or not exist.
If there was a widely accepted place for female characters that are just another character, just a human being existing, just like male characters are, then we could have a space where you have those like hyper-attractive female characters just like games currently have the Adonis-attractive male characters.
Yeah, I agree with that. Tifa had a huge rack, but she was also a fully fleshed out character and not really sexualized outside of being a nebulously romantic interest of Cloud's. Her bust size was reduced in the remake because, and I'm guessing here, they were going for a more realistic look than the superdeformed look of the original and it would have been out of place [0].
The problem is that the backlash was entirely in the form of man-children making this out to be some woke appeasement move because they can't ogle quite as much volume of virtual knockers. And even worse is that, as a culture, we just kind of shake our heads at this and ignore it.
[0] Barret is still ripped as fuck, but his proportions are much better. The Rock actually looks like that.
Try and replace attractive men and woman in movies with average people and see how quickly movie sales will drop. Men and woman enjoy watching attractive men/woman doing interesting stuff.
If 1% of a fanbase of 10 million gets mad then you have 100k angry people. And of those a percent or so will be insane people who likely will murder someone in real life at some point, its just statistics. And those one thousand insane people will create a lot of ruckus, but that doesn't mean their views are shared with the community in general.
> The tech industry is strongly biased in the favor of white men
That's debatable. CS was overwhelmingly male and wasn't prestigious until recently.
> video games even more so
I wonder how much of that we can attribute to DOOM. The DOOM devs wanted to make an hyper-violent game centered around Demon and heavy metal, and that reflected in the culture at id (not the violence). And they made a bunch of money which spurred copy-cats and got investors thinking game devs had to look like this to be profitable.
> Think about all those men complaining that a video game _dared_ have a female character or even more so, a non-conventionally attractive one gasp.
> We're talking about the same career that's been known as a money-printing machine for the past 25 years?
20 years ago it was fairly frequently perceived as both very nerdy in an unpopular way and in imminent danger of being outsourced entirely.
It's sad how many people who had to put up with bullying for their interests back then quickly became bullies themselves when they had the opportunity. Of all people, we should know better.
Man. I went to high school in the late 90s, and we didn't even have a CS course. We did have a "programming" class, and it was taught using Pascal. It wasn't a required class, and only the "nerds" (such as myself) took it. And my high school was a brand-new school that was branded as a "tech magnet" school, in a relatively well-off area.
You certainly can have a career that's lucrative, but not prestigious. I've been coding for over 25 years and in that time, have been referred to as a "nerd", "geek", etc... pretty much the entire time. Not prestigious monikers. Most people that I encounter do not act as though my career is a "money-printing machine", but rather that I do some, strange, arcane, thing that they could never approach (or would want to), that is very difficult, but yes, finally, makes money. They see my title as prestigious, but not programming. The people I see with different attitudes about programming/prestige/gender are much younger (<30). I don't fully understand their attitudes yet.
To be honest though - geek and nerd have become prestigious monikers. I think that management and sales still reign supreme in terms of prestige but skilled individual contributors are being more recognized as cogs that make a company run smoothly... and after the 00's worth of culture we've seen a shift where technical aptitude has become more praiseworthy.
I guess that depends on where you are. I still don't think of geek and nerd as conferring prestige. IMO they just aren't (as) stigmatized anymore, and are mostly neutral descriptors.
And fifty years ago it was incredibly female dominated - the "male shift" in CS is easy to observe and pretty handily defeats any of those false claims you'll see about "men's brains being wired" for programming. It's important to remember that men muscled women out of programming initially once the field became seen as something more than a secretarial position.
As you pointed out CS was once secretarial work. But what constituted CS also underwent a transformation during that time period. No one was muscled out so much as barriers to entry broke down thanks to market forces.
I am a programmer like my mother before me - but while I've had it easy working in high level language like C++ and PHP she worked in binary and, only toward the end of her career assembler. She made banks work using nothing but low level machine instructions which far exceeds the rudimentary stuff I'm doing today. Eventually she graduated up to management and project planning, but this was back in the day where individual contributors never made much money directly - if you wanted to keep getting raises you had to career track switch to management.
I don't disagree that programming itself did significantly shift, but it's been perpetually getting easier, not more difficult, to work professionally at.
This is patently untrue. Men started to dominate when it turned from a "secretarial" position into an engineering job, as they did in ... wait for it ... actual engineering.
> once the field became seen as something more than a secretarial position.
It's not just perception; "Computers" used to refer to employees performing calculations manually for numerical methods. Then "Computer Operators" were secretaries translating assembly instructions written on paper into the correct octal code to punch on cards to feed the machine. They got the instructions from engineers. The teletype made their work obsolete, but you can still see the demographic shift in "Computer Related Occupations" as aggregated on government data.
I think you have to go to the 1940s and 1950s for programming being a “secretarial position”. That was 70 and 80 years ago.
It’s not even a valid comparison at that point, it’s too different. CS back then was completely different than today or even the recent past. As one example, computational complexity wasn’t even a thing until the 1960s with Hartmanis and Stearns.
There was a lot more time spent on inputting programs and data than today.
And not just more so - but more so with worse tools to do it with. There are really hard problems in development these days that we all deal with - and we only deal with them because we're standing on the shoulders of giants - most of whom were women.
Common wisdom was that going to be completely outsourced in "the next decade". Then Google, Facebook and the rise of SV proved all of them wrong.
Internationally? No. In a lot of countries there's no track for ICs, no staff engineers and you are supposed to go into management. Programming is seen as brick-laying. Ironically, that's one of the reasons outsourcing failed so bad...
It was prestigious to be a computer-adjacent business person for the past 30 or 40 years. But there wasn't much prestige involved in the actual work of building, or programming, computers (unless you became rich and turned into a business person).
In my experience prestige has been a lot more about which company I worked at than the role. If anything my being a programmer detracted somewhat from prestige outside the company, while adding to it only within.
Its a bit more recent than 25 years, probably 2003-2005 maybe.
When I was a young "computer nerd" who went off to college we had a pretty decent CS program but it was awfully dusty to those not into it. I think there were maybe 5-10 "great" CS programs in the US, now major cities have 2-5 real "learn to code" programs outside of colleges.
In 96, a "programmer" could make decent money but it was defo not a money printing machine.
It paid significantly less than other engineering fields, and much, much less than specializations in finance, medicine and law (which artificially constrain supply through various gatekeeping mechanisms) up until recently, when the wage-fixing and anti-poaching policies were quashed.
There were also two periods in the past 25 years where it was very difficult to find work, especially for entry-level, without there being an especially large glut of engineers. Dot-com bust and the 2007 recession.
known by whom? I got halfway through my CS degree before I realized software paid significantly better than other STEM work, and I'm in my twenties. my parents weren't convinced it wasn't all a waste of time until I showed them my first offer letter.
I believe the common response here to this sort of comment is "yes, not all men, but too many men", and that it's the responsibility of men to call out the men they see being that kind of deplorable on their actions, to reduce the frequency of those men.
Shaming all men for what a (bad) subset of men do is sexist. Shaming all white men for what a (bad) subset of white men do is sexist and racist.
Shaming all black men because some black men are criminals is racist.
Highlighting that the (good) majority should call out the (bad) minority is reasonable. Blaming the whole is not. It's true regardless of the target race, or sex, or gender, etc.
"Men" is both a social and biological differentiator. They are the only ones with power to stop this if they want to. We can play philosophy but reality is what it is. Sexism continues because men look the other way, not because women endure it.
It still feels so strange to me to criticize an entire race or gender lump for a perceived trait of that group (here, the trait of not calling out sexism enough).
I mean, I could've probably left "white" out and it would've been just as accurate.
I do apologize for my "shoot from the hip" and should've been less specific about "white men" vs "men". I can't be totally sure of a racist undertone in tech since I am white. I don't know _for sure_ if PoC men feel the same discrimination.
> Think about all those men complaining that a video game _dared_ have a female character or even more so, a non-conventionally attractive one gasp. That was in 2018... That's the _average_ person who is making a video game.
My guess would be the poster is referring to The Last of Us Part 2, where criticism of the storyline was presented by most mainstream media as people hating the female lead character. But one could also easily argue that it's the actions taken in the story that cause people to hate her.
Most people I know took issue with the bait and switch, as anyone watching the promotional material would have expected something quite different than Abby... playing golf. It reminds me of a similar tactic film journalists used with The Last Jedi, deflecting to complaining about fans' alleged bad behavior rather than taking a hard look at whether the criticism is merited. It's a lot easier to find a handful of the dumbest criticisms on Twitter and dunk on that strawman though I suppose.
...which it should be noted is actually a lackluster sequel with an incoherent plot regardless, so not all of the negative reviews are by racist misogynists.
ITYM Horizon: Forbidden West. They changed Aloy's face to make it less attractive and feminine since the first game, perhaps to check some "anti-sexualization" checkbox on some designer's list. No one had a problem with her appearance in the first game, but the sudden Seth Rogenization of her face was offputting, like an actor getting plastic surgery and looking not only worse, but very not like themself.
I hadn't heard that. I had seen that controversy but took it as the same issue coming up and more people complaining she wasn't conventionally attractive, rather than the studio 'dulling down' her looks on purpose. TIL.
I guess I totally missed what Aloy looked like during the first game and didn't realize they had changed how she looked.
To be honest, I actually like how she looks now. She looks like you'd expect someone to look like in a post-apocalypse world and looks like someone you'd pass on the street.
From a cursory glance at the comparison shot I'd say it looks like she got a bit older and her face saw a lot more direct sunlight. Pretty reasonable changes if you ask me.
But they said 2018 which implies there is a specific game in mind. Forbidden West was announced in 2020. Based on other answers it sounds like Battlefield V.
I understand this is a common theme but I was actually curious which specific game they were talking about.
It was not criticized because there was a woman, it was criticized because there was a cyborg woman when it was supposed to be a WW2 game.
And I think it was indeed a really stupid picture. Also my grandmother was a prisoner of war of the nazis and got real medals. That fantastic representation of women in war is just idiotic and distorts history to the point of absurdity.
Does calling her a "cyborg women" automatically mean it isn't period-appropriate? My 2 minutes of research seems to indicate that there is nothing anachronistic about the tech[1].
It really does earn that Metacritic score, doesn't it? Almost a perfect game in every way. No plot holes, no silly characterization, totally fun game from start to finish.
Look up what sparked Gamergate. It was largely based in men getting mad about women calling games out for being misogynistic.
I am sure some was valid criticism. I am not really a fan of "every game must be progressive", etc. but the fact men got mad that women dared criticize video games should say a lot about the state of the video game industry.
Not only that, but also, for a long time, video games just weren't marketed to girls at all. All video games catered to males and were specifically targeted as such.
It's mainly the Wii, Nintendo DS and Switch that were a big on-ramps for women into mainstream gaming. Even now, many men assume "female gamer == Candy Crush" or some other weird idea. Or joke that if you are a woman on a video game that you _must_ be a trap.
That wasn't what Gamergate was about at all. What started it was first Doritogate, and later the Zoey Quinn and Anna Anthropy Business (both cases of women getting lackluster or bad games reviewed just because they had some kind of relationship with the journalist, Zoey her boyfriend accused her of seducing the journalist, and Anna Anthropy was roomate of journalist that covered her games).
The misoginy accusations came later, and only then the whole thing morphed into a culture war thing.
Yes, threats happened, nasty stuff happened, but part of it was false flag too, for example Brazillian police arrested a Brazillian that was making death threats in the name of Gamergate, but also was making such threats in name of a ton of other random organizations, the guy just liked to see the world burn and was self-professed progressive.
The misogyny was the driving force from the start. The original 'Quinnspiracy', before it became 'Gamergate', was a harassment campaign organized around the blatantly false claim that Quinn had slept with a gaming journalist to get good reviews of her work (the only mention he ever made of her work was before they even met).
The guy that made the accusations was her former boyfriend, and seemly not a gamer.
Around that time people were also upset with other journalists, the Quinnspiracy thing became just the straw that broke the camel back, and gamers weren't upset because she was female, they were upset because Kotaku kept making shitty articles.
It is mostly true though. Of course all genres has some women but they skew very heavily in that direction. Strategy games etc barely has any women at all, especially the more complicated ones. Instead they mostly play puzzle games, and more social games like mmorpgs or story based games like rpg's.
I don't know what mmorpgs you've been playing but they hardly count as social games anymore. I used to play MUDs and those tended to be pretty evenly gender divided and all about that social aspect (at least the ones I played). MMORPGs today are closer to either the MOBA or an RTS with twitch based responses and tactical understanding being key to play at the top levels.
I don't have a full knowledge of everything, but I can say with certainty that there are several women who can clean up in AoE2 - even with its top echelons being male dominated (and a relatively non-toxic community from what I've seen). I think that women tend to go unseen intentionally in a lot of video games, avoiding mic use if possible and masquerading as men to avoid sexual attention and abuse.
If I remember correctly, the gamergate controversy was about a female indie developer dating a male indie game journalist. I can imagine why that would make people search for conflicts of interests.
Nope. Gamergate was about an abusive former boyfriend of a female indie developer stepping waaaaaay out of line, exposing details of their relationship in a blog post, while also claiming she slept with a game journalist (and then later saying he had no evidence of that).
That journalist briefly mentioned her work once (before she started dating that abusive boyfriend), so conflict of interest argument never made any sense, because... you know, he never actually wrote a review of any of her games.
It then spiralled even more out of control, targetting even more female developers for even more bullshit reasons. Brianna Wu was the target because she mocked Gamergate. Felicia Day was doxxed just for saying she was scared to even mock Gamergate (knowing what happened to Wu). Anita Sarkeesian for daring to kickstart a YouTube series about how women are represented in video games.
In other words, Gamergate was about absolutely nothing but misogyny.
Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend claimed that she was dating a gaming journalist to get good reviews. She was dating that gaming journalist, but the only things he'd written about her work were from before they'd met. Despite that, an endless parade of assholes on the internet immediately used that to justify harassment, doxxing, rape and death threats, hacking of accounts, etc.
The ex-boyfriend wrote a post about her infidelity. I have seen the claim that he constructed the story to maximize impact, but the fact that she cheated on him was not disputed. Also the other claim was that the positive coverage was made before they were dating, not before they met, you have to take their word that they were not involved earlier so that point is rightly controversial.
My take is/was similar to David Pakman's: there's evidence of non ethical behavior in the videogame journalism and how the topic was handled, but so what? it's not really one of the greatest issues that plague mankind at this moment. With that in mind, I bear no doubt that the whole thing was astroturfed to culture war topic by right talking heads. But this is in my opinion mishandled on the left, as I dare to say most of the people following the event were not really involved in politics, and were fed a narrative by the misogynists and anti-sjw types.
This is like saying WWI was about the life of an Austrian royal. Yes, you might be technically right, but it grew so big and so many people were fighting for so many different reasons that the specific spark isn't that relevant.
The post you're responding to is just repeating the same 'just asking questions' crap that led to the harassment campaign in the first place.
What actually happened is pretty well-documented: a woman developer made a short game about dealing with depression to which various people then responded with rape and death threats; her ex-boyfriend lied about her sleeping with a gaming journalist in exchange for good reviews (the only things said journalist ever wrote about her work was before they met); and thousands of people then jumped on that as a justification for further harassment, doxxing, and wild conspiracy theories that persist to this day.
Is there any documentation why people harassed her that isn't just speculation? The gamer culture works just like twitter mobs, they attack things for almost no reason and do it hard, harassment and death threats etc. There is no big plan or conspiracy behind it, just thinking that maybe she slept with some reviewer to increase her score is enough to trigger the hate mob.
With that said, I'm not saying it was justified. Gamers are biased against women, yes. Gamers overreact and harass people who don't deserve it, yes. But they don't just harass any woman who publishes games, there are thousands of women who do that and nobody cares. It requires a spark, just like a twitter mob, and they become relentless attacking the target. And of course, if you accuse them of misogyny here they start attacking you, since they didn't attack her due to misogyny, similarly how when a twitter mob attacks a man with little evidence they don't do it due to misandry, they just attack someone they think did something wrong.
Speculation? Her former boyfriend wrote a blog post detailing their relationship (and lying that she slept with a game journalist, something he later said had no evidence of), someone posted it on 4chan, they tried to spin it as "ethics in game journalism" discussion (which never made any sense since he never reviewed any of the games she worked on). That's all there is to it, and it's pretty well documented.
You speculated about the motive of the harassers, not the actual chain of events. Nothing you say here says that the harassers attacked her for being a woman instead of attacking her for cheating the game review system.
I didn't speculate shit, I read those threads as they were happening. You know what they've boiled down to? She was a woman (with a couple of feminist takes), this dude made allegations against her, therefore let's doxx her.
> instead of attacking her for cheating the game review system.
Again, he never reviewed any of her games, so unless your argument is that no game journalist should ever date any game developer under any circumstances, what system was she cheating exactly?
You put way too much credit in the intelligence of hate mobs. People attack others for nonsense all the time. And I don't view gender bias as misogyny. Women are biased to believe women and men are biased to believe men, that is just natural. So men accusing women leads to male hate mobs, and women accusing men leads to female hate mobs. Of course male hate mobs are usually more vicious, but the workings are the same.
I didn't say she did. Hate mobs can attack people for things that aren't true, happens all the time. There is a reason why we don't use hate mobs in the justice system.
For example, lets say a twitter mob attacks a man for something he didn't do. Is that misandry? No, they did it thinking he actually did it.
Gamergate was a harassment campaign organized against women in gaming. It was organized by men who were assmad that a female game developer released a game with a mental health theme rather than the usual focus on skill and violence favored by men, to critical acclaim. Her dating and sexual history were brought into it because that is a common tactic used by men to undermine women and discredit their achievements.
Once again -- men got mad because a woman dared to release a game that didn't cater to their expectations or desires. That's Gamergate in a nutshell.
For anyone wondering, there was plenty of harassment, doxxing, and a number of rape and death threats against Zoe Quinn entirely because people hated her short game Depression Quest for being "political" or "not a game", well before the term 'Gamergate' or any of the 'ethics in journalism' conspiracy nonsense even came into the picture.
Quinn's ex-boyfriend, who made the original claims, later explicitly said:
> To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature.
For further context, the only coverage the journalist in question made of Quinn's work was before they had met, and well before the April in question.
>For further context, the only coverage the journalist in question made of Quinn's work was before they had met, and well before the April in question.
The article was published March 31st, and they started dating in early April. What's your definition of "Well before"?
> It's still common for men to talk down to women on video game
I only play games where you can't tell anyone's sex (Starcraft 2 for instance) and you get insulted all the time. You get insulted when you're playing badly, you get insulted when you're playing too well, you get insulted whether you're a man, a woman or a dog.
That's general smack talk, which can be brutal, but is besides the original point. The bigger point is that if a woman's sex is revealed, say by using voice chat, then it is inevitable until they are harassed and insulted for being a woman and receive misogynistic insults. Do you understand why that is different from general insults?
It's not all that different, it's just extra ammunition. If they hear you are a male with a lisp or your voice sounds hispanic or black, they will attack that too. The gender part is just low hanging fruit but all of it is equally fucked up.
I tried playing Heroes of Newerth at some point, which was a DOTA clone with voice comms. Right in the first round I get told that I need to be raped and murdered by some punk. I didn't take it personally but that's a very bad onboarding experience and a good learning opportunity for game designers. It's also likely it's the type of game that attracts the more aggressive/testosterone driven player.
Contrast that to say World of Warcraft or LOTRO where most people are very nice, and any ladies that come up on voice comms are treated with respect. This is just anecdata I guess.
> Think about all those men complaining that a video game _dared_ have a female character or even more so, a non-conventionally attractive one gasp. That was in 2018... That's the _average_ person who is making a video game.
Mrs PacMan? Samus? Peach? That was all before 1988
- Princess Peach is exactly the type of "conventionally attractive" character the poster was mentioning. A young, white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, damsel-in-distress - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Peach
Peach was one of 4 playable characters in Super Mario world 2, released in 1989.
The Samus reveal in Metroid is notable for the exact opposite of what you stated. There were no curves or skin tight anything. This continued with Super Metroid.
It's MS Pacman, IIRC. And... while they were shown having a kid together, I don't think any formal wedding ceremony was ever shown. Quite progressive for its day.
Based on my observations the vast majority of "men" talking down girls in video games are teenager boys, most of whom eventually grow up and stop doing that. Admittedly some never grow up, perhaps they're more likely to be heavy gamers and even become game devs?
Anyway, I think any spaces dominated by teenagers will always be pretty toxic places, no matter if we're talking about schools or gaming servers. I have no idea what could be done about it, other than proper supervision by staff or server moderators.
>It's still common for men to talk down to women on video games, to the point where the overwhelming majority of women do not use voice comms or make their gender known.
Gamers talk down to everyone on video games and have since they have been invented. This sounds like a new group of people entering an existing space and not understanding the dynamic (namely incessant shittalking). I can't even count how many strangers have not so kindly informed me of their sexual adventures with my parents. Am I missing something here?
It's not trash talk. I can handle trash talk. It's stuff like "Ah, a f_cking girl. Cool guys, now we are going to lose", before the round even starts, or "Get back to the kitchen, B_TCH" or just harassing me until I leave the game, either through team-killing or preventing me from playing.
And if everyone is "behaving", I get treated differently in PUGs than just another team member. I don't want that. I don't want special attention or treatment. And then you get harassed for your social media or phone number or get incessant in-game messages or get asked if you're hot or some other variation of thing that isn't "Yo, you, we are doing X, Y, Z. Sound good?" like you are just part of the team.
Just wanted to say, as a male, I had this exact experience. I was playing Pavlov VR using my wife's account. Steam profile avatars float next to people in that game, so people assumed I was female. I didn't have a mic, so I couldn't correct them. A group of people started repeatedly asking whether I was female, not for any purpose other than "hurr durr female," and then ultimately hunted me down. I forget exactly what the game was (there are custom games, so it changes from map to map) but it was exactly the feeling you describe here, of "this is totally unrelated to anything in the game."
It was eye-opening, and I'm sorry you have to deal with it.
This should be a "challenge" (if those are still a thing), to be performed by anybody who believes that the issue doesn't exist. Create a female account for some online game and see how much fun you will be allowed to have with it.
There are meme "speedrun any%" videos on YouTube for this sort of thing, so there are probably some real ones out there.
FWIW I made a female character on FFXIV (partly to see if this sort of thing would happen) and never encountered this. Maybe I put out a male vibe with how I move and play (I heard we jump around a lot more). But in my experience that game's populace skews far more heavily female than normal, and a lot of the guys I met also play as female characters so maybe that's why.
The trash talk isn't the issue. When I, a male, join a multiplayer session I'm largely ignored. If I'm talked to, yes it's usually to trash talk me.
But when a female joins a session, they become the center of attention. They can't simply play the game; everyone is watching them and wanting to interact with them. In addition to that, the conversations from other players isn't just trash talk, it usually includes a heavy mix of flirting and sexual advances. Not funny, trolly, trash talk sexual advances. But intentional advances.
Not to mention the stalking outside of that session that females can experience.
The vast majority of people joining a multiplayer session are there to relax and have fun. Not get hit on by strangers on the internet, be the center of attention, or be open to harassment even after the session.
But that applies to anywhere though. As a man you can sit alone in a bar and nobody will bother you, as a woman lots of people will come up and start to speak with you and possibly get angry if you don't want to speak with them. The fact that the same happens in games isn't evidence that there is something particularly wrong about gamers, rather it is the exact same social game that happens in all leisure spaces.
Of course it would be better if women didn't have to deal with it, but you can't just blame this on gamers since men everywhere does the same thing.
This doesn't match tho, atleast in my various experiences in MMOs. The stuff female friends had to deal with for being female is pretty big.
Unwanted dick pics and other unwated advances, stalking, people masturbating in voicechat. Comments like "do you really want to listen to females"/"she's sleeping with xyz to get a raidspot".
I never had to deal with that. I get a generic idiot/retard/kys comment every now and then and that's it. No stalking, no dick pics.
yeah, you're missing the potential on-paper profits to be made from making video games more accessible to a wider audience by sanitizing them and their communities. whether this change is is a good idea in the long run or not can be debated, but that's where the last decade or so of rhetoric against "toxic gamer culture" is coming from, regardless of what is said.
could any of the downvoters please tell me how I'm wrong?
Having been a gamer for over 30 years now I can assure you that "toxic gamer culture" is very much a thing. You think swatting people is something a healthy culture of good-natured ribbing does?
I didn't say it wasn't a thing, and taking things to that extreme isn't really having a good-faith discussion. I said that "toxic gamer culture" has always been a thing, until these large corporations realized that sanitizing it could, in theory, lead to more people playing their AAA games, thus resulting in higher profits. what's controversial about this statement?
The way you start by questioning weather or not making things less toxic is a good idea and put quotes around "toxic gaming culture" sure makes your post read like you were brushing off the whole thing as some kind of overly-woke-brigade cancel-fest or something.
My lack of knowledge of the DFEH and other cases they have tackled are probably the reason for my question. The rebuke from Riot was more data driven in which they point out a few misleading claims from the DFEH: https://www.pcgamesn.com/riot-games-lawsuit-dfeh-response. Both Blizzard and Riot have a similar response stating that the DFEH is out of line, misrepresenting claims, or baseless. It either points to very bad SoCal video game company cultures or maybe there is some merit to the rebuttles. Maybe the real answer is somewhere in between.
Crossing my fingers for widespread changes either way. The video game industry has a long-standing reputation for many other things besides just not being inclusive.
>>considering women playing video games only became socially acceptable a few years ago.
Ohh Please, I remember vividly playing my Grandmother in Sonic the Hedgehog on the original Sega Genesis many decades ago. That trope is just plain incorrect and a complete revisionist history
> The tech industry is strongly biased in the favor of white men
Who cares?
I'm a black man, have been gaming since 6 years old, and never once in my circle of friends or family questioned silly things like potential political implications of 3D cartoons that I can manipulate. If I want a black, yoked mofo with a giant sword and a colourful pony sidekick with a red peacock feather in a video game - I know what I have to do.
Start my own gaming company to build games to do just that.
> It's still common for men to talk down to women on video games, to the point where the overwhelming...
Ofcourse, it's video games not nobel prizes, not civil engineering projects, not...
When was it ever not "socially acceptable" for women to play video games, what society is that referring to?
edit: I'll assume this is about the US then. At any rate, my earliest memories of playing video games with female friends go back to the 1980s, and I don't recall a single moment where that wasn't "socially acceptable".
> considering women playing video games only became socially acceptable a few years ago.
It should be mentioned that this was different from the usual exclusion of women. Women were mostly discriminated from outside the group of those playing games.
> That was in 2018... That's the _average_ person who is making a video game.
The average person who was making a video game was upset at themselves for putting non-conventionally attractive females in the games they were making?
I didn't get that vibe, but can definitely understand that. I actually disliked it at first until I realized I was being lumped in with people who had an agenda I didn't have ("Women didn't fight in wars! Women avatars should only be allowed to play Medic!")
I mean, Battlefield has never really been about super serious war simulator, it has always had a goofy undertone.
Battlefield has always been a little wacky. They had an offshoot game that was TF2 meets BF, everything cartoon-y. Then their _main line_ games for a few years involved a rogue group of US soldiers who blew stuff up, drove around in golf carts and had humorous lines. After that, they had a game that was cops-and-robbers meets BF.
People who mix up ARMA and BF, and I don't say this to be mean, probably aren't real Battlfield fans. Battlefield has never _necessarily_ been about realism or pure historical accuracy.
There has always been wacky tactics that aren't just purposefully put in but explicitly promoted by their trailers (see Zooking, Rendzooking and my favorite, loopzooking.)
Like, yeah, I too was thrown off by the triple amputee woman in the trailer. It was a little weird, I thought / hoped they were going for a cyberpunk / time-traveling motif but nope. I am more than happy to discuss how DICE & EA has ruined Battlefield though, that much I do agree with and likely ties into poor marketing and PR.
You can see how they're going all-in on the 'wacky' part with the trailers for BF2042. Driving away from a tornado in a tuk-tuk, a knives vs defibrillators battle, etc.
I am so excited for BF2042. I've had to remind myself a few times about not pre-ordering it.
I hope, with the weather stuff and higher end hardware, they lean more into destructive environments. I am still kind of surprised they haven't and have been re-using the same destruction and relying on a single scripted large-scale destruction.
I want to get that feeling of the first time using a grenade launcher to open up walls but even better.
I guess it may be more about game design and keeping maps accessible rather than a technical limitation or a lack of desire on DICE's part.
It is extremely possible that DFEH is either not the authority, ill equipped by the legislature to be the authority, and or bungled their own case, while it being simultaneously possible that the companies are problematic and that individuals are marginalized and hurt in a way unrelated to doing a good job
No chance DEFH is out of line.
The tech industry is strongly biased in the favor of white men in my opinion and video games even more so, considering women playing video games only became socially acceptable a few years ago. It's still common for men to talk down to women on video games, to the point where the overwhelming majority of women do not use voice comms or make their gender known.
Think about all those men complaining that a video game _dared_ have a female character or even more so, a non-conventionally attractive one gasp. That was in 2018... That's the _average_ person who is making a video game.