Wow dude that is just the most nonsensical comparison I’ve read thus far. If you think those things are in anyway similar I can only suggest you hit the books.
The forum is for an open discussion you can opt to join or you can opt to go about your day. The fact you waste time on a post to simply make insults says much more about how pathetic you are than it does me.
Oh, you mean like that insulting comment you posted on Polygon? Don’t be a hypocrit.
Difference between making a direct insult to another user and a comment mocking a groups belief in a given context, but I guess such differences are too much for you to stress over.
The difference is, I just insult one guy. You insulted a large group of people for no reason.
Come on, man…
You’re making a half-assed assessment of the situation, try to think why would I make that comment. If you payed a bit of attention to the news or take the time to look up some videos you’d know how common feminists complaints are ranging from trivial matters to downright nonsensical issues. My comment does not go so far as calling feminists foolish or pathetic, it’s making reference to how easily they get riled up which is a well documented fact so yeah I thought it was funny. Don’t be so silly as to believe my comment somehow justifies your petty insults.
I am only assessing the one situation. And you acted in a really stupid way in that one situation. I don’t pretend to know how your life is or how you act outside of what we’re discussing here, I don’t care what your opinion is on any group of people, and I don’t care what your opinion about me is either.
Thing is, you did something stupid, you got punished for it, and then you run to another forum to whine about it. You f#cked up, and instead of owning up to it, you point fingers at everyone else.
If you act like a douche, you’ll be treated like one. Just stop.
You know internet rule #645 states the second you reference Hitler in a comparison you have automatically lost the argument. 
■■■■. XD
Reading comprehension not you forte eh. The question in the OP is simple, was Polygon justified? I’m not telling anyone to agree with me. If you are incapable of answering without resulting to your garbage insults it begs the question why you’re still here dragging on the discussion even after I requested the mods close the thread? Do you think that by engaging in this argument you’re some sort of hero? Is it to make you feel smart? Well I’m long past the thought of caring. There’s no worth to the opinion of someone one who is incapable or unwilling to have a formal discussion. I just can’t help but laugh at the irony of this situation, but don’t worry I can’t ban you as rude as you may be lol.
Nah, just telling you the stupidity of your actions and how pointless this thread was to begin with.
Oh, and btw, I DID answer your question. It was yes:
I guess your own reading comprehension is rather lacking as well.
Nah reading was always my best subject.
Sorry I’ll talk about world hunger next time.
You mean post a mean comment about how you cry for the poor and hungry along with a Mr. Krabs meme? You’re so clever. <3
You know what
That’s your opinion man, you’re absolutely entitled to it. As I said, and will now repeat, I never called you a bigot. If me interpreting what you were saying makes you think I’m looking at you that way, well, maybe you should spend less time telling people to interpret why you said something and more time crafting a better, more constructive message? Just my completely unsolicited two cents.
You see what feminists want as trivial. Do you think it’s even slightly possible that you’ve always had what they want as far as gaming is concerned, perhaps to the point of taking it for granted?
What if a vast majority of games had female protagonists and men were only there to be the doe-eyed reward at the end or the titilation to lure female gamers?
What if every time a guy said he’d like to see a strong male lead, he was met by Internet eye rolls and mocked for his opinion on something so trivial or critiqued based on their looks or harassed or bullied by raging female gamers online who threaten to rape them or dox them or swat them?
I know, going from a silly meme that was meant in good fun to swatting seems extreme, but it’s all part of the bigger picture of gamer culture and some of the problems therein.
Look man, I really didn’t set out to kick you in the pills. I was just going to fly through and then leave you to your thread and whatever opinion you have about the women that want equality in as many areas of our lives as possible; big, small, important or seemingly trivial, so I think I’ll just do that and stop derailing your thread.
You ever feel like talking about it some more, feel free to PM me. I’ll try to be just a little less condescending, sanctimonious and self-righteous. Otherwise, good luck to ya. No hard feelings on my end.
… You’re too nice.
I understand that may have not been you intent, but when you compare my comment to outright sexists jokes I don’t see any other way to take that quite honestly, but I’ll take your word for it that you didn’t mean it. Again as I stated repeatedly the topic of this discussion was never meant to be about feminism I’d have titled the thread as such otherwise hence why I did not think it needed to be elaborated on much further, but it seems it can’t be avoided.
You’re argument moves too far into the realm of speculation. There’s no telling what I’d say if I was in his or her shoes there are countless factors in life that decide one’s interests, if we were to try to account every factor we’d never find an answer. When in these situations I find it best to ask the simple questions. Is a particular group being targeted? Is this group being restricted by any sort of laws? The answer to both these questions based on the relevant data is no. Yes things could be better, things can always be better, but we should not make mountains out of mole hills.
There has been no correlation shown between gender and harassment based on all the known research or at least not in gaming. What does have a direct correlation with harassment? Popularity, those who are popular in the media and have taken controversial stances are those who are harassed the most, but that’s normal. Large profile figures make easy targets, it’s that simple, which is why I find it odd people arrive to the conclusion that these large publicly known feminists figures like Anita are merely attacked due to there gender or because they are progressive. This is a group that has outright slandered gamers calling them basement dwelling man children among other claims that if not are false is severely lacking evidence, so of course when you make such statements there will be an inherent backlash. Not saying it’s right, but it should be expected.
Again the problem is not that woman want to game or that they want to be represented, it’s the ham-fisted method of pushing for it.
Well, you at least gotta admit your post was pretty unconstructive and antagonistic. I don’t agree with them banning you over that comment, but I’m not all that sympathetic either. Don’t expect them to treat your viewpoints as valid, inoffensive, and worth engaging with until you do the same.
Honestly, the whole discussion over this kind of stuff is gridlocked by a culture war of two overly fussy, self-righteous, and intolerant factions who are too eager to mock and offend each other, producing this insularity and all these problems like the issue you’re facing. If you want to make a difference and help avoid these incidents from happening to you, start by being the change you want to see - be polite and constructive, even whens it gets hard.
Fair enough.
Okay, let’s see if this thread can go somewhere constructive before it gets closed.
Is there a way that games could possibly appeal more to men? I think they kinda maxed out on that a long time ago.
So, a few points:
Indeed, tbh when I saw the thread title I basically just assumed this was going to be a thread about feminism right away.
Since we’re having this conversation one way or the other, I think it’s worth saying a few things here.
I’m not sure where you get this idea that FemFreq is a “one trick pony” – in fact, I kinda wish they stuck to a more compact core of messages, because I think their attempts to espouse a more wide-ranging ethos tend to backfire. In particular, you don’t have to look very far (try Brianna Wu for example, or Wiseman and Burch, particularly their presentation) to find prominent feminists who aren’t on-board with Sarkeesian on her non-violence agenda. I think including these ideas in the Tropes vs Women in Games sequence makes people feel like they’re being compelled to take “violence in games is relied upon too much” along with core messages like “fridging the girlfriend so the dude protagonist can go on a revenge quest is ■■■■■■”, when the latter message alone would be a far easier sell.
But on the core messages, I think FemFreq is usually very strong. The first Tropes vs Women in Games video in particular was to my eyes ground-breaking and very thorough, and I’m yet to see a word of compelling counterargument against it.
Where I think people come undone when watching the Tropes videos, is that they see Sarkeesian describe a trope and then run the evidence reel, and they see it as this giant out-of-context calling-out of all their favourite games as misogynist filth, and they lose their ■■■■ over it and say that Sarkeesian is deliberately misrepresenting the games to make them look bad. Whenever people respond like this, I usually tune them out, because they’ve funamentally misunderstood the structure of Sarkeesian’s analysis, which is summarized at the start of each Tropes video as follows:
[quote]This project will examine the tropes, plot devices and patterns most commonly associated with women in gaming from a systemic, big picture perspective.
This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters, but remember that it is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of it’s more problematic or pernicious aspects.[/quote]
I mean, maybe “systemic, big-picture perspective” is too arts-major speak for a majority of viewers – but if you can’t engage Sarkeesian’s arguments from that perspective, then you probably shouldn’t be commenting on her views. Mind, that might be a barrier that feminists ultimately need to find ways to remove, so that the unwashed, uneducated masses stop misinterpreting their commentary.
But let’s try explaining what “systemic, big-picture perspective” means: let’s say we have a jar full of dollar coins, a thousand in total, and I take out each coin in turn and flip them, and say that if it comes up heads then I keep it, and if it comes up tails then you keep it. And then, let’s say at the end of the process 650 of the coins came up heads (so I get to leave with $650), and the rest turned up tails ($350 for you). Hm, that seems reasonable, right? Kinda close to the 500/500 split you’d expect to see. How likely do you reckon 650 heads is?
If you’re a statistician and you know your Chernoff bounds, you’d be calling rigged – the odds of anywhere near that many heads showing up are significantly worse than 1 in a million. In all likelihood, you’ve just been screwed out of $150.
So that was almost certainly a jar of biased coins. But what can we say about any given coin in the jar? I mean, the first coin (say) turned up heads, is it rigged? Well, sure it turned up heads, but if it’s a fair coin then there’s a 50% chance of it turning up heads, so it merely turning up heads once can’t implicate it in the ruse. Same deal for the third, and the fourth, and the seventh, and so-on. What we have is evidence that there might be a bunch of really biased coins within the whole sample, or maybe a slight bias on every coin, or anything in between – but almost zero evidence of bias on any particular coin we might try to single out.
That’s all Tropes is really doing: calling attention to the fact that women get damselized, or slaughtered at the beginning of the story to make the protagonist get angry, or dressed up in bikini armor, right under your nose, over and over agin, far more frequently than you’d expect if there wasn’t a one-in-a-million bias in play – even if every single one of those games trotted out to demonstrate the pattern can nobly justify the occurrence of that trope within. None of them is on trial – they’re all just bearing witness to a systemic, big-picture trend.
And that’s why the other part I highlighted is included: Sarkeesian wants you to keep liking the games you like, despite trotting them out in the evidence reel! She doesn’t want to mire your favourite games in an inquisition – she just wants to point out an overarching trend, and needs to present data points in order to do that.
Anyway, a basic understanding of the mode of argument Sarkeesian is going for is what I’m looking for when I see someone argue against FemFreq. I don’t often see that, and I often see a lot of ugly emotional objections in place of it, which is maybe the main reason why I find the Tropes videos so compelling. I’m hoping my explanation might help non-arts majors (or at least help STEM majors 
) understand where they’re going off-course on this.
This is yet another situation where I think the “anti” side misreads a very arts-major way of thinking about things. This is sort of a point which (sadly now former) Giant Bomb editor Austin Walker tried to make in one of his early Giant Bomb articles, but I’ll try to speak to it briefly.
When feminists talk about wanting – or even demanding – more representation for women and other marginalized groups in games, they’re not talking about human rights, or enacting legislation or enacting quotas or undoing freedom of speech or expression or anything like that. Instead, they want to reshape social norms and pressures. They want us to “demand” better female representation from developers, in the sense of considering badass female protagonists a “social good”, and being more inclined to give worse reviews and poorer recommendations for games which ■■■■ on the women in them (as one among many other factors).
Indeed, I think a big difference between the people in the feminist camp (and others in the arts and social/political sciences) and those opposed, is that the former camp actually believes in a concept of social perception and norms that has a current, a sway over things and can be talked about in in strong terms like demanding and so forth, to the point of taking debating its form for granted; whereas I think most people in the opposing camp only really think of legislation and this big expanse of freedoms which exist apart from legislation, where people do as they please and are never influenced by anything. If they knew the argument wasn’t about rights, maybe they’d ease up a little.
A similar thing happened in the comments section of a guest article over at Giant Bomb by trans woman Heather Alexandra, where “demands” that developers include trans people in the creation of trans characters were repeatedly rebutted in the comments by the asertion that “developers have the right to do what they want.” It was frustrating to read through, because, whilst I do think Alexandra may not have separated her arguments for her case clearly enough, it was just immensely clear that said assertion was utterly irrelevant and added nothing to the conversation. She wants trans people being involved in the creative process for trans characters and themes in media to be seen as a social good, not as a legislated requirement.
I sense a bit of irony here, in light of the above points: you rebut feminist commentators as though they’re talking about whether developers had a right to do what they do, and yet you expect people to be mindful of more than merely the rights of those involved when deciding how to treat you in situations where they have authority.
Dude, you’re on a video game forum, posting about getting an account banned from the comments sections of a game reporting website. If what feminist games commentators are “about” is trivial, then you could probably find better things to do with your own time, too.
Say that to the transgender suicide statistics.
Seriously, if fiction is a place where society paints an idealized gloss over relatable experiences, then an lack of representation in fiction of a minority group which you belong to…well, you can finish this sentence, can’t you? If you’re going into practically any important life situation where you expect to be judged versus some ideal (e.g. job interviews, public speaking of any kind), what does the former (unfinished) sentence do to your confidence, and hence your chances of success?
Again, nobody is entitled to an opinion.
I mean, they can think what they want within the confines of their own mind, sure. Hell they can even form whatever sequence of words they like in written or vocal form in a public venue.
But we need to get away from this notion that everyone’s ideas deserve equal weighting in the question of what is or isn’t correct, and the slogan “I’m entitled to my opinion” is a last defense wielded in the face of stronger counter-arguments when one has no other recourse.
See, I think that feminists and other marginalized group advocates agree with you on this point: you’re not part of their marginalized group, so it’s a bit rich for you to claim to understand their experience or what is important to them. From there, they would assert that the best you can do is listen to them, and try to accommodate their needs.
But this is maybe a point where I maybe disagree with everyone. I think empathetic thinking can be very difficult, but I don’t think piecing together empathy logically – especially once a bunch of people so much as mention that a thing could be concerning, but maybe even without that – is impossible. I don’t think that experience can ever trump rationality entirely, and I think we’d be screwed if it ever did. This is one point on which I depart from the social justice left. Sure, consulting with those you’re reasoning about is indispensable, but I think that we need to give rationality a bit more credit, and that you yourself ought to be able to see eye to eye with people who want to see themselves represented more in games if you try, even if you (like me) couldn’t yourself fathom caring about representation as a need of your own.
…what? You honestly think women don’t take more ■■■■ in gaming communities than men? Would you put money on that claim? Did you actually look at a study on the subject before reporting to us said lack of a correlation?
You didn’t notice that it was the harassment surrounding her Kickstarter campaign that made Anita Sarkeesian a big-time industry figure? What rock have you been living under?