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 Frankenberry wrote:
And honestly? Drove her out of her home? There isn't a person alive that could do that to me without killing me first.

I am pretty sure the cops could. Or really, any skilled arsonist .

 mattyrm wrote:
I have to say as well, why are people so scared of death threats?

Because some people are crazy enough to actually act on their threat. And because by being pretty prominent on the internet, she is way, way, way lore likely than you to get the interest of one of them. If the black boxes cover personal information that proves the guy making the threats has stalked her, that is a pretty normal reaction.

 LuciusAR wrote:
blocks any legitimate criticism of her work

This “legitimate criticism”, I hear about it a lot, but I hardly ever hear it.

 jreilly89 wrote:
Creating videos to identify "misogynistic video game tropes" and then blocking comments when people call you out on your gak, then releasing a video about how everyone unfairly hates you because you're a woman. That legitimate enough?

Creating videos to identify misogynistic video game trope is what she did, but I fail to see this as a valid criticism because that does not strike me as something bad.
Blocking comment on YouTube video, especially on a polemic subject, hardly seems out of the ordinary. I do not see how that is supposed to be a bad thing again, so again not valid criticism.
I am trying to make sense of your argument. You are angry that Anita Sarkeesian does not let you post your criticism on the fact she closed comments on her YouTube video, and your criticism of her is that she closed comments on her YouTube video? If she did open her YouTube video, what the freaking hell would you post there?

 Sigvatr wrote:
>> Claiming to research her facts
>> Not researching her facts
>> Presenting strongly biased opinions as "facts"

That alone is ridiculous enough to strip her from any credibility.

You know, it would be better if instead of saying “Not researching her facts”, you would say “Says that X when actually it is Y”. Because here, it looks like you are actually just presenting your own strongly biased opinions as facts. Oh, wait, what does that mean for your credibility, again?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Let us sum up Anita's sins. Apparently, she prevents people from giving their justified criticism. The main criticism that people are unjustly precluded from giving is that they are precluded from giving justified criticism, which seems pretty damn circular to me. Their second criticism is that what she say is not true/researched, no details provided ever. Their third criticism is that she uses footage from other YouTube video, and how that is in any way supposed to make her arguments less valid than if she had recorded it herself is left as an exercise to the reader or something. I honestly have no idea. Maybe video game automatically change when it is a woman playing and therefore the image would be totally different.

Did I miss something?

 jreilly89 wrote:
failing to back up your claims with legitimate evidence from said games

I am a bit confused by this. For instance, her first videos were on the “damsel in distress” trope. Do you think she failed to provide evidence, even though she provided an ample list of games that do employ this trope? Or do you disagree with the fact that trope is misogynistic? Or what, exactly?
Please be specific, rather than random vague accusations like that.

 jreilly89 wrote:
and then blocking comments so you can basically say "Nuh huh!"

I do not see a problem with that. She never talked about establishing a debate about video game. She promised a short documentaries series on tropes concerning women in video games, and that is what she delivered. The fact she is not one bit interested in hearing your opinion is maybe infuriating to you, but it is perfectly within her right. And given the amount of abuse she likely received when the comments were open…
I mean, it would basically take two or three people working full-time to moderate that flux of hateful insults!

 jreilly89 wrote:
They do exist, but saying they exist in every single video game ever made holds no water.

And where did she said they exist in every single video game ever made?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, for the record, I am not saying her videos are exceptionally good or anything. I am saying all the criticism of them that I have seen is exceptionally poor or vague.

 Slarg232 wrote:
Didn't Sark promise somewhere upwards of 12+ videos or something like that, and has only delivered three of them?

Nope. She promised I do not care how many videos, and had been slowly but steadily releasing them.

 jreilly89 wrote:
Her evidence is entirely taken out of context in most cases. They are usually single clips or quotes. Link to her video. [/url]http://www.feministfrequency.com/2013/03/damsel-in-distress-part-1/[url]

So what? The aim of the video is not “presentation of various video games and why they are awesome and you should like them”. It is not even “Look at those bad misogynistic games that are awful and that you should definitely boycott”. It is about tropes. The rest of the game is largely irrelevant. That is why her video will do a better job by including very short clips from a lot of different games rather than very long clips from very few games.

 jreilly89 wrote:
I'm sorry the world sucks, but if you put something out there claiming critical analysis of a widely appreciated medium, you should be willing to engage in a discussion.

No. There is no single reason why you should be. Especially not with those kind of faceless, mindless interlocutor that is an internet mob.

 jreilly89 wrote:
"Ok, so we’ve established that the Damsel in Distress trope is one of the most widely used gendered cliché in the history of video games and has been core to the popularization and development of gaming as a medium." Direct quote from her transcript pretty much saying all video games ever made.

Except it is not. It just says this trope is used a lot, and is a big part of the history of video game. And that is completely true, hence why we have many games referring to it as self-reference. See Braid for instance, or Super Meat Boy.

 jreilly89 wrote:
Honestly, my biggest problem with her is The Last of Us claim. I feel its unfounded, as the claims she makes are unsupported by three separate characters.

I do not remember what she said about The Last of Us. What did she say?
But honestly, saying all her videos are completely wrong because of one clip on one game? Seems a bit excessive, no? Especially given the “trope” aspect I have been mentioning earlier.
I mean, it is like in that tumblr where she lists examples of the use of the Damsel tropes: yeah, I feel putting Kerrigan in is really stretching the definition quite a bit. For about every other game I know, it fits perfectly, and for those I do not, the screenshots seems pretty explicit anyway, so I am not going to let that detail derail me from the big picture.

 jreilly89 wrote:
You can support either side, my problem is in the Houston Press he writes a review without having beaten the game.

Okay, why did you switch to speaking about an article that was not written by Anita and that I have never heard about before?

 jreilly89 wrote:
Because I can take anything out of context and make it fit my theory. If you take something out of context it no longer has any validity.

If your theory is that there are a lot of people wearing red clothes in movies, posting tons of movie scene with wearing red clothes is a good argument, and giving context about why the people are wearing red clothes in those movies is unnecessary.

 jreilly89 wrote:
While I agree about the internet mob, you're saying everyone on the internet is free to write things that get posted in the press without consequence or criticism?

No, I am saying the person in question is not required by any moral or legal obligation to provide himself or herself a platform for such criticism. More precisely, I am saying anyone is free to post a YouTube video and deactivate comments on it.

 jreilly89 wrote:
It is calling it a majority of the games

No, it is not.
The first part says it is one of the most used gendered trope. So, unless you can point out some gendered trope that is more used than the Damsel, you do not contradict that. The second part says it has been has been very present when video games have started to become popular. Want to know a game that is using this trope? Super Mario Bros. Basically the historical video game. And at that time, this trope was I think much more used than now.

 jreilly89 wrote:
How is it completely true, other than games referencing it as a bias? Saying it exists versus completely true and in every video game is a big distinction.

Chill out, dude. Noone ever said it was part of every video game. Noone. And certainly not me.

 jreilly89 wrote:
I provided the link because it shows what she said about the Last of Us

Could you point to the actual video? First hand account is always better than a recollection.

 jreilly89 wrote:
and I would argue I'm not sure Anita has beaten half of the games she is claiming bias exists in.

She is not listing game in which bias exists. She is listing game which use some trope. See, it is pretty much exactly like the Bechdel test. Failing the Bechdel test does not mean a movie is misogynistic, and passing the test does not mean a movie is feminist, but if 50% of movies fails such a simple test, it is telling something. Here it is the same: having one damsel in distress in one game does not make the game misogynistic, but the sheer number of time that trope is used is the problem.

 jreilly89 wrote:
Pretty sure those two arguments are wildly different.

“A lot of video games include situations where a female character is powerless and must wait rescue from a male character” → Show tons of examples of games with this happening.
“A lot of movies include scenes with characters wearing red clothes” → Show tons of examples of movies with this happening.
Seems legit to me.

 jreilly89 wrote:
Then by that same notion I am allowed to call her all manner of insults and disprove her theories without any actual evidence.

You are allowed to rant. But not on Dakka, we have a set of rules over here. Also not likely the best of idea.

 jreilly89 wrote:
If you're going to talk about tropes, how about main characters who are white?

Because:
a) that does not fit the definition of a trope, as far as I can tell, and most importantly
b) that is not what she told she was going to do when she asked for funds.
But do not misunderstand this as meaning it is not useful to raise awareness on that. Please, do some videos on it!

 jreilly89 wrote:
The second part? Guess what? Pong, Moonlanding, Pitfall, all the historical video games without the damsel trope!

Pong is the only one the mainstream audience might maybe recognize. Mario will be recognized every time. But there are tons of other games using that trope, including very good ones that I really like. For instance Earthworm Jim.

 jreilly89 wrote:
You just said it was completely true...

I said that something else than “every video game use the damsel in distress” is completely true. How do you get to twist my meaning into “every video game use the damsel in distress” is completely true ?

 jreilly89 wrote:
I feel by that right I could claim a million games as mysogynistic because I am killing women.

A trope can be misogynistic/problematic without all the games using that trope being misogynistic/problematic. See, the problem is not on any specific application of the trope. The problem is on it being so recurrent.
For instance, I am pretty sure no-one wants black characters to be always magically immune to death. But still, when the black guy dies first every. single. time. ever, there is a problem.

 jreilly89 wrote:
She makes gak up

Then again, what has she made up?

 jreilly89 wrote:
and is genuinely sexist. A lot of her comments do come off as misandric and offensive.

Uh, what?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 SneakyMek wrote:
"I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
Voltaire

That was not actually Voltaire.

The most oft-cited Voltaire quotation is apocryphal. He is incorrectly credited with writing, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." These were not his words, but rather those of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, written under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre in her 1906 biographical book The Friends of Voltaire. Hall intended to summarize in her own words Voltaire's attitude towards Claude Adrien Helvétius and his controversial book De l'esprit, but her first-person expression was mistaken for an actual quotation from Voltaire. Her interpretation does capture the spirit of Voltaire's attitude towards Helvetius; it had been said Hall's summary was inspired by a quotation found in a 1770 Voltaire letter to an Abbot le Riche, in which he was reported to have said, "I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write." Nevertheless, scholars believe there must have again been misinterpretation, as the letter does not seem to contain any such quote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire#Prose

 Melissia wrote:
In fact, a better summary is that third-wave feminism incorporates the needs of women of color and the anti-racism movement, along with the needs of lesbians and trans*women in the LGBTQ rights movement, and other minority groups such as women of non-Christian faiths and the like

Trying to reconcile faith, Christian or not, with feminism, when most religions have very, very deep misogynistic roots .
Well, I guess that could work for Hindus, they do have pretty cool goddess at least.

Anyhow, I never really understood that whole feminism wave system, or the need for it, and never really cared about it either. If I think it is a good thing, I do not need to know whether it is first wave, second wave, third wave, new wave, darkwave, batcave or deathrock. And neither do I if it is a bad thing.

 Melissia wrote:
... says the guy that links a video whose splash page depicts someone as a militant screaming nazi in the style of wartime propaganda posters.

I think it is supposed to be a reference to Sergent Hartman:

The backdrop evokes Japan, and the arms evokes the USSR to me, for some reason.

I did not meant it was. It is just that the uniform screams US army, so I was confused about that nazi stuff, and wanted to clarify.

Good game then. Personally I cannot play Strife because of maintenance on the servers :(.
(That was rather OT, sorry about that…)

 Lynata wrote:
The saddest thing, however, is that a lot of people don't even seem to realise when they - or others of "their side" - are deliberately escalating the debate by posting silly remarks or videos they think are "fun" but are in the end intended chiefly to offend and troll.

I hope that is not my Sarge Hartman video you are talking about.

 Crablezworth wrote:
Well, it's up to individual youtube users whether they wish to allow comments but silencing people because they might say something "bad" or simply something you don't like isn't great for fostering discussion. Did you perceive every commentor as hateful? Did you see a single case of valid criticism?

Hey, I am going to bring some trash collectors in front of your house, and then discharge all of the trash in your garden. Do not worry though: in the trash, I will add one or two very beautiful pearl. Is that not going to be awesome, having those very beautiful pearls hidden under tons of trash in front of your house?

That is basically how your comment reads to me. But yeah, blocking people is a sure way to get some of them very angry .

 Crablezworth wrote:
What do you make of her trying to profit off of the recent threats?

Nothing. Not going to give any money. I need it to spend it on video games and models .

 jreilly89 wrote:
Yeah, except people wearing red clothes =/= mysogyny. Claiming all non-important characters wear red shirts is way less of a "critical analysis" than claiming all games with this trope are mysogynistic.

You seem to be missing the point again. It is not about saying “These games are misogynistic”. It is about using games to show tropes that exists and are actually widespread. And then showing the problem with those tropes.
It is not one game being misogynistic, it is the prevalence of certain tropes being so. Very, very few games, when taken into a vacuum, could be considered misogynistic.

 jreilly89 wrote:
My point was if she can make wild claims without backing them up, so can I.

Yeah, okay. Nice to know.

 jreilly89 wrote:
b) I'm using it as comparison. I know it isn't what she claimed to do, but I'm using it as a comparable argument.

A comparable argument for what?

 jreilly89 wrote:
Tetris. Megaman. Bomberman. There are tons of classic games that refute this trope.

And tons that fits it. Ask a random person on the street to give you the most basic plot of old-school video game: go save the princess. Yeah, he is not going to give you the plot of Tetris or Bomberman, because there is none, or the plot of Megaman, because he does not even know the game exist. He is likely not going to give you the plot of Sonic either, even if he knows the game.
Why? Because even if neither the plot of Sonic, nor the plot of Megaman, nor the (non)plot of Tetris and Bomberman all do not have any damsel in distress, they do not have anything in common. Hence why even if only, say, only two out of every ten games (random numbers) include a damsel, we could still have the damsel as the most common trope in video game . That guy did not brought up “Save animals imprisoned into robots and big containers” because that is the plot of Sonic, and basically only Sonic. He will rather bring up something that is the plot of Mario, Zelda, and dozens of other games!
The other scenario that could come forward if “Alien are invading, kick them back to space”, I guess. But this feels less specific to video games.

 jreilly89 wrote:
Absolutely. But again, that includes CONTEXT. How do you know he was the first to die without context?

Uh? Because the person is telling you. If you do not trust her, just check it out. There is certainly no need to tell the whole story though.

 jreilly89 wrote:
Refusing to identify games that don't fit in nicely with her theory?

Okay, I want to make sure I understand you right. Your problem is that Anita has not mentioned that Tetris, Demolition Derby and Theme Hospital do not use the Damsel in Distress trope?

 jreilly89 wrote:
Guess what? Calling all men sexist makes you sexist.

Guess what? She never said that.

 jreilly89 wrote:
She claims developers are intentionally misogynystic

Can I have some first-hand reference here? Link to video and time?

 Crablezworth wrote:
Apparently all gamers are at fault, good to know.

You know, I do not identify with other gamers any more than I do identify with other moviegoers or music listener. Why do no one ever writes “Movie goers are X” and then have all the movie goers going berserk on him or her? Why do no one ever write about how music listeners are all anything?

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
If she'd used the bare minimum of makeup and no jewellery, I would at least respect her for sticking to her principles.

I think you did not understand her “principles” actually. Or rather, her argument.
Let us put it that way: a bird does not wear clothes, or use make-up. A human do. So, usually, most representation of human do include clothes, and most representations of birds do not. It is normal to have your representations of humans wearing clothes. Nobody is arguing against it. However, if your representation of birds usually do not include clothes except for the female ones, all of them, and those are always gender signifiers, well, that is saying something. Basically that if one of your representation of a bird does not have any gender signifier, they are male, by default, and if they have the very special and very specific characteristic of being a female, you then feel the need to add something to show they are not the default.

 The Grumpy Eldar wrote:
Seriously, from my perspective she doesn't understand gaming culture, at all.

Whaoh, gaming culture? What is that?

 Grundz wrote:
a thread about nosgoth

Just to point it out, the game actually has two female classes, so basically half of the human faction is female. And they are really not that much sexualized:

The vampires are all vampires.

 Grundz wrote:
It simply cannot be addressed without becoming a "personal attack" because the implication that the person is simply not interesting and injecting the same tired garbage and the same people taking the bait into every thread that I see the person post in must be a personal attack, it couldn't possibly be that we've all heard it before over and over and over and when everything is an OUTRAGE it kinds of takes the edge off of outrages.

Oh, so your problem is that Melissia would like to see more female character and mention it once in a while? I understand that might be unbearable, but as far as I can tell she has not done so here…

squidhills wrote:
What happens when a female designer is told she has to design the strippers in the part of the game that involves a shoot-out in a strip club?

Depends on your setting, but really, just make half the performers chippendale and done, problem solved.

 Slarg232 wrote:
It would actually be highly hilarious to go gunning through a chippendale strip club XD

I said mix gender!

squidhills wrote:
There's a stage in a Duke Nukem game where all the strippers in the club are male.


...and clones of Duke. It's kind of unsettling, actually.

Oh, fun and unusual!

 Melissia wrote:
We have three threads on Dakka at the same time all talking about the same topic, in fact.

Three? I thought there was only two. Where is the third?

 Slarg232 wrote:
It's a fair assumption to make; there is a trope that men are the expendable gender, after all.

Actually, it is more an issue of male by default, linked to the gender signifier stuff that I mentioned in this thread or the other.

 Melissia wrote:
plus the thread where they linked to TotalBiscuit's little speech on the same topic.

That is the one I was missing.

 Melissia wrote:
Yeah, the thread is kind of going off in a different direction every five to ten posts...

Twitch plays PokeDakka !

 Melissia wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The reason I cannot stand Anita's videos is because of her intellectual dishonesty, cherry-picking and blatant (you could basically say deliberate) misrepresentation of the subject material to "prove" a point.

There is not a single thing in this post which is true.

No, for once he do have a point. There is a clear misrepresentation here. While I am not agreeing with him on the bigger picture, that section was clearly a misrepresentation.

 Chongara wrote:
Looking at the achievements for Hitman I see an achievement for "Killing something beautiful", with an icon that depicts a woman in underwear and heels in the middle of removing her bra, supposedly attained for killing a character named Layla. In contrast to the achievements for killing the male characters, this seems to call a great deal of attention to the character's gender and sexuality.

Well, Anita should have mentioned this rather than misrepresenting something from the game. I mean, if you are loosing point for killing the girls, you are not encouraged to do it, clearly.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Layla is one of the game's villains. You get achievements for killing pretty much all the villains in that game.

She is still referred to as “something beautiful” because she is a woman.

 Manchu wrote:

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:
While I am not agreeing with him on the bigger picture, that section was clearly a misrepresentation.

I think LoH addressed this already:

 LordofHats wrote:
Wait... No one else sees a tall building in a game and immediately thinks "I wonder what would happen if I jumped off?" Just me

I do not see how that address anything.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
And in any case when its presented to you, you ignore that "5% actual criticism", or label it as bigoted; thereby dismissing it without actually refuting any of the points made. Same goes for Melissia.

Not for me, right? I am good?

 jreilly89 wrote:
I have made several points with evidence and you disagree. You have made several points with little evidence and I disagree.

Actually, I made brilliant points backed by incredibly accurate date that proves how awesome I am as a man, and you wrote random babbling nonsense. Truth.
Well, maybe…

 Melissia wrote:
Just because there is a disincentive to do that doesn't mean that it works, or that it is thus no longer a problem. The fact that it is in this hypothetical situation allowed in the first place through the gameplay can still make it problematic.

So basically the developers should not have included a section in a strip club.

 Slarg232 wrote:
All feminists want 90% of the male population culled from society, and the remaining 10% to be put into labor and breeding camps.

Femitheist explicitly said she was not a feminist, man.

 Slarg232 wrote:
Why is that different from Hitman; Anita stated a claim that is wildly off base as has been proven in let's plays and this thread. It is misrepresenting the hitman game and feminist population.

The feminist population is a bunch of different people with very few in common. The hitman: absolution game is… well, one game. Not even a series. So, yeah, your comparison makes no sense.

 Melissia wrote:
In the you aren't meant to interact with something, you wouldn't be able to., just like 99% of the characters in the game.
This is a video game. If you can interact with it, you're "meant" to interact with it.

But you are able to interact with the other characters in the game.

 Slarg232 wrote:
I kill Joe the Plumber in Hitman. I kill Scarlet Furbooties the Stripper in Hitman. I kill Jane the Cop in Hitman.

Why is only one of those reprehensible?

That is a different argument you are making now.

David Cage.