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How about, instead of dismissing my statements as a "conspiracy theory", you actually educate yourself on the topic? Just because I stated there was a "concerted effort" doesn't mean I think there's some sort of grand conspiracy. What it does mean, however, is that these are NOT your typical "troll".

[edit: removed my own potentially inflammable section . Sorry if you already read it.]

Perhaps conspiracy theory is too dismissive a term, but I think you're seeing the situation from a biased perspective. No one likes to feel as though they're part of a group that's being targeted for abuse, and your experiences are causing you to see this in a more malevolent light. Are there lunatics out there? Without a doubt. My point of contest is that I cannot believe that a 4chan mob's actions are in whole manifestations of this.

I'd posit a fair number are kids (who are basically just lunatics who haven't been taught better yet), and a fair portion are just being outrageous for the sake of being outrageous, without giving a second thought to any wider meaning or pattern.

Do I approve of this sort of behavior? Of course not. But I do see it for what it is: a bunch of meaningless white noise wrapped some small core of genuine radicalism.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:
My point of contest is that I cannot believe that a 4chan mob's actions are in whole manifestations of this.

I don't believe that "a 4chan mob" is behind it to begin with.

That's YOUR assumption, not mine. I make no assumption on what kind of person does this sort of thing, aside from a tendency for them to be men.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I seriously recommend you read the three links I gave you earlier. You do not appear to have read them thoroughly. This is not a pleasant topic, but it is a topic that needs to be approached. It's not a "grand conspiracy" or anything, but it IS a big problem. And ignoring it will NOT make it go away, it'll only encourage them more.

Wasn't 4chan spammed with links to it? I'll confess I haven't visited 4chan in many years, except once to search /rs/ for a tabletop rulebook I couldn't find elsewhere (for the record, I couldn't find it there either), so I can't confirm this firsthand.

I'm not going to go so far as to assume she did that herself, since there are plenty of trolls who'd do it just to hit both sides at once, but the most explicit attacks look like 4chan or something similar. Which means outrageous for the sake of outrageous, with the joke being on anyone who let's themself be upset by the gibberings.


A partially related point is that from what I've read, misogyny can be an idiosyncratic symptom of clinical narcissism. From my experiences, it seems to hold true. Every misogynist I've ever met has also been a narcissist, which would seem to indicate that it's not so much a cultural problem (in the first world, excluding Japan) as it is a mental health issue. Perhaps in more backwards places it remains cultural, but it's not like those aren't riddled with unacceptable ideas and behaviors anyways...

It's weird of you to call it a conspiracy theory at all, given that your explanation is the one that calls it a literal conspiracy and ours calls it a manifestation of a negative cultural undercurrent in society.

The story goes that she posted it like crazy all over /V with the intent purpose to piss people off and spread the video. After receving a massive amount of negative feedback including death threats she was featured on national news where she absolutely played the victim and managed to plug her Kickstarter on TV.

There is a lot that stinks about this:
- I dont know a single person who would post on 4chan looking for anything positive to come out of it
- Being upset and "not knowing" there would be a massive backlash. I can play call of duty for 5 minutes and my life is threatened and Im called many horrendous things. Its not right for that to happen to anyone, but when you throw yourself out there, how are you surprised? Every gamer (girl or guy) knows that.
- She's a youtube partner that gets money from views, infamy is just as good as fame, and as profitable.

Manchu wrote: But like any trope it shouldn't be used over and over.

Except that's exactly what a trope is (using the now common TV Tropes definition of Trope). I like TV Tropes as a site, but I'm probably gonna bash them a bit here for taking the word trope and equating it to cliche in spite of their silly page where they redefine tropes as cliches and then say they're not cliches.

 Manchu wrote:
I don't think the prevalence of the trope supports the conclusion of institutionalized misogyny but then again I don't think that is necessarily the point of the damsels vid. .

That case has been made rather fervently in this thread, however.

 Manchu wrote:
I think the point is that the damsels trope is pervasive in video games. She didn't prove or IMO even attempt to prove that its prevalence has a negative effect in wider society. If the damsels phenomenon does indeed make video games less welcoming or even more hostile to women then that will have to be proved or at least addressed in a further video. The argument at issue here is that female characters are objectified, that is, they are denied a great deal of agency, in a great number . .

So is it argument for argument's sake? What is the desired end result?

 Manchu wrote:
And her argument on that point is reasonably persuasive. .

Well, it's like making a video proving that the sky is blue most of the time. A lot of games are based on the same tropes as other types of entertainment, damsels in distress being one of them. I guess my hang up is whether or not it is bad, and what one thinks should be done about it.

 Manchu wrote:
As for why it needs to be made in the first place, the results speak for themselves. A lot of the critics in this case flat out deny that this obvious phenomenon even exists.

See above.

For everyone else, as to vs. nurture, I'd advise reading a undergrad psychology textbook to realize how profoundly uninformed the discussion on the topic is in this thread.

 Ravenous D wrote:
The story goes that she posted it like crazy all over /V with the intent purpose to piss people off and spread the video. After receving a massive amount of negative feedback including death threats she was featured on national news where she absolutely played the victim and managed to plug her Kickstarter on TV.

There is a lot that stinks about this:
- I dont know a single person who would post on 4chan looking for anything positive to come out of it
- Being upset and "not knowing" there would be a massive backlash. I can play call of duty for 5 minutes and my life is threatened and Im called many horrendous things. Its not right for that to happen to anyone, but when you throw yourself out there, how are you surprised? Every gamer (girl or guy) knows that.
- She's a youtube partner that gets money from views, infamy is just as good as fame, and as profitable.

Funny how these allegations that she spammed it on /V only come out after the first video was released and we had never heard of it during the whole fund raising campaign when it actually would have mattered. I'm sorry but unless I see any actual proof or a source this is nothing more than her detractors grasping at straws because they realised death threats and abuse isn't working. I also find it quite funny that the same people who did said abuse are now crying foul that they were used. I must have missed the part where she forced people to harass her.

I also must say that this kind of attitude disgusts me as it reeks of victim blaming that is a plague on our society, that maybe she is partly responsible or perhaps even deserved it.

You know what makes this even less believable, this is not a once off thing.

Bioware, Jennifer Hepler made some comments about writing in their games, she then received a torrent of abuse not unlike the kind Anita received. Are you going to say she planned that aswell. Or how about the article about problems in gaming journalism written by Robert Florence. The article mentioned Lauren Wainwright and some questionable things she had done in the name of gaming journalism. After some legal threats the article taken down, and guess what the internet did. Lauren Wainwright received a torrent of misogynistic abuse that we gamers are starting to be known for.

This kind of behaviour is becoming VERY common and it is laughable to suggest that she started it.

Funny how these allegations that she spammed it on /V only come out after the first video was released and we had never heard of it during the whole fund raising campaign when it actually would have mattered.

Uh, check the date on some of the videos. Just because we're only posting them here now doesn't mean their new. I doubt many people here had even heard of her until Ahtman posted her first video. The accusations go all the way back to the Kickstarter video and her blog posts.

As for Jennifer Hepler. She's a writer for Bioware. Have you been to the Bioware forums and seen how much hate is there for the writing in ME2, DA2, and ME3? It's like a swirling tsunami of people who apparently have nothing but time to hate on a developer because they didn't like their game. Of course one of their writers is going to get hate.

And again, why do people continue to confuse the form the hate takes with why the hate is directed in first place? Lauren Wainwright got hate because when a guy talked about the nature of gaming journalism and called out some names, he lost his job, and Lauren Wainwright went onto twitter and said she didn't see the problem. Especially on the PC end of things, the nature of game's journalism has gotten criticism for nearly a decade. Then in response to an article pointing out some of the problems, instead of explaining her behaviors she just said that she didn't see a problem with it, which was stupid because Florence's article basically accuses games journalists of mass corruptions and she said "yeah so what?" Of course she got hate.

People get hate when other people don't like them (even when the reasons for not liking them are stupid, namely the case of Jennifer Hepler, who hadn't even worked on some of those games).

 Monster Rain wrote:

Manchu wrote:The argument at issue here is that female characters are objectified, that is, they are denied a great deal of agency, in a great number.

So is it argument for argument's sake? What is the desired end result?

The desired end is critical thought about gender roles in video games. Isn't that obvious?

 Monster Rain wrote:

 Manchu wrote:
And her argument on that point is reasonably persuasive.

Well, it's like making a video proving that the sky is blue most of the time.

In a world where many people say there's no such thing as the sky.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LordofHats wrote:
Except that's exactly what a trope is (using the now common TV Tropes definition of Trope).

As far as I know, a trope is a narrative structure or a literary device. It doesn't have to be a cliche but can be deployed in a cliche manner.

 LordofHats wrote:
Uh, check the date on some of the videos. Just because we're only posting them here now doesn't mean their new. I doubt many people here had even heard of her until Ahtman posted her first video. The accusations go all the way back to the Kickstarter video and her blog posts.

I wasn't aware of her work until I'd seen this thread.

 Manchu wrote:
As far as I know, a trope is a narrative structure or a literary device. It doesn't have to be a cliche but can be deployed in a cliche manner.

Tropes are rhetorical devices. I.E. Irony, Metaphor, Simile, etc. Cliche essentially meant (at the turn of the 20th century) a commonly used motif, symbol, narrative device, etc. However, in the hay day of dime store novels and pulp magazines, literary critics began to use the term cliche negatively and it adopted its now negative context of 'tired and irritating.' TV Tropes, rather than use the technical terms (and probably because TV Cliches just doesn't have the same ring to it) simply took to the expanding use of the word trope, which expanded to match the expanding use of the various devices it represented (and because no one wants to use cliche anymore for what it originally meant).

I don't necessarily have a problem with the new usage of the term. But by that very definition a Trope is something that is used over and over again, so criticizing a trope for being used over and over again, is kind of pointless. Something doesn't get to be a trope for being novel. It gets to be a trope for being commonly used.

EDIT: Also. Mechagodzilla's awesome.

Things get used over and over in various senses. The letters in the alphabet get used over and over and that's not an issue. Repetition in video game content, however, is a different matter. If a huge number of female characters are portrayed the same way, that's at the very least boring.

 Manchu wrote:
If a huge number of female characters are portrayed the same way, that's at the very least boring.

I don't disagree (though there is actually a trope for that: Save the Princess), but Damsel in Distress is probably one of the most common tropes. Period. You'll be hard pressed to find a series that never invoked it even once. I mean there's so many examples, TV Tropes needed to give most of the categories its own page and those pages are just the tip of the iceberg. EDIT: One can even say that fantasy fiction practically ran itself on this trope back in the 60's and 70's.

I have my issues with characterizing the trope as inherently objectifying for women, because as a plot point it's an extremely vague one that can be used in numerous ways, but video games are hardly the only media that uses it constantly (EDIT: Well, used is a more appropriate term).

 LordofHats wrote:
I mean there's so many examples

Yep, this is part of Feminist Frequency's argument -- that this is one of if not the most pervasive portrayal of female characters in video games.

 LordofHats wrote:
I have my issues with characterizing the trope as inherently objectifying for women, because as a plot point it's an extremely vague one that can be used in numerous ways

In order to be a damsel in distress, the character in question must (1) be helpless as to escaping the distress and therefore (2) rely on someone else to save them. That's really paring the definition down, such that a male character could be a damsel in distress or that a female damsel in distress could be saved by a female protagonist. What Feminist Frequency further points out is that the damsel trop doesn't exist that way: the damsel is overwhelmingly female while her rescuer and abductor are overwhelmingly male. That is to say, in most of the examples of this trope actually being deployed in products, the female character has no agency herself and is rather the object of the agency of male characters.

 Manchu wrote:
In order to be a damsel in distress, the character in question must (1) be helpless as to escaping the distress and therefore (2) rely on someone else to save them. That's really paring the definition down, such that a male character could be a damsel in distress or that a female damsel in distress could be saved by a female protagonist. What Feminist Frequency further points out is that the damsel trop doesn't exist that way: the damsel is overwhelmingly female while her rescuer and abductor are overwhelmingly male. That is to say, in most of the examples of this trope actually being deployed in products, the female character has no agency herself and is rather the object of the agency of male characters.

If one takes her poor framing of the trope as the only way it's ever used. Most often it's but one plot point among many, especially when you get out of the 80's and out of simple excuse plots. As I said on the first page of the thread, is she condemning the trope (She strikes me as doing this), it's usage, or that video games have poor writing?

I don't think she's condemning anything -- except the beginning of Double Dragon. Instead, I think she's pointing out how this trope as deployed tends to result in objectified portrayals of women.

You know, we could just blame Nintendo. They are the ones who really abuse this trope.

It seems that she's establishing that the trope is used and widespread, presumably as groundwork for the upcoming episode(s). I don't think she really did anything more than that.

HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
It seems that she's establishing that the trope is used and widespread, presumably as groundwork for the upcoming episode(s). I don't think she really did anything more than that.

She also explained a theory of how the trope objectifies female characters.

Well there is also how oppressive the trope is.


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 Manchu wrote:

HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
It seems that she's establishing that the trope is used and widespread, presumably as groundwork for the upcoming episode(s). I don't think she really did anything more than that.

She also explained a theory of how the trope objectifies female characters.

Then we have those games that literally objectify female charters. As in make them into objects. Like the fairies from Zelda, or the DiD form spunky.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:
Wasn't 4chan spammed with links to it?

It is what is claimed.

Without any supporting evidence save a few half-assed videos that themselves have no real evience.

 Melissia wrote:
Without any supporting evidence save a few half-assed videos that themselves have no real evience.

It's also mentioned in bunches of forum posts going all the way back to summer last year, a few articles referencing trolling by 4chan users, and you know: http://archive.foolz.us/v/thread/139813364/

Damn you all for making me actually find that. Whether it's actually her is speculative, but that post was spammed on 4chan and still exists in the archive. It doesn't take that long to find.

Is it bad that I actually laughed at the "Anita Broom" joke? Sorry, Mel and all other women reading this.

Yes, I did read most of them. And the OP admitted s/he wasn't Anita. I think it was a fan trying to solicit funds or a troll trying to direct 4chan's hate machine towards Ms. Gets100ktoplayvideogames.

Am I the only who thinks that someone probably spammed that for the sole purpose of causing backlash?

No.

I'm actually kind of surprised one user actually posted a comment warning of the coming storm. At least 4chan knows its a gak storm.

The bearded hordes of Anonymous are a spiteful but blind group. All one needs to do is show them the way and they will attack without relent.

That or anything that discusses male privelege gets hated on. Probably some sort of innate desire to silence disent.

At the risk of stereotyping...I have a feeling a lot of Anons and...whatever it is people called those who use 4chan (btards?) were/are nerds and never scored a reasonably attractive, let alone hot girl. They are now resentful and hateful towards all woman, because woman won't be the whores they desire...or if they are whores, they're ignoring the Anon crowd.

That and the /v/ board has A LOT of stuff that's really hateful towards women. A lot of it. I can't say a lot enough times my eyes are still bleeding and I only caught a glimpse of it. It really is the cesspool of the internet @_@