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 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Because sometimes an external opinion can offer an alternative perspective.

Nah, its just for the drama, we all know it. They could have invited other outsider feminists, with more credentals and background than her, but Anita was the one that would have generated more noise for the convention.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Because sometimes an external opinion can offer an alternative perspective.

But if the industry is already changing to her ideals, what alternative perspective can she offer?

 Galas wrote:

Heroes of Might and Magic is probably my favourite videogame series of all time.

Heroes of Might and Magic was a fantastic format that offered something for everyone, so successful even non gamers play it.

 Sinful Hero wrote:
But if the industry is already changing to her ideals, what alternative perspective can she offer?

Not perspective. Service.

It's 'changing' to her ideals, perhaps. But she's selling her seal of approval.

I really doubt any convention pays someone to come and tell them things they disagree with. Someone earlier ITT called Ms. Sarkeesian a "change maker" or some such, which I originally read as "change MARKER," like a symbol of some change. I think that is why she is being invited in such a high profile way. The industry, and especially GenCon as a business in itself, wants to preempt criticisms that it is misogynistic, or homophobic, etc, etc, etc.

Please keep in mind that GenCon derailed its own marketing efforts back in 2015, toothlessly threatening to move from Indiana if then-governor Mike Pence signed that "religious liberty" law. This is the context. GenCon is a cynical business interested in leveraging virtue signaling for sales purposes.

That is a fair assumption, especially in the context of the confrontation with the governor.

That makes it even more sad for everybody.

Is it wrong to ask what quantifiable effect have Sarkeesian's videos had on the (video) games industry (besides vague possible future nightmare scenarios)? And how does that effect compare to the basic pressure of billion dollar companies who have shareholders to placate and increase profits? Or how about the industry's working conditions? How much worse has her "feminist agenda" been in comparison to games moving to even more DRM, needing constant internet connections, moving to a GaaS model, loot boxes, ever excessive preorder bonuses, and all that. How much have games changed in the last five years due to her? Would her effect even register on a top 10 list of negative influences?

Sqorgar wrote:Yes, and I'm sure that when you were 10, that was fine. But can you say the same thing about how we treat 10 year olds today? I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say we have hundreds of new regulations and laws concerning what is acceptable for children than we did 20 or 30 years ago. When I was a kid, I could walk to the park by myself. I read a story last year about a women who was arrested for allowing her daughter to that.

That's a rather distinct US thing and your reaction was to advocate for games to be more exclusionary to "protect them". Essentially a panic about a panic about kids. I mean somebody in the US created this: http://www.freerangekids.com/ because the US drifted away from what other countries consider common sense. I'm sorry that this is happening in the US but it's your own damn fault if you have to reinvent all kinds of basic concepts. You can't blame everything on SJWs, that's just about how the US treats its kids. Why should we over here have to pay the price for your oddities?

What I'm saying is that we treat this as an adult hobby in which children are welcomed, at their own judgment. That is to say, a child who can not handle the content in Warhammer 40k should not play Warhammer 40k, and one that can handle it should. That's different than saying that all miniature games must be designed to meet the needs of all children and the ones that don't must go through an expensive process to get a label saying so. The ESRB has limitations to how video games of certain ratings can sell their product - where they can be placed on store shelves, who their television commercials can be shown to, and what other games they can be advertised with (you can't, for example, advertise an AO game on the same website as non-AO games, so most visual novel publishers are forced to have two different online stores for their adult games and non-adult games).

I'd rather see miniature games treated like books. No ratings. No restrictions. It's up to the booksellers, publishers, and customers, and not some intermediary organization - and that requires an assumption of a basic level of maturity, like books have. Not every book is appropriate for every customer, but there's a certain understanding that they won't be.

It's not about being exclusive. You can still be inclusive without pandering.

And in the end there's no big difference. Regular bookshops won't put controversial stuff up front or they'll exclude certain types of books. The difference with a rating system is that can quantify why a game/movie wasn't available in a specific store while you have to ask the employee in a bookstore if they are selling something. I also would love ratings to be different. Having guidelines for parents is good because nobody can pre-select everything for their kids (and maybe even doesn't want to and might want their kids to explore the fun of reading on their own). But ratings are useful for the big companies because it allows them to force training wheels on their products so they don't accidentally stumble (because they are seen as safe for certain demographics and something they can point at to defend themselves) and also so their investments don't go up in flames (plus they can bully smaller creators).

Books just tend to cost comparatively less to make in comparison to other entertainment products. Even if a book fails or is controversial it's usually doesn't create a deficit in the millions (except if some big author really messes up). If books had similar needs of investment you can be sure that big companies who invest in them would love to have ratings and guides to reduce risk for their own investment while also hindering smaller creators from easily entering the industry. And even despite game ratings you can still make a game (completely uncensored) and sell it directly to customers through your own website to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The only thing that you don't have access to would be certain (mainstream) stores that use ratings to cheaply filter out content. The same goes for movies and other rated media. If you want access to certain mainstream stores you have to play by their rules (ratings and everything else).

Right now miniature games are already treated as books for the most part (like you imagine in your best case scenario). The only restriction is a 12+ rating due to small parts (and I think because of US laws being stricter in that regard that European ones, our stores didn't care and sold up the miniatures anyways). You are the one who said that miniature games should be treated seriously and mentioned excluding kids (except the ones who are mature enough by some standard) thus wanting some sort of implicit, cultural, and invisible "rating system". There's no need to create imaginary fences. I think that's the wrong approach and to just let toys be toys and let people of all ages play and react to them in their own way. You want to treat this hobby as something special and fragile and restrict access instead of as something flexible and accepting that can stand on its own even if you word it in a way that implies the opposite.

Sqorgar wrote:I assume you aren't familiar with the legal term "chilling effect"? Simply put, it is something which discourages people from fully exercising their legal right to the freedom of expression. For instance, if there was a regulating body which could slap a label on your product that made it so that stores would not carry your product - your right is not strictly being limited, but it effectively is because of the consequences of using it are so dire.

For instance, a code of conduct, if done improperly, could have a chilling effect on people expressing their opinions on things because they could get kicked out of the con for speech that is entirely legal, reasonable, and appropriate, but the code of conduct was written in such a way that any speech that could be claimed to be offensive (even when reasonably not, nor intended to be) is against the rules. For instance, male panelists could be terrified of sharing any potentially disagreeable opinions on the chance that a woman labels their opinions as harassment.

There's the spirit of the law and the letter of the law, and while the letter of the law may not be broken, the spirit certainly is. And nobody wants to walk around with a broken spirit.

Wait now you worry about the chilling effect but a few pages ago you said that the solution to her harassment was to give the harassers no target (to shut up?) instead of actually fighting the harassment. Have you ever considered how all that harassment or a loose and abusable CoC could have a chilling effect on her or other critics? Or do their voices just not matter? There are also, for example, many stories of women leaving the tech industry within 10 years due to the behaviour of their colleagues but somehow you need to slippery slope your argument into an imaginary chilling effect that could affects men before even considering that there's already chilling effects that are affecting women (and minorities). There are already implicit biases like this one: https://www.sciencealert.com/women-s-code-found-to-be-better-than-men-s-but-is-rejected-unless-they-hide-their-gender

The findings suggest that female programmers may be better at what they do than their male counterparts, but that attitudes within the software community might be making it harder for them to have their contributions recognised and accepted – unless they're already known by collaborators, or elect to hide their gender, that is.

 Manchu wrote:
Please keep in mind that GenCon derailed its own marketing efforts back in 2015, toothlessly threatening to move from Indiana if then-governor Mike Pence signed that "religious liberty" law. This is the context. GenCon is a cynical business interested in leveraging virtue signaling for sales purposes.

What happened with that? Did he sign the law and then they did nothing?

He signed the bill, and once various organizations boycotted the state and other states started doing government funded travel bans, they wrote another piece of legislation watering it down a month later, ending the boycotts.

So, the protests were toothless in that they did exactly what they were intended to do and achieved their goal, I guess.

GenCon =\= protests. IIRC GenCon walked back their original stance pretty quickly.

Mario wrote:
Is it wrong to ask what quantifiable effect have Sarkeesian's videos had on the (video) games industry (besides vague possible future nightmare scenarios)?

It's not wrong, but it is asking for something that is innately unquantifiable. After all, how can you measure the influence someone has by sharing a public opinion? The only quantifiable thing that I think you can say about Sarkeesian is that if her effort was to make the game industry a kinder, more tolerant place, it had the exact opposite effect.

And how does that effect compare to the basic pressure of billion dollar companies who have shareholders to placate and increase profits? Or how about the industry's working conditions? How much worse has her "feminist agenda" been in comparison to games moving to even more DRM, needing constant internet connections, moving to a GaaS model, loot boxes, ever excessive preorder bonuses, and all that. How much have games changed in the last five years due to her? Would her effect even register on a top 10 list of negative influences?

I would consider her one of the top 10 most negative influences, at least in the last 10 years. I think there's very real consequences of what she was preaching, but it is impossible to say how directly she is responsible. Here are some examples:

* Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball 3, despite being more successful in the West for previous iterations, was not considered for release in the US/UK/AUS due to the political climate.

* Nintendo directly censored several of there games that were intended for adults and older teens. Fire Emblem Fates had all the bathing suit models removed and had several scenes changed. The main character, Corrin, had her outfit changed to remove extra thigh in several of her appearances and amiibo. Tokyo Mirage Sessions, an M rated game, had scenarios changed and removed the shadows of hips on a mid-riff baring character (her "vagina bones", as it became known as). Xenoblade Chronicles X had the breast size slider removed and several outfits were changed. (It should be noted that Nintendo no longer appears to do this, and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is surprisingly uncensored outside of a few small dialogue changes)

* NIS America censored multiple releases, such as Criminal Girls 1 + 2. Criminal Girls 2 was changed so that the sexy time scenes removed all restraints from the images, and silenced the squeals the girls made when being punished.

* Omega Labyrinth Z was banned from release in Australia and the UK. It hasn't been banned in the US, but its release has been indefinitely postponed.

* Street Fighter V changed a victory animation in which a character slaps her butt in order to appeal to the US market, which they perceived as being more uptight about that sort of thing.

* Dragon Quest 8's 3DS rerelease removed Jessica's bikini outfit.

And so on. It's hard to argue that these changes weren't a result of the cries of sexism going on at the time - especially in the case of games where the rerelease had more censorship than the original.

And in the end there's no big difference. Regular bookshops won't put controversial stuff up front or they'll exclude certain types of books.

Stephen King's IT has a very controversial scene, yet you can find it recommended at regular bookshops. The Song of Ice and Fire books are rather extreme too. Fifty Shades of Grey. This is mass market stuff, sold in Target.

Books just tend to cost comparatively less to make in comparison to other entertainment products. Even if a book fails or is controversial it's usually doesn't create a deficit in the millions (except if some big author really messes up).

Indie games are routinely censored as well. The recent Agony game, which was funded through kickstarter as a very adult game with explicit content, has been censored, even on PCs.

You are the one who said that miniature games should be treated seriously and mentioned excluding kids (except the ones who are mature enough by some standard) thus wanting some sort of implicit, cultural, and invisible "rating system".

Not about excluding. It's about putting the burden of appropriateness on this children and/or their parents rather than the developers. In theory, that's what a rating system is supposed to do, but it ends up dictating content to fit those ratings rather than vice versa. It would be like having a rating system which starts at 12+, so anything that would be typically censored for younger people (drug use, alcohol, sexy clothing, violence) is never censored.

Wait now you worry about the chilling effect but a few pages ago you said that the solution to her harassment was to give the harassers no target (to shut up?) instead of actually fighting the harassment.

I said keep doing what you normally do and don't give any attention to the harassment. If Sarkeesian had just continued to make her videos without publicly addressing the harassment she was getting, it would've dissipated after a week. Her videos were fine. Telling the harassers that they are getting to her was not.

Have you ever considered how all that harassment or a loose and abusable CoC could have a chilling effect on her or other critics? Or do their voices just not matter?

I've weighed the options and I think we'd lose a lot more from abusable regulation than we would for people feeling uncomfortable to speak. It's kind of the whole premise behind the freedom of expression. We allow everybody to speak and we'll hear a cacophony of voices, sometimes offense. If we choose who is allowed to speak, we hear only one permitted voice, who has nothing to say.

There are also, for example, many stories of women leaving the tech industry within 10 years due to the behaviour of their colleagues but somehow you need to slippery slope your argument into an imaginary chilling effect that could affects men before even considering that there's already chilling effects that are affecting women (and minorities).

I think those stories are exaggerated. I mean, I left the game industry within 10 years myself, due largely to the fact that I wanted to have a family and didn't think I could do that when I was working long hours with no vacation time. I'm sure they didn't like their coworkers (I didn't like mine), but a more obvious answer is staring us in the face. I'd honestly question the sanity of someone in the tech industry who didn't leave within 10 years. It's a really, really, really gakky working experience.

There are already implicit biases like this one: https://www.sciencealert.com/women-s-code-found-to-be-better-than-men-s-but-is-rejected-unless-they-hide-their-gender

The findings suggest that female programmers may be better at what they do than their male counterparts, but that attitudes within the software community might be making it harder for them to have their contributions recognised and accepted – unless they're already known by collaborators, or elect to hide their gender, that is.

I'm going to have to get back to you on this one. I don't have time to dig into another study right now. But I will say, upon a cursory reading of that article, my bs detector is going wild.

Mario wrote:
There are also, for example, many stories of women leaving the tech industry within 10 years due to the behaviour of their colleagues...

Just a thought, man- stories don't make evidence. A famous and wise doctor once said, "People Lie". Does that mean all the stories are lies? Absolutely not. But when people get on the internet, and provide a story without evidence... it's best to outright expect the evidence.

I have zero doubts that there are inappropriate behaviors in every work environment. I've seen some myself and had to step in. But I've also seen just as many individuals fabricate stories about why their work life was so difficult for them.

So if you're asking me just to give someone the benefit of the doubt and hear them out, okay- I'll do that. If you're asking me to stand up and take action, and demand some sort of special policies, or something like that? Well, you're going to have to come off with the proof. I don't do witch hunts.

Unless there's actual witches.

And they're ugly and mean.

Unless they brew awesome drug potions.

Anyone remember the Comics Code Authority?

Not sure if it's been brought up in the past few pages (I was honestly surprised that this thread was still open when I logged in), but I think that's the kind of thing Sqorgar is arguing against.

And we all should. It was awful.

 Sqorgar wrote:
It's not wrong, but it is asking for something that is innately unquantifiable. After all, how can you measure the influence someone has by sharing a public opinion? The only quantifiable thing that I think you can say about Sarkeesian is that if her effort was to make the game industry a kinder, more tolerant place, it had the exact opposite effect.

You say you can't directly measure the effect, but then you immediately go on to measure that effect when it favors your argument. Make up your mind.

Here are some examples:

Two things:

1) All of your examples are examples of minimal-value porn elements being removed from games, and therefore nothing of value was lost. Can you honestly say that "I don't get bikini outfits to look at while I play my game" is really a negative influence on par with having major parts of a game's content locked away behind recurring microtransactions and/or RNG loot boxes? I mean, I know that if I had to choose one of those things to change it's not going to be the bikini outfits.

2) These are examples of voluntary changes being made. You can cite them as examples of change, but they don't at all support your paranoia about a dystopian future of censorship and poor game quality. The publishers, in all of these cases, voluntarily made the changes to their product without any threat of censorship being imposed (at least in the US, we know Australia's censorship laws are a problem). The publisher looked at the market, realized that the profit to be made from those sex games/features was too small, and cut them. If the demand for those games/features was high enough for them to be profitable then they would have been included as-is. And anyone who wants to make a sex game is 100% free to do so, and say " you" to anyone who objects. The real issue here is that you don't like that "people who feel that bikini outfits are an essential part of a game" is a tiny and irrelevant market, and you have no financial power to compel game publishers to put them in their games.

Stephen King's IT has a very controversial scene, yet you can find it recommended at regular bookshops. The Song of Ice and Fire books are rather extreme too. Fifty Shades of Grey. This is mass market stuff, sold in Target.

This just proves your paranoia wrong. The controversy exists, but there is profit to be made and so the books are sold in regular bookshops.

The recent Agony game, which was funded through kickstarter as a very adult game with explicit content, has been censored, even on PCs.

Really? Censored by who? Which government agency required them to remove content?

 Peregrine wrote:
1) All of your examples are examples of minimal-value porn elements being removed from games, and therefore nothing of value was lost.

For you.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Anyone remember the Comics Code Authority?

Not sure if it's been brought up in the past few pages (I was honestly surprised that this thread was still open when I logged in), but I think that's the kind of thing Sqorgar is arguing against.

And we all should. It was awful.

It was also a product of its era, a time when mass publication was out of the reach of most independent authors/publishers. A similar thing would be much harder to organize in 2018, where internet publishing and marketing is a thing and presence on retail store shelves is growing less and less relevant. A store can say "we won't sell this unless you comply with the rating system", but the publisher can just put up an online store and sell directly to their customers. It's much easier to ignore any attempt at a ratings authority now.

It's also important to remember that the CCA was a private organization, not government-imposed censorship. Anyone who wanted to publish comics that violated the code was free to do so (and some did), they just couldn't force stores to sell their product. If there was a greater demand for CCA-violating comics then it's a safe bet that those stores would have promptly dumped the whole thing and taken the profits. The CCA had authority only as long as it had market value.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
For you.

Are you honestly claiming that being able to stare at women in bikini outfits is an important part of gaming, and removing that is a major loss?

 Peregrine wrote:
Are you honestly claiming that being able to stare at women in bikini outfits is an important part of gaming, and removing that is a major loss?

Are you honestly saying there isn't a market for that, and that your feelings on icky girl boobie cooties is an objective position?

YOU don't like it. And that's fine, but don't assume 'nothing of value' was lost. It had SOME value, because there was a demand and in Japan it was fairly successful.

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
If you're asking me to stand up and take action, and demand some sort of special policies, or something like that? Well, you're going to have to come off with the proof. I don't do witch hunt.

Congratulations, you've set up a situation where change can never happen because your standard of proof is set to high that it can't be met. Individuals sharing stories are dismissed as untrustworthy, any incident with hard proof (such as a recording of a conversation) can be dismissed as a single outlier, and any industry-wide study that could establish rates of harassment will inherently depend on polling people and trusting their answers. Just what achievable level of proof would be enough to satisfy you and get you to endorse changes?

Agony was censored, yeah, to be able to publish it on consoles, if I remember correctly, but they ended up not releasing the PC patch to un-censore the game, they just released a video.

But that has nothing to do with Anita or feminism, you can't get games with those kind of scenes anywhere near a store, not today, not 5, not 10 years ago.

BTW I have seen the "censored" scenes and they are all very tame, at least if you compared them with regular porn that most people consumes.
In general Agony is just a very bad game that tries very hard to be "edgy". And it is not bad because is very gore. Its just a bad game overall.


EDIT: Wow, 5 post in chat-mode while I was writting this. Adeptus, Peregrine, I know you can't stand each other in this kind of conversations (I know you agree in the forgeworld ones) but can you please don't... make the mods close the thread?

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
Are you honestly saying there isn't a market for that, and that your feelings on icky girl boobie cooties is an objective position?

There clearly is not much of a market for those games because they are not being sold.

It had SOME value, because there was a demand and in Japan it was fairly successful.

We know Japan has some major cultural issues on stuff like this. I mean, this is the country where they've had to come up with a commonly-known word to describe young men who live with their parents and spend all of their time fantasizing over anime porn. But do you really want to endorse that kind of thing as an important part of the US gaming community, and consider its loss to be a significant problem?

 Peregrine wrote:
Congratulations, you've set up a situation where change can never happen because your standard of proof is set to high that it can't be met. Individuals sharing stories are dismissed as untrustworthy, any incident with hard proof (such as a recording of a conversation) can be dismissed as a single outlier, and any industry-wide study that could establish rates of harassment will inherently depend on polling people and trusting their answers. Just what achievable level of proof would be enough to satisfy you and get you to endorse changes?

That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Show me actual evidence of a problem, and I'll say 'we need to fix that'. But show me stories on the internet, and I'll listen and consider it. But I'm sorry, I don't act just because people have 'stories'. I don't know these people, I have no reason to trust them, and I have no reason to put my credibility on the line or dedicate my time to an anonymous blogger.

Otherwise, if 'stories' are all we need for a panic, then I'll see you in the trenches during the Reptilian Wars.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Peregrine wrote:
There clearly is not much of a market for those games because they are not being sold.

Except that they are. I mean, you probably hate KDM and it's still being sold. Not like 40k, but it's still there. Doesn't mean it doesn't have value, it's not your thing- fine, no one's judging you for not liking it. So how about you be respectable and do the same?

Don't like it? Don't buy it.

Just like with Anita's panel, right? Don't like her, don't attend. Works both ways.

 Peregrine wrote:
We know Japan has some major cultural issues on stuff like this. I mean, this is the country where they've had to come up with a commonly-known word to describe young men who live with their parents and spend all of their time fantasizing over anime porn. But do you really want to endorse that kind of thing as an important part of the US gaming community, and consider its loss to be a significant problem?

I want people to be able to purchase a product they are interested in. And between puritans and sex-negative activists behaving the same way, I think I'm getting a bit tired of people playing 'moral authoritarian nanny' to grown adults that are fully capable of determining what sorts of entertainment they'd like to engage in.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Galas wrote:
EDIT: Wow, 5 post in chat-mode while I was writting this. Adeptus, Peregrine, I know you can't stand each other in this kind of conversations (I know you agree in the forgeworld ones) but can you please don't... make the mods close the thread?

Just watch and pay attention. Please, watch. I promise.

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
Except that they are. I mean, you probably hate KDM and it's still being sold. Not like 40k, but it's still there. Doesn't mean it doesn't have value, it's not your thing- fine, no one's judging you for not liking it. So how about you be respectable and do the same?

KDM clearly has a market because it is being sold and making money. So what does it say about these bikini outfits, that they couldn't even match the market demand of a niche-market game within the niche market of miniatures games? Nothing of value was lost, literally. The video game publishers concluded that cutting the material would cost them so close to zero dollars that the lost money was not worth considering.

I want people to be able to purchase a product they are interested in. And between puritans and sex-negative activists behaving the same way, I think I'm getting a bit tired of people playing 'moral authoritarian nanny' to grown adults that are fully capable of determining what sorts of entertainment they'd like to engage in.

Ok, you want people to be able to publish a product they are interested in. So what is the solution to allowing them to do so? There are already no government restrictions on the production and sale of those games to adults, anyone who feels that those people are a sufficiently profitable market to be worth selling to is free to produce the exact game they are interested in. If nobody chooses to do so it is only because that market is not a profitable one. So what do you think should be done? Should we introduce more socialism, where the government collects tax money and uses it to subsidize the production of bikini-outfit-filled video games to convince the game industry to make and sell them?

Who needs healthcare when you can have public bikini-outfit-filled video games?

 Peregrine wrote:

KDM clearly has a market because it is being sold and making money. So what does it say about these bikini outfits, that they couldn't even match the market demand of a niche-market game within the niche market of miniatures games? Nothing of value was lost, literally. The video game publishers concluded that cutting the material would cost them so close to zero dollars that the lost money was not worth considering.

Except, you know, 'they figured'. The results, however, show that they lost even more money. So no, you can't say 'nothing of value' was lost. No more than I can say something you like has no value. Don't assume your moral outrage about digital tiddy is a universally-accepted truth and standard.

I'll even say this- how much more money would they have made had they not caved?

 Peregrine wrote:
Ok, you want people to be able to publish a product they are interested in. So what is the solution to allowing them to do so? There are already no government restrictions on the production and sale of those games to adults, anyone who feels that those people are a sufficiently profitable market to be worth selling to is free to produce the exact game they are interested in. If nobody chooses to do so it is only because that market is not a profitable one. So what do you think should be done? Should we introduce more socialism, where the government collects tax money and uses it to subsidize the production of bikini-outfit-filled video games to convince the game industry to make and sell them?

No, we should keep moral busybodies out of these decisions. Let adults make their own decisions. You can say this all you want, but bullying a company into changing something isn't 'government intervention' and therefore isn't illegal. But these companies were bullied, threatened- mostly by people who weren't playing the games anyway.

Also, I'll flat-out say it: If someone can't handle a digital tiddy, then they have psychological problems. We need to stop catering to mentally unstable reactionaries.

 Manchu wrote:
GenCon =\= protests. IIRC GenCon walked back their original stance pretty quickly.

I think they gave the excuse they have venue booked for the next X years and cannot go back without violating some contracts.

As to censorship, cleaving to the narrow view that only governments can censor seems outdated. At least in Western society, corporations are extremely influential as to the threshhold of generally acceptable public rhetoric. I doubt this was foreseen by the authors of the U.S. Constitution, who envisioned the key conflict as between the government and individuals or at least relatively small communities. I think people today worried about "censorship" assume, mostly correctly, that this is no longer the key conflict when it comes to whether our society is characterizsd more by openness or wariness about what constitutes unacceptable speech.

Back when the white supremacicts marched on Charlottesville, I learned the term "Overton Window" - which means the range of ideas that can be freely discussed publicly. Commentators at the time suggested that white supremacists and neo-Nazis were trying to widen the Overton Window so that certain previously unaccpetable ideas (e.g., white nationalism) could be discussed in the mainstream. The reactionary name-and-shame campaign that resulted in the high publicity firing of a few of the marchers was the same kind of tactic. Notice how at no point was the government a key player in the fight over what's socially acceptable to talk about openly. Instead, the key player were private media outlets and corporate employers.

It seems to me that much of political commentary can be understood as a fight over what can fit into the Overton Window and what should be excluded. I think GenCon invited Ms. Sarkeesian not because it wants to widen or narrow the window but in recognition that the window already has a particular shape. Another metaphor would be "which way the wind is blowing."

 PsychoticStorm wrote:

 Manchu wrote:
GenCon =\= protests. IIRC GenCon walked back their original stance pretty quickly.

I think they gave the excuse they have venue booked for the next X years and cannot go back without violating some contracts.

As I recall, the initial bombast was about pulling up stakes and leaving. This was pretty ill-considered because it gave a bad impression of the city the company has chosen as its host for so long. So the company very quickly clarified that it had never had any problems with bigotry and that GenCon had always been "safe" for all attendees. The issue then was, if there has never been a problem then the complaint seems hollow. The notion that the law would create a problem where none had ever existed, according to the company, was baseless. Even the left-leaning news media had to travel a ways out of the metropolitain area go dig up some tiny little business (Memories Pizza) whose owners said they would not cater a gay wedding. Again, GenCon saw an opportunity to virtue signal, blundered, made a clarification that undermined their original self-righteousness, and fortunately the whole thing kind of evaporated because it was never an actual issue to begin with, except for insulting Indianapolis by implication.

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
Except, you know, 'they figured'. The results, however, show that they lost even more money. So no, you can't say 'nothing of value' was lost. No more than I can say something you like has no value. Don't assume your moral outrage about digital tiddy is a universally-accepted truth and standard.

First of all, the results don't show that they lost even more money because no game company publishes the numbers you need to make that conclusion. If anyone at all has exact information on how much money they lost due to removing bikini outfits it's the company's marketing department and that is extremely valuable business information that is not going to be published. You can not use overall financial information for the industry because that information includes all potential causes of declining profit. You have no way to tell if a company lost sales revenue because of not having bikini outfits, or because players hate RNG loot crates.

Second, I can say it because it is true. This is a capitalist economy and a game publisher's primary goal is to produce profits for its shareholders. If removing bikini outfits is a net loss of profit then bikini outfits will be back in the game as fast as the art department can create the assets. The fact that they have not done so is proof that the publisher looked at the market numbers and concluded that it would not produce additional profits. IOW, nothing of value was lost, literally.

No, we should keep moral busybodies out of these decisions. Let adults make their own decisions. You can say this all you want, but bullying a company into changing something isn't 'government intervention' and therefore isn't illegal. But these companies were bullied, threatened- mostly by people who weren't playing the games anyway.

Adults can make their own decisions. Included in that group of adults making their own decisions are the adults running video game companies, who can choose to listen to criticism or ignore it based on the financial numbers. If these "bullies" were so irrelevant, not being part of the customer base, then the adults in question were 100% free to say " you" and make a game that the "bullies" hate. The fact that you don't like the choice those adults made, or that their choice reveals how powerless people like you are in the video game market, does not mean that their ability to make a decision was denied.

Also, I'll flat-out say it: If someone can't handle a digital tiddy, then they have psychological problems. We need to stop catering to mentally unstable reactionaries.

There is a difference between "can't handle it and become mentally unstable at the sight of one" and "don't want our games to be masturbation fodder for people with no sense of boundaries". If I'm watching a football game I don't need gratuitous naked women all over the screen while my team scores the winning touchdown. And if someone insists on adding them I have to wonder about what kind of issues they must have to be so obsessed with adding low-grade porn to random things.

 Manchu wrote:
Even the left-leaning news media had to travel a ways out of the metropolitain area go dig up some tiny little business (Memories Pizza) whose owners said they would not cater a gay wedding..

Wasn't that the pizza place that was being blasted for not catering to gay weddings, because... they didn't actually do catering?

I could be wrong, I may be thinking of a smaller side story somewhere in that nontroversy.


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 Peregrine wrote:
Second, I can say it because it is true. This is a capitalist economy and a game publisher's primary goal is to produce profits for its shareholders. If removing bikini outfits is a net loss of profit then bikini outfits will be back in the game as fast as the art department can create the assets. The fact that they have not done so is proof that the publisher looked at the market numbers and concluded that it would not produce additional profits. IOW, nothing of value was lost, literally.

"Nothing of value" to YOU. Not everyone, reverend brimstone.

I don't think you understand. You see, when people have their little moral panics- and start demanding harsher censorship, it's under threat that the game will get an unwarranted rating or negative publicity. It's because if you raise enough hell about Tiddy Tackle Trollops 2: Electric Jiggloo, there will be stores refusing to carry it. This hurts sales, and in order to actually try and make a profit- they have to comply or not sell (like DOA 3).

 Peregrine wrote:
There is a difference between "can't handle it and become mentally unstable at the sight of one" and "don't want our games to be masturbation fodder for people with no sense of boundaries". If I'm watching a football game I don't need gratuitous naked women all over the screen while my team scores the winning touchdown. And if someone insists on adding them I have to wonder about what kind of issues they must have to be so obsessed with adding low-grade porn to random things.

Don't like it? Don't buy it. Don't like the bikini costume? Last I checked they were an option that any adult with any sense of self-control can refuse to utilize. Unless you believe this is a problem for a significant portion of adults (It isn't), then perhaps you should re-evaluate your aversion to tiddy that no one is forcing you to look at. It's not hard.

Let adults be adults, and make their own choices. Stop playing Nanny, please.

Again.

Don't like it? Don't buy it. Or, like some have said defending Star Wars: "Maybe you aren't the target audience"

Weird how that never seems to work both ways, isn't it?

I am pretty sure they got the business owners on the record as saying they would not cater a gay wedding because it would conflict with their religious beliefs. Whether they actual cater any events is of course a separate matter. Everything about this "news story" was principally hypothetical anyhow.

 Manchu wrote:
I am pretty sure they got the business owners on the record as saying they would not cater a gay wedding because it would conflict with their religious beliefs. Whether they actual cater any events is of course a separate matter. Everything about this "news story" was principally hypothetical anyhow.

Ah. Well, I guess some people don't know how to use gay money or something. Last I checked, it spends just like straight money but smells a bit nicer.

I'm pretty sure they've served worse sinners.