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 Adeptus Doritos wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
The thing you describe in sentence one, and the thing you describe in sentence two are not the same thing. I also would agree that rape culture doesn't exist if we invent a definition for it in which it means something else.

Oh, then we really need to revisit some of the definitions that get thrown around these days, then. You sure you wanna do this?

Get into an intellectually dishonest argument with your moving goalposts? Since Peregrine gave a definition and you ignored it in favor of going back to the made-up one: No, I'm good, I've had enough of that.

My comment was intended for the other people in the thread who perhaps don't know what the concept of rape culture is, and who now perhaps will see that it's not defined the way it was presented in that post.

I don't think criticizing a game mechanic like points-buy list building (or its absence) is anything like or at all connected to the legitimacy of criticisms of a fantasy setting allegedly inspired by IRL ideologies. You can definitely have one without the other. And neither need be a case of extortion. Extortion comes in when someone threatens to (mis)represent a product in extremely polarizing, hyperbolic terms (generally unconnected to the product itself) in order cause a ruinous PR scandal, generally on the backs of the uninformed/misinformed.

"I don't like these mechanics and I will not buy this game," is not the sme thing as "I will ake sure everyone knows that this game excuses rape and the people who support it are creepy rapist-enablers if not also rapists themselves."

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Well this thread was ok while it lasted.

I thought the thread went how I thought it would go, and illustrates why there aren't a lot of female posters on Dakka.

 Ouze wrote:
Get into an intellectually dishonest argument with your moving goalposts? No, I'm good, I've had enough of that. My comment was intended for the other people in the thread who perhaps don't know what the concept of rape culture is, and who now perhaps will see that it's not defined the way it was presented in that post.

Well, at least you admit your arguments are intellectually dishonest. I've yet to see otherwise, at least.

Sorry, the US is not a 'rape culture'. "Rape culture is a sociological concept for a setting in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality." Well, we kind of genuinely hate rape and it's not a normal occurrance, and we tend to have harsh punishments for rapists (unless it's a female teacher molesting a child).

And most of the 'symptoms' of 'rape culture' like police asking what the girl was wearing? Yeah, kind of parts of building a case to investigate. Oh, and false accusations DO exist. As a matter of fact, quite a few rape cases are unfounded.

After all, you can just ruin someone's college education by saying they raped you without any evidence whatsoever.

 Manchu wrote:
Shut Up & Sit Down reviewed the new L5R LCG to the effect of 'clever game but too boring to finish.' Not great.

Fun Fact: One of the guys behind SU&SD is married to Leigh Alexander, writer of the "Gamers Are Dead" article that basically set off GamerGate, and Matt Lees is a beyond the pale male feminist ally that has authored some really terrible articles himself. I'd put them only slightly lower on the crazy scale than Sarkeesian. It's really amazing how incestuous new media really is...

Ben2 wrote:
I thought the thread went how I thought it would go, and illustrates why there aren't a lot of female posters on Dakka.

"Guys, come on, you'r running off all the hot girls that wanna play warhammer with me!"

Like, are you actually serious?

Ben2 wrote:
I thought the thread went how I thought it would go, and illustrates why there aren't a lot of female posters on Dakka.

I blame Peregrine too...

 Sqorgar wrote:
Fun Fact: One of the guys behind SU&SD is married to Leigh Alexander, writer of the "Gamers Are Dead" article that basically set off GamerGate, and Matt Lees is a beyond the pale male feminist ally that has authored some really terrible articles himself. I'd put them only slightly lower on the crazy scale than Sarkeesian. It's really amazing how incestuous new media really is...

Jesus Christ, that explains quite a bit.

And I wouldn't write Sarkeesian off as crazy. Just dishonest and a swindler. I don't even think she's crazy enough to believe what she says, she just knows there's people who are just crazy enough to eat it up.

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
Get into an intellectually dishonest argument with your moving goalposts? No, I'm good, I've had enough of that. My comment was intended for the other people in the thread who perhaps don't know what the concept of rape culture is, and who now perhaps will see that it's not defined the way it was presented in that post.

Well, at least you admit your arguments are intellectually dishonest. I've yet to see otherwise, at least.

Sorry, the US is not a 'rape culture'. "Rape culture is a sociological concept for a setting in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality." Well, we kind of genuinely hate rape and it's not a normal occurrance, and we tend to have harsh punishments for rapists (unless it's a female teacher molesting a child).

And most of the 'symptoms' of 'rape culture' like police asking what the girl was wearing?

So, again to reiterate, the reason I refuse to get into this with you is that we started with this definition:

xraytango wrote:
There is no such thing as "rape culture". Literally, there is no one saying that rape is a good thing and advocating it.

And now, 4 posts later, you've moved into a new, slightly more accurate definition without missing a beat while claiming I'm intellectually dishonest. Have fun with your Calvinball.

 Peregrine wrote:

xraytango wrote:
There is no such thing as "rape culture". Literally, there is no one saying that rape is a good thing and advocating it.

But that's not what "rape culture" means. Few people outside of the lunatic fringe are advocating rape, but a lot of people are making excuses for it. Look at how short her skirt was, boys will be boys, what did she expect coming up to his hotel room, it was just a miscommunication, etc. We expect the potential victims to be constantly paranoid about rape (don't go out alone, always watch your drinks, etc), and immediately jump to questioning all of their choices. And that's the best-case scenario, when they aren't just accusing rape victims of lying (despite evidence that false accusations are very rare). The end result is dismissing the severity of rape, looking for anyone to blame except the rapist.

No those are just excuses that bad people make to justify or lessen their responsibility. They are reprehensible and need education on the matter. But it still isn't a 'culture', no fair-minded individual makes excuses for rape. A crime is a crime, that's all there is to it.

One definition of culture is, "a system of operations, i.e. how things are done, or accepted means and standards". The standard for rape is, "don't do it" that is the standard of our society. Our culture does not endorse rape. Rape cannot be a culture to itself, no one is using rape as a standard method of operation.

There are, unfortunately, rapes; but there is no rape culture. It is a made up buzzword.

 Sqorgar wrote:
Fun Fact: One of the guys behind SU&SD is married to Leigh Alexander, writer of the "Gamers Are Dead" article that basically set off GamerGate, and Matt Lees is a beyond the pale male feminist ally that has authored some really terrible articles himself. I'd put them only slightly lower on the crazy scale than Sarkeesian. It's really amazing how incestuous new media really is...

Thanks, I didn't know that at all. After reading over/listening to about a dozen of his reviews I started to strongly suspect this wasn't just about games and decided to not read/listen to any more.

Ben2 wrote:
I thought the thread went how I thought it would go

It's not an accident that virtually every thread about Sisters of Battle turns into a trainwreck.

 Ouze wrote:
And now, 4 posts later, you've moved into a new, slightly more accurate definition without missing a beat while claiming I'm intellectually dishonest. Have fun with your Calvinball.

Except one of those posts isn't mine. I'll chalk that up to yet another honest mistake.

Yes, I'm aware of that. I didn't claim you said that. You followed that thread. This is how a discussion works.

it's only been half a page and generally that's a smooth read, so I'd rather not create giant quote pyramids just to accommodate the guy who super aggressively claimed racism didn't happen in a thread because he couldn't be bothered to read all of it.

xraytango wrote:
There are, unfortunately, rapes; but there is no rape culture. It is a made up buzzword.

You'll find it in very few places. In third world countries and very... I suppose you could say 'behind the times' cultural cesspits (not specifically 'cultures', but their own 'bad clusters'). It's there, but it's not something you're going to find in the FLGS.

The worst you'll ever see as far as anything even remotely relatable is, "Dude put down his Imperial Guard and just raped me by turn 2". Which, of course, I'll be the first to say isn't appropriate for a group setting. Talk any way you like in private, but you shouldn't throw that word around just as much as you should any other vulgarity.

 Manchu wrote:
So into this fragile time and in the context of a backhanded review we blunderinly inject a potential narrative explosion via an influenced with a relatuvely huge following. No one put a gun to Christian Petersen's head but the situation was clearly, this is not a hill we should die on. Esepcially since the hill was a molehill that could easily become a mountain.

But you can also look at it the other way around. FFG was in a delicate situation with a customer base wary of their beloved game's future. Why pick removing the chant as the hill to die on and accept a backlash from their existing customers? Why not take it as a cheap way of saying "STFU critics, we are loyal to our fans"? Sure, that gets more attention, but it's attention that tells an important part of the market that you are on their side.

 Ouze wrote:
It's not an accident that virtually every thread about Sisters of Battle turns into a trainwreck.

It becomes a trainwreck because some posters just can't handle the concept that sexy miniatures aren't sexist. Remove that one thing and the discussion would end with "let's agree to disagree". But because it is sexist, and thus immoral and dangerous to women, changing the character and design of the Sisters of Battle isn't just a preference, it is a God given duty!

 Ouze wrote:
it's only been half a page and generally that's a smooth read, so I'd rather not create giant quote pyramids just to accommodate the guy who super aggressively claimed racism didn't happen in a thread because he couldn't be bothered to read all of it.

Of course you missed the part where I asked if it actually happened, and then said "Nevermind, I see it" or something to that effect. But hey, I'm sure that was another one of your 'honest mistakes'. You really outta work on that, friend. Otherwise one might get the impression you're desperately trying to misrepresent someone. And try not to get too carried away with the name-calling, okay? It cheapens you.

 Manchu wrote:
I don't think criticizing a game mechanic like points-buy list building (or its absence) is anything like or at all connected to the legitimacy of criticisms of a fantasy setting allegedly inspired by IRL ideologies. You can definitely have one without the other. And neither need be a case of extortion. Extortion comes in when someone threatens to (mis)represent a product in extremely polarizing, hyperbolic terms (generally unconnected to the product itself) in order cause a ruinous PR scandal, generally on the backs of the uninformed/misinformed.

"I don't like these mechanics and I will not buy this game," is not the sme thing as "I will ake sure everyone knows that this game excuses rape and the people who support it are creepy rapist-enablers if not also rapists themselves."

But hyperbole is exactly the sort of thing that happens with game mechanics. Yeah, there was calm and rational criticism, but there was also a whole lot of hyperbolic outrage (remember the guy burning his WHFB army?). Granted, it may have been less hyperbolic because AoS was genuinely a terrible game and there's less room for hyperbole than there would be with a game that is merely mediocre, but there sure was a lot of polarizing discussion going on and a very divided community. So why is it acceptable to do that over one thing but not over a different thing?

Discussion about "rape culture" itself is best left to the OT Forum and most likely some other forum altogether.

The only relevance here is that it is sometimes evoked to criticize game products. Without at all speaking to the concept itself, I can say that it isn't always and by necessity a completely baseless accusation (again, F.A.T.A.L. comes to mind) but the specific example was a blogger who fully admitted to ignornace about a game, its genre, its references, and its context making that particular accusation and being rebroadcast by sympathetic media to the point of Kickstarter unilaterally pulling the plug on a successfully funded game its own editors had marketed as a "project We Love" or whatever the label was in those days.

 Sqorgar wrote:
It becomes a trainwreck because some posters just can't handle the concept that sexy miniatures aren't sexist. Remove that one thing and the discussion would end with "let's agree to disagree". But because it is sexist, and thus immoral and dangerous to women, changing the character and design of the Sisters of Battle isn't just a preference, it is a God given duty!

Ding-ding-ding.

Really, most people on the rational side are pretty excited to see them come back. I know, honestly, two things: I want people to shut the hell up asking about them in literally every comment section even remotely related to 40k on the internet, and two... oh, man the old ones are so ugly. A guy I know plays them and those girls have been knocked around in a plastic box and repainted and stripped more times than I can count. Please get that boy some new toys...

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
Well, we kind of genuinely hate rape

Only because we define "rape" as "a stranger jumps out of the bushes and drags a victim (preferably young, white, attractive, and a pious virgin) off by force and rapes them as they scream NO as loudly as possible" and insist that things like getting someone drunk and having sex with them while they are unable to consent are just "regretting it the morning after" and not really rape.

And most of the 'symptoms' of 'rape culture' like police asking what the girl was wearing? Yeah, kind of parts of building a case to investigate.

WTF no. Bringing it up in court, with the implication that wearing something "too sexy" is a sign that a woman is consenting to sex, is not a legitimate part of building up an investigation to send a criminal to jail. I mean, this should be pretty obvious from the fact that this question is commonly raised by the defense lawyer, not by the police.

Oh, and false accusations DO exist. As a matter of fact, quite a few rape cases are unfounded.

The actual statistics on this disagree with you. False accusations exist, but they are rare.

 Peregrine wrote:
...AoS was genuinely a terrible game...

I have literally never seen you post anything that wasn't factually untrue, incendiary, or abusive in all the time I've been here... and that's still the case. If I ever become unstuck in time, you will be my rock by which I navigate the multiverse and return home.

TBF I don't think burning your toys is a legitimate criticism. I figured the guy in question was either deranged or angling for clicks/subscriptions/attention. Wait, those things aren't mutually exclusive.

But extortion? No, I don't think so. That was not a credible attempt to disgrace GW by leveraging minstream ignorance/self-righteousness.

 Sqorgar wrote:
It becomes a trainwreck because some posters just can't handle the concept that sexy miniatures aren't sexist.

Because it's almost inevitably a concept that doesn't exist in the real world. Yes, in some hypothetical porn game where everyone, male or female or not human at all or whatever, is sexy and the game is all about sex having sexy miniatures wouldn't be sexist. But in the real world we're inevitably talking about bikini outfits in a game where the men are wearing practical clothes, and the obvious intent is to make sexy women for the enjoyment of male customers. It presents the sexist message that men are the relevant characters, and women are there as decorative objects.

I suspect FFG didn't double down on the banzai chant because they only knew enough about it to try it at GenCon to emphasize continuity to holdover players and it wasn't actually the key to those players' hearts or anything. Listening to long time L5R CCG players talk about it, a few love it as a custom and tradition. Many more are ambivalent to yelling something in public because a lot of gamers are shy and don't like calling attention to themselves.

In essence, it's a lot easier to just pull the plug on that old custom then explain to people arguing in bad faith or, in the case of people arguing in good faith, from ignorance and disinterest about something as complex as cultural sensitivity at the intersection of history and fanatsy,

 Sqorgar wrote:
I have literally never seen you post anything that wasn't factually untrue, incendiary, or abusive in all the time I've been here... and that's still the case. If I ever become unstuck in time, you will be my rock by which I navigate the multiverse and return home.

I love you too.

And AoS was a terrible game on release. It was utterly broken and unplayable. Even setting aside the missing point system (which reduced a game of AoS to "whoever spends the most money on GW products wins") GW couldn't even bother to notice and fix issues like models on flying bases being immune to being charged because you had to get into model to model contact (ignoring the bases). There's a good reason why AoS nearly killed GW's fantasy line, and required a desperate second edition in all but name release (which reversed GW's design decisions) to be rushed out before it was too late. Now it's less terrible, but only because GW changed the worst of its flaws and conceded that the criticism was accurate.

Back on topic again, criticizing the mechanics of AoS (or similar) is probably not what we will see from Ms. Sarkeesian's participation at GenCon.

 Manchu wrote:
I suspect FFG didn't double down on the banzai chant because they only knew enough about it to try it at GenCon to emphasize continuity to holdover players and it wasn't actually the key to those players' hearts or anything. Listening to long time L5R CCG players talk about it, a few love it as a custom and tradition. Many more are ambivalent to yelling something in public because a lot of gamers a shy and don't like calling attention to themselves.

And that's the real root of the issue. This wasn't a beloved tradition that FFG abandoned, a devastating injury to the community and triumph of extortion over product quality, it was a case of a game publisher dumping something of marginal value and most of their customers being happy to see it go. TBH I wouldn't be surprised if FFG was already kind of wary of the whole thing because of how awkward it was and secretly glad to have an excuse to get rid of it. As an example of the power of "extortion" it's a pretty weak one.

It's kind of like GW stores and the anecdotes about yelling WAAAAAAAAGH. I don't particularly care what motivates GW to dump the idea, or what ideological group wants to claim credit, as long as it is gone.

I agree it wan't a universally beloved tradition. But it was a tradition. It was something practiced to create a sense of unity and participation. It was successful for some and a non-issue for others. But it had never been a justification of 20th-century Japanese war crimes until one looney racist demanded that it was and a bumbling reviewer misunderstood this and rebroadcast it as an issue of cultural insensitivity. That is what killed it, not shy people who would prefer to avoid yelling in public.

By the bye, it was actually an example of how vulnerable even larger publishers are to bizarro claims deployed by a tiny (in this case, two) number of individuals. I don't think, SU&SD was trying to extort FFG a la the blogger/Tentacle Bento debacle.