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| Cats: Not hardcore gamers. |
On MGTOWforums.com, the central questions about women and gaming aren’t “what do women want, game-wise” or “is there something about certain types of games that repels women, or do they stay away because it gets really tiresome really quickly to have to listen to 14-year-old boys calling them “cunts” on XboxLive?” No, to the MGTOWers the big question is simpler: Why are women allowed to play video games at all?
Why can’t men have their own space? …
Women, back the fuck off. You stole our TV. You stole our movies. You stole our malls. You stole our clothe shops. You stole our supermarkets Meanwhile the gays are stealing our gyms, our theater, our dance, our music. Video-games is all we have left.
I don’t hear this bitch [note: a commenter on CNET] complaining about the lack of inclusiveness of games like bejeweled to men (I’ve played bejeweled maybe 10 minutes in my life, fun for about that length of time or when you are sitting on the bus). …
Companies like Zynga want to make casual games to target the hundreds of millions of girls on facebook. Fine! … Why not push to make casual games more “male-friendly”, you bitch? Farm-ville and City-ville could use some thought. Those games suck. They are clearly designed for the modern day brainless airhead bimbo with too much time on her hands.
The only casual game I’ve ever sucked dry was Plants Vs. Zombies. And if you aim to finish everything it becomes really hardcore in the survival levels.
1) Women identify with their gender too much. It seems that taking control of a male avatar is a problem for most of them. They cannot identify. I can identify with almost all avatars today. Male, female, adult, child, alien etc…
2) Females have less interesting personalities in real life, and therefore in fiction. There is a reason fiction involves men going through challenges and being transformed by them. In video games the two female archetypes are: the princess and the “you go grrl”. Women in real life have less dimension. They aren’t interesting. They bitch or they submit. That’s it. And I don’t care to hear some loud mouthed bitch barking orders at me through an ear piece. It’s unpleasant. If I’m in a war simulator I like hearing men talk. They usually have unique personalities, accents, character traits etc… When female characters do this they come off as pretending to be men and it doesn’t work.
Bitches like the one above form groups funded by donations to artificially fuck with the market. Men’s money today goes overwhelmingly towards good video-games. Let the market decide what women get. Bitch!
>Wait, I didn't realize that a single person could confirm a stereotype. Does that mean that all the negative stereotypes about women can be confirmed with a single example too?
>Commenter Nightstorm says that video games are the last refuge of "us men".Sounds distinctly like an evolutionary cul de sac to me.
>No, to the MGTOWers the big question is simpler: Why are women allowed to play video games at all? This is an excellent question. But really, why are we "bitches" allowed to do anything that doesn't involve sucking dick or making dinner?I don't see how female characters having different accents and personalities mean they're "pretending to be men," but I'm sure that's just my dumb ladybrain failing me again.
>Cold, editing error on my part. Fixed.
>Women make up 40% of console gamers (ESA, Nielsan, and other major sources on this present comparable data). Which means that women are a higher percentage of gamers than congresspeople, university professors, CEOs, and many other professions. If video games are the last "bastion of manliness", they have lost that war. Shoot, if we assume that at least part of the male gamers are manginas like David, then "free market" dictates all games be directed towards women. Hear, hear!
>Thanks for fixing it.FWIW I have no problem with women playing video games as long as they express any objections they have to the content of games the mature way by not buying said game instead of demanding that games be censored or banned. The Phoenix Wright cosplay events I attend would also be kind of weird if it was all men and the female characters had to be played by guys in drag.
>Hilarious. "God, all these women invading our spaces! We didn't build civilization for them!"
>Wait, supermarkets used to be men only? And women started going there, so men couldn't? The things MRAs teach me! Thanks, MRA dudez!
>FWIW I have no problem with women playing video games as long as they express any objections they have to the content of games the mature way by not buying said game instead of demanding that games be censored or banned.This isn't a woman thing. As you probably know, one of the most vocal proponents for video game censorship is (or perhaps was) Jack Thompson.
>FWIW I have no problem with women playing video gamesgosh, Cold, that's so magnanimous of you. if only more men could be so open to women doing man things as long as we behave appropriately!meanwhile, i bet our friend AC101202 has appeared (or will appear!) at Fat, Ugly or Slutty.
>There is a difference between censorship and expressing a negative opinion/asking someone not to do something. Censorship involves an authority in power prohibiting something (the FCC, for example), not a consumer complaining on their blog. So, if I complain that GTA is sexist, that is not censorship. If I were to write a letter to the company telling them I was no longer buying their products because of it, that would not be censorship either. Now, trying to pass a law to ban certain games, that would be an attempt to censor. There has, in fact, been scarcely little of that, and basically none from women gamers. I can think of one big issue of intentional censorship by console makers which truly occured. The big console makers in the US used to prohibit games on the US market on their consoles from having queer sexuality or openly queer characters. A number of characters who were queer or trans in the original Japanese games were made cis heteros for the American market. When Sony and Nintendo ban sexism or violence from their game on their systems, you can get back to me on this one, cold.
>Now, trying to pass a law to ban certain games, that would be an attempt to censor. There has, in fact, been scarcely little of that, and basically none from women gamers.There was this big brouhaha back in 2009. Some idiot tried selling pirated and badly translated copies of a very dumb Japanese game on Amazon Marketplace, and feminist groups went ballistic. They couldn't even be bothered to do any research and initially claimed that Amazon itself was directly selling the game. Then they pushed for the game to be banned in Japan itself, which caused a Streisand effect and resulted in the online torrent for the game getting thousands of seeders and tens of thousands of downloads.Granted that Equality Now isn't an organization of female gamers, but there were a lot of female gamers supporting their actions. In fairness, there were also a few who opposed that censorship and even a few who admitted to playing and enjoying the game, but they were the minority.The big console makers in the US used to prohibit games on the US market on their consoles from having queer sexuality or openly queer characters. A number of characters who were queer or trans in the original Japanese games were made cis heteros for the American market.If you're referring to Nintendo of America's pre-1995 censorship policies, that applied to sexuality of all sorts, not just homosexuality. As for Sony, I distinctly remember an obviously gay character named Mukki in Final Fantasy 7, and the PlayStation had only been out for 2 years when that game was released.
>A number of characters who were queer or trans in the original Japanese games were made cis heteros for the American market.Ah, poor Birdo. He couldn't be himself when he came to America. :(This isn't technically censorship, but I found Bioware's approach to sexuality offensive, but I respect them a lot more now because they actually did something about it. In Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, the PC had two romance options – one always depended on the gender of the PC (the love interest would be the opposite gender), and the other was always a woman. So basically your options were a straight relationship, or a lesbian one. The blatant pandering to the young male demographic is terrible. I mean it would be good to have a lesbian romance option, except that they deliberately left out a gay male option, so clearly they only put the lesbian option in there because their target demographic would find it hot.That bothered me about BioWare, but in Jade Empire and Dragon Age, they allow for hetero relationships, gay male relationships, and gay female relationships. I was glad they finally addressed the heteronormativity in their games without implying that lesbians only exist to give dudes boners.
>gosh, Cold, that's so magnanimous of you. if only more men could be so open to women doing man things as long as we behave appropriately!Yes, because asking you to simply not buy titles you don't like instead of petitioning to have them banned/censored/restricted is such a tall order. I ask the same of men, but in my experience male gamers are already extremely anti-censorship and men in general are less likely to try to silence ideas they don't like. The blogosphere alone is ample proof of that.
>Speaking as a developer of console game titles, I suspect ACnumber might be horrified by the number of women actually working on action titles. And no, not just in the art discipline but in code and gameplay design.
>Well I'd have to agree that the petition is a little dumb. Wouldn't it make more sense to petition Gearbox to remove the ass-slapping from the game? Not that I'd expect such a petition to work, but it at least points the finger at the ones responsible instead of asking retailers to police our purchasing choices for us, which is a notion I've long been opposed to.and men in general are less likely to try to silence ideas they don't likeNot that any of the above gets you off the hook for making monumentally disingenuous statements like this.
>Cold-I am fairly sure that the reason they fought to get it banned had to do with the fact that it lets the player rape a little girl, her sister and mother repeatedly, force them to get abortions and otherwise do incredibly disgusting violations. Source
>You know. most people would say that 2 examples in two years would count as scarcely any.
>And, yeah, what Elizabeth said. Also, the Duke Nukem capture-the-babe-and-slap-her deal is pretty bad. I suspect that putting that in there was partly a publicity stunt on the part of the game makers. Offend women and sell games! Wonderful.
>Offend women and sell games! Wonderful.Yeah, Duke Nukem is supposed to be a paragon of masculinity, and unfortunately in our culture that means that if it makes those nagging women scold you, it must be DOUBLY manly!I mean the defenses of the Captube the Babe tripe are predictable – it's all in fun, it's just a gentle slap on the ass, it's a joke, etc. But they're disingenuous. When you put this in the context of the way that video games so often portray women, it's not a step in the right direction at all. There are already plenty of games where the PC is supposed to escort a female character and protect her. In many cases (not all, but many) she's completely useless and incapable of protecting herself. Resident Evil 4 is a major example. So now, let's just not even bother escorting her! Let's just hoist her over our shoulder and carry her, and if she protests, smack her on the ass to remind her where her value lies!So yes, it's offensive and sexist. Should it be banned? No. Does it reflect incredibly poorly on Gearbox? Yes.
>This actually popped up in the blogosphere the other day – a poster on the BioWare forum was bitching that Dragon Age 2 had neglected the Straight Male Gamer by writing in romances for women and non-heteronormative players. David Gaider, the lead writer for the Dragon Age franchise, actually got on the forum and told the Straight Male Gamer to STFU and that the way to cater to one demographic is not by taking choices away from others. David Gaider is my new hero, you can read about it here: http://www.nomorelost.org/2011/03/25/straight-male-gamer-told-to-get-over-it-by-bioware/And since when are video games 'men's domain?' When did all the stores selling men's shoes and clothing disappear from the malls? When did men start being prevented from buying groceries? Women are half the population, and sharia law hasn't taken effect yet to sequester us away – we have as much right to enjoy movies and video games as any man does.If a woman is playing and enjoying Halo or Duke Nukem, that doesn't reduce a man's ability to enjoy the game. And if it does, somehow, the problem is with the man, not the woman. If you don't like CityVille or FarmVille or Bejeweled, just do what I do – don't play them, and block Zynga updates on your Facebook feed. It's not up to a few men to summarily declare that women (or anyone) aren't allowed to have fun with FarmVille. It's not like these games were planned with 'Annoy these guys' in mind. Also, in Dragon Age: Origins, I thought that Wynne, Shale, Leilianna and Morrigan were way more interesting and well developed than, say, Sten.
>I personally happen to despise farmville, so I don't play it. I also don't like video games at all. In fact there are certain games which I find abhorrant (there is one for the wii that has the player strangle people to death and since it's the wii you are actually having to make the strangling movement, that frightens me) I am not however asking for these games to be banned, but I will write to the producers of games like this and express my displeasure with their entire team for coming up with something so awful.
>@cold, the link you give is a signature list asking walmart not to sell certain games, not a petition to change the law. People have a right to ask the businesses at which they shop not to carry certain things. If you do not like the selection at Walmart (which is notorious, btw, for only selling edited music), you should shop elsewhere, under your own logic. Also, if you think Walmart has less social power than change.org, please share your excellent drugs with the rest of us.
>and another textbook formulaic post from manboobz.step 1quote mine for hours on MRA forumsstep 2 find a few quotes that touch on an issue that easily lends itself to your bland and redundant attempts at anti-misogynist sarcasm.step 3saturate your post with enough circle talking "humor" so that the actual issue at hand is never actually addressed, whilst ensuring the mindless drones in your echo chamber of a blog get to co-sign you ad infinitumthe result. you attempt to make fun of those that would imply that men are better suited towards mastering complex highly competitive video games, such as halo reach, without ever actually confronting the reality that the best gamers, the ones with the most ability and talent are and always have been men.just more patriarchy in action i guess
>I like that the guy's complaint #1 is that women "identify with their own gender too much," and his complaint #2 is that he's only comfortable when completely surrounded with players and characters of his own gender, to the point that even hearing a female voice ruins the whole game for him.Also:They bitch or they submit.There it is, the distilled essence of every MRA/MGTOW post ever made. You can shut Manboobz down now.