This may be old news to gamers, but a reader just brought it to my attention:
Capcom and IGN recently put on a little online gaming “reality” show called Capcom’s Cross Assault, based on the game Street Fighter x Tekken. The show, like the game, pits a team of Street Fighter players against a Tekken team.
During a live stream of the ongoing battle on day five of the tournament, Twitch.tv community manager Jared Rea made a few remarks criticizing the assholish, and often misogynistic, comments of some of the fighters.
Here’s how the Penny Arcade Report summarized what followed. (I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting several particularly egregious comments in bold.)
“This is Aris,” a voice said on the feed. “If you don’t like onions, you get your sandwich without onions on it, man. This is the fighting game community.” He then stated that sexual harassment and the fighting game community are “one and the same thing.”
The voice belonged to Aris Bakhtanians, the coach of the Tekken team.
“The sexual harassment is part of the culture. If you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community… it doesn’t make sense to have that attitude. These things have been established for years,” Aris stated. He then noted that making sexual jokes at StarCraft players would be inappropriate, so it’s unfair for anyone to tell fighting game fans they can’t viciously mock women. …
“That’s what you’re trying to do to the fighting game community and it’s not right,” Aris continued. “It’s ethically wrong.” This may be the first time in the history of video games that someone had said that removing sexual harassment is ethically unjust.
Later in the, er, discussion, after someone brought up the harassment of a guy playing a female character (“someone yelling the world “bitch” over and over … and then scream[ing] for her rape when she lost”) Aris responded with this:
“What is unacceptable about that?” Aris asked. “There is nothing unacceptable about that. We’re in America! This isn’t North Korea! We can say what we want.”
You can listen to the whole discussion on this video; it starts, with Rea’s comments, at about one hour forty-five minutes in. (Aris starts commenting about two minutes later.)
Many more appalling details in the PA report post.
Oh, gaming community! Get it the fuck together.
LBT, I speak for men everywhere when I say that I do not appreciate my organ being reduced to an insult.
Speaking as a man, I don’t give a fuck if you reduce IR’s organ to an insult.
The Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres were misanthropic. Marc Lepine’s and George Sodini’s massacres were misogynistic. Why should one type of hatred be elevated in seriousness above the other? Don’t both lead to tragedy?
Into the kinky stuff, eh?
The previous comment was directed @kinky kiki
Ugh, the video. See, this is why I go out of my way to avoid geek-centric environments even if they center on things that I am interested in, like sci-fi. Too many of the men you run into are basically Fratboy 2.0 – The Passive-Aggressive Version.
Um… wot?
Reminds me of an exchange from an old comic book:
– “No offence intended.”
– “None comprehended!”
It reminds me of a discussion I had about the sexual objectification in professional wrestling. There again, the claim was, “If you take away the sexual objectification, you take away the wrestling! The sexual objectification is part of what makes it so great! If you took away the sexual objectifaction, it would be like selling tofu at the deli! (actual argument)” So now sexual harassment is what makes gaming great. What next? Sexual assault is what makes the comic book fandom great?
Whoa, Roscoe totally smacked down David’s post about “Columbine and Virginia Tech: No Big Deal Really.”
Maybe misanthropy and misogyny are both bad, did I just blow your mind?
One almost never causes problems, the other causes problems daily. Only one of these actually is a serious problem, so yes, it should be elevated in seriousness relatively.
I’m sure somewhere in the world, someone has died by a rampaging moose, but rampaging moose are not a very serious problem compared to traffic accidents
Well, there are lots of racists out there, but I have never seen an example of a significant portion of any society adopting misanthropy and offing themselves. And the distinction between “politically correct” misanthropy and “politically incorrect” misanthropy is meaningless, because misanthropy means a hatred of humanity as a whole. Racism and misogyny are just that– racism and misogyny.
Roscoe, I’m sure there are lots of things you don’t understand, such as how not to rape someone.
IR/FF, get off your opulent Aryan horse.
P.S. No gaming threads without the XBox girls!
I prefer my organ happy.
Speaking as another man, I also don’t give a fuck if you reduce preggo punchout’s organ to an insult.
*waits patiently for accusation of being kinky*
Well no of course not. When men are called names for their actions its srz biz but when women are called names just for being a woman thats ok because its all in “good fun” and being against it is restricting freedom of speech!
As a female “gamer” I tried (I really did!) to play online. First, I tried with voice-chatting. I have nothing against people having fun and there being some competative talk… But I was quickly ganged up on in a free-for-all game because I am a woman, and the comments got severely out of hand. So I tried to play without participating in voice chatting. Other players checked my profile and found out I was a female and I got a lot of shit again. So I just don’t play online anymore.
And then I often hear men saying that women just DON’T play “real” games online. That that’s not something women do, and it’s not true. We just stay away because people are assholes.
“Dick” is misandrist, you guise. Say “asshole” because almost everybody has one. That way, it’s acceptable, i.e. misanthropic.
RE: IR
I’m a man too, but that’s fair. I’ll change it to ‘douche.’ Acting like a douche to people is douchey. Better?
As soon as “dick” is used as an insult to imply that men are incapable of X or should get out of X or is used as a general term to chase away men from something then I’ll fight against it as misandry.
As long as MRAs bemoan the use of the word “dick” because it totally means “man” since men have dicks I’ll just point and laugh and call them dicks. 🙂
On topic, I am quite happy to not be part of certain gaming communities. Remember that story a while back where a group decided that the best way to stop the harassment of female gamers was to ban female gamers? Yeah…
It’s not that women don’t play video games, its that certain communities are dead-set on ensuring that women don’t play video games.
And I completely missed lexiedi’s future-prediction ninja. ^_^
It’s not that women don’t play video games, its that certain communities are dead-set on ensuring that women don’t play video games.
It’s a conspiracy, I tells ya! Heh, all of the jackasses here trying to pretend they’re above us humans.
@Roscoe
Yeah except last time I checked there is no movement that embodies a misanthropic message that has harmed people, while there is a movement that embodies a of misogynistic one (the MRM) and it was misogynistic ideals that kept women below men up until recently. There’s also a difference between targeting people and targeting a specific group of people, especially when that group was historically oppressed and considered less of a human being. Do you not remember the media frenzy and outrage over Columbine? I remember it like it was yesterday. Their crime was not one out of simple misanthropy. They were bullied and one was a suspected psychopath.
I wonder why misogynists always try to gloss over misogyny? maybe so it’s easier to not be called out on your shit? or maybe you brush off Lepine because his suicide note practically sounds like it was ripped off the manosphere word for word. Of course it’s not in your best interest to acknowledge that. Don’t think others wont though.
@IR:
Well, I can float for an absurdly long time with all my secondary jumps.
Roscoe seems like the type of dude that would say “why are there HATE crimes and not just regular crimes!”