Our old friend over at the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog is angry again. This time he’s mad at a legitimate target: National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre. But not because LaPierre is the head of an organization that has stood athwart every attempt at sensible gun control, making tragedies like the one in Newtown an all-too-predictable side effect of the easy availability of semiautomatic weaponry.
No, Mr. Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Tech is made at LaPierre because he thinks the NRA big gun has turned into a feminist. No, really. Noting that in the wake of the Newtown shootings LaPierre launched a transparently opportunistic attack on violent video games, Mr. PMAFT accuses him of doing the work of the grand feminist conspiracy against men and manhood:
The most important reason why LaPierre is wrong is because what he is doing is feminist. Video games are an activity predominately enjoyed by men. So are guns. Both activities are under attack from feminists (just like other predominately male activities like science fiction are) because men are interested in them and women are mostly not interested in them. LaPierre is shooting himself in the foot (pun intended) by alienating allies among the video game community and helping out feminists in their war on male activities.
Never mind that nearly half – 47% — of those playing video games these days are girls and women, according to the Entertainment Software Association. (I await the inevitable comment from a troll telling us all that whatever games these women are playing just don’t count because blah and blah.)
What LaPierre should have done is form an alliance with the video game community. While the Newtown shootings are being used against gun owners right now, the next target will be video games and other mostly male interests and activities. Both the video game community and the gun community are fighting the same enemy, feminism. They should be working together to point out facts like how the Newtown shooter was raised by a single mother and how homes where the father is kicked out lead to more violence.
Never mind that the shooter — like virtually all mass shooters — was a dude; a woman is always to blame.
The NRA is in a position of weakness now because they are attacking video games and not the real causes of the Newtown tragedy, single motherhood and feminism. The NRA is in the same boat as the Republican Party where it needs to become an explicitly anti-feminist and pro-mens rights organization to survive. (Lots of conservative and right wing organizations are in this situation.) Guns aren’t the problem here, but neither are video games. The NRA needs to realize this and realize that its only way forward is by fighting feminism. Anything else leads the NRA to irrelevance.
So one of the most powerful lobbies in American politics needs to team up with a Men’s Rights “movement” that can’t organize a single event that draws a crowd bigger than 8 people, or else it will fade into irrelevance?
I dearly hope the NRA fades into obscurity, and I am hopeful that public opinion about guns is beginning finally to shift in the right direction, but I’m not sure the NRA needs any pointers from MRAs on political relevance.
@katz
Yes and no. They are trying to get something better, but a lot of times that means they produce the same old crap. The idea (which very few if any games have really managed to do) is to have the educational material blend seamlessly.
Let me put it this way, in any videogame, you actually learn a lot and, if the game and tutorial are done well, you learn everything you need to know without a manual. Ideally, in addition to learning how to move and jump and punch and developing those skills over the course of the game, you could also learn a math or language or science concept that progresses in difficulty as you advance in level. James Paul Gee is a big name if you want more than my simplified summary.
And a bonbon dispenser. Perhaps a tiny cupcake stall could be arranged.
Plenty of scented fucking candles, obviously.
Given the amount of music fans we’d probably have a turntable and a bunch of exciting records. I’m all about the .mp3’s myself but this is all about making digital tangible, right?
@Clairedammit
That’s a good one!
Some of sort of kitchen and well-stocked bar/cafe given all the food and drink talk.
*Some sort of
“No! That’s not true! That’s impossible!”
I’d love to write out The Wedding of River Song, seriously, it’s like an inverse Lost Boys. Lost Boys goes well until the last ten min, that episode is only good for about the last 10 min. And OMGS don’t get me started on the Stormageddon thing, so many of the last 2.5 seasons have had promise and then fizzled out (I do not like 11, nor his writers)
Two main rooms, one for derail/forum content, and one for David’s ever-changing misogyny display, for mocking purposes. Derail room would have the bar bit and and a sign saying “Welcome To The Friendzone!”
I think we’d need a special music corner for the music nerds to sit in so that we don’t annoy everyone else.
Speaking of, from the Uncyclopedia page for Dimmu Bordir (had to do something else while avoiding the troll of tedium).
@kiki
I think we are using different definitions of narrative. The way I am using narrative is that it refers to everything that isn’t play mechanics. So, if you are playing a character that looks female, that is narrative. If you are playing with a certain weapon, that is narrative. That all matters in terms of making a game you like. The mechanics are important, too, but many games have virtually identical mechanics. Players choose between them because the particular narrative elements appeal.
Ludology is a branch of videogame study that is only concerned with play mechanics and thinks the narrative an added, but ultimately unimportant factor. What matters is the buttons you are required to press and what the character does in response (hence the definition I initially used for videogames). I find that field rather dumb, but it is incredibly influential. Another defintion is of a game plus a movie, and there certainly are games where that is a decent description. Another definition posited is any game played on a specific level of technological equipment. So, chess on a PC is a videogame just like The Sims. It is why I think anyone who wants to argue that games played predominately by women don’t count hasn’t given the topic much thought beyond their fear of cooties.
There is a lot of theory that focuses on the playspace that you find so fascinating. If you are interested, I can look up the name of a guy who focuses on FPS environments and the HUD. Really cool (and a totally fun guy to hang out with).
Y’all missed the obvious. Feminists ruined scented fucking candles.
From a few pages back:
That women are horrible sluts who should keep our legs shut until we get married to a man in a Christian church and then stay in the marriage and be perfect forever so he won’t leave us, and also be as white as possible. The racism also comes in with the institutionalized assumption that black and Latina women are inherently more sexual than white women (while Asian women are not sexual in the same way, but more desirable for being passive), which is why black and Latina women are all single mothers with a bunch of baby daddies, etc. Nobody uses a wealthy or middle-class white single mother as an object lesson, only the poor whites and non-white single moms.
It’s all about controlling women. Always has been, always will be. For both MRAs and the right-wing. (I’m preaching to the choir here, I know.)
Science fiction is still very heavily gendered, by the producers/editors/gatekeepers, to be only of interest to men. Women are still very much treated as outliers and no matter how many times the data is gathered, producers especially (film & tv) simply do not accept that women like scifi. They continue to insist their only audience is young white dudes and thus everything has to be tailored to them. (I’m so glaring in the direction of the Stargate producers right now…)
I volunteer to make the scented fucking candles!
I think the Man Boobz house (or castle … let’s go for broke!) would have lots of music rooms for people to use, soundproofed so nobody’s disturbed outside. Lots of private areas or little rooms and lots of big ones for general hanging out.
And totally yes to lowquacks’s suggestion of a well-supplied kitchen. Goes without saying.
And a drinks cabinet, obviously. Probably quite a few drinks cabinets. 😉
It’d also need hi-tech self-emptying self-deodourising kitty litter trays.
@The Kitteh’s Unpaid Help
Wouldn’t we make the men do it?
The WHITE men! 😀
That is how it is done at my house. 😀
Also, we’d need some music practice rooms. I could bring my digital piano and maybe Argenti and I could work up something beautiful to play for you.
Don’t forget — we need a flag with a fringe on it, to keep Owly at bay.
That does seem to be defining narrative broadly to the point of meaninglessness. Art, for instance, isn’t narrative (you could tell the exact same story with a different art style); same for voice acting. Surely narrative is just the story that the game is telling?
“Also, we’d need some music practice rooms. I could bring my digital piano and maybe Argenti and I could work up something beautiful to play for you.”
Preferably something that doesn’t need me to hit notes much above C6!
Pecunium plays too, and Whataboutthemoonz implied ze does too. We could get a regular little group going!
Concerts! YES!
Fringed flags? Is that a bit of Owly weirdness I missed?
Kitteh, it has to do with the so-called “sovereign citizen” movement, which I had to have explained to me right here.
I’m cooking farro for dinner tonight for the first time, and since I am often kind of bad at cooking grains I will need good luck. Wish me some! 😉
Sovereign citizens!
Wasn’t that Peter Andrew Nolan (c) though? I though NWO just really sounded like them but didn’t go full fledge “the courtroom is a ship” about things?
Kitteh — apparently flags have fringe like on ships and thus admiralty law applies, and I doubt they’d board a ship that David was captain of, literal or figurative ship. They’re weird, to day the least.
Okay, I need to ask my boss if he knows anything about fringed flags … we sell the damn things for boats and I’ve never seen one with a fringe on it!
Perhaps we just need to put fringes on everything in Castle Manboobz, just to be sure.
Okay, a quick look on Wiki says the use of gold fringe on the US flag is decoration, nothing more, nothing less.
Good ol’ Owly, trust him to fall in with such excessively stupid conspiracy-theory paranoia.
I now has a yen to dance around in a USA swimsuit with gold fringes, just to upset him.
Good luck, cloudiah!