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.
Word to all the Donna love. (Although I also love me some Martha, I just make myself forget her unrequited- nope, I don’t remember anything to dislike about Martha.)
all videogames operate on the same push a button, get a treat in your brain principle
I think this is what Dan Dennett would call a deepity. To the extent that it’s true, it’s no more meaningful than saying that all music operates on the ‘hear a sequence of tones, get a treat in your brain’ principle, or that all sport operates on the ‘perform a physical activity, get a treat in your brain’ principle – the fact that the human brain enjoys being entertained is no big shocker.
As an accurate description of the processes involved in ‘all’ video games, on the other hand, it’s so simplistic as to be completely false. I, for example, have never played any Farmville/WoW-type games; if I wanted to click on icons and do basic maths, I’d turn off the Xbox and do some work. I’ve just been playing Tekken (a martial-artsy game for thse who didn’t know – sorry for the mansplainin’) against other players online, and you do not get the ‘rewards’ from simply ‘pushing a button’; you get them from out-thinking your opponent, from bluffing and double-bluffing, from improvising approaches that your opponent hasn’t thought of and from adapting to approaches that you haven’t encountered before, just as you would in chess, poker or any other brain-based competitive game.
On the topic… Does everyone hate Rose with all her simpering uselessness as much as I do?
“Push a button, get a reward.” This guy has clearly never played Dark Souls. It’s probably too hard for him, the manly man who loves video games for manly men, because he is a total man.
Yeah, I really only love Rose as the Bad Wolf, other than that, Martha please! Amy was even more useless though, Rose at least got the Doctor to answer useful questions, but maybe this is more a complaint about 11.
I like Rose. I’ve liked all of the companions, although not that crazy about Amy and Rory.
“I know I should be more offended that single mothers are being blamed for horrible tragedies (their lives are nightmare mode), but it just irks me so much when people equate a hobby of mine (video games) with horrible stuff like MRAs and Second amendment fundamentalists.”
It’s the divide-and-conquer tactic of banal evil.
“Single moms, not to blame. Why does no one ever talk about the men who made them single mothers?”
Same reason there’s a reddit thread going around right now about “Why are these raped whiners in Dheli getting all the attention when far more men are victims of violence in India?” while completely ignoring that the majority of violent crimes are committed by men.
And to be fair, the reason I’m a single mom right now is because his dad was the single dad for awhile -by mutual agreement- and now it’s my turn to parent our kid -by mutual agreement. But yes, the statistics prove repeatedly that far more single parents are female because they end up being the begat-upon while the fathers run off whining how their lives are being ruined. Or that the whore was lying and it was some other poor sap’s kid.
Parts of reddit are the online version of a cesspool.
“I got my ass handed to me at Wii Sports fencing by a 5-year-old girl, but I’m sure that doesn’t count as a “real” game.”
Wow, she sounds a bit young to be a Game of Thrones fan O_O
“But yes, the statistics prove repeatedly that far more single parents are female because they end up being the begat-upon while the fathers run off whining how their lives are being ruined. Or that the whore was lying and it was some other poor sap’s kid.”
Or the even mor common “he’s in jail” option (thank you racist and classist prison system, go ahead and create more single mothers and just continue that cycle…can you tell I hate the American prison system?)
And I think my favoritest companion was Wilf actually. 11 should really pop in to tell him he’s fine, considering how they parted ways.
@kiki
It is the neuroscience look at what is going on in your brain and also a (slightly exaggerated) summary of the field of ludology, which looks just at the mechanics of play and ignores the narrative (which is what you identify as different). The narrative means a lot, to me, but there are quite a few scholars who discount it. I think you are underselling casual games when you claim the rewards in the brain are so fundamentally different. And, yes, play against real opponents, as opposed to NPCs is very different, but that is because you add social interactions (also things our brains are big on) to the basic button/learn/reward mechanics. Even if you don’t talk or chat, just knowing they are real people as opposed to NPCs makes a difference in how you deal with them in your brain.
“Or the even more common “he’s in jail” option (thank you racist and classist prison system, go ahead and create more single mothers and just continue that cycle…can you tell I hate the American prison system?)”
Yes, thank you for pointing that out. And yes, I have shipping-container of rants on our prison system…..
@ kiki
One of the reasons it is important is because videogames are rather unique in how fast and how well they stimulate both learning and reward.* There is a lot of research into how to use games in education because almost everyone would get more out of a really well-designed educational videogame than they would a classroom environment or books or what have you. So I wouldn’t say it is a deepity because it actually does unite videogames by a quality that nothing else seems to have.
*Games in general are every good at this, but the teaching as you go and speed of learning aspects of videogames seem to be unique. I shouldn’t discount all the sensory data than makes, say, Halo very different than chess.
And I compulsively spell-checked you, Argenti, sorry lol
Heathenbee, I’m on an iPad with damn you autocorrect, feel free to correct it!
@heathenbee
I would think that is better than the passive-aggressive (sic). 🙂
iPad autocorrect does some truly bizarre things.
“iPad autocorrect does some truly bizarre things.”
TRUFAX! It’s learning though, sadly, it knows misandry already.
And, yes, play against real opponents, as opposed to NPCs is very different, but that is because you add social interactions
Again, I must disagree – the closest I come to socially interacting with people when playing Tekken is when I delete the inevitable sore-loser PMs calling me a fag or a scrub or whatever. The reason playing Tekken against a human is more satisfying than playing against the CPU is that Tekken is far too complicated to create an AI opponent that is anything like as challenging or as much fun to play against as even a moderately competent human opponent. It’s not just because playing against another human feels more like social interaction, it’s because the AI opponents really are very predictable, and playing against them feels more like running through a rote set of routines rather than responding to another player’s gambits – like hitting a tennis ball against a wall when you don’t have anyone to play tennis with, it just ain’t the same, purely in game terms.
I don’t really tend to play games where narrative is important – the characters in Tekken apparently have back stories and friendships and rivalries with each other, but they don’t affect the gameplay, so I’ve no idea what they are. My favourite open-world game is Just Cause 2, because it’s got hardly any story, and lots and lots of sandbox. I remember finishing Red Dead Redemption and thinking, ‘For the four or so hours of mediocre cowboy movie you squeezed onto the disc, you could have included another thousand bad guys for me to shoot. Priorities, people!’
I love the artform, and there’s no reason why a video game couldn’t have a story that’s equal to the finest movie or book, I just don’t think any have come remotely close yet.
Isn’t that just edutainment, an enterprise generally made of fail? Or are they going for a different angle?
I shouldn’t discount all the sensory data than makes, say, Halo very different than chess.
One of the things that I think is fascinating about videogames is that while they can’t be described as a ‘sport’ by any means, they often do have a ‘physical’ element – not in the sense that you have to physically press the buttons, but in the sense that they take place in a virtual ‘physical’ space. You can’t play Halo by mail or in your head, as you can with chess; it has to happen ‘live’ within that three-dimensional physical space.
I think there are some gamers that refer to videogames as ‘electronic sports’, and while that does seem a little precious or silly, it is quite an accurate descriptor for something that cannot be considered a ‘game’ in the same way as chess.
Isn’t that just edutainment, an enterprise generally made of fail? Or are they going for a different angle?
There are those really annoying Youtube ads for Lumosity which say that it ‘works with your neuroplasticity’ but ‘in a way that just feels like videogames’. Yeah, I know something else that does that – it’s called FUCKING VIDEOGAMES.
Feminists have also ruined politics, the last bastion of manhood known as the bathroom, urinals shaped like womens mouths, shopping for anything at all, job promotions and the hiring process and the comfort of a mans “castle” also known as home where dinner is served at six sharp.
Is it wrong that I’m mad that this MRA has brought Sci-fi into the fray, last I checked, a genre of fiction wasn’t a gendered interest…
You know, it’s funny. Most series of the reboot of Doctor Who have 13 episodes. Series 6, for some reason, only had 12. I felt cheated.
For the life of me, though, the phrase “Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All” has been floating around in my head associated with Series 6, but I can’t find the episode it comes from …
/silly