It’s rare that they come out and say it this explicitly, but here’s Heartiste, arguing that unless society treats women badly they won’t give him a boner. In a brief post about “Dread Game” — his term for manipulatively gaslighting women to prey on their insecurities — he offers up this bit of shitbag philosophy:
Dread game on a societal scale keeps women in line, always working hard to please men lest they be cast to the icy wastelands with the rest of the anti-feminine rejects. The opposite of Dread Game — Coddle Game — relaxes selective pressures on women to stay feminine and thin and agreeable. And so what you see now in the decadent, coddling West is what we get: Ballbusting fat feminist cunts and careerist androgynes.
So brave, Heartiste, so brave.
I also played a good deal of Spyro when I was in high school. There is something about dragons that always seemed to empowering to me, and the How to Train Your Dragon franchise really brought that dream of mine to fruition. My sister has a two year old niece who is a big fan and I painted all five dragons (plus one ferret dragon since she absolutely adores my Wickett) across all the walls in her room. 🙂
Dragons are just fun in general. Especially sassy, baby dragons. Hehehe. Spyro will always be some of my favorite games.
This guy, what the hell is wrong with him? Hard to imagine the kind of out-of-balance life he’s in, if his mind only works in one aspect. All the world out there, all of the mind’s capabilities in there, and he’s got ONE thing:
Fucking.
How to get to fucking.
Who’s worth fucking in his opinion and who is not.
What a fuckable rating does in any individual’s life, and how debilitating an unfuckable rating is to the scope of any individual’s entire existence.
Life span of fuckablility.
And if that ever wears even slightly thin, garnish with a little racism. But mainly just keep to the fucking.
@sparky If you did it to Heartiste no jury would convict you.
…Unless it was a jury comprised entirely of MRAs but what are the odds of that?
I got the Kickstarter email about the latest video, but didn’t watch it until now. I thought Part 1 was bad, Part 2 is just fucking awful.
If games are supposed to be escapist, putting DV and rape into them makes them the exact opposite for many women. For those among us who haven’t been raped or sexually assaulted, they fucking know women who have been.
I am a gamer and I don’t play these bloody games. For a start, many of them are First Person Shooters, which I loathe. For a second reason, they don’t have playable female characters.
I’ve been enjoying Civ V (cooperative LAN play with my partner) and have just got back into Torchlight II after not playing it for over a year.
Of course if it were a jury of MRAs it wouldn’t matter what you did.
The funny thing is that heartiste is a completely unremarkable middle aged guy who… lives off his sister!! A feeeeemale. LOL
Not expressing myself well. What I mean by the Parts being awful is that Anita shows just how bad the treatment of women is in current games. 🙁 I thought that her video series would be a good idea – I backed her Kickstarter. 🙂
We actually have god of war III, red dead redemption, one of the gta games and some others that came with our used ps3. My husband let our (at the time) prepubescent boys play god of war, which I’d never heard of before then, until we actually saw some of the content. Luckily it was before that part she highlighted. Still, having to rip someone’s head off was gruesome enough, and now we have a stack of games that not only can they not play, they also can’t watch anyone else play either.
Have to say, though, I kind of liked Dragon age origins. That one plotline aside, they pretty much stayed away from gendered violence iirc, and had some pretty strong female characters.
Pallygirl, thumbs up to Civ 5.
The constant parade of sex work and sexual violence on Game of Thrones infuriates me because it’s not 100% gratuitous. It would be nice if I could just call it disgusting, write the show off, and move on with my life. (Actually, I still may do that). The frustrating thing is that is makes sense — to a degree — for it be there. It’s a show about the pervasive abuse of power. Every other kind of human evil is in there so it would be strange to omit sexual abuse completely.
Sometimes they’re even thoughtful about it. Sansa, Shae, the healer, the mother of the infant royal bastard, and some others have interesting in which the writers seem to have put a little thought into the actual impact of sexual violence or sex work. But the abuse, violence, and gratuitous display of female bodies just never stops, and most of it happens to nameless women we immediately forget about. It’s really awful.
I’ve been enjoying Civ V (cooperative LAN play with my partner) and have just got back into Torchlight II after not playing it for over a year.
I got Civ5 when it first came out, wasn’t impressed. I’ve only reactivated it with all the DLCs and stuff (Steam sale) and I’m REALLY enjoying it.
Still like Rise From Erebus for Civ 4 better tho.
@ Orion – I’ve been on the fence about whether I actually wanted to watch that show, to see what the big deal was. The more I hear, though, the less I’m inclined to make the effort.
@Mistyful: I was also surprised that Dragon Age Origins was on the list at all because I’ve heard so many good things about it from other female gamers. I can forgive one sin in a game though, especially one that has a lot of hours of gameplay and many quests. That said, I haven’t played that game because I prefer games that are in more colorful, abstract fantasy worlds or games where you play as a cute playable creature, like Spyro, Little Big Planet, or Puppeteer. Or Alice in Wonderland. Or Gravity Rush. I LOVE Gravity Rush.
I still need to play Okami though. When I have the funds I will most definitely track down a copy.
If anyone is interested, my favorite Steam find is a game called Skyborn. It’s low budget and has RPG maker graphics, but also has a strong story line, amazing female characters that currently outnumber the male ones in my party 3:2, and beautiful illustrations of the characters and enemies. I haven’t heard of Torchlight, but more research is pending.
@Orion: As for Game of Thrones, I swear I could understand some instances of sexual assault in that sort of storyline. I mean, I love me some Walking Dead and that series touches on that darkness as well. But Walking Dead has never triggered me to the extent that Game of Thrones did in one season and I’ve been following The Walking Dead religiously through 3 seasons. But I’ve always been more of a horror fan than a fantasy fan when it comes to live action, so I may be somewhat biased.
Pondering on this some more, this Part 2 has dredged up memories of those fucking horrid war movies from the 1970s/1980s. The ones set in a non-European country, where a local woman is raped by soldiers, runs, and is typically shot in the back. I don’t like war movies as a genre because of the violence anyway (and as much as I love Pan’s Labyrinth, I find the violence gut-wrenching) and adding the rape/murder aspects has just meant I will never watch another war movie.
Back to the games, I don’t understand why these contain such sexualised violence. Many of the players who play them now won’t care if those elements are removed (because they’re not the key reason the games are purchased) and I won’t play games like that. Of all the ones she mentioned, I have Dragon Age:Origins, and I play a female character. Most of the group composition choices I use are female.
While I’m fine with the cartoon violence in games like GW2 and WoW, I didn’t like some of the Horde quests – like ?poisoning the dogs. Yes I know they’re computer graphics, but it seemed like a horrid thing to do.
I’m still working on Civ V; it’s easy on Prince difficulty but then it kicks my ass on King. Strategies?
LOL you’re ahead of me, I’m only winning on Warlord now.
ha, been playing Civ for years and I can never be arsed to go past Warlord. I lack time to devote to it and once I finish up a session, I’m disinclined to go back to it. So, Warlord means I can build fast in my limited time and attention slot. I also disable war as a victory because I hate building military units all the time.
It’s been a long time since I’ve played Dragon age origins, but I enjoyed it greatly. Now if I play anything, it’s Don’t Starve. That is actually one of the most playable yet challenging games I can think of, that I can actually play (issues with my hand interfere with play time and make me a sad kitty). Anyone else here play it?
Uh, sorry, out of sequence, but just wanted to say regarding this quote…
Dread game on a societal scale keeps women in line, always working hard to please men lest they be cast to the icy wastelands with the rest of the anti-feminine rejects.
How sweet it is. Losers lose, and women do fine.
Katz,
What are you trying to accomplish? Which victory are you going for, which sort of nations?
Any kind. I’ve never won on any difficulty.
I’ve played a couple of Prince level games to victory. I’m still getting used to king myself, and sometimes it goes badly. A few things I’ve learned the hard way: You must keep your starting warrior at home or you will be wrecked by barbarians. You can scout with them a tiny bit but once you get a worker your warrior is a full time babysitter. You need at least one reasonably modern soldier for every town, plus ideally 1-2 to defend road builders, workers in transit, and allied city-states. So, a 3 city civ should keep a standing army of at least 5 units. You must build a scout, because you can’t scout with your warrior. I usually build the scout before anything else. (Sometimes I build the Shrine).
If you don’t prepare for war your neighbours will crush you. I find it hard to win as a pacifist because I hate “wasting” time and money on self-defense. Conquering your enemies is pretty hard. It can be done but you need a decent pile of units and you need to pick your moment. The ideal time to attack is immediately after researching your nation’s special unit. Try to save gold to upgrade a bunch of troops so you can use your special unit immediately.
Since pacifism and world conquest are both fairly hard, I recommend a middle approach. I like to crush one of my neighbors early on and then entrench. Taking their land gives me enough of an economic boost to win by pacifism, and the army I forced myself to build for the attack turns into a real self-defense force. Sometimes I’ll take out another neighbor later. Eventually I like to control my whole continent, but invading other continents is so hard I don’t bother.
This just remotely reminded me of an exchange quoted from one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies:
“In a fair fight I’d kill you.”
“Not much incentive for me to fight fair then, is there?”
Somewhat similarly, the idea of a world where we are kept in subservience through mistreatment is not exactly going to discourage any of us from being feminists.
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Also, the newest Tropes vs. Women episode was pretty disturbing. But for me it was more because of how normalized and cheap the brutalization of women in games seems to have become than because of the brutality itself. Which is the main point of the video.
Anyway, if any of you want something more cheerful, here’s a better video involving a dead girl/woman.
Surprisingly sound advice for life in general too.