Men’s Rightsers take up arms against the vidya game destroyers. And Kroger supermarkets. Never give up! Never surrender!

Colecovision! I’d nearly forgotten about that, Chie. Back in high school we (male + female friends) used to hang out at this one girl’s house and play Qbert and Donkey Kong. Graphics were so primitive that nobody identified much with the central characters. There was no larger social agenda, no gender roles. Just simple hand-eye coordination challenges featuring inanimate shapes and colorful, cute critters. It seems like the dudebros started to take over around the time VGA and PC games gained market share in the early ’90s, and the graphics and storylines started to get more realistic.

“Leisure Suit Larry” is the first game I remember being totally repelled by – not just by the horrible PUA content, but because it was so divisive, and explicitly designed to make women feel uncomfortable and excluded from the gaming party. I certainly didn’t want to hang around the den and watch my brother’s girlfriend’s brother (and his friends) playing it. It didn’t make any sense that game designers would deliberately halve their profits by alienating/degrading a huge swath of their potential customers. But then again, segregation never made any economic sense either.

At any rate, there was at least a 20 year period in the beginning where gaming was for everyone. It would be nice to see a return to that golden age.

David – absolutely, feel free to quote!

I’ve always played games too; obscure board/card games, D&D, and video games.

I’m going to misspell this horribly, but one of the first video games I played was called Hunt the Wompus. Very early graphics, mostly stick figures. The goal was to figure out where the monster was and kill it with an arrow before it got you. (The monster was invisible until you shot it or got eaten). Nothing was gendered.

I still have my original NES, which I still break out occasionally to play Final Fantasy.

I have a 3DS and play PC games.

I’ve always been here (girl cooties and all).

Kotaku is the website that was totally fine to let their commenters bully one of their writers on every single one of her posts to the point that she started drinking so much she almost became an alcoholic. People were pulling pictures from her personal webspaces and posted them in comments to make the perfectly eloquent point of “lol, she so ugly!”.
This went on for months and no one – including the editor-in-chief – stepped in and told them to knock it off.
Compare that to his response just mere days after one of his male writers was named in the Zoe Quinn “scandal”, despite the fact that almost none of the assholes actually went after the writer and instead focused on Zoe.
This whole thing apparently was merrily going on until the point that she started missing deadlines on turning in her articles at which point the editor-in-chief finally went to her and asked what’s up and got her to go on a hiatius for a few weeks.
She made a post on Kotaku about it later and apparently once they did realize just how badly it was affecting her, they did try to get her help, but even then there was no official “Guys, just fucking stop it already” from the people in charge. And in that very post commenters were already starting up again about how she totally deserved it though, essentially for writing articles about games and the industry maybe not being all that cool with women just yet.

I wasn’t really too surprised that it happened though, Kotaku is part of the Gawker network after all. And we all know that Gawker was just fine letting their almost exclusively female writers on Jezebel (and the readers if the mods didn’t catch it in time) deal with thousands of graphic pictures of brutal rape and real corpses every single day.
They only stepped in once Jezebel called them out in public and other Gawker sites (Kotaku being one of the primary targets) started getting spammed with pictures of gay porn.
Cause clearly making women look at other women being raped and murdered is a-okay, but gamer-dudes having to look at pictures of two dudes fucking? The most horrible thing that you could subject a person (read: man) to!

I actually do read Kotaku every day, partly for the news and partly for my daily dose guys just being soooooo boo-boo sad that women aren’t shutting up already, but the Kotaku comment sections isn’t really known in the online world as being filled with horrible people cause they’re all just so damn feminist-y (totally a word that exists).
To look at Kotaku and see a website that is totally oppressing the menz is just so mindboggling, it makes me want to ask these guys just what reality they are living in.

My mind is boggled at this. Thanks, David!

@Headless Unicorn Guy

Thing is, I’m a gamer. From when “gamer” meant paper, pencil, funny dice, graph-paper dungeons stocked from Monster Manual random-rolls, and calling in pizza missions at 2 Ayem. Back when gaming was almost exclusively geeky white boyz like me, with three little books plus Greyhawk.

And we had a lot of a-hole gamer types back then who were “No Gurlz Allowed”. Including urban-legend horror stories of what happened to the first girl gamers when they started trickling into otherwise all-guy gaming groups. Didn’t happen in my regular group (but then, to us being gamers trumped being male or female — common interest), but when you introduce a female gamer to an all-male group who have never interacted with a RL female, a lot of dumb and clueless things can happen. But these guys are beyond dumb and clueless to flat-out hostile.

I was part of that “males-only” table-top gaming group. Not that they ever said they’d refuse to allow a woman to play. I was simply the only woman there. And my big brother was the Game Master. No one DARED to insult me, or insinuate that I had no place there. Nope. Big Bro was protective of me, and anyone who was mean to me would PAAAYYYYY! Seriously, my bro is the kind of “smiling game master” you never want to trust, and if he wants you to suffer, he’ll keep healing you juuuuuusst enough to make your torture last a long, loooong time.

Golly, but Iove him!

However, at first, it did not occur to me that they ever thought of me as anything other than “one of the guys.” I guess they all had sense enough to behave from the get-go. It was only that night we were out late, and he insisted that the whole group walk me back to my dorm, that I realized I really was getting some special treatment. See, big bro smiling Game Master smiled at me, too.

As long as everyone treated me as just “one of the guys,” it was all cool, though. My Bro insisted on everyone behaving politely to everyone in the group, regardless. Clean language, no insults (except the clearly playful kind), and if anyone’s feelings were hurt, then we had to resolve the issue. Basically, if the other person isn’t enjoying it, you have to stop. They never had a chance get sexist at me.

So, really, the walking home thing was the only difference. And the only reason he asked them all to join was because we weren’t done with a particularly interesting discussion, and he didn’t want to miss it, while he walked me home.

Yes, he always insisted on walking me home. I was glad of it, because this was during my “Can’t stand to be touched – still traumatized and scared” period, so it didn’t feel paternalistic or patronizing, at all. It felt like he was loving me, when I needed it most, acknowledging my fears as real, and helping me get through them until I didn’t feel so darned vulnerable all the time.

He’s also the one who taught me how to defend myself, for when I needed to go out by myself, and it’s thanks to his training that I was able to go out and about alone, at night, when my roommates were huddled in the dorm, because there was a known rapist (escaped convict) sighted in our area. He taught me how to feel confident and safe. He taught me to take precautions, and be prepared, and not be afraid. But also, if those precautions failed, and the monster attacked, he’d never blame me. He’d blame the monster.

He frequently told the guys, though, that it was very valuable having a woman in the group, because I tended to look at things from a different perspective than they did. In other words, I saw the traps they didn’t, and they saw the traps I didn’t, and we complemented each other quite nicely.

That was when I decided that “Gamer” meant “geniunely good, nice, and kind person, with whom I could feel safe and trusting.” The first man I trusted, outside my family, after high school was one of those gamers. Since then, I LIKED gamers. Way to stereotype, I know, but I was young, and had really good experiences with the gamers, and thought they were representative of the community.

#&T%*#(#$& this stupid #GamerGate business, and them showing themselves to be such jerks. I don’t think so highly of “gamers,” now. They have usurped the term, in my mind. Although those fellows I used to game with? Still great guys.

I can only hope that the “Gamers” are just the vocal minority of the gaming community, and that most people who game are still those genuinely good, nice, kind people I loved.

TL;DR: #GamerGate has ruined “Gamers” for me, and made me ashamed to call myself a Gamer.

@BQS

I can’t imagine, say, model railroad enthusiasts getting all bent out of shape about more people taking up their hobby, and embarking on a hate campaign to define it as for old people ONLY.

Oh, this made me laugh out loud! I got this mental image of old dudes, waving their canes and shouting obscenities at the young whippersnappers having the temerity to suggest that maybe there should be more diesel engine representation, instead of only steam engines, all the time.

You don’t think David types his own articles, Emma Sherrifs? But yes, Dean Esmay and Gamergaters are incredibly ridiculous. Snarking them is indeed well worth it.