When women, in conversations online, point out the ridiculously tiny percentage of video games that feature women as protagonists, they tend to get flooded with responses from indignant gamebros telling them that if they don’t like the games out there, they should just make their own.
The gamebros mean their comments to be conversation-enders. Just as Vivian James, #GamerGate’s imaginary girlfriend, tells game critics to “shut up and play,” these guys are telling critics of the retrograde gender politics in gaming to “shut up and make games.”
It never occurs to them that some of the women they smugly tell this to … might already be doing this.
One of the more entertaining aspects of following the Twitter account of much-harassed game developer Brianna Wu — known in #GamerGate circles as Literally Who 3 — is watching clueless gamebros try this “argument” on her.
LOVE IT when men tell me, "Don't like how women are represented? Make your own games!" Lol. http://t.co/LlkDLnmOVs pic.twitter.com/n0BgqwvH2B
— Brianna Wu (@BriannaWu) October 26, 2014
The whole thread is here if you’d like to see what an unpleasant fellow this Simon Wood really is.
Oh, but there’s more:
It never ends:
Of course, some of her, er, critics seem to realize that she already makes games. But somehow this doesn’t keep them from yelling at her to make games anyway.
@iMatthewCM @Swispy @SmegmaKing @Spacekatgal fuck the trolls. If you have a bitch fit about gender/races in a game, go make one twats
— Timothy Sleeper (@Sleeper83091) October 26, 2014
https://twitter.com/mchugepants/status/524445877398544384
Others demand that she start making GOOD GAMES.
https://twitter.com/BABPEEGTWO/status/525769579595718656
(Huh. Seems like a decent number of people think the game she just releaased is good.)
And this demanding GamerGater wants to know why she doesn’t make MORE games.
Oh. That.
This guy apparently thinks that instead of criticizing the game industry, Wu should be personally training a new generation of girls to make games.
@Spacekatgal Just because they are mostly designed by men doesnt women cant enjoy them and if they don't, teach women so they can make games
— Dragonslay3r94 (@Dragonslay3r94) October 22, 2014
It must be hard to find time to make games with all these dudes yelling at her to make games. And then yelling at her more when she does.
Do any of you follow David Pakman at all? He does a progressive opinion/news show on youtube/radio/etc. I saw that he interviewed Brianna and then his page was hacked? Then I saw he had an interview with “Nero”.
I’m honestly too afraid to watch them, which is stupid. When the Elliot Rogers shooting happened he reported on it and didn’t say one thing about misogyny or even his manifesto but brought up the racial component. That had me pretty angry for months. Now I’m scared that another “progressive dude” that I admire is going to be receptive of the “it’s about ethics…” malarkey. Hopefully this isn’t a huge derail, if so I will stfu about it. Just wondering if anyone saw it and maybe what they thought.
My sentiments, exactly, Anarchonist, although when I said something to that effect, and noted that we’d banished the XBox from our house, I got a whole lotta reactionary wailing and gnashing all up in my grill.
There are good arguments to be made for doing whatever it takes to put some limits around electronic gaming, internet rabbit-holing, and social media socializing. Truly. Certainly, these people who go ballistic at women game developers and/or critics on Twitter or who sit in their manosphere echo chambers complaining about ‘bon bon-eating feminizes who want all the good jobs so they can sit around and live off of men’s money while expressing their sperm so they can have babes without men’ would really benefit from having their electronic toys confiscated.
@Kyle, seconding WWTH, seriously, death and rape threats against her aren’t bad enough to call it harassment for you? How far does it have to go?
Also, why the fuck would you come here to a feminist space and say that shit? Wait, don’t bother, I know the answer: you’re a trolling, misogynistic fuckstick and I hope every time you go for a swim in a swimming pool there’s ever so slightly too much chlorine in the mix.
Actually, while I have been reading here, and occasionally commenting, I have mainly been hiding from Gamergate by uh..gaming. My GW2 time has escalated almost alarmingly 🙂
@Estwad
Popular “dude bro friendly” games don’t burst into flame and vanish from the earth forever when a woman critiques one.
GGers overshoot anti-intellectualism and anti-critical thinking, they’re actually anti-light discussion. #PoorConversationalists
Kyle, how uninformed do you have to be to think that GG has nothing to do with Brianna? You should try life without the blinders on.
Also, Estwald, what in the fuck is a “feminist game”? People act like women are 5% of the population or something and are demanding ridiculous things by wanting a little more representation in games. We’re half the fucking population and we make up a huge chunk of video game consumer. Why do you view leaving us out as a “neutral” thing?
What are games that feature more people of color? Civil Rights games? I honestly can’t even imagine being one of these dude bros who gets so offended by added diversity in games. Must be nice having the world revolve around you so much that that is even possible.
@Kyle
I just love* this kind of an argument. It feeds the idea that evil things are done by random evil people for random evil reasons and could certainly never be systematic and indicative of something seriously wrong in a culture or subculture. It ignores the statistical fact that those higher on the power hierarchy are most often the perpetrators, and those lower almost always the victims, and otherizes the evils born of a patriarchal system to a handful of outsiders**. Women are still, in this day and age, a socially disadvantaged group, something the misogynistic #GamerGate folks, the majority of them white men, don’t want to see changing.
Whether or not harassers and abusers are outing themselves as part of the “movement” is irrelevant, as both the tone and content are identical to #GamerGate rhetoric. You’d have to be really fucking dense to think these are random people randomly harassing a woman and not, you know, part of a larger movement built on a privileged group (men) attacking women somehow associated with the gaming industry.
———-
*By “love”, I mean “despise with the fury of a thousand suns” in this particular instance. Sorry for any confusion for the admittedly inappropriate word choice.
**Remember that whenever a bad thing happens that fits right into a pattern that exposes the very naked correlation between power (social, political and economical) and evil, MRAs, racists and other regressives start shouting “Not one of us! Not one of us!”, and disown the evil-doer by laying the blame on a disadvantaged group. Frequently, the group of choice is the mentally ill. Anything as long as the problems inherent in the hierarchical system itself are left untouched.
This also serves as a short summary for why I’m an anarchist.
———
It’s interesting that whenever someone you disagree with says or does something, it’s an agenda, but when your people say or do something, it’s activism.
Earth to Kyle: feminists don’t control the media. Most forms of media are (as pointed out by Anita Sarkeesian, among others) pretty goddamn sexist and unfeminist. But please, go on telling yourself that gamers are an oppressed minority when all AAA games have been catered to suit your tastes.
@weirwoodtreehugger
Consider this stolen.
This is sarahrocco, I changed my name 🙂
Proof that if you have a vagina, you cannot win with these fuckers.
If you don’t like games you make them.
I do.
Well if you don’t like games then make more of them.
Just finished one.
Well if you don’t like games make better ones.
The one I just made is pretty popular.
Well if you don’t like games then just go kill yourself because I’m insecure and have nothing to offer society so I’m just going to be a dick because me <3 boobeez and evil feminazi bulldykes on their period who don't understand evolutionary psychology because if they did they would know that they're inferior and should be making me a pie…and they are indisiously trying to take my love of boobz but hatred of what they are attached to away from me!
…..but it's all about journalistic integrity.
Mary, I do remember that particular thread. Many of the posts in reply were by long-term commenters making a number of valid points. I don’t want to turn this comments section into more of the same – there have been more than enough troll posts and mighty teal deers over the last few days – but please don’t refer to members of this community challenging your views as ‘reactionary wailing’ and ‘gnashing up in your grill’.
OMO154: it’s like being smart or having class. If you have to tell people, then you don’t have it. These are qualities to be defined by everyone but the speaker.
Also, “Why don’t you get a job, huh huh”, says the dude…to the woman who already works two or three of ’em.
CJ : it would be kind of cool if it was like that episode of Star Trek where Kirk used “logic” to lock the robots circuits up. What was that “Mudd’s Planet”? You could just do that to all of them.
But it’s about ethics in game journalism, right? I mean, telling a woman game developer to “shut up and go make a game” after she already has, y’know, made a game is totally all about game journalism. Totally. /sarcasm
And I see we’ve already had a “no true gamergate!” troll drop by. With a lovely side helping of “she’s not harrassed, she made it all up!”
Yeah. It’s so totally about ethics in game journalism.
Who said it was? Point me to something claiming exactly that, and nothing more.
Come on, now.
Kyle, if you actually look at the twitter accounts of the people I quoted in this post instead of making assumptions, you would see that most of them have used the hashtag, and some are quite active in it. One mentioned #GG in the convo I quoted from.
One of them says he’s not a GGer but is a big fan of @nero.
If you think Wu hasn’t been targeted by #GG? She’s “Literally Who 3” for fuck’s sake.
Take a nice long look at all these tweets:
https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=%40Spacekatgal%20%23gamergate&src=typd
Anyway, Kyle, you’re banned from this thread for victim blaming someone who’s literally been forced from her home by threats. See the comments policy for a note on this.
Ppfffft. If Gamergaters don’t want to be hated, they can do just one simple thing: STOP BEING SO FUCKING DETESTABLE.
Seriously, it’s NOT rocket science.
Also, I’d argue that despising Gamergate isn’t “misguided”. On the contrary, it’s very well-guided indeed. Anyone who’s read even a tiny fraction the gamebros’ drivel under that tag would come to such a conclusion quite independently.
Interesting that you consider objecting to your self righteous posturing to be “reactionary wailing”, Mary.
You have a lot in common with the gamergators.
I don’t mean to start a row. Still, it should be noted that this is the internet – and thus, we can link to people’s previous statements (You’re all welcome to go find that terrible thing I said where I insisted on rhyming orange with porange.
I’m sorry )
So here is the last time we had a discussion about things, in Operation Krampus, and the “reactionay wailing” response to it
And, also, why do “dudebro friendly games” have to be in opposition to “feminist friendly games?” It’s not like it’s absolutely necessary for a game to be completely misogynistic in order to be appealing. Having a white cis-het muscly manly man as a protagonist and lots of scantily-clad, passive female NPCs as background decoration aren’t exactly absolute necessities for fun game play. Even for FPS, which I guess are the only “really real” games.
Clarification: Not agreeing with the above I blockquoted; trying to argue against it. Re-reading my post I wasn’t clear.
According to PC Gamer, women now make up just over half of all *PC* Gamers: http://www.pcgamer.com/researchers-find-that-female-pc-gamers-outnumber-males/
Apparently women edge out men a little bit in social games (but not by the landslide so often claimed), they have an even *greater* lead in RPGs, and constitute a full third of FPS and MMO games.
The comments on the article, unfortunately, are exactly what you’d expect. That is, they’re full of bluster and rage about Farmville and claims that this study must be horribly biased and agenda’d, COMPLETELY IGNORING the fact that women lead in RPGs and are far from being unicorns in two other “real” genres.
Like, even having real numbers, on a major gaming website, limited to the snobbiest gaming platform, and including a breakdown of genres which separates social games from everything else, the dudebros cannot accept that women exist as a major video game market.
@Various trolls
http://i.imgur.com/HvqrS7c.jpg
@ M the SJR – very well played!