How did anyone ever come to think that the gaming world is hostile to women? This GameStop training video from 2009 shows just how welcoming the video game retailer has been to “one of the world’s most fascinating creatures.” Yes, we’re talking about the enigma that is the human female.
In the video, an expert in “womanly studies” attempts to explain to GameStop staffers how to understand “a segment of the species that remains a mystery to over fifty percent of the population today,” analyzing staged interactions between male staffers and some of these mysterious females.
In addition to the weird sexism of the video, which manages to be patronizing to women and men alike, the video features some amazing graphics (relying heavily on stock photos of these mysterious “women”), brilliant acting, and extras who are supposed to be standing frozen in the background but can’t help compulsively blinking.
The worst part of this video is that despite its cringeworthiness it probably did help some male GameStop staffers deal with women in a slightly less patronizing way.
H/T — Polygon
I hate to nitpick (okay, that’s a lie, that’s sort-of my thing), but a quick Google search shows that the video in question has been floating around the ‘net since 2009, before more recently becoming a topic of discussion in the last week or so. Is it really still a “leaked” video when it’s been out there for like six years?
OH! OH! ON THAT!
I’M AWAITING THE DROP-OFF OF MY NEW PS4!
*45 minutes elapse because the Mr got home bearing coffee*
AHHH! IT’S HERE!
http://imgur.com/0htHJju
Sorry for yelling.
I am excited.
For those of you who offered (wonderful) feedback re: Dragon Age v Shadow of Mordor: I ended up getting SoM because Amazon had a deal for that + The Last of Us Remastered + a PS4 for the same price of the base system. My husband LOVED TLoS and this has all of the DLC that we didn’t buy on the PS3.
I’ll hang out a bit and see if there’s an upcoming GoTY edition for DA, but it does look really cool. We’re primarily into the (vanishingly small world of) FPS local co-op (…soooo…Borderlands…), but DA especially seems like it has wonderful potential for multi-playthrough (and, “Hey, I’ll watch!” playthrough) given its expansiveness.
And, yes – I am a console peasant 😉
My kiddos like to play, too, and – while I know that you can always hook a nice gaming PC up to a TV, use controllers if you want, etc – it’s not going to happen with smallish children running amuck.
Oh! I also ordered Lego Marvel Universe, too. It was $12, looks neat, and has split screen play.
I’ve got friends who really like Borderlands, proxieme.
This thing is from *2009*? I’ve been hearing people talk about it and I assumed it was from, like…. whenever Gamestop first opened, I’m not sure.
@Falconer – It’s a great game/series if you dig its class of mechanics and aesthetic.
My husband’s into moody games with more realistic mechanics (The Last of Us, etc).
Eff that.
If I die, I want to immediately re spawn. I also want physically improbable weapons and magic or tech so advanced that it’s practically so*.
* OK, that’s not entirely true – I did quite enjoy Red Dead Redemption.
@Falconer–
Knoxville as in Knoxville, Tennessee? If so, OMG I AM A TENNESEEAN TOO HI HELLO FELLOW ARMPIT-OF-THE-SOUTHENER!
If Nashville is any way convenient, we have looooads of great tabletop places here (and in the surrounding areas).
…I forgot what the rest of your post was because I got excited. But yeah, don’t shop at GameStop. It’s a hellhole to work in and a shit company in general.
You should see their sexual harassment policy. It’s almost exclusively about employees not sexually harassing customers, with very little policy about in-house harassment or harassment of employees by customers, the later of which I had enormous problems with as the Token Ladypart Owner with Bewbs.
And then there’s the fact that my DM and SM told me I would get more pre-orders by flirting and showing cleavage.
And then there’s the part where it was unreasonable for me to do resets because ladies are not physically strong, but it was totally reasonable for me to close alone in a high-theft store because robberies happen everywhere.
And then there’s…well. There are too many parts to list.
And Skyrim and Fallout and a buch of stuff.
But Borderlands is fun.
@WatermelonSugar: Yep, we’re one county over from Knoxville.
And, unfortunately, it takes me three hours to drive to Nashville. I’ll do that for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see Neil Gaiman do a reading, but not regular.
There’s been other Tennesseeans around in the comments over the last couple of years.
I was generally shopping at GameStop because it let me pre-pay for the games I want, which is not something I could do online. I got Skyrim, Skyward Sword, XCOM and Mass Effect 3 that way. Lemme tell you, paying $10 or $20 a week is a lot more sustainable than $60 all at once.
When we get a PS4 (which we probably will at one point, because of No Man’s Sky), we’ll be sure to get it somewhere else.
Last time I was in a GameStop, someone had cut the power line for the hands-on 3DS, probably thinking they could steal it — it was screwed to the display stand.
I feel my disapproval dissolving into schadenfreude.
After yesterday’s TWful, vomit inducing horror I needed this terrible video to cringe-laugh at.
Plus all those magazines do not look like things I would enjoy reading. At all.
@Falconer–
Yay! I always get so excited when I see other Tennesseans around feminist-space. I guess because I feel so. damn. isolated. in regular life from anyone with half a brain. It’s just fun to know other people near me are not assholes. Yay!
And I understand how the reserve system helps out–that was also how I did the majority of my purchases while there. After my experience, though…Yeesh. I would rather have six hundred root canals than set foot in a GameStop again.
Honestly, working there left such a bad taste in my gaming-mouth that I hardly play anymore. I mostly hold it down on my 3DS, catchin’ ’em all, bravely defaulting, or ruling my animal neighbors with an iron fist…or SNESing it.
Faint Praise | February 13, 2015 at 1:08 pm
And this is why I went to Steam. Seconding that “ugh”.
“Wimmens are only in GameStop because they want to find a game for their families of children and don’t know anything about games!” Fuck. Off. As if I needed any more reason besides their shit trade in rates and their desire to get in good with developers, so they can help chop up games into pre-order DLC to squeeze more money out of their consumer’s wallets, to not bother with GameStop. They’re shit all around, and this video only confirms it for me.
I like small, locally-owned brick and mortar stores for the most part. I used to live next to a really awesome one during my small-town days, but they closed up. Then another one opened after I moved away that was more of a hobby store. The guy who runs it is pretty cool, says he’s not there for a profit, but to give the kids of the town something to do, which they needed desperately.
proxieme | February 13, 2015 at 3:32 pm
I’ve heard nothing but good things about the Last of Us. It made so many people cry, and I love games that can make me have feels about characters, for better or for worse (don’t get me started on Angela Orosco. I have very personal feels for her, and the fact that she dies makes me cry every time I play Silent Hill 2. ANGELA DESERVED BETTER).
I have a mod on PC Skyrim that lets me have a Portal gun that shoots explosive potatoes. Kills dragons in one or two hits, and I just cackle. Because SCIENCE.
I also found myself enjoying Red Dead Redemption, though there were some bits that I got snarly with. I was riding up to a camp with a single guy who looked really suspicious, so I pulled my gun out. I got a message saying “You have to come back later to get this quest because you were hostile.”
A suspicious man out by himself in the middle of the old west where people had no qualms about shooting each other for looking at them funny, and you expect me not to act “hostile” by having my gun out where I can easily defend myself?
I also failed some of the quest with the cannibal because I walked up to HIM with my gun out. LIKE WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?
Also, it’s a huge pain in the ass to bring back bounties alive. I have issues with the lassoing.
And I do take issue with the prostitutes being stabbed all over. I know it’s a symptom of the time, but goddamn Rockstar…
I thought this was odd too but then realized that whoever made that statement might not realize that women are also part of “the population”.
Hell yes, I LOVE that mod. And the lemon grenade mod. >D
(No way, the person with the GLaDOS avatar loves sticking Portal into otherwise non-Portal things? Never! =P)
“over fifty percent of the population” sounds like it could be said by an MRA/PUA, cause they seem to think they understand women better than women understand themselves.
Don’t think they were actually making an “only men truly understand women” argument in the video though. I’d like to think gamestop’s not that aweful.
re: mods: That is something that I do truly miss out on as a console gamer.
Wasn’t there an early one for Skyrim that gave all of the dragons Macho Man’s face?
re: The Last of Us + story/emotion: Yes. My husband had to walk away from it for awhile after the initial sequence (no spoilers 😀 ).
The game play is not my cup of tea (“No, I don’t want a turn. I have enough tension in my real life.”) but it’s one that I totally sat down and watched.
re: Red Dead Redemption: I kept shooting the racist/anti-Semitic shopkeeper in the middle of a tirade.
It never went over well and he always re spawned, but it ways made me feel better.
Ok – ceiling’s painted, shower’s done, and pizza’s almost here for pizza and movie night (I’m being an adult about the PS4 and am waiting until the children are in bed before being sucked in).
Have a great weekend, everybody!
I’ve always hated it whenever women are described as “mysterious creatures” and the like. When growing up, you always hear jokes about how women are so hard and confusing to understand the the poor men are trying their best to decipher their mysterious womanly ways… It really gets to me
Oh gods, not that mod! I don’t know which one is more odd/hilarious, that one or the one that replaces all dragons with Fluttershy from My Little Pony.
http://www.gamoholic.net/images/stories/macho-dragon-mod-skyrim.jpg
http://ponyvillegazette.com/files/2012/01/MLP_Skyrim_Mod.jpg
Huh. I’ve never had a negative experience in a Gamestop, even when I know damn well I’m being read as female. Most of the time, the workers just say hi when you walk in (if that) and just let you do your thing. If you have a question, you just go up to the counter. Maybe it’s just where I live. I’m sorry everyone elses’ Gamestops suck :/ Thank God for Amazon…
Of course, I’ve been known to be astonishingly oblivious, so maybe something they were doing was rude and I just didn’t know.
I think it’s a real video that’s trying and failing to be funny.. That is, the aspects of it that are supposed to be funny — the woman’s name, that she’s a professor of womanly studies, etc — aren’t, while lots of the things that aren’t supposed to be funny are.
Obvously the descriptions of women as mysterious creatures are tongue in cheek. The trouble is that it’s equally obvious that to gamestop’s management and some of its staff women really are mysterious creatures.
The promotion mentioned in the video — where you can get a subscription to Cosmo or some other women’s magazine (they also include smart money, presumably in case some man takes advantage of the offer) — was real; when I was looking around to see when it was made I ran across an article on it.
I don’t go into video games stores much, but I do spend a fair amount of time in tabletop/comics stores.
I’ve never been harassed, but I’ve often been ignored entirely in favor of men, and that’s really, really aggravating. I’m not someone’s girlfriend, darnit, I’m a nerd! I deserve to be treated like a nerd!
The best Skyrim mod, though, will always be this one:
http://s18.postimg.org/5j9v3mdd5/Skyrim_Posh_Mudcrabs_Mod_600x337.jpg
It’s so intensely stupid, and yet, it makes me laugh every bloody time I think about it.
What’s crazy frustrating about this video is that GameStop’s probably right to have a training video for how to talk to moms. Plenty of women who don’t give a damn about gaming will be buying for their kids, after all.
It’s just disheartening that these corporate overlords can realize, “Hey, we’d better figure out how to get our 19-year-old employees communicating with their mothers’ peers,” but they don’t seem to think that it’s important to avoid alienating women who do game.
This is a very old video, yeah. So old, in fact, that it was one of the first things Retsupurae ever riffed:
Also people here in the comments talking about Skyrim mods, reminded me of this video from the same channel:
Mewens — yeah, I was very disappointed that the “hunter” was after a gift card and not, idk, even just some Mario game from when she was a kid — something, anything, that was for herself.