Over on Roosh V’s endearingly clueless gaming site Reaxxion, a self-described Red Piller named Mike Caputo is still mad at writer and experimental game developer Devin Wilson for suggesting, in a Gamasutra blog post last August, that video games aspire to be more than just “fun.”
This wouldn’t seem to be a particularly radical notion. I mean, “fun” is not the only thing that we humans expect to get out of art. Not every book I read is “fun.” Not every movie I watch is “fun.” Art is often challenging and even unpleasant. And aren’t #GamerGaters always telling us that video games are art? That they’re more meaningful than a game of Skee-ball?
Well, apparently not to Caputo, who thinks that trying to make video games anything other than fun is the equivalent of trying to bring back the Soviet Union.
Evidently unable to believe that gamers might be able to handle video games that are anything other than plain old fun, he warns readers that
video games will no longer exist as a medium in which to promote social good if they are not fun: no matter how well-designed for this purpose, their “healing” powers will go to waste because no one will play them.
And this makes him think of COMMUNISM. Because making video games that aspire to be more than “fun” is basically the same thing as making tractors that don’t work.
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, it was littered with things like factories producing farm equipment that was worth less than its component parts, because not only did the end product not work, but the cost of salvaging the components was too high to be economical. This will be the result if we allow feminists and other peddlers of academic sanctimony to continue to interfere with the video game marketplace and turn it into a PC haven.
By “PC” I’m pretty sure he means “politically correct” and not “personal computer,” because all truly manly gamers know that PC Gamers are the “master race.”
Caputo warns his readers that the evil feminaziscommies are actually worse than the real commies. The Soviets, after all, weren’t deliberately trying to make tractors that didn’t work. But feminists are trying to bring down gaming on purpose.
[T]he feminist campaign to destroy gaming is just one piece of a larger strategy to eliminate or co-opt masculinity in all its forms. Video games are one of the few media that cater more to male than female entertainment preferences: they are dominated by games involving sports, war, and fighting, and often contain images of the female body that appeal to male sexuality.
It’s true. Outside of video games, images of sexy ladies are pretty much impossible to find. And sports? Just try to find that on television or in any of the gigantic stadiums and ball parks that dot virtually every largish city in America.
It’s time, Caputo cries, to “man the battlements.”
If you imagine the world of entertainment or leisure generally as a map, video games are one of the few geographic regions where boys are still allowed to be boys, and this is simply not tolerable to feminists. They look at that territory and see a dark black stain on the pink-tinted expanse of modern culture. Feminine sensibilities and political correctness dominate the traditional media, Hollywood, academia, and publishing, while video games serve a niche market that, though large in absolute numbers, impacts a far smaller percentage of the population than other media. In other words, they have us surrounded.
But all is not lost! The only reason the evil femmies seem to be winning now is because
we haven’t been fighting back. Men have spent 50 years meekly retreating, conceding cultural territory, and even defecting to the other side. It has taken a blatant, undisguised assault on some of the least-threatening members of the male population, people who mostly just want to enjoy their hobby in peace.
Apparently, enjoying a hobby in peace involves making lots of rape jokes and sending out death threats.
Caputo’s solution? Be a manly man and don’t listen to those devious wimmenz.
The answer is to become a man in the traditional sense: self-sufficient, productive, ambitious, knowledgeable about the world you live in, and resistant to female emotional manipulation.
La la la I can’t hear you, ladies!
Women who understand the benefits they get from living in a masculine environment will do what the majority of women do best: follow and support you, or get out of your way. The rest, alone, bitter, and without any offspring to indoctrinate as future feminists, will join their ideological fellow-travelers in the dustbin of history.
Huh. You know who else liked to talk about his opponents being tossed into the “dustbin of history?”
This dude.
H/T — Responds_to_Woosh on r/againstmensrights
Red pillers and everyone else in the Manosphere is like that guy who got every flavor of ice cream in the world including all the toppings but he is crying because he doesn’t have sprinkles and then he sees a woman wanting ice cream but all she got is sprinkles.
The man cries “you should be grateful for what you have! I always wanted sprinkles!”
And the woman stares at him in astonishment on how hyprocritical, spoiled, dramatic and stupid he is.
I laughed SO HARD.
By the way, speaking of feminazicommies, I just checked out The Paranoid Style in American Politics. I expect to find lots of parallels between Cold War-era political delusions and MRM fuckwittery.
Yes, because game developers would totally make a game they didn’t find fun themselves. They also don’t take into account that more people might be drawn to more inclusive games that effectively replacing them as customers. Also, what kind of changes in game play do they think is going to happen? I doubt much is going to change anytime soon.
Paradoxical Intention:
Well, there is the part where he says:
Every bit of representation of anybody other than them is a concession of cultural territory. That line there is pretty darn telling.
I can’t even find the wrongest part.
http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/50shades-thefunimalscribe.gif
In his world there are two sides. There is one side that hates women and one that does not. He believes all men a born in the first camp and turn traitor to the cause should they ever be caught not hating women. He also believes that men who are not obviously feminist are only reluctantly giving ground to the evil femnazi overladies.
I hope men who don’t speak up as feminists are paying attention when misogynists say those sorts of things. I hope the guys who don’t want to condemn rape jokes for the sake of “free speech” are paying attention too.
Why is everybody with a bug up their behind about the simple notion that we should make room for those we’ve oppressed in the past (women, PoC, homosexuals, etc..), suddenly become dime-store philosophers overnight, whose knowledge on the topics at hand have been learned by reading an abstract or two.
You know what the true culprit in all of this is? Illiteracy. Not just the inability to read, but the inability to understand what is read or how to apply it, relying instead on others to give inaccurate summaries of the work.
Is there a credible feminist essay out there that says (even figuratively), “we hate all men, we want them to either be our slaves, or we want them to die.” Maybe I’m not looking hard enough? But it seems every so often I encounter an MRA who asks why I hate all men and want them dead. Illiteracy strikes again!
Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.
“Specialization is for insects.” -R.A. Heinlein
Perhaps not the best person to quote here, but in his famous quote, he said that a /human being/ should be able to do such things. So, in the interest of this thread, I offer the following.
A medium is a lens by which we view a subject, a lens crafted by others, and by ourselves.
A medium composed by human beings should by no means be restricted to a single source of emotion. ‘Fun’ is one. But a medium can contain so many possibilities: it can make you laugh or cry; it can make you despair; it can make you think; it can make you shiver in thoughtless fear. It can require that you focus like a burning lens, to defeat the challenges or puzzles therewithin; it can, alternately, be a gentle breeze, letting you stroll through carelessly. It can invoke a million words, or perhaps only a hundred, or perchance none at all.
To distill a person into a single emotion is to destroy them, to render them nothing more than a shard of glass in your consciousness. To distill a medium, likewise, is to render it worthless.
th1stle | March 16, 2015 at 11:38 pm
The thing the privileged fear most is being treated like those they have oppressed. They’re afraid that women/PoC/queer people would do the same things to them they’ve been doing to women/PoC/queer people all these years. It’s simple projection.
Essentially: they’re afraid of karma.
And I see this a lot too. When it comes to things like gender, PoC, or queer people being better represented in media, I see one of two reactions: “Oh, it wasn’t accurate to make this character PoC/female/queer!”, or “Why should it MATTER so much?! It doesn’t MATTER that this character could be PoC/female/queer!” I see the second one a LOT with queer head-canons and such, though recently it’s been happening to canon queer characters like Korra and Asami on Legend of Korra, and even more recently with Ruby and Sapphire on Steven Universe.
Of course it’s “accurate”/it doesn’t matter when your gender/race/sexual orientation is getting all the representation you could possibly ever want.
It seems like most game developers rather like the idea of doubling their audience by ensuring women can enjoy the game just as much.
Obviously SOMEBODY’S never played a little game I like to call Number Crunchers.
[img]http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/1/14982/861941-numbermuncher10.jpg[/img]
When I look at dumb statements like “Video games are one of the few media that caters mostly to men,” I think it’s similar to the phenomenon whereby it’s widely believe that women talk more than men, even though every empirical study on the subject suggests that this is utterly false. There’s a perception that in film, books and TV, women are being catered more often than they ‘should’ (i.e. with films like Paul Feig’s upcoming all-female Ghostbusters) and this turns into a perception that they’re being catered to as often as, if not more often than men. Incidentally, the fact that many people’s expectations about what sorts of audiences should be served by media are so skewed towards men is a big part of the reason why the conversation about representation is important IMO.
Also, Errant Signal has a pretty interesting video about why ‘fun’ is just not a useful concept for understanding video games (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lit0xPh_v5c). It’s just too vacuous, and this can be seen by the fact that you can invoke the concept to respond to almost any criticism at all: If I say that a game isn’t realistic, you could respond by saying “Developers shouldn’t focus on making realistic games. They should focus on making fun games!” If I say a game is too easy, you can again say, “Games shouldn’t be difficult. They should be fun!” And so on. ‘Fun’ is just too vague to meaningfully oppose to other values that might be important in making a game; it just ends up being shorthand for “what I like.”
@th1stle:
Robin DiAngelo has a lengthy 2011 essay in which she coined the term ‘white fragility’ (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/03/why-white-people-freak-out-when-theyre-called-out-about-race/), basically a phenomenon whereby many white people become super-defensive and irrational whenever topics like racism and privilege are raised. Perhaps there’s a similar phenomenon of ‘male fragility’ which can help explain MRA-type reactions to issues like sexism and male privilege.
Annie: Terribly sorry, do you mean this one, Number /Munchers/?
— https://archive.org/details/Number_Munchers_v1.2_1986_MECC
Annie: Did you refer to this particular gem?
( https://archive.org/details/Number_Munchers_v1.2_1986_MECC )
And did you know that there are /sequels?/
Holy hell. The comments on that white fragility article are like … par for the Internet, I guess, but they’re horrible.
@th1stle “Is there a credible feminist essay out there that says (even figuratively), “we hate all men, we want them to either be our slaves, or we want them to die.””
I can only assume some of them think “the scum manifesto” is mainstream feminist theory.
@Jorji Costava “Robin DiAngelo has a lengthy 2011 essay in which she coined the term ‘white fragility’, basically a phenomenon whereby many white people become super-defensive and irrational whenever topics like racism and privilege are raised. Perhaps there’s a similar phenomenon of ‘male fragility’ which can help explain MRA-type reactions to issues like sexism and male privilege.”
I’ve often thought there was a similar process going on with the MRA-types, racial stress and gender stress(? not sure what you’d call it) seem to evoke similar responses from those with the privilege, especially the desire to derail things and make the issue about themselves instead of the oppressed group (what about the menz?!).
@Lea
In 2nd grade, at recess, the children formed into two teams: the Boys’ Team and the Girls’ Team. I don’t recall why this happened, it was just some sort of mob consensus, but it was all out war for a while. Swingsets were claimed, defended, and lost to the enemy. Abigail Peterson kicked me in the face while I was going down the slide and I got in trouble for calling her names. Misandry! You could get really nice dirt clods with grass still attached from the edge of the woods out back. These made excellent projectile or melee weapons–spinning the dirt around holding the grass was inaccurate, but looked cool.
Over the summer, I kept running into Audrey–who was Vice President of the Girls’ Team–out in the woods near our houses. She turned out to be pretty cool (for a girl, I overlooked her inadequate appreciation for the Ninja Turtles) and we caught salamanders and explored abandoned barns together.
Some kids made an effort to restart the war when we went back in the fall. I was still hanging out with Audrey and the whole thing seemed dumb. I was promptly exiled from the Boys’ Team.
And that’s how I became a traitor to Men Everywhere.
I still talk to Audrey.
I was going to mention the success of Papers, Please, but I suspect he’d hand-wave that away with a No True Gamer argument.
That “fragility” or “gender stress” is known in psychology as “status anxiety” and can be the trigger to extremely violent behavior. Seriously, look it up. Scary stuff.
Has this guy played Spec Ops: The Line?
That game is straight up not fun, its a grinding slog that wears you down inch by inch till you hit the bottom and then the bottom falls out….because its supposed to be that way and it’s one of the best arguements for games-as-art for it. It’s a hauntingly real indictment of the player and the toxic idea of the modern shooter as well as a great look into PTSD.
Oh sorry, that means it has an agenda and politics! To the bonfire with it!!
@Zoon
You mean… MRAs are acting like playground children long past the age where it’s acceptable or cute? I am shocked, shocked!
zoon echon logon:
Did the high council send her her reward? It’s mighty impressive to bring in a defector at such a young age.
These asshats must be horrified about the diversity in character representation in Dragon Age: Inquisition (for those who don’t know, a game that cleaned up in the various industry awards).
I can only imagine, given their WAAAHing over Axton being bi and Torgue’s being an EsJayDubya.
“But, but, AAA games aren’t supposed to do that! I can’t have FUN if they get awwwwll PREACHY!”
I’m sure Caputo’s definition of “fun” tooootally isn’t defined from the perspective of a straight, white, 16-35 year-old dude who thinks a gritty FPS is the very epitome of true gamerhood and fun-having-ness, to the exclusion of all other perspectives.
“Video games are one of the few media that cater more to male than female entertainment preferences”
– the only explanation for this nonsense is that the guy is so utterly incapable of taking a critical look at anything that for HIM the way media/society as a whole caters to straight (white) men is “neutral”. for him something is only really catering to what he thinks all straight men enjoy when it has nude huge-breasted-women or gigantic guns everywhere. I take a wild guess and say that kind of video game is also the only kind he accepts as “real game”. I’m also pretty sure he is actually proud of his ignorance.