There’s some great news for supporters of The Sarkeesian Effect, the seemingly random collection of badly filmed interviews with assorted people who dislike Anita Sarkeesian that is allegedly being edited into a film of some kind!
In a new video, Jordan Owen — the hairier of the two Sarkeesian Effect impresarios — has announced an amazing new opt-out opportunity for the alleged film’s backers to donate money to him and his pal (then enemy, then pal again) Davis Aurini.
Owen reports that, even though they’re supposedly already done filming their alleged film, the two have somehow managed to work out a way to do some more filming “that we didn’t think that we’d be able to do but it’s really going to tie the movie together,” much like the non-big Lebowski’s famously peed-on rug, I guess.
Now, Owen won’t provide any details — which, he suggests, might have something vaguely to do with the Honey Badgers’ recent escapade in Calgary? — but apparently it is a quite exciting filming opportunity and it somehow requires another month’s worth of funding for the alleged film, and unless the project’s backers specifically opt out by the end of the month they’re going to get charged for it!
It’s all very ethical.
In the video, Owen also invites supporters to check out the amazingly professional web site they have up for their amazing film at TheSarkeesianEffect.com. I would also highly recommend that you check it out; it is in every way up to the exacting standards the two are known for.
And before I forget, I’d like to mention some great news for fans of the unintentional comedy that the Sarkeesian Effect duo provide almost every time they open their mouths.
A couple of Sarkeesian Effect mockers — Andrew Todd from badassdigest.com and @kav_p from Twitter — have come into the possession of puppets that, as Kav P puts it, look “startlingly similar” to the Sarkeesian Effect duo. They plan to produce a series of short videos starring said puppets.
Here’s the theme song for the series, which they call MRAsterpiece Theater. You may notice that despite costing nothing to anyone but the two people who made it, this video somehow manages to look and sound a lot more professional than anything the actual Sarkeesian Effect dudes have produced so far.
There’s nothing racist about enslaving Africans, it’s just economics.
Your
Gah, iPad typing fail.
Your argument is a big old argument from popularity fallacy. Video games have a problem with misogyny because the consumers driving the industry have a problem with misogyny. Just because they are in the majority doesn’t make it okay.
I think my “favourite” Jordan Owen moment is from his now-classic “Fainting Couch” video (seriously, the Professional Victim-Finder General spends half of that video with the back of his hand nailed to his fucking forehead in a literal “poor-me” pose, in between alternating bouts of reiterating that he’s not a loser, whining about high school, and begging for money), where he looks at the camera and says, in reference to getting more sweet sweet Patreon dollars, “It’ll make it something that I want to do.”
I swear, I can remember using pretty much the exact same wording, tone of voice and puppy-dog eyes at the age of about ten, when I was trying to convince my dad to pay me for cleaning my room.
It’s true! We can extrapolate the ancient 1/1024-bit ur-Nintendo from these two bone needles found in Lascaux. Also, if chicks get too good at games their testosterone will go up, and they’ll get hairy nipples and male-pattern baldness. So it’s for their own good really.
@Kootiepatra
You talk about the portrayal of women in video games but do you not realize that the vast, overwhelming majority of male characters in games are used either as plot devices or as cannon fodder? In your typical action game you have the hero (usually a man but sometimes a women) mowing down hundreds if not thousands of enemy male soldiers. Female characters don’t get that kind of treatment. The main villain or villains are nearly always men as well because obviously women could never do something evil amirite?
Gamers are jerks to each other and always have been. It’s been that way as long as I’ve been a gamer. It didn’t suddenly start happening when more women became gamers.
4th, this is the argument you’ve made just now: It’s always been this way, which means it should always be this way! I FEAR CHANGE!!!
@the 4th survivor – If women in video games were part of the opposing army, I would have no trouble killing them. In fact, when I had to kill female characters in WoW, I had no problem with it, because, hey, that’s how war goes. They were armed, they had weapons, they were meeting me on the field of battle.
I wish there *were* more women soldiers in game. The fact that women are usually only there to a) decorate the set, b) serve as the MacGuffin, or c) helplessly, graphically, and pointlessly die to emphasize how very bad the bad guys are, is the problem.
Male NPCs aren’t overwhelmingly the cannon fodder in warfare games because they’re male. They’re the cannon fodder because there are few, if any, competent women in the game.
But, if you’re going to argue the underrepresentation of women as heroes is purely down to market dynamics, with no sexism involved, then the overrepresentation of men as cannon fodder has to be, too. I’m sticking to my point that both of these dynamics are problematic, for pretty much the exact same core reason, and it can be alienating to female players.
I would contend that this is a problem.
Firstly, I’ve known girls who have played video games since I was a kid (25 years ago), so the “more women becoming gamers” thing rings pretty hollow to me.
Secondly, of course not, but that doesn’t explain why my guy friends get mocked for being n00bs or having bad tactics, and I get asked to show my tits. It’s not a generic jerkdom that applies to everyone. Women get specifically harassed for existing as female, and that’s messed up.
Oh and re: the villain thing – Yep, I want to see more female villains, too, ideally ones that aren’t super sexy siren temptress witches.
@ the 4th survivor
You do realize that the vast majority of all “characters” in games are plot devices or cannon fodder? You do realize that the demographic skew may have more than a little to do with problematic views of women? You do realize that Sarkeesian actually raises this point and calls for more diversity in the enemy ranks?
And while it is true that many gamers can be jerks, it certainly is not the case that it has always been this way. While I won’t try to pinpoint an exact date for the change, I can safely say that for more than half my years as a gamer, the name of the game was friendly competition, not rampant ass-hattery. And this change may not have started with the influx of women, but it sure as fuck targeted them.
Finally, “just the way it is” is a lazy, shitty excuse. Something being horrible does not mean that the people with the power to improve it should not do so.
Are you aware of “action” game types other than “Battle of Honor: Embiggened Warfare”?
Female characters don’t get most kinds of treatments, because so many games only create female characters for a very narrow set of purposes. This is something that you would have picked up if you had ever watched thirty seconds of any of the Tropes vs Women videos that you so confidently claim to be a scam. Watching Thunderf00t talking over an excerpt doesn’t count.
Women are almost half of all gamers, roughly 45%. This is a demographic of consumers that is asking for games that aren’t populated by nothing but big beefy men and tiny willowy victims with huge boobs. Game developers are listening and putting out more games to appeal to that demographic and obtain some of that sweet, sweet female cash. That is the free market at work. That is what you are whining and beating your chest about.
Keep your mouth shut about the free market until you know what it is. The free market doesn’t work like a first-past-the-gate popularity contest. If women were 30% of gamers, or 20% of gamers, that is a fucking huge pile of cash that developers are leaving on the table if they don’t make games that appeal to that demographic. Just suck it up, you whiny little baby, and stop throwing tantrums.
I was going to chime in on the claim to capitalism, but PoM beat me to it with much more style. Brava!
Oh man, looking at that site gives me Geocities flashbacks.
Jordan and Davis – here is some free advice [Worth about as much as you paid for it of course]
– Read @magnesium above. Some good design tips. I fully second the WordPress idea. Hit up something like Templatemonster. With all of that cash you are bringing in, spending a few hundred on a good site is worth it for your fans. You can spend a lot more for a great site, but lets be realistic, you don’t want to piss off your fans by appearing to waste their money right?.I assume you are trying to create a community of racist, misogynistic, MRA a-holes – so why not make their home to spew venomous bile your own site? You may have to learn a bit of HTML to change it to your liking, but then you can add a skill to your resume!
Just think of the amazing job opportunities you can have with “Created a video harassing a woman” “bathtub enthusiast” and “website designer” to show to future employers!
– Make sure you are using good SEO tactics. Better homepage title, H1’s, mobile friendly responsive design (you don’t want google to downrank you do you?), proper 404 page, and so on. Any decent free SEO ranking service will give you a good list of things to fix.
—–
@the 4th survivor: I have very likely been gaming far longer than you have. So I can speak from relative authority here: You are wrong. The GG movement is wrong.
“Hey, we don’t have a problem with black people, we beat up gays too!”
Ah, the argument from antiquity fallacy, an oldy but a goody.
“My Pappy owned people, and his Pappy before him. It’s just the way things be.”
I like how the troll notes that guys can be assholes, and the solution is to do nothing. “Let’s try to stop guys from being assholes” is apparently not something we want to pursue.
The “cannon fodder” in action games consists of largely cut-and-paste models of some simple character; make a few changes between models so the player doesn’t get bored of killing the same enemy over and over, but don’t spend to much time because their survival time is going to be at most a couple minutes.
F.E.A.R. manages to work in a premise where the characters are all literally clones, all the same save for a few tiers of difficulty. You’d be lucky if you even get that is most games.
The reason that fodder is mostly male is because male is the default; making a female trash enemy actually takes effort and thought because “female” is considered a varient of a person. It’s the same reason all the fodder tends to be the same race (usually white unless the game’s environment demands otherwise, and for the same reason that “white” is the default).
But hey, Bioshock had female splicers. Left 4 Dead had female zombies mixed in. Skyrim has women all over the place. You’ll find that it’s the progressive games with richer environments that have more complex cannon fodder, and thus more diversity with gender.
Anyway, this is a disingenuous argument at the core. The fodder may be male, but the hero is also male. There’s no anti-male sentiment behind killing tons of enemies, they’re just the bad guys. Hell, probably the fodder defaults to male so often because women are supposed to be the ones the hero rescues, not the ones the hero defeats. Gender roles are awful!
I’ve been thinking about how easy it would have been for the Baldur’s Gate trilogy to have made “male human lawful-good fighter” the only character option, and made the plot “Sarevok has kidnapped your girlfriend, go rescue her!”
That would have saved the devs some time and a lot of imagination, but what a profoundly boring game that would have been.
Note that 4th Survivor doesn’t quite grok that Sarkeesian’s success is based on crowdfunding, one of the ‘purest’ distillations of free-market forces we’ve got, as there’s very little gatekeeping between producer and consumer.
****
Hmm… Tubman and Skullboy….
Punk band, Netflix-exclusive cartoon series, or indie comic book?
@bonelady:
I took “Listen and Believe” as a reference to John Carpenter’s film They Live, in which (for those who haven’t seen it) subliminal messages of a similar construction are discovered in advertisements and media.
Basically they’re calling Sarkeesian a melty-faced space alien bent on conquering the Earth with skulduggery. This would naturally make Tubman & Skull Boy Roddy Piper.
Feeemales only started playing video games in the past few years? I guess I hallucinate the late 80s and early 90s I spent constantly playing NES with my girlfriends. Silly lady brain making me think I actually did stuff other than make sandwiches!
@Policy of Madness:
Wait, wasn’t that second bit the first half of Baldur’s Gate 2?
So video games are full of sexist tropes because that’s what the people want, as evidenced by the absolutely right and true hand of the free market. No one could possibly be unhappy with sexism in gaming and the videogame industry. If there were, there’s be people out there criticizing sexism in videogames, like, I don’t know, maybe making a series of videos about sexist tropes in games. And even if there was someone out there criticizing sexism in videogames, it’s not like anyone is listening or that this has sparked conversations among gamers and developers about making videogames more diverse and less sexist or anything like that. I’ve certainly never heard of such a person.
That’s also why all videogames are exact clones of Duke Nukem, and why games that break that mold and are more diverse and inclusive are completely unheard-of and non-existent. Even if such games did exist, it’s not like they’d be popular games that people love or anything like that.
/sarcasm
Do you hear the people play
Playing misogynistic games
They are the product of a market
That just gives you what you want
I’ve been playing video games since I was two. My mom got me into them. She stills has books of level codes from when she played all those NES games that required them. I used to watch her play Silent Hill and Parasite Eve on the ol’ PS1 and 2, and it was a great achievement of mine the first time *I* had to help her with an end level of a game.
Psychonauts, the Meat Circus. She couldn’t do the rail sliding part.
I was really sad dad bought her that game from Christmas instead of me. 🙁
*for Christmas, not from d’oh