Tag: sexist

Gamergate geeks shocked as their heroes snub them

amazonGamers who have been waging a war on women have been surprised and shocked to discover that their heroes think that they are  socially retarded.

For a while now “Gamergate” has been waged against those who think that games should be more inclusive and less sexist.  A hard core of male gamers has taken it upon themselves to threaten anyone, particularly women, with violence, threats and general abuse.

For a while they have genuinely believe that sort of misogynistic behaviour was “cool” and that somehow becoming a gamer Taliban made them something special.  However over the weekend a number of tweets has put them in their place.

The tweets have come from nerd heroes such as Patton Oswalt who said that the “The misogyny of “GamerGate” sickened me.” Seth Rogen called for people to stop supporting this “stupid cause.”   Joss Whedonm responding to an article about the GamerGate tactics, said that it was not terrorism blowing things up, but it is using a fear of violence to “cow us and control our actions.”

Felicia Day dubbed the gamers a “cliched bloodthirsty roaming gang from post-apocalyptic fiction” while Tim Schafer (LucasArts) called on everyone to watch the video on sexism in games that set everything off. Mariel Cartwright the illustrator of Skullgirls said she found the whole thing depressing.

The gamers were initially shocked that the people they idolised considered them the backward scum of the earth and the only famous person who backed them was Alec Baldwin.

One person, without a trace of irony, or intelligence actually wrote on 4Chan: “Even misinformed people can put out their opinion on whatever they want, and they’ve got a large platform to do it with via the internet.”

Sexist trolls force feminist gamer out of her house

Ricostruzione_homo_neanderthal (1)Desperate to prove that there is no such thing as sexism in the gaming community a bunch of misogynistic socially retarded trolls have managed to scare a feminist gaming campaigner out of her house with death threats.

Earlier this week, Anita Sarkeesian posted the latest in a series of crowdfunded videos called Tropes vs. Women. The videos analyse games which portray women as damsels in distress, ornamental eye candy, incidental victims, and other archetypes that tend to be written in service of and subordinate to male players and characters.

Sounds harmless enough but some male gamers clearly felt deeply threatened and launched an incessant, deeply paranoid campaign against Tropes vs. Women generally and Sarkeesian.

This included a flood of violent comments and emails, videos documenting ways in which she is not a “real gamer.” Someone wrote a game where you can punch her in the face, and a proposed documentary devoted to exposing the “lies” and “campaign of misinformation” from what is, again, a collection of opinions about video games.

Now it seems that they have got so carried away with themselves they now think it is ok to kill Sarkeesian as a warning to other women who dare to stand up to men.  How very Saudi Arabian of them.

Sarkeesian spent the night with friends after contacting law enforcement about “some very scary threats” against her and her family. She’s published a page of extremely violent sexual threats from the person who apparently drove her to call the police; in it, the user mentions the location of her apartment and threatens to kill her parents, who the user names and claims to be able to find.

Apparently most of the vitriol is coming because Sarkeesian is actually succeeding and  is getting high profile support from popular developers and media figures. Joss Whedon and William Gibson, among others, mentioned it, and Tim Schafer of Double Fine urged everyone in game development to watch it “from start to finish.”

Having read some of the death threats and posts, you cannot help but wonder how these gamers are missed a court-imposed therapy for views about women with make Leviticus look like a pro-feminist tract. It is so retarded and so out of control that it contaminates the gaming community and gives them an excuse to attack women.

Fortunately, for the sake of humanity the trolls have not heard of the Streisand effect and not twigged that their over the top attacks on Sarkeesian have propelled Tropes vs. Women to a level of visibility it would not otherwise had had.

It is also weakening their argument that “misogyny is a lie propagated by Sarkeesian and other “social justice warriors” when you actively give it such an overt demonstration.