Tag: threat

American gamers tell Aussie women to get back to the kitchen

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

aussie minersCorrection: Sarkeesian cancelled a planned speech at Utah State University (USU), which is in Logan, Utah and is a different university than the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Apologies.

Women video game developers and critics in Australia are being threatened with rape and murder by American and Canadian gamers as the dispute that has gripped the global gaming community  goes global.

Sydney-based independent video game developer and critic ‘Sarah’ said she had received threats as a part of the movement after she voiced her opinion on an online gaming forum.  They were pretty blunt about what they were going to do to her for daring to make games that did not depict women as whores or sex objects.

“They were saying that they were going to rape me, they were going to kill me… They ran to friends of theirs, got them together … and started tweeting threats at me,” he said.

Sarah believed the perpetrators had set up a system that sent multiple threats to her account automatically.

Fortunately, they were not that clever. One posted a picture that allowed Sarah to figure out their name because they would screen capped it with their Facebook account in the background so I was able to find out the attackers name, and get a sense of who the other guys were.

They are all young, and they are all from the US and Canada and are all keen to spread their backward brand of misogyny to countries where women are treated a little more equally.

“That was almost a bit more terrifying – that they were this loose group of people that one of them could call up the others and they would attack.”

Unfortunately, because they were not Aussie misogynists they could not be arrested and charged with threatening behaviour.

The movement originated from a debate about whether video game journalists were too close to the industry, but then took a more threatening turn.

Earlier this month American feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian was attacked by people claiming to be from the gamergate movement shortly after posting an online video about the portrayal of women in games.

She was forced to cancel a speech at the University of Utah, after an anonymous threat from somebody who said they were planning to carry out a mass shooting at the event.

Sexist trolls force feminist gamer out of her house

Posted on August 29, 2014 by - News

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.