i am confused and baffled and disappointed by this episode. i didn’t hate it, and it wasn’t complete and utter skippable garbage like House Guest and Fusion Cuisine, but i guess that’s not a high bar
It’s a head splitting cognitive dissonance to be fielding requests for help from friends who have just gotten swatted at the same time as giving someone else numbers on the harassment and abuse perpetrated by GamerGate because someone he’s talking to thinks it’s over and never had a big impact on…
Anonymous asked:
rewatching s1 for like the 100th time--at what point does all the brilliant animal sight gag stuff (eg the croc wearing crocs) get added? is it like, we need to have a croc wearing crocs, where can we fit this in? or do you start out by needing someone to guard the food and say let's do a crocodile--hey, he should wear crocs? or some kind of total afterthought, or something else entirely? thanks. love the show, my favorite of all time.
Hello! I am going to answer your question, and then I am going to talk a little bit about GENDER IN COMEDY, because this is my tumblr and I can talk about whatever I want!
The vast vast vast majority of the animal jokes on BoJack Horseman (specifically the visual gags) come from our brilliant supervising director Mike Hollingsworth (stufffedanimals on tumblr) and his team. Occasionally, we’ll write a joke like that into the script but I can promise you that your top ten favorite animal gags of the season came from the art and animation side of the show, not the writers room. Usually it happens more the second way you described— to take a couple examples from season 2, “Okay, we need to fill this hospital waiting room, what kind of animals would be in here?” or “Okay, we need some extras for this studio backlot, what would they be wearing?”
I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that the croc wearing crocs came from our head designer lisahanawalt. Lisa is in charge of all the character designs, so most of the clothing you see on the show comes straight from her brain. (One of the many things I love about working with Lisa is that T-Shirts With Dumb Things Written On Them sits squarely in the center of our Venn diagram of interests.)
NOW, it struck me that you referred to the craft services crocodile as a “he” in your question. The character, voiced by kulap Vilaysack, is a woman.
It’s possible that that was just a typo on your part, but I’m going to assume that it wasn’t because it helps me pivot into something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last year, which is the tendency for comedy writers, and audiences, and writers, and audiences (because it’s a cycle) to view comedy characters as inherently male, unless there is something specifically female about them. (I would guess this is mostly a problem for male comedy writers and audiences, but not exclusively.)
Here’s an example from my own life: In one of the episodes from the first season (I think it’s 109), our storyboard artists drew a gag where a big droopy dog is standing on a street corner next to a businessman and the wind from a passing car blows the dog’s tongue and slobber onto the man’s face. When Lisa designed the characters she made both the dog and the businessperson women.
My first gut reaction to the designs was, “This feels weird.” I said to Lisa, “I feel like these characters should be guys.” She said, “Why?” I thought about it for a little bit, realized I didn’t have a good reason, and went back to her and said, “You’re right, let’s make them ladies.”
I am embarrassed to admit this conversation has happened between Lisa and me multiple times, about multiple characters.
The thinking comes from a place that the cleanest version of a joke has as few pieces as possible. For the dog joke, you have the thing where the tongue slobbers all over the businessperson, but if you also have a thing where both of them ladies, then that’s an additional thing and it muddies up the joke. The audience will think, “Why are those characters female? Is that part of the joke?” The underlying assumption there is that the default mode for any character is male, so to make the characters female is an additional detail on top of that. In case I’m not being a hundred percent clear, this thinking is stupid and wrong and self-perpetuating unless you actively work against it, and I’m proud to say I mostly don’t think this way anymore. Sometimes I still do, because this kind of stuff is baked into us by years of consuming media, but usually I’m able (with some help) to take a step back and not think this way, and one of the things I love about working with Lisa is she challenges these instincts in me.
I feel like I can confidently say that this isn’t just a me problem though— this kind of thing is everywhere. The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male.
You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster.
I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?
i feel like i didn’t adequately express anything here but i guess that’s sort of the problem
i’m not even tweetin this one because i don’t like to make a big deal out of a thing i don’t even get
edit: rofl fuck that hair bow looks like a bow tie on its own
edit 2: i guess i like forcing people to guess a pronoun on twitter because the resulting guesses aren’t unanimous, which is reassuring — i’m not pegged definitively one way or the other, so i must be doing something right
can we, like, *not* dox people? what they did was not remotely okay, but hunting them down to take out your anger on them can't help leelah now. it's just more abuse.
here’s a perspective: doxxing them may ruin their life, but they ended leelah’s life. you say it’s not remotely okay, yet you sit there and attempt to safeguard them. you obviously don’t think leelah’s life has much value, considering you seem as if you’re trying to protect them.
leelah ended her life. don’t take away the last shred of agency she felt she had left.
here’s a perspective: what if someone now shows up at their house to hurt them? do you accept responsibility for that? what if it happens and then it turns out you had the wrong people? this has happened before, very recently.
maybe you’d like to post some photos of yourself at their home and workplaces, as long as we’re borrowing from the gamergate playbook.
calling the world to someone’s doorstep to harass them is not okay.
leelah is gone. your vengeance cannot help her. pour your rage into something that can help the people who are miserable but still here.
man it is seriously fucked up to just divide everyone into either acceptable or worthless. they may very well be fucking horrible human beings but they still deserve respect as human beings. we should all be better than this.
reminder that labels are just loose descriptions, not hard requirements
sometimes i see people struggling with the question of whether they’re bi or gay or asexual and like
why should it matter what you call yourself
would that really change how you feel
labels are supposed to be shorthand
they shouldn’t condemn you to whatever fixed set of behaviors you think they mean
you can call yourself gay and still find people of the opposite gender attractive
you can call yourself asexual and still have sex once in a while
you can do and feel whatever you want
and you don’t owe anyone an explanation
Anonymous asked:
Just keep this as a porn blog m8 it's clear you don't know shit about transgenders.
Why is someone acknowledging that a woman is pretty and saying so considered cat calling? I full on get “yo girl you fine as fuck” is messed up to say but people are taking someone simply saying “youre pretty” is offensive nowadays.
Because, as almost any woman could tell you, “you’re pretty” or “hey how are you” from a strange man you’re passing almost ALWAYS is the start of an interaction that devolves into them telling you how sexy you are or something. That is why there’s been such a visceral reaction to this video from many woman - because so many of us have these experiences and KNOW where the conversation would have gone had that woman responded to those men. Is it fair to assume that about every one of those men? No, but it also isn’t fair that those men decided that woman’s body is public property worthy of commenting on without her doing absolutely anything to illicit those comments.
I want to point out here, many of those men that said something like “you’re pretty” got really pissed off when she didn’t respond. That should clue you in on those men’s intentions - it wasn’t about making someone’s day better by paying them a compliment, because if it was they would have been content whether she reacted or not. It was purely about getting power over a woman and her attention. How DARE that woman not respond to them? Pay attention to them? Doesn’t she KNOW she’s supposed to be grateful for any man - even if it’s a strange man she doesn’t know at all - validating her?
Honestly, I really don’t think a man that’s never experienced cat calling can ever understand how these kind of seemingly innocuous comments can cause SO much anxiety. I’m not even being hyperbolic when I say watching this video legitimately stressed me out. It reminded me of all the times I’ve been in situations like that - faced with a strange man that’s decided he DESERVES my attention . A man that could easily overpower me if he decided he was pissed off at me ignoring him. Men grabbing my arm asking me how I’m doing. Men touching the small of my back and whispering in my ear how good I look today. Men threatening me and demanding my attention simply because I am a woman. It’s absolutely terrifying.
strangely timely, about women who become targets merely for getting some critical mass of attention, and which other people come to deeply resent. crushing to read, but read it anyway.
“MEN, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
I’m not a games industry professional. I’m not a journalist. I have my hands full with unrelated creative projects and in my precious moments of leisure time, I have Nuclear Throne to beat. Realistically, I have no time for this. ‘This’ being a social media smog monster going by the name of ‘#gamergate, which, like the antagonist of Godzilla versus Hedorah, is a rancorous, shape-shifting cloud composed of every kind of pollutant dumped into the ocean of the internet, driven by a malevolent sentience.
Okay, enough metaphor, Jon. What is #gamergate, literally and specifically? It’s a Twitter hashtag. What else? What else indeed. While various patterns of behaviour coalesce around the hashtag, #gamergate’s protean nature resists attempts toward summary and narrative. It readjusts and reinvents itself in response to attempts to disarm and disperse its noxiousness, subsuming disaffected voices in an act of continual regeneration, cycling through targets, pretexts, manifestoes and moralisms. Say that it began as a harassment campaign targeting a female indie developer, as reported by credible news sites, and you are subjected to contradictory objections - “No, #gamergate began after that, as a reaction to biased reporting” and “No, #gamergate has been building up for years" - as proponents jostle for the story that paints them in the best possible light:
It’s barely a movement and it’s more than a controversy or consumer pressure group; it’s a creature. And the only way to understand a creature like this is to look at the kind of material that circulates within it.
Taking it as read that much of that has descended, at this point, into post-hoc justification and mantra-like repetition, to begin with, here are some of the comments posted on early articles covering #gamergate:
The developer Zoe Quinn is repeatedly brought up, with references to her promiscuity:
Here’s a particularly unpleasant lie that is aggressively perpetuated. It deviates even from the gossip on which it is based in order to exaggerate its claims:
Ignorance, in its various forms, is also plentiful. Here’s the reaction to finding out professional games journalists use a private mailing list to discuss the handling of potential stories with each other:
(At this point, #gamergate became extremely excited that it had found proof of ‘collusion’ among the journalists it had targeted).
A favourite running theme is the rejection of any discussion of sexism in games:
Here’s a widely distributed boycott list, targeting social progressives for ‘ruining our hobby’, promising to ‘hit them where it hurts most’. A similar list was made targeting developers.
It’s worth noting that both hit lists were drawn up well before material was uncovered to implicate any of the above journalists in the wrongdoing they have subsequently been accused of. At this point, the #gamergate argument was simply that ‘SJWs’ (social justice warriors) are unwelcome.
But beneath protestations that #gamergate is about ‘journalistic ethics’, the attacks on feminists continue. Here’s Twitter over the past week:
Sometimes a more extreme political subtext creeps into the open, unguarded. This Twitter user later confirmed to me that he believes ‘the gay agenda’ is part of ‘cultural Marxism’ too.
#gamergate discussion for a long time revolved around high-pitched hostility toward prominent feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian.
Like Zoe Quinn, Sarkeesian has received death threats, but the tactics employed to make her disappear are wide-ranging. Here’s one of many, many attempts to discredit her:
(The ‘gamers are dead’ message refers to a series of articles in the games press exploring the death of the traditional ‘gamer’ identity as the gaming audience diversifies and sexism becomes less acceptable. These articles have been seized on as a pretext for targeting some of the journalists in the above hit list).
One man, Ben Spurr, created a game in which the player is invited to bruise and bloody Sarkeesian. Without a trace of self-awareness, a tweet pinned to the top of his Twitter page reads “The biggest mistake with declaring war on gamers is that they’ve been training their entire lives to combat evil. #gamergate.”
Here’s Davis Aurini, who is crowdfunding for a film that will ‘investigate’ Sarkeesian.
This is a quote from the video this still is taken from:
"And then we have the women themselves. Women, in our culture, have become the most decadent sluts since the fall of Rome … we have the most fat, disgusting women that have ever existed in history and who still think they’re hot stuff … Women have become like dogs that were never trained.”
He appears to have no serious interest in gaming, but he has been a fixture of #gamergate since close to its inception.
Then we have Christina Hoff Summers, who has made a profession of apologising to men for feminism. Her books include The War Against Boys and Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. She has capitalised on #gamergate by releasing a video positing the question ‘Are games sexist?’ In it, she berates ‘the video game gender police’, her accusation being: “They want the male video game culture to die.” She appears to have no serious interest in gaming but she has been embraced by #gamergate, who have even given her an affectionate nickname, ‘Based Mom’.
Another youtube personality, Thunderf00t, is the author of the video ‘Why feminism poisons EVERYTHING’. His popular diatribes against Sarkeesian are one of his sources of income. As well as providing ad revenue, they direct viewers to a donations page. He accused Sarkeesian of personally engineering the suspension of his Twitter account, and made two more (again, profitable) videos articulating his outrage. He has no evidence to back up his claim. He appears to have no serious interest in gaming but his views have been embraced by #gamergate.
There are numerous other youtube video essayists engaged in the project of continually re-invigorating and re-arming the mob, hyperlink-shuttling their enraged audience from one inflammatory call-to-arms to the next.
Here is Milo Yiannopolous, a right wing journalist and probably #gamergate’s most popular and visible supporter:
Before #gamergate, his views on gaming were this: “Personally, I don’t understand grown men wasting their lives playing computer games. It seems a bit sad to me. I mean, we’ve all been sucked in to a few rounds of Candy Crush, but if you want to shoot a gun, why not go to a rifle range?”
Here’s another right wing journalist, James Delingpole, creepily courting #gamergate:
These agitators seem to recognise what #gamergate supporters repeatedly deny: that the driving force behind #gamergate is a reactionary conservatism that seeks to shut down and shut out socially progressive voices in gaming. Of course, in the manner of reactionary conservatism the world over, it seeks to frame this as a rebellion against a censorious ‘political correctness’ imposed by shadowy cabals and corrupt networks of power. If you search the #gamergate hashtag, this is the narrative you’ll find being pushed most concertedly. That and ‘journalistic ethics’, which has become all but the slogan of #gamergate.
However, this shift in emphasis is the result of realising that the anti-feminist angle isn’t very popular. Here are some excavated 4chan chat logs, courtesy of David Futrelle at We Hunt The Mammoth:
Aug 21 17.23.31 <sarahv> The problem is that making it about Zoe sleeping around amounts to a personal attack which, while funny and something she totally deserves, will hurt our chances of pushing the other point … Aug 21 17.23.38 <rd0951> ./v should be focused on the implications of gaming journalism … Aug 21 17.23.47 Because SJWs will cherry-pick the /b/ shit posting and say “See? It’s sexist MRAs!”
Aug 24 15.16.10 <PaperDinosaur> Also Zoe is no longer the target to be focused on Aug 24 15.16.13 <Josh_> ^^ Aug 24 15.16.14 <sarahv> ^^^^^ Aug 24 15.16.18 It’s about the 5guys Aug 24 15.16.21 <sarahv> It always has been Aug 24 15.16.28 <Josh_> It’s more about the journos Aug 24 15.16.33 <PaperDinosaur> She’s done, we’ve wrecked her in a professional manner. … Aug 24 15.16.42 <sarahv> Unfortunately most of the people involved in this seem to be interested in destroying Zoe Aug 24 15.16.46 stop digging up shit on zoe’s past Aug 24 15.16.47 <PaperDinosaur> Now we have to wreck her shield, the people who tried to defend her
Aug 25 07.18.18 <Logan> Any chance we can get Zoe to commit suicide? Aug 25 07.18.29 if we can get more daming evidence Aug 25 07.18.29 I think the [doxxing info removed by DF] is a good shot. Aug 25 07.18.33 <temet> like her fucking a train of lack dudes … Aug 25 07.18.39 <PaperDinosaur> fuck off Logan Aug 25 07.18.39 <temet> black Aug 25 07.18.51 <Logan> Nah 21st century doing a train is so 90s. … Aug 25 07.18.59 <PaperDinosaur> If she commits suicide we lose everything … Aug 25 07.20.34 <PaperDinosaur> If you can’t see how driving Zoe to suicide would fuck this entire thing up then you’re a fucking idiot Aug 25 07.20.41 Imagine the kotaku article … Aug 25 07.20.48 <temet> PaperDinosaur is right Aug 25 07.20.51 <temet> not the right PR play
Meanwhile, #gamergate’s witch-finder generals are out in force, furtively trawling through websites and documents to prove a malignancy, talking of ‘exposing’ - an exposure which they hope will act as intently as the flames that lick the stake. Yet another youtube video essayist, Sargon of Akkad, has set out to prove that feminists have taken over DiGRA, a non-profit academic thinktank with a focus on games. He began his investigation, of course, forearmed with the conclusion.
Other #gamergate protagonists coach each other in avoiding debate, a response to efforts by journalists to talk to them:
‘Do not engage order’ is also stamped in bold and red across screenshots of people’s Twitter profiles and disseminated.
They also constantly remind each other of the need to be polite, having learned now that overt aggression is ‘not the right PR play’. The order of the day is instead character assassination and pretext-hunting. Thus, an Asian journalist is pilloried for racist comments he made as a teenager which he has repeatedly, sincerely and profusely apologised for:
And even though the mantra of ‘journalistic ethics’ is now being employed like a foghorn, it can’t quite drown out the underlying consumer revenge fantasy that has taken hold:
(Note, however, that gamers are not even the intended audience for one of the sites whose advertisers have been targeted. #gamergate is going after journalists its proponents have never even read).
So why even engage with such collective madness? Especially when the arguments made are ranging, fluctuating and hugely reliant on mischaracterisation of others’ opinions and arguments. Think endless variations on Sommers’ “They want the male video game culture to die” - a straw man shooting gallery. Now add in every conceivable objection, however wildly irrational, to several years’ worth of journalistic content, because all of it is dredged up to support a claim of endemic corruption. Individual missteps and past controversies are linked to a general demand that games journalism be liberated from a socially progressive ‘agenda’, as if everything problematic about a constantly evolving industry were being orchestrated from behind the scenes.
It’s admitted that in amongst the wide array of trumped-up charges a plethora of genuine issues have been touched on. So a small number of journalists and developers suggested these be discussed under a different Twitter hashtag, to divorce it from the anti-feminist rhetoric. Did this fly with #gamergate? Of course not - because it would have involved abandoning a juggernaut with vicious momentum and having an open, honest conversation with the ‘opposition’.
Again: why engage? Firstly, there are those who can’t exit the battle, who find themselves set upon repeatedly as part of a deliberate and concerted effort to wear them down, force them to abandon their careers, their passions. Unsurprisingly, and despite the composition of the hit lists, the most consistently targeted and spat-upon individuals are nearly all women. At the very least, I think it’s worth drawing attention to this.
I also want to resist #gamergate’s arrogant attempts to position itself as representative of ordinary consumers who play games - as representative of me. I would like people outside of gaming culture to know that this ugliness is the spittle and spite and self-immolation of a cornered minority, joined by the callous excitement of others who are seduced by the music of revolt and aren’t particularly scrupulous when it comes to picking a side, while others still hitch their own misgivings, prejudices and grudges to an irresistible bandwagon.
Then there’s the third thing: the grim fascination with how language is weaponised and used to obstruct, rather than facilitate, understanding, how every tool that has been effective in making social media a progressive force is repurposed as a method of obfuscation and provocation. It’s like watching intelligent animals work out how to maim each other with writing implements, and it gives a disturbingly sharp insight into the limitations of reason when dealing with a collective mania.
There’s no creativity to #gamergate’s methods. It copy and pastes what has been seen to work elsewhere, whether for good or evil. Boycott campaigns, infographics, memes, petitions, sockpuppet accounts, hacking, doxxing, vlogging, dogpiling. On the level of daily interactions, every word or phrase that ever had a modicum of power is employed as bludgeoning instrument. The authors of the aforementioned diatribes drench themselves in the language of scrupulous philosophical investigation as if that in itself imbues them with moral authority, while displaying nothing close to real consistency, rigour or intellectual honesty. To anyone other than those predisposed to ardently agree, these essays and videos are appallingly unpersuasive - but then, they aren’t intended to persuade. The effort is one of blunt force - to wield any tool available in order to club the enemy, and in particular to stoke the confidence and fury of the mob so that it attacks with greater ferocity. The death threats Sarkeesian receives reflect the agenda of hate preachers who simultaneously wish to position themselves as several steps removed from the worst excesses.
Sarkeesian turned off the comments under her own video series - something which is alluded to repeatedly with fierce disapproval. Why such ire? Not because this constitutes censorship (nothing #gamergate dubs censorship is really censorship) but because it robbed them of one of the forums in which they could freely wield their cudgels - by endlessly and irresponsibly repeating unfounded accusations against her.
Once a new word or phrase enters the collective vocabulary and is recognised as having some potency, it is chanted, chorused, abused and misused. “Shill, shill, shill,” parroted the #gamergate collegiate, once they had got hold of a word that they understood could be used to undermine the intentions of apparently independent commentators. “Fallacy!” they cry, as if revealing the identity of a murderer, whenever an unflattering comparison is made. They understand the general moral pallor of any particular word all right - ‘diversity’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘integrity’ are good, ‘hate’, ‘bias’ and ‘agenda’ bad - but then go about using them with reckless inconsistency. Their enemies are ‘colluding’ but they themselves are merely ‘like-minded’. Feminists are ‘ideologues’ and ‘extremists’ but the neoliberal utopia they espouse - naked of cultural criticism, ruled by consumer frenzy and corporate wile - is somehow apolitical and ideology-free. A mixed race female journalist is repeatedly described as ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’ on the thinnest of premises, but the term ‘misogynist’ is objectionable:
And of course, the word ‘ethics’ - repeated at every available opportunity, cherished for its aura of respectability.
Meaning is abandoned; only import matters.
This applies too to the metaphors #gamergate drapes itself in, right down to the absurd, hyperbolic soubriquet itself. I refer back to the tweet pinned to the top of the Twitter account of the man who made a game simulating the physical battery of Sarkeesian. It bears repeating: “The biggest mistake with declaring war on gamers is that they’ve been training their entire lives to combat evil.” Metaphor allows #gamergate to target and hurt individuals under the guise of fighting ‘evil’.
It’s indicative of the level of commitment to a warped vision of the world that is uncompromising and - temporarily, at least - unswayable. There is no authority, moral or otherwise, so high that its opposition to #gamergate is perceived as a genuine indictment or reason for a sanity check. Games journalists, mainstream journalists, academics, Wikipedia editors - even the founder of Wikipedia - all become enemy collaborators when they refrain from endorsing the #gamergate narrative:
So too the owner of 4chan, one of the very online communities where the movement was incubated, as soon as he decided #gamergate had had its day and forbade further discussion.
What it speaks to is a failure of reason to penetrate through means of language alone. The language of reason is instead perceived solely as an aggressive force, and crudely wielded as such. The moral highground is a territory cynically - not sincerely - sought. How does #gamergate deal with the negative perception caused by the death threats against Sarkeesian and harassment of female journalists and developers? By conjuring up similar tales of victimisation perpetrated by its enemies. How does #gamergate react when a piece of cultural criticism is genuinely searing? By complaining that the critic is guilt-tripping (and thus attacking) their audience. #gamergate thinks critics should be using their powers of persuasive rhetoric not to call games culture to account, but to battle outsiders:
So what is #gamergate? #gamergate is a mob with torches aloft, hunting for any combustible dwelling and calling it a monster’s lair. #gamergate is a rage train, and everyone with an axe to grind wants a ride. Its fuel is a sour mash of entitlement, insecurity, arrogance and alienation. #gamergate is a vindication quest for political intolerance. #gamergate is revenge for every imagined slight. #gamergate is Viz’s Meddlesome Ratbag:
#gamergate is a madness that dreams it’s a revolution.
Further reading:
Here is a concise list of genuine ethical concerns surrounding gaming and the coverage of gaming by Leigh Alexander.
Here is the developer Damon Schubert, trying to engage with #gamergate supporters.
i'd like to thank you on behalf of all those who love porn of niche characters; thank god that you draw vivian with a pussy. I know you did both but at least you thought about the (minority?) in this case and i appreciate that greatly.
I wrote a bunch of words and then hated them so let me try this again.
This all started with the announcement of the death of “gamer”, right? I think we’ve all forgotten about that, when it’s the key to understanding what’s going on.
Did you know Zynga has a bigger market cap ($2.47B) than Ubisoft ($1.41B)? How many more people play Zynga’s games, too? Yet Ubisoft’s games are “video games”, and Zynga’s are not. I’m not sure what they are, but this line in the sand has been drawn so successfully that I doubt most average (read: not on Twitter 10+ hours a day) people would consider FarmVille to be a “video game” — even people who play it. It’s certainly not what first comes to mind when you say the phrase.
What about The Sims? Is that a video game? Well… yeah… probably. Still not what comes to mind as a “video game”, though.
What do you think of when I say “movie”? Probably a recent blockbuster like Lord of the Rings or one of the superhero adaptations. Everyone’s seen them or at least knows about them; they’re basically pop culture. And they raked in zillions besides.
What do you think of when I say “video game”? Why is it not The Sims, one of the best-selling games of all time? Why is it not a mobile phone game, when over a billion people play them? For many people it’s probably not even Mario, who is basically the mascot of video games.
Gamers have successfully defined a “video game” as a very, very narrow thing that involves fancy graphics, either twitchy reflexes or extreme patience, and probably some sort of gun that wobbles at the bottom of the screen. In turn they have defined “gamer” as a person who regularly and enthusiastically plays those kinds of games. I doubt you could find me anyone who exclusively plays Zynga games and self-identifies as a gamer.
The very identity “gamer” is thus, in fact, about control of itself.
I read death-of-gamer articles and I saw a cry of exasperation. “Why is this word reserved for such a small subset of people who play games?” they asked. “Everyone plays games. Let everyone into the clubhouse.”
By the way gamergate talks about those same articles — as alienation and stereotyping and mocking — you’d think they said we don’t need anyone to play games any more. Get rid of them all.
Well, of course. If the clubhouse is open to everyone, is there really any difference? For people who actively pride themselves on being gamers, who actively preserve the barriers of entry, what would it mean to be in the same category as your dad who thinks Candy Crush is super cool? Especially for people who identify solely as gamers, who’ve built their entire identities around the video games they play.
Video games. Video games. All of this over video games. Pong. That’s what this is all about.
What other form of entertainment has such a striking contrast between the core audience and the long tail? Hell, it’s usually the other way around: those blockbuster movies are the cheap accessible junk, and if you want something of real quality, you go see obscure/foreign/indie films. And you call them “films”. Yet in gaming, the conversation is dominated by an endless onslaught of games that appeal to a very specific demographic, who gladly consume every single one of them. The real mass-market stuff is way out on the fringe, so far out it’s barely considered “games”, despite being played by a fifth of the entire human race.
This is how much power gamers have over their own industry.
Power. It’s all about power dynamics. The “fake gamer girl” trope. The guy on every CoD server who calls you a faggot. The rape jokes, the trans jokes, the gay jokes, the outright vitriol that nobody ever seems to call out. The in-game rewards for obsessively scouring for secrets or whatnot, ensuring that nobody who doesn’t have ten years’ worth of FPS experience will never collect everything. (I note that Mario Kart 8’s hardest achievement is just a variant kart, which you get for getting one star on every course. Three stars on every course gets you nothing at all. Nintendo gets it.)
These are all self-reinforcing barriers to entry. Everyone who truly wants to get into games has to prove their mettle by enduring this hazing: the slurs and abuse, the assumed knowledge of tropes, the reflexes and/or tolerance of tedium. If you can get past all that, you must really want to be a Gamer. And once you are, your sympathy has been somewhat worn away; if you can put up with it, why can’t everyone else?
I asked several gamergate randos about multiplayer abuse. All of them said they find it distasteful; all of them said the people doling it out are jerks; one of them even said it had deeply bothered him when he first started playing online. And yet all of them asserted that the onus is on the target, the newcomer, to suck it up. None of them had ever chastized some asshole for being an asshole, and they were all adamant about not ever doing so.
Why? Because they don’t want to be the buzzkill. They don’t want to risk being the target. That one asshole has control over them, like they have control over gaming.
And this is what gamergate is: a display of that control, against the people suggesting they may lose it, and the people actively working to wrest it away from them. It’s thinly about corruption, but if that were really the issue, why wouldn’t they go after the publishers who hold early game access over reviwers’ heads? The excuse is cracking, anyway. They so adamantly want this to not be about Zoe Quinn that they’re now calling her “Literally Who”, so they can continue to talk about her without talking about her, because it’s so much not about her. I’ve seen more than one list of targets (of boycotts, of emails to advertisers) based not on particular corrupt incidents, but on the handwave of “SJW influence”.
It’s all a power play to preserve the status quo. Because it benefits dudebros in their mid-20s. (Yeah, I know, you’re not-my-shield. But you’re their shield, playing the role as the token minority, because you’ve already been hazed.) That one asshole is loud and obnoxious so you’ll either leave or show how desperately you want to fit in, and now gamergate is doing the same thing to games journalism en masse.
It’s been a month and little has come of all this, except that even 4chan has gotten sick of their crap, which you’d think would be a bad sign. Sadly nothing has happened in the other direction either; gaming is still kind of a cesspool, and anyone who asks “why are 90% of games about men?” is still called a cunt and lambasted and driven out of her house.
Like a lot of big-media problems, I’m hopeful this will all eventually be solved by the increasing ease of just making a game oneself. But we’re a very long ways from being able to cobble together an AAA game with just a couple people and pocket change, so in the meantime, it’s a question worth asking.
And to the gamebros: relax. Nobody cares that you enjoy Call of Halo. Nobody cares that every game you play has a straight bald white buff cis male protagonist. Nobody even cares that you get off to the vapid chesty love interest you need to save. It’s fine for different things to exist.
People care when this is the vast majority of what we have. People care that gamers have twisted pop culture to think that this is what games are. People care that a huge bulk of money in gaming goes towards pumping out a lot of the same kind of thing. People care that poor attitudes towards women and QUILTBAG people and other races and the minorities are given such a huge stage, yet so many of the privileged core group come out in droves to demonstrate the very reason this is a problem when anyone points it out.
This isn’t a zero-sum game. But by waging war against feminists and casuals and anyone else not in the core demographic, by explicitly seeking to purify your own insular group, gamers are making it one.
I know. It’s not individual gamers. Individual gamers only leave the one kinda-mean comment, or let the one slur slide, or buy the one game. But this is the impact the group is having, and if you care so much about being part of that group, the burden is on your shoulders.
Knock it off. You don’t need to own an entire medium. Let everyone in the clubhouse.
Anonymous asked:
The species sheet of imps says they are intersex but according to eevee, the accurate term for them would be hermaphrodite since it's species wide and apparently they have both types of fully functional sexual organs. Are they that and the species sheet is wrong or is it a meta kind of thing where imps would prefer to be referred to as intersex due to some sort of stigma attached to the term hermaphrodite in that universe?
Imps are outside of “male and female” sexual organs, even if their genitalia often looks like a mix. Imps are able to reproduce with species that don’t have standard genitalia or standard “male/female” sexes. They have one set of reproductive organs that changes (sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly) according to what’s needed, and that’s not always to “egg/sperm” - hermaphroditic almost fits, but it starts to fall outside of that a little with the organs being able to change to reproduce with things that can normally only reproduce with themselves.
Intersex was picked as a term because they’re almost always going to display characteristics that don’t fit solely “male” or “female” of the species they’re a mix of. For instance, pygmy pyzkyes and regular pyzkyes are female and male respectively (as far as reproductive organs go), normally, but if you had an imp mix — there would be confusion on its appearance because it would be a mix of both. I’d pull up an example of some other male/female differences mixed into one, but we don’t have a whole lot of species with different secondary sexual characteristics yet! But imagine if we did, the imps would usually display a mix of those traits normally associated with “male” and “female”.
So basically, I picked “intersex” because they often look like they’re between male and female secondary sexual characteristics. I didn’t list “hermaphrodite” because I didn’t want to capture the idea of “male and female” organs since theirs are something different, allowing offspring with any individual who’s not sterile. This only matters more to mention as species with different methods of reproducing are introduced. For instance, Heartbreakers and Moonmen don’t have a normal set of “male/female” organs, but imps can reproduce with them regardless. In practice, it can look like hermaphroditism, but it should be differentiated. There’s no actual word for this in English that I know of, which makes this hard.
Also: I apologize, on the sheet it looks like BECAUSE they’re intersex they can reproduce with almost anything, when it should be that they’re intersex and CAN ALSO reproduce with almost anything. I didn’t mean to imply that being intersex caused the the reproductive ability, and should have taken a little more space to clarify that. (Hopefully words here will suffice in that regard.)
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floraverse answered:
i am confused and baffled and disappointed by this episode. i didn’t hate it, and it wasn’t complete and utter skippable garbage like House Guest and Fusion Cuisine, but i guess that’s not a high bar
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