Internet shitstorm of the week

[Squire Grooktook]

When dealing with users though you can actually talk with them and ask specific things about the game. Often times essential details that can make or break a game (for me, subjectively) don't come up in a more formal paper.

Mark from Classic Game Room is okay. He "gets it" on a lot of arcade style games, how they're meant to be played, how they're not "too short" etc. but I still feel that many of his reviews don't go into enough depth. For example IIRC his Rayforce/Layer Section review barely goes into any details about the scoring system/risk reward/level design/etc. and just slaps "it's good and really playable" on most of it.

Someone here once suggested that he needs a "nerdy sidekick" to form the perfect team of enthusiastic presentation and in depth analysis. Would be pretty spot on.

[system11]

Mark from Classic Game Room is okay. He "gets it" on a lot of arcade style games, how they're meant to be played, how they're not "too short" etc. but I still feel that many of his reviews don't go into enough depth. For example IIRC his Rayforce/Layer Section review barely goes into an details about the scoring system/risk reward/level design/etc. and just slaps "it's good and really playable" on most of it.

That's why he's so good, he presents nice high level overviews of games in the context of enjoyment, with a nice relaxed style.

[Skykid]

I would never trust user reviews, my God.

IMDB and other 'contributory' website facilities remind me why a professional pool actually exists. The same with amateur publishing, which is essentially a user review domain with a private arena, and that's when we end up with the mis-information of HG101.

Professional media journalism, so called, is way below acceptable standards in gaming, sub par for film, and better for music - but at least these individuals have pressure to outline the core of a product and identify flaws correctly. Even if some results are untrustworthy, the criticism should be in the ball park.

In comparison I've witnessed countless horror stories by amateur reviewers and users. Things like "well I don't care if it has low scores across the board, my preorder's in and I'm going to enjoy the hell out of this come Friday - 10/10"

Or other fan sites promoting such fallacy as Kaze Kiri being 'perhaps the best game on the PC Engine.'

GTFO with that stuff.

As for user film reviews, Jesus wept.

[Squire Grooktook]

I would never trust user reviews, my God.

What kind of user reviews though? I'm not asking random casuals on Steam forums what they think of Dodonpachi. I'm asking people who's business it actually is to know. Maybe you're thinking of something entirely different from what I'm thinking of by "user reviews", or assuming I'm just going to trust one opinion without researching or confirming it.

If I want to know whether a fighting game is to my tastes, I'm not going to look to some casual 3 sentence user review and I'm not going to look to some professional review that's 1 paragraph long and scribbled out after 5 hours of playtime (and wastes 2/3rds of that paragraph talking about graphics, single player content, etc.). I'm going to actually ask a bunch of tournament players who have been playing it dedicated for months. I'm going to ask them how the balance is, the pace, how diverse the characters are, what the general playstyle of the game is like, what kind of playstyles the characters have, etc. etc. etc. That's my user review.

And than I compare this to research I've done (before and after) on the games mechanics, match footage, developer interviews, etc. if it seems their opinions are valid, and that more importantly what I've learned about the game aligns with my personal tastes, than I'm good to go.

Similarly, any professional review of a shmup would be unlikely to even "get" how arcade style games are meant to be played, let alone go into intricacies of things like how much rng the game has, how varied the enemy types are, how involved the scoring system is, how balanced it is, whether it's got slow focused dodging or manic unfocused dodging, etc. etc. etc.

I could ask that shit on a forum like this and get a ton of answers, examples (even pinpointing specific patterns which a professional review would never have the time to do even if they were inclined to give a shit), and opinions I could verify by looking up the game.

Communicating with people and networking has lead me to a lot of fantastic games, not one of which I would have played or likely even discovered if EGM was still my bible.

Mark from Classic Game Room is okay. He "gets it" on a lot of arcade style games, how they're meant to be played, how they're not "too short" etc. but I still feel that many of his reviews don't go into enough depth. For example IIRC his Rayforce/Layer Section review barely goes into an details about the scoring system/risk reward/level design/etc. and just slaps "it's good and really playable" on most of it.

That's why he's so good, he presents nice high level overviews of games in the context of enjoyment, with a nice relaxed style.

I guess that's fine depending on what you're looking for. I enjoy his enthusiastic and easy going presentation of these games, but he doesn't give the kind of information I'd want if I were going to spend 80 dollars importing a shmup. I guess that's not really the point of the show, but that's generally what I'm looking for from any kind of review or pre-purchase opinion.

[BryanM]

That's why you look at the aggregate, and skim, not read, the writing portions. It's amazingly more efficient when you can scan and discard 20 opinions at a time, than one opinion per page per site. If you need an "outline of the core of the product", why aren't you youtubing the game in question and watching it with your own eye orbs?

Nothing is perfect, but by god, the latent simmering hate within all gamers gives them a much better than average barometer than consumers of other media. It's not often 2/5 gets 5/5 from the community, but it happens all the time with video. Which is a magical place where the worst thing of all time, worse than Human Centipede and Transformers combined, can get 4.3/5.

Reviews are superficial. If you're going to take hours of your life reading some shit to decide if you're going to spend hours of your life watching/playing some shit before you're already invested in said shit... something is wrong there. "Is this worth my time" doesn't require a thesis to answer.

[Skykid]

@Grooktook if you want to wait three months to get feedback from tournament players you don't need any review, since the period of release and recommendation has long past.

Before discovering forums like these where people are actually (mostly) educated in gaming history and have years of experience, my social group was a perfect place to find out what was upcoming, worthwhile, and worth avoiding.

But while I haven't really trusted games journalism since Super Play magazine and a select period of CVG - and that was a one off, I found overzealous Gamefan and EGM reviews back then to be horribly overzealous and often far more incorrect than a lot of today's publications - I still wouldn't turn only to amateur sites and user input unless I know it's a trusted source.

Shmups.org is a rarity. Think how many consider HG101 to be reliable and reputable? Those people will be informed the entire Darius series is useless shit up to Gaiden and G, and that Psychic Assassin Taromaru is a poor game - mainly because the site's editor simply isn't experienced enough to give an accurate opinion.

Commercial games journalism of today is a reflection of the industry itself, just another FPS in word form: repetitive, bland, formulaic. But there are still places with integrity. I may be biased but Eurogamer practices a strict code of not accepting PR gratuities and pays all of its own flights and accommodation to disassociate itself with the issues surrounding media corruption - and its reviews have never been afraid to be utterly brutally honest, dealing out 1's to certain early Xbone titles. It's not perfect, and still partly buckled by the current trend of anything below an 8 is below average, but I still consider it a positive source of games journalism to the point where I won't even pitch to other publications to make a little bread.

[Squire Grooktook]

@Grooktook if you want to wait three months to get feedback from tournament players you don't need any review, since the period of release and recommendation has long past.

Except that pre-release tournaments are often going on with high level players involved 3 monthes or more before release. Of course, truly knowing what a fighting game is all about can take years (IIRC mvc2's infamous "god 4" characters weren't even being discovered till at least 2-3 years into the games history), but the point is I have never or at least extremely rarely found as much in depth analysis in any kind of professional review outlet as I have from simply talking to people who have devoted a large amount of time to it.

If I'm on the fence about a title (rare actually, usually I can tell what a game is like just by doing some research on the game itself), the information I'm looking for is generally not the kind of thing that most professional and even most non-professional game jounalists write about or care for. That doesn't mean that all game journalists are terrible, but the number of them that give out information relevant to me is so small that it barely even exists.

But while I haven't really trusted games journalism since Super Play magazine and a select period of CVG - and that was a one off, I found overzealous Gamefan and EGM reviews back then to be horribly overzealous and often far more incorrect than a lot of today's publications

Believe me, I'm under no illusion that EGM or most older game review publications were that great compared to modern day ones, or that games in general are all that much better (say what you want about the "cinematization" of gaming, but for every bland Hollywood triple A shooter there is today, there was likely an equal number of awful furry mascot platformers and Mortal Kombat knock offs back then).

My main problem with the older reviews is the same problem with the ones today (barring the fact that they no longer cover many genres I'm interested in): I don't need an 8/10 scale to find out if a game is solid, I can easily find that out myself just by researching the game itself. What I want to know is the fundamentals of how the game really plays, what it's really about, what kind of skills it emphasizes, etc. Most reviewers today simply aren't going to tell you if Platformer-X is a static memorization journey or a twitchy rng hell (unless it's INCREDIBLY obvious like in the case of a "rogue lite" or something). This is the kind of information and insight that I'm looking for, and which the vast majority of reviewers simply don't take into account.

Shmups.org is a rarity. Think how many consider HG101 to be reliable and reputable? Those people will be informed the entire Darius series is useless shit up to Gaiden and G, and that Psychic Assassin Taromaru is a poor game - mainly because the site's editor simply isn't experienced enough to give an accurate opinion.

HG101's missteps are probably one half not doing the research, and one half subjective opinion. I know the pre Gaiden Darius titles are a bit of an acquired taste even around here, so I can't entirely fault someone for passing off the earlier titles as subpar (even if they shouldn't label such opinions as confidently as they do). That being said, HG101 is about as accurate as old EGM reviews, if not more so. Some of their opinions are disagreeable, but that's just a lesson on why you don't accept only one persons opinion as law. Especially if you don't know how much time and effort they've actually put into the game.

[Randorama]

I am posting it here because I am really too lazy.

I have been invited to join a workshop on "gender studies" held at the university I currently work at, to discuss about gender issues in video games.

This, on the grounds that one of the organizers knows that I "know well arcade games" (?), and that I "research on language" (relevance to game art of this...?).

For those who wonder, I may be able to publish in 2015 in "video game studies", and for this strand of bullsh...research, I am close to Jesper Juul's positions.

If anyone cares, I may share whatever material I may present, in case I actually go.

[Eaglet]

lol so much SU.

[Randorama]

Lol so much media/communication studies.

Most of these people are not interested at all in understanding and studying the underpinning principles of videogames, but just force e.g. movie analysis onto the "genre", which is actually comprised of very different genres. Most of these "scholars" do not even know that arcade games exist.

Then again, I would get a free Christmas lunch (at the fancy restaurant on campus, even), and the opportunity to belittle people that spend the whole day "doing research" on these topics.


Besides, it could be worse: it could be Uppsala!

[CIT]

Really looking forward to how this pans out, Rando.

Yeah, I hate that so many people approach games with the toolset of analysis of narrative or visual representation and label that "game studies". It can be relative to some games, but the most important aspect of a game is still that it's...well, a game.

In other words, you can discuss the difference between this



and this



but that actually wouldn't be a study of the game itself.

[Randorama]

CIT, we will see, but I will share if I prepare some slides.

What I find appalling is that some "people" are supposed to actually look at the facts, before making certain sweeping statements.
Or so, I believe that academia works (/naive thinking).

The most interesting part is that I *should* be able to publish two papers that discuss well-known aspects of shmups and their mechanics, and the reviewers have been at odds for a while, now, trying to convince me that I shouldn't be focusing on how the mechanics work, offering no reason whatsoever as to why I should be doing what they say (hint: this is the most unprofessional act a reviewer can do).

A hint on what the papers are about...
if videogames (well, their designers) are trying to tell us a message, what is the message behind rank? Or suiciding? Or chains?

But then again, "gamergate" and the Sarkeesians of this world argue about appearances, don't they? And appearances sell.


EDIT: I may just go and present numbers on the character rosters of some arcade genres.
After all, we had Proco and Tiat in 1986, so we solved the emancipation problem a long time ago, within shmups.

Shmups 1, rest of the field 0. How about this?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

EDIT: I may just go and present numbers on the character rosters of some arcade genres.
After all, we had Proco and Tiat in 1986, so we solved the emancipation problem a long time ago, within shmups.

Shmups 1, rest of the field 0. How about this?

Don't forget how many shmups have either females as the main character (Guardic Gaiden, Pulstar, the Aleste series) or better yet, have gender choices where the female characters end up being more popular because they're stronger. Batsugun's probably the biggest instance of this (Type B ships are absurdly powerful), but there's also:

* Blazing Star - Windina's spreadshot and Dino 246's shielding are both insanely popular, and then there's the Peplos which does ridiculous damage when using an autofire setup.

* Armed Police Batrider - in a cast of mostly guys, Carpet, Maria and (to a lesser extent) Shorty are pretty popular.

* Mushihimesama Futari - Reco Normal and her BL version are both super popular for clears, only Palm Abnormal comes close in popularity, and his shot sucks for stages, he's really useful just for bosses.

* Espgaluda - the world record is with Tateha. She's actually the strongest in the first game (yes, better laser damage than Ageha) and isn't too shabby when in Kakusei either. Ageha's a lot more popular in the sequel, though Tateha and Asagi are pretty useful too (and Asagi has the highest damage in the game when in Kakusei).

* ESP.Ra.De - all three characters are pretty good to be honest, but the world record is with Irori. I'm not good enough to know the game, but maybe something about her makes her the best for scoring?

* Guwange - Kosame's arrows are incredibly strong, and she's got a better Shikigami attack than the guys (extra explosions, similar to Ring + Chain combo in Progear).

* Gunbird 1 & 2 - Yuan Nang in the first game, Tavia in the second. Tavia's also got a bullet cancelling sword slash, which seems to be unique to her?

* Giga Wing 1 - Shutock is arguably the best in the game due to his crazy powerful spreadshot, but Ruby is pretty awesome too. Isha's not bad I guess, but the worst character in the game by far is Sinnosuke, the young ninja dude (his spread shot is so weak).

* Giga Wing 2 - Chery's got an autoaiming shot, and Limi's really darn strong. The least useful character is one of the guys, Ragulo, who has that awkward close range radius shot that doesn't do enough damage to be worth it.

* Sonic Wings Series - Mao Mao and Angela. The only game in the series where the world record is held by one of the guys (Keith) is the first one.

* Sengoku Blade - Hagane/Katana, insanely strong and also the world record holder.

[system11]

Obvious reason for some of this - shmups are an old genre. Back in the day, anyone went into arcades - gaming wasn't a specifically 'male' thing, that's a modern invention. Nobody cared what gender the characters were. Good times. You couldn't even make Outrun these days without someone whining about the passenger being female.

Most amusing article I spotted this week was after all the reviews of Bayonetta 2 came out. Many SJWs (including journalists) were pointing out how Bayonetta is a great example of an acceptable female design since she's in control of her sexuality. However, then I saw a story where someone actually decided to ask some women what they thought of it. The results were ... far less flattering. Of course this is obvious, unless you have absolutely no fucking clue at all, which covers the vast majority of SJW/GG involved people.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

However, then I saw a story where someone actually decided to ask some women what they thought of it.

Women who had actually played the game or women who were just shown pictures of the game?

This was an interesting article about Bayonetta I read a while ago:

I want to be this witch. I want to run up the sides of walls in the moonlight and shoot angels with my awesome heels and look totally amazing while I’m doing it. I want every pose I strike to be ready for an issue of Vogue. I want to stand back to back with my sister and smash the corpse of god into pieces after I throw it into one of the most potent symbols for masculine gods: THE MOTHERFUCKING SUN.

This is a revenge fantasy where you hack institutionalized Christianity into bloody pieces.

Speaking of SJWs: mass shooting in Seattle? Immediately blame it on "toxic ideas of masculinity". Back in the real world, a woman with an actual education who's an associate professor of history points out that it's all too easy to forget about one of the earliest school shooters in history, Brenda Spencer. Spoilers: girl with living with mental health issues and an alcoholic dad gets a rifle and 500 rounds of ammo for christmas instead of a radio like she asked for. The person she's comparing Brenda to, Adam Lanza, is the shooter from Sandy Hook, but the point is it's not really a gender specific issue.

Comparing Spencer’s and Lanza’s attacks on small children and school staff members, we begin to see that these terrible episodes are more than an expression of a male-dominated culture of violence.

Much more salient are the facts that Spencer and Lanza both came from homes with ready access to guns and massive amounts of ammunition. Both had parents that celebrated gun use, and both appear to have been psychologically troubled.

[system11]

Is that a Twitter troll account?

I used to think I simply didn't agree with Anita, I don't consider her part of the SJW/GG clusterfuck because she was just someone stating an opinion, the fault is with media+SJWs taking it as gospel.

However, that's one of the most retarded things I've read this year.

[cave hermit]

Maybe the pressure is getting to her?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Is that a Twitter troll account?

Sadly, no.

[Some-Mist]

first full teaser for the sarkeesian effect

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Anopt-Egb60

tho it's just as cringeworthy as reading posts by sarkeesian herself.

and then the xoxo speach
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah8mhDW6Shs

[Randorama]

Obvious reason for some of this - shmups are an old genre. Back in the day, anyone went into arcades - gaming wasn't a specifically 'male' thing, that's a modern invention. Nobody cared what gender the characters were. Good times. You couldn't even make Outrun these days without someone whining about the passenger being female.

My 0.02 beer-laden cents.

Some recent statistics I found show that both men and women attended and attend arcades in Japan - a trend that started in the late '80s (think of bored wives but also salary-women having a a credit or two). Women are at most less prone to play fighting games than men, because they are zero, player vs. player games ("you win, I lose").

The statistics I read about Swedish on-line players show that local women tend to avoid frat fuckwads games (Halo and WWII stuff), but are eager to play anything else, whether it is competitive or not. I have been taking samples for a while, now, and most of my younger female students have no problems to frag anything and taunt other players, apparently. I successfully supervised two master theses showing this: Swedish women will use language such as "STFU N00b" to taunt other players as much as men.

Also, as Bareknuckleroo shows (a small set, even! aren't there something like 400 shmups?), shmups have been catering to both genders for a while, now. I think that we could cover the whole set of shmups and have a slight prevalence of women fighting the good fight, with a strong tendence to have female-pilot-only games in the last ten years (e.g. Under Defeat, Muchi with the three BBWs!).

The problem is that all of this nonsense comes from US culture's obsession in particular, but western culture's obsession in general with a fetishist approach to visual stimuli, and with the pathetic but very real inability to see the -game part of videogame.

In a few words: any statistics on "identification" suggest that player characters are polygons that programmers use to sell the game the first few times. After a few plays, players remain for the game system, or give up the game in a few more tries.

Obsession about gender of characters and plots is akin to wishing more non-white characters in fiction: useless for the actual emancipation of the "under-represented" categories in real life. It comes as no surprise that comes from those who want to brand and control "video-games" and their players. As far as I am concerned, I care that my wife gets the same contract as a male employer and that rape is stamped out, but I am fine if Mario needs to save Peach. I can't give a fuck less about fiction.

Sarkeesian...she fabricated data and is not worth bothering about. She is trying to sell herself as a highly divisive character, which is something that appears to sell a lot, in many western countries.

Closer to home, I have challenged some people in this field to display a basic understanding of gaming principles, and they showed none. Yet, they published books in which they offered "theories" about video-game analysis. The names are in my previous post. I am fine with the press being ignorant fools: they are the press, so they are not supposed to know, just to bend down and swallow, whether it be video-games or war reportage. The aspect that in part disturbs me is the people who pretend to do this in academia, since I am currently in this field, too.

However, at this level I take it that in order to talk, write and even get published about something, I need to know the subject matter and how it works, and display that I understand these basic bits, when I write about it. Still, when it comes to topics such as video-games, it seems like these basic rules of...I don't know, rational writing we learnt in junior high are simply suspended. Some of these guys did even a whole Ph.D., to get it this comically wrong.

Of course, I am grumpy because it is Sunday evening and I am reviewing a paper about related topics just because two imbeciles who are acting as my reviewers are flat-out lying on games they have not played. One of them even challenged me to prove that I could not have actually played Battle Garegga, and asked what this MAME thing was.

What was the topic, again?

[Squire Grooktook]

However, then I saw a story where someone actually decided to ask some women what they thought of it.

Women who had actually played the game or women who were just shown pictures of the game?

This reminds me of when I went to Comic Con last year, on the first day I initially saw more women lined up to play the Bayonetta 2 demo than men.


Also yeah, arcade games tend to be pretty decent for gender representation. There's still a lot of fanservice and whatnot, but more than any other genre I can think of a lot of cool female leads (many of whom aren't heavily sexualized, Rayforce for instance) in arcade games.

[rancor]

There are a LOT of girls that play arcade games here. Usually when I notice, I do a quick check - "Wheres her boyfriend at?" Then I see that shes kicking ass at Melty Blood or something. Always with the fighting games, and usually alone...

[Ed Oscuro]

Here's the real shitstorm of the week!

However, at this level I take it that in order to talk, write and even get published about something, I need to know the subject matter and how it works, and display that I understand these basic bits, when I write about it. Still, when it comes to topics such as video-games, it seems like these basic rules of...I don't know, rational writing we learnt in junior high are simply suspended. Some of these guys did even a whole Ph.D., to get it this comically wrong.

Excellent post and it didn't seem grumpy to me.

From what little I can see from my perspective, it is at the fringes of academia that some of the stranger stuff happens. This is both good (it's like a garden plot for "too crazy" stuff) and bad (it can take up too much public attention from objectively important issues), so the question is how to shift it more towards the good.

For example, T. Colin Campbell showed remarkably bad scientific acumen and arguably worse faith when he set up and promoted the findings of his academic China Study as a reliable nutritional guide in his bestselling popular work "The China Study." Yet it remains to be said that there is a mix of good and bad in the end - despite the vast simplifications and harm done to the debate, many people have gotten into these discussions without a shred of understanding about logical argumentation and the scientific process. They never could realistically have been expected to be guided to the light (which, for the moment, says something like "there are some big things we certainly have problems with, but an epidemiological study isn't going to tell us much about proper nutritional guidelines for anybody, let alone random people on the Internet") by the right sort of argument and personality.

Academics often show a strong capacity for fanatical gatekeeping - sometimes stronger than is warranted for a topic at hand, before professional interests are considered (naturally the interests of private academics and bureaucracies account for some of the more knee-jerk reactions to developing, i.e. untested, ideas). I generally like the slow-and-painstaking approach to improving the state of affairs seen in developed academic disciplines, but at the same time one can countenance some of the vandals as carrying some worthwhile ideas or criticisms along, and occasionally those things get picked up, and looking into the future it seems that some of the new 'Studies' areas are quite promising and influential, given that the pace of discovery amongst traditional disciplines with their own intractable pet problems / money sinks isn't necessarily very high either.

At the end of the day these matters obviously a lot to some people - even some people we would laugh at for hyperbole and lacking integrity, are completely sincere. I think that represents an opportunity to at least reflect on the matter and see what can be done. At the very least, protests represent "the other side," even if it must be cast in a purely adversarial sense.

As for this topic in particular - well, I think it's no mistake that it tends to be some of the newer "Studies" programs in academia that are most aligned with this topic. They do not have all the same traditional allegiances (including some they should, like being good and honest researchers) and they are more open to these topics.

Overall I am more convinced by the "what is going to directly benefit people is not just rhetoric," but changing rhetoric certainly feeds into this at least a bit. And as things develop more, sometimes the rhetoric provides a new area to break through to public consciousness, at the very least. It's not a safeguard against hypocrisy or an assurance of equality, but it was never rightly expected to be that.

In short, I'd like to see a professionalization of these new "Studies" programs. Cross-pollination worries are always with academia, though. Direct adult oversight would seem to be desirable, but as I stated I think that there can be a bad tendency to strangle "foreign/not built here" types of programs. That said, I have seen some attempts to talk about aesthetics of gaming by philosophy students - the real problems are that most old-timers could say "what's the universal import of this?" or find, again, that it's just not really germane to the typical conflicts. So there definitely are a generation of people trying to talk about these new problems - but I don't know whether they will find an acceptable home and framework to work within at a more traditional program. Meanwhile, the new programs are the real new Wild West.

Actually this is probably a very old problem - would somebody explain to me what the hell "movie analysis" is in a way that makes it look important? I don't mean "Roger Ebert was a mentalgen and s scholar" but I mean in what way is it distinct from old-fashioned political science or philosophy, but still a value-add?

[antron]

This women is a terrible human being.

this post is the reason why the phrase "it takes one to know one" exists.

[Lord Satori]

So Stephen Colbert recently took a stab at #Gamergate, and it was pretty funny. Though he had that Sarkeesian girl on as a guest.

Honestly, I see her point, but I feel there's an extreme version of tunnel vision going on where any game that features a strong female role, playable or otherwise, completely escapes her notice. Have you not heard of the Final Fantasy XIII games (or VI even), Bayonetta, Tomb Raider, or Super Frickin Princess Peach? The damsel in distress trope is worn out and tiring, but when you think about it, these princesses are likely to have been pampered and taken care of by servants their entire lives. Female or not, when you live a life like that, you aren't going to be able to take care of yourself. Not every character designed for a game needs to be a positive role, there are plenty of characters both male AND female that have despicable qualities. You think all of us guys like being portrayed as drunken, horny, rapists? If you want to change the way women are being portrayed in games, try designing your own game. Make characters. Write a story. Sure it's harder to do than complain and make other developers change their games, but if your works manage to inspire people, then it'll probably have the same effect. Also, fyi, having tits doesn't automatically make a character bad or sexualized or whatever. Though I do understand complaints about overly sexualized outfits.

All of that being said, I think this #Gamergate thing is just as bad. Throwing a shitstorm and spewing out death threats just because a few women have the courage to speak out against lonely designers who think a female medieval breastplate should literally only cover her breasts does absolutely nothing to disprove drunken horny rapist stereotype I mentioned above. I know I posted a lot more about the other side than this one, but really I think both sides are ridiculous.

[quash]

The kind of people who unironically tell others to "check their privilege" are rabbling about a patently first-world problem. Is there anything more ridiculous than that?

[BulletMagnet]

The kind of people who unironically tell others to "check their privilege" are rabbling about a patently first-world problem. Is there anything more ridiculous than that?

If you feel you're being treated unfairly you shouldn't let the notion that somebody somewhere is being treated even more unfairly than you dissuade you from saying something.

[Ed Oscuro]

You think all of us guys like being portrayed as drunken [...]

Even Chris Redfield! IS NOTHING SACRED?!

The kind of people who unironically tell others to "check their privilege" are rabbling about a patently first-world problem. Is there anything more ridiculous than that?

If you feel you're being treated unfairly you shouldn't let the notion that somebody somewhere is being treated even more unfairly than you dissuade you from saying something.

That's a good point, but I feel the way "check your privilege" is framed (usually) shifts the discussion to winners vs. losers, and a zero-sum view of things, rather than talking about the idea that everybody can do better by helping each other.

We are a long ways off from gender and sex equality, but without context, "you should give up some power to me" doesn't make sense.

[Mischief Maker]

I hate this issue. I'm on the side of the gamergaters and I feel as uncomfortable as FDR posing for a picture next to Joseph Stalin.

In all seriousness, what's the difference between Sarkeesian going after videogames and Bill O'Reilley going after Ludacris because his lyrics glamorized, in his words, a "life of guns, violence, drugs and disrespect of women?" Both videogames and the character of Ludacris are absurdist fantasies.

The internet has been around for decades now and still people haven't figured out that taking trolls seriously is like reading "fuck you" on a bathroom stall and saying, "Fuck me? How... how dare they!!!"

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

I'm on the side of the gamergaters and I feel as uncomfortable as FDR posing for a picture next to Joseph Stalin."

I don't. "Yu all hate women because you can't get laid" is baby-tier shaming that only works on idiots.

Not that I support harrassment - I think ZQ and Anita deserve medals for the torment they've endured. Silver and bronze medals, to be specific. Gold still goes to Chris-chan.