How Women Became Gamers Through D&D 239
An anonymous reader writes: To add some historical context to the currently controversy surrounding attitudes toward women in gaming, Jon Peterson provides an in-depth historical look at the unsurprisingly male origins of the "gamer" identity. It also examines how Dungeons & Dragons helped to open the door for women in gaming — overturning a sixty-year-old dogma that was born when Wells's Little Wars first assumed the "disdain" of women for gaming.
It's always been a myth (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea that there are few women gamers has always been a myth in the first place. Sure there are certain genres where men and boys dominate the demographic, but there are also genres where women dominate the demographic.
The idea that women "don't belong in gaming" or are "under-represented in the gaming community" is a myth perpetrated by the same kind of childish mentality that thinks "l33t speak" makes one cool and special.
It also comes from women (Score:2)
I've seen a surprising number of women that see gaming as a "boys thing". That is slowly changing with age, but it is still more prevalent than with men. When I was a kid, only nerd played video games or PnP games. Real boys splayed sports. That has changed now, and it is perfectly acceptable for all boys to play games, and most people are even coming around on male adults gaming. With girls/women, there is still a more prevalent view of it not being "normal" to be in to gaming.
Funny thing is, it'll come fo
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The idea that women "don't belong in gaming"
I've literally never heard anyone say that.
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"Gamer Gate" is about misrepresenting markting as journalism; and all the evils that walk side by side with marketing types. The triggering for all the outrage, which spilled over from mere complains about ethics to an entire campaign, was this Quinn fellow performing sexual favors for gaming journalists in exchange for good reviews. She did this five seperate times, once with a married man.
Now an entire industry is trying to spin this as a feminist issue, yet getting the actual facts behind this story isn'
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And given that you just blindly repeated the misogynistic lies about Zoe Quinn, I think you just proved GP's point.
To stay with the observable facts: there is absolutely no proof that Zoe slept around to get good reviews. There has been no positive article on her work that can be directly attributed to her relationship.
And that Gamergate was born on this lie and acting as if they care about journalistic integrity, while staying mostly silent on 'Shadows of Mordor' tells a spectator exactly what the prioriti
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Whatever. I'm interested in journalistic ethics.
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This depends on what people mean when they says "gamers". Speaking as someone who owns a shop that sells Tabletop games like Warhammer, Magic the Gathering, D&D etc, men outnumber women about 20 to 1. But then the reverse is probably true for stuff like Candy Crush on facebook. But lumping all that stuff together under the umbrella term "gamers" paints a gigantic gloss stroke over some significant differences. There is a big divide between the stuff that involves "being a geek" and stuff like facebook g
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My girlfriend is a gamer; video type. She's done some casual social gaming but since we started dating last year, she's gotten into more complicated resource type games and role playing (she's playing an Indian in the Deadlands Reloaded game I referee).
So still 50/50 but with 6 data points :)
[John]
The article is miogynistic on its own (Score:4, Insightful)
"Jim Dapkus wrote one of these: he loved the game but expressed concern that it offered little by way of roles for female characters. He complained that a “witch or female counterpart to the magic user is not listed,” aside from the lone illustration in Men & Magic of a “Beautiful Witch.”"
So women don't want to be a magic user, barbarian, thief, ranger or paladin (all arguably sexless) but... a "witch"?
O'RLY...
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And by the same logic I could complain about the lack of masculine My Little Ponies..
There ARE masculine My Little Ponies. While the Mane Six (Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Applejack, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie) are female, there are plenty of male supporting ponies.
Where is this "disdain" coming from? (Score:3)
overturning a sixty-year-old dogma that was born when Wells's Little Wars first assumed the "disdain" of women for gaming.
The quote is "for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books." Nothing about disdain.
And judging by the gaming friends I've interacted with over the years, the quote holds true for gaming even today. The ratios are close to even in social games (including MMOs), not so much for shooter/wargames.
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> The ratios are close to even in social games (including MMOs), not so much for shooter/wargames.
Can you blame them? Hell, I don't either want to listen to some 14 year old f-bomb this, f-bomb that, trash talk and whine about everything and not learn a dam thing about _teamwork_.
Thank God for private servers, and SourceMod to freeze / slay / ban the little shits.
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This really, really is the answer. The only way some people learn good behavior is by learning there are consequences for bad behavior.
By the industry forcing all these games to be on company-owned servers, they have inadvertently created this situation. When I first started playing multiplayer games, like Starcraft or Counter-Strike, you didn't run into this kind of nonsense. If you cheated or were a horse's ass to othe
Re:Where is this "disdain" coming from? (Score:4, Insightful)
overturning a sixty-year-old dogma that was born when Wells's Little Wars first assumed the "disdain" of women for gaming.
The quote is "for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books." Nothing about disdain.
Well, it is a put-down for the average girl, since "the more intelligent sort of girl" would be the one who likes "boy's games and books."
My guess is that they were just looking for a quote to back up their bogus thesis. After all, quotes are like statistics - you can find one to prove anything :-)
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Well, it is a put-down for the average girl, since "the more intelligent sort of girl" would be the one who likes "boy's games and books."
Doesn't say that the girls who don't like boy's games/books are dumb. By this standard, every comparative compliment demonstrates disdain.
"That girl is fitter than most"
"OMG, you think the average girl is fat?!?!"
The point of the description is to describe a set of people. It's not making claims about people outside the set.
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The point of the description is to describe a set of people. It's not making claims about people outside the set.
Or, as you put it, a subset of girls are intelligent enough to be equal to the boys.
How about putting it into modern-day context: "the more intelligent sort of woman who likes mens stuff such as programming and video games."
It doesn't pass the smell test. The "description" is an implicit putdown that girls, on average, are less intelligent than boys. After all, only "the more i
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Let;'s turn it on it's head:
"the more intelligent sort of boy_ , the one _ who likes girl's games and books"
You butchered the quote to add an emphasis that wasn't there. It's not that hard to do a search/replace for girl/boy.
for that more intelligent sort of boy who likes girls' games and books
Second, the quote is not attempting to describe "intelligent girls", but "the intelligent sort of girl". What difference does it make? The quote does not say any thing about the "intelligent sort of girl" who doesn't like boys' games and books. The author is not saying they do not exist or that they are inferior - they're just not part of his intended audience and so he doesn't refer to
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"If you're a gaming girl who's reading the book, essentially you're being complimented by the author as being intelligent."
Because the implication is, as the original quote made clear, that reading a book is something boys do, or intelligent girls. Notice it does not say "intelligent boys" So boys - generic, as in all boys, It's a "guy thing."
But the original article is also wrong about gamers, and falls into the trap of sexism by assuming that the original gamers were more than 99% males, because D*amp;D attracted that audience.
The original gamers go back bef
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How about putting it into modern-day context: "the more intelligent sort of woman who likes mens stuff such as programming and video games."
1. That implies that programming and video games are "mens stuff" (sic), which is clearly not true. Currently half the people playing video games are female, and a few decades ago there were far more women doing programming than there are now.
2. It implies that "women's stuff", things that the writer thinks women enjoy doing, are more suited to those with a lower IQ. That is clearly nonsense.
It amazes me how many guys are still suck with these ridged ideas of what it means to be male or female. Women shook
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1. That implies that programming and video games are "mens stuff" (sic), which is clearly not true.
That was my point. It's like claiming that D&D introduced women to gaming, when the facts say otherwise. Risk and Monopoly have all the competitive elements, we all played them as kids, and some of those games took a whole afternoon. About the only way to argue against this fact is to claim that only people playing D&D are "true gamers." The article is simply factually inaccurate by assuming there were no "gamers" before D&D.
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Doesn't say that.
At worst, the statement excludes the less intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books. And well, it is a book. (The girls who don't like boys' games and books won't care about not being the audience for a boys' game book.)
Any girl gamers who consider themselves the less intelligent sort of girl and are offended by not being included?
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Umm (Score:2)
How Women Became Gamers Through D&D
Yup, lump them all together as one homogenous mass. They love that.
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Well, of course they love it -- they're one homogeneous mass, after all. It's only the ones not part of that mass who don't appreciate being lumped together.
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My table has always had women (Score:5, Interesting)
several marriages have emerged from my gaming group, Lots of dating, I've been running games since I was 13, I'm 49 now. In college, I was running groups that were always co-ed. after college, once I was married, I was running games with a mix of married and unmarried couples. Nowadays I pick my gamers based on whether their kids get along with my kids.
Retirement is going to rock, a bunch of old fogies, rollin' for initiative.
Re:My table has always had women (Score:4, Interesting)
I was lucky enough to be able to retire (mostly) just after my 50th birthday, and let me tell you, my skills have since gone through the roof. The problem is, that my similar-aged friends aren't into gaming, so I find myself playing with a lot of younger people. It kept me off multiplayer games for a long time. Fortunately, I'm now starting to connect with people who are avid gamers and know how to behave, so I'm slowly getting back into it. I've had to scour the comments sections of gaming sites and then see if I could find their accounts on Steam or Origin. I also joined a good outfit in Planetside 2.
Now, my main problem is that I play at a time when most people near me are working, so most of the gamers I encounter are half a world away. Thankfully, broadband speeds are such that it hasn't been too much of a problem. Now if I could just learn to speak Finnish or Chinese.
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I was lucky enough to be able to retire (mostly) just after my 50th birthday, and let me tell you, my skills have since gone through the roof.
Lucky guy. I'm not the greatest gamer, but I have found when I watch game streams on twitch/ustream I do a similar thing to the sports fans screaming at the TV.
"Gaaaah! Why haven't you secured your minecraft build spot, that creeper showed up because you don't have torches and walls up! Why are you heading out into that forest at NIGHT! Build a tree farm inside walls so you can get wood safely 24/7. GAAAAH DON"T eat apples, save them!"
Now, my main problem is that I play at a time when most people near me are working, so most of the gamers I encounter are half a world away. Thankfully, broadband speeds are such that it hasn't been too much of a problem.
Ditto, I work overnights so I usually play at times that are non-pri
Re:My table has always had women (Score:5, Funny)
there's an article in an early dragon magazine where characters are bragging about their accomplishments around a tavern table, and after several accounts of daring do and bravado, one mage quietly announces "My husband is the Dungeon Master." The entire inn goes quiet, and someone says "only someone who can truly make that claim would not be instantly stuck down!" and everyone runs for the exits.
To put it simply (Score:2, Interesting)
you don't know what you are talking about. You must be young. Back in the early days of D&D (and I'm talking nearly 40 years ago - so if you relate to that, you are in your 40s, 50s. or 60s), we had plenty of women in our groups (my best friend's mom was even a passionate player) - and it wasn't odd, or revolutionary, or reactionary, it was just normal, that wasn't even a consideration then, and it remained so all the way up to the 90s (and the same was true for comic books, science fiction or fantasy n
My Personal Experience of Disdain (Score:2)
I have been on the receiving end of plenty of disdain about my gaming, from multiple members of the opposite sex.
I am male.
D&D in the 1980s (Score:3)
I was in 3 different long lasting D&D groups in the 1980s. I think most of us would have loved to have girls join, but no girls played with us in that decade. Whenever we got the balls to ask a girl to play they just looked at us like we were crazy, like they would get nerd cooties. I went to a D&D convention in New Haven at that time and I remember there was only one girl out of about 500 guys. She was very popular, with a whole lot of guys wanting to be in her group.
There certainly was a social penalty for me being a nerd at that time, but I didn't feel I had a choice. I loved gaming and it was part of my identity. At that time, however, I think there was a larger penalty for female nerds coming from the non-gaming community than for male nerds. Any girl joining our very small and admittedly not very attractive group probably would have been marked as a pariah by mainstream social groups.
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Well, half of gamers are female now so it does appear that for a long time the games industry ignored a huge and lucrative market. It wasn't sexism, just that the industry as a whole didn't seem to know how to appeal to 50% of its customer base.
No need to build straw feminists this time. Wait for an article about Brianna Wu.
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I really hate things that are made to "appeal to women". There's no reason a screwdriver needs a pink handle, and there's no reason why women can't play and enjoy the same games that man do. When you start a game of Skyrim it doesn't ask "do you have a penis?" and boot out of the game if you answer no.
Re:More feminist FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
I really hate things that are made to "appeal to women". There's no reason a screwdriver needs a pink handle, and there's no reason why women can't play and enjoy the same games that man do. When you start a game of Skyrim it doesn't ask "do you have a penis?" and boot out of the game if you answer no.
Skyrim's actually really popular with women. Partly because it's so open-ended and exploratory, and is presented more as an adventure and less of a proving grounds ("I'm so hardcore I killed all the halo aliens on the level in 4 minutes"). You're free to play the way you want to play, and your decisions are meaningful.
Even just being able to play as a lady character makes a big difference, rather than having to play as Generic Grizzled White Dude #58.
So yeah, building games that appeal to women isn't hard to do - but it does require that you build games that don't cater exclusively to the "hardcore gamer" audience.
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Even just being able to play as a lady character makes a big difference
Actually, it makes no difference at all. At least I had the impression the game mechanics has been dumbed down to the level that character traits like strength or dexterity are non-existent in Skyrim. You can play any character as long as you're happy with all of them being the same.
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Not in terms of how your character behaves, but rather in terms of "women enjoy playing this."
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Fixed that for you. Being "open-ended and exploratory" does not make it more enjoyable for women it makes it more enjoyable for anyone who enjoys open-ended or exploratory games. Just as hardcore games are no more enjoyable for men than they are for women. Hell, my wife has ascended, how many guys do you know that have pulled that off? Women are just as capable of being hardcore gamers as men are. Unfortunately the culture
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Oh no, I really enjoyed the Halo series (stopped playing after Reach, so I can't say after that), don't get me wrong. I didn't really object to anything about lady characterization, Cortana was pretty cool. But the linear gameplay, lack of story-altering choices and focus on your skill at shooting baddies are a turnoff to a lot of ladies, especially those who don't have experience with the shooter genre. It rewards a skill-set that is mainly possessed by the "core" gamer crowd (men below 25 or so), and if
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"...and if you don't have that skill-set..."
Or if it's just not your favorite thing. Game style preference doesn't mean lack of skill (though if one is bored enough by a particular style one is less likely to acquire the skill, but there's a lot of room for playing this while I wait for something better to come along.)
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Yeah, but Dark Souls is also really popular with women.
Citation needed.
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I am just surprised, really. I'd like to know how you came to that conclusion. Although, I could see how female gamers might like it because of the limited interaction between players prevents a lot of the griefing in other games.
Re:More feminist FUD (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:More feminist FUD (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's be honest there was also a ton of anti-gaming marketing targeted at women by existing female targeted products. The whole scam being, don't spend you money on games that are meant only for teenage pimpled nerds instead buy makeup, but clothing, buy shoes, buy buy buy more shoes. This is real competition for the consumer dollar or credit line as per the current reality and a huge amount of counter marketing going on, to deny competition.
The computer game does in reality block a lot of other sales opportunities, not just because of the money it consumes but also because of the consumer time it consumes and how cost effective a recreation it is for the consumer ie dollars spent for recreation gained. Something that made it a pretty solid target for peer pressure marketing for decades and this marketing is clearly failing as more females get directly exposed to gaming and benefit by the low cost recreation (money saved from not be spent on other forms of recreation and you don't need to fancy dress to play an online game with others).
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And the scantily clad fantasy babes used in a lot of advertisements are seriously offputting to a lot of women, especially teenagers.
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I haven't seen any of that marketing, can you point me to some?
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"didn't seem to know how to appeal to 50%" -> wasn't interested in appealing to them. When the industry was young, immature and relatively small the devs made games to appeal to themselves and their direct target audience. Most game ideas started as "it would be sweet if there was a game that did this" or "I could do this better". This mentality built a multi-billion dollar industry.
Secondly, targeting "casual" gamers (which is the important demographic if you want to count women as 50% of gamers) isn't
Re:More feminist FUD (Score:5, Informative)
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I was amazed to learn, 10+ years ago, that the biggest demographic playing Everquest was middle-aged women, far more such gamers than teen males. From some chats with players (limited sample size, to be sure), there was a lot of appeal in having a social outlet outside the norm, where it was OK to be a geeky woman, with no social stigma in discussing geeky stuff in EQ chat (this was before there was anything cool about geeks).
EQ was fairly bad at putting the female characters in "slut-mail" (seriously, pla
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I think it was different in the 90s. Certainly Sony set out to write an MMO for teen male gamers, to judge by their artwork and such, and it's not like they did no market research. But it's just as clear they mis-judged it, and I suspect that it you looked as pre-EQ MMOs, not games in general, that the demographics were there from the earliest roots, in pre-internet AOL and CompuServe multiplayer RPGs, and in The Realm Online (the first internet "MUD with pictures").
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Oh, I agree. It's very clear the concept of a fantasy RPG is not any more appealing to men than women. It was also the case that in the early D&D scene, gaming groups were often filled with such socially mal-adjusted gamers that women stayed away - but games like EQ offered the FRPG without the horrible company. Fortunately, the PnP RPG gaming scene has changed since then as well.
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Anecdotally, I occasionally play EQ and EQ2 (yes, there really are players of EQ2 still out there). As does my wife.
More than half my guildies in EQ2 are women (we use voice chat a lot, if you're planning on asserting that they only claim to be women). The GM's include two Grandmothers. And (some of) their children are in guild. As are a grandchild or two...
Yah, that always annoyed me. One of the reasons I started doing EQ2 was that I c
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That's only if you count nonsense like candy crush as games. People who play games on their phone don't tend to be called gamers, which refers to console/PC players.
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Depends on the game I guess. I avoid the mindless Tetris and Candy Crush things but play Carmageddon, Risk, Ticket to Ride, and Small World on my Tablet and Phone. I have Doom and Wolfenstein 3D on the phone but the update to the iPhone 5 broke the controls :(
[John]
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Yes it's a game. Not the type of game that 'gamers' play however.
Are you really too daft to get that, or do you just enjoy semantics?
Re:More feminist FUD (Score:5, Interesting)
My lady friend also happens to have a PhD in marketing, the whole "controversy" is simply a marketing exercise so that people like my lady friend can identify with the label "gamer". However the way they have gone about trying to broaden the definition of "gamer" by associating it with adolescent "greifers" and throwing it overboard has blown up in their faces since the demographic you point to overwhelmingly interprets the whole thing as political correctness gone mad. Rather than broaden their audience they have divided it into two camps; people who play games, and people who claim the ability to read their minds....for a price.
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"Adult women are now the largest demographic in gaming"
Sure, that's a valid statement...when you include casual gaming like Bejeweled and Farmville. When you drill down to AAA titles though the truth comes out, which is that women are a tiny fraction of the marketplace.
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It probably doesn't help that most programmers are male. And so when making a game (of their own initiative) would make a game that appeals to them. Of course this is changing now, but it is not surprise that it started skewed and it will be no surprise when it remains skewed for quite a while.
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I wonder about routes of exposure. I was going to write about how my best friend (also female) first got me into gaming via D&D - and then it occurred to me that no, really my first exposure was when my dad introduced me to Collosal Cave Adventure (which was right then bring the entire CS department to a screeching halt) when I was five. My later vectors were my aforementioned SF geek best friend and my hacking buddies.
Re:I know! (Score:5, Funny)
Were the hit
An entire generation
Of girls loved that sh*t
Burma Shave
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Re:I don't get the rage (Score:4, Informative)
I've never seen any rage against female gamers. That's certainly not what "gamergate" was/is about: game journalism. Feminist (not necessarily female) journalists were the target of their ire.
Gender-issues aside for the moment, game journalism is rotten - financial and/or romantic relationships between game journalists and games publishers is normal. I hope that doesn't get lost in the noise about misogyny - even by the falling statanrds of journalism generally, blatant conflicts of interests are uncool.
Re:I don't get the rage (Score:4, Informative)
It may not be as ubiquitous as some would make it out, but that rage certainly exists. I was witness to it happening to a woman in a multiplayer shooter, and it was so over the top and angrily aggressive it really shocked me. If I hadn't seen that, I might have felt the way you do. It put me off multiplayer games for a long time.
Regarding journalistic ethics, the facts of the Zoe Quinn case don't support that there was any improper relationship. Grayson never reviewed any of her games, and the only time she appeared in any of his columns was well before they were involved. So that's kind of a red herring.
The most egregious violations of journalistic ethics in game media are the ones that happen in the biggest sites, like IGN. It's a little suspicious that there was no outcry from the gamergate types about those situations. Certainly the gamergate people aren't all hateful monsters, but they're giving cover to the hateful monsters that are out there..
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Yep, the rottenness in game journalism isn't about any one journalist, but about the high frequency of conflicts of interest: almost no "gaming" publication even has a formal ethics policy to rule that out in the first place (while e.g. every major newspaper does).
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OK, but it seems the sites the gamergaters are complaining about aren't "publications" at all, but rather just blogs.
Does Slashdot have a formal ethics policy? Does 4chan or Reddit (the source of much of the gamergate activity)?
Take it to other areas: Do you think Motor Trend has a published, formal ethics policy? What about the PSICOP website?
I'm sorry, but the whole
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Does Slashdot have a formal ethics policy?
Of course! You never send documents over e-mail in MS Office formats, only in plain text, or at least PDF.
Re:I don't get the rage (Score:4, Informative)
4chan and Reddit was a knock-on effect. Both sites heavily censored discussion of gamergate in the early days, choosing themselves to side with the gaming publications and ban all discussion of their ethics.
you think Motor Trend has a published, formal ethics policy?
I'd bet all the large car mags do - if a reporter had a significant financial stake in a particular manufacturer, for example, that would matter to the editor. I remember when Car&Driver was accused every month of being a wholly-owned subsidiary of one Japanese brand or another (for daring to point out that the Japanese cars were, well, better), and was pretty uptight about ensuring there was no truth to the regular accusations.
I'm sorry, but the whole "journalistic ethics" gamergate complaint seems to me to be a way to give cover to some very ugly and unseemly sentiment.
Possibly. There's certainly ugly sentiment - longtime gamers are quite upset about the longtime prejudice against them, about being stereotyped, about being told they're no good or their games are no good. This was just another Jack Thompson event, and people are still pretty bitter about the original.
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"I've received an anonymous death threat, therefore my opponents are scum" is pretty fallacious "reasoning".
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It's more the fact that the GamerGate supporters were more willing to believe that it was all some giant conspiracy and these victims were sending death threats to themselves, and then creating a fake harassment campaign on social media, rather than believe a woman.
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Rather than believe someone they didn't trust in the first place you mean. Their gender had nothing to do with it. And yes, some people were willing to posture about that being a possibility. It is not an unknown tactic used by certain people.
It is not a "giant conspiracy" for someone to threaten themselves or make up a threat. Nor is it a conspiracy for a single supporter to send the threat. Both happen. No one knows if it has happened in these cases but asserting it is not even a possibility is disingenu
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Well, you've clearly decided all gamers are evil. Whatever makes you happy. That was the mainstream view for most of gaming's history after all - from the moral panic over D&D, to the various attempts to outlaw violent video games, you fit right in.
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Not even close.
I've been an avid gamer for 30 years. It's pretty easy to see that most gamers aren't evil. Even the misguided gamergators aren't evil. They're just sad and unwilling to accept that their world has changed around them.
And the last thing I would ever want is any part of video gaming outlawed. I don't know what in anything I've said in this discussion I would have led you to believe any of those things, but I think our conversation has given
Re:I don't get the rage (Score:4, Insightful)
#gamergators are just gamers. Most gamers (myself included) give approximately 0 fucks about gender issues, feminism in gaming, or any of that BS and just wish the SJWs would be noisy somewhere else and let us get back to gaming. But it sure would be nice to have game review site that reviewed games on their merits as games, not on whether it's the kind of games one is "supposed to" like, and especially not based on whether the game is from the game company the reviewer is currently sleeping with someone from, or renting an apartment from, or the like.
Now I feel a burning need to re-install Duke Nukem Forever and play it through again. I blame you for this Ratzo - the blood of triple-breasted aliens will be on your hands.
Re:I don't get the rage (Score:5, Informative)
Regarding the improper relationship between Grayson and Quinn, the official line of kotaku is contradicted by the chat logs released by the boyfriend. In any case, the time line wasn't 'well before' either. An article was published 31st of March, which featured Quinn, written by Grayson, and then they supposedly started a relationship merely days later...
In the chat logs, Quinn admits that her relationship with Grayson got close at a Las Vegas trip, approximately two weeks before the article was published. So either Quinn is lying and backdated her relationship or Grayson/Kotaku are lying and moved the date forward... While the relationship ultimately doesn't matter (but it did happen, and Grayson should never have written the article he did), kotaku went back and edited numerous articles by various authors, one of which, Patricia Hernandez, was also covering games from people she was living with, and in relationships with. Then the 14 or so 'gamers are dead' articles also sprung up all within hours of each other.
Regarding rage, have you ever played a game of DotA? That has an awful community. No one is saying that abuse doesn't happen, but why should only abuse against women be remarkable and others not?
Re:I don't get the rage (Score:5, Insightful)
As John Scalzi put it: "Face it dudes: "Gamergate" is a toxic thing. You can't say you support (it) WITHOUT explicitly standing with those who hate and harass women."
It's this sort of utter bullshit that offends me. I hear it constantly from the left - all arguments are ad-hominum. "If you disagree, you can only be a racist." "If you disagree, you can only be sexist." "If you disagree, you must be a Nazi". And on and on like that for decades.
And then discussion sites ban all discussion of the issue. It's the most frequent leftist argument of all: "I'm right because SHUT UP".
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It's this sort of utter bullshit that offends me. I hear it constantly from the left - all arguments are ad-hominum. "If you disagree, you can only be a racist." "If you disagree, you can only be sexist." "If you disagree, you must be a Nazi". And on and on like that for decades.
PopeRatzo's bio labels himself as an "leftwing extremist", so go figure.
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Are you sure that your bad experiences do not just come from the fact that you're a racist sexist nazi? I'm not saying you are, just want to point out that I know from personal experience that there are a lot of racist sexist nazis out there who have no idea that they are one.
Also, what about this constant rightist/leftist bullshit, is this alleged dichotomy really still relevant where you live? Because where I live it sure isn't, except perhaps for the extreme left and right totalitarians who tend to agree
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It's very easy to respond, because clearly, you're not entirely informed. The violation is, and the accusation was from the very beginning of getting free publicity. Nowhere did I say that a review of the game was made by Grayson. However, it is worth pointing out, that after the failure of the game jam written about in the article, Quinn decided to use this publicity to 'start' her own game jam, which had no date, no location, no judges, and was accepting donations into her personal paypal account... Why w
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Gamergators are the real victims. Clearly, it's the people who are intolerant of their intolerance that are the real intolerant ones.
They're just engaged in a righteous crusade for journalistic ethics, as you can clearly see if you read the 4chan and Reddit forums where the movement started.
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Well, then why did the gamergate movement provide over $70,000 to help women make video games (the fine young capitalists) while absolutely no mainstream 'journalist' outlets covered it at all. It happened on no publicity at all, yet still went through. I think it proves a point that you're position is laughably ignorant.
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I'm sure you know that the article which "featured" Quinn was about a reality TV show and not a review of a game or of Quinn.
Amazing. There's a conflict of interest right there and you just don't get it because it doesn't precisely fit the mold of whatever you think a conflict of interest is.
Kind of like claiming bribery isn't bribery, if you pay for the bribe with a credit card rather than the stereotypical suitcase of cash. Because crooks only pay for bribes with suitcases of cash. Seriously.
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"Conflict of interest"? This is a friggin' blog about games. We're not talking about The New York Times here. It's a blog. If they want to write about how good their mom's apple cobbler is, it does not violate any "journalistic ethics".
Somehow, khallow, I knew you'd pop up on the side of #gamergators.
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The rage is general (Score:2)
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That this came as such a surprise to a significant number of gamers is evidence of their lack of ever having interacted with a real-world woman.
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even by the falling statanrds of journalism generally, blatant conflicts of interests are uncool.
Someone should have told that to the editors.
Florian Mueller
doing Ask Slashdot
save your ire for
the clickbait whore
journalism it's not.
Burma Shave [tt]
Re:I don't get the rage (Score:5, Insightful)
Right -- there is no controversy about women in gaming. Not about women playing games, and not even about women making games.
There's a controversy about women (mostly two particular women) criticizing games and gamers on feminist grounds, and there's a controversy about one woman game developer who was involved in some rather public relationship drama involving game journalists. And there's a controversy about all their journalist supporters conspiring against gamers -- which the damn fool journalists went and set afire by proving their opponents right (on that point at least) by launching a coordinated attack in their respective publications.
Re:I don't get the rage (Score:5, Informative)
There generally isn't any rage. The problem is you have a whole swathe of 'journalists' who are pushing their wheel-barrow full of opinion that there's oppression against women and other minority groups. Part of the backlash towards the 'journalists' is how duplicitous they are, but also how heavily slanted they push these view-points, to the detriment of their main readership and audience.
People suspected that at first it was just provocative click-bait. But when it started to become visible that a lot of the authors genuinely believed it, people started to see it more like a conspiracy. The 'journalists' have always run the line that any criticism is misogyny or bigotry, closed comments and then proceed to stroke their ego's about how brave they are. I'm no bigot, but I really hate constantly being preached to like as if I am one. Then to top it off, this holier-than-thou attitude completely turned on its head when people started uncovering mountains of evidence that the 'journalists' have no ethics in their work, since having relationships with people they cover, or actually having monetary ties with them is completely fine, according to them. It has really turned into an us vs them issue and I can't see it finishing any other way. They want to continue doing what they do; have a soap box to infect everyone with their miserable lives!
I for one have decided to 'check-out' from games; I'm no longer spending any money on games with anyone for anything. I'm not pushing a boycott, I've just decided that the well has been so poisoned, that I don't want to be supporting anyone with my custom. This is all due to the constant propaganda that gamers hate women amongst other minority groups, and the constant pandering of the industry to promote that fiction. So much of the industry has been goose stepping together on this issue, and so ready to throw their customers and readers under a bus. I feel like this has been an abysmal failure on the part of the games industry.
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The gamers behing GamerGate make a really good point: that they like their games violent and showing b00bs, female bare skin and women in scant armor, and these games should not cease to exist merely because some people are offended by them.
The journalists against GamerGate make an equally really point, though: that such games do not belong in mainstream titles intended for all audiences; they should be distributed through special channels as the soft porn [wikipedia.org] they are.
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Welcome to #gamergate.
Also, they've just figured out that large swaths of the threats against her came from a journalist in Brazil. [imgur.com] But remember the movement is full of all white men according to people like her.