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Thanks for all the kind words, guys! It made my birthday a lot brighter. Anyway, here's that post about #GamerGate that I mentioned, because I just have too many feelings about it.
If you want a summary of it, there's an extremely short version. There's far too much in all sorts of different places for me to summarize, and some of the 'evenhanded' summaries are giving way too much credit to retrogressive fucks that do not deserve it.
Mostly, I'm done. I'm not even in the game industry, and I'm pretty much exhausted, anxious, and miserable watching it all play out because I have terrible self-preservation instincts when it comes to internet drama. So here's a collection of thoughts.
I have been playing video games for as long as I can remember. I played Tetris on my grandmother's old handheld, the kind that was only black and white and only played one game. I played SNES and NES games on my neighbors' systems back when my parents wouldn't let me have any for myself. I have nearly hosed my finals because I spent most of that week playing Zelda instead of studying. I have played through all of the Mass Effect trilogy multiple times. I have always been here.
There's this game called Arkham Asylum. You get to play as Batman. I love Batman. This game was lauded from every corner of the game industry. I wanted to play this game. I tried the demo, and when we met this version of Harley Quinn I quit the game then and there. The game couldn't have said THIS GAME IS NOT FOR YOU any louder than it did. So I didn't play it. I'm sure someone would tell me that I'm being unfair for not looking at how great the game is. I don't care. I know that the game doesn't want me there. So I'm not going to give them money and I won't play it.
#GamerGate is the cries of a bunch of whiny babies who have always had their needs catered to, who have never had to slice and dice their cultural milieu for the things they like and the things they have to grudgingly accept. I wonder how many of them realize that the things they are feeling, their claims of being ignored, dismissed, attacked, and insulted, are how women have felt in the industry for decades.
I have no sympathy for the ones who feel anxious about the attacks on the term 'gamer'. Men have been policing it as a way of excluding women forever. Despite the reports that women *gasp* enjoy pleasant mental feedback loops as much as men do, men have been dismissing the games women enjoy as 'casual games', though the real difference between Bejeweled and Tetris has never been clear to me. Outsider, experimental indie games (frequently made by women) have been labeled 'not games'. The neverending war against 'fake gamer girls', girls who have the audacity to enjoy some games without feeling the need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of them, is still ongoing. As far as I can tell, gamers have been reaping what they sow.
Oh, and there's been lots of claims that Anita Sarkeesian is faking the death threats made against her and her family Seriously, fuck you. In order to combat this, she produced a small sampling of the torrent of abuse (warning: extreme misogyny) that she has received.
So yeah. I'm done. Fuck the gaming community. Fuck their self-important bullshit. Fuck their misogyny. Fuck their inability to understand journalism or science. Fuck their complete lack of empathy. I'm going to go play this pigeon dating simulator now.
If you want a summary of it, there's an extremely short version. There's far too much in all sorts of different places for me to summarize, and some of the 'evenhanded' summaries are giving way too much credit to retrogressive fucks that do not deserve it.
Mostly, I'm done. I'm not even in the game industry, and I'm pretty much exhausted, anxious, and miserable watching it all play out because I have terrible self-preservation instincts when it comes to internet drama. So here's a collection of thoughts.
I have been playing video games for as long as I can remember. I played Tetris on my grandmother's old handheld, the kind that was only black and white and only played one game. I played SNES and NES games on my neighbors' systems back when my parents wouldn't let me have any for myself. I have nearly hosed my finals because I spent most of that week playing Zelda instead of studying. I have played through all of the Mass Effect trilogy multiple times. I have always been here.
There's this game called Arkham Asylum. You get to play as Batman. I love Batman. This game was lauded from every corner of the game industry. I wanted to play this game. I tried the demo, and when we met this version of Harley Quinn I quit the game then and there. The game couldn't have said THIS GAME IS NOT FOR YOU any louder than it did. So I didn't play it. I'm sure someone would tell me that I'm being unfair for not looking at how great the game is. I don't care. I know that the game doesn't want me there. So I'm not going to give them money and I won't play it.
#GamerGate is the cries of a bunch of whiny babies who have always had their needs catered to, who have never had to slice and dice their cultural milieu for the things they like and the things they have to grudgingly accept. I wonder how many of them realize that the things they are feeling, their claims of being ignored, dismissed, attacked, and insulted, are how women have felt in the industry for decades.
I have no sympathy for the ones who feel anxious about the attacks on the term 'gamer'. Men have been policing it as a way of excluding women forever. Despite the reports that women *gasp* enjoy pleasant mental feedback loops as much as men do, men have been dismissing the games women enjoy as 'casual games', though the real difference between Bejeweled and Tetris has never been clear to me. Outsider, experimental indie games (frequently made by women) have been labeled 'not games'. The neverending war against 'fake gamer girls', girls who have the audacity to enjoy some games without feeling the need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of them, is still ongoing. As far as I can tell, gamers have been reaping what they sow.
Oh, and there's been lots of claims that Anita Sarkeesian is faking the death threats made against her and her family Seriously, fuck you. In order to combat this, she produced a small sampling of the torrent of abuse (warning: extreme misogyny) that she has received.
So yeah. I'm done. Fuck the gaming community. Fuck their self-important bullshit. Fuck their misogyny. Fuck their inability to understand journalism or science. Fuck their complete lack of empathy. I'm going to go play this pigeon dating simulator now.