Responding to Damion Schubert's Sarkeesian/TvW piece #GamerGate #notyourshield

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> Games should show more women capable of strength, agency and power in your game world, instead of being relegated to simply being background props or quest objectives that could be replaced with a sock monkey.

Same could be said for male NPC characters. Yes, I'm whatabouthemen-ing, but only to point out that there's a distinct lack of context in her videos. A significant number of the criticisms she levels at video games and developers apply also to their treatment of male characters, and gendering and/or ignoring half of the context of those points is disingenuous and misleading. This circles back to your remarking that she doesn't understand the constraints of development; but it's more than that. She doesn't have a firm grasp of the topic she claims to be an expert in, either.

> find ways to depict more female characters in more interesting and unique roles.

I'm not convinced this isn't already happening all the time. Tropes exist for a reason. One could even call them archetypes.They've been used since the beginning of time, and each generation has brought something a little different to its interpretation of the roles. Granted, I no longer play a lot of "AAAs" because most are poor excuses for games (and I'm a Linux user), but those I have played seem to be making a concerted, if calculated, effort to stretch beyond the way women have been portrayed in the 90s-- and the 90s made an effort to move beyond the 80s, too. Archetypes aren't going away, sorry. But the industry changes. There's something about Anita's laser-focus on proving misogyny and sexism and patriarchy and victimhood that pisses people, including me, off like very few other critics manage to do. She's in the "rarified" company of the likes of Patrica Hernandez.

> Game designers should keep in mind that a lot of people (and not just women) have a viscerally negative reactions to scenes showing violence against women (particularly as many have first-hand experience with it), so maybe we shouldn’t just throw these scenes in casually.

And here I'm going to whataboutthemen again, because there's something seriously fucked up about a world that doesn't mind men being tortured, killed, and generally abused but gets up in arms the second a woman suffers the slightest harm. That Anita doesn't address this in her videos at all is a HUGE failing. The lack of context is, again, disingenuous and misleading.

>Seriously, all the dead, spread-eagled naked women in games are kind of creepy.

And what of it? Art and entertainment has long been a way for society to grapple with its psychoses and fears and the darker aspects of itself. It's good that you think it's creepy. It says something about you as a person. At the same time, it's deeply worrying to me that the West is so paternalistic when it comes to the way women are treated in video games.

>[In GTA3] “The writers wrote the character to annoy the player, so the decision to kill her is the punchline in a deeply misogynistic joke.” (Also not wrong)

No, wrong. What is the definition of misogyny? Hatred of women. If you just hate this particular woman, that's not misogyny. That's good writing. This is, frankly, brilliant execution. Well done, GTA, for making people care so much about a character.

> “…The crude, sensationalized misogyny of Duke Nukem…” (Again subjective, but much less debatable)

Not really subjective. Is a HATRED of women displayed? The game's chauvinistic. Yes, there are discrete differences among chauvinism, negative sexism, benign sexism, and misogyny. They're distinctions that Anita doesn't deign to make.

>Times which she says that all games are problematic: zero. In fact, she frequently makes it clear that she means the opposite:

That's really, really undermined by how she never has anything good to say about games. Why doesn't she have anything good to say about games? My theory is she doesn't actually know enough about games to feel comfortable being positive about them. (Cf Bayonetta. What a ridiculous video that was. Which she's since removed, without acknowledging she was wrong or apologising for it.) Sorry, not good enough.

>This one point caught my eye in particular, about how relegating stories of trauma and sexual abuse to being crappy side quests trivializes one of the greatest crimes and fear that many women have:

And all the other crimes that are relegated to side quests? Again, there's a remarkable lack of context here.

>I’m not saying stories seriously examining domestic abuse or sexual violence are off-limits to interactive media. However, if game makers do attempt to address these themes, they need to approach these topic with the gravity, subtlety and respect they deserve.”

Why? Quentin Tarantino makes irreverent movies of horrifying subject matter all the time. Holy cows are stupid--and dangerous.

>This is all a conversation that’s worth having.

Yes, but Anita shouldn't be its spokesperson. She's clearly not up for the task.

Here is my biggest criticism of Anita: her perspective is distinctly American, in an industry which is increasingly without borders. Her understanding of Bayonetta, for example, betrays the sex-negativism that is the hallmark of America. There is a way to see Japanese games as sexist and misogynist, and certainly there are those games, but really the Japanese industry is more fetishist than it is anything else. Look to anime just a decade or two ago and you'll see men treated with the same sort of lens, sexually, as women are. (Yes, the roles of that sexualisation differed, but the lens was the same.) What changed? Anime became international, and had to tailor itself to the regressive attitudes of Americans. The same has happened to gaming. It's colonialism by economics.

I won't get into Sarkeesian's brand of feminism, except to point out that one feminist critic has passingly referred to the TvW series as "conservative" and that The Fine Young Capitalists have huge reservations about it.

Speaking of The Fine Young Capitalists, they have some fascinating stuff to say about feminism. Their ideology's much more rooted in valid academia than lazy, bastardised pop culture. Here's some material I encourage you to expose yourself to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KszuGqKxTk8 (a much better treatment of the DID)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYv8cpe3jpI (look past the GamerGate stuff, pay attention to Matthew's ideology)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB0nXONv3i0 (lots of interesting stuff about how the industry's treated them, TFYC's attitude and projects, etc.)

In closing, I'd like to note that while Sarkeesian herself might not be that important or harmful, the way the media are treating her is. She's been reduced to a damsel in distress, a shield against criticism, a tool for clickbait. It's just another damning indictment of how fucked up the gaming media is. Nobody's owned up to this. Nobody's accepted the responsibility of treating her work with the analysis and scrutiny they claim it deserves. In the greatest of ironies, the very industry which accuses its enthusiasts of being manbabies doesn't have the maturity to treat a discussion of gender with anything beyond the maturity of a teenager.

And please let's stop referring to Sarkeesian's videos as "academic". There's nothing academic about them. When you outright lie about your subject matter (You're encouraged to kill women in Hitman! The only good thing about Bayonetta is that she's a single mother!), you're spreading propaganda.

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