Posted: Oct 23, 2014 4:58 pm
Rachel Bronwyn wrote:Thomas Eshuis wrote:They just did special report on gamergate on the news here yesterday.
Now regardless of your opinions about sexism in games and games designed for women, I find it quite sickening that there's a sizeable group of people issuing death threats to some of the female developers and activists.
And you should. Everybody should. The kneejerk response to this shouldn't be "Yeah, we'll, Richard Dawkins probably gets it worse". Richard Dawkins is higher profile than ANYONE involved in this shitshow and has made a career out of antagonizing religious people. The people recieving death threats in this case are..... at worst, wrong on the Internet.
I'm the only one who mentioned Dawkins, and two sentences made after following a media storm on and off for two months and making 5-6 posts in which neither Dawkins nor any other comparison to the victims was made is very far from a kneejerk.
I made the point that when 99% of the media-led coverage focuses on 0.0001% of people at the most extreme end of the spectrum the conversation isn't balanced. I believe and have clearly stated that death threats are unacceptable and should be prosecuted (although you're wrong to say that only one side in this fiasco has issued them), but the dialogue being dominated by the opinions of a select few is utterly pointless, if misogyny is an abnormally large issue among gamers, that will be apparent without continual recourse to the same couple of dozen people, it can be decided on the arguments and statements put forward by the majority. If the people who disagree with Dawkins are wrong, this will be apparent in exactly the same way, not because some nutjob with an anger problem wrote some screed.
Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn are, as you say, at worst wrong on the internets (and on TV, and in interviews), how exactly that's clearly completely different from Richard Dawkins, who is at worst wrong on the internets and in a book he wrote (and on TV, and in interviews) seems to be slightly unclear though.
Rachel Bronwyn wrote:No one thinks all or most gamers threaten to kill women. What people are wondering is why the ones who do aren't being told to shut the fuck up at anywhere near the rate these women are being criticised just for being disagreeable.
They are, every day. But there's only so many times people preface comments with "death threats are wrong" when an issue is discussed daily, by millions of people for two months.
It's a pretty pathetic criticism that most people would rather discuss the substance of what Anita Sarkeesian says than discuss a handful of trolls for the umpteenth time. It takes the most minimal amount of empathy to understand why that could be the case.