Full disclosure: my admittedly ignorant comment about Red Dead Redeption was based on her latest video. I tune out her (IMO, vapid) feminist theorising. The game clips she shows speak for themselves.

I'm not going to go hunting for examples, since I largely gave up on (commercial) games a long time ago. The other day, I saw a trailer for the XBOX 360, all of whose games are adolescent crap about killing the shit out of people. I like the odd bit of adolescent crap, but it is massively overrepresented in video games, and I expect it to be fairly stigmatised by culture critics.

With this, you were either joking, trolling, or entirely unfamiliar with the subject matter. Posting it made pretty much anything you said before or after unimportant if you were being serious; your credibility has been forever destroyed. Sentence-by-sentence breakdown:

Full disclosure: my admittedly ignorant comment about Red Dead Redeption was based on her latest video.

I respect that, actually. I find myself admitting fault fairly often on this forum... But, it's kind of made moot when you make an oversight twice as large in the same small post.

I tune out her (IMO, vapid) feminist theorising.

If you tone out much of her rhetoric, why bother watching her videos? That's a pretty core component thereof...

The game clips she shows speak for themselves.

You find her feminist outpourings vapid, but you use a clip that she likely took out of context to be representative of the game in question?

I'm not going to go hunting for examples, since I largely gave up on (commercial) games a long time ago.

You gave up on them, yet you say that they're all crap. You are saying that all these games you have never played and have no interest in playing are crap because quite a few that you have played before were crap. In the same sentence, you admit that you have given up even trying new games. If you don't like games, you don't like games, but judging a body of works that massive by a few examples is absurd, to say the least.

The other day, I saw a trailer for the XBOX 360, all of whose games are adolescent crap about killing the shit out of people.

I think I lost brain cells. If you can't see the brain-hemorrhaging falseness, the intense, painful, and aggressive wrongness of that statement, you have never looked on a Gamestop/EB Games shelf. It is this sentence that leads me to believe that you may just be looking for a reaction, because the most cursory glance at the material in question would destroy that notion.

I like the odd bit of adolescent crap, but it is massively overrepresented in video games, and I expect it to be fairly stigmatised by culture critics.

I agree that FPSes are over-represented. They do not make up the entirety of the videogame industry, not even the mainstream video game industry.

Finally, you keep calling them computer games, regardless of platform. While technically true, that terminology seems pretty much indicative of the level of familiarity you have with the medium as a whole.

Maybe I seem to be a little bit too mean about this, but it's comments like this that show the general status of the "Stigma against video games in modern society"... ignorant people taking the most popular/advertised examples of gaming as representatives of the entire medium.

"Computer games" is the de facto term in the UK, it doesn't show ignorance, it shows nationality.

It's similar to when Americans discuss the great video game crash and discuss how the NES saved the industry and get blank looks from Europeans who know that isn't true (as the crash didn't happen there).

"Computer games" is the de facto term in the UK, it doesn't show ignorance, it shows nationality.

It's similar to when Americans discuss the great video game crash and discuss how the NES saved the industry and get blank looks from Europeans who know that isn't true (as the crash didn't happen there).

Ah. Well, now I feel like an idiot. Sorry for that last one.

Zadocfish2 wrote:

"Computer games" is the de facto term in the UK, it doesn't show ignorance, it shows nationality.

It's similar to when Americans discuss the great video game crash and discuss how the NES saved the industry and get blank looks from Europeans who know that isn't true (as the crash didn't happen there).

Ah. Well, now I feel like an idiot. Sorry for that last one.

It's going a bit out of style due to American influence being the norm in international communication in this day of integrated online magazines and whatnot, it's still how I think of myself though.

Personally I don't get too defensive about how people see gamers, I don't take seriously the debate over "video games as art" and I don't really give a toss about gamergate (although, I admit less utterly shit worse-than-tabloid-hack journalism would be nice - I mean one of the most respected games journalists can go to work drunk and behave grossly unprofessionally and nobody really gave a shit).

I think you're taking Vaz far too seriously by the way, sure people think that video games are just murder simulators and he's explaining why people see it that way. But so what? It's not hard to understand that they judge bioshock by the 95% of the game that is gameplay rather than the 5% of it that's story (I do too, bioshock was boring as fuck to be honest). But anyone who lectures you on that view is doing something much worse than being merely wrong. They are being a bore.

The kind of person who does this is the man who goes with his mates to the pub when football is on and complains that it's just a bunch of men kicking a ball. Or it's the woman who complains that ballet is just a bunch of people in silly costumes. Sure we can see why they make the complaint I just don't care.

Personally I've never murdered anyone, I'm not seriously worried that my FTL fetish will turn me into a psycho, but on the other hand, I'm not going to defend it by pretending I'm being highbrow, or learning, or that I play for the story. I don't, I play it because it's fun and I'm the sort of person who likes fun. Anyone who disagrees can go and bore someone else as far as I'm concerned.