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[Smiler]

No, he was saying if you switch Anita out with some random other person, we would be able to see if everyone hates her, or just her message. Replacing her with someone who also for some reason gets a lot of hate won't really get results.

[A²]

Maybe Brentai just likes big black booty.

[Classic]

What I want right now, and I'm serious, is for Aisha Tyler to do these same exact videos, making whatever changes she feels she needs to make.  That would probably make the question of who's angry at what a lot clearer.

This wouldn't work because I've seen stream chats of the Ubisoft E3 presentations. For some reason gamers really hate Aisha Tyler because she is a black woman.

... Do you have painful transcripts of the above to share?

[Ted Belmont]

No, he was saying if you switch Anita out with some random other person, we would be able to see if everyone hates her, or just her message. Replacing her with someone who also for some reason gets a lot of hate won't really get results.

Oh, okay. I read it as, "Since Aisha Tyler is black in addition to being a woman, the people who are just hating the messenger will be a LOT more forthright and obvious about it."

[Smiler]

Classic: No, but there was a short period of time when I forgot that I had the chat box on twitch open, and it was just a long line of "Who's the black bitch?" over and over again. And then there's the whole thing where she had been still getting flak about "not knowing anything about games" from E3 2012 into this year, so yeah, gamers have a beef with Aisha Tyler for some unknown reason.

[Brentai]

I was really going for "Aisha Tyler is clearly a gamer and Anita Sarkeesian is not."

And that's the crux of the problem, I think.  It doesn't matter if she's male, female, white, black, American, Japanese, Democrat, Republic, big-endian, or little-endian.  She can be any of those things (theoretically, apparently not, but work with me here).  What she can't be is an outsider.

I'm sure this girl plays games and enjoys them but it's not her Thing.  It's not her hobby.  Take away gaming and she's still the same person, a feminist blogger.  But it's her audience's thing and it's her audience's hobby and they're not the same without it and that's important.  You might have noticed over the years that gamers have an extremely insular culture.  Even among hobbyists it's a little exaggerated, but it's nothing you wouldn't see with any other pastime.  Try addressing a group of serious weightlifters with the opening "I enjoy lifting weights and I've studied weightlifting for a while and this is what I think a lot of you could be doing better" and see if you get more than a four word question that's already been answered.

The realization I've come to is that it's not really Anita's fault that she couldn't measure up to the Internet's standards.  It was just a bad goddam idea from the start.  No amount of accurate research is going to make her less of an intruder, and I think most of the noise that's rising up around her is a lot of people who would, from the right person, be entirely receptive to the message, but is so defensive about the messenger that they're just going to attack her on any goddam grounds they can find.  Because nobody's going to just up and admit "You're just plain not welcome in our club house."

[Bongo Bill]

An outsider gets attention that an insider probably wouldn't, merely for being "intrusive." There are people writing far more intelligently about this issue who - well, I wouldn't call them "obscure," but it's just business as usual for them. Progress is being made by the vanguard. You can probably think of a few. They focus on exploring their ideas rather than on producing link bait, so they're not as popular, but they are out there.

Frankly, I wouldn't expect someone who fits into "gamer culture" to make something noticeably more intelligent. It would probably have fewer outright factual errors, but still fail to draw a conclusion from them that's more than puddle-deep. This is because games have no established tradition of criticism, no language or common idioms with which to evaluate games more deeply. Remember that we are talking about art, not merely the hobby of consuming it. (Progress is also happening here, but it will probably never filter through to the hobbyists or to the general public. This is okay.)

It's necessary first to establish at least one passable theory of criticism. With one of those, it will be possible to communicate complex ideas about games farther than any single insular community. Then you can use that theory to examine games' treatment of gender issues. If you don't have a way to apply these ideas to the medium of games, the best you can do is analyze them using tools developed for looking at books or films or TV commercials or whatever, which are no more suitable for games than they are for each other. That in turn means relying on the audience to fill in the gaps based on their own knowledge of feminism, which might work for the readers of a feminist blog but not for players of video games. There are many whose knowledge of feminism begins and ends with "a woman is scolding me for something," so right there they're already taking it in the most personal and useless manner possible.

(If you're taking "the Internet" in aggregate, though, you will be disappointed; rather than tracking any realistic measure of progress, you're in effect measuring a cross-section of Kotaku commenters, a self-selected demographic; first take the people dumb enough to read Kotaku, and then from among those take those who are dumb enough (or frequent enough readers) not to realize that commenting on Kotaku articles is useless, and you should see why you're not getting representative data.)

[Classic]

Brent, did you just "fake geek girl" Sarkeesian?

EDIT:
Sorry. Sleepy. Look: As far as I can tell "Fake Geek Girl" is a way for geeks for whom "(attractive) woman" equates to "outsider" to hold exclusionary beliefs and practices.  See also Smiler's comments on the reaction to Aisha Tyler.

[She is] still getting flak about "not knowing anything about games" from E3 2012 into this year, so yeah, gamers have a beef with Aisha Tyler for some unknown reason.

But seriously, what's with this asinine no true scotsman from you Brent?

I'm sure this girl plays games and enjoys them but it's not her Thing.  It's not her hobby.  Take away gaming and she's still the same person, a feminist blogger.

How is it different than:

I'm sure this boy plays games and enjoys them but it's not his Thing.  It's not his hobby.  Take away gaming and he's still the same person, a QA lead.

And if it somehow were, why is this exactly the kind of subjective criterion that assholes love to move the goalposts for according to their whims?

Anyway, I think I'm gonna be sulky in the corner now. Both about this and about how you haven't finished slogging through your Xenogears LP.

[Crouton]

Crouton: Holy shit, man, here I was thinking Stupidest Post in This Thread was a legitimately tough competition and you just walked away with it like you never even broke a sweat.

Sora's gone, Guild's gone, 3rd string represent?

I'll ask the same question more politely. Which do you guys think is more sexist? The hostility towards her because she's a girl who doesn't know what she's talking about, or the defensive reaction to support her because she's a girl who doesn't know what she's talking about?

Is sexism a problem in gaming? Absolutely. Does Sarkeesian know her shit? I personally doubt it.

[Royal☭]

Ocksi manages to make the point I've been trying to make about the last three videos in one goddamn post. Read it, understand it, ban Crouton because he's an idiot.

[Zaratustra]

Crouton: Holy shit, man, here I was thinking Stupidest Post in This Thread was a legitimately tough competition and you just walked away with it like you never even broke a sweat.

I'll ask the same question more politely. Which do you guys think is more sexist? The hostility towards her because she's a girl who doesn't know what she's talking about, or the defensive reaction to support her because she's a girl who doesn't know what she's talking about?

it's true. just the other day this chick was denying the holocaust and i was like OH MAN SHE'S SO DEFENSELESS IF I DEFEND HER TO HER DETRACTORS SHE WILL BE SO HOT FOR ME

[Büge]

Yeah right, Zara. Like your wife would stand for that.

[Ted Belmont]

For real, this "fake geek girl" bullshit has got to go. It's toxic, stupid, and serves no purpose other than to let frightened nerds play at being the bully, rather than the victim.

[Bal]

I don't think anyone is actually making the fake geek girl claim, just the claim that she isn't a gamer. Those are different things. She might be a gamer, but it doesn't seem like it, and enthusiasts of an stripe don't like being told by outsiders what's wrong with their hobby, and by "don't like" I of course mean "are immediately and actively hostile toward". That's obviously not all of what's going on here, but I think it's part of what's raising the hackles of people who otherwise would be sympathetic, or just not care.

I, for my part, have decided to shift back to not caring, at least about her. The drama has forever destroyed whatever she was trying to accomplish with these videos, and you can tell because almost no one, on either side, is actually talking about the content of the videos anymore. Really, thinking about it, I feel like this was inevitable. No one could have lived up to the hype.

[Mongrel]

Not sure where you guys are getting the "fake geek girl" nonsense from Brent's post.

Fake Geek Girl usually refers to the idea of poser girls 'slumming' it in a community with low average self-esteem, in order to attract more attention than they normally would. The type of attention that Sarkeesian is looking for is completely different than that.

This really is a case of not all forms of attention being the same, so lumping all forms of attention-seeking together is just silly.

EDIT: Also what Bal just said.

[Brentai]

I'm sure this girl plays games and enjoys them but it's not her Thing.  It's not her hobby.  Take away gaming and she's still the same person, a feminist blogger.

How is it different than:

I'm sure this boy plays games and enjoys them but it's not his Thing.  It's not his hobby.  Take away gaming and he's still the same person, a QA lead.

It isn't, you self-congratulating dickhead.

It doesn't matter if she's male, female, white, black, American, Japanese, Democrat, Republic, big-endian, or little-endian.

That's the whole point.

[Ted Belmont]

I don't think anyone is actually making the fake geek girl claim, just the claim that she isn't a gamer. Those are different things. She might be a gamer, but it doesn't seem like it.

No, those are not different things at all. "Fake geek girl" is not some magic spell that requires those specific words to be invoked, and casting doubts on whether someone is a gamer just because they haven't met some arbitrary standard, or because they don't "seem" like a gamer, is a huge part of the problem. No one should be expected to prove that they are a gamer, or a geek, or part of any other voluntary enthusiast community, and no one should be allowed to set themselves up as gatekeepers to these communities, or subject others to increased scrutiny based entirely on irrelevant factors like gender. That's what the "fake geek girl" nonsense is all about.

[Brentai]

No, bullshit.  I have every right to tell some fly-by-night activist to fuck right the hell off if he or she tries to tell me what I'm doing wrong with my time.  I don't care if it's Jack Thompson or Anita Sarkeesian.  It's rude as hell.

[Ted Belmont]

Again, you're operating on the assumption that she doesn't play and enjoy videogames, that she's just some outsider poser type shoving herself into a discussion that doesn't involve her...based on what, exactly?

And nobody's running around going, "this is bad and you should feel bad for enjoying it!". It's not some personal attack on you or the things you enjoy. I think that's part of the problem, that people seem to think this criticism of sexism in games is an attack on the quality of the games, or the people making/playing them, but it's not.

[Ted Belmont]

Also:

 

It doesn't matter if she's male, female, white, black, American, Japanese, Democrat, Republic, big-endian, or little-endian.

That's the whole point.

It shouldn't, but if you honestly think it doesn't(not referring to you personally, but in the larger conversation/culture) you haven't been paying attention.