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Kotaku: Souls Games Are Great, Except For The Sexist Messages From Some Players
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I know you may be angry but maybe you could try to calm down and talk to others in a rational way instead of using so much swearing.
I get what both sides are trying to say but discussion just ends up in tatters once people start getting angry. Discussion goes both ways. Truth see things from his perspective and hopefully he will try to see things from your perspective and maybe, just maybe you guys will find a middle ground.
Either way this isn't my argument.
Yeah, that's how I feel.
Look, this happens literally every time someone tries to point out anything that is in any way low-key sexist. EVERY TIME. I'm tired of that shit, man. Even when it's worded in a very polite and calm way you'll still see a bunch of people going "outrage culture!" just because someone had the AUDACITY to point out that sexism and racism are still things. Fuckin' tiresome.
Don't be shocked when I show REAL outrage when people keep dismissing my concerns seemingly non-stop, just because they don't share them. Give me a fuckin' break, man.
User Banned (1 Week): Repeatedly downplaying concerns over sexism
And I do. The point is, these messages are fucking harmless and making a big deal about them makes no fucking sense.
They aren't harmless - well, likely harmless to you but these kind of jokes end up affecting women in real ways every day. Ugh, "Get in the Kitchen" , hur hur, "boobies", er, "make me a sandwich". All the same line of shitty sexist shit designed to make women less and exclude them from spaces.
Oh, my bad then, haha! I understand what you mean, I just usually don't put it past straight men to be the tones doing those kinds of jokes, since I've heard them a lot before coming out, and I see them somewhat often on YouTube and Twitch.
That article is ridiculous. I wish I could get paid to write something pontificating about how much I don't like juvenile (and ultimately harmless) toilet humor from other players in a video game.
Seriously, messages left by players in game like "tongue but, hole." or "amazing chest ahead" isn't some overarching conspiracy of sexist souls players meeting in thy're dark cabals to oppress women and make them feel unwelcome. Like, how painfully pretentious do you have to be?
Seriously, messages left by players in game like "tongue but, hole." or "amazing chest ahead" isn't some overarching conspiracy of sexist souls players meeting in thy're dark cabals to oppress women and make them feel unwelcome. Like, how painfully pretentious do you have to be?
This is my stance as well. It's not a big deal and humans will be humans and sometimes be immature, especially when online.
Like I've never thought of this before.
If it's Women, men, unidentifiable corpses, non gendered skeletons and sometimes inanimate objects that have immature messages attached to them, the messages can't really be sexist against one particular sex or gender? Can they? I'm genuinely curious.
They're mostly dumb but every now and then I chuckle. This headline comes off a bit like "Fortnite is great except for the racist screaming from other players". Like yeah, this is part of what we sign ourselves up for when we play online. Sometimes your teammates give you valuable info on enemy locations and whatnot, and sometimes they just scream the n-word in your ear.
This is soooooo easy to say when you're never the target of sexist jokes. It's fine you don't find ir harmless, of course you don't. But don't go telling others, especially the ones being target, how they should feel. Some women may find it harmless too, some others don't, both are right.
What is not right is men coming here saying how women should feel when they keep being targeted of sexist jokes (and this same reasoning should be applied with racism and homofobia btw).
I don't understand how any one can find the "Amazing chest ahead" message and find it sexist instead of extremely funny. It's just some dumb fun playing around with the game mechanics. Are you saying you never written ASS on the arcades when you were younger?
https://twitter.com/Doshmanziari/status/1032758092759486465
Clearly in good faith...
https://twitter.com/Doshmanziari/status/1032758092759486465
Clearly in good faith...
Sexists aren't some evil moustache twirling villian, most sexism isn't intentional. Like c'mon.
Check out OnlyAfro he's a gay streamer YouTuber I made friends with him for a bit
You are not affected by them ≠ harmless.
You repeatedly speaking universally and continuing to ignore statements that refute your claim is the reason for Laiza's response.
You should feel fucking mortified.
"fucking harmless"
I think you need to read more. Specifically, maybe read about how these "harmless" remarks add up over time to create an unbearable reality for many women.
Or maybe just stop, like, trying to pretend that my feelings are imaginary, maybe? I don't fuckin' know how much clearer I can make this for you. I really don't.
You guys...
Intent is not required for something to be sexist. "Women belong in the kitchen" jokes are sexist as hell. Open proclamations about how guys want to grab women's boobs are obviously fucking sexist. Like, how is this even in any way ambiguous? And this is on top of the sheer volume of these messages in front of any female character...
I'm not going to defend the author's twitter behavior.
But the overarching pattern of dismissiveness is beyond justification. It's just straight-up callousness. And I'm done with "tolerating" it.
It's pretty childish but also rather innocuous I think - some are derogatory about female characters, some are about necrophilia, bestiality etc. It's the same mindset that brought us the 'git gud' meme, all part of the shit talking that online play brings us. Tiresome, yes but not limited to just Souls and certainly not the worst offender.
Man, come on. It's sexist if the content of the messages are sexist. The volume of groping messages alone makes it clear that a lot of men see women as objects to be oogled rather than as people.
The "women belong in the kitchen" jokes especially are completely, 100% unambiguous, too. Like, really, there is no way you can spin that as somehow being not sexist. Really.
Lol how is this even in the same league??
It's humour, and clever humour at that based on how little they have to work with. This is also assuming everyone who plays Dark Souls and leaves these hilarious messages are male - they're not.
They're fucking jokes. This outrage is unfounded and honestly it's embarrassing.
Took a while to get to this, but I was recommending a vetting system, e.g. all comments are looked and approved by a moderation team. It's obvious that people will do whatever they can to get around curse filters.
User Banned (Permanent) - Misogyny, history of severe infractions.
If you're Kotaku, everything can be sexist. Even nature is sexist, it gave men penises and gave women vaginas so men can assert dominance stabbing women's vaginas with their penises. Everyone should have a penis, it's the only way to true equality.
Fair enough, I was more so criticizing the author for thinking that this was some larger conspiracy. I don't disagree there is a disproportionate amount of messages left by female characters but it is not exclusive to them. I've personally seen lots of them by male characters my self but that evidence is anecdotal so take that as you will.
Though I do stand by that this is mostly harmless toilet humor.
"Go make me a sandwich!" is a common "joke" IRL. It's still sexist as fuck. That's on top of things like "two-handing required ahead" being only a "joke" in the most crude and juvenile sense, assuming you find notions of physical sexual assault to be humorous.
Comedic intent is not a get-out-of-jail free card.
I'm outraged? I'm not, I'm used to it now - doesn't mean it's not sexist. Your tone is alot angrier then me.Why are you so bothered by people finding something sexist? LOL, this outrage is sooooooo unreal. OMG, it's so embarrassing....
Because for 99% of the people in this game the words they put together within From Software's messaging system are not an endorsement of their personal views or how they treat people. It's absurdist juvenile humour in a game that is as far away from humorous as possible. That's why most of it "works". That's why many go for the ridiculous or the rudest thing the words From put into their game can allow.
Dark Souls is not supposed to be funny, other than opening a wrong chest and getting eaten. It's supposed to be a miserable, oppressive experience and the fact players found a way to use a system that's only purpose was for help to be a bit daft isn't some large-scale assault on people in the real world.
There have been 4 Souls games now all with daft messages and so on and I seriously doubt any of that has influenced much real-world behaviour by anyone.
For yourself and others, how about you move onto explaining what the solution is for the Souls world? I'm assuming most of you play the Souls games and you're aware of how the messaging works. So what does From do? Remove the messaging system completely? Remove any word that has a double meaning or that can be strung together in a sentence and suggest innuendo?
You really think From can afford a full-time moderation team to manually approve thousands of messages dropped into a Souls game? Why would they even pay for that if they could? The messages are also real-time, you're not supposed to drop a message and come back 12 hours later to see if it's been approved yet.
The system is built to stop users from entering their own words for the precise reason of stopping slander, swearing and so on. That is the reasonable compromise here. Character names have a filtering system, but that's because they get entered manually by the player.
Because I think some might have entered this topic with no idea how Souls messages work, here
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His "twitter behavior" pretty much shows how the article is nothing but click bait garbage meant to generate traffic and he doesn't even try to hide it. That tweet is there just to generate even more traffic. Somethings do deserve to be dismissed completely, this is one of those things, there is no actually intent to start a discussion on sexism in gaming, because if that was actually the intent there are a hell of alot more valid things to write about and actually be taken seriously.
I dont want to offend anyone who is actually outraged, but i just feel like the conclusions made by the author are a very very large reach. To the point of ridiculousness.
"go make me a sandwich" isn't funny. It's also not in dark souls.
"chest ahead" - I do find that humorous given the context of it.
No, clearly this is an agenda and we must all be outraged by it.
Oh no, the women belong in the kitchen jokes are 100% sexist.
The other stuff however is harmless in my eyes. My eyes aren't the eyes of 7 billion other people though so my opinion is naturally different to others. It's just how I view it. I'm strictly speaking about the "try finger, but hole" "try thrusting" kinda jokes. I don't see how they could harm someone male or female. They aren't targeted at any particular sex and have been attached inanimate objects even.
Okay, let's get this out of the way:
A lack of care is still a sign of sexism. Specifically, if someone puts out a sexist joke in my presence it is likely that they did so at least partly because they couldn't give a shit how women feel about these jokes. This happens all the time IRL so you'll have to forgive me if I don't share your rather charitable interpretation of this behavior.
Someone cat calling me on the street doesn't give a shit about how it makes me feel. They might be doing so because they feel they admire my appearance, maybe, but it sure as hell does not make me feel appreciated when I'm obviously not trying to draw attention to myself and they do it anyway. By the same token, men putting down 100% unambiguously sexist "joke" messages all over these games gives me a very clear message: "we don't care that you exist". Or, perhaps more charitably, "everyone who plays this game is a dude anyway", which isn't really much better.
And note, I don't even necessarily want From to somehow "fix" this (I don't actually think they can without removing the system or hamstringing it heavily). I just want some ACKNOWLEDGEMENT that this could, maybe, possibly, just maybe be something of a problem, for some people. Because what bothers me most about this thread is the dismissiveness from so many posters who obviously couldn't give fewer shits about how I feel or what I think, just as the in-game messages are themselves dismissive of my existence. Is that clear enough for you?
Amazing chest ahead is the same as telling a women to get in the kitchen?
That's one tweet y'all are getting stuck on. He also tweets during his research phase here (three weeks ago). And he has done really diligent and interesting architectural analyses of the Souls games here. It's okay to dismiss his opinion, but all the claims that he's outraged for the sake of it, or that he's an awful journalist because "outrage culture" are pointless and kind of reveal how toxicity towards journalists can be found even in communities that distance themselves from Gamergate like this one.
Btw the "TWO HANDING REQUIRED" Joke isn't at all about sexual assault. I genuinely don't know why that is being said.
Its about having a large penis. At least that's what I saw In my play through. It was always against a male character or corpse.
Its about having a large penis. At least that's what I saw In my play through. It was always against a male character or corpse.
See you didn't read the article:
Though constantly laughing about womans' boobs isn't exactly great either.
I tweeted back at him with this response
and he blocked me for it. This guy has some pretty thin skin since what I said isn't even more than a mild criticism of how he put together this article
What has cat-calling got to do with this? Harassing someone, an actual person, is not even in the same league as leaving this message in Dark Souls
How are messages in Dark Souls telling you people "don't care you exist"?
People wouldn't be as dismissive if the OP wasn't going off on the tangent of drawn penises being an assertion of power and then yourself trying to move the ball to cat-calling and situations where an actual person is harassed.
Dark Souls is not real life. The Dark Souls NPCs are not real people. There wasn't even voice chat in most of the games, and in 3 IIRC it's only private between friends. No one is sending harassment directly to other players.
Not everyone has to like or even find the messages funny, that's fine, but call them out on a reasonable playing field, not poisoning your own argument by inserting actual harassment into the mix.
See, here's my thing about topics like this. I hear the initial argument and I'm not super convinced, people say things like how it's just juvenile humour and it's unspecific in who it targets and I go okay, maybe that's true. Then you get guys saying that you just have to accept things like racism when you go online:
and I'm like, oh, so you're admitting that even if there was a problem you don't actually care enough to push for a solution, or to even let people acknowledge the problem. And I find myself thinking that those kinds of replies are often a lot worse than the problem that drew them out.
and I'm like, oh, so you're admitting that even if there was a problem you don't actually care enough to push for a solution, or to even let people acknowledge the problem. And I find myself thinking that those kinds of replies are often a lot worse than the problem that drew them out.
I don't make these jokes so I could be wrong, but I doubt the people who do are thinking "are women going to be offended by this message?"
Not necessarily because they don't care about women, but because somebody getting offended by these things is so rare and limited to such a small amount of people that it would never cross their minds. It's not a lack of care that women exist, but a lack of care that people who don't like these jokes on a personal level exist.
It doesn't surprise me anymore that something like this can bother some people, but in my and most people's eyes it's just a silly childish message designed to get a cheap laugh. And those cheap laughs aren't limited to men, just anyone who may have a slightly immature sense of humour.
Oh boy. Hardcore lady Souls player here too. I fully agree with PhazonBlonde's great post from earlier.
That article has problems. Like, major ones. It's a pity, because there are some okay points somewhere in there, about the sexist messages. The author should have stuck to examining that. When he started talking about the game lore and the marketing and all that, he not only completely lost the plot, but he posted some egregiously sexist thoughts himself, way worse than the obnoxious kitchen/boob jokes from user-messages:
NOPE NOPE fuck off. "It's not such a leap", he says. Actually yes, it's a huge fucking leap. An insane one. And it's frankly insulting to every female Souls player out there, or every female player who enjoys skill-gated games. How he immediately connects "this game is hard/requires skills -> therefore it's for boys" is insanely sexist and offends me far more than the juvenile user-messages in Souls games. (And that's not even considering his ridiculous leap about what drawing penises mean...)
Sigh. But okay, let's talk about the messages. Some are funny. Some are clever. Some are juvenile or crass, but not particularly sexist or misogynistic.
But some are absolutely sexist as fuck, and that's not a debate, guys. Whether one is offended by them or not is one's choice, but to belittle people who find it upsetting to see those messages over and over, to be constantly reminded that "wow boys really see women as sex objects/waifus/etc and it's all they think about when they see a female character huh", can be really grating. No, it's not on the same level as catcalling, but it's a similar kind of microaggression. Individually, a single message like that is nothing, but in accumulation, it's an eyeroll.
And while it's true that "finger but hole" messages are all over the game world including on male corpses, you're kidding yourself if you deny the obvious gender slant those messages can take.
That article has problems. Like, major ones. It's a pity, because there are some okay points somewhere in there, about the sexist messages. The author should have stuck to examining that. When he started talking about the game lore and the marketing and all that, he not only completely lost the plot, but he posted some egregiously sexist thoughts himself, way worse than the obnoxious kitchen/boob jokes from user-messages:
NOPE NOPE fuck off. "It's not such a leap", he says. Actually yes, it's a huge fucking leap. An insane one. And it's frankly insulting to every female Souls player out there, or every female player who enjoys skill-gated games. How he immediately connects "this game is hard/requires skills -> therefore it's for boys" is insanely sexist and offends me far more than the juvenile user-messages in Souls games. (And that's not even considering his ridiculous leap about what drawing penises mean...)
Sigh. But okay, let's talk about the messages. Some are funny. Some are clever. Some are juvenile or crass, but not particularly sexist or misogynistic.
But some are absolutely sexist as fuck, and that's not a debate, guys. Whether one is offended by them or not is one's choice, but to belittle people who find it upsetting to see those messages over and over, to be constantly reminded that "wow boys really see women as sex objects/waifus/etc and it's all they think about when they see a female character huh", can be really grating. No, it's not on the same level as catcalling, but it's a similar kind of microaggression. Individually, a single message like that is nothing, but in accumulation, it's an eyeroll.
And while it's true that "finger but hole" messages are all over the game world including on male corpses, you're kidding yourself if you deny the obvious gender slant those messages can take.
Yep.
Great point. I've always played as female characters first (I make several characters per game) and I never had the impression that Firekeepers were weak or submissive either. His interpretation of the game content is thoroughly warped.
Cripes.What has cat-calling got to do with this? Harassing someone, an actual person, is not even in the same league as leaving this message in Dark Souls
How are messages in Dark Souls telling you people "don't care you exist"?
People wouldn't be as dismissive if the OP wasn't going off on the tangent of drawn penises being an assertion of power and then yourself trying to move the ball to cat-calling and situations where an actual person is harassed.
Dark Souls is not real life. The Dark Souls NPCs are not real people. There wasn't even voice chat in most of the games, and in 3 IIRC it's only private between friends. No one is sending harassment directly to other players.
Not everyone has to like or even find the messages funny, that's fine, but call them out on a reasonable playing field, not poisoning your own argument by inserting actual harassment into the mix.
Yeeeep. You nailed it.
Well, I mean, that's the problem specifically. It never crossing their minds, somehow, in spite of the target of the joke being a woman and despite the joke itself having sexist content, is not a good look. At the very least, it raises questions as to why it never comes to mind.