I feel like I see those kinds of odd revisionist arguments from cis het male gamers weirdly often. Stuff like "no one cared about LGBT issues before [arbitrary year usually after 2000 at least]" or "feminism never came up in gaming before [see previous brackets]." It's a very tellingly self-centered view in my opinion, where just because they didn't engage in that stuff or hang out in places where they might've noticed it means it actually didn't exist at all, as if they are the all-seeing center of all video game discourse.
Revisionist history is, for some reason, very popular and common in gaming. I often get the feeling that this is a medium that doesn't take its history seriously at all.
I read tons of academic literature talking about depiction of women in games when I was doing my degree, there was plenty of study and critique happening there going back to the early 2000s if not earlier. However, mainstream games journalism barely even touched issues around women in games until probably the late 2000s, and even today there is constant whining and complaining from a certain part of the audience any time it's brought up, so it's not that surprising someone would assume it wasn't being discussed back then if they weren't actively looking for it. Obviously that is a misguided view afforded by privilege, but honestly it doesn't speak super well of Jeff if that's what he thinks.
The thing that annoys me about that is that sure, it's a pretty normal first thought to reference your own experience on the matter, but surely it's also a very normal followup thought to question if your own experience is really the be-all-end-all on the subject? Surely these people have the minimum of self-awareness to know that there are more viewpoints to explore before giving a definite statement like that? Like, maybe that's more telling of me that I tend to question my own "expertise" (or rather lack of), but it's always wild to me to see people just fire off takes like that with full confidence.
To their credit, the Giant Bomb folks basically came out unequivocally against GamerGate and similar "movements", they've been pretty openly in favour of better treatment of employees in the games industry, including voicing support for unionization, and when women were coming out with their #MeToo style stories about Activision, Blizzard, Ubisoft, Insomniac etc. they were always firmly in support of those affected and called out leadership for not doing enough. When mistakes were made in the past, GB was really good about owning up to them and apologizing to the community.
Yeah, that tactic is part of their playbook.
I think it is normal to make statements about a subject based on the speaker/writer's own experience and knowledge, and fail to consider other perspectives. That is a problem, but in practice, the main problem comes from how the person reacts when other perspectives are brought to the person's attention--which then forms part of their knowledge base for future output.
It's so frustrating cause they're almost definitely the ones that blew it up out of proportion and made it worse
They are gonna start fully going after any queer devs and attempt to terrorize the companies into firing them.
Yeah, I'm seeing people explicitly go after Arrowhead devs and the HD2 discord is apparently full of bigotry. It's so exhausting.
Sadly that will never happen, for these people sexualization is something they feel they are entitled to, so whenever a female character is revealed and is not sexy they bitch about "woke" or some shitImagine what it'd be like if gamers had nearly as much energy for sexualization and female presentation in games like Stellar Blade as they do for Helldivers 2 requiring a PSN account.
Yeah yeah appeal to worse problems and all that but still....like....goddammit.
God I wish. They can't even handle "you're not bad for liking these games, but please think critically about how this treats women and minorities" without going ballistic.Imagine what it'd be like if gamers had nearly as much energy for sexualization and female presentation in games like Stellar Blade as they do for Helldivers 2 requiring a PSN account.
Yeah yeah appeal to worse problems and all that but still....like....goddammit.
Many of them absolutely do. Just not the way they should.Imagine what it'd be like if gamers had nearly as much energy for sexualization and female presentation in games like Stellar Blade as they do for Helldivers 2 requiring a PSN account.
Imagine what it'd be like if gamers had nearly as much energy for sexualization and female presentation in games like Stellar Blade as they do for Helldivers 2 requiring a PSN account.
Yeah yeah appeal to worse problems and all that but still....like....goddammit.
At least for the new Mario game they did the correct thing by letting you play as Peach, Daisy and Toadette with no "Bowser kidnapping a female character" plot this time around
Yeah, Nintendo used to be pretty bad about this (not that they don't still find new ways to damsel characters). It wasn't until a decade ago that they started improving. In the last decade (or specifically since the NSMB sub-series ended in 2012) and ignoring ports/remakes, the games where Peach gets kidnapped are:
www.wowhead.com
Yup, I was happy that in Wonder that was not the case, and the game was still amazing and possibly the best 2D Mario game since the SNES. Which should be proof enough that absolutely nothing about Nintendo games being good has to do with them perpetuating all the same old stereotypes.
Just hope that continues with the next mainline 3D Mario.
That was hilarious.
They nailed multiple cadences of men that are angry and also don't know what they're talking about.
