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IF YOU HAD to describe the past year that Brianna Wu has experienced, ‘eventful’ would be a major understatement.
Not only did the studio she co-founded, Giant Spacekat, release its first game Revolution 60 on iOS this time last year (and a PC/Mac port is close to completion), it was also a year where she became one of the targets of Gamergate, an online movement which began back in August that claimed it’s tackling corruption in gaming journalism but really began with an attack on one female games developer and snowballed from there.
This year alone, she’s received 106 specific death threats for speaking out about the treatment and obstacles women in her field face, but that hasn’t stopped Wu from pushing forward with her work.
Most of that work revolves around Giant Spacekat’s first title, Revolution 60, which took roughly three and a half years to complete before it was released on iOS in June 2014.
For a debut game, it was an ambitious title and has received generally favourable reviews for its focus on story and characterisation. Spending that much time developing it was in response to both a growing audience not interested in action games and a grievance she had with games: the lack of women in games as a whole.
“What I wanted to show was a game that anyone could play. That they could just enjoy the story no matter what their skill level is,” explains Wu. “It was very challenging, but I have to be honest, we came so close to failing so many times and it’s a work I’m tremendously proud of.”
My mission with my company, I absolutely believe in women being treated more fairly in the games industry, but the real reason I got into the industry is because the games I wanted to play weren’t being made by the marketplace.
That marketplace has changed in the past few years as more than half of gamers are women compared to just 3% in 1989. Of that general demographic, roughly 1.5 million people have played Revolution 60, showing that it is tapping into an audience that want’s something more than just endless runners or clones of Bejeweled or Candy Crush.
A PC and Mac version is due to be released soon, but not before some changes are made to it. For one, feedback from the women who played it felt the characters were a little too skinny and sexualised which the team is addressing. Doing this adds an extra three or four months to the development process but it’s important to Wu as it shows the team is “willing to listen to our consumers and [we] also care about criticism.”
Ongoing harassment
Yet while gaming is an industry that has made leaps and bounds in terms of technology and money, parts of it are still catch up, mainly the general perception towards women in gaming.
Much of it is a case of unconscious bias but at its worst, and something that has been greatly exacerbated thanks to GamerGate, it leads to death and rape threats – these threats forced Wu out of her home at one point – harassment and abusive messages being directed at women in gaming.
No matter who you are, constant tweets, emails and people analysing your every move to disprove you or find a smoking gun takes a major toll and it’s something Wu faces regularly.
She has regularly spoken out against it and has gone as far as holding talks with lawmakers, the most recent one was with the FBI earlier this week, but online harassment is still an area where law enforcement can’t properly address, something Wu finds “very frustrating.” However, she doesn’t want this to distract her from her job.
“I think it’s important to hold the people accountable that have been sending me threats of this nature and I think that’s something I have a responsibility to other women in this field too, but I also have a responsibility to the women in this field to get back to making games,” says Wu. “I don’t want to be a games critic, I just want to make games.”
What is very frustrating about being a woman in the gaming industry is this. If a man comes out and critiques the gaming industry in a professional role, it’s treated as just that: criticism. If a woman comes out and criticises the gaming industry, all of a sudden we’re censors, we’re not real gamers, we want to censor creative thought. It’s such a double standard that we’re held to and it’s nothing but a silencing tactic.
This doesn’t just impact those women immediately targeted, but all women within the industry.
As an example, Wu mentioned how employees in her studio had to use aliases when dealing with people outside the company in case those using said threats would target them and their families and likewise for those on the outside who may fear that speaking out about it will lead to the same thing.
Although there are signs that things are beginning to change. At E3 this week, one of the biggest gaming events on the calendar, there was an increase in the number of women on stage at each major keynote as well as more high-profile games with female protagonists heading them. There’s still a long way to go, but it’s a good first step towards greater diversity and inclusion within the industry.
Wu highlights the multiplayer action game Splatoon, a recent release from Nintendo, as an example of how this diversity can work. The developers behind it came from the same team that created the Animal Crossing series, one that has an even split of men and women from different ages and backgrounds.
The result is a game that turns a well-worn genre, the tactical person shooter, on its head by shooting paint at your environment to win (and the opposing team), and it has enjoyed strong sales and a great critical response. Most development teams tend to be male-centric, but Nintendo’s success was “the result of a game that studio including women and letting us have a seat at the table.”
And turning existing ideas on their heads is something Giant Spacekat hopes to do with its next project. For one, it will be a virtual reality experience – they’re working with Oculus Rift since the team already use the Unreal Engine for development – and it will focus on an area in games that hasn’t really changed since the 80s according to Wu: dialogue.
“If you look at dialogue in games, it has barely changed since the 80s… dialogue would be pick one of three options and that would be it,” says Wu. “It’s now 2015 and it’s the exact same thing, no one out there is thinking about this or working on this problem.”
I am so excited about this because imagine a game where you put on the goggles where you’re talking to someone and the beats of what you say, how you say it, what you respond to, what that person’s personality is, what their facial features are telling you as you’re talking to them. That’s all stuff you have to pick up on and respond to so we’re trying to invent the holodeck and to me that’s an exciting problem to work on.
This statistic that is being bandied about that more than half of gamers are now women is a completely spurious one.
Downloading gaming apps for free on your smart phone does not make somebody a ‘gamer’. If you cut out the gaming apps and only consider the demographic who play X-box, Playstation or PC games, the figures will show women still make up a very small.minority of those who play computer games.
For god sake. Some one who plays games is a gamer. There’s appeal in apps that doesn’t exist in triple A games for women. Publishers are just too stupid to tap that market.
That doesn’t make a drop of sense, Scipio. Women play computer games a lot: mobile platform offers a different range of games and opportunities that seem to gel better with more women. Unless you want to redefine ‘games’ to only mean console/PC games, and make a separate phone/handheld category, which seems deliberately exclusive to me.
Gamer is a specific identity largely defined to be a certain type of person who plays games. Much like an audiophile is a certain kind of person who listens to music. Simply playing a game does not make one a gamer in this context. My mother plays solitaire her computer. Calling her a gamer would remove any meaning from the word.
However publishers are trying to tap that market and that’s fine. No gamers are against people making another candy crush. They are against attempts to take games traditionally aimed at gamers and stripping out the elements which might alienate non-gamers. That is the battleline, not the existence of games which don’t appeal to gamers.
As an example, requests for games to have a “skip combat button”. People are against that. Such changes would entirely devalue what games are and what they are about. Can you image if the bottom of every page in a book had a TL:DR? Yeah that.
Lol. No. There will never not be hardcore male power fantasy games. People just want there to be more diverse games too to appeal to everyone. These things can coexist. Text based adventures from the 80′s are still called games. But if you think shooting and stuff is the only thing that defines games then whatever. I don’t get this precious gatekeeping of a so called identity.
Yes different games can co-exist, that was what I had actually just said, it seems redundant to repeat what I say. The fact different games can co-exist is exactly why there is no need to change all games to be more appealing to non-gamers. Loads of developers already make those games, they don’t need to take games for “gamers” and make them more appealing for “non-gamers”. Compared to movies, gamers are super diverse.
A text adventure becomes a “game” if it has puzzles, if it has “gameplay”. Interactive fiction is not widely consider to be games. Gameplay requires that there is some form of rules to play too. It’s pretty simple to make a text adventure a game. Text adventures usually tend to be games by virtue of the “adventure” element. This usually involves some form of puzzle solving or system of rules. Interactive fiction lacking in gameplay is not a game.
You are the only person here saying the shooters define games.
They can co-exist, but the women this article is talking about are trying to stop that. Anita has literally complained that a game lets you pick a male or female character, instead of just a female one.
I find the fact that the gamer gate side has never been represented in mainstream media, this woman and her friend Anita Sarkessian are proven pathological liars, who have profited immensely from this so called scandal, the fact is it began as criticism of gaming journalism as Sarkesian had been dating the man that was reviewing her games, there is an obvious bias and conflict of interest there.
I don’t care I’m happy that women make games and play them more frequently, and no doubt there is a problem with sexism as there is across all of society, but that doesn’t give these people a right to play a victim card as there is another side to the story that funnily enough isn’t being represented since it is a criticism of journalism (funnily enough)
As far as I understand Anita Sarkeesian isn’t actually a game developer, she’s a blogger and feminist? Aside from that, I can understand a lot of the complaints women make about abuse towards them on the internet etc. if you ever go on the website Break.com (viral video site) and read the comments, it’s completely depressing stuff. Anytime a woman is featured in a video, the bile spouted towards her is appalling. Comments about how she looks or what they’d like to do to her. If not that sort of comment it’s pure racism, the online world is full of disgusting cowards that love to hide behind anonymity (aware of the irony of not using my real name).
I agree with you that yes the internet is a vile cesspool of negativity and hatred, but I can just as easily find equivalent blogging sites that call for equally horrible and vile actions to be taken against men (and anyone who has ‘privilege’)
Unfortunately hatred and intolerance of each other can only get us so far as a society until we understand to just accept each other’s differences and get on it with, not like it matters anyway, I don’t even care enough about these people to like or dislike them, I do disagree with the tactics employed by Wu and colleagues, if they have received threatening messages, instead of screen capping and sharing on twitter (asking for Patreon donations) should have just gone to the police, but that might show up how these people have deliberately portrayed themselves as victims, and actually made a career out of it.
Outrage culture can actually be profited from now and I find that ridiculous
Several factual errors in your comment. It was Zoe Quinn who was having several affairs with people in the industry, including at least 1 journalism who had wrote at least 2 positive articles about her or her game. To put it in context why that would be considered strange, her game was a html interactive fiction “game”. i.e. not really a game and something that a person with some technical knowledge could knock out in an afternoon. It has a story, you make choices, end of game. There isn’t really much game in it so people from the start questioned why she was getting coverage when so many other developers, making real games struggle for coverage on big gaming sites. She had made a name for herself an awful person long before this all kicked off.
When it was discovered she was having a sexual relationship with a journalist who reported on her, people got annoyed. The discussion (which had a significant amount of misogyny) was shutdown across the net. This lead to people digging deeper and finding regular and widespread failures to disclose relationships by game journos. Then there was a evidence of a game journo mailing list which appeared to have been used to by reviewers across various sites to develop a singular reporting narrative. This is where the “ethics in video game journalism” comes from. There were a multitude of failures discovered and it is still a problem. It was discovered that there is a deeply incestuous relationship between journalists and a clique of indie developers. Too many examples to go into, but many directly point to high review scores being given to games developed by friends of the reviewer. Higher score == More money, so don’t pretend that it’s not important because it’s only “video games”. It’s corruption and collusion within the largest entertainment industry in the world.
Brianna Wu is a talentless hack who makes awful games which literally look like something from the late 1990′s (even though they are developed on the most advanced graphics engine in the industry). She has nothing to do with gamergate but has continuously inserted herself into the controversy, presumably because she gets reported on for it and gets speaking engagements such as the above.
Thanks for the fact corrections, I can’t say I’ve been following it with a lot of passion more like frustration that the whole farce is still ongoing… The only reporting that gets done of it paints an entire group of people that enjoy video games as misogynistic losers, kind of a shame really when as you say there is a serious discussion to be had
In all seriousness, I’ve tried to avoid this as much as possible because there’s so much stupidity on all sides, but if you genuinely think there’s an issue in the gaming world, is it not time for you to start jumping ship from the actual sexists and lunatics in the movement, and getting a group of gamers together who want to raise their points properly?
Again, I’ve tried to avoid it all as much as possible, but there do seem to be people who want to see a change in the gaming industry, which is fair enough, but allying themselves with the lunatics is doing them no favours. It seems like dumping some of the stupid in your side would be the best thing to do, and then if you want to see some sort of change, it’ll be a lot easier to be heard and respected.
Oh right, it’s about ethics in game journalism. A talking point you seem to have taken on board without even bothering to find out the origin at all. Anita Sarkeesian makes the fantastic feminist frequency and is not a game developer. You are mixing her up with a small game developer targeted for utterly vile and indefensible sexist abuse.
If you are actually concerned with ethics in game journalism go for the paid content masquerading as reviews in gamer mags rather than a non existent review of a small independent game.
Improper journalism should be challenged no matter it’s origin, yes I should have fact checked better before I posted any comment on this to begin with, but I think my original point about the narrative on the whole issue being remarkably one sided is still relevant.
@Shalak
A bit late, but I sort of agree. It’s difficult to contain a hashtag, and some people do take measures to report harassment or threats when they see them but there are a number of prominent people who are just awful. As bad as anything I’ve seen on the opposite side, both in terms of opportunism and behaviour.
By and large if you check the hashtag there isn’t anything too disagreeable to be seen (which is a highly subjective measure). They do insult “SJW”s a lot, but usually avoid dog piling or direct harassment and the hashtag has regular contributions from women and minorities. I’d say a good 60% is white men, but it tends to vary a lot after that and the abuse, threats and harassment occur on both sides. Women who support GG are regularly called stupid (*cough* Graham Linehan *cough* ) simply for supporting GG so the misogyny, racism and all the rest is not isolated to GG.
Games are an incredibly diverse entertainment medium (far more than movies imo) and Gamers have rarely stood against that. Gamers have never shouted down a good game, regardless of its message or characters. The two areas of concern are thus:
Journos pushing mediocre “art” games because those games support their own particular flavour of political thought. Gamers want games to be judged on artistic/gaming criteria not feminist criteria.
Co-opting existing brands to sell progressive politics. Gamers want devs to make the games they themselves want to play. Simple as that. Tokenism rarely makes any form of entertainment better.
If women were totally left in charge of gaming we would have games where you would meet a handsome young man get married and go shopping and you could kill the bitch who stole your husband with a power up gossip button.
You would also have to spy on your boyfriend and beat him up if you catch him with another woman.
Would we get bonus points for all the times we forgive them for making the same stupid mistakes over and over and over and over and over and over
Yeah that’s how it works, man does the dirt, woman assaults him, he apologies.
and lots of vivid lilac pinkish colours, why make it so obvious? yea we know you’re a woman, no need to colourise that fact :/
Such a pointless comment… Women have as much place in game development as men. They contribute to some great titles!
Wow you just totally suspended your critical faculties to write this. The narrative is everything, eh?
As far as i remember gamergate all started when a female dev slept with journalists for good reviews, sent herself death threats and blamed a forum for lonely men who like disney films or something like that. The whole gaming industry is toxic. Gender makes no difference when everyone gets online abuse. Cant read comments on gaming sites anymore its just depressing to do so.
That was all debunked. The review doesn’t exist. Gamer gate started because of a creepy stalker ex boyfriend who couldn’t let things go.
Entirely untrue Joanna. There was no review, but there was several examples of namedropping or positive coverage on respected gaming sites for a game which amounted to a series of webpages.
Regarding Zoe Quinns ex-boyfriend I invite you to read the Zoe Post. It details a long period of emotional abuse and manipulation by her while she cheated on him with up to 6 different people. She lies several times in the message history, constantly withholding information from him regarding her behaviour. He is the victim of emotional abuse by his partner and you are victim blaming.
If you haven’t read the Zoe Post, then you should. If you have then you are victim blaming because the message history makes it crystal clear who the abuser is.
Was the review not pulled down after the backlash and covered up? I do remember at the time every mention of gamergate was being deleted off the internet.
No there was no review, that seemed to be a mistake made by some people early on (and even still is a mistake made by some).
What was said however was that their (sexual) relationship only started on a certain date, which was immediately after the last article he name-dropped her in. They can’t hide that they were friends for a long time however so the lack of disclose is still an issue.
It’s sort of sh*t cause I really liked Nathan Grayson, loved to read his stuff on RPS. TBH the journalists responded to this whole mess in the worst possible way. Within days there were dozens of examples of friends reporting on friends and the Journos just doubled down and insulted their readers (by calling them autistic in on example)
Since then they have continued to talk down to their readers and insult them, but interestingly they have all updated their ethics policies in line with what Gamergate requested so..
I read as much of the Zoe Post as I could muster and an interview with the guy who wrote it and whatever actually went down between them doesn’t take away from the fact that the guy is a disturbed psycho who needs help.
So you didn’t read the Zoe Post (his story) but instead something from the media.
How is he a disturbed psycho? Perhaps you think all victims of domestic abuse should be silent about their abuse?
You’re victim blaming again..
None of it was debunked. It was positive coverage, not reviews. Which does exist if you spend half a second on google: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/depression-quest/
Why doesn’t these women turn their efforts to the fashion industry? That is a far more dangerous basket case than gaming. Or are they just looking for an excuse to beat men up as usual.
Because fashion is the only thing women are allowed to be passionate about??? Or are you just looking to be sexist “as usual”?
Of course fashion isn’t the only thing women can be interested in. But it has a lot more interest from women and issues with it than gaming. Most women don’t care about gaming at all, ask this attention is a cynical red herring
Because they like gaming.
44% of everyday gamers are women
I didn’t realise speaking out against death threats = beating up men.
I play destiny all the time (1450 hrs game time)and I have several fellow guardians who are female and I have to say they are brilliant fun to play with and Damn good players… Join the clan Guardian Geezers as its for all us old school players and all welcome..
Destiny ain’t half addictive. Just waiting on Hawkmoon to complete my exotic collection. Got Gjallarhorn last Monday after 8 months or so playing.
You luck xxxxxxx I’ve done numerous raids / Night falls but still can’t get it to drop my missus will be well pleased when I get the horn….!!!!! See you star side fellow guardian!!!
I know nothing about the woman in the article or the scandal mentioned. The,game that they developed seems to rely on sexual/gender stereotypes which was demonstrated by the criticism it received – cartoon characters of women with impossible figures.
However, I recently read an academic paper on sexist comments and threats that female gamers receive whilst playing multiplayer action games. They are truly shocking attacks. I have to say that I have never read anything as vile and hateful as them.
Anyone who wants to have a presence on the internet needs to have thick skin. Constantly playing the victim and accusing an entire industry of misogyny because of comments from a few idiots is the problem. Why feed a troll? Because it helps the feminists weak argument.
Guaranteed most gamers who complain of abuse are playing Call of Duty. Watch Twitch streams both sexes get it & give it.
That’s bullsh*t David. There’s a difference between criticism and what some of these people are saying.
If people disagree with your point, even if they do it in a harsh way, that’s fine, and more people need to be able to take that. Jesus Christ, there’s another site I’m on where I seem to spend half my time justifying harsh criticism and complaining about people who think somebody disliking their work is a personal insult.
But if people disagree with your points and use “You deserve to be raped” as an argument, that’s NOT okay. If you can’t make a list of points you disagree with and refute them in a normal way, then you’re the issue. If you think insulting the way someone looks is the way to argue, then it says more about you than whoever you’re arguing with.
If a certain group are finding they can’t engage in proper arguments because whenever they try, they’re being insulted for being a part of that group, that’s an issue. Everyone with a brain should be against that, because if, for example, you feel like feminists have stupid arguments, focus on taking down the arguments, not the people behind it. Would prove your point far more effectively.
These trolls represent such a tiny minority they shouldn’t even be discussed, that are being used as evidence of a misogynist agenda that doesn’t exist.
I play xbox live and have gotten a lot of abuse over the years from name calling to getting obscene images of a sexual nature to graphic sexual messages which are quite scarey. I take no notice now but when you’re younger playing online and are subjected to this it is upsetting. Some men and boys on xbox live are good craic and take it with a pinch of salt when you shoot them in games like battlefield/cod but a lot take offense in being beaten by a lady and lash out.
Do yourself a favour Elaine and get away from Battlefield & CoD. It might not bother you as much but still it must disheartening getting messages off the bro brigade because you have a positive kill/death ratio. Most communities of other multiplayers are trouble free but those 2 are nothing but future anger management problems.
I just ignore and mute them. I enjoy it too much to quit, not letting others ruin my fun. Thanks though Keelan, there are some great communities online just a shame the FPS have some right weirdos.
a simpler solution: Mute the voice chat. Problem solved
I am gamer and game programmer I try and stay away from gamer gate as much as I can because it’s just stupid but the comments on here are just distressing. It’s fine for me I’m older but what about young girls who want to get into the industry thinking that this is what it’s like. The game industry is full of amazing talented people(yes mostly men) who I am lucky enough to call friends. These people hidden behind their computers do not represent the games industry.
If you’re in the industry it makes sense not to go near it. Just keep making games :)
An industry which was started primarily by men for men is another target for feminist ire , it seems as if every successful male dominated industry has to make way ,lower standards and give a free pass to women, no wonder there is so much negativity.
Spot on, but just like women’s sport no one will give 2 tosses because they are usually rubbish.
if they can’t get what they want, target the brain and spread rumours, lies and gossip. nasty work,
Gaming was not created for men, and it’s idiotic to assume such. Everybody plays games, and I can’t understand why expanding would be considered lowering standards in this case. If anything, having more female developers would create more games with different gameplay and make the whole industry more interesting.
“Gaming was not created for men”
Actually it was. Created by men, for men. That doesn’t mean it’s hasn’t changed since then, but it was created for men and marketed only to men for a long time
Jaysus Quinton this article is awful. You seemed hell best on avoiding the real story or else didn’t bother researching the actual version. This lady is not a game developer in the traditional sense, she is someone who wants celebrity. She thrives on articles like this one “shining the light” on something that isn’t really there.
Proof?
The other side of the story is pretty easy to find out, but facts and balance are secondary to the the cause.
The comments on any article about feminism justifies feminism itself. The misogyny from some of the commentors on the journal is incredible. Get a life.
No it doesn’t. Because one is wrong doesn’t make the other right.
It was republicans who freed the slaves in the USA. Should all African Americans be Republicans now, or can they acknowledge things change and make a choice based on their current circumstances.
Most men are pro equality. Feminism has lost it’s way completely, it wants equality in the work place, but only in favourable jobs and ignores the lack of men is areas like nursing and teaching. It talks about ending violence towards women, but ignores the fact that men(and especially boys) are far far most likely to be a victim of assault not even mentioning the high levels of domestic violence towards men. I am a firm believer in women’s rights because I want the women that I love to have the same opportunities as Any man but this type of gender, third wave feminism only serves to divide us.
Any article about gamergate justifies gamergate itself.
so she doesn’t like women on the game being criticized
I’ve taken apart modern “feminism” below as a public service to you all:
1) Gender Victim Industry. There is now an industry dedicated to perpetuating the notion that women are some sort of “grouping” that is discriminated against on a continued basis. This is an industry like any other, ie looking to profit. The multitude of feminist writers you see in the Guardian for example. Think about it, the Guardian hired about a dozen young women, all of them strident feminists, who have the capacity to write about little else. Why? Because gender articles are click-bait, they generate advertising revenue. The more controversial the better. Also, many of the writers have books out or coming out so they have an interest in keeping the narrative going.
Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook being another example. Ironically touted as a role-model “woman in tech”, we have to remember that Sheryl is not a techie and couldn’t code to save her life. She is a COO, ie the chief administrator. Essentially she gets to decide where peoples desks are located and where the Christmas party is going to be. That hasn’t stopped her trying to cash in by writing a book, which correctly makes the case that women need to be more assertive but also deliberately states biased statistics as facts (for example she states there is a gender pay gap. The implication is there is a gap for the same work, but that’s not correct. There is only a gap when we average across full time and part time workers across all industries. When we control for type of job, hours worked and years of experience, then there is no gap at all, in fact young women in the US and UK earn more than young men). But it would be harder to sell books to insecure young women if you give the full truth as I have just done, so she conveniently just states the biased statistic.
Note also, no industry ever wants itself to go out of existence if there’s profit to be made. So there never will be any “solution” to these gender issues that makes everyone pack up and go home. No, the industry will adapt and continue to find perceived grievances. We already see this with all this talk of “rape culture” (all the stats show rape declining decade on decade in the western world). In the past the main issue would have been concrete issues such as pay inequality etc. Now that there is no evidence of any pay discrimination, they are forced to retreat into “softer” interpersonal relationship issues. But they will always find a grievance; they have to as an industry. And as they search, they will become more vague, on purpose.
2) Amplification effect of “social” media. There always existed misandrists within the feminist movements. But in the past they would have just said these things to their mates, now it’s put online and willingly given disproportionate airtime by media that know its works as click-bait.
3) Professional Class women. This class is intelligent enough to know that a lot of the claims of feminists are bogus, but dont challenge these claims or even propogate them. Why? because this is the very class of people that would benefit from any resulting affirmative action programs such as boardroom quotas.
4) Feminist assertions are very attractive to young women coming up in the world. Intelligent young women put a lot of pressure on themselves to succeed. Being able to put the blame for any shortcomings on an external locus (such as men), can relieve some of the pressure. We’ve all been there, when under pressure we suddenly feel better if the focus goes off ourselves and onto someone else who we perceive is holding us down. I believe this is why feminism is most attractive to women with higher IQ’s (i know quite a few doctors who are strident feminists, but not many nurses). And this is where the Guardian opinion writers and book-writers come in, always ready to offer a biased statistic which re-enforces easy notions of victimhood. Always follow the money.
If the word gaming is in the sentence, nothing important is happening.
Uh oh looks like we’ve got a dry shite over here
Meet Danny Wilson.
It strikes me that feminism needs victimhood to achieve relevance.
Get your own popcorn.
Some days I wish gaming never went mainstream. It’s slowly having the joy sucked out of it.
That is why CDProjekt Red are the best Developers in the industry right now. America and the UK have been churning out total crap for over a decade.
‘Total crap’ is very harsh. Make a top 10 list of games and at least half if not more will be from the US and the UK.
You’re saying that there haven’t any been top quality value for money games coming from the US/UK in the past decade?
Terribly written article. You could at least TRY to be impartial before gushing about the ‘evils’ of gamer gate.
want to see all that is wrong with gaming and why people tend to take the piss out of female gamers, check out kaceytron in YouTube or twitch saying that though, I play regularly I think the main problem is children playing online who just like spam abuse and hide behind a keyboard. there is constantly flaming on online games and for me it’s destroying the fun. male,female,gay,straight,black,white whatever you are, we all play for one reason, to have fun and if your not having fun, well then your not doing it right. Enjoy it, no need to be vile.
Lets play spot the GamerGaters/MRA’s in the comments section!
David G – “Constantly playing the victim and accusing an entire industry of misogyny because of comments from a few idiots is the problem.”
Cian Rynne – “I find the fact that the gamer gate side has never been represented in mainstream media, this woman and her friend Anita Sarkessian are proven pathological liars, who have profited immensely from this so called scandal, the fact is it began as criticism of gaming journalism as Sarkesian had been dating the man that was reviewing her games, there is an obvious bias and conflict of interest there.”
Cathal Healy – “Brianna Wu is a talentless hack who makes awful games which literally look like something from the late 1990’s (even though they are developed on the most advanced graphics engine in the industry). She has nothing to do with gamergate but has continuously inserted herself into the controversy, presumably because she gets reported on for it and gets speaking engagements such as the above.”
Cal Cryton – “I’ve taken apart modern “feminism” below as a public service to you all: (a long pile of shite)”
Mick Bacon – “An industry which was started primarily by men for men is another target for feminist ire , it seems as if every successful male dominated industry has to make way ,lower standards and give a free pass to women, no wonder there is so much negativity.”
Paudi Onail – “if they can’t get what they want, target the brain and spread rumours, lies and gossip. nasty work,”
Paul Roche – “It strikes me that feminism needs victimhood to achieve relevance.”
right wing – “If women were totally left in charge of gaming we would have games where you would meet a handsome young man get married and go shopping and you could kill the bitch who stole your husband with a power up gossip button.”
Thankfully nobody against gamergate ever sent a death threat or harassed someone on Twitter.
Actually they’ve sent the majority of them. As even ones directed at themselves, end up being sent by themselves far too often
I know. It’s sarcasm.
Maybe the women should just shut up the lol
TL;DNR which is my attitude to this article and the whole stupid gamer gate saga on BOTH sides of the argument.
Perhaps these games are shite? Nothing to do with whether a man made it or a woman.
The whole “gamergate” controversy is much more complex than the one sided argument presented in the article above, but putting that to one side, there are other issues which need to be addressed. If and when a game presents character models with unhealthy female body images, such as those in Revolution 60, they are lambasted by feminists, but somehow this element has been skipped and nobody can explain why. Next, please take a look at “Reboot” ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuEJWmxWkKw ). This cartoon was developed in the early 90s and has a striking similarity in design to Revolution 60, developed last year. I’m surprised that the makers of Reboot haven’t commented on this or contacted her directly. Next, compare the modern graphics in Nintendos Splatoon with Revolution 60. The article mentions that 1.5million have downloaded the game. Downloaded numbers is a false economy. How many people played it and liked it? How many would have downloaded this old fashioned under-developed game if there had been less controversy. Unless there is a massive graphic overhaul I would expect the MAC/PC version to fail into obscurity very quickly in the modern market. There’s more to this story than your article tells.
The PC/Mac version because of comments made by other gamers about the look and weight of characters. You’d think she would notice this herself. Or was she hoping to manufacture more outrage.
*is delayed. Balls to that.
Only if that criticism comes with calls to censor/ban games, as criticism from these people have. They’ve even succeeded in some cases, and whined like babies in the cases they failed. They aren’t criticizing by the way, they’re saying videogames are a threat to every woman. That’s why they’re being protested against.
have your say