Old media has been perpetually scare mongering in this space...
1980s: Gamers worship satan
1990s: Gamers are violent and shoot up schools
2010s: Gamers are misogynists
1980s: Gamers worship satan
1990s: Gamers are violent and shoot up schools
2010s: Gamers are misogynists
Please don't do it again.
I get plenty of upvotes (and downvotes) so obviously what I say is resonating with some of the population here.
Edit: To be clear I don't think you can talk about moral panics in gaming without mentioning the one that's currently happening.
You've subtly changed the subject by saying "contentious submissions". That's not what this is about.
The guidelines hold independently of upvotes. HN is a constitutional democracy. If you're tired of following the guidelines, please stop posting here until your energy is recouped.
It's harmful to optimize for apparent signal/noise ratio at the expense of making it harder to differentiate signal from coherent groupthink noise.
It would be great if all overly political comments could be eliminated [0], but I don't see how that's going to happen. So the tradeoff is either having low-quality irreconcilable flaming, or preventing such by marginalizing dissent and encouraging a groupthink that permeates discussion but can never be called out - the noise will still be present, just masquerading as signal. IMHO it would be better for violent disagreements to act as flypaper and be more easily ignored, ideally through technical features.
[0] I guess that would necessarily include all non-technical anti-surveillance articles/comments as well, due to the opposing viewpoint of pro-surveillance. I don't think it would be good for this community to neuter itself in the fight against surveillance, but here I am showing my own bias.
Actually it seems quite the opposite of sexism since they're deliberately trying to make the game more accessible to women.
Note this does not mean women are worse at first person shooters, it just means that the game is currently designed for "experts" and there's an adjacent segment that gets exposure to the game via watching their partner play. "Girlfriend mode" is an attempt to reach that segment.
Having a "boyfriend zone" in a women's clothing store would be analogous and also not sexist.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/pi_2...
This is widely believed to be because each form of harassment is specifically targeted to have the maximum effect on the victim. Women are more generally upset by sexual harassment, men are generally more upset by emasculation.
Second, the reason the media narrative seems skewed in the opposite direction is because women are generally more likely to be upset by harassment:
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/pi_2...
But neither of those studies are particularly important, because "gaming" is a market so huge that it basically encompasses the entire population, or at least a significant enough portion that any truthful statements that could be made about "gamers" would likely hold equally true of the superset.
Overly broad statements such as yours actually hinder the cause of preventing the above issues, as it denies the existence of healthy and positive women gamers. By getting an accurate picture of harassment in general and how to address it we can more effectively treat it, but painting the whole issue as "because men hate women" is an uninformed appeal to emotion and overly defeatist. It implies that the problem is either unsolvable or only solved by removing men entirely.
When I was young, I played dungeons and dragons (the board game). I remember how this campaign ostracised people who wanted to play. In particular, girls were very vicious with the insults about being a freak (to all of us that played).
I would compare the stigma to those that liked computers.
I can't think of a single girl who liked either d&d or computers in the 70s or 80s (my wife tells me she started in computing in the 80s though and I don't doubt her). Strangely, supposedly, revisionist reality is the opposite - girls were driven away by mean men (it's revisionist history, but misogyny is the buzzword of the new century and truth be damned).
I'm glad misogyny was mentioned because my life experience was the exact opposite. However, I enjoyed these pursuits and no amount of bullying stopped me. The attitudes have changed so much today and not for the better.
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting more than one downvote here. For example, my gaming group in college was about 1/3 women, and they got along fine with the men, in both directions. I could follow rustynails' example and call him a liar and a revisionist for saying that he knew mean girls--but that would be a stupid and shortsighted thing to do, wouldn't it? There are all kinds of people in the world; you don't get to claim that the ones in your little circle are the only prototype for all the rest, for better or worse.
Not from me, but I might explain.
> I'm not sure why you think your experience disproves the experiences of thousands and thousands of other people, though.
[ citation needed ]
A youtuber by the name of Sargon of Akkad had a guest on his show talk about her experiences with online hate after she gave a public talk. The following link is to about 32:00 in:
https://youtu.be/D_Rmbmc1BH8?t=1910
She explains how terribly misogynistic everyone has been. He explains why those insults are gendered: because that works as an insult. Men get different insults than women do. The people claiming "the internet is misogynistic" largely seem to ignore insults directed at men, and talk loudly about the insults directed at women.
She later explains how she gets death threats, and this is an example of online misogyny. He explains slowly that he gets death threats, too.
Her response is that she's clearly shocked. She's never for one second thought that anyone else might be having problems on the net. Just that she's having issues, therefore it's personal, and it's only her (and people like her).
It's an astonishing admission to make publicly. That everyone else on the net is so unimportant as to be not worth human empathy, or even 30 seconds of rational thought.
That's why every time I hear "the internet is evil towards X", I have to ask "Oh? And how is everyone else treated?" Usually the response is "Uh.. I don't know".
Or, as another comment here shows... studies demonstrate that the sex which gets the most death threats, hateful comments, etc. is not women. It's men.
Heck, I've had death threats online. Do I go to sleep worrying about it? No. The people involved are cheap losers who live thousands of miles from me. They can muster up the hate to issue death threats online. They can't muster up the wherewithall to book a bus ticket to my home and ring my doorbell.
The solution to feelings of powerlessness is to give people power. Not to control the majorities speech because a small number of losers are assholes online.
Teach people how to deal with assholes, and they're less afraid. Teach people to be afraid, and they'll demand that we "safe space" the world in order to assuage their fears.
I was as nerdy a kid growing up as I am in adulthood, and I while I had virtually no problems with girls, I had a whole fuckload of problems with cliquish and bullying boys. That, I'm afraid, didn't do much to make me more tolerant of men bullying and excluding women today.
Take from your bad childhood experiences the lesson that deliberate and calculated exclusion is bad, not the idea that anyone has somehow earned a right to justify excluding others.
I'm going to jump in here and second this. I also had a fuckload of problems with cliquish and bullying boys, and none with girls. It would have been nice if girls had been more interested in me, but I finally figured out much later that much of that was because I never took any initiative and approached them or socialized with them; once I figured that out, and how to be more outgoing with them, things changed rapidly. Boys were always the source of real misery in middle/high school.
I've heard (in more recent years) of girls being vicious little back-stabbing bitches to each other, and there's movies that reinforce that stereotype, but as a boy that got picked on, I never saw that myself or had any problems with girls that weren't my own fault.
As for why gaming is so often attacked? I supected it's an audience thing. Hardcore gamers are often conflated with nerds (same with die hard tabletop gamers and roleplayers), and are seen as an 'easy' target for populists and media mouthpieces. People love a scapegoat...
Anyway, look at it from the media’s perspective. “violent videogames turn your kids into sociopaths” is a pretty great hook, it’s going to get the suburban parents attention, it’s going to turn into endless PTA meetings, it’s going to make it to the House of Representatives. “women are getting horribly harassed in a particular industry” just doesn’t make the headlines.
For example:
http://alternatives.gamergate.community/
There's also a fair bit more GamerGate support in the Nintendo fandom, with the bigger sites being at least neutral to it.
But it's still a bit more grassroots, since a lot of the sites on the support list are run by communities and fans rather than corporations.
Three women who were interviewed all commented in the video about how BBC misrepresented their views and cherry picked quotes to fit the narrative
YOGSCAST Hannah: I pointed this out during my interview, and said online gaming companies need to step up and help support reporting and banning like DOTA 2/Valve did - looks like that didn't get through, they just kept the bit where I said abuse happens to everyone :(
0Apes0: 3 days ago Being the manager of the HoG (shooting the shot gun) I am very disappointed at the finished edit of this. This was supposed to be a film about women in gaming but 'sorry we had to change direction) in the last couple of weeks. It's only purpose is to make women feel like victims when we're not. MEN and women experience a use everyday online, the bet thing to do is to ignore it and ban the stupid people on Twitter, live, psn and twitch. Not worth the worry. I said this but clearly this was deemed too logical to show and we must all remain victims. Not happy with the finish product only that it's appeared on YouTube and not real TV. Also lol good job at bringing KSI in.
Ms 5ooo Watts: 1 day ago I'm honestly disappointed with how this turned out. I was approached to speak about women in gaming as a whole not to only talk about the negative side. Even during the interview I was asked to give my positive experiences with being a gamer as they didn't want this to be a one sided thing. None of my positive comments about my community and the gaming community as a whole were included at all. The initial email that I received asking for an interview said, and I quote "I’m working on a BBC3 documentary looking at the experiences of female gamers, how experiences are changing (and how the games themselves are changing)" No where in there does it say that the program will be about "the dark side of gaming" I never signed up to be some kind of warrior against sexism online, I was asked to talk about the experiences of women in gaming, how things are changing and how games themselves are changing to reflect women in gaming now being more represented. Not happy at all.
> > hasn’t had much to say about
is
> That's simply not true at all. See recent BBC video on 'Dark side of gaming'
Can you agree that a single programme on a minor BBC channel is not much?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/arts/video-games/why-2014-... http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2565116360 http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/15/living/gamergate-explainer/ fox news: https://archive.is/dycHE
One of the guys who was on the recent BBC series commented on the fact and refused to play along .