Wrap Up and New Material on the Gaming Community Trilogy

Now that my trifecta of analysis is completed I wanted to share some updates.

The reason that I decided to write on what I did was because of this add by Hardees:

As you can see from even the thumbnail image: this is an add targeting men in the most horrendous way. I saw this as an add prior to watching a YouTube clip. As a man I was grossly offended and I felt sick. The reason is because I felt completely pandered to: and not in a good way. Come to think of it, there isn't really a good way to be pandered to. But in either event, I was not pleased and decided that I needed to get my uneasiness out of my system. After deciding to write I had discussions with several friends about female representations in RPG's and our wargames. All told, the previous three articles are my thoughts on what is wrong/what I think needs work in our current gaming meta.


I also think that there is an issue within the male gaming community of denial of what is happening. I read a very powerful piece today about a vlogger by the name of Anita Sarkeesian. She is the author of a media criticism blog called the Feminist Frequency, where she discusses representations of women and many other things in contemporary culture. She recently began a Kickstarter campaign to create a series of vlogs showing depictions of women and sexuality in video games. Her goal was $6,000 for video equipment/production and research costs. However, the day that she posted the video asking for funds her video's comments box where flooded with obscene comments and general douchiness. I have no respect for those that posted these malicious things. One of the many reasons being that she hadn't even made the video yet so these idiotic jerkwads spawned of 4chan were jumping so many conclusions that they should probably become Olympic hurdlers. You can find the first 100+ comments that were made on the YouTube video here: Comments as well as Sarkeesian's coverage of the violation and destruction of her Wikipedia page here (in which they called her very colorful names and changed her picture to that of a porn star). Don't worry though, because she publicized these attacks, her Kickstarter raised $158,197 (2500% increase). Read about her and her campaign here on wired: Wired and on GameSpot here.

These kind of outbursts are absolutely not OK. As a male gamer, or a decent person for that matter: we cannot let stuff like this happen any more. There is a line to be drawn, and it should have been put down long ago. Misogyny in any form is not the efforts of a little minority, it is perpetuated by the silent majority. When you friends make sandwich and kitchen jokes, but you don't say anything: you just gave the green light. As a community we are so much better than this, gaming used to be an all inclusive hobby because we had no where else to go. Now that gaming has become mainstream we have developed more issues that I care to deal with. Make a stand this guy says it all: Ill Doctrine

Also, this has a much more upbeat message, that I think is worth sharing from Penny Arcade: Here


Thanks for putting up with me. Don't feed the Trolls.