International Women's Day

[Khris]

Jack: again. Why are you here? And not some Incel subreddit?

Defending GamerGate in a thread about International Women's Day. It would be funny if it weren't so utterly pathetic.

[Jack]

To compare that to people speaking back against you and some people getting banned from some forums for violating the rules (but still perfectly free to voice their opinions in other forums) is not comparable to a real communist dictatorship.

It's not there yet, but certainly on the spectrum. We already have the protected classes, who no one may speak about unless it's praise. It would be too late to point it out after it becomes illegal.

Not using transgender pronouns could get you fined

You probably think this is great, helping all these strong characters who have no one to defend them, but in reality it's a legal penalty for saying the wrong thing. This was 3 years ago. When they figure out this law didn't help their cause at all, what comes next?

(Go hide in your tent, Khris)

[Ali]

That article makes it clear that accidentally using the wrong pronoun is not going to result in a fine. There's a lot of hysteria around legislation that protects trans people, because bullies like your GamerGate mates love playing the martyr.

Repeatedly and deliberately using the wrong pronoun for someone is bullying. Are the poor bullies being picked on? Boo hoo.

EDIT: Anyway, my point was that the adventure game genre seems to have its share of bigoted dimwits who think they're being victimised by women and minority groups. I'm grateful to Jack for backing me up.

[Scavenger]

Also, using someone's pronouns costs you absolutely nothing. Why would you want to regularly and willingly refer to someone as something other than their proper pronouns? What purpose does that even serve?

[Jack]

There's a lot of hysteria around legislation that protects trans people, because bullies like your GamerGate mates love playing the martyr.

Because it's a legal penalty for not playing into someone's delusions. This is a belief you have, a rather soviet bit of logic (but this is coincidental), which means to you that a man becomes a woman just because he said so. Including any of the dozens of made-up genders, with pronouns including "your majesty". It's just a belief system, and mandating that others have to believe in it too is the lowest form of insecurity.

What if you didn't personally benefit from legislation like this, or if it were about something you didn't believe in? What if you when you passed me in the halls of your building you had to give me the nerd salute and address me by rank, because if you don't help me feel like a real nerd, I could have you fined.

[Kweepa]

You don't have to believe anything, just respect your fellow human beings (and their harmless beliefs) in this society you are a part of. It's not that difficult.

[Monsieur OUXX]

If Jurassic Park were released now, people would say "Oh, they made the hacker a girl? She's a total Mary Sue." If Indiana Jones were made now, people would be yelling, "why did they make the baddies Nazis? Talk about virtue signalling! Keep politics out of entertainment!"

Very well summarized. Go to Youtube, look at the first 10 comments under any video about any pop-culture movie, and there are several comments that are basically along those lines.

[TheFrighter]

In all this what women says? Female developers and female gamers are really concerned about all this?

_

[Khris]

Because it's a legal penalty for not playing into someone's delusions. This is a belief you have, a rather soviet bit of logic (but this is coincidental), which means to you that a man becomes a woman just because he said so. Including any of the dozens of made-up genders, with pronouns including "your majesty". It's just a belief system, and mandating that others have to believe in it too is the lowest form of insecurity.

Shut up

[Blondbraid]

In all this what women says? Female developers and female gamers are really concerned about all this?

Short answer: Yes. There are plenty of women in the industry who've faced death threats and explicit threats of rape and sexual torture for the most petty reasons, just look at Jennifer Helper for one example.

It reminds me of a quote by Margaret Atwood; Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them.

To compare that to people speaking back against you and some people getting banned from some forums for violating the rules (but still perfectly free to voice their opinions in other forums) is not comparable to a real communist dictatorship.

It's not there yet, but certainly on the spectrum. We already have the protected classes, who no one may speak about unless it's praise. It would be too late to point it out after it becomes illegal.

Not using transgender pronouns could get you fined

You probably think this is great, helping all these strong characters who have no one to defend them, but in reality it's a legal penalty for saying the wrong thing. This was 3 years ago. When they figure out this law didn't help their cause at all, what comes next?

(Go hide in your tent, Khris)

When it comes to protecting trans people, it's because they are disproportionally targeted for violence, assault and murder more than any other demographic and in some places it's still legal to kill a transgendered person if you were dating them when you discovered they were trans, the so-called trans-panic defense. As late as the 1970's in Sweden, one of the most progressive countries on the matter, the songwriter Cornelis Vreeswijk was involved in a scandal where he had attacked two transwomen with a kitchen knife and the newspapers played it for laughs, and Cornelis even got to publish a humorous song joking about the whole ordeal and remained popular. Just to get this straight, everybody laughed at him trying to kill two persons with a knife and even cut one of them, and there was a law in place that all trans people in Sweden had to be sterilized that wasn't removed until 2013.

If there is a slippery slope, it leans towards society regressing back a hundred years and not whatever imaginary dystopia you think of.
To me, the entire debate on weather society has gone too far and minorities have too many rights is frighteningly similar to the rhetoric that was seen in the Weimar republic before the nazis took hold. In the 1920's, Berlin was seen as a safe haven for queer and transgender people and there was even an institute for gender studies which housed some of the first known scientific text on transsexualism, but once the nazis took power (and they were able to take power exactly because the moderates and conservatives thought the nazis would respect the democracy once they were in power) all the writings and teachings of the institute were deemed degenerate and all texts burnt at nazi book burnings and the people teaching at the institute forced into exile, and the persecution of the queer, handicapped and political adversaries on the left became a way for the nazis to test the water and warm up the populous to the idea of exterminating large groups of people.

And I see similar worrying trends in right-wing nationalist movements today, in Hungary, Victor Orban has banned gender studies and an entire academic field of study became prohibited by law overnight. If you are so eager to defend the right of American people to misgender transpeople, all in the name of free speech, would you be equally ready to defend the right of the Hungarian students and teachers to exercise their free speech in order to teach and study subjects that the prime minister's party is uncomfortable with?

[Khris]

Don't do it.
Engaging with Jack and his "arguments" means he has "won". Just don't do it.

[WHAM]

Well, I think the Adventure game genre has been largely spared from the brunt of it, but I've seen lots of hateful comments surrounding many other games, and to name just one example the latest Battlefield got tons of hate for being "disrespectful to history" by letting people pick the gender and skin color of their avatar in a game set in WW2, whereas the 2004 game Silent Storm, also set in WW2 and you can pick the skin color and gender of your avatar, doesn't have a single review scolding the game for it.

I decided not to buy BF5 because of this. Allow me to explain the difference between the two games you described as examples and why your comparison of the two of them is nonsense:

BF5 was marketed as "the most immersive and realistic historical Battlefield experience to date" while showing non-realistic characters, events, equipment and situations. Dropping a V-1 rocket onto a french field or showing a british soldier with a samurai sword being just a couple examples, and yes, the female soldier with the robot arm being another.
I wound up playing some more Red Orchestra 2 instead, to get my realistic WW2 shooter fix. If BF5 was marketed more accurately for what it was, a fantasy rendition loosely based on a WW2 setting, I doubt there would have been any issue at all, seeing that the Battlefield series has had a proper sci-fi entry before. Instead the developers doubled down and went on to declare anyone questioning their marketing and game not aligning with one another a "bigot" or "uneducated" and stating that such people should "go read a book". Fine ways to alienate your core audience, and from what I've seen the sales were impacted as one can expect.

Silent Storm was a silly WW2 tactics game with nazi mecha suits and didn't pretend to be anything else.

This reminds me: I should really replay Silent Storm. It was good!

[Ali]

Just to place your non-bigoted opinion in context, WHAM, here is you saying there isn't a moral difference between the Nazis and the allies in WW2:

If the Germans had won "The War" we would be having this exact same conversation, except for the fact that we would replace all swastikas with "stars-and-stripes" or "hammers-and-sicles", and instead of talking about how nazi's were evil, we would be talking about how the communists and capitalists were evil.

Names change, ideas do not.

Here's you saying the Nazis did some good things:

I realize they did bad things, AND I realize they did good things.
Hey, isn't that true for ALL ruling powers in the world?

This Nazi discussion is actually quite pointless, so I will drop it for my part now.
The major difference is that I live in a country that was allied to the Nazis during The War and most of you guys lived, to my understanding, in countries who fought the Nazis.

Here's you saying that criminals aren't really human:

Let me remind you, once again, that criminals are the same species as you and me.

We agree to disagree on this point.

Here's you calling for a "final solution" to criminal elements in our society:

However, the solution (if one exists) is not to just shoot them all and say "problem solved". Just like you wouldnt cut your head off to cure a tooth ache.

What you describe is nuking the city where a criminal is caught, and even I would call that an overblown reaction.
What happens in real life is that the dentist identifies the tooth, realizes it is rotten and pulls it, to relieve the pain and keep any possible infections from spreading...

Sounds like my final solution, doesn't it?

(The criminals in question being the poor, predominantly black London rioters.)

So when I say far-right nutjobs are the ones pushing this regressive anti-women, anti-minority agenda, you chipping in doesn't convince me I'm wrong.

[Khris]

"I didn't buy a game because it wasn't exactly like the marketing promised"

[Ali]

Jesus Christ, I forgot about this. Here's WHAM complaining that the Holocaust is "seen in a purely negative light".

On one hand there is never a good reason to start a war.
On the other hand there always is a good reason to start a war (For the Nazis it was mostly Lebensraum and international political power)

How I see it, the main reason for the Nazi regime's anti-Jew plans was twofold: Jews were a minority and thus easy to turn into scapegoats to unite the majority of the German people. In addition, in many areas it was the Jew populace that held great sums of money in gold, stocks and investments, and "relieving" these people of their riches was an easy way for the Nazis to fund their plans.

When you dig deep enough, there is always a reason for things like this. Whether or not it's a good or a bad thing depends on who you ask and how well the offender does his job.

If the Nazis had won the war, I highly doubt we would be here, pondering on "the poor Jews" and their misery. However, since the war went the way it did, the event we have labelled "the Holocaust" is seen in a purely negative light. No, I am not saying the Holocaus did not happen, nor that it wasn't a terrible thing to do, but what I am trying to do is have historical perspective and neutrality on the subject, instead of jumping on the global "oh the poor Jews" -bandwagon.

You're a fucking fascist.

[WHAM]

"I didn't buy a game because it wasn't exactly like the marketing promised"

Clarification: I didn't buy a game because it wasn't what I hoped it would be, despite the game having been marketed as something I would have wanted.

So when I say far-right nutjobs are the ones pushing this regressive anti-women, anti-minority agenda, you chipping in doesn't convince me I'm wrong.

You characterization of the BF5 issue was incorrect, so I corrected it so that people who were not perhaps as aware of the background could be made aware.
I have no issue with games that have minority or female characters, as long as the characters make sense for the setting and premise of the game.

As for the rest of my quoted statements (from 2011? Neat! I didn't realise I had a fan!), I stand by every single one and am happy to discuss or debate them elsewhere.

[Ali]

Yes I remember that thread, because I tend to make a note of WHO IS ACTUALLY A NAZI SYMPATHISER.

I don't know what BF5 is. It wasn't me who brought it up.

[Danvzare]

Holy crap, did things go off topic!
I mean, Gamergate was mentioned!
That thing's so old, that I made a comic about it two years ago, and it was old news even then!

Here's a shameless plug by the way:


Now to get back on topic. 

The reason why I feel as though people are annoyed with things like International Women's Day, and the Battlefield fiasco, and so on, and so on. Isn't because of women. But because of the political correctness that's constantly being shoehorned in. People are wanting to rebel, because of how annoying it is. I mean, there's nothing inherently wrong with women in BF5 when you consider other similar games, which has the same thing, and which didn't cause any controversy. It was the way it was presented that was the problem, and the way they reacted to people disliking it.
Everything with women in it is being weaponized. I think a good example is the recent Wonder Woman film that came out a few years ago. I know someone who was actually going to go out of her way to NOT see it, because she thought it was just going to push an agenda, just because of how the news made it out to be. It's a damn good movie as well!

It's a real shame how this overcompensation for better portrayals of women in media, has led to such a hostile pushback.
Of course you've also got the sexist pigs. Unfortunately on both sides. But loudmouths like them are present everywhere. And can usually be easily ignored. It's when you lump everyone who disagrees with you into that group that there's a problem.

As for how women are doing in the video game business these days.
As far as I can tell. Roughly the same as before. Make of that what you will. 

[WHAM]

Yes I remember that thread, because I tend to make a note of WHO IS ACTUALLY A NAZI SYMPATHISER.

I take offense at being called a Nazi sympathiser as it is not a realistic or accurate depiction of my character. Same goes for the term "fascist", which you seem to be using incorrectly as well.
Don't worry, friend. I forgive your ignorance. Just please stop saying such nonsense so that we can remain civil.

[Khris]

WHAM: I fully agree that you are a fascist and a nazi sympathizer.

Danvzare: It is exactly that ignorant, simplistic, broad-brush and nuance-free thinking that pushes young frustrated men into the arms of the alt-right.