This week, Kevin Butler gets in trouble for... playing himself, PETA makes yet another game parody, this time a Pokemon one, an update on the League of Legends world championships and its controversies, Mass Effect and Gears of Wars movies apparently still in the works, and some updates and discussion about Anita Sarkeesian making the rounds in the gaming industry... whether we like it or not.
The hosts this week:
Eji (Steam name: Krentist the Dentist), Colin (XBL: kojimyuu | Steam name: scoot_stl), David (PS3: Badgerfone)
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Stuff we mentioned:
2-Part video on Anita Sarkeesian
Part One Part Two
Destructoid article about Sarkeesian's incorrectness on female characters
Doom guy wakes up his kid
Wing Commander dev making a new space sim game
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I am so happy I found this. My friends and I were digging around on DeviantArt last night, and we discovered your art as well as your podcast.
ReplyDeleteSo, I figured that any gaming podcast was going to have a Sarkeesian episode, and I made a b-line for it. And I have to say that I agree with a lot of what you say.
Anita Sarkeesian's analysis is incomprehensible, and the only one who understands it is Anita Sarkeesian. The irony of her series is that she clearly pulled the vast majority of her "research" from TV Tropes and failed to note that TV Tropes itself is a social experiment that reveals how futile it is for even the best content creator to avoid tropes. Almost anything you write is derivative of some common experience and will therefore be subject to being called a trope. I find it ridiculous that people even spend their time researching tropes for any reason other than personal amusement. For Anita to not even be aware of this is akin to not seeing the forest for the trees.
Unfortunately, it's far too simple to even attribute Anita's misinformation to naiveté alone. She references the "Women In Refrigerators" trope but fails to mention that the so many counter-examples were found of the trope applying to males that the page was renamed to "Stuffed Into The Fridge". Anita no doubt saw this but chose to go with the archaic version anyway.
And I mean no disrespect to Gail Simone, the originator of the trope, but being a talented and respected figure in the comic industry does not make one immune to being wrong.
But that's not to say that the fridge trope doesn't still have merit. After all, it's still a male-centric trope with very few examples of tragedy from a female's perspective. But this revised perspective doesn't fit into Anita's stilted view of misogyny in gaming, so she doesn't even consider it.
And that brings me to my biggest problem with Anita is that she trumps up charges of misogyny when it's not even there most of the time. A lot of the examples she brings up can be attributed to certain cultural biases and assumptions of gender that have no malice to them whatsoever. And some content creators aren't even aware of them until you point it out to them and are perfectly willing to be more conscious of their portrayal of female characters if these things are addressed in a level-headed manner.
Contrasting Sarkeesian to Simone, Simone at least takes a more neutral stance on her criticisms of the industry, and she takes the time to respond to her critics. She invites discussion and isn't alienating anyone. Sarkeesian, on the other hand, builds up an impenetrable wall so that she never has to deal with criticism, and the community that rallies around her is nothing short of hostile.
Sarkeesian doesn't care about any of this. It's perfectly obvious to me that she has no academic cred whatsoever and did this purely to advance her status and make her money.