FrozNlite Wrote:Yet another great video, with the last few minutes especially doing a great job at bringing everything together and explaining why it's such a problem. You're not ignorant, you're just more intelligent and conscientious than most gamers. It's important to remember, when discussing topics like these, that the average person representing the majority is the one affected by such narratives to the effects described. For example, nearly every person playing a game with rampant gun violence will not pick up an assault rifle and shoot up a crowd, but only a very small percentage remains completely pacifistic. In other words, it's the heightening of aggressive feelings/thoughts/moods during and immediately after the playing of such games that afflicts the vast majority of gamers - those to whom Anita is speaking. The success of these games is rooted in their ability to trigger an emotional response in their players, and though not every person will up and commit acts of gun violence or violence/abuse against women, the games' incessant repetitions of the same dehumanizing actions against women alters the psychology of audiences to view the gender with less regard. Which Anita said beautifully from 20:37 - 21:30, summarizing the point with: "So when developers exploit sensationalized images of brutalized, mutilated, and victimized women over and over and over again, it tends to reinforce the dominant gender paradigm which casts men as aggressive and commanding, and frames women as subordinate and dependent." Therefore, sure, you may have guys who "appreciate women more," but are they appreciating them more as complex, dynamic human beings, or symbols/figures of sexual love and possession ("she's MY girl!")? And even if the former is the case, are these men truly appreciate of the gender as a whole? Or do they continue to perpetuate the same institutional sexism they claim to denounce through the usage of women as the punchline for cheap jokes and other "seemingly harmless" perspectives of comedy and discourse?
Dan: "Therefore, sure, you may have guys who 'appreciate women more,' but are they appreciating them more as complex, dynamic human beings, or symbols/figures of sexual love and possession (she's MY girl!')? And even if the former is the case, are these men truly appreciate of the gender as a whole? Or do they continue to perpetuate the same institutional sexism they claim to denounce through the usage of women as the punchline for cheap jokes and other 'seemingly harmless' perspectives of comedy and discourse?"
Response: Your conclusion is that women shouldn't be the punchline of cheap jokes, but how do you feel about expensive ones? Nor should they be the target of harmful comedy or discourse, but what about safety padded ones? If women are complex, dynamic human beings then why does your post conclude with the sentiment that truly 'respecting' them is basically treating them like porcelain or fine glass. If women were truly the complicated and pro-fitness human beings that you make them out to be, then why can't they handle a little slander when they've likely been exposed to racial criticism if they are niggers, papayas, or chinks. I can't even take this line seriously when you ask if men can, 'truly appreciate of the gender as a whole.' It is absurd to even bring a question that seems to imply that men fail to appreciate an entirety of a gender, when such a concept is purely theoretically and not at all realistic. Shame on us, the united male geist of the planet Earth for failing to properly respect that which is of the female of this planet. You can't truly appreciate something that doesn't exist. Nor can you try to hold double standards for something when you demand equality on all fronts.
Dan: "... the average person representing the majority is the one affected by such narratives to the effects described. For example, nearly every person playing a game with rampant gun violence will not pick up an assault rifle and shoot up a crowd, but only a very small percentage remains completely pacifistic. In other words, it's the heightening of aggressive feelings/thoughts/moods during and immediately after the playing of such games that afflicts the vast majority of gamers - those to whom Anita is speaking. The success of these games is rooted in their ability to trigger an emotional response in their players, and though not every person will up and commit acts of gun violence or violence/abuse against women, the games' incessant repetitions of the same dehumanizing actions against women alters the psychology of audiences to view the gender with less regard.
Response: Am I the only person that started reading this from the middle of the first sentence, got to the end, tried to re-read and give Dan the benefit of the doubt and then said, 'That still doesn't make sense no matter how many times I interpret that f'ing quote.' If the average person, who being the 'average' person that he is tends to be an ideal person to presume to be the 'majority' (I actually think someone completely average is quite rare) is influenced by video games (how many people can consent to conscientiously being subconsciously influenced by video games?), then why is it that Dan insists that a consequence of a 'majority' of 'average' persons playing a violent game only results in a 'very small percentage' being subconsciously influenced to remain pacifistic? SOMEONE HASN'T GOTTEN ALL THEIR POINTS STRAIGHTENED OUT YET. Someone's inner Doctor Phil is giving them Doctor Jekyll Consistency Disorder (DJCD).
Digressing from the contradiction, let's look at this conclusion, "the games' incessant repetitions of the same dehumanizing actions against women alters the psychology of audiences to view the gender with less regard." I don't know man. Do you know why games involve crazy things that you look at and say, 'Wow that s*** is messed up.' Maybe it's because... no matter how many times we see something wrong, we still recognize that it's wrong and still have an emotional reaction to it being wrong. Maybe the vast majority of us that actually exist realize that the abuse presented in a game, is being presented in a game and are cognizant that reality and fantasy aren't of the same realm. Maybe if it weren't for gender biased video games, someone would have called the cops when Katy Genovese was murdered instead of calling Nintendo Hot Line (come on guys you don't need me to explain this one). The only merit that this point holds is that we're subconsciously or passively influenced by the gender bias in video games and we somehow allow this subconscious chauvinism to materialize in our real lives. Video game Freud Disease isn't the real threat that produces chauvinism and female discrimination. And simplifying that the actualization of such biases produce an analogous attitude in the minds of children in some 'complex, subtle, metamorphical, fantasmical, imaginerical, complexical, neurosciencial, oh I guess I'm bull****ing and saying that there is no hard core scientific double-blind study for what I'm saying cause I have an MA and am now taking kick starter money to pay off tuition-ical' manner is nothing but paradoxical.
Point: What Anita does is 'cool' in the sense that you watch your little cousin or nephew cover himself in paint and then roll himself unto a white backboard canvas and then proudly call it art. In a similar manner, it is 'neat' that Anita canvases various popular video games with 'shock factors.' However her mistake is that she actually believes that the A-matter is actually in the games themselves. It doesn't take a scientist or even someone with an MA to figure out that games aren't the problem. They never were or never are. Look at our society well before video games and we see how ignorance of equality led to a legitimate mistreatment of other people and races. Chauvinist attitudes aren't started because of subliminal video game programming. Did Ted Bundy have the balls to do what he did after playing repeated levels of PONG? Do you think OJ cut up his own ex-wife & her friend and then had the gal to publish a book entitled, 'If I Did It' because he was a hardcore gamer who made a run through 'Anita's featured video game listing' during off-season. Let's be real here. And by real, let's not b.s. ourselves into taking a journey through a youtube playthrough of shocking video game moments of female abuse to be equivalent to be treated as some social documentary of the human race. To do so would be a disgrace to not only the women the video supposedly advocates for (eye roll every ten seconds of video), but to the common sense we all possess.