Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Invisible Benefits of Gaming while Male

15 comments:

  1. I'm always happy to see this kinda stuff here as well. Working with and being part of the Ags community has been consistently one of the best online experiences I've had.

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  2. A far larger benefit of being male is apparently the ability to stand up for yourself in the least. Who's such a damsel in distress that they need a guy in a pink shirt to complain for them? Yah, guess why people aren't taking you seriously.

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    1. How exactly is someone siting the examples of benefits they receive complaining for someone else?

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    2. Exactly: A complaint is an appeal to another party with the intent of remedying a grievance. These guys were not citing sexist trivia to brag about it.

      A better question is why -ists think that pretending not to understand the definition of a common word like complaint would make their adopted arguments seem more credible.

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    3. Pstonie, I'm not censoring your comments but please can you stick to the topic. Do you have any evidence against any of the claims in the video rather than ad hominem attacks or complaints about who is presenting it?

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    4. I'm not disputing that women get harassed in online games. Men get harassed too. All the ones who take it lying down, to be exact. It's a competitive environment, usually set in a violent context, filled mostly with men. There's bound to be verbal challenge. Of course about 10% of all people are total idiots, and will take it too far. On top of this, women are the proverbial new kids in gaming. I get it.

      What I want to know is whether women really expect the world of games to bow down to them, just because they're women. Should we indeed treat them as generally less capable than ourselves, as the video implies? I submit that treating all women as damsels in distress, or the disabled, shows them less respect than any person deserves.

      One can either receive preferential treatment, or be respected as an equal, not both.

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    5. In the same way that police violence against black people is not somehow suddenly OK because white people also get abused by the police, women being abused shouldn't just have to deal with the abuse just because guys get it too. When you say "There's bound to be verbal challenge" you are asserting the the males who dominate the gaming space can't help but be abusive. Where's your respect now? There's also a qualitative difference between "I'm going to kill Elflady Ghxzyk" in a game and looking up their IRL address and telling them you're going to come round and rape them. Wanted not to be abused is not being a damsel in distress. Eric Garner was not a damsel in distress yet he wanted to not be choked. And can you quote which bit of the video implies women are less capable, please?

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    6. As for your final statement, math shows you are wrong: when there has been historical discrimination, positive discrimination is REQUIRED to re-establish balance, as long as any slight bias remains: http://ncase.me/polygons/

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    7. Please don't confuse murder with online trolling. The abuse we are discussing here is verbal abuse, and by far most of it is harmless. It's just the media that makes a circus of the utterly extreme cases. The internet is not a nursery, and it shouldn't be turned into one because someone who wants to play CoD with the boys can't handle being called a chuwero.

      As you point out, there are issues in the world which are not first world problems such as many of the meta-issues this video is about. The unmasking of the US police state is a good example, another is the systematic murder in palestine. I don't want to get off topic, but I want to establish a context relating to activism, because while these events are occurring, what gets the most airtime in the mass media, as concerns activism, is women and rhino conservation. This should be a clue as to where our attention should be focused. Do they also have 16 days of activism over there now? In addition to women's month? And women's week? The people who push this garbage are the real terrorists.

      The entire video implies that women are less capable. The women affected by this could not make themselves heard? They needed the guy who looks like Beverly Archer and his pink shirt to stand up for them? I suspect that they couldn't get 25 women together to complain about this list of mostly petty nonsense. I suspect that most women who want to play CoD (or whatever the kids are into these days) also have the ability to tell their challenger to go fellate themselves.

      Would affirmative action be a good example of this "positive bias" you speak of? You know, where white men are discriminated against based simply on their race and gender. Two wrongs don't make a right.

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    8. Did you even watch, or just repost this pink shirt thing from somewhere? He's on it for about 3 seconds. In any case, what has the colour of a guy's shirt or who he looks like got to do with ANYTHING? Your predjudice is showing. You still have not given a concrete example of how a bunch of guys saying advantages they have is in any way implying anything about the capabilities of women. If I say "Liberia needs help with Ebola" that by no way at all implies that I think Liberians are incapable.

      I suggest you actually watch the video, too, as your "points" about people being able to stand up for themselves are actually somewhat addressed.

      You're pretty much proof of the first thing the video says that male gamers sometimes dismiss the issues women face as unimportant, so thanks for proving it right.

      Issues it mentions like sexual harassment and assault are hardly "first world problems". Please think before you reply.

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  3. Other films in this series:

    The invisible benefits of gaming while 12
    The invisible benefits of dating while female
    The invisible benefits of being a dinosaur
    The invisible benefits of being invisible
    The invisible benefits of being visible

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    1. So, you don't have any response other than to try ridiculing it?

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    2. Only the one that was deleted. Too logical? Facts are dangerous to some, I know.

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    3. None of your comments have been deleted.

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    4. My apologies. Must've been a javascript error with blogger or something.

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