OF GAMES, REPRESENTATION, AND WOMEN'S CHEEKBONES

Y'know, since we're already floating in the ether discussion-wise, I really liked Sooz's line of thinking a few pages back. Specifically, the fact that you can add diverse characters without needing to specifically acknowledge it, right? Like, the idea that you only include a black character or a gay character or a trans character when you're trying to create some sort of message is silly. I think that's a pitfall a lot of us trip into.

author=SnowOwl
That kind of thing is never going to go away. It shouldn't be encouraged, but learning to have some resistance to it is basically a prerequisite to browsing any open forum. Maybe I've browsed too many guro spamming, shitflinging and hate filled places, but it doesn't even faze me when someone insults something that I would be offended by if someone said it to me in real life.

I'm gonna ignore the hilarious projection you stuffed in at the end and teach a lesson instead.

this is something a lot of people seem confused about, and I kind of understand it; they go 'well, I don't care about this sort of thing, so why should they?' and decide that people are choosing to be offended (or some other infeasible easy answer). this actually ties in with what I was talking about earlier, about people who enjoy 'default' status -- it's easy to assume, when the culture and the dialogue and the marketing all cater to you and your circumstances that your experiences and opinions also apply to the rest of the world at large.

the problem is that they don't. people's circumstances differ, and that sort of thing can change how you view these situations significantly. you can laugh off sexist bullshit because you're a dude, and you can excuse people throwing out transphobic slurs because to you, that's just another small part in the ball of undefined internet nastiness; it doesn't have personal meaning to you, except that it's vaguely intended as an insult.

but being a trans person surrounded by transphobic shit, even if it isn't aimed at you specifically, is far more striking and unpleasant. a core, visceral part of your life and your being, one which has already given you strife, is nothing but a shameful joke to these people. everything about you is Wrong. time and time again, you're indirectly told that you're nothing but a visual gag, a pervert, a tragic story found to deepen the plot.

being ~not offended~ by things isn't some special skill, and it doesn't come from strength of character or moral fiber or whatever the hell else. you're able to ignore and excuse these things because to you, they're not personal. and I think a good way to grow past that is just to understand that people's circumstances and experiences are much broader than you might think, and that an emotional response is not a sign of weakness.

author=slash
Y'know, since we're already floating in the ether discussion-wise, I really liked Sooz's line of thinking a few pages back. Specifically, the fact that you can add diverse characters without needing to specifically acknowledge it, right? Like, the idea that you only include a black character or a gay character or a trans character when you're trying to create some sort of message is silly. I think that's a pitfall a lot of us trip into.

yeah, absolutely! explicitly or otherwise, a common and irritating subject when writing diverse characters is whether they 'need' to be black, or gay, or trans, or whatever. writers who aren't ready to approach their own biases often fall back on the idea that it just 'feels wrong' -- that just a shift in race or sexual orientation would alter a character into something unrecognizable. this often leads to ridiculously homogenous settings -- places that have djinn, for instance, but no middle-eastern people. it's a weird double-standard.

author=Sated
I'm not here to make you a better person.

no, you're here to try and corrupt the concept of discrimination into something that creates a moral imperative for me to stop pointing out harmful behaviour in a marketing-based subculture. it's pedantic, it's predictable, and I've seen it dozens of times before. if your only purpose here is to clutch a dictionary to your chest (useless, by the way, for defining nuanced social concepts) and pretend that I'm being ~gamerphobic~, then I'm gonna have to ask you to leave.

author=SnowOwl
the right of people to express their opinions.

forums and social media are not public places by the standards of free-speech laws. I've been saying this for seven years now; 'free speech' is not the freedom to say whatever you want to anyone you want without consequence. it does not obligate people to listen to you, or guarantee you an audience. ignoring shitty people, or removing them altogether, is not a breach of human rights, and somehow people on the internet still don't understand this thing that I've understood since high school.

bahleted

mawk
forums and social media are not public places by the standards of free-speech laws. I've been saying this for seven years now; 'free speech' is not the freedom to say whatever you want to anyone you want without consequence. it does not obligate people to listen to you, or guarantee you an audience. ignoring shitty people, or removing them altogether, is not a breach of human rights, and somehow people on the internet still don't understand this.

That changes absolutely nothing, and wasn't even part of the point. I'm interested in how you would remove these people though (especially in anonymous places). I'm fairly certain even you have at some point have done something that could make someone call you toxic. How high would the threshold for this "internet police" be? How would you judge what is toxic, when it differs from one place to the other? It's just not feasible in the current way the internet works, and would probably take resources that nobody has. So my point stands.

few people self-identify as an 'SJW' except as a bad joke, and also there hasn't been a decades-old multi-billion dollar industry focused on creating 'SJW' as a buyer identity to sell products by promising not only instant gratification, but also moral and intellectual superiority based on purchasing decisions. visit any gaming con and you'll clearly see what I'm talking about when I mention 'gaming culture'. visit activist groups, and you'll see little of what people attribute to 'SJWs'.

there are problems in feminism and activism at large, certainly -- but we already call those by their names. white feminism speaking over black women, trans-exclusionary feminists attacking trans women, and so on. none of these problems are acknowledged with the useless and senationalist umbrella term of 'SJW', whose only consistent meaning is 'activist who Takes It Too Far' -- 'too far' being, potentially, literally anything the speaker dislikes.

'gamer', though, is characterized by consumerism and a desire for gratification and superiority based on purchases, an observable behaviour in any large-scale event aimed at this self-identified subculture. a common consequence of this, associating personal tastes with personal worth, is a large part of why gamers are uncomfortable with harsh criticism of things they enjoy; to them, that parses as 'you're a bad person for liking this bad thing', when what's being said is more complex than that.

to put it plainly, 'gamers' define themselves by the way they engage with their hobby, while 'SJW' is an externally-imposed label stuffed onto anyone the speaker finds inconvenient. just because two things seem like ideological opposites doesn't mean that they're both equally true.

you see how I'm not accusing anyone of being a 'gamer' as though that would dismiss everything they're saying? that's the difference.

author=Sooz
The latter requires not only patience and sympathy on the part of the person bringing the topic up, but a willingness on the part of the audience to trust that person, which, given the often adversarial setup these kind of mindsets are in, is often about as likely as getting someone to enjoy going to the dentist.

I enjoyed going to the dentist once recently because the dentist was young and beautiful and her stomach growled hungrily during my check-up, which she referred to as it talking to me (which if anyone knows me is one of those pluses).

Just give them a lollipop because children love those things, and frankly, if you're not willing to hear someone out, you're either physically or mentally a child.

author=Sated
People are cunts because they're cunts, not because they happen to enjoy a particular pastime.

I don't mind if people continue pointing out toxic behaviour

Practically in the same breath, so I think it speaks for itself.