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No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

polygon.com

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Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#341

Post by georgiapeach »

legulere wrote: post #254
cheez wrote: post #17

> I lead a development studio that makes games. Sometimes, I write about issues in the games industry that relate to the equality of women. My reward is that I regularly have men threatening to rape and commit acts of violence against me. My suspicion is that she is not threatened because she leads a development studio, but because she is a writer. She's not asking for it, but she is making herself a public figure an…

Obviously you get more threads if you're a writer or even a journalist. Journalists get pretty extreme hate mail all the time. But that's not what this article is about. It's about how it is different from what men get and about how it is more than what men get. You won't get the same reaction from writing a blog post as a man as what's described in this article.

> It's about how it is different from what men get and about how it is more than what men get.

It's about that, but it doesn't prove that. Not at all. Not one bit.

Four anecdotes aren't proof of anything.

Come back with stats.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#342

Post by georgiapeach »

enraged_camel wrote: post #155
cheez wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the area of competitive sports, it is pretty common to receive death threats for athletes who do not perform well. I'm not saying it's right. It's not. I'm saying that the reader needs to tease apart the two.

>>In the area of competitive sports, it is pretty common to receive death threats for athletes who do not perform well. You are making this comparison because you haven't fully thought things through. In your mind, death is worse than rape, therefore receiving death threats is worse than receiving rape threats. But it's not so simple. Rape threats are significantly worse than death threats, for a similar reason that…

> Rape threats are significantly worse than death threats,

That is such unadulterated bullshit.

Would you rather be raped or killed? Quick! Choose one!

Exactly.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#343

Post by kaonashi »

georgiapeach wrote: post #339
kaonashi wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I know how you like to spend your free time. Maybe you should get a life instead of harassing women.

How does that answer the objection I raised? It doesn't. It's pure ad hominem. And for that, you lose by default. Thanks for your time, anyway.

Objection? I think you mean denial.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#344

Post by ahris »

tomp wrote: post #317
ahris wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the target demographic for games doesn't just have to be males. There was a great piece by Tracy Lien detailing the history of video games and how marketing is the direct cause of the stereotype that video games are for males. Video games don't inherently appeal to a specific gender. Indie games, in general, are a great example of how games can have gender inclusive appeal. Anyways, here is her article. I really…

Obviously. E.g. The Sims was probably targeted more at girls/women than at boys/men. But that is irrelevant, different games are targeted at different sectors of the market, and some are targeted specifically at men (violent games come to mind). I would think that the marketing of video games is more connected to the fact that in the beginning, most games were developed by males (simply because most programmers/geeks…

My point is that games don't have to target a specific gender. Not only does that encourage gender stereotyping, but it limits the games available for either gender. It might be a viable market practice, but it should be criticized for its negative social effect.

Just fyi, but Sims wasn't targeted towards a specific gender. Its marketing was focused on young adults and casual gamers. The Sims is slightly more popular with females, but that doesn't mean it was specifically intended for a certain gender.

In addition, you don't need to speculate on the marketing of video games. The article I linked gives a very thorough walkthrough of its history. The very first games were predominately designed by men, but the content wasn't targeted towards males. For example, Pong, Breakout and Centipede are relatively gender neutral. The extreme marketing bias was introduced after the video game industry crashed in 1983. Companies had to be more careful of the products they created and Nintendo took the lead on the initiative to specifically target males.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#345

Post by Fomite »

scotty79 wrote: post #336
Fomite wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher level management, yes, they are. But it's fairly common to track women into middle management roles because they're "good with people" - and then write them off as not being engineers. There have been posts about that on HN not all that infrequently. And hell, even if you don't want to consider that, it's not a blatant twisting of his words. She's the CEO of Yahoo . That's not a "waste of a good brain".

> She's the CEO of Yahoo. That's not a "waste of a good brain". How can you be sure? What a CEO of Yahoo can do? Hire some people, fire some people? Pick some project to develop and some to abandon? You could say that this has some value but you can't predict which project will turn out worthwhile. "Predictions are hard especially about the future." What's sure that there is one smart person less actually working on…

This logic is also applicable to engineers. Everything an engineer could potentially do has value, but you can't predict which project will turn out to be worthwhile. And without someone smart managing them, I'd assert there's a higher probability of that, which wastes everyone's potential.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#346

Post by georgiapeach »

rafaelCosman wrote: post #107

"Footnote: Two of the names of women that agreed to interviews for this article were changed at their request." It's telling (about the state of the industry) that two of these women felt uncomfortable sharing their names even while interviewing for an article about this very topic.

Anyone should feel uncomfortable making up unsubstantiated bullshit to push a toxic, hateful, misandric agenda.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#347

Post by georgiapeach »

chaostheory wrote: post #300
chillingeffect wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and plastic doesn't conduct electricity well, so why keep trying to force electricity through it? The problem as stated was "How can I make everyone in my game studio behave the way I want?" That is like sending electricity through plastic. The real problem is: "How can I earn a living to feed my family doing what I love to do in a safe environment?" My answer is the answer to the real problem. If you think you…

A conductor whose properties don't change is a bad analogy to the human psych, which can change for better or worse depending on the environment. > The problem as stated was "How can I make everyone in my game studio behave the way I want?" That is like sending electricity through plastic. No it isn't. You can influence it or change it through culture and rules. We're not static machines.

Great. If you truly believe that human thought and behavior can be changed, go ahead and change your own.

Stop getting offended by trivial things.

You're the problem, so stop being a problem.

Re: No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

#350

Post by georgiapeach »

cushychicken wrote: post #144
imgabe wrote: post #100

> We live in a society that’s sexist in ways it doesn’t understand. One of the consequences is that men are extremely sensitive to being criticized by women. I think it threatens them in a very primal way, and male privilege makes them feel free to lash out. I don't mean to "Not all men" this, but I wish we would stop treating behavior like this as a normal part of the male psyche. It's not. It's seriously disturbed.…

>I hate to "Not all men" this, but I wish we would stop treating behavior like this as a normal part of the male psyche. It's not. It's seriously disturbed. I think that realization is the very opposite of the "Not all men" mindset. Saying "Not all men are like that" is a red herring - it's a way of distracting yourself from the fact that there are people out there who treat women like dirt by saying you don't do tha…

Yo, dude, it's not cool to use the fringe behavior of a few individuals as leverage to baselessly and hatefully defame and entire gender.

You need to cut that shit out, and you need to cut it out right fucking now.

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