No skin thick enough: the daily harassment of women in the game industry
I'm gonna hold Besada to this.
Seriously though, I have nothing against this policy if the way people are speaking is particularly crass.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
There's a lot of shitty stuff about the internet that people just take a shrugging "its the internet man" reaction to. Not to draw too weird of a comparison, but can you imagine if we had to put up with shitty blatantly deceptive advertising everywhere in real life? (in before "hur dur haven't you seen Apple?")
deltatheta
Member
Why draw a distinction? If you post racist stuff on the internet, you're a racist. If you post misogynist stuff to the internet, you're a misogynist. If you call someone a "gay assfucker", you're homophobic. Why should the reason for your racism or misogyny matter? I'm sick of people having such an overly a high threshold for calling hateful stuff for what it is.
Bookmarked it once I am at my home computer. But from the stuff I read so far, there are far too many women talking stuff which is fuel for light minded guys who never converse with the other gender. In the other hand i met women telling me that I am a macho and discriminating them because I am discussing(!!!) with them and won't acknowledge their opinion. So that's a certain problem in this regard getting a neutral position from both genders. Treat everyone equally. Don't feel special as a woman and don't try to be superior as a guy.
Well, I do recall pages of them in Girl-Gaf.
If it just means pictures posted in threads that have nothing to do with that subject, then that would be fine.
I'm gonna hold Besada to this.
Seriously though, I have nothing against this policy if the way people are speaking is particularly crass.
That's the thing. People arguing for "the same policy for hot guy threads" are not seeing the difference between "this guy is soo hot" and "oh fuck lol now I need a new keyboard because I ejaculated all over mine GOOD LAWD I WANT TO STICK IT IN" or any other variation of the garbage we see on this forum on a daily basis. If someone posted something similar to the latter example in a hot guy thread, yes, it would be dealt with similarly.
Oh yes, those are very brazen. Nonetheless, degrading comments such as those should not be tolerated. Thankfully it's being cracked down on.
The Librarian
Banned
Well, I do recall pages of them in Girl-Gaf.
If it just means pictures posted in threads that have nothing to do with that subject, then that would be fine.
Um, you don't see me or any other girl saying "omg I want him in my vag" or anything like that in GirlGAF.
There was that one thread about some male magician that kinda got into that territory "I want to see the dove in his pants"
http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=830974&page=1
It was one the first times I really noticed that done to a man. I can understand that it bothers people, especially when it completely derails the thread, but I also don't think that it's all that harmful as long as it's still done with some restraint. And when it's done to both genders it might actually be progress
DURHUR HAVEN'T YOU SEEN A- oh...
No but I mean, we let it pass because the internet was this lawless, wild west type deal that we, as individual users, felt we had no real control over; a lot of us still don't think we have any power if the net neutrality issues have been any indication.
But seriously, when was the last time someone pointed a finger at something happening on the internet and said, "No"? These lawless sites, Reddit, 4chan, twitter, have so much power but no one really tries to use it for good, or when they do they do it in such a hamfisted way that good intentions end up failing the original purpose of the act (remember when 4chan sent cards to the old man in the hospital and got so many that the nurses couldn't keep up with the mail influx?).
I don't know, maybe that has nothing to do with anything.
Nostremitus
Member
Gotcha, I read it as a defense of the behavior. I apologize.
Exactly.
The Librarian
Banned
As someone of the gender that is the subject to it regularly on NeoGAF, um, yes, it is harmful.
Well, because the underlying motivation is something different and that would be something you would need to consider if you would try to fight this kind of behavior.
Of course, on the first sight or for those people who are hurt by such behavior, it does not make a difference.
Elderly black female widows are the most marginalized group in America. It's honestly heartbreaking what happens to women in those circumstances.
MiniBossBattle
Member
I just don't want this article to make people think that game development is a bad place to work. Its hard, requires a lot of skill/effort & talent and you have to work hard but it also provided me a career and ability to support my family.
I don't remember. Haven't been in there in a while. Maybe not though.
I wasn't really saying they make those kind of comments though, I was just mentioning the girls do post hot guy pics. That's all.
BlastProcessing
Member
To the person who asked what the difference between normal sexual harassment and elitist sexual harassment is, I think this is the Arabian Double Front of Sexual Harassment.
One of many disgusting things about this is that he started the conversation on saturday night, presumably slept on it and then immediately doubled down the next morning.
Without taking this too far afield, I think that divvying people up into normal and asshole buckets is often detrimental, especially when talking about things like misogyny. We like to believe that only bad or evil people do evil things, but that is not really the case. Many psychological experiments, the Millgram experiments being the most famous, have shown that people's actions are often determined more by their environmental situation than by some sort of inherent goodness or badness.
Thinking that only assholes say hurtful things on the internet blocks us from evaluating the actions of ourselves and our friends. We think "I'm not evil, so of course I didn't do anything wrong" or "He is a good guy, he was just having a bad day". We need to do do our level best at evaluating our actions with the understanding that good people often do bad things and focus our attention on changing the things in our environment that can motivate people to act in hateful ways.
Misogyny is incredibly insidious, it shows itself most obviously in disgusting explosions of hate, but exists most of the time hidden in plain sight.
Nostremitus
Member
So, "this girl is soo hot" is ok?
The Librarian
Banned
Posting pictures of attractive people is not the problem here.
Well, I meant with restraint. Talking about getting into vaginas or searching up facebooks crosses some lines, but pointing out that someone's hot?
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
I don't necessarily disagree with your broader point, but apparently the Millgram experiments were an absolute mess of coercive influences on the "guard" figures as well and I don't plan to use them as the basis for anything in the future
I know. I understand the point Cyan made.
I understand the sentiment but lets not pretend this is a dynamic that specifically targets females or a certain racial group.
I have received every possible insult one can imagine, from my early days in the world of Ultima Online to ranked matches in Street Fighter today.
-I hope your family dies of Y disease
-You are worthless, you are XYZ, you deserve to die, the world will be better off without you.
-Endless spam, hateful pictures, constant trolling and what not. Some lunatic harassed me for several day when I played Counter-Strike back in the day in a clan and everyone was using mIRC.
I would wager a lot of people over here have similar experiences. Then again these hateful sentiments are magnified and they probably feel that much worse when the victim is not used to operating in this environment or is part of some group that has to witness institutional bias in our society - outside of internet.
I have received every possible insult one can imagine, from my early days in the world of Ultima Online to ranked matches in Street Fighter today.
-I hope your family dies of Y disease
-You are worthless, you are XYZ, you deserve to die, the world will be better off without you.
-Endless spam, hateful pictures, constant trolling and what not. Some lunatic harassed me for several day when I played Counter-Strike back in the day in a clan and everyone was using mIRC.
I would wager a lot of people over here have similar experiences. Then again these hateful sentiments are magnified and they probably feel that much worse when the victim is not used to operating in this environment or is part of some group that has to witness institutional bias in our society - outside of internet.
The Librarian
Banned
That's not the comments I was talking about, and threads have, in the past, regularly devolve into the "would" or "I'd fuck her" type posts that are so bothersome.
Depending on the context. I certainly don't want to see any more "WOULD" posts in threads about women who killed their family or things like that.
The Librarian
Banned
You're right, but it does affect women more often and more harshly.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Would you say it...triggered a response in you?
How many of those things happened specifically because you were a man?
What the fuck. Didn't know it got that bad.
In don't think the milgram experiment had guards. That was the Stanford experiment.
This isn't a conversation about "harassment only targets women" it is about how inproportional the harassment is at women.
ie: the link earlier to a neogaf thread that cited this study "In 2006, researchers from the University of Maryland set up a bunch of fake online accounts and then dispatched them into chat rooms. Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7."
I'd think so. When you start writing poetry about licking said girl's thighs, THEN maybe you go back to the drawing board.
As someone else pointed out, yes, that grates. It's objectifying and irrelevant to the conversation. It reads to me like "hold up guys, everybody stop talking about what we're discussing for a second - we need to acknowledge the woman in the room and how I totally find her sexually attractive, because that's what's really important."
Even if it's not overt or explicitly annoying in a single incidence, "hot" women are subjected to it over and over again. It absolutely would be grating, anything in repetition would be.
And that ignores the lack of utility of said posts. What purpose do they serve?
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Thats an exaggeration for comedic effect but man, sometimes stuff gets damn close.
Well, I do recall pages of them in Girl-Gaf.
If it just means pictures posted in threads that have nothing to do with that subject, then that would be fine.
This is ignoring the part of Cyan's post that he highlighted as being the most important.
Look, the point of moderation - what we have to keep our eyes on when we're trying to figure out what sorts of rules to adopt with respect to what kind of behavior we ban for - is to make the forum a better place. This requires balancing a lot of competing concerns. People in general like to comment on what they find attractive and point it out when it appears, etc. People can also become really uncomfortable if they're bombarded by talk which doesn't really care that people like them are people.
Even a pretty graphic description of exactly what a straight female or gay male poster would like to do to some hot guy is just not going to be making straight male posters feel like GAF isn't for people like them. They know that people like them make up the vast majority of posters and they know they can count on a lot of people sharing their perspective and even vocally supporting their take on a lot of things where opinions tend to break down along gender lines. Hot guy comments can be gross, and we'd want to deal with them for that reason, but they're hardly oppressive in the way that the non-stop stream of objectification of women can be. There's no equivalence here, given what GAF actually looks like, and it's just silly to insist that gender-swapped comments are basically the same in their effects on other posters, which is obviously what really matters.
Consequence
Member
No one is pretending this. This is a debate of severity and frequency, not incidence.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Krejiooc said:
Its just the general way in which conversations about news involving women warp towards discussions about the woman's viability as a sexual partner. Because again, its never "wow she's beautiful, I bet she's a confident and happy person", its always "wow she's hot, I'd love to fuck her" (regardless of if that's explicitly expressed or not)
Dragonborn
Member
Because there's nothing to do about it. You'll always get hate no matter what. The difference between the internet and real life is that there are consequences in one and not in the other. In a real world conversation, people with stupid or extremist opinions will censor themselves, but once they're behind the mask of anonymity they'll reveal themselves.
It's not acceptable, but rather it's just something people are used to. That of course, doesn't make it right, but outside of heavy moderation on every website, forum, etc, I don't think there's any real way of ever fixing the problem.
There will always be bias, but at least in the real world most people with those biases censor themselves due to repercussions. If a guy in my group starts making misogynist comments, you bet he'll be get chastised and heck, maybe even thrown out of the group. But on the internet, you just don't have that. For example, is there any moderation at all on Twitter?
Gaf is really good about this thanks to heavy, active moderation. Other sites don't have or maybe even don't care to have that kind of policy. Again, this isn't me downplaying the issue, or saying that we should just take it. I'm just giving my view on why the internet in general seems to be so hate filled.
I'm not sure this article is doing that, but there have been quite a few articles on how women are treated in development. I've seen a bunch of guys saying they're in development and have never seen anything like this. Surely their female counterparts would tell them if it happened.
Except, they don't. Because women in development are in the unenviable position of fearing for their jobs if they rock the boat. This is something that comes up over and over again in discussions with women developers, the fear that if they say something, the men will huddle up and punish them.
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/Jennifer...he_Reality_of_Sexism_in_the_Game_Industry.php
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...he-night-twitter-took-on-the-industrys-sexism
http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2012/11/women-video-game-industry-twitter-1reasonwhy
Northeastmonk
Gold Member
The harassing comments should be looked at as a legal matter as well. There's many ways to deliver criticism and to debate topics. I think women are being harassed because they are being serious on subjects we all enjoy. It's coming from an immature side that cannot respect someone whose on the same side of the fence, and who are also trying to make their views heard. If someone was saying "I'll downplay this and that about the industry, but I won't hear any other side", then I think that's debatable because we aren't really having a discussion, instead we're being told that this is A and that's B. That's not the case here. It's about as one sided as violent video game discussions are. A lot of the hate is also very immature and it has not grown up at all. We need to be mature people here. We're degrading the medium if we don't.
I respect sites like Gamasutra, Polygon, and the like because they take the industry out of the degradable forge that it typically sits in.
Texting her own address? I mean, "shut up" and "STFU" are one thing, but seriously? Threatening her personal life? That shouldn't be tolerated. What's worse is how they're being treated and it's also not helping the industry grow whatsoever. It's literally going to scare people away. I think a lot of these hate messages with personal opinions and also their real names attached are downright scum.
I respect sites like Gamasutra, Polygon, and the like because they take the industry out of the degradable forge that it typically sits in.
Texting her own address? I mean, "shut up" and "STFU" are one thing, but seriously? Threatening her personal life? That shouldn't be tolerated. What's worse is how they're being treated and it's also not helping the industry grow whatsoever. It's literally going to scare people away. I think a lot of these hate messages with personal opinions and also their real names attached are downright scum.
The Librarian
Banned
Yup. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone post "would" and me wanting to sarcastically respond, "I don't care to know that you want to have sex with her" only not not do it for fear of being hounded for my "ridiculousness."
Well said.
That is an unbelievable statistic, considering the amount of abuse I've experienced as a hard core male gamer that would be just too fucking much no question about it. Then again I hold some reservation with these studies, because the environment can change drastically depending on the genre, platform, age group and so on.
I do believe people should be forced to register their real names and be held responsible for their actions even if in game they were allowed to use a nick.
I buy games with sexualized women. Because I enjoy good games that also happen to have sexualized women. I'm glad that games with sexualized women are made because it suits my tastes.
I don't condone threats and harassment. I find that to be completely unnecessary to the process of creating the types of games that I enjoy.
Is that as far as you've gotten? "stop buying games made by these horrible people"? How am I to know if the people who created a game with a sexualized (in someone's opinion) woman are actually "horrible people"? How am I to know that the people who made some squeaky clean, absolutely-no-sexualized-women-here kind of game aren't equally horrible people?
Is there a database somewhere on the internet that lists all games and notes the ones that are made by 'horrible people'? If not, can we make one? With detailed profiles of all the people who worked on each game.
Then we can work on a database of all the horrible people who like sexualized characters in games.
tl?:dr? - In short, I don't feel that sexualized characters, (in games, books, movies, etc) are wrong. And I don't think that anyone who makes a game with a sexualized character in it is a 'horrible person'. And I don't think that people who enjoy sexualized characters in any media are automatically 'horrible people'. Obviously.
hipsterpants
Member
Had to stop by to say the new(ish?) policy is awesome! Now back to work.