I'm genuinely curious as to whether you've read anything by Karpyshyn.
You must have never read anything by Drew Karpyshyn.
Damn, that was good.
These people squat for a "living." It wouldn't surprise me, considering the shady implications of Zuccotti Park.
I love puns!
In my experience Kotaku has the best commenters. People here can express thoughts coherently, but their thoughts aren't pretentiously stupid like the ones found on Bogost's website or Brainy Gamer.
Kotaku has the best people on the internet. Except its staff.
Okay, it's at the point where Kotaku's staff goes searching the dark corners of the internet for sexist problems to complain about that I quit.
Joystiq does a pretty good job, you know. It and other less saliently "progressive" sites have allowed me to curb my Kotaku viewing drastically. Probably by 80% or more. I'd recommend people check out other places and see for themselves. They have the news without the scrawlings of knuckle-draggers insultingly presented as "food for thought." You don't have to digest this stuff to know it's crap.
It's difficult to explain to people who were raised pragmatist, as most Americans are, how everything is connected, but women aren't just "men with vaginas." I'm not even talking about other biological differences, but the psychological differences that develop naturally therefrom, and make women unfit to dispense violence, dramatic or otherwise.
That's the key. Until you understand that, my argument is unbelievable.
1. I disagree with neither point.
2. I talked about marketing because his anger makes clear that he doesn't think a mistake is being made, but a deliberate injustice.
3. As for XBL, I think the insults to women are mostly the result of A), the age of the users, 2) their anonymity, and 3) the fact that women are rare. It is not their femininity, but their rarity that makes them targets. Do you believe that women would be harassed as they are now if they weren't so rare? I don't.
4. I was exaggerating. I don't hate him unless I concretize all the harm he's doing, which I don't because I barely think about him. He did, however, illegitimately bring up the specter of government censorship to cow his opponents into submission in "Part 1" of this article, so I'd suggest you read that. I told him in the comments on his site that this was a horrible thing to do, and he called me an asshole (I think) and told me to leave.
"He hasn't made life any worse for it."
5. Yes he has. By selecting a problem that doesn't exist, or, specifically, calling something that exists a problem when it isn't, he is encouraging action to be taken that will be harmful and make games less enjoyable. I don't want my Batman villains to avoid being sexist because video game developers are afraid of being labeled the same by nihilists like O'Malley.
First, what's a "woman's perspective"? There is such a thing, but it's of marginal value, and certainly not so needed that it would stop honest women from enjoying, say, Uncharted, just as men don't mind playing Metroid.
Next, there's an obvious and natural and legitimate bias in the way big games are presented. Blockbusters are more often than not violent. There is no reason to expect that a woman would, or should, be featured as the protagonist of Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto.
Here's why games inherently feature more males than women, over and above the fact that as a product of history men are represented in greater numbers in the majority of fields:
The essence of games is interactivity -> The best way to dramatize the results of interactivity is through violence -> most popular genres of games are violent -> women are not featured as prominently in video games, because women are physically inferior and therefore generally not fit for or associated with violence.
I disagree that the concept is valid as O'Malley uses it. This is his thesis: "...the main thrust of the article – guys, you have advantages that lead you to act a certain way that is off-putting to women."
But notice how he mixes it with all manner of slander and labels it "sexism." Is it "sexism," then, that the rules of football give males advantages such that they act in ways that are off-putting to women? Could we remedy this by requiring guys not play as hard so they wouldn't hurt women?
The difference is only that in football there is a physical, necessary difference, whereas in video games there is no inherent reason why women shouldn't want to join in. That said, they haven't in the numbers men have (I disagree with every statistic I've seen, or at least the way they've been presented), and as such it is preeminently fair that video games be geared toward their primary audience: men. If people want to say that a bigger audience could be attracted if women were catered to, fine, but that's a marketing decision and if that's all there were to it, we wouldn't see the kind of outrage he's expressing.
Harris O'Malley is trying to convince us that marketing and all other kinds of decisions are made based on an irrational hatred for women, but the only thing he's convinced me of is that I have a rational hatred for Harris O'Malley.
I read this guy's first article. I read snatches of this one. I understand what he's saying and why he's wrong. I have read countless articles, many on Kotaku, about gender issues in video games. None are convincing, and for obvious reasons that can't be concealed (at least to me) by claims of sexism.
I've had enough of this argument from intimidation. If he wants to say things that are untrue, he has every right, but I am damn sure not going to take him seriously, and I exhort everyone else to mock or ignore him as well.
I can't actually tell if you're agreeing with me, but I'd like to see how you'd rephrase my paragraph. It seemed a little unnecessarily complicated to me, but I didn't spend much time thinking of a way to fix it.
Oh wow, this guy gives dating advice. This is why I like when people are outspoken.; it makes clear whether they are mentally handicapped so you can know to be on the lookout for signs of retardation in their work.
I will not read another article about male privilege in video games. The 3 "D"s amount to "listen to me no matter how worthless and insulting my arguments because you're a bigoooooooooooot!"
I won't, and I hope others here will join me in guiltlessly playing lots of video games with muscular, ripped men and sexy, busty women.
Oh. Could be. That gels with how I've heard it used, but I'm not sure.
I'm taking AAA to mean cream of the crop. What do you take it to mean?
GOTY awards are useless because the standard makes no sense and is impossible to justify. There's no way to say objectively whether any of a handful of AAA games are better than the others, especially when they're of different genres.
That said, L.A. Noire was not a AAA game. I can't say what the best game of the year was, but I know L.A. Noire wasn't.
Not taken from me at gunpoint. I'd pay what was worth it to me if they were voluntary.
Is cold coffee a thing?
Drop the pretense. What if I say no? You're going to attempt to get the government to steal my money to support you anyway. Why don't you stop pretending that you're offering us a trade, and start acknowledging that you're just informing us of what you've already decided to do with our money?
I don't want to spend my money on preserving video games. If you steal my money to do it, so be it, but don't you dare insult me by requesting I help you pretend this isn't thuggery.
