Privilege! In action!

Suicide-Squad

In case you were wondering what has the spoiled man-babies up in arms lately, let me tell you. It’s not that the police have been murdering people, or that we aren’t doing anything about global warming, or that the Zika virus is becoming worrisome. Nope. It’s all about their entertainment.

Blizzard is cracking down on cheaters in their multiplayer game, Overwatch (which I haven’t played, although it looks fun). So people were loading up on mods that made the game easier for them, like adding code that auto-aimed their weapons for them. So Blizzard banned them for life from playing multiplayer.

The howls of outrage are amusing. They want to sue! They want to sic Anonymous on them! They paid good money for this game! They are being persecuted for their beliefs!

It reminds me so much of when I’ve caught cheaters on exams, especially the argument that they paid money for this class, so they deserve to pass it. No, you don’t. Bye.

One of their most anticipated movies, Suicide Squad, is getting bad reviews (I also have not seen this movie, but it’s opening in Morris this weekend). So they want a movie review site removed from the internet.

Here’s some news for you: everyone doesn’t have to like the same things you do to the same degree. I thought the new Ghostbusters was OK, the plot was nothing to rave about but the characters were good, and I got hate mail from people howling that we SJWs were unfairly propping up the movie and we should have been honest and hated it, like Milo did (curiously, the people who liked it better than I did are not damning me to eternal darkness).

I was disinclined to want to see Suicide Squad myself by the trailers — it looked like yet another excuse to showcase people in strange costumes demolishing a city with lots of explosions, and I’ve had enough of those already. Instead of complaining about bad reviews and trying to shut down reviewers, how about complaining about bad movies instead, and demanding some complex characters and relatable interactions in addition to the comic book destructive heroics?

You know, there’s nothing wrong with lobbying for entertainment you like. It’s just that these guys consistently lobby for the wrong things, things that would actually make their games and movies worse. I guess they just need their little hugbox where they can get cookies for being cheaters and for reveling in mindless violence.

Women are so bad at computer games…

Not.

But that’s the stereotype, that men are more competitive and better at playing games, so of course women are just naturally squeezed out of the gaming environment. The thing about computer games, though, is that performance is stored in digital data, so researchers can take it apart case by case and assess performance objectively. In a study of 11,000 players, researchers found no gender gap in performance.

Do men advance faster than women in MMOs? Prior research found a perceived gender gap in participation and performance, suggesting men as playing more and better than women. This article challenges this gender gap through a longitudinal performance analysis of men and women in two MMOs in the United States and China, EverQuest II and Chevaliers’ Romance III, respectively. Controlling for extraneous factors such as play time and guild membership, our results showed that women perform at least as well as men do. Perceived gender-based performance disparities seem to result from factors that are confounded with gender (i.e., amount of play), not player gender itself. The stereotype of female players as inferior is not only false, but it is also a potential cause for unequal participation in digital gaming.

However, while men and women are just as good at playing the games, there’s a huge difference in participation: the sample for this study was 18% women, 82% men. That’s something that has to be explained, but at least now we can throw out the old ‘girls suck at games’ excuse. As the authors suggest, it may be that the stereotype itself is self-reinforcing.