Brianna Wu faces a lot of scorn and abuse right now from Gamergate. And also this.
Gamergate, realising Brianna Wu makes games, now claiming she's not a "REAL" dev. pic.twitter.com/bD6KWimnZ4
— Tauriq Moosa (@tauriqmoosa) November 3, 2014
Wu has faced and is facing harassment, was chased out her home and continues to fight against abuse – despite good reasons not to. So while facing a horde of misogynists and other horrible people, now is certainly a good time to take your big boy pants to her work! Totally!
@tauriqmoosa I don't care about her personal life, but professionally, she is making us look bad.
— Alexander (@Bane_Alex_Uk) November 3, 2014
Aside from the fact that saying a person who develops isn’t a “real” developer – which No True Scotsman cuts across like a train – it’s just… pointless.
It’s just unnecessary.
I have numerous problems with Sarkeesian’s work, not least her views on sex work. But the world isn’t coming to an end because my opinions haven’t been voiced. I don’t see why it’s necessary right now to do so. I also have other concerns.
But mainly: Sarkeesian, Wu, etc., are facing a mob of hostility from the internet and adding to that – no matter how well intentioned – is a jerk move.
Instead of using my limited time and resources to target Wu or Sarkeesian, I use it against the mob hating them.
And I do this for people who make racist Tweets about brown people like me and non-white people who live in Africa (like me).
If I can focus my criticism and use my finite time and finite energy to respond to an online mob attacking racists, I’d think gamers could do something similar for game devs and critics they don’t like. Oh, so you think Brianna Wu is a crap or fake game dev: yes, now is the perfect time to Tweet about that and make that your response (consistently in his interaction with me). And way to dismiss concerns of her safety as that being her “personal life”.
Sorry but I defended people who might hate me for my skin colour. What is so important about vidya games that it needs brave defenders targeting harmless women who everyone knows is being harassed and targeted? You have the freedom to criticise them, just as I have the freedom to tell you that’s pretty vile.
I don’t know but it seems to me more moral – ITS ABOUT ETHICS, AFTER ALL! – to use your finite energy where it’s most needed, instead of being another person trying to score points against a harmless woman on the internet.
I’m concerned that video game companies’ stock fluctuates based on metacritic review scores, which is going to tend to push them toward producing flashier games that have less depth and no replay value. I’m concerned that when a game that’s decent comes in under another game that gets slightly better reviews, the stock market punishment that ensues can be a 10%-20% drop in the stock price, which will affect the company’s ability to produce good games in the future and will encourage a Michael Bay-esque “swing for the fences” mentality. If anyone reading this is a Destiny player, you’ll know what I’m referring to.
I’m concerned that E3 has become a rite that must be performed, which serves as a barrier to entry to independent publishers. If you can’t afford hundreds of thousands of dollars for a great big booth and giveaways will you be able to make enough of a buzz to get any reviewers at all?
I’m concerned (as I am regarding every industry) about the inevitable relationship between review magazines that sell advertisement space, and the tendency to always review any game that has at least a full-page ad. I know how this works; I used to buy full-page ads in computer security trade journals, to make sure my company’s products were “on the chart” .. it’s not quite payola, it’s more like removal of a barrier. And if anyone thinks that a publisher doesn’t listen when an angry marketing person from a vendor calls and says “we’re slated for $120,000 worth of print ads with you guys, and we didn’t even get on the list of products in your review, WTF?!” you’re a babe in the woods. I’ve made those calls. I’ve bulldogged the editors of journals until I got a special product focus review of my product, by threatening to take my ads somewhere else.
I’m concerned that the review press always reviews a sequel to a popular title, which means: more sequels. If you aren’t concerned about this, you apparently haven’t noticed the effect it’s had on hollywood’s movie production, having slept through the last Transformers movie.
Etc.
There’s a lot to be concerned about, and if the gamergaters were concerned with things that matter, they’d be too busy to be abusing and harassing a few people in the gaming community who happen to be women who happen to be feminists. Anyone who hasn’t been asleep since the opening splash screen has realized that ‘gamergate’ has nothing to do with ethics in gaming and damn little to do with gaming at all – it’s about abusing the women that had the temerity to climb into the treehouse, ignoring the “icky girls keep out!” sign.
She is making them look bad.
She is.
Really?
Just like organized atheism, isn’t it?
So now we can add “games” to the list of things #Gamergaters apparently don’t understand, along with ethics and journalism. Say, isn’t that literally everything #Gamergate is supposedly “actually” about? Multiple gibibytes is a lot of info, and phones are even less standardized than desktops (except for Linux desktop environments, maybe), given the many, many revisions of Android (including countless user-developed versions) or iOS concurrently in use and supported and different carrier requirements and countless hardware configurations. Really, developing for mobile could be much MORE complicated than developing for desktop PCs, and is inevitably more complex than developing for any console (for games of similar scope). I imagine making touchscreens in any way functional as a gaming UI is itself a bigger design challenge than any single thing console developers have to manage (except maybe AI, which is still pretty bad no matter what, on any platform). But Wu is no true game developer?
No dice – just more evidence that it’s all about the feminists.