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[Orayn]

She is not a gamer. Others have shown that she doesn't record her own footage either, she is mostly using youtube videos. Which explains why she gets so many things wrong about many of the games she criticizes.

Would you say she's stealing valor from the thousands of gamers out there putting their lives on the line every day to defend our freedom... To game?

Slightly more seriously, what evidence would convince you otherwise? How does one earn the True Gamer Cred that's apparently so necessary to criticize the medium?

 

[Isaac Otherworld]

This is highly reductive imo.

She has attended events and developers actively engage with her. People listen.

And her platform is one for serious consideration whereas a web comic really isn't the most efficient medium for it, so I don't mind the repetition even if it does exist.

I wasn't saying "penny arcade said it so there's no reason to talk about it."

I'm saying "These feminist critiques have been around for so long even Penny Arcade makes comics about them a decade earlier. I don't see what makes her so cutting edge."

Mostly what I'm hoping to hear is "her later videos were better than her first few and worth checking into."

 

[John Kowalski]

She is not a gamer. Others have shown that she doesn't record her own footage either, she is mostly using youtube videos. Which explains why she gets so many things wrong about many of the games she criticizes.

What has she gotten wrong about those games? I don't remember anything like that.

 

[Zakalwe]

You're both right. Especially in the context of this thread being about the legacy of the content.

It was more of a personal revelation I had that I am going to keep in mind about when I discuss and refer to Anita and her projects in the future. I have always been very restrained even when exclusively discussing times I fully agree with her. I'm just going to stop being so passive-defensive about it. If others feel the same way, or can relate to my post, I hope they can do the same.

I appreciate the reason for your posts and the content of them fully, it's a really messy situation because it's so damn volatile in so many ways (some righteously, some maliciously).

Genuine good intent does go a long way here!

I wasn't saying "penny arcade said it so there's no reason to talk about it."

I'm saying "These feminist critiques have been around for so long even Penny Arcade makes comics about them a decade earlier. I don't see what makes her so cutting edge."

She doesn't need to be cutting edge to be an effective spokesperson for the cause

The very fact these issues have been around for so long and still require the discussion (which comes long before action, so we've still got an incredibly long way to go) is evidence that that we need people like her pushing for change.

 

[Nepenthe]

I wasn't saying "penny arcade said it so there's no reason to talk about it."

I'm saying "These feminist critiques have been around for so long even Penny Arcade makes comics about them a decade earlier. I don't see what makes her so cutting edge."

She's not cutting edge. She just happened to lay all of the shit bare in a high-profile way involving money, but the content itself is basic feminist critique.

That makes the overblown response to her by men all the more indicative of a deep insecurity in gaming.

She is as relevant as she is because the harassment campaign and otherwise disingenuous arguments and overall nerd rage made her relevant, because gamers fulfilled the prophecy of their own doing that gaming has a problem with women by...harassing a woman to the point that fucking Stephen Colbert picked up on the story.

If her videos had been treated like the Penny Arcade comics, we wouldn't be here discussing this. Where's DJ Khaled when you need him?

 

[Nerokis]

That's how hard it is to talk about feminism. I'm a radical left populist progressive with a particular passion for women's rights and even I have to preface my praise for Anita with some sort of unconscious appeal to moderation.

Speaking for me alone, this isn't quite true. When I acknowledge that I didn't always find her arguments persuasive, it isn't because I'm appealing to moderation. It's because Anita has had a massive impact on how a lot of people think about these issues, and I'm grasping for the precise mixture of things that resulted in such an impact. As pure criticism, her videos weren't necessarily revolutionary, and some were more thought provoking than others. But it all came together into something of outsize significance.

I admire Anita, and no part of me feels like adding a "but" to that.

 

[nkarafo]

What has she gotten wrong about those games? I don't remember anything like that.

Theres already a video posted by someone in this thread with some examples.

 

[Adam_Vania]

I'm saying "These feminist critiques have been around for so long even Penny Arcade makes comics about them a decade earlier. I don't see what makes her so cutting edge."

1. she has a much bigger platform, massive media attention. people outside the industry don't give a shit about Penny Arcade. they give a shit about her.

2. she is a woman. this is a big part of the feminist critique. the Penny Arcade guys are not women. also she is actually educated in this stuff. there is a history of feminist theory. the Penny Arcade guys are dudes who figured out that video gamers like snark. she is informed on the subject, they are not. they also make jokes about rape.

3. why does it need to be "cutting edge"? yay pat yourself on the back for encountering these ideas on a surface level in an internet comic strip. you must be an expert now, no need to further engage.

 

[TatteredHat]

The series itself didn't do anything for me personally, and I stopped watching the episodes halfway through season 1. If I'm totally honest I had sort of forgotten about the series until I read this topic title.

I guess it probably helpful to some people out there, maybe?

 

[Finale Fireworker]

Speaking for me alone, this isn't quite true. When I acknowledge that I didn't always find her arguments persuasive, it isn't because I'm appealing to moderation. It's because Anita has had a massive impact on how a lot of people think about these issues, and I'm grasping for the precise mixture of things that resulted in such an impact. As pure criticism, her videos weren't necessarily revolutionary, and some were more thought provoking than others. But it all came together into something of outsize significance.

I admire Anita, and no part of me feels like adding a "but" to that.

Good!

I'm trying to think of more to say in response but I don't really have anything. Just... good. Good points, good thoughts, good feelings.

I have nothing to add, but I wanted to reply.

 

[Zakalwe]

I admire Anita, and no part of me feels like adding a "but" to that.

This shit is so insidious that I can fully get the reaction.

It's difficult to tell how genuine a person is being from a few posts in a single topic and it can seem like more of the same.

 

[Osiris397]

I actually thought the show was well-done, but I agree about the spoilers. It's a shame there's no way to watch it without that risk.

I thought the series was pretty well done, the information was very much needed and honestly the importance of the topic outweighs any want or need to avoid spoilers.

I'd like to point out here that nowhere in the video or in the description of the latest video upload does Anita indicate that this is the last Feminist Frequency episode, so I'm not really sure the article is accurate unless there's information the writer knows that Sarkeesian would not relay to fans of the show personally. Even though she's been doing a new set of programming I sense she's leaving the door open for more Feminist Frequency in the future, which would be cool in terms of reporting the improvements that have occurred that I tend to believe she was indirectly/partially responsible for as well as areas where there are still shortcomings.

Considering the "Ordinary Women" series looks to be complete the posting of a new or a relatively new Feminist Frequency is probably a harbinger of what's to come rather than a punctuation for the end of the series.

 

[Oidisco]

To everybody that says she doesn't actually play games, you do realize she regularly streams on Twitch right? Like I'm even a moderator on her channel and she often streams several times a week.

 

[RecRoulette]

Wasn't a fan of the videos I did see so I stopped watching them, but kudos to her starting discussions to a larger audience that no one else would bring up.

 

[FlyinJ]

To everybody that says she doesn't actually play games, you do realize she regularly streams on Twitch right? Like I'm even a moderator on her channel and she often streams several times a week.

But that doesn't fit the narrative!

It's probably just her capturing another stream and saying it's her own.

 

[dottme]

To everybody that says she doesn't actually play games, you do realize she regularly streams on Twitch right? Like I'm even a moderator on her channel and she often streams several times a week.

Do you have some link? I was quickly looking at the past stream and each Caro is playing and she is on the chat.
The FemFreq twitch looks to be mainly Caro. So maybe I'm not looking at the right place.

Edit: sorry I've got one. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/138536492

 

[Stilton Disco]

I always enjoyed hearing her points of view and particular type of analysis on a medium that all too often feels like it caters exclusively to right wing, white, male, straight, cis, middle class, 13-35 year old Americans.

I genuinely think the attention she garnered, both supportive and vile, had a net positive affect on the industry overall, and 'nerd culture' more broadly, especially in exposing the increasingly aggressive alt right bigots that are seemingly spawning throughout social media.

Saying that, her opinions and views were incredibly American, and all the deep seated socio economic, racial and especially sexual hang ups that Americans are uniquely screwed up about, did make me scratch my head at times as a European. But that's not a criticism I can uniquely level at her, and is at least an interesting 'alien' point of view I found interesting to experience.

 

[timetokill]

I don't care if she used somebody else's footage as long as she cited them. Considering she's doing basic academic videos you'd hope she'd at least follow the most basic rule which is to cite your sources.

 

[added_time]

I just watched the "lingerie is not armor" episode because of this thread. It really appealed to me because one of my biggest complaints about games for as long I can remember was how female characters are dressed. I never thought of my male view of it as being feminist as much as I just think it's so cheesy and ruins my impression of games. It's clearly there to appear sexy to young males even at the expense of feeling immersed in the game.
I agreed with almost every point she made in the video.

The one thing I didn't understand was including Perfect Dark in the video though. The commercial for the game they show was terrible but I thought the actual game wasn't like that (unless I'm remembering it incorrectly from years ago). The game designers can't control what shitty marketing people do. Although I do understand that the advertisements are part of the problem too.

 

[Freeza Under The Shower]

Personally I kinda just ignored them because, as I've said before, I was more interested in a qualitative study than the actual tropes, but it's been impossible to dodge the crap it somehow started with 'men'.
To me, it's fairly basic stuff, and it's mostly been really disappointing to see that it's not with most people.

Also, somehow Halo 4 came out just before this started, and on the topic of 'lingerie is not armor', that game is probably one of the worst with what it did to Cortana. Like, complete character switch and everything. It was shocking just how bad that game fucked up on simple characters.

 

[Madame M]

I like her hoop earrings, they were sassy.

They will be missed.

 

[Oblivion]

There's a lot that I disagree with her about, but she deserves credit for unearthering this massive layer of rightwing sewage that's been permeating through the gaming industry.

Since 2012, I've always wondered if a major portion of the gamer demographic was always incredibly racist, misogynist, and bigoted, or is it that they were just simply more susceptible to those things?

 

[SaniOYOYOY]

I kinda want Aoife to pick this up

 

[Liliana Eileen]

To everybody that says she doesn't actually play games, you do realize she regularly streams on Twitch right? Like I'm even a moderator on her channel and she often streams several times a week.

I was going to say this. Who cares if she doesn't play games?

 

[FyreWulff]

I just watched the "lingerie is not armor" episode because of this thread. It really appealed to me because one of my biggest complaints about games for as long I can remember was how female characters are dressed. I never thought of my male view of it as being feminist as much as I just think it's so cheesy and ruins my impression of games. It's clearly there to appear sexy to young males even at the expense of feeling immersed in the game.
I agreed with almost every point she made in the video.

The one thing I didn't understand was including Perfect Dark in the video though. The commercial for the game they show was terrible but I thought the actual game wasn't like that (unless I'm remembering it incorrectly from years ago). The game designers can't control what shitty marketing people do. Although I do understand that the advertisements are part of the problem too.

Rare was the publisher of Perfect Dark (even if Nintendo was cutting the checks) and had final say on the ads, even if they conflated with the presentation in the game.

 

[Massive Duck. C.M.]

In my eyes, her greatest legacy will always be her unfortunate and inadvertent role in facilitating the rise of the alt-right. Often her videos act more as a source content for anti feminist Youtubbe channels thsn as an effective form of communicating the ideas she intended. It is similar to the MTV Decoded series, often the channels based around vitriolic critique of her and her channel end up becoming far more popular than her own channel.

This is the dumbest thing I've read all week

 

[Ninjimbo]

I think the series worked well as a primer and it was a good way to introduce a bunch uneducated people about media analysis. Anita herself has always been a complicated figure to me. I think her message has good intentions and was probably needed, but i've always thought she came across as a person stuck in a bubble. I found it hard to sit through some of her videos simply because her examples were cherry picked, and ignorant of important context. I never got the feeling that she wanted to be fair.

To be honest tho, she's so good at making her point and the industry was in dire need of some perspective that going about it the way she did was probably the exact remedy. She turned off a lot of people, but she also gained a lot of supporters so I don't think she was in the wrong, so to speak.

Ultimately, her series is important in the annals of gaming culture and history.

 

[SomTervo]

Honestly, the fact that so many of us feel the need to clarify we didn't agree with everything she said but still found her videos valuable shows how difficult it actually is to talk feminism. Why do we feel so compelled to quantify that we liked her videos but, you know, not everything?

Isn't this true for... anyone? Who watches Jim Sterling and never disagrees? Or even Dunkey? Who reads Jason Schreier and thinks he's spot on 100% of the time? I don't agree with every point content-creators ever make but I don't feel the need to point that out. It's only Anita Sarkeesian and her videos that I end up saying "I don't always agree, but..."

That's how hard it is to talk about feminism. I'm a radical left populist progressive with a particular passion for women's rights and even I have to preface my praise for Anita with some sort of unconscious appeal to moderation.

So, kudos to Anita Sarkeesian and her team for talking about things nobody else was talking about and having the bravery to put her name and face out there time and time again in the face of a historic movement against her ideas.

Ideas I share.

I'm not going to be tepid about that anymore.

I think it's simple and a different situation for this series. It's brazenly talking about things that aren't being talking about and spreading healthy ideas - the caveat being some of its examples aren't great. That's fine because the ideas themselves have a long history and are robust.

In the case of Sterling, Joe etc, the arguments are usually way more idiosyncratic, unique to the specific game/situation. It's less broad and much more "individual take on a specific issue" rather than "decades-long trope and how it presents in games".

With TvW it's like "well that Ellie example is ridiculous - but all her other points are great and studies have shown it's a real issue, plus she also discusses some contrary examples, so it's fine" but with Sterling and, say, his criticism of various VR (eg the Vive), it's like "well... He doesn't like standing up. And there aren't many big games. And he doesn't enjoy the technology? And it's too expensive." It's much more binary consumerist stuff and he always provides multiple arguments that aren't wider cultural tropes.

 

[Adam_Vania]

dont compare those egotist clowns to Sarkeesian. if her videos were like theirs they would be 50% about how much hate she is getting followed with proclamations about how right she always is about everything followed by shout-outs to Patreon donors, inter-cut with her and her friends acting out shitty unfunny skits pointlessly re-creating game footage in front of a bad green screen. her videos are way more on-topic than anybody else's.

 

[Onlinehero]

Didn't like her works at all.
Basically she first create her thesis, then create arguments and find flaws based on those thesis. It's an anti-journalistic way to represent a work like this.

Basically she only show what is good for her, but the real problem is she only disclose examples but you can't find a real thinking on why this things happens or what developers can do to overturn the situation.

She debate on why male so male chauvinist? Ok, good job Sarkeesian.
Ask yourself in the first place, and then tell us, why there are so few girls programming videogames, for example,

Just saying videogames are sexist is the same to complaining about that old tv series with all member of the family white or black, or why women are misrapresented in the '50 movies.
Ok, then?

You cannot help just showing how sexist is this or that subject, but you can do something when you try to understand why this things happens and how you can change the situation.

How about if you want to focus on sexism within video games you do that and do it well without someone asking why you don't fix all the world's problems in one go? It's a trite argument against any struggle to achieve change, the famous "why don't you focus on this?" how about YOU fucking do it then, maybe you'll find that a lot of people struggle to get women into programming (again).

 

[Dragon Puncher]

I don't love everything in her videos, but her work is immensely important. Hopefully it will lead to some sort of change down the line.

 

[RM8]

I just watched the "lingerie is not armor" episode because of this thread. It really appealed to me because one of my biggest complaints about games for as long I can remember was how female characters are dressed. I never thought of my male view of it as being feminist as much as I just think it's so cheesy and ruins my impression of games. It's clearly there to appear sexy to young males even at the expense of feeling immersed in the game.
I agreed with almost every point she made in the video.

The one thing I didn't understand was including Perfect Dark in the video though. The commercial for the game they show was terrible but I thought the actual game wasn't like that (unless I'm remembering it incorrectly from years ago). The game designers can't control what shitty marketing people do. Although I do understand that the advertisements are part of the problem too.

I'm old enough to remember the time when regular male gamers would ridicule Dead or Alive Xtreme (or even DOA) or complain about dumb lingerie armour on GameFAQs. Plenty of us believed those cheap pandering designs were dumb and low effort, and I literally never got called a SJW or otherwise viciously attacked for having such opinions - it wasn't a feminist thing. On GameFAQs too! it's pretty insane how things changed.

 

[R00bot]

You can just look at GAF as a reason for why she doesn't. GAF is a heavily moderated forum with a staff of moderators, and yet look at this thread and some of the negative posts so far...



...and then think back/look at how "active" these threads used to be back when she first started doing these videos and were full of posts like this, before people knew the kinds of negative posts these videos generated:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=520365

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=569689

Anita's youtube channels/blog would be even more work since there would be more random people trying to participate, people not worried about a GAF TOS/getting banned to say what they "actually want to say", to the point of making actual physical threats against her/hacking her. Internet comments aren't the avenue for her to have dialog.

I'm not sure that the public consensus has really changed. How NeoGaf reacts to it certainly has changed though, so I guess that's a start. I'd even go so far as to say that there's probably still a lot of people with those opinions on NeoGaf, however they now know better than to post them because they have seen the amount of people who have been banned for that in the past as those links showed.

 

[SomTervo]

dont compare those egotist clowns to Sarkeesian. if her videos were like theirs they would be 50% about how much hate she is getting followed with proclamations about how right she always is about everything followed by shout-outs to Patreon donors, inter-cut with her and her friends acting out shitty unfunny skits pointlessly re-creating game footage in front of a bad green screen. her videos are way more on-topic than anybody else's.

Totally

 

[Budi]

Took me few videos to really warm up, really important voice to the industry. Hopefully others are willing to step up.

 

[Adam_Vania]

i have to lol everytime someone says her work is not "journalistic", as if that is relevant to the field of art criticism. these are two different fields. one has to do with reporting mostly political real world events, the other has to do with cultural criticism, textual analysis of a work of art. it's the flimsiest critique of her work possible. it doesn't even make sense. Roger Ebert isn't a journalist either, does that mean he is disqualified from talking about movies?

here is her thesis: that a woman's perspective on female representation in games is valid and a much-needed counterpoint to a culture mostly marketed towards infantile machismo. yes she only showed things that validated the points she was trying to make. that is how you make an argument. this is something people do constantly, every day, in irl inter-personal communications, and in thousands of video essays all over youtube, yet when she does it, there is something not right about it, some insidious agenda about it.

its kind of amazing how much resistance she gets, a lot of times she pretty much proves her point without even saying a thing.

 

[PtM]

My problem with her angle is that gaming is such a large sphere now that there's usually something for everyone. If you really want to dig deep enough I'm sure you can find some awful hentai games hidden out there with all sorts of weirdness going on. At the other end of the spectrum there's games like candy crush which is completely inoffensive and massively popular with the female demographic.

Your problem with her is that she didn't go for the extremes?

I don't care if she used somebody else's footage as long as she cited them. Considering she's doing basic academic videos you'd hope she'd at least follow the most basic rule which is to cite your sources.

Eeeh... she names the games, that's sufficient in her context. She doesn't show the videos for the individual gameplay itself.

 

[timetokill]

Eeeh... she names the games, that's sufficient in her context. She doesn't show the videos for the individual gameplay itself.

I disagree. And it's such a simple thing to cite your sources, too.

 

[Inferno313]

Anita is fantastic. This series is fantastic. Sure, she's said a few things I disagree with, both in this video series and outside of it. But the idea that someone's entire work is invalidated because you disagree with them, sometimes, is a load of horseshit. She's a tremendously valuable critic for this industry. Maybe, in some ways, the critic of the last few years. Love her work.

 

[ebullientprism]

It still blows my mind what a shit storm came out of what was fairly tame and somewhat decently reasoned criticism.

 

[FyreWulff]

It still blows my mind what a shit storm came out of what was fairly tame and somewhat decently reasoned criticism.

The shit storm started as soon as the Kickstarter went up. Which is why it's pretty lulzy that some are inferring she triggered the rise of the conversative gamergate movement, it was always there.

 

[Spman2099]

The critique was often shallow, and sometimes intentionally twisted to emphasize problematic elements. Never was their appraisal evenhanded or nuanced.

That being said, it will be remembered as an important turning point for the industry. I think fifty years from now people will look back at Feminist Frequency in an extremely positive light.

 

[BassForever]

While I didn't always agree with what she said or the evidence she present to prove her case, the embarrasing back lash at her just for bringing up the topics justified the shows creation.

 

[Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku!]

This can't be right. I was told she was just going to take the money and run without finishing the series.

 

[V_Arnold]

I loved this series. I hated how people all around the world (including in GAF!) decided to enrage when their Favorite Game(tm) got mentioned and could not take any kind of criticism at that - look, she repeated it enough times that these are not meant to make jabs at your Favorite Game(tm). Really not.

Criticize the trends, not the games. I think she did this very well. It opened my eyes to many things that I took as granted. One could argue with it but honestly, upon introspection, some of these complaints are *very* basic and easy to check/validaty. Yes, our hobby really IS that juvenile. We have a lot of work to do.

 

[Crimson_Echidna]

It's funny because I can't get into the videos because I think they are too tame. Otoh, of course, for a lot of people they are the 3xtr3m3 feminizt revolution that should be destroyed because it is the end of civilization itself, so obviously she was doing something right. Merely pointing out sexism was obviously way too much for gg's delicate sensibilities. Anything more poignant and we would be seeing mass suicide or something.

Anyway, I am really happy for her and all her success and I hope all the best to her. The debate she helped shaped still is very important.

That's kind of my takeaway from the "legacy" she created; it was ironically moreso the reaction her series caused than the actual content of her talking points that made her work important.

On it's own, she really just made pretty bite sized critiques that any rationale person would have just agreed and maybe shared with their friends, or if they disagreed just not watch the videos anymore. And yet it ended up shining a bright light on a really toxic side gaming culture, a side that people can't ignore anymore.

 

[FyreWulff]

I loved this series. I hated how people all around the world (including in GAF!) decided to enrage when their Favorite Game(tm) got mentioned and could not take any kind of criticism at that - look, she repeated it enough times that these are not meant to make jabs at your Favorite Game(tm). Really not.

Criticize the trends, not the games. I think she did this very well. It opened my eyes to many things that I took as granted. One could argue with it but honestly, upon introspection, some of these complaints are *very* basic and easy to check/validaty. Yes, our hobby really IS that juvenile. We have a lot of work to do.

the saddest one is "it could have been a nice message but she spoiled a bunch of games"

like um reviews and critiques talk about the thing they are reviewing and critiquing, disowning "hey guys dunno maybe stop treating women like shit" is being handwaved away with "but my vidjagame spoilers" is like the most empathy lacking statement ever

 

[PtM]

The shit storm started as soon as the Kickstarter went up. Which is why it's pretty lulzy that some are inferring she triggered the rise of the conversative gamergate movement, it was always there.

Wasn't the KS goal already met when the shit hit the fan?

 

[Oersted]

She set a bar. We need more of that.

Anita is fantastic. This series is fantastic. Sure, she's said a few things I disagree with, both in this video series and outside of it. But the idea that someone's entire work is invalidated because you disagree with them, sometimes, is a load of horseshit. She's a tremendously valuable critic for this industry. Maybe, in some ways, the critic of the last few years. Love her work.

It is rather normal that a critic happens to be wrong. Roger Ebert was wrong alot of times, sometimes even worse, but still, he did overall great.

Wasn't the KS goal already met when the shit hit the fan?

Sortish. KS exploded when the harassment hit.