Thoughts on GamerGate, r/Kotakuinaction, gamer activism movements
I want to work on this at work, but I don't want anyone to see me browsing these stupid sites...
I browse r/kotakuinaction for fun. I can't say for sure why I keep doing it. But after seeing stupid take after stupid take and double standards everywhere, I decided to write about it.
I should start by clarifying my position on the "movement". I probably discovered r/kotakuinaction during the 'first' gamergate era, during my edgy anti-sjw, egalitarianism-instead-of-feminism phase when I was a teen. I've somewhat grown out of that contrarian phase. I'm still a contrarian, just in a different way, I suppose. To be clear, there are definitely parts of what they're saying that I'd agree with. I guess I'll structure this (article? essay?) by going through some of their common complaints and talking points, where I may agree, and where I think they're being retarded.
Gender stuff
I don't like the movement to de-gender everything. It actually really irks me when my player character is referred to as they/them, particularly when it's an avatar meant to represent ME. I didn't like that the English localization of the new Animal Crossing always refers to other human players as they, and I've seen this done in a couple other games. This bothers me so I can see why it bothers other people. The quickest solution to this would be to select your pronouns on the character creation screen, but then when games do actually do this, like Starfield, gg's (gamergaters. I need a label to describe these people if I'm gonna write about them and this one works as good as any.) still get angry. I think it's a fair compromise. This isn't like real life where you can just expect people to know that you're obviously a man or woman, it's a video game. It can't see you behind the screen.
They also reeeeally don't like when character creation screens offer a male and female body model and then say "style A and style B" instead of "male or female". Personally this is a nothingburger. Yes, I know that 'wokeness' has changed the clearer language to less clear language, but it doesn't really matter because the options are still there. Again, it's an issue of semantics. Somehow "are you a boy or a girl?" being changed to "what are your pronouns?" and "pick a style!" has made people extremely angry and I really don't see what the fuss is about considering the original options are still there even if they're behind different wording.
ok yeah there's no way I'm working on this in public.