Some thoughts about things on my mind

First off, my writing schedule has nosedived because I have started school. Which means Mechanical Engineering Senior Design. Guess where my free time went? :P

Second, I have been following the most recent hot button topics in the gaming industry news from a distance, and I feel like I am finally comfortable forming my subjective, personal opinion about the main, general issues.

Before I do that though, I have some caveats for the discussion: I am subjective, limited and human. There may be things about my perspective that you can definitively say are wrong. However, if you would like to correct me, you have to do some things before I would be able to consider your claims: You have to give me sources that support your claim, preferably in the comments where possible, and you have to demonstrate both the accuracy and the validity of those sources. Just because some person's blog post says "X is what is happening right now" does not necessarily mean that the blog post is correct, after all. Saying is NOT Believing, and repeating incorrect, misleading, biased and/or incomplete sources over and over again does not make those sources more or less valid than they already are.

Also, I will make this blanket statement: If an action by a human being leads to a decrease in the quality of life for any individual, regardless of how MUCH has decreased, then I am automatically against it. Thus, I wholeheartedly condemn the harassment campaign carried out against independent game developer Zoe Quinn carried out by a certain group of faceless, anonymous individuals. I also wholeheartedly condemn the notion that all of "gamer" culture is to blame for the harassment; be specific with your accusations if you feel that you must make them.

I also wholeheartedly condemn the notion that feminists should just "leave games alone". As with any creative medium, any creator, be it a game developer or a painter or an animator or a writer or whathaveyou, needs feedback on the positives and negatives of their created works, from as many diverse perspectives that they can get, so that they can judge for themselves if their created work has the impact they desired. Wide-ranging critiques from numerous sources regardless of their validity or comprehensive or objective quality also expose the creator to thoughts and ideas that they may not have even considered, which creates an excellent learning opportunity for the creator. Plus, just because a critique is negative or highly critical does not mean that the creator has been "attacked" via the critique; all such a critique means is that the creator has a lot to improve in some specified way, shape or form, usually outlined in the critique itself.

I am also against a violation of the basic notion of honesty, on both sides of the "culture war": tell your readers, subscribers, followers, whathaveyou, what your personal biases and/or issues are, so that they are properly informed of those aspects of your work. This includes disclosing whether or not one has been targeted by harassers, and whether or not your life and safety have been threatened by anonymous individuals. As a corollary to this notion, even if someone makes a threat against your life or your safety and does not follow through on that threat, does not mean that you did not feel threatened. Simply feeling threatened, even if the threat is empty, is enough to cause moderate to high levels of clinical anxiety, depression, or worse. Such threats may even trigger severely debilitating mental disorders, if the target of the threat suffers from them. There is also the fact that a threatening action is a hostile action, which means that you are effectively telling the target of your threat to leave you alone, to not get near you, or else suffer retribution. This is an exclusionary action that seeks to create and maintain a boundary that has severe consequences when crossed, which is not the same thing as inclusivity, diversity or community growth and solidarity.

Journalists need to be honest about whether or not they are friends/lovers/acquaintances/haters/etc. of a video game developer before they pass judgment on that game. And folks need to be honest about whether or not their actions are truly motivated by a desire to improve video game industry ethics, and it is their responsibility to maintain a calm and rational mind about fulfilling that desire in a positive and constructive manner that will benefit everyone.

These caveats are here because I always try to seek the truth of the matter, rather than blindly follow the word of another human being. I will investigate a topic if I want to, and I highly encourage folks practice some kind of investigative method as well. I am upfront with my biases and my perspective about the issues involved, and as much as I am against what certain parties have done in this matter, as I briefly described a few examples above, I have no authority to pass judgment on those actions. I have simply stated how I felt about all these interconnected issues, and I hope nobody takes these words as somehow more than a subjective perspective awash in a sea of subjective procedures.

Whew! That took a while, but I hope it helped XD

In any case... let me get to the point of this post:

No one won the argument here.

For whatever advantage of disadvantage either side had, for however much passion they poured into tearing each other apart, all they have done is effectively bloodied each other's noses. It doesn't matter quite who started this mess, because the ending effect has been making both sides look like they have been in a boxing ring for several uninterrupted bouts.

This is what happens when an argument turns destructive, when the issue is no longer about the original issue, and becomes whether or not either side has a right to exist.

This has an unfortunate side effect of sucking in all other relevant points of possible enlightened, thoughtful and positive discourse into the destructive storm of battle. By both sides declaring war, they create a lose-lose scenario:

Feminists now fear that there is no safe place for discussion about their themes and concepts. After all, the Internet is quite possibly the most open platform possible, where just about anything can happen and just about any discussion can take place. To be rejected by such a relatively free environment is incredibly disheartening, especially since EVERYONE uses the Internet, especially for communication. This feels like society itself is actively suppressing their right to free speech, simply because of what they believe in.

In the other corner, gamers have now had one more label slapped on their foreheads: "crazy misogynist". This is incredibly unfair for obvious reasons: they had to fight against the stereotypical "gamer" image of a fat white tech wizard who lives in their mamma's basement. They had to fight against the stereotype that all video games were "murder simulators". They had to face the specter of government censorship with SOPA and PIPA, and in various measures taken against the medium in the past. They had to fight for their favorite hobby to be considered a legitimate art form. And now some crazy misogynists have once again made their lives a living hell, and have demonized their favorite hobby once again.

What have both sides gained? Well, feminists have now raised awareness about the fact that certain common elements of video games are problematic, and that these problems deserve discussion rather than get swept under the rug. Gamers have shown that they are not the misogynistic ones, even if their favorite hobby does have misogynistic elements in certain video games, and that they want the hobby to expand as an art form into something that everyone can enjoy without issue.

Feminists want their human right to be themselves respected, and they want to be safe with whatever legal act of self-expression they want to use to exercise that human right. Gamers want their hobby to be respected as an art form, and to end all the senseless conflicts and near-constant scapegoating that the medium has had to endure.

And the reason both of these parties were at each other's throats was because certain anonymous individuals decided to harass, defame, threaten and try to destroy a female game developer for emotional reasons not based on logic or reason. The developer in question never threatened her attackers before the attacks happened, so one cannot justify that the harassment campaign is an act of self-defense. The attackers struck first, and they struck so hard that the developer said that she could no longer go home, since certain threats were specific enough that she no longer felt safe in her place.

And then a prominent, highly visible feminist critic posted the next video in a series of video critiques about common elements in video games that have sexist elements. The misogynists turned their crosshairs onto her, and she got the same treatment as the game developer. Of course, things were much worse than that: a bomb threat was made against a function that the feminist critic attended. It doesn't matter that the threat was empty; what matters was that the threat was made in the first place.

As far as I can tell, the true aggressors are those misogynistic individuals who participated in the attacks against the developer and the critic. Not gamers as a group: their focus is on ending conflicts, not starting or prolonging them. Not feminists: they want a place where they can exercise the right to speak their mind in a way that does not threaten their life. And it is obvious that these misogynists are not part of any single group of people: they take on whatever skin is convenient for them, so that they can accomplish their agenda: domination over the opposite gender.

The gamers and the feminists got caught up in the intensity of these attacks, and they themselves felt like they were under fire from the "other side". As we all know, the more mad and hurt and upset we become, the less rational we act. Next thing you know, gamers and feminists are fighting each other for the wrong reasons.

Biologically speaking, humanity is like a bird: the only way it can fly is if both its wings are strong. If one wing is the male gender, and the other wing is the female gender, then both genders need to be equal in strength in order to have smooth, controlled flight. Misogyny as a concept goes contrary to this notion, because it advocates for one gender to be weaker than the other.

Feminists want humanity as a whole to move forward and be better. Gamers want humanity as a whole to move forward and be better. If those misogynistic individuals have their way, if their criminal tactics such as bomb scares are successful, then humanity will not be able to effectively move forward, because both genders will not be equal.

We all have a mother who gave birth to us. We all have a father who helped conceive us. Biologically speaking, both genders came together to create you, the reader, and to create me, the writer of this overly long opinion piece. The mother had to be healthy enough to give birth to you and me. The father had to be healthy enough to conceive you and me. Biologically speaking then, both genders had to be healthy enough to play their roles in order to give birth to us.

Thus, biology is not misogynistic.

If biology is not misogynistic, then it would seem that misogyny is against the notion of human survival. After all, if women are weaker than men... that means the logical extreme is that women may eventually not be strong enough to give birth. Wouldn't that create the end of the world as we know it? It's silly, but I deliberately stretched this metaphor this far out of my intended context to characterize why I believe that misogyny is harmful to humanity as a concept.

As a result, I am against misogyny. If I see it in an individual, I am likely to react very negatively. And I hope the gamers and the feminists can stop hacking each other's figurative limbs off long enough to recognize how the fight REALLY started: some crazy misogynists did some crazy illegal things and claimed to be gamers in the process.

Take everything within this blog post with as large of a grain of salt as you wish. Interpret it however you want. Hopefully though, I have shown you a perspective you may not have considered. Investigate it at your leisure.

Mr. Album