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× A place for boardgame traitors.

Gamers Launch Harassment Campaign Against BioWare

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21 Feb 2012 11:46 #117072 by KingPut
My daughter told me she signs up for online gaming using a guys name because guys will harass women playing. I said really? are you serious? Well I guess we find a-holes everywhere. They're even harrassing Jennifer Hepler, a writer for Old Republic. Being a dad of 2 daughters this really pisses me off.

http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=7832

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21 Feb 2012 12:07 #117073 by repoman
The flash-lynch mob of the modern day is a disturbing trend. Not only in gaming but other aspects of life. I find it repulsive myself.

As to female gamers being harassed. I admit my experience is somewhat limited to the time I spent playing WoW. I did find that boys offered to help female characters more than male ones. I don't know if that would escalate to harassment, though I suppose it might. Being an adult I just blocked anybody I found annoying.

My step daughters never complained of being harassed but they did talk about "creepers". However, as they were both forged in the fires of my sarcasm they had more fun destroying such people with witty comebacks than they were scared or intimidated.

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21 Feb 2012 13:12 #117076 by tscook
Nice to be reminded casual misogyny is still alive and well.

Personally, I skip "listenting to the dialogue" because I turn on subtitles and skip the shitty voice acting.

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21 Feb 2012 13:39 - 21 Feb 2012 15:27 #117079 by Mr. White
This crap reminds me of the Dickwolves fiasco.

At the risk of pissing some people off at this site, I can't stand the videogame/comic book subculture and hope my kids take no part in it.

(Kinda ironic with a videogame avatar...)

EDIT: To clarify, by subculture I'm referring to the group that folks like Penny Arcade and Kevin Smith pander to.
Last edit: 21 Feb 2012 15:27 by Mr. White.

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21 Feb 2012 13:51 #117081 by ubarose

KingPut wrote: My daughter told me she signs up for online gaming using a guys name because guys will harass women playing.


I've had several conversations with her about this. And interviewed some other teen girls. One girl, who had been passing as a guy, had her entire party turn on her during a raid and kill her character when it leaked out that she was a female player. I was going to write an article about their experience as both boardgamers and on-line gamers, but decided it was too depressing and didn't reveal anything that people weren't already aware of. The best I could offer was play on-line with other women and keep your gender better hidden.

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21 Feb 2012 14:16 #117087 by Chapel
This is why I like face to face boardgaming. Cause no one talks shit about you from across the table.

Videogames suck.
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21 Feb 2012 14:29 - 21 Feb 2012 14:30 #117089 by Wetworks
I don't condone harassment against anyone but it's misleading to say that they are only picking on her because she is female. These are the main things people are upset about her,

1. She is a senior writer for Bioware one of the biggest and well respected game developers in the industry and she has publicly stated that she hates playing video games.

2. A lot of people don't like her writing and what she did to some of the characters in Dragon Age 2, for example Anders.

3. She has stated that she wishes there was an option to skip past the "game" part of video games to get to the story and dialogue portions. Bioware has been watering down their games to appease casuals, ala Dragon Age to Dragon Age 2, this doesn't sit well with a lot of gamers.
Last edit: 21 Feb 2012 14:30 by Wetworks.
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21 Feb 2012 14:41 - 21 Feb 2012 15:22 #117094 by Mr. White

Wetworks wrote: 1. She is a senior writer for Bioware one of the biggest and well respected game developers in the industry and she has publicly stated that she hates playing video games.


Like Chapel says, videogames suck, but there's a lot of money in it. Can't judge someone for earning a livelihood. I'm sure there are plenty of people in the videogame industry that don't play videogames in their spare time. Hell, I don't code afterhours, and yeah it rates pretty low on my favorite things to do.

Wetworks wrote: 2. A lot of people don't like her writing and what she did to some of the characters in Dragon Age 2, for example Anders.


She wrote some dialog/story/whatever and fans didn't like it, so she deserves to be harassed? Don't like it, don't play her 'games'. Do you harass novel writers that you don't care for?

Wetworks wrote: 3. She has stated that she wishes there was an option to skip past the "game" part of video games to get to the story and dialogue portions. Bioware has been watering down their games to appease casuals, ala Dragon Age to Dragon Age 2, this doesn't sit well with a lot of gamers.


So? It sounds like an _option_. _All_ of these 'rpg-like' video games are watered down. Sink enough hours into them and anyone can finish them. Beat Ikaruga, Super Ghouls and Ghosts or Metal Slug, then come back and claim you aren't a casual. (Also, you won't have to worry about 'writing', they're real games.)

EDIT: Bottom line, regardless of whether fans like her writing or are happy with how little she likes to personally play videogames, would she be harassed to this level if she were a male? Are bad male writers singled out, called at home? Do male players need to hide their gender when playing online?
Last edit: 21 Feb 2012 15:22 by Mr. White.

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21 Feb 2012 14:47 #117097 by SuperflyPete

Chapel wrote: This is why I like face to face boardgaming. Cause no one talks shit about you from across the table.


FWIW: I do. That's 10-20% of the fun. Sticking you with 2 Monkeys and a Vending stall in Zooloretto and declaring "Yeah, you know you're pimping out apes, you fucking pervert...do you enjoy your own stock or is it solely for the money? No wonder you always pick the Flamingos for your zoo...Freudian slip?" That kind of shit talk makes the game worth winning. But the key is that it's not an anonymous person. I'd never talk shit to some dude I was playing Rainbow Six with or something just to be a dick. Those people fucking kill me.

But I digress....

This isn't just a woman problem, it's a loser problem. I used to play a shit ton of Ghost Recon on Xbox Live back 7 or 8 years ago, I guess. Back when it was THE SHIT. Same with Counterstrike back in the day. There's always the aggo cockbiters who will stop at nothing to berate every single person there, chipping away until they find the hot button and then going after that mercilessly. It's just the nature of a lot of online gamers.

The "vagina" is completely arbitrary to me, I think it's that the abusive pricks online just use the ammo that they know how to use, and belittling a woman to make their sad, lonely little self-handjob laden lives a little less dreary by tearing someone else down is all they 've got. I'm not sure if it's pity or seething hatred that I have for those kinds of people; maybe a mix of both. But preying on the weak (or those they perceive as weak) for enjoyment is just sickening.
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21 Feb 2012 15:08 #117101 by Chapel

SuperflyTNT wrote:

Chapel wrote: This is why I like face to face boardgaming. Cause no one talks shit about you from across the table.


FWIW: I do. That's 10-20% of the fun. Sticking you with 2 Monkeys and a Vending stall in Zooloretto and declaring "Yeah, you know you're pimping out apes, you fucking pervert...do you enjoy your own stock or is it solely for the money? No wonder you always pick the Flamingos for your zoo...Freudian slip?" That kind of shit talk makes the game worth winning. But the key is that it's not an anonymous person. I'd never talk shit to some dude I was playing Rainbow Six with or something just to be a dick. Those people fucking kill me.

But I digress....


True. But that is different kind of shit talking. That's just having fun with friends kind of shit talk, and not meant to be mean or degrading.
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21 Feb 2012 15:41 - 21 Feb 2012 15:55 #117107 by Dogmatix

KingPut wrote: My daughter told me she signs up for online gaming using a guys name because guys will harass women playing. I said really? are you serious? Well I guess we find a-holes everywhere. They're even harrassing Jennifer Hepler, a writer for Old Republic. Being a dad of 2 daughters this really pisses me off.

http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=7832


One of the strange parts of going to a university (Marquette) that was an early adopter of Internet technology is that I'm still completely conditioned to assume that 90% of all female screen names are actually men as that's precisely how it used to be on the old MUDs, IRC, newsgroups and the like. In the Guys used to fall all over themselves to heap gear, attention, and the like on "women"--and the requests (and responses) for cybersex were kind of breathtaking. The entire attitude toward gender online was, at best, sophomoric.

Now, since the advent of the World Wide Home Shopping & Pornography Network, the number of actual women online has increased enormously, but the attitudes toward them have not. If anything, the net's broad reach into homes and the huge increase in both younger users and the general masses (in 1988, if you had an email account and USENET access, chances were good that you were at least at university or in a highly technical profession; in 2008, you basically needed nothing more than buying a cup of coffee at Starbucks) has increased the douchebag quotient by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Ultimately, this is one of the reasons why I refuse to use public voice comms in any online game. I don't need to hear any whining, bitching, or degrading shit. I've yet to find a single bit of gameplay that is enhanced by the intrusion of other people's voices...
Last edit: 21 Feb 2012 15:55 by Dogmatix.
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21 Feb 2012 15:50 - 21 Feb 2012 15:51 #117109 by mikecl
I haven't really seen it myself. I played Battlefield 2 online (Sony Playstation Network) for the better part of a year with a couple of tough talking chicks who dropped into our games at some point and were easily as good as the guys. (We use voice comms so they WERE women).

No one harassed or talked down to them. Maybe that's an anomaly. I don't know. That's my own experience. I don't play a lot online but my work buddies had a thing going with Call of Duty that later morphed into Battlefield for awhile.
Last edit: 21 Feb 2012 15:51 by mikecl.

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21 Feb 2012 16:56 #117125 by ubarose

Wetworks wrote: I don't condone harassment against anyone but it's misleading to say that they are only picking on her because she is female. These are the main things people are upset about her,

1. She is a senior writer for Bioware one of the biggest and well respected game developers in the industry and she has publicly stated that she hates playing video games.

2. A lot of people don't like her writing and what she did to some of the characters in Dragon Age 2, for example Anders.

3. She has stated that she wishes there was an option to skip past the "game" part of video games to get to the story and dialogue portions. Bioware has been watering down their games to appease casuals, ala Dragon Age to Dragon Age 2, this doesn't sit well with a lot of gamers.


#1 was taken out of context. She was saying that what she hated most about her job was having to play through competitors video games to see what they were doing with storylines and dialog. It was very time consuming and she wished she could just skip the game part and read the story and dilogue.

She's just being scapegoted for Bioware, and probably video games in general, making their games more accessible to casual players and more appealing to a broader audience to sell more games. Because she is a woman, it becomes about gender. It's just easier to throw out gender specific insults, and call her fat and ugly than it is to articulate a well formed and informed critisism of her work or to have a reasonable and intelligent discussion of the direction a company is taking with their product.
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21 Feb 2012 17:30 #117134 by jeb
I have been saving this article from the The Escapist for when my girls are ready to start going on the Internet. Whitney Butts nails it, and she nails it in 2005. THAT'S SEVEN YEARS AGO. The Internet is a cesspool.

If you think Penny Arcade is on the wrong side of this, you are mistaken. In fact, they invented the equation that most aptly describes it:

File Attachment:


The vilest, sexist, racist disgusting nonsense poisons almost every random encounter on the Internet. You have to work to find people you can trust to not be awful griefing monsters. I recommend joining the communities at co-optimus or the like to find a pool of gamers you can trust.
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21 Feb 2012 17:49 - 21 Feb 2012 17:51 #117140 by Mr. White

jeb wrote: If you think Penny Arcade is on the wrong side of this, you are mistaken.


Well, if you think Penny Arcade is on the right side, go read about their Dickwolves handling. From where I sit, encouraging fans to heckle and hassle rape victims is in no way the right side. But hey, these women need to learn to take a joke right?
(If you do read about this, I'm not referring to the actual comic strip, but their handling of the criticism.)

Regardless of that, I'm not a fan of super coarse language as humor. Not offended, I just find them base and unfunny. Personally, I'd rather my kids not be part of a culture that think terms like 'fuckwad', 'shitcock' (or whatever Penny Arcade/Kevin Smith phrase is used for laughs) are acceptable.
Last edit: 21 Feb 2012 17:51 by Mr. White.
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