Lyrailis wrote:
Criminy wrote:
IDrownFish of the Seven Seas wrote:
idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
Also, really? Someone rated down the post with the DG talk linked? Rating down my posts because you disagree with what I'm saying is one thing, but the post linking to a talk by a Lead Designer for one of the few game studios that actually has representation for women on the design team, given at one of the biggest game design conferences in the country, to a room full of his peers working in game design, about the state of sexuality and sexualization in game design is beneath people's time.
I judge whoever rated that down so hard.
Someone got butthurt and went through the entire thread downvoting
everything from page 2 on. Even comments that have nothing to do with the current discussion.
Edit: I fixed it.
Edited, Jan 29th 2014 10:17pm by IDrownFish Yeah I saw that. Wonder who had their cheerios pissed on...
Maybe Kavekk because he got rated to default on that one post of his?
Thanks, Fishy. Because honestly, even if you think I'm a mouth-breathing load of crap, that talk is REALLY worth listening to (if you have the time). Gaider approaches topics from both the business perspective and the end-user experience, as well as the general social equality angle. So it makes the entire presentation super accessible.
And I doubt it was Kavekk. He lives to troll, it doesn't seem like his style.
Quote:
I live in a high context culture. That's something like being trapped in an episode of Criminal Minds, where everything must be analyzed for meaning beyond the word themselves. It can get annoying, but it is habit now. The first things that I see in this sentence are that you have labels in your cause, and you treat them as titles. You could have simply said "someone" but to you they aren't, you identify them by their role "an Ally" but they're depersonalized because you don't use pronouns or common language.
Labels are generally used in social justice discussions to help set common points of understanding, to move forward from there. "Ally," for instance (while most common to the ***** rights arena), is essentially anyone who is not part of the discriminated group, but has vested interest (either through generally passive support or activism) in advancing the position of that group towards equality.
Because the issues are dynamic, the definitions of labels becomes important, because you need to approach the issue from some kind of common ground, so you don't just end up talking circles around each other.
Misogyny is a good example for feminist literature. I tried to break it down earlier, but I probably didn't do an awesome job, but in feminist literature misogyny is the broad label for cultural systems of oppression by male dominance. This can be as clear and repulsive as rape, it can refer to patriarchal systems with built-in controls (generally systematic, and many aren't
consciously supported), and it can refer to every-day gender policing (frowning down upon women who are "too masculine," men who are too "feminine," etc.)
There's really very little room for argument that the game design industry doesn't fit that definition pretty fully. Women occupy less than 12% of all game design positions in the US, and the testimonial evidence of constant gender policing is immense. Here's the
#1reasonwhy twitter campaign from 2012, here's an article from Kotaku two days ago about a
game designer who had a games reporter sexually harass her on Facebook (the reporter, Josh Mattingly, said he sent those to her drunkenly, and has stepped down from his position to "work on himself").
There's plenty there.
I don't think women are generally getting felt up in their team meetings, or are being asked to exchange sex for promotions (at least, not more than any other industry). I DO think that a system that's incredibly male dominated, particularly in the positions of power, has led to a situation in which under-representation of the female gender has made it that much harder for women to get ahead.
I don't think these guys are intentionally dismissing female candidates; I think they're used to working in a boy's club and they're evaluating candidates from a boy's club perspective, leading them to (unknowingly) rank female applicants lower for the same level of skill. Because you don't just get a job because of your qualifications, you also get it by how well the hiring agent thinks you'll meld with the rest of the group.
Fortunately, I also think that this is a problem that primarily fixes itself as women become more represented in the field, because I don't think most of these guys are ********. I think they're not really aware of the systems that are keeping women out, and I think the office culture naturally changes to be more open to female coworkers as a larger base of female employees exist.
But you still need to get to that point. And the best way to do it is call out the **** where you see it. There's been a big push to do that for the gaming industry in the past few years, and I REALLY hope that continues.
Both for the sake of equality, and for the sake of the industry itself.
