I just had an interaction with one of the female authors at rock paper shotgun prior to learning about this scandal. I had written a complaint that many of her 's.exe' articles come off as man hating, and the sympathy that I have towards the subject of misogyny is somewhat put off when the author is immediately on the attack because of the pipework in my pants. There are plenty of guys out there who are decent people. The Internet is full of jerks. I don't know what I can do about that.
And for all of the complaints about misogyny, don't we all have stories about female gamers getting special treatment? Is that also misogyny? I have seen so many alleged female gamers getting handouts in so many games, treated like royalty merely because they are a rare occurrence, and happily surrounded by males drooling over them. More often than not, I have seen them exploit this, eat it up, revel in it, and at the expense of others. Some might say, "well, since men exploit women in games, no sympathy if they exploit men, too." All right, let's just admit everybody is exploiting everyone else as if they were part of the game.
I used to play a night elf female in World of Warcraft a) easy on the eyes and b) everyone let me play in their groups and gave me free stuff. I never said I was a female (because I'm male), but by the time I quit, rumor went around that I was taking a break due to pregnancy.
I let that stand because it was so damned hilarious. Guys can be really stupid when the fantasy of a female in the group is in their minds.
When I create characters in RPG's, I invariably create beautiful women because, frankly a 60 hour journey through the bowels of hell needn't be hard on the eyes. I don't want to look at a male character busting out of his armor when I can do the exact same thing and have it be female. Does that make me some kind of pig? I don't think so. I consider myself well-adjusted. And with that said, I think that women should be able to do the same thing. If they want to have some kind of muscle-man or whatever as what they get to stare at for 60 hours, so be it. Have at it. It's a harmless thing, and I don't think that we need to be handing out digital breast reductions and baggy armor loot to combat misogyny. And if we are going to go that route, then don't be a hypocrite about it and apply that logic to music, movies, and every other part of your life where people enjoy and use their own sexuality because they are human. My digital ample-breasted skyrim character is of no concern- I hope!- to any woman out there on the Internet. And by the way ladies who may or may not be reading this, just because we create some kind of fantasy female in our games is not a statement about you. It's not a criticism about you.
It's not about you! You are fine just the way you are. It's only a fantasy. "So that's what you like!" No, men like well-adjusted, sane, decent human beings of all packages. It's going to be okay. If you feel there is a race to some kind of ideal, that's part of the propaganda, it's not the reality. That's like saying all men should be worried that our women are going to run away with sparkle vampires.
So addressing the scandal at hand, the tragic thing is, all of the true pigs on the Internet now have a specific incident in mind when they will accuse women of getting special treatment. And the fact that these allegations include the big gaming news sites that have been all about manufacturing sentiment against the word "gamer" for their own clickbait purposes makes it all the more difficult to advance the cause they claim to care about.
Your outrage meter is your own, but, I think we can at least have some measure of sympathy for the people who paid money to enter their games into this alleged rigged competition. That isn't right. If this extends to the journalistic side and the articles that get written, that's not right also. And people have a right to be outraged.
The other stuff about who did what, who was banging whom, it starts to get amusing at that point. It's beyond absurd. I don't condone the personal harassment, the showing up at the houses, the apartments, ddos'ing, doxx'ing, all that stuff needs to stop. It looks like the major characters in the story were all playing a very dangerous game, and it went nuclear at the end.
I'm sure we haven't heard the last of this story.
