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Anita Sarkeesian ends web series that rocked the world of gaming Anita Sarkeesian breaks down the way video games portray women as "exotic" fantasies. So it’s easy to see how two people might sit through the same Sarkeesian presentation and think “This completely matters” and “This doesn’t matter at all.”. I actually had to learn a lot about video games in the process of making this.” (Correction - 8/13/16: The clip was from 2010, not 2011. An NYU security guard stood in front of the audience, watchful, as she spoke. “It actually isn’t equal.” Her view of how women are seen in much of society and culture is fundamental to her arguments: “Women are thought of and represented as sexual objects to be used by and for the sexual pleasure of others in society, and men are not viewed that way. Gamergate is a response to radical feminist Anitra Sar-somethingorother complaining about games that do not have Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs Women in Video Games Friends of Freethought: Video Game Adaptations: A leap of faith in ignoring non-gamers? I saw her trying to draw clear lines all throughout her NYU talk, and I could sense what a fraught endeavor that was. Sarkeesian never acknowledged the security, and she only briefly mentioned the online harassment she’s received for her work. Under her breath she added: “I don’t even know if I want to say that now, but whatever.”, She said she’d “bought into the bogus myth that, in order to be a real gamer, you had to be playing GTA or Call of Duty or God of War or other testosterone-infused macho posturing games which often had a sexist, toxic culture that surrounded them. “Motion capture and animations for female characters often have them looking like they’re walking down a runway at a fashion show,” she said. I immediately wanted to hear what she had to say, astonished at her bravery. She has certainly been critical of the interactivity that leads players to rescuing damsels in distress, but if, say, developers changed many of the Eight Things she requested in her talk, it wouldn’t make games play differently, if at all. “It’s very much like one step forward, two steps back,” she said. Anita Sarkeesian saved me from abandoning the medium I now want to base my career on. Anita Sarkeesian to create new series looking at masculinity in video games New, 361 comments By Ross Miller @ohnorosco Jan 26, 2015, 2:12pm EST YouTube is where I found my middle ground. “When I say that media matters and has an influence on our lives, I’m not saying it’s a 1:1 correlation or a monkey-see, monkey-do situation,” she said, “but rather that media’s influence is subtle and helps to shape our attitudes, beliefs and values for better and for worse. The community sent her death threats, doxed her, and even sent her images of her being raped by video game characters. I’d previously reported about a bomb threat against Sarkeesian’s GDC acceptance speech nearly a year prior. She’s blamed for ‘ruining’ every game release with a hint of a decent female characterisation since 2012. The first TvW video has 47 thousand dislikes to 15 thousand likes. She is the founder of Feminist Frequency, a website that hosts videos and commentary analyzing portrayals of women in popular culture. Introduction To Medics Sport- What’s The difference? “Just give players more diverse options. Her list was brand new. How do we truly determine the impact of the characters we see or control on how we relate to those characters or view the world? The added protection, I was told, was “the result of NYU Public Safety’s extensive security audit of the situation,” though NYU did not specify, despite my asking, if they were there in response to any specific threats. This is not a new topic. As Sarkeesian pointed to fan-art that imagined Team Fortress 2's cast as being all women I thought about her position as an advocate. She made fifteen-year-old me feel allowed to love video games, and let me ignore the men that still- to this day- try to force me out of this community. ), Have female characters of various body types. Anita Sarkeesian brings Tropes vs. Women in Video Games to a close "This is one of the most emotionally complicated projects I've ever created." Russian Oligarchs And An American Invasion: Stories Of The Transfer…, The Story Of Notts County’s Season So Far, Nottingham Forest 1-0 Derby County: Spoils Shared In East Midlands…. We’re so excited to announce that the Games and Online Harassment Hotline is officially launching on August 3, 2020. In response to Sarkeesian’s thoughtful critique of games she clearly loved, the community sent her death threats, doxed her, and even sent her images of her being raped by video game characters. Her work as a media critic, public speaker, and producer who thrives at the intersection of digital culture, accessibility, and social justice helped create a new lexicon … Shorter version, if you just want the list of the list of what she says are "Eight things developers can do to make games less shitty for women", paraphrased from my notes... not that a lot of this pertain to action games and probably make more sense if you're thinking about first and third-person shooters, the Arkham games, and stuff like that: “Fixing this is, of course, incredibly easy,” she said when talking about games that may have several playable protagonists but offer few, if any, who are women. 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