Lego City: Undercover, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, and a discussion about the Tropes vs Women series.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/connectivity/33601
Welcome to Episode 78 of Connectivity! We have two segments for you this week.
Starting the show off is a "What We've Been Playing" segment with Alex, Neal, and Andy. The trio talks about a bunch of current and upcoming games, including Lego City: Undercover, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon.
After that, Carmine, Scott, Kim, and Zack discuss the first video in the Tropes vs Women in Video Games series. The gang covers the initial controversy surrounding the Kickstarter campaign, the content of the first video, and the overall place for a discussion about women in video games. Guaranteed to be divisive or your money back!
That's it for this week. Have some constructive thoughts about the Tropes series? Click here to send 'em in. Also, if you are going to be in Boston for PAX, make sure to hang out with us all weekend and be a part of our live game of "Who Wants to be a Nintendoaire?" on Sunday at 11 am!
There should definitely be somebody out there taking the issue of sexism in games as seriously as Sarkeesian is, but from what I've seen, she isn't the right person to do it.
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But, as with everything on the internet, there have also been enough legitimate complaints about Sarkeesian for me to be wary of her.
and this is the only Kickstarter I've seen where the person got waaaaaaay more money than they needed. It just plants seeds of doubt in my mind.
What about the Penny Arcade guys? Kickstarter is to help fund projects, but they abused Kickstarter to essentially have fans pay just to get rid of ads. At BEST, that violated the spirit of Kickstarter, at worst it flat out violated the rules (specifically: No "fund my life" projects.
Examples include projects to pay tuition or bills, go on vacation, or buy a new camera.) as they were using Kickstarter ONLY to pay their bills but Kickstarter let them get away with it since they get a percentage of all the money raised.
I don't understand holding the "over donation" against her. Is there a way in the Kickstarter system to stop taking pledges once the goal is reached? If not, why is her project discredited based on the amount of money given? Even if there is / was, it seems like some people are bitter that the topic being discussed is important enough to so many people that raising this amount of money was possible in the first place. By the way, good to hear a female voice on the podcast. Hopefully we'll hear more even when sexism isn't the topic.
I don't understand holding the "over donation" against her. Is there a way in the Kickstarter system to stop taking pledges once the goal is reached? If not, why is her project discredited based on the amount of money given? Even if there is / was, it seems like some people are bitter that the topic being discussed is important enough to so many people that raising this amount of money was possible in the first place. By the way, good to hear a female voice on the podcast. Hopefully we'll hear more even when sexism isn't the topic.
Never heard of that until now. But it sucks, and that's the kind of issue I'm getting at here. How do I know that the vast amount of money she got over her goal is not going into personal things? From what I've seen, there's no way to know. Not just with Sarkeesian, but with ANY Kickstarter. For video game Kickstarters, it's a little easier to believe, because I know they cost a lot to develop. But for youtube videos that we know people can do for free? It raises questions and concerns. Like I said, this applies to all Kickstarters (one of the reasons I'm not sure how I feel about them). Sarkeesian's just sticks out because she's been talked about so much, and because her total goes very, very far over her goal.
I think it's reasonable for people who donated to hear how the excess funding will be used. People give because it's a topic that deserves attention, and (I imagine) most people would like to see those gifts put to effective use.
Here's what I would like to see. If this subject is so important (which it is), then I'd like to see sites like NWR and podcasts like this to do more than just have one podcast about Sarkeesian and what she thinks about sexism in games. Do more of your own segments. Have women on the podcasts more often, and not just when you're talking about sexism. Is that not in its own way slightly sexist? We (the site and the commenters) should be more proactive in this discussion on our own, rather than just talking about someone talking about it.
...I think it's reasonable for people who donated to hear how the excess funding will be used. People give because it's a topic that deserves attention, and (I imagine) most people would like to see those gifts put to effective use.
Sarkeesian did add stretch goals. She started with five videos, then she doubled that to 10, then she added two more bonus videos, then she added a free classroom curriculum that she'd create. Since she looks to be doing at least two videos from the Damsels in Distress Trope, we may actually want to double the number of videos she'll produce even though she hasn't promised such. These were multiple stretch goals up to about the $26,000 mark, after which I wonder if she gave up promising additional stretch goals because the donations had exceeded her expectations so much that she had to retool the project completely.
I think it's right to wonder what all that money went to, but I believe that Sarkeesian has stated that this has allowed her Feminist Frequency work to scale up from a side-project to a full-time endeavor. She posted a picture once of a huge pile of physical games she'd bought for research, and it definitely takes a lot of time to actually play through these if we assume the research is in-depth. I know she's also mentioned being able to bring on a dedicated researcher to the project, and hire her producer full-time as well, so evidently this is more than a one-person team. I wouldn't be surprised if she's been able to upgrade her studio space and equipment as well.
And I think Scott said this in the podcast, but the kickstarter's success may have made Sarkeesian extend her timeline and put more work into research and the tone for these. I found some of her previous videos and her opinions a little precipitant, but this latest one seems surprisingly more even-handed and much less pointed. I'm speculating, but this may be the result of a more in-depth and time-consuming research and editorial process due to the money she raised.
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Thank you for spelling that out. I wish that more people/sites who took the time to talk about how much money she raked in would go into half as much detail. I also wish that she had a way to make this kind of information more visible (again, maybe it is somewhere and hasn't been brought to my attention) so that instead of hearing "she mentioned this, wouldn't be surprised about that" people had solid numbers to point to.
There are a couple giant assumptions in this post. Her supporters saw what her current total was when they donated. They saw her added videos and stretch goals, if applicable. What if a significant portion of her donations were simply votes of confidence in the cause behind the kickstarter? Why does it seem like almost all of the criticism I've read of her overflowing response has been from people that seemingly weren't backers themselves?
If what Carmine says is true, and she has al this big stuff planned, then fine.
Here's what I would like to see. If this subject is so important (which it is), then I'd like to see sites like NWR and podcasts like this to do more than just have one podcast about Sarkeesian and what she thinks about sexism in games. Do more of your own segments. Have women on the podcasts more often, and not just when you're talking about sexism. Is that not in its own way slightly sexist? We (the site and the commenters) should be more proactive in this discussion on our own, rather than just talking about someone talking about it.
interesting episode.
I don't have anything against FemFreq or what Anita is doing but I'm kind of disappointed that she doesn't offer anything other than criticism or praise. I think learning how to make and distribute games that hold the values she espouses would be a far more effective way to change the gaming landscape than just teeing off on problems.
I find it interesting how quickly discussions like this are quickly and effortlessly derailed from the topic. Instead of discussions of sexism in games, in this case, or racism or homophobia or other topics along those lines we will jump to all the things surrounding it. We'll talk about who's talking about it, we'll talk about the platform they're using, how anyone could do a better job, how it's not enough, how it's too much, and somehow avoid completely the topic at hand. That's just something to think about. Both in the podcast and in this thread there isn't a lot of discussion of sexism in games.
And I have a major gripe with the podcast talking about being disappointed the comments were turned off. People aren't just making jokes about sandwiches and kitchens. She received hundreds of rape and death threats. You guys just kept talking about the comments and such like people were only doing playful ribbing and that is just not the case. There would be no discussion on the youtube page, it would just be an endless barrage of rape threats. It happens all the time. Whenever people choose to talk up about these sorts of topics large groups of other people respond, not with jokes, but with violent threats, and it's perfectly reasonable for someone to not want to deal with that all day every day of their life.
It's also trivializing to continue to talk about how small a percentage of people do this sort of thing, when it's actually a part of video gaming culture.
The people on the podcast talked at length about how defensive they were at things that aren't even slights. When you have that attitude already you're not going to be a part of anything that gets people to stop issuing rape threats over this kind of stuff. So while not everyone is being that vile, we're all a part of a community that encourages it. We dismiss it as not being a lot of people, we dismiss it as not being that bad, we say people should be forced to deal with it and when confronted about our hobby we get defensive and wont' deal with criticism and that sort of silence works right in conjunction with the not as few people as you want to think who are doing a lot more than just telling her to get back in the kitchen.
