Because its not just about egos, either the aggressors' or the victim's. Its about a person being devalued on something other than the basis of their merits. The default position of women in tech, wrongly, is less than the position of men. A woman's opinion, more often than not, will be over scrutinized even when its correct; a man's opinion, more often than not, will stand over that woman's opinion even when he's incorrect. If the playing field were even I would have some sympathy for your views, but such as things are, I have none.

I believe that there are specialized organisations and laws that deal with gender specific discrimination. Every post of mine has not even touched that area of the debate and doesn't even try.

We're not talking about weathering a few infrequent acute incidents, women face those, plus the constant daily reminders of "their place" small and moderate that keeps deeper wounds top-of-mind. Imagine the toll that must take over time. Those women who "give up" as you say, don't do it because they can't keep up with the work, they do it because they become mentally and emotionally exhausted over dealing with the discrimination while simultaneously realizing that change won't come quickly enough.

I just realized what is the cause of the dissonance between me and the rest of the people here. Different cultures. I do not share the "American" emotion based culture.

Am I correct? Am I talking to people here, who are immersed in the American Culture? Please, tell me, so that I do not have to make baseless assumptions. I might be onto something here.

I just realized what is the cause of the dissonance between me and the rest of the people here. Different cultures. I do not share the "American" emotion based culture.

Am I correct? Am I talking to people here, who are immersed in the American Culture? Please, tell me, so that I do not have to make baseless assumptions. I might be onto something here.

No, it is not correct. I thought about making this a private warning, but since you publicly asked for the details, I'll make it a public comment.

It is possibly because of cultural differences, but I don't think that is the problem. Several of your comments are bluntly offensive. Your region may tolerate it, but most of the English-speaking language does not.

* Just go. Go away. You clearly have no reason to be arguing over here.

* Dude, you do not share the same thought-space as I do. Only I know what I know and if I really heat up that thought-space, I might even know, what I don't know.

* Dude, you need to work on your reading comprehension, before spinning some wild strawmen.

* A failure is not someone who f*** up or messes up something.

The forum's posting guidelines prohibit insults and personal attacks. Offensive language is sometimes permitted but should never be directed toward other members.

Others of your comments show a lack of understanding:

* Game needs to be decent and needs to have proper advertising. That's it. Only reason why the popular "one-archetype" games sell is that these games are advertised more.

* There is no protecting to be done. Once you start protecting someone, you become a part of the problem itself. There is no point in protecting the victims. None. The victims are the products of their own choices. ... Yea, lets not blame the kid for yoloing down from the highest branch of the tree and through the process breaking a leg, let's blame the gravity instead of, I dunno, chastising the kid for not posessing enough common knowledge to make the obvious decision NOT to swagger down from somewhere, where harm is most likely to follow.

* So, instead of comforting the victims of the system, we should shun anyone who posesses the nerves to quit trying.

For the first of these bullet points, that is an extremely oversimplified world view. You accuse others of setting up strawmen, which are building your own weak or false interpretation of their statements and then knocking it over, but then you do the same thing. That is a false depiction of the game industry, which you then use as the basis of your argument.

For the other two, victim blaming gets complex. As a very popular example, women and their clothing in cases of sexual violence. Yes, there is a small amount of blame in some cases; wearing a micro/miniskirt to an environment with known sexual predators is foolish to say the least, but that doesn't mean they should be blamed for the crime. Another, dressing well and flashing money while traveling through a crime-ridden poor area is foolish to say the least, but that doesn't mean the person who flashed their money should be blamed for the crime. There is plenty of blame to go around, but the person who commits the crime IS the person who committed the crime.

Shunning the women who are sometimes attacked and sometimes abused and sometimes harassed, suggesting "we should shun" them, is absolutely a form of blaming the victim. We absolutely can create games that cater to a genre or fantasy without creating a bad workplace environment. Sadly, unlawful discrimination and harassment are very real problems. (I make a point to call out unlawful discrimination, because the word has multiple meanings; lawful discrimination, or recognizing the difference between things, is necessary, unlawful discrimination through prejudice, bigotry, or intolerance is unjust.) Recommendations that we shun people because of the don't want to be harassed is inappropriate.

Getting back on topic...

It is a complex thing. Entertainment industries in general and games specifically are often confused by outsiders, where the products made are sometimes improperly a reflection on the people who made them.

We, as an industry, have products that feed fantasies. Yes, we have chess and checkers and go and bejeweled, games that feed non-realistic fantasies. Some games fill gender-specific and sometimes adult-specific fantasy. There are fantasy worlds like The Sims that cater to certain types of fantasies. Fantasies of Legend of Zelda where the hero is a male wandering the world often on behalf of a captured princess. There are games like Modern Warfare that appeal to others, fantasy worlds like World of Warcraft that appeal to others, fantasy worlds like Spiro that appeal to others, fantasy worlds like Mario that appeal to others. Those are products. Yes, there are games where the fantasies they project are sexist, racist, whatever-phobic, vulgar, profane, sexual, and more, just like there are books and movies and other entertainment products that cater to certain fantasies. The appropriateness of the fantasy worlds is an appropriate area for discussion, people often debate about books and other media that contain explicit material or violent material or degrading material. The debate on the harm of porn has gone on for ages. Movies you hear it constantly, that the roles Tom Cruise plays are insulting to women, and how James Bond is a degrading womanizer, and can only reply "Yup, that's the character." Books like "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Gone With The Wind" caused discussion about slavery that is important to have. You can discuss games where kids commit murder in a style similar to adult-rated games or adult-rated movies, and follow it down paths of parenting and appropriateness of adult-targeted media. You can have discussion on stress relief, physical rehabilitation, education, and social behavior. Discussing that common themes in society may be harmful or beneficial can both lend themselves to societal improvement.

That does not mean that as an industry we should treat our co-workers without respect. The products and the process are different worlds. You can build a violent game like The Godfather without building a mafia-like environment in your business. You can build a game like Mortal Kombat without beheading co-workers. You can build a sexual game like BMX-XXX without degrading and insulting the females at the studio. Even an extreme game like the Japanese game RapeLay can be made without discriminating against workers in the studio. The process of making games is an office business environment that can be free of discrimination, even if the fantasy product they are making is offensive or aggressive against a group. But unfortunately, like most workplaces there are elements of harassment and unlawful discrimination in the workplace. Many women are harassed. Many older people, starting around age 40, are discriminated against. Many workplaces have discrimination against minorities hired at the business. Those problems are separate from the depictions inside the fantasy worlds. Just look back a few decades ago at the monolithic Disney Animation Studios where, during an age where such discrimination was everywhere, women and racial minorities were forbidden from working the main animation jobs. The groups could be secretaries, or janitors, or assorted laborers, but never animators and painters. Fortunately that practice has changed. It is appropriate to discuss and correct similar problems in today's workplace.

It is definitely a complex issue made up of multiple issues with no simple solution.

I believe that there are specialized organisations and laws that deal with gender specific discrimination. Every post of mine has not even touched that area of the debate and doesn't even try.

That begs the question of what conversation you think you're having here. Everyone else is talking about exactly that, and what can be done to change the culture that supports said discrimination.

I just realized what is the cause of the dissonance between me and the rest of the people here. Different cultures. I do not share the "American" emotion based culture.

Am I correct? Am I talking to people here, who are immersed in the American Culture? Please, tell me, so that I do not have to make baseless assumptions. I might be onto something here

Cultural differences could certainly impact how one perceives the issue. In general, the East and the West treat work-life quite differently.

But I certainly don't think people's emotional well-being is overvalued here -- valued more than in the workforce of other places in the world surely -- but not given an undue amount of concern. I don't think that's any kind of excuse for discrimination though, nor for dismissing the discrimination that does occur.

It is definitely a complex issue made up of multiple issues with no simple solution.

This ^.

IMO, these are some but not all of the problems, and both sides ('feminism' vs. others) have them:

• GamerGame lame death and rape threats. This shouldn't have happened at all. Shame on them.
• Sarkissian pointing out legacy games that people have been fond of as 'wrong' or worthy of a critique just for displaying damsels in distress. It's a bad move. There are damsels in distress, there have always been. Showing a damsel in distress doesn't make you sexist. She should've just picked the blatant ones like Duke Nukem, for example.
• Certain men who felt 'threatened' at the presence of women in their domain of work, and somehow felt less masculine when some women show higher mental/physical prowess than them.
• Certain women who felt they got discredited at work simply because they are women. This varies stories by stories, but I suspect that some of them were really just because they proposed a Bad Idea that just got rejected simply because they were bad ideas. It's kind of like if you are the minority race in the population, then you could see all actions against you as racist. There are racist responses, but not all of them.
• Women are not immune to mistakes and errors. Getting drunk and passed out on the street is always idiotic. Kind of like leaving the front door to your house open all week, but claim innocence when your stuff got stolen. Sure the robbers are wrong for robbing things, but you are also at fault for being stupid. There are contributory negligence at play here.

The irony of all this: aren't we all playing damsels in distress here, the very same idea that we are trying to minimize? "Oh look, there are injustices toward women, we should all save them!" If you truly believe in gender equality, then treat the gender the same. If these were to happen to men, where are all the noise?

I just realized what is the cause of the dissonance between me and the rest of the people here. Different cultures. I do not share the "American" emotion based culture.

Am I correct? Am I talking to people here, who are immersed in the American Culture? Please, tell me, so that I do not have to make baseless assumptions. I might be onto something here.

It is possibly because of cultural differences, but I don't think that is the problem.

I can confirm that Ironmaggot is just as offensive if the cultural and linguistic focus is non-American. For example German.

That begs the question of what conversation you think you're having here. Everyone else is talking about exactly that, and what can be done to change the culture that supports said discrimination.

My original goal was about, how to shatter the illusion that game development is supposedly "men's bussiness", when it is like any other bussiness, where "initiative takes the cake".

Since the status quo way of solving it didn't please me (because it was basically training helplessness), I proposed a way to reach the same goal, without a single risk of training helplessness.

Cultural differences could certainly impact how one perceives the issue. In general, the East and the West treat work-life quite differently.

But I certainly don't think people's emotional well-being is overvalued here -- valued more than in the workforce of other places in the world surely -- but not given an undue amount of concern. I don't think that's any kind of excuse for discrimination though, nor for dismissing the discrimination that does occur.

Well, here's the difference. Emotional well-being recieves no attention here. Everyone is expected to keep their emotions to themselves and deal with them on their own in their free time.

So, anyone who experiences harassment knows all too well that they won't recieve any help by just sitting and wailing. They must take up the initiative themselves to solve it. Thanks to the harsh reality, they do. Thus, any potential harasser is not likely to harass at all, since they know that the target will not just sit and take it.

Now we know how things work over here. Perhaps it would be beneficial to implement something similar? The low value of emotions can stay here. I don't expect this kind of thinking to fly well in western circles. But we can deduce that the core principle that makes it work is "initiative". So, my proposal is to train initiative, initiative for people to take care of their own problems the moment they arise. Train them to not accept BS from anyone. Etc.

[spoiler]
Teach them to think: I need no feminism, I need only my own strength and wit. :p
[/spoiler]

The irony of all this: aren't we all playing damsels in distress here, the very same idea that we are trying to minimize? "Oh look, there are injustices toward women, we should all save them!" If you truly believe in gender equality, then treat the gender the same. If these were to happen to men, where are all the noise?

No, we don't need to save the women, we need to stop perpetrating the injustices, and stop even tacitly supporting those who do.

The irony of all this: aren't we all playing damsels in distress here, the very same idea that we are trying to minimize? "Oh look, there are injustices toward women, we should all save them!" If you truly believe in gender equality, then treat the gender the same. If these were to happen to men, where are all the noise?

No, we don't need to save the women, we need to stop perpetrating the injustices, and stop even tacitly supporting those who do.

Contradiction:

As far as I know the stopping of the perpetration of injustices still falls under the act of saving someone, a whole bunch of someones.

The irony of all this: aren't we all playing damsels in distress here, the very same idea that we are trying to minimize? "Oh look, there are injustices toward women, we should all save them!" If you truly believe in gender equality, then treat the gender the same. If these were to happen to men, where are all the noise?

No, we don't need to save the women, we need to stop perpetrating the injustices, and stop even tacitly supporting those who do.

I'd like to offer a different perspective here. Games are essentially about fantasy and doing things you normally cannot or would not do. A lot of games are essentially about gratuitous killing (be it demons, orcs or even other humans).
Still, I don't play games because I want to reinforce my mass murder tendencies or am too afraid to kill in real life and I'm looking for an outlet. I would never willingly do it in real life.

If I'd actually believed removing one thing from games would help to remove it from real life, I'd rather say we go with killing and try to deal with sexism in some other way. But I don't think either would really work.

However, I also think that is a different kind of discussion that does derail the thread.