Tropes v Women In Video Games is under troll attack

I’ve mentioned the Tropes vs Women in Video Games kickstarter project before, along with the FeministFrequency series of 101-level videos about feminist concepts as regards popular culture. These videos, by the way, are excellent — they’re so excellent, in fact, that they’re even used in schools. The kickstarter exists to help keep FeministFrequency making new videos, as well as to fund the concerted research and time spent on this specific video that FemFreq is making.

In taking on this topic, however, it seems she’s stumbled onto the hornet’s nest of misogyny that is the online video game community.

As some of you may be aware, this project has recently been subject to a coordinated online harassment effort waged by various online video game forums vowing to “take me down”. I always expect a certain level of harassment when discussing gender issues online. This time however, it’s a more organized and sustained effort than I’ve experienced before.

The intimidation and harassment effort has included a torrent of misogyny and hate speech on my YouTube video, repeated vandalizing of the Wikipedia page about me, organized efforts to flag my YouTube videos as “terrorism”, as well as many threatening messages sent through Twitter, Facebook, Kickstarter, email and my own website. These messages and comments have included everything from the typical sandwich and kitchen “jokes” to threats of violence, death, sexual assault and rape. All that plus an organized attempt to report this project to Kickstarter and get it banned or defunded. Thankfully, Kickstarter has been incredibly supportive in helping me deal with the harassment on their service.

There’s a terrible, terrible screenshot of the sort of misogyny her Youtube video promoting this kickstarter has been getting. I know, I know, Youtube comments are like one of the major nexuses of hatred on the internet, owing mostly to the extremely low bar for commenting and the ubiquity of the website itself, but still.

An example:

so you’re a bolshevik feminist jewess that hates White people and does website design for Tim Wise extremist platform and you expect to be taken seriously when you’re “critique-ing” video games.

fucking ovendodger.

— haploguy

Or:

NO1 WANT TO PLAY A GAME STARRING A FAT UGLY LESBIAN WOMAN ITS JUST THE TRUTH

— Nyberg93

Or how about:

Fucking downvoted and flagged for terrorism. Dumb ass nazi cunt.

— BoxxyizQueen (gee, that’s a tell)

That’s not even to mention the myriad instances of “tits or gtfo” or “back in the kitchen”. It’s not like those comments are unique to feminist videos anyway.

I happen to think this bullshittery is an excellent reason to go give her lots and lots of money. The project closes June 16th.

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Tropes v Women In Video Games is under troll attack
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20 thoughts on “Tropes v Women In Video Games is under troll attack

  1. 1

    Have you ever had one of those crises of identity where you don’t know if you’re a feminist for sincere ideological reasons or simply because you despise common mouth-breathing, sh!tsucking twittish ignornance like this?

    Donated. Thank you.

  2. 4

    My friend linked me to this Kickstarter project soon after it was created – he found out about it due to some haters talking about it on a certain imageboard. I was really impressed with it but wondering if it would meet the goal. When I found out today that she, in fact, raised *over 500% of the goal*, I was so delighted. I decided to add some money to the pile on behalf of me and my friend.

    I wish her the best.

  3. 5

    I’ve read about people raising money for human rights campaigns when the Westboro Baptist Church has its “protests”. Would something like this work in the Internet world, perhaps against organized YouTube trolling and Wikipedia vandalism?

  4. 6

    Flagged for terrorism? Are these people fucking out of their minds? If anyone is doing terrorism here, it’s you, asshat #102,573,806.

  5. 7

    I played Team Fortress 2 for a couple of months recently.
    Disgusting community.

    There are no limits to the amount of sexism, homophobia, racism nationalism and every other kind of bigotry that goes on in these gaming networks. It actually seems to be a contest to see who can be the most cooly, casually offensive.

    I was banned from one board for simply and politely suggesting that these things were uncool. “That’s how we LIKE it” was the reply from everyone including the Admins. (Along with the tired “it’s the internet, get used to it, faggot” comments.)

    Frankly I see it as a community beyond saving and not worth it anyway. We just need to find a way to keep them in the game and not let them out into the real world.

    (hmmm. maybe there’s a sci-fi novel idea in this somewhere…)

  6. 9

    @almostambl – when I was a teenager I couldn’t grasp separatism. I thought “Men aren’t that bad”, so why live. without them?

    I’m in my mid-thirties now, and think teenage me was a silly girl. Separatism seems to make more sense every year.

  7. 10

    Looks like they’ve just realised there are girls (ew) among them that are ‘pretending’ to be boys! They could have actually been talking to them as if they were an equal!! It’s like the old guys who complain when they see men with long hair or women in suits because it makes it so hard for them to figure out which ones they are supposed to be discriminating against.

  8. 11

    Re my previous comment. Sorry seem to have jumped off track on an irrelevant tangent and crashed. This is why I usually read carefully the post before jumping in to comment, because when I don’t I embarrass myself.

  9. 12

    How does someone decide to be that kind of person? Do they wake up one day and say to themselves; “I want to be just as stupid as I am ignorant. I want to make a monument of my malicious bigotry so that all the world will see just how bad a human being can get; how low he can go; how pathetic he can become. I want to be a living festering bloodfart, naked to the world and swilling with the juice of all things dense and terrible! I will make my mother so ashamed that she will have no choice but to be proud. Unable to see what i do, all that love me will somehow contrive to think otherwise when they witness my body, my speech, and the very aura of filth that surrounds me wherever I go. I will be a living, walking, breathing testament to the power of dissonance reduction as people witness the pile of putrid pig puss that i am rolling into the room and, lacking all other resources, tell themselves that I am beauty. Smell my love!”

  10. 14

    Frankly I see it as a community beyond saving and not worth it anyway. We just need to find a way to keep them in the game and not let them out into the real world.

    But that’s the thing, they ARE out in the real world, and they’re not some separate community, they are average everyday people. They’re just abusing their anonymity.

  11. 15

    Frankly I see it as a community beyond saving and not worth it anyway.

    Oh yeah. Most gaming communities need to be burned down to the ground. Hopefully with all the gamers still locked in inside whatever rat hole they were spawned in.

    Gamers are why I give no credence to the awkward nice guy bit. That racist asshole is the one who’s been getting a raw deal? I call bullshit.

  12. 19

    […] Trolls. They’ve come out from under their bridges. Mostly they are nasty individuals who use the relative anonymity of the interwebz to abuse people They can be easy to ignore – don’t feed them by responding – but occasionally they get properly personal; sometimes they really get frightening and start breaking all kinds of laws. […]

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