@Asmo

Except my daughter doesn't want to play other games--she wants to play Mario Brothers games. They have excellent game and level design. Why should she have to go elsewhere? Are you trying to say Mario Brothers games not for girls?

All my daughter is asking is to be allowed to play as the Princess--maybe after you free her from Bowser. That doesn't seem like much to ask, as it would have exactly zero effect on gameplay.

Personally, I'd go much farther and say when a game series continuously sends the message that women are helpless victims who need to be defended by men, when they're continuously objectified as trophies to be passed from player to villain and back to player again, then something is very wrong with that game and things need to change. Yeah, other games may be great, but why should that prevent people like Sarkeesian or myself from pointing out the games that aren't? Why should the trend itself not be pointed out when we can find examples of it outside of the Mario series?

No, it's not required that every game have a male/female playable character. It is, however, good business sense not to insult potential female customers of a product by portraying females (playable characters or NPCS) in sexist ways (or homosexual characters in bigoted ways, or ethnic minority characters in racist ways, while we're on the topic). This doesn't seem very difficult to understand and clearly game companies DO understand it because most are making great efforts to be diverse and more realistic in their portrayals of characters. However, just because some are trying doesn't mean we shouldn't point out the bullshit in those that don't. Games like the Mario platformer series, for instance.

You disagree with the way Sarkeesian presents her message... okay. I don't have a problem with that. I think everything you wrote grossly misrepresents what she's saying about games and gamers, but you're entitled to your opinion there.

Moving on... sorry you felt insulted. That was never my intent. But your comments on this issue are written in an extremely emotional manner as if you've somehow been personally wronged. If you don't want people to take it in that manner, you might want to think carefully about the tone your posts on this topic take. I have no idea what that link you provided was supposed to prove, so I'll just leave it alone.

On "Damsel in Distress," it's "your trope" because you've been--throughout this thread--defending it as if it is some bastion of literature that must be preserved. You are quite literally the only person I've ever seen actually try to defend it. And as I said, if it is that dear to you, you can have it. Games will still get made using it.

Other media,though, have long since moved on from it. Take the movie Die Hard as an example. Yeah, the main character's wife gets taken hostage by terrorists and that provides a nice emotional hook to move the plot forward--damsel in distress, right? If it were a game, though, we never would have heard from Holly Gennarro McClane again until Bruce Willis killed all the terrorists. Or maybe a video recording of her would show up after every "boss fight" where she tells John McClane, "Sorry honey, but I'm being kept in another part of the building."

But that's not what happens is it? The character of Holly is central to the plot of the movie and she appears nearly as much as John McClane does. She tries actively to subvert the terrorists by hiding her true identity and by taking responsibility to make sure the hostages are treated well during their captivity.

In other words she's portrayed as a real human being with personal agency throughout the movie.

And that's the point that you seem to be missing. That doesn't happen often in games despite the fact that it does happen in every other form of media (or at least in the examples from media that we generally consider "good"). When we are talking about the "Damsel in Distress" trope in games, THAT is what is being critiqued. Not the fact that someone was kidnapped to provide an emotional hook, but that one particular gender is always targeted and--to add insult to injury--is presented as weak, helpless, and without any agency of their own. They exist for the sole purpose of being rescued.

Thanks for the pro tip, BTW. Had no idea you were a pro at being a patronizing git but I'll take your word for it.

It does mention ethnicity. Let me grab the definition of that for you. "An ethnicity, or ethnic group, is a socially-defined category of people who identify with each other based on common ancestral, social, cultural, or national experience."

Please take a moment to notice that it doesn't mention people who identify with each other based on RELIGION. You cannot define a person's ethnic background with a religion, you simply can't. Muslim people are not a race, nor are they in any way an ethnicity. From the mouth of one of their own religious leaders from the 1200's "A Muslim is a person who has dedicated his worship exclusively to God..."

You can call him Anti-Islamic, but you can't call him racist. Well, you can, but you would be wrong.

@lucky760 The issue I take with what Harris is doing is that whenever he wants to use an example of something that is 'bad', he tends to use an example of something done in the 'muslim world'. There's no argument that there are plenty of bad ideas coming from Islam (which Cenk states several times), but Harris is biased in how he uses his examples (he always seems to dip from the same well), so it seems very clear that he has an agenda. Whether that agenda is to sell books, or for some other reason I don't know.

To understand him better, I would recommend watching more of his video's, you will see what I mean.

The other thing going on here is that Maher has already made up his mind about Islam/Muslims being extrememists before anything is said. You can easily tell this by watching who he interrupts. Ben gets constantly interrupted whenever he tries to say anything - Harris does not - it's just like watching Fox. He's not interesting in listening to reason, he has decided what he believes and if any guest tries to disagree with him then good luck trying to get a full sentence out.

@JiggaJonson are you sure about your definitions? Try reading article 4 of the United Nations Human Rights "International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination". I'll put the important part of their definition of racial descrimination here for you.

it includes "all propaganda and all organizations which are based on ideas or theories of superiority of one race or group of persons of one colour or ethnic origin"

The important part there is that it includes ethnicity, and there is no distinction between the two. So in essence, those trying to call out @billpayer for using the term incorrectly... have not educated themselves on what the term means.

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CERD.aspx

So did all those encounters with white people end badly or something? You make it sound like being white and holding a position of power immediately makes that person a racist. How is that not racist towards white people? Should a white person feel guilty for applying to and getting an affluent job? When I was a teenager I remember apply for a job each summer at the local 7/11 and other local shops. I distinctly remember the 7/11 manager would only hire Middle-Eastern employees and another store only hired Asian employees. I remember thinking how discriminating this was but managed to move on and eventually found a job elsewhere.

What about the hiring of visible minorities over potentially more qualified non-minorities just because there is a mandate to achieve a certain level of ethnic diversity in order to be considered an equal opportunity employer? How is that not racist towards white people?

As was mentioned by another poster above, racism is not a trait limited to white people. Personally, my parents brought me up to judge people as individuals, by how they act and treat others.

Can be, yeah, although apparently it's still a legal definition under English law.

But even if it wasn't, it still strikes me as odd to tag a video of a crime with the ethnicity of the person committing it.

Imagine the (justifiable) outrage if someone tagged a video "black" just because there was a black guy getting arrested in it?

It is not a white problem, it is a human race problem. Every ethnicity has racism towards others. I refuse to allow people, whose only real knowledge of racism is what they've been taught by professors who make a living off 'white guilt', to label my race as inherently the only racist one based off of what happened almost 150 years ago.

Are there white racists? Hell yes! There are also Hispanic racists, Asian racists, and Black racists. Every culture fears and has stereotypes about other cultures that are not logical, but are ingrained into their sub-conscious from the moment they learn how to listen. If you have ever been to Japan, you learn very quick that there is a undercurrent of racism that is extremely strong. Same in the Middle East, same in many parts of Africa.

Is it fair to only label white people as racists when most of the people living today do not come from a family that owned slaves, or in some cases were close to slaves themselves? Half of my family came over to this country from Germany and immediately went to work in the coal mines, paying a huge chunk of their wages to the company store to subsist. The other half came from Italy and were also relegated to the poor jobs that no one wanted. I am 100% certain that they were scared and racist towards other races, because everyone is scared of the unknown. You grow out of it over time and the mixing of cultures.

Or uncomfortably on the nose (ethnic pun intended).

You make a point to be sure. And it is clearly being ignored. Regardless of how it came to the point, the USA for sure would go absolutely insane, and declare war on the attackers, as well as one or two of their so called friends.

We already saw this in 9/11. We saw a conflict that required far too long to come to an inconclusion. We also saw it used, politically, as motivation to launch an additional war against someone else. I might add, that I suspect many people would consider both efforts to have been unsuccessful.

The situation in Palestine seems far more similar to the situation with the Native Americans some time ago. Land theft and ethnic cleansing by virtue of superior technology and a racial superiority complex and an unwillingness on the natives' part to just roll over. I would have hoped that we had learned something since then.

I would

I do understand that the purpose of Godwin's law is to reduce the worst kinds of hyperbole, and that's exactly what I'm trying to do.

Whatever you think about Israel's policies regarding the Palestinians, referring to it as extermination only shows that you haven't taken the time to understand anything about the current conflict and you are just reacting emotionally to the terrible horror of war. Extermination is the total elimination of a certain population by killing, and such an action is so far beyond the state of oppression we see in Gaza today that I just can't take your comparison seriously.

The only way you bother to support these outlandish statements is by telling me that death is death - no matter what the cause - as if that mindless tautology is enough to render two wildly different sets of circumstances and tactics equivalent.

Should we also call all murders murders and not bother to make distinctions between first degree, second degree, involuntary manslaughter, etc? Should we treat the serial killer the same as the drunken brawler who hit someone too hard in a bar fight?

Of course not. As thinking people we analyze factors such as intent, quantity, severity, remorse, and perhaps most importantly, we consider what measures can possibly be taken to correct the underlying cause. All of these elements are wildly different in the different degrees of murders, and having an honest grasp of these differences helps us understand how we as a society should react to each degree, both in terms of punishment and rehabilitation.

To similar ends, it is very important that we consider analogous distinctions in the different degrees of atrocities between nations or ethnic groups. The fact that it is obvious that I would much rather be in Gaza today than a concentration camp in 1943 is very much so relevant to this sort of analysis. The fact that there is no Israeli intent to exterminate the Palestinians is also relevant.

But if you want to leave the depth of your understanding at "dead is dead" then I guess that's your choice.

Yes, I think we understand that, and we think it's fucked up.

The other point Jon made is where are you expected to run ?
Do I need to remind you that Israel shelled children playing on the beach and missile attacked a U.N. hospital and school.
The whole city is surrounded, under seige, being systematically destroyed, and no one is allowed to leave.

Strategic Ethnic cleansing. War crimes.

I realize everyone is foaming at the mouth and positive of what happened here, but it should be noted that Israel denies hitting the hospital, and that the United Nations had not confirmed the source of the blasts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/25/world/middleeast/despite-talk-of-a-cease-fire-no-lull-in-gaza-fighting.html?_r=0

Everyone wants to paint Israel like this giant monster, but things are being way overstated. Let's get serious. If Israel was embarking on a program of "ethnic cleansing" they could easily kill every last person in Gaza. Seems clear enough to anyone that this is not what they're trying to do.

If Hamas was in Mexico shooting rockets at Texas half the people shouting genocide at Israel would be wearing little yellow ribbons hoping our soldiers all come back safe from our Mexican invasion.

I have a hard time imagining, or believing, that anyone purposely bombed a hospital full of children. But I can easily believe accidents of all kinds will happen in a battleground the size of Detroit.

I definitely agree with you on the democracy point - my whole post was mostly an attempt to explain what I perceive to be the main factors that drive Israeli democracy toward the oppression we see over the Palestinians. The nutters on the hilltop have very little influence on this drive, but the combined forces of Jewish nationalism and protective insulation go a long way toward making these policies successful in Israel's free and democratic society.

I guess, then, in an extremely limited respect I agree with you on the 4th reich thing just because of the comparison between complacent German citizens who were only patriotic and insulated from the realities of Jewish suffering and Jews who are only patriotic and insulated from the realities of Palestinian suffering.

That being said, using the term "Fourth Reich" doesn't illuminate this sort of nuance and instead it accuses Israel of many extremes of which it is not guilty. For example Nazi Germany was guilty of a truly unprecedented campaign to methodically exterminate vast populations based on their ethnicity, and they were literally bent on world domination - I have many harsh criticisms for Israel, but if you think that Israel's conduct can be reasonably compared to that then you are delusional.

In a similar vein, while I do think that Gaza in many ways is the world's largest prison, it is not in any way comparable to Nazi concentration camps. I would much rather live in present day Gaza than be in a Nazi concentration camp, for one, and secondly I think that Israel's policy towards Gaza can better be described as one of control and marginalization, whereas the Nazi's goals with concentration camps was straight up efficient extermination.

So long story short, don't fall prey to the "reductio ad hitlerum" fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum) and make a more careful comparison between Israel's and Nazi Germany's respective civilian populations and I'd be more inclined to agree with your point.

No, instead the perpetuate a state sponsored version of history that says the palestinians willingly left their homes when Israel was founded, ignoring the terror campaign instituted that made them want to leave their homes, ignoring the hundreds of thousands that were literally forced out at gun point. Instead they force their children to participate in a generations long campaign of ethnic cleansing. Instead they relocate their families to settlements, thereby implicating them in war crimes. No, they don't use suicide bombers, they just use bombers. That way they can go back over and over again.

I'm not saying the Palestinians make good neighbours. I am saying that Israel makes for a horrible neighbour.

This situation is sad and ironic.

The area known as Judea was renamed Palestine during the time of Roman emperor Hadrian.
The residents of Judea/Palestine were forced to convert from Judaism to Christianity around 400 ad by the Romans, and later in the 700's ad were forced to convert to Islam.
They never left. They just changed religions. The children of the Jews of the new testament, are the Palestinians of today (now practicing Islam).

Many years passed, the Eastern Roman empire resided over much of the area, ruled out of Turkey, and the region was more or less all-right. Along the way it changed names to the Ottoman empire.

After WW1, the Ottoman empire shrank dramatically, and renamed itself to simply Turkey. However it still held some lands that were not actually Turkish (eg. ~Syria), and was still a mini-empire.
Around this general time period, Palestine became a British colony.

During WW2, there were many displaced Europeans of Jewish faith that had nowhere to go.
(*Britain didn't want them either, most places didn't. Anti-Semitism was rather common at the time. Even the Nazi eugenics policy wasn't much criticized at the time. re: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Supporters_and_critics. Actually, the Nazi's strong association with anti-semitism + all the anti-Nazi propaganda during WW2, helped cure a lot of anti-semitism in Europe.).
In the late 1940's Britain split occupied Palestine into smaller-Palestine+Israel, and assisted in relocating WW2 displaced Europeans of Jewish faith to Israel. Which at face value made sense, because "the bible says Jews are from Judea". However the area from which was established Israel was more or less ~devoid of followers of the Jewish faith in the 1940's.
And that's the irony! The British creation of Israel involved taking land from Palestinians (i.e. The children of the original Jews of Judea), and giving it to Europeans of Jewish faith (foreign immigrants).

That then resulted in middle-eastern resentment and backlash over western invasion/occupation/seisure-of-land. This resentment against immigrating European Jews caused 'Jews at large' to be discriminated against throughout the middle-east, and that in turn led to a migration wave of regional-Jews from the surrounding areas into Israel.
This resulted in a concentration of Jewish-faithed immigrants of European and middle-eastern ethnicity, all in Israel - further displacing the original residents.

Basically, in the end, the original people of Judea were kicked out of their homes and their lands given to immigrants... and they really resent it. While in the mean time the immigrants acclaim to have a god given right to be there because there is some old paper that says that people of their faith are from the area.

Ta-da.

Britain could have just sent Europeans of Jewish faith to Palestine, and made it an integrated nation.
But nope, they had to displace people and create a bunch more problems.
Gee, thanks Britain.
I pretty much face-palm when I hear "this conflict is thousands of years old" (when it's only been ~66 years).


Note :
I make the distinction between ethnically Jewish and religiously Jewish.
I use the phrase "Europeans of Jewish faith" to clarify that these were displaced Europeans, who may have had an ancestor or two way way way up the family tree that was from Judea - but were otherwise European and of Jewish faith - who may have lived in an area with little mingling with outsiders, and hence a visually distinct appearance (i.e. what made it possible to make visual caricatures of their people, such as : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternal_Jew_%281940_film%29)
You can also play semantics with "what is ethnically Jewish, when the ethnicity is labelled after the faith", etc.

There's also the geopolitical aspect. Israel is the only "Western" nation in the middle-east. Given that the area is globally significant in terms of resources, that makes Israel a critically important ally. So the rhetoric will always lean.

Personally, I wonder if the things that European Jews suffered during WW2, didn't create some mental/emotional baggage that today plays itself out with how they treat Palestinians. Sort of a "I don't care about your suffering, because I've been through worse" kind of situation.

However, I understand how Israel does not want an open integrated society with Palestinians. The Jewish population is rather small, and in an integrated society they would be such a small proportion that they would essentially be bred out of existence within a few generations. For those who wish to preserve their culture, that's 'kind of a big deal'.

-scheherazade