To me,she seems pretty OK.Never been in the whole Gamergate(i was 7),and while her videos are informative,they're not really my thing.Thats not to say anything bad about female characters though.All in all,she seems pretty good and well respected by the public(she gave a speech about the current state of female characters in gaming two years(I think)) Curious,does anyone have any criticisms of Anita? I appreciate what she's doing,bit I want to know.
Thought I'd show some videos related to feminism and video games:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WgvYJ9Ei90Y&pp=ygUdVmlkZW8gZ2FtZSBzZXhpc3QgYW5pdGEgZmFpbHM%3D
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9MxqSwzFy5w&pp=ygUaVmlkZW8gZ2FtZSBzZXhpc3QgZmVtaW5pc3Q%3D
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g09vQAQmYM8&pp=ygUaVmlkZW8gZ2FtZSBzZXhpc3QgZmVtaW5pc3Q%3D
I watched a ton of her videos as they were coming out. I was in college at the time and she was actually the first person I’d ever heard talk about a lot of these topics. I would definitely believe that her videos would come across as surface level or uninspired to a modern audience. But she was the first one I’d ever heard talk about the points she was making *at all*.
That said, I think it is a great thing that her commentary seems so banal now. I think that is a sign that the conversation has grown beyond her and the critiques she was making over a decade ago. Which is really what we should always hope for in a movement.
She opened up a much needed venue for criticism and changed the industry to help make it much more girl and woman friendly. There’s a lot of work left to do. She said what was needed at the time and a lot of her stuff is really good. Her videos were very accessible and easy to understand and she made a big difference in our culture and helped push out feminist narratives that otherwise would have remained invisible.
It’s a decade old so I think people will call it basic now but we have to remember the time and context of her activism. Frankly I’m surprised by these comments. I think it’s way too easy for us to be overly critical of our own. I’d even say some comments here are not in good faith and just reflect the culture war this sub always seems to be a target in.
By today’s standard, her criticisms might be seen as simple and basic, but one must remember that, whatever one’s opinion of her, Anita’s mere *existence* inspired a disproportionate and inordinate *rage* in such a large subset of terminally-online gamer men that they spent most of the subsequent decade telling on themselves.
Anita was kind of like the Barbie movie before the Barbie movie was a thing. Basic AF feminist criticism that still somehow managed to piss people off. I think we’ve moved beyond Anita’s original arguments (I imagine she has as well), but I don’t think we would have gotten here without her. She was one of the first well-known voices talking about sexism in gaming and, as a result, made it more mainstream. Credit where credit is due.
Back in 2013 she acted as one of my gateways into the video essay genre. I was a freshmen in college at the time As a girl who played video games with many male friends who also.played, it was really awesome to hear her perspective. I think she was one of many who helped bring a “feminist” perspective to gaming/media into a more mainstream audience.
Even though I was an adult when “Gamergate” happened, I haven’t seen any of Anita’s videos. I don’t sit around watching videos about people talking about games; I am actually playing them. I don’t pay attention to what people are saying about them. All I knew was she talked about feminism in games and pissed a bunch of boys off, which sounds cool to me. The people harassing her were vile.
There is some controversy with the new Assassin’s Creed game that reminds me of what happened to Anita. My former Japanese professor was hired as a historical consultant for the game, and she is being dragged online by whiney baby man-children who essentially don’t want to see Black people in their video games. They have found ways to contact her irl and are threatening her and her family. It’s madness. I feel so bad for her.
I got to see her talk at a game developers conference and really enjoyed her panel. She had great stage presence and I applaud her for not backing down when seemingly the entire male gaming industry was at her throat.
It sounds like most of the people who are claiming that her feminist takes are basic and surface level should consider this: maybe we’re not the target audience?
I’m an experienced computer programmer, so I’m not going to get anything out of an “intro to programming” video, but there are definitely people out there who would benefit from it.
I remember when she was a bit of thing in my group. I don’t think about Anita. I remember then as I do now, people want to make the world better but can’t agree on how.
But, oof, the comments. “A feminist being logical??? 😱” 🙄
I’m not a big enough gamer to follow Anita on a day to day level, but I think everyone should educate themselves on the outrageous level of harassment that she was subjected to for simply trying to discuss gaming from a feminist perspective.
I have the deepest respect for every woman who is standing up to a male-centric industry the way she did.
And without knowing much details about her I know that she was a milestone in my development from „not stereotypical woman“ to „smash the patriarchy“.
Like many women after her she offered me a new perspective and made me question things that I had just accepted as normal.
She’s a foundational figure in online feminism, and genuinely the video game industry would be way further behind than what it is now if it weren’t for her videos. She managed to put a spotlight on a lot of (extremely basic) issues with female representation in games. Like, more importantly than anything else, that conversation was needed.
I haven’t followed her other work, no idea what she’s like, but I know she paved the way in terms of just simply talking out loud about this stuff.
Idk if there’s anyone who has been continuously targeted for such a long time either. Alt-right types will still yell about her sometimes. I feel bad for everything she went through, but I hope she knows her impact.
OMG, you’re making me feel old, OP! 😂
Honestly, I never watched her videos, but I think the reactions towards her really say all you need to know about Gamergate and how gamer men feel about women.
[Anita Sarkeesian forced to cancel Utah State speech after mass shooting threat](https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/15/tech/utah-anita-sarkeesian-threat/index.html)
I am simultaneously not a fan of her at all and ridiculously defensive of her
I found her videos interesting when they came out. But I’m a person who enjoys video essays. It was very informative and pretty tame considering the amount of backlash it got.
I didn’t watch much of her, since her stuff was basic feminism 101 for video games… And I was well beyond that in the 90s… I’m just not much for public speaking. She got horrible harrassment over the internet for the mildest of critiques, because she was a woman, criticizing the boys club that has always been gaming. It was a bold thing of her to do, and I admire her for that.
This is coming from a man but I never felt her opinions were all thay radical or inflammatory. The response from gamers to both her and Zoey quinn was down right frightening. I saw more damage to gaming culture from gamergate than I ever did from Anita
From what I remember some good takes, some bad takes, got a lot of hate for basic feminism 101 takes which was definitely ridiculous and undeserved
She’s a hero
she did not deserve the hate gamergate gave her her videos were mostly factual and just giving fair critiques of games.
I said it back then and I’ll say it again: The reactions to her videos said far more about the issues in gaming than the videos themselves ever could. And the adults in the room (aka the game developers) took notice. Games have gotten so much better in terms of representation since then.
You can call the videos basic or entry-level or whatever, or you can nitpick some minor details, but it’s all irrelevant.
What matters is that her overall points were correct and that alone was enough to trigger the shit out of the so-called gaming community. She said what had to be said during a time when no-one else dared to say it.
And we’re all still benefiting from it.
I view her as I view many early feminists, like Mary Wollstonecraft: while her views might not be the most controversial *TODAY*, they once were. I am deeply grateful for Anita and her courage to tackle the gaming world, despite the vile reactions she received.
Her extremely brave videos are (in my opinion, a large) part of the evolution in video games that allows women to participate in the gaming world on the same premise as men – as nuanced characters who can have the same important in the video game stories as men.
I’m seeing a couple guys in here with distaste for Anita and they’re using the same talking points that gamergaters used to bash her. Her arguments while maybe not entirely well constructed, were not polarizing things, they were rather basic, and not a surprise to any other girlgamer out there, but gamergaters blew it way out of proportion and most guys who spew those talking points don’t have the faintest idea of what they are talking about, they’re just repeating what they heard.
I was working in the games industry during gamer gate.
Anita said a lot of things that needed to be said, but had nobody else in a position with a loud enough voice to say it. Every time I wrote a misogynistic joke or wrote a 2-dimensional wank-bait character I hated it – but I was the only woman on the entire dev team (never mind in a leadership position) I was already paid less than everyone else, and I knew speaking up would get me branded as an over-reacting killjoy and could easily lose me my job.
While FF did contribute to a lot of backlash that made the industry unbearable for women working in it at the time (I ended up leaving for 7 years) it was necessary. The games industry has changed massively in the past decade and I genuinely think that we owe a lot of the progress to conversations Anita started – and even the ugliness it highlighted. Gamer Gate was so big and so hideous that those in leadership positions could no longer pretend they didn’t know about the way their audience behaved, or pretend they weren’t partially responsible and needed to do better.
I’m now back working in game dev, and I still have to pinch myself with how much progress we’ve made. I now work on a team with 4 other narrative designers, 3 out of 5 of us are women. I’m a Women in Games ambassador. I’m writing a game with a female protagonist and she’s not wank-bait. I’m writing trans and gender fluid characters. My *boss is a brown woman.* I would have never believed that the industry and the games we make could improve so much in 10 years.
And yeah, the game I’m making still gets targeted by toxic “Go Woke Go Broke” bros on our trailers. I just don’t give a shit anymore because now their ire feels so impotent – the industry has already changed from the inside and I’ve got support and a community that didn’t exist a decade ago. I’m no longer writing to please a room of socially ignorant bald heads.
Also Anita’s cool. I’ve met her at conferences a couple of times. She always makes time to talk with women game devs.
I think it’s more important to read about Gamergate and why it was so insidious and still relevant and something to keep an eye out on today. Anita Sarkeesian’s takes themselves are not actually that spicy as feminist critique, but what’s important was that she was the first to prominently say it in the gaming space. At the time, there was a perception that gamers of all gender were “united”, but Gamergate showed very much that it was still a male dominated space and the average female gamer simply had quietly held onto their grievances and accepted it as the norm. It was the backlash that was far more compelling evidence that Anita was onto something if men could not take even the most basic call outs of sexism.
I encourage everyone to watch this series https://youtu.be/6y8XgGhXkTQ?si=OKcx1oKRcwsV9LFk
It explains in depth why gamergate came about in the first place, and why so many men reacted to Anita the way they did.
I’m going to say, after careful consideration, that maybe all the harassment she received WASN’T ok, actually.
Honestly? We’re just now starting to see some leftist critiques of her. She leans pretty hard into the concept of gender being a strict binary, and something you are, not a spectrum or something you perform. When called out on this and told it was TERF talk, she actually said that TERFs don’t exist… it was a “baby leftist” mistake, but with that you knew that most of her sources were old second wavers. That’s why she keeps banging on at that old media salt that depiction always equals endorsement. She also leaned really hard into the idea that Feminist characters should be perfect role models. I really did lose a lot of respect for her when she said that Fury Road wasn’t feminist.
When I was younger I never wanted them and heard they were bad, but upon watching them last year for a class, I saw that they were very lukewarm bottom of the barrel observations of gaming, I don’t know how they got so much hate for being so benign.
I think she’s a bit cringe and has bad takes sometimes.
Which if anything proves she’s a real gamer, lol.
Jokes aside, she has some good points, even if not always well articulated. People just fixate on the bad ones to avoid talking about the good ones.
Ironically, the vitriol levelled at her was the best evidence for the misogyny present in gaming she could have had. If people had just rolled their eyes and moved on, she would have never got famous. But guys can’t help hating on women for daring to have opinions on “their” thing
She’s an example of “I disagree with what you say, but I defend your right to say it.”
I feel that a lot of her takes are shallow or lacking context, and I find her way of presenting information bland and uninspiring. But by god do I defend her right to do what she does without getting doxxed or death threats!
we don’t see eye to eye in many issues, but I respect her deeply (plus she’s pro trans, and at this point, we need any allies we can get, specially in feminism)
She’s an interesting character, she isn’t wrong and raised an important conversation in the industry. I feel like her criticism were kinda weird in the examples she was picking. The first video you have the guy is trying mock her pointing out Hitman glorifying hurting sex workers but then Hitman is actually a game mechanic applied to all “humans” in the game. She framed her argument that it is intentionally a sex worker but honestly in my opinion I would ask why do you even need to have sex workers portrayed in a video game at all.
Men in any form of IT have been so dominant in this field that any idea of “middle” ground is going to look extreme because we’ve kinda pushed yall 10 miles away from IT, games and techlogy. So conversation she started NEEDS to happen in order to bring people back to some sense of balance so women have a place to have fun and play games too. Could she have done a better job presenting her arguments? Sure, but who on this planet couldn’t? She did a great job, didn’t deserve the anger and hatred she got. She helped start conversations that got guys like me to start taking an interest in what women’s opinions are on games and well everything around IT and technology.
She had a lot of bad takes. She criticized games she never played and shows she never watched with sometimes inaccurate research.
Her big video staples were “sexualized female character bad” and “having a story arc that contains human trafficking or SA is somehow inherently endorsing those things”.
She had some points that were good and valid too but they were usually buried under a lot of facile and shallow ones.
Not my cuppa tea.
What do you mean “not your thing”? The issue with female characters is still ongoing. Also, Anita is kind of old news now. Not sure why you’re bringing it up now. It seems like you’re trying to promote some type of anti-feminist content.
The lady in that video sounds like a total tool, lol. I’m not even gonna bother with the other two.
I found her critiques kind of milquetoast and surface level, even when they first came out. She didn’t say anything controversial in my eyes and her analysises never made me think: “wow, I never saw it that way before” or caused me to think deeper about a topic.
But it’s like she became the face of anti-gamergate movement just because and the amount of hatred that was sent her way was sickening.
Never saw her videos honestly, but i do remember seeing plenty of youtubers criticizing her work back around 2013/14
She’s fine for an initial, shallow view into feminist criticism, but I don’t know of many other critics who approached game criticism _specifically_ from that lens. I know a bunch who have a feminist background and criticize games, Steph Sterling, HBomberguy, PlayFrame, a few others.
For leaning Real Feminism, I have found Philosophytube to be the right balance of entertaining, informative, and grounded. There’s others, but she’s one of the best imo.
I was so excited when she announced her series coming about feminism in video games. I was totally in support and really stoked to see it. Then they came out and she was just… wrong. Claiming that games like Hitman allowed, and even *encouraged*, you to kill people for sport not involved in the storyline. Which is not true at all. It’s been a long time since I watched it so I can’t remember all the details but I just remember thinking that this was only going to fuel the feminism-hate more with dishonesty and misrepresentation, than help any awareness or discussion. And sure enough.
That said I was very shocked to see her name as a cultural consultant on Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood when I finished it about a month ago. I thought for sure I’d mis-read her name, one I have not heard in a decade, as the credits were scrolling. But nope, it’s her.
All in all I can’t speak for what she’s doing now, but I feel that she did more damage than help to feminism. If you’re going to approach a hot topic you better fact check and make sure what you’re saying is accurate, for the love of god.
Edit: lol at the people down voting me for not liking someone adding fuel to the fire with inaccurate facts. Yall kill me.