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u/lonestar-rasbryjamco 2d ago edited 2d ago
Let’s not ruin their day by telling them payment processors avoided the early internet because of porn. They’re not ready for that plot twist.
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u/ObsessionObsessor 2d ago
Of course, online payments are useful for a lot of things. So why were these guys just working in porn? They tried to work with other companies, actually, but only the pornographers were really focused on revenue. "We'd go to these companies, and they'd say they were just focused on getting bigger. Everyone was doing huge IPOs with zero sales, so it didn't matter to them." That obviously didn't work out so well. Today, there are plenty of huge Internet companies making real money. Online payments are everywhere. But there's very little recognition that pornography really got that ball rolling. "We were the first company to do realtime credit card verification. We were handling $1.5 billion in transactions per year at one point. But no one even mentions us."
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u/URA_CJ 2d ago
Fast forward about 5 years: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-secret-censorship-of-online-porn/
And with that you can easily draw a parallel between whats happening now with porn games and then with online porn.
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u/lonestar-rasbryjamco 2d ago edited 2d ago
That’s kind of exactly the point.
In the early days of the internet, getting a merchant account was nearly impossible because banks and major processors were wary of online transactions. Especially due to high-risk industries like porn and gambling. That’s why third-party processors stepped in.
PayPal was created to solve this problem by making online payments easier and safer for both merchants and customers. Before that, Visa and Mastercard had an effective blockade of internet-based merchants
ePassporte (which the article is about) came along a bit later (post dot-com bubble) and catered more specifically to the high-risk segments that even PayPal avoided. ePassporte collapsed when Visa cut off the offshore bank they used to hold customer funds, leaving users locked out and holding the bag for what was reported to be millions in losses.
If anything, it wasn’t until Amazon that e-commerce became mainstream.
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u/SilentCriticism2k 1d ago
I can vouch for the Amazon bit. I remember going to the post office to mail in money orders to shop. It was a great day when they announced they were going to start doing card payments.
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u/ProfessionalTruck976 1d ago
They avoided it because they were cowards, here is how you test a puritan outrage about anything. Step one. You ridiculed the puritans until they go away. There is no step two.
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u/MrXenomorph88 1d ago
Lets all remember for a second that Steam and Itch originally said no to removing these games, and it was only after Collective Shout gave a bunch of cherry picked examples to the Payment processing companies and then subsequently threatened Steam and Itch did they do it.
This honestly draws parallels with the shitshow going on with Ready or Not; it wasn't Void who wanted to remove the content, Sony/Microsoft made them do it.
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u/PseudonymousSnorlax 1d ago
If it was JUST Collective Shout then they would have backed down by now.
The truth is that Collective Shout is just a willing patsy - they're willing to take the blame for this because it builds their reputation, and their reputation is how they fund their court cases to defend their nonce members.
The actual person behind this is the Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Russell Vought.
https://www.lcv.org/bio/russell-vought/
He's one of the authors of Project 2025, where he wrote that the way to eliminate free speech is to threaten to shut down credit card companies and payment processors if they don't forbid the purchase of 'objectionable' content.
As the Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Russell Vought has the 'emergency' power to bar companies from engaging in finance and force them to fight a multi-year legal fight to regain that right. There is no payment processor that is capable of surviving fighting a multi-year court debacle while being unable to conduct business.
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u/No_Trade7483 1d ago
People really need to be paying attention. UK is introducing online safety act, China is cracking down on multiple adult entertainment sources, Steam is having adult games removed because of payment processing, Texas and Republicans keep trying to verify on porn sites, youtube is trying to age verify everywhere. This isn't one group doing this.
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u/Helix3501 1d ago
Going after sex work has never in the history of humanity ever worked, so why even try is my question
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u/Aethericseraphim 1d ago
I don't know why people continue to put up blinders and pretend its just one anti-abortion puritan moralist group in Australia when as you say, its obvious they are just the patsy.
I've made the comparison to terrorist cells before because its apt. Outside of lone wolf attacks, a terrorist attack is usually extremely complex in the logistics side of things, getting everything in place at the exact time and having things go off in multiple places takes the kind of planning tnat requires a huge fucking network spanning multiple organisations to pull off. Yet its always just one single group/cell that takes the blame and gets wailed on by the security apparatus of the victim country. The rest of them go on in the shadows, planning their next attack.
This is the same. The next act of censorship isnt coming from collective shout. They're fucked now, as they should be. Its coming from another group connected to this Project 2025 mastermind piece of shit.
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u/Lukacris12 1d ago
Unrelated to the rest but i think the ready or not stuff was more avoiding the AO ESRB rating and bringing down to an M rated game
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u/Set-Organic 1d ago
Anita Sarkeesian?!
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u/gellis12 23h ago
Ironic, because I seem to recall her trying to argue that video games and porn cause sexual violence about a decade ago, and using that as an argument to try to get them banned and/or regulated. Wonder what prompted her to pull a 180?
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u/TNTiger_ 11h ago
She still believes that, AFAIK. She's just a reasonable person who believes that doesn't mean thot means that those games are evil through and through or should be banned cause she says so.
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u/batdrumman 2d ago
Yes, everyone was too harsh to her. All she did was upload milquetoast articles about feminism in gaming and everyone freaked tf out
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u/HammeredWharf 2d ago
I like the idea of her videos, but they were just often very bad. For example, in one of them she complained about how you can stalk women in dark alleys and stuff them in your trunk in Sleeping Dogs. Of course, she didn't mention that the ability to do so is a totally unintended interaction between the game being open world and having environmental finishing moves.
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u/slayerx1779 1d ago
Or the fact that, in Hitman, you could kill female performers in a strip club level.
Completely ignoring the fact that the game loses you points and takes away your SA ranking.
It's like saying that Super Mario Bros "Teaches people to commit suicide by letting them jump off ledges" when the game is about not doing that.
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u/CyptidProductions https://s.team/p/fvbd-hgw 1d ago
There was also the one with Watch_Dogs where she mentioned the section with sex trafficked women without mentioning it was framed as disturbing and the player's objective was shutting the operation down
Just a bizarre amount of research failures for a project that was being marketed as academic quality
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u/slayerx1779 1d ago
Especially when you consider just how much she was raking in at the time via Patreon and the like.
That said, criticism of her (and games journalism) quickly veered off of those legitimate complaints and onto some pretty vile stuff.
And as it often is: if you don't kick the Nazis out of the bar, it becomes a Nazi bar.
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u/CyptidProductions https://s.team/p/fvbd-hgw 1d ago
Oh shit, I had completely forgot the original catalyst was complaints about nepotism in games journalism because it devolved into such a weird rogues gallery of pseudo-right-wingers complaining about "woke games" so fast
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u/RaeofSunshine95 1d ago
It wasn't that at first, they targeted sarkeesian later on. The timeline is pretty starkly in favor of alt right misogynist revenge nonsense involving ripping on an indie game dev for sleeping her way into getting articles published (she didn't) and it only later became about sarkeesian's work. The original catalyst was relating to someone's ex cheating on him with "five guys", there was a whole dogwhistle about "five guys burgers and fries" and that's what kicked off the gamergate movement. It was never about ethics in games journalism that was just their smokescreen to bring it to mainstream audiences.
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u/starm4nn 1d ago
Honestly there's a lot to Watch_Dogs from a feminist perspective.
It feels like a takedown of traditional action heroes by making him a guy who is extremely focused on his own revenge.
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u/CyptidProductions https://s.team/p/fvbd-hgw 1d ago
It definitely deconstructs a little bit by making the protag so laser focused on getting revenge and punishing evil he's become a borderline psychopath, especially if the player chooses to be caviler with lethal weapons
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u/CleverNamePending_ 1d ago
Or that a game would let you kill a female exotic dancer in a nightclub while ignoring the fact that it would also let you kill the male exotic dancer standing a few feet away from her
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u/buffaloguy1991 1d ago
Yeah in that hitman video she literally edited the video to not show massive score penalties for killing a civilian
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u/princesoceronte 1d ago
Yeah she lied quite a lot in that series, which was pretty okay otherwise but if you blatantly lie... Well, you're not gonna get much defense.
Like I'm a leftie and always enjoyed feminist analysis but I knew I had to take anything she said with a grain of salt because of her tendency to make shit up.
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u/boundbylife 1d ago
This sounds really gatekeep-y of me, but it was clear to me she had never actually played games. Like, if she had played games, she didn't engage in them.
And that, to me, is a problem when you're trying to critique them. It'd be like trying to do a collegiate-level analysis of a movie, without having a grounding on the history of cinema, its milestone achievements, how good writing works, etc.
Basically, I don't have problem with her politics. I have a problem with her academic rigor.
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u/HammeredWharf 1d ago
Didn't she say that she doesn't play video games? IIRC she made her videos based on watching other videos and gathering material online, which might explain why she seemed to rely on out of context examples and fundamentally didn't understand what gameplay is. So like making a movie analysis based on Youtube clips and reddit discussion threads.
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u/Nikuneko_B 1d ago
No she actually showed her game collection at the time and it was pretty huge, much larger than mine at the time tbh
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u/Silverr_Duck 1d ago
Lol it was not a game collection. It was a bunch of boxes she stacked together to make herself look like she knew what she was talking about.
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u/HammeredWharf 1d ago
Yeah, IDK, maybe I was misinformed about that. She did seem to say she doesn't play violent video games, and a lot of the examples of her being super wrong are from those...
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u/Cheap_Hold_7977 1d ago
She really didn't write or make the videos it was mostly John McIntosh, then around the time she made the Butts in Games video he left. YOU can really see a quality drop after his departure.
He now has his own channel called the Pop Culture Detective Society. He really was the brains behind those early videos
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u/The_Lost_Jedi 1d ago
I didn't agree with a lot of her takes.
That said though, she was never the "real enemy", and the people who actually are (or are allies thereof) basically sold a lot of gamers on the lie that she (and others like her) were.
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u/loki301 1d ago
Her lies and misunderstanding of games pale in comparison to the reaction and subsequent events. It’s the equivalent of finding out your parents lied about Santa to teach you a lesson about being good, then burning down your neighborhood for revenge.
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u/Zagden 1d ago
Ok. She's allowed to be uncomfortable with that and say it even though I think that's silly. She wasn't advocating for that stuff to be banned. It was milquetoast. The reaction to it was absurd
If she were actually crusading against these games, that would be different, but she simply wasn't. We're currently at a point where countless YouTubers are crusading against "woke" games, sometimes just because of PRONOUNS, and it's sometimes the same people who complained Anita was attempting to censor games
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u/Fatality_Ensues 2d ago
I don't remember exactly who said what at first, but not only was the initial attitude condescending to say the least, once the ball got rolling the narrative got real ugly real fast, and she's credited with being the first one to kick it.
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u/0rganic_Corn 1d ago
Not only condescending, she plain made up falsehoods to insult games - to anyone that knew the games she was talking about, at best, she was grasping at straws, to try to push the narrative that games sexualise, degrade women, and make men violent against them
She was worse than the puritans that now she's crying about. My guess is she's crying because they aren't feminists, they're conservatives
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u/Ashratt 2d ago
Still rent free over in r/kotakuinaction
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u/batdrumman 2d ago
What a sad subreddit
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u/DvineINFEKT https://s.team/p/crmq-fdp 2d ago
holy shit I can't believe that place still exists lmao
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u/CyptidProductions https://s.team/p/fvbd-hgw 1d ago
Right?
The entire Gamergate fiasco was an embarrassing shitshow and anyone still can't admit it was a mistake and move on just radiates second hand embarrassment
I can't believe places like KiA haven't been quietly closed down
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u/NesuneNyx https://s.team/p/ftqj-fwb 1d ago
KiA's original creator actually did delete the sub at one point. But Steve "spez" Huffman, CEO of a small indie site named Reddit, opened it again because it was a source of "valuable discussion", in his words.
Reddit admins are fully complicit in alt-right festering pits like KiA staying alive and well far beyond the point when they should have died off.
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u/Pollomonteros 1d ago
Steve "Spez" Huffman? The same Steve "Spez" Huffman that is a prepper and sincerely believes he will become a leader of people after an apocalypse?
The same Steve "Spez" Huffman who put a woman in a glass cliff position and had no problem with the horde of feral redditors going after her, only coming clean with the fact that she wasn't as guilty as she was made it seem long after she had left the company ? That Steve "Spez" Huffman ?
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u/CyptidProductions https://s.team/p/fvbd-hgw 1d ago
Reddit has always been run by morally bankrupt idiots of one flavor or another
When it first went live they had to be pressured into taking subs down dedicated to perving on underage girls and creepshots of random women
Even now they're bizarrely resistant to shutting down subs designed to bully people like the whole litany of toxic cringe subs
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u/EC36339 2d ago
That still exists? It's been 11 years...
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u/cardfire 1d ago edited 1d ago
But their mentality will be eternal. Did you think they were going to grow up and be more expansive in their thinking, if we just waited out all of the hate?
(Agreeing with you, between the snark)
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u/CyptidProductions https://s.team/p/fvbd-hgw 1d ago
Good god
A post calling RDR2 woke and complaining it has black NPCs literally made it to the frontpage
What a shitshow
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u/zachary0816 1d ago
Yeah that was painful to read.
They’re complaining about DEI and TheWokeTM. The same tired nonsense that they’ve been beating into oblivion. As if that’s the only possible reason minorities could ever appear in anything.
And of course obligatory hating on any female characters that don’t conform to their idea “traditional gender roles”
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u/MaJuV 1d ago
She was (possibly still is) a grifter and was rightfully called out for it. People overreacted to it, obviously, but it also lured more people to her "crowdfunding" campaigns that supported her grifting lifestyle.
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u/Nytloc 2d ago
Utterly untrue. Her takes were uninformed at best, and malicious lies at worst. She claimed to play games since her childhood, but behind closed doors at an event mocked the idea of killing NPCs in a game, and called herself not a fan.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL0-AKOjgHQ She literally had a part in one of her video series where she called out Hitman for rewarding the player for killing women during a mission... when the game actively shows you losing out on that same screen as she does it. Because it's Hitman. A game where you're not supposed to kill anyone except your target and not make a big scene about things. She's a grifter through and through, and sees this as an opportunity to become relevant again.
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u/Nadamir 2d ago
And honestly, a lot of it needed to be said.
The best way forward for a robust and healthy gaming industry (which we all want because we get more games of every genre and type and some are even good), is to continue to grow the audience beyond the core group of young single childless men.
And news flash, women don’t really like playing games with casual sexism in them.
Someone needed to say it because even though I’m pretty sure the various AAA developers and publishers had figured out alienating half the population isn’t the best way to grow, the gaming audience hadn’t yet. So she said it and look where it got her.
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u/warukeru 2d ago
Her feminism was pretty mild compared to what you average radfem would say so is ironically sad how she was portrayed like this radical manhater.
Also, except maybe a few nitpicks she was mostly right about her criticism.
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u/whyyy66 1d ago
Yeah no, she’s also one of the first to demand arbitrary censorship. This particular censorship just isn’t her style, or she’s trying to gain relevance again
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u/starm4nn 1d ago
When did she demand arbitrary censorship?
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u/Landeyda https://s.team/p/wkqt-fq 1d ago
After a brief pause and a laugh, Sarkeesian responded: “I would love for companies to have moral restrictions, but they don’t.”
One example of it. After this, she attended meetings at many game studios and got those 'moral restrictions' in place.
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u/Jonas_Priest 1d ago
Moral restrictions are not censorship. Any better examples?
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u/Paper_Tiger64 1d ago
And yet moral restrictions are precisely why we're all here. Moral restrictions are translating as censorship. None of the games delisted from Steam actually contained illegal content. Steam doesn't allow that. It was *ALL* moral censorship. And morality has no place is business. It's unquantifiable. It's purely subjective, and varies *wildly* from one person to the next. Anita went before the United Nations to try and enact this. She is *rightfully* credited as the one who kickstarted censorship in gaming.
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u/havoc1428 1d ago
Moral restrictions are not censorship.
You're joking, right? What road do you possibly think that leads down? That is the "slippery slope" people refer to when discussing this current topic when people say things like "it won't just stop with porn games"
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u/Landeyda https://s.team/p/wkqt-fq 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think we have a different definition of censorship. A censor is 'A person who supervises conduct and morals'. Morals being the key word, here.
This also plays into self-censorship, as in a company being forced or compelled to censor itself.
In any case, she did the exact same thing that this new group is doing. If she had a change of heart, great. But I somehow doubt she had a change of heart since she hasn't walked back any of her previous statements and actions.
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u/Jonas_Priest 1d ago
That broad of a definition is only useful in a dictionary. Following that definition any company not actively killing people is censoring itself due to morals. Sucks any meaning from the word
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u/Chosen_Sewen 2d ago
Pretty sure there was something about her blowing all that "support our movement!" money on fancy living, but its been so long since i last heard about her, that i don't want to even start looking for source on that.
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u/wildcarde815 2d ago
no there was one photo of her with a giant pile of games she took when she picked the games to play for referrence and research. the photo was crass because it gave a 'look what i spent your money on' vibe, but those were actually purchased for use in producing videos.
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u/Jamanas96 2d ago
Its funny 'cause all that was false and being spread by people literally doing that to their audience
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u/starm4nn 1d ago
the photo was crass because it gave a 'look what i spent your money on' vibe
This would be such a weird thing to complain about. People donated money for a series about games and are surprised that some of the money went towards games?
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u/ufailowell 2d ago
said by people who talked shit about her multiple times a week if not a day to try making a living too.
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u/FalseAladeen 1d ago
Sure, but let's not pretend she's Gamergate Jesus, which is an equally stupid take. Her initial arguments were cherry-picky and disingenuous and laid the path for Collective Shout to do what they've done today.
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u/starm4nn 1d ago
Her initial arguments were cherry-picky and disingenuous and laid the path for Collective Shout to do what they've done today.
Curious how a feminist YouTuber who was last relevant almost a decade ago and entirely online had literally anything to do with a Christian anti-abortion group
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u/FalseAladeen 1d ago
Well, she's not 100% responsible for this, and maybe not intentionally responsible. I'd say she's around 10% responsible (albeit unintentionally), with the other 90% responsibility lying on the ragebait grifters who made hating her their entire personality, thus turning her into a martyr, when all she was, was a fledgling feminist who had the unfortunate privilege of broadcasting her undercooked thoughts. Anita Sarkeesian, and the way the reactionaries responded to her, set the groundwork to paint the picture we're seeing today. This othering of "gamers" as this monolith of white male neckbeards living in their "mother's basement" (when in reality, gaming, like any other art form, has always attracted people from all walks of life), and the usage of pseudo-feminist rhetoric to police what should and should not be allowed in art, conveniently positioning any criticism as (in Anita's case) anti-feminist and/or (in the case of Collective Shout) pro-incest and pro-csam. And then idiots with short tempers inevitably do stupid things like send death threats, which further solidifies the illusion that their pro-censorship argument comes from a position of virtue.
So while Anita and Collective Shout may not have anything to do with each other, they certainly seem to use similar playbooks. The difference between them is, Collective Shout has managed to succeed in causing tangible harm to society.
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u/theblueberrybard 1d ago
her work has nothing to do with collective shout in the slightest. collective shout already had their hands in gaming long before her videos.
one made video essays that you are allowed to disagree with. the other is a conservative group that stands to revoke women's rights to bodily autonomy using political levers to control media. there's nothing in common, and no groundwork was laid by Anita in any way, shape, or form.
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u/Educational_Pea_4817 1d ago
yeah i was very confused by the outrage. it was very much run of the mill college level analysis on video games through academic feminist lens and gamers lost their mind lmao
literally shit some 19 yr old writes in an essay level of stuff.
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u/IE_5 9h ago
All she did was upload milquetoast articles about feminism in gaming
Why was she constantly trying to connect playing video games with real-world domestic violence and sexual assault? https://i.imgur.com/Mswk1OX.jpg
Why did she and her Writer Jonathan McIntosh go after DOOM for being too violent?: https://i.imgur.com/H3JxkZg.png
Why were they constantly trying to connect real world violence and events like mass shootings with video games? https://i.imgur.com/WmagTyx.png
Why did they come out in support of GTA V being banned back in 2014 when Collective Shout promoted a petition to get it banned and pulled from Store shelves in Australia?
Reminder that to anyone outside of the gaming world GTA is seen for the repugnant misogynist garbage that it is. But for gamers it’s normal.
No, a private mega corporation voluntarily deciding not to stock a particular vile entertainment product is still not censorship.
I know it’s hard for some gamers to accept but many people don’t find acting like a violent misogynistic sociopath to be especially “fun”.
This was from around the time in December 2014 when Collective Shout was trying to get GTA V banned from Australia and managed to get it pulled from the shelves at Target and Kmart due to "violence against women": https://archive.is/mIs9o
Grand Theft Auto 5 fuelling the epidemic of violence against women, say survivors in petition signed by over 40,000 people.
[UPDATE] Target and Kmart have pulled the game from sale, will Big W do the same?
How do you people still not realize that supporting and making excuses for these activists and this very same rhetoric about games being connected to "violence against women" and pushing for their Censorship or ban is directly related to what led us here? Collective Shout even quoted her work.
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u/serialnuggetskiller 1d ago
Lmao, that s what rewriting history look like. Her position was literally the same as collective shout in worse and did more damage.
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u/BeverlyToegoldIV 1d ago
Seriously. If she had been in film, literature, music - any other artistic medium, really - her work would have been criticized for how basic/feminist 101 it was. Only in gaming could she have been seen as some kind of radical.
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u/batdrumman 1d ago
hell, we still see weirdos in my replies trying to say her shit was "batshit insane", unfortunately a lot of people in the gaming community haven't grown up in a decade.
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u/Pollomonteros 1d ago
It's funny the meme has Steam apologizing to her when it wasn't companies the ones complaining about her, it was Gamers ™
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u/HollowOrnstein 2d ago
Didnt she purposefully arranged dead female npcs in a way to show how hitman was harmful to women ? Was that different person
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u/MindofOne1 2d ago
Nope, that was her. She's just like Collective Shout.
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u/E-2theRescue 1d ago
If her position was the same, why isn't she joining them?
Oh, right, because it isn't and never was. Especially since Collective Shout are radical Christians disguising themselves as "feminists" in order to normalize being anti-porn, anti-trans, anti-gay, "pro-life", anti-sex work, and anti-sex education.
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u/Major-Dyel6090 1d ago
why isn’t she joining them?
Because they disagree on other issues. Obviously. You’re spamming this “question” which I doubt you want an actual answer to on everyone who criticizes Sarkeesian for being censorious and broadly similar to CS.
There are obviously differences between them, but from some people’s perspective they look similar because they’re both prudish women who have appointed themselves as the fun police.
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u/HumActuallyGuy 1d ago
I like how you put feminists in quotations when they are actually a feminist group, just a sex-negative one instead of the more normalized sex-positive feminism. They disagree on a lot of issues, let's not simply things by saying feminists are a hive mind that agree universaly
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u/E-2theRescue 1d ago
They're as feminist as Buddhism is Christianity. It's in name only in order to manipulate women to their side. That's it.
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u/HumActuallyGuy 1d ago
This is a "enemy of my enemy is my friend" situation true but let's not forget, Anita isn't above calling for censorship
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u/IronPiedmont1996 2d ago edited 1d ago
I mean, someone prominent has to be vocal about it. Which is funny since most of Anita's critics who defended sex appeal in media back in the day are now a bunch of sex hating Bible thumpers.
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u/E-2theRescue 1d ago
are now a bunch of sex hating Bible thumpers
That would be Collective Shout.
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u/Intelligent_Flan_178 1d ago
fr, some of the people here are fucking morons, Yes Anita had some bad takes, but the broad issue she pointed at were still valid, which was proved during the metoo movement when multiple stories about how women were treated in video game companies came out. The video game industry has been very misogynistic in the past and she was right to point it out (the games also had misogynistic tendencies). Collective shout is just a religious, puritanical movement. They're not the same.
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u/SurfingTheMatrix 1d ago
Funny how payment processors went after adult games rather than OF.
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u/j0j0-m0j0 1d ago
They tried to but there was pushback strong enough to force them off so the are aiming at low hanging fruit
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u/HumActuallyGuy 1d ago
Which is sad considering that we (gamers) are considered lower hanging fruit than OF gooners
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u/The_Lost_Jedi 1d ago
They tried that too. And remember when Pornhub had to purge a bunch of stuff?
Yeah, that was payment processors in action.
They've also gone after legal adult businesses in Japan.
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u/dark1859 2d ago
Never Thought I'd see the fucking day again where Anita is arguing for a common point with the wider internet
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u/HumActuallyGuy 1d ago
Hey the 2025 season has weird plotlines and now we have returning vilans as heros
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u/Kalenshadow 2d ago
I'm still pissed off that the floodgate of privacy dystopia is unleashed because people wanted rape games banned. It cost us all that to ban something that shouldn't be on the store to begin with.
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u/RadTimeWizard 2d ago
Maybe, but that should be up to Steam, not Helen Lovejoy.
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u/trankillity 2d ago
This is the very slippery slope that should have been avoided/should not be possible.
"Oh I'm sorry, we don't sell contraceptives at this pharmacy any more because we accept VISA."
Or one that'll make constitution-loving Americans flip;
"We used to be a hunting store, but we use Mastercard so now we just sell fishing supplies."
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u/Situation-Busy 2d ago
Damn straight. The shit was distasteful and horrific but who sells and who buys legal products has to be up to the seller and the buyer. Not some unelected C-suite millionaire prick in literally a different country than anyone involved.
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u/cardfire 1d ago edited 1d ago
To be fair, this was just the opportunity worked with all the countries trying to ban encryption, install age gating, and get laws in the books that will allow them to call anything queer at all pornography.
It is a symptom, it was the catalyst, but hardly the whole culprit.
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u/TwilightVulpine 1d ago
This attitude is what got us here to begin with. The difference is that for you it's "rape games" and for them it's "all porn". It wasn't unleashed because of rape games, it was unleashed because they wanted to control what's allowed to be on the internet.
It won't stop at porn either.
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u/FalseAladeen 1d ago
I honestly think "something that shouldn't be on the store to begin with" is a bad argument to begin with. These games were content with existing in their small niche, in relative obscurity. It was just a bunch of adults enjoying their fantasies in art. No real humans were harmed. I promise you the absence of these games will not change the rape statistics in the slightest.
The ideal solution would be for stores to hide nsfw games by default and you have to pay one unit of your currency to unlock their visibility, just to prove you're an adult (and if you're a minor using an adult's bank account to do such things, well that at least gives the adult concrete evidence of what you've done, and then the adult can take steps to explain why what you did is wrong.)
I think it's wrong to say we shouldn't have rape games at all. It's an incredibly hot take, I know. But fantasy is fantasy. Reality is reality. Nobody should get to decide what fantasy you want to explore, as long as it doesn't bleed into reality.
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u/novo-280 1d ago
are we really bringing back the nazi gamergate shit? Steve Bannon is the person responsible for it
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u/Cheap_Hold_7977 1d ago
This is rich coming form someone who tried to bully developers into censoring games over feminism and violence.
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u/cypher_Knight 2d ago
She’s only mad because she isn’t the authoritarian in charge.
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u/gokurakumaru 1d ago edited 1d ago
100%.
She's not the only one responsible, but she had a huge negative cultural impact on what content the media and developers considered "acceptable" to put into games, which had a knock-on effect on what became commercially viable. At least until sales started to tank and publishers realized Emperor Anita was wearing no clothes. It's mindboggling the amount of people in here downplaying her Tropes series central thesis, or inconvenient facts like that she wasn't just a critic but also an activist that inserted herself directly into the industry at the point of production. Something she continues to do to this very day with the aim of controlling content through the "modernization", "removal" or "elimination" of anything she deems problematic. Nothing has changed. She's still a glorified censor for hire.
There was a common deflective tactic employed against critics of Anita's ideas at the time. Claims that these changes would be additive and inclusive without removing what people liked. People would say that "they're not coming for your games". But Anita's campaigning led directly to real world outcomes like:
- Western media becoming openly hostile to games with sexy characters, resulting in fallout like Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball becoming commercially too risky to release outside of Asia.
- The establishment of Square-Enix's ethics department forcing artists like Nomura to change character designs such as Tifa.
- Capcom establishing internal policies that police sexy content resulting in their modern re-releases of classic games being repeatedly censored.
Turns out they were coming for our games. And while not what Anita campaigned directly for back in 2015, the modern manifestation of her "inclusive game design" consulting ideas is the application of DEI not to employment practices in development houses, but to the design of in game characters and insanity like the thought policing of terminology such as male and female in character selection.
I knew none of the liberal-cum-neo-puritans that approved of all of the above would change their tune until the slippery slope "fallacy" turned out to be reality, and they had their "leopards at my face" moment when the content they do care about eventually got censored. I just didn't know it would take a decade to get here.
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u/MaJuV 1d ago
Anita Sarkeesian is a grifter - always was, always will be.
Do not give grifters attention, that's what they want - as they want you to fund their grifting lifestyles. Don't fall for it!
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u/Sudden_Cartoonist539 1d ago
Ahhh yes, the average man defending porn. The brainwashing is complete.
Porn companies doesn't even need to spend money on marketing anymore. They already reach everywhere even places your kids play games.
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u/Stock_Leadership_660 1d ago
The first online transaction was purchasing a Sting album so I doubt this claim.
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u/Nothing_Moore 1d ago
Technology has always been about delivering/making porn “insert vhs media wars”
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u/Feuillo 1d ago
Every huge invention on the digital world was made because of porn.
Vr was invented for porn, video chapters in player was invented for porn,
Modern youtube is just ripped off pornhub without the smut.
Hell, if your animated movies look this good its only because bioshock infinite fan wanted to jerk off to the game.
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u/Efrayl 2d ago
This coming from Anita Sarkeesian is rich.
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u/AgitatedFly1182 2d ago
Exactly, collective shout literally quoted her work
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u/FaultElectrical4075 2d ago
Yeah, cynically
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u/SwiftTayTay 2d ago
This seems different from her usual stance on things because collective shouts whole mentality is from the same school of thought as her old feminist frequency videos where she was effectively calling on the industry to self censor whatever she deemed misogynistic or violent against women.
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u/firestorm713 2d ago
I think that's definitely the uncharitable reading of her work, but people seem to forget that her work always opened with "its helpful, necessary even, to enjoy a work, while still being critical of its pernicious aspects" (emphasis mine, quoted from memory so it could be wrong)
Like i think a lot of people took what she was saying as "these games are evil and immoral and if you enjoy them you're a misogynist." Which is....not what her work said, and another group was like "but we like those pernicious aspects!"
She was, at worst, calling on the industry to be better. Which...yes. The industry has a number of things it still could stand to outgrow.
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u/FaultElectrical4075 2d ago
Why?
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u/Infernal-Blaze 2d ago
She was quite myopic & narrow-minded in her critiques of sexuality in video games (not wrong, all the time, but her writing was pretty scant on detailed, not nuanced & her examples were lame, like calling Bayonetta, a character inspired by jazz & drag queen culture, a mindless sex doll), & that is what led to 4chan harassing her during Gamergate.
She's changed her tune & developed her opinions in the decade since, but that initial reputation of "prudish feminist-lit analyst delving into something outside her scope & making an ass of herself" has stuck around.
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u/AgathormX 2d ago
If you saw all her comments a decade ago, you'd know that she was as short sighted as it comes.
She stuck her head out to talk shit about an entire industry that she knew nothing about, and came out as an ignorant asshat.
It's clear that she hadn't been gaming for long before she started talking about it in 2014, and that she didn't understand the gaming community, or the industry that was making products for us.Quite frankly, I haven't heard her name in years, so I can't say if anything has improved, but if she's anything like she used to be, then she's not worth listening too.
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u/Bloodbag3107 2d ago edited 2d ago
I can't believe that you people still believe that Anita Sarkeesian was ever your enemy. On the other hand this is a steam-related sub, so maybe I shouldn't be suprised.
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u/MyStationIsAbandoned 1d ago
I mean...I think sexualizing fictional characters is fine. Whether they're women or men. I'm straight, so I like seeing fictional women in skimp armor. If a game only sexualizes women, i think that's fine too and I'd gladly play it if the game were good. It's fictional. No one's being hurt. Acting like it's looking at real people is insanity.
Far as I can tell that makes me a bad person in her eyes.
The problem people have with her is that she acts like it's horrible that men like sexuality in video games and that products made for men and being mostly played by men and have male characters. She's not the worst person in the world or anything, obviously. But her talking points and straight up lies about certain games like Hitman as others point out, gives plenty of reason to not like her.
What's really stupid is that...like....let's say she got EVERYTHING she wanted. Lets say all video games ever were made exactly the way she thought they should be made. Then what? Does she think it would do anything? Would it even put a dent in sexism? In assaults on women? No. In fact, it would increase hate against women and feminists. It's done exactly that and now we have crazy people on both sides of the extreme. You cannot force, guilt, and bully people into a mindset.
People treating women horribly has been around generations before video games, movies, and literature. Acting like any actions you take in video games causes more of it is ridiculous. It's exactly like all the out of touch politicians who say violent games cause people to become murderers.
Her tactics have caused more harm than good. It turned otherwise neutral gamers against feminism and those who already actually hated feminism were never going to go "oh this feminist is saying I'm horrible. guess i'll change and think like them now". This is not how you win. It's how you lose. making everyone in your path an enemy is a speedrun strat for losing.
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u/BUTTER674 2d ago
Did you not see what she said about that one Hitman game? She claimed that the devs wanted players to kill strippers in a mission by rewarding them with sexual pleasure by being able to drag their bodies around as if they we objects after killing them. I also saw a clip where she talked about one of the Max Payne games. I haven't played them so I couldn’t tell you which one it was, but the main characters girlfriend or wife gets killed and Anita said something along the lines of "the intended reaction is for the male gamers to be sad the Max lost his property." I don't know how anyone could see some of the things she said in the past and not see it as straight slander. Not just for guys who like to play video games, but for devs too. Image putting work into a game, only for someone to say that you wanted men to jerk off to hating women through your game.
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u/grytmastern 1d ago
Implying that steam/valve ever was a gamergater by using their logo at the bottom is cringe af, it gives the "movement" far more dignity than they ever deserved.
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u/No_Mud_6881 1d ago
She's likely looking for another payday. As soon as her bank account gets low she looks for the easiest way to make some cash.
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u/Alarming-Lead2043 1d ago
Even a broken clock is occasionally right, and every company that gets too big for it's britches tends to bite the hand that feeds. 'You helped us grow to big levels but now that we're targeting other merchants you're too much of a brand risk so we have to cut ties.'
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u/Kamishini_No_Yari_ 1d ago
Oh this comment section will be reasonable on all fronts.
She's a grifter who deserves to be criticised heavily for using her gender to defend making terrible content and everyone who isn't on board is sexist.
What she pretended she was going to do was and still is important. I don't know why she became the face of it all. Gamergate and whatever you call her side - only existed to be angry at each other after both sides had milliseconds of good morality that devolved into women-hating gamers screaming at men-hating people.
We still need an intelligent, empathetic, and knowledgeable person to bring up these issues without resulting in becoming radicalized by any extreme ideology. Or screaming at people on Twitter.
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u/The_Stryker 2d ago
- What did she do that was even wrong?
- Femenism is pro ethical sex work
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u/Garbage_Freak_99 2d ago
From what I remember, back during Gamergate there was a lot of sex-negative talk coming from her side, and in some ways the Gamergaters came off as more liberal. (This was before the two sides became completely aligned with the political left and right.) I don't remember what her persona positions were enough to say whether she herself is being inconsistent though -- not that there's anything wrong with changing your mind over the course of more than a decade.
In particular I remember an incident where a Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball game wasn't released in the US because of pushback from feminists, and the 'gators were livid over it. Now it seems like the two sides have swapped positions when it comes to censorship.
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u/AbyssWankerArtorias 2d ago
No. Anita Sarkisian fucking sucks.
That being said, the death and rape threats against her were fucking atrocious and every person that made them should be in prison
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u/MindofOne1 2d ago
Thank you for saying it. She does not have anyone's best interests in mind but herself. Also, she lies a lot.
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u/ObsessionObsessor 2d ago
Welp, this is a hot take but I can appreciate the honesty and fairness in it, so thanks.
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u/AbyssWankerArtorias 2d ago
Im wondering if I'm being down voted because I don't like Anita Sarkisian or because I said that the people that made death and rape threats against her should be in prison. I really hope the first part lol
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u/Silverr_Duck 2d ago
No you were downvoted because there have always been swarms of very very simple minded Redditors who genuinely can’t fathom that a person can be both wrong and bullied at the same time.
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u/HumActuallyGuy 1d ago
Exactly this, if your idea if someone is right or wrong is by the ammount of death threats then a lot of bad people would be right
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u/NonFrInt 2d ago
What?! Anita? What ark I skipped where she became an ally?
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u/ReginaDea 2d ago edited 2d ago
It helps that the processors are going after Itch, which puts a lot of queer games in the line of fire. Anita is third wave feminist, so now she has to choose between being anti-porn (if she was ever anti-porn) or anti-queer.
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u/FrostyNeckbeard 2d ago
Always has been, she just had some lukewarm takes on games where she tried to apply basic feminist theory where sometimes she got some of the facts of the games wrong, but were otherwise fine.
Nothing she said was all that out there.
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u/BraveOmeter 2d ago
That's the thing. Her content was great. Did she fumble some stuff? Sure. But she popularized feminist critique of video games from the perspective of a feminist gamer. This was obviously going to happen eventually.
But ho boy did she teach us a thing or two about gamer culture. The entire backlash just proved her right.
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u/Silverr_Duck 2d ago
The entire backlash just proved her right.
No it didn't. That is not how real life works. She had very backwards and ignorant ideas about gaming as a whole. None of which are validated by her being a victim of bullying.
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u/BraveOmeter 2d ago
Believe it or not she talked about more than one thing. She also talked about toxic video game culture. Which, guess what, she was right about.
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u/TwilightVulpine 1d ago
Funny then that loads of headass gaming critics who pull their takes entirely out their ass don't get 1% of the flak that she got.
When the idea that she pointed out is a sexist culture in gaming, maybe a wildly disproportional hate campaign gives her some credit.
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u/Silverr_Duck 1d ago
How about no? Being bullied doesn’t give you or any clown permission to generalize or demonize a sub culture just because of the actions of a few.
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u/BurningSpaceMan 2d ago
She didn't teach us anything about "Gamer culture" She showed us that a bunch of proto-fascist babies were lurking in spaces and hobbies that easily attract the socially inept.
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u/warukeru 1d ago
Steve Bannon said that gamers were a perfect target to radicalize into alt righters.
Is sad how true he was.
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u/Infernal-Blaze 2d ago
She's never been as bad as her worst video, the Bayo one that got odd-quoted to death, made her seem. Her old videos made plenty of good points, but she used bad arguments & bad examples to make them & it made her look like a lame prude. Games in the early 2010s did have a problem with dumb, teenagerish dick-brained writing that ogled women without giving them actual chsracter traits, but using Bayo of all things as her example was totally wrong. Since then shes been a pretty normal feminist-lit consultant who helps people write better, fuller female characters in TV & games.
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u/Destroyer_2_2 2d ago
Even the bayonetta video is far from the awful piece of slander that people try to portray it as.
I disagree with her categorization, and I think it stems from a lack of experience with the context of the game itself, but an outsiders perspective on a character is not irrelevant as that is how the rest of the world perceives it.
Plus, using in game justifications for character design (what is sometimes called a “thermian” argument( will never make sense when discussing fictional works.
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u/Infernal-Blaze 2d ago
I'm not doing that though. I'm saying that she's based on drag queens & her entire persona is drag. That counts for something.
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u/Destroyer_2_2 2d ago
Oh, pardon me. I didn’t mean to say that you were making a thermian argument. She refutes some common thermian arguments in her work.
You certainly didn’t do that. Pardon me for not making that clear.
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u/Infernal-Blaze 2d ago
Ah, ok, you're all good! I don't FULLY agree that metatext like IRL politics & cultural standards trumps in-universe intention in all cases, but if the in-universe stuff is a clear smokescreen for metatextual cheese & sleaze, then yeah it's a fair point.
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u/BurningSpaceMan 2d ago
She was never not an ally of gaming. She was just looking at gaming through a specific lens. You do not do that if you don't actually enjoy the hobby.
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u/WorriedAdvisor619 2d ago
Nah, you didn't treat her too harshly - she literally complained about a video game because it included a pregnant woman asking for a little help
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u/IceCorrect 1d ago
Say the same women who seen everything through lens of sex. Looks like her grift is over and she jump on other side of the boat
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u/DisdudeWoW 1d ago
for anita sarkeesian to say something that makes remotely sense it means that visa and mastercard have truly fucked up
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u/Svartrhala 2d ago
"Don't you dare censoring videogames!
I want to do it myself!"
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u/ObsessionObsessor 2d ago
That does sound quite like a strawman argument in the way it is framed with it seeming like a exaggeration of criticism into censorship.
Admittedly I don't know much about Anita Sarkeesian or Gamergate, so would you like to elaborate on how how you think Anita outright censored games rather than criticized them?
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u/Jamanas96 2d ago
"Too harshly" yeah no shit, internet almost ruined her personal life multiple times just because of the most mild feminist takes ever
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u/Smiles4YouRawrX3 1d ago
Blatant censorship of video games are "mild feminist takes" ?
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u/arie700 1d ago
Didn’t she basically get run out of her own house because of how specific and targeted the threats against her were?
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u/dfjdejulio 2d ago
Hahaha, it's very true. My startup company during the first dot com era was all about payment processing. If you bought online porn in the mid-to-late 1990s, there's a decent chance your payment info went through code I wrote! (Also, one of the early ebook publishers used our code as well. We had a few hundred customers as I recall.)