Monthly Archives: October 2014

Brianna Wu: Rape and death threats against female gamers. Why haven’t men in tech spoken out? #GamerGate

Brianna Wu, Washington Post, October 20, 2014– They’ve taken down women I care about one by one. Now, the vicious mob of the Gamergate movement is coming after me. They’ve threatened to rape me. They’ve threatened to make me choke to death on my husband’s severed genitals. They’ve threatened to murder any children I might have.

This angry horde has been allowed to wage its misogynistic war without penalty for too long. It’s time for the video game industry to stop them.

Gamergate is ostensibly about journalistic ethics. Supporters say they want to address conflicts of interest between the people that make games and the people that support them. In reality, Gamergate is a group of gamers that are willing to destroy the women who have invaded their clubhouse.

The movement is not new. Two years ago, when Anita Sarkeesian tried to crowdfund a series of videos critiquing the hypersexualized female characters of video games, they threatened to kill and rape her. The movement reached fever pitch – and got its name — when a jilted former lover of indie game developer Zoe Quinn published transcripts of her life online. Gamers who were outraged over charges that Quinn’s game Depression Quest had received favorable reviews due to an alleged romantic relationship with a journalist, seized the opportunity to shame and terrify her into hiding. Now, Gamergate is a wildfire that threatens to consume the entire games industry.

The fact that Gamergate supporters went after Quinn and not the journalist says everything you need to know about the movement.

I became Gamergate’s latest target when I tweeted this joke about supporters of the movement:

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The next day, my Twitter mentions were full of death threats so severe I had to flee my home. They have targeted the financial assets of my company by hacking. They have tried to impersonate me on Twitter. Even as we speak, they are spreading lies to journalists via burner e-mail accounts in an attempt to destroy me professionally.

We’ve lost too many women to this lunatic mob. Good women the industry was lucky to have, such as Jenn Frank, Mattie Bryce and my friend Samantha Allen, one of the most insightful critics in games media. They decided the personal cost was too high, and I don’t know who could blame them.

Every woman I know in the industry is terrified she will be next.

The culture in which women are treated this way by gamers didn’t happen in a vacuum. For 30 years, video games have been designed by men, marketed to men and sold to men. It’s obvious to anyone outside the industry that video games have serious issues with the portrayal of women. It’s not just oversexualized examples, such as Ivy of the Soul Caliber series. Games are still lazily falling on the same outdated tropes involving women. Princess Peach, of Nintendo’s Mario games, has been kidnapped in 12 separate games since 1985. Perhaps the most disturbing of all is the propensity of games to have women thoughtlessly murdered as a motivation for the male hero, such as Watch Dogs.

Read More: Washington Post

Feminist Critics of Gaming Facing Threats #GamerGate

Photo Jim Wilson, New York Times

Photo Jim Wilson, New York Times

Nick Wingfield, New York TimesOctober 15, 2014– Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist cultural critic, has for months received death and rape threats from opponents of her recent work challenging the stereotypes of women in video games. Bomb threats for her public talks are now routine. One detractor created a game in which players can click their mouse to punch an image of her face.

Not until Tuesday, though, did Ms. Sarkeesian feel compelled to cancel a speech, planned at Utah State University. The day before, members of the university administration received an email warning that a shooting massacre would be carried out at the event. And under Utah law, she was told, the campus police could not prevent people with weapons from entering her talk.

“This will be the deadliest school shooting in American history, and I’m giving you a chance to stop it,” said the email, which bore the moniker Marc Lépine, the name of a man who killed 14 women in a mass shooting in Montreal in 1989 before taking his own life.

The #STEM Movement: Golden Opportunity or Trojan Horse? #OISE #UBC

OISE Centre for Science, Mathematics and Technology Education Forum Series

The STEM Movement:  Golden Opportunity or Trojan Horse?

Thursday, October 30, 2014
4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
OISE, NEXUS Lounge
Centre for Science, Mathematics & Technology Education
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE)

This event will be video-recorded in front of a live audience
FREE admission – No RSVP required

Panelists:
Larry Bencze (OISE); Jason Foster (U of T Engineering Science)
Samson Nashon (University of British Columbia); Ana Maria Navas (OISE)
John Wallace (OISE)

Moderator:
Indigo Esmonde (OISE)

The past several years have seen a surge of activity in education around the acronym STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Much of this effort has been spurred by an economic agenda, that is, to produce more graduates in science-related fields for the job market. In many cases, governments, universities and school systems (sometimes in concert with private enterprise) are gearing their curricula and resources toward programs to attract students in STEM fields. For some commentators, this is seen as a golden opportunity to revive interest in science and mathematics related subjects, to improve scientific literacy and to attract more females and minorities to the field. Others see the movement as more like a Trojan horse, attractive on the outside, but focused mainly on skills training to feed the capitalist enterprise, to the detriment of general public education.