Tag: SJW

Superversivity

An important essay by Tom Simon:

For about a hundred years now, ever since the First World War broke the confidence of Western civilization, it has been fashionable to praise subversion. Art, music, and literature, as many of the critics tell us, are not supposed to go chasing after obsolete values like truth or beauty; they are supposed to shock, to wound, to épater les bourgeois – to subvert the values of society. Here is a fairly typical example, from the literary critic, John Grant: 

It must meddle with our thinking, it must delight in being controversial, it must hope to be condemned by authority (whatever authority one chooses to identify), it must be at the cutting edge of the imagination, it must flirt with madness, it must surprise.

Grant is prescribing goals for fantasy, but the same demand has been heard in every genre and every art form, much to the harm of the arts. Most people don’t share Grant’s ideological preoccupations; they see the arts not as vehicles of propaganda, but as entertainment. Trying to get yourself condemned by authority may be good sophomoric fun while you are doing it, but it makes a dull spectator sport. Considered as entertainment, it has no virtue except novelty; and it has not been novel since about the 1920s. This is one reason why the ‘serious’ arts see their audiences shrinking year after year, until they are only maintained in precarious existence by public subsidy.

Part of the trouble comes from that apparently blank cheque, ‘whatever authority one chooses to identify’. In practice, this always means the same authority: the ghost of Mrs. Grundy, the narrow-minded, puritanical, bourgeois authority that lost most of its power in 1914, and does not exist at all anymore. If you rebel against a different authority – the Chinese Communist Party, or the rulers of militant Islam – you will not find the critics so approving. They will call you reactionary or even neocon, and the hand of Buzzfeed will be raised against you.

For the world of art and literature is largely dominated by the Left, and the Left is dominated by people whose world-view is inherited from their great-grandfathers. In this view, we need labour unions to defend us against the peril of child labour, Big Government to defend us against Standard Oil. America is one false move away from theocracy and Jim Crow; Europe is one false move away from another World War. Nothing can save us except a wonderful new panacea called Socialism, which has never been tried before, and with which nothing can possibly go wrong. These, in the main, are the ideas of the Left even today; and the people who believe these things have the nerve to call themselves Progressives.

They call for progress; but they are still trying to progress from 1914 into 1915. They call for subversion; but the thing they are trying to subvert no longer exists.

Superversivity is an important concept. It is the philosophy of the builder rather the destroyer. It is the ideal of those opposed to the pinkshirts, to the SJWs, to the de facto Chantry Guild that infests every modern institution and organization and pasttime that seeks to disqualify, redirect, and destroy everyone and everything that is insufficiently supportive of their societal subversion.

It is our job to build Western civilization’s intellectual redoubt and ensure that the next generation is even more resistant to the poison than we are. Because eventually, the infestation will burn itself out and collapse due to its internal illogic and inconsistencies.

I have but one criticism of Mr. Simon’s piece. He implies that the neocons are the enemies of the Left. This is not true. Neoconservatism has always been of the Left and is, in itself, a form of subversion.

They think they’ve won

The pinkshirts don’t just think they’re winning, they think they’ve already won. Because Inevitable, insofar as I can follow what passes for the logic:

There’s a culture war happening right now. It’s happening in games, in film, in journalism, in television, in fiction, in fandom. It’s happening online, everywhere. And everywhere, sexists, recreational misogynists and bigots are losing.

They are losing, and they don’t know why….

I’m talking about gender itself, sex and sexuality itself, as a game you can play and win by ‘beating’ the other ‘side’ into submission. A game where the other ‘side’ isn’t really human at all. Shoot to kill. Destroy the brain. Move on.

Games and pickup artistry gave a formal structure to that mindset for this generation, but it’s older than that. The gamification of misogyny predates the internet, but right now, in this world full of angry, broken, lost young men convinced that women have robbed them of some fundamental win in life, it’s rampant.

The trouble is that treating other human beings like faceless opponents doesn’t work in the real world.

Gender isn’t a game you can play and win by brutalising and harassing and shaming and hurting the other ‘side.’  Ultimately, there is no other side. Gender oppression is structural. Everybody loses, in the long term, because everybody has to live in a culture where it’s normal to hound women out of their homes for daring to demand fairer treatment, normal to shame girls and queer people into silence for suggesting that there might be other interesting stories to tell. There is no way to win this game, except by not playing at all.

So they can’t understand why they’re losing.

They can’t understand why their arguments aren’t working. They can’t understand why game designers, industry leaders, writers, public figures are lining up to disown their ideas and pledge to do better by women and girls in the future. They can’t understand why, just for example, when my friend, the games critic and consultant Leigh Alexander, was abused and ‘called out’ as an unprofessional slut, a lying cunt, morally and personally corrupt, just for speaking truthfully and beautifully about all of this, it was Alexander who was invited to write her first piece for Time magazine, Alexander who got to define the agenda for the mainstream, who received praise and recognition, whilst her abusers’ words will be lost in a howling vortex of comment threads and subreddits and, eventually, forgotten.

Their rage is the rage of bewilderment.

This is a beautiful piece of feminist agit-prop, which begs the very question it asserts. It is an attempt to simultaneously encourage the Social Justice Whores who are demoralized by the unexpectedly fierce resistance being shown by the gaming community while undermining that resistance by falsely claiming it to be counterproductive.

Notice how the need to resort to existing allies is portrayed as some sort of victory; is there any doubt that Time Magazine was on their side from the start? The classic female attempt to silence the opposition and pretend it doesn’t exist instead of confronting and defeating it is portrayed as a victory, instead of the renewed offensive it actually is. But in fact, the need to throw in your big guns is indicative of the fact that the battle is not going your way.

The Social Justice Whores, who as I noted yesterday are the moral mutaweenies of the godless Left, are making two major mistakes. First, they have completely failed to understand their enemy. Second, they have prematurely declared victory.

We aren’t bewildered at all. Nor are we even slightly mystified by why we have been losing for decades, anymore than we fail to grasp why the pinkshirts are suddenly feeling the need to screech louder and redouble their efforts. The truth is that they are meeting with active and stubborn male resistance for the first time in years and they are stunned and astonished by it. Remember, an angry woman always engages in psychological projection. When Penny Red talks about “the rage of bewilderment” she is talking about herself.

The problem is not that “women are creating culture, changing culture,
redefining culture”, the problem is that women are actively attempting to DESTROY culture and they offer nothing that anyone wants in its place. That is why “those cunts, those poisonous cunts, those
disgusting, uppity cunts must be stopped”. And that is why they will be stopped.

We will win so long as we refuse to submit because we are the creators. They are nothing but pale imitators and parasites. They create nothing new, they bring nothing to the table, they gorge themselves insatiably off the scraps that we cast off and then claim to be feeding themselves.

A year ago, Castalia House did not exist. In six months, we have sold or given away more than 35,000 books. That’s a drop in the bucket, but it is a start and we are but one minor player in the growing resistance to the SJWs “in games, in film, in journalism, in television, in fiction, in fandom.” The sides are being drawn up, and soon it will become apparent that the pinkshirts have absolutely no idea how reliant they were upon male forbearance.

But we know what our predecessors did not, we see where their perceptions failed them, so we will show no mercy and we will not give them one single inch of additional ground. They will soon find that victory comes considerably harder when the enemy is actually aware there is a war on. Ask yourself this: if they are truly winning this latest battle, why did Penny Red feel the need to close comments on her blog post?

When publishing was taken over

In the annual Publisher’s Weekly salary report, it is easy to see when the Pink Rot solidified:

Meanwhile, the pay gap between men and women—the other well-known imbalance in the industry—continued in 2013, even though women accounted for 74% of the publishing workforce and men only 26%. The average compensation for men in 2013 was $85,000, the same as in 2012, while average compensation for women rose to $60,750 last year, up from $56,000 the year before. Women filled at least 70% of the jobs in sales and marketing, operations, and editorial, but only 51% of the management positions. The relatively large portion of men in management roles (though they’re still a slight minority there) partly explains the overall pay gap, since those jobs are the best paid in the industry. But men also tended to earn more than female colleagues with similar titles last year, due, in part, to the fact that men tend to have more experience. In 2013, the median number of years of experience for men in the industry was 17, compared to 11 for women (the median for men in management was 19 years, compared to 13.5 for women).

Look at the Years of Experience chart at the linked post. Whereas 37 percent of the men have more than 20 years of experience, only 21 percent of the women do. But sometime between 11 and 20 years ago, women first made up the majority of employees. That’s observably the point at which the pinkshirts took over; for me it first became apparent when THE QUANTUM ROSE, which is little more than a romance novel in space, won the Nebula and made me realize how much the SF/F field was changing, and not for the better.

The amazing thing is the way it is implied that a field in which there are three times as many women as men working is somehow stacked against women due to the “pay gap”. The amusing thing is how lily-white and non-diverse the field is; it is readily apparent that the reason the publishing industry so feverishly embraces diversity in their authors is as a shield to distract from their own lack of diversity in their offices.

Obviously the process began more than 15 years ago, but that’s when it became increasingly difficult for those writing masculine fiction for male audiences to break into print.

Escalating #GamerGate

A veteran game developer, Brad Wardell, who unlike Zoe Quinn actually has a fair amount of game development experience, weighs in on #GamerGate:

In my mind, the balance of wrongdoing is heavily weighted on the opponents of #gamergate.  Mainly, because its opponents have had a long head start of character assassination and harassment. I know some of my friends in the media will be appalled by that but that’s mainly because they haven’t seen the shit storm directed at anyone who dares not support the “social justice” narrative for the past few years.

Without the August 28th mass “gamers are dead” article series on multiple sites, none of this would have happened. Let’s remember that.  It was a tempest in a teapot before that.

Every major escalation I’ve seen in this industry conflict has begun with one side mass misrepresenting others with a very broad brush.

The anti #gamergate people are the ones who brought me in

One thing to make clear here: The pro-#gamergate people didn’t ask me to stand up for them. They made no demands on me.  All I did was, as game developer, was tweet that I like gamers and don’t like seeing gamers misrepresented.  For that, the anti-#gamergate people started smearing me. (SJW logic: Make up allegations, use allegations as evidence, repeat).

In other words, I was not/am not trying to use #gamergate to get a pound of flesh. You want me to quit throwing in the misdeeds of the SJW crowd in SJW faces? Then tell them to quit character assassinating me.  Because, let’s face it, I have a large, heavy, blunt instrument in the form of having been falsely accused of sexual harassment and having won that case so thoroughly that the plaintiff had to publicly apologize. You don’t get more clear cut than that in the legal world.  I’d be delighted to just talk about games, tech, etc. But if you’re going to suggest I’m some sort of misogynist or rapist or sexual harasser then yea, I’m going to use the 800 pound mace that SJWs carelessly crafted for me.

And for those truly concerned in the gaming media: If you want to do “the right thing” (even if it’s two years late): Feel free to have the articles and threads that smear me set to just not be indexed by search engines. Is that really asking for a lot? No censorship. No retractions. No apologies.  Just make it so that new harassers aren’t born every time someone looks at the first page of Google results on us. I’ve been doing stuff 20 years, I’ve helped invent a number of the technologies you guys use on your PCs every day. But it’s all crowded out because the media chose to use me as a cartoon villain to push forward an agenda. Thanks for that. I just love having to discuss the Kotaku article every few weeks with some investment banker or enterprise customer. I really enjoy having to answer awkward questions by extended family. And the occasional random “You fucking shit lord, I hope you die in a fire!” emails I get are just..well they’re just so heart warming. Thank you for that.

The double standards

When I see a Ben Kuchera arguing for the deletion of threads because they might encourage harassment of game developers, I ask, where was he when I was taking a beating on nearly every gaming forum for something I didn’t even do? Oh that’s right, he was helping spread it!  Yea, thanks for using an image that shows a claim that I asked my female employees if they enjoyed tasting semen. And you know what? I didn’t hold any of this against anyone. I didn’t send PR people to demand threads removed. No DMCA messages. But it’s pretty infuriating to see calls to censor discussion based on “harassment” when they had no problem when I was the target.

Except, of course, in my case, I hadn’t actually done any of the things I was alleged to have done. No, I’ve gotten to fry for the past couple years in countless threads across the net.  I also want to point out that even though we won, and we got a public apology, some don’t consider that enough because apparently we were supposed to demand the plaintiff admit in writing to committing perjury. So even mercy is frowned upon by these people….

Let me preface this: NO ONE can survive detailed scrutiny. This is doubly true if the person doing the scrutiny is not giving you the benefit of the doubt.

Historically, the activist columnists in other industries have gotten away with trashing their opponents. It’s easy to lampoon the Tea Party people, for instance because their core base aren’t very technical and have no real means to strike back.  Same was true of the Occupy movement which got overrun by SJWs and was easily dismissed soon after.

But gamers are technical. They do have the means to fight back.  I’m sure it never occurred to the columnists who wrote “gamers are dead” that their targets would be able to effectively return the favor. Those who have had great success cherry picking and editing quotes/emails/tweets to create a false narrative of their opponents never dreamed that doing so would come back to haunt them.

I am very loosely acquainted with Brad, having spoken to him a few times when he was at Stardock. He’s a smart guy and he’s perceptive too. However, I think he’s making one mistake here, the same mistake that most people in the SF/F community have made over time, which is thinking that being reasonable and moderate and fair to the other side is an option. It is not. There is absolutely no evidence supporting that belief… one can’t even call it a conclusion. Fantasy would perhaps be the better term.

We’re not dealing with reasonable people here, we are dealing with psychologically damaged people who want to utterly trash and destroy the things we love due to their envy, their mental instability and their evil, twisted ideology. They’re not going to stop simply because they’ve been shot down once or twice. Failure doesn’t demoralize them because it is their natural state. They’re simply never going to stop until you have submitted to them and they have destroyed yet another predominantly male bastion.

Understand that I’m not considered an extremist because I’m a hot-tempered angry person given to historically unusual positions, but because the Social Justice Whores all realize that I am immune to their influence and I am therefore a threat to them by demonstrating that their victory is not inevitable Progress and one need to cower before them. Unlike most of their targets, I can take every accusation of sexism and racism and homophobism and religionism and inequalism and bigotism, laugh at it, and refuse to be swayed by it. What they call an extremist is nothing more than an individual who will not submit to them and dutifully confess that black is white and gay is good and two plus two is five on command.

As Instapundit says, we have to punch back twice as hard. Trash back twice as hard. They’re not used to it. They can’t take it. They freak out when we simply point out the observable fact that Zoe Quinn aka Chelsea Van Valkenburg is a slut, and, allegedly, a whore. They go ballistic when we observe that Anita Sarkeesian is a complete fraud who knows virtually nothing about games. They are furious when we note that very few people read most of their award-winning works and that there is little science in their “science fiction”. We don’t have to assassinate their characters because they don’t have any. And they can’t handle the truth, which makes it our most potent weapon.

But only for those with the courage to stand up for it and wield it. So stop temporizing and thinking you’re going to somehow straddle the fence. Stop thinking that perhaps you can keep your head down and escape notice. You’re not. That’s the first step towards ultimate submission. Choose consciously and courageously, don’t let your fear of rejection make up your mind for you.

After all, being rejected by this collection of delusional neurotics is an absolute badge of distinction and good sense.

UPDATE: The SJW are now launching attacks on The Escapist due to its refusal to fall in line:

This is an attack by the Anti-Gamergate side. Kuchera was unable to browbeat Greg Tito into censoring the discussion, now that the corrupt journalists are losing this debate rapidly, the Anti-GG side is desperate to shut down the discussion.

They’ve already begun censoring on 4chan. They’ve turned it into a SJW hugbox, to the point where being politically incorrect in /b/ (the bloody POLITICALLY INCORRECT FORUM) is a ban worthy offense.

If you wonder why the Anti-GG side is doing this, the answer is simple:

They’re bloody terrified of losing their power.

For about 3 years now, they’ve had the privilege to attack, patronize, and demean others. They could insult people sarcastically, insinuate that all attempts to disagree with them were based on “racism” or “misogyny” rather than logic. Now with Gamergate being more popular and them being shown for who they are, they are absolutely desperate to end the discussion.

They’ve been painting us as the harassers, us as the doxxers and the “hackers”. You can all see now, that this is a lie. They’re a group founded on hatred, a clique desperate to retain their power and trying to censor the opposing side’s discussion.

Say what you will of us, but we haven’t been attempting to bring down sites for allowing the opposing side to speak.

So the next time someone says “We aren’t trying to silence you” or “we aren’t trying to take your games or websites away!” just know that it is a lie. It happened to 4chan. It’s attempting to happen here. We wont let them silence us.

Sanity does not prevail long

At this point, I’m rather looking forward to seeing the idiot Vikings get shellacked again. I don’t think this decision to deactivate AD again, this time indefinitely, is going to go over well with the Vikings fan base. It certainly hasn’t gone over well with the Vikings fans in the Day household:

The Minnesota Vikings placed Adrian Peterson on the Exempt/Commissioner’s Permission list, requiring the running back to abstain from team activities during his child-abuse case, the team announced Wednesday morning. Peterson was indicted last Thursday on a charge that he injured his 4-year-old son by spanking him with a tree branch. He was inactive for the team’s Week 2 loss to the New England Patriots but was reinstated Monday.

To be honest, I thought people were exaggerating when they talked about Goodell and Pink October being harbingers of the NFL’s downfall. But the invasion of the self-appointed SJW police into what used to be a man’s game is seriously killing the game in more ways that one.

As Ender commented, they could cut the number of flags being thrown in half and there would still be too many. At this point, I’d rather watch soccer than an NFL game just because most of the action one watches actually counts.

“soccer is way more gay than the NFL. …  i must believe it so. dear god please”

Perhaps once, but not anymore, I’m afraid. I’ve actually seen more serious injuries on the soccer field than on the football field. One of my teammates got a pair of ribs broken in our game last week, and I’ve seen numerous legs broken, including one nasty compound fracture that was sticking out through the skin.

Defeating the fiction police

The cartoon is from here. One autistic indy game developer points out that he doesn’t think praising the talking dog for the content of his speech is helping him:

Those in the gaming mass media think they’re doing people like me a favor, but they’re not. They’re smothering me and others like me. I know now there is no way they will hold my game truly accountable for any flaws it might ultimately have because they’ll think that any dismissal or criticism of the game as a whole will be a direct attack on autistic people, and it quite clearly is not. When people do dog pile on games that cover issues like this (I won’t name names but I’m sure you can fill in the blanks), it’s because of how the subject matter is approached, not that it was approached at all. The flaws of these games have been in their inability to truly connect with the people who play them, not that they had the audacity to attempt something new. If I had come forward before this, I would have been made a pet of the ‘social justice gaming crowd’, a person they could throw around to show how diverse and righteous they are, all while shielding themselves from criticism. I would be given preferential treatment just like I always have. It never ends….

Seeing a new game get ravaged for supposed sexism, racism, homophobia,
transphobia, ableism, etc. seemingly every week makes me feel less
inclined to want to write characters like Tinker, Hannah, or the many
others who will be playable in our game. To these people and
publications, all I have to ask is: is this what you want? Do you want
people to be too afraid to make inclusive art? Because whether that was
your intent or not, it’s what’s actually happening. It’s hard enough
investing all your money and time into making a studio, working for
years on a game that will eventually be judged by both critics and
consumers without then also having to be worried that those same critics
will sensationalize your game in order to make a few more big articles.

My answer is that the game developer should do as Harlan Ellison has suggested that the author do: answer them with the mighty power of your pen. By which he means to ignore them and write or develop whatever it is that YOU decide you want your book, or your game, to be.

Some people have already complained that FIRST SWORD has no female gladiators.  Tough. There is no need for them and so we’re not going to waste any time or development resources on them. And if the Social Justice Whores don’t like that, well, they are welcome to decry the lack of female slavery in our game to their heart’s content; it’s not going to make any difference whatsoever to me or to how well the game does.

The only power the Social Justice Whores have over you is the power you give them. Look at VP and its continually growing traffic. Look at Castalia and the increasing number of books it is publishing. Both have prospered despite the best efforts of the SJWs to attack them. There is no reason to give them even the slightest ground; doing so only inflames and encourages them. So don’t do it!

Root them out wherever they have infested, slap down all their attempts to invade and influence, and resolutely ignore them when they are safely on the outside. John C. Wright explains how they, and a panoply of other evils, will be defeated:

I submit that victory shall be ours by using the same methods we used to overthrow the Roman Empire and replace paganism with Christianity.

First, we must pray. We must live differently from the pagans around us, according to standards of higher discipline, displaying more fidelity in marriage, eschewing divorce, assisting the poor and downtrodden, and living lives so holy that even the devils are amazed.

Second, by being willing to suffer public scorn, loss of prestige, position, and fortune for Christ.

Third, by being open, vocal, coordinated, and relentless in our efforts. Fourth, by staying on message and never giving an inch.

Fifth and last, by showing the imagination of man that no one can live in the craven airless cesspool of the mental environment of political correctness, but that men flourish and grow strong and brave, not to mention more sexually appealing, in the walled gardens of the Church and the battlefields of life.

Stay on message. Never give an inch. Stop trying to play moderate in the hopes that you’ll escape the heat. Stop trying to win them over by telling them that you’re not opposed to them when, in fact, you are. You cannot reason with the willfully insane.

Video Game Sex War

There’s a headline for you. It’s pretty obvious that the anti-game women are alarmed and in retreat when they are running to the international media for support simply because Zoe Quinn was exposed as a whore taking advantage of corruption in the world of independent game journalism:

Evil women are coming to take away your computer games. At least, that’s the message that a group of angry young men have been articulating on the internet in the past few weeks. According to them, these games – once a haven for socially awkward teenage boys – are being ruined by the monstrous regiment….

This online explosion grew from two separate, though connected, incidents. The
first was the success of a series of videos made by the blogger Anita
Sarkeesian, called Tropes vs Women, which explored the portrayal of women in
video games (generally submissive and for decoration). When she launched a
crowdfund appeal for the project in 2012, she raised $150,000 more than she
asked for, but also unleashed a vicious campaign of sustained harassment.
Hackers tried to gain access to her social media accounts and she was
bombarded with tweets and emails threatening her with rape and death. A few
weeks ago, she had to leave her home because she feared for her safety.

While this was going on, a game developer called Zoe Quinn also became the
target of abuse, when her former boyfriend posted online accusations of
infidelity: he claimed she had cheated on him with a games journalist. A few
impressionable young men decided that this was their opportunity to end
“corruption” in games journalism once and for all. They bombarded Quinn with
abuse and threats, insisting that their anger was about press ethics – she
had traded sexual favours for good reviews – rather than misogyny. It turned
out that the journalist in question had not even reviewed Quinn’s game.

While many of the men involved in these incidents are undoubtedly motivated by
sexism and sadism – there is a nasty trend on the internet to abuse women
per se – they are right about one thing: women are coming to take away their
computer games…. [A]s video games are increasingly subjected to the same cultural criticism
that is routinely applied to books, films and television programmes, their
developers are coming under pressure to change the way they portray women.
This, obviously, angers many of those who define themselves as “gamers” and
who feel threatened by the idea of such interference…. Games are growing up, whether gamers like it or not, and
testosterone-riddled male-power fantasies are bound to fall out of favour as
a result. The nerds are going to have to grow up and learn to live with the
invasion.

In other words, she’s admitting that those awful angry young men are absolutely correct. But speaking as a game designer who knows a fair percentage of the top game developers, these assertions are downright risible. I was at the offices of an extremely successful new game developer not too terribly long ago, and I would estimate around three percent of their employees were women. And in two days of discussions concerning what they were working on and what they were planning to develop in the future, there was absolutely zero mention of what might be of interest to women or female gamers. It’s just not their market, and therefore it is of no interest or concern to them.

My own game now in development, FIRST SWORD, came under some criticism from the likes of Manboobz and other petty SJWs a few months ago because I made it clear there will be no female fantasy gladiators. Historically speaking, female gladiators were the light comic relief between the real action; they were often set against midgets, for example. These complaints had no more effect on my design decisions than complaints about prostitutes had on Rockstar or complaints about scanty armor on female characters have had on every game company everywhere. But it is more than a little ironic to see that there are pinkshirts who will actually complain about the fact that I am refusing to design female slavery, in which women would be literally bought and sold as property, into a game.

The fact that there is now a large Lite Games industry in which women are the vast majority of the consumers doesn’t change what continues to appeal and sell to young men. You don’t need to tell me about the difference. After all, I designed Hot Dish for THQ, one of the more successful “casual games” played predominantly by women before Zynga rode the Facebook platform to going public. Some of the other options I came up with were a Wedding Dress game, a Bridal Party game, and a sorority-based game. I was literally years ahead of today’s pinkshirts.

But these casual girl games have as little to do with the current AAA shooters as the shooters do with the turn-based wargames that preceded them. Girl games are just another gaming genre, that’s all, and they will have as little effect on the design and development of games in other genres as has always been the case in the past. Now certainly, if someone comes up with a good mechanic in one of them that is useful in another genre, it will be copied and used. After all, Candy Crush Saga is simply a dumbed-down version of Steve Fawkner’s Puzzle Quest, thus allowing one to trace its design lineage all the way back to a turn-based wargame, Warlords, a CGW game-of-the-year which has probably been played by fewer women over the last 25 years than read this blog. But Call of Duty hasn’t changed how designers or players approach Advanced Squad Leader, and Depression Quest won’t change how they approach Call of Duty either.

The reason that the game industry is much less susceptible to the sort of pressure that Sarkeesian and Quinn are attempting to appeal is that whereas it is easy to write and publish books, it is much harder to design and develop games. And the sort of men who design and develop games are considerably less inclined to pay any attention to whatever it is that the pinkshirts are demanding today than the sort of men who used to write science fiction.

I find it all rather amusing. If the pinkshirts are already complaining about the lack of women in a fantasy gladiator game still in development, it should be downright hilarious to see their response to RIDING THE RED HORSE when it comes out in November.

But since we’re speaking of inclusiveness, this is as good a place as any to note that the Spanish (La Gravedad Mata) and Portuguese (Gravidade Mortal) versions of QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills are free today on Amazon. As is the immortal John C. Wright’s Awake in the Night.

UPDATE: Lest you doubt it, academic feminists are quite literally attempting to destroy the game industry in much the same way they have destroyed science fiction and fantasy:

Adrienne: Why do we see such tension between academics and game designers?  less of an issue with indies, but there are always some people in industry that have similar questions until industrial logic takes over later and how can we better intervene in industrial logics to disturb that process.  How can academics bridge the gap to the industry audience to help them do different work?  How can we disrupt the capitalist norms that facilitate this?

Deirdra: This is a hard, personal issue.  Getting attacked or having friends getting attacked hurts.  It’s hard not to feel personally attacked and to get to an academic spot where you take the personal out of it.

Andrew: Feels quite viscerally injured when someone like Samantha Allen is lost to the industry because the reaction to her by some gamers was so violent that it didn’t make sense to stay. Academia needs to push for more radical positions within the industry to help make things better.

If they think the reaction was violent already, they haven’t seen anything yet now that we actually know what they are up to. It is time for the game industry to declare war on academia.