Feminist Frequency is shutting down after 15 years .

[You]

On 8/5/2023 at 7:29 PM, Dreakon13 said:

I don't really care who is on the screen, male, female, hetero, homo, black, white, trans, etc... as long as the games are fun and the stories are compelling.  I feel like the militant stance for inclusion has long become almost as kind of silly and over the top as the people who claim to be against it (though I think it more just petty spiting at this point)... but including is better than not including, so I guess keep fighting the good fight people.

 

I think everyone thinks like you, and to an extent I think people still do. Always did, always have.

 

I think honestly, the easy way to sum it up, is that certainly people have just gone mad.

 

This isn't just exclusive to games though.

 

I probably will start to sound like AJRadio, but in the 90s, people were just sane, and not crazy. And nobody thought of such nonsense to get upset about.

 

Let me tell you a quick story.

 

So almost 20 years ago now, my mum came into my room once, and I'm playing Final Fantasy Tactics...again, I was grinding for JP and EXP, fantastic game!

 

and she said "Oh no, not this game again, I hate it" so I asked her why, since of course she hasn't even played the game, didn't even know what it was about. How could she hate it?

And she replied with "Oh there's all these guys just running on the spot on some mountain somewhere, like Olympic jogging and not even moving, and half the time they don't even move forward, they look stupid" (Most had haste and I'm just hitting a trapped Chocobo over and over again)

 

I mean I just laughed, and this is quite an interesting take, and the reason she thinks something like that, is simply because she doesn't play games.

It's of course valid criticism, for her, but probably something that no gamer has even thought of, let alone considered a value reason for something being a "bad game".

But imagine if my mum was employed at some business somewhere, and needed click bait articles.

 

So fast forward to 2010s or so, when erm "busybodies" let's call them. Professional complainers, like literally their job, entering areas that often they have no idea about, learning the ropes quickly and trying to find stuff to complain about, for clicks.

 

I'm pretty sure there was a Feminist Frequency about the trope where a woman gets kidnapped and the guy has to save her. And well, that is pretty cheesy, but she didn't use Double Dragon as far as I remember. She used Super Mario and Bowser locking up Princess Peach in the castle. Like I say, for clicks, and including one of the most recognizable games in the world. Like anybody who has ever played Mario, I bet not one person ever thought that was an issue with the game. It's a reach honestly.

 

Anyway, so when you open an argument with some a stupid example like this, the gloves are off aren't they are? Pretty much every criticism in every game you could ever dream up is possible.

 

Not all kidnap stories involve a woman, and sometimes it's not even kidnap. Like in Double Dragon 1, Marian is kidnapped, in Double Dragon II she is murdered. Sometimes it's a guy, sometimes it's a kid, sometimes it's the president's daughter, sometimes it's the president (Like in Bad Dudes VS Dragon Ninja)
 

The thing about games though, and it's a simple one. And like I know I almost feel weird saying it, but games are fiction.

I mean ffs, in Dragon Ninja, the president is kidnapped by fluorescent green and blue ninjas cos you know it's the 90s and things are still fun. Ninjas that should be dark and hiding in the shadows but nope in Dragon Ninja all these bright coloured ninjas riding on top of trucks like in Teen Wolf. Games are fiction FFS and in the case of Dragon Ninja, it's a guy that is kidnapped. Not every game uses a trope and even if it does, does anyone even care? Most home versions of Double Dragon don't even have the Marian Kidnap in the game at all, game wasn't censored, they just didn't fucking have the memory to barely even recreate the arcade experience at home. Cos you know nobody fucking cares about small details like that, gamers play the games, honestly who cares?! Well, people who are clutching at straws inventing issues in games that never really existed.

 

So considering the trillions of murders in total that occur in just the GTA and COD games alone, and all violent games since Mortal Kombat as far back as 1993. It's pretty evident that violent games do not cause violence.

 

I find it odd that the same isn't applied to racism and sexism. Sure there are certainly racist or homophobic people who play games, however it's common sense (to me anyway) that these people were racist or homophobic well before they even touched a game, and games do not increase or encourage all these bad behaviours.

 

These people are best ignored, well I don't mean that about my mum, of course. But when she says FFT is shit because of running on the spot, I can laugh and just get on with my day, because you know, people who criticize something but have no idea about it, those people are better ignored. It's literally a conversation that will go nowhere.

 

I think Feminist Frequency is a dead brand, which is probably why it got the chop, the youtube channel has just over 200k subscribers, videos get 4k views and on twitter they maybe get 5-10 likes per tweet. User engagement , tat's honestly really low for a channel of that calibre, especially considering how much praise, attention and support she gets from various outlets.

 

I guess the controversy angle waned, other more prominent people getting that coverage instead.  Nobody cares anymore, well I certainly don't any.

Nothing of value has been lost. Also it ain't 2016 anymore, causing drama is big business now and there was no competition back then, and other people clearly do it way better.

 

Like I said earlier, I'm happy for her. She is certainly a wealthy lady right now, and she got all the fame and glory she wanted and even if she isn't rich, what a legacy eh? 15 years of being in the spotlight, a celebrity almost. I'm actually impressed she managed to keep it going that long.

 

But, I doubt most people these days will even know who she is as is the quick turnaround of what is and isn't famous on the Internet these days.

I am not sure what her legacy will be, for me, she actually just reminds me of the time when Gamergate was going on, and when Trump was posting on twitter saying that an entire nation was shit, or something. lol

 

 

Edited August 6, 2023 by enaysoft

[Dreakon13]

1 hour ago, enaysoft said:

I probably will start to sound like AJRadio, but in the 90s, people were just sane, and not crazy. And nobody thought of such nonsense to get upset about.

 

There weren't "clicks" or "likes" back then.

 

If people did back then what they do now, it'd be the equivalent of daily nonsensical rants to the same small group of people in your life... and they'd at best tolerate it, at worst hate you.  Now that nonsensical ranting isn't just encouraged, it's the identity of an entire generation.  They don't know what they'd even be without social media giving them causes to champion and the constant ear and affirmation of similarly misplaced people.

[Mellenthin]

On 04/08/2023 at 6:25 AM, Jelly Soup said:

Please don't take the bait on this, folks. Whatever interesting talking points you think there are, they aren't actually here. Every time, and I mean every damn time, this crap gets brought up you'll find the same "I am very smart!" people repeating the same scripts to whip people up into a tizzy. Easy way to tell, if the phrase "everything is political" comes up, you're dealing with a bad actor. Someone who isn't interested in having a discussion, they want to prove you're a woman hater/GGer/nazi/snuffleupagus and will use the same poorly backed up talking points followed by oneliners to piss you off. Then when you're mad and/or visibly done, it'll be all "See see! This is how those people act!" Take that shit back to ResetEra.

 

 

You tell me!

 

 

I'll take your advice on this one.?

 

It's a shame though because this kind of debate could have been so much more instead of the huge rupture it caused back then.

[BrettyBoy]

Good.

[Eagle]

I love threads like these because they always expose at least one person whose bigotry I wasn't previously aware of (granted, I'm not that active here on the forums, so their bigotry was probably already exposed a long time ago by this point and I just never noticed, but still). It's incredible how these folks never fail to trip themselves up in the "oh no I'm not racist/sexist/LGBTphobic/etc., it's just that [proceeds to be racist/sexist/LGBTphobic/etc.]" discourse.

 

On 8/4/2023 at 1:25 AM, Jelly Soup said:

Please don't take the bait on this, folks. Whatever interesting talking points you think there are, they aren't actually here. Every time, and I mean every damn time, this crap gets brought up you'll find the same "I am very smart!" people repeating the same scripts to whip people up into a tizzy. Easy way to tell, if the phrase "everything is political" comes up, you're dealing with a bad actor. Someone who isn't interested in having a discussion, they want to prove you're a woman hater/GGer/nazi/snuffleupagus and will use the same poorly backed up talking points followed by oneliners to piss you off. Then when you're mad and/or visibly done, it'll be all "See see! This is how those people act!" Take that shit back to ResetEra.

 

 

Not every single game (or piece of media in general) is political, of course, but the vast majority of them are, whether intentionally or subconsciously. Politics encompasses a vast majority of our social interactions and the way we perceive the world as humans, it's not just when there's something happening on the screen that you (as in general, not as in you specifically) don't like. And, as people mentioned before, it's not the fault of women/POC/LGBT/etc. that their lives had to be made a political matter because otherwise they would just be exterminated merely for being different from the "standard" (which is very much a fabricated and oftentimes hypocritical standard, at that, but that's deviating from the matter at hand).

 

And usually, the people who get upset whenever that's brought up are either ignorant (as in the "not knowing" sense, not the "idiot" sense) and still believe in apoliticality (which is perfectly fine – it's difficult to swallow, as I learned from personal experience, especially when one side's dedicated to fueling that narrative as much as possible because it works just as well for them as having active supporters) or are the ones who are being challenged by the view on X political topic contained in a given work. It's not really anyone wanting to prove a person is a bigot as much as it is just speaking and seeing which of the two is the case; the latter type will naturally out themselves sooner or later.

 

On 8/6/2023 at 11:25 AM, You said:

I think, honestly, the easy way to sum it up is that certainly people have just gone mad.

 

This isn't just exclusive to games though.

 

I probably will start to sound like AJRadio, but in the 90s, people were just sane and not crazy. And nobody thought of such nonsense to get upset about.

No, people were always affected by sexism/racism/LGBTphobia/etc. The difference is that now they actually can express themselves, have their plights heard and find peers which they can share their struggles with, thanks to social media, whereas before they would either be forced to hide their struggle for the rest of their lives or be honest about themselves and then face the immense ostracization (at best... think I don't need to say what the worst outcomes would be) from the society around them afterwards.

 

Of course, this is a simplified explanation – these people were fighting for their rights long before the Internet even dreamed of existing, evidently, but their reach was massively capped by their material conditions at the time (which is what makes things such as the Stonewall riots, the anti-segregationist movement in the USA, etc. and their leaders that much more impressive).

[Jelly Soup]

14 minutes ago, Eagle said:

-snip-

Quite literally not one sentence of that word soufflé is an actual response to the post you quoted, beyond picking out the word 'pollical' to soap box from. The point was less about arguing people down and more about people coming in all piss and vinegar with the same aggressive statements (and it's always the same), then getting all hot and bothered when that same aggression is shoved back in their faces. I fully admit there is a good, healthy discussion to be had on the subject. However, in my experience people who toss around "everything is political" as critical arguments dismissively or resort to petty ad hoc "god the bigots!" statements aren't arguing in good faith. They came looking for a fight. Anyone who points this out is [-ist label goes here].

 

And look at me taking the bait.

Don't @ me for this, I'm not playing.

Edited August 17, 2023 by Jelly Soup

[Eagle]

6 minutes ago, Jelly Soup said:

Quite literally not one sentence of that word soufflé is an actual response to the post you quoted, beyond picking out the word 'political' to soapbox from. The point was less about arguing people down and more about people coming in all piss and vinegar with the same aggressive statements (and it's always the same), then getting all hot and bothered when that same aggression is shoved back in their faces. I fully admit there is a good, healthy discussion to be had on the subject. However, in my experience, people who toss around "everything is political" as critical arguments dismissively or resort to petty ad hoc "god, the bigots!" statements aren't arguing in good faith. They came looking for a fight. Anyone who points this out is [-ist label goes here].

 

And look at me taking the bait.

Don't @ me for this, I'm not playing.

Well, I do agree that such discussions are usually charged with more aggression than perhaps was necessary to be (especially in places like Twitter [or X, I guess] and whatnot) – sometimes, it is because the people in these discussions are merely interested in the personal attention and/or peer validation and don't actually care much about the causes they are defending, true, but I find that oftentimes it's because it's getting more and more difficult by the day to differentiate people who aren't coming out of a place of malice and those who are but need to pretend like they don't (for obvious reasons), and thus the ones affected by such discourse have to keep their guard up at all times lest they fall into the trap of giving apparent legitimacy to someone who will use that to bolster their ill purposes.

 

Also, unfortunately, this is not like Discord where I can quote someone without sending them a notification (at least, not as far as I'm aware of – if there is a way to do so, please let me know), so I'm gonna have to disappoint you on that front. Sorry. I promise it's not in bad intent, as much as I can't imagine there'd be anything particularly worrisome coming my way if it was anyway.

[JPtheNeurotic]

The whole point of “everything is political “ is that fiction and media doesn’t exist in a vacuum and that everyone crying about politics in their games are either hypocritical or media illiterate.

 

FFVII is a 1997 game that starts with eco-terrorism .

 

silent hill 3 is a 2003 game about the fears and anxieties that woman go through. 
 

 

[Alos88]

On 8/17/2023 at 7:47 PM, JPtheNeurotic said:

The whole point of “everything is political “ is that fiction and media doesn’t exist in a vacuum and that everyone crying about politics in their games are either hypocritical or media illiterate.

 

FFVII is a 1997 game that starts with eco-terrorism .

 

silent hill 3 is a 2003 game about the fears and anxieties that woman go through. 
 

 

But it's a blanket statement. Not everything is political, and I'd argue the statement 'everything is political' actively detracts from work that try to be- it can just as easily be read in a casual, dismissive way. After all, if all fiction WAS political, what would be impressive or daring about including a political message? AAA games most certainly don't, and by design as well. If people are going to get the credit they deserve for having messages in their games we have to get past this ridiculous notion that everything has always been political from the start because frankly all it does is diminish the efforts of those that do try to go for that in their work.

[JPtheNeurotic]

1 minute ago, Alos88 said:

But it's a blanket statement. Not everything is political, and I'd argue the statement 'everything is political' actively detracts from work that try to be- it can just as easily be read in a casual, dismissive way. After all, if all fiction WAS political, what would be impressive or daring about including a political message? AAA games most certainly don't, and by design as well. If people are going to get the credit they deserve for having messages in their games we have to get past this ridiculous notion that everything has always been political from the start because frankly all it does is diminish the efforts of those that do try to go for that in their work.

It’s because the actual use of the word political has been used wrongly by those complaining about it.  It’s really just a catch all term when used as actual rebuttal to explain that the games  excused from the real world . 

 

The reality is a lot of gamers complain about politics being pushed into their games as if any message or themes never existed even in much older titles. Even the creation of games can be viewed a such depending on tje circumstances of how it was made and distributed .

 

I’ll stop talking about when people stop getting upset about gay people being games or capcom making their woman “unattractive “ or dead space remake having gender neutral bathrooms .
 

 

 

 

[DrBloodmoney]

38 minutes ago, Alos88 said:

But it's a blanket statement. Not everything is political, and I'd argue the statement 'everything is political' actively detracts from work that try to be- it can just as easily be read in a casual, dismissive way. After all, if all fiction WAS political, what would be impressive or daring about including a political message? AAA games most certainly don't, and by design as well. If people are going to get the credit they deserve for having messages in their games we have to get past this ridiculous notion that everything has always been political from the start because frankly all it does is diminish the efforts of those that do try to go for that in their work.

 

That is not an unreasonable point, however, I would argue that the statement "everything is political" is rarely used as anything other than a rebuttal to the rather tiresome (and often rather over-active) contingent, who - either wilfully, or ignorantly - cry "politics" when they disagree with something, but steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the presence of equivalent politics when it's something they agree with.

 

For example, the contingent who decry representation in games as "political", yet fail to acknowledge that, by their own rationale and their own argument, the pre-existing lack of representation over the years (by either deliberate action, or apathetical inaction,) is itself "political" by the same metrics.

 

 

While, yes, there are works of art and commercial products that are inherently apolitical (I challenge anyone to find the political message in Tetris, for example!), it is deeply hypocritical for someone to argue that, for example, Life is Strange is "political", but Metal Gear Solid is not - and it is those to whom the statement "everything is political" tends to be used as the opening salvo to a challenge.

 

Saying "Everything is Political" is, therefore, not strictly true...

...but it has the ring of truth as an an idiomatic phrase, summarising a rebuttal to a particular argument that has long been the go-to safe-space of the apathetic or the actively craven. 

 

Edited August 19, 2023 by DrBloodmoney

[JPtheNeurotic]

1 minute ago, DrBloodmoney said:

While, yes, there are works of art and commercial products that are inherently apolitical (I challenge anyone to find the political message in Tetris, for example

Real quick I absolutely agree with your post but I could see an argument while the game Tetris itself isn’t political the creation or it’s distribution might be .

 

I just t it be funny to point that out as a possibility haha 

[DrBloodmoney]

Just now, JPtheNeurotic said:

Real quick I absolutely agree with your post but I could see an argument while the game Tetris itself isn’t political the creation or it’s distribution might be .

 

I just t it be funny to point that out as a possibility haha 

ha! - True - that’s a whole different kettle of fish there!

[Ghost-Zeus514]

Who

[DrBloodmoney]

EDIT:

 

misquote (new forum changes!)

Edited August 19, 2023 by DrBloodmoney

[CelestialRequiem]

Amateur videos with incredibly poor social analysis coming from someone who admitted to not really playing games.  She would have done a lot better with her research if she was forthright from the start and said from the start "As someone who doesn't play games, this is what I see." However, let's not act like the treatment she got was fair either, and her getting threats or any type of abuse never warranted the production she was putting out. That's the worst part about all of this.

 

But, her impact could have been far greater if it didn't just start off as a social axe to grind, going as far as to complain about people men and women sit differently in Destiny. I wonder if the people who praised her content actually ever watched it, because it's painfully mediocre and misguided. Can't say it could have ever turned around, but I don't really see anything positive or negative regarding it shutting down, as it's been desperate for relevancy for half a decade. When was the last time anyone here even thought of that site?

 

Also, no ResetEra is an egregore. Feminist Frequency at least as the progenitor for more women-focused topics in gaming, as shitty as it was -- there is no value that comes from ResetEra. It's incredibly culty and shared narratives and concepts need to be expressed in order to even be compliant. For as much shit as we give PSNP, at least no one is getting banned for thinking differently. Do ten minutes of research into the site, and it'll be clear how awful it was.

 

Oh yeah, and don't forget that the site mocked Etika's mental illness and pushed him out; calling him a bigot and racist when he was clearly just mentally ill. Clearly a sane dude that REALLY needed ResetEra's treatment, as he was so unstable that he took his own life.

 

Fuck that place. Feminist Frequency was just a few people, ResetEra is thousands of clowns who only demand compliance and an echo chamber. Shame you guys can't see that, lol.

[Xylobe]

1 hour ago, DrBloodmoney said:

While, yes, there are works of art and commercial products that are inherently apolitical (I challenge anyone to find the political message in Tetris, for example!)

 

Tetris is a game in which success is fleeting and failure cascades; I don't think it takes a historian or art critic to apply its mechanical design to the context of its creation in the mid-80s Soviet Union.

 

The point of "everything is political" as a snappy one-liner isn't to argue that every piece of art has some secret hidden meaning that, conveniently, tells you to vote for Hillary (not that that's what you're suggesting!), but rather that every piece of art is shaped in some way or another, intentionally or otherwise, by the culture and politics within which it was created. It's just another way of saying, as I think @JPtheNeurotic put it earlier, that art isn't made in a vacuum.

[Beyondthegrave07]

Locking, per request of OP.