Liana Kerzner on the rift in gaming.

WideAndNerdy wrote:

I have no reason to believe that link would have answers to my questions about feminist alternatives to imprisonment. I'd be better off doing a google search. Which turned up this a few links down ("Professor thinks women should never be jailed") and another link about the imbalance in who is incarcerated. Neither of these are against incarceration in general. So I was hoping someone here might clarify.

Although it's virtually certain you'll take my response as me being even a bigger vindictive bastard to you I'd like to point out something about your first link.

It was published on Campus Reform which, according to their "About Us" section positions them as "watchdog to the nation's higher education system" whose purpose is to expose "bias and abuse on the nation's college campuses" by reporting on the "conduct and misconduct of university administrators, faculty, and students."

There's also a little blurb that says Campus Reform is a project of The Leadership Institute. The mission of which is to "increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists and leaders in the public policy process" by "indentif[ing], recruit[ing], train[ing], and plac[ing] conservatives in government, politics, and the media."

That's interesting from our earlier discussion about political bias in the media. Here we have an example of a group that's blatantly trying to inject conservative political bias into not just the media, but as public policy and the government in general.

It also brings up a point about critically reading things and, whenever possible, finding the actual source of the information to make sure no one is pulling a fast one on you.

In this case you would have been much better served to read Patricia O’Brien's Washington Post op-ed than Campus Reform's summary. That's because, unsurprisingly, Campus Reform cut out any information that didn't make her sound like a scary "feminist prof." Hell, that dog whistle phrase alone should have clued you in that you were getting a biased view of the O'Brien's proposal.

Campus Reform purposefully edited out any information that didn't make O'Brien seem like a radical.

Patricia O'Brien wrote:

The argument is actually quite straightforward: There are far fewer women in prison than men to start with — women make up just 7 percent of the prison population. This means that these women are disproportionately affected by a system designed for men.

...

Essentially, the case for closing women’s prisons is the same as the case for imprisoning fewer men. It is the case against the prison industrial complex and for community-based treatment where it works better than incarceration. But there is evidence that prison harms women more than men, so why not start there?

Most egregiously, Campus Reform cut out the very first paragraph of O'Brien's op-ed in which we learned that this wasn't a plan cooked up by Oberlin feminists, but rather it's something the British government has been working on as part of a ten-year prison reform program.

WideAndNerdy wrote:
Gremlin wrote:

I'm still not sure how you get from doubts about bias in mainstream newspaper journalists to game journalists, because if you think that game reviews are being written by the New York Times editorial board you are gravely mistaken. Even if mainstream journalists were substantially biased--which, as OG_slinger's post demonstrates, there's not a lot of evidence to support--it doesn't have any bearing on the original discussion about game journalists.

This all got confused because I mentioned old numbers I saw about conventional journalism but I have no reason to believe that games journalists are that much different politically. I think many journalists want to believe that what they're writing about is important. And if you come from any kind of school of journalism "Important" means "deals with important social issues" so I think critics and reviewers tend to be motivated when a game deals with such topics so they can show others that the stuff they write about is "important".

Of course games are important for a lot of reasons, and I'm sure games journalists get that, but the "important social issues" motivation is easier to sell outside of gaming circles than starting from scratch with lessons about game design and the participatory nature of an artistic experience crafted partly by designer and player. Yes they make their money from their gaming audience but at some point I believe they want prestige as well. I'll bet a lot of people at 20 think "oh cool, I'm writing about video games" but by thirty they're thinking "Am I really spending my life writing about video games? I have to justify this." Maybe its different ages for different people but its only natural for this to happen.

Um, yeah. You've never met any game journalists. Most of them didn't go to any kind of school for journalism, and if you meant "school of thought", well, there are some videogame-writing-specific schools of thought, but they're more stuff like New Games Journalism, which is about exploring personal perspectives on games, not about issue advocacy. That's the source of the sea change in games writing over the past decade. Now, some of those essays have been about things like racism. But that's because it meant something to the person writing it.

Could some of them be motivated by "important social issues"? I guess. But if that's what honestly interests them, why not? There's an audience for it, no one forces you to read it, and it hasn't replaced traditional reviews or previews at all.

See, people write about walking simulators and so on because there are people interested in playing them. Maybe they're a little less blockbuster than Mario Maker, but niche games have their place too. I mean, have you played any of them? They may not grab everyone, but when they do they can be amazing. Watch a sunset in Proteus sometime, or play The Stanley Parable (I think you'd relate to the story). Or play Papers, Please, which is about as traditionally videogamey as you can get and still does interesting new stuff.

I mean, what kind of games do you like? I can probably suggest something totally new and obscure that you'll love to bits.

WideAndNerdy wrote:

So tell me, what do feminists want actually done? Are you telling me that they seek to accomplish everything they want done without more laws and spending programs?

There's a leap you keep making, assuming that people are going to leap straight from idea to action. (And that the only kind of action that you can think of them taking is left-wing government intervention.) Feminism is a big tent, there was never one unified call to action.

When there have been widespread action, it has just as often been things like the wave of women's discussion groups that started in the '60s. Which entirely consisted of women gathering together and talking. Sure, sometimes they came up with some other action or advocacy to do, but that wasn't the purpose: the main goal was just to talk, spreading awareness and letting other women know they weren't alone.

Just talking. That's it.

@OG_Slinger
Last part first, the article does mention O'Brien's references to a British program. As for the rest, you were no doubt able to find the Op-Ed courtesy of the link they provided in their article. They weren't trying to hide anything, they just wanted to call attention to the particularly egregious parts of her statement.

But there are already far fewer women in prison so naturally we start there? Women are a victim of a system designed for men? Last I checked women and men are put in different prisons. But she doesn't suggest anything that could be done to fix women's prisons to be more for women (whatever that means) she just thinks they should be let out.

Even though she acknowledges that women are only 7 percent of the prison population, she tries to make it sound like an alarming reality by pointing out that incarceration of women has gone up 646 percent in the last 30 years. Sounds to me like we're just wising up that yes sometimes women do bad things too.

Her argument seems to suggest that women are more needed (think of the children) and acts like the crimes they commit aren't really their fault because gosh they had it rough before they decided to break the law.

I like this quote (from the Op Ed)

The United States is a prison nation. More than 1.5 million people are incarcerated in the country. And this obsession with punishment is expensive. Cumulatively, states spend more than $52 billion a year on their prison systems.

This obsession with punishing people?

But don't worry, this isn't reaffirming my notions about feminists. If anything this risks creating a whole set of wacky new notions in my head about them. (Emphasis added in a futile attempt to head off the inevitable backlash there, I said 'if anything' emphasis "if" got it? This is meant to be facetious.)

She goes into all these numbers about how much prisons cost and how much the cops cost (52 billion for the states and tens of billions for federal policing and incarceration is what the op ed says. But considering that the latest U.S. budget is 3.9 Trillion dollars, I find myself in the strange position of wondering why we're spending so little of it on policing and enforcement since its one of the few indisputably legitimate functions of government agreed upon by pretty much anyone who thinks we should even have a government. She's looking to cut costs here? Really?

Efforts to make prison “work” for women have only perpetuated the growth of the prison industrial complex. These putative reforms have helped some individuals, and possibly brought the nature of mass warehousing of poor, black and brown bodies more into focus, but the number of incarcerated people still continues to rise.

You're right, previous attempts to fix the prison system have created problems, so lets just give up and let all the women out.

Even as we learn about promising diversion programs for women, are we really ready to shut down women’s prisons? If we think of abolition as a citizens’ effort and believe that women should be allowed to jump the queue for transport along the path of recovery and healing, there are steps that must be taken from a feminist perspective.

Lets say her argument is "less women are violent" well, you could just propose doing this program for all non violent offenders but her argument is women are more likely to be non violent offenders so lets start with women. Let the male nonviolent offenders hide in their cells fearing rape a while longer so we can heal the women first.

You can't defend this. Do not even try.

And don't worry, I see this as one nutty woman. I have to assume not all feminists are like that if only for my own sanity.

Gremlin wrote:

-snip down to the interesting stuff-

Could some of them be motivated by "important social issues"? I guess. But if that's what honestly interests them, why not? There's an audience for it, no one forces you to read it, and it hasn't replaced traditional reviews or previews at all.

There's no harm sure. But as I'm not a big fan of politics its a little annoying when it seems like someone can't just like a thing for its own sake and have to justify that by having important social stuff thrown in. I was formerly a comic book fan and that kind of BS thinking would crop up there from time to time too. Superman would be doing cool and awesome stuff and then stop to deliver a very important message about the real world I'm trying to get away from for 15 minutes.

Gremlin wrote:

See, people write about walking simulators and so on because there are people interested in playing them. Maybe they're a little less blockbuster than Mario Maker, but niche games have their place too. I mean, have you played any of them? They may not grab everyone, but when they do they can be amazing. Watch a sunset in Proteus sometime, or play The Stanley Parable (I think you'd relate to the story). Or play Papers, Please, which is about as traditionally videogamey as you can get and still does interesting new stuff.

I mean, what kind of games do you like? I can probably suggest something totally new and obscure that you'll love to bits.

I'd heard about all these things. Proteus if I recall has a blocky aesthetic. So if its going for mood, thats not a point in its favor. It didn't seem like a good game for me. If I want atmosphere, I'll wander around Skyrim, or more recently Dragon Age Inquisition or still more recently Witcher 3.

I loved Stanley Parable. Thought it was brilliant.

Papers Please seemed like a neat idea. Bought it and played for about an hour. Didn't finish. THAT I could relate to after ten years of being a self loathing libertarian who works for the government. It was a little too real for me. So its back to killing monsters to try to take my mind off the life that isn't happening.

Gremlin wrote:
WideAndNerdy wrote:

So tell me, what do feminists want actually done? Are you telling me that they seek to accomplish everything they want done without more laws and spending programs?

There's a leap you keep making, assuming that people are going to leap straight from idea to action. (And that the only kind of action that you can think of them taking is left-wing government intervention.) Feminism is a big tent, there was never one unified call to action.

When there have been widespread action, it has just as often been things like the wave of women's discussion groups that started in the '60s. Which entirely consisted of women gathering together and talking. Sure, sometimes they came up with some other action or advocacy to do, but that wasn't the purpose: the main goal was just to talk, spreading awareness and letting other women know they weren't alone.

Just talking. That's it.

Both major parties like laws and spending and coke. Its the safer bet to assume people are going to take action when talking about these kinds of issues. If you're wrong, little is lost. If you're right, starting the pushback early keeps a bad idea from becoming bad policy a little while longer.

If they just want talk, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

I don't know why I care. I'll be dead before the worst of any of this happens. It should take the crazy Oberlin types at least a decade or two to make crazy Oberlin style policy into law. I'm sure I'll have either died or ended it by then.

WideAndNerdy wrote:

Both major parties like laws and spending and coke. Its the safer bet to assume people are going to take action when talking about these kinds of issues. If you're wrong, little is lost. If you're right, starting the pushback early keeps a bad idea from becoming bad policy a little while longer.

If they just want talk, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

I don't know why I care. I'll be dead before the worst of any of this happens. It should take the crazy Oberlin types at least a decade or two to make crazy Oberlin style policy into law. I'm sure I'll have either died or ended it by then.

Dude, you don't sound like a realist. Or a cynic. You sound depressed.

You consistently assume the worst motivation in others, you've repeatedly talk about your negative feelings about your self-image, you feel hopeless...how is your concentration? Have you lost interest in stuff that you used to care about?

If I can tell you one thing, I want you to know that you're not alone in this. You're not the first person here who has experienced this, and it has nothing to do with your beliefs, or feminism, or anything we've been talking about. None of us can completely understand the unique pain you're currently going through, but I can be here to listen. And to let you know that you're not the only one: we have an entire thread full of people who have felt just as numb about the world and the future as you do.

This post is off-topic.

Our American obsession with punishment over reform sickens me. It is indeed an obsession, IMO. Rooted in the basest forms of retributive "justice".

Our American prisons (for men and women) are an amped-up version of our male dominated culture. Rape and violence are the law of the land inside among the inmates. If you're an inmate, God help you if you try to seek an escape from that via any authority outside of the inmates themselves.

These institutions tend to corrupt anything that wasn't corrupt going into them. They do not reform. The one thing they contribute is the ability to lock away our real problems for a time. It is not enough.

Gremlin wrote:
WideAndNerdy wrote:

Both major parties like laws and spending and coke. Its the safer bet to assume people are going to take action when talking about these kinds of issues. If you're wrong, little is lost. If you're right, starting the pushback early keeps a bad idea from becoming bad policy a little while longer.

If they just want talk, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

I don't know why I care. I'll be dead before the worst of any of this happens. It should take the crazy Oberlin types at least a decade or two to make crazy Oberlin style policy into law. I'm sure I'll have either died or ended it by then.

Dude, you don't sound like a realist. Or a cynic. You sound depressed.

You consistently assume the worst motivation in others, you've repeatedly talk about your negative feelings about your self-image, you feel hopeless...how is your concentration? Have you lost interest in stuff that you used to care about?

If I can tell you one thing, I want you to know that you're not alone in this. You're not the first person here who has experienced this, and it has nothing to do with your beliefs, or feminism, or anything we've been talking about. None of us can completely understand the unique pain you're currently going through, but I can be here to listen. And to let you know that you're not the only one: we have an entire thread full of people who have felt just as numb about the world and the future as you do.

I'm sorry, I meant to attach a Linkin Park video to my last post.

Locked at request of thread creator.