Okay this is fascinating. From a post on a gaming website:
Dead Island, whose PR and publishing team won an advertising award earlier this year for a pricey and very artistic trailer, finds its way back into the news this week in a much less pleasant way. A non-final “developer’s build” version of the game, which was accidentally released on Steam a couple of days ago, has been cracked by an enterprising fan. Turns out that one of the unlockable “Skills” for one of the two female avatars is called “Feminist Whore” in the original code base: re-titled “Gender Wars” in the “sanitized fit-for-public consumption” version of the game, it allows the character to deal extra damage to anything male.
Now the game’s “International Brand Manager” and publisher have to scramble and apologize for what must appear, to any sane adult, as an unplanned glimpse of the naked, bald-faced, slavering hatred of women which lives and breeds in their developers.
They’ve hurried to say that the person responsible for this misogynistic snippet of code was a “Lone Gunman” tech monkey, who introduced the phrase into the debug code as a “private joke”. Thus the notion that all feminists were angry whores would “represent the views of only a single person” on that development team—or in this industry in general—and only one guy (at most) should suffer any professional consequences, naturally.
Wow…how very very familiar that sounds. What a lot of it we have been seeing lately, some of us (like me for instance) with amazement shock horror surprise consternation alarm confusion.
…virulent misogyny is not a freak incident in this business. It is actually the norm in many studios. It’s extremely common in the culture of gaming as a whole, and it is present in developers, gamers, publishers and the gaming press in copious abundance. Anyone who doubts that insults like “Feminist Whore” are unwelcome in gaming has only to check the forum thread where the “Feminist Whore” skill was first discovered. You’ll see a typical string of comments which you might see on virtually any gaming forum. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few comments attached to this post later that will be equally cringe-worthy and repugnant.
This seems to confirm a thought I had when reading Skeptic Lawyer’s post on manners, in particular her thoughts about geek subcultures. The thought was that maybe that’s where a lot of (or hell, for all I know all of) the more frothingly and obsessively misogynist commenters on ERV’s elevator posts originated. Maybe they’re all members of the geek subculture community and maybe that community is particularly infected with unabashed misogyny. What Arinn Dembo at Gamasutra says and what her commenters say provide a lot of evidence for that.
I like this one:
Rushing to dismiss feminist questions stinks. Always. A vicious dismissal of the concerns of others because you have some haughty anti-PC bent doesn’t make you George Fucking Carlin. It makes you a vicious pig. You are not an iconoclast and your protection of a broken and diseased culture also stinks.
Yeah.