The other day, I was looking at footage for the new HD Remake of Twilight Princess. Fuck, that game looked good back in ’06 and it looks amazing ten years later. Top notch work, Nintendo. I’m still pissed that you would much rather keep upscaling and upgrading your work into HD rather than put out new and original series, like a new goddamn Metroid and Legend of Zelda, or why you just don’t outright buy the rights to Bomberman considering Hudson Soft folded ages ago and Konami fucking blows donkey dicks, but even you guys have to pay the bills.

While being simultaneously mesmerized and remembering how brutal Twilight Princess was, I came across a website involving video games, feminism and other nonsense. I’m not linking it here because I’m not going to give this person/these people direct attention. It isn’t because it’s a feminist website, although that’s grounds enough for not liking to the article anywhere. No, it’s because most of the work, while fairly well-written (read: not anus to the eyes), is stupid and illogical and, to me, that’s far more dangerous than a bunch of soft-bodies whinging on about ‘inequality’ and shit that exists in third-world countries and shouldn’t be used to try and parallel to first-world problems which are bullshit and don’t exist. Additionally, there are links to the site’s Paypal and Patreon accounts plastered everywhere, and I do mean everywhere. I know they’re banners, but nobody liked banner ads ever, unless they were attached to the end of plane and that’s only because it’s such a ridiculous way to advertise shit that it’s awesome. If you need money, get a job. Stop being a ‘starving photography artist’ or whatever kind of artist you want to be (because that shitty term means nothing anymore) and find some work. The one good thing I can say is that the author reviewed the ‘game’ Life is Strange which I had been on the fence about buying, but now that I know the entire point of the game was to hamfist a bullshit ideological agenda to the player, I can save the five bucks and put it towards a way better game, like Fallout 4.

To tangent for a quick second, I find it fascinating that feminists need to invent new terminology consistently to explain things despite that already exist. In this author’s review of Life is Strange, she brings up a term called the ‘missing stair’ to describe a character who is, by all accounts, a cunt. Apparently, this term is supposed to mean that the person is know to be a cunt, yet nobody tries to help this person not be a cunt. Why in the hell did you make a three syllable phrase when you could’ve just said the word ‘off’? Stop inventing words that add complexity for no reason because you are too socially retarded to understand implicit meanings and social queues. The term definition specifically states that the person is an ‘abuser or harasser’, but if that’s the case, why not use those words instead? Seriously, it’s like these people just slept through their entire schooling and are trying to stuff their shitty half-language into our full language so they can make it. Oh, wait, they are.

One of the pieces that stuck out at me was a piece about the term ‘casual gaming’ and how it’s a shitty term. The piece starts out like this:

If conclusions were platforms, feminists would be as good as Mario.

I don’t even need to look up the previous entry because I know the statistic is referring to one of those polls/studies that breaks down what sex plays what kind of games and on what platform. These studies have been done to death and effectively prove that women generally do not play games typically featured on a console. Unfortunately, the author is too busy getting pissed off of some made-up injustice to realize that the term ‘casual’ is in reference to games that are extremely simple to pick up and play, and are designed to be played in extremely small pockets of time. The second half of that sentence is why games like Super Mario Bros. and Mega Man and similar games are not casual games. They require a lengthy bit of time to be completed and you can’t just get save and come back to the game later, you have to beat it in one sitting. Mega Man has a password system, but you still have to invest the time to get the passwords and then the energy to remember them and then the time to continue on through the rest of the game. It’s not designed around you picking the game up later, it’s designed around being beaten in a full sitting, but it has the option of being picked up later when something inevitably takes your attention away from the game.

Since we’re discussing a casual game, a great casual game is Snood. Snood is a match 3+ bubble shooter that was well known for being extremely addictive and having goofy graphics. It’s one of my favorite games of all time because, like Lemmings, it rides the line of brute force vs. finesse expertly well. If you suck at Snood, you can still win, it’s just harder, takes more time and you get less points. If you’re good at it, then you get a higher score. Ah, the days of arcade-style games. Another great casual game is Plants vs. Zombies. It’s probably the best example because it’s a game entirely based around player intelligence, foresight and level design, isn’t designed to bilk money out of you through random difficulty spikes, and can be played enjoyable for long stints, but is designed around busting through a level at a time in short, five minute periods.

Anyways, saying that women generally play casual games pisses off ‘feminist gamers’ because what they hear is ‘WOMEN ONLY PLAY CASUAL GAMES AND CASUAL GAMES ARE SCUM’. Yeah, it’s true that in gaming, there are elitists who believe that if you don’t play Call of Duty and spend ten hours a day grinding out your gold skins and then play World of Warcraft and raid Mythic mode until your eyes bleed and you get server first, you’re trash and should die in a fire. It’s also true that idiots like this make up an incredibly tiny portion of the gaming population and are generally extremely loud and vocal about their accomplishments. That doesn’t mean all gamers need to be painted with your broad brush, and it sure as shit doesn’t change the objective numbers that, on the whole, women play games that are designed around casual play far more than men. Applying this to what I quoted from the author is even funnier because the person she is quoting at no point has a clear indication of whether or not the point that he/she is making is to pigeon-hole women as ‘casual gamers’, just that women statistically play games that are designed around casual play, and the author flips her lid like a five-year old that just got told he/she couldn’t get McDonald’s; a class act, indeed.

She then makes a reference to someone I’ve never heard of, probably because I don’t read the works of shitty writers unless it’s to completely tear them apart for entertainment purposes, stuffs a collage of shitty image captions below that, one of which is the ‘Fake Nerd Girl’ meme, and captions it by saying how she could write an entire post about the aforementioned meme. What? The point of the meme is to highlight how a large number of girls who have boyfriends will game with said boyfriends to appeal to them and the gaming crowd of the boyfriend, despite only doing it because it turns the boyfriend on. The joke is that the girlfriend isn’t a gamer but is acting like she is, and this is stupid because she’s being a dishonest person to her boyfriend, his friends and her friends who think she is, indeed, a gamer when, really, she just wants attention from her boyfriend. If anything, it highlights how pathetic humans can be and how we crave attention from society or the people around us that we like so much that we’re willing to fabricate our image in order to appeal to these people.

Stopping my deconstruction, let’s define the term ‘gamer’ simply because the word itself is a giant grey area. This is because nobody ever takes the time to explain the general definition or even a personal definition; people instead simply use the word implicitly like we, the audience, are supposed to understand what is meant and who the word applies to. Any junior high language/grammar teacher will tell you this is shitty writing because while using implicit writing is fine, it doesn’t work for terms and themes that have multiple definitions. When writing about someone crazy, it’s easy to do since there are very clear indicators that are used throughout societies that define ‘crazy’ behavior. There are no clear indicators that define a ‘gamer’, mostly because nobody wants to take five seconds and define the fucking word.’

A ‘gamer’ is someone who plays games. This is grossly over-simplified and covers a lot of games, so let’s slim this down. Since sports are games, but have existed long before video gaming, those ‘gamers’ are known as ‘sports fans’. There is no term for people who like to play ‘board games’ that I know of, which is fine since very few people in general spend a ton of time playing board games. That essentially leaves us with people who play video games, and a few other niche kinds of ‘gamers’ out there (card gamers, role-players). The main thread combining all these ‘gamers’ is that these people generally make the games they play or watch a huge part of their life. By using this thread, we can conclude that a ‘gamer’ in the most commonly used vernacular is a person who plays video games for a large portion of his/her life.

Now that we have a definition to work with, we can see why the term ‘casual gamer’ doesn’t work. If you do something casually, you do not make it a big part of your life, and this makes sense for casual games; the games are not designed to take up a huge part of your life and don’t ask much time of you. If you are a gamer, then games are a big part of your life and quite possibly who you are. The term runs counter-point to itself, and it is for this reason that people who are gamers do not like the term ‘casual gamer’ and people who use this moniker. It is contradictory qualifier and has been used by people to push their way into a culture that they will likely not fit in well with, but are doing so because fitting in is all that matters (like the Fake Nerd Girl meme I pulled apart above, look at that!).

Moving on, the author continues with this:

I didn’t hate girl gamers, but your shitty bias might end up making me by the time I’m done here.

Nobody hates you. Seriously, this ‘girl gamer’ hate is fabricated and these outlandish claims are perpetuated by morons who only pay attention to academia ‘research’ and don’t actually involve themselves with the gaming community. That or the author only reads YouTube comments and takes them for facts, which means she’s a retard, but we kind of already knew that going into this. When I started playing World of Warcraft, I made a female avatar because I wanted some ideas on how to create a female character for a story I wanted to write. I was constantly hit on because, as a teenager  who was enraptured with the world and the lore the game laid out and being anal about typing with proper spelling and grammar, I was constantly mistaken for a girl. Many people were and still are. People would randomly mail me cool shit because they thought I had tits and a vagina. Of course I took it; who doesn’t like free stuff? The point I’m trying to make is that girls are looked at with an absurd amount of reverence in the gaming community, partly because a ton of gamers are slightly socially stunted and suck at talking to the opposite sex in person, and partly because gaming is a sausage-fest and it blows the mind of the average gamer to know that, yes, a real girl plays the game that they play.

As for the rest of the image, I don’t understand it and that’s likely because it’s really poorly written. I can only surmise that when the author says ‘real gaming’, she means people who consider themselves ‘real gamers’, and to that all I have to say is: read up. I’ve defined the term ‘gamer’ and why ‘casual gamer’ is a contradictory term used by people trying to stuff themselves in for no real reason at all. It has nothing to do with girls or not containing girls, it has to do with attention whores trying everything available to whore attention, and the culture they’re trying to whore attention from doesn’t like it and isn’t afraid to call something shit when it sees that it’s shit.

Pushing forwards:

If I don’t even smirk at your ‘jokes’, you aren’t funny.

I can come up with an entire treasure chest full of games more addicting the Civilization, and it’s not because I don’t like the Civilization series or think it isn’t addicting, because I do and it is. It’s just that there are games that are objectively more addicting because they are designed around the Skinner’s Box principle. Sure, all games use the principle to some extent, but the level that these games use it is unreal and untouchable and, despite not being well-made, are indeed games. Shit, to be a game, all you need is a reward, a set of rules and a path to get from where you are to the reward. The author wouldn’t know this, of course, because she is too busy slinging her agenda to stop being a moron. It also isn’t ‘moving goalposts’ because the vocal minority considers casual games ‘not games’. They are, statistically speaking, unimportant, which means you can and should ignore their ‘influence’ or, in this case, their opinion. That means that this vocal minority that believes that casual games are not games is unimportant and can be ignored, thus destroying the entire point trying to be made by the author. It’s amazing what a little bit of mathematical knowledge, logic and deductive reasoning can do.

Later on, she writes an absolute gem:

Pretty clear someone never went to an arcade growing up.

Who compares arcade games to Bejeweled? The answer is people who are stupid and don’t understand the fundamental difference between arcade games and casual games. You can’t ‘stop’ in an arcade game, you halfwit. It doesn’t have a moving save point. It doesn’t hold your hand and push you through tutorials to get you adjusted to how it works. You can’t pick it up and take it anywhere. Most importantly, there is a penalty for losing in an arcade game. A casual game has secondary systems to ensure the player always makes progress because if they didn’t, people wouldn’t have a fucking reason to return to them an hour later. You can put dollars and hours into a Pac-Man cabinet and never make it past level one; it’d be awe-inspiring to be that garbage, but it’s absolutely possible. You can never not rank up in Bejeweled. I bought a game on Steam a couple weeks back called Plantera, which is a simple clicker game. If I play the game, I make progress. If I leave the game, the game’s code continues doing shit when I’m not playing so that I make progress. I cannot lose. That is a casual game: a game that I can play for short stints that ensures I never fall behind, that holds my hand before dropping me off into its world on my own and that constantly saves my progress so I’m always safe. It is the video game equivalent of a safe space, with the only difference being I don’t hate it at the end of the day and I don’t hate when people play it or talk about it outside of them complaining that they are being ‘hated’ for playing it when shit like that never happened. Also, fighting games? Hon, seriously, are you addled? There is nothing casual about a fighting game. It is literally the spirit of physical competition stuffed onto a brightly colored screen. My god, you are unbelievably dumb.

Following this, the author comments on what she calls the ‘commitment binary’, or the idea that you can only be a casual gamer or only a hardcore gamer:

So what about those dudes who like playing casual games, huh?

It’s worth noting that the author prefaced this typed vomit by saying that men are the ‘hardcore gamers’ yet never mentions them here. That is because the point of this paragraph is to say ‘See everyone, girls can be hardcore gamers and casual gamers and everything in between’, despite stating moments before that only men were the hardcore gamers. I thought feminism was supposed to be about equality?

She then presents a study which she fully admits isn’t scientific at all, thus we can ignore it because it is not a study and not important or relevant to anything. The author doesn’t, unfortunately, and starts to make conclusions based on her ‘findings’, regardless of the fact that more qualified people who actually know how to do statistics and create a solid poll and perform an actual study have already done this.

Who the fuck stacks the bars on top of each other?

Doing the math (because why should the author provide us with it), these women played thirty hours per week of casual games total and forty-four point seventy-five hours of non-casual games a week; please note these are rough estimates because our author is too busy stroking her hate-boner to give us a reasonable bar graph with a reasonable Y-axis. Putting aside the poor presentation and extremely small sample size, which was probably biased to begin with since the author actually knows these people and probably knows what they play, thus leading to a decently high chance of statistic cherry-picking, I’m impressed. It looks like we’re starting to buck the trend! A beer for you ladies, even if we don’t possibly agree with ideologies, and I guess a shot for the author even though the rest of her piece is pretty terrible. But wait, there’s more!

Ooh… so close.

So all this means is that the data is garbage. In fact, this statement directly implies that two of these women wouldn’t be gaming as much as they do if they had shorter commutes, which likely means they take the train/subway/bus to work and back, so if they drove they probably wouldn’t even be gaming to begin with. Granted, non-casual still beats casual in either case, but that’s not reliable data. Even worse, here are some of the non-casual games the author listed:

So much role-playing.

First, Catan is a fucking board game, not a video game. Yes, I know it’s been released on  PC and mobile phones, that doesn’t change the fact it is a board game and has been a fucking board game for an eternity. Second, the vast majority of Final Fantasy and Fire Emblem games are casual games. I know someone will say ‘but Sahltines, it has a story and it takes forever to beat and tactics and stuff and RPG and fun and…’ but just know that I consider the vast amount of RPGs to be casual games because they essentially invented the whole ‘save now, return later’ that games all feature now, especially casual games. They also featured what is now known as tutorializing, or the act of familiarizing the player with the controls and game world. Granted, the older games were much better and less overt about it, but it doesn’t change the fact that they did this. Also, yes, Pokémon is a casual game. Fuck man, the game was made for kids, of course it’s a casual game. Again, the vast majority of text-heavy, battle menu RPGs, tactics-geared or not, are casual games. You are not a non-casual game if I can put you down and come back to you at some point in the future with ease. I’d also like to note that there are no FPS games listed, and the vast majority of games these ladies play are RPGs. In fact, it’s the overwhelming majority, not ‘some RPGs’ like the author states. Nothing wrong with it, just misleading the way the author describes it.

She finishes up her thoughts by breaking out the ‘feminist theory’ to explain that most people don’t fall into either complete pole, the poles being completely casual or completely non-casual, but fall in the middle. I’m not sure why she needed ‘feminist theory’ to explain this considering there is no such thing as ‘feminist theory’ because the word ‘theory’ implies that it adheres to the scientific method, which most of it does not, and that the word ‘spectrum’ is a part of anthropology, which is not something only feminists learn, and is also a word that someone above grade seven would understand in any context, but whatever makes you feel like that Gender Studies degree was worth the crippling debt.

For our last stop, our brave heroine goes on to invoke the ‘games are sexist’ ability, which falls on its face because it’s a technique only used by people who have agendas to push and think that because they make a living off of being professionally offended that their horse shit isn’t horse shit. She then references an old image dumping website responsible for that god awful GTFO documentary in an effort to somehow bolster her point, which it doesn’t because she doesn’t have a point to begin with. Another gem is pushed out:

Games are designed to be played. You are an idiot.

I can’t help but feel that girls who have insecurity problems, have small breasts, no asses, are overweight or just unfortunately ugly are the ones who always bring up the physiques of these fictional characters.  I also can’t help but feel that this is the only consistent point gaming feminists bring up as if it holds weight, despite the overwhelming fact that girls with bodies similar to many of the modern female video game characters do exist (Dragon Crown aside). Heck, I frankly think some of the real girls who cosplay as the video game ladies look even better than the video game gals, but that’s because I like real women, with real tits and asses and believable personalities. Also, it’s a wonder that you feel so goddamn slighted when all you have to do is just fucking ignore these obvious teenagers you’re going up against online and keep destroying them. You act like they only say this shit to you because you have a cooter, but the bottom line is that these survived abortions would say the same fucking thing to anyone else. Going on that, I would say that it’s downright egalitarian for these morons to treat you with the same disrespect they show everyone else.

She ends the entire piece by saying ‘If you don’t like the same things as other people, then shut the fuck up and don’t say anything. Don’t shove their beliefs down their throat. You don’t get to decide what’s fun, fuck you. Don’t be that guy’ or something to that effect. I couldn’t be bothered to make sure or get a screenshot of it because I was too busy being floored at the fact that this moron is telling you what to do about not telling other people what to do. I love how it’s implied that only a guy can reach this level of dickitry, yet women are  miraculously unable to.

To the author of this unnamed article: nobody made you the arbiter of the word ‘gamer’. Considering how much time you spend on game websites and doing other shit not even tangentially related to actual gaming, I frankly think it’s remiss to even call you a gamer by my definition. In closing, fuck you and eat a bag of dicks.

 

Addendum

I added this here because her article had one, so I figure if I add one, I may get e-famous and then I’ll be able to plaster my Patreon and Paypal links all over this stupid site of mine and you’ll click them and give me money for doing what is essentially a glorified hobby that anyone over the age of twelve can do successfully.

More than likely I’ll cover more of this lass in the future because after digging through her posts, it’s apparent that whatever she studied in college she passed with flying D+’s, her relatively decent prose aside. I just finished going over some post where she’s critiquing some World of Warcraft art from a million years ago about how it’s not anatomically correct, yet she makes a measurement of the head head that’s basically setting the average human height to that of someone that could be classified legally as a midget. Stellar work.

Her addendum contains some story about being trolled, which is hilarious considering that only two people ever call out a troll on being a troll: a better troll or someone who is butthurt to the nth degree, and we all know which one she is. What’s even better is that her addendum tells readers to ‘go read the comment here’ and she’s edited and deleted the responses! Man, nothing is better than seeing someone with a glass ego have it shattered all over the digital floor.

To any and all women reading this and possibly about to rage comment me, save it. If you want to be a gamer, then get into gaming and embrace the culture. Stop getting your panties in a fucking knot over some random shit-stain sending you a l33tsp33k message that isn’t able to be parsed because it’s so fucking dumb. Stop turning into a ball of mush whenever someone doesn’t think you’re a ‘real gamer’. Gamers don’t argue, we go hard in the virtual paint and we game. We’re rude to each other and when someone is being an actual douche, we kick them out and ostracize them until they get their shit together. Stop trying to weasel your way in because you want attention, because you think you can get something from us or because you want to prove that all gamers are scum. We’re not. We’re a culture that has never been given a fair shake by anyone, and we’re rightly pissed off about it. Instead of adding to the heap of shit we deal with and have dealt with for ages, why not be a brah, quit your whinging and help us kill some bosses?