http://iplaywinner.com/news/2011/11/2/the-salty-runback-oktoberfest.html
Let’s isolate the issues and points that I want to talk about first. Then kind of “Socratic” my way through them.
- There are more online gamers who are women than men.
- But they can’t clearly be all playing the same kinds of games, can they?
- How many of them play competitive games?
- How does that define “average gamer” stated in the article?
- Isn’t it contradictory to claim that gamers are misogynistic if a large number of them are women? What would be the nuance that we need to take into account to reconcile this difference?
- And who are gamers? How do we profile average gamers? Should we even bother?
- There are way fewer women competitive gamers.
- There are way fewer women in fighting game tournaments.
- Women are treated poorly (versus some kind of societal national average way women are treated) in competitive gaming scenes.
- Poorly meaning in a sexist way?
- Is sexism just another way to put down someone?
In the end, an article like this is problematic because it kind of just doesn’t offer any facts. I think a lot of the statements in the article is true to the sense that I’ve seen some statistics saying more or less the same thing, but some of the conclusions are blurry versus what they are really stating. Is it just saying “oh fighting game gamers are sexist and should go and learn about girls first”? Because that is probably way too tl;dr for something so simple. (Not to mention, sexist in its own ways.) But that is what it seems to be. Also, that blog is probably the sort of blog if you leave a comment on anything out of line you will get flamed, regardless if you are doing it out of good faith and will, let alone if you are right or not. And by “out of line” I mean anything the regular readers disagree.