There's a new disturbance in gaming, as if Anita Sarkeesian herself were resurrected and turned into a formerly successful actor.
Her name: Geena Davis.
Geena Davis created the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media: (If she can see it, she can be it™).
And they kinda just sat out there doing Anita Sarkeesian type research, counting the number of women that are in media.
But now they've turned to the video game world and put out "an analysis of masculinity in video games and the gaming community."
seejane.org/wp-content/upl…
As you might imagine, I have issues. 🙂
I'm not going to do a deep, deep dive into the study because this is stuff we've all seen before. It's a content analysis. How many streamers are men. How many streamers play male protagonist games, blah blah.
One of the things it did was use a bot to comb through language on Twitch and report on language it considers problematic.
For example, 20% of the time, streamers use that horrible, ableist slur... "crazy."
The study carries with it the same argument that Anita Sarkeesian relies on: video games somehow reinforce toxic masculinity in the real world through stereotypes.
The major difference between this and Sarkeesian's work is that it does not try to hide its anti-violence agenda.
The study uses some form of the word "violence" 79 times.
One of the studies it cites lists Brad Bushman as one of the authors. Bushman has had a paper on violence in video games retracted and his co-author had her PhD revoked it was so bad.
So what's Geena Davis' agenda? Here it is.
Increase diversity in games. Gotcha.
More fat people in games. Yay fat dudes!
More old people in games. Even though they exclude anyone over 26 in their survey.
Revealing clothing is bad!
Avoid gratuitous violence in video games...
As I said, it's mostly Anita Sarkeesian, but more transparent in their agenda. And here's Anita Sarkeesian announcing that she's going to host a panel about it!
And, of course, games media like @BrendanSinclair are reporting uncritically about it.
Best not question these reports. That'll get people to thinkin'!
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