Thoughts on Gamer Culture, Rape Culture, and CNN

Melissa McEwan has generously given me space for another guest post at Shakesville.  Here’s the intro:

[Trigger warning for discussion of video games which simulate rape and violence.]

I’ve got video games on my mind lately — as some of you have probably seen me talking about in comments, I was at the Penny Arcade Expo in Boston this past weekend — and I just wrote a mostly-positive post with some criticism and a dubiously clever pun for the title over at my blog, about gamer culture in general and one panel at the Expo in particular.

This post is much less positive, and I’m also much less certain, ultimately, what should be done to try to fix the problems I’m talking about.

Many of y’all probably remember previous discussion, both here (Rape For Sale, Looking for Rape Products? Try Amazon., From the Mailbag for 2009-08-17) and at many other blogs over the past several years, of a Japanese computer game called RapeLay, the genre of hentai (lit. “pervert”/”perverted”) games, and the subgenre of rape-focused hentai games to which it belongs.

CNN’s Connect the World program has now run a story on the game, and its continuing availability through illicit channels despite its having been pulled from production and removed from retail…

Et In Penny-Arcadia Ego

I was very happy to be able to attend PAX East in Boston this past weekend. I had a great time, despite missing Wil Wheaton’s keynote and some of the panels I hoped to see. Penny Arcade is a remarkable phenomenon, and one I don’t think could have been possible at any historical moment other than this, or more precisely other than 1998 to 2003: that first half-decade in which, with a combination of timing, talent and luck, Jerry “Tycho” Holkins and Mike “Gabe” Krahulik turned a hobby webcomic into a successful business venture and into a focal point for the nascent gaming community — until it had reached a sort of critical mass, and Gabe and Tycho were able to use it as a springboard for additional projects.  In 2003, they launched the Child’s Play charity, which to date has provided nearly $7 million worth of toys, books, movies and of course video games to children’s hospitals around the country; and a year later, when it was announced that E3 would no longer be open to the public, they decided to launch their own convention, the Penny Arcade Expo.  In 2005, after noted anti-video-game crackpot and public nuisance Jack Thompson (this was back before he was disbarred) offered $10,000 to a charity to be chosen by the head of the ESA, and reneged, claiming it was “satire,” Gabe and Tycho gave the $10,000 in his name.

What I’m saying is, they’ve built a hell of a thing, and they’ve done some real good in the world, in the process of doing it.  They have managed to become sort of a nucleus around which gamer culture, or at least a subculture of it, is starting to coalesce.  The first PAX, in 2004, had some 3300 attendees; PAX 2009 was over 60,000, and it’s my understanding that this first east-coast incarnation of the convention was of a similar size.  Watch Wheaton’s keynote, and the sense of love for and pride in gamer culture is palpable; watch exchanges like these two (from just a single panel I happened to attend) and also easy to understand.

Dr. Margo Seltzer [Ada Lovelace Day]

Last year I didn’t have a post idea for Ada Lovelace Day, so I just put up a small link roundup.  I wanted to do a little better than that, this year.

Dr. Margo Seltzer‘s [Wikipedia entry, personal website] is not necessarily a well-known name in most computer science circles — I know I hadn’t heard of her until late 2007, when she encouraged my partner to come to the Harvard PhD program as her advisee — but her influence in the field is significant.  She was an original codeveloper of Berkeley DB, the ubiquitous embedded database, and cofounder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the company formed to provide commercial support for BDB in 1996.  (Sleepycat and BDB were acquired by Oracle in 2006, and BDB remains available under either a commercial or an open-source license.)

Seltzer also helped break ground at Harvard — her undergraduate alma mater — for gender equality in the sciences, beginning as an associate professor a year after receiving her PhD at UC Berkeley, and winning tenure in 2000.  She conducts systems research, serves as Vice President on the USENIX Board of Directors, and works to encourage more women to study computer science.  On a personal note, as I mentioned, she is my partner’s PhD advisor, and has been incredibly helpful and supportive both with courses and research, and with various personal, family and health related issues my partner has had to deal with in the past couple years.

See also:

• Wikipedia’s listing of women in computer science
• The Border House
• Geek Feminism
• Adafruit is doing 24 posts, one every hour!  (And a 10% off sale on their awesome kits.)
• The Hathor Legacy
• Twenty-Something Science

Quick Hit: Health Care Reform

Well, it’s done.  The House has passed the Senate bill, and the package of reconciliation fixes.

There are a bunch of good things that kick in quickly, and that’s a big plus.  Some thirty-odd million more people are going to have health care coverage, and insurance companies will (at least in theory, though I expect they’ll find whatever ways around this they can) be prohibited from denying coverage to or retroactively rescinding coverage from sick people.

There’s no long-term solution to rising costs, and the Democrats’ — from the President on down — betrayal of their own party platform, which says “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right,” is craven, disgusting, and disheartening in the extreme.  And this is an absurdly industry-friendly bill, carefully tailored to maintain insurance company profits, and to not introduce any measures, such as genuine competition from a public option, optional earlier Medicare buy-in, removing their anti-trust exemption, or new, robust regulation, that would come close to bringing American per capita health care costs in line with the rest of the developed world, who spend much less for care as good or better than ours because single-payer systems are more efficient.

So in short, the Democrats remain a party largely under the influence of corporate money and the inbuilt misogyny of our social structure, while the Republicans are not only completely and happily under those influences but actively seeking at all times to expand them.  D. Aristophanes’ graph, thus, applies pretty well both to the HCR bill and to the parties themselves.

In other news, as Paul Krugman notes, Newt Gingrich is now attacking the HCR bill by comparing it to LBJ’s civil rights legislation.  Hey Newt, your mask is slipping.

Quick Hit: And Here I Thought…

…that dumping Lou Dobbs indicated CNN was starting to take their middle initial seriously.  As it turns out: Nope!  They were just looking for someone even more objectionable. (One wonders why they didn’t just keep Glenn Beck, really.)

I don’t really see what further comment I could add.  Erickson is vile.  He’s certainly as vile as Limbaugh or Beck.  He makes much of the rest of the conservative blagoweb look measured and reasonable, and that’s no mean feat.

Yet, somehow, the fact that people say “fuck” on Daily Kos is constantly held up as evidence that liberal bloggers are hateful and meanspirited and unserious — and I have no doubt that we’ll also continue to see right-wing bloggers and Fox News blasting CNN for being an exemplar of the “liberal media.”

(Previously, previously. Via.)

The Century

Two years, four months, and five days from my first post: this here’s my hundredth.

(Update: also, a year and a few days from my previous arbitrary milestone.)

In that time, I’ve had a bit over 18,000 pageviews:

That’s…an average of about 0.116 post per day, if I did my math right.

…

Huh.  Guess I’d better try to pick up the pace.

And through the magic of post-publish editing:

The trackback from this post to my first is the 100th "comment."

Thanks to all who’ve read, linked, and/or commented!  Onward to the next hundred!  Maybe in less than a year this time!

RIP Al Weisel

Weisel, better known to the blogging world as Jon Swift, reasonable conservative, apparently died on February 27th.  This is a sad loss to the liberal blagoweb, who will miss his wit and satire, but obviously a much greater loss to his family, to whom I offer my sincere condolences.

Thanks to Kate Harding, Jill Filipovic, and Jeff Fecke for the news.

I wasn’t really an active reader or commenter, let alone a blogger myself (though I can’t really claim to be very “active” now, either) when the legendary Steve Gilliard died, so my experience of the collective heartbreak of the lefty blogosphere at the time was only third-hand and at some remove of time; a web without Gilliard wasn’t a shock to me, as I hadn’t really known one with him.  I didn’t know Weisel personally either, of course, but the difference between the blogosphere with him, and the blogosphere without, is stark.

Update: Shakesville now has a post up as well.

Quick Hit: I've Got My Story and I'm Sticking To It!

Yesterday on my way to work I was listening, as is often the case, to the BBC World Service NewsHour program on my local NPR station, and one segment in particular caught my ear.  They were discussing the aftermath of the Chile earthquake, including President Bachelet sending thousands of troops into Concepción to “restore order.”  Starting at minute 39, presenter Robin Lustig talks with Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology, about “the morality of looting.”

What struck me about this was Lustig’s dogged insistence on established narrative — people who take food and supplies from stores in the aftermath of a disaster are “looters,” selfish criminals out for their own benefit who don’t care about anyone else; post-disaster urban areas (especially those populated by non-white people) devolve into Hobbesian nightmares; it’s correct for governments’ primary response to be “restoring order” by sending in police or troops — in the face of Furedi’s patient explanation that the evidence doesn’t support that narrative.  People act more altruistically after a disaster, crime rates are lower, and those who “loot” food and supplies tend to then distribute them among the population.  But Lustig would be damned if he’d let silly little things like facts interfere with the preferred story.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p006czxs#p006q1fw