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posted by martyb on Sunday October 02 2016, @09:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-need-more-hermaphrodites dept.

Twitch boss Matthew DiPietro is clear that the industry needs to do more about online sexism in gaming.

The senior executive was speaking to us from the streaming site's headquarters in San Francisco.

Gamers have told Newsbeat about their experiences and Twitch says it's doing all it can to stamp out sexism on the platform.

But Matthew tells us this isn't a problem that Twitch can solve on its own.

He says the industry needs to invest money to "move forward on this issue".

He's calling for "investment in terms of people, education and money.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @12:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @12:48AM (#409203)

    Let's think about this. Let's say they develop some sufficiently effective, reliable way of removing sexist discourse from Twitch. So any 14 year old bedroom boy screaming about gigantic batwing labia is banned, or at least silenced. Forever, because idiotic teenytrolls have no problem waiting out a cooling-off period. And on all accounts, because idiotic teenytrolls have no problem making sock puppet accounts.

    Fair enough. Mission accomplished. They lose a lot of accounts, but what they hell, they didn't want those users anyway.

    Then the various parties online complain that it's not all about batwing labia - there are other sexist statements of relevance. OK, so any reference to vagina dentata gets similar short shrift. And references to menstruation, breasts, nipples, cosmetics, lace, Victoria's Secret and Natalie Portman.

    OK, but you still haven't done enough, so we also start banning anyone who makes references to rape, daterape drugs, alcohol, football players or cheerleaders. We ban mention of (because cisgirls aren't the only ones out there) transitioning, transitioning status, transitioning processes (no more snip-and-tuck discussions, for example), hormones, physical development, personal sexual identity or preferences.

    And of course, we have to add fat shaming, slut shaming, thin shaming and diet discussions at all.

    Now what? You've banned vast swathes of human discourse, and it's still not enough (because even SNL references to girlymen are sexist) and teenytrolls are too ingenious.

    You'd have to create a whitelist of topics for discourse, and simply silence or bleep out everything else.

    But even then, you're constraining your audience so much (because a lot of apparently sexist words have sufficient semantic overlap with innocuous usages that you'd constrain a lot of other discussion) that you're driving them off.

    "Man, I got banned for suggesting that TwitchHero7632 should look for more ammunition in the men's restroom."

    "Oh shit, you can't say that! It's suggesting men have more ammo than women!"

    The whole thing is a hole with no bottom. And Twitch saying that the industry needs to invest more - good luck on that one. Some of them might. Maybe. And others will have scantily-clad big-breasted anime girls doing roundhouse kicks because people buy that.

    But even something as anodyne as the Hello Kitty Cube Frenzy game is overtly sexist. Hello Kitty is prim and demure and has so much pink and does girly things, while Bad Badtz Maru is a naughty, messy boy. Is that banned from Twitch now?

    In a nutshell, this is pointless grandstanding about an impossible goal. It's like Nixon declaring the War on Drugs. There is not even any plausible victory condition, so there's an eternal list of complaints to whine about.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @03:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @03:30AM (#409234)

    Thank you, your post is one of the only ones here that is decent and makes a good point.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @07:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @07:41PM (#409596)

      You're welcome.

      Honestly, the most practical approach may be something like an ignore list. Is someone being an obnoxious little brat? Hit the button, you never hear their whiny little voice again. You can extend the principle to MMORPGs, making the obnoxious individuals largely irrelevant for LFG calls, making their characters invisible outside raids and whatever.

      That way everybody becomes their own editor, and the central system saves bandwidth by not propagating irrelevant data.

      The answer to every: "Waaah! he said something mean!" should always be: "So block him."

      Don't want to be blocked? Don't be a dick. And guess what, the MRAs can block the SJWs, and everyone's happier.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 03 2016, @11:56AM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 03 2016, @11:56AM (#409361)

    There is not even any plausible victory condition

    Some dirtbags just like watching the world burn. If they have to light the fire by talking nonsense about sexism in video games, they don't care as long as the eventual fire is glorious.

    Then there's the whole "anti-14 words" thing, where if white males like it, it must be destroyed, because they must be destroyed. Nothing personal and nothing specific to pixels on a screen, its just methodical intentional destruction of any ally of a racial enemy. Unfortunately white males like video games, so the games must be destroyed.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by gidds on Tuesday October 04 2016, @12:30PM

    by gidds (589) on Tuesday October 04 2016, @12:30PM (#409953)

    You seem to be making a slippery slope argument [wikipedia.org] — that one single move down that road must inevitably lead to its end, that there can be no middle ground or reasonable compromise, and that everyone not actively against this suggestion must be a rabid totalitarian extremist.

    Which is clearly a fallacy [wikipedia.org].

    Do you have any more reasonable arguments why nothing at all should ever be done about blatant sexism, misogyny, and other forms of hate speech?

    --
    [sig redacted]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @09:03PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @09:03PM (#410319)

      No, it is not a slippery slope argument.

      If it were a slippery slope argument, there would be some sort of derived series of consequences which would be either ironclad (hence valid) but more probably dubious (hence a fallacy).

      Example:

      Twitch will ban misogyny, and then they will ban violence, and then they will ban all games except abstract games like Go and Tetris, and then they will go out of business.

      Your statement concerning middle ground or extremism leads more to the fallacy of the excluded middle - again, not really the point above.

      Your final paragraph:

      Do you have any more reasonable arguments why nothing at all should ever be done about blatant sexism, misogyny, and other forms of hate speech?

      has nothing to do with the grandparent post. The grandparent post did not say that nothing should be done about those types of communication whatsoever. It made the key point that the problem statement from the side of Twitch is a poor one, with no clear standard for success and with a class of remedies that are not in the broader gaming industry's plausible power to impose in a top-down fashion.

      The closest thing to a slippery slope argument was an examination of what would be required to actually stamp out any semblance of trolling. Simple word recognition is not enough. It has to be context sensitive, because a suggestion by a teenage basement dweller that he would like to fuck another person (of whatever description) anally can be easily rephrased as a desire to pork the target's peach. Pork and peach are not words that, absent context, immediately suggest hostility, but in context they become a possible bone of contention. This fails to be a slippery slope argument because it does not purport to state a series of supposed consequences, but investigates a range of possible technical approaches to the editorial goal, and establishes how they fall short, thereby demonstrating the limitations of feasibility of doing "more about online sexism in gaming".

      Unfortunately, one of the larger problems is that so-called "hate speech" (which might be more accurately termed "speech indicative of hatred") is rather in the eye of the beholder. There are no objective boundaries around it, and what some might consider to be entirely innocuous is in the eyes of others blatant and obnoxious. The grandparent post's reference to the Hello Kitty game is a perfect example: it is blatantly, shamelessly sexist in its content and its premises. However, many would not see it, not think about it, or not care. If Twitch wants to ban sexist material, they would have to ban sexist games, and yet here we have a children's game, the very existence of which could arguably constitute an exercise in what you might call "hate speech".

      Having thus excluded a top-down imposition of editorial standards as being implausible (if not outright technologically infeasible until we have really deep machine cognition) what are we left with? Not nothing. We still have the ability to afford users tools for performing their own editorial discretion. The same way that anyone who does not wish to see a superhero movie in a theatre has the straightforward opportunity not to purchase those tickets or attend those theatres, one can avoid undesirable content online, given the right tools. Don't want to enjoy the sophisticated physics behind Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball? Don't go to those things on Twitch, but also silence (in your interface) the fools who persist in discussing that topic.

      The strongest position, in both technological and practical terms, appears to be empowering the individual to make choices. Technologically, because excluding signals by source is easy while distributing the intelligence behind making those choices to the affected parties is efficient. Practically, because it removes the question of editorial discretion from a company that can never strike the correct balance because the correct balance is a matter of opinion - and those opinions vary massively across the population.

      Ultimately, this is the technical and social equivalent of recognising that people are responsible for their own happiness, and that wishing dissent away does not work. Even if you could somehow construct a perfect ivory tower of universal peace, love, understanding and utter nonjudgementalism (dubious, but hypothetically useful) there's no reason to suppose that someone else might not construct the counterpart dungeon populated by the malcontent exiles from your ivory tower. At that point the inhabitants of your ivory tower are as deliberately blind as if they had personally hit a big, red IGNORE button on everyone who had hurt their delicate sensibilities, rather than having you do it. But you would have done nothing to prevent the counterpart dungeon's denizens from existing, or (inevitably) holding your ivory tower's inhabitants in contempt. Realistically, if history is any guide, the ivory tower would be a morass of petty jealousies and cliques, but we can pretend that it would be an environment of perfect love and companionship and the analysis would remain the same.

      If we were to draw parallels to real world human interactions, we could find some interesting examples. For instance, the followers of the Westboro Baptists are a canary in the coalmine of free speech. You don't have to like them, value the content of their message, or agree with them in any way to understand that there is a value in permitting them to spew their verbal refuse. Similarly, there is a value in not requiring a newspaper's editor to grant them press, even negative. Given that the boundaries of "hate speech" are constantly shifting, to the point that some lines of academic inquiry have been described as such, it seems difficult to make the case that it must be an absolute ban, or necessarily even regulated out of the public square. This in no way prevents private entities from exercising editorial discretion, but does not make a case for imposing editorial standards in the same way that, for example, laws against fraud do.

      The pursuit of pluralism allows for a robust and resilient society. This is clearly a virtue, but it comes at the cost of tolerating dissent, rather than requiring disengagement. Blanket efforts to stamp out what you might consider to be "hate speech" (by whatever your favoured standard might be - recognising that reasonable people could differ on the definition) do not afford much scope for dissent, let alone true pluralism. Useful solutions would have to be discretionary, personal and contextually employed to be at their best in the service of society.

      I hope that this clarifies some of the points of confusion that appear to have afflicted your reading.