Forum - View topic

The X Button - Littered Picks

TehDarkPrince wrote:

Actually, if you look at this informal survey that was passed around to various forums, including those 4chan and Reddit places you seem to complain about a lot her being a woman ranks as the bottom of the list. It's her being unfit for her position and lacking in qualifications that seems to be the highest.. http://strawpoll.me/865387/r

Let's be clear here. That poll may as well have had two options:
1) "We were wrong to act the way we did."
and
2) "No, we don't have a problem with women, it's all HER fault."

That they voted for "No, no, it has nothing to do with her being a feminist, honestly" is meaningless. You may as well point to a poll with Congress agreeing they all deserve raises. Well they WOULD say that, wouldn't they?

That said, there were people who genuinely thought they had legitimate grievances. Because they were systematically lied to by a handful of individuals that used screencaps of her old tweets and comments, carefully not including the parts of what she said that would have calmed everyone down.

And to clarify, there's a MAJOR factor that kept this going that was WAY outside her control.

The forums themselves are a disaster. Comcept used drupal. It's garbage. You can't pin a thread (which is REALLY needed when you've got certain Questions being Frequently Asked).

You can't merge threads, so you've got two bad options: Either you allow people to endlessly make new threads about the same thing, or you start locking some of the new threads with a note saying to post in an existing thread devoted to the subject. She went the latter route and there were people having fits at how she was a Nazi mod for asking people to keep the topic to just two threads.

You can't private message, you can't search a user's post history (so you can't just click on her name and get a quick list of things she's said), and all the threads are nested with replies collapsed by default. So to see her replies to questions you have to open a thread and start opening replies one by one.

And keep in mind that it's not like there's a huge number of experienced bilingual community moderators. It's just not as established a position in Japan, and there's definitely not a history of interacting with fans that speak two very different languages.

Make no mistake, there was a core of misogynistic individuals that got the ball rolling. And yes, they were very good at convincing other people that she posed a legitimate threat to the game, not just because she was a feminist. And in reacting to the absurd accusations she handled it as well as can be hoped for the most part, with a few legitimate slip-ups, but with the frankly awful drupal forums making it impossible to handle the situation well. But you can't point to those later problems and say that's all that matters, while ignoring how things got started. And while they may be a minority, the boards do still get the occasional new member saying that they'd "just heard about" the feminist that's going to ruin the game... somehow. With her feminism. And there's still people taking passive-aggressive potshots. When a user was asked not to post adult fanart of a character (because it's an all ages forum) and the fanart was taken down, someone made a new thread posting it again with some of her art mockingly photoshoped in as censor bars. Specifically the piece she did that people had been insulting for a week claiming she was trying to turn the main character female. That's not "things have moved on," that's "people tell themselves things have moved on, but things haven't really moved on." It's an embarrassment to gamers in general.

Kyogissun wrote:

It's disgusting how often people just assume they know what the problem is and fail to inform themselves on the topic and just make their thoughts on topics like these mirror someone else's thoughts and loose their identity in an attempt to feel like they have some nonsensical feeling of 'belonging' to a set of ideals or a similar mindset of others... So here, let me offer people the chance to inform themselves, because when I did, I had a better grasp of the situation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXDSfUJBCj0

This is sadly ironic. The problem is, you're upset and angry that other people did insufficient research and just went by what they heard. Then instead of doing first-hand research, you went with what YOU heard. A video.

Unfortunately, the video lies. It's the "Half a truth is often a great lie" sort of lies... but deception is still the name of the game.

Luckily it's easily debunked.

According to InternetAristocrat, Dina never played Mega Man before. And he had a screengrab of her tweet saying so. And she emailed people saying she'd played the games, so, he explains, she's a LIAR.

Yes, that's a screengrab of her saying she never played it. Thing is, to get that screengrab, do you know what InternetAristocrat had to do? He had to go into her twitter history and scroll past the tweets of her playing the games in preparation for her new job. They're still there. Another screengrab if you like. http://oi39.tinypic.com/2r23fvp.jpg

Yes, she did during the kickstarter say she never played the games. And then she thought she might get a job where she would've needed experience with the games, so she played them. But he left out that last part.

He also pointed to a comment she said in the kickstarter comments, about how it would be cool to play as Call or a female Beck. And InternetAristocrat shared that screengrab of that, so we could all see that she wanted to change Beck's gender. Thing is, in order to get that screengrab, he would've needed to see the next thing she said: a clarification that she just wanted an option to play as female Beck. http://oi43.tinypic.com/hsomc8.jpg Like in Shovel Knight. It's actually an idea comcept had toyed with during the kickstarter campaign, well before they had hired her, but they decided it would've cost too much.

And it goes on like that. Did she only get the job by nepotism? No, knowing people in the company meant she knew a job was available, but Inafune was hardly going to hire someone unqualified. She needs to speak and read Japanese and English, and she does that very well. She's got a degree in visual creation from Kyoto University of Art and Design, and she's got experience in game design ( http://toucharcade.com/2009/12/28/plushed-quirky-and-beautiful/ ). It doesn't matter who she knows in the company, she's qualified in her own right.

And it goes on like that, he says she's designing for the game with her art style that's unsuited to it, she says she's not with a superior at the company backing her up on the Backers' forums. Yeah, she's an artist, it's a poor company, they said they'd find design work for her. But not on this game. He says we should be terrified she'll push a feminist agenda on the game, she laughs at the idea that the new girl essentially in the mail room can push a feminist agenda into the game Inafune is most interested in. Her superior laughs at the idea. Ben Judd laughs at the idea. It's just not a well-thought-out fear.

It's sad that video has so many hits, and so many people are pointing to it going "if you just had the facts, here watch this!"

It's a lie.

So is it all about feminism?

I don't know. You'd have to ask InternetAristocrat just what it was about Dina that made him want to lie about her for 20 minutes.