[Mac Sirloin]

I have a problem with you bringing up Sarkesian, but before I explain why I want to explain what she is.

She's lucky, but almost chiefly opportunistic. I think Anita Sarkesian found a niche to express something a lot of people who don't know better found easy to agree with, and carried that rhetoric forward to continue appealing to these same people. As such, she's trapped in this role as the great Feminist Video Gamer, an entirely meaningless role and title. She'll be a cultural footnote at best and replaced by someone even more conniving and inflammatory at worst. I think that if she is motivating more girls into the game development industry, that's a good thing, but she hasn't done anything to actually improve how trite and tone-deaf gaming is in general. It's a leisure activity that had a necessity for ideology foisted upon it sometime in the last 20 years. It's like politicizing a fucking board game, there's only so far the literal connotations of Monopoly can be scrutinized before you realize it's just kind of a shitty game anyway.

My problem with you positing Sarkesian as something harmful is that The Amazing Atheist is the exact same person. He found a niche (beleaguring simplified arguments for the good religion does with an adolescent level of condemnation) and stuck to it. Neither Anita or TAA are going to grow as people though. One of them is trapped in a role she was never a capable enough activist to actually do something with and the other is just genuinely ignorant and wishes to remain so. I think you can't be concerned about one without recognizing the same toxicity in the other; they both argue an extremely narrow and generally contrarian way of examining their culture of choice without actually contributing something to it. You really can't hate one without understanding you love the other for the same reasons.

The real problem is the culture of divisiveness we allow ourselves to become embroiled in, through no distinct individual's agency or will, people have found an infinite number of topics to shit all over each other about on the internet. Gamergate and Atheism: Two words for something that doesn't really have any meaningful presence whatsoever. Atheism is widely interpreted as an absence or erasure of god, because it's hard to comprehend the complete, inevitable silence that is no god at all. I don't believe in any god, though I could accept an infinite celestial being might exist on some combination of dimensions or another, it's not any human god and it's not in any way connected to us. It's a purely (and puerile) scientific concept in my mind, not tied to any smelly old books.

Gamergate is a desperate attempt to make the culture surrounding games seem grown up and dramatic instead of just boring and human. The same way that the actual construction of a game is an incredibly tedious process, especially as the projects get bigger, so too is the widening maw of 'atheism' just one big breath before a yawn. If you have nothing to say to this god who isn't there, don't proclaim how important that is. Just get on with your day. If you're not going to just play a video game, don't start pretending some interpersonal bullshit that has nothing to do with you is actually affecting your ability to enjoy a video game. Anyone who got upset over any side of gamergate was just wrong to get hung up on it in the first place, and any atheist who hasn't dropped the whole 'religion is just 100% bad no question' ~one month in needs to find some new topic. I wrote a blog earlier that illustrates how this applies to the religious as well: Shut the fuck up and stop pretending what you believe isn't horrible and weird.

My reasons for thinking The Amazing Imbecile is not only ignorant, but also dishonest and contemptuous (like Sarkesian) is based on a simple personal anecdote that has stuck with me for several years. One of the first times I was browsing reddit TAA was doing an AMA and IMO it was TMI.

Anyway, he got asked some question like 'Yo did being a fat guy who yells like a child on the internet ever get you laid?' (paraphrased)
To which the obvious response of no, of course it wouldn't, was completely avoided and Amazing Anal cyst claimed that when he was in the lineup for a movie, some random girl happened to recognize him and later that night he was having sex with her. Let me illuminate that this story reeks of bullshit. Even then I thought it was completely inexplicable and didn't make any sense, but with every year I just get annoyed with how bad of a lie it was in the first place. That kind of thing doesn't happen if you're still a fat, childish loser in real life, which TAA definitely is. So that kind of self-serving, masturbatory nonsense is what rules this guy's life, and I find him even more loathsome for not only being gross and hateful, but incompetent and stupid as well.