The banks got $29 Trillion during the bailout, so its doable.
PAY ME WHAT YOU OWE ME
I absolutely believe in repartions for slavery and also reparations for native americans, including returning stolen land and giving proper services to those who have already fallen on very hard times. I would gladly contribute more in taxes for this single goal. I ALSO BELIEVE WE OWE BOTH GROUPS A FORMAL APOLOGY AS A NATION.
This week, we sat down with Cara Ellison (@caraellison) narrative designer, columnist, and writer who currently works for Arkane Studios on Dishonored 2 among other projects. Embed With Games, a book following Ellison’s journey from game developer couch to game developer couch across the world is also slated for release in November from Polygon Books.
Emma Fissenden (TMS): Can you tell me a bit about your journey?
Ellison: Somewhere around 11pm on a Sunday just after Ne’er Day 2014, I felt like a failure as I looked at my housemate’s rent money sitting in my bank account. My half of the rent wasn’t there. I’d co-written a television programme about video games the previous year and the last of the decent amount of money I’d gotten from it had trickled away.
At some point, I thought, you will have to admit it. Maybe writing about video games on the internet isn’t for you.
Except then I got drunk and defiant and made fists about it. I put up a Patreon, a kind of internet subscription service, saying I’d pack the essential possessions into two bags, give up having any kind of home, and go and live with a bunch of different game developers for a whole year if people just subscribed money to read about it. If I got to $1000 a month, I said, I’d really do it, I’d go and write weird essays about gamemakers.
I don’t know if it was generosity or voyeurism or a combination of both, but the internet obliged. In a few hours the dollar count was way over 1000 and I was starting to sober up considerably. Perhaps ‘panicking’ is not the word, but I didn’t tell my mother about it for over a week.
If you’ve ever read Tony Hawks’ Round Ireland With A Fridge, it was a similar kind of bet to that, only I’d made it with the internet, and instead of with a fridge it was a year-old Macbook Pro and instead of Ireland it was the whole world. It was Tony Hawks’ book that was a salve whenever I came across people who heard about my project and did the equivalent of spitting the word ‘Millennial’, ‘get a real job’, because Tony Hawks is a southern English dude who has made a career of creeping by on cleverly constructed sentences and whimsical ideas and is concertedly not a ‘Millennial’. Only people are probably quite impressed by him. He’s tall and wears a suit and is not a five foot seven Scottish writer woman with glasses designed to hide half of her face.
In any case, I did go all around the world in 2014 and I wrote about the gamemakers I stayed with. Instead of the pledges going down each month, they went up, so I must have done something right. I did it for as long as I could bear, about twelve months before the lack of personal space really messed with me and I had to stop before I admitted myself to The Priory in Glasgow.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Keep an eye on Cara’s website and twitter for updates on Embed With Games!)]
TMS: How did you end up where you are today?
Ellison: I think it’s not really to do with talent, although I do believe I have some … rather I think it’s a combination of
Privilege, in that I was born in Scotland where I had a free university education and healthcare and inherited other societal privileges that are afforded to idiosyncratic white girls in a literary world.
Real, hard-headed, fuck-you resilience—which isn’t the same as hunger or cut-throat behaviour—I think what’s really valuable is the ability to get metaphorically stabbed in the gut a hundred times and still get back up, look around, and choose another way to get where you want to be.
Genuine affection and warmth towards other people, an interest in their work, a curiosity about humans and a willingness to pitch in.
Practice, just churning writing out and letting people loose on your body of work (sometimes a bloody affair).
The ability to know when a valuable opportunity is being offered and taking it. I think over everything, never sneer at someone you think is less creative than you, because chances are they’ll learn in time and you’ll work alongside them one day or they might even end up commissioning you. Talent is a fragile thing and it’s way too fragile to live only in one type of person and there absolutely is enough of it to go around.
TMS: What was your initial entry into the games industry, and what prompted it?
Ellison: I left university with an English Literature degree (aka a degree in how to tell humorous anecdotes at parties) despairing because I didn’t think I could get that job in a publishing house editing William Gibson novels all day, and I thought I’d end up being a teacher which didn’t appeal. I always loved video games and I saw Rockstar North were advertising for QA testers. I applied and after checking my favourite GTA was Vice City, they let me in and I worked there on GTA IV for a year before going on to do other things in media in and around games.
Anyone who lives in Edinburgh Scotland and likes video games ends up in the Rockstar North office at some point. It’s just a matter of time. I think primarily what North looked for in a tester was critical analysis and an ability to communicate clearly, which arts degrees are incredibly good at teaching. QA testers are just the internal game critics of the studio, really. They are very valuable.
TMS: Can you describe what your role writing for Dishonored 2 at Arkane involves? What’s an average kind of day for you?
Ellison: I’m contract so I only go into the office when Harvey [Smith] tells me to! I also work for other studios too (the projects are unannounced as yet). I’ve done dialogue and in-game texts so far. I’m part of a large narrative team that are all working on it—Austin Grossman, Sachka Duval, Harvey Smith, and Terri Brosius, the famous voice of SHODAN. It’s kind of a privilege to be on the team. When I was in studio I mostly just made myself a coffee, started up Drake’s Nothing Was The Same, and wrote all day! It’s a dream job for someone who likes living in the minds of imaginary people.
TMS: Do you have any advice for those, especially women, who might be considering pursuing a similar career? What’s one thing you wished the younger you would have known?
Ellison: I guess if you want to work in games development in any meaningful way, you have to be making games and be interested in the process of making games. It’s not really enough to play them or have encyclopaedic knowledge of them. Even when I got a job in QA we were encouraged to take part in the process of creating the game by giving ideas and feedback, by giving advice about where collectibles would be best placed, and many QAers do go on to work in level design if you show interest. As far as I know the first time Harvey thought I’d be good on the narrative design team of his game was when he played a game I made called Sacrilege, and then I did writing tests and a really long interview in which I basically crapped it the entire way through because all these talented people were asking me very hard design questions.
As for a career in games criticism, which is the thing I am most known for I guess, I’m not sure there is any meaningful career in it—though maybe there was one back in the golden age of print magazines, maybe like Charlie Brooker or Kieron Gillen had. The staff writer jobs also don’t usually support the kind of work I scraped by on freelance—features work and irreverent reviews and such, unless you get very lucky. If you really want to land a job in writing about games don’t become a critic—become a reporter or news writer. Websites are starved of journalists, particularly women journalists, that want to sift through press releases and do investigative work for very little salary. You could probably do a day job and write a feature a week maybe, if you wanted to make your name as a critic. You get time to think over your thoughts so you knock it out of the park every time. Brendan Caldwell over at Rock Paper Shotgun is one of my favourite people who does that. He’s a really talented writer.
But on being a writer: I think if I had some advice for a young me, it would be to try not to be ashamed of being a writer. At school kids used to make fun of my complete inability to be able to be near paper without writing a piece of fiction about imaginary people on it. The humiliation of it was so bad that I wrote in private for the rest of my life. I never showed anyone my writing until I was 27 (although I guess when I did show it to someone it was Kieron Gillen and he told me to pitch websites with it) and people wanted to pay me money for it. I’d been good all along, really, and I’d wasted all my youth thinking I was total shit. But I never knew because I never showed anyone it. SHOW YOUR WORK TO PEOPLE YOU RESPECT, is my point.
If you’re a woman in games criticism on the internet, I only have sympathy for the extra layer of shit you have to wade through if you ever want to describe your point of view. I used to just go to the pub with friends after an article went up just to stop myself reading the comments. Ellie Gibson had a really good attitude about it: ‘fuck ’em’, she’d say.
TMS: Can you comment on any plans for your own future, and where you hope the future of the gaming industry might be headed?
Ellison: I think I’d like to stick with narrative design for a while. I’ve got a few indie games in mind to make and I want to work on some big blockbusters too. I want to go big or go home. And then maybe I’ll put out a novel or two or maybe go back to radio or TV. I want games to become more welcome to women, of course, in future, and I also want to see some really cool playable women characters happen, particularly women of colour. I saw Tacoma‘s concept art for their main character the other day and it’s so rad.
TMS: Do you have any advice for those, especially women, who might be considering a career in games? What’s one thing you wished the younger you would have known?
Ellison: I absolutely never considered that I could have a career in games when I was a kid. That’s not even a gendered thing, I don’t think. UKIE did a survey into what UK kids think about games and across the board they thought games were made in the US. Even though the biggest game franchise in the world is made in Edinburgh Scotland, they had no idea they could just rock up and apply to work there, and they feared that they didn’t have the skills to make games—but they thought you had to go to university for this sort of thing. Most of our games deities never studied games at university!
That’s a new idea. They just picked up tools and made their own games. So I wished I’d known where to look on the internet for gamemaking tools or at least had some classes in Unity at school (even though it didn’t exist then). My advice is go to some Unity classes, I think, and learn the basics of how to script. You could do what I did and pick up a simple text game engine like Twine to play around with narrative design—I think the people over at Telltale prototype narrative in Twine too. Also: find a mentor and a gamemaking partner! Ask questions! Mess around. Experiment. If you start making games with other people it’s a better experience and problems are solved so much quicker.
TMS: Can you talk about anything really difficult you’ve had to overcome as both a writer and woman in the games industry?
Ellison: Though women are more common across the industry than ever before it sometimes isn’t obvious where they are all hiding, since everyone stays quiet. Popping your head above the precipice always for some reason invites scrutiny. It can be a little lonely and often you can feel like you are only competing against other women for a ‘slot’ in a job when really you’re competing against men too. The added scrutiny you get for being a woman is exhausting and irritating, particularly if you’ve had years of it. The very fact that programmer and producer Jade Raymond was pretty in pictures, at one point, was enough to have pornographic comics made of her and have her harassed out of ever appearing in studio photographs again. Jade is a badass and she deserved to be proud of what she had achieved. I don’t believe she should have been punished for being visible and doing good work.
I feel like I haven’t really experienced anything as bad as that, and I don’t spend much time on forums looking for people who hate me, but I know the kinds of attitudes that form this behaviour as I always see it in comments everywhere. I really admire the work that Anita Sarkeesian does, for example, because although I don’t always see completely eye to eye with some of her analyses, she really is doing some good groundwork in looking at one angle of a neglected lens on games—and it’s all in the face of some of the grossest responses I’ve ever seen towards a woman on the internet.
Her work is a really good starting point for a lot of thoughts I have about how stereotypes can form and be used and I really like how wide-ranging her selection of games is. I think I’m more lenient towards sexualised bodies than she is—I think of it more as a character’s personal self-expression and if it fits with who they are then they can definitely be dressed ‘sexily’—for example like Isabella in Dragon Age II or Bayonetta. And of course I’d love to have male characters occasionally go out of their way to be sexy too. But because Anita brought this stuff up I feel like I can understand my own opinions on things better, if that makes sense. It clarifies my choices as a game designer. She’s doing a good job in starting conversations between designers, I think.
TMS:Embed With Games (slated to release November this year) chronicles your travels across the world staying on game devs’ couches. Has writing about the games industry in this project and others helped to somewhat prepare you for what goes on behind the scenes?
Ellison: I don’t know if it’s helped in a very explicit way, but it has prepared me to look after myself more! I think people often overwork themselves in games, and I’ve seen how hard it is when that overwork takes its toll. I think Brendon Chung (Blendo Games) and Teddy Diefenbach (Heart Machine) have a really good outlook on taking care of themselves when it comes to lifestyle—they try to go home on time, they take regular breaks, they review each others’ work—Teddy sometimes even institutes group push ups with the rest of the Glitch City office as a way of getting some exercise. Everyone at Glitch City in LA is really chilled out and I think they have the right idea about development—taking care of yourself is really important and I don’t think you should punish yourself just to finish your game.
TMS: Okay, time for some quick fire questions! Favourite game you’ve worked on?
Ellison: www.playsweatshop.com
TMS: Three favourite games of the past year?
Ellison: Increpare’s Cooking, For Lovers, Alien: Isolation, Jazzpunk
TMS: Of all time?
Ellison: UGH. Thirty Flights Of Loving, maybe?
TMS: Most frustrating sequence you’ve ever played in a game?
Ellison: You should check out my Ride To Hell: Retribution review. It involves a combine harvester.
TMS: Favourite character?
Ellison: Mo Corley from Full Throttle.
TMS: Favourite character you’ve written for and why?
Ellison: Emily from Dishonored 2 because she is a cool-ass lady and ruthless assassin who doesn’t take any shit from anyone.
TMS: First game you ever played?
Ellison:Elite, on the BBC Micro. (After I interviewed David Braben I called my dad to tell him)
TMS: And, finally, coffee or tea?
Ellison: I love tea because you aren’t allowed not to as a Brit, but coffee is my love and I intend to buy an espresso machine when I finally get somewhere to live.
Emma Fissenden is a writer of all trades. When she’s not pushing through her next rewrite, she’s playing too many games and editing fiction as the Editor in Chief at@noblegasqrtly. You can find her on Twitter @efissenden, or check out her other series for TMS, Game Changer.
Bernie Sanders has been portrayed as the progressive darling of the campaign trail for the last few weeks, but a Black Lives Matter protest during his speech over the weekend has sparked a national dialog about his prioritization of economic issues and how he will address racial problems if elected.
Alternative Press began as a photocopied fanzine in Cleveland in 1985. Three decades later is still in print, defying the widespread death of independent music magazines while also embracing the digital realm.
what if it's just a care bears movie, because that's basically all those fuckers were
In a deal near seven figures, Sony Pictures Animation won a three-studio auction for an animated movie pitch centering on the Emoji, those lovable round headed figures that are as much a staple of social media correspondence as adverbs and adjectives.
Boston is by far the most expensive. At $7.75 for a beer, it's tied with only the Cubs and Phillies, but Boston only gives you 12oz for that price compared to 16oz at Chicago and 21oz at Philadelphia. That puts Boston at nearly 65 cents per ounce--15 cents per ounce more than the second-place Yankees, Giants, Marlins, and Mariners--or $10.33/pint.
The MLB average is $5.98/15oz, or $0.40/oz. The Angels bottom out at $0.28/oz.
A day or evening at the ballpark offers up a few hours of outdoor fun, and of course an opportunity to have more than a beer or two. But washing down those pretzels, peanuts, and hot dogs is going to cost you quite a bit. How much?
Streamus, the Chrome extension that turns YouTube into a serious music service, has been neutered by Google after a long battle between the company and the developer of the add-on.
Bioware's acclaimed Star Wars RPG series, Knights of the Old Republic, has long suffered a major pockmark in the form of the original game's sequel having a buggy, rushed launch on PC in 2005. KOTOR II was left for dead for so long, fans took it upon themselves to fix its problems, at which point they discovered whole swaths of cut content within the game—and famously modded the game to bring those cut bits back.
Even after the mod's launch and continued development, neither the game's publisher Bioware nor the game's original developer Obsidian bothered officially patching the PC version since April 2005—until Tuesday, that is. With no official Web or social media announcement, KOTOR II received its first official patch in over 10 years exclusively on Steam, and the update is crazy huge.
Most importantly, the game now includes direct Steam Workshop mod support, meaning players can download and install the Sith Lords Restored Content Mod with greater ease. Additionally, the game now runs on Linux, OS X, and SteamOS; natively supports PC gamepads; includes achievements and cloud save support; and can be viewed in both widescreen modes and resolutions up to 5K.
'The Surface range appears to be credibly carving out a decent niche for itself. Revenue for the quarter was $0.89 billion, up 117 percent year on year, and for the full 2015 financial year, revenue was $3.6 billion, up 65 percent. For a narrow product line-up—no conventional desktops, laptops, or all-in-ones, just a pair of slightly quirky hybrids—this is an encouraging performance. Xbox sales were up more than 30 percent, to 1.4 million in the quarter.
Consumer-oriented Office 365 subscriptions are also up substantially. There are now 15.2 million consumer subscribers to Office 365, with nearly 3 million of those added in the most recent quarter, and nearly 10 million added for the whole 2015 fiscal year. The real question for this business will be renewal rates. Many Windows devices come bundled with 1 year subscriptions to Office 365. Will those subscribers renew at the end of that year, or abandon the service?
On the commercial, volume licensed side, Windows revenue was down 8 percent and Office revenue was down 18 percent. Even server products, normally strong performers, were flat year on year; while annuity (subscription) revenue was up, this was offset by a decline in transactional (non-subscription) revenue. As a whole, licensing was down 7 percent.'
This was driven by a $7.5 billion goodwill and asset impairment charge from Nokia Devices and Services, coupled with a new $0.78 billion restructuring charge, and a further $0.16 billion cost for integration and previously announced restructuring. In total, the company booked $8.4 billion of losses in the quarter.
A security researcher has taken umbrage at Italian malware developer Hacking Team after discovering that his open source exploit tools were included in Android surveillance software sold to governments around the world.
Collin Mulliner, well-known in security circles for exposing vulnerabilities in mobile devices, published a blog post Tuesday that attempts to set the record straight. To wit: his tools—which among other things surreptitiously capture conversations and other sounds within earshot of infected Android phones—were used without permission or notice by Hacking Team. He learned about the use only after the breach of Hacking Team computers, which resulted in a 400-gigabyte leak of confidential company documents, including these e-mails showing company engineers discussing Mulliner's tools.
'Yes that's right, Google's original internet photo service is still alive! Picasa will apparently be serving as the host for pictures shared during Google Hangouts chats. A letter went out to Google Apps administrators tell them to enable Picasa Web if they want to continue sharing photos over hangouts, and we've seen our personal accounts jump back and forth between Picasa and Google+ hosting as well. We guess then you make two of everything (or in this case three of everything) you have lots of options to fall back on when you kill one.'
The great Google Plus Purge continues at Google. With the launch of the standalone "Google Photos", the Google+ version of Photos isn't needed anymore, so Google has announced it's shutting the service down. A Google+ Help page says that "sometime after August 1" the Google+ Photos app will stop working.
Google Photos (the non "plus" version) launched at Google I/O, and was pitched as a spinoff of the Google+ Photos. Besides a new app and website, it added computer vision search, which would automatically recognise places, people, and objects in photos, allowing the user to pull up "pictures of cars" without any manual tagging. Google+ used to be seen as the social backbone of Google, but after several years of struggling and the departure of the project's leader, Google has slowly been working to de-plussify its ecosystem. Soon the site will be just a social stream.
Not all of the photo functionality of Google+ is going away. Users will still be able to share photos to their stream, and existing shared photos will still be on the site. It's just all of the mass photo storage and viewing features from Auto Backup are going away. It's still easy to share to Google+ from Google Photos via the share button, it's just separate and neutral now.
According to The New York Times and Bloomberg News, four men in Florida and Israel have been arrested in connection to the 2014 hack against JPMorgan Chase, which resulted in gigabytes of bank data being exfiltrated. The news outlets, citing anonymous sources, did not fully explain how all the suspects were connected.
The United States Attorney in Manhattan announced that the two Florida men were arrested Tuesday and were formally charged with operating an unlicensed Bitcoin exchange, coin.mx.
However, their criminal complaints make no mention of JPMorgan Chase. The two Israelis were named as Gery Shalon and Ziv Orenstein and were arrested by authorities there. A fifth man, Joshua Samuel Aaron, an American living in Israel, is reportedly still at large.
A newly discovered mountain range lies near the southwestern margin of Plutos heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region), situated between bright, icy plains and dark, heavily-cratered terrain.
This image was acquired by New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers) and sent back to Earth on July 20. Features as small as a half-mile (1 kilometer) across are visible.
These frozen peaks are estimated to be one-half mile to one mile (1-1.5 kilometers) high, about the same height as the United States Appalachian Mountains. The Norgay Montes (Norgay Mountains) discovered by New Horizons on July 15 more closely approximate the height of the taller Rocky Mountains.
The names of features on Pluto have all been given on an informal basis by the New Horizons team.
Plutos moon Nix (left), shown here in enhanced color as imaged by the New Horizons Ralph instrument, has a reddish spot that has attracted the interest of mission scientists. The data were obtained on the morning of July 14, 2015, and received on the ground on July 18. At the time the observations were taken New Horizons was about 102,000 miles (165,000 km) from Nix. The image shows features as small as approximately 2 miles (3 kilometers) across on Nix, which is estimated to be 26 miles (42 kilometers) long and 22 miles (36 kilometers) wide.
Pluto's small, irregularly shaped moon Hydra (right) is revealed in this black and white image taken from New Horizons' LORRI instrument on July 14, 2015 from a distance of about 143,000 miles (231,000 kilometers). Features as small as 0.7 miles (1.2 kilometers) are visible on Hydra, which measures 34 miles (55 kilometers) in length.
There have been a lot of great athlete dogs in the past, but could this be the best one ever?
I don't want to go offending people, but this dog might be awesome as Air Bud. Seriously, this is amazing. You want to see it in slow motion? Of course you do.
Delay after delay kept it out of our hands for months, but with last week’s release of Hawkeye #22, Matt Fraction and David Aja’s spectacular series has come to a close. While it’s nice to finally read the end, it’s with a twinge of sadness: we’ll miss this Hawkeye an awful lot. Here’s just six reasons why.
Lately Airbnb can’t seem to keep its foot out of its mouth. Right after releasing a much-derided, creepy ad that suggested the service helps you understand whether humankind is good by allowing you to sleep in people’s beds (that generated this fun spoof) the home-rental company has a new campaign comparing its homestay service for travelers to the treatment that immigrants endured coming to America via the iconic and notorious processing center at Ellis Island, in New York.
For 70 years, Ellis Island welcomed people from all backgrounds to NYC. Today, @Airbnb hosts continue the tradition. http://t.co/mrrdi0iQoI
A piece of interactive advertising featured in the New York Times presents the history of Ellis Island—the entry point for 12 million immigrants who came to the United States between 1892 and 1931—through pictures, data and interviews with descendants of the migrants who passed through.
The ad—a rather long and inconsistent scroll-down feature—presents Ellis Island in glowing terms: “Over a span of roughly 70 years, Ellis Island grew from an anonymous outcropping in New York Bay to an iconic symbol of American multiculturalism. Equally important to its legacy is the culture of hospitality beyond its shores.”
But as The Observer first pointed out, the picture Airbnb paints of the reception immigrants passing through Ellis Island received may be a touch too rosy. A 1903 archival document from the facility describes the treatment of immigrants as less than hospitable. They were inspected and “aliens who do not appear normal are turned aside, with those who are palpably defective, and more thoroughly examined later.” They were then grouped and interrogated, then either deported, quarantined, or sent off to trains or relatives, with precautions taken to protect them from “the boarding house runners’ and other con men who lie in wait for them at the Battery.”
Those boarding houses, again, sound much more pleasant in Airbnb’s telling: “Coming through Ellis Island was not always easy,” the ad acknowledges. “Some newcomers were sent home, others spent months in quarantine.” But for those allowed to stay, the ad explains, “Private residences, both middle and lower class, offered immigrants simple shelter and sustenance for a reasonable price.” At these boarding houses, immigrants found “valuable support networks” and “a sense of community,” and benefited from America’s “emerging culture of hospitality.”
Immigrants in line to be checked.(Photo courtesy Library of Congress)
Community may well have formed, but it’s also true that many of those 19th-century immigrants would end up in squalid tenements in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, often without indoor plumbing or running water, and with rats spreading disease. Children were particularly susceptible to the epidemics of typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, and pneumonia that swept the overcrowded apartment complexes.
Children sleeping in Mulberry Street, 1890.(Jacob Riis (via Wikimedia Commons))
The social reformer, writer, and photographer Jacob A. Riis showed all this in brutal detail in his 1890 book, How The Other Half Lives. Riis described conditions that even the most hardy Airbnb customer would balk at: apartments divided up to house 12 families, with unventilated bedrooms just a few feet square.
D. dark L. light. H. halls.
Airbnb describes these close quarters as a bonding experience. “It was not uncommon for a sense of family to develop,” the ad asserts, quoting Megan Smolenyak, a genealogist: “’If you look at old census records you’ll see lots of immigrant families living together,’ Smolenyak says. ‘The whole family, plus anywhere from one to 10 other people, all crammed in the same house.'”
Sure, Airbnb can sometimes be somewhat unpleasant. But it seems a bit unfair to compare it to what immigrants struggling ashore a century ago faced.
We were thrilled yesterday when we were able to tell you about the awesome covers for the upcoming FIFA 16 games, upon which we would see female players for the first time ever. However, not everyone was happy about it – which would be fine if they could get by without running to the Internet fueled by Haterade. Alas.
This has been going on since the announcement that women would be playable in FIFA 16, and when we looked for reactions to the new covers on Twitter, we noticed that the second most popular search in relation to the game was “#fifa16 women jokes:”
It takes a lot of women jokes to make that search autofill; such gems as:
FIFA 16 Career Mode: Your star striker has been ruled out for 9 months due to pregnancy.
Which would be offensive if they weren’t so silly. Period jokes? Come on. If women actually became incompetent every time they had their periods, NOTHING IN THIS WORLD WOULD GET DONE. And yes, women sometimes get pregnant. Does that mean that a female professional soccer player is definitely going to? And if she does, why is that worth mentioning? Male players often can’t play for months at a time due to injury. Do we bring that up by making blanket gender-related statements? FIFA 16 Career Mode: Your male star striker has been ruled out for 8 months due to a broken leg. No we don’t, because reason for injury and being out of a game for extended lengths of time don’t matter. When a pro player is in, they’re in. When they’re out, they’re out. And that’s all there is to it. It’s 2015, y’all. There are women’s sports teams. Over 147,000 women play in FIFA-affiliated leagues and cup competitions. If those sports teams exist, it’s only right that they be included in a video game about their sport. End of story. The negative comments are totally unnecessary.
That is, of course, unless the people telling these “women jokes” are looking to get attention and be written about, in which case, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Interesting, considering that so often just about anything women do is considered “attention-seeking” when people don’t like it. It’s funny to see that after these tweets, you see the tweeter’s friends chiming in telling them that the BBC used their tweets in a news item. Cue simultaneous admonishment of the BBC and congratulatory messages to the original tweeter!
Well enjoy these 15 minutes of fame, because when they’re over, you’ll still be the same sad, sexist people you were before, and we’ll all have moved on with our lives.
The one bright spot in all this is that there are plenty of people out there who are quick to let these jokesters know that making jokes at the expense of female professionals is unacceptable. In addition to articles like the one at the BBC, if you look at the #fifa16 women jokes search on Twitter now, you’re more likely to see tweets like this:
We finally get women in a FIFA game (long overdue!) and then my fellow men go making sexist jokes. Dang it I can’t win. #Fifa16
Super Opinionated.
