Many thanks to Linda for supplying this transcript!
[0:00] Thunderf00t: You know, Anita Sarkeesian has recently found herself in some goood company. According to her, just like Jack Thompson and Glenn Beck, games are actually a direct and significant influence on people’s behavior.
[0:14] So Glenn Beck was convinced that just merely pushing the buttons on the gaming control in the game Watch Dogs was actually teaching people how to hack mobile phones and computers!
[0:24] clip from “Glenn Beck: Violent Video Games”: “Watch Dogs allow the players to hack into cell phones, ATMs, drawbridges, even helicopters, to wholly envelop the lives of others . . . the idea here is they’re teaching you to hack, and then become the ultimate voyeur in other people’s lives—including their bedrooms—by hacking into their phones, and everything—everything that we talked about.”
[0:51] Thunderf00t: And Jack Thompson was declared by Machinima to be the number one enemy of gaming for his long history of claiming that video games actually teach people how to become school shooters.
[1:03] clips from “Jack Thompson on Nightline”, “Top 10 Enemies of Gaming”, “Women as Background Decoration: Part 1 – Tropes vs Women in Video Games”,: “Though the 130 million dollar suit was dismissed, Thompson is still convinced that these images inspired three murders.”
[1:10] “NUUMBER OOONE! Jack Thompson! Disbarred attorney Jack Thompson has long been an advocate against obscenity in pop culture . . . But this Jack Thompson fella, he sees obscenity as something different than you or I. Basically ANYTHING that offends his own delicate personal sensibilities. Over the years he’s sued or threated 2 Live Crew, N.W.A, MTV, Madonna, and recently he’s turned his attentions towards the video games.”
[1:36] “To him, this is not entertainment. It is a murder simulator.
[1:41] “Once a person is reduced to the status of objecthood, violence against that object becomes intrinsically permitted.”
[1:47] “You’re kicking, punching”
[1:49] “Violability occurs when, as Nussbaum points out, the objectifier treats the object as lacking in boundary-integrity, as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into.”
[2:01] “Ultimately shooting, cutting the heads off of people with machetes of people you don’t even know and don’t have a motive to be violent against.”
[2:07] “Since these women are just objects, there’s no need or reason for players to have any emotional engagement with them. Meaningful relationships or interactions are not even possible.”
[2:16] Thunderf00t: Indeed, not only did Machinima declare him the “number one enemy of gaming,” they claim that he was the ultimate end-game villain:
[2:24] clip from “Top 10 Enemies of Gaming”: “He is the ultimate level-boss to the gaming industry. Using videogames as scapegoat for tragic school-shootings, he said: “In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers.
“He even suggested that the PS2 controller’s vibrations help condition gamers’ minds to enjoy killing.”
[2:42] Thunderf00t: Now Anita Sarkeesian must have watched all of this with a deep sense of envy, because she has declared herself to be the ultimate villainess—ah, sorry—correction, she claims that gamers have declared her to be the ultimate villainess.
[2:59] clip from TEDx Talks, “Anita Sarkeesian at TEDxWomen 2012”: “So, in their minds, they concocted this grand fiction in which they’re the heroic players of a massively multiplayer online game, working together to take down an enemy; and apparently, they casted me in the role of the villain.”
[3:12] Thunderf00t: Oh, I know, vanity and aspirational victimhood in one package. Yeah, damn straight, Anita Sarkeesian is pretty much exactly what you would expect from an unholy hybrid of Jack Thompson and that crazy woman from Amy’s Baking Company:
[3:29] clip from “Kitchen Nightmares Amy Bouzaglo Season 6 Episode 16 Part 1”: “I have issues with customers that are trying to be online bullies and say horrible things.”
“Online bullies?”
“I told them, I thought he was a loser, he was a moron.”
[3:38] Thunderf00t: So Jack Thompson claims that video games CAUSE SHOOTINGS. Glenn Beck claims that videogames CAUSE HACKING. And Anita Sarkeesian claims that videogames CAUSE SEXISM. Hey fellas, got a great question for ya: did the game Batman make you wanna dress up like a bat and fight crime as a vigilante?
[4:01] clip from “Jack Thompson on Nightline” “Centuries ago, it was the pamphleteers who were scolded for dragging down society. In the 50’s it was comic books, in the 60’s it was The Beatles.”
[4:10] Thunderf00t: However, meanwhile in reality with the sheer number of computer games played, the one thing that we CAN say with surety is that if there IS any link between behavior and playing computer games, it’s BLOODY weak.
[4:28] clip from “Jack Thompson on Nightline”: “Game industry lobbyists are quick to point out a total of 9 Federal Courts have rejected so-called “studies” that video games cause aggression.”
[4:35] Thunderf00t: But just so we’re clear how dishonest Anita was willing to be to come to this conclusion: she claimed that in the game Hitman: [Absolution] men were meant to get their rocks off to beating up the dancers and then controlling their dead bodies:
[4:49] clip from “Women as Background Decoration: Part 1 – Tropes vs Women in Video Games”: “Players are meant to derive a perverse pleasure from desecrating the bodies of unsuspecting virtual female characters. It’s a rush streaming from a carefully concocted mix of sexual arousal connected to the act of controlling and punishing representations of female sexuality.”
[5:05] Thunderf00t: The problem was that no one who played the game DOES that. Trust me, I watched at least 40 playthroughs and none of them attacked the dancers, ‘cos in Hitman, you’re not meant to kill innocent people. Indeed, you get penalized for it. So how can Anita then claim that this game is making people sexist?
[5:26] Well, obviously she’s gotta go beat the living crap out of these virtual women herself, then drag their bodies around in a big circle—and you know it’s her doing it, because the body starts right by the body locker that she’s eventually going to put it into, and then she drags it around in a BIIIG circle over the other body to make it seem as nasty as possible. That is, in reality the only people who play Hitman as a fantasy to kill women and desecrate their bodies, are feminists like Anita Sarkeesian. Indeed, it’s kind of ironic that if you actually listen to what she says:
[6:01] clip from “Women as Background Decoration: Part 1 – Tropes vs Women in Video Games”: “-derive a perverse pleasure from desecrating the bodies of unsuspecting virtual female characters. It’s a rush streaming from a carefully concocted mix of sexual arousal, connected to the act of controlling and punishing representations of female sexuality.”
[6:16] Thunderf00t: Anita’s footage of this part of Hitman is quite literally the only footage that I’ve seen anything even remotely like this. And quite how Anita’s strange fetish for violence against women in computer games proves that games cause sexism—I’m not quite sure. But yeah, with arguments as rigorous as that, it’s quite CLEAR why she’s got the same winning ratio as Jack Thompson. I mean, Anita’s arguments here are about as convincing as suggesting that team games encourage team killing. And just to prove it, here is some POWERFUL footage of Anita going on a team killer killing spree.
[6:55] clip
[7:08] Or it’s like her going griefing in Minecraft—that’s the practice where assholes go and destroy worlds which took people DAYS to make—simply so she can claim that the game is there to encourage and reward people for going griefing in Minecraft.
[7:24] clip from “Jack Thompson on Nightline”: “And it makes him an object of scorn in the gaming world. Kids who wear ‘I hate Jack Thompson’ t-shirts can trade blows with his likeness in the game Mortal Combat.”
[7:37] Thunderf00t: Interestingly though, while Jack Thompson was being inserted into videogames as a character who could be killed in numerous, violent ways, like having his body fed through grated, grinding, bloody wheels of one sort or another—that really didn’t offend Anita’s sensibilities. Apparently men being fed into thrashing machines doesn’t count as sexism, or harassment, or online bullying. However, when someone made a much simpler version of that game with Anita:
[8:07] clip from “16×9 – Dangerous Game: Tropes vs Women bullying”: “The games are not meant as a threat. They’re not meant to intimidate. He goes on to say he was criticizing your project as a person in the media.”
“To make a game to beat me up and then hide behind this idea of ‘we’re just trying to have a conversation’—I mean, I don’t think anyone would buy that. Or anyone would think that that was an acceptable form of communication.”
[8:28] Thunderf00t: Oh no! This must be a unique hatred of women in gaming! Because remember, if there’s one thing that Anita has taught us, it’s that it’s ONLY sexist when it happens to WOMEN. Well, I’m done. Can I have another $160,000 now?
[8:45] “This videogame character is dressed too sexily. I don’t like it! Change it!”
“I’m dressed too sexily and you don’t like it? STOP OPPRESSING ME!”
Thunderf00t 