I don't get it. Why bother with the GoT license (as a designer OR a consumer) if it's not about the GoT characters? Am I wrong, or is life outside King's Landing and Daenarys's caravan pretty intensely generic fantasy?

I finally thought of a way to illustrate the distinction between what men and women face. This hacked celebrity photo scandal. The same sense of entitlement towards women's bodies, and associated disregard for the women themselves as people, beats at the heart of this hacked photo event, the depiction of women in…

I apologize for my glib response. I was emotionally exhausted when I typed it.

You did make a coherent ball of insightful text! But I'm afraid I don't have the answers either. I'm a man — I'm a little myopic no matter how hard I try to empathize with women and see it as they see it — and I'm not sure it would be my place to propose solutions to this particular problem even if I thought I did.…

I don't think anyone needs to be a part of a particular institution to make a credible statement about it (least of all when it's difficult for them [in this case a woman] to get into the institution [in this case video game design] to begin with). And Sarkeesian herself is a scholar and a critic, and how many…

I don't follow your hypothetical scenario, but no, not necessarily. Men are born with institutional advantages, and even sexual agency, that women aren't. Look at athletes. When male college athletes rape women — even when they're indisputably guilty — they're often perceived and treated by their institutions as…

That's a very thought-provoking comment. Art imitates life, right? I think one way we change life and our society is to change the art we share, art that helps shape our view of the world. Just a couple of generations ago women were casually, routinely depicted as happily subservient to men in media, stuff as mundane…

It's not any different from Hollywood and books! And there are scholars who study their gender and social politics, just not Anita Sarkeesian, and not on Kotaku :) I'd agree that things are getting better, if only because women are actually starting to be heard about it now. And that's why it seems like people are…

Actually I've noticed people getting treated differently because of their sex since apes *became* people, and in women's case, almost entirely worse. We agree that there's a double standard, we just apparently disagree about who it favors.

You can't believe a woman about what it's like to be a female gamer? Reminds me of the US Congress, holding hearings about women's health with all male committees and all male speakers, to decide how women will be treated! That's the way of the world.

I think that's essentially what you're doing when you accuse them of unjustly playing the "misogyny" card, and implying that they're trying to impose an unfair double standard, but if you don't feel that way, then I stand corrected. You do appear to choose your words very carefully.

I'm not unqualified because I'm not a game designer, I'm unqualified because I'm not a woman. Women are the injured party, so women set the terms of arbitration. If I presumed to dictate the way to fix this problem I don't even fully understand myself, I'd just be perpetuating the unjust system where men have all the…

That logic is very popular, but it's based on a superficial assessment of a very complex issue (gender politics) that reaches across the entire breadth of human history. It's Donnie in The Big Lebowski walking into the middle of a conversation about Lenin. It's glib. And I try my best, but explaining millennia of…

Calling them sexist (or at least implying it).

Don't ask me, I'm not qualified. Ask Anita Sarkeesian :)

As a male character myself, I have to very strongly disagree. :) I'm a white, straight, Christian man in America. The playing field's rigged in my favor, in video games and life in general! It's only recently that I've begun to understand that, and try to correct it.

No, I'm saying they're very tepidly acknowledging the "wrongness" of the act, while simultaneously enabling it to happen in the first place.

Uh, yeah, they will. In fact I'm pretty sure you are. People will also organize campaigns to threaten them, stalk them, harass them, and generally try to ruin their entire lives.

How about Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian? Does it take guts for them to say what they say?

Women are getting a kind special treatment, but "special" doesn't mean "better."