On the Gates that Gamers Build

Sorry to steal over an hour of your time, but this was really good.

From Business Week.

We’ve talked about Anita Sarkeesian before, such as in this related post, and her show Feminist Frequency. Having watched all of those videos, YouTube had the good sense to recommend to us the first video… which we then found out was a six-part series.

We watched it all once we started.

I really like the way that the question was approached – why on Earth did all of this happen? Why all the hate, why the targets that ended up being targeted? We’ve been following it all for a while, but not everyone has, and it can be dangerous to bring Anita up when you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.

And I should say – we’ve specifically avoided talking about the hashtagged gate that gamers built because we know that people were trolling that and giving grief. And we were wanting to avoid the grief when we had nothing to add to the conversation. With these videos, that has changed.

Watch them. Share them with those who might need some thought to go into it. There’s some deep psychology stuff in here. Some tough questions. Not a lot of answers. But it’s good stuff.