{"id":1392,"date":"2018-04-26T11:05:14","date_gmt":"2018-04-26T15:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/?p=1392"},"modified":"2018-04-26T11:05:14","modified_gmt":"2018-04-26T15:05:14","slug":"how-dare-they","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/2018\/04\/26\/how-dare-they\/","title":{"rendered":"How Dare &#8220;They&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I know I don&#8217;t post here a lot anymore, but today&#8217;s level of ridiculous is just that, so I feel like this is worth posting.<\/p>\n<p>Even if GamerGate ended back in 2016, more or less, as Breitbart writers and editors transferred from the dark depths of the internet to mainstream media and lecture circuits and&#8211;god help us all&#8211;the White House, clearly the attitudes which made it happen in the first place are sadly alive and well.<\/p>\n<p>I say this because in the past few days, a game developer has dared to present a third gender option for its players to choose based on pronoun: &#8220;he,&#8221; &#8220;she,&#8221; and &#8220;they.&#8221; (The game is <em>Battletech<\/em>, available through Steam.) During avatar creation, the player simply is asked to select class, name (first and last), and pronoun, along with one of a variety of premade headshots of varying skin tones, features, and gender-alignments.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s it, folks. One little drop-down menu choice of pronoun. And it has produced this rants of epic proportion, as this Twitter user notes (really, go click on the images):<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">I can see the Steam forums are taking Battletech&#8217;s decision to allow &#8220;they\/them&#8221; preferred pronouns in the character creator well and not at all posting gigantic frothing rants. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/onOe2XBljA\">pic.twitter.com\/onOe2XBljA<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 MayaScientist (@MadScientist212) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/MadScientist212\/status\/989410452483395584?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 26, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>That, by the way, is <em>one rant<\/em> spurred by the <em>possibility of choosing a gender-neutral pronoun<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The level of entitlement and male (and presumably white) privilege exemplified in this post is quite frankly nauseating, and reminds me why I stopped writing so much about gender in games&#8211;because what kind of inhumane person gets that worked up <em>because someone else might choose a gender-non-specific pronoun<\/em> in the creation of their avatar?!<\/p>\n<p>GamerGate is not dead, folks. It&#8217;s a lurching zombie, and it&#8217;s desperately trying to eat all our brains. It&#8217;s time to take this seriously and fix this epidemic of entitlement-rage, because it can&#8211;and let&#8217;s be honest, it probably has&#8211;gotten people killed. This is the same sense of entitled privilege that led a white manager to call the cops on some black people in Starbucks (using Starbucks the same way <em>everyone else who is white uses Starbucks<\/em>), and the same sense of privilege that &#8220;permits&#8221; self-identified &#8220;incels&#8221; to believe they have the right to <em>kill people <\/em>because women won&#8217;t lay down and have sex with them just because they want it. We have created a culture of compassion-less monsters, and it is high time we do something about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I know I don&#8217;t post here a lot anymore, but today&#8217;s level of ridiculous is just that, so I feel like this is worth posting. Even if GamerGate ended back in 2016, more or less, as Breitbart writers and &#8230; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/2018\/04\/26\/how-dare-they\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1710,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9134,104,9136],"tags":[9182,3717,9181],"class_list":["post-1392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming-community","category-gender","category-videogames","tag-battletech","tag-steam","tag-they"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6XN03-ms","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1710"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/playing-at-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}