Three Times The Controversy

There have been three controversies in the blogosphere lately that I haven’t had a chance to comment on. (Well, three that I know of, at least-I’m sure there are more floating around.) I don’t particularly like to be controversial on this blog but I did want to at least voice my opinions.

Twitter and MMO Gypsy made me aware of a Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview with Peter Molyneux that made the rounds of the blogosphere. Regardless of what I think of Molyneux and Godus, I personally found it an appalling example of tabloid journalism if not an outright abuse of press credentials. Hard questions do not need to be openly belligerent. I really hope that’s not the direction that games journalism is heading. (Interestingly, or perhaps shockingly, that style of interview turns out to be fairly normal overseas.) I wrote a big long post about this but honestly I don’t want to dwell on it that much.

Jaedia over at Dragons and Whimsy wrote an excellent article about sexual objectification that I highly recommend reading. (There are many excellent articles on this topic actually, this is just the latest.) I’m not super comfortable commenting on this, because, being a plain old WASP, I tend to be the demographic that is the source of all the cultural problems in the world, so I find that it’s usually better to just keep my mouth shut. But I agree that it’s a problem and it was extremely brave of her to post that article especially in a post-Gamergate world.

Lastly, Belghast summarized a kerfuffle that resulted from Jaeda’s post. I missed it because I can’t keep up with Twitter conversations very well, and it’s been a rough week for keeping up with anything online anyway. But I wanted to chime in that I also strongly disagree with the idea of freedom of speech being used as a club to force unpleasant opinions on people. I’ve seen this shield brought up especially about blog comments for years. Freedom of speech doesn’t necessarily give you the right to be heard, particularly over a commercial medium like blogs or Twitter or in a game chat. It’s to protect you from being arrested for criticizing your government.