Until it was brought up on The Indoor Kids podcast, I had almost completely forgotten about Feminist Frequency’s Tropes vs. Women In Video Games, the crowdsourced video series detailing, among other things, how the gaming industry’s overuse of the damsel in distress and its descendants has not only contributed to the toxic culture of gender politics in the United States, but has used the bodies (and horrors committed upon those bodies) of countless pixilated women as a foundation for an entire industry. I thought that my missing part two (even as reports of YouTube users flagging the video for removal reached the edges of my awareness) was a kind of failing on my behalf, but given the nearly three month gap between videos, I forgave myself. Besides, Indoor Kids hosts Kumail Nanjiani, Emily V. Gordon, and Matthew Burnside were coming down pretty hard on Anita Sarkeesian’s hotly debated video.
“Boring,” said Nanjiani several times, intoning that, were this a high-school research project, it would earn a B-plus, at best. “There’s nothing really useful or interesting in them.”
The Indoor Kids’ criticism of Anita Sarkeesian’s video series, while objectively much nicer than that which Sarkeesian faces every day through a variety of social media outlets, is no less dismissive and insulting, a three-pronged attack seeking to strike Sarkeesian down thusly: she’s not entertaining, she’s ignoring all the games where women aren’t treated as objects, and she’s not a big enough nerd to “get” gaming culture. Across fifty-minutes of video, the three hosts of The Indoor Kids found forty seconds of material worth praising, suggesting that Sarkeesian was out of her element and, as such, it would be best if video game fans simply ignored her videos, rather than giving them power through their wounded complaints. (more…)