Imru’ al-Qays;128373572 said:
Having a written discussion with someone is very, very different from reading a book. And I think it's pretty clear that the YouTube format is one of the reasons for Sarkeesian's explosion in popularity: she wasn't anywhere near this visible or influential back when she was just a text blogger. Videos are accessible.
A book is not at all like a text blog or an article. I don't know why you keep making these kinds of misleading comparisons. Reading a written discussion is incredibly similar to reading a blog or articles that may or may not allow comments. In fact, it's much more similar than watching a video.
Feminist Frequency has been a video series since 2009, it's not like her popularity is some new development, it took her time to build up a consistent following in the 100,000s. You'll notice that the only 'explosion' of her popularity occurs after she starts doing the Tropes in video games series. Look at this timeline:
A video about the Oscars, 500,00 views. A video about the hunger games, 280,000 views. Then a video about her kickstarter, 380,000 views. Then her first video about video game tropes, 2,000,000 views. Quadrupled. That is not normal. That explosion is not because of youtube, that's because the gaming community went crazy. Her viewership didn't suddenly explode when she made the kickstarter video, it was only after the gaming community was brought to a frothing frenzy of controversy by the time of her first video release.
I would also hazard a guess that you were not familiar with Anita Sarkeesian prior to her making this series. If that's true, then I'd have to ask why you think you would have been familiar with a theoretical alternative to her who could have had similar visibility. That people who provide the type of analytical content you want in text form rather than video is not a slight against them, it's just a reflection of stubborn refusal to consume the content where it is. You can read an article much faster than you can watch a video, and I don't think you've made a habit of perusing youtube for academically orientated video game commentary either. You said you would watch videos of those types if they existed, but how much time do you actually spend looking for them or watching them? I don't think it's a low probability that the only reason you heard about Anita and her series was through GAF or something similar and not because you found the series independently through habit.
I'm not sure this is true. Gaming is a much smaller space than literature in terms of internal variety. The AAA "genre" absolutely dominates gaming in a way that no single genre dominates literature, and in terms of the demographic diversity of its fanbase it is, I think, quite assimilable to a single literary genre. This is why almost all of Anita's examples are from AAA games. I think comparing gaming as a whole to, say, the romance genre (which was my intent when I mentioned Twilight and 50 Shades), or to scifi/fantasy, is perfectly valid.
First I think you're trying really hard to smooth over significant differences in the AAA space. JRPGs, shooters, fighters, Turn-Based-Strategy, puzzle games, platformers, action adventure, MOBA, etc. The AAA space is still quite diverse and acting as if it is a single genre is wrong. I don't know how you can say the difference between the MOBA scene, fighting game scene, shooter scene, and speed running scene is non-trivial. It is far from being assimilable to single over-arching all-inclusive genre. However I do agree I nitpicked too specifically. A fair comparison would not be COD: Ghosts consumers, but AAA shooter consumers.
Aside from that, I don't see how the existence of those two books, or romance novels in the aggregate, somehow proves that romance novel readers are not aware of or agreeable to feminist critiques of the genre, or that the proportion of those who are is divergent from the corresponding proportion of gamers who think the same. There is plenty of debate about female depictions in SFF and romance novels by both readers and commentators. That these critiques do not seem to you to have fundamentally changed their respective industries does not seem to me any more relevant than saying criticism of male-dominated politics has not resulted in a more equal gender share of elected officials.
So what was the point of bringing this up in the first place? You agree the depiction of females in games is problematic, but for some reason you need to talk about romance novels and how you don't think the same kind of critique is making any significant headway there. So what? If you agree with the critique in the first place I don't see why that fact would need mentioning. Because the implication you're making seems to be that the critique itself is therefore wrong or that it should not be taken into account if the audience doesn't want it. Otherwise, I don't see why you would bring it up because the implicit assumption would be that more work needs to be done if it hasn't had an impact yet (assuming that, as you said, you agree that it should).