That Penny Arcade Controversy

[Henry]

My opinion is meaningless, but I do want to say that i'm absolutely FLOORED that i've missed this teacup tempest for THREE YEARS.

 

[SkidAce]

Same here [MENTION=158]Henry[/MENTION].

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Most of the rhetoric is extremely slanted. I've read a lot about this story in the past couple of days since I hadn't heard about it until recently.

I'd like to provide a bit more context from the other point of view.

They wrote a comic that had nothing to do with rape. It was about how it was funny in MMOs that you only save 5 people when there's a 6th right there waiting to be saved simply because a quest tells you to only save 5 of them. All sorts of horrible things could be happening to the slave that you failed to save. Rape was mentioned as one of those horrible things you COULD be preventing by saving the slave...but you don't because...your screen says to only save 5.

A number of people got VERY angry about using rape as a joke, about mocking rape survivors and about triggering them. Mike tried to explain this wasn't the joke they were making at all and they thought rape was serious. For this, they were called Rape Apologists, that they were "encouraging a rape culture", that they were horrible human beings, people threatened them with boycotts and various articles were written on blogs saying people should stop reading their comic and stop giving them money.

Mike got angry and frustrated. I can understand why. He was tired of reading a barrage of angry tweets when he logged into twitter and being directed to look at blog entry after blog entry on Rape Survivor and Feminist blogs talking about how horrible they were. Especially because they couldn't understand what they had done wrong. They didn't make any jokes about rape. They didn't encourage or make rape sound good in any way. People explained to them that even if they weren't using rape as a joke, just mentioning it in a comic was "creating a rape culture" where it was considered acceptable. They thought this idea was kind of stupid, so they wrote a comic that apologized for insulting anyone and reiterated that they hate rape and rapists. But, in their frustration, they made fun of the fact that their comic somehow encouraged anyone to rape anyone else by saying "if you are raping someone right now because of our comic, stop."

Which only caused more anger, more blog posts yelling at them and even someone threatening to kill their families as a joke to see how they'd like that. Mike got super defensive. When someone asked him how it felt to encourage a rape culture on twitter, he sarcastically answered "Pretty good, actually". A lot of people with no sense of humor took him literally and posted even more posts about how he just didn't get it.

It mostly blew over until Mike's comments that "women have vaginas". Which is a statement likely to be said by a LARGE portion of the population, probably even a majority of people. I might have even been prone to say it before I read how much it pisses some people off. The idea that someone without the sex organs of a woman would call themselves a woman is....rather foreign outside of the transgender community.

So, he once again got a huge helping of insults and hatred thrown at him. He tried to explain that he had never heard the term cis before and hadn't ever thought of the idea that a woman might not have female sexual organs. But now that he had been told, he understood.

Still, a lot of people said it was impossible for anyone to be that willfully ignorant and that he was being even more insulting by saying the idea had never occurred to him. It was suggested by many people that it was actually IMPOSSIBLE to not understand gender identification.

After that, they became real jerks. I'll admit it. They drew a d*ckwolf during a panel at PAX mostly because they were angry at being called names so many times that it became a point of pride to fight back. Which they shouldn't have. But the drawing of the d*ckwolf just caused more people to get angry which caused Mike to become more angry. So he decided to make a shirt out of it. Which was the worst idea EVER.

The thing is, people ascribe malice to the creating of the shirt that wasn't there. People say that they created the shirt to personally insult Rape Survivors. This just isn't true. Nothing I've EVER read about Mike or anyone at Penny Arcade says they hate Women, Rape Survivors, or Transgender people. The shirt wasn't created to insult Rape Survivors. It was created as a statement that they were tired of being harassed and told what to do. So, they were going to do the exact thing they were being told not to out of defiance. To them, it was a symbol of freedom from oppression. They were extremely blinded by their frustration.

But a couple of people reasonably explained to them that the shirt DID insult people. That although they believe the dickwolf was simply a creature they made up for a small mention in a comic and held no ill will towards anyone...that other people didn't see it that way and that other people's perception is what matters, not theirs. So, they pulled the shirt and apologized.

Which many people took as a sign of "victory" over the evil villains who had been mocking them for years. Some of them felt that they were finally being listened to and mostly let it go. Others cried that it was a ploy to make them forget about the insults they were throwing around, that they created the shirt just so they could get rid of it and trick everyone into letting the issue drop. Though, over time the whole controversy did start to die out.

Then they went and opened their mouth about regretting having discontinued the shirt. Which caused this new wave of complaints. As they explain in their new apology, they only said this because they regret doing anything to engage with people. They made one joke that people took the wrong way and it was their choice to engage that caused it to escalate out of control. The discontinuing of the shirt was simply their most recent attempt to "engage" the people who were offended, so it was the one most recent in their memory.

I think the problem is there is too much hyperbole being thrown around. Motives are being ascribed to people that simply aren't there. People are overreacting. On both sides.

I think "Let's never go to PAX again because it is run by horrible human beings" is an extreme overreaction. But so is "These people disagree with our comic so let's make a t-shirt out of the thing they hate".

 

[Janx]

Most of the rhetoric is extremely slanted. I've read a lot about this story in the past couple of days since I hadn't heard about it until recently.

I'd like to provide a bit more context from the other point of view.
...snip..

That sounds like exactly what I thought happened. Which assuming your version is reasonably correct means that I was able to piece together the same story by reading the apology from PA and that's it.

This is what is wrong with the people who escalated this mob against PA. They have an inability to observe, comprehend and come to a reasonable conclusion. they assumed the worse.

They have the audacity to assume that everything is about them, and then they went on the attack.

Against people who have a demonstrable version of Oppositional Defiance. Aka as people who will push back to ridiculous levels. It's like trying to bully bruce banner in the chow line and wondering why he turned green.

 

[billd91]

This is what is wrong with the people who escalated this mob against PA. They have an inability to observe, comprehend and come to a reasonable conclusion. they assumed the worse.

They have the audacity to assume that everything is about them, and then they went on the attack.

In their defense, everybody does this. Seriously. Everybody brings their own perspectives to everything they experience. If being the target of rapists, fanboy gatekeepers, sexual harassers, and whatever chauvinist crawled out of the woodwork is part of their experience it will color their perspective of many things they see - including web comics and comic authors whose instinct is to react kind of like a punk when faced with criticism. So of course they talk about it in those terms. Those are the terms that form the lens through which they see the issue - just as a lot of guys will see the issue through the lens of being privileged to rarely have to worry about rape at all, much less rape by dickwolves.

I do think there are corners of the internet that try to sensitize people to issues like these and the effect they have is often to over-sensitize, particularly when the internet also tends to act like an echo chamber that amplifies the message (for good and bad). For example, a lot of the fanboy gatekeeper issues started cropping up quite suddenly over the last year or so on the internet. Of course, it had always been there, but the posting, reposting, sharing, and re-sharing of blog after blog over social media caused the appearance of the issue to snowball to the point that my wife was genuinely concerned that my 15 year-old daughter would be at serious risk at Gen Con. As it turned out, she had no troubles at all from fanboys trying to ferret out fake geek girls. But the huge buzz the issue was getting made it look like women couldn't turn around at a convention without facing the issue.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

To distill my point as much as possible: up until the Team Dickwolves shirts were made*, I simply saw it as dueling free speech, and had no problem with either side. The apology was lame and potentially inflammatory, but the shirts- to me- violated Wheaton's Law.

It would still be free speech, yes, but incredibly vile and insensitive, and truly worthy of backlash.


* and I mean, made as real, physical objects and put on sale- had they existed only in the comic strip as attire for some evil character, I'd have been fine with that.

 

[Orius]

Mike's biggest problem in this controversy is that he came down with a big case of Artist Ego -- some creative types seem to have a tendancy to act high handed and arrogant at times and this is a pretty good example of it. He seems to have acted reasonable at first, but as the controversy kept getting dragged on he lost his patience and went for the stupid Dickwolves blunder which only made matters worse. That was a stupid move on his part, and saying he regretted pulling the mechandise was also pretty damn stupid.

The other side seems to be acting with the usual narrow vision of activists who either are unable to understand context at all, or deliberately ignore context to try to make a point. And by getting worked up over this, they're wasting efforts that could be put to better use elsewhere by say helping people who have actually suffered from some form of sexual abuse. Getting their collective danders up over a webcomic does little or nothing useful for rape victims. And what good will boycotting PAX do? PA runs some sort of charity event right? What good does it do to potentially hurt that charity because Mike repeatedly put his foot in his mouth?

I'm also with Henry. I'm not sure how I managed to miss this. Then again, I don't regularly read PA. That or maybe it's not the big controversy everyone's making it out to be.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Oh yes- and count me as another for whom this kerfuffle was news!

 

[Janx]

Mike's biggest problem in this controversy is that he came down with a big case of Artist Ego -- some creative types seem to have a tendancy to act high handed and arrogant at times and this is a pretty good example of it. He seems to have acted reasonable at first, but as the controversy kept getting dragged on he lost his patience and went for the stupid Dickwolves blunder which only made matters worse. That was a stupid move on his part, and saying he regretted pulling the mechandise was also pretty damn stupid.

The other side seems to be acting with the usual narrow vision of activists who either are unable to understand context at all, or deliberately ignore context to try to make a point. And by getting worked up over this, they're wasting efforts that could be put to better use elsewhere by say helping people who have actually suffered from some form of sexual abuse. Getting their collective danders up over a webcomic does little or nothing useful for rape victims. And what good will boycotting PAX do? PA runs some sort of charity event right? What good does it do to potentially hurt that charity because Mike repeatedly put his foot in his mouth?

I'm also with Henry. I'm not sure how I managed to miss this. Then again, I don't regularly read PA. That or maybe it's not the big controversy everyone's making it out to be.

Yup.

I would say, to be fair, if the PA guys get a pass for being over-reactive spazztwits, then technically so do the Uncomprehendatards who started it. they just happen to suffer from a different mental malfunction.

But I really dislike Uncomprehendatards because they ruin communication for the rest of us. And they started it.

And this is the first I'd heard of the PA issue as well.

 

[Alzrius]

...and back!

That's not a distinction between ethics & legality, that's a distinction between morality and ethics or legality.

http://www.diffen.com/difference/Ethics_vs_Morals

In general, yes, but in this issue, their overlap is so significant so as to be nearly congruent.

Now that is some fine parsing.

Slightly more seriously, the reason I was using them interchangeably is because ethics and morals largely exist in a continuum; that being that (as I see it) a lot of people take an ethical code of conduct and (unconsciously) adopt it as their own moral code, often with some personal tweaks to it. For example, somehow who takes legal ethics and starts treating them as what's morally right and wrong.

That said, I'll differentiate between the two more clearly from now on.

This is an agreement that was freely entered into, eyes wide open. If you didn't want to abide by the agreement- with all of its potential ramifications- then you should not have entered into the agreement.

The potential for litigation is based in the contract that you signed. If you don't want to abide by this, don't sign the contract.

Again, this speaks not at all to the moral aspect of the question involved. Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's morally sound. This also doesn't speak to litigation brought for non-contractual reasons.

Absolutely nobody has a "right" to sell a commercial product in someone else's store.

The rules were in place: X, Y, and Z would not publish a product that didn't meet their standards, and retailer W wouldn't sell it. That's the free market. You don't like their rules, you find another outlet or produce a different product.

See above. You're ignoring the moral aspect of this, which is what the original question is about. Look at the question of "what is right?" instead of "what are your legal rights?".

No, that's just a disagreement in which you are exercising your free speech and economic power.

Again, utilizing your "economic power" to squelch the ability of someone else to express themselves in a given venue is an act of censorship. The fact that it's legally protected is meaningless in this context.

An individual or group of private citizens are free to say that they won't do business with a person or organization, and organizations may do likewise. There may be repercussions, of course.

Yes, but what's the moral dimension of that? You don't seem to want to engage with this aspect of the discussion, despite that being what the topic is about.

Thank you for the clarification and sorry. The "just to clarify" was there because that's how I read your last line in light of the Rockstar example and wanted to see if that's what you meant. I should have put something like "I read that as .... Assuming I'm misreading it, help!" instead.

No worries.

I agree with the desirability of focusing on ethics as well as the law (the example of non-compete clauses in some contexts, etc...) and that private enterprises certainly do have a great deal of power over the distribution of creative products (and thus over what products are attempted).

Precisely, and I don't see this being addressed very often. Corporations have the ability to exercise power over the public, and when that power extends to things that we've come to rely on and view as ubiquitous - if not essential, to some degree - then that power approaches that wielded by the government. The difference is that we're used to checks and balances in the government, whereas we champion the lack of such restraints on private enterprises, based around the idea that multiple entities will keep each other in check...something I consider dubious.

In the case of the Rockstar example, is there a particular way you feel the ethical failure occurred? (Systematically in the sense that a few huge companies function as gate keepers - kind of like a few large states in the case of school textbooks; that the distributors opted not to distribute things they disagreed with; that they outsourced the decision making on what was disagreeable; or...?)

For a question like this, I find it helpful to clarify the nature of the particular moral failing we're discussing, and then examine the actions that went into making that happen.

In this case, we're talking about a violation of the moral duty (according to my personal moral framework) of "do not suppress someone else's freedom of creative expression." From a nonconsequentialist standpoint, this is one of the negative duties - the highest tier. It means that this is one of the things that is bad if you do it.

As such, we need to examine just who performed this action. I'm tempted to cite the ESRB here, as they likely knew what the results of their issuing an AO rating would be. However, the point of nonconsequentialism is that it's not concerned with consequences - it's the nature of the action itself that matters. Ergo, the ESRB can't be held accountable for what happened; their action was simply to rate the game as they saw it.

That leaves the companies themselves, and it's here we find the moral fault. Each of them had a policy saying that they were going to suppress a particular instance of free expression, conditional to the rating it was given, because they didn't like it and didn't want to be associated with it. Now, that's entirely legal, but as listed above, it violates the stated moral principle. Ergo, I find that the moral fault is with the big three video game companies.

Also sorry about the colors - cut and pasted something back in that I had accidentally snipped out.

Don't worry about it. I suspect that fewer people are using the classic background these days.

I think this is the danger zone of where some supreme court suits have mis-stepped (thus politics, for which I will try to not cross the line, and speak vaguely and neutrally).

[...]

I could not agree more. Well said.