Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery is a Twine joint, therefore all arguments against Twine are invalid.
To stop being flip for a moment, I think that if we’re worried that the next generation will lose all interest in parser IF, we need to take a serious look at accessibility and whether or not the things we hold dear as traditions are actually fun or just nostalgic, because that’s where I think we’re losing people. It’s one thing to wrestle with a recalcitrant parser when it’s 1987 and all the games you own fit on four 5.25 floppies. These days, there are untold millions of other games a person could be playing at any given time, and they’re not going to wrestle with a parser for long if they’re not having fun.
Parser IF has something that nothing else has, the illusion that you are free to interact with the world in a way constricted only by your imagination, and I feel like we should be looking for ways to play up this feeling and get rid of the clunky bits that stand in the way, as well as the idea that IF should be a learning-curvy playground for the old guard.
Also, I know people are responding out of feeling threatened, but the anti-inclusivity argument here reminds me of the anti-feminism, anti-diversity argument happening in video games culture at large right now, and it’s just gross, you guys. Twine is being taken up as a mode of expression by people who feel marginalized and unrepresented. Can we please at least be cool to those people.
I welcome people who want to make interactive stories. Is it a story? Is it interactive? Then you’re good.
I make parser games, for the most part. I make parser games because I love parser games, and the parser format is often the best way that I see to tell the interactive stories I want to tell.
I also make parser games because I know Inform 7 better than any other medium. I’ve repeatedly made games that “should have been” choice-based games in parser (Wildflowers, Fish Dreams, What Are Little Girls Made Of?) because I know that format best.
My decision is valid.
I presume that people who are working in a choice-based medium are doing so because it is the best way to tell the interactive stories they want to tell. Choice of the Deathless wouldn’t work in parser. Neither would Cis Gaze. Neither would their angelical understanding.
People who are working in Twine may make choice-based games because they know a choice-based system better than any other medium.
Their decision is valid, too.
There is room in my worldview and my community for more than one kind of interactive fiction. I write parser games. I show people how to make Twine games. I play interactive fiction of all kinds - not just Zork and Wishbringer and Hitchhiker’s, but Device 6 and Choice of the Deathless and Coming Out Simulator 2014 and Cis Gaze and Trapped in Time and 18 Cadence and more than I can list.
I welcome people who want to make interactive stories. I want to play your games. I want to be part of a community where we all make interactive stories together.
And your games belong at IFComp every bit as much as mine do.
+1 CVanEseltine. I think the thesis statement is wrong. It’s possible that the IFComp would die without the injection of fresh new blood and participation that Twine brings into the fold. Lots of people excited about IF is what makes the Comp, and keeps people who can write parser works in business at all. Just like serious filmmaking would have likely gone the way of the dinosaur if there weren’t Summer blockbusters making money and keeping the general populace going to the theater.
There will always be more Twine games for the simple reason that Twine is easy to develop in. The relationship is symbiotic, not parasitical: If Twine can keep people interested in reading their games, we should welcome the injection of this demographic to an artform that probably would have gone out years ago with Infocom.
I’d like to add my voice to the last few comments by Carolyn, Jenni, both Emilys, Hanon, and probably someone other folk I’m missing. Interactive Fiction is large and can contain multitudes. We don’t want to come across as devotees of some esoteric discipline who, faced with some more folks who want to bring something different to our community, start telling them to go away. That’s never a good look. When the devotees saying “Go away” are a lot maler (and maybe whiter and straighter and almost certainly cis-er) than the new people, it’s really not a good look, no matter what the motivations are.
And something I’ve said before but I’ll say it again, if you want to find some parser games go look in the minicomps. There were a lot of parser games in last year’s EctoComp. There were a ton of parser games in ShuffleComp. It’s not like people have stopped making parser games just because there are a lot of non-parser games in IFComp.
…I think the accessibility problem for parser is a real thing, too (and something that is not going to be solved at all by complaining about non-parser games). What Jenni said here:
[quote=“Jenni”]
To stop being flip for a moment, I think that if we’re worried that the next generation will lose all interest in parser IF, we need to take a serious look at accessibility and whether or not the things we hold dear as traditions are actually fun or just nostalgic, because that’s where I think we’re losing people. It’s one thing to wrestle with a recalcitrant parser when it’s 1987 and all the games you own fit on four 5.25 floppies. These days, there are untold millions of other games a person could be playing at any given time, and they’re not going to wrestle with a parser for long if they’re not having fun.
Parser IF has something that nothing else has, the illusion that you are free to interact with the world in a way constricted only by your imagination, and I feel like we should be looking for ways to play up this feeling and get rid of the clunky bits that stand in the way, as well as the idea that IF should be a learning-curvy playground for the old guard.[/code]
In my experience, I thought Tea and Toast was pretty accessible once you explain a few commands–if you thrash around it basically tells you what to do–so I tried it out on a couple members of my writing group and they hated it. Once commented that you want to do things that you do in your own kitchen, like look out the window, and I was like “Dude who types LOOK OUT WINDOW when the game hasn’t mentioned a window?” Someone who hasn’t marinated themselves in the conventions of parser IF, that’s who. They were a lot more enthusiastic about my Twine piece which is telling because my Twine piece was awful.
So, well, I haven’t solved the parser outreach problem. To some extent I don’t mind because I don’t necessarily expect what I do to reach beyond a tiny audience of people who are interested in that sort of thing–like the guy in the Steven Millhauser story who devotes himself to clockwork figurines (or do I mean the guy in the Steven Millhauser story who devotes himself to old-fashioned animation?) But if we want to solve the accessibility problem for parser IF, complaining about non-parser IF isn’t going to do it. Getting parser stuff next to more accessible stuff seems likelier to help than hurt.
I think the text book definition of misogyny is hatred or dislike of women or girls. Lets not conflate peoples dislike for CYOA (which is a preference of taste, and therefore completely valid for those who feel it) with something dangerous and evil like misogyny. Thank you.
Honestly, is my English so bad that you don’t get what I say even after I’ve explained myself three times?
I didn’t attack anyone. I was actually saying something in defense of non-parser games, without any form of aggression or disrespect. Then there was this 7 pages of “lessons” from Ye Old Ones telling me and the others what to express and how to do it.
Seriously, saying something and being bashed for 7 pages by everyone, arrogantly, is what always scared people out of this forums - not least a guy who’s been here for ages like Peter Pears. Not being male, female or one of the thousands shades of grey in the middle.
And then we have the optional threat from a moderator, in the end - just to be sure we are missing nothing.
I’m pretty conscious that people such as me - who might have their own ideas, faulty as they are - are never welcome in places like this. I never felt welcome, here, at least, anyway. There’s some guys that could stay silent for ages and then, at the first sight of a post of mine, go down and try to shut me up with the same, malevolent tone, every single time. I have examples if you want. I also have been the subject of LIES, told on my back and without me knowing if not by mere chance, just because. And the whole community embraced those lies, just because. In 2010 I was laughed at pretty hard by many because I didn’t write perfect English not being from fucking Cambridge. I don’t recall many taking my defense, talking about “misogyny”.
Still, I didn’t go cry somewhere because of the misogyny of this forums. I suppose others can do the same. They can survive the public: if not I suggest they avoid going public - publishing games in the IFComp by example.
Please, stop mentioning me when addressing people being bad to Twine, newcomers, non-straight ones, kids, elderlies, chickens, cows or Higgs bosoms. I didn’t hurt anyone in here in centuries if not by them misunderstanding. Or PRETENDING they were misunderstanding and using my words (even SINGLE WORDS) out of contest to play a role of the sacrificial victim.
Now ban me, if you want. I have to pass the day in this bar with Pears and Pudlo, anyway, drinking beers and having a toast to absent friends.
I was sure – absolutely sure – that the first page of this thread had to be irony. Then I had to go check it hadn’t been thread necromancied from 2004. Turns out I didn’t know the IF community as well as thought I did.
When interested outsiders drop by to check on the competition, the largest and most active thread they’ll see will be about how they’re killing the subculture with their cooties and lack of eliteness. #textgamergate
+1 to Carolyn, Matt, Hanon, Jenni and everyone else I overlooked. And a hearty ‘hope you are feeling happier tomorrow’ to the others.
I think there are just two people that we’ve banned from this forum, and I don’t expect to be banning anyone else. I don’t think this topic has yet gotten too toxic, and I definitely don’t think you have done anything wrong James.
The only thing that is out of order here is to suggest that all the Twine games deserve an automatic rating of 1. If you do that you could even get disqualified from judging.
My “look up the definition” comment was meant just that: look it up. As Healy said:
Porpentine’s complaining that people 1-voting games is discriminatory against women? No, it’s not. Sex doesn’t come into it. It’s discriminatory against everyone, male and female.
For what it’s worth, I take the whole “1-voting games 'cos it’s in a system I don’t like” quite personal. From 10+ years of using ADRIFT and watching people 1-vote my games purely because they were written with ADRIFT, I can appreciate how frustrating it is. Seriously, someone once used to 1-vote every single ADRIFT game on IFDB purely because it wouldn’t run natively on their Mac. So yes I hate the whole 1-voting thing.
While I think the acrimony is in some sense justified, although inappropriate, (in that I personally believe parser-based interactive fiction is in for a period of decline or “crowding-out” and then- maybe later -a period of resurgence), it is obvious that it is a nonsensical act of self-mutilation to try to cordon off parser-based interactive fiction from choice-based. CYOA being the death of IF smells like catastrophizing, and I think even those reporting the death of IF will eventually find that there is still much and more to enjoy.
For one: There exist opportunities to expand interactive fiction and so gain new voices, new authors, new programmers, new readers, new gamers - ie. to have an even more dynamic and productive community.
Many such people may not ever join in if not for choice-based IF. (ie. They are probably not “replacing” parser-based authors and games with choice-based authors and games… so much as growing the entire body of work.) Particularly since the barriers-to-entry of choice-based IF are tremendously low (Mind you, this is also a valid orientation from which to make critiques of Twine, etc.) compared to say, learning the natural-language-programming-language of Inform. (which, to me, always seemed to have plenty of the disadvantages of natural languages and programming languages while having few of the advantages - and I am bemused to see Twine also taking this path in some respects, but that’s another story) Internet (gaming) communities rise and fall based on barriers to entry. They are not preferable for a community of authors and readers.
The point is that the alternative to welcoming choice-based IF + adapting to new conditions is effectively refusing a game-changing (hehe) infusion of activity in preference for what is (an understandable but) basically just a reactionary/conservative impulse…
For another: IF is not dead, and would not die even if parser-games died out completely.
Parsers are one way to organise Input/Output. Explicit links as choices are another. In an abstract sense, the texts themselves are structurally very similar. It’s simply that parser-based games don’t just hand over the white-listed actions that can be taken.
We have gone from page-based traversal of textual content in books… to something more like a tree or graph-based traversal, in computers. So why should we be surprised that the methods by which texts are navigated on these ‘graphs’ is itself something that can be experimented with? (After all, even books aren’t all structured to be read in a linear fashion.)
It should be understood that the interaction is itself an aspect of interactive fiction that is subject to authorship.
I understand the bewilderment about why objections to choice-based games might be considered misogynistic. However, there is a broader context to this conversation that I suppose some people here may be unaware of.
Twine has been adopted by many creators who feel left out of traditional game creation power structures, especially women and queer authors and people of color: in some cases people who do not program or do not have the time and energy to program; often people who face disproportionate challenges in getting hired in the game industry. The traditional parser IF community has always skewed towards white men, but the Twine community has a different composition, and for some Twine authors it is the one context in which they feel their voices can be heard.
A number of female and queer game developers and journalists have been the target of a sustained and in some cases criminal harassment campaign for the last two months, including rape and death threats, hacking attacks, the distribution of private financial information and nude photos, and attempts to get them fired from their jobs. There is a huge, depressing story here (you can google GamerGate and spend all day reading if you really don’t need your faith in humanity any more), but at least some portion of that situation has been about organized, overtly anti-feminist and anti-queer attacks. At the center of that campaign is Zoe Quinn, author of the Twine interactive fiction Depression Quest, and there has been a flood of discussion about interactive fiction – by which in this context they mean Twine, since our corner of the internet mostly isn’t visible enough to appear on the radar – being not real games, as being part of what is “ruining” games. A number of Twine authors have come under direct attack in the process. Several valued devs and journalists have left the games field entirely because it wasn’t worth dealing with the risks and the attacks any longer.
So there are a couple of issues here. One: for those of us aware of the GamerGate situation, there’s something very uncomfortably reminiscent of that in a group of people denouncing choice games as not real IF when the large majority of the choice games submitted this year are in Twine. Maybe not intentional, maybe not something that the writers of those posts were aware of, but they echo some unpleasant things said elsewhere, and that colors the experience of reading them.
Two: even if no conscious misogyny is involved, the practical effect of the parser IF community excluding an influx of Twine authors is, among other things, to exclude people whose presence would make our community more balanced and diverse, people who have faced a lot of previous exclusion. That’s something that we should think about a bit. In my experience a lot of the reason the game industry is so tough for women is not because everyone’s overtly sexist (though there certainly are a few such people) but because there are a lot of institutions and pieces of infrastructure that have traditionally been male-centric and male-serving, and preserving the status quo for its own sake often also means preserving a situation that objectifies and talks over women. It is easy to contribute to that situation by accident, even for very well-intentioned people; even for women themselves. But the problem is a real one. I was totally astounded by the level of functional sexism when I entered the game industry. I seriously could not believe it. I’d thought that as a society we’d finished with some of that stuff back around season 5 of Mad Men. But no.
So, to sum up: I’m not saying anyone contributing to this is intending to be misogynistic; I’m not saying that being female is now a reason to win all disagreements; I’m not calling anyone names. I understand the feeling of loss if parser games go away. I am, however, saying that there is a surrounding context to this conversation in which issues of gender and power are absolutely in play, and it’s going to affect how people feel about what is said.
OK, I hope we’re not going to make Peter Pears into some kind of martyr to the IF Social Justice Warriors. I’m sorry that Peter’s gone, but he got bashed for 7 pages because he kept saying things that had unfortunate sexist implications and then doubling down on them when people disputed them. His comments are gone from that thread now, but he started off by basically saying that it was illegitimate to criticize a game for being sexist, and he eventually wound up using a dehumanizing term for large female opera singers and did not react well when someone, who had not yet criticized him on the thread, super politely asked him to withdraw it.
Now if people hadn’t criticized him for that we’d have a forum where it was OK to talk about women in ways that make them seem non-human and where feminist critiques of games could be ruled out of bounds just for being feminist critiques of games. I’m not a woman, but from women I’ve talked to and read, it seems like that sort of thing is what scares people, specifically (but not just) women, out of forums. And it certainly seems as though in general men feel more comfortable than women on the forum, judging from who posts here (and the fact that at least two women have said on this thread that they don’t like it here/won’t send people here for discussion).
I’m sorry for bringing Peter’s posts up again, because he deleted them as something that he regrets, but I don’t think it’d be healthy for this forum to let him go down as someone who got driven off by big meanies rather than someone who found himself in a hole and wouldn’t stop digging.
This thread has been locked and then reopened. Thanks to Dannii (who was man enough to do both, and to whom I simply say thank you), I had the opportunity to think about what I was about to write. Thanks to David, I had the opportunity to put things back into perspective and regain my senses.
I think this discussion is NOT useless. It just should be moved somewhere else, because it only in part talks about IFComp, but can affect it hard, which I wouldn’t like.
This said, back to my rants. I hope this can be the base for a further insight into things and not to start a flamewar. As stated somewhere else (namely, on twitter) I’m 42 and can’t believe I let myself be dragged into flamewars after 20 years on the internet.
Although this could have been phrased more politely – and, yes, you people keep asking for politeness but don’t even how to spell the word, it seems – you are right. Using Peter as an example, in the given case, is wrong for both sides of the medal. Sorry. He’s no hero. Bad choice.
Let it be known, though, that somebody – whom I talked to in private, and whose identity I’m not gonna spoil even when you’ll say “it’s too easy like this: you are talking about ghosts” – is having a hard time lately just RELEASING games for the fact he/she is scared to death by the judgement of this forum. So: no pears, but maybe a lot of different fruits. Let’s think about it. It may well not be a single case.
As expected, your post is complete, well said, largely correct… and polite. I understand your point.
Now, just to let you understand that I’m not trying to beat a dead horse or digging my own hole, I’d like to expand on the subject. To show the reverse of this mirror.
Peter Pears.
Yeah, he dug his own hole. He was attacked because of what he said, and what he said was driven by rage, and something I will never consider right. That said: having him leave the forums (I know the outcome was not intended, but that’s how things went, after all) left the world better or worse? Do we have one less misogynist (given he is one) on Earth or did we just hide the dust under the carpet? As far as I can tell, he’s just somewhere else, misogynning. The problem is not solved.
In the particular case, I guess a more “let’s try and understand each other” approach would have worked better. For both parties, as we have not one single misogynist less and he had to leave to cover for his irresponsibility.
I myself am the kind of guy who thinks “I can’t really explain THIS, it’s so obvious!”, so if you think it’s pointless to try and educate people on a subject, you can keep up the good work of NOT doing it. I can relate.
Misogyny.
This thing is creeping me out. I mean: I know the fact is rather real and contemporary (and it was about time!) but… do we really have to see the Devil inside everything? The game discussed in the “Pears Thread” was named “sexist” because no women inside the game, except a dead mother, was lawful good. So what? Nowadays, to pass the metal detector, we have to brand characters so that they fill every gap in the industry?
I fully understand the “struck nerve” you are talking about, Emily. You know we discussed this privately, too. So, if we are at the point in which we are conscious there is a struck nerve, why not giving people the benefit of doubt, sometimes?
As far as I know him (not too much: just by reading his post in here), David Whyld has never expressed anything greatly offensive to anyone, let alone genders. How can we now possibly take his “I’d 1-grade any Twine game” as “I hate woman/trans/homosex”? Why can’t we just accept that he doesn’t love the fact that so many Twine games are in the IFComp? Turns out he doesn’t even know about #gamersgate. How could he possibly imagine that hating Twine games would mean hating a distinct category of writers?
This said, I’m definitely IN FAVOUR of bringing up the sexism problem. The world needs it. Every category of people who feel hunted by moral society needs it. I’m just asking that not every damn post is turned into a sex-flame war. Sometimes, a spoon is just a spoon and turning every fork into a spoon means soon enuf nobody will care anymore,
Me.
As for David, I think my record speaks for me. You can read back all my posts, including the ones in this very thread, and I challenge you in finding something “inappropriate” in the senses we are after.
Of course, some slipping may have occurred, and this is where I’d like some feedback. I must admit that I may be inclined to misogynist acts: I was born and breed in a society which motto is “the more chicks you bang, the cooler you are”, so something could have gotten under my skin, against my will. What I open-heartedly assure you is that I don’t want to be like that. I BELIEVE misogyny is wrong, as well as many other behaviors. I want it eradicated. All I’m asking for is the benefit of doubt. “Did he really say that or did I misunderstand?”. Just that. You can even ask for disambiguation. Some are very verbal, in here. I suppose a couple more syllables won’t ruin your hands.
Again, I want to stress this out: in my very first post I actually tried and bring up the point that CYOA doesn’t mean no interactivity. So IF is not dead, and it won’t be even when Inform days are over as TADs’ and ADRIFT’s are. I can’t get how this turned into me being one who wants to cut-off Twine games.
Twine and Web-based.
Let’s expand on this subject (which is the only relevant subject in here, as far as we understand that 1) misogyny is bad and 2) no harm to any category was intended).
As far as I can tell (and this is plainly what I tried to express in my first post), CYOAs are as interactive as anything else. Or, let’s say, can be interactive.
In my experience, not many web-based games are CYOAs. CYOA is a very precise thing, and the vast majority of what I read during the last year is not a CYOA.
80% of what I experienced is made from Twine games which are just stories being held together by the clicking of a link, in a graphical environment that hurts my eyes. Like turning pages in an e-book, in pink and black.
Of course, my experience is very limited because I’m not that fond of the medium, but I think I can express a feeling. I don’t even play FIFA or PES, but I know about them enough to express an opinion. That opinion can be wrong: all you have to do is politely tell me (and argument why).
So: in my opinion, very few web-based games are CYOAs. They are just stories, told digitally. This said, we’ve been using the word “story” for parser-games for a lot of time, so we can very well accept web-based “stories”. My last game, as people who have played it are well aware of, is a parser-based that is really just a “story” with some eeeeeeeasy puzzles. Could it be told in Twine? I guess so. This to prove that I’m not against the genre per-se, let alone by platform.
What I said was: “I don’t think there will be many really interactive games in web-based platform, but I may be wrong”.
As a side note: Twine won’t kill Inform, you may be right. Just don’t go all “this happened already when you were 15, poor kid” because a) I’m probably older than you; b) you are simply irritating, proving no point, and acting like the sort of teacher we all wanted hung by their sex when we were in school.
That’s all. I hope it’s nothing that can disrupt the forums. Just a rock in the pool. Give me, please, some POLITE waves back. (If you want, of course)-
Thank you, Emily, for finally giving me the missing piece of this puzzle! I don’t follow gaming or mainstream media, so the only mentions of Gamergate I had seen were on Slashdot. I had no idea that Twine (about which I know next to nothing) was involved in that situation. The numerous invocations of gender, etc. in this thread had been completely bewildering up to this point. Lucea’s oblique reference to “mainstream media coverage noticing an influx of female authors and designers who work primarily, but not exclusively, in Twine” hadn’t helped–I didn’t really know what to search for. So by sheer accident my lament at the loss of parser games gets interpreted as related to Gamergate because of Twine. I see now that even my subject “IF is dead” steps right into that trap! That’s exceedingly unfortunate, and I apologize for my ignorant screw-up.
Now that the scales have fallen from my eyes, I wish to most strenuously disassociate myself from that foul pit of hatred and harassment. I’m white, male, cis, straight, with a tech background, but I don’t follow modern gaming at all. My kids have a Wii, but I only use it to watch Netflix. The most recent commercial game I played was probably Doom 2. Like I said, I don’t play Web-based CYOAs, but I also don’t play MMORPGs, Angry Birds, sports simulations, Candy Crush, or those military shooters that seem to be so popular nowadays. When I do play any computer games, it’s mostly text adventures and NetHack. For what it’s worth, I’m glad that more and more people from all walks of life are finding a voice and an audience in computer games. I am not a part of the opposition. I probably wouldn’t have even posted if there had been 40 parser games and 80 Web games. I’m sorry for the stupid coincidence.
Actually I don’t have a problem with Twine (I wrote a Twine game for the EctoComp last year) or CYOA in general (I’ve written quite a few CYOA games in ADRIFT over the years) and I think it was someone else who said they’d 1-vote all the non-IF games, but I certainly get your point. People here are way too sensitive. They seem to actively go out of their way to find things to complain about. They see hidden and sinister meanings in everything. If things carry on like this for much longer, it’ll one day reach the stage where no one will dare comment on a game by a coloured / homosexual / female writer in case they get branded as a closet racist / homophobic / sexist. “Oh my God - you said you didn’t like this game and the writer’s a lesbian! You homophobic bastard!”
People: stop assuming every comment has a hidden meaning. It doesn’t. And for the record, I’ve written games with female protagonists and gay protagonists (even both at the same time), parser and non-parser, and I’ve written plenty of negative reviews of games written by white male straight authors.
First, Nathan, I’d like to second Carolyn’s sentiment. It’s great to see where you’re coming from. I think sometimes we can start with general discomfort, and if an argument brings up understanding like this, it’s useful. And we can see what is really disappointing to us.
The way I see the argument is, we should be conscious of others’ triggers. At least, as I understand them. I wasn’t aware GamerGate attacked Twine in particular. But I can see why people feel that trigger. I know it happened to me with Chemistry and Physics, ironically by two people who just posted. Maybe you’ll laugh at me that that caused a trigger, but the game was about an abusive relationship. And I was in a chemistry/physics AP program in high school, and one of the teachers was an abusive (REDACTED). So I hated the game after fifteen seconds. There is no way the authors could or should have known that about me, so I can’t get mad at them.
And I want to understand more universal triggers and back off and give people space, and I want to talk so that I step on as few triggers as possible. But I don’t think it’s fair to call a not-100-%-informed dislike of Twine misogyny…when I think of Twine games I don’t like, men come to mind much more readily.
I think we ultimately need more than being conscious of the current hot social issue, though. We need people to participate, to feel comfortable participating, and to see they can make a difference. We need a way for testing requests to be more than “I guess I need to make sure it’s not broken.” With ShuffleComp, I think there was a sense of community.
My opinion is, I would have agreed abstractly with the people arguing against Peter Pears in the “Brothers” thread. But here is a quote from there, with “This is why it’s important to do your research, rather than relying on your impressions. Because that’s what informed, intelligent people do.”
This is telling someone they’re an idiot without telling them they’re an idiot, and not very kindly, either. It’s tough to do this research–there’s just too much information, and we’ll miss huge chunks.
If someone gives the Twine/Misogyny example…and that our words mean more than we wanted them to mean, well, the poster above just more or less called Peter Pears lazy and stupid with their concluding statement, after making some good points. If there are code words for misogyny (and there are) there are also those for calling people stupid.
The shame is, I actually hadn’t known that bit–and it’s good research, that men think women are better represented than they are–but it turns the focus away from equality and seeing the world differently and more towards Peter’s not knowing something, and being a bit ashamed about it.
People notice this sort of thing. They may not process it, and they may not be able to write an essay about it, and if pinned down, they may say “Gee, I dunno, something’s wrong here.” It turns them away. Heck, it would’ve turned me away for a bit.
Why would’ve? Because I didn’t visit there, because I’d seen annoying conversations before. This is coming from someone who pays a lot of attention to the I7 subforum and who will probably be sticking around for a while. And since I think newbies are probably going to visit the intro first, you can imagine how welcoming it is.
It’s not the most important issue floating around, but it’s one that is important to me, and one I feel I can address, as I’ve gotten a “DUDE I THOUGHT YOU WERE SMART YOU DIDN’T KNOW THAT?” in various flavors. It hurts about as much whether I should or should not have known, and whether the person asking it was actually right or not. And I think people seeing something like that say, oops, I better come correct to post here–when the truth is, we want to provide a low barrier to entry.