Moggy wrote:Venom wrote:Moggy wrote:I wouldn't class it as a hate crime but YouTube are within their rights to remove the video.
I can’t remember the exact terminology, but I believe it’s words or actions taken to deliberately cause offence. So not dissimilar to those people who burnt an effigy of Grenfell Tower on Bonfire Night.
If he gave the character he was killing in the game the name of a real life person then I’d agree. If it’s just a random game character then I think it’s different. Scummy behaviour, but not a crime.
I think it the context of how the video maker frames the character and actions that allow youtube to take the stance they did.
The character may not be a real person but they they are identified as something that many people themselves are, feminists. The video explicitly uses the context of a feminist portrayal as the motive behind doing villainous game actions and then pushes those actions as an exhibition. It is not an exhibition of how to act like an outlaw in the old west (kidnap a woman and tie her to train tracks) but an exhibition of how RDR2 can be used to fulfil the fantasy of harming, torturing, or killing progressives/feminists.
If players want to kill that character because they don't like what she represents, they can, in fact it wouldn't even be historically inaccurate to do so (women were killed for wanting the vote). What isn't part of the game however is compiling that footage to be used as what could be considered anti-progressive propaganda or merely what could be considered a work of poor taste.
It isn't the attack on the character that is at the front of these videos but the attack of an idealism. "Beating up annoying feminist", emphasis on the use of the word annoying there as to plant this idea of the radical "SJW" straw feminist, something that to many people is what feminists class under by default because the idea is so commonly perpetuated.
Games are creative works (you could even call them art) where the player is given a degree of co-authorship over the media. The game is the canvas and the actions available to the player is their paint brush and oils which they use to create meaning. If the meaning of the video was expressed in the forms of paintings, film, text etc we would be more inclined to put the creator under scrutiny, but because he is performing these actions within a digital sandbox where all actions exists as laws rather than rules and principles we are more inclined to look past it all and say "but it isn't real".
The medium (youtube video) is the message, and the message is how this game unintentionally sets itself up to let people intentionally play out scenarios where they can punish caricatures of stereotypes. I don't think Rockstar would have been thinking of the game on these terms when it was being designed but under the right conditions this fictional feminist could very easily become a symbol or target whom certain groups of people use to unite over, something worryingly similar to how modern anti-feminist/progressive movements form over the internet when it comes to reacting to real-world progressives.