I believe this is worthy of its own thread rather than being drowned out in other Cyberpunk threads, as it already was in the OT yesterday.
For context, the GameSpot and Polygon reviews, written by Kallie Plagge and Carolyn Petit respectively, both shine a spotlight on the representation and transphobic issues in the game. Kallie's review has especially gotten a lot of attention simply due to having a numerical score that isn't a 9 but Carolyn's review has also led to grotesque harassment.
I will not be linking to the social media posts specifically, at least one of which has now been deleted because of the harassment, but will instead copy and paste just a few of the comments.
This is only the smallest fraction of what these women (and I'm sure other reviewers who have commented on the game's blatant issues) are seeing.
I'm sure some will argue that giving these sexist, transphobic assholes any sort of "spotlight" is the wrong thing to do. That is wrong. One of the biggest problems is that too many are ignoring this and simply hoping it goes away. This is a very deep issue in the gaming community.
There is first the obvious issue of social media companies doing absolutely nothing to stop this. Twitter and Instagram do not care. Reporting these posts, in many cases, does absolutely nothing.
The other is that this is overall being ignored by most of the industry. Even some of the more respected critics, websites and YouTube channels are barely touching on the issues in the game in their reviews/impressions and on top of that, they are completely quiet about the treatment that their colleagues are receiving for daring to poke the bigoted hive by laying out facts about the representation issues and transphobic content within the game.
Something needs to change.
For context, the GameSpot and Polygon reviews, written by Kallie Plagge and Carolyn Petit respectively, both shine a spotlight on the representation and transphobic issues in the game. Kallie's review has especially gotten a lot of attention simply due to having a numerical score that isn't a 9 but Carolyn's review has also led to grotesque harassment.
I will not be linking to the social media posts specifically, at least one of which has now been deleted because of the harassment, but will instead copy and paste just a few of the comments.
This is only the smallest fraction of what these women (and I'm sure other reviewers who have commented on the game's blatant issues) are seeing.
I'm sure some will argue that giving these sexist, transphobic assholes any sort of "spotlight" is the wrong thing to do. That is wrong. One of the biggest problems is that too many are ignoring this and simply hoping it goes away. This is a very deep issue in the gaming community.
There is first the obvious issue of social media companies doing absolutely nothing to stop this. Twitter and Instagram do not care. Reporting these posts, in many cases, does absolutely nothing.
The other is that this is overall being ignored by most of the industry. Even some of the more respected critics, websites and YouTube channels are barely touching on the issues in the game in their reviews/impressions and on top of that, they are completely quiet about the treatment that their colleagues are receiving for daring to poke the bigoted hive by laying out facts about the representation issues and transphobic content within the game.
Something needs to change.
