Anonymous asked: yo jeff your GTA5 torture scene comment is on the front page of reddit and people are taking it to mean you wouldn't be complaining about women's representation if you've played the game and you need to correct them because you're making a lot of MRA-types super happy

Gross. I guess those dirtbags are backed so far into a corner that they’ll latch onto anything they can get, even when it’s actually fairly ambiguous.

I’m sorry if people feel slighted by what I said. I think my main problem with the way all this has gone down is that, when I look at other mediums, I see a lot of the same sort of potentially objectionable content without the same fervor. And when people have discussions about things they don’t like about a medium like film, they talk about it more in the context of the medium, and less about any one film. Much of the recent criticism has been focused specifically on GTA, which seems a little narrow. We’re talking about a problem that exists in games as a medium. Rather than asking a specific game to be something that it isn’t, it seems like it’d be a more productive conversation to talk about games as a whole and different ways to bring the balance that people are looking for to the medium.

That said, given how far out of whack things seem right now in gaming (and tech), I can understand why people would latch onto something like GTA as a clear and extremely popular example of what they see as a very real problem right now. It’s still a very young medium with a lot of very tough growing to do, so in some ways it’s only natural that we’re starting to have these discussions more and more.