I wouldn't really classify it as some extreme version of feminism and also really wouldn't call it sex-negative feminism.
I didn't say extreme, I said perversion.
The videos advocate for more diverse female characters who are not just a token in a game. I'm male and even before her videos I knew that in a lot of games the female characters are not much more than a prop for the protagonist and it's just the laziest of storytelling and game design.
**She doesn't hold a monopoly on diversity, so opposing her doesn't mean one is opposed to games diversifying their characters.
Nobody would react like that if I were to say that Michael Bay movies tend to have a really shitty stories and really deficient character motivation/development; and even the most kinetic cinematography and glorious explosions won't save his work.
Gamer have been aware of the sub-par writing in games for years long before the perpetually outrage, point and shame crowd came along
Yes, there are counter examples (and also male characters who get objectified) but overall the depiction of female characters is much less balanced than male characters (who themselves, for example, have the DoomGuy trope that gets abused for a lot of protagonists).
Objectication is a bullshit concept to me, so the debate around that is not something I entertain.
What is so polarizing about her talking about that topic in video games? The same criticism is possible for other media. And even if she got details about some games wrong, that not really an argument against the overall point she's trying to convey.
Because she misrepresents games she doesn't play to push a point and posits unsubstantiated claims about the effects fictional media have on people. And then her dumb-ass followers misinterpret people picking her crap apart as being against diversity. She's also the literal sock puppet of a privileged white guy, which is rich considering her fans love to talk shit about privileged white guys... even other privileged white guys.**
She has no influence when it comes to making laws (so no possibility of censorship) and any non-indie game developer might listen to her talks (and get something from it or not) but in the end they really, really have to listen to the publishers who front the money for the game's development.
Fair enough, I guess
Instead of fighting against her for proposing that games could be more diverse –actually only for her criticism being highly visible while most of the other criticism is often ignored, not seen, or soon forgotten– GG could actually fight against the monotone sameness of the big publishers, and instead of fighting for ethics in games journalism in the context of some (relatively) low profit indie games GG could actually try to do something against big publishers who abuse reviews for their own, and much higher, profit.
Being opposed to Anita does not mean equate to being opposed to diversity. You're assuming everyone's interest in gamergate is exclusively on journalistic ethics, some people here including me were active in atheist circles years ago and have seen this dance before and stuck around because it was the biggest pushback these "progressive" types have faced. I don't buy the Hollywood aping AAA games or 2deep4u indies, I almost exclusively play Japanese games, so on that front there's not much I can do since I'm funding the shitty practices of big publishers to begin with.