Time Magazine's 100 most influential people: Anita Sarkeesian profiled by Wil Wheaton

My main problem with her is that her videos are boring. I find it easier to watch a ten minute critique of her videos than watch the actual videos. Most of the critique videos are better than what she's producing. Not in terms of production value (go kickstarter budget!) but in terms of content -- more entertaining, more carefully thought-out, more engaging.

When I manage to make it through one of her videos, my secondary problem is her failure to recognize when she's picked a bad example or is utilizing a line of thought that doesn't hold true. Some of her conclusions are so out of left field and removed from reality, it's bizarre. Some of her examples are so bad it's unclear why she's picked them. I mean, she'll give her reason, but with the bad examples it's often a huge WTF moment, like, "how on earth would anyone have concluded that based on this?"

I think she also fails to truly examine at the underlying causes of the behavior. She only ever does so in the most cursory way. I get that she's not a psychologist, but she seems to have such a poor understanding of other people's motivations, it gets in the way of what she's trying to do. She examines the results of various mentalities, but without trying to understand how this situation in gaming came into existence, or exploring how it can be fixed, her critique isn't constructive. This means her critique is inherently destructive. And thus, she gets far more backlash than if she were approaching this in a more constructive way.

Unfortunately, I don't think her critical thinking skills are at a professional level, so I'm not sure if she can offer constructive critique. This really hurts what she's trying to do. What she's trying to do is amazing and important, but she doesn't seem to have the reasoning skills to make her points effectively. A lot of her reasoning is at a basic populist (haha, mistyped that as "poopulous!") propaganda level. There's a reason that level fails to enact meaningful change -- it's just telling your followers what they want to hear for the most part. It's not nearly deep or thoughtful enough. It's just playing to your political base.

Lastly, I'm not sure she's going to fully follow through on her kickstarter. It seems like she's over the subject matter at this point (probably with good reasons, haters be hating) which is definitely contributing to the boring video issue. This is so disappointing because it is important subject matter. I just don't think she's the right person to be examining it. I feel like she lets her ego get in the way.

/r/GirlGamers Thread Parent Link - time.com