Wonderful profile of Anita Sarkeesian, the feminist games critic who made an army of shitty manbabies very, very upset

Anita Sarkeesian (previously) is a brilliant media theorist and critic whose Feminist Frequency/Tropes vs. Women in Video Games projects revolutionized the way we talk about gender and games -- and also made her a target for a virulent misogynist hate-machine of harassing manbabies who threatened her life, doxed her, and did everything they could to intimidate her into silence.

Polygon's 9,000 word profile of Sarkeesian contains a lot of color about her personality and approach (which is great stuff -- Sarkeesian is a fun and interesting person in real life as well as on-screen), but where it gets really good is in describing how Sarkeesian led a massive change in the way that games companies approach games, with "great women characters" appearing in "The Last of Us, Assassins Creed Odyssey, Dragon Age: Inquisition,The Walking Dead, Battlefield 5, Dishonored 2, Hellblade: Senuas Sacrifice, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Overwatch"

Sarkeesian's academic training is a combination of feminist theory and media studies, which made her the perfect person to bridge between the insidery, jargon-heavy world of gender studies and a popular, easily digested way of thinking through these issues for games practicioners; Polygon's Colin Campbell calls it "a toolkit that developers could use, to lever themselves out of the box theyd made for themselves."

This was literally and figuratively "game changing" -- Sarkeesian wields "criticism so sharp that it cut the past from the future," making a new world of games, at real personal cost.

That cost is also an important part of the story: Sarkeesian's harassers were unspeakably vile and vicious, and throughout, Sarkeesian made a point of never showing how it affected her, though it did (as it would anyone who was subjected to it). Read the rest