Iris' Favorite Gaming Post of 2013: How to Respond to Microsoft's Incredibly Sexist Xbox One Email

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

It's surprisingly easy to pick out my favorite piece of gaming news coverage from NWN in 2013. It was a story that was just too good to pass up: The marketing team for the Xbox One released a form email that could be sent to loved ones, requesting a new Xbox with the holidays in mind. The problem? The default values on that form veered from nonsensical to downright offensive. It was nearly as bad as a relic from the golden age of sexist video game print ads. The campaign was edited within hours of course, but I took plenty of screenshots to frame my own strongly worded hypothetical response.

As usual, Lewis' Law proved true and I got my fair share of ignorant, apathetic, and downright dumb blowback in this post's comments, but this remains one of my favorite posts from 2013. Read it in its entirety here.

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Iris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Timesand has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan andwith pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Stripped of the strawman rhetoric, false equivilencies and a solid metric ton of other logical fallacies, the sexist and racist backlash currently sweeping many sectors of public discourse amounts to the following: "I'm rubber, you're glue".