@eSculpt: Gamergate started with the Zoe Quinn controversy. The key issue that people took was the possibility (I don't think this was in the original blog post, but I didn't read the entire thing and I don't care to) that Quinn had slept with Nathan Grayson, formerly employed by Rock Paper Shotgun, for a positive review of her free Twine game, Depression Quest. Irrespective of whether or not that happened, Grayson's article can't be found, because it doesn't exist, and never existed to begin with. An angry mob on the internet decided that this was clear cut evidence of corruption in games journalism, and subsequently launched a harassment campaign against Quinn, sending her death and rape threats and making public her contact details and address, while accusing her of 'doxxing herself'. While I have no doubt Grayson's received a lot of flak for this, it's nowhere close to the amount Quinn has received. If Gamergate wasn't misogynistic (in its behaviour, if not its intentions), would Grayson, the person responsible for the corrupt journalism (in their minds) not have received far more crap from this?
Phil Fish was also doxxed here, solely for the apparent crime of aggressively defending Zoe Quinn. While Fish is certainly a volatile personality, it's pretty difficult to question the validity of his reaction to having his bank details shared on the internet.
Subsequently, Anita Sarkeesian posted her most recent Tropes vs Women in Video Games episode. She too received rape and death threats, and was further harassed when Gamergate suddenly decided she was lying about reporting those threats to the police. Also, see Davis Aurini and Jordan Owen trying to crowdfund a documentary to out her as a massive fraud. If Gamergate isn't against diversity and women's voices, why does it threaten to murder a woman espousing the astoundingly benign and inoffensive message of 'video games have done a shitty job of portraying women, maybe let's try harder'?
Now we have the Leigh Alexander controversy. Gamergate is constantly going on about the absurd number of 'gamers are dead' articles that appeared on the same day. Why is it that they've gone after Alexander, or at least that they've gone after her with the most fervour? Dan Golding's piece was actually the first one published. Why is it that a woman, and the most outspoken feminist among the authors of those articles, is having her employer's sponsors astroturfed by people who don't constitute her target audience, and don't seem to have read the article properly, or willfully misinterpreted it if they did?
Feminist video game researchers are also under scrutiny at this point. Someone made a video claiming that DiGRA's board is now predominantly feminists and there are only a few academics left on the board, which so clearly illustrates how little this human knows about academia, because you can be a feminist and an academic. Feminism, aside from being a political ideology, is also an epistemological framework that researchers have been using to inform their scientific studies (in italics because they are scientific) for decades. This tinfoil-hatted cretin (and I'm not reserving judgement for this dickwagon, because this is one of the more egregious displays of ignorance from this movement, not to mention the closest to being an affront to me personally) believes that feminist academics have taken control of an organisation that publishes papers and arranges academic conferences in order to 'poison the video game industry with feminism'. The absurd operation whereby gaters are now trying to mass 'peer-review' DiGRA's feminist articles, despite not being peers, or reviewing the papers blindly, is obviously an attack on feminism and women's voices. They're taking a small fraction of the papers the organisation has published, and not even hiding the fact that they're unconcerned about the validity of papers written by men, or women who don't explicitly identify as feminists.
I'm not fully conversant in these issues, but at some point in this whole fiasco, Jenn Frank and Mattie Brice, two outspoken feminists, the latter a transgender woman of colour, were harassed to the extent that they chose to drop their careers as video game critics/journalists. I'm not aware of any men who've run into the same issue. Perhaps apart from Phil Fish, but again, he was defending the voice of a young female developer and her right to a safe place in the industry.
So here we see what Gamergate has achieved. Is there really any way that you can look at this narrative and say that it's not oppressive to minorities, especially women? I'm not saying that's necessarily the concrete goal of Gamergate, or what they're consciously trying to do. But that's what's happening.
As for NotYourShield, I'll admit it's tricky, but it's not the grassroots movement you think it is. It was intentionally created as a means to deflect accusations that GG is bigoted: https://storify.com/strictmachine/gameovergate (ctrl+f the hashtag to find the bits pertaining to it, but the whole thing is worth reading). Sure there are people from marginalised groups participating in Gamergate, we shouldn't ignore that, but they can't rely on the 'my friend, who is a woman, said that thing I did isn't sexist, so it isn't sexist' (and again, applied to a large scale). Jenn Frank has written on how she was a terrible misogynist as a teenager (I think Zoe Quinn might have as well, but there's no way Google is going to show me what I want if I search for 'Zoe Quinn misogynist' :P ) http://www.unwinnable.com/2012/07/13/i-was-a-teenage-sexist/ This shows how women can also be affected by patriarchal power structures. Think about various insults. If you disapprove of the way a dude is acting, you might say 'you're being a girl'. You insult him by calling him a woman. If you insult a woman, you have words like 'bitch' and other gendered slurs. Somehow we've reached a point in our society where some of the most ubiquitous insults are synonyms for 'woman', or words tangentially related to femininity. It isn't impossible that women supporting Gamergate are sexists of the kind Frank talks about in that piece I linked to. Look at CH Sommers, she's definitely a sexist and she's probably the woman with the loudest voice in Gamergate (perhaps, aside from Vivian James, but I don't know how much credence we should lend to a woman 4chan made up to agree with them, and whose appearance is a reference to a rape joke).
Maybe the awful ones are the vocal minority in Gamergate, but no matter how valid the concerns of the majority, by piggybacking on a platform that's responsible for so much hostility and toxicity, they implicitly condone those actions. If they want to have a serious conversation about their concerns, they shouldn't be marching behind misogynists to be heard.
@Kobusvdwalt9 - Just want to take a moment here to commend you on this :
Ok guys, thanks. I didn't know it was like that at all. I think @rustybroomhandle's *edit* I fucking meant @garethf *edit* post was a stellar post.
It seems that some of the people distributing the information are twisting it in insane ways. I am assuming that everything you said is correct cause you have nothing to gain from making this up.
So then it seems I was misinformed about the press clique and I apologize for any inconvenience. That was my biggest concern.
Probably pointless self explanation follows >>> I didn't follow this thread that closely because I thought It didn't effect me. But when I heard some chatter over journalists being unethical, I jumped in. The fastest way for me to gather info on what actually was going on was a video. I checked out that video and it seemed like there were enough proof for it to be legitimate but it turns out its biased. But you are right I should have educated myself from more sources and dug a little deeper into this before throwing my opinions at this.
Really, no condescension intended to you at all here. And I'm not just giving you kudos just because you agree with me now. Someone gracefully admitting that they were in error and changing their mind on a topic after being presented with new evidence is a rare event on these here internets, and I tip my hat at you sir. I tip my hat!
Sure ok. Well let's give it a try. As soon as it gets ridiculous I'm out though.
I strongly suggest that you check with people when you feel attacked (because I presume you will, given your previous reactions in this thread) and make sure that actual attacks are both intended and perceived by others.
Just because you say someone is attacking you, doesn't make it true. No matter how many times that's repeated.
I'll leave other people to respond to the rest of this post, because I'm at risk of actually lashing out at you should I continue right now. All of your questions have already been answered in this thread.
Yeah and I did state that I'm starting over.
If you read the post rather than going fury, you would've seen that.
@eSculpt: Gamergate started with the Zoe Quinn controversy. The key issue that people took was the possibility (I don't think this was in the original blog post, but I didn't read the entire thing and I don't care to) that Quinn had slept with Nathan Grayson, formerly employed by Rock Paper Shotgun, for a positive review of her free Twine game, Depression Quest. Irrespective of whether or not that happened, Grayson's article can't be found, because it doesn't exist, and never existed to begin with. An angry mob on the internet decided that this was clear cut evidence of corruption in games journalism, and subsequently launched a harassment campaign against Quinn, sending her death and rape threats and making public her contact details and address, while accusing her of 'doxxing herself'. While I have no doubt Grayson's received a lot of flak for this, it's nowhere close to the amount Quinn has received. If Gamergate wasn't misogynistic (in its behaviour, if not its intentions), would Grayson, the person responsible for the corrupt journalism (in their minds) not have received far more crap from this?
Yeah I have no idea either, I haven't read any of it, and don't plan on it, ever. I think he mentioned the game one time, but nothing really worth caring about in the least.
And yeah you're probably quite right, logically it would make sense to have given Grayson way more flak, since if the story were true he'd really be the offender in the scenario more than anyone. So yeah that's bad.
Phil Fish was also doxxed here, solely for the apparent crime of aggressively defending Zoe Quinn. While Fish is certainly a volatile personality, it's pretty difficult to question the validity of his reaction to having his bank details shared on the internet.
Yeah, I'd be mad too.
Subsequently, Anita Sarkeesian posted her most recent Tropes vs Women in Video Games episode. She too received rape and death threats, and was further harassed when Gamergate suddenly decided she was lying about reporting those threats to the police. Also, see Davis Aurini and Jordan Owen trying to crowdfund a documentary to out her as a massive fraud. If Gamergate isn't against diversity and women's voices, why does it threaten to murder a woman espousing the astoundingly benign and inoffensive message of 'video games have done a shitty job of portraying women, maybe let's try harder'?
Yeah those two are pretty questionable. The whole campaign is idiotic, and they come across as asshole opportunists in the whole thing. Burn 'em.
Also, there isn't evidence to insinuate that GG was behind those threats. It could've been any one of a billion online trolls, that may or may not have had anything to do with GG. We don't know. Let's stick to evidence?
It's really shit that it happened though, and no woman should be silenced in such a way for extending a criticism. It's also created an atmosphere within which anyone who questions her deductions or references is immediately deemed a monster, and I personally really resent that, because as much as I hate what happened to her, I don't agree with her on all fronts.
One study that she referred to in particular was problematic for me, as it seemed to have mixed results, but still was used as evidence all over.
I just think the scope and methods are questionable, and it actually shows in the study that women who played as sexualised avatars that did not look like themselves had a lower RMA than those who played as non-sexualised avatars that did not look like themselves (most game characters do not look like the people behind the screens), which was enough reason for me to throw the whole thing out the window. (BTW, don't use the abstract of a study as evidence of something folks.)
Now we have the Leigh Alexander controversy. Gamergate is constantly going on about the absurd number of 'gamers are dead' articles that appeared on the same day. Why is it that they've gone after Alexander, or at least that they've gone after her with the most fervour? Dan Golding's piece was actually the first one published. Why is it that a woman, and the most outspoken feminist among the authors of those articles, is having her employer's sponsors astroturfed by people who don't constitute her target audience, and don't seem to have read the article properly, or willfully misinterpreted it if they did?
Honestly, I feel like it was the tone of the article that made the biggest impact, as well as the fact that it was like 15 of them all at once. It came across in a way that people took offense to.
Leigh has also been digging herself in with all her lashing out at the mob. Not that it justifies anything, it just explains it a bit.
In the case of being surrounded by an angry mob irl, flinging poop at them, will only make your situation worse.
Feminist video game researchers are also under scrutiny at this point. Someone made a video claiming that DiGRA's board is now predominantly feminists and there are only a few academics left on the board, which so clearly illustrates how little this human knows about academia, because you can be a feminist and an academic. Feminism, aside from being a political ideology, is also an epistemological framework that researchers have been using to inform their scientific studies (in italics because they are scientific) for decades. This tinfoil-hatted cretin (and I'm not reserving judgement for this dickwagon, because this is one of the more egregious displays of ignorance from this movement, not to mention the closest to being an affront to me personally) believes that feminist academics have taken control of an organisation that publishes papers and arranges academic conferences in order to 'poison the video game industry with feminism'. The absurd operation whereby gaters are now trying to mass 'peer-review' DiGRA's feminist articles, despite not being peers, or reviewing the papers blindly, is obviously an attack on feminism and women's voices. They're taking a small fraction of the papers the organisation has published, and not even hiding the fact that they're unconcerned about the validity of papers written by men, or women who don't explicitly identify as feminists.
You're surprised that they're under scrutiny? They even planned for the backlash, I just don't think they expected this much. Even they knew it was coming.
Not that feminism shouldn't exist, but in the case that you call out a big industry and consumer base, backlash is going to happen.
I dunno why people are even talking about Digra though. An institution exists that pushes feminism and does studies on feminism. Who cares.
Criticize it when it gets to the public sector, if you so wish.
I'm not fully conversant in these issues, but at some point in this whole fiasco, Jenn Frank and Mattie Brice, two outspoken feminists, the latter a transgender woman of colour, were harassed to the extent that they chose to drop their careers as video game critics/journalists. I'm not aware of any men who've run into the same issue. Perhaps apart from Phil Fish, but again, he was defending the voice of a young female developer and her right to a safe place in the industry.
Don't know anything about either of them unfortunately, I have nothing to say about that other than that I condemn the harassment.
So here we see what Gamergate has achieved. Is there really any way that you can look at this narrative and say that it's not oppressive to minorities, especially women? I'm not saying that's necessarily the concrete goal of Gamergate, or what they're consciously trying to do. But that's what's happening.
This isn't an inclusive narrative unfortunately, so I can't really deduce that much about it. It's really one sided.
As for NotYourShield, I'll admit it's tricky, but it's not the grassroots movement you think it is. It was intentionally created as a means to deflect accusations that GG is bigoted: https://storify.com/strictmachine/gameovergate (ctrl+f the hashtag to find the bits pertaining to it, but the whole thing is worth reading). Sure there are people from marginalised groups participating in Gamergate, we shouldn't ignore that, but they can't rely on the 'my friend, who is a woman, said that thing I did isn't sexist, so it isn't sexist' (and again, applied to a large scale). Jenn Frank has written on how she was a terrible misogynist as a teenager (I think Zoe Quinn might have as well, but there's no way Google is going to show me what I want if I search for 'Zoe Quinn misogynist' :P ) http://www.unwinnable.com/2012/07/13/i-was-a-teenage-sexist/ This shows how women can also be affected by patriarchal power structures. Think about various insults. If you disapprove of the way a dude is acting, you might say 'you're being a girl'. You insult him by calling him a woman. If you insult a woman, you have words like 'bitch' and other gendered slurs. Somehow we've reached a point in our society where some of the most ubiquitous insults are synonyms for 'woman', or words tangentially related to femininity. It isn't impossible that women supporting Gamergate are sexists of the kind Frank talks about in that piece I linked to. Look at CH Sommers, she's definitely a sexist and she's probably the woman with the loudest voice in Gamergate (perhaps, aside from Vivian James, but I don't know how much credence we should lend to a woman 4chan made up to agree with them, and whose appearance is a reference to a rape joke).
I resent you making me look at that link.... I really don't want to know anything about ZQ. Ever. I don't care. But I condemn the harassment against her.
And as much as you seem to think 4chan is some conspiracy group, it's not. These are a couple assholes playing spy. And as much as some would like to think digra is some feminist conspiracy group, it's not.
Tinfoil hats off please.
And why would anyone give any credence to a fictional character? xD And how would you justify that her appearance is a reference to a rape joke? I don't know anything about that.
Some sources have stated that she was created for TFYC for a game.
Which got hacked and torn apart by some silly monkey(s). For shame -.-
Maybe the awful ones are the vocal minority in Gamergate, but no matter how valid the concerns of the majority, by piggybacking on a platform that's responsible for so much hostility and toxicity, they implicitly condone those actions. If they want to have a serious conversation about their concerns, they shouldn't be marching behind misogynists to be heard.
Hey, maybe it's there.
But when so many consumers feel this way, and undertake consumer activism under a tag that's actually making progress for them, why would they disband and reassemble elsewhere while risking loss of numbers in the process?
And would you be able to keep responses shorter? I would like to cover alot of ground, and don't really have the time to reply to long posts like this one :)
Now, MAJOR DISCLAIMER. I DON'T BELIEVE THIS. I JUST WANT A RESPONSE TO IT.
And, following your response, is there not any course of action that can be taken against a multimillion dollar entity spewing lies for the sake of an agenda, in the case that this is all untrue?
Because if it is objectively untrue, someone should destroy AEI. Like, obliterate them legally.
Also, there isn't evidence to insinuate that GG was behind those threats. It could've been any one of a billion online trolls, that may or may not have had anything to do with GG. We don't know. Let's stick to evidence?
Good point, actually. It is pretty likely that within a week of the Zoe Quinn situation blowing up, a second, entirely unrelated hate group would pitch up to harass another woman. Not sure how I didn't see that as the most obvious conclusion.
In the case of being surrounded by an angry mob irl, flinging poop at them, will only make your situation worse.
Yes, because trying to destroy someone's career is a totally proportionate response to them saying something mean about you.
This isn't an inclusive narrative unfortunately, so I can't really deduce that much about it. It's really one sided.
What else do you want? You asked how Gamergate oppresses women, and I gave you multiple examples of how it's doing that. You can say that I'm cherry-picking evidence, but there's certainly reason to pay attention if I can gather this many cherries.
I resent you making me look at that link.... I really don't want to know anything about ZQ. Ever.
Why are we having this conversation if you don't want to engage with the god damned topic?
And as much as you seem to think 4chan is some conspiracy group, it's not.
Here you go, close to 4000 pages of 4chan IRC logs showing them coordinating Gamergate and NotYourShield. We can refrain from the use of the term 'conspiracy' if you want, but appellation doesn't change the fact that they spent this long talking about how to ruin Zoe Quinn's life, and doesn't paint them in the best light.
And how would you justify that her appearance is a reference to a rape joke? I don't know anything about that.
Her hoodie is purple and green. Look up 'piccolo dick'. The choice was made to 'prevent SJWs from appropriating their daughter' (no jokes, some members of 4chan referred to this character as their daughter).
But when so many consumers feel this way, and undertake consumer activism under a tag that's actually making progress for them, why would they disband and reassemble elsewhere while risking loss of numbers in the process?
Because rallying behind a hate movement is not the best recipe for being taken seriously.
And would you be able to keep responses shorter? I would like to cover alot of ground, and don't really have the time to reply to long posts like this one :)
This is the second time I've typed all of this out:
So please, tell me what Gamergate is about, I want to know the ins and outs of its viewpoints. Every detail. Please enlighten me. I'd like to know if I've misunderstood this. I'd like you to illustrate how this is a movement that doesn't want women to stop making and talking about games. Explain away how the industry no longer has voices like Mattie Brice, Jenn Frank, and Samantha Allen. Tell me how there's a group of journalists, developers and academics conspiring to destroy video games as we know them, and make sure that all the guns in games are replaced with feelings and lesbians. Tell me how Gamasutra, a site by and for industry professionals, is not having its ad funding pulled because of an astroturfing campaign that arose because people who aren't even their target audience didn't bother to read more than the headline of an article, and how this isn't because the person who wrote that article is an outspoken woman who is critical of a culture that facilitates blatant misogyny.
You've already pissed off everyone else in this thread to the extent that they've stopped engaging with you (well, @dislekcia at least, and he's been making an effort for a long time now). I understand trying to constrain parameters of a conversation to keep it on track, but if you're asking the same questions over and over and ignoring my answers, I'm going to get more and more verbose, or eventually just stop responding.
How would you respond to the factual feminist's video?
According to a University of Maryland study, online users who appear female are 25 times more likely to receive threats and sexually explicit messages than online users with male names. The disproportionate targeting of women accords with statistics compiled by the organization Working to Halt Online Abuse (WHOA). In 2007, 61 percent of the individuals reporting online abuse to WHOA were female while 21 percent were male. 2006 followed a similar pattern: 70 percent of those reporting online harassment identified themselves as women. Overall, in the years covering 2000 to 2007, 72.5 percent of the 2,285 individuals reporting cyber harassment were female and 22 percent were male. 70 percent of the victims were between the ages of 18 and 40 and half of them reported having no relationship with their attackers.
What of the comment that these statistics are somehow skewed because women are just more likely to “*complain* about it [whereas] Men are more likely to either ignore it, see it as trivial, or engage in self-help.” Here, the study from the University of Maryland’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department is particularly instructive. Robert Meyer and Michel Cukier studied the threat of attacks associated with the chat medium IRC. They used a combination of simulated users (i.e., bots) and regular users. In an experiment using silent bots, they tested whether or not the gender of the user-name had an affect on the number of attacks received. The female names used were Cathy, Elyse, Irene, Melissa, and Stephanie. The male names were Andy, Brad, Dan, Gregg, and Kevin. The study found that female bots received on average 100 malicious private messages a day while the male bots received an average of 3.7. It found that the user gender had a significant impact on the number of sexually explicit and threatening messages received. Moreover, studies suggest that women under-report cyber harassment due to feelings of shame, not over-report as the commentator suggests.
This is par for the course for CH Sommers, the "factual" feminist. She has made a career out of distorting the facts to discredit feminist claims, and has been hired by a right-wing think tank for her efforts for the cause.
But the facts don't match the "factual" feminist's claims, I'm afraid.
*steps off spaceship and into something squishy* What the hell is this shit?
I've been a bit out of the loop lately. I know very little and only have opinions so I can't contribute much useful. I'll just see if I can learn quietly in the corner for a bit.
...on the surface of it, that sure is a familiar smell though.
*steps off spaceship and into something squishy* What the hell is this shit?
I've been a bit out of the loop lately. I know very little and only have opinions so I can't contribute much useful. I'll just see if I can learn quietly in the corner for a bit.
...on the surface of it, that sure is a familiar smell though.
Lol 4000 pages? I would love to see those pages, but of course, who has time to even look at it. That's not what I saw in the link you shared, I just saw a few snaps of irc chats, that did look bad admittedly, but nothing like 4k pages of anything.
And why're you taking my text out of context? I did say that it wasn't a justification for the way that things are happening for Leigh?
I don't know the ups and downs of it's viewpoints in every single detail? I'm one person. Gamergate is a mishmash of endless differing viewpoints. I don't know what they all think.
And you didn't asnwer my real question on the factual feminist video, which is what can be done about them spewing that kind of misinformation?
Surely if it's clearly false, and leading to endless misinformation, can't anyone do anything about it? Send digra after them? :P
And you can get pissed off at me, I'm already the villain here. I'm not trying to undermine you either, I'm actually reflecting common arguments.. If it's gonna drive you nuts, repeating things for the sake of the people hopping on now, that's fine.
@brondin: You're a goddamned hero. Thank you for trying to engage with what is probably the most trollish behavior this forum has ever seen. (And we've had Eyeball here, so that's saying a lot) There are enough of us here who see how reasonably, how calmly and how resoundingly you've dealt with all of @eSculpt's arguments.
If anyone is truly seeing this stuff now for the first time (hi @DarkCarnivour) then it's my hope that they read this all from the start and take the time to really familiarise themselves with what's been said and why. I'm more than confident that nobody needs @eSculpt standing up for their edification, no matter how valiantly he reflects common arguments.
Also, thanks for linking that Katherine Cross storify. I wanted to put that up here in reply to @eSculpt's earlier question about NYS, it's a great set of points.
@eSculpt: Stop acting like a troll. Please. You've won, I guess... You get to "end" the conversation without having to concede any points, or you get to take this post of mine as me attacking you (or at least, pointing out the consequences of your actions, which seem to be the same thing in your view). Either way, I reckon quite a few people here will have a hard time feeling that any criticism they give you in the future will be well-received, so you've probably damaged the usefulness of this community for yourself. Good luck, and I hope you make games in better faith than you argue.
@brondin: You're a goddamned hero. Thank you for trying to engage with what is probably the most trollish behavior this forum has ever seen. (And we've had Eyeball here, so that's saying a lot) There are enough of us here who see how reasonably, how calmly and how resoundingly you've dealt with all of @eSculpt's arguments.
If anyone is truly seeing this stuff now for the first time (hi @DarkCarnivour) then it's my hope that they read this all from the start and take the time to really familiarise themselves with what's been said and why. I'm more than confident that nobody needs @eSculpt standing up for their edification, no matter how valiantly he reflects common arguments.
Also, thanks for linking that Katherine Cross storify. I wanted to put that up here in reply to @eSculpt's earlier question about NYS, it's a great set of points.
@eSculpt: Stop acting like a troll. Please. You've won, I guess... You get to "end" the conversation without having to concede any points, or you get to take this post of mine as me attacking you (or at least, pointing out the consequences of your actions, which seem to be the same thing in your view). Either way, I reckon quite a few people here will have a hard time feeling that any criticism they give you in the future will be well-received, so you've probably damaged the usefulness of this community for yourself. Good luck, and I hope you make games in better faith than you argue.
Dude. There have been couple people in this thread so far that have pointed out that the way that you've been hostile to them not including me.
I'm just saying, there's something about the way you address people that you disagree with that comes across as really hostile. Even if you don't intend for it to come across like that.
And nobody ever wins in these discussions.
And yeah @brondin thanks for engaging me, for the most part without being hostile about it. I think alot of people learnt some stuff from it.
@eSculpt: Yep, calling it. I feel like we're going over the same stuff over and over. The answers to all your questions are in this thread. I'm really struggling to imagine that you're not just here to play devil's advocate at this point.
@dislekcia: Thanks, man. I have no idea how you managed to engage with this thread from the very beginning. I've only been here for a few days and I'm strongly considering spending the next few sleeping. :P (Not that it's anywhere close to what the women we've been talking about have had to deal with).
@Gazza_N: Also a Katherine Cross piece! First Person Scholar is a great resource if you're looking for accessible academic writing on video games :)
Discovering Katherine Cross has kind of been a silver lining in this awful situation, for me at least. Weirdly enough, Gamergate's managed to expose me to a lot of people with really good opinions, and the ability to articulate those opinions really well. The lists of SJW journalists (which feature surprisingly few women)? They're the writers whose reviews and articles I want to read. The list of companies that 'collude with SJWs' or invoke SJW themes in their games? Going to throw my money at them in the future. DiGRA feminists? Gamergate introduced me to academics whose work is going to make my dissertation better. They actively contributed to the writing of another piece of the sort of postmodern critical theory influenced research that they so clearly hate. And that's just endlessly delightful. :)
Damn you, @Gazza_N, for posting that link before I could. :P
To echo the sentiment though, that's a DAMN FINE piece of writing, right there.
Get past the first bit, which just recaps GG, to the comparison with utopian revolutionary movements. Uhnnfff, writing that good, it makes me feel all warm and tingly and shit.
Just read the Katherine Cross's 'We Will Force Gaming to Be Free' essay, thanks @GazzN for posting it. I must agree @garethf,the essay is particularly well written, the utopian revolutionary framing being particularly enlightening. Katherine Cross uses GG as a good example to demonstrate how conspiratorial mindsets work. An essay worth reading and re-reading.
How the hell does such a "thinktank" exist if it's all lies? D':
Because, and this is the really ironic part, if you think about GamerGate's manifesto, they have...a political agenda. ;)
I think a big difference that's worth noting here is that AEI, is a big government funded research institution. GG is just a bunch of angry people. I don't really think comparing the two is equivalent
GamerGate's manifesto includes avoiding people with political agenda. Yet they loved the hell out of the "factual" feminist's videos, a woman who has a political agenda, working for a think tank with a giant, obvious political agenda.
It's like announcing you're going witch hunting, then accepting the Wicked Witch of the East into your group, so you can team up to hunt down kids wearing witch costumes on Halloween.
That's what's called "irony".
AEI isn't a government funded research instituted, btw. It's a private right-wing non-profit think tank. Which means they accept money from right wing donors to come up with policies and tactics for promoting a conservative political agenda.
GamerGate is now about old school writing journalism vs new school streaming journalism.
This is actually a really interesting topic. A lot of Youtubers, TotalBiscuit and JonTron (god, using these as their official names is so weird) have framed themselves as victims of Gamergate as well. If I recall correctly, and I could well be wrong here, there's the concern that the old guard of (hyper)text journalism is in some sense trying to run Youtubers out of business, because their audiences are much larger and they're drawing a lot of funding that previously went to games news websites is now being given to popular Youtube game reviewers. (Along with the two of them seeming to be generally disapproving of the notion of 'SJWs' having a voice in video games)
At the same time, there are some interesting discussions happening about the state of games journalism in its written form. Here's a really interesting talk given by Cara Ellison a few months ago at A MAZE in Berlin, where she talks about how she's trying to do something different as a games journalist/critic, and attempt a project similar to those carried out by embedded journalists who went on tour with rock bands in the 70s:
And here's a list she's compiled of people who write about video games in a way that's substantially different to what you'd expect from the bland features/news/previews/reviews type articles you'd find on a site like IGN.
Hmm, this seems like it might only be tangentially related to the issue, but I think 'WTF is going on in games journalism/reporting/criticism right now?' is a much healthier topic than rehashing the Gamergate business for the millionth time.
Reading through that document, and that excellent essay on First Person Scholar (linked by @Gazza_N and almost @garethf), GamerGate bears all the hallmarks of Anonymous. A group of people with no clear goals, no coordination, running campaigns of terror against targets for no real reason other than their own self-righteous convictions.
Which means there's good news: When was the last time you heard anything about Anonymous? They eventually lost coordination and came apart at the seams, leaving only a few lone twitter accounts broadcasting links that nobody's clicking on. So it's possible that this will eventually burn itself out, and all of us can get back to business as usual.
Back to business as usual... Another female game dev has been forced to leave her home because rape and death threats (to herself and children) were received from someone who also knew her home address.
Back to business as usual... Another female game dev has been forced to leave her home because rape and death threats (to herself and children) were received from someone who also knew her home address.
And before the now-common "But we can't prove that this was #GamerGate, stop assuming the movement isn't just about journalistic ethics" refrain starts up again: The dox were leaked on GG message boards, spread in GG chat rooms and gleefully pounced upon by people who're hanging out there. Meanwhile, the harassment of Zoe continues too, unabated...
You know where those dox weren't? Anywhere that people care about journalistic integrity. I'm actually pretty glad I'm not at rAge right now. I feel like there would be one or two people that would "side" with GG in random conversation and end up ruining my day - and theirs :(
This goes quite a long way towards explaining how such a small number of people could seem so incredibly loud. Also note that most of their "connections" that Thunderclap measures are based on a few accounts with very high follower counts. More people funded Feminist Frequency than people willing to click GG's thunderclap. I'm really not sure how anyone can believe that GG represents a silent majority and that their consumer wishes are relevant.
Here's a great piece on the arguments that 'the truth is in the middle' or 'both sides are guilty of harassment'. tl;dr, the neutral position is not as morally sound as some might think.
@Dislekcia Ok, maybe not the absolute first time, but I had mostly missed it then. Don't worry, as an instinctive lurker, I've read most of it.
What's there to say of GG... Their actions are indefensible. How do you go anywhere from there? Their words: Journalistic accountability Their actions: Harassment and abuse (some of which to an actually-criminal-with-real-implications degree) of largely people that have little or nothing to do with journalism.
Game 'journalism' is littered with genuine ethical questions and obvious conflicts of interest - when it's not being a straight up funnel for PR BS into the mouths of gamers (yeah), but GG doesn't give a shit about that. IMO GG is an embarrassment for anyone in gaming and certainly tarnishes the name of 'gamers'. (Even the name is so retchingly self-important)
It's pretty hard not to dismiss the 'cause' of GG with integrity like that, though their actual actions can't be dismissed. I still think there is something to learn from GG, even if only to gain more insight into the nature of the beast we serve.
I don't yet have a worthwhile opinion regarding the original question about how much devs might be responsible, what we could or should do/not do.
Article about how GG fits the definition of a hate group, how it uses the structures and mechanisms that define a hate group and how it behaves like a hate group. But that obviously means it's a duck (according to some of the replies this thread has gotten).
#Gamergate, as they have treated myself and peers in our industry, is a hate group. This word, again, should not lend them any mystique or credence. Rather it should illuminate the fact that even the most nebulous and inconsistent ideas can proliferate wildly if strung onto the organizational framework of the hate group, which additionally gains a startling amount of power online. #Gamergate is a hate group, and they are all the more dismissible for it. And the longer we treat them otherwise, the longer I fear for our industry's growth.
@dislekcia: Regarding the second last paragraphs in that article, do you think GG is currently propagated by fear? My experience seems to be of a group whose defining characteristic is a sort of righteous willful ignorance. The 4chan IRC logs that Zoe Quinn compiled should have been enough to shut them up, but they pretty much ignored that. There's some outrage when a mainstream outlet publishes an opinion piece, but ultimately nobody within the movement is questioning their public face and why the actual goddamned news is reporting on their misogynistic harassment instead of these "good points" we've been hearing about for ages. Whenever someone points out how awful the right-wingers who've latched onto the movement are, their response is "no I'm left-leaning, but these people represent my gaming interests," or "it doesn't matter that Milo is every kind of bigoted, he's the only one doing any 'fair and honest reporting'." This doesn't seem like a movement that's afraid it might be losing, it's one that's so unwilling to critically reflect on itself that it thinks it's winning.
Saw this brief discussion between Maddy Myers and Jenni Goodchild on Twitter yesterday. Is anyone else worried that Gamergate isn't actually going to go away, and it's just a thing that devs, journalists, and other players are going to have to deal with in the games industry from now on? Obviously these people have always been here, but they've never been organised to this extent (which isn't tremendously organised, but whatever facsimile of cohesion they've achieved, it's had devastating results).
Saw this brief discussion between Maddy Myers and Jenni Goodchild on Twitter yesterday. Is anyone else worried that Gamergate isn't actually going to go away, and it's just a thing that devs, journalists, and other players are going to have to deal with in the games industry from now on? Obviously these people have always been here, but they've never been organised to this extent (which isn't tremendously organised, but whatever facsimile of cohesion they've achieved, it's had devastating results).
GamerGate is simply the new face of hate that has been endemic in the industry for a substantial amount of time. One of the most recent events of a similar nature pre-GG was a bomb threat on Sarkeesian this year it's the same thing that keeps churning and popping it's head out to harass people popping out to harass Carolyn Petit out of her job and semd threats to kill her children that forced Jennifer Hepler to leave BioWare. And look, those are just the names I can remember off the top of my head.
Unfortunately the threats and effects of GG are nothing new the industry, we've had this crap for a long time. GamerGate is the face of a hate group which roped in moderates to help legitimize their cause. It is perhaps with the greatest of irony that they use the tagline Not Your Shield be cause it should have the subtext written under it: because we really want them to be ours.
I think this is the bit that I've been most interested in. I definitely agree that GG is a continuation of the same old horror, but what exactly that crowd has harnessed to rope in enough fools is what I'd like to understand better. Historically, 'gamers' have been a defensive bunch, which makes sense considering some of the history of the emerging medium, and their rallying around this BS here looks like the same old reaction of people acting out of a feeling of being threatened. Perhaps that's part of the energy of it. That's not a justification, I'm attempting to understand the mechanics. The other option of course is that these 'gamers' are just universally, irredeemably misogynistic.
Is anyone else worried that Gamergate isn't actually going to go away, and it's just a thing that devs, journalists, and other players are going to have to deal with in the games industry from now on? Obviously these people have always been here, but they've never been organised to this extent (which isn't tremendously organised, but whatever facsimile of cohesion they've achieved, it's had devastating results).
As you say, the rotten core has always been there and it's not likely to go anywhere in a hurry. Personally, I don't think GG is going to hold in the same form - see every political movement ever. At the end of the day, holding back progress is a losing battle. That's what they're trying to do, isn't it? I still think it's a thing that we (devs in this case) will have to deal with in some form and have always dealt with without really knowing it was there. To this end, I'd like to better understand that thing.
@brondin: Yeah, I tend to think most violence comes from fear. I believe that the righteous willful ignorance you're talking about is an attempt to allay fears of being seen as misogynist or sexist. It's very similar to how so many people in SA are deathly afraid of being called racist because their privilege is so great that that's the worst they can imagine. There was an interview with Brianna Wu on some US TV channel in which a friend of hers mentioned reading possible explanations for the GG fear mentality: Gaming used to be socially reviled, so the people that rejected social judgement of the passtime stayed, this created a stronger culture around gaming based on a similar set of self-reinforcing loops to how the Westboro Baptists maintain their membership. The reactions people are seeing now are the result of those reinforcement loops wildly thrashing about trying to find something else to stand against in order to keep that culture defined... I think this makes particular sense given the overwhelming presence of the ideas that "gamers are maligned by society because journalists say things" and "gamers in all their numbers are under attack somehow by critique". This is a problem in reactionary cultures, especially ones defined by the concept of defense against attacks on their humanity or ones that place value on different behaviors that aren't valued by society at large.
So yes, this is fear. The sad part is that they don't seem to believe anyone telling them that their fear is unfounded. Their worries about belonging aren't strictly true (unless those worries are about belonging to a tribe of sexist memesters, although sexist behaviors are often repeated as social norming strategies in order to belong - why else would we smile openly at jokes we don't find funny?) - that's probably the main reason that I feel the way to stop this thing is through education: Once people understand feminism is ceases being a scary attack on their core values. The problem is that feminism often causes people to adjust their core values, so it looks a lot like the death of aspects of a culture to the unaware.
@rustybroomhandle: I'm not 100% up to speed on what's going on right now (work work work, right?) but I'm seeing echos of some sort of mainstream media coverage of GG, do you know what that was? Also, I'm not sure that #StopGamerGate2014 is a good idea.
@rustybroomhandle: I'm not 100% up to speed on what's going on right now (work work work, right?) but I'm seeing echos of some sort of mainstream media coverage of GG, do you know what that was? Also, I'm not sure that #StopGamerGate2014 is a good idea.
Ah okay, I saw that. That was a few days ago now though, I thought there might have been something new.
Did you see the Escapist follow up to their earlier article that got linked here a lot, the "Female Game Developers talk about GamerGate" one? Turns out that "Game Developers talk about GamerGate" (all male, not anonymous, sourced from GG forums, included interviews with actual harassers from the IRC logs, contained some seriously fucked up questions) might just indicate a little bit of latent sexism. At the Escapist, who would have thunk?
Oh right. Is this the same Huffpost thing that tried to ambush Zoe with the dude from 8chan? The ones that told the 8chan guy who he'd be debating right off the bat (so that reddit threads could be made, etc) and was super cagey about telling Zoe anything about other people being on the show? Because yeah, that seems like a great news outlet.
For anyone who thinks that GG isn't about Zoe Quinn, it was in response to articles about gamers being dead/publications attacking their own audiences etc.
"We are presenting these interviews in full because we found the sheer amount of testimony to be extremely valuable. Doing so also prevents any semblance or perception of an editorial bias, which many allege is at the heart of the controversy. The voices and opinions of the game developers below are as varied as the voices we hear everywhere in the world."
15 interviews in total and worth a read. Gamergate isn't a black and white issue.
@SubiyaCryolite, @eSculpt: People, no. No, we already covered this. Nobody is saying that GG is a black and white issue, it's a thing full of deflection and false equivalences and weaseling out of responsibility for actual consequences in other people's lives. It's all sorts of muddy grey all the way through, I'm really not sure what posting this is trying to achieve, but it's not without its own problems.
So, yes, they deleted the two interviews of active harassers and changed the article image to deal with the latent sexism of game developer/female game developer. But there's still a lot wrong with those pieces... I mean, all you need to do is see that the women who responded were afraid to be named.
What the fuck is this question:
Imagine a development team composed of middle-aged white men creates a game explicitly aimed at young men called AMERICAN VENGEANCE that features a lantern-jawed white American soldier attempting to save his exotic-dancer girlfriend (complete with jiggle physics) from torture at the hands of Jihadists. Violence is the only way to advance in the game and the girlfriend's torture is as graphic as anything in the movie SAW. But as far as violent shooter games go, it is exceptionally innovative, gorgeous, and fun. Is it fair to give the game a low review score for lacking inclusiveness? Is it fair to give the game a lower review score for having violent or misogynist themes?
So, GamerGaters are boycotting Borderlands:The Pre-Sequel for some "SJW" themes/references. Yet it's still the top selling game on Steam right now.
That's because the GamerGate movement is only capable of generating hot air, and does not represent actual gamers (ie the people that buy and play games).
To be fair some of the male devs remained anonymous as well and the Escapist was very open with its audience. The article clearly states that 2 interviews were removed but when you see comments like this "love how they had to find these fucking nobody devs to talk about how great gamergate is" you can't expect a productive dialog. Basically anyone who agrees or sympathizes with any of the moderate complaints within GamerGate should be shut down or ignored.
Who should be sampled, who should be interviewed, should we only get one side of this story? Some women developers are afraid to be named is those interviews, that's a shame. But what about those who come out in the open as neutral parties, who say a few things that (sane) members of gamergate would endorse (). These women are always left out of the narrative. As it stands both sides are going out of their way to make each other look bad which is just sad, its basically just a flame war at this point.
One of the biggest mistakes GamerGaters made was not speaking out against the extreme elements within the movement. That massacre lunatic was the last straw really, at that point the movement got such a negative perception I don't think they'll be able to brush it off. Right now hostile members on 8chan/4chan are used as a figurehead for the entire movement, which I hate because there are a lot of people who I feel have valid concerns and reasons for using #gamergate. More moderate spectators like MundaneMatt, InvestigGamer or InternetAristrocrat are completely drowned out and ignored in mainstream coverage. Any attempt at a dialog never follows through, for example: https://soundcloud.com/radio_nero/series-1-episode-4-threats-and-harassment
As for that loaded question, " Is it fair to give the game a lower review score for having violent or misogynist themes?". Polygon recently gave Bayonetta 2 (a game with overwhelmingly positive reviews and a Metacritic of 91) a 7.5 because of the "sexualisation" of the games main character. As expected a lot of Nintendo and gaming enthusiasts are accusing Polygon of not reviewing the game based on its merits but rather the authors own ideologies. More extreme elements are labeling this as part of the "SJW agenda" to sabotage certain games. It was kind of a big deal so Polygon had to talk about this issue in its latest podcast. http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/16/6990847/we-talk-about-our-bayonetta-2-review-on-our-podcast-quality-control. Original review: http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/13/6957677/bayonetta-2-review-wii-u. Meta: http://www.metacritic.com/game/wii-u/bayonetta-2. Unfortunately I expect much more controversies of this nature as time goes on, particularly from Japanese games (The Phantom Pain, Soul Calibur).
Long story short. Bridges are being burnt and not built. I don't think anything positive has been achieved. Thanks to mainstream publicity, "gamer's" are once again being portrayed in a negative light and because of this they will continue to lash out. "Gamer's" on most forums will continue to project their frustrations at journalists and certain indie devs. Worse off some gamer's will continue to be hostile towards women who they will continue to perceive as being "attention seeking". I think the "gamers", gamergate, some outspoken devs (e.g Phil Fish) and the industry handled this very poorly.
Comments
Phil Fish was also doxxed here, solely for the apparent crime of aggressively defending Zoe Quinn. While Fish is certainly a volatile personality, it's pretty difficult to question the validity of his reaction to having his bank details shared on the internet.
Subsequently, Anita Sarkeesian posted her most recent Tropes vs Women in Video Games episode. She too received rape and death threats, and was further harassed when Gamergate suddenly decided she was lying about reporting those threats to the police. Also, see Davis Aurini and Jordan Owen trying to crowdfund a documentary to out her as a massive fraud. If Gamergate isn't against diversity and women's voices, why does it threaten to murder a woman espousing the astoundingly benign and inoffensive message of 'video games have done a shitty job of portraying women, maybe let's try harder'?
Now we have the Leigh Alexander controversy. Gamergate is constantly going on about the absurd number of 'gamers are dead' articles that appeared on the same day. Why is it that they've gone after Alexander, or at least that they've gone after her with the most fervour? Dan Golding's piece was actually the first one published. Why is it that a woman, and the most outspoken feminist among the authors of those articles, is having her employer's sponsors astroturfed by people who don't constitute her target audience, and don't seem to have read the article properly, or willfully misinterpreted it if they did?
Feminist video game researchers are also under scrutiny at this point. Someone made a video claiming that DiGRA's board is now predominantly feminists and there are only a few academics left on the board, which so clearly illustrates how little this human knows about academia, because you can be a feminist and an academic. Feminism, aside from being a political ideology, is also an epistemological framework that researchers have been using to inform their scientific studies (in italics because they are scientific) for decades. This tinfoil-hatted cretin (and I'm not reserving judgement for this dickwagon, because this is one of the more egregious displays of ignorance from this movement, not to mention the closest to being an affront to me personally) believes that feminist academics have taken control of an organisation that publishes papers and arranges academic conferences in order to 'poison the video game industry with feminism'. The absurd operation whereby gaters are now trying to mass 'peer-review' DiGRA's feminist articles, despite not being peers, or reviewing the papers blindly, is obviously an attack on feminism and women's voices. They're taking a small fraction of the papers the organisation has published, and not even hiding the fact that they're unconcerned about the validity of papers written by men, or women who don't explicitly identify as feminists.
I'm not fully conversant in these issues, but at some point in this whole fiasco, Jenn Frank and Mattie Brice, two outspoken feminists, the latter a transgender woman of colour, were harassed to the extent that they chose to drop their careers as video game critics/journalists. I'm not aware of any men who've run into the same issue. Perhaps apart from Phil Fish, but again, he was defending the voice of a young female developer and her right to a safe place in the industry.
So here we see what Gamergate has achieved. Is there really any way that you can look at this narrative and say that it's not oppressive to minorities, especially women? I'm not saying that's necessarily the concrete goal of Gamergate, or what they're consciously trying to do. But that's what's happening.
As for NotYourShield, I'll admit it's tricky, but it's not the grassroots movement you think it is. It was intentionally created as a means to deflect accusations that GG is bigoted: https://storify.com/strictmachine/gameovergate (ctrl+f the hashtag to find the bits pertaining to it, but the whole thing is worth reading). Sure there are people from marginalised groups participating in Gamergate, we shouldn't ignore that, but they can't rely on the 'my friend, who is a woman, said that thing I did isn't sexist, so it isn't sexist' (and again, applied to a large scale). Jenn Frank has written on how she was a terrible misogynist as a teenager (I think Zoe Quinn might have as well, but there's no way Google is going to show me what I want if I search for 'Zoe Quinn misogynist' :P ) http://www.unwinnable.com/2012/07/13/i-was-a-teenage-sexist/ This shows how women can also be affected by patriarchal power structures. Think about various insults. If you disapprove of the way a dude is acting, you might say 'you're being a girl'. You insult him by calling him a woman. If you insult a woman, you have words like 'bitch' and other gendered slurs. Somehow we've reached a point in our society where some of the most ubiquitous insults are synonyms for 'woman', or words tangentially related to femininity. It isn't impossible that women supporting Gamergate are sexists of the kind Frank talks about in that piece I linked to. Look at CH Sommers, she's definitely a sexist and she's probably the woman with the loudest voice in Gamergate (perhaps, aside from Vivian James, but I don't know how much credence we should lend to a woman 4chan made up to agree with them, and whose appearance is a reference to a rape joke).
Maybe the awful ones are the vocal minority in Gamergate, but no matter how valid the concerns of the majority, by piggybacking on a platform that's responsible for so much hostility and toxicity, they implicitly condone those actions. If they want to have a serious conversation about their concerns, they shouldn't be marching behind misogynists to be heard.
If you read the post rather than going fury, you would've seen that.
I think he mentioned the game one time, but nothing really worth caring about in the least.
And yeah you're probably quite right, logically it would make sense to have given Grayson way more flak, since if the story were true he'd really be the offender in the scenario more than anyone. So yeah that's bad. Yeah, I'd be mad too. Yeah those two are pretty questionable. The whole campaign is idiotic, and they come across as asshole opportunists in the whole thing. Burn 'em.
Also, there isn't evidence to insinuate that GG was behind those threats. It could've been any one of a billion online trolls, that may or may not have had anything to do with GG. We don't know. Let's stick to evidence?
It's really shit that it happened though, and no woman should be silenced in such a way for extending a criticism.
It's also created an atmosphere within which anyone who questions her deductions or references is immediately deemed a monster, and I personally really resent that, because as much as I hate what happened to her, I don't agree with her on all fronts.
One study that she referred to in particular was problematic for me, as it seemed to have mixed results, but still was used as evidence all over.
You can have a look at it if you want :)
http://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2013/fox-chb-sexualized-virtual-selves.pdf
I just think the scope and methods are questionable, and it actually shows in the study that women who played as sexualised avatars that did not look like themselves had a lower RMA than those who played as non-sexualised avatars that did not look like themselves (most game characters do not look like the people behind the screens), which was enough reason for me to throw the whole thing out the window.
(BTW, don't use the abstract of a study as evidence of something folks.) Honestly, I feel like it was the tone of the article that made the biggest impact, as well as the fact that it was like 15 of them all at once. It came across in a way that people took offense to.
Leigh has also been digging herself in with all her lashing out at the mob. Not that it justifies anything, it just explains it a bit.
In the case of being surrounded by an angry mob irl, flinging poop at them, will only make your situation worse. You're surprised that they're under scrutiny? They even planned for the backlash, I just don't think they expected this much. Even they knew it was coming.
Not that feminism shouldn't exist, but in the case that you call out a big industry and consumer base, backlash is going to happen.
I dunno why people are even talking about Digra though. An institution exists that pushes feminism and does studies on feminism. Who cares.
Criticize it when it gets to the public sector, if you so wish. Don't know anything about either of them unfortunately, I have nothing to say about that other than that I condemn the harassment. This isn't an inclusive narrative unfortunately, so I can't really deduce that much about it. It's really one sided. I resent you making me look at that link.... I really don't want to know anything about ZQ. Ever.
I don't care. But I condemn the harassment against her.
And as much as you seem to think 4chan is some conspiracy group, it's not. These are a couple assholes playing spy. And as much as some would like to think digra is some feminist conspiracy group, it's not.
Tinfoil hats off please.
And why would anyone give any credence to a fictional character? xD
And how would you justify that her appearance is a reference to a rape joke? I don't know anything about that.
Some sources have stated that she was created for TFYC for a game.
Which got hacked and torn apart by some silly monkey(s). For shame -.- Hey, maybe it's there.
But when so many consumers feel this way, and undertake consumer activism under a tag that's actually making progress for them, why would they disband and reassemble elsewhere while risking loss of numbers in the process?
And would you be able to keep responses shorter? I would like to cover alot of ground, and don't really have the time to reply to long posts like this one :)
Let's move on aswell. :)
............................................................................................................................................................................................
How would you respond to the factual feminist's video? : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm8nBt9rQBo
Now, MAJOR DISCLAIMER. I DON'T BELIEVE THIS. I JUST WANT A RESPONSE TO IT.
And, following your response, is there not any course of action that can be taken against a multimillion dollar entity spewing lies for the sake of an agenda, in the case that this is all untrue?
Because if it is objectively untrue, someone should destroy AEI. Like, obliterate them legally.
...............................................................................................................................................................................................
If you want to hear how messed up NYS is from someone who isn't Zoe Quinn, here's Katherine Cross' explanation: https://storify.com/Firebomb173/katherine-cross-on-nys-and-bigotry-in-gamergate Her hoodie is purple and green. Look up 'piccolo dick'. The choice was made to 'prevent SJWs from appropriating their daughter' (no jokes, some members of 4chan referred to this character as their daughter). Because rallying behind a hate movement is not the best recipe for being taken seriously. This is the second time I've typed all of this out: You've already pissed off everyone else in this thread to the extent that they've stopped engaging with you (well, @dislekcia at least, and he's been making an effort for a long time now). I understand trying to constrain parameters of a conversation to keep it on track, but if you're asking the same questions over and over and ignoring my answers, I'm going to get more and more verbose, or eventually just stop responding. Uproarious laughter or abject horror, depending on my mood. Seriously though, here's an article that does a better job of explaining the flaws in Young's study. That way I don't have to go into it and can keep my responses short.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2014/09/07/are-men-really-harassed-more-than-women/
Link
Women are definitely harassed more than men online, and to a worse degree. This is par for the course for CH Sommers, the "factual" feminist. She has made a career out of distorting the facts to discredit feminist claims, and has been hired by a right-wing think tank for her efforts for the cause.
But the facts don't match the "factual" feminist's claims, I'm afraid.
What the hell is this shit?
I've been a bit out of the loop lately. I know very little and only have opinions so I can't contribute much useful.
I'll just see if I can learn quietly in the corner for a bit.
...on the surface of it, that sure is a familiar smell though.
Lol 4000 pages? I would love to see those pages, but of course, who has time to even look at it.
That's not what I saw in the link you shared, I just saw a few snaps of irc chats, that did look bad admittedly, but nothing like 4k pages of anything.
And why're you taking my text out of context? I did say that it wasn't a justification for the way that things are happening for Leigh?
I don't know the ups and downs of it's viewpoints in every single detail?
I'm one person. Gamergate is a mishmash of endless differing viewpoints.
I don't know what they all think.
And you didn't asnwer my real question on the factual feminist video, which is what can be done about them spewing that kind of misinformation?
Surely if it's clearly false, and leading to endless misinformation, can't anyone do anything about it? Send digra after them? :P
And you can get pissed off at me, I'm already the villain here.
I'm not trying to undermine you either, I'm actually reflecting common arguments..
If it's gonna drive you nuts, repeating things for the sake of the people hopping on now, that's fine.
We can call it then.
How the hell does such a "thinktank" exist if it's all lies? D':
If anyone is truly seeing this stuff now for the first time (hi @DarkCarnivour) then it's my hope that they read this all from the start and take the time to really familiarise themselves with what's been said and why. I'm more than confident that nobody needs @eSculpt standing up for their edification, no matter how valiantly he reflects common arguments.
Also, thanks for linking that Katherine Cross storify. I wanted to put that up here in reply to @eSculpt's earlier question about NYS, it's a great set of points.
@eSculpt: Stop acting like a troll. Please. You've won, I guess... You get to "end" the conversation without having to concede any points, or you get to take this post of mine as me attacking you (or at least, pointing out the consequences of your actions, which seem to be the same thing in your view). Either way, I reckon quite a few people here will have a hard time feeling that any criticism they give you in the future will be well-received, so you've probably damaged the usefulness of this community for yourself. Good luck, and I hope you make games in better faith than you argue.
I'm just saying, there's something about the way you address people that you disagree with that comes across as really hostile. Even if you don't intend for it to come across like that.
And nobody ever wins in these discussions.
And yeah @brondin thanks for engaging me, for the most part without being hostile about it. I think alot of people learnt some stuff from it.
@dislekcia: Thanks, man. I have no idea how you managed to engage with this thread from the very beginning. I've only been here for a few days and I'm strongly considering spending the next few sleeping. :P (Not that it's anywhere close to what the women we've been talking about have had to deal with).
@Gazza_N: Also a Katherine Cross piece! First Person Scholar is a great resource if you're looking for accessible academic writing on video games :)
Discovering Katherine Cross has kind of been a silver lining in this awful situation, for me at least. Weirdly enough, Gamergate's managed to expose me to a lot of people with really good opinions, and the ability to articulate those opinions really well. The lists of SJW journalists (which feature surprisingly few women)? They're the writers whose reviews and articles I want to read. The list of companies that 'collude with SJWs' or invoke SJW themes in their games? Going to throw my money at them in the future. DiGRA feminists? Gamergate introduced me to academics whose work is going to make my dissertation better. They actively contributed to the writing of another piece of the sort of postmodern critical theory influenced research that they so clearly hate. And that's just endlessly delightful. :)
To echo the sentiment though, that's a DAMN FINE piece of writing, right there.
Get past the first bit, which just recaps GG, to the comparison with utopian revolutionary movements. Uhnnfff, writing that good, it makes me feel all warm and tingly and shit.
GG is just a bunch of angry people. I don't really think comparing the two is equivalent
GamerGate's manifesto includes avoiding people with political agenda. Yet they loved the hell out of the "factual" feminist's videos, a woman who has a political agenda, working for a think tank with a giant, obvious political agenda.
It's like announcing you're going witch hunting, then accepting the Wicked Witch of the East into your group, so you can team up to hunt down kids wearing witch costumes on Halloween.
That's what's called "irony".
AEI isn't a government funded research instituted, btw. It's a private right-wing non-profit think tank. Which means they accept money from right wing donors to come up with policies and tactics for promoting a conservative political agenda.
Clipped from: http://imgur.com/a/LgZBN
At the same time, there are some interesting discussions happening about the state of games journalism in its written form. Here's a really interesting talk given by Cara Ellison a few months ago at A MAZE in Berlin, where she talks about how she's trying to do something different as a games journalist/critic, and attempt a project similar to those carried out by embedded journalists who went on tour with rock bands in the 70s:
And here's a list she's compiled of people who write about video games in a way that's substantially different to what you'd expect from the bland features/news/previews/reviews type articles you'd find on a site like IGN.
http://caraellison.co.uk/uncategorized/weve-already-got-our-lester-bangs/
Hmm, this seems like it might only be tangentially related to the issue, but I think 'WTF is going on in games journalism/reporting/criticism right now?' is a much healthier topic than rehashing the Gamergate business for the millionth time.
And here's GamerGate's newest ally!
Here's the donotlink, if you have the stomach for 8chan and you don't feel like typing it into your address bar: donotlink.com/bzfj
Another article on how wonderful this human being is: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/12/4693710/the-end-of-kindness-weev-and-the-cult-of-the-angry-young-man
Which means there's good news: When was the last time you heard anything about Anonymous? They eventually lost coordination and came apart at the seams, leaving only a few lone twitter accounts broadcasting links that nobody's clicking on. So it's possible that this will eventually burn itself out, and all of us can get back to business as usual.
Also, it would be nice if my friend could go back home and not just back to business.
https://twitter.com/ErnestWAdams/status/520779622074834944
You know where those dox weren't? Anywhere that people care about journalistic integrity. I'm actually pretty glad I'm not at rAge right now. I feel like there would be one or two people that would "side" with GG in random conversation and end up ruining my day - and theirs :(
Also, related:
https://twitter.com/MikeSchnier/status/520365734120001537
This goes quite a long way towards explaining how such a small number of people could seem so incredibly loud. Also note that most of their "connections" that Thunderclap measures are based on a few accounts with very high follower counts. More people funded Feminist Frequency than people willing to click GG's thunderclap. I'm really not sure how anyone can believe that GG represents a silent majority and that their consumer wishes are relevant.
http://inurashii.tumblr.com/post/99751399160/gamergate-and-the-golden-mean-fallacy
What's there to say of GG... Their actions are indefensible. How do you go anywhere from there?
Their words: Journalistic accountability
Their actions: Harassment and abuse (some of which to an actually-criminal-with-real-implications degree) of largely people that have little or nothing to do with journalism.
Game 'journalism' is littered with genuine ethical questions and obvious conflicts of interest - when it's not being a straight up funnel for PR BS into the mouths of gamers (yeah), but GG doesn't give a shit about that.
IMO GG is an embarrassment for anyone in gaming and certainly tarnishes the name of 'gamers'. (Even the name is so retchingly self-important)
It's pretty hard not to dismiss the 'cause' of GG with integrity like that, though their actual actions can't be dismissed.
I still think there is something to learn from GG, even if only to gain more insight into the nature of the beast we serve.
I don't yet have a worthwhile opinion regarding the original question about how much devs might be responsible, what we could or should do/not do.
Article about how GG fits the definition of a hate group, how it uses the structures and mechanisms that define a hate group and how it behaves like a hate group. But that obviously means it's a duck (according to some of the replies this thread has gotten).
Saw this brief discussion between Maddy Myers and Jenni Goodchild on Twitter yesterday. Is anyone else worried that Gamergate isn't actually going to go away, and it's just a thing that devs, journalists, and other players are going to have to deal with in the games industry from now on? Obviously these people have always been here, but they've never been organised to this extent (which isn't tremendously organised, but whatever facsimile of cohesion they've achieved, it's had devastating results).
Unfortunately the threats and effects of GG are nothing new the industry, we've had this crap for a long time. GamerGate is the face of a hate group which roped in moderates to help legitimize their cause. It is perhaps with the greatest of irony that they use the tagline Not Your Shield be cause it should have the subtext written under it: because we really want them to be ours.
Historically, 'gamers' have been a defensive bunch, which makes sense considering some of the history of the emerging medium, and their rallying around this BS here looks like the same old reaction of people acting out of a feeling of being threatened. Perhaps that's part of the energy of it. That's not a justification, I'm attempting to understand the mechanics.
The other option of course is that these 'gamers' are just universally, irredeemably misogynistic. As you say, the rotten core has always been there and it's not likely to go anywhere in a hurry. Personally, I don't think GG is going to hold in the same form - see every political movement ever.
At the end of the day, holding back progress is a losing battle. That's what they're trying to do, isn't it?
I still think it's a thing that we (devs in this case) will have to deal with in some form and have always dealt with without really knowing it was there. To this end, I'd like to better understand that thing.
https://twitter.com/Sethrogen/status/522258591814660096
https://twitter.com/Sethrogen/status/522265747288911872
So yes, this is fear. The sad part is that they don't seem to believe anyone telling them that their fear is unfounded. Their worries about belonging aren't strictly true (unless those worries are about belonging to a tribe of sexist memesters, although sexist behaviors are often repeated as social norming strategies in order to belong - why else would we smile openly at jokes we don't find funny?) - that's probably the main reason that I feel the way to stop this thing is through education: Once people understand feminism is ceases being a scary attack on their core values. The problem is that feminism often causes people to adjust their core values, so it looks a lot like the death of aspects of a culture to the unaware.
@rustybroomhandle: I'm not 100% up to speed on what's going on right now (work work work, right?) but I'm seeing echos of some sort of mainstream media coverage of GG, do you know what that was? Also, I'm not sure that #StopGamerGate2014 is a good idea.
Could also be about the university talk that Anita Sarkeesian had to cancel after the uni got threats of a student massacre.
Did you see the Escapist follow up to their earlier article that got linked here a lot, the "Female Game Developers talk about GamerGate" one? Turns out that "Game Developers talk about GamerGate" (all male, not anonymous, sourced from GG forums, included interviews with actual harassers from the IRC logs, contained some seriously fucked up questions) might just indicate a little bit of latent sexism. At the Escapist, who would have thunk?
Not surprised at how badly The Escapist screwed that one up. Greg Tito is not always the brightest of bulbs.
Amongst other things, this post contains a nice summary of that buggerup: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=134397896&postcount=12285
Link
Also, this is another great read that manages to say something new about GG. On how represents the new shape of culture wars.
For interests sake.
Huff post did a thing giving some of the women of gamergate a voice.
(Baldwin coined the term with this tweet)
Link
15 interviews in total and worth a read. Gamergate isn't a black and white issue.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/features/12383-Game-Developer-GamerGate-Interviews-Shed-Light-on-Women-in-Games
Read: https://storify.com/alexlifschitz/escapist-drama
So, yes, they deleted the two interviews of active harassers and changed the article image to deal with the latent sexism of game developer/female game developer. But there's still a lot wrong with those pieces... I mean, all you need to do is see that the women who responded were afraid to be named.
What the fuck is this question: Seriously. WTF is that?
So, GamerGaters are boycotting Borderlands:The Pre-Sequel for some "SJW" themes/references. Yet it's still the top selling game on Steam right now.
Read into that as ye wish.
To be fair some of the male devs remained anonymous as well and the Escapist was very open with its audience. The article clearly states that 2 interviews were removed but when you see comments like this "love how they had to find these fucking nobody devs to talk about how great gamergate is" you can't expect a productive dialog. Basically anyone who agrees or sympathizes with any of the moderate complaints within GamerGate should be shut down or ignored.
Who should be sampled, who should be interviewed, should we only get one side of this story? Some women developers are afraid to be named is those interviews, that's a shame. But what about those who come out in the open as neutral parties, who say a few things that (sane) members of gamergate would endorse (
One of the biggest mistakes GamerGaters made was not speaking out against the extreme elements within the movement. That massacre lunatic was the last straw really, at that point the movement got such a negative perception I don't think they'll be able to brush it off. Right now hostile members on 8chan/4chan are used as a figurehead for the entire movement, which I hate because there are a lot of people who I feel have valid concerns and reasons for using #gamergate. More moderate spectators like MundaneMatt, InvestigGamer or InternetAristrocrat are completely drowned out and ignored in mainstream coverage. Any attempt at a dialog never follows through, for example:
https://soundcloud.com/radio_nero/series-1-episode-4-threats-and-harassment
As for that loaded question, " Is it fair to give the game a lower review score for having violent or misogynist themes?". Polygon recently gave Bayonetta 2 (a game with overwhelmingly positive reviews and a Metacritic of 91) a 7.5 because of the "sexualisation" of the games main character. As expected a lot of Nintendo and gaming enthusiasts are accusing Polygon of not reviewing the game based on its merits but rather the authors own ideologies. More extreme elements are labeling this as part of the "SJW agenda" to sabotage certain games. It was kind of a big deal so Polygon had to talk about this issue in its latest podcast. http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/16/6990847/we-talk-about-our-bayonetta-2-review-on-our-podcast-quality-control. Original review: http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/13/6957677/bayonetta-2-review-wii-u. Meta: http://www.metacritic.com/game/wii-u/bayonetta-2. Unfortunately I expect much more controversies of this nature as time goes on, particularly from Japanese games (The Phantom Pain, Soul Calibur).
Long story short. Bridges are being burnt and not built. I don't think anything positive has been achieved. Thanks to mainstream publicity, "gamer's" are once again being portrayed in a negative light and because of this they will continue to lash out. "Gamer's" on most forums will continue to project their frustrations at journalists and certain indie devs. Worse off some gamer's will continue to be hostile towards women who they will continue to perceive as being "attention seeking". I think the "gamers", gamergate, some outspoken devs (e.g Phil Fish) and the industry handled this very poorly.