I watched that video, and those interviewees are repeating the same already-debunked lies over and over. They are typical of exactly what's wrong with GamerGate.
The main thing with GamerGate is: We don't need it. Ethical issues in games reporting gets called out all the time, have been for years, and mostly by more reasonable people. And calling out actual problems with games reporting - you won't find much of that in the confused mess that is that hashtag.
And calling for reviewers to review without "politics"?? - well screw that, you might as well post a spec sheet, score/10, trailer, and be done with it.
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.
Do you not think that gamers being portrayed in a negative light is largely to do with how gamers have behaved over the past month and a half? Also not sure how you think the industry's reaction to Gamergate is to blame for the fact that the misogynerds are going to keep lashing out and attacking women on forums?
And calling for reviewers to review without "politics"?? - well screw that, you might as well post a spec sheet, score/10, trailer, and be done with it.
This. I understand wanting a thorough run-down of the mechanics and whether or not they work, or wanting to know if a game is worth the large sum of money you're going to spend on it, but those reviews exist. IGN and Gamespot (if I remember correctly) fulfill that function, and there's no problem with their existence, we need them. But if we're taking games seriously as an art form, and we should, then we have to be grownups about the fact that they have political implications, and that those elements are fair game when it comes to criticism, and that some sites are going to make recourse to this when reviewing games.
Disclaimerpants! I'm totally glad you're engaging in this debate :) If you feel that I'm attacking you, instead of discussing the points you've brought up like a sane human being, please let me know and I'll gladly re-state what I'm trying to get across instead.
Basically anyone who agrees or sympathizes with any of the moderate complaints within GamerGate should be shut down or ignored.
Except that's not what's happened at all. People have been actively searching through GamerGate rhetoric and accusations for real complaints and addressing them. That's how we can point to the complaints about "corruption" being based on false assumptions, or why people that engage with GGers keep pointing out actual instances of corruption in games journalism (and how they were exposed and dealt with by the media). This narrative of dismissing moderate complaints is being pushed by GG itself to prevent moderates from "leaving" the movement, it doesn't match reality.
Who should be sampled, who should be interviewed, should we only get one side of this story?
This is, once again, a false and unhelpful idea, there isn't some magical middle ground here. Things that are facts should be covered. It is a fact that these things are happening: Female developers and writers are being targeted by insane hate campaigns; Incorrect and debunked accusations are being constantly repeated as though they were true by GGers; GG is enabling, organising and condoning these attacks on women; GG is actively engaging on obfuscation campaigns in order to prevent useful discussion about these topics.
People like @brondin have shown how media is always complicit in selecting what to show, it's our job as media consumers to find facts and draw conclusions from multiple sources. GG is all about muddying the waters to prevent exactly that from happening so that the misogynistic minority that's very much in control of it's messages can keep attacking women in order to "make examples out of them". There is only one side of the story: Reality.
Some women developers are afraid to be named is those interviews, that's a shame.
That's basically the entire point. Women are afraid. GG wins when that happens, that's what they want. The fact that so many people (way more than are actively harassing women) are willing to dismiss that this venomous harassment is happening in order to talk about non-issues is a master-stroke for the harassers.
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.
Unfortunately, those women are just repeating already debunked accusations. That doesn't stop those accusations from harming people though. How many otherwise nice people that didn't identify with GG before are going to end up supporting a movement whose outcomes have been so incredibly harmful now because of nothing but already disproven lies? That's a huge problem.
It's also irrelevant that these people are women. Women can be misogynist and sexist too. Women can, through their actions, support misogyny and sexism. That's one of the tragedies of our society and having a vagina doesn't give people a free pass from having the outcomes of their affiliated movements evaluated. Nor does holding up token people of a specific subtype that support a largely discriminatory message absolve people of the responsibility for that discrimination.
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.
I'm sorry, but having watched a few of those videos that people like MundaneMatt and InternetAristocrat have put out there about this, they are not moderate, nor are they spectators. They're active participants in the sexism that's driving the core of GG. I would be very, very skeptical of any conversations with them as well, based on their demonstrated abilities to twist reason in outright lies and their poor exhibition of logic. It's like, why would you bother listening to Ken Ham trying to talk about evolution - it's not a useful thing to do.
As for GGers making mistakes. I dunno, I feel like GGers have done this masterfully: They've managed to surround themselves with a self-reinforcing ring of people that they can hide behind and continue their campaigns of attacks against women. They've managed to convince these otherwise well-meaning people to repeat lies in order to confuse issues and prevent discussion, in fact they've even managed to convince these people that no discussion is even possible - that they're fighting for a cause so just it doesn't require empathy. And they've even granted them the name of their movement that was started in harassment and misogyny, they let them call themselves GamerGaters proudly - all the while knowing that they're just puppets.
I think the core GGers are terrifying people. These are their "operations".
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.
Polygon reviewed the game. That's basically it. That review doesn't stop anyone from playing the game. The opinions of the reviewer might allow people to discuss things like sexual representation in games in a way that they had never thought of before. How is that bad? How is that attacking anyone? How, in all honestly, does that justify attacking anyone?
As for that question I posted from the interview, it boggles my mind that people don't go "Wait, why is there all that troubling, racist and sexist content in the game if it doesn't have anything to do with the mechanics?" - the whole act of dismissing troubling content for the sake of mechanics that don't have anything to do with them is what makes many people think that gamers are really, really weird. That dismissal is only possible from a perspective of massive privilege, which is what's been pointed out multiple times... Unfortunately that seems to make certain insecure people want to lash out instead of try to understand why their actions are hard for others to rationalise.
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.
People are reacting to the actions of GamerGate as a movement. The things that GG proclaims as victories are sickening. The things that GGers say they're actually trying to fix are lies and trumped up accusations with no basis in reality. Is it any surprise that people are saying that GG is seriously worrying? What does anyone get from being part of GG now? And what discussions can only be had from the platform of falsehoods provided by GG? Why do people need it, if not to hide behind it while harassing people?
The burning is being done by GG, that's what's attacking women and driving them out of the industry instead of encouraging their voices, that's what's making mainstream media talk about gamers as the misogynist basement-dwelling entitled asshat stereotype (because that's what they're acting like), that's what people are reacting to. It really sucks that GG is trying to paint opposition to their outcomes as negative by doing false equivalence campaigns like trying to equate people's reactions to GG tweetspam accounts with concerted efforts at harassing single individuals across their entire visible lives. That's just not something that you can compare (also, people are quick to point out that ANY harassment is bad).
@brondin Sorry, I meant the press not the industry. I feel that in the early days (10 coordinated gamers are dead articles in one day) certain outlets just added fuel to the fire, rather than tried to put it out.
@rustybroomhandle I agree that gamergate isn't needed. My point is that the initial reaction of the press and outspoken indie dev's just contributed to the problem. If the press had come out with a more level headed approach to this out of the gate, it would have died down. If pro gaters like MundaneMatt or InternetAristrocat had a civil debate or discussion with members of the press or devs on a neutral platform or podcast, it would have died down. The best thing about debates is that they usually show the true nature of participants to the audience more often that not. After the debate no one could make accusations of one sided or biased coverage. The audience would be able to make a fairly informed decision. I feel this could have ended so soon if this approach was taken. Unfortunately this never happened, this wont ever happen. Instead the press lashed out against pro gaters with articles and what I consider to be shaming tactics. In the end gamergaters feel vindicated and keep "fighting back". This does more harm then good because it makes discussion impossible, it creates a with us or against us environment. As it stands, I don't see this ending. I'm worried that after the New York times article some extreme pro gaters are going to do something extremely stupid, like real world stupid. It should never have made it this far.
@SubiyaCryolite The negative response to those '"gamers" are dead' articles shows exactly what the problem is.
A group that self-identifies as some kind of closed outcasts, gets offended when it is pointed out that their closed/exclusive group is actually not as closed and exclusive as they would like. That's a problem.
This is also the source of why some of them are using the chance to jump all over casual games or anything they don't deem to be true games.
@SubiyaCryolite That's pretty much how I interpreted it anyway :) What I'm trying to get at is: if gamers are perceived as misogynists, then that's the fault of gamers. The media is doing what it's supposed to do, report.
As for the bit about gamers still being hostile to women in the event that this ever dies down: GG is largely driven by that hostility, it's been around for a long time, and it's going to stick around. I don't see how anything the media could have done would have resulted in some of these people going "oh shit! You're right, the patriarchy is real and I was totally unaware of the existence of my privilege. I should go apologise to all those women I sent death threats to." If the media doesn't outright condemn what's going on, they create wiggle room for the interpretation that the silly bullshit might have some legitimacy. There's no need to hold debates between the two sides of the issue, because "wimmin should get out of mah gaemz" is not a position that anybody should be putting forward or listening to, and it isn't worth the time of day it'd take to record a debate for a podcast.
Regarding the death of gamers articles, I've said it a bunch of times, but the backlash there was clearly a result of having only read the headline or being entirely unwilling to engage with the arguments being made in those articles.
I will say though, for all the shit that's gone down since this "movement" started, the best thing to come out of it so far is a clear demand for unbiased journalism, and if that's the only output GG is remembered for (and if it makes marketing companies rethink hype marketing in general) that'll be a good thing.
Oh wait, who am I kidding, it's commercial journalism. It's always going to be biased, has been since the dawn of time, and will be until our species is wiped from the earth.
@wogan - People questioning games writing is not something that's new or sprang from GG, and it's really not something actually done BY people who support GG. And be careful when asking for "unbiased journalism" that you understand what it is you are asking for.
@wogan - People questioning games writing is not something that's new or sprang from GG, and it's really not something actually done BY people who support GG. And be careful when asking for "unbiased journalism" that you understand what it is you are asking for.
Those are just facts, and facts are just opinions, and opinions can be wrong. The only thing that is never wrong - confidence!
I think the biggest thing for me is the idea that every member of GamerGate enjoys the outcomes of the harassment perpetuated by a few within the movement, even if a specific self-identifying member doesn't expressly harass themselves, they receive the benefits of being associated with that harassment. The reticence of others to engage with GamerGaters, and the speed with which people give up or capitulate for fear of being dogpiled, as well as the continuous re-stating of sentiment to put the "average" GamerGater at ease (stuff like "I know you're not personally harassing anyone" and the willingess to accept counter-claims of harassment of GG as a meaningful issue) are all as a result of people fearing the harassment that GamerGate wears like a cologne.
Those are just facts, and facts are just opinions, and opinions can be wrong. The only thing that is never wrong - confidence!
Brilliant quote!
Unfortunately I can't lay claim to it. Rather, it belongs to Veronica Palmer, portrayed by the excellent Portia de Rossi in Better off Ted. A series I would recommend to anyone who ever found a Dilbert cartoon amusing.
@dislekcia: That video is fucking incredible, I've seen the link floating around for a little while now, glad I finally took the time to check it out. It just hits every point on how media works, from authorial intent having no bearing on the effects of a text, to the inherently political nature of the process of creation.
Scott Benson (responsible for this gem) was posting some really interesting stuff on Twitter this morning, one portion of which could certainly serve as a companion to the point about enjoying the benefits of harassment even if you haven't harassed anyone. I don't think I'll post a full transcript (there's a lot of stuff, paraphrasing will keep this much shorter), if anyone's interested in exact wording, just look for the numbered tweets on his Twitter.
Essentially, every time GG is accused of being a bunch of straight white manbabies, they cite #NotYourShield. While this is largely just the "I can't be racist, I have a black friend" fallacy"I can't be racist, I have a black friend" fallacy, it's true in that there are elements of diversity and intersectionality within GG. That said, the effort to preserve a particular status quo, one where marginalised groups don't have a voice in the gaming industry or its myriad communities, is one that inherently privileges the straight white cis dude contingent, and ensures that their views and tastes are still the ones that are predominantly catered to. We can certainly agree with anyone who says that GG isn't just straight white guys, but we can't deny that GG is pushing for an end goal which is overwhelmingly for straight white guys.
And for something a bit more entertaining, a long angry creatively expletive-ridden rant by an NFL player.
This is an insult-hurling masterpiece. It doesn't say anything new or particularly insightful about GG, but reading phrases like "paint huffing shitgoblins" and "slopebrowed weaseldicks" is a surefire way to brighten your day :D
That said, the effort to preserve a particular status quo, one where marginalised groups don't have a voice in the gaming industry or its myriad communities, is one that inherently privileges the straight white cis dude contingent, and ensures that their views and tastes are still the ones that are predominantly catered to. We can certainly agree with anyone who says that GG isn't just straight white guys, but we can't deny that GG is pushing for an end goal which is overwhelmingly for straight white guys.
Yeah. The way that video spoke about how the perfect game-playing woman is one that is indistinguishable from a specific kind of "guy" was golden. So much understanding to combat the derpness! Have you seen how people on Twitter are starting to just reply to GG swarm accounts with the tactics he lists in that video and which one the GG accounts are currently using? That's so much easier than engaging and it forces them to stop doing that shit if they want to actually talk.
And for something a bit more entertaining, a long angry creatively expletive-ridden rant by an NFL player.
This is an insult-hurling masterpiece. It doesn't say anything new or particularly insightful about GG, but reading phrases like "paint huffing shitgoblins" and "slopebrowed weaseldicks" is a surefire way to brighten your day :D
Chris Kluwe is pretty damn awesome, although sadly he's not an NFL player anymore - his contract wasn't renewed after he added his support to NFL players coming out as gay and how that shouldn't affect anyone in the slightest. Dude's been shouting positively about games for a while on American TV too.
4 September 2014. Ahhh, the good old days, when we were optimistic about the maturity and grace of our fellow man :)
Yeah, turned out to be a much bigger, wider reaching, and more poorly handled problem than I expected back then (especially when trying to be cautiously optimistic).
Only flaw in his reasoning is that Gawker's not the only company involved. Worst wrt publicizing stolen nudes of women and doxxing of hundreds of pages of legal gun owners etc though.
@eSculpt David Auerbach has written at least one other article for Slate about Gamergate (the other one being from September 4). The previous one as I recall was similarly critical of the strategy of the anti-gamergate movement.
@eSculpt I don't quite follow your statement about Gawker and that Slate article's reasoning? (though to be honest I know very little about Gawker Media)
I mean that Gawker isn't the only press entity that gamergate has in mind, so if gawker did all those things, it wouldn't end the fiasco. It would be a good thing if gawker were to address their ethical issues though.
I could link you the articles where they published stolen nude photos from various women, and the one where they published a ~450 page list of legal gun owners names in NYC. But I really don't want to divert any traffic towards that kind of abhorrent clickbait.
Their ethical issues are beyond gamergate though, they've done some really ghastly things, and refused to delete any of it afaik.
Wait. How does acquiescing to the spurious demands of gamergate do anything other than strengthen the movement and make people stick with its narratives and strategies even harder?
I honestly don't think that it's ethical to hand-wave away the total lack of actual journalistic issues in the things that started gamergate. It's not like GG now is currently awash with addressing journalistic ethics issues either... I also don't think it's ethical to basically lob a whole ton of equivalence fallacies at people in order to overwhelm them into agreeing that Gawker needs to somehow do something to make moderate GGers leave a cause that would have been made successful. He's basically laying all these sins at the feet of Gawker to fix, which is exactly what he accuses Kuchera of later.
That final jab at Ben Kuchera is also really weird... The quote in question makes perfect sense: The legacy of GG will be the light it shone on how badly women are treated in the games industry. That's not magically transferring the sins of (unnamed, but we're sure they're bad, right?) developers onto otherwise innocent GG moderates. It's addressing how GG has made mainstream media talk about video game sexism from an industry-wide perspective, complete with handy constantly-renewing reference cases of rampant misogyny. That's not a thing Kuchera is trying to rhetorically shoehorn onto GG, that's what's already happening and what it'll be remembered for more than anything else.
And nowhere in this piece is the actual solution to GG mentioned: Education. I agree that the GG moderates are what's made it last so long (and that's exactly why they were courted by the crunchy core of assholes), but the issue at the heart of keeping those moderates in the movement is the simple lack of understanding they have about the concepts of both feminism/sexism and journalistic ethics. The idea that criticism of sexist tropes in a thing someone loves automatically calls that person a sexist is logically incoherent. The idea that enthusiast journalists who are working hard to increase the transparency of their field should be the ones whose publishing agencies are targeted through their advertisers is so incredibly against the concepts of journalistic integrity that it boggles the mind. Yet these two concepts are at the core of GG moderates self-identifying with the movement. That and the willful lack of comprehension that when someone writes a thing about "gamers" being dead, they're not the same as people that hit you when you were young.
The only thing that will stop GG is the illumination of minds to the misconceptions they hold. If you know a way to do that in a viciously polarised environment, short of a frame-of-reference reset after a horrible tragedy, please share it.
Wait. How does acquiescing to the spurious demands of gamergate do anything other than strengthen the movement and make people stick with its narratives and strategies even harder?
That's meant to be rhetorical right? Because the article talked about that in some detail, and it's safe to assume that @eSculpt would just tell you what the article already said because he said he mostly agreed with it (with an exception he pointed out).
I don't think anyone thinks education is a bad idea. I can't imagine anyone needing convincing that changing the worldview of the people who make up GamerGate would solve the problem. I'd assume that that Slate writer would totally agree that education would solve the problem. But you yourself point out some major problems in achieving that in the immediate future.
If the only solution you're willing to accept is education, I'd like to hear your plan for that.
"... colluding to blacklist someone from employment is illegal. In the state of Florida, where Allistair’s employment contract originated, it is illegal to collude, confederate or combine with two or more employers to prevent, prohibit or actively blacklist someone from gainful employment."
Which there is evidence to prove.
True enough Allistair's a bastard considering how he outed that trans person (considering major transphobia in society), but the law there describes the actions of those involved in that discussion as collusion.
"The criticisms were not "debunked" but "denied". "Debunked" is a success verb that implies more than simple denial. Having looked at the leaked emails, I would say that the allegations of collusion are largely and obviously true. So there's not really any justification for us to go further than "denied"." - Jimmy Wales discussing the gg wiki page.
It's unethical. (So is Allistair, but he'll never work in that industry again IMO)
Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't necessarily mean they're uneducated. That's kinda ridiculous.
I'm also unconvinced by the Slate article. Acquiescing to the demands of GamerGate or even its moderates represents an implicit legitimisation of the movement itself. Sure, the moderates will probably leave when the ethical concerns are addressed (assuming there are actually that many moderates whose ethical concerns aren't still to do with the misguided belief that Nathan Grayson wrote a positive review of Depression Quest), but that leaves enough wiggle room for GG as a whole to interpret that as a victory, and continue their godawful shenanigans under the guise of 'ethics'. Because 'hey, look, we already handled all those other ethical problems, clearly we're the good guys here, look at our track record of addressing ethical problems in video games!'
"... colluding to blacklist someone from employment is illegal. In the state of Florida, where Allistair’s employment contract originated, it is illegal to collude, confederate or combine with two or more employers to prevent, prohibit or actively blacklist someone from gainful employment."
Which there is evidence to prove.
True enough Allistair's a bastard considering how he outed that trans person (considering major transphobia in society), but the law there describes the actions of those involved in that discussion as collusion.
"The criticisms were not "debunked" but "denied". "Debunked" is a success verb that implies more than simple denial. Having looked at the leaked emails, I would say that the allegations of collusion are largely and obviously true. So there's not really any justification for us to go further than "denied"." - Jimmy Wales discussing the gg wiki page.
It's unethical. (So is Allistair, but he'll never work in that industry again IMO)
Not sure what point(s) you're trying to make here? Not saying there isn't one or that it's bad, but this seems like it's a response to something, I just can't figure out what.
Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't necessarily mean they're uneducated. That's kinda ridiculous.
True, there isn't a necessary relationship between disagreement and lack of education. @dislekcia is arguing that there's a relationship between "assuming that a woman making internet videos about problematic tropes and reviewers writing about sexist content is clear indication that there's a feminazi hate mob controlling video games and conspiring to break into men's houses to steal their video games before brainwash developers into only including trans women of colour as playable characters," and "lack's education with regards to feminism and cultural criticism." Also, as someone who's literally been educated on this sort of thing, I would certainly agree with the observation that the majority of disagreements with Sarkeesian's web series and with the notion of cultural criticism within the gaming press are the result of a fundamental misapprehension of intersectional feminism(s) and the application of critical analytic tools to media.
If the only solution you're willing to accept is education, I'd like to hear your plan for that.
I'd also quite like to hear about this. Not convinced it'd be of much help now, GG is unlikely to actually engage with any text presented to them, but even as a hypothetical discussion about future preventative measures to try to stop this sort of thing from happening again, do you think it'd be possible to compile a sort of 'anti-GG 101' syllabus, and what would that entail?
Not entirely relevant, but this happened. I think we could all use the LOLs:
No I understand that, and femfreq has every right to speak about whatever. The issue as I've perceived it on many accounts is that nobody called her out on stuff that was questionable, including her references that included a fair amount of "sex-negative" feminist writers.
Buuuuut Liana K made the good point that nobody really wanted to be the person to call her out, for obvious reasons. Which IMO didn't help the situation.
People perceived that all as an ethical issue in that it didn't conform to this "– Support the open and civil exchange of views, even views they find repugnant." line of of the SPJ ethics code and other lines.
This has been furthered by several journalists, driving the situation further down the ethics route. IMO
wrt to psyops stuff, there have been several instances of troll groups including something awful, gnaa, goons etc stating that they're being paid to harass both sides. Whether that in itself is an action attributable to trolling, I have absolutely no idea.
But the reality is that 3rd parties are present and doing weird stuff for unknown reasons. Would love for the fbi to deal with that, so people can actually have a discussion.
And wrt "Anti-GG 101" syllabus, I think it'd boil down to something pretty simple. Don't accuse people of doing things without proof, and don't stereotype people based on what you think about gamers, it's bound to irritate folks. Especially the misogynist fat white cis male basement dweller bit. It's just really unnecessary. Considering the anti side in this is claiming the moral highground in the whole thing, I've seen way too many attacks on people, including dehumanizing real people, which really is not something that anyone striving for diversity should be doing, IMO..
The banner waving and warmongering on either side is just making it worse for everybody.
... don't stereotype people based on what you think about gamers, it's bound to irritate folks. Especially the misogynist fat white cis male basement dweller bit. It's just really unnecessary.
How the heck did this creep into the current conversation again?
In my opinion, the only way the conversation can continue in any sort of meaningful way is is #GamerGate ceased to exist. If the whole thing is about what club one belongs to rather than about individual issues, it achieves nothing. "You're either with me, or you're with the terrorists" - no.
No I understand that, and femfreq has every right to speak about whatever. The issue as I've perceived it on many accounts is that nobody called her out on stuff that was questionable, including her references that included a fair amount of "sex-negative" feminist writers.
Well many people do call her out on what they see as questionable, including you on this forum, and isn't there thousands of hours of YouTube videos doing just that? So that cannot really be the issue at all.
No I understand that, and femfreq has every right to speak about whatever. The issue as I've perceived it on many accounts is that nobody called her out on stuff that was questionable, including her references that included a fair amount of "sex-negative" feminist writers.
This is a fairly new criticism and it certainly didn't originate within GamerGate. Furthermore the vitriol has been going on for two years, her work didn't talk about sex workers until two months ago. It's certainly a valid issue, but the notion that this has been the concern of her critics all along when disphits like Phil Mason are spending 20 minutes shouting that a straw man is "LYING. SHE LIES TO PEOPLE AND SHE SCAMMED KICKSTARTER. SHE'S SOOOOOO BUSTED," is absurd.
Buuuuut Liana K made the good point that nobody really wanted to be the person to call her out, for obvious reasons. Which IMO didn't help the situation.
Yep, waiting for the day we can have this discussion. It'll be a good one to have. Unfortunately I do believe that having it now will just further contribute to the harassment.
People perceived that all as an ethical issue in that it didn't conform to this "– Support the open and civil exchange of views, even views they find repugnant." line of of the SPJ ethics code and other lines.
Are you referring to Sarkeesian not allowing comments on her videos? She's not a journalist. She isn't beholden to the SPJ ethics code. That's the baffling thing about this. GG is so intent on convincing us this is about ehtics, but their discourse overwhelmingly makes reference to Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and Brianna Wu, none of whom are journalists.
And wrt "Anti-GG 101" syllabus, I think it'd boil down to something pretty simple. Don't accuse people of doing things without proof, and don't stereotype people based on what you think about gamers, it's bound to irritate folks. Especially the misogynist fat white cis male basement dweller bit. It's just really unnecessary. Considering the anti side in this is claiming the moral highground in the whole thing, I've seen way too many attacks on people, including dehumanizing real people, which really is not something that anyone striving for diversity should be doing, IMO..
Well I was thinking more along the lines of some articles outlining the argument for 'maybe don't threaten to rape and/or murder people who irritate you', but you know, that's just me claiming the moral high ground.
Yep, waiting for the day we can have this discussion. It'll be a good one to have. Unfortunately I do believe that having it now will just further contribute to the harassment.
Are you referring to Sarkeesian not allowing comments on her videos? She's not a journalist. She isn't beholden to the SPJ ethics code. That's the baffling thing about this. GG is so intent on convincing us this is about ehtics, but their discourse overwhelmingly makes reference to Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and Brianna Wu, none of whom are journalists.
No I'm referring to overall press coverage. Didn't mention her comments.
Well I was thinking more along the lines of some articles outlining the argument for 'maybe don't threaten to rape and/or murder people who irritate you', but you know, that's just me claiming the moral high ground.
I don't know why you're being like that. I hate that people are being threatened as much as you do.
But IGN's article stating "The argument against covering harassment is that it plays into the hands of the aggressors, who measure their payoff by the disruptions they cause."
Kind of indicates my stance on why that coverage is problematic.
I agree with this entirely. On the flipside, there's also a fair bit of people sticking the hashtag on things without legitimate reason or connection.
GamerGate-shaming isn't helping anyone, as has been pointed out in the Slate article. What that article is saying isn't legitimising the hashtag, it's asking the question what can actually be done to deal with it in an effective way.
WHAT DIDN’T WORK
Ending Gamergate will not happen by moral grandstanding. Let’s quickly go over tactics that have been tried so far to stop Gamergate, none of which have worked:
Hyperbolic comparisons of Gamergate to ISIS, the KKK, fascists, terrorists, Ebola, child pornography, etc., etc. Endless ridicule and antagonism of Gamergaters on Twitter. Convenient erasure of Gamergate’s many female, LGBTQ, and minority members, however wrong they may be. Telling Intel and others they are misogynist cowards when they pull advertising. Hauling out celebrities to condemn Gamergate and telling them their heroes hate them. Threatening to blacklist Gamergate members from the gaming industry. Wishful-thinking pieces like “So Long, Gamergate.” Fire-and-brimstone sermons like “Stop supporting Gamergate.” Shutting all gamers (not just Gamergate members) out of media discourse. The old “video games cause violence” canard, unproven as ever. Defective quantitative analysis. Defective social science. Obtuse social theorizing.
I don't know why you're being like that. I hate that people are being threatened as much as you do.
I have little doubt of that. But the things that you say, irrespective of your intentions, come across as condoning that harassment. If I ask the question as to what information might have left people better informed about feminism and how responding to it in the most puerile way possible is maybe not the best way to be taken seriously, and your first response is "the answer is simple, tell the press not to make fun of us or we'll get irritated," it makes it sound like you're blaming the press for the harassment. Like this all could have been prevented if the press hadn't called out shitty behaviour, and that harassment is justified because "the press said mean things about us."
But IGN's article stating "The argument against covering harassment is that it plays into the hands of the aggressors, who measure their payoff by the disruptions they cause."
Kind of indicates my stance on why that coverage is problematic.
I feel that failing to acknowledge it or publicly condemn the actions of your readership that you find most foul is problematic. Not that I don't see the value in trying not to paint targets on women's backs while making your own moral stand. It's not entirely relevant, but I feel like IGN beat so far around the bush it wasn't even within arm's reach. This reads far more like a desperate attempt to not pick a side than a genuine examination of the merits and downfalls of those arguments.
I found a corpus analysis of one of the GG hotbeds (either 8chan or Kotaku In Action) that suggests that the lexemes 'corruption' and 'ethics' are used significantly less than cognates of 'feminist' and 'SJW' and still quite a bit less than the three aforementioned women. I'll see if I can find a link. I'm certainly open to being wrong about this, statistics aren't really my thing :)
I have little doubt of that. But the things that you say, irrespective of your intentions, come across as condoning that harassment. If I ask the question as to what information might have left people better informed about feminism and how responding to it in the most puerile way possible is maybe not the best way to be taken seriously, and your first response is "the answer is simple, tell the press not to make fun of us or we'll get irritated," it makes it sound like you're blaming the press for the harassment. Like this all could have been prevented if the press hadn't called out shitty behaviour, and that harassment is justified because "the press said mean things about us."
It's not necessarily about information, but rather about open discourse. Had there been open discourse, none of this would've happened in my opinion.
There would have been no controversy, and controversy is troll breeding territory, so it would've been less of a thing.
This especially regarding Anita imo. If she'd discussed with other reasonable people regarding opposing views, things might not have been the way they are. But this is a speculative assertion.
I found a corpus analysis of one of the GG hotbeds (either 8chan or Kotaku In Action) that suggests that the lexemes 'corruption' and 'ethics' are used significantly less than cognates of 'feminist' and 'SJW' and still quite a bit less than the three aforementioned women. I'll see if I can find a link. I'm certainly open to being wrong about this, statistics aren't really my thing :)
Yeah I saw one of those and added in "ethics" as a term and it showed ethics and corruption as being doubly as spoken about as "sjw's" / feminism.
Can't remember what the syntax was to do that atm though, so I can't recreate it properly :/
@eSculpt Damn, can't find the one stating the opposite now, which is making me question its existence :P
Regarding open discourse: the controversy, insofar as GG is concerned, began when Eron Gjoni posted about his breakup with Zoe Quinn. People got really angry about the possibility that Quinn had used a personal relationship or sexual favours to leverage a positive review, that claim is still thrown around despite it having been debunked within the week of it appearing. This is ultimately the catalyst for GG, and I'm not sure what open discourse would look like here or how it would have prevented the controversy?
As for Sarkeesian, she was being sent death and rape threats, as much as I would have liked to have seen lengthy debates about her videos, I can't fault her for not wanting to see more of that abuse on the comment threads for her videos. And we both know that if she had left the comments open and received the inevitable vitriol, the dominant criticism would have been "why is she complaining about this? It's the internet, people are awful. If she doesn't want to deal with harassment she should turn the comments off." There was no way she was going to win when it came to this issue.
Also, while level criticism discussing her discourse around sex work and sex workers has appeared recently, I feel like there hasn't been anything worth paying attention to up until now. Everything I've seen has just been people shouting about her being a liar and cherry-picking. Can you point to someone you'd consider a reasonable person with opposing views (stuff that isn't about the sex worker business, that's easy enough to find)? I genuinely would be interested in engaging with good criticism of her work.
But I don't know. I didn't really notice much until "gamers are dead" articles. Many people noticed at that point in time.
Regarding open discourse in Anita's case, I'm not talking about comments. She can leave the comments off if she likes. I'm referring to some kind of public debate, be it video or textual. That might've helped. Maybe.
who knows.
But in terms of there not being anything worth paying attention to, that's my point. There wasn't any reasonable coverage of opposing views regarding her assertions by journalists
But in terms of there not being anything worth paying attention to, that's my point. There wasn't any reasonable coverage of opposing views regarding her assertions by journalists
That's what I'm asking though, where are the opposing views coming from and which ones are worth taking into account? In my experience, which is admittedly fairly limited, there are a lot of opposing views, but none worth the time it'd take to read/watch/listen to their arguments. Also, did journalists neglect to cover this reasonable opposition because of whatever reasons, or did they not cover it because it just doesn't exist?
I have no idea what it means, but it's kinda pretty to look at
That's a social graph, the dots are either individual tweets, or accounts. The larger the dot, the more impact the dot has standalone - and the more connections to it, the greater reach it has in a network. What you're really seeing there is the hothouse of GG tweets being repeated in a massive echo chamber (the online equivalent of a massive pep rally).
That one blue dot at the center of the anti-gg vortex is likely a single, popular tweet, or just a popular account (@femfreq maybe?) that everyone else is retweeting to their respective networks.
tl;dr It tells us that online activists engage in more online activism - something that should be self-evident. It also points out, much to my dismay, that the forces of rationality are far outweighed by the angry shouts of the "oppressed".
I genuinely would be interested in engaging with good criticism of her work.
By which you mean the Tropes vs Women in Video Games series? I found it fascinating myself - very densely researched, tons of good examples, excellent editing and post-production. If there's one criticism I have, it's that her work doesn't really include the views of game developers - some interviews/discussions would have been nice, instead of a dense, whistle-stop tour about everything bad that's ever happened to a female character in a video game.
Unless if you were referring to some other work I'm not aware of :P
(The stats are mildly interesting, but I don't think one can read toooooo much in them. Look for example how the image here differs from the one @eSculpt posted. Mining tweets for data like this is quite difficult to do properly, so you have to be careful with any conclusions. I did a few tests using Topsy, and it's quite easy to get the graphs to say different things.)
(The stats are mildly interesting, but I don't think one can read toooooo much in them. Look for example how the image here differs from the one @eSculpt posted. Mining tweets for data like this is quite difficult to do properly, so you have to be careful with any conclusions. I did a few tests using Topsy, and it's quite easy to get the graphs to say different things.)
Those are some good stats, thanks! This graph is particularly telling:
Roughly 25% of all Gamergate activity is coming from accounts created in the last two months.
There might be a fair amount of sockpuppet accounts there, just to get the messages signal-boosted. I saw a similar thing when looking into a SA retailer chain's twitter promotion - lots of fake accounts were registered to artificially inflate follower and retweet counts.
The main reason the green/purple graph looks different is that @eSculpt's graph will be looking at message reach, and your graph is looking at number of people. So in the 72 hour window that the sample was run, the number of people/accounts on each side of the debate looks more balanced, but when you look at the virality of the messages coming out of the GG camp (over a different time scale too, probably), they reach a wider audience.
Comments
The main thing with GamerGate is: We don't need it.
Ethical issues in games reporting gets called out all the time, have been for years, and mostly by more reasonable people. And calling out actual problems with games reporting - you won't find much of that in the confused mess that is that hashtag.
And calling for reviewers to review without "politics"?? - well screw that, you might as well post a spec sheet, score/10, trailer, and be done with it.
People like @brondin have shown how media is always complicit in selecting what to show, it's our job as media consumers to find facts and draw conclusions from multiple sources. GG is all about muddying the waters to prevent exactly that from happening so that the misogynistic minority that's very much in control of it's messages can keep attacking women in order to "make examples out of them". There is only one side of the story: Reality. That's basically the entire point. Women are afraid. GG wins when that happens, that's what they want. The fact that so many people (way more than are actively harassing women) are willing to dismiss that this venomous harassment is happening in order to talk about non-issues is a master-stroke for the harassers. Unfortunately, those women are just repeating already debunked accusations. That doesn't stop those accusations from harming people though. How many otherwise nice people that didn't identify with GG before are going to end up supporting a movement whose outcomes have been so incredibly harmful now because of nothing but already disproven lies? That's a huge problem.
It's also irrelevant that these people are women. Women can be misogynist and sexist too. Women can, through their actions, support misogyny and sexism. That's one of the tragedies of our society and having a vagina doesn't give people a free pass from having the outcomes of their affiliated movements evaluated. Nor does holding up token people of a specific subtype that support a largely discriminatory message absolve people of the responsibility for that discrimination. I'm sorry, but having watched a few of those videos that people like MundaneMatt and InternetAristocrat have put out there about this, they are not moderate, nor are they spectators. They're active participants in the sexism that's driving the core of GG. I would be very, very skeptical of any conversations with them as well, based on their demonstrated abilities to twist reason in outright lies and their poor exhibition of logic. It's like, why would you bother listening to Ken Ham trying to talk about evolution - it's not a useful thing to do.
As for GGers making mistakes. I dunno, I feel like GGers have done this masterfully: They've managed to surround themselves with a self-reinforcing ring of people that they can hide behind and continue their campaigns of attacks against women. They've managed to convince these otherwise well-meaning people to repeat lies in order to confuse issues and prevent discussion, in fact they've even managed to convince these people that no discussion is even possible - that they're fighting for a cause so just it doesn't require empathy. And they've even granted them the name of their movement that was started in harassment and misogyny, they let them call themselves GamerGaters proudly - all the while knowing that they're just puppets.
I think the core GGers are terrifying people. These are their "operations". Polygon reviewed the game. That's basically it. That review doesn't stop anyone from playing the game. The opinions of the reviewer might allow people to discuss things like sexual representation in games in a way that they had never thought of before. How is that bad? How is that attacking anyone? How, in all honestly, does that justify attacking anyone?
As for that question I posted from the interview, it boggles my mind that people don't go "Wait, why is there all that troubling, racist and sexist content in the game if it doesn't have anything to do with the mechanics?" - the whole act of dismissing troubling content for the sake of mechanics that don't have anything to do with them is what makes many people think that gamers are really, really weird. That dismissal is only possible from a perspective of massive privilege, which is what's been pointed out multiple times... Unfortunately that seems to make certain insecure people want to lash out instead of try to understand why their actions are hard for others to rationalise. People are reacting to the actions of GamerGate as a movement. The things that GG proclaims as victories are sickening. The things that GGers say they're actually trying to fix are lies and trumped up accusations with no basis in reality. Is it any surprise that people are saying that GG is seriously worrying? What does anyone get from being part of GG now? And what discussions can only be had from the platform of falsehoods provided by GG? Why do people need it, if not to hide behind it while harassing people?
The burning is being done by GG, that's what's attacking women and driving them out of the industry instead of encouraging their voices, that's what's making mainstream media talk about gamers as the misogynist basement-dwelling entitled asshat stereotype (because that's what they're acting like), that's what people are reacting to. It really sucks that GG is trying to paint opposition to their outcomes as negative by doing false equivalence campaigns like trying to equate people's reactions to GG tweetspam accounts with concerted efforts at harassing single individuals across their entire visible lives. That's just not something that you can compare (also, people are quick to point out that ANY harassment is bad).
Sorry, I meant the press not the industry. I feel that in the early days (10 coordinated gamers are dead articles in one day) certain outlets just added fuel to the fire, rather than tried to put it out.
@rustybroomhandle
I agree that gamergate isn't needed. My point is that the initial reaction of the press and outspoken indie dev's just contributed to the problem. If the press had come out with a more level headed approach to this out of the gate, it would have died down. If pro gaters like MundaneMatt or InternetAristrocat had a civil debate or discussion with members of the press or devs on a neutral platform or podcast, it would have died down. The best thing about debates is that they usually show the true nature of participants to the audience more often that not. After the debate no one could make accusations of one sided or biased coverage. The audience would be able to make a fairly informed decision. I feel this could have ended so soon if this approach was taken. Unfortunately this never happened, this wont ever happen. Instead the press lashed out against pro gaters with articles and what I consider to be shaming tactics. In the end gamergaters feel vindicated and keep "fighting back". This does more harm then good because it makes discussion impossible, it creates a with us or against us environment. As it stands, I don't see this ending. I'm worried that after the New York times article some extreme pro gaters are going to do something extremely stupid, like real world stupid. It should never have made it this far.
A group that self-identifies as some kind of closed outcasts, gets offended when it is pointed out that their closed/exclusive group is actually not as closed and exclusive as they would like. That's a problem.
This is also the source of why some of them are using the chance to jump all over casual games or anything they don't deem to be true games.
As for the bit about gamers still being hostile to women in the event that this ever dies down: GG is largely driven by that hostility, it's been around for a long time, and it's going to stick around. I don't see how anything the media could have done would have resulted in some of these people going "oh shit! You're right, the patriarchy is real and I was totally unaware of the existence of my privilege. I should go apologise to all those women I sent death threats to." If the media doesn't outright condemn what's going on, they create wiggle room for the interpretation that the silly bullshit might have some legitimacy. There's no need to hold debates between the two sides of the issue, because "wimmin should get out of mah gaemz" is not a position that anybody should be putting forward or listening to, and it isn't worth the time of day it'd take to record a debate for a podcast.
Regarding the death of gamers articles, I've said it a bunch of times, but the backlash there was clearly a result of having only read the headline or being entirely unwilling to engage with the arguments being made in those articles.
I will say though, for all the shit that's gone down since this "movement" started, the best thing to come out of it so far is a clear demand for unbiased journalism, and if that's the only output GG is remembered for (and if it makes marketing companies rethink hype marketing in general) that'll be a good thing.
Oh wait, who am I kidding, it's commercial journalism. It's always going to be biased, has been since the dawn of time, and will be until our species is wiped from the earth.
http://blip.tv/foldablehuman/s4e7-gamergate-7071206
I think the biggest thing for me is the idea that every member of GamerGate enjoys the outcomes of the harassment perpetuated by a few within the movement, even if a specific self-identifying member doesn't expressly harass themselves, they receive the benefits of being associated with that harassment. The reticence of others to engage with GamerGaters, and the speed with which people give up or capitulate for fear of being dogpiled, as well as the continuous re-stating of sentiment to put the "average" GamerGater at ease (stuff like "I know you're not personally harassing anyone" and the willingess to accept counter-claims of harassment of GG as a meaningful issue) are all as a result of people fearing the harassment that GamerGate wears like a cologne.
This blows my mind.
Scott Benson (responsible for this gem) was posting some really interesting stuff on Twitter this morning, one portion of which could certainly serve as a companion to the point about enjoying the benefits of harassment even if you haven't harassed anyone. I don't think I'll post a full transcript (there's a lot of stuff, paraphrasing will keep this much shorter), if anyone's interested in exact wording, just look for the numbered tweets on his Twitter.
Essentially, every time GG is accused of being a bunch of straight white manbabies, they cite #NotYourShield. While this is largely just the "I can't be racist, I have a black friend" fallacy"I can't be racist, I have a black friend" fallacy, it's true in that there are elements of diversity and intersectionality within GG. That said, the effort to preserve a particular status quo, one where marginalised groups don't have a voice in the gaming industry or its myriad communities, is one that inherently privileges the straight white cis dude contingent, and ensures that their views and tastes are still the ones that are predominantly catered to. We can certainly agree with anyone who says that GG isn't just straight white guys, but we can't deny that GG is pushing for an end goal which is overwhelmingly for straight white guys.
https://medium.com/the-cauldron/why-gamergaters-piss-me-the-f-off-a7e4c7f6d8a6
9/10 would back the Kickstarter.
Speaking of shouting, but of a less positive kind: Did you see the article that Felicia Day wrote about GG and how it makes her feel? Did you see that she got doxxed almost instantly? Did you see Kluwe's response to that level of bullshit?
Worth the (very long) read.
Best one I've read.
By Slate even? Interesting
Only flaw in his reasoning is that Gawker's not the only company involved. Worst wrt publicizing stolen nudes of women and doxxing of hundreds of pages of legal gun owners etc though.
@eSculpt I don't quite follow your statement about Gawker and that Slate article's reasoning? (though to be honest I know very little about Gawker Media)
I mean that Gawker isn't the only press entity that gamergate has in mind, so if gawker did all those things, it wouldn't end the fiasco. It would be a good thing if gawker were to address their ethical issues though.
I could link you the articles where they published stolen nude photos from various women, and the one where they published a ~450 page list of legal gun owners names in NYC. But I really don't want to divert any traffic towards that kind of abhorrent clickbait.
Their ethical issues are beyond gamergate though, they've done some really ghastly things, and refused to delete any of it afaik.
I honestly don't think that it's ethical to hand-wave away the total lack of actual journalistic issues in the things that started gamergate. It's not like GG now is currently awash with addressing journalistic ethics issues either... I also don't think it's ethical to basically lob a whole ton of equivalence fallacies at people in order to overwhelm them into agreeing that Gawker needs to somehow do something to make moderate GGers leave a cause that would have been made successful. He's basically laying all these sins at the feet of Gawker to fix, which is exactly what he accuses Kuchera of later.
That final jab at Ben Kuchera is also really weird... The quote in question makes perfect sense: The legacy of GG will be the light it shone on how badly women are treated in the games industry. That's not magically transferring the sins of (unnamed, but we're sure they're bad, right?) developers onto otherwise innocent GG moderates. It's addressing how GG has made mainstream media talk about video game sexism from an industry-wide perspective, complete with handy constantly-renewing reference cases of rampant misogyny. That's not a thing Kuchera is trying to rhetorically shoehorn onto GG, that's what's already happening and what it'll be remembered for more than anything else.
And nowhere in this piece is the actual solution to GG mentioned: Education. I agree that the GG moderates are what's made it last so long (and that's exactly why they were courted by the crunchy core of assholes), but the issue at the heart of keeping those moderates in the movement is the simple lack of understanding they have about the concepts of both feminism/sexism and journalistic ethics. The idea that criticism of sexist tropes in a thing someone loves automatically calls that person a sexist is logically incoherent. The idea that enthusiast journalists who are working hard to increase the transparency of their field should be the ones whose publishing agencies are targeted through their advertisers is so incredibly against the concepts of journalistic integrity that it boggles the mind. Yet these two concepts are at the core of GG moderates self-identifying with the movement. That and the willful lack of comprehension that when someone writes a thing about "gamers" being dead, they're not the same as people that hit you when you were young.
The only thing that will stop GG is the illumination of minds to the misconceptions they hold. If you know a way to do that in a viciously polarised environment, short of a frame-of-reference reset after a horrible tragedy, please share it.
I don't think anyone thinks education is a bad idea. I can't imagine anyone needing convincing that changing the worldview of the people who make up GamerGate would solve the problem. I'd assume that that Slate writer would totally agree that education would solve the problem. But you yourself point out some major problems in achieving that in the immediate future.
If the only solution you're willing to accept is education, I'd like to hear your plan for that.
Which there is evidence to prove.
True enough Allistair's a bastard considering how he outed that trans person (considering major transphobia in society), but the law there describes the actions of those involved in that discussion as collusion.
"The criticisms were not "debunked" but "denied". "Debunked" is a success verb that implies more than simple denial. Having looked at the leaked emails, I would say that the allegations of collusion are largely and obviously true. So there's not really any justification for us to go further than "denied"." - Jimmy Wales discussing the gg wiki page.
It's unethical. (So is Allistair, but he'll never work in that industry again IMO)
Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't necessarily mean they're uneducated. That's kinda ridiculous.
Not entirely relevant, but this happened. I think we could all use the LOLs:
FUCKING PSY OPS YOU GUYS
No I understand that, and femfreq has every right to speak about whatever. The issue as I've perceived it on many accounts is that nobody called her out on stuff that was questionable, including her references that included a fair amount of "sex-negative" feminist writers.
Buuuuut Liana K made the good point that nobody really wanted to be the person to call her out, for obvious reasons.
Which IMO didn't help the situation.
People perceived that all as an ethical issue in that it didn't conform to this
"– Support the open and civil exchange of views, even views they find repugnant."
line of of the SPJ ethics code and other lines.
This has been furthered by several journalists, driving the situation further down the ethics route. IMO
wrt to psyops stuff, there have been several instances of troll groups including something awful, gnaa, goons etc stating that they're being paid to harass both sides.
Whether that in itself is an action attributable to trolling, I have absolutely no idea.
But the reality is that 3rd parties are present and doing weird stuff for unknown reasons.
Would love for the fbi to deal with that, so people can actually have a discussion.
And wrt "Anti-GG 101" syllabus, I think it'd boil down to something pretty simple. Don't accuse people of doing things without proof, and don't stereotype people based on what you think about gamers, it's bound to irritate folks. Especially the misogynist fat white cis male basement dweller bit. It's just really unnecessary. Considering the anti side in this is claiming the moral highground in the whole thing, I've seen way too many attacks on people, including dehumanizing real people, which really is not something that anyone striving for diversity should be doing, IMO..
The banner waving and warmongering on either side is just making it worse for everybody.
In my opinion, the only way the conversation can continue in any sort of meaningful way is is #GamerGate ceased to exist. If the whole thing is about what club one belongs to rather than about individual issues, it achieves nothing. "You're either with me, or you're with the terrorists" - no.
If you see something you disagree with, call it out - but don't call it out in the name of #GamerGate or #whateverthehellthenextbandwagonis.
I hate that people are being threatened as much as you do.
But IGN's article stating "The argument against covering harassment is that it plays into the hands of the aggressors, who measure their payoff by the disruptions they cause."
Kind of indicates my stance on why that coverage is problematic.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/10/24/on-the-problem-of-harassment
Unless you know of more pseudonyms I can add in here?
http://topsy.com/analytics?q1=#GamerGate&q2=#GamerGate -Anita -sarkeesian -@thequinnspiracy -@femfreq -zoe -quinn -zq -lw -lwu -@spacekatgal -brianna -wu -lw1 -lw2 -lw3&via=Topsy
Looks like 5% at most based on this
GamerGate-shaming isn't helping anyone, as has been pointed out in the Slate article. What that article is saying isn't legitimising the hashtag, it's asking the question what can actually be done to deal with it in an effective way. I completely agree with this sentiment.
There would have been no controversy, and controversy is troll breeding territory, so it would've been less of a thing.
This especially regarding Anita imo. If she'd discussed with other reasonable people regarding opposing views, things might not have been the way they are. But this is a speculative assertion. Yeah I saw one of those and added in "ethics" as a term and it showed ethics and corruption as being doubly as spoken about as "sjw's" / feminism.
Can't remember what the syntax was to do that atm though, so I can't recreate it properly :/
Regarding open discourse: the controversy, insofar as GG is concerned, began when Eron Gjoni posted about his breakup with Zoe Quinn. People got really angry about the possibility that Quinn had used a personal relationship or sexual favours to leverage a positive review, that claim is still thrown around despite it having been debunked within the week of it appearing. This is ultimately the catalyst for GG, and I'm not sure what open discourse would look like here or how it would have prevented the controversy?
As for Sarkeesian, she was being sent death and rape threats, as much as I would have liked to have seen lengthy debates about her videos, I can't fault her for not wanting to see more of that abuse on the comment threads for her videos. And we both know that if she had left the comments open and received the inevitable vitriol, the dominant criticism would have been "why is she complaining about this? It's the internet, people are awful. If she doesn't want to deal with harassment she should turn the comments off." There was no way she was going to win when it came to this issue.
Also, while level criticism discussing her discourse around sex work and sex workers has appeared recently, I feel like there hasn't been anything worth paying attention to up until now. Everything I've seen has just been people shouting about her being a liar and cherry-picking. Can you point to someone you'd consider a reasonable person with opposing views (stuff that isn't about the sex worker business, that's easy enough to find)? I genuinely would be interested in engaging with good criticism of her work.
charted RT networks based on some data found somewhere.
big cluster = GG
cluster on the left that looks like a black hole = anti-gg
apparently.
I have no idea what it means, but it's kinda pretty to look at
Re ZQ, I think people were more concerned over the potential allegations of "gaslighting" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
But I haven't read his post. Don't plan to.
But I don't know. I didn't really notice much until "gamers are dead" articles. Many people noticed at that point in time.
Regarding open discourse in Anita's case, I'm not talking about comments. She can leave the comments off if she likes. I'm referring to some kind of public debate, be it video or textual. That might've helped. Maybe.
who knows.
But in terms of there not being anything worth paying attention to, that's my point. There wasn't any reasonable coverage of opposing views regarding her assertions by journalists
That one blue dot at the center of the anti-gg vortex is likely a single, popular tweet, or just a popular account (@femfreq maybe?) that everyone else is retweeting to their respective networks.
tl;dr It tells us that online activists engage in more online activism - something that should be self-evident. It also points out, much to my dismay, that the forces of rationality are far outweighed by the angry shouts of the "oppressed".
Unless if you were referring to some other work I'm not aware of :P
From: https://medium.com/message/72-hours-of-gamergate-e00513f7cf5d
The bigger image at the site has labels.
More stats: http://www.newsweek.com/gamergate-about-media-ethics-or-harassing-women-harassment-data-show-279736
(The stats are mildly interesting, but I don't think one can read toooooo much in them. Look for example how the image here differs from the one @eSculpt posted. Mining tweets for data like this is quite difficult to do properly, so you have to be careful with any conclusions. I did a few tests using Topsy, and it's quite easy to get the graphs to say different things.)
The main reason the green/purple graph looks different is that @eSculpt's graph will be looking at message reach, and your graph is looking at number of people. So in the 72 hour window that the sample was run, the number of people/accounts on each side of the debate looks more balanced, but when you look at the virality of the messages coming out of the GG camp (over a different time scale too, probably), they reach a wider audience.