Inb4 Gamergate was never about misogyny or feminism. It was about getting some damn ethics into gaming journalism and the people against gamergate made it about feminism and misogyny. Seriously what’s so damn offensive about wanting there to actually be fair and unbiased reviews of games so that people don’t end up being duped into buying a game that’s honestly shit? Seriously Gamergate was about gaming to begin with, to get more ethics into gaming journalism and stop the rampant amount of corruption within gaming journalism, it just happens that when we called someone out for essentially bribing journalists into making good reviews for her game that it devolved into a shitstorm of her using the shield of feminism and misogyny to defend herself when she shouldn’t have been bribing people in the first place.
hi, i’m just curious, who did you call out for bribing what journalists into making what good reviews? can you link me to these reviews? i’d be very interested in seeing them
i hope they actually exist or you’d be actively reporting falsehoods many months after the fact, which would be the polar opposite of ethical journalism! but i’m sure that’s not the case
I apologize for this and I cannot find much else outside of the accusations made by Zoe Quinn’s boyfriend, although I do know a nice article that explains it without taking a side here: X , I apologize for being a bit too passionate at the time and saying these things without backing them up and in the future I will actually research this before making any claims.
Again I apologize and I hope everyone has a nice day.
EDIT: I would also like to point out that yes, I know this article has a lot of viewpoints that conflict with those of gamergate as well as says some things I don’t agree with, but it still stands that this is one of the few articles i’ve found where it does try to get all the facts in order and actually talk about what started all this instead of devolving into falsehoods and taking one side or the other.
i appreciate this but i would like to really drive this home:
gamergate is a movement that has claimed, the entire time, to be concerned with ethics in journalism
and yet you were spreading a falsehood about the very story that spawned the movement, five months later!
but this isn’t about blaming you
step back and consider carefully: why did you think there were positive reviews?
where did you hear that?
and if those reviews never existed: how did you go this entire time without ever knowing? until encountering me, someone who is opposed to gamergate? someone that gamergate would insist “hates ethics”, whatever that means
you aren’t the first person i’ve encountered to believe that there were reviews involved, and you surely won’t be the last. the early days of gamergate were predicated on spreading gossip around.
was it deliberate? who knows. i can tell you that i have seen gamergate spread falsehoods with orders of magnitude more enthusiasm than i have ever seen them attempt to spread retractions. if something is wrong it’s just quietly forgotten (at best); there is never any attempt to repair the damage.
is this really the movement you’re going to trust to push for ethical journalism? a movement that fed you a complete fabrication about its own origins and let you believe it for half a year, even though ten seconds of google would prove it wrong?
i noticed you replied to someone else who had the same question with this post:
That and then there’s Brianna Wu’s game revolution 60 which has received really really really suspiciously good reviews.
so you are suggesting that maybe another game developer is also bribing for game reviews, based on this hard-hitting evidence:
- you don’t like the game
- someone else did it too (which is false)
that’s it. that’s your entire train of thought. is this your gold standard for what unbiased ethical journalism should look like?
meanwhile, gaming has had known problems for years and years, and gamergate is conspicuously ignoring them in favor of picking on indie devs. where is the outcry over poor working conditions, extreme long hours towards release, vastly overinflated scores, being funded via ads by the very products you’re reviewing, tying employees’ bonuses to metacritic scores? certainly not coming from gamergate — they are too busy picking on the likes of zoe (not a journalist) and brianna (not a journalist) and randi (not a journalist).
what has this all accomplished? i guess they got intel to briefly pull ads from gamasutra over a single editorial. in other words they were trying to control the kinds of articles gaming websites published by influencing the advertisers. clearly that’s a great step on the way to unbiased and ethical journalism.
gamergate is an angry mob: convinced it’s justified in going to any extreme to get what it wants. but it doesn’t know what it wants, it only knows that it’s angry, so it’ll just keep hopping between targets. everyone else can either join, get out of the way, or get trampled. the only tangible influence it has had on the gaming ecosystem for me is to make twitter suck more.
sorry for this wordnado but, you know, perhaps consider hitching your cart to a different horse.
“we just wanted to stem the corruption in gaming journalism” — people who will gleefully spam unrelated hashtags, weave vast conspiracy theories, ally with whoever is politically convenient no matter how reprehensible, and spread lies that they never bother to retract
“we are NOT YOUR SHIELD” — people who literally claim they cannot be racist or sexist because some black people and women agree with them
“why are people against us? i don’t understand”
Inb4 Gamergate was never about misogyny or feminism. It was about getting some damn ethics into gaming journalism and the people against gamergate made it about feminism and misogyny. Seriously what’s so damn offensive about wanting there to actually be fair and unbiased reviews of games so that people don’t end up being duped into buying a game that’s honestly shit? Seriously Gamergate was about gaming to begin with, to get more ethics into gaming journalism and stop the rampant amount of corruption within gaming journalism, it just happens that when we called someone out for essentially bribing journalists into making good reviews for her game that it devolved into a shitstorm of her using the shield of feminism and misogyny to defend herself when she shouldn’t have been bribing people in the first place.
hi, i’m just curious, who did you call out for bribing what journalists into making what good reviews? can you link me to these reviews? i’d be very interested in seeing them
i hope they actually exist or you’d be actively reporting falsehoods many months after the fact, which would be the polar opposite of ethical journalism! but i’m sure that’s not the case
Anonymous asked:what is this quinnspiracy / gamergate thing i keep hearing about and what does it have to do with jontron? do you have an opinion on it?
oh christ
ok i think it goes something like this
a jilted ex posted a bunch of chat logs and a kinda spiteful-sounding story about how a female game developer, zoe quinn, had cheated on him with a few people in the game industry
reaction 1 was “omg what a dirty slut” because, y'know, gamers. but that turned out to not be popular rhetoric. this is the only place jontron is relevant: he retweeted a comic someone drew that starred zoe graphically in the middle of a gangbang. (probably because he was also in the comic, presented as the voice of reason. but wow.)
a couple of the accused people were writers for internet video game websites, so reaction 2 was a rallying cry for more ethics in game journalism. which on its own would be okay except
(a) the worst dirty laundry by far in game journalism imnsho is how review scores are kept artificially inflated effectively by extortion — if you give a game a bad review, the publisher can just not give you early access to its games any more. which is possibly why only 3% of games have a metascore under 33, versus 9% of movies. but that’s a problem with the publishers, really, and not something journalists can directly control.
(b) none of the journalists zoe had a relationship with gave her game a good review, as was a common refrain. as far as i can find, only one of them wrote about her game at all, and it was months before they were supposed to have hooked up. even the jilted ex confirmed this.
so reaction 2 was kind of complete hogwash as well.
reaction 3 was to devolve rapidly into conspiracy theories and general mudslinging like: zoe was in cahoots with a reddit mod (evidence being that he tweeted at her asking to DM), explaining why tons of posts were deleted from /r/gaming (which the mods claim was to remove personal information); that zoe had actively doxxed and destroyed a gaming charity (based on a reddit comment from someone involved with the charity) (but the charity now explicitly says zoe was not involved); or that zoe had faked being hacked and doxxed (????) because the posted phone number was from a place she’d never lived (my phone number is from pennsylvania where i’ve never lived, welcome to cell phones).
meanwhile, with spectacular timing, anita sarkeesian released another “women vs tropes in video games” video, which i guess showcases a bunch of examples of women as decoration or sex objects in video games, and everyone exploded anew.
faced with all this, basically everyone with a voice shook their heads and tut-tutted at gamers for being big whiny woman-hating baby manchildren. and then there came some murmurings that it might be time to hang up the “gamer” label altogether, because it’s become toxic and insular, and who never plays any games whatsoever?
which brings us, i think, to #gamergate. i’m not actually sure, because its origins and goals and contributors are all incomprehensible. i’ve been told two completely different things:
1. that #gamergate is about journalistic ethics, i.e. doubling down on reaction 2. i was talking to someone last night and asked for an example of “misconduct” he was tired of; he linked me to an article by leigh alexander, one of the people suggesting “gamer” is obsolete. apparently the problem is that she’s a journalist but also runs a consulting firm for game developers, but has never disclosed this “potential conflict of interest” in her articles. i think that’s fucking ludicrous, because if she’s not writing about her clients, there’s not even potential for conflict of interest, right? also, surprise, she’s a woman.
2. that #gamergate is about we’re not gonna take this disrespect of gamers any more. some feathers got ruffled by the fact that the people with an audience in the gaming community are making fun of the people who think they are the gaming community. (this is one of those awkward problems where, well, whose responsibility is it to ostracize toxic members of a group? if anyone’s?) my response to those people is that maybe they should try playing a game online with strangers for two minutes. i tried getting back into tf2 recently and very clearly recall joining a server just in time to hear an exchange of rape jokes. riot has had to pour untold manhours and UI tricks into tricking its players into not being complete assholes. and xbox live is basically infamous. navigating a minefield full of this kind of sludge is not really what i consider a good relaxing time, which is why i basically never play worldwide multiplayer anything. (but thank god for mario kart.) anyway given the long-running reputation self-labeled “gamers” have for being xenophobic and generally hostile to anyone who’s not a straight dude who loves FPSes, being taken aback when journalists point this out is kind of bewildering to me.
the one thing they do seem to agree on is that this isn’t about hating women, except a few thing it is about fighting “SJWs” or something, i don’t know.
a curious observation: most of the people replying to #gamergate tweets (and believe me, if you use the hashtag, you will get replies) are using accounts with a handful of follows/followers, three digits of tweets, and basically nothing except #gamergate replies and retweets. so it’s a bunch of people who don’t even use twitter trying to do twitter activism over a thing they can’t decide the meaning of.
oh and naturally several of the accounts i looked at were also retweeting misogynistic garbage. because gamers.
anyway stay tuned for further developments as the core gamer demographic burrows itself ever deeper up its own collective asshole
zachsrpblog:
me: “gamergate is ineffective at the one thing it claims to fight for, and is actually working against its own goal”
you: “ok yeah but people who AREN’T gamergate have ALSO done bad things which i will now list”
ok but what does that have to do with anything?
the “other side” is practically an illusion, dreamed up by people who are used to settings with two clear sides. (like, you know, in games.) but there is no organized banner under which opponents of ethical journalism (lol) are rallying. and i haven’t identified myself as a member of any particular group of people here, so what group do you think you’re criticizing? i don’t even follow most of gamergate’s nemeses.
i’m gonna guess you’re referring to the original “gamers are over” article, which was written by a gamer and was saying that we should stop pandering to the basement-dwelling scumbags as though they were the only people who play games.
then gamergate came along and did its damnedest to prove that gamers really are as awful as the stereotype, which i totally appreciate
err, yes, that’s how critiquing media works. she says some things she thinks about it; you reflect on those things and agree or disagree or do whatever you want.
and btw as far as i’m aware, the protagonists and the vast majority of characters who actually do anything significant in all of those games are all dudes, so they are not exactly poster children for gender equality
i haven’t watched her videos but fyi, saying something is sexist doesn’t mean it’s actively and pervasively evil. sexism is a common pattern in our culture that takes effort to avoid; pointing it out just means “hey, this fits the pattern, maybe we should make more effort.” it doesn’t even mean games like GTA shouldn’t exist at all. but something is kinda messed up when games like GTA dominate an entire type of media.
i am extremely confused as to how criticizing video games’ portrayal of women is a “fucking horrible thing”
or in any way comparable to anything gamergate has done
reviews are biased. they are informed by the reviewer’s experience. that’s the whole point of them. there is no way to give an unbiased review except to, like, list the system requirements and read the plot summary off of the back of the box. people listen to game reviewers because they trust the reviewers’ opinions.
you can take the big obvious parts of your bias into account, e.g. probably avoid reviewing genres you just don’t like at all, but expecting a completely objective description of whether something is fun doesn’t make any sense.
your two example quotes are basically the same thing, really. no one reads a review expecting anything but the reviewer’s opinion, so it’s a complete waste of time to guard every sentence with “this is my opinion btw!”.
ok sure you too.