These taleoftales and sunset fucks are so goddamn salty lmao, who knew marketing to SJW’s on SJW’s websites and hiring SJW’s to market your garbage would cause you to sell almost no games and go fucking bankrupt
Its almost as if SJW’s dont play fucking games and real gamers dont like your indie dev shit and politics forced on them while being told they are shit and gamers should die
…
Protip for indie game makers:
Dont force your politics Dont insult your consumer bases Dont pander to people who dont play games Dont hire or market to SJW’s Dont hire Leigh Alexander AT ALL for anything regarding your game Make your games longer than 2 hours Walking simulators are shit so dont make them Gameplay is king Fuck off with your pretentious art projects
list of instructions about what kind of games to make, brought to you by the people who insist it’s censorship to tell game devs what kind of games to make
eta: it’s curious that this is blamed on “‘SJWs’ don’t play games” when i am neck-deep in social justice twitter and i never heard of this game or this studio until they were shutting down. it seems likely the real lesson here is merely: marketing is hard
ps maybe instead of whining about someone else’s game you should make your own lol
Boy gamers are so self-centered they act as though women haven’t been playing video games for decades, and then act horrified when the female gamers who have always been there actually become visible and vocal about the rampant misogyny that has infected the gaming world.
Like seriously, how entitled do you have to be that women saying “it sure would be nice if I wasn’t treated like shit while enjoying the games I play” translates to “I must be catered to” when video games have LITERALLY been catered to men for decades?
I see some of your points here but let me tell you something else, the people on the other side don’t have clean hands either.
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.
Like for example, if you go out and search for a bit you’ll find that people who claim to support social justice have been doing nothing but tarnishing the reputation of gamers as basement-dwelling scumbags. Now this wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t do the same thing they do on tumblr and basically sweep anyone who plays games under the “Gamer rug” as it were and saying that everyone who plays games is like that.
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
Another problem that was prevalent at one point where people like anita sarkeesian were claiming that games like Saints Row, GTA, and Hitman were misogynistic and such other things, despite the fact she did things to make it look like they were misogynistic, in GTA I can ride an airplane to 5000 feet skydive into a granny at the speed of sound because it’s a sandbox game and if anything many of these games have powerful female characters that take no shit from anyone.
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.
My final point being that I may go back to just being neutral on the subject, because both sides have done fucking horrible things and a lot of the time the ends don’t justify the means.
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
By ethics I mean I believe there should be more reviews where the person just gives their honest, straight, opinion on the game like for example Yahtzee Croshaw. If there were more reviews like that then the gamerx themselves would be able to form their own opinions instead of having to trust someone who’s trying to pass off opinion as fact. “This game is awesome and you have to buy it, no if’s and’s or butts.” is a lot different from “This game is quite good in my opinion and if you’re into this type of thing you should go give it a look.” An Unbiased, honest, matter of fact review is the type of goal i’m shooting for when it comes to ethics in gaming journalism.
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!”.
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
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
It’s a head splitting cognitive dissonance to be fielding requests for help from friends who have just gotten swatted at the same time as giving someone else numbers on the harassment and abuse perpetrated by GamerGate because someone he’s talking to thinks it’s over and never had a big impact on…
From the very first, the movement that became #GamerGate was never about “ethics”. (TW for threats, slurs, homophobia, mention of suicide, and so much misogyny.) Document will likely be updated.
hey so if you ever wanted to see a series of screencaps of /r9k/ users plotting and scheming and figuring out how to launch what would later be dubbed #gamergate in an attempt to justify a hate campaign against zoe quinn while also admitting that a lot of them think the post from zoe’s ex is mostly bullshit and that they just wanted an excuse to harass a woman they already hated
all on DAY ONE of this bullshit way back in august
well then here’s this
if you can read this and still think that gamergate is a legitimate consumer revolt movement then i don’t even know what to say to you
“MEN, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
I’m not a games industry professional. I’m not a journalist. I have my hands full with unrelated creative projects and in my precious moments of leisure time, I have Nuclear Throne to beat. Realistically, I have no time for this. ‘This’ being a social media smog monster going by the name of ‘#gamergate, which, like the antagonist of Godzilla versus Hedorah, is a rancorous, shape-shifting cloud composed of every kind of pollutant dumped into the ocean of the internet, driven by a malevolent sentience.
Okay, enough metaphor, Jon. What is #gamergate, literally and specifically? It’s a Twitter hashtag. What else? What else indeed. While various patterns of behaviour coalesce around the hashtag, #gamergate’s protean nature resists attempts toward summary and narrative. It readjusts and reinvents itself in response to attempts to disarm and disperse its noxiousness, subsuming disaffected voices in an act of continual regeneration, cycling through targets, pretexts, manifestoes and moralisms. Say that it began as a harassment campaign targeting a female indie developer, as reported by credible news sites, and you are subjected to contradictory objections - “No, #gamergate began after that, as a reaction to biased reporting” and “No, #gamergate has been building up for years" - as proponents jostle for the story that paints them in the best possible light:
It’s barely a movement and it’s more than a controversy or consumer pressure group; it’s a creature. And the only way to understand a creature like this is to look at the kind of material that circulates within it.
Taking it as read that much of that has descended, at this point, into post-hoc justification and mantra-like repetition, to begin with, here are some of the comments posted on early articles covering #gamergate:
The developer Zoe Quinn is repeatedly brought up, with references to her promiscuity:
Here’s a particularly unpleasant lie that is aggressively perpetuated. It deviates even from the gossip on which it is based in order to exaggerate its claims:
Ignorance, in its various forms, is also plentiful. Here’s the reaction to finding out professional games journalists use a private mailing list to discuss the handling of potential stories with each other:
(At this point, #gamergate became extremely excited that it had found proof of ‘collusion’ among the journalists it had targeted).
A favourite running theme is the rejection of any discussion of sexism in games:
Here’s a widely distributed boycott list, targeting social progressives for ‘ruining our hobby’, promising to ‘hit them where it hurts most’. A similar list was made targeting developers.
It’s worth noting that both hit lists were drawn up well before material was uncovered to implicate any of the above journalists in the wrongdoing they have subsequently been accused of. At this point, the #gamergate argument was simply that ‘SJWs’ (social justice warriors) are unwelcome.
But beneath protestations that #gamergate is about ‘journalistic ethics’, the attacks on feminists continue. Here’s Twitter over the past week:
Sometimes a more extreme political subtext creeps into the open, unguarded. This Twitter user later confirmed to me that he believes ‘the gay agenda’ is part of ‘cultural Marxism’ too.
#gamergate discussion for a long time revolved around high-pitched hostility toward prominent feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian.
Like Zoe Quinn, Sarkeesian has received death threats, but the tactics employed to make her disappear are wide-ranging. Here’s one of many, many attempts to discredit her:
(The ‘gamers are dead’ message refers to a series of articles in the games press exploring the death of the traditional ‘gamer’ identity as the gaming audience diversifies and sexism becomes less acceptable. These articles have been seized on as a pretext for targeting some of the journalists in the above hit list).
One man, Ben Spurr, created a game in which the player is invited to bruise and bloody Sarkeesian. Without a trace of self-awareness, a tweet pinned to the top of his Twitter page reads “The biggest mistake with declaring war on gamers is that they’ve been training their entire lives to combat evil. #gamergate.”
Here’s Davis Aurini, who is crowdfunding for a film that will ‘investigate’ Sarkeesian.
This is a quote from the video this still is taken from:
"And then we have the women themselves. Women, in our culture, have become the most decadent sluts since the fall of Rome … we have the most fat, disgusting women that have ever existed in history and who still think they’re hot stuff … Women have become like dogs that were never trained.”
He appears to have no serious interest in gaming, but he has been a fixture of #gamergate since close to its inception.
Then we have Christina Hoff Summers, who has made a profession of apologising to men for feminism. Her books include The War Against Boys and Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. She has capitalised on #gamergate by releasing a video positing the question ‘Are games sexist?’ In it, she berates ‘the video game gender police’, her accusation being: “They want the male video game culture to die.” She appears to have no serious interest in gaming but she has been embraced by #gamergate, who have even given her an affectionate nickname, ‘Based Mom’.
Another youtube personality, Thunderf00t, is the author of the video ‘Why feminism poisons EVERYTHING’. His popular diatribes against Sarkeesian are one of his sources of income. As well as providing ad revenue, they direct viewers to a donations page. He accused Sarkeesian of personally engineering the suspension of his Twitter account, and made two more (again, profitable) videos articulating his outrage. He has no evidence to back up his claim. He appears to have no serious interest in gaming but his views have been embraced by #gamergate.
There are numerous other youtube video essayists engaged in the project of continually re-invigorating and re-arming the mob, hyperlink-shuttling their enraged audience from one inflammatory call-to-arms to the next.
Here is Milo Yiannopolous, a right wing journalist and probably #gamergate’s most popular and visible supporter:
Before #gamergate, his views on gaming were this: “Personally, I don’t understand grown men wasting their lives playing computer games. It seems a bit sad to me. I mean, we’ve all been sucked in to a few rounds of Candy Crush, but if you want to shoot a gun, why not go to a rifle range?”
Here’s another right wing journalist, James Delingpole, creepily courting #gamergate:
These agitators seem to recognise what #gamergate supporters repeatedly deny: that the driving force behind #gamergate is a reactionary conservatism that seeks to shut down and shut out socially progressive voices in gaming. Of course, in the manner of reactionary conservatism the world over, it seeks to frame this as a rebellion against a censorious ‘political correctness’ imposed by shadowy cabals and corrupt networks of power. If you search the #gamergate hashtag, this is the narrative you’ll find being pushed most concertedly. That and ‘journalistic ethics’, which has become all but the slogan of #gamergate.
However, this shift in emphasis is the result of realising that the anti-feminist angle isn’t very popular. Here are some excavated 4chan chat logs, courtesy of David Futrelle at We Hunt The Mammoth:
Aug 21 17.23.31 <sarahv> The problem is that making it about Zoe sleeping around amounts to a personal attack which, while funny and something she totally deserves, will hurt our chances of pushing the other point … Aug 21 17.23.38 <rd0951> ./v should be focused on the implications of gaming journalism … Aug 21 17.23.47 Because SJWs will cherry-pick the /b/ shit posting and say “See? It’s sexist MRAs!”
Aug 24 15.16.10 <PaperDinosaur> Also Zoe is no longer the target to be focused on Aug 24 15.16.13 <Josh_> ^^ Aug 24 15.16.14 <sarahv> ^^^^^ Aug 24 15.16.18 It’s about the 5guys Aug 24 15.16.21 <sarahv> It always has been Aug 24 15.16.28 <Josh_> It’s more about the journos Aug 24 15.16.33 <PaperDinosaur> She’s done, we’ve wrecked her in a professional manner. … Aug 24 15.16.42 <sarahv> Unfortunately most of the people involved in this seem to be interested in destroying Zoe Aug 24 15.16.46 stop digging up shit on zoe’s past Aug 24 15.16.47 <PaperDinosaur> Now we have to wreck her shield, the people who tried to defend her
Aug 25 07.18.18 <Logan> Any chance we can get Zoe to commit suicide? Aug 25 07.18.29 if we can get more daming evidence Aug 25 07.18.29 I think the [doxxing info removed by DF] is a good shot. Aug 25 07.18.33 <temet> like her fucking a train of lack dudes … Aug 25 07.18.39 <PaperDinosaur> fuck off Logan Aug 25 07.18.39 <temet> black Aug 25 07.18.51 <Logan> Nah 21st century doing a train is so 90s. … Aug 25 07.18.59 <PaperDinosaur> If she commits suicide we lose everything … Aug 25 07.20.34 <PaperDinosaur> If you can’t see how driving Zoe to suicide would fuck this entire thing up then you’re a fucking idiot Aug 25 07.20.41 Imagine the kotaku article … Aug 25 07.20.48 <temet> PaperDinosaur is right Aug 25 07.20.51 <temet> not the right PR play
Meanwhile, #gamergate’s witch-finder generals are out in force, furtively trawling through websites and documents to prove a malignancy, talking of ‘exposing’ - an exposure which they hope will act as intently as the flames that lick the stake. Yet another youtube video essayist, Sargon of Akkad, has set out to prove that feminists have taken over DiGRA, a non-profit academic thinktank with a focus on games. He began his investigation, of course, forearmed with the conclusion.
Other #gamergate protagonists coach each other in avoiding debate, a response to efforts by journalists to talk to them:
‘Do not engage order’ is also stamped in bold and red across screenshots of people’s Twitter profiles and disseminated.
They also constantly remind each other of the need to be polite, having learned now that overt aggression is ‘not the right PR play’. The order of the day is instead character assassination and pretext-hunting. Thus, an Asian journalist is pilloried for racist comments he made as a teenager which he has repeatedly, sincerely and profusely apologised for:
And even though the mantra of ‘journalistic ethics’ is now being employed like a foghorn, it can’t quite drown out the underlying consumer revenge fantasy that has taken hold:
(Note, however, that gamers are not even the intended audience for one of the sites whose advertisers have been targeted. #gamergate is going after journalists its proponents have never even read).
So why even engage with such collective madness? Especially when the arguments made are ranging, fluctuating and hugely reliant on mischaracterisation of others’ opinions and arguments. Think endless variations on Sommers’ “They want the male video game culture to die” - a straw man shooting gallery. Now add in every conceivable objection, however wildly irrational, to several years’ worth of journalistic content, because all of it is dredged up to support a claim of endemic corruption. Individual missteps and past controversies are linked to a general demand that games journalism be liberated from a socially progressive ‘agenda’, as if everything problematic about a constantly evolving industry were being orchestrated from behind the scenes.
It’s admitted that in amongst the wide array of trumped-up charges a plethora of genuine issues have been touched on. So a small number of journalists and developers suggested these be discussed under a different Twitter hashtag, to divorce it from the anti-feminist rhetoric. Did this fly with #gamergate? Of course not - because it would have involved abandoning a juggernaut with vicious momentum and having an open, honest conversation with the ‘opposition’.
Again: why engage? Firstly, there are those who can’t exit the battle, who find themselves set upon repeatedly as part of a deliberate and concerted effort to wear them down, force them to abandon their careers, their passions. Unsurprisingly, and despite the composition of the hit lists, the most consistently targeted and spat-upon individuals are nearly all women. At the very least, I think it’s worth drawing attention to this.
I also want to resist #gamergate’s arrogant attempts to position itself as representative of ordinary consumers who play games - as representative of me. I would like people outside of gaming culture to know that this ugliness is the spittle and spite and self-immolation of a cornered minority, joined by the callous excitement of others who are seduced by the music of revolt and aren’t particularly scrupulous when it comes to picking a side, while others still hitch their own misgivings, prejudices and grudges to an irresistible bandwagon.
Then there’s the third thing: the grim fascination with how language is weaponised and used to obstruct, rather than facilitate, understanding, how every tool that has been effective in making social media a progressive force is repurposed as a method of obfuscation and provocation. It’s like watching intelligent animals work out how to maim each other with writing implements, and it gives a disturbingly sharp insight into the limitations of reason when dealing with a collective mania.
There’s no creativity to #gamergate’s methods. It copy and pastes what has been seen to work elsewhere, whether for good or evil. Boycott campaigns, infographics, memes, petitions, sockpuppet accounts, hacking, doxxing, vlogging, dogpiling. On the level of daily interactions, every word or phrase that ever had a modicum of power is employed as bludgeoning instrument. The authors of the aforementioned diatribes drench themselves in the language of scrupulous philosophical investigation as if that in itself imbues them with moral authority, while displaying nothing close to real consistency, rigour or intellectual honesty. To anyone other than those predisposed to ardently agree, these essays and videos are appallingly unpersuasive - but then, they aren’t intended to persuade. The effort is one of blunt force - to wield any tool available in order to club the enemy, and in particular to stoke the confidence and fury of the mob so that it attacks with greater ferocity. The death threats Sarkeesian receives reflect the agenda of hate preachers who simultaneously wish to position themselves as several steps removed from the worst excesses.
Sarkeesian turned off the comments under her own video series - something which is alluded to repeatedly with fierce disapproval. Why such ire? Not because this constitutes censorship (nothing #gamergate dubs censorship is really censorship) but because it robbed them of one of the forums in which they could freely wield their cudgels - by endlessly and irresponsibly repeating unfounded accusations against her.
Once a new word or phrase enters the collective vocabulary and is recognised as having some potency, it is chanted, chorused, abused and misused. “Shill, shill, shill,” parroted the #gamergate collegiate, once they had got hold of a word that they understood could be used to undermine the intentions of apparently independent commentators. “Fallacy!” they cry, as if revealing the identity of a murderer, whenever an unflattering comparison is made. They understand the general moral pallor of any particular word all right - ‘diversity’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘integrity’ are good, ‘hate’, ‘bias’ and ‘agenda’ bad - but then go about using them with reckless inconsistency. Their enemies are ‘colluding’ but they themselves are merely ‘like-minded’. Feminists are ‘ideologues’ and ‘extremists’ but the neoliberal utopia they espouse - naked of cultural criticism, ruled by consumer frenzy and corporate wile - is somehow apolitical and ideology-free. A mixed race female journalist is repeatedly described as ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’ on the thinnest of premises, but the term ‘misogynist’ is objectionable:
And of course, the word ‘ethics’ - repeated at every available opportunity, cherished for its aura of respectability.
Meaning is abandoned; only import matters.
This applies too to the metaphors #gamergate drapes itself in, right down to the absurd, hyperbolic soubriquet itself. I refer back to the tweet pinned to the top of the Twitter account of the man who made a game simulating the physical battery of Sarkeesian. It bears repeating: “The biggest mistake with declaring war on gamers is that they’ve been training their entire lives to combat evil.” Metaphor allows #gamergate to target and hurt individuals under the guise of fighting ‘evil’.
It’s indicative of the level of commitment to a warped vision of the world that is uncompromising and - temporarily, at least - unswayable. There is no authority, moral or otherwise, so high that its opposition to #gamergate is perceived as a genuine indictment or reason for a sanity check. Games journalists, mainstream journalists, academics, Wikipedia editors - even the founder of Wikipedia - all become enemy collaborators when they refrain from endorsing the #gamergate narrative:
So too the owner of 4chan, one of the very online communities where the movement was incubated, as soon as he decided #gamergate had had its day and forbade further discussion.
What it speaks to is a failure of reason to penetrate through means of language alone. The language of reason is instead perceived solely as an aggressive force, and crudely wielded as such. The moral highground is a territory cynically - not sincerely - sought. How does #gamergate deal with the negative perception caused by the death threats against Sarkeesian and harassment of female journalists and developers? By conjuring up similar tales of victimisation perpetrated by its enemies. How does #gamergate react when a piece of cultural criticism is genuinely searing? By complaining that the critic is guilt-tripping (and thus attacking) their audience. #gamergate thinks critics should be using their powers of persuasive rhetoric not to call games culture to account, but to battle outsiders:
So what is #gamergate? #gamergate is a mob with torches aloft, hunting for any combustible dwelling and calling it a monster’s lair. #gamergate is a rage train, and everyone with an axe to grind wants a ride. Its fuel is a sour mash of entitlement, insecurity, arrogance and alienation. #gamergate is a vindication quest for political intolerance. #gamergate is revenge for every imagined slight. #gamergate is Viz’s Meddlesome Ratbag:
#gamergate is a madness that dreams it’s a revolution.
Further reading:
Here is a concise list of genuine ethical concerns surrounding gaming and the coverage of gaming by Leigh Alexander.
Here is the developer Damon Schubert, trying to engage with #gamergate supporters.
I wrote a bunch of words and then hated them so let me try this again.
This all started with the announcement of the death of “gamer”, right? I think we’ve all forgotten about that, when it’s the key to understanding what’s going on.
Did you know Zynga has a bigger market cap ($2.47B) than Ubisoft ($1.41B)? How many more people play Zynga’s games, too? Yet Ubisoft’s games are “video games”, and Zynga’s are not. I’m not sure what they are, but this line in the sand has been drawn so successfully that I doubt most average (read: not on Twitter 10+ hours a day) people would consider FarmVille to be a “video game” — even people who play it. It’s certainly not what first comes to mind when you say the phrase.
What about The Sims? Is that a video game? Well… yeah… probably. Still not what comes to mind as a “video game”, though.
What do you think of when I say “movie”? Probably a recent blockbuster like Lord of the Rings or one of the superhero adaptations. Everyone’s seen them or at least knows about them; they’re basically pop culture. And they raked in zillions besides.
What do you think of when I say “video game”? Why is it not The Sims, one of the best-selling games of all time? Why is it not a mobile phone game, when over a billion people play them? For many people it’s probably not even Mario, who is basically the mascot of video games.
Gamers have successfully defined a “video game” as a very, very narrow thing that involves fancy graphics, either twitchy reflexes or extreme patience, and probably some sort of gun that wobbles at the bottom of the screen. In turn they have defined “gamer” as a person who regularly and enthusiastically plays those kinds of games. I doubt you could find me anyone who exclusively plays Zynga games and self-identifies as a gamer.
The very identity “gamer” is thus, in fact, about control of itself.
I read death-of-gamer articles and I saw a cry of exasperation. “Why is this word reserved for such a small subset of people who play games?” they asked. “Everyone plays games. Let everyone into the clubhouse.”
By the way gamergate talks about those same articles — as alienation and stereotyping and mocking — you’d think they said we don’t need anyone to play games any more. Get rid of them all.
Well, of course. If the clubhouse is open to everyone, is there really any difference? For people who actively pride themselves on being gamers, who actively preserve the barriers of entry, what would it mean to be in the same category as your dad who thinks Candy Crush is super cool? Especially for people who identify solely as gamers, who’ve built their entire identities around the video games they play.
Video games. Video games. All of this over video games. Pong. That’s what this is all about.
What other form of entertainment has such a striking contrast between the core audience and the long tail? Hell, it’s usually the other way around: those blockbuster movies are the cheap accessible junk, and if you want something of real quality, you go see obscure/foreign/indie films. And you call them “films”. Yet in gaming, the conversation is dominated by an endless onslaught of games that appeal to a very specific demographic, who gladly consume every single one of them. The real mass-market stuff is way out on the fringe, so far out it’s barely considered “games”, despite being played by a fifth of the entire human race.
This is how much power gamers have over their own industry.
Power. It’s all about power dynamics. The “fake gamer girl” trope. The guy on every CoD server who calls you a faggot. The rape jokes, the trans jokes, the gay jokes, the outright vitriol that nobody ever seems to call out. The in-game rewards for obsessively scouring for secrets or whatnot, ensuring that nobody who doesn’t have ten years’ worth of FPS experience will never collect everything. (I note that Mario Kart 8’s hardest achievement is just a variant kart, which you get for getting one star on every course. Three stars on every course gets you nothing at all. Nintendo gets it.)
These are all self-reinforcing barriers to entry. Everyone who truly wants to get into games has to prove their mettle by enduring this hazing: the slurs and abuse, the assumed knowledge of tropes, the reflexes and/or tolerance of tedium. If you can get past all that, you must really want to be a Gamer. And once you are, your sympathy has been somewhat worn away; if you can put up with it, why can’t everyone else?
I asked several gamergate randos about multiplayer abuse. All of them said they find it distasteful; all of them said the people doling it out are jerks; one of them even said it had deeply bothered him when he first started playing online. And yet all of them asserted that the onus is on the target, the newcomer, to suck it up. None of them had ever chastized some asshole for being an asshole, and they were all adamant about not ever doing so.
Why? Because they don’t want to be the buzzkill. They don’t want to risk being the target. That one asshole has control over them, like they have control over gaming.
And this is what gamergate is: a display of that control, against the people suggesting they may lose it, and the people actively working to wrest it away from them. It’s thinly about corruption, but if that were really the issue, why wouldn’t they go after the publishers who hold early game access over reviwers’ heads? The excuse is cracking, anyway. They so adamantly want this to not be about Zoe Quinn that they’re now calling her “Literally Who”, so they can continue to talk about her without talking about her, because it’s so much not about her. I’ve seen more than one list of targets (of boycotts, of emails to advertisers) based not on particular corrupt incidents, but on the handwave of “SJW influence”.
It’s all a power play to preserve the status quo. Because it benefits dudebros in their mid-20s. (Yeah, I know, you’re not-my-shield. But you’re their shield, playing the role as the token minority, because you’ve already been hazed.) That one asshole is loud and obnoxious so you’ll either leave or show how desperately you want to fit in, and now gamergate is doing the same thing to games journalism en masse.
It’s been a month and little has come of all this, except that even 4chan has gotten sick of their crap, which you’d think would be a bad sign. Sadly nothing has happened in the other direction either; gaming is still kind of a cesspool, and anyone who asks “why are 90% of games about men?” is still called a cunt and lambasted and driven out of her house.
Like a lot of big-media problems, I’m hopeful this will all eventually be solved by the increasing ease of just making a game oneself. But we’re a very long ways from being able to cobble together an AAA game with just a couple people and pocket change, so in the meantime, it’s a question worth asking.
And to the gamebros: relax. Nobody cares that you enjoy Call of Halo. Nobody cares that every game you play has a straight bald white buff cis male protagonist. Nobody even cares that you get off to the vapid chesty love interest you need to save. It’s fine for different things to exist.
People care when this is the vast majority of what we have. People care that gamers have twisted pop culture to think that this is what games are. People care that a huge bulk of money in gaming goes towards pumping out a lot of the same kind of thing. People care that poor attitudes towards women and QUILTBAG people and other races and the minorities are given such a huge stage, yet so many of the privileged core group come out in droves to demonstrate the very reason this is a problem when anyone points it out.
This isn’t a zero-sum game. But by waging war against feminists and casuals and anyone else not in the core demographic, by explicitly seeking to purify your own insular group, gamers are making it one.
I know. It’s not individual gamers. Individual gamers only leave the one kinda-mean comment, or let the one slur slide, or buy the one game. But this is the impact the group is having, and if you care so much about being part of that group, the burden is on your shoulders.
Knock it off. You don’t need to own an entire medium. Let everyone in the clubhouse.
Zoe “Social Justice Rogue” Quinn has been lurking in 4Chan’s raiding IRC channels the last couple of weeks, gathering chat logs.
Turns out, the ENTIRETY of #GamerGate was completely manufactured by 4channers, and they played EVERYONE that joined in on the #GamerGate tag and the #NotMyShield tag. Everyone. None of it was true.
Favorite tweet from this?
I make video games, did y’all really think I didn’t know how the internet works?
well this is way fucking scarier than anything else, and damn there’s enough evidence to convince me it’s true and that i was wrong in not believing zoe quinn. if she didn’t abuse anyone she hasn’t done anything wrong - video game journalism is still, however, bullshit.
the only thing i wanna see is that the other person had video evidence of what was supposedly their former chat logs, any kind of actual video stuff in terms of evidence would even the playing field. either way this is horrifying and really fucking scary
welp i’m sold, 4chan fooled me and is scary as hell.
Yep. It’s scary as hell, and I’ve been seeing it unfold for the past month and a half, and it’s enough to scare women out of game development, and they’ve also been driving out freelance journalists (also women) as well.
And Zoe’s going to be uploading a vid that one of her friends took while her tumblr was attacked.
i am shocked — shocked — that this was all a narcissistic power play by /b/ losers who want to feel powerful by messing with people
my favorite part is “don’t tell me you actually buy the corruption in journalism thing”
lol
Anonymous asked:
Close. There were no reviews -- in fact, almost no one, anywhere, actually reviewed it. However the timeline is a little off. Grayson wrote about the game less than a week before the ex alleges he was sleeping with Quinn. And Quinn and Grayson are on video sharing a hotel room at GDC at least a week prior to said writing.
“turns out i’ve got nothing so i’ll just suggest her game sucks instead”
so unless i’m missing something in the whopping two gaming news outlets he has worked for this year: you are completely wrong, try again
oh i see you already tried again
Even if the start of this was a little shaky (I’m fairly sure it wasn’t) it’s evolved into something much bigger. We’re not concerned with Quinn’s antics anymore, we haven’t been for a while. We’re mostly dealing with nepotism and corruption.
rofl “we’re not concerned with quinn’s antics any more” and then you open with quinn’s antics, jesus christ.
so, you’re “fairly sure”
you have a whole big clusterfuck of people here running around leveling accusations carefully designed to threaten whole careers
and you are “fairly sure”
it also turns out you are “completely fucking wrong”, just like almost everything i’ve been told is the root of this circus. just like every idiot who’s approached me on twitter to tell me i’m wrong, then mumbled “ummm do your research” when pressed for concrete detail
nepotism? corruption? like the accusation that zoe quinn doxed TFYC, which never happened? like the positive reviews for depression quest in exchange for sex, which don’t exist? like the condemning of leigh alexander for the crime of owning a side business? like the disparaging of jenn frank for writing an article supporting someone she knows?
that is an exact exhaustive list of the examples of “corruption” i have been given, and wow, hey, what an incredible coincidence: those people are all women.
giving you the benefit of the doubt that you’re not just a raging woman-hating misogynist, i’m sorry to have to tell you: you have been had by some raging woman-hating misogynists. they have framed their crap in terms of Our Tribe Is Under Siege Oh No and you have swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
it’s basically the same tactic the republican party uses to keep racism alive: just use the word “welfare” instead, along with the traditional stereotypes of laziness and inferiority and worthlessness. people will practically turn it into us-vs-them for you. it’s like magic! if you’re lucky, they’ll even spice it up with some moral panic!
this isn’t about the generalization of gamers, or corruption in journalism, or whatever slimy excuse 4chan is puking out now. it’s about a bunch of maladjusted teenagers who have absolutely nothing going for them except that they know how to move a crosshair with a joystick, and they are fucking terrified that no one’s impressed by that any more. even girls can do it now! what happened! CORRUPTION
don’t get me wrong, there’s totally corruption in the game industry. but most of it lies with the publishers. strange, isn’t it, that this flash mob is going after the journalists instead of the people who have all the actual power and control? why do you think that is?
i have a guess: because doing a goddamn thing about the real sleaze in gaming would require not playing a popular game. and for a group of people whose very identity revolves around suckling the teat of big publishers, that is literally unthinkable.
tl;dr you and all of gamergate are completely full of shit
There’s a tag on twitter called “gamergate” where hardcore gamers are “rallying” for journalistic integrity in the gaming community.
Which really, they’re piggy backing the Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian drama to promote an idea that women who speak up in media should have solid proof of harassment before speaking up about the toxic culture of the gaming community. Which, ya’know, is kinda shitty.
Yes, there are some legit claims in the tag, but those were not what I decided to comment on. Briefly. This morning.
Which was a huge mistakeeeee. I’m now getting @replied by a buncha people who have received misinformation regarding my comments about making gaming culture more inclusive and comfortable for women. Mostly because some drama-accounts are stirring the pot by mass-hastagging out-of-context tweets I made in response to other conversations. SIGH
then, after removing myself from the conversation, I just started blocking people. Which made them more mad. Now my twitter has been posted to either 4chan or reddit and I keep receiving shitty @ messages, some of which make no bloody sense at allllllllll. (like how I’m whiteknighting to get some feminist tail, or how I’m ACTUALLY the misogynist because im blocking ladies who @ reply me shitty messages)
So uh, I’m shutting off Anons again. bc i’ve started getting them here too. Just to clue y’all in on whats going on in my neck of the woods.
wow wtf harsh i never got Twitter Targeted
maybe this will cheer you up:
“gamergate” is a real word and it literally describes a hivemind of only male drones trying to make it without any women http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate
Anonymous asked:
did you hear about the new gamestation 8?? now it can render billions of polygons that you can’t interact with in any way
how far we’ve come