I have never seen an own goal as dramatic as GamerGate — it has exposed a whole vast collection of unpleasant characters. Here’s a list of the “bad apples” of gamergate, who are categorized as a ridiculous mob of d-list right-wingers. In particular, take a look at Mike Cernovich, who we’ve encountered before — what a piece of work. What we’re learning is that it has always been this way, and i’s alway been a misogynistic movement with a lot of overlap with the same harassing atheists.
They’re an ugly bunch. It’s good to see them expose themselves like this.
The GGers are quite amazed that mainstream journalism isn’t seeing them as #braveheroes. Instead GG is portrayed as a bunch of whiny misogynists playing silly games to boost their egos.
Maybe the biggest irony of #gamergate is this: they’re cozying up with the same right-wing hacks who fought on the Moral Guardians’ side back in the Jack Thompson/Columbine days.
point the first: Biddle is an opportunistic callous ass for making the “hur hur, let’s bully the nerds” jokes on twitter. Those jokes don’t fucking help anyone, AND they basically throw female nerds under the bus just for (what appeared to be) some cheap jockbro vs nerdbro pissing contest. with allies like that…
point the second: none of that had anything to do with Anil Dash or any of the other ppl Cernovich bothered about Bibble’s bullshit.
point the third: it’s tragicomic how inept the “ethics in journalism” cover is: “game journalists shouldn’t get free stuff to review” (uhh… how the fuck do you think movie, book, or restaurant reviews work?); “game journalists shouldn’t socialize among themselves and with the people whose stuff they review” (suuuureee… and sportsball players shouldn’t talk to sportsball players in other teams and shouldn’t be drafted to become commentators & sports journalists, either); “it’s about saving video games” (then why are you rallying around a dude who wrote that the Isla Vista shooting was caused by video game culture?); etc.
I have seen this whole thing on the news lately on The News Hour and on Democracy Now and they could not really make it make sense other than it is a bunch of threatening asholes.
great keep’m talking
uncle frogy
@ Jadehawk
Restaurant reviewers don’t get free food from restaurants. The restaurants don’t even know who they are. Movie reviewers go to critic previews, which are free, but pretty much anybody with a press pass can go. This is opposed to what video game studios do, which is to only give preview copies to friendly reviewers, an actual problem GG seems uninterested in solving.
lol. food critics don’t pay for their meals. and actually, yes, restaurants do know when a food critic shows up.
but even “secret shoppers” don’t pay for the experience.
@jadehawk:
Food critics have what is known in rarified accounting circles as “an expense account”. They eat “for free” in the sense that their employers pay for it, not that the restaurant owners give them free food.
Some restaurant critics are recognized, some aren’t. The really highfalutin ones apparently tend to be massive egoists who delight in being recognized. Ruth Reichl, who was food critic for the New York Times for a while back in the 1990s, wrote a biographical work titled Garlic and Sapphires; it may or may not be totally factual, but she was trying very hard not to be recognized, because she suspected — and was essentially confirmed in this suspicion — that her reviews were fairly useless she was treated like a regular diner. She said something along the lines of “when a critic is recognized by the staff of a restaurant, the portions get bigger, the ingredients are more carefully-picked, and the service improves dramatically”. Her attempts to go incognito — once again, assuming that her book was reasonably factual — resulted in a number of fairly famous restaurants receiving much lower reviews than they had under the previous reviewer.
yes. and? how does this refute my point? Reviewers don’t spend money on the shit they review. GG wants them to, though, because “ethics in journalism”.
I really don’t know what the point of this nitpicking on something I didn’t even say is.
I mean, yeah, obviously game reviews are more like reviews of other products (e.g. books, music) where they get sent free stuff to review rather than experiences (e.g. movies or restaurants) where they have to go do something. But none of them pay for the reviewables. That and that alone was my point. Because the “free stuff” is the entirety of GG’s point on this issue.
Not giving game journalists free stuff to review means that they can’t review prerelease products. I.e.: they have to wait and buy them at the same time as we do. Which means that the detection window for crap just got a whole lot tighter and we’re more likely to buy a cruddy game.(*)
I like reading reviews like: “I was using the prerelease version of the engine, but the controls were choppy and irregular and the camera movements made me sick – I hope the final released version has addressed that little problem.” What gamer in their right mind doesn’t want the reviewers to have early access to free games? Sure, they’ll have to learn how to read coded phrases like “the plot is as deep and thought-provoking as Richard Dawkins’ twitter feed, with twice the replay value.” as meaning “sucks.” But do these gamergate morons not realize that prerelease screening and reviews are terrifying to publishers and movie studios because they often try to sell us stuff that sucks and it’s useful to us to have someone figure the suck out before we open our wallets?
Not that gamergate is about, you know, making better games. Because if it was, they’d be trying to tell the studios how to make better and more inclusive gameplay rather than trying to put up “NO GIRLS ALLOWED” signs. Which is really what’s bugging them.
(* Those of us who aren’t patient to wait a few months for the furor over something new to die down, that is)
This was one of the things that really got to me earlier in the month. Some GamerGate people set up a website, sadly I have forgotten the name, where they said their goal was to reduce bias in games journalism. But their plan was to just post press releases, the most biased form of gaming information available. They said this was better as it lets people make up their own minds, but of course, you cannot really do this with the information in a press release, they will be universally positive and uncritical.
I do have to wonder if many people read reviews differently than I. I rarely care about the little score at the end, I try to read them critically, looking for aspects I like, or do not like. I usually read multiple reviews, compare them, often disagree with things that have been said, or at least question them. It is also clear that many people do not know what reviews are. The number of people I have seen demanding objective reviews, or laying out restrictions on what can be discussed (claiming only gameplay and graphics can be discussed, talking about the sexual content, and looking at them from a feminist viewpoint is a no-no apparently) is truly a testament to people’s ignorance.
@8, Jadehawk:
The entity which is funding the production of the review is, ethically, identical with the reviewer — from the ethical standpoint, “meal was bought by the reviewer’s boss” is not distinct from “meal was bought by the reviewer”, and both are distinct from “meal was provided at the expense of the restaurant/chef being reviewed”.
(I don’t disagree with you that game reviewers should not have to purchase games — but the case of a modern-day game reviewer simply isn’t identical to that of someone who reviews any sort of actual physical product, because a game isn’t a physical product and there’s no unit cost to the programmer/publisher to distribute an extra copy, once a release — even a developer release — is produced. Comparing restaurant reviews with game reviews is an extremely bad metaphor, and the burden of paying for the goods is an important part of that.)
how nice and still completely irrelevant to my point.
it’s not any kind of metaphor, as a matter of fact. it’s not even an analogy.
oh, I did however forget one other thing I had meant to add to my 3rd point, namely that GG whines about the incestuous nature of the game reviewer/developer/company world, but then ALSO throws a shitfit over a genuinely independent series of reviews with no financial, social, or sexual connection to that world. Because Teh Ebil Feminizmz.
As a journalist, watching the #gaters go “? wat iz jurnalism?” without even bothering to get the basic concepts down was equal parts funny and irritating.
It must be painful watching this then. It has been mind numbing seeing so much ignorance of journalism in so many posts. I am not sure if it is dying out now or not, looking at tweet stats on Topsy it looks like the number of GamerGate posts is still fairly high, but today things seemed much calmer than yesterday, but I never look at the live stream of tweets so my impression could be rather wrong despite following many people that have been targets. However, the last week has been bad for anyone in GamerGate, there have been so many negative articles in mainstream media, and on TV. Getting Intel to drop their Gamasutra ad campaign a while back is probably all they will be able to manage when it comes to convincing companies to go along with their demands. Sadly all that leaves them is harassment of individuals.
I got an obligation-free review for GameGhazi right here:
Official press releases (and pompous manifestos) for Hashtag GamerGate were, unsurprisingly, full of self-praise for finally taking it to what it saw as gaming’s deeply corrupt journalism-industrial complex. Imagine my surprise when, upon opening the box, all I found inside were self-serving, woman-loathing, harassing, abusive, stalky, shrill little manchildren behaving like toddlers at the prospect of being denied a fourth lollipop. Marching with them were irrelevant opportunists like renowned misogynist-approved feminist Christina Hoff Sommers (recently appointed official court feminist by the Manly Atheist Leadership Establishment Society, whose thralls overlap significantly with #GG) and assorted rightfully long-forgotten fringe conservatives, all lining up to encourage (read: cynically exploit) the ever-increasing rageboy chorus in order to enable their own return to the limelight.
What was supposed to be some kind of grassroots Waterloo for gaming journalism ended up more closely resembling the output from a water closet. The advertised aims of holding gaming journalists’ feet to the fire and holding developers responsible for unfairly gaming the system (as it were) were no more substantive than the hot air currently being blown out the side of my laptop. Though the targets have been legion, the main villains in the piece – two independent game developers and one gaming critic, all women – are neither journalists nor large players in the industry. The instigator of the movement, a jilted lover of one of the women, penned and publicly posted a list of mouth-foaming lies about his former flame that were so easily and quickly debunked that they may as well sit next to “Creationism” in the Encyclopaedia Bovinus Excreta (the big one regarding said flame’s sleeping with a journalist in order to garner good press was instantly belied by the fact that said journalist never reviewed said game! That’s a plot-hole worthy of Michael Bay). The “good guys”, if there ever were any, were nigh-instantaneously replaced by the kind of ranting, incoherent, double-fisted hate-wankers you’d normally only find in Youtube comment threads but have, emboldened by internet anonymity and the company of fellow woman-hating pre-adolescents, seen fit to air their “grievances” (chiefly in the form of intentionally offensive sexism or abuse, frequently in the form of graphic threats of rape and murder – on occasion including the alleged villains’ home addresses) via social media. They are aided in this by the aforementioned nobodies who, like the opportunistic predators they are, have swum to the chum.
I’m used to being sold a pup by press releases, having compared many a game, politician, film, book and TV series to their PR and finding them wanting, so disappointment would be the wrong word to use here (perhaps “reappointment”?). However, Hashtag GamerGate is by far the most egregious case of the label not matching what’s in the box I’ve yet encountered. The primary players are tooth-grindingly stupid, obsessively hateful or attention-seekers of the lowest possible order, with fewer relevant things to say than any given Kardashian on any given topic. Their targets are in the crosshairs not for lapses in journalistic ethics, nor for bribery or corruption, but for the heinous offences of 1) not coddling and kowtowing to a large and vocal subsection (some would say subspecies) of the gaming community in the way they think they deserve and 2) not shutting up and going away in the face of sustained intimidation campaigns, instead continuing to say things that upset the clearly emotionally delicate GameGaters’ feelings.
The aims of #GG might be loftily expressed via several-dollar words and fine-sounding phrases, but they are belied by naked, unapologetic, incandescent misogyny to such an extent that it now defines the movement – and will in perpetuity. If #GG was a movie I would not only urge, beg and bellow at you to not watch it, I would advise all and sundry to blockade any cinema that screened it for the good of humanity.
No rating given. Even “minus one star” would give this dog’s breakfast more legitimacy than it deserves.
(Looks at the “bad apple” list). Wow. I’m surprised Thunderf00t wasn’t included.
#5 drken, #7 The Vicar. The actual comparison is with motor vehicle reviewers, book reviewers and television reviewers. All receive the product for free and have to to be able to do their job. All reviewers have been accused of corruption but most do their job honestly.
#GamerGate-rs also ignore the fact that beta-testers get the game for free and that games companies use such beta tests as free publicity.
GamerGaters ignore everything that’s actually corrupt about gaming and gaming journalism. I don’t hear any calls to boycott Ubisoft for buying positive reviews for Shadow of Mordor or boycotting any of the publications that sold positive reviews for same. I don’t hear any calls to boycott either Game Informer or Game Stop despite the former being owned by the latter. As near as I can tell, of their targets, Zoe Quinn came the closest to doing anything corrupt and that claim didn’t withstand even the scrutiny of the raging misogynist jackasses with the greatest incentive to believe it. They seem to be defining corrupt as “doesn’t think girls have cooties”.
One publisher practice that has not been picked up on, but is prevalent, is pre-reviewing.
Here, a publisher hires a games journalist to review and write an honest review of their game in the period running up to publication. The review is never published, other than internally, so is generally an honest assessment. After all, the intention is NOT for the journo to suck up to the publisher. Rather, it is a effort to test the waters and help predict a likely Metacritic score.
In essence, it is done to brace the executives for the best or the worst to come.
It’s worth saying that pre-reviewing is not itself problematic or unethical, because the review remains unpublished. However, it does leave the industry open to accusations of cosy relationships with journos.
Seven of Nine (#20): I found one blog that had an article about Shadows of Mordor, and used the GamerGate tag. Interestingly, they credited the actual people that broke the story who were Jim Sterling and TotalBiscuit, both of whom refuse to align with the ‘Gaters (Jim is actually on a “Do Not Like” list they have developed).
What baffles me about them is that they’ll try and use their spamming campaigns to urge sponsors to pull out of any website that paints their gamerbro in a bad light, they’ll scream at feminists like Sarkeesian for daring to suggest their games are anything but perfect but then they’ll team up with a guy like Milo Yiannopoulos who said “If you’re a grown man with hands clamped to an Xbox controller instead of a pair of tits you need a good slap!”
Their self esteem must be through the floor!
I also came across these articles:
Someone went through and examined the claims that GamerGate was making, and tore them apart: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=134839993&postcount=15450
A journalist writes an article slamming GamerGate and gets the usual cry of “That is not what we are really about! Go to and do some research!”. And, well, he does and the results are predictable… http://np.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2h36ue/another_poorlyresearched_hitpiece_from_the_boston/cldrqeu
Isn’t it just neat – touting a fight against corruption in gaming journalism, while simultaneously death-threatening what is arguably the most ethical games critic.
The critique about the supposed incestuous relationship between reviewers and developers mystifies me. I’ve been in early planning and development stages to
conquer the worlddevelop and release a game, and following the mantra that you should first have a solid business plan, I took a dive into how game marketing works (or could work). The problem that most indie developers face is that the market is over-satiated: while triple-A title companies may have an interest in getting positive reviews, indie developers would be privileged to get reviews at all. Making a good game is no longer a selling point of its own: games need exposure not to be submerged in the hundreds of titles appearing weekly. Given that indie developers hardly have a budget for advertising, one of the most common recommended strategies is that they actively approach reviewers and take an effort in building networks to get their games reviewed. This includes showing personal interest in the reviewer and the kind of games they enjoy, providing a ‘hook’ (an interesting story related to the game), a selling point and of course, all the unlocked content they can give to see as much of the game as the reviewers require. I should note that none of those strategies suggest pandering for good reviews.Reviewers, especially the more prominent ones, really don’t have a need to actively search for new review content. There is a constant flux of new games in their inbox appearing from which they can hand-pick anything that seem worthy enough of an in-depth review. I don’t blame them – there is a lot of tripe appearing so it’s more rewarding to pick out the developers that really make an effort to sell their game – it suggests a considerate amount of attention has been given to the game as a whole.
But this … symbiosis (for lack of a better word) is why I don’t understand why the GamerGaters are pretending to hammer on ‘journalism ethics’. If anything, indie developers are significantly dependent on the developer / reviewer relationship to get any exposure at all – without it, game players would miss out on a vast curriculum of titles that could diversify the game world. Corruption would constitute buying positive reviews, and convincing evidence apparently is there for triple A title developers (Ubisoft example above by Seven of Mine) but still missing for the one developer they’ve accused and pitchforked for doing so, for a game that was never even on their radar in the first place.
TL;DR: GamerGate is not about journalism ethics.
That Mike Cernovich guy is a fucking demented piece of shit…Jesus fucking christ how are these people part of any society? I can’t fathom how it is possible that someone like that steps into the streets without people pointing at him and yelling “Arsehole! Fuck off!”.
The gamergaters are an spectacular bunch of idiots…but i don’t know that they are stupid enough to self-defeat. I’m hoping this ends well, with the idiots being overrun and drowned in a sea of decent human beings, but i’ll have to wait and see. The one thing that gives me hope is that neither my brother nor any of my gamer friends have even heard of GamerGate…that tells me it is not that big of a deal.
Charlie Brooker weighs in:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/20/gamergate-internet-toughest-game-woman-enemies?CMP=fb_gu
azhael, #27
He seems like a made-up character. I can’t believe a piece of shit like that is a real life person. That post by Ed is a fantastic read.
Brentalfloss has made mistakes along those lines combe-wood. Some years ago, he put together a “Tetris” lyrics video that basically consisted of a repeated statement of “Tetris is for chicks”. I never understood why, considering it was, and still is, one of the most popular games ever, and the defining “puzzle” game. I mean it’s not Panel de Pon, am I right? Right?
…
Right?
… Well I better be hitting the ol’ dusty trail…
…found the fire door…
mickll #24
Oh but you see, he has changed. At least that is what I saw GamerGate people saying when his past statements came out. Sure, he had not addressed it and was in the process of deleting old objectionable tweets rather than admitting what he had said and actually trying to indicate he now felt differently, but he has changed.
That Mike Cernovich guy is a fucking […] piece of shit…
I agree. At first I thought he was a parody.
With his fat-shaming comments I thought he was either projecting or a narcissist body-builder and… um… Do your own google image search.
The CBC (Gian Gomeshi’s show) just ran an interview with Brianna Wu. And didn’t bother with “binary objectivity”, ie. no representative of the “other side” was included. So yeah, the mainstream media doesn’t seem to be taking the GG’ers seriously.
Eamon Knight@33:
Jian Ghomeshi has always been pretty heavily on the side of social causes, all the way back to being a strong abortion rights supporter at university. There’s a reason why Moxy Früvous used to do fundraising concerts for Dr. Morgentaler.
I find it not at all surprising that he in particular would realize that GamerGate is a destructive little cesspit.
So, we have connections with Breitbart, the American Enterprise Institute and other rightwing sludge ponds. This is not good.
When Anita Sarkeesian cancelled a speech in Utah, lots of mormons-worse-than-regular-mormons came out of the woodwork.
The size of gamergate’s base has expanded to include more whacks. Not good at all.
Dark Jaguar @ 30
Also amusing regarding Tetris being for chicks is that spatial reasoning is supposed to be one of those things that men are inherently better at than women, i.e. Tetris is for dudes.
The fact that the gamergaters are so willing to ignore the shit that their new “friends” have said about them and that they would welcome them with open arms is such fantastic proof that they will go to any lengths to achieve their goal of keeping their treehouse girl-free. Anyone who is going to help them ostrasize women is welcomed..ANYONE…even those pieces of shit…
Meanwhile there was something about ethics and gaming not being taken seriously or whatever….
More on #gamergate’s bedmates. Davis Aurini’s anti-Anita “documentary” has Justine Tunney (Google’s Techno-Slavery Lady) as one of its interviewees.
Ansatz, if you’re reading this, explain to me why is your movement consistently attracting all the worst human beings it comes across.
Check out the end of this week’s Caustic Soda.
Joe especially mops the floor with gamergate.
I went from fan to superfan today.
http://www.causticsodapodcast.com/
They sell merch.
Just say’n.
LOL. instant fail.
#17 @Hank_Says :
Golf clap….golf clap. Hey man, nice shot.
Matt Binder, who dug up all those tweets that show what a lousy human being Mike Cernovich is (Storify here), did an interview yesterday with Brianna Wu. (Twitter), (youtube link). I suggest especially listening after the 20-minute mark (the interview’s 28 minutes total) where Brianna Wu mentions that she and Zoe Quinn are talking with Elizabeth Warren about possible solutions, and about the women and girls driven away from the entire gaming industry.
Your old pal Thunderf00t is in the trenches fighting the good fight over this. :-/
Duckbilled Platypus wrote:
Like most outrage-machine generated nonsense, there is a slim sliver of reality on which the rotten edifice was built. There actually is a problem with this in that developer time is handed out like prizes to compliant or friendly reviewers who can be trusted to give positive reviews. Those that give critical reviews can find their access cut off. Other publishers use developer access to get reviewers to accept invitations to extravagant
all expense paid vacationspromotional events. Contrary to the gater’s insistence, friendships or other cordial relationships between reviewers and developers is rarely going to be a problem.Likewise, there is a tiny sliver of reality in the “free stuff” complaint. Promotional merchandise is handed out like candy by publishers, and each item is sometimes worth hundreds of dollars (or more if it’s a rare promotional-only item). This is basically bribery, and plenty of reviewers recognise it as such (although many of the ones that do are on the gater’s shitlist). Free (pre-release) games, on the other hand, are basically no problem at all except when exclusive access is given to reviewers that the publisher feels are certain to give their games good reviews.
Basically, it’s dog whistles. They say something that means something utterly mundane to the public, but something entirely different to the ingroup. Sadly, this is an effective recruiting strategy, as the mundane problems being stated aren’t entirely unimportant, but it can be enough of a hook to get people to identify with the larger group, and start accepting other views from them, as well.
Jadehawk @ 8
It’s even more nonsensical than that.
They want reviewers to disclose when they’ve paid for games via Kickstarter et al too. This games journalist corruption test captures the insanity perfectly.
Apologies to crustaceans for this analogy.
Gamergate is a hate-filled little crab, threatening and abusing females in its path. It is loud and demands attention; but it is indefensible when exposed out in the open, and it knows it.
So it crawls about collecting and cover itself with things from its surroundings; things that provide protection and camouflage, and make it seem more acceptable in its environment, but don’t impede its movement too much. Things like “Journalistic Ethics!”, and “NotYourShield!”, and “Stop Corruption!”, and “Fight the SJWs!”.
Soon, unless you look very hard, you can’t even see the hate-filled little crab underneath its protective covering. It shambles across the sea floor with its decorations making even more noise than before; “Ethics! Journalism! Not All Gamers!”. Some of the creatures attached to its shell even delude themselves into believing they are in control, and the mob around them is marching with some glorious purpose.
But it’s still the hate-filled little crab underneath it all that steers them where it wants. And if you listen very closely, you can still hear it mutter under its breath, “Whores.”
Keep in mind, this is what a “fence-sitter” looks like in the gaming community. A case study: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/9814-Its-Okay-To-Like-Or-Not-Like-Bayonetta
(Warning: Auto Play)
On a video about Bayonetta and whether or not her sexuality is agency or objectivification, Jimothy Sterling doth mention that you if are going to something to the effect of “I don’t condone death threats, however…”, just put the period before the however and don’t be a fucking asshat. So what kind of bleating idiocy do we get from a “moderate” gamer?
Fucking hyperbolic assholes with extreme irrational hatred of a feminist who indecently decided to exist and shit. No real position to speak, just ridiculous levels of confident dismissal while still puffing themselves as Reasonable and Moderate. Because, ya know, they aren’t threatening people. That is “moderation” in the gaming community now, apparently. That was the first comment on that page, and got 120 likes so far. Every other comment during the same period has 20 likes, maybe, if they’re lucky (aside from the first two mostly agreeing responses to the inanity above).
We point out the shitheads in Gamergate. They don’t give a shit. The rest of the masses have a one two punch set up just for that scenario:
1. No True Scotsman.
2. My extreme opinions are now moderate and reasonable because I am not as bad as the shitheads.
It’s a winning scenario for them. Like Republicans making themselves look more credible by letting their most odious members make fools of themselves as a Tea Party. They get their agenda pushed AND they have plausible deniability if the clowns push too far. That’s what Gamergate seems to be all about, at bottom: Pushing the Overton Window to make sure the not so blatant misogyny of the “moderates” remains unchallenged and remains socially acceptable.
Kagato, that was great!
The people who use “I don’t condone, but…” clearly have no idea how ‘but’ is used in such a sentence. If they *really* must express the sentiment, phrasing it like thus at least might make them read as far less of a sexist asshat who tacitly condones death threats despite their protestations.
“I do not, and never will, condone death threats to (person). I may not agree with them on every topic, or even most topics, but that makes no difference where death threats are concerned. Not agreeing with someone does not make death threats okay. Death threats are always wrong, even if you don’t like someone.”
vaiyt:
Double bonus irony: Just saw a popular thread on The Escapist comparing Anita Sarkeesian to Jack Thompson.
Rowan vet-tech
Quite frankly, I don’t think they give a shit. For some I might believe it is just an accident of language, just mistakenly not realizing how the phrasing is interpreted by other people. Most of these assholes though, it becomes clear that their lack of condoning is just putting a lampshade on their own irrational hatred. It’s a meek disclaimer, a flimsy mask. Their real goal is to spew venom and ensure the dismantling of The Enemy, and they will only tolerate momentarily being inconvenienced by the obligation to assure us that they personally aren’t “that bad”. It’s a transparent and pathetic attempt at PR the vast majority of the time. Principles are not involved. Empathy is not involved. There is no examination of issues, or looking at WHY these death threats are surfacing and what that might mean. The only reason these people give a shit about death threats is just because it makes them personally look bad. That’s all. I swear that the ignorance is deliberate.
anteprepro… you’re probably right, but that really does make me despair for our species.
Rowan vet-tech: My working philosophy on the subject of despair and the outlook for our species is that once you get just the right mixture of despair, hope, and outrage, you can finally call yourself a realist. I still don’t know what the right mixture is though. I am currently working with about 5 parts despair, 4 parts outrage, and 1 part hope.
anteprepro: Half the time I go around with the attitude of “meh, fuck it” when it comes to all existence. Am I a realist yet? XD
@antepepro
Keep in mind that #gamergate has got Jim Sterling on their shitlist for a while now. As far as we know, that could just be another bunch of Gaters trying to add spin to their narrative.
No surprise. The centerpoint of #GG propaganda is that “Social Justice Warriors” want to censor/ban THEIR vidya. That’s the premise they start every argument from, and any attempt to demonstrate it is just tautology.
vaiyt
I imagine that is a good point. Whether they are labeling themselves “gaters” or not, the Menz Horde has camped out on Jim’s Escapist page well before gamergate was a thing. They’ve been whining about SJWs and Sarkeesian and what not on every video for a while, relevant or not. Because that’s just the kind of people we are dealing with here.
That does about describe it, doesn’t it?
Rowan vet-tech: Sounds realistic enough to me :P
@vaiyt #38
Same reason why anti-GamerGate has people like Biddle, I’d imagine. There’s a lot of terrible people out there.
The brief round-up, as expected is a bit one-sided. Supposing that every examples listed are taken at face, a similar list could be constructed on the flip side as well, so what does it really mean? Well, if you accept the logic presented for the former case, it presents a bit of a conundrum in the latter case.
Actually, it’s not much of a conundrum. There’s always been a problem with race and class in the social justice movement, much like in everything else.
Given the problematic issue that some members have with #Notyourshield in comments on previous blogs, I’d like to invite a reading of this, if it hasn’t already been seen:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/10/18/1337285/-A-Black-perspective-on-GamerGate
There’s a bit of a parallel there and with what has happened within feminism. I vaguely remember a series of cartoons PZ once posted on a similar topic awhile back . . .
ansatz: I don’t understand how anyone can justify belonging to gamergate without a whole bunch of delusional thinking and revisionist history. I keep hearing how coverage is one-sided, biased etc that it focuses on the good rather than the bad etc. If the Klan got into environmental concerns, would that justify their existence? Would it excuse the ignorance of new comers to the history of the movement?
(That should be “focuses on the bad rather than the good”, sorry)
ansatz @ 58
So demonstrate that the examples listed shouldn’t be taken at face value and construct the analogous list of socially conscious people who’ve made a hobby out of trying to harass gamers/gaters off the internet and threatening them and their families with death and rape.
With regard to that Daily Kos opinion piece….it’s a fucking opinion piece by a person who happens to be black. It’s the same fucking apologetics. We can fucking see what #GG is actually doing. It’s paying zero attention to actual corruption and simply going after socially conscious people (most of whom aren’t even journalists, let alone journalists guilty of having sold positive reviews to game developers/publishers). You’re going after people expressing opinions you don’t want heard.
ansatz @58:
“Anti-GamerGate” doesn’t “have people”. “Anti-GamerGate” isn’t a thing.
Just because gamergate is a self-styled “movement”, doesn’t mean there is an organised opposing force. There are people who are vocally opposed to GG. Lots of people. But that doesn’t make them a counter-movement.
Do you know what my problem with #notyourshield is?
It was explicitly manufactured to deflect criticism. It’s not a grass-roots response; 4chan invented it, planted it and sockpuppeted it into popularity on Twitter (ironically, turning anyone who uses it into a shield for GG). This shit is documented.
There is a straight fucking line from the initial harrassment of Zoe Quinn to the gamergate “movement” that cannot be denied.
* Her ex posted a rant about her, leading to accusations that she slept her way to positive reviews. This was a lie.
* She was harrassed, her address posted, and received multiple threats. This is documented in chat logs.
* Adam Baldwin coins the #gamergate hashtag while linking to videos about Zoe Quinn (not journalistic ethics, not corruption in gaming, straight up attacks on her person based on the previous falsehoods).
* 4chan / 8chan discuss putting on a show of being about ethics, and rallying under #gamergate. This is documented in chat logs.
* 4chan / 8chan coin #notyourshield and push it into use. This is documented in chat logs.
* The harrassment continues and expands to new targets. There are now 4 “Literally Who”s (whatever the fuck that’s about). All women.
* Magic happens. Two months after the attack campaign started, Gamergate is suddenly actually about ethics and is no longer merely a cover for anon harrassment of feminists! Hooray! Everyone can feel glad they’re part of a force for pure good in the world.
We’re not talking about some long-standing organisation, and having the old guard replaced with new blood who push the org in a new direction. This whole thing has happened in the space of two months. You can’t honestly believe that’s enough time for what was an anti-feminist attack squad to have been diluted and replaced with honest ethical crusaders? That the former were somehow pushed out? They’re not gone from gamergate. They’re the gamergate base.
@ansatz
Must be very convenient to have a movement that can rally behind anything while assuming responsibility for nothing.
#GG embraces the terrible. The bad apples are ALSO the major trendsetters. Every time someone at #GG issues a concrete list of demands or a manifesto, they always show they’re rotten and liars. The core issues of #GG consist on misconceptions and fabrications, dressed in a package that’s appealing to angry privileged nerds. The “corruption” mentioned in #GG circles is a chimera that a crook pulled out of his ass. The supposed SJW Cabal out to censor your precious vidya is a fantasy. Both are just excuses to target people who speak for inclusivity in video games – the one thing that #GG has actually done consistently. Hell, the very name of your mob references a fake “scandal” produced by a jilted ex-boyfriend who successfully turned 4chan into his personal army.
While you and the supposed “good guys” of the movement refuse to take a stand against the assholes, they have been very organized and focused since the beginning, not to mention all the experienced opportunists clinging onto your cause as a vehicle for their own brands of hate. Where’s the internal questioning? Instead, all I get are excuses.
http://np.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2h36ue/another_poorlyresearched_hitpiece_from_the_boston/cldrqeu
Here’s the opinion of an actual journalist, based on the recommendations of #gaters themselves. This was an attempt from #GG to present itself in the most honest way, and IT FAILED to look like anything but a hate group.
# Off Topic
I went and read that reddit post from jsingal and looked at a few of the comments and found the following comment thread:
*deded*
Chris Kluwe has also weighed in on the matter.
Matthew Trevor @59:
Shhh, you’ve found out the secret of ansatz. Xe was doing so well hiding that (not).
I predict this is the time ansatz slinks away like the coward they are, and waits until the next thread to bleat the same bullshit again.
Gamergaters portraying themselves as caring about journalism and ethics is exactly like creationists portraying themselves as caring about finding answers to deep questions. Creationists use that excuse as a disguise for undermining science education; gamergaters use it to undermine feminism.
Dalillama, #65
That was awesome! Reading that makes it seem like he’d be a regular here.
I see ansatz has returned to continue using #NotYourShield as their shield. Fantastic.
Ansatz likes to continue to play this Both Sides game, pretending that there is some coherent Anti-GamerGate side that is Just As Bad. But they are always, consistently, low on specifics, just like most false equivalence spewing bullshit artists are. Last time they actually bothered to cite some specifics, it turned out that it was obvious bullshit. Fancy that. I wonder if they will pull the same routine again and point to examples that, once again, result in shooting themselves in the foot.
Morbidly entertaining.
https://archive.today/N7Ip5 #GamerGate activism in action.
Teacher posts open letter critical of #GG – Gaters are torn between “GATER SMASH! LET’S RUIN HIM!” and “No it will be bad PR”. Do note the misgendering of the teacher (who is male) and MRA buzzwords flying about. Do note, as well, that even the “good guys” are still aiming their guns at people they disagree with rather than any kind of real corruption.
Oh my fucking Christ. The article, the only solid thing ansatz had to bring to the table, was about the same Bad Person they were whining about last time. They had a plethora of Bad Tweets from that person that were all, actually, not that bad. The focus of the article is the one legitimate gray area tweet, the one about “hood men”. It sounds totally racist, but then you have to kind factor in that Leigh Alexander, bad person and racist in question, is mixed race herself: http://leighalexander.net/on-twerking-and-being-mixed-race/
That kinda is relevant to the “she is a racist omg!” equation but it is also a fact that the gaters conveniently ignore, in constantly referring to her one deleted tweet, over and fucking over.
Manufactured outrage is far more serious and far less ridiculous than Social Justice Warrioring, apparently.
And apparently this is among the only examples that ansatz can come up with of Anti-Gamergaters behaving badly. Rather fucking telling.
vaiyt, #72
Somehow those comments piss me off more than the death threats.
Particularly this enabling POS:
Yeah, I can’t believe my tax dollars are “being spent” on trying to stop vile hatred and hostility towards our daughters! Dammit, they’re MY tax dollars!
This one has got to be a joke…. right?
Teach the Controversy!
Leigh Alexander’s ebil Tweets means that both sides do it? Damn she’s powerful. One of her is as powerful as all the horrible gamers that ansatz desperately doesn’t want treated as representative of GamerGate (too late there buddy).
Oh, that last link that vaiyt gave is slightly entertaining.
Look, I can point out contradictions just like they do!
> This is totally irrelevant to English class and I think his boss and the parents of the kids he teaches would be interested to know what their tax dollars are paying for.
>Bradbury is fucking spinning in his grave right now. Not blindly trusting everything you’re told was the biggest theme in that book, aside from censorship allowing the government to more easily take control of the people.
“Teachers shouldn’t have opinions! Tax dollars! Indoctrination!”
“CENSORSHIP! CENSORSHIP! WILL NO ONE STOP THE CENSORSHIP!”
This by fucking god, the projection
This one is such a witty retort. It’s a geekgasm veneer over an argument that is essentially “NO U”
And it is surreal to hear the simultaneous shrieks about “zealotry” and “censorship” while also shrieking for getting the teacher fired for “vile propaganda” .
They attempt to whitewash themselves, and yet one upstanding citizen starts comparing the guy talking about being decent to women to a Christian pastor exaggerating the dangers of weed while trying to seem cool, characterizing him as being “blissfully unaware of how square and condescending he comes across”. Because decency is so lame, you guys.
And this is where I stopped reading:
That’s pretty much their view in a nutshell, once you strip away all the window dressing and mumbling under the breath.
It is like fucking clockwork. You can’t have gaters talk for more than 5 minutes before they make it blatant what odious fuckers they are. And every time they do, the next one that pops up whines at us to be fair and give them another 5 minutes to convince you that they are totally not a bunch of immature, sexist douchebags covering themselves with a fig leaf.
It’s like a whack a mole, except that the moles tell you not to use the hammer and that they are peaceful, gentle folk that would hurt no-one, and they rise more and more out of their hole, and then finally the machine ejects a fucking giant rabid mole that lunges at us. We whack it finally, it disappears, and then next one pops out, cute and tiny, squeaking about how mean we were and how judgmental and how we shouldn’t generalize, and how that giant cannibal mole from before was not representative of the mole community, and if you would just give them five minutes of your time….
Say the people who’ve been blindly trusting whatever shit Yiannopoulos and Bloomfield pull out of their asses.
vaiyt:
It’s only blind obedience to authority figures when the Brave, Bold, Individualistic, Independent-Thinking Iconoclasts so decide that it is blind obedience to authority figures. That’s a noble truth across the spectrum from newagers to gibbertarians to creationists.
An hour ago Felicia Day finally made a statement about GamerGate.
And at least one person is dropping what they claim to be her address in the comments already. At the same time, gater assholes are insisting GamerGate has never doxxed anyone.
Fuck’s sake.
Oh, this is really charming.
** Content warning on the following **
You’ve probably heard of Vivian James by now, the girl gamer mascot invented by 4chan/v/ for The Fine Young Capitalists (after donating to them to spite Zoe Quinn, who had criticised one of their policies and was falsely accused of doxxing a staffer).
You might assume the green and purple stripes on her top are just a curious design choice by the artist.
However, the green-and-purple combination has a (NSFW) very specific meaning to 4channers.
It’s a reference to an image known as the ‘daily dose’: an animated gif of one Dragonball character (Picollo, green with purple clothes) anally raping another. The image was spammed everywhere with the goal that whenever you saw the characters, you’d think of the image. It happened so much even they got sick of it and banned it. So users would post progressively more censored versions, until they were just posting random images with prominent green-and-purple colouring. The idea being, everyone had already seen the image, and now the colours alone were enough to trigger the memory of it.
I can’t believe this is just a random coincidence. There are other more obvious 4chan references in her character design (such as the clover on the headband), and 4chan wouldn’t let something like that slip through without comment.
So in their mascot design for a charity-supporting, women-only game jam, 4chan thought it would be funny to include a private rape ‘joke’.
The Mellow Monkey: For clarity, let me add that Felicia has now, understandly, ditched Disqus for that post so there are no comments anymore. Additionally, for any who don’t bother to go read her post (you really should): She explicitly mentions being afraid to speak up about this issue explicitly because she was afraid of being doxxed and harassed. So of course that is what a gater comes and immediately does.
Ansatz, in light of that, if you come back to this thread and continue your bleating about how we misunderstanding Gamergate and it is all about Journalistic Integrity, you can go fuck yourself in advance. If your response to that shit is just more apologetics, you are exactly what is wrong Gamergate: you are an enabler who cares more about being part of a trendy, manly mob than about the women you are, through action or inaction, all hurting.
Kagato: Jesus fuck. That is one horrid meme, which is pretty typical 4chan honestly. It seems plausible that they would integrate something like that into anything they got their paws on too. They love spreading their “humor” around.
I mean, just look at the games they played regarding the charity: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/vivian-james
Other charities that 4chan charmingly put forward were two different charities related to abused men (to make the usual asinine Men’s Rights message) and something called the “Jewish Internet Defense Force”, their typical anti-semitic humor (see also: some of the shit they have been flinging regarding Anita Sarkeesian).
These are not just your comrades, gaters. These are your leaders . These are the people that started this shit. You are just fine with that and will pretend that it is no big deal and that it has no relevance. Bull. Shit. Your piss-poor misdirection fools no one and it is fucking galling .
Surprised, I am not. That’s 4/8chan, they use rape jokes as punctuation.
Incidentally, Piccolo doesn’t even have a penis. His species is asexuated and reproduces by vomiting huge eggs.