Given that the author has gone on record comparing GamerGate to ISIS and actually stated that GamerGaters are _worse_, I think it's worth drawing attention to.
So "gamergate" is the label for some organized group of people now?
edit: frankly i see it as the legacy of the "anonymous" period. It gave people that would otherwise not act out a way to do so under the cover of seeming to belong to a group.
As that wound down, individuals started looking for something, anything, that allowed them to continue their antics. Gamergate is just such an excuse, but other controversial subjects are also being used in this manner.
Edit: You know, I should have known better to get involved. Despite my best intentions, people have decided to misrepresent what I said as something completely different. Might as well just end it here.
For further context, I'm not saying there aren't a disproportionate number of misogynist assholes in GG, but plenty of people who have used the GG tag / affiliated with it had far different agendas. For example, a frequent target is ill-advised Polygon / Kotaku clickbait thinkpieces - you don't have to be an alt-right neo-Nazi to find something objectionable about those.
Sure, but GamerGate really isn't about those. If you look into how the movement came about in the first place, you will see that its origins lie in Eron Gjoni using the internet as his personal army to punish Zoë Quinn by tarnishing her reputation with misogynistic lies. "Journalistic integrity" is just a figleaf to mask the true aims of the movement.
That is really disingenuous. I don't disagree that GamerGate has a large misogynistic component, but it wasn't about Zoe Quinn, it was about the Gaming Media's reaction to Zoe Quinn.
Gamers wanted to discuss the zoepost because it was well, drama. Journalists,developers, the people running run awards and events, going to parties together, getting drunk together and gasp! even sleeping together. It revealed how cliquey and tightly knit the "artsy" indie gaming scene is.
The response of the media, the admins/mods of various forums was not good. They shutdown any discussion of the zoepost. DMCA claims were put to videos which discussed the zoepost (wrongful use of DMCA really pisses people off). The media responded with multiple articles about how "Gamers are dead". The thesis which of, was that "gamers" are childish basement dwelling adults who refuse to grow up.
Textbook case of the Streisand Effect. The coordinated media strike and the systemic censorship (right or wrong) also furthered that idea that the people running the show were heavily intertwined. When you attack a sub-culture like that they are going to get angry and try to break free.
I think fundamentally the gamergate, and much of what we are seeing across multiple fandoms represents a clash of systemizers vs empathizers. The "Gamers" care well, about gameplay, the rules, systems how they interact, the simulation of the setting. While a gamer will always like a good story, not if it comes as a sacrifice to the gameplay.
Empathizers care more about the social aspects of the game. How it makes the players feel, and the role of a game in our culture. The writing side of the gaming media seems to be largely composed of this segment, while the youtube side of the gaming media (total biscuit and such) seems to be largely systemizers.
This explains much of the tension that exists in gaming right now. Take a game like http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/gone-home. Great critical reviews. Terrible user reviews. Why? Because the critical reviewers place value on how the game makes the feel, and gone home is all about empathizing with the protagonist, while the majority of the users place value on gameplay. Hence the derision of this games as "walking simulators". Gamers want simulations. They want rules and systems and a game that is just a "walking" simulator is (to them) a poor game.
Or take the reaction to the trans-character in the new Baldur's gate expansion. The significant anger with that was because Baldur's gate is very much a systemizer's game. THACO and such. While it is a DnD game the room for role playing is limited. The draw of the was the system of the gameplay and the simulation of the world. The transcharacter was a violation of both aspects. Gameplay is agnostic of gender or sexuality, so pushing that was seen as valuing the wrong thing, and second of all, the character was a violation of the simulation of the world, as any trans person would just use the existing magic in the world to change their gender. It was a reflection that the people making the game did not care about what the people who wanted to play the game cared about. Hence the anger.
> While it is a DnD game the room for role playing is limited. The draw of the was the system of the gameplay and the simulation of the world.
How old are you? I remember when Baldur's Gate 2 came out and it was a roleplayer's dream, all across the internet. Which was a lot smaller back then. This statement is about as wrong as one can be about a huge number of people playing and loving Baldur's Gate 2.
And in the mean time, Zoe Quinn can't get up in the morning without receiving rape and death threats so, yeah, GamerGate is still absolutely about her.
That's a "blind men and an elephant" characterization. GamerGate and anti-GG are much more complicated than that. Here's a copy/paste of a comment of mine from a year or so ago after I spent way too much time trying to unravel this. I found at least 4 or 5 distinct groups with quite different goals involved:
1. People who are in fact concerned about the sorry ethical state of game journalism.
2. Trolls and jerks who have jumped in to cause trouble, mostly by attacking women in groups #3 and #4.
3. The game journalists whose ethics are being called into question.
4. Assorted "social justice" activists. They showed up because the original spark that set all this off was a lying, vindictive open letter from an ex-boyfriend of a female developer, accusing her and some journalists of unethical practices, and that caused the developer to receive some very inappropriate comments. The letter was fairly quickly discredited, but the incident did get many fired up to do something about long standing unethical game journalists, which had long been something people were annoyed about but never got organized enough to do anything about, which is what led to the formation of group #1.
5. Group #1 includes many female gamers. Many of them have been receiving death threats and rape threats. It's not clear if these are coming from people in group #4, or if there is a distinct group of trolls and jerks similar to #2 but who have decided to attack #1 instead of #3 and #4.
• group #1 is concentrating on fighting #3, and trying to keep #2 out.
• group #2 is attacking #3 and #4, and trying to make sure #1 gets blamed.
• group #3 is trying hard to make sure people don't consider the points of #1, by making sure to cover all the activities of #2, which they attribute to #1, and ignoring group #5's activities.
• group #4 is fighting group #2's actions, which they often attribute to group #1.
• group #5 is fighting the women in group #1.
There may be other groups. The women in group #1 maybe should be considered a separate group, because in addition to fighting #3, many of them are also fighting #4.
The problem with this analysis is "GamerGate" is, and was within days of being coined, overwhelmingly defined by group (2). It does not help at all that one of the first sparks igniting the "ethics in journalism" conflagration was a tell-all open letter from the jilted ex-lover of a female game developer; in a universe of slime and corruption in every form of trade journalism, GamerGate chose this one to get started over.
Are there ethical issues in the trade press? Of course there are. But good-faith advocates of clean trade journalism by and large shun the label "GamerGate", because it's so pungently associated with bad-faith advocacy that targets women.
Therefore, identifying multiple distinct factions embroiled in "the GamerGate controversy", even if they include people with a legitimate interest in "ethics in journalism", just isn't dispositive. The argument that GamerGate is about misogyny easily survives that rebuttal.
Maybe good-faith advocates avoided the discussion rather than receiving death threats like TotalBiscuit. Clearly, neither side had much of good-faith activity in them, and both side focused on the worst participants from the other side, primarily those that did misogyny and misandry.
Are there warring bands of trolls on the Internet latching on to either side of any controversy? Yes.
Does that change the fact that people who self-identify as "GamerGaters" are overwhelmingly likely to be the same people carrying on about the evils of "feminism" on message boards? No, it does not.
>The goals of GamerGate are pretty much to terrorize women.
Which is bizarre as the only doxing/death threats/rape threats/threats against family/threats against woman/bomb threats I've seen occur in GamerGate either came from those who oppose it within their little media circle clique who have an utter distaste for their audience [0] or happens to women who support #GamerGate [1].
Not to mention they've tried to fake harassment against themselves several times and have been caught red handed doing so.
>Remember, it started as a campaign to put the fear of God in Zoë Quinn.
Since when is "#FiveGuysBurgersAndFries" equivalent to "#GamerGate"? The collusion that happened so quickly after 5 guys is what led to GamerGate as everyone realized the media was in the pits together. It was definitely a catalyst for but was never the focus of. The only time I heard mention of Zoe since at least Oct. 2014 is when the paid-for Twitter spambots spam whatever WashPo article was just written about her.
Most of the people I see against #GG have little to no understanding of what it is about other than what has been parroted by the media (lol) or the Wiki article (which was hounded so hard by the clique members against #GG that some had to be banned from editing the page for doing literally hundreds of edits to bias the page. It remains biased and even cites a Kotaku article - one of the companies being rammed against by #GG.
I dunno. That article is kind of an evidence point towards what the author is talking about - the interplay of ownership. Who "owns" the ending to Mass Effect 3 - the creators or the players?
The article clearly falls on the side of the latter - protesting that it destroys many of the player-chosen threads in the story. But isn't there something in that? No matter what you choose, no matter what kind of person you are, there are inevitabilities that none of us can stop?
I find it an interesting thing to think about. I don't think this article does a fantastic job of it, but nor do I think there is much balance in the article you've linked to.
Yep, good write-up that hits a lot of the points about how the great equalizer for communication - the Internet - also allows the ugly side of human nature to shine as well.
It's sort of like a twisted reverse of the old saying "Never meet your heroes" - this is a case of "Never interact with your audience" and that might take hold as a credo as well.
>I see things getting worse - creators walling themselves off from fans while corporate masters happily throw vision and storytelling under the bus to appease the people who can get hashtags trending.
I don't think that's getting worse, I think that's a return to form. The Entertainment Industry is all about chasing money, first and foremost. Yes, there is art within the industry but it's not some kind of altruistic charity thing.
This article is shit, the bias is practically dripping off the page. This is not a discussion of how people interact on the internet, but an incoherent scatterbrained rant about self-superiority and entitlement arguing against straw-men and internet trolls.
Seriously you just have to look at his phrasing.
> childish uproar over Mass Effect 3
> that tantrum
> terrorist hate group GamerGate
> the nature of modern fan entitlement
> immediate access to spew any kind of hate
> other version of that makes you despair for humanity
> century's holy popcult warriors.
This article is so bad that even though I came into the article agreeing with his general point about political correctness I fished the article with a bad taste in my mouth.
I got none of that from the same read. I got more of the phenomenon where people personally self-identify with people in stretch pants and masks now and the expectation that they own the tales more than their creators.
Fandom isn't broken. Are there nutcases in fandoms for things? Yeah sure, that's life. Everyone from authors to musicians to film directors and video game designers have a few fans that take their love of the work too far. Only difference is that there's no authority or editor that can filter out the 'hatred' before it reaches the creator.
As for GamerGate... it's not a 'terrorist hate group'. There are some extremists in it (and some extremists against it), but it's basically a revolt against what some see as a broken media, political correctness being forced on a community that didn't want it and favouritism among the gaming press. Kind of like the situation with Trump or Sanders or UKIP or the anti establishment political movements really.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 82.4 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_designat...
It might be polemical, but if inaccurate at all, it is only so in degree, not kind.
edit: frankly i see it as the legacy of the "anonymous" period. It gave people that would otherwise not act out a way to do so under the cover of seeming to belong to a group.
As that wound down, individuals started looking for something, anything, that allowed them to continue their antics. Gamergate is just such an excuse, but other controversial subjects are also being used in this manner.
I'm not sure about that. They literally capture women as sexual slaves and have extremely regressive views of women's rights.
Gamers wanted to discuss the zoepost because it was well, drama. Journalists,developers, the people running run awards and events, going to parties together, getting drunk together and gasp! even sleeping together. It revealed how cliquey and tightly knit the "artsy" indie gaming scene is.
The response of the media, the admins/mods of various forums was not good. They shutdown any discussion of the zoepost. DMCA claims were put to videos which discussed the zoepost (wrongful use of DMCA really pisses people off). The media responded with multiple articles about how "Gamers are dead". The thesis which of, was that "gamers" are childish basement dwelling adults who refuse to grow up.
Textbook case of the Streisand Effect. The coordinated media strike and the systemic censorship (right or wrong) also furthered that idea that the people running the show were heavily intertwined. When you attack a sub-culture like that they are going to get angry and try to break free.
I think fundamentally the gamergate, and much of what we are seeing across multiple fandoms represents a clash of systemizers vs empathizers. The "Gamers" care well, about gameplay, the rules, systems how they interact, the simulation of the setting. While a gamer will always like a good story, not if it comes as a sacrifice to the gameplay.
Empathizers care more about the social aspects of the game. How it makes the players feel, and the role of a game in our culture. The writing side of the gaming media seems to be largely composed of this segment, while the youtube side of the gaming media (total biscuit and such) seems to be largely systemizers.
This explains much of the tension that exists in gaming right now. Take a game like http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/gone-home. Great critical reviews. Terrible user reviews. Why? Because the critical reviewers place value on how the game makes the feel, and gone home is all about empathizing with the protagonist, while the majority of the users place value on gameplay. Hence the derision of this games as "walking simulators". Gamers want simulations. They want rules and systems and a game that is just a "walking" simulator is (to them) a poor game.
Or take the reaction to the trans-character in the new Baldur's gate expansion. The significant anger with that was because Baldur's gate is very much a systemizer's game. THACO and such. While it is a DnD game the room for role playing is limited. The draw of the was the system of the gameplay and the simulation of the world. The transcharacter was a violation of both aspects. Gameplay is agnostic of gender or sexuality, so pushing that was seen as valuing the wrong thing, and second of all, the character was a violation of the simulation of the world, as any trans person would just use the existing magic in the world to change their gender. It was a reflection that the people making the game did not care about what the people who wanted to play the game cared about. Hence the anger.
Or take statements like:
https://twitter.com/radicalbytes/status/737394198253428736?l... https://twitter.com/radicalbytes/status/737009100093980673?l...
Josh feels that games should be about emotion and social perspective and such, that games should be art.
So that is was gamergate is about. Gamers (mostly systemizers) thought that the gaming media (mostly empathizers) had their comm...
How old are you? I remember when Baldur's Gate 2 came out and it was a roleplayer's dream, all across the internet. Which was a lot smaller back then. This statement is about as wrong as one can be about a huge number of people playing and loving Baldur's Gate 2.
And in the mean time, Zoe Quinn can't get up in the morning without receiving rape and death threats so, yeah, GamerGate is still absolutely about her.
1. People who are in fact concerned about the sorry ethical state of game journalism.
2. Trolls and jerks who have jumped in to cause trouble, mostly by attacking women in groups #3 and #4.
3. The game journalists whose ethics are being called into question.
4. Assorted "social justice" activists. They showed up because the original spark that set all this off was a lying, vindictive open letter from an ex-boyfriend of a female developer, accusing her and some journalists of unethical practices, and that caused the developer to receive some very inappropriate comments. The letter was fairly quickly discredited, but the incident did get many fired up to do something about long standing unethical game journalists, which had long been something people were annoyed about but never got organized enough to do anything about, which is what led to the formation of group #1.
5. Group #1 includes many female gamers. Many of them have been receiving death threats and rape threats. It's not clear if these are coming from people in group #4, or if there is a distinct group of trolls and jerks similar to #2 but who have decided to attack #1 instead of #3 and #4.
• group #1 is concentrating on fighting #3, and trying to keep #2 out.
• group #2 is attacking #3 and #4, and trying to make sure #1 gets blamed.
• group #3 is trying hard to make sure people don't consider the points of #1, by making sure to cover all the activities of #2, which they attribute to #1, and ignoring group #5's activities.
• group #4 is fighting group #2's actions, which they often attribute to group #1.
• group #5 is fighting the women in group #1.
There may be other groups. The women in group #1 maybe should be considered a separate group, because in addition to fighting #3, many of them are also fighting #4.
Are there ethical issues in the trade press? Of course there are. But good-faith advocates of clean trade journalism by and large shun the label "GamerGate", because it's so pungently associated with bad-faith advocacy that targets women.
Therefore, identifying multiple distinct factions embroiled in "the GamerGate controversy", even if they include people with a legitimate interest in "ethics in journalism", just isn't dispositive. The argument that GamerGate is about misogyny easily survives that rebuttal.
Does that change the fact that people who self-identify as "GamerGaters" are overwhelmingly likely to be the same people carrying on about the evils of "feminism" on message boards? No, it does not.
Hence, my original comment.
Which is bizarre as the only doxing/death threats/rape threats/threats against family/threats against woman/bomb threats I've seen occur in GamerGate either came from those who oppose it within their little media circle clique who have an utter distaste for their audience [0] or happens to women who support #GamerGate [1].
Not to mention they've tried to fake harassment against themselves several times and have been caught red handed doing so.
>Remember, it started as a campaign to put the fear of God in Zoë Quinn.
Since when is "#FiveGuysBurgersAndFries" equivalent to "#GamerGate"? The collusion that happened so quickly after 5 guys is what led to GamerGate as everyone realized the media was in the pits together. It was definitely a catalyst for but was never the focus of. The only time I heard mention of Zoe since at least Oct. 2014 is when the paid-for Twitter spambots spam whatever WashPo article was just written about her.
Most of the people I see against #GG have little to no understanding of what it is about other than what has been parroted by the media (lol) or the Wiki article (which was hounded so hard by the clique members against #GG that some had to be banned from editing the page for doing literally hundreds of edits to bias the page. It remains biased and even cites a Kotaku article - one of the companies being rammed against by #GG.
TL;DR - http://i.imgur.com/yYlbJHG.png
[0] http://i.imgur.com/LK3NieU.png
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2tbbkg/a_fi...
The article clearly falls on the side of the latter - protesting that it destroys many of the player-chosen threads in the story. But isn't there something in that? No matter what you choose, no matter what kind of person you are, there are inevitabilities that none of us can stop?
I find it an interesting thing to think about. I don't think this article does a fantastic job of it, but nor do I think there is much balance in the article you've linked to.
It's sort of like a twisted reverse of the old saying "Never meet your heroes" - this is a case of "Never interact with your audience" and that might take hold as a credo as well.
>I see things getting worse - creators walling themselves off from fans while corporate masters happily throw vision and storytelling under the bus to appease the people who can get hashtags trending.
I don't think that's getting worse, I think that's a return to form. The Entertainment Industry is all about chasing money, first and foremost. Yes, there is art within the industry but it's not some kind of altruistic charity thing.
Good luck, industry.
Seriously you just have to look at his phrasing.
> childish uproar over Mass Effect 3
> that tantrum
> terrorist hate group GamerGate
> the nature of modern fan entitlement
> immediate access to spew any kind of hate
> other version of that makes you despair for humanity
> century's holy popcult warriors.
This article is so bad that even though I came into the article agreeing with his general point about political correctness I fished the article with a bad taste in my mouth.
As for GamerGate... it's not a 'terrorist hate group'. There are some extremists in it (and some extremists against it), but it's basically a revolt against what some see as a broken media, political correctness being forced on a community that didn't want it and favouritism among the gaming press. Kind of like the situation with Trump or Sanders or UKIP or the anti establishment political movements really.