#GAMERGATE: The Threadening [Read the OP] -- #StopGamerGate2014

Status
Not open for further replies.
Mandatory read related to Gamergate:

[...]the most dangerous time for a woman with online visibility is the point at which others are seen to be listening

From the hater’s POV, you (the Koolaid server) do not “deserve” that attention. You are “stealing” an audience. From their angry, frustrated point of view, the idea that others listen to you is insanity. From their emotion-fueled view you don’t have readers you have cult followers. That just can’t be allowed.

You must be stopped. And if they cannot stop you, they can at least ruin your quality of life. A standard goal, in troll culture, I soon learned, is to cause “personal ruin”. They aren’t all trolls, though. Some of those who seek to stop and/or ruin you are misguided/misinformed but well-intended. They actually believe in a cause, and they believe you (or rather the Koolaid you’re serving) threatens that cause.

But the Koolaid-Point-driven attacks are usually started by (speculating, educated guess here, not an actual psychologist, etc) sociopaths. They’re doing it out of pure malice, “for the lulz.” And those doing it for the lulz are masters at manipulating public perception. Master trolls can build an online army out of the well-intended, by appealing to The Cause (more on that later). The very best/worst trolls can even make the non-sociopaths believe "for the lulz" is itself a noble cause.

There is only one reliably useful weapon for the trolls to stop the danger you pose and/or to get max lulz: discredit you. The disinformation follows a pattern so predictable today it’s almost dull: first, you obviously “fucked” your way into whatever role enabled your undeserved visibility. I mean..duh. A woman. In tech. Not that there aren’t a few deserving women and why can’t you be more like THEM but no, you are NOT one of them.

If you’ve already hit the Koolaid Piont, you usually have just three choices:

1. leave (They Win)

2. ignore them (they escalate, make your life more miserable, DDoS, ruin your career, etc. i.e. They Win)

3. fight back (If you’ve already hit the Koolaid Point, see option #2. They Win).

That’s right, in the world we’ve created, once you’ve become a Koolaid-point target they always win. Your life will never be the same, and the harassers will drain your scarce cognitive resources. You and your family will never be the same.

And what’s left when you’ve done as much digital damage as you can?

Real-life damage.

Doxxing with calls to action (that — and trust me on this — people DO act on).

Swatting (look it up). That nobody has yet been killed in one of these “pranks” is surprising. It’s just a matter of time.

Physical Assualt: the online attack on the epilepsy forums, where the trolls crafted flickering images at a frequency known to trigger seizures in those with “photosensitive” epilepsy. Think about this. People went to the one safe space they knew online — the epilepsy support forums — and found themselves having seizures before they could even look away. (Nobody was ever charged.)

But Photoshopped images? Stories drawn from your own work? There’s a creepy and invasive horror knowing someone is pouring over your words, doing Google and Flickr image searches to find the perfect photo to manipulate. That someone is using their time and talent to write code even, about you. That’s not trolling, that’s obsession. That’s the point where you know it’s not really even about the Koolaid now…they’re obsessed with you.

http://seriouspony.com/trouble-at-the-koolaid-point
 
Has this article been posted?

Twitter Is Broken - It stresses conflict over consensus. It rewards trolling instead of reasoned debate. And GamerGate proves it.

But the full spectrum of Twitter’s defects only became known to me as I have been covering the #GamerGate imbroglio, the ongoing and increasingly incomprehensible angry-gamers-vs.-angry-journalists public relations nightmare that started over a month ago. GamaSutra editor-at-large Leigh Alexander wrote a “gamers are over” article in which she called gamers “these obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers.” Her article prompted Intel to pull an ad campaign from GamaSutra last week, presumably on the grounds of needing those hyper-consumers’ money. Alexander’s Twitter stream is arguably even less temperate, with remarks such as “it’s funny how dudes who are ‘aspiring games journalists’ tweet bullshit at me as if I cannot instantly kill all their dreams” and “maybe mean of me to burn a young female writer but, sorry, this is not gonna be a career for her.” I doubt that GamaSutra would have published her statement that actor and GamerGate supporter Adam Baldwin “jacks off goats.” You are a professional writer who has just written that a mainstream actor who disagrees with you masturbates goats. What is going on with you?

Possible answer: Twitter is what is going on with you.

http://www.slate.com/articles/techn...10/twitter_is_broken_gamergate_proves_it.html
 
All right here are some statistics on age, BakedYams.

USA (ESA, 2014)


Europe (ISFE, 2012):
Wow, those stats are so accurate to my own life. 22 year old male, been playing games for 15 years, I believe games by far provide the best entertainment-to-price ratio, and I tend to get games based on forum impressions, art style and narrative, or just being a fan of that particular developer

My parents still believe video games are for kids. I guess it's that generational difference. I grew up with games, it's just another entertainment medium like tv or books. They haven't, and see them more as toys
 
- Ethics in gaming journalism - Being a relatively "new" kind of media and mostly composed of amateur journalists , the conflict of interest issues are unavoidable. I’m not saying it’s natural, but gaming reviews are a huge driver for sales, relatively bigger than movie and book reviews.
I don't think anyone would disagree that there are issues, but GamerGate has done very little to address any of it.

The movement seems focused on targeting journalists and publications that they don't agree with, rather than those who might be engaged in unethical activities. By doing things like convincing neutral parties to pull ads from sites, all GamerGate is doing is empowering game publishers. This will lead to less independence from those covering games and more influence from those who want you to buy them.

Furthermore, the movement conflates a lot things which aren't even related to ethics. To use your post as an example:

This whole “death to gamers” situation only made it worse.
What exactly does this have to do with ethics in gaming journalism?
 
Are there any good #Gamergate defense force blogs or articles out there? Beyond tweets and chat logs? Anything marginally coherent? I'm particularly interested in anything ongoing.
 
I don't think anyone would disagree that there are issues, but GamerGate has done very little to address any of it.

The movement seems focused on targeting journalists and publications that they don't agree with, rather than those who might be engaged in unethical activities. By doing things like convincing neutral parties to pull ads from sites, all GamerGate is doing is empowering game publishers. This will lead to less independence from those covering games and more influence from those who want you to buy them.

Furthermore, the movement conflates a lot things which aren't even related to ethics. To use your post as an example:

What exactly does this have to do with ethics in gaming journalism?
Yup
https://storify.com/BradGrenz/gamergate-versus-real-anti-consumer-actions
Brad Grenz: But the publishers aren't on your side. The media aren't on your side. They are cashing checks and fucking gamers.
---
Gamergater: Because at present, MS, Sony and Ubisoft aren't the ones writing articles telling gamers to go fuck themselves.
Pretty much sums up the Gamergate mindset
 
I didn't read it all but got the gist, it's unfortunate that some people behind gamergate are using the movement to harass women and push a misogynist agenda. Back to my original reply, having this kind of people in this circle is unavoidable unfortunately.

Death to gamers lol.
English is not my first language, apologies for the semantics error.

Furthermore, the movement conflates a lot things which aren't even related to ethics. To use your post as an example:

What exactly does this have to do with ethics in gaming journalism?

I found absurd how several of the biggest outlets released very similar articles on the same day with the intent to "kill" the gamer label and insinuate the label is related to misogyny. That's what was most upsetting in my opinion.
 

Very superficial treatment of the thing and it also establishes false equivalence between "sides", when one is a bigoted, self-centered misogynistic troll movement with death @ rape threats and the other is basically asking for respect and letting their voices be heard.

I wouldn't blame Twitter as much as I would blame bigots. You might argue the platform makes them more loud-mouthed though and gives easier access to harassment campaigns.
 
I didn't read it all but got the gist, it's unfortunate that some people behind gamergate are using the movement to harass women and push a misogynist agenda. Back to my original reply, having this kind of people in this circle is unavoidable unfortunately.
.
That is literally what GG was founded to do. Literally. It wasn't about Destiny. It wasn't about Mordor. It was about Zoe Quinn, one tiny developer who made a text adventure game, it was about harassing Quinn and levering baseless accusations about her sex life as a basis to insult, harass and generally abuse her

Literally. There's no escaping it
 
I'd love to see Twitter eradicated from the internet.
This is like the Reddit thing. Twitter is really infuriating at times, but it's also pretty damn awesome. It's a fantastic way to follow game development and chat with your favorite devs, or talk with friends, etc. Twitter during the Ferguson protests was engrossing

But absolutely the worst platform in history for trying to debate and discuss something. You can't really say anything of worth in 140 characters
 
I found the reaction in this thread to your simple (and obvious) typo a little shameful.

"'Gamers' are over" and "Death to gamers" is kind of a huge difference.

English being a secondary language is understandable (it is for me as well) but that is a pretty huge misquote with massively different meanings. And in context of GamerGate and the overreaction that caused a lot of this, it's not exactly obvious that it was a mistake.
 
I found absurd how several of the biggest outlets released very similar articles on the same day with the intent to "kill" the gamer label and insinuate the label is related to misogyny. That's what was most upsetting in my opinion.
What's the ethical concern, though?

What's the issue with people expressing an opinion about issues with the gamer label? You might not agree with them, but that's the fun thing about opinions. You're free to disagree with them all you want, but to try and frame that as some sort of breach of ethics is misleading.
 
I didn't read it all but got the gist, it's unfortunate that some people behind gamergate are using the movement to harass women and push a misogynist agenda. Back to my original reply, having this kind of people in this circle is unavoidable unfortunately.

Dude, it's not even really about gamergate, it's about the tech industry and tech press. It's about how people (including the EFF) started supporting a notorious piece of human garbage because they couldn't deal with the cognitive dissonance that someone who had their civil rights abused by the federal government could also be utterly terrible. Oh, surprise, once out of prison the dude wrote an editorial for a neo-nazi site, and has a massive swastika tattoo. People who supported him for the most part didn't say a word.

But frankly, the tech industry (which includes the games industry, of course) is way worse than 'gaming'. Not putting more diverse characters in games is a real fucking shame, but not hiring minorities is way worse. It's always bothered me how games writers would go for the low-hanging fruit of game content, while avoiding slinging sand in the eyes of the industry giants. The big fuss people make about gaming is just more embarassing, because the stakes either way are so low.
 
"'Gamers' are over" and "Death to gamers" is kind of a huge difference.

English being a secondary language is understandable (it is for me as well) but that is a pretty huge misquote with massively different meanings. And in context of GamerGate and the overreaction that caused a lot of this, it's not exactly obvious that it was a mistake.
It was a typo, I was actually thinking of "Death of the gamer identity" debacle.

That is literally what GG was founded to do. Literally. It wasn't about Destiny. It wasn't about Mordor. It was about Zoe Quinn, one tiny developer who made a text adventure game, it was about harassing Quinn and levering baseless accusations about her sex life as a basis to insult, harass and generally abuse her

Literally. There's no escaping it
The problem is: you can prove that some people in the movement are actual misogynists, but you can't generalise the movement as it is now. It did indeed start with the Zoe Quinn incident, but that's a movement with several facets, that's why I mentioned I'm not a 100% advocate, but I do agree with some points, which I mentioned before.
 
Note the ACLU can and does defend neo-Nazis when freedom of speech issues are at stake or at least file Amicus briefs supporting them. Weev is a toxic prick but EFF felt that the prosecution was overreach. Defending rights often means defending people you wouldn't be caught in the same postcode with let alone on the same 'side'. Fuck weev though.
 
It was a typo, I was actually thinking of "Death of the gamer identity" debacle.

I understand that and I do believe you. I'm just saying that it's not that out of line that people misunderstood and called it out. It is understandable that you made the error but it is also understandable that people reacted the way they did. In the end it was a misunderstanding and you've clarified it.

I was just addressing calling the reaction shameful. Nothing about you. I'm glad you're engaging in a fairly one sided thread. Discussion is important.
 
Note the ACLU can and does defend neo-Nazis when freedom of speech issues are at stake or at least file Amicus briefs supporting them. Weev is a toxic prick but EFF felt that the prosecution was overreach. Defending rights often means defending people you wouldn't be caught in the same postcode with let alone on the same 'side'. Fuck weev though.

Sure, but the problem is no one's saying 'fuck weev', they're mostly kinda overlooking his flaws because he's a 'hero' now. As her the pony blog, he started denying stuff he admitted to of his own free will, and everyone believed him over known journalists and victims because, well... fuck if I know.
 
It was a typo, I was actually thinking of "Death of the gamer identity" debacle.
Fair enough I can only imagine how poorly I express myself in French years after secondary school. Just understand that an awful lot of folks have tried to defend GG by repeating outright lies or fabrications that were told to them so I assumed that you'd been misinformed about what the articles were about also.

The problem is: you can prove that some people in the movement are actual misogynists, but you can't generalise the movement as it is now. It did indeed start with the Zoe Quinn incident, but that's a movement with several facets, that's why I mentioned I'm not a 100% advocate, but I do agree with some points, which I mentioned before.

There are a lot of misinformed folk with good intentions in GG but it has zero positive achievements and an awful lot of negative ones. There's no saving GG it was started by a collection of aggressive misogynists who then grafted on the 'gaming ethics' slant. Of course all of the claims in relation to ZQ have no basis in fact but we still see them quoted in here every 2-3 pages or so.

Every instance pointed to by GG as an ethical issue has been shown to either be an outright fantasy or the normal human relationships formed by reporters working a beat.
 
Oh, look:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/10/08/kingdom-come-deliverances-rural-idyll/

I wonder if they were pressured into posting something by the GG crowd.

More likely it's because a video trailer was posted yesterday.

The complaint before was that no one would write about an alpha patch... It's rare for anyone to write about alpha patches. But there's a video now so they'll have some media exposure.

And it's not like this is the first time RPS has written about the game. You just don't generally write about alpha patches.
 
The problem is: you can prove that some people in the movement are actual misogynists, but you can't generalise the movement as it is now. It did indeed start with the Zoe Quinn incident, but that's a movement with several facets, that's why I mentioned I'm not a 100% advocate, but I do agree with some points, which I mentioned before.

I don't really care about the individuals, I judge the movement on its actions.
 
What's the ethical concern, though?

What's the issue with people expressing an opinion about issues with the gamer label? You might not agree with them, but that's the fun thing about opinions. You're free to disagree with them all you want, but to try and frame that as some sort of breach of ethics is misleading.
The opinion piece is fine, I don't agree but whatever. What I was upset was the fact that almost all main gaming news outlets wrote the same article on the same day, conveying the same idea.


Dude, it's not even really about gamergate, it's about the tech industry and tech press. It's about how people (including the EFF) started supporting a notorious piece of human garbage because they couldn't deal with the cognitive dissonance that someone who had their civil rights abused by the federal government could also be utterly terrible. Oh, surprise, once out of prison the dude wrote an editorial for a neo-nazi site, and has a massive swastika tattoo. People who supported him for the most part didn't say a word.

But frankly, the tech industry (which includes the games industry, of course) is way worse than 'gaming'. Not putting more diverse characters in games is a real fucking shame, but not hiring minorities is way worse. It's always bothered me how games writers would go for the low-hanging fruit of game content, while avoiding slinging sand in the eyes of the industry giants. The big fuss people make about gaming is just more embarassing, because the stakes either way are so low.
Honestly I never heard about this neo-natzi situation until now, I don't use twitter very much and I don't participate in online activism.

About the tech industry issue, what's the source on the "not hiring minorities" claim? I work in IT (finance, not tech) and in some cases there are teams with more than 50% asians.

Writers go for the low hanging fruit because of publisher pressure to avoid risk. But game writing has evolved immensely in the past years, with games like Borderlands, Mass Effect and Last of Us featuring gay characters and still selling very well.

I don't really care about the individuals, I judge the movement on its actions.
It's never nice to generalise like that, but I don't intend to change your notions.
 
The problem is: you can prove that some people in the movement are actual misogynists, but you can't generalise the movement as it is now. It did indeed start with the Zoe Quinn incident, but that's a movement with several facets, that's why I mentioned I'm not a 100% advocate, but I do agree with some points, which I mentioned before.

Fair Cop on the typo and sorry I reacted the way I did.

Many, many people have come into this thread, and actually it's even more common outside of it, with massive misconceptions about what those articles said, and in many cases, without having read them, or read them very critically, instead relying on people with a concerted stake in the situation to tell them what they mean. I encourage you to go re-read them if you have the time, or at the very least this rather good annotated version of Leigh Alexander's

As to your post here, it's not so much the idea that there are some harmful or bigoted elements to the movements, its that every "point" that has so far bubbled to the surface of the insane collective consciousness has been based on very little evidence or critical thinking, and has largely been a smokescreen for the movement's entirely misogynistic beginnings, and not just it's beginnings, but it's prominent figures, and low-level talking points for its entire existence.

Even if we ignore the first two weeks of unequivocally disgusting behaviour that some would not consider "Gamergate" in an official sense, the tag not having been conceived yet...

It was first used by noted nutbar and anti-progressive/feminist/sanity celbrity conspiracy theorist Adam Baldwin, directly linked to a misogynistic attack video about Zoe Quinn.

It's shining example of journalistic ethics is Milo Yiannopolous, who can no longer get a job writing for anywhere but Breitbart, a "News" site Wikipedia will not accept as a source because of it's history with outright lies and hateful material, because he himself has a long track record of hateful and fabricated "journalism" up to and including actual criminal fraud, and even writing far, far worse attack articles about games mere weeks before the tag was taken up. Oh! Also, he has a long history of misogyny, racism, and especially transphobia, which are 100% tolerated by the supposedly inclusive movement.

As people have pointed out, there is literally zero evidence the "Gamers are Over" articles were coordinated in any way, and it fact, they seem more like maybe a half dozen writers who agreed with Leigh Alexander's actual point about the expanding game industry, and those reacting negatively to that (They don't say gamers are a dying identity, merely a changing and expanding, and probably outmoded one) and over the course of a couple of days, wrote a few more giving their own perspective (Many of them are far less similar than many will have you believe, beyond their somewhat uncreative titles in some cases).


Given all that, I'd still like you to hang out in the thread and talk this stuff through, because a lot of people have a lot of misconceptions about what Gamergate is, and how well supported or intentioned the "points" they've been making are.
 
The opinion piece is fine, I don't agree but whatever. What I was upset was the fact that almost all main gaming news outlets wrote the same article on the same day, conveying the same idea.

Oh also this is simply not true.

2 on Gamasutra, nearly a day apart, one on Kotaku, one on Polygon, and one on Ars Technica, which I would say is more a tech site but people apparently use it for game stuff so I chucked it in.

Those are the sites, out of probably hundreds, that posted anything of the sort.
 
You have to understand, the actions of the movement are trying to help the greater good of Video Games
I hope you expand this point because the only actions thus far have been a co-ordinated harassment campaign of prominent female voices that have forced several of them out. Latterly there has also been a movement against advertisers on websites deemed dangerous for their support of diversity in games. How could any of that be seen as good for the future of anthing?
 
Very superficial treatment of the thing and it also establishes false equivalence between "sides", when one is a bigoted, self-centered misogynistic troll movement with death @ rape threats and the other is basically asking for respect and letting their voices be heard.

I wouldn't blame Twitter as much as I would blame bigots. You might argue the platform makes them more loud-mouthed though and gives easier access to harassment campaigns.

I see more than two sides here. You have the "social justice warriors" fighting back against the constant harassment towards women and minorities. You have the gamers who are pissed that they are the targets of said group when most haven't harassed anyone. And you have the trolls who have puppet mastered this entire thing, have faced no consequences and aren't even getting blamed for it. It's "gamers" and "gamer culture" not random sociopaths on the internet. GamerGate is the perfect example of what happens when blame and hate is misdirected. You now have good people, people who love games and would never harass anyone, joining a cause born from trolling and frustration.

As the harassment towards women continues we'll see more and more hate is directed at "gamers" as if they can do anything about it. GamerGate will get even bigger and nothing will change until the true authorities are held accountable for what's going on. Twitter, Facebook, the United States justice system, etc. As long as the trolls face no real world consequences they will continue to do this no matter how many anti-gamer / gamer culture articles are written.
 
I see more than two sides here. You have the "social justice warriors" fighting back against the constant harassment towards women and minorities. You have the gamers who are pissed that they are the targets of said group when most haven't harassed anyone. And you have the trolls who have puppet mastered this entire thing, have faced no consequences and aren't even getting blamed for it. It's "gamers" and "gamer culture" not random sociopaths on the internet. GamerGate is the perfect example of what happens when blame and hate is misdirected. You now have good people, people who love games and would never harass anyone, joining a cause born from trolling.

As this harassment continues, more and more hate is directed at "gamers" as if they can do anything about it. GamerGate will get even bigger and nothing will change until the true authorities are held accountable for what's going on. Twitter, Facebook, the United States justice system, etc. As long as the trolls face no real world consequences they will continue to do this no matter how many anti-gamer / gamer culture articles are written.

The Gamers actually seem more like they're pissed because they've been told by the worst of the worst that they're under attack by those who are fighting harassment, and aren't able to think critically enough to figure out that they're not.

If they feel like pointing out the games industry has a lot of systemic problems with bigotry of all kinds is an attack on them, rather than a call to action to try and make it better, well I don't know what to say to that other than "If you're not helping, step aside."
 
Oh dear lord let's not get into the institutional 'problems' of men please. It's fucking awesome being a man. Don't even try to deny it. I say this having been a victim of paternity fraud who had to fight against a system stacked against me to not pay child support for 18 years. I still think my life is ridiculously way easier because I'm a man.
 
I hope you expand this point because the only actions thus far have been a co-ordinated harassment campaign of prominent female voices that have forced several of them out. Latterly there has also been a movement against advertisers on websites deemed dangerous for their support of diversity in games. How could any of that be seen as good for the future of anthing?

Might I ask how is GamerGate trying to harass woman? Do you really think that GamerGate are all woman hating white straight males. I just want to know why you hate the movement that is all, Besides "GAMERGATE is misogynist!"
 
So do you want fair and balanced video game reviews and previews?

Why did you come in here to fight a strawman then? You made the statement it's for the 'good of video games' and 'fair and balanced' reviews and previews, explain how.

Edit: Just saw your reply.

I say it's only victories are forcing women out because that's all anyone can point to, what else has it achieved?
It may not all be misogynists but the outcomes are starkly so, just looekd at twitter and again the movement is still fixated on the demonstrably false ZQ stuff and a flagrant misreading of LA articles. The most prominent voice in the GG universe seems to be Milo a guy who called gamers the 'yellow underpants crowd' but upon smelling the clicks was accepted without reservation whereas LA despite a lifetime of gaming and a nuanced article with follow ups is still persona non grata.

You say it's positive, list how
 
So do you want fair and balanced video game reviews and previews?

No. I want subjective opinions backed up by persuasive writing. I do not want "fair and balanced" reviews that just state facts about the game and assign an arbitrary score that doesn't represent what the reviewer actually thought about the game.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom