There’s been a lot of press coverage of Gamergate in the past few weeks. Of particular note:
- The Verge (one, two and three)
- Breitbart (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine)
- Cracked (one, two, three)
- TechRaptor (one)
- Forbes (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight)
- Slate (one, two, three)
- Vice (one)
- TechCrunch (one, two)
- RealClearPolitics (one)
There’s more, but you get the idea. So that’s actually a pretty wide mix. Cracked and the Verge come hard from the left/anti side, whereas Breitbart comes from the right/pro- side and emphasizes the culture war aspect of the debate. There’s also a wide range of beats: Slate, RCP and Breitbart are politics. Forbes is financial. Cracked is probably the best pop culture criticism on the net, masquerading as a humor magazine. Agree with them or not, there’s a lot of coverage out there. But there’s sure someplace where it’s missing: the Gaming Press.
I keep hearing #gamergate complained that they are being hammered by the sites on the boycott list. If #GamerGate were really a war for the soul of all gamers, one would expect for the Gaming Press to have daily updates and attacks on these poor defenseless souls! But that’s not what I see. What I see is the blacklisted sites pretty much blacklisting #gamergate coverage right back. I did a quick perusal of these sites over lunch, and here’s what I found.
Polygon (yes, they have an Ethics Statement)
They have one article that mentions Gamergate: Intel apologizes for pulling advertising from Gamasutra. Beyond that, they have a whole bunch of stuff that doesn’t mention gamergate by name, and would probably still be covered even if GamerGate didn’t exist: Christina Hoff Sommers logic failure and Jonathan Mann’s musical rebuttal. Anita’s XOXO talk (Coverage of Sarkeesian’s XOXO talk and Posted Video). Some stories about the FBI stepping in to help Anita and the IGDA deal with issues of harassment. 1000 Game developers sign letter demanding greater tolerance. Saint’s Row developer says ‘Anita was Right’.
Of note, there’s pretty much NOTHING other than the Intel story and anita’s talk video since the Sommers’ video, and again pretty much the Intel story alone mentions GG.
Kotaku (since this article: About Gamergate, on Sept 5th):
Even less. I’m being charitable and including their Shadows of Mordor payola scandal coverage, solely because it came up here as something that GG should care about. They also covered Anita Sarkeesian’s GDC Award Ceremony being a target of a bomb threat in March, Christina Hoff Sommers’ logic catastrophe and 1000 Game developers writing a sternly worded letter in gamergate’s direction. That’s a MINISCULE part of what’s happened in GG the last six weeks, and none of it mentioned #gamergate by name.
Gamespot
The ability to troll back through Gamespot’s history goes back only a week, so instead I tried web searches: Gamergate. Sarkeesian. Quinn. Ethics. MundaneMatt. Ideology. Sommers. I literally got so few hits I actually searched Destiny and Sims to see if their engine worked. It does.
What I found was: Intel pulls ads from pressure for Gamergate but says it isn’t taking sides. FBI investigated Death Threats against Anita Sarkeesian. Sarkeesian Bomb Threat at GDC 2014. Three stories out of HUNDREDS that could be considered tangentially related to GG.
IGN
Seriously, I got bored at this point. I only went back 15 days, through literally hundreds of article headlines and found literally nothing. As in, there were TWO articles about how having Shatner show up in Star Trek 3 was probably a bad idea, but none I’d consider even tangentially gamergate related. Searching for ‘gamergate’ on their search engine brought up a few hits, all from private consumer blogs, but absolutely zero from their own editorial staff.
Rock Paper Shotgun (since their ‘Videogames are for Everyone‘ addressing of issue)
Running out of lunch break to spend on this, I went straight to the search engine: Gamergate (0 hits), Sarkeesian (0 recent hits), Payola (0 recent hits), Misogyny (no hits), Quinn (none recent/relevant), Ethics (1 recent hit about Steam Curators). In short, pretty much fuck all.
Literally, not a single one of these articles is nearly as comprehensive or detailed as anyone one of the other articles I listed at the very top of this article, from ANY side or outlet. In short, other than the developer letter in early September, and the Intel ad pullout last week, your average gamer who reads Gamespot, IGN, Kotaku and Polygon pretty much has no idea this thing is still going on. It’s really quite remarkable when you think about it. But anyone who tells you the games press is pounding on Gamergate is blatantly, BLATANTLY lying. The games press is treating this like it’s radioactive. The only games press talking about gamergate are the sites actively trying to court those guys, like the Escapist. So why is this?
First off, I believe that they don’t know how. They are, effectively, part of the story because of the corruption angle, and reporting on yourself in an impartial way is tricky as hell, especially when your credibility has already been cast in doubt (wrongly or no). If they had more structures like an ombudsman to help people have faith in their credibility on the topic, they might be able to do so. But as it is, anything they write will be instantly cast in a ‘burn the witch’ light.
The second thing is that they don’t think they need to. Sure, they could solve the above problem, or they could just keep on keeping on. Polygon’s editor proudly tweeted their QuantCast scores yesterday, and the buzz I got from talking to my source on the inside is that Polygon is pleased as punch with how they’re doing right now. It turns out that Polygon’s readers aren’t the ones who are mad at them.
Let’s look at some of the sites swirling around this on Alexa (If anyone knows of better or more accurate data, or thinks I’m reading this wrong, I’m all ears. This is not my area of expertise):
- IGN (#328, up from ~#350 or so a year ago)
- Gamespot (#943,up minorly from a year ago)
- Kotaku (#1060, up from ~#1500 a year ago)
- Polygon (#2721, up from #6000 a year ago)
- Gamasutra (#7307, about flat for the year, having just rebounded)
- RockPaperShotgun (#7389, also flat for the year, rebounding after a trough)
By comparison, here are some more GG friendly sites:
- The Escapist (#5505, up from about #6500)
Other common pro- sites, like TechRaptor, GamesReviews, NicheGamer and GoodGamers.us are all still too small or new to have Alexa rankings. The Escapist probably has gained from #Gamergate, but it’s not clear that the other sites have lost much, if anything. It certainly hasn’t been enough for the Escapist to change positions on that list anywhere. The classic gaming sites can still deliver HUGE audiences to publishers looking to sell games. So the main gaming sites are still kicking ass. Why change?
Which leads to the third reason: the websites are betting gamergate’s bite is probably not as bad as it’s bark. 7 weeks in, and there’s been one significant boycott victory, which the advertiser immediately regretted. That’s actually not a ton of progress.
James Wagner Au has asked before how many people are actually part of #Gamergate. Riffing on some of the things that he notes:
- KotakuInAction (the home of Gamergate on reddit) has 10,385 readers, up from 5,131 a month ago. So some growth, which you can see in the graph here, but not the kind of exponential movement they need to really take off.
- On the other hand, Twitter noise has actually been pretty flat for the month, holding at about 40K tweets per day, although there’s definitely a rise in the month of October. The graph clearly shows Oct 8’s Thunderclap, which had 3716 supporters and failed in the stated goal of getting #gamergate trending again.
- @Radio_nero has 1513 followers. @RogueStarGamez has 10.8K. @MundaneMatt has 16K. @Int_Aristocrat has 17.7K.
- The Sarkeesian Effect video has 402 patrons (whereas Anita’s supposedly minority view that no one actually cares about got nearly 7000 backers)
- Milo’s first radio show has by now accumulated about 19000 listens.
- MundaneMatt’s Zoe and Eron video now has 97K views, and InternetAristocrat’s recent #gamergate related stream hit 150K views.
What does that mean? Hell if I know. Here’s where someone should go tell EEDAR this is important and go figure this out. If I had to wager a guess, I’d note that this seems to be very much a stream/youtube motivated revolt. It’s got a relatively small number of speakers. How many people are actually listening and caring enouth to act is much harder to measure. Still, I’d guess high 5-digits to low 6-digits at MOST would call themselves passionate Gamergate supporters.
By comparison:
- There are literally tens of millions of Next Gen Consoles (PS4s, WiiUs and XBox Ones) out there.
- Grand Theft Auto 5 had sold 33 million copies – total accumulated as of May.
- 27 Million people play League of Legends every day.
- Destiny shipped $500 million dollars of product on day one.
- Candy Crush has 8 million plays every day.
All of a sudden, #Gamergate feels kind of small, doesn’t it?
“All of a sudden, #Gamergate feels kind of small, doesn’t it?”
Then why does zen of design cover it so much?
Trap sprung.
I like watching car crashes.
As a small aside, I think their Intel campaign worked because there wasn’t a counter campaign. Intel got flooded with emails lamenting their backing of Gamasutra and they pulled adverts without thinking. After the pull, all the other well meaning people that didn’t care about gamergate took a look at it, saw the hateful bile on twitter (I know it’s NOT ALL bile, but it’s prominent enough), and responded to intel with an equal or larger flood of email.
I really think your observations on UO PKing holds up here. less than 1% seem to have a larger impact than expected.
It worked because Intel didn’t want to be associated with a website that repeatedly attacked their readership. Sorry 😉
Gamasutra’s readership is mainly developers or those interested in other aspects of the industry, not previews and reviews. Its also a platform for industry types large and small to share insights and opinions.
“Gamers”/consumers are not thier primary readership, game creators – programmers, artists, writers, etc. – are.
Kind of a big difference, I think. Do you see a problem with how GG picks it’s targets now? They tried to hurt Alexander, but ended up attacking a resource for creators, which Alexander was speaking to.
The comments on Gamasutra from developers were mostly negative. If you go to GameIndustry.biz and read comments there about the topic every single popular comment (last time I checked) was also negative on the piece.
Gama also runs a lot of “getting into the industry” stuff, so it’s not just for industry professionals.
The fact is the piece was received poorly by pretty much everyone. The only people who don’t grasp this are people who live in carefully constructed bubbles.
By which you mean to imply me, though you know nothing of my opinion. I tend to think Alexander comes of as needlessly venomous in her writing, but her point was toxic people who chest thump thier marketing label identity are going the way of the dinosaur because gaming is too mainstream for them to matter.
She’s right in that respect, but some people take thier consumer identity too seriously.
If I meant you I would say you. I have no idea what your particular opinion is – be less paranoid please.
Very few people thump their chest with their marketing label. That is a primary problem with the piece and the thinking around it – the idea that a bunch of people think of themselves only as gamers and wrap their entire existence around that is not based in evidence.
It’s lazy, fanciful thinking.
Nope. They saw a shirt storm and looked for cover. And got another. I doubt it’ll work twice.
I think the gaming press said everything it had to say to GG back then. When it didn’t matter — when it became clear that the rabid rage and foaming insanity from the loudest chunk of individuals would neither abate nor allow more constructive dialog to occur, the gaming press shrugged and got back to work.
The self perpetuating circle of gamergate:
As more main stream media talk about it, as they start realizing that they are but a tiny, expendable part of gamers, as they as they start to realize that the “anti-gg” is not an identifiable group but more or less “the rest of the world”, the more they feel threatened, isolated, the stronger their beliefs, the stronger they bark.
Will it ever end?
I think Damion and a handful of others have made an admirable effort to pull the few genuine ideas and problematic concepts out of a morass of muck that deserves to stay buried. But this is honestly a question for self-identified GG-ers.
Movements persist when they channel something important, meaningful, and broadly valued. There are elements of GG that could fit this bill but only if people step up to champion them — and explicitly vote against the rest of the muck. Decrying nonexistent radical feminists who are supposedly ruining things will not work.
The columnists at Breitbart and other sites that are using GG to push a broader conservative agenda are *using* it to push a broader conservative agenda — not attempting to take up any cause or ideology for its own sake. Once the next manufactured crisis comes along, they’ll drop GG. At that point, it’ll be sink or swim time.
[Hello again!]
I made the point on the Escapist that gaming media had already interacted as much as they were going to want to with GG. Kotaku + Polygon addressed patreon. There’s no pressing reason for them to do anything more.
I was talking to a few RL friends of mine and their consensus was:
1. Poor behaviour by some the industry which was unfortunate. (Some were more angered by it than others, the more angry were in favour of letter writing campaigns.)
2. They were utterly unconvinced GG did anything to help *them*/gamer community. Except the wizards, they liked that.
But mostly they just really didn’t care, they did play cod Nazi zombies to celebrate being dead though.
TL;DR the only bit that they were really interested by was the behaviour of certain public individuals. They thought the rest sounded, quote, “fucking stupid”.
It’ll end eventually when they hopefully decide they have somewhere else to go, like youtube personalities, *shrug*.
The longer it lasts, the more I’m becoming enraged toward “outreachers”. Those trying to “listen to them”, trying to cover “both sides”. That includes Erik Kain. (I mean, how many times must he repeat that Leigh’s articles were incendiary? He must have said it/wrote it/tweeted it 25+ times already… what is he trying to say??)
And of course The Escapist.
Tonight’s fiasco with TheEscapist is a strong proof that trying to listen to “both sides” leads to giving a megaphone to people who will say anything, from complete nutjob conspiracy theories, to outright hateful comments. Without the slightest hint of challenging the bullshit being said from the interviewer.
No offense to Mr Schubert. There was no way of knowing your name would appear next to downright haters in tonight’s edition of TheEscapist.
Is it the kind of journalism Gaters are looking for? Giving a megaphone to anyone willing to shout and not standing up for truth?
Anyhow.
Have a nice weekend everyone
Fridays havn’t been good days for two weeks in a row.
I just wish Intel would get their head out of their asses and just admit they fucked up.
/endrant
Gamergate isn’t going away, and there’s nothing that frauds like Quinn, or their “journalist” enablers, can do to stop it. But continue throwing temper tantrums, either way.
For those who missed TheEscapist drama
https://storify.com/alexlifschitz/escapist-drama
Well. That’s…
That is simultaneously exactly what I expected and exactly as horrifying as it ought to be to anyone with a conscience. The things said to Brianna Wu are even worse.
As much as I enjoyed that read, I do believe Alex is Zoe Quinn’s boyfriend and should be treated as a not-impartial source.
Even worse than the women in gamergate who have been threatened?
I’ve addressed those in today’s article. Note that they do not do a great job of documenting their hardships.
That storify is idiotic on many levels.
The whole concept of storify is that you take tweets out of context, add narration and construct a story. It’s nor a serious medium for anything except spinning yarns.
That’s not a pro or anti GG statement. Storify is a terrible medium – it’s even worse than Twitter itself!
Storify is indeed woeful.
I remember saying to my friend the reason the Escapist article was title “game devs” was because there were women involved. Since that’s the most obvious explanation. Lo and behold there were.
My patience is non-existent for people disregarding the obvious conclusion right now. Could the article have perhaps made that clearer? Probably, but there was no mention of “male” in the article’s load-out so it’s an *assumption* that it was all men. One which was apparently false. People seem oblivious to this.
I’m not gonna unfurl a GG banner here, but shit like this with people finding allegations like this which suit a narrative and jumping on them? Looks the same as GG from where I’m standing.
And “sourced them all from 4chan?” Sounds like the same conspiracy shit Gamergate spews. Seriously so many people in all of this look like complete jokes.
Sorry for the rant, but my patience is really at 0 with all of this bollocks. No one is looking good.
PS: Including Roguestar was fucking stupid regardless.
Roguestar, and Grim, the guy doing the Gor game (supposedly.) Whatever they used to find people to participate was … inadequate. There are ways to engage the developer public on a tenuous issue, and whatever means they used, this wasn’t the right one.
Now *that* is definitely reasonable criticism. Roguestar is not a “reasonable person” in all of this and I thought everyone wanted “reasonable people” to be heard.
Sorry for my ignorance but I dunno what Gor is. I don’t think someone who as contentious views is needed to be discarded, but I’m not a fan of giving someone a platform who talks of wanting someone’s suicide. (fuck anyone who says that. It is *never* acceptable.)
At this point the people who want to speak out are largely going to be zealots and idiots. There’s not much room in the conversation for rational people who lack an unhealthy investment.
That said that they all came from 4Chan is a lie.
I’m very tired of people posting screencaps and claiming that the screencap is “proof” of something it’s not, just hoping that people won’t examine it themselves. This is constant behavior from across the spectrum. It preys on people with such low attention spans that they just take claims on face value.
Gor is a series of novels by John Norman that had some classic scifi buried beneath a whole lot of fetishized dom/sub sexual subjugation of women.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gor
Also, notice how Escapist Editor becomes worried, not when Zoe is saying she’s been harassed by one of their “devs”, but ONLY when a MAN speaks up and says he’s been harassed by that same guy
Alexa is a useless metric, btw. It measures from people who have the Alexa toolbar installed in their web browser which is miniscule and easily gamed.
If there’s another one publically available, let me know. Only 1 or 2 of them use Quantcast.
I think the metric is appropriate given the context of it being used to champion the effectiveness of GamerGate in its early goings, however.
In general I agree that the metrics aren’t very useful. Some have outright challenged them (I remember reading up about a “for women” adult website and Alexa said that the majority audience was elderly black men, a notion the site’s owner straight up stated was absurd)
Here is gamergate setting some rules if you receive threats
(not all of them are bad, and I’m pretty sure they would apply if you receive a serious threat in any other context than this online ridiculous war)
But still, notice how they define and decide how YOU should act. So if you don’t follow the rules, they can continue to harass you for “not following the rules”. Especially if you shout out publicly that you are being threatened.
So from now on, please just be silent, victims. You make us look bad when you are vocal. And if you do not remain silent, WE will make you look bad
http://8chan.co/gg/src/1413016072862.png
“So from now on, please just be silent, victims. You make us look bad when you are vocal. And if you do not remain silent, WE will make you look bad”
Super fucking creepy, dude.
I should have put quotes on that part.
I hope everyone understood it was my impersonation of some members of GG. And not my own pov
Just making sure
Apologies Jonathan. Obviously I misunderstood what you were saying. I’ll read replies a little more slowly and carefully from now on.
What a bizarre and frankly stupid way to read that. PD always tell people don’t interact with death threats. Notify the police, notify family and friends, don’t broadcast it. For the love of god don’t respond.
Celebrities get threats literally every day, but how often do you see people talk about it on twitter. Honestly it’s almost a uniquely gaming culture thing to boast your chests about getting a threat over twitter
Police say that indeed.
And they probably have good reasons to say that.
But a couple of things need to be considered
1)advices are advices. They are opinions. They sometime apply, they sometime don’t
2) I’m pretty sure those advices apply to most of death threats going around in the world.
3) we’re in 2014, in the middle of a meme war. In the end, it’s the privilege of the person on the receiving end to decide whether he/she considers the threat solid enough to call the police, to denounce them publicly or not, to shout their outrage or not. It’s not GG’s privilege to dictate what they should do
4)this came online mere hours after yet another female game dev received twitter threats, and publicly denounced them, vocally on twitter.
5)this came online mere hours after Adam Baldwin twitted the same thing :”people should keep threats silent, not publicize them” or something in that vein
6)even Milo did’nt abide by those rules. Yes, he was’nt very vocal about his threats, but he surely didn’t strictly follow the police’s code.
So pardon me if I watch this “what gamergate suggests you do if you receive death threats” with a big degree of irony. And as a way of further attacking this specific female dev who chose to publicly denounce the threat.
I’m not blaming gamergate for the threats. I’m blaming the overall ambiance going on.
And coming out after a dev decided to speak out with outrage at threats she received , and say “tsk tsk….. you should keep them silent… that’s what police says…” was a shitty move.
Brianna Wu has said she gets threats every day. She only mentions them occasionally like your celebrities. Celebrities tend to have access to walls of security, handlers, expensive lawyers, etc, they’re much better equipped to deal with death threats than some struggling indie dev or a feminist critic. Anita’s had over two years of threats and I’m not aware of a single arrest let alone anyone being charged with anything. Death threats, rapes threats, hacking, doxxing, etc and nothing’s noticeably happened. Surely it’s understandable that these women don’t trust the system that’s in place.
There’s a few simple things Twitter could do to reduce the amount of abuse people receive. This people have been asking for for years. Talking about this and shaming them is the only way they listen.
http://danilocampos.com/2014/07/the-least-twitter-could-do/
Talking about the threats and harrassment is a way of drawing attention to a problem that remaining silent won’t so. These women talk about this btw. They talk about why they don’t remain silent, why they keep ‘feeding the trolls’. You just need to listen.
That reply is to Adam btw.
By the way University of Advanced Technology also pulled their ads from Gamasutra. I don’t really expect decent research on anything GG related from you guys but I can always dream
We knew. Don’t worry
And we also know that NVidia did NOT remove them (is it from Kotaku?) despite the ginormous amount of mail you sent them. And was it Amazon you guys were targeting Wednesday? Amazon either. And Autodesk. And all the other targets of your mail campaign.
That we know so far.
Another correction to this article. Totalbiscuit supports GG and he has 300k followers. You might want to slot him next to mundanematt, internetaristocrat, etc etc
While he may support gg, that does not necessarily deliver all 300k of his followers to either ‘side’of this, any more than this blog delivers all of its followers to either ‘side’. It gives him a large audience, some of whom are in that camp, and some of whom are not. The majority of them, I suspect, don’t care enough to side with either camp.
I like TB when he’s doing frank and well crafted criticisms of video games, not when he’s tacitly apologizing for a mob or railing about how old media will be crushed beneath the mighty boot of Youtubes.