Okay, it’s not as bizarre as Mercedes Carerra ranting about Anita, but Mark Kern’s petition against Kotaku and Polygon is strangely uninformed, out of left field and… well, just plain wrong. Patrick Garrett has some thoughts here. So does Cara Ellison. But they left a couple of things out.
1. First off, let’s make one thing clear. Polygon, Kotaku and the other gaming sites have not been feeding this fire – they’ve actively been trying to ignore it. I documented this clearly in this article here where I noted there was far more coverage of the topic on Verge, Breitbart, Forbes and motherfucking CRACKED than on any major games website – despite many commentators and activists (including myself) actively shaming them for it. It wasn’t until the major media (MSNBC, New York Times, CBS, NPR) actually caught on to the story that the gaming press picked up on the thread again, presumably because it seems pretty shitty when a game-themed story hits the New York Times and your top five gaming site is pretending that shit doesn’t exist. Here’s a great example of IGN explaining why they choose not to feed the trolls. A week later, all these sites would drop that shit like it was a hot potato.
2. So this episode of Law & Order: SVU is gaming’s ‘Reefer Madness’? Um, sure. Look, shitty gaming related TV shows and movies have been on the television for YEARS. Here’s a CSI: Miami from the Jack Thompson days. The CSI: NY episode about Second Life is a wonder of badness that’s almost amazing to behold. Neither really resulted in much more than uncomfortable conversation, and I doubt that last year’s #46th ranked show is going to make much of a blip in their lowest ranked show of the year. If Furries can survive their CSI episode, I’m sure we’ll be fine.
3. It was not “relentless and histrionic slander” against all gamers. It showed a full game con of mostly peaceful, happy men and women playing and loving video games. It showed an Anita analog standing before a conference room of enthusiastic fans, cheering for a game that could be played both peacefully and through might. It tried to show the main protagonist of the show as being a hardcore, con-dwelling, Kotaku-reading, FPS-rockin’ gamer himself, even if the results of those efforts were unintentionally HILARIOUS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7faUHdlh9g#t=128
4. The episode was eye-rollingly bad at times, and yes, the ending was downright shameful. And yes, it clearly shows perpetrators who had taken things farther than any real life analog has so far. Still, let’s not pretend that its not based on fucking nothing. Some of the topics the episode tries to cram into a very short amount of time that are very much based on the reality that some people, particularly some women, have faced since last August include doxings, swattings, stalkings, constant rape and death threats, accusations of sleeping your way to success, threats of mass murders against public gatherings where prominent feminists are speaking, and lunatics screaming death threats to a camera to pander to an anonymous Youbute audience of nutballs, all of which, if you click on the links I’ve provided, link to some pretty clear analogs that have actually happened. I’m sure that if they’d contacted Zoe, Anita, Brianna or observers like myself, they could have written an entire fucking miniseries. It’s very nice that Mark Kern lives in a world where he hasn’t experienced any of this personally, but to be clear, this shit is still happening. Yes, it’s a tiny, tiny group of assholes doing it, but its impact is still huge on the people in its crosshairs.
It’s an insult to those who have been victimized over the last few months to describe what limited press that HAS occurred as ‘yellow journalism’. It’s even more of an insult to suggest that the press should be sweeping the very real fucking events of the last 8 months even more under the rug than they’ve already been. If Mark Kern was serious, he’d be talking to the people who are actually DOING the damage, not the ones who are merely reporting it.
Wow, Kern is trying really hard to rewrite history. He is basically denying abuse and claiming that denouncing abuse is causing trouble, not the abuse itself. He is at best, a lying thug, a worst an abuser trying to deny the abuse because it creates sympathy to the victim.
He is not trying to fix anything, he is just trying to punish GG’s victims of…being victims, he trying to punish those who denounce the abuses
(I know, Godwin law) Honestly, this petition disgusted me. It was painful to read. It reminds me of neo-nazis doing holocaust denial, trying to shift the blame of the atrocity of WW2 on the Jews while denying the atrocities exist at all. I detect the same desire to harm mixed with the same desire to deny sympathy to their victims.
https://www.change.org/p/kotaku-lead-the-way-in-healing-the-rift-in-video-games/u/9696201
This update is particularly telling, he is telling that the purge must go on and he is doing his worst to make an example of those sites.
I love how you address basically EVERYTHING Kern Talked about EXCEPT the gamers are dead articles, all the gaming press had to do was ONE THING, throw Zoe and Nathan UNDER THE BOSS and let them take the heat, but they couldn’t do that for one reason or another, so NOW all OF THEM HAS TO PAY, the more and more this goes on, the worse we MAY look to the MAINSTREAM, but the worse and worse actual GAMERS see u guys. You can throw around whatever bullshit narrative you want, but we WILL NEVER FORGET GTA 5 fuck u feminists.
Urg.
You are claiming that the gamer are dead is an unforgivable insult, anybody who read those articles, there are a reaction to harassment. Anybody who is seriously insulted by those article either can’t read or they identify with the object of the condemnation. If you identify as a harasser, you should do some introspection. I tell you something, I never felt the gamer are dead applied to me.
As for Zoe and Nathan, I give you a hint: there was a witch hunt for the better part of a year and nobody have seen those biased reviews. You want the head of two people for a crime that doesn’t exist. Nathan never reviewed Depression Quest. There is no biased review to be found, there isn’t even a review to doctor as a biased review. You have nothing. Is it like Saddam Hussein’ WMDs, nothing. Nada
The whole casus belli is invalid. Since this hate movement never had anything remotely serious and credible, it leave only one reason why anybody would ask for Zoe’s head: hate.
8 fuking months running on pure hate and still going, that the story.
“all the gaming press had to do was ONE THING, throw Zoe and Nathan UNDER THE BOSS and let them take the heat, but they couldn’t do that for one reason or another, so NOW all OF THEM HAS TO PAY”
Do you see how this reads as something hateful and illogical rather than a reasonable request?
I see how it reads as someone taking a stance on ethics in game journalism.
… I wish I was surprised that it’s clearly against it. “All they had to do was kowtow to what our group told them to do, and spread our libel against innocent people!”
And GamerGate supporters wonder why some people think they’re unhinged.
I know u will not approve my comments, which is ANOTHER REASON why this is happening, cause of censorship.
Why on earth would I censor your post? Because it pretty much proves my point, which is that GamerGate is a cancer on the industry and the press was correct to condemn and/or ignore it.
I won’t blame Damion if he think my comment is over the line.
I am pretty tired of the “I write here but you will censor me ***ing SJW”. Here, I’ve seen a ton of comment that are pretty much undiluted hate and I would delete them without remorse.
I hate to imagine the vile things that get “censored”.
Nothing is being censored. That’s part of the problem. Free speech should also come with responsibility for it. Right now the most responsibility anyone is bearing are the ones who get harassed for what they say. Randos like you get off scot free.
If you’re still reacting to “gamers are dead” shit from last August:
1. You’re clearly not dead.
2. Let it go.
3. Find some other way to define yourself. It shouldn’t be just one thing.
4. Mark Kern is an ass.
Me and Damion have disagreed on various aspects of this mess as we have gone along, enough that it has occasionally required us to take a time out and discuss something, *anything*, else for the sake of maintaining our friendship (from such timeouts are things like researching Cock Hero born).
But blaming Kotaku/Polygon for the SVU episode is nonsense. I actually thought it could have been a lot worse, compared to previous visits by the L&O franchise to video-game related subjects, it did a lot better. Someone (possibly Ice-T) made sure that a lot of the cultural references were actually accurate, and probably reined in the worst “moral panic” elements (there are a lot of places where somebody says something hopelessly stupid about games or gamers, and Ice-T’s character corrects them and amplifies).
SVU’s writers are not reading Kotaku or Polygon. They probably aren’t even reading The Verge or Forbes. The headlines they “ripped” this from were probably the NYT, if not The Mary Sue and Jezebel. So it could have been a hell of a lot worse, at least their villains were such hopelessly unrealistic caricatures that the damage done to the image of *actual* gamers is little to nothing.
SVU is always taking real events and creating a fictional re-imagining of them, where the sexual threat meter is cranked to 11 and the drama is over the top. Compared to how they have handled things like professional sports (or even the space program, we got through comparatively unscathed.
–Dave
The main poetic license of the episode involves depicting some actions that have been threatened but not successfully followed up on. And the actions they did depict are actually pretty tame compared to the serial-killer level graphic threats that we’ve already seen.
As the article above points out and directly links to, most of the bad actions depicted in the episode are things that definitely did in fact happen. Most of that stuff wasn’t ‘ripped from the headlines’ so much as ‘ripped from real events that did in fact happen already’. Which is pretty sad.
“despite many commentators and activists (including myself) actively shaming them for it.”
Is shaming going to achieve the results we want (better representation of women in the game industry)?
It seems you agree that it so far has not, although it appears it is the chief tactic of many of those taking up the cause. IMO it looks like some people aren’t pro GG, just reacting negatively to the use of shaming.
The goal of GG isn’t “ethics in game journalism,” so it’s fair to say that every word written against someone who uses GG as an excuse to be an ass is not made with the goal to better represent women in the game industry. As has been said before, GG prevents women in the game industry from even wanting to say very much at all, or even identify themselves, lest they be sucked into the vortex.
It just takes time. Everything takes time. Meanwhile, standing up and speaking out has power if it’s used sparingly and with purpose, any purpose.
Is shaming going to achieve the results we want (better representation of women in the game industry)?
You took “shaming” out of context. Here’s what he originally wrote:
“I documented this clearly in this article here where I noted there was far more coverage of the topic on Verge, Breitbart, Forbes and motherfucking CRACKED than on any major games website – despite many commentators and activists (including myself) actively shaming them for it.”
So here he’s talking about shaming games journalists, not gamers or GamerGate.
But even more generally with regards to shaming, the point of it isn’t to address the worst actors, e.g. Eron Gjoni or 8 chan, but to prevent third parties from surrendering to them (Intel being the primary example here). Journalists and devs don’t want to live in a world in which their bosses say “GamerGate is screaming at us about you, therefore you must have done something wrong and you’re fired.”
It’s not about making the trolls go away. It’s about refusing to let the trolls run the place.
I’m just disappointed we never got a Seinfeld episode where Jerry dumps a girl because she’s a gamer, even though she is hot and gave him the best sex he ever had – only to discover afterward that she’s also a huge fan of Superman comics.
I think you’d have to search pretty hard to find a TV series that includes video games as a positive for their characters. Some other examples are:
– In “The Inside Man”, the lead bank robber shares a scene with a boy who he cautions against playing violent video games. Yep, it’s the armed thief promoting less violent video games.
– The “X-Files” had the “First Person Shooter” episode about video game events killing people, and it was terrible.
– I’m pretty sure in “Silent Witness”, the murderer is a drug-using, gaming teen in “Death Has No Dominion: Part 1”. His gaming habit is used to show his lack of empathy. (I could also drag in “Luther” here for a series where the killers were RPG-playing twins who used dice rolls to determine who they kill, but that’s for another time.
In short: video games pretty much always appear negatively on screen. It’s not like L&O was moving into unexplored territory.
No doubt. Want good honest commentary on video games on TV? Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe is unassailable. And of course it doesn’t say altogether nice things about everyone involved.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC613893F6AA8823B