For those who view #GamerGate as a Macabre Theatre, this week was far less spectacular than last week. But that’s to be expected, I guess. Last week was a masterpiece of the surreal – it was GG’s Red Wedding. And let’s face it – you just can’t keep that up week to week. The audience would be exhausted.
In all honesty, Red Wedding Week was good for those Gamergaters who actually have noble ideals about ethics in games journalism, in that it did actually expel or minimize some of GamerGaters worst agents who were driving some of the stuff that riles up opposition and makes Gamergate look very bad. Enthusiasm on both sides has been waning. As such, events were much more subdued in the last week than previous weeks. Which manifested itself in a lot less horrible stuff happening.
But no shortage of very silly stuff.
GamerGate did have a couple of victories. Not very meaningful victories, of course. For example, they managed to push the Kotaku curator list to the second page of the Steam curators. The Steam Curators are so prestigious and important, I couldn’t even FIND it in the main Steam GUI. But don’t worry, GamerGate didn’t achieve this goal by forming a new Curator group. No, instead they did this by simply hijacking the Anime Games group that was closest to completing that goal. Which is a pretty good clue that even #gamergate realizes they don’t have 40K people capable of clicking a button.
They do have at least 20K, though. This week, GamerGate’s primary reddit, KotakuInAction, hit 20000 users which is — erm, not a whole lot. KiA is roughly #1380 on subscribers out of all subreddits – the stats are just slightly out of date, and do not reflect that they recently jumped above EnlightenedBirdMen. Sure, it’s one of the most TRAFFICKED reddits (i.e. it’s small pop posts a lot), but the population is still quite small. Among the reddits that beat it:
- Riddles (20407) – Be sure to use the spoiler tag on your guesses!
- Feed the Beast (20729) – A Minecraft mod reddit
- Rabbits (20761) — Awww, they’re so cute!
- The Underboob (21901) -NSFW
- Denver (22235) – go broncos!
- Calligraphy (20977) — Show your work and learn!
- PantyFetish (21952) – NSFW
- GirlGamers (27645) – Enough said.
Gamergate was also kind enough to help make ggautoblocker a more effective twitter block list thanks to Operation Skynet. In this brilliant plan, all GG Twitizens made an effort to follow each other and retweet each other, Voltron-ing into an even more perfect echo chamber that made anyone only tangentially interested in the cause defollow them in order to reduce the spam of their Twitter feeds. The net result? In what is described by everyone as a Twitter-centric revolution, we discover that there are fewer than 10000 engaged GamerGaters on Twitter.
Based on these datapoints, one conclusion is very likely. GamerGate is very active, but still suggests its active core is a small, fringe movement. The fact that it is still this small so long after its conception suggests that it likely will always be so. Hey, if you set things up to be you against the world, don’t be surprised when the world takes you up on the offer.
For pure comedy, a good place to check is the attempts by GamerGate to write their own wikipedia entry after being directed to do so by Jimmy Wales himself after he addressed them repeatedly harassing their Wikipedia arbitration committee. So… how’s that been going, Jimmy?
@gameragodzilla So far, I am entirely unimpressed.
— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) November 12, 2014
GamerGate hero Nero had a big week. He started off the week with a Twitter suspension, and then came back just in time to adverrtise his most recent article, which aired unsubstantiated rumors that Zoe Quinn was a murderer and labelled Brianna Wu a “dissheveled, psychologically unstabled transexual’ before admonishing #gamergaters not to stoop to ‘personal attacks’.
Oh, and he painted the whole anti-GamerGate movement as a leftish fringe. Just as a reminder, the opposite true. The most notable sites that have backed GamerGate are Breitbart, the right wing tabloid site, the Daily Caller, a site trying to be more right-wing than Breitbart, and Return of Kings, who just this week published a nice article about how wives needed to not be uppity bitches and know their place.
Anyway, I digress. This week, after doing a victory lap for this GamePolitics correction (on the heels of my own – but hey, this week Breitbarters shouldn’t get too cocky) he tried to convince #Gamergaters they should not support Net Neutrality. For those who don’t know what Net Neutrality is and why its important, let Oatmeal tell you. For what it’s worth, 80% of both Democrats and Republicans strongly favor the principles of Net Neutrality. Milo is unfazed.
Net neutrality is the Marxism of the tech world.
— Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) November 13, 2014
Response was predictably negative – hey, one thing you do NOT do is get between a GamerGate and his fast pings and HD streaming porn.
The big story of the week was that, on Friday, Gamasutra announced that they had resumed their advertising with Intel. This is significant because it marks the total rollback of #GamerGate’s only significant boycott victory of an actual game-related site.
If I had to guess why Intel folded, I’d guess it’s because Gamasutra is the top game developer website, and Intel probably looked at the stats I did and realized they sell more CPUs to game developers in a month than to angry GamerGaters in a year.
Yes, @Intel reinstated ads on Gamasutra. Yes, it’s a paid campaign. No, it’s not an ad service. Thanks for reading!
— Gamasutra (@gamasutra) November 14, 2014
GamerGate apparently failed a roll to disbelieve, because there is still a healthy contingent of Gaters who were convinced that Gamasutra was lying to them, even after Intel spokespersons confirmed the ads were legit and intentional. Orders came down to wait until after the weekend, so they could directly reach out to Intel to confirm. Until then, this weekend, the plan would be to DO NOTHING. In particular, they launched #OpMute, a plan where they would attempt to systematically ignore, block and not retweet any of the Literally Who women. This plan earned hearty endorsement from many.
#opmute is Gamergate’s plan to not interact with me, @thequinspiracy or #femfreq. I enthusiastically endorse as the best idea they’ve had!!!
— Brianna Wu aka LW3 (@Spacekatgal) November 15, 2014
Then some asshole doxed one of her close friends.
There were a ton of minor stories.
- Mattie Brice made an ill-advised joke, which resulted in a whole bunch of GamerGaters trying to get her fired as an IGF judge. In this episode, GamerGaters established that they are just as thin-skinned as they accuse the SJW brigade of being.
- Geordie Tait entered the ‘dude, you’re not helping’ zone.
- GamerGaters are trying to set up a Metacritic alternative. What the improvements are have not yet been disclosed.
- For some reason, supposed reasonable moderate Gamergater TotalBiscuit decided to bash the concept of patronage. Note: the concept of Patronage gave us the Renaissance. In related news, Jim Sterling abandoned the Escapist for Patreon, with buzz being that the reason being the Escapist’s lukewarm support of the GamerGate community.
- Gamergaters made a press kit in an attempt to ensure people realized they are totes serious about ethics. It is probably the most professional piece of writing the movement has produced so far, despite many familiar flaws. As an example, it mentions Zoe Quinn 33 times.
- A GamerGater went to r/BitCoin to suggest they team up. r/BitCoin pretty much dismissed Gamergate as being full of crazy conspiracist-minded idiots.
- Randi Harper wrote an excellent reminder of why you should care about this shitstorm. Anyone who cares about women in STEM roles should read this.
If there is any significant milestone of the week, it’s that this is the week that a huge part of #GamerGate stopped pretending they were about ethics in games journalism. There was a minor scandal this week, where Assassin’s Creed: Unity had a press embargo on their reviews that didn’t release until 12 hours AFTER the game went live, in an attempt to screw over early purchasers and pre-orderers (the game is not reviewing very well). This story did not get much coverage – largely because GamerGate villians Kotaku and Polygon were the ones who broke the story. There’ve been a couple of threads, but no one wants to admit that these two sites actually did a good job breaking the story and, in general, protecting gamers from unscrupulous publishers.
Compare that to #Shirtstorm coverage, though. Holy living fuck, the last three days have been a never-ending cavalcade of Twitter feed coverage and yesterday, at least half a dozen and probably more than a dozen KiA articles about the topic dominated discussion. The most notable thing about this, of course, is that this is a new story that is neither about games nor games journalism, much less ethics. It is completely about the influence of feminists, progressives and SJWs in the media, and it’s driven almost completely by the outragecore brigade. To quote me from yesterday:
Yes, the shirt merited comment, the comment was made, and yes, there are those on the left who were altogether too entirely precious about all this. But man, the reason this story is dominating my twitter feed has nothing to do with the progressive/leftists in my feed, but rather those on the other side who are determined to be outraged on behalf of a contrite Matt Taylor.
The other story that got talk? A stupid scandal about ‘banning the word feminism’ from a Time poll due to brigading. As Gamergate starts to unravel a tad, more and more posts keep popping up talking about how SJWs were always the endgoal. Again, this is not all GamerGate participants. But the voices who are in GamerGate because they want to exclude feminists and progressive voices from geek culture made their voice loud and clear this week. And the ones who actually care about Ethics in Games Journalism this week were marginalized in favor of the assholes determined to be on the wrong side of history.
“This week was way less insane than last week – thankfully to everyone, including GGers”
This week we saw targeted harassment campaigns against Mattie Brice Elizsbrth Simins and Luke Plunket mirroring very much what happened previously to Jenn Frank. The whole incident show just how much GamerGate misunderstands the concept of harassment. In fact the very harassment patrol seems to be very pro-harassment as evidenced in the participation in the attack on those 3 people and the reaction against WAM.
I don’t think it is a minor story. This is probably the most important aspect of GamerGate now – they are volatile and will explode for the smallest of reason. You can be attacked for crimes you didn’t know you committed. This is the biggest story about GamerGate right now.
And if you think about it Geordie Tait didn’t get as much harassment as those 3.
As near as I can figure, Geordie got ignored because most of GG feels that he’s either mentally ill or trolling, and either way they don’t want any part of him.
If we’re talking about @ElizSimins, someone who uses the alternate handle “i.e. the man-hater” and the description text “probably an elaborate hoax created to troll men // “mad genius” —@themarysue”, may not be an innocent bystander.
As far as Mattie Brice and Luke Plunkett go: They were hardly just ambling along, minding their own business, when a gang of GG ruffians beset them out of the blue. They picked fights and got them (Mattie, for example, made a ‘joke’ that she was going to downvote any IGF entries that were made by male teams, which even the IGF felt was out of line).
If GG has any unifying thread I have been able to find, it is not “ethics in game journalism” or “crusade against feminism”. It’s an anti-defamation league for geeks. You poke the bear, it’s gonna bite. Taunting someone and then using their reaction to defame them is perilously close to high-schoolers torturing someone until they snap, then calling them a “spaz”.
And I’m not sure you can say that Geordie was “ignored.” There was a lot of talk about him on the forums, and KOP actually got him on his stream so that the craziest members of each side of this debacle could go at it for 2 hours. I haven’t actually watched it, but I’m sure it must have been either hilarious or horrifying depending on your point of view.
And I definitely agree with you that GG seems to be primarily be an “anti nerd defamation league.” Hence why they’ve put so much energy into attacking Gawker over Biddle’s infamous tweets.
I’ll say that the ‘Anti-Nerd Defamation League’ is probably GamerGate’s best recruiting tactic, and has more actual legs than any of the very silly ethics charges they keep trying to milk.
If they are actually using “Anti-Nerd Defamation League”, then they will get a lawyer dropped on them as soon as the ADL notices — they are very protective of that Trademark.
“Anti-defamation league for geeks” is my phrase, not theirs. I’m looking at observed behavior, it’s geek-bashing that incites and inflames them, their numbers always jump when a major incident of that type occurs, and they pivoted on a dime to go after Gawker in the wake of the Sam Biddle/Jezebel “Bring Back Bullying” incident.
Just as there’s been a thread of misogyny in GG, there has been a constant drumbeat of nerd-bashing and geek-shaming in the opposition to it.
As far as i can tell GG don’t see criticizing people on twitter as harassment, because most normal people don’t. It’s only when i’m reading stories about GG do I see this insane logic that critcizing someone on the internet is “attacking them” on a personal level.
Ans you forgot to mention David Auerbach acting totally inappropriate on twitter and Wikipedia, calling for the head of a Wikipedia editor, over small nuance in paraphrasing of an article discussing another article written Auerbach. He seems to not be happy in his assessment of wikipedia’s assessment of Elias Isquith’s assessment of his own article.
The part that got me the most was when he actually was pulling out of context quotes to chow the supposed hypocrisy of Wiki editors and prove some vague point. In other words David Auerbach is “Gatesplaining” on twitter now.
The ironic part is he was complaining about the Wiki article alleging he supports harassment, while now is helping fuel the months long harassment campaign against certain Wikipedia editors.
It is, as you might imagine, quite a challenge to figure out how far into the weeds is too far for these roundups.
A wikipedia editor misrepresented what he said (that’s a nice way of saying the wikipedia editor lied) and David objected.
What exactly is the problem with that?
Your idea of “inappropriate” behavior is laughable. “I should be able to outright lie on Wikipedia and someone calling me out on that is harassment!” Yeah…good luck with that.
As someone who has remained fairly neutral during the GamerGate saga despite following it with interest I feel I should point out that a subreddit’s subscriber count doesn’t mean very much. Some subreddits with high subscriber counts are years old and have few active users, and most of the time people just lurk on a subreddit without either subscribing or logging into a reddit account. If you look at the actual traffic statistics for KiA it gets hundreds of thousands of unique visitors.
But how many of those visitors are supporters?
I’m sure I’m one of them, for instance, and I don’t even use Reddit – I just dropped in to browse the crazypen for a bit.
The point is not everyone subscribes to the reddit page. It’s not as if KiA is a membership card.
And my counterpoint is “by what other measure can you estimate supporters of that page?”
“visitors” sure as hell will be inflated far beyond it’s supporters. Subscribers might undershoot the number, but it’s bound to at least be closer.
To be honest, I only thought it merited a story was because KiA was celebrating it like it was a meaningful milestone (I tend to agree with you). Also, i really wanted to point out r/EnlightenedBirdmen
33 mentions in a 20,000 word document really isn’t that much. Furthermore, all the things she’s mentioned in regards to seem to be legitimate issues, though some are a bit weak (her feud with TFYC not getting reported because Quinn told a journalist that the group was exploitative and transphobic, for instance). In any case, the document talks about plenty of other stuff, including several questionable incidents involving AAA publishers.
Regardless, I think it’s a little silly to say that this week saw the release of a 50 page document put together by GGers that is solely about ethics in gaming journalism, then go on to say that this week proved that GG doesn’t actually care about ethics in gaming journalism. Sure, there’s a lot of baggage, tangentially if not totally urelated issues, and cranks mixed in there, but I think the fact that GG got something like this published was a very good sign.
Fun fact: I was watching 8chan when the press kit was first suggested there, and it was by someone claiming to be “a member of an international anti-corruption NGO” who said something along the lines of “One of the reasons you don’t get good press is because it is hard for an outsider to get a sense of your grievances. Seriously, your wiki is a mess. You should write all your concerns up in a ‘press kit’ about 50 pages long that you can send to journalists.” It was also originally going to have a section about “harassment being used as a deflection of criticism,” but that was apparently dropped at some point to focus solely on game journalistic ethics. A very good decision, in my mind.
Sorry, I misread your blog post a little. You’re saying that the ones who cared about ethics got sidelines by the people who get upset about things like shirtgate. I’m not sure if looking at the current topics on KIA is a good indication of that, since shirtgate blew up more recently than the dossier got released, and there wasn’t much else to talk about during the weekend.
Is it worth mentioning that ‘ethics’ is only used 27 times?
If you include variations of the word such as “ethical,” then the count rises to 58.
The fact that Zoe is mentioned half as often is still ridiculous, given she has a historical note but all proof of actual ethics violations by her are specious at best.
But seriously, I really don’t think word count comparisons are a good way of analyzing a document. If you read the whole thing, Zoe is only mentioned in 2 sections near the end.
Well got to say I strongly disagree with the overriding point of your post. Which, as it reads to me, is: “The failures of gamergate are connected to the fundamental issue that they are about.”
Yes, the whole ethics in game journalism was largely a cover argument. It created a false narrative that suggested if you were not pro gamergate then you were not for ethics in journalism. Most people saw through this pretty quickly.
Yes, the tactics of gamergate have largely been ineffective. But this is not connected to the fundamental concern that gamergate has been somewhat representative of. Their failures are simply tied to the processes that this group tried to organize around. I gave a more detailed post about the albatross around the neck, that was this Anon inspired ‘we have no leader’ approach. The post is in another of your blogs here: http://www.zenofdesign.com/dear-gamergate-please-form-a-consumer-organization-kthxbye/ What I said is the bottom comment at this time.
All that being said, the core issue to me is this progressive liberal ideology that attempts to control the narrative. This is done by creating these ‘trigger’ words or phrases or hobbies or many other things, that automatically connect you to an entire mindset or ideology. It is silly to deny that such a thing does exist. Look at the minefield any republican politician steps into as soon as they start talking about poverty in black communities.
Let me be clear. I am not saying there is a large conspiracy or that there is some secret SJW cabal hatching nefarious plots. That is ridiculous. What it comes from is a mindset that is incubated in higher education. Especially the ivy league. Is anyone in denial that Berkley has a left progressive bent to it?
Let me be clear on another point. I do not think that progressive ideology is pervasive in game development. You made another post mocking those that think there is, I thought that post was funny and made a good point. That being said, there is also undoubtedly those who wish there was an overriding progressive ideology in the games industry.
I noticed a very subtle thing that happened after the Aug. 28 articles came out. Many attempted to reinterpret what those articles actually said. The reinterpretation went something like this: “Those articles were about condemning a small sub group in gaming that harasses women and game devs.”
Unfortunately for the reimagining that has been attempted, what is written on the internet does not go away.
Lets look segment from: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224400/Gamers_dont_have_to_be_your_audience_Gamers_are_over.php
“Suddenly a generation of lonely basement kids had marketers whispering in their ears that they were the most important commercial demographic of all time. Suddenly they started wearing shiny blouses and pinning bikini babes onto everything they made, started making games that sold the promise of high-octane masculinity to kids just like them.”
That is condemning an entire generation of gamers, hardly talking about just a small group.
“When you decline to create or to curate a culture in your spaces, you’re responsible for what spawns in the vacuum. That’s what’s been happening to games.”
And who is going to ‘curate a culture’ in the gaming space? Liberal writers is who I think they see leading such a process.
“This is what the rest of the world knows about your industry — this, and headlines about billion-dollar war simulators or those junkies with the touchscreen candies. That’s it. You should absolutely be better than this”
That reads to me like they just to a shot at everyone who plays CoD to people playing Candy Crush. Hardly just condemning just a small segment of the gaming community.
Let me reiterate, that that quote is saying ‘you should feel some guilt if you like those war simulators’.
“It makes a strange sort of sense that video games of that time would become scapegoats for moral panic, for atrocities committed by young white teen boys in hypercapitalist America — not that the games themselves had anything to do with tragedies, but they had an anxiety in common, an amorphous cultural shape that was dark and loud on the outside, hollow on the inside.”
O sorry, I didn’t realize I was ‘hollow on the inside’ for fondly remembering the games I liked in the 90s. Can Leigh Alexander really be surprised that people like myself felt personally insulted?
“That’s not super surprising, actually. While video games themselves were discovered by strange, bright outcast pioneers — they thought arcades would make pub games more fun, or that MUDs would make for amazing cross-cultural meeting spaces — the commercial arm of the form sprung up from marketing high-end tech products to ‘early adopters’. You know, young white dudes with disposable income who like to Get Stuff.”
And here comes the identity politics the progressives love so much. The interesting thing about this little bit is that to me it says more about how this writer grew up than myself. I may have once been one of the ‘young white dudes’ but I lived in a very mixed community. All our parents were in the army. Most of my friends were of a different ethnic group than myself. Guess what, we all loved games. One of my friends used to draw panels of a 2D side scroller he was imagining (super Mario was real popular at the time), guess what, he was black.
Me and another friend worked out that if I got the Super NES and he got the Sega Genesis for Christmas we would have access to both systems. O yeah, he was black too.
As much as I have agreed with your mocking and condemnation of gamergate, I think you have glossed over just how stupid those articles were. They reviled a dislike of their own audience. Also the reimagining of what many of those articles were saying has in my view been intellectually dishonest.
At the end of the day I think that evil ‘hyper-capitalist’ system is working just fine. There are games for everyone. And liking Gone Home is not better than liking CoD.
Of all the political issues out there, video games rates a 0 for me. I don’t think teen age boys liking a game that is made for teen age boys is an issue.
Bioshock may have been a critique of Atlas Shrugged, a book I like and on many things agree with but I’m not offended by the existence of Bioshock. I think the progressive side should try not being so easily offended themselves.
As for GamerGate, I’m sure they will not even be worth talking about in a few more months….. or weeks. They are a disorganized and incomprehensible mess of a ‘movement’.
But I don’t think the underlying issue of why people felt insulted by many of those articles is going to go away. No matter how many writers say ‘well you didn’t understand what we were really saying’.
/end rant
“All that being said, the core issue to me is this progressive liberal ideology that attempts to control the narrative. This is done by creating these ‘trigger’ words or phrases or hobbies or many other things, that automatically connect you to an entire mindset or ideology. It is silly to deny that such a thing does exist. Look at the minefield any republican politician steps into as soon as they start talking about poverty in black communities.”
Unrelated to the rest of your post, I just wanted to comment on how your use of the word “trigger” displays such a gulf of distance from the original meaning and connotation of the word as used in the sense of “Trigger warnings”. You are conflating that concept (marking content, usually about traumatic events like assault or rape, which may cause someone who has experienced similar trauma to have a flashbacks, with a warning so that such people can make an educated decision about whether or not to read the content) with the concept of “dog-whistles”, phrases or buzzwords or framing of topics in a way that is nominally unoffensive or uncontroversial, while signalling to an in-group a different, more derisive message (referring to black male criminals as “thugs” is a classic conservative dog-whistle). I myself have been fascinated to watch the ever-evolving “coding” of certain things as representative of an entire lifestyle and worldview. (My favorite recent example of this is the “fedora” as a stand-in for the PUA/MRA/generally vaguely unpleasant and possibly misogynist, but certainly somehow socially inept, white male. What really kills me about that is the hat-of-preference driving this sartorial association is, in fact, most often a *trilby*.)
This kind of coding is going on all the time, and is a useful rhetorical shorthand, but when the conversation is global, as it is on the internet, the subtle coding can be misunderstood or lost entirely to an audience not familiar with the shorthand that is common to the speaker. I have to think a lot (A LOT) of the anger, confusion, and resentment association with the GrandGuignol stems from a total mis-communication between various sub-cultures who have become so entrenched in their own jargon that they’ve forgotten it has a different or no meaning to a larger audience. Anita Sarkeesian’s recent Tweets trying to clarify her use of the word “sexism” in the academic sense of institutional power structures is one example. The constant use of really offensive slurs as casual nick-names or even terms of affection by those familiar with *chan culture is another.
I would say it would “help” to define terms, but then the GargleGalaxy would just be a big argument about definitions and usages. I mean, more so than it is already. (The evolution of the meaning of the word “shill” has been fascinating to watch. Ditto “ethics”.)
Well in response I would say that the intent of what I was saying was not hard to understand. What you did was fall back on what I talked about. Trying to control the narrative. As in assigning a point of view or ideology based on reimagining what I said or assigning subjective views/opinions onto words I said.
As for all this trigger stuff. Well ok, here is what I think. Having been in the Army and known people who deal with PTSD I find most the claims on the net to be highly questionable. The idea that reading an article can cause on issue does not jive with how I have known people to experience this phenomenon. That being said, I do not suffer from it myself and don’t know all the ways it can surface.
I do however think giving trigger warnings in articles is………… stupid. I mean seriously, look up ptsd and understand what it is.
It’s cultural signalling.
It’s sort of like dog-whistle language but not exactly. The intent of using these words is to convey very little meaning other than that you are a member of a certain cultural subgroup. People in a cultural subgroup speak a certain way, and if you speak the same way it’s a shorthand way of demonstrating you’re a member of that group.
Why do progressives call everything “problematic”? They don’t say “has problems” or “is troubling” or “is flawed.” They always use specifically “problematic”, even when it doesn’t really fit or conveys very little. The reason is because that’s how progressives demonstrate they are progressives. Especially internet progressives who are literally all talk – they have no progressive credentials beyond word choice.
We’ve gotten to the point that so many important words have taken on a double meaning as cultural signals that the original meaning has been strongly eroded, and where people can write entire paragraphs that contain no original thought, just a word soup of signals.
“Bayonetta 2 is a problematic game, the sexualization of the main character reflects toxic patriarchal values and the inherent internalized sexism of its creators.” This is the type of thing you read all the time now and it means nothing – it’s just words arranged in order that say nothing beyond “pat me on the head I’m a good progressive.”
This is related to the movement towards writing specifically to the already converted rather than attempting to be persuasive. The vast majority of “persuasive essays” on social issues are nothing of the sort – they aren’t intended to persuade anyone, only to demonstrate fealty.
Progressives are hardly the only group that uses this sort of signalling language, but the problem is they’ve co-opted so many important words. Republicans use “death taxes” to demonstrate that they are Republicans but “death taxes” has no use outside of that – nothing of value is lost if that phrase has no meaning beyond signalling. But words like “racism” are important – turning them into meaningless nothings that people roll their eyes at is a bad thing.
These discussions of what are ostensibly serious issues now often come across as brainless gamesmanship.
“Anita Sarkeesian’s recent Tweets trying to clarify her use of the word “sexism” in the academic sense of institutional power structures is one example.”
The idea that racism and sexism are “prejudice plus power” is just a semantic trick. Everyone has a common-sense understanding of what “racism” and “sexism” means – pretending they mean something else is just a silly ploy to waste people’s time and derail discussions. We already have a phrases for institutionalized sexism – “institutionalized sexism.”
This is a different phenomenon from signalling language I think. This is more a rhetorical trick that became institutionalized. The idea that you can’t be sexist against men or racist against white people (or Asians? or Jews?) is so fundamentally stupid that the only way to argue it is to redefine words.
I clicked on the link to the EnlightenedBirdMen Reddit… and now I’ve fallen into a hole of insanity I’m not sure I can and want to escape.
Squibble squibble.
Sterling leaving The Escapist sounds so predictable in retrospect. Two weeks ago, for my own Gamergate round-up (I know that my name reeks of sulfur in some circles, but I am and have always been decidedly anti-GG), I was sniffing around the Internet for material regarding the so-called “mouthpiece of the gaming generation”, as “The Escapist” calls itself, and I found this revealing snippet from an Advertising Age article from last June:
“Additionally Defy Media will promote Viacom’s brands and content across its owned digital properties and network of third-party sites.”
Defy Media being the current owner of “The Escapist”, Sterling’s comments on his Patreon page would seem to confirm your view of his departure, as would a few comments on The Escapist’s forum itself, to wit: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.865230-Farewell-Jim-Sterling?page=10#21617167
Looking at more press material from Defy and its predecessor Alloy Digital also indicates why “The Escapist”‘s endorsement, however tepid, of GG was inevitable: I’ve never regarded “The Escapist” as anything more than a matchmaking service between a product and its audience. But it now seems they’re beginning to pay the price for it.
Still, they can rely on that walking profanity in a fedora that is Yahtzee Croshaw for page hits – until he figures out his fan club will follow him wherever he goes.
Feed The Beast is not a Minecraft mod, it is a mod pack (and later launcher) that spawned from a special challenge map.
This has nothing to do with the larger topic and is basically irrelevant, but there you go.
“Gaters Gonna Gate” is a beautiful phrase and I can’t believe I have not encountered it until now.
To say Kotaku/Polygon “broke” the Unity story is a flat out fucking lie. The review embargo was a story among YTubers/twitch days before, and they were the first to talk about the framerate issues. As usual GJ scrambled to cover the story, and dodged questions as to why they never told their audience that ubisoft had such a stringiest embargo.
I know your desperately looking for a story to justify their usual incompetence.but this isn’t it. Again
Are you lying about Milo again? Where did he say that Brianna Wu is a transsexual? Numerous others have distastefully suggested it, but nowhere has Milo that I’ve seen. There are two prominent trans people who have picked a fight with Gamergate: Mattie Brice is transgender, Chloe Sagal is transsexual. Milo could have been referring to either or someone else entirely. But you have no evidence he was talking about Brianna Wu, and again prove why you don’t understand complaints about journalistic ethics. Just happily smear people and hide behind not being a journalist like the Ralph Retort does.
Google Brianna Wu transexual. It is a commonly, commonly repeated bit of ‘trivia’ thrown out about Brianna Wu, in the same parts of the net that throw out Zoe Quinn’s murder allegations as fact.
https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Brianna_Wu
Gee, it’s like you didn’t read the part where I said “Numerous others have distastefully suggested it.”
Where did Milo say it?
Oh, and those “unsubstantiated rumors” that ZQ is a murderer are based on her own statements that she’s subsequently admitted making. Sure, they may not be true, but they’re not hearsay, either. It’s just epic trolling of ZQ who is a habitual liar.