Month: February 2015

The Escapist appears to be going through a period of great upheaval in the last 6 months. Just to recap their last few months:

1. When GamerGate started, the Escapist bent over backwards in order to make themselves home for GamerGate.  It started with them being the only major game site that didn’t close down #gamergate threads, and culminated in a befuddling editorial that vastly misunderstands the actual metrics and economics of AAA game development.
2. This all led to the Escapist doing the disastrous interviews with developers about GamerGate.  One of these developers was one of the original harassers of Zoe Quinn in #burgersandfries (this one embarrassingly was removed from the site).  Another cheerleads rape as a game trope and had a financial investment from founder Alexander Macris for his Gor-themed RPG that was undisclosed. A third was repudiated by his employer Microsoft for saying that the games industry was 90% supportive of GamerGate.  (Full disclosure: I was also interviewed for this).
3. During this period of time, the Escapist has just been cutting ties with some of their most notable talent, in particular their video talent such as Jimquisition, MovieBob, Miracle of Sound, I Hit It With My Axe (a series about playing D&D with porn stars) – I feel like I’m missing a couple, but it seems pretty much everyone other than Yahtzee has wandered off.  And at some point, Yahtzee has to realize he could probably put up a Patreon and make twice what Jimquisition does.
4. The Escapist had a nasty layoff just a month ago, which hit several long-term employees including long-term Editor-in-Chief Greg Tito.
5. Despite the need for layoffs due to budget cuts, the Escapist has managed to find some money to get some new writers contributing, all of which have a unique and curious slant of being decidedly more right-wing and/or blatantly pro-gamergate.  This includes Lizzy F, who described the ‘gamers are over’ articles as an attack on her 3-year old autistic daughter.  It includes Brandon Morse, who appears to have little or no gaming writing in his portfolio but was labelled one of the top 30 Republicans under 30.  It includes Liana K, whose somewhat befuddling takedown of Anita’s video series is mostly that Anita is too successful, and Anita’s followers can be kinda mean.  And it also includes reaching out to Oliver Campbell, who wrote this about one of the most vile extended campaigns of harassment in the history of gaming.

Watching the people and conversation within #gamergate, it is actually the CLOSEST I’VE EVER SEEN to MLK’s dream in the world.

— Oliver Campbell (@oliverbcampbell) December 13, 2014

Um, right.  At any rate, I think it’s very clear that the Escapist has decided to embrace a certain editorial slant for their future content,  which is fine.  Game journalists SHOULD be able to have slants and biases – otherwise, every single piece of writing will read like the puff pieces that just regurgitate publisher talking points, which is what games journalism was back in the print days.  It is, I note, probably going to be roughly as fair and balanced as, say, Fox News.   Or, dare I say it, less objective than Polygon – just the other direction.

Pandering to this audience has created some level of excitement amongst the GG diehards.  Will it work?  Possibly.  Polygon is actually doing pretty well from all evidence I’ve been able to find, in stark contrast to the Escapist’s sinking fortunes (compare the 1yr data to see what I’m talking about), so clearly talking about games from a well-defined point of view can build a readership.  That being said, GG is not actually a very big movement – KiA’s readership of 28K is a rounding error compared to the 12M people that Kotaku reaches monthly, and the Escapist’s sinking fortunes overlap tidily with their embrace of GamerGate, meaning that the slow shift they’ve been making already appears to be alienating more people than they’re bringing in.

All that being said, I can tell you that I’m no longer the target market for that magazine.

The continuing saga of Mark Kern condemning the games media for #gamergate (part one and part two)

So the cartoon I posted, I am interested in knowing what each point means and the facts on both sides. Pls lmk.

— Mark Kern (@Grummz) February 22, 2015

The Cartoon that Mark is referring to is this one.   Later, he tried to constructively egg on the people who were pointing out that this was basically him peddling GamerGate talking points while pretending to pursue an avenue of peace – which basically means he’s asking for everyone to just shut up and accept GamerGate’s demands.

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Earlier this week, I wrote an article about Mark Kern’s extremely bad interpretation of events over the last few months.  I was inclined to give him a pass beyond this.  I mean, it’s possible he’s been busy and not been paying close attention to what’s been going on.  People who are in the quagmire that is #GamerGate have no idea how soap opera-like   the whole thing is – I was only able to keep up for a while because I was switching jobs.  Seriously, I’ve been in start-up mode professionally for the last month or so, and I swear, after a full day of dealing with that insanity, I have no time and energy to read about which KotakuInAction guy is mad because which GamerGhazi moderator said yadda yadda yadda.  It’s got more daily twist and turns than a Mexican telenovela, with the added bonus of you have to learn and understand Chan culture to be able to make sense of any of it.   You come in a few months late, and its an incomprehensible mess.

So I figured, maybe he’s busy. Maybe he doesn’t fully grok the origins.  And to be fair, he is legitimately trying to prod these magazines to be agents of change, which is nice and idealistic.

The problem is that blaming Kotaku and Polygon for the events since last April is kind of like blaming Walter Cronkite for Vietnam.  And describing these events as Yellow Journalism is grossly unfair to the people who were the true victims of Gamergate.  Chief among these victims include three game developers: Randi Harper, Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu.  It includes many others.  Including, I note, myself.

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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.