In the wake of Intel’s unfortunate and (I believe) misguided decision to withdraw their advertising from Gamasutra, I’ve seen some amount of bile aimed at The Verge for their headline: “Intel buckles to anti-feminist campaign by pulling ads from gaming site.” This has prompted no small number of people in my twitterfeed to erupt in anger. “Do you really that #gamergate is anti-feminist?” many gamergaters have ranted.
Well, of course it is.
“But we have lots of women on our side!” Yeah, sure. They may be there for reasons that are good (press corruption, whatever). They may be there for reasons that they think are good. They may well not be feminists. They may be completely misled. But if they are there because they think it helps feminism in any way, or feminism in games, they are very, very wrong.
One of the cornerstones of #gamergate is the attempt to bully the gaming press into no longer covering feminist issues. They claim to be anti-ideology. They’re not. They are just against an ideology that is different than their own. One of those ideologies that is under attack is feminism, because they think it will somehow hurt the games they love. Trust me, it won’t. But the fact is that many voices are so opposed to feminism that they believe that the press should be assailed for even LINKING it.
If you support free speech, and you think this is remotely okay, you’re wrong.
One of the most commonly attacked targets of #gamergate is Anita Sarkeesian, and anyone in the press who dares to point out her point of view without immediately repudiating it. Whether or not you agree with Sarkeesian on everything (and I don’t, and I’d love to have a lengthy debate with her someday, if I ever thought it could be done without turning into a class 5 shitnado for both of us), she is one of the leading feminist voices in gaming.
Incidentally, the fact that Anita’s harassment were a core part of the initial shitstorm, and her views continue to get shit on is a huge part of the reason why critics of the cause hold fast to the idea that #gamergate is the poisonous fruit of the harassment tree. Seriously. I know game devs who poke their heads up like groundhogs onto Twitter, say, “Oh, gamergate is still bothering Anita”, and go back to ignoring it. Keeping kicking Anita and her views keeps the ugly roots of #gamergate from fading from view.
Christina Sommers, one of Gamergate’s largest self-made celebrities, is virulently anti-feminist. She calls herself a feminist, but in order to do that, she had to invent a new kind of feminism, ‘equity feminist’ (shorthand version: legal equality only), and her actual philosophy can best be described as “boys will be boys”. She actively scoffs at true modern feminist concerns, including improving pay equity, reducing sexual assaults, reducing female harassment online, and increasing upward mobility for women. Whether or not you agree with her, there is no doubt that she has made bashing feminism a career, and trolling feminists an art form. Also, she’s discovered that she no longer needs to use logic to get an audience.
the US the organized women’s movement is doing more harm than good domestically. Its been taken over by aggrieved eccentrics. – CHSommers
Milo Yiannopoulos, their favorite reporter, is also virulently anti-feminist. And he’s also made a tidy little career that seems to focus on that. His first article about gamergate was “Lying, Greedy, Promiscuous Feminist Crusaders are Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart.” (A title that was apparently too contentious even for Breitbart since it’s been since shortened – but it’s still there in the URL). Here he is bashing the #HeForShe campaign. Seriously, he really likes bashing feminists.
If only feminists put this much effort into their cooking
— Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) October 2, 2014
And he REALLY likes bashing the traitorous men who support them.
Some men will do literally anything to get laid. Witness the outpouring of support among sexually-frustrated dickless wonders for #HeForShe, an attempt by the United Nations to get men on board with feminism. — Milo
So sure. I happen to think that #GamerGate in its current incarnation is anti-feminist. But that’s only because I look at its heroes. It’s because I look at its villains. It’s because I look at the type of dialogue they want to shut down completely, McCarthy-style.
And this really hurts gamergate. It hurts the part of gamergate that could do good. There ARE parts of gaming journalism that need cleaning up. The sideshow into the hardcore opposition of SJW causes is just stupid. Do you know how hard it is to convince people who know nothing about the conflict that “Social Justice Warrior” is supposed to be an epithet?
At the end of the day, feminism is really about the crazy idea that women are people too. And many devs and publishers are not going to happily engage with a cause that is so obviously perceived as being against equity and diversity. The AAA publishers who actually have all the power in this equation are not going to side openly with an organization that is seen as anti-diversity. And the anti-feminist/anti-SJW slant is just that.
GamerGate likes to say they’re pro-diversity. Anita Sarkeesian’s message is not about censorship. It’s not calling for the end of games as we know it. It’s about thinking about how to make our games more inclusive and welcoming. THAT is diversity. Developers feel so strongly about this that we gave her the 2014 GDC Ambassador’s Award for her role in helping the industry do just that. Even if her own faith in her beliefs sometimes go beyond mine or many more moderate feminists, a cause that shuts it down cannot credibly claim that mantle for themselves.
[Anita Sarkeesian] loves videogames. She’s so passionate about them that she feels they’re worth fighting for. — Neil Druckmann, Creative Director and Writer of Last of us
GamerGate likes to say they’re against ideology. Shutting down a point of view is, in fact, an ideology in its own right – its reactionary conservatism. And even though there are aspects of feminism, particularly advanced 3rd wave feminism, that I don’t necessarily agree with, they should be allowed and welcomed to speak. Game designers are more than capable of listening to such people, challenging those people, and choosing whether to incorporate that feedback or ignore it altogether.
As long as GamerGate targets and censures those who would speak to this cause, and those websites who dare to give them a voice, then yes, I will call them anti-feminist.
/applaud
Feels like you deserve one of those 🙂
So.
What do you think will happen with Intel?
Was it a kneejerk decision made by some unimportant dude that knew nothing about the story? Was it made higher in the hierarchy, and thus, a strong statement that they don’t agree with the editorial line of Gamasutra?
I was expecting some statement today (2nd of October)… and am quite mystified to see none.
If the decision was made by some more or less high exec (marketing, etc…), there’s no turning back.
If it’s a poorly though decision, and the “dude” is getting fired as we speak, as his supervisors try to fix the problem… what will they do??
Sadly, we have to rule out the only win/win choice they had : lay low, don’t remove the ads, no one will even talk about you. (how could they not see that!!! See who’s everyone NOT talking about today? Autodesk, the other target of “Operation Disrespectul Nod”. That could have been you, Intel, the one no one’s talking about… tsk tsk…)
From now on, it’s lose/lose:
1)Lose if they stay silent and keep agravating their case with the general population as more and more articles are published (NYT, Verge, etc) about how they are “siding with gamergate” and all it’s crazyness
2) Make ammend, say it was a kneejerk reaction, reinstate the ads and…. give ammunitions to gamergate. OMG. Imagine the outrage. Social Justice Warriors are SO POWERFULL, they FORCED Intel into giving money to corrupt Gamasutra. It’s a big conspiracy. Nobody listens to US. We are DEAD.
I’m pretty sure they will opt for option #1. General population is much more reasonable than the gators. We will send a few mails (I did), we’ll write well though articles, but we won’t go apeshit. Much easier to deal with than #2 and the mob.
I’ve never read a more misleading article.
How can you even do this to people? Trying to rally people into believing the most strawmanny of all arguments in this century so far?
Gamergate isn’t about sexism, or racism, or anything like that. Gamergate is about PURSUING INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM. Gaming journalism has been despicably corrupt for at least two decades. Kane and Lynch is a fine example of how cozy game devs are with game reviewers. When a reviewer stopped playing along, he got fired because the game devs wanted it.
The fact of the matter is that in this current round of gaming journalism, some of the people at fault are indeed women. That DOES NOT MEAN THAT GAMERS HATE WOMEN. Some idiots in any group will always hate some cause, people or idea that does not merit the emotion. Most gamers are just mad that game devs and game reviewers were sleeping together and doing who knows what in order to secure a favorable review. And that’s actually a problem, because as long as these people want to call themselves journalists, they should be adhering to the SPJ Code of Ethics.
That’s all it is. Anything else is fallout from fringe idiots and it should not be attributed to the majority of gamers whatsoever. Furthermore, Intel distancing itself from this fight was a WISE BUSINESS DECISION. If you ran a business, you wouldn’t want it to garner negative publicity, right? They’re just doing the sensible thing. Stop hating on Intel. They power all your Macs, anyway.
Glad someone else wrote this so I didn’t have to. Your blog post is EXTREMELY misleading – it’s really not about anti-feminisim – that’s only one small part of the big picture.
Free speech is all fine and dandy and the GamerGate movement in no form or fashion is trying to diminish it from ANYONE. All it’s trying to do is say: “GAME JOURNOS/BLOGGERS: WE’RE NOT STUPID, WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING. SO, GET YOUR FUCKING ACT TOGETHER, PLEASE?”
When a major game site publishes an article that says “Gamers are dead,” it should be pretty obvious business decision to remove advertising from it when gamers make up a big part of your consumer base.
“GAME JOURNOS/BLOGGERS: WE’RE NOT STUPID, WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING.”
The funny thing is that no, you actually have no idea. Your idea of what goes on in game journalism is completely alien from what I, working in game journalism, have actually experienced. So yes, you kind of are a little stupid.
“When a major game site publishes an article that says “Gamers are dead,” ”
The NYT published a “Death of Adulthood” piece a few weeks ago. Should adults boycott the NYT? No, because it’s understood that it’s a rhetorical fucking device meant to discuss problems with something rather than an attack.
Because they are adults.
Which gamers, apparently, are not.
“When a major game site publishes an article that says “Gamers are dead,” it should be pretty obvious business decision to remove advertising from it when gamers make up a big part of your consumer base.”
It was an opinion column, and labeled as such.
Do you read Gamasutra often?
So…in order to prove that journalistic and developers are far too close is to go after ‘indie’ devs? Because that’s the outrage that I’m seeing from GG (you know, when I try to dig under the layers of sexism, racism and homophobia that’s slathered all over the top of this magnificent shit-cake). They COULD try talking about how games are reviewed right alongside advertisements for them in GameInformer, and other such publications. But nope, it’s all about the indie devs, who I would be the LEAST concerned about.
Not to mention Game Informer is owned by the biggest purely games retailer out there.
Not what one would call an independent journalistic platform at all.
I asked a GGer about that, specifically why they are so consumed with going after specific (mostly female) indie devs when corporate game makers should probably be their focus.
The answer (well, the start of it, since it went into a nosedive of anger and righteousness after) is “We tried to go after the corporations, but we lost because they’re corporations. So now we’re doing this.”
…. As if going after the main crux of the problem failed once so they’re going to harass small fish devs because it’s easier to get them to quit. I just … it’s been a few days since that reply and I’m still dumbfounded.
I was trying to describe the roots of the issue to a friend of mine who is completely unrelated to games. He’s a lawyer. He is just enough of a gamer to know about Zoe Quinn allegedly doing favors for coverage. I tried in no uncertain terms to tell him it wasn’t proven to be true.
His response was, “Dude, I don’t really give a shit. Seriously. Indie artists have been offering lines of coke to DJs to get their songs played for fifty years. Movie companies have hired fake reviewers to put review quotes on their posters, so you actually think someone liked Gigli. All entertainment coverage is a crock. I think the funny thing is that gamers thought that maybe this is somehow new or different.”
[As a side note: I really hate that the Intel thing was even happening. I find it difficult for an industry to “engage peacefully” like so many Gamergaters seem to claim they want while it’s under very real attack from consumers].
Ehh…I’m not really interested in making a “not all Gamergaters!” defence but that’s probably what I’ll sound like. Worth noting my following notes are more with the article rather than your post. I don’t take issue with describing Gamergate as “mostly anti-feminist” or the like and I think it’s pretty much fine there. But I do think it may have missed a trick.
Obviously I think by this stage I’ve made it clear I’m no “friend” of Gamergate and that harassment silencing developers is a far more useful issue to tackle than any Gamergate claim so far.
I think we can agree on a few things:
1. Gamergate has an obvious anti-feminist tint to it.
2. Even if Gamergate “isn’t really about anti-feminism”. There are at least some who have acted in such a way while under the Gamergate “banner”.
3. It is in the public interest for stories about this kind of anti-feminism to be covered.
4. The “heroes” of Gamergate really speak for themselves.
5. It really wouldn’t kill the “good side” of Gamergate to accept this once in a bloody while.
What I don’t know if we agree on is if I say the following:
There is a very real possibility of people being sympathetic to Gamergate/angry without anti-feminism being any pre-cursor
I think I can also make the following claim:
People can be feminists and be campaigning against sponsors. I’ve really been questioning if I’m absolutely crazy recently about the “…Gamers are over” article. Allow me to put forward two possibilities.
1. Gamers are angry at the idea of someone questioning whether they are “over” as an identity. [I’m 100% sure we agree this is terrible. It fully falls under an attempt to supress freedom of speech.] As an aside, I find it *really* naïve when people insist on using the simple legal definition to “rebut” this… and I’m a bleeding law geek!
2. Gamers are angry at some of the language used in the articles and the general tenor. (“obtuse shitslingers” etc. Seemingly like this person. https://twitter.com/GGfeminist/status/517394952649601025)
Honestly, when I first heard people were angry at “gamers are dead”, I assumed it was under interpretation 2. The idea of the anger for interpretation 1 was so baffling to my mind I literally didn’t even consider it. I strongly think there’s at least a chance of “a bit of column A” and “column B” at work here.
However, I strongly suggest that people under interpretation 2 are not anti-feminist by default. And that (while I’ve made it clear I *really* don’t like the boycotting) they are neither logically inconsistent nor logically unreasonable in their protests. *If* we assume they regard it as outrageous “hate speech” or whatever, it makes sense that they would want to boycott and protest with sponsors. I don’t agree with it, but I can see the point of view.
Now I’m not saying that the Verge is suggesting such people *would* be anti-feminist, just that the idea doesn’t seem to be mentioned and it’s worthwhile to look at.
Here’s my other proposition: People under interpretation 2 have not been given any real consideration by various publications. Ironically, they’re the only people really worth talking to imho. I’ve described it as journalists have taken interpretation 1. I do not believe the existence of interpretation 2 is unreasonable nor, frankly, immensely unlikely.
“But the piece quickly drew flak from those who saw the acknowledgement of video gaming’s depth and breadth in 2014 as a personal attack on their very own identity”.
Quotes like this demonstrate a lack of agreement with my “interpretation 2” idea. They don’t raise the prospect of the inflammatory language used in the piece. I believe that is a possibility worth covering. I do not accept that the only reason people could take umbrage with the articles are “political” reasons.
“Certainly the #GamerGate movement has secured support from genuinely concerned people who define themselves by their hobby and see it under fire from those with political motives”
This is somewhat more “neutral” but again doesn’t raise this possibility I’m incessantly harping on about. Interestingly, this Intel issue can possibly be separated somewhat from Gamergate, [if we magically knew everything] since some number may be emailing outrage at sponsors of the websites in question and doing nothing further under Gamergate. [Obviously, we can’t since we don’t know, I just find it an interesting thought experiment.]
I also think people under interpretation 2 will be angry at being described as “anti-feminist”. Now, of course, simply saying “I’m not sexist!” does not make it so, but it’s not necessarily true they have been proven as sexist and thinking they’re being accused of it starts off the anger train again.
The main thrust is that the diverse range of views and opinions in Gamergate make it a simplification to declare all of them are motivated by anti-feminism and that the only real possible explanation for Intel complaints is anti-feminism/suppressing dissenting opinions/politics.
This of course is from an extension from arguments I’ve made previously there has been pejorative labelling from both “sides” and it’s made matters worse/escalated things and that it is worth it to de-escalate.
To summarise: I think I can simultaneously stand by the claims that Gamergate generally sucks and this article could have mentioned the possibility of “interpretation number 2”. Of course nothing above takes away from my position that:
1. Gamergate sucks and I’m generally in agreement with your post. Especially that action-wise, Gamergate has abuse/censoring and the like under its cap and, while it might not be “fair”, it can’t be simply be ignored either [Just not 100% convinced by the entire picture presented by the Verge in that article.]
2. The Intel result seriously friggin’ sucks. Mostly because it further “digs the trenches” and helps possibly de-stabilise things industry-wise which is never cool.
There is also option number 3 in all of this: I’m deluded, sorely out of touch with reality and am the only person who really thought this. As time goes on this actually looks increasingly likely. :/
“However, I strongly suggest that people under interpretation 2 are not anti-feminist by default. And that (while I’ve made it clear I *really* don’t like the boycotting) they are neither logically inconsistent nor logically unreasonable in their protests. *If* we assume they regard it as outrageous “hate speech” or whatever, it makes sense that they would want to boycott and protest with sponsors. I don’t agree with it, but I can see the point of view.”
They are not “anti feminist” by default. But they clearly did’nt read the article, or understood why it was written, and what had led to it being written in the first place.
It’s a tactic most gaters will use: identify the “Gamers are dead” article as the “starting point”. Everything starts there. Everything before that is irrelevant. Everything about harassment is irrelevant. Everything about the Zoe and Anita is irrelevant.
It is not, and I’m sure you agree. Those articles were the conséquences of harassment toward (besides others) Zoe and Anita (and at least one of them is a proeminent feminist).
So yes, you are right, those people are not “anti-feminist” by default. They are just misinformed, or are ignoring facts to justify their outrage.
(PS: BTW, love how you play Devil’s advocate :D)
[Insomnia sucks a lot kids.]
“Love how you play devils advocate”.
I don’t see myself as a devils advocate so much as some kind of holier than thou moral philosopher whose opinion no one asked for. I’ve been genuinely critical of a lot which has happened from many parties involved. Basically I’m this guy: http://xkcd.com/774/.
“It’s a tactic most gaters will use: identify the “Gamers are dead” article as the “starting point”. Everything starts there. Everything before that is irrelevant. Everything about harassment is irrelevant. Everything about the Zoe and Anita is irrelevant.
It is not, and I’m sure you agree. Those articles were the conséquences of harassment toward (besides others) Zoe and Anita (and at least one of them is a proeminent feminist.”
Yup, I’m not interested in defending Gamergate as some noble movement. If they got a leader/organised I’d be more interested though. I also think it’s stupid that a bunch of people say they are pro GG because they want devs to have freedom to make games and then ignore what devs are want for Christmas [no more harassment thanks.] I also find it strange when GGers don’t accept Raph Koster explaining what was going on with “gamers are dead” articles. [Anyone using Raph and shill in the same sentence isn’t worth the time of day.]
At the same time, dismissive categorising of the individuals involved won’t help things. [The wizards things alone shows there was something which had to be looked at. I’ve also stated that issue had personal resonance with me. Doesn’t make most of the movement’s actions less stupid though. Racketeering? Christ…]
“They are not “anti feminist” by default. But they clearly did’nt read the article, or understood why it was written, and what had led to it being written in the first place.”
Here’s where we’re going to disagree. Just because A is a murderer, doesn’t make it a good idea to label persons B C and D that same way because they all wear the same hat.
Here’s the thing: If an article says “harassment is bad”, which is completely undeniably true, that doesn’t simultaneously give it license to say whatever it wishes without provoking backlash. I’ve stated numerous times I do not regard the language as acceptable and I likely never will.
You can completely understand the true meaning of the article and still find it offensive. These aren’t irreconcilable concepts. [Put simply, decrying hate while using hate is not advisable, if understandable in those circumstances.]
I also reject the notion that it is good for an industry to speak that way about it’s consumers, or anyone in general for that matter. I also think a reaction of utter surprise to *interpretation 2* type backlash requires a touch of arrogance, assuming there is type 2 backlash after-all. Interpretation 1 backlash of this type will always baffle me though.
“Gamergate in a nutshell:
Gamers being insulted is a bigger problem than devs/critics being harassed”.
I care more about dev harassment than being personally insulted, but I don’t accept the premise that someone else being offended/finding the articles inflammatory and needing re-examination means they can’t also have the same belief, or that such a belief is unreasonable. I have not been impressed by the “professionalism” of some recently and it reflects badly.
A acting worse doesn’t shield B.
“Gamergate in a nutshell:
Gamers being insulted is a bigger problem than devs/critics being harassed”.
The GG side does not know about most of the harassment. We generally have not publicized it, in the name of not feeding the trolls, and seeing how much of a field day they’ve been having that was a good policy overall.
But it has created a big pile of tension, and a lot of people have lined up against GamerGate as if somehow “winning” a war against their core market will lead to the defeat of the trolls. But the trolls are absolutely loving it, and are sockpuppeting on both sides to keep it stirred up. The only way to stop the harassment is to burn the entire market to the ground, and the industry with it.
For most of them, their first real notice about the harassment was being told *they* were responsible. They didn’t respond well, and how can you blame them? Yes, the harassment is a major problem, but this will never fix it.
What is the “win scenario”? To keep carving chunks out of the market until there’s no-one left for the trolls to hide behind?
I am unconvinced that #GamerGate is the core market.
Clearly, the people who (by and large) make up #GamerGate are people we’d refer to historically as part of the hardcore market, but that doesn’t make #GamerGate (even as an aggregate) the same as the core market.
And i’d say we’ve strong indications (e.g. steam curator list) that a guy like Total Biscuit is a better representation of the core market than any of the attacked journalist sites. And he was eemingly quite annoyed by the stupidity of their reaction.
I mean let’s be honest here for a second.
The whole thing is a PR catastrophe, which we might not have seen without the whole “Gamers are dead”-articles. And that doesn’t mean we couldn’t have discussed the whole problem. But we might have had to postprone such a discussion after extinguishing the fires.
Adland.tv is giving imho a nice advertising view on the whole subject.
Also i think the current wave of Journalists comments on Intels behaviour might become a boomerang. As far as i understand advertisment, their PR department might take notes who’s currently leading people against them.
Gamergate in a nutshell:
Gamers being insulted is a bigger problem than devs/critics being harassed
Jonathan in a nut shell, devs/critics being harassed are a bigger problem than Syria and Iran.
(appeal to larger issues)
@LegalFauxPas
Maybe I am the only one who thinks this way, maybe I am more secure with my identity as a gamer, but your interpretation 2, that gamers are erupting because of the insults thrown out in those articles, still seems like an interpretation that fails the critical thinking test (not your thinking, the thinking of those who are outraged).
I read an opinion piece calling gamers “obtuse shitslingers”, etc, and I simply think, ‘yeah I hate those people too’. I recognise that there are a TON of gamers who ARE obtuse shitslingers, and I have no trouble understanding that the article is talking about those people, not about me. I believe it takes a willful misinterpretation (or for it to be true) to jump to the conclusion that an article that was written for a large audience is somehow targeting you, specifically. I have no trouble with the concept that I am a gamer, that the obtuse shitslingers are gamers, and that an article that insults gamers as having undesirable behavioural qualities is, in fact, not about *all* gamers at all – even without the existence of an explicit disambiguation (#notallgamers, etc).
If you are actually meaning to say that these gamers are objecting to the use of that kind of language at all in a professional article, well you would probably be unsurprised to learn that I completely disagree.
No, sorry, you haven’t read Leigh’s article, or you interpeted as “she can’t possibly be talking about me, I like her.”
The first three paragraphs are nothing but talking about how pathetic and awful “gaming culture” is. The only place she leaves any room for doubt is in the 6th paragraph, and it’s in the most indirect “I don’t actually believe they don’t suck, but let’s say they don’t while we blame from being complicit in letting other people suck” kind of way.
Disparaging reification of “gamer nerd” stereotypes are everywhere, while being linked to harassment not as coincidental, but causative.
“‘Game culture’ as we know it is kind of embarrassing”
“They don’t know how to dress or behave.”
[The entire third paragraph is one long “these mouthbreathers are stupid enough not to like me” bit of self-indulgent insulting nonsense]
“…people who are okay with an infantilized cultural desert of shitty behavior…”
“…generation of lonely basement kids…”
“…people who’ve drank the kool aid about how their identity…”
And that provides the leadin to what you dismiss as not really “aimed at gamers”, her penultimate paragraphs:
““Gamer” isn’t just a dated demographic label that most people increasingly prefer not to use. Gamers are over. That’s why they’re so mad.
These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers — they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had.”
And Leigh’s was one of the *less* offensive articles in that set, most of the others are worse. How do you read that, in or out of context, and not conclude that the writer truly despises the people she nominally writes for?
Those “wailing hyper-consumers” pay our salaries. Why does anyone think they need to defend her? Because she’s a girl, and the yucky boys are being mean to her just because she told everyone not to play with them anymore? That’s what feminism has been reduced to, defending a bad writer from the consequences of her actions out of paternalistic impulse?
I am not on the GG side, but I certainly was offended by this article and the others like it that came out the same day, and I don’t understand why anyone who ever thought of themselves as a “gamer” wasn’t.
–Dave
Why would you be offended by it? Are you one of those wailing hyper-consumers?
Obviously we are reading this completely differently. I cannot imagine that she is talking about me, because I do not contribute to the kind of gaming culture that she is shitting on. I am not offended by someone generalising about a group I am in if I know I do not meet that criteria and it does nothing to disadvantage me. Especially when there are those in the group who *do* meet that criteria.
“How do you read that, in or out of context, and not conclude that the writer truly despises the people she nominally writes for?”
I conclude that there is a group of people that she truly despises. I understand that that group is a subset of the larger group of people that she writes for. I am not a part of the group she despises. In fact, I share her scorn, her anger, her disgust with that subgroup. As I said to LFP, maybe I am the only one who is able to make this distinction when reading her rant, I dunno. But I would guess that a majority of the vast, silent mass of gamers who either don’t care or don’t consume games media or games culture, would also realise that she isn’t talking about them. Kind of by definition, really.
As for “those wailing hyperconsumers pay our salaries”…no. The wailing hyperconsumers are a small part of the market. The silent majority pay the lion’s share of your salary. That’s like saying that it’s mostly the forum posters of WoW that pay Blizzard salaries.
Finally, I can’t believe I have to even say this, but no, I don’t defend Leigh Alexander’s article “because she’s a girl”. I’m not even sure I’m defending it. I’m disagreeing with attacks on it that I think are caused by a lack of critical thinking and/or misinterpretation.
“Obviously we are reading this completely differently. I cannot imagine that she is talking about me, because I do not contribute to the kind of gaming culture that she is shitting on.”
You’re right that we’re reading it differently, because the way I read it, she’s shitting on all of it.
–Dave
Regardless of the merits of their approach, if they are in fact a real part of the boycott the media should be reporting on them. The issue of whether they’re “right” in their views is irrelevant to whether the media should report on them.
“If you are actually meaning to say that these gamers are objecting to the use of that kind of language at all in a professional article, well you would probably be unsurprised to learn that I completely disagree.”
Not entirely, I’m suggesting that some may well strongly object to what they regard as inflammatory and inciteful language. I do not regard that as an unreasonable view. As I have said way too many times now, the media’s continual refusal to examining this angle is causing more ire than there need be.
Though regardless of their existence, I for one *do* object to the rhetoric being used in a professional article. An industry should not be happy at seeing that sort of language used painting with the broad strokes that the articles did. I was against it when I saw it with the infamous Jack Thompson and I strongly dislike it now.
Controversial opinion: If gamers need to sort out toxicity in their culture, the industry needs to sort out toxicity in its own culture. If gamers are expected to hold people not really “tied” to them accountable in the name of culture, the same applies to industry participants. I’m not interested in painting targets on people’s heads but there are a few people “in industry” whose behaviour has been repulsive.
You have a lot of nonsense there, but someone who claims to be a lawyer should really know better than to say “I’m 100% sure we agree this is terrible. It fully falls under an attempt to supress freedom of speech.”
If I call somebody an asshole, and they tell me not to do it again, they are not infringing on my freedom of speech. If I use a megaphone to call him an asshole, and he uses the noise ordinance to get my megaphone taken away, he is not infringing on my freedom of speech.
Leigh called Intel’s customers names, they didn’t like it and asked Intel to stop giving Leigh money. If she loses her “megaphone”, it still won’t be suppressing her freedom of speech.
–Dave
[Thanks for your replies generally, they’re a good read!]
I’m not a lawyer nor do I claim to be one. I’m a law graduate with no plans to go into the profession but an above-average interest in the law. I’m sorry that I gave an impression otherwise.
You’re correct, it does not infringe on Leigh’s right of freedom of speech. That right is vertical and therefore only the Government actively engaging in censorship, or failing to protect a vulnerable group from society actively and deliberately oppressing them, can it really go against the legal right.
But the ideal of freedom of speech is not limited to just the law. I can phrase it like this:
1. There is are laws and legal rights re: freedom of speech. These have not been infringed.
2. The ideal of freedom of speech extends beyond this. Members of society should be careful of pushing out people’s voices.
I am aware that my second proposition is controversial and has no authority, it is a political outlook.
An example is when feminists pulled a fire alarm to stop MRAs from meeting at a university. [Maybe this isn’t a good example, since it involved both actual active suppression and criminal behaviour.]
My point is that I increasingly see people willing to go trigger happy to censor “offensive” things. Such as when a website deleted my comment and called me a rape apologist for correcting their article’s woeful interpretation of the law. I really didn’t like that either.
So when I’m talking about freedom of speech in my post I’m referring to a political ideal of mine. It’s also self-evidently stupid I didn’t take the time to point that out, my apologies.
I didn’t describe “type 2” outrage as censorship or suppressing freedom of speech, since I do regard the language used as unacceptable and understand why people register their protest. The reason I don’t like it is it “entrenches” everything and I’m not entirely sure if Gamergate started by emailing and asking Gamasutra for a response. I can understand eventually boycotting Intel, I’m not interested in chastising it.
But under “type 1” backlash it’s stupid and is lashing out against an opinion, I don’t like that and I don’t think it’s good for society to engage in. Same thing happened with [Elevatorgate] whose a guy who storifies people’s tweets that he finds objectionable and leaves them without comment. People claimed he was a “harasser” who “needed to be shut down”. Even though Storify would be “in their power” to shut down such an account, I’d still say it goes against the idea.
I do have to confess I am baffled that the media, until this point, have seemingly ignored the type 2 backlash when taking about this issue. I don’t like attributing “malicious” motives to peope, but I do struggle to fathom why they don’t air that part of the story. I’d argue they are attributing “malicious” motives to GG’s boycott when there may be, as I’ve said many times, another explanation.
tl;dr sorry I gave a false impression and sorry I failed to properly expand on my freedom of speech point. Though I obviously disagree that I “have a lot of nonsense here”.;) I would genuinely be interested in your views, I’ve been reading some of your other comments and they’re very good reads.
If you happen to be interested, and have a love for wasting your time, I’ve written up my main feelings on Gamergate here:
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sc8vao.
I suspect the two of us actually agree on a fair number of things re: the “anti-GG side”.I don’t know if we agree re: pro-GG side.
If you have the right to call me an asshole, I have the right to tell you to shut up. If someone is paying you to call me an asshole, and I am paying them, I have the right to ask them if they really want to take my money and give it to you, because if they do, I might not want to give them any more of my money.
–Dave
Thanks for the reply.
I suspect we’re at an impasse.
I did not disagree with what you just said. I’m really not in the mood to defend inflammatory and demonstrably offensive rhetoric and then act like this result was surprising, despite how the media have spun it. I have also said on various mediums that the industry as a whole needs to cut it out.
But I can also say I don’t like aggressive campaigning against the *idea* behind something. In other words:
1. Article as it is right now? Yup, as I said earlier I’m not interested in chastising the approach of boycott as a reaction to hatred. It’s perfectly civil.
I think it’s unfortunate for the state of play now for Gamergate as a whole, but I’m not going to sit here and act like it doesn’t show a massive problem with the industry. One they haven’t shown great impetus in fixing.
2. If all the pointlessly aggressive rhetoric was removed and the same points were then protested against? I wouldn’t like that at all.
Yes, they would still have the right to engage in that behaviour and I fully accept that, doesn’t mean I like it.
It was the same as I didn’t think a boycott of a company was needed b/c CEO donated to a cause I find utterly without merit.
Tl;dr, if you’re just talking about legal rights, 100% agreement between us. If we’re talking world views; we’re probs at an agree to disagree thing.
Threatening advertiser boycotts does not violate the First Amendment.
However, GG claims to be supporting “freedom of expression” in so far as feminist critiques of game tropes somehow removes freedom from developers. The GGers are not protesting government action, they feel that some criticism is an attempt to shut down speech.
It makes absolutely no sense to claim that criticism is censorship, but advertiser boycotts are free speech. (In fact, the first claim makes absolute no sense on its own–you have the right to make whatever art you want, I have the right to tell people why I don’t like it.)
Audience matters, and Gamasutra’s audience isn’t gamers or consumers; it’s game developers. So by going after the source of funding (advertising) for a developer-facing publication, they’re really sending a message to developers that they’re willing to burn gaming to the ground for their agenda, damn the consequences.
It’s almost like a terrible JRPG plotline, where the villain of the game has to destroy the world to save it.
This brings us back to the same disconnect we’ve had all along: As long as there are people you can point to on the other side that are in some way too objectionable to talk to, you won’t talk to anybody at all on the other side. The “taint” attaches no matter how great their remove from the attacks.
But those attacks, especially the worst of them, may not even be from “real” GG’s, but from trolls enjoying the chance to keep things stirred up. Or just plain misanthropic assholes, who you have given plenty of company and cover. How does the GG side make them stop?
It’s a high-faluting, “principled”, way of setting conditions that essentially say that there won’t be any dialog about anything until *everyone* has agreed to your terms so completely they are no longer considered “tainted” (“After you surrender, we can negotiate”). And when the other side refuses, it’s just more “proof” that they really were as bad as the worst, or they wouldn’t have made a stand? It’s not like you were being *unreasonable*, you just wanted them to stop talking, then you would be completely willing to listen.
Damion, I’ve lurked and sockpuppeted in a lot of internet sewers along the way. White supremacists, christian reconstructionist militia types, Native American nationalists (trust me, you do *not* want to know how they compare). I know vile, bigoted people when I see them, and although there are some on the GG side, there are also some on your side of this fence, and it’s pretty much a wash.
You can’t fight a community without understanding it. And the refusal of the “anti harassment” forces of Justice and Light to look past their own propaganda and see that they are mostly in agreement with most of their opponents and open a dialog is the key logjam in this mess. The anti-feminism comes from two sources: A lot of the “feminists” have behaved abominably and the GG side is justifiably pissed at them, and; When you turn something into a feminist flashpoint, those with an anti-feminist agenda are going to join in even if they don’t care about the subject matter (Milo, Hoff-Summers).
–Dave
I may be wrong here, but it sure seems to me that Damion’s post is only addressing one half of the GG agenda. It is not at all the case that anyone (that I’ve seen, anyway) is calling for the complete surrender of the GG crowd, it is that they are calling for the discussion to not be focused on anti-feminist views.
The GG camp claims that it is about corruption in the games media. Fine, then let’s talk about that – Damion has listed a buttload of issues that should be getting a whole lot of scrutiny. But as soon as you start linking “the feminist agenda” or “SJWs”, and “corruption”, then there is a problem. That is where the discussion breaks down, and as far as I can see, it is entirely on the GG side that it happens. I wonder how many GG proponents have written posts about, or comments/letters to, the gaming media sites they are concerned with, simply addressing the issue of corruption and integrity in the media and what the journalists think about those issues? No mention of feminism, not one word about SJWs, just a focused, thoughtful inquiry about the corruption issue? I would venture to guess very few, if any.
Well, once the conflict got mis-defined as a crusade against misogyny, anti-feminism was pretty much an inevitable aspect of it.
Tell you what. You work on getting everyone on your side to stop talking about misogyny, and as soon as you accomplish that I’ll work on getting GG to stop being anti-feminist. Deal?
“You work on getting everyone on your side to stop talking about misogyny”
People should talk about misogyny. Especially the misogyny that’s inherent in almost all of the attacks on Sarkeesian and Quinn.
Look, it’s okay to disagree with someone talking about misogyny. Surely we all have, at some time or another. It’s not okay to pretend that talking about misogyny is somehow corrupt or illegitimate.
Thank you for telling me what it’s not okay to talk about. I will carefully note that in the future, all accusations of misogyny are always perfectly true and not at all an attempt to distract and discredit.
Meanwhile, the Girls of Gamergate podcast had quite a useful discussion about why reviews that focus on the bodytypes of female characters, especially “unattractive” features like non-Barbie Doll measurements, are a problem for young girls. Then they had a dialog with a male gamer about why it’s crude and creepy to ask a girl in a game where she lives.
Remind me again, which side are the feminists on? Because all the useful equality-consciousness education seems to be over *there*, where the “feminists” say all the misogyny is.
–Dave
You dishonestly misrepresented me, Dave Rickey. I just freaking said “it’s okay to disagree with someone talking about misogyny. Surely we all have, at some time or another.”
You are the ones telling US what it’s okay to talk about! You said “You work on getting everyone on your side to stop talking about misogyny.” You’re telling us that it’s not okay to talk about misogyny.
I said I just told you it’s not okay tell us what it’s okay to talk about. Disagree with us if you like, don’t tell us that we’re illegitimate, fake gamers or corrupt just because we talk about misogyny.
And you completely missed my point, a “modest proposal” that if it’s reasonable to insist that no dialog can begin until they stop bad-talking feminism, then it is reasonable to ask you to herd the cats into not talking about misogyny, first.
Nobody can make everyone do anything. There’s no way for GG to completely police themselves, and making that perfect policing a precondition for discussion is just saying you don’t want any discussion, but you don’t want to look “unreasonable”.
–Dave
You still misrepresented me.
And YOU actually missed the point. People talking about misogyny and anti-feminists aren’t comparable, because people talking about misogyny is a good thing.
The problem isn’t a few bad apple anti-feminists. The problem is exactly as Dahaka said: “as soon as you start linking ‘the feminist agenda’ or ‘SJWs’, and ‘corruption’, then there is a problem.” Linking them together only makes sense if you assume that there is something illegitimate about feminism or talking about misogyny–that we should only talk about games “objectively” (i.e. only about the stuff that you care about).
“SJW” was coined as an attempt to *separate* the moralistic outrage-junkies that mis-use feminist rhetoric as a weapon from feminism. In the broad, dictionary definition of feminism, most of these “anti-feminist” GG proponents qualify as feminist.
They’re railing against those that are casting every disagreement as “misogyny”, and equating all dissent as “enabling harassment”. If you’re not one of those, they don’t mean you.
Are their anti-feminists (in the proper sense of opposing the equality of women) in or allied to GG? Yes, because there are anti-feminists everywhere and they flock to any chance to get in some shots. Much the way that the feminists circle the wagons to defend an “SJW” that pulls the “Wounded Gazelle Gambit” when one of the targets they’ve chosen to bully fights back.
Facts matter. Just knowing (or thinking you know) the relative positions of the sides in the “Identity Matrix” of the Oppression Olympics doesn’t tell you who is right and who is wrong.
–Dave
I think using the term SJW is a mistake.
I realize that, outside of gaming and in some leftist Twitter circles, there is a real phenomenon of intersectionalist identity politics create circular firing squad.
But in practice, “SJW” just means “feminist or anti-racist I disagree with”. Even those of on the left who who resist people who focus exclusively on identity politics (because they all too often ignorie the privileges of class, wealth and education) still avoid the SJW term because, ultimately, Social Justice is a good thing, most of the people using the term SJW have bad motivations, and because it’s good thing that when minorities are attacked they can rally their communities for support–sometimes they have no alternative. No, that doesn’t mean that said minorities or activists are always right. But it does mean that they have a right to organize and support each other, even if they are sometimes wrong.
So, as someone who agrees with you that identity politics sometimes gets out of control, I suggest that you stop using the term SJW. It makes discussion of a serious, nuanced, multi-sided issue much more difficult.
And furthermore, although I don’t agree with everything feminists do in the space of games, I think it’s a huge mistake to say that feminist corruption is a signficant influence over the overall direction of the industry. There is sometimes groupthink among feminist gamer twitter cliques, just like there is groupthink in ALL Twitter cliques, but there is a huge gulf between clique groupthink and conspiratorial corruption. I mean, they tell me to follow the money, but what money? Sarkeesian may get some sympathy donations (which is totally fucking legitimate because she was under legitimate attack) but speaking out on feminism in gaming is not generally a lucrative career move.
To put it another way, the bulk of GG is not just saying that feminists are wrong sometimes (everyone is wrong sometimes) but that feminists voices are too loud in gaming. And if they *aren’t* saying that, they should stop linking feminism and corruption.
Thought Experiment: Let’s make up a new term.
Glarble: A person who mis-uses the rhetoric and tools of feminism to bully others, emotionally torture those they dislike, and rally well-meaning bystanders into supporting and defending their abusive behavior.
Now, we would agree that glarbles do exist, right? Not all of those under the banner of feminism are stellar examples of humanity, and bullies use whatever tools come to hand.
Now, would anti-feminists label every feminist a glarble? Of course. Same with the racists.
Would glarbles, in order to defend themselves and retain their ability to be glarbles (people that use feminism as a tool for abuse), point to this and say that the term glarble is just an attempt to discredit feminism? Certainly.
And would feminists, ever mindful of the need for solidarity, accept this argument from the glarbles and agree that anyone that uses the term “glarble” should be ignored?
As for groupthink vs. ideological corruption: From objective evidence, how could anyone possibly tell the difference? It’s even possible to have both mixed together, ideological corruption exploiting and encouraging useful groupthink. Or groupthink that organically creates ideological corruption.
It is a “distinction without a difference” to pick nits over whether something is the result of groupthink or conspiracy.
–Dave
“Glarble: A person who mis-uses the rhetoric and tools of feminism to bully others, emotionally torture those they dislike, and rally well-meaning bystanders into supporting and defending their abusive behavior.”
Okay, you’ve already gone wrong. There shouldn’t be a specific term for feminists doing this. ALL FACTIONS on Twitter having people rallying allies over perceived grievances. It happens all over social media. If you think you belong to any faction that doesn’t do this, you’re probably doing it. (That’s definitely true if the faction in question is GG!)
And the thing is that sometimes you should rally your allies over a grievance. “redress of wrongs” is in the Constitution for a reason, you know?
So, yes, using the term Glarble, or making a new noun for same sort of the thing, is probably a mistake. It’s *definitely* a mistake if the term is specific to one faction.
As for groupthink vs. ideological corruption: From objective evidence, how could anyone possibly tell the difference?
Ideology is not corruption.
Here’s the thing: if you can’t distinguish between groupthink and an organized conspiracy, stop talking about organized conspiracies and systematic corruption. If you’re talking about organized conspiracies, and there is no conspiracy, that makes it much harder to talk about groupthink.
You can easily say “feminists don’t consider enough evidence from outside their movement and have missed X, Y and Z”. Or “this particular feminist is attacking people for disingenuous reasons”. But if you try to tell me that game industry corruption, overall favors feminists, all that means is that you think feminists are too loud.
I mean, if you want a games industry were feminists hesitate before they speak, congratulations, mission accomplished! We now have a lot of devs and journalists afraid to speak out on this stuff. GG has successfully used Intel to send a message that when a women questions gaming, it costs money. You have all succeeded in defeating corruption by becoming corruption.
Why shouldn’t there be a term for bullies that use a specific and identifiable set of tactics? Fine, I’ll use the generic term: Bullies. The anti-GG cause was created, encouraged, and is still led by bullies, who have snowed a lot of people into thinking they are striking a blow against abuse, even as they are used as a tool of abuse.
Leigh? A bully. Most of gamergate? Her designated victims. The well-meaning white knights of the “anti-harassment” campaign? A “feminist” tool being mis-used in an attempt to beat those victims into submission. Harassment? A very real problem being used as a broad brush to tar everyone who opposes her clique.
You don’t have to go into conspiracy-spinning theories about cultural warfare to see that many of your leaders are terrible people (just as many prominent pro-GG voices are opportunists with contempt for their “allies”). And I don’t have to be anti-feminist (or pro-GG) to oppose bullies that call themselves “feminists”.
–Dave
Because a lot of those tactics are legitimate if done in pursuit of a legitimate cause. If you’ve been legitimately harmed, it’s legitimate to ask people sympathetic to you for help.
Yes, there are some feminists who engage in behavior I would all “bullying” I don’t think there are very many, but I think the nature of Twitter can act as a force multiplier for bad actors. I also don’t think this is happening more often inside feminism than in any other movement.
I do oppose bullies who call themselves feminists. I mean, look up how Sarah Kendzior smeared Jacobin and Douglas Williams. That is how you bully people. But Leigh Alexander’s ‘Gamers are over’ is bullying? I don’t think so. I said I was angry over it but never felt bullied by it. For one thing, it’s not individually directed. She’s saying she doesn’t like a broad cultural trend. She’s not pointing at some individual on the bus and yelling “nerd!” More importantly, that article’s not trying to control anyone’s behavior. It’s not threatening anyone.
Look, I don’t know everything that your targets have done. I do know that what Alexander, Sarkeesian, and Quinn get yelled out most loudly for is either perfectly legit or absolutely none of my business. If there is any “there” there, you guys have cried wolf one too many times for me to ever bother to find out. I will *never* have any interest in who GG thinks is a terrible person.
So if I point to an individual person and call him an asshole, I’m being insulting, but if I wave vaguely at the crowd and scream “ASSHOLE” through a megaphone, none of them should take offense because there’s no way for them to be sure I was talking about them in particular?
And the article is, in fact, trying to shame developers into not making certain kinds of games anymore. That is it’s stated purpose. Shame is a tool of control, yes?
And who is “you guys?” Am I not an individual, product of my own experiences, responsible only for my own actions? My points and concerns are unworthy of notice because people vaguely similar to me have worn out your patience? There’s a word for that, I can’t remember, something about judging people in advance based on superficial attributes….
I am not “pro-GG”, I take issue with them for a lot of things totally outside of the scope that has been opened up for permissible discussion by the guardians of acceptable conduct.
I am in favor of a dialog, rather than trolling and shit-slinging, which seems to have put me into opposition with quite a lot of both sides, who seem perfectly happy to fight to the death even if the price were burning down the whole community.
–Dave
Criticizing a community or cultural idea for the kinds of behavior it encourages is not vaguely waving at them and calling them an asshole.
By “you guys”, I mean the people making the same disingenuous, dishonest arguments that you have.
But, yes, when there is a prominent bullshit campaign directed at someone, and I’ve spent too much time looking into and finding nothing, I’m going to wait until someone I already trust says I should look at it again. Attacks on ZQ, AS, and LA passed that point long ago.
I’m actually not anti-ideology. I’m anti-censorship and anti-witchhunts. I wouldn’t have such a problem with the crazy SJW stuff if there was more diversity of opinion and willingness to engage with critics or gamers. But instead, they do their best to shut out other voices. Look at how many anti-gg have used epithets like “The Tea Party of gaming” or “This is gaming’s Benghazi” to dismiss it. That’s not what a moderate, pro-tolerance ideology looks like. They’re incredibly skewed to the left, and only a small part of the left.
Some people don’t want politics in their hobbies, and if they don’t want that they should feel free to ignore it. There are plenty of people who are interested in those discussions, and you should reach out to them and make them feel comfortable instead of calling them bigots because they’re not SJWs. It’s weird to see GamerGate treated as a silencing, witchhunty movement when from my point of view it popped up because they are sick of the witchhunts. They are tired of people who think they can make and break careers, silence critics, but when you criticize one of their friends suddenly that’s unacceptable.
“Some people don’t want politics in their hobbies, and if they don’t want that they should feel free to ignore it.”
Best way to avoid politics in hobbies is to not self-identify with a label that defines them as a politick.
If “gamers” were not a politick, then nothing negative about “gamers” would resonate with anyone.
Politics ought to be the way by which people with different backgrounds and value sets come together and resolve differences without brutal tactics.
That’s not what’s happening.
Are boycotts and letter-writing campaigns destructive? In my view, they can be. But I’ve never met a liberal who spoke up against the Mozilla boycott or the Sirius/XM boycott against Anthony Cumia. So it’s weird to see the kind of people who generally support consumer boycotts and agenda-pushing freak out when those are targeted against them. I think if the gaming journalism circle dropped the vitriol, and dropped the self-serving cliches like “free speech does not mean freedom from criticism” and “tolerance of intolerance is no tolerance at all”, but acted like leaders and facilitated a discussion, the boycott campaign would go away. (It did in the Escapist’s case) People are skeptical because they don’t know when the websites will go back to ridiculous banning policies and twitter blocklists.
I think Fredrik deBoer had a couple blog posts arguing against the Mozilla boycott. I know there were huge debates, with leftists on both sides, at CrookedTimber.
Also note that no one is complaining about you not going to Gamasutra because you don’t like it. The point of the boycott was to go after advertisers so that people who do like it can’t have it. So in that sense it’s worse than the Sirius/XM thing.
It’s exactly the same thing as the Sirius/XM boycott. The boycotters didn’t listen to Opie & Anthony and most of them weren’t subscribed to the service.
I despise the Tea Party. But the Tea Party should be offended to be compared to Gamergate. Darell Issa’s investigation of Benghazi is an absolute farce. But it’s nowhere near as ridiculous as Five Guys/Quinnspiracy.
I hate the Tea Party more than I hate Gamergate, but that’s only because the Tea Party is much more effective than GG.
If you’re anti-censorship I hope you oppose advertiser boycotts.
I opposed the boycotts of Chic-Fil-A and Mozilla, and I got lectured how I was “misunderstanding the first amendment” and “freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism”.
Well, they were right. Boycotts are not illegal, and I don’t feel bad that the professional witchhunters are having their own tactics used against them. When the witchhunters want to put down their pitchforks and have a conversation about political correctness, that’ll be a good day.
No, you don’t get it. Go through this slowly.
It’s perfectly consistent to say that all boycotts are compatible with free speech.
It’s perfectly consistent to say that boycotts are censorship but criticism of games and shutting down forum threads in a forum you own or blocking annoying twitter users on your own account is compatible with free speech. (In fact, the latter is *inarguably* compatible with free speech–GG twitter does not have the right to force itself into my stream.)
It’s perfectly consistent to say that both boycotts and criticism of games and forum thread deletion is incompatible with free speech. I don’t know how far would want to take this–if someone is yelling at me in the street, am I obligated to invite them into my home for a discussion? Are negative movie reviews censorship, or only the “subjective” ones?
It is not consistent to say that boycotts are free speech but Feminist Frequency is trying to censor games.
At numerous times GamerGaters have claimed free speech as one of their issues. This means not only that they support free speech, but their opponents are doing something that violates free speech. But no honest person can claim that anything the games press or industry is doing represents more censorship than advertiser boycotts, trying to shut down entire web sites over opinions they don’t like. None of those forums that deleted your threads stop you from making your own forums.
Note that it makes no sense to arguing that you’re giving the other side a taste of their own medicine. Does the ACLU ever call for censorship of anyone who opposes free speech or civil rights? No, because the ACLU cares about free expression. Operation Disrespectful Nod proves that GamerGate does not.
It proves that you don’t oppose boycotts. You only oppose boycotts of bigots.
The people being boycotted are professional boycotters and witchhunters, down to the same specific individuals. They’ve destroyed careers and made made people feel unsafe in their homes with their nonsense. Gamers feel there is a double standard between the people “in the clique” and the people outside of it. Treatment that the Kotaku clique have employed against their own designated “enemies” is apparently harassment and bigotry when employed against them. (How bigotry comes into a conversation about toys is beyond me)
Do you think that all cliques on the Internet ought to have open membership?
If they did, would they be cliques?
Seriously, there are very few groups of people who frequent one section of the Internet who aren’t going to seem cliquish to an outsider. There are many closed circles. If you can’t get what you want from them, it seems to me to be a better response to build your own clique, make your own scene.
Don’t just tear something else down because you don’t like or understand how it works.
Clique is a perjorative. It doesn’t mean “group of friends”, it means where the group of friends excludes people and gangs up on them. I don’t see why opposing cliques is a bad thing.
Gamergate supporter here.
I’m sick of being called ‘anti-feminist’ and ‘misogynist’. I was fucking raised feminist. I was educated in a feminist system.
I’m not anti-*feminist*. I’m anti *3rd wave* feminism. I’m against the feminism of 20-something upper-middle class white people. I’m *not* against the feminism of 50-something 2nd wave hippies.
Stop calling me anti-feminist. I am a feminist. You 3rd wave sycophants have mutated Feminism beyond its goals. You are no longer feminists, you are totalitarians.
That’s funny, because the 3rd wave of feminism, which sought to successfully integrate LGBT people, POC, male victims of domestic violence/rape, is infinitely more welcoming and addresses more issues than the 2nd wave which bred Dworkin & co and only cared about middle-class white women and MAYBE lesbians (this is where the ‘political lesbian’ was born, mind you).
3rd wave is an improvement in every way over 2nd wave.
I don’t understand the difference between 2nd-wave and 3rd-wave. 2nd-wave seems to be Dworkin, while 3rd-wave is Dworkin plus trans-inclusivity. Both seem to exclude reasonable voices like Christina Hoff Sommers and Wendy McElroy.
“I don’t understand the difference between 2nd-wave and 3rd-wave. 2nd-wave seems to be Dworkin, while 3rd-wave is Dworkin plus trans-inclusivity. ”
Well there’s your problem. You’re not actually aware of what 3rd wave feminism is.
3rd-wave feminism is sort of where we get the splintering of feminism, the realization that one singular movement that catered only to middle class white women could not adequately address the needs of all women of various backgrounds at the same time. 3rd-wave is where you start getting WOC feminism movements, an increased LGBT focus, the rise of “intersectionality” which crosses with anti-racism movements, womanism, etc. It’s defending sex workers and in general sex-positive, saying that pornography is not inherently bad (though the porn industry that exists is largely extremely exploitative – and racist). It’s where we get ideas to abolish gender roles and stereotypes (which work for men too, btw) and the rise of queer theory, rape culture, etc.
3rd wave is in every way an improvement over 2nd wave, which was an improvement over 1st wave.
Here’s the thing, though: While the 3rd wave (arguably 4th wave, since there’s a strong argument to be made that the rise of internet feminism marks a new wave) is actually the most male-friendly movement yet, it’s male-friendly in context. You don’t get to just spout reactionary bullshit that doesn’t jibe with the facts and be taken seriously.
CHS is excluded because she has no beliefs that align with the current feminist movement, and more than anything she seems to be a sock of the AEI to prove LOOK WE CAN BE LIBERAL TOO. She’s a “feminist” parroting MRA talking points. Why SHOULD she be taken seriously?
I agree that #GG has become about shutting out voices, which is always sad. However, it only escalated to this point because your side (the rest of your post justifies this categorization) is so obviously incapable of dealing with other viewpoints. You still think that you get to adjudicate the definition of feminism, which is ludicrous. If even one moderate voice of feminism from Sommers’ camp had been allowed to counterbalance the extremist baloney that made it to the gaming press, we would not be dug into the current trenches.
Also, it is posts like this which perpetuate the “SJW” label. I agree it’s silly. But as long as you refuse all correct self-identification by wrongly claiming to speak for all of feminism, some sort of disambiguation must be imposed upon you.
I’m not anti-feminist. But once you’ve made up your mind how your personal niche of feminism shall be known, add me as anti-that.
How has #GG been about shutting out voices? On what platform would they even do that? They’re a collective, not an industry.
By comparison, people are being shadow banned on Reddit for talking about supporting #gg, and after much complaints have been given their own containment board.
Even 4chan has been affected by unprecedented censoring of the topic.
Then there’s the numerous cases of doxxing, including against ‘community leaders’ like TotalBiscuit, Sargon and IA, KingfoPol, etc.
Milo Yiannopolous has been the target of doxxing and mystery care packages of syringes filled with unknown fluids.
One #gg user had their workplace contacted, wherein the person who called attempted to have the user fired.
We’ve heard word directly from developers and pro-gamergate journalists about not being able to voice their opinions on the matter.
Hell, in the Gamejounrolist emails, we see people who take a moderate stance on the whole thing shouted down by people like Ben Kuchera.
I’m honestly not sure how anyone can claim that #gamergate are exclusively trying to silence the other side. They don’t have a proper platform or loudspeaker to even do something like that.
But honestly, BOTH sides are complicit in forced censorship. The reason a lot of us try to ignore it and move on is because it’s always FRINGE groups within these larger groups that do it. Why would we start using the extremists to determine the values and goals of the larger group?
“counterbalance the extremist baloney that made it to the gaming press, we would not be dug into the current trenches.”
This tells me you don’t know what extremist arguments actually are. the stuff that gets reported on mainstream game sites is seriously 101-level mainstream stuff.
Feminism as dictionary definition might be an easy concept, which one might call equality for women, which therefore means equality for everyone. But it’s no description of thedifferent movements calling themselves feminism, nor is it a description for some measures some people want to take to reach said goal. And it seemingly isn’t the definition of the average Joe or Jane.
Therefore being ‘anti-feminist’ might not actually mean one has something against equality or even diversity. And both words are meaningless without context.
Hoff Sommers seemingly critizises statistics and it doesn’t matter if she makes a living doing so, when her critique is head on. And just again, using the unadjusted gender pay gap, while speaking about doing the same work, is simply lying.
But in the same manner we’ve got no singular group of feminists, we’ve no singular group of gamergaters (again just to clarify, never used the tag, nor will i do so).
And so for some it is anti-feminist, for some it might even be anti-egalitarian or anti-humanist, but for others it’s not. And overal it’s about consumers feeling mistreated and slured by journalists who, as you yourself pointed out, as far as i remember, before (only in reference to AAAs though), are corrupt.
“And just again, using the unadjusted gender pay gap, while speaking about doing the same work, is simply lying.”
Depends on what point you are trying to make. “Doing the same work” is, itself, a kind of privilege, as some kinds of work are compensated more than others (if it’s even recognized as “work”, e.g. domestic labor), and women have historically tended to be pushed into the less compensated kind.
Sorry but you’re plain wrong.
a) Similar actually means similar. We’re not in politics here, but statistics. As long as one doesn’t find a good metric to group similar jobs together and uses that in his analysis instead of job position names, we can’t speak about similar jobs, when representing said studies, when we actually speak about different job positions.
b) Using a figure saying ~23%, which is the unadjusted one, is definately wrong if we want to account for “home production/domestic labor”.
c) If we speak about monetary income and home production / domestic labor, we’re mostly talking about couples and single parents. Which again would be a huge difference, then speaking women overall. It’s especially to note that economics overall seemingly (meaning most paper i know) find that the better comparable groups are, the smaller the gap shown by statistics becomes.
d) If you want to tell us that history is dictating women taking different jobs, then we’re in another discussion and narration. We are also in a different discussion if we want to speak about why women work more part time or are more likely to stay home after having children and such.
We can have all sorts of different discussions about why gender/sexes make different choices within life, which thereby lead to different outcomes. But we can’t simply say there are different outcomes, therefore there must be something wrong.
Actually, I agree with you that as a matter of describing describing descriptive fact, “doing the same work” means you can’t compare unadjusted totals. I was sloppy in responding to you.
“But we can’t simply say there are different outcomes, therefore there must be something wrong.”
I would say that when outcomes are different, we should suspect that something is going wrong until we find evidence otherwise. It should be privilege that requires justification, not equality.
“I would say that when outcomes are different, we should suspect that something is going wrong until we find evidence otherwise.”
That’s something we disagree on. It’s making me curious about the reasons, but i don’t presume there’s something inherently wrong.
Let me put it a different way. If society puts someone into a lower station, I don’t presume that they deserve this lower station. I don’t think the guy on the bottom should have to prove that it’s unfair that he’s down there, I think the guy on the top should have to prove he deserves to be there.
(And by “prove” I don’t mean in a court of law. I just mean in terms of how I think about people. Without further information, I presume that every should be equal until proven otherwise.)
The problem is that not everyone can be equal in a society with some sort of hierachy. And hierachy itself will always form when a group needs to be organized. That doesn’t mean though that differences in groups are necessarily right.
For me it’s really a case by case basis.
Just as an example.
When i take a look at the natural science field or medicine we can find that even though the female student population has risen, we find that certain fields have only few female students.
And one has to question why the conception of “females shouldn’t study” have died, and also some conception of “females shouldn’t study nature sciences”, but why seems there still to be a bias for them entering different specialisations as males?
My current thesis for that is that of different interests. And i might be wrong in that, but i think this thesis is less harmful, then thinking we need to push females more into a direction they’re not willing to go themselves.
That said, because you speak of the bottom.
We’ve situations whereas discrimination is solely an outcome of socio-economic variables. And in these situations screaming people are discriminatory won’t help. We’ll need to find intelligent (because otherwise we will most likely have boomerang effects) ways to help change those variables and if we can’t find intelligent answers we need to stay away and see if people are themselves able to overcome these walls.
Why am i speaking of intelligent answers?
My country, as a lot of countries, is running different ‘We need more females’ campaigns and just allowed females into the army in combat roles. And nearly as soon as they allowed it voices rose and questionend why the leadership of the army was mostly male.
Well guess what? It takes time to rise to the top. But no, the political parties gave out the typical order of “Same qualifications – raise the female first”.
And now we had one of the first reports about how soldiers percieved femaled soldiers. And we got the non-surprising result, that now soldiers were less willing to have female soldiers…
And i see that as a clear boomerang effect, because people feel/think the meritocracy is broken here. Or to put it differently. When judging personal treatment the feelings are more based upon the individual experience, then the knowledge of societies problems, which is a problem if we try to reach equality thorugh unequal treatment.
“And i might be wrong in that, but i think this thesis is less harmful, then thinking we need to push females more into a direction they’re not willing to go themselves.”
I don’t know for certain whether your thesis is right or wrong. My view is this: there are probably multiple reasons for gender discrepancies in academic fields. Given how the diffuse, subconscious nature of gender bias, and given how often women in some fields report mistreatment (philosophy in the U.S. seems to be a huge offender here, for some reason) I find it very difficult to believe that gender bias isn’t part of the explanation. Whether it is the whole explanation or not doesn’t really matter. (In fact, it may be a multiplicative problem–the initial discrepancy (in an imaginary world in which we build academia from scratch) might be legitimate differences of interest, but once a field has more men than women it tends to mistreat women.)
Where I definitely disagree is where you assign harm. I think it is hugely harmful to tell a disadvantaged group that it’s their fault they haven’t done better, if that isn’t the case. That’s especially true if I’m pretty it’s not totally their fault, if at all. Ethically speaking, blaming the loser bothers me a whole lot more than blaming the winner, even assuming blame in both cases is equally unfair.
Furthermore, all fields of inquiry benefit from diverse viewpoints. The case for affirmative action could be made even assuming there was no past injustice (in fact, I believe according to the US Supreme Court, affirmative action is only justified if the purpose is to increase diversity, not to rectify past injustice.) To put it another way, even if women are less interested in philosophy biologically, philosophy would be well-advised to work harder recruit those who are so that the products of philosophical research are less gender biased.
While we might profit from a more diversified views in science, we might loose quite a bit by forcing people against their biology or inducing wishes that are unfullfilable.
What do i mean by that? Pushing the picture of women having to be great mothers and having a highly successful business career becomes a problem when people who can’t fulfill that, internalize such a picture.
I’m highly afraid so to say, that we’ll demand to much from later generations, that we’ll try to hard to make them better people and thereby damage a lot of them.
Maybe i’m a bit to afraid that we might try to push progress too hard, but in my school time one of the major topics was being critical of movements promising an Utopia by ‘reprogramming’ humans and using manipulative media.
“And just again, using the unadjusted gender pay gap, while speaking about doing the same work, is simply lying.”
But it isn’t. Changing a male name on a resume to a female name reduces the offered salary by an average of almost $4000. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/2012/09/23/study-shows-gender-bias-in-science-is-real-heres-why-it-matters/
But it is.
You’re not making a point to the contrary here. You pointing towards a special segment of labor statistics where there might be quite a big problem.
But there’s validity to your point and i’m a bit of a fan of the idea to applications having to be anonymised before judgment, to eleminate such biases. Only problem is that i also acknowledge some right of companies to choose by looks, when we’re speaking about public company representatives.
On the negative side though:
You should note that there are most likely field with such a bias in reverse. I know for example that some studies showed that boys got worse grades for the same works then females in school. Which leaves me baffled as to why such a bias turns around after university. My working thesis currently is that people subcounciously note a bias in school and try to correct that later on, but overcompensate – it’s a thesis though without any factual research.
What’s also interesting, that to my knowledge these entrant differences vanish within the first years of employment.
Also please note how the gender of the judges didn’t matter, which would also be baffling if we speak of the old notion of conscious discrimination because of a belief of superiority of one group.
So it’s an interesting topic and we need to discuss it. But again, we need to be very exact about what definitions we use and what data actuall supports. Because otherwise we’ll most likely end up doing more harm then good.
I’m not familiar with your boys/girls grade study, might you cite it/link to it? It sounds interesting.
I do want to address this:
“Also please note how the gender of the judges didn’t matter, which would also be baffling if we speak of the old notion of conscious discrimination because of a belief of superiority of one group.”
We aren’t, though. Nobody is saying this is conscious. Most modern bigotry is unconscious and rationalized away, i.e., “I don’t hate black people, I just don’t trust black men because they’re violent so I’m going to wait for the next elevator instead of get on the one with two black guys on it.”
I link a time article that to my knowledge links to one of such studies:
http://ideas.time.com/2013/02/06/do-teachers-really-discriminate-against-boys/ . The same was seemingly found by the german PIRLS (in german IGLU) study, as Prof. Dr. Bos (the german leader) pointed that – didn’t find an english translation saddly.
I mean it basically shouldn’t be that surprising as we’ve got studies indicating influence of looks and other social-economic and personal variables. Even some indications (even so no conclusive findings) of firstnames influencing gradings.
This whole matter leads me often to the believe that it might be better to have a segregated school system to be able to adjust to different needs on average.
“We aren’t, though. Nobody is saying this is conscious. Most modern bigotry is unconscious and rationalized away[…]”
It’s not rationalized away. It exist because a lot of said behaviour is based upon rational thought, and the existance of irrational fears towards harm. It’s the whole behaviour beyond the idea of statistical discrimination. And a solution to such a problem is neither telling people to act irrational, nor is insulting them a good tactic. We might need to work on influencing factors.
Here’s a few things that I don’t understand;
1. How can this be an attack on women if the vast majority of #gamergates targets so far have been men, and continue to be men?
2. Is it seriously just accepted now that Zoe Quinn did nothing wrong? Most people didn’t even know who she was until the allegations were made.
3. 4chan were the ones who started in on the harassment, following the posting of the “5 guys, burgers and fries” blog. This began the “Quinspiracy” or whatever it was called.
But it’s not as though Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian are the only targets of 4chan. I mean, has no one been following their saga with Phil Fish? Or Ben Kuchera? Or Yahtzee? Even TotalBiscuit has been the subject of harassment on 4chan. Do people here seriously believe that because 2 women were harassed, that it’s always been targeted at females?
It is not so much that women are being harassed more than men – as you noted, it is more likely the target is a man. But that is just going by sheer numbers, since most public gaming industry figures are men. A higher percentage of female public gaming figures are targeted, which tends to be more easily noticed.
Anyway, it is not so much that those attacks are targeting women more than men, it is the sheer intensity and violence of the hatred in the attacks against women that are noteworthy. The shit that regularly gets directed at women on the internet is a fucking sharknado compared to the harassment that male gaming figures receive. Phil Fish is, from what I gather, the recipient of the harshest bile thrown at men, and yet afaik he has not received the floods of death threats, rape threats, and doxxing that women like Anita and Zoe have. Moreover, Phil Fish (again, from what I gather) triggered the harassment by being a total dickwad in public. The only thing most women who get rape and death threats have done is voice an opinion – or worse, related actual experiences they had IRL – that certain people couldn’t handle.
As for your #2, well yeah it is fucking accepted that Zoe did nothing wrong (by which I mean the allegations of corruption, one could call cheating on your partner doing something wrong but that is irrelevant to the gaming community and none of our goddamn business) because THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT SHE DID ANYTHING WRONG.
No, it’s not accepted that she did nothing wrong. They’re just past caring about her. She isn’t relevant anymore, except that the anti-GG side keeps bringing her up in order to “taint” GG.
They don’t talk about her any more because it would drag *her* victims back into the spotlight, and they want to be left alone. Much the way that ZQ gets a fresh round of hate every time an article railing against GG says it is all about her. One could almost think that they are keeping her front and center, drawing fire, in order to keep the outrage porn flowing and dialog impossible.
–Dave
Um, actually, I’d like to correct some factual mistakes that you’ve made.
Phil Fish got his computers hacked, and his entire business and personal life thrown online.
It was so bad that he dissolved his studio.
I think that that would qualify as both harassment and doxing.
He came out of this a loser, by far.
But, I encourage you to find out for yourself.
Of course, Fish is hated because of corruption, because of misappropriation of money, and because he was given an unfair advantage just because he’s less awkward than most of us, and more able to make friends with the right people.
That’s a big reason why people hate Zoe Quinn, as well.
I’m a game developer, and I would never compete in a gamejam that involved either Phil Fish, or Zoe Quinn.
Why should I?
They’ll just be unfairly awarded the prize anyway.
Also, Zoe Quinn most certainly did many wrong things.
She engaged in harassment of The Fine Young Capitalists, a feminist collective that was raising money for women in gaming.
4chan stepped in and was able to save the fundraiser.
I don’t care about her personal life.
And, you really think that a traditionally attractive white girl is *oppressed*??
I will admit that I don’t think I’d get along with her, since she’s praised for making a glorified geocities website, while people barely notice the “gross” nerds who spend countless hours perfecting their craft.
She couldn’t make anything in Photoshop, much less something like Unity.
I can’t see what she could possibly contribute to game development.
But, she demonstrates yet again that the pretty white girl throwing a temper tantrum will get everyone trying to sooth her feels.
And if you really think that the next battleground for women’s rights is in chatrooms and conference conduct policies, than you’re sheltered and privileged, and you don’t even know it.
“No, I care about women’s rights, I’m a ‘real’ feminist, I am complaining about popular culture and people saying mean things on the Internets”
You SO don’t represent me, and it’s really insulting that you’re presuming to.
I suggest you educate yourself, and *listen* to people.
There is a serious problem working under the guise of feminism whether you want to admit it or not. Thousands of people just like Suey Park (you might remember her from #CancelColbert) who are creating this violent pecking order.
Ideas don’t matter, only identity. If you’re a white man, shut up. If you’re arguing with a woman, you better be a minority woman, or lgbt; unless you’re republican, or disagree on some core tenet of the third wave religion, in which case nothing will save you.
A very small minority take issue with ACTUAL feminism. And even then, mostly on the current states of society (ie. how unequal are we really? Women outnumbering men in med school, stat games re: pay gap, etc)
Re: Anita, she’s a liar, straight up. She claimed to be a gamer, she’s on film saying she hates games. She claims videogames are about slicing up women; the game is called Hitman. The only way to avoid the OPTION to kill women is to just have zero female characters. And then she’d complain about that.
I’m reminded of the recent Tropico 5 review where the reviewer CHOSE to play as a dictator (as opposed to the viable choice of benevolence) and then bashed the game for it. Or the recent Shadow of Mordor reviews linking the mind control ability to slavery. Kind of like how these self-identified “feminists” branded Brad Wardell a racist because his book had orcs.
#gamergate has morons in its midst, but you have lunatics who are getting writing space on Verge and Polygon. These aren’t anons you can’t control, these are the people who are passing muster in your camp.
Suey Park actually asked to cancel a TV show. That is, shut down a media enterprise.
No one saying negative things about “gamers” asked for anything resembling that. Anita Sarkeesian has never actually advocated for anything being canceled, censored or otherwise removed.
Unless you just don’t know how to deal with “if you’re a white man, shut up” without getting on the defensive, then you are advocating censorship on the basis of fear. From that view, #gamergate may as well be #cancelgamesmedia.
Would you call the effort to get advertisers to stop contributing to the sites that posted the five (FIVE. THERE WERE FIVE WHOLE ARTICLES, ONE WAS ON A BLOG AND THE ONE ON KOTAKU HAD BARELY ANYTHING OTHER THAN LINKS TO TWO OTHER ARTICLES, THEN SAID “YUP BASICALLY THAT.”) articles that said the mean things about gamers, “morons”?
I don’t think they’re morons. But I think it’s easy to get caught up in things that make no sense when there’s no direction to begin with besides pure chaos.
Reviews aren’t journalism.
No, there were 11 articles on 10 sites in 24 hours. Limiting the number for Disrespectful Nod was a strategic decision to focus on the ones that were seen by the organizers as more vulnerable or especially egregious, as part of the process of herding the cats into effective action.
And (speaking as a non-white man), what is so unreasonable about getting defensive over “If you’re a white man, shut up”? What is even defensible about saying that?
–Dave
Have you ever actually heard someone say that?
Implications don’t count. White straight men are the easy mode of life.
If it was 11 articles on 10 sites within 24 hours, that means that columnists read each other. They don’t take a lot of time to write, as posts in this thread prove.
You just gave credence to Disrespectful Nod as an “effective action.” I think THAT is indefensible. If you don’t like a site, don’t read it. I seriously doubt most people read Gamasutra regularly who aren’t pursuing an actual career in game development. Calling on advertisers to pull out is beyond the pale.
Either there are going to be discussions about the issues that matter, or there aren’t. People here declaring, “we don’t want to talk about it, do what we want now, whatever that is” just underlines how there is no movement here, there is only chaos and noise. And if that’s what they want, nothing will be resolved.
And if you don’t want a resolution, you are part of the problem.
I definitely want a resolution. But I think you picked the wrong word, “Disrepectful Nod” has succeeded in their goals by getting several advertisers to drop Gamasutra, that is “effective”.
It may be unwise, if the Intel backlash attacks drag in more people on the anti-GG side that aren’t there because they care about games, but because they heard their team is losing.
Or you can argue that it is morally wrong, as some have, to quell “free speech” by going after advertisers. I would just point out that it isn’t “free speech” if someone is paying for it. And we could go round and round, pointing out instances where such actions were used for good or for ill. So let’s just skip that part, okay?
And I’m really not sure which side you are referring to as insisting that nothing else can be talked about until they get what they want. That seems to be modus operandi on both sides, and it is unfortunate that the “games journalists” made themselves part of the story and can’t facilitate communication around the logjam.
–Dave
“the anti-GG side that aren’t there because they care about games”
I’m on the anti-GG because I care about games, and if GG got their way–silencing critics they don’t like, forcing “objective” reviews–games would be ruined.
GamerGate is, by far, the biggest threat out there to gaming.
That’s one of the places I part company with GG: I think that reviews that include an assessment of moral and cultural ramifications are fine, when they are done well they are incredibly useful to me as a designer. And I’ve argued that with some of them, and I don’t think that’s really their problem.
They are more concerned that *unstated* ideological biases are being injected into the reviews, and that scores are being adjusted in accordance without explicitly saying so. “Objective” reviews that aren’t.
The sum of the controversy is certain the single biggest threat, I would agree with that (no, I’m not misinterpreting you, I know that’s not what you said). If it breaks out into a full-blown culture war flashpoint in mass media, it will be a *huge* disaster.
I think that a cultural dialog about games would be a great thing. Maybe if somebody hadn’t used a megaphone to hurl insults, they could have started one.
–Dave
Anita & McIntosh believe games make people violent & sexist. You can look it up on youtube, straight from the horse’s mouth.
For the record, I’m not white, but I take to offense to the idea as much as “if you’re a black man, shutup.” You focus on all the wrong things with identity politics.
And if it was just Suey Park telling her interviewer his opinion doesn’t matter because he’s a white man, I wouldn’t give a shit. But it’s getting to be more than that, and I’m uncomfortable with it.
“Reviews aren’t journalism”
No but they shouldn’t be sole and parceled PR either.
*sold, packed & parceled
This hits the nail on the head. Labels can mean a lot of different things, whether it’s “feminist”, “SJW”, or “gamergate”. To label an entire movement as one thing, like “anti-feminist” is meaningless. Not only because it paints everyone with an overly broad brush, but because we don’t even know what type of feminism it refers to.
These labels have become a sort of Rorschach test, where the thing being attacked or defended is an idealized form of whatever the person likes or dislikes. It’s a way to avoid addressing any actual points being made by the opposition, and then declaring victory. In other words, the textbook definition of the strawman fallacy. It might feel good, but it accomplishes nothing.
Conversely, if symbols mean different things to different people, it’s absurd for you to insist that a symbol has to mean something positive to me.
The origins of #Gamergate are too tainted for a lot of people to ever take the movement seriously. You might disagree, and that’s okay. But they have a right to feel that way. The bad apples have just as much right to claim the mantle of “#GamerGate” as the moderates–nobody has the trademark.
You’re right in that the straw man fallacy is perfectly legal to use.
Straw man fallacy doesn’t have anything to do with it. You have a brand called #GamerGate. Life would be so easy if other people were obligated to like your brand, but we aren’t. Some of us thing the origins of that tag are too tainted in harassment to engage with it. We are not legally, morally, rationally or in any other legitimate way required to engage with a brand that we believe to be toxic.
If you have legitimate grievances to discuss, you would be advised not to associate with that hashtag. Many people are, quite understandably, avoiding it.
It goes both ways. Anti-GG has been associated with doxxing, harassment, calling people’s employers to get them fired, etc. Unless you’re comfortable associating with those people, it’s extremely hypocritical to paint gamergate with that same brush.
What’s needed to actually forward this discussion is a PLATFORM. Right now it’s a bunch of journalists publishing articles to their own ends, leaving #gamergate supporters to take to Twitter or Reddit or whatever they can get their hands on to make rebuttal.
You can’t address the sites directly because that gets shut down pretty quick (community articles on Kotaku are being deleted).
So that leaves us with nothing. If we got some people in a room to properly debate this, maybe we’d get somewhere.
I understand that lots of people joined #GamerGate because “‘Gamers’ are over”, out of context, offends them.
What you need to understand is that it’s okay for the rest of us not to like #GamerGate. To the “good” GGs, #GG means something positive. To the rest of us, it means harassment of women. And the harassment of women was in #GamerGate before the “Gamers are Over” articles. The first GG tweet was one of those Quinnspiracy videos.
“You aren’t listening to us!” Well, no, I’m not. Being listened to is a privilege. It’s a privilege that journalists and publishers fight a losing struggle to obtain every day.If I invite a guest over to my house and they yell at me, I’ll probably kick them out. If you start a thread on my (imaginary) forum about how I’m no good and a feminist conspiracy controls my actions, I don’t want any of my mods wasting a cent of time I’m paying for on your crap. If you use a tag like “GamerGate”, that’s associated with far more noise than content, I’m not going to waste my time sorting the wheat from the chaff when there’s so much chaff that becomes impossible–and that’s a calculation that every human being and every business has the right to make.
“What you need to understand…”, when I said that I obviously didn’t mean Mr. Schubert. As I was writing I thought I was replying to someone else. If I can’t keep my own posts straight, that’s a very good sign that I’ve posted too much–sorry, I’ll go.
In context, “Gamers Are Over” was even more offensive. If it had merely been an observation that the demographics of people who play games has broadened, and developers could make games for people who didn’t fit into that label, it would have been pure “Duh, welcome to 2007” observation of the obvious.
No, it was a declaration of war, filled with insulting caricatures and an insistence that anything other than a complete abandonment of that market was enabling a toxic stew of worthless misogynerds. And it does not exist in a vacuum, but has to be paired with and viewed in light of all of the other articles with similar sentiments and even worse insults that came out the same day, and the tweets from the author that made it clear that yes, she really did think everyone who described themselves with the label “gamer” was a horrible person.
The “feminist conspiracy” guys are a fringe within GG, present mostly because the way that nearly a dozen websites declared war on the culture they were nominally a part of in such insulting terms made absolutely no logical sense. I don’t think they were conspiring, I think they just had contempt for their readers and were extremely stupid in following the groupthink off the cliff.
–Dave
Some of the ‘Gamers are over’ articles did contain broader cultural criticism, yes. Cultural criticism is okay. I called myself “Consumatopia” more than a decade a ago, to mock consumerism. It’s okay for environmentalists to think our culture glorifies waste, for atheists to think we are too religious, for Christians to think culture is too sexualized, for libertines to think isn’t sexualized enough, for art critics to think it’s too stupid, or for populists to think that it’s too boring. And it’s definitely okay to disagree with some or all of these people!
But once you start talking about how the people thinking this start are engaged in a “war”, you start to look like Bill O’Reily’s “War on Christmas”.
Imagine if Bill O’Reilly came on his show and announced “Christians are deluded fools that need to stop talking to their invisible shy daddy and worrying about who is having sex with who. While we’re at it, “Merry Christmas” is a stupid thing to say, from now on it should be “Saturnalia Salutations.”
Websites about games, who are presumably in the business of promulgating and supporting “Gamer Culture”, decided that was too nerdy and gross for them and they wanted all the people who like killing things and seeing boobs (or just didn’t mind it as long as the rest was fun) to go away. They weren’t just players with different tastes, they were the source and cause of everything bad.
I’m sorry, that was not “broader cultural criticism”. That was “fighting words”. Do I really need to go pick out some lines from another article to show how much they were excoriating diatribes against the hand that feeds them, and not just “cultural criticism”? Because, as I said, Leigh’s was actually one of the less insulting.
–Dave
There are ARE some aspects of Gamer Culture that are totally fucking gross and need to change. The incidence of harassment of women in online games has been absolutely crazy for a number of years–and, no, it’s not just the bad apples who are the problem, but an industry that doesn’t work hard enough to police it. And that hesitation to enforce basic standards of decency has a lot to do with broader culture–both “boys will be boys” and a broader sense of gamer entitlement that absolves them of the responsibility to behave themselves.
There’s some really bad design out there, games that integrated “social network” tools into their systems without any consideration at all for how to keep it from being mis-used. Developers *absolutely* could and should do a lot more to prevent harassment in their games.
But perhaps there’s a middle ground between doing nothing to limit the damage done by mouthbreathers, and burning the community to the ground in an attempt to flush them out?
–Dave
I’m not saying those articles were perfect. But no communities were literally burned to the ground, right?
Did some of them imply that it’s not merely that some nerds are behaving badly, but there is something intrinsic to the very idea of “nerd”, “geek” or “gamer” that needs to be addressed? Yes, but that’s a claim worth taking seriously. Maybe it is a mistake to define our identities by the products we consume?
Maybe it was a mistake to be so grossly and gratuitously insulting while ostensibly raising a cultural dialog over identity? Maybe blaming the victims of those insults for having chosen the identity that was being insulted isn’t the best way to move forward?
–Dave
I’m not saying those articles were ideal. I am saying that I think it’s fair to talk about broader cultural problems with the way we define ourselves, and that those problems are sufficiently severe that I think the passion those writers felt was understandable. And I think an “ideal” version of those articles would probably still enrage gamers just as much.
I say that as someone who was originally angered by it, and only went back weeks later to see that some valid points were being made. Would I have still reacted to a “better” version of those articles? Yeah, sad to say, I think I would have. The Internet makes me stupid just like it does everyone else.
“Maybe blaming the victims of those insults for having chosen the identity that was being insulted isn’t the best way to move forward?”
And hold on a second here. You, a GamerGate supporter, may not want women to be harassed. But the #GamerGate hastag, as a piece of data in Twitter servers, is about and itself constitutes harassment of women. It was a mistake for you to choose that identity. If you’re going to keep fighting everyone who thinks that #GamerGate, the hashtag, is about harassment of women, then you will always be fighting because I will always think that because it is true. You might be a decent person, I’ve never met you. But you cannot make me like that tag.
So, yeah, I do blame people who were angry with those articles, like I was angry with those articles, for signing onto the #GamerGate hashtag. They may have acted through ignorance rather than malice. But I wish they had known better.
I am not a GG supporter. I join them in their anger over those articles, but I think that they are fixated on petty issues and have maneuvered or been pushed into a position where they have no win scenarios.
Which is also true of the other side. I want to see a dialog, so that we can address those larger issues. Unfortunately, the people whose job it is to facilitate that dialog made themselves part of the story and took up leadership of one side of the fight. And as near as I can tell, until those publications admit their mistake, there’s no way out of this mess but mutual destruction that takes the whole community down with it.
–Dave
I apologize for grouping you together with them (though I don’t really think I can blamed too much for that given the way our discussion went.)
What do you mean by “admit their mistake”? There are plenty of journalists out there who publicly disagreed with those articles. But if you’re demanding that Alexander et. al. should be fired, that’s probably not going to happen and it would only turn journalists against GG even harder. Editors and media have been known to disown works printed on their pages in the past, but usually that’s only after infractions that are much more serious than the problems of tone that we’re mostly talking about here. Where Alexander was wrong, people should point that out, but it’s ridiculous to demand that she and others somehow be called out on the carpet over this. Especially when there’s no indication that this would do anything but encourage GG to be even louder and nastier. It would be just like Intel–GG would stop going after Gamasutra, and find some new target.
If it had come quickly, a clarification or a “I’m sorry you were offended” nonpology would probably have been accurate. All it would have taken is making it clear that they didn’t mean “all gamers”, but just the actually misogynistic trolls.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, most of the writers including Leigh went on twitter to throw more insults and generally make it seem pretty clear that they *did* mean “all” of the people that identified with the label “gamers”.
I don’t think you can unscramble that egg with less than a full apology; “We got caught up in the moment and said things that we shouldn’t have, they aren’t true and we’re sorry it happened.” Yeah, some of the GG side will still demand blood, but the greater majority of them would be defused.
No matter *what* your stance on the issue of harassment and gamers, it should be clear by now that this approach has not helped, if anything it has made it worse by compromising the moral standing of the websites to lead that “cultural dialog”. They picked a side and tried to shout their opponents into silence, that is not appropriate even in what passes for “journalism” for video games.
There were a lot of ways they could have taken a stand for support of the victims of online harassment that would not have escalated this, would have been positive for the community. But that ship has sailed. Now I’m just hoping that it can be defused before I’m watching Bill O’Reilly attacking feminists and defending video games.
–Dave
Apologize for Twitter fights? I guess, but there would have to be way more apologies on the GG side of the fence.
Even the apology you suggest goes to far. The problem wasn’t that they wrote things that were untrue. Some of them were wrong, but being wrong doesn’t mean you get dragged out for a public apology, it means that somebody will explain to them why they were wrong. It’s not exactly like they supported the invasion of Iraq, here. (I mean, stop and think for a second how Thomas “Suck On This” Friedman still has an extremely prestigious job, and people are complaining about anything written at Gamasutra or linked to by Critical Distance?)
The problem I’d say was the tone. And it wasn’t so much that the tone was too hard on gamers. Ultimately, gaming is a consumer choice, not an identity. But there *IS* a serious conversation that the social justice left needs to have about the way they talk about virgins, nerds, and funny-looking or acting people in general. Some of the articles probably crossed a line on this front. Since this is a much bigger issue, affecting lots of people who don’t play games at all, it’s not really a good GamerGate issue.
I’m definitely not saying those articles helped. But “lost moral standing” goes way to far. They had a perfectly legitimate point of view. GamerGate does not get to decide who has moral standing. #GamerGate has no moral standing. And the websites, even if they decide to stop blocking GamerGate, should not apologize for blocking it now. Web sites have every right to block content that doesn’t fit their web site–especially who those threads require a lot of time and money to moderate. I’m sure the website look at all the people complaining about blocking GamerGate and say “who the f### are you to demand that I spend money giving you a space to discuss your idiotic conspiracies?!” I’ve seen discussion threads ruined by much less contentious “SJW” issues than this one. The end result of GamerGate is almost certainly could to be more walled gardens–the only viable tool we have at this point to fight harassment.
Anita Sarkeesian called it a culture war at XOXOfest. Gamers didn’t declare war.
You know, GamerGaters would be a lot more convincing in their repeated assertions that they’re only upset about the terrible things journalists have said about gaming and gamers and aren’t really anti-feminist if they didn’t keep allying with and idolizing journalists like Milo Yiannopoulos and James Delingpole who have actually said far, FAR worse things about gaming and gamers than any “gaming journalist” and who are blatantly and egregiously anti-feminist.
Every single attack against #GamerGate, every single one, has been written from an SJW perspective. Seriously, find me a criticism of #GamerGate that doesn’t revolve around what a bunch of misogynist shitlords we all are. And you’re surprised that we don’t like you very much? Of course we’re fucking anti-SJW when the SJW’s have made it abundantly clear that they’re anti-us. And by the way, you guys kind of forfeited the moral high ground when you ignored, suppressed, and trashed an actual feminist project to get women into game development while we donated $70,000 to it.
Dave Rickey has it mostly nailed.
Gamers are freaking outraged, of the language and the politicizing of the hobby. A hobby a lot of us were willing to save bits of change for over the years as children to buy SOMETHING, either as a gift for a sibling’s birthday a year down the road or for our own enjoyment. A hobby that now, as grown ups, we are willing to spend our disposable income on. Have these media people consider that their “nerd shaming” HAD caused suicides in the past? Some of these “basement dwellers” and what not have extreme anxiety THANKS TO PEOPLE LIKE LEIGH IN THE PAST. Do these people know how HARD it is for friends, family and medical professionals to help these type of people to function at least normally? You think the typical basement dweller with low self-esteem would be screaming about women and not just some stupid kids crashing on hormones from puberty and anonymity behind the keyboard? That’s why some of us were UTTERLY DISGUSTED THAT THE MEDIA FAILED SO HARD ON WIZCHAN. They didn’t do the MOST BASIC of research when some of us desperately try to help some of these people whether it was related to games or not, instead they PILED ON THE HARASSMENT THANKS TO THEIR WILLFUL IGNORANCE. Oh right, some of press proudly proclaim they are misandrist and SJWs/rad-fems, so it’s bloody okay right? The press should be protected for their arrogant, hateful speech even when they should know better, disregarding the bare minimum required for a journalist?
I thought most people in the media would know already, but I was rudely awaken when people actually started asking me what asian gamers think of the whole #gamergate + SJW thing. You know what the general consensus is? These SJWs are an american manufactured white-privileged blowhards with too much times on their hands (the native terms are even more derogatory if I translate it verbatim).
Have the anti #gamergate crowd look beyond their own bubble? Beyond the North America border? Seriously, some of the vocal voices among the women and minorities are completely and utterly sick of the bullshit that get thrown at them. We get labeled “misogynist” and help with “partriachy’s suppression of women”, that we have “white privilege” because we are “white cis scum” (to be fair, I don’t think most devs said or would support the language, but their silence give the perception that they did, and yes, this language were used by certain game media, specific devs and their followers).
That’s especially rich when you consider that a lot of these people dealt with REAL OPPRESSION by their culture and government. A lot of us see the same language used between dictators, communists and so forth used the same way as these SJWs. You want a recent example? Compare it to the message Xi Jinping sent to Hong Kong’s citizens in regards to “purity of cause”, “removing the cancer from the healthy organism”, “we can’t talk to you until the people remove the taint”, “we know what’s best for you”, etc… You want patriarchy suppression? Try freaking rural india, pakistan, asia minor and so forth where women are AFRAID to talk about something as basic as female hygiene. Simple things like TAMPONS are taboo, and they are ASHAMED to talk about it. Does anyone of these bloody SJWs know how bloody hard it is to actually WORK FOR CHANGE? It took a bloody decade, no amount of outside “expertise” and money was working, and it was an indian man to actually get it rolling by making a simple to use machine (relatively “cheap” and given out) and spread it by word of mouth with the help of his female family members. And no, I’m not using this as a form of relative privation, I’m pointing out why some of us are SO BLOODY OUTRAGED AT THESE GODS DAMNED MORAL AUTHORITARIANS THAT THINK THEY KNOW OPPRESSION. From some of our perspective, they are not much different from the actual oppressors some of us faced and continue to face.
The #gamergate movement have voice and supporter from 6 continents, the continued arrogance and inflammatory attacks by the certain part of game media and their mainstream friends sounds eerily similar to local propaganda elsewhere in the world. The vast majority of gg are left leaning in general, I can say that for the most part, we are okay, and even support Social Justice. It’s the white-privileged Social Justice Warriors (please, someone tell me with a straight face that the ones harping the “misogyny” bullshit are NOT primarily white and middle class) that a lot of us have an issue with. Some of us from “outside” looked to the west as models, especially in term of journalism. I guess that contributed to some of the anger as well, the feeling of disappointment getting thrown into the mix.
I honestly thought some of the press that claim to be feminists would know about these issues. It appears they are just playing lip services while trying to profit off of it. A few of the devs I talked with are aware that there are trolls on both sides, three in particular acknowledge that there are trolls within the press itself. To be honest, I don’t think this whole #gamergate will die down while certain media continues to fan the flames. The media pulled the trigger on the whole thing. Had an apology happened in the first place, had certain writers and journalists didn’t further antagonize people in their comment section and forums, had they not personally attacked readers that reached out to them, a lot of the shitstorm happening now wouldn’t even be here.
That’s why there’s such an adamant call for journalistic ethics, none of the gunpowder would have been added to the keg had ethics been followed, at least on the consumer side of things. On the industry side, consumers aren’t privy to that, to lay blame on the consumers for unreported things happening within the industry is disingenuous at best.
As for a “leader” or a commitee of some sort? #gamergate doesn’t need that, just by addressing the journalistic issue and to stop antagonizing people unfairly, most would just go back to whatever it is that they do.
The “anti-feminism” angle? Maybe to this particular brand of “criticize and offer no solutions”, “we are the victim of the patriarchy” feminism. Actually, that’s why a lot of old feminists moved onto being egalitarians/humanist, myself included, to distance themselves from those who would just destroy and play the victim card instead of trying to find solutions. Some leading feminists were pushed so hard that they left feminism all together and founded MRA organizations ffs.
I don’t think devs and GG are against each other save for a small portion on each side. But the press media is the primary problem that needs addressing going forward.
@A’isha
You know why GG like Milo despite his views? The man did actual journalism, he went and play games to at least try to understand the mind of a gamer. He went on the record, on stream, twitter and forums apologized for the things he said, even went so far as to say “I’m old enough to learn that I could’ve been a villain”. GG isn’t a mass of hate, a lot of people are well, people, they can forgive when a sincere apology or regret are expressed by others. You know, the same reaction GG people had when Archon and Greg Tito came out and apologize for horribly screwing up the reporting on Wizchan? I’m not sure about Delingpole, I don’t think anyone “idolize” him within GG. Regardless, a lot of our views outside of GG might be vastly different, but we don’t mind since the people supporting it threw out their political stripes. The anti #gamergate crowd would be more convincing in calling Milo out if they are made up of a more diverse group, all the screaming of “diversity” and “women” seems laughable when neither women nor diversity is a majority nor are they evident in the anti #gamergate group.
As Schubert has so amply pointed out on this very blog, Yiannopoulos doesn’t do journalism. He’s a right-wing hack, working for Breitbart. Until he and the gamergaters found common ground in their mutual perceived enemy, Evil Feminists ™, Yiannopoulos was one of the most egregious promoters of the most insulting stereotypes about gamers and gaming, doing everything from calling you virgin beta males to rapists to the reason for Eliot Rogers going on a homicidal rampage. Even right in the initial article that made him a hero to gamergate, he doubled down on the insults, calling gamers “dorky loners in yellowing underpants”. But because he also went after “lying greedy promiscuous feminist bullies” in that same article, all was apparently forgiven.
As for Delingpole, he wrote an article in the Spectator last week about how GTAV was awesome because it pissed off the “feminazis”, how he decried “the stifling worthiness of our modern culture whose default position on innocent pleasures like this is to condemn them for their outrageous sexism, racism, misogyny and violence”, and how you should Google Milo Yiannopolous to get the skinny about gamergate since he did such a fantastic job breaking the story. In the comments, gamergaters are showering him with praise.
Strangely, Delingpole doesn’t mention how last year he himself was one of those people condemning GTAV in a hysterical article for the Daily Mail, in which he lamented that youngsters would be able to get their hands on this “deeply disturbing” game which “carries the casual amorality to new depths of depravity”, and fearfully concludes “The fact that this is the most popular computer game on the market should make us all shudder, and pray that the violence on the screen doesn’t bleed into Britain’s streets.” Nor does Delingpole see fit to disclose the fact that he’s Yiannopolous’ editor at Breitbart.
Of course, since (like Yiannopolous) he rails against “SJWs”, “feminists”, and “cultural Marxists”, that’s all gamergaters need to hear, and toss any anger about attacks on games and gaming or concerns about “journalistic ethics” out the window. Because despite their protestations, gamergaters don’t care one bit about those things, and will gleefully join up with people saying the most insulting and hysterical things about video gaming and who violate journalistic ethics as a matter of regular practice, just as long as they share gamergate’s anti-feminist attitudes.
I can see why you might think that. Breitbart isn’t exactly trustworthy. But in this case, we’re talking about emails from the journalists. Not just someone talking about the emails, but the actual emails themselves, which the journalists openly admit to sending. You can’t pretend something doesn’t exist simply because you don’t like the messenger.
And those emails don’t show anything remotely resembling what Yiannopoulos and Delingpole claim they do. Schubert covered this too when he pointed out what a partisan failure as a “journalist” Yiannopoulos was.
A lot of it was overblown, but the stuff about intentionally misrepresenting gamergate out of spite wasn’t.
There were no emails that were about “intentionally misrepresenting gamergate out of spite”.
“I don’t want to in essence reward the jerks doing this by giving their ‘issue’ any attention at all … I’m not even going to give the bullshit ‘journalism ethics’ excuse for these attacks the time of day.” – Kyle Orland(Ars Technica)
“I don’t think we, as games press, should support furthering the story by commenting, editorializing or even allowing others to ruminate on it.”
– Andy Eddy
Neither of those have to do with “misrepresenting” anything, whether out of spite or otherwise.
Gamergate began out of baseless attacks on Quinn rooted in her sex life (seriously…go look at Adam Baldwin’s tweet – made BEFORE all the “gaming is dead” articles were published – coining the hashtag which was accompanied by a link to a “Quinnspiracy” video). Eddy and Orland didn’t feel that treating vile internet harassment of Quinn over nonsense as anything other than a case of, well, vile internet harassment of Quinn over nonsense was something the game press should be doing.
And, you’ll note, other people in that discussion disagreed, meaning that in addition to there being no “misrepresentation out of spite”, there was no collusion or pushing of a single unified message either. Thus making Breitbart triply wrong.
Hi, I’m someone who’s not attached to the GamerGate movement but who wrote letters to the advertisers of Polygon, Gamasutra, and several other sites in the wake of the “Gamers are Over” articles. I think I can provide some insight into the “Intel situation” that may help clarify how why a lot consumers are both sick of sexism in gaming and sick of being told that, as someone who plays games, we’re sexist.
I’ll stake, categorically, I don’t identify with Gamergate. I don’t have a metaphysical issue with Anita Sarkeesian, though I do have several issues with arguments she presented (while still finding most of videos, in totem, to be interesting).
At the same time, when the bevy of “Gamers are Over!” articles came out, I was offended. Offended because I’ve looked at, and have been asked to look at, gamers as a diverse and inclusive group of people. From my personal experience, that rings true. When the vast majority of on-line commentators decided, nope, we’re all a bunch of “obtuse shitslingers”. While I would like to give the collective authors of these articles the benefit of the doubt that they only meant THOSE gamers (“you know the ones”), that’s not what their words said. And that’s shitty.
So, yes, I contacted Intel, Kroger, and variety of other advertisers letting them know how I feel about that. Frankly, Intel’s decision to listen to their consumers makes me happy. I’m switching from an AMD chip/motherboard combo to an Intel chip/motherboard combo for a PC I’m building this winter as a result. I have and will vote with my dollar.
On that note, I don’t see that as “silencing a voice” or “censoring” Ms. Alexander. Ms. Alexander can still call me a “wailing hyperconsumer” all she wants. Intel just doesn’t want to fund it anymore. And that’s fine. And if others decide they no longer want to support Intel, that’s fine as well.
To the author: I don’t think this situation is a binary as pro/anti Gamergate. There’s a lot of people who aren’t pro-gamergate but who are really upset with the gaming press, collectively, for their condescending attitude towards their consumer.
My thought experiment pays off! I’m actually very grateful to read your post since it confirms I’m not deluded into thinking people could have been offended over the articles because of the inflammatory rhetoric, great!
But yeah I was wondering if there was some % of people emailing advertisers who have had no further input, or even, as you have, specifically do not identify as a member of Gamergate. Posts like yours [and others I’ve been finding] confirm that.
I find this interesting because it changes the whole dynamic of how these things should be reported on. Intel is a part of the “Gamergate saga” and yet worthy of discussion completely outside of the “Gamergate” lens.
I don’t know if you wrote this post specifically to answer mine but thanks for the info, I’ve been trying to find people with viewpoints such as yours.
Have a nice day. 🙂
Lol, we meet again!
Exactly what I’ve been saying all along.
A GGater reads the “Gamers are dead” articles and feels personally insulted, personally outraged.
A non gater gamer read those article and was OUTRAGED at the harassment toward female devs and critics those articles described.
I think it must be something about someone’s brain capacity to empathize with others. Or basic English comprehension… Or the brains capacity to actually understand one’s anger.
So, if I’m interpreting this correctly, you’re saying that GGers care more about their own hurt feelings than people being made to feel unsafe from campaigns of harassment?
Isn’t it what evidence shows? Isn’t it what the post above that I’m commenting says out loud?
Basic GG narrative:
It all started with the gamers are dead articles.
Let’s forget what those article were responding to.
All the harassment of Zoë and Anita that led to those articles being written in the first place is irrelevant. Because, narrative. Because, I’m hurt you said bad things about the gaming community, of which some members just behaved like FUCKING CRAZIES.
My bad, I misunderstood what you were saying. Apologies! We are in agreement.
And the unfortunate part is that the crazies happened to dig up enough dirt for a lot of the ppl that never gave a damn about the sex thing to look at and go WTF. Wizchan’s incident (who happened to be the VERY DEV that’s claiming harassment, that was ENABLED by the very media to PROMOTE harassment against a vulnerable group of people by simply crying wolf) and TFYC was enough to tip a lot of us over after the Streisand effect, then there’s the hernadez deal among others. Then we started paying attention, we started looking, it seems there’s a pattern of actively promoting a 3rd wave feminist agenda. Temkin’s little rape/not-rape thing that JUST HAPPENS to involve the same dev. The Wardell’s case? Jaffe’s case? Blizzard’s interviwe with the designers? Yeah, excuse us for having some standards and be incredulous.
Top that off with the articles that’s outright attacking the consumers soon after? It’s funny that Anita S. got brought in, cause quite a lot of us don’t know who the hell she was. Oh right, she ANNOUNCED HERSELF INTO IT WHEN WE DIDN’T GIVE A DAMN. The funniest part is that most of us wouldn’t have given a damn if it wasn’t for reddit killing TB’s twitlonger. Then when we go to the writers, well, “abusive” is saying the least.
But hey, you know what, they don’t want us as their consumers? We will take the advertisers who DO want us as their consumers. Some of us in the states did it to right wing radicals, it’s just as fair to do the same to a different sort of radicals. And yes, “mah feels” certainly come into it, getting attacked by the industry as the audience? They aren’t comedians, well, not the usual kind anyways. Guess how many angry consumers will stay with any business in any industry that antagonize them? Guess how many will outright try to make their competitors comes on top and thrash the business? Welcome to the reality, welcome to the world of business. Gearbox will be a small litmus test since they did intentionally alienate a portion of GG, let’s see if there’s enough gamers willing to vote with their wallet.
@aisha
I don’t see any “idolization” of delingpole, but you seem to skip the parts where Milo apologize (several times in fact). Something that quite a few people choose to ignore. As for common grounds? We have everything from left to right and everything in between all in this together, isn’t it strange that something so WTF that people of very different political leanings are willing to stand against a certain group of radicals? When was the last time any coalitions that broad stand together? What does it say about the people the coalition is standing against?
Now excuse me while I email another advertiser.
“I don’t see any “idolization” of delingpole,”
Read the comments of the article he posted.
“but you seem to skip the parts where Milo apologize (several times in fact). Something that quite a few people choose to ignore.”
Gamergate latched onto Milo LONG before his apologies. And it’s obvious he’s just using gamers to help fight his anti-feminist battle, and the instant gamergate stops being useful for that, he’s going to go right back to writing articles about how you’re all pathetic virgin manchildren and how Grand Theft Auto is a moral travesty.
“As for common grounds? We have everything from left to right and everything in between all in this together”
The only “common ground” that the gamergaters orbiting around right-wing non-gamers like Summers, Baldwin, and Yiannopoulos is railing against “SJWs”, “feminists”, and (that classic right-wing conspiraloon bugbear) “Cultural Marxists”.
And, as Liana Kenzer and Devi Ever learned, even if you’re totally pro-gamergate, the slightest criticism of Emperor Milo is grounds for instant ostracism from the movement.
You assume they read the ‘gamers are dead’ article. You are too kind.
The “gamers are dead” campaign was a direct response to the GamerGate hashtag.
Why not both?
And there’s not a single mention of Zoe Quinn as an abuser.
Not a single mention of Eron’s post as a call out, that Zoe Quinn’s friends has shamed, blamed and silenced.
Wow.
Here is a helpful guide for you, if you are wondering when you should be concerned about who someone else is sleeping with:
1. Are you sleeping with them?
2. Is someone you are sleeping with, sleeping with them?
3. Are they interested in sleeping with you, and you are deciding whether or not you are interested in sleeping with them?
4. Are they an elected official trying to make the kind of sex they are having illegal for everyone else?
If the answer to all of those questions is no, then good news, there is no need to be concerned! Their sexual activities are in fact none of your business.
Wow, you’re right.
How DARE I care about someone who is a leader in social justice gaming media being an abuser. And using her friends to silence, blame and shame her victim.
I said /nothing/ about sex. I said she’s an emotional abuser and you and other feminist and social justice journalists have been using bias language to shame the call out of her problematic and abusive behavior.
Her ex has a right to call her out. To warn others. And he posted logs as receipts to her behavior.
“Jilted” and “bitter” ex. Sounds like words used to discredit and dismiss victims.
If you think her ex’s actions were right, your moral compass is just a wee bit twisted.
But I’ll help you, because I care.
If your metric is “stop abusive game developers”, you can go ahead and stop playing AAA games entirely. Because the process of creating those games is (and has been for decades) *incredibly* abusive to the game development staff. All of the major publishers are guilty.
So, while I disagree with your position on this, I commend you for being so invested in stopping emotional abuse that you are willing to entirely forgo a hobby that is so much a part of your identity to take a stand.
…Are you comparing /working/ to /abuse/ in a relationship?
Are you real?
My metric is warning fellow victims that the media that claims to support them is filled with abuse apologists who are shaming, blaming and silencing victims from calling out abuse.
No, I am stating outright the treatment of game developers by AAA studios is historically incredibly abusive and destructive.
If you want to avoid abusers, you need to avoid companies that publish AAA games.
So what you’re saying is that you don’t want to talk about the emotional abuse of Zoe Quinn and the way social justice-minded journalists have dismissed and mocked the call out of her because of personal friendships with her because… other abuse happens? So we shouldn’t talk about this example of it?
I want to congratulate you. I’ve never seen that deflecting before. I mean, it’s another spin on ‘What about the abuse people face in WORST places?’ but. I mean. Kind of original.
I expected you to go the ‘harassment cancels out her abuse’ route.
If anyone was emotionally abusive in that relationship, I’d say it was the one who spread the private details of it, mixed with a bunch of unfounded and false allegations about his ex, all over the internet, then participated in IRC chats named after a slur about her sex life and organized to harass her and others.
But that’s just me.
And so much for “#gamergate is not about Zoe Quinn!”.
I’m so glad you wrote this article. Both sides of the GamerGate debate have been awful. They both post nasty comments on the internet, troll, dox, and send death threats, and insult you when you call them out on it. It’s sad. The best, nicest, most civil places on the internet are places where nobody talks about GamerGate.