Zen Of Design

The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Category: Gamergate (Page 3 of 10)

Fem Freak

June 18, 2015 /

Last night, GamerGate was following around Jonathan McIntosh and mocking him for having an expensive backpack – that it turned out wasn’t even his. As if that wasn’t stupid, creepy and stalkerish enough, this morning E3ers woke up to find the area around the convention center papered with anti-Anita posters.

It’s difficult to tell, but the white background ones repeat the words ‘GamerGate’ over and over again. Which is all ironic, given that Gators love to say over and over again that #GamerGate is about Ethics in Games Journalism, which has fuck all to do with either Anita or John.

Perhaps realizing that this little escapade was even more awful and creepy than what normally passes for acceptable discourse (stalking McIntosh, for example), and definitely falls in the category of being harassing little dickbags, KotakuInAction has been desperately trying to spin this as a ‘false flag’ – i.e. done either by Anita and John themselves, or by Third Party Trolls. The truth of the matter is that, once again, some sick, demented lone wolf took an action that they thought was in bounds in an attempt to discredit and silence critics that they disagree with. The lone wolf was probably this guy – a crazy street artist with a decidedly right-wing bent. If it’s him, he’s clearly someone who believes in the various right-wing bullshit he’s trying to peddle, which means he’s probably thinking he’s doing God’s work carrying GamerGate’s message. But that’s just a theory: this Twitter account is the only person who has claimed credit.

But this is all speculation. Whoever it is plastered #GamerGate’s name all over it, and because #GamerGate has earned the mantle of being obnoxious little jerks with a history of engaging or high-fiving in support over similar actions, they get saddled with the blame. And they should. Whether they took the action or not, they created the toxic environment that made someone think they’d be treated like a hero for this.

The FemFreak episode shows the problem with an anonymous ‘chan’ style of protest. People think that no one can speak for an anonymous group. The truth is anyone can. And once enough bad ones do, there is no reason in the world why anyone should give that protest the benefit of the doubt anymore.

Professional Victims: Part Deux

June 18, 2015 /

You may remember when I pointed out the story about the Honey Badgers at the Calgary Expo, who threatened to sue the convention for kicking them out once it was pointed out that they lied about their agenda upon entering and were according to some a disruptive force on the floor?  Yeah, well, shortly afterwards, they set up a fundraiser to sue the Calgary Expo, and promptly raised $30K from gullible gators who actually believed this was a winnable case.  To be honest, I’d thought we’d heard the last from this aberrant little outgrowth of the movement.  I thought wrong.

Today, HBB started talking about how their money was being spent.  One detail (from the AGG subreddit) was particularly amusing.

We retained the legal services of Harry Kopyto. He is a very controversial figure in the area of human rights and discrimination law and a disbarred lawyer. However he has received awards for his work defending human rights–specifically he has fought for the rights of dissenters and underdogs, marxists, gay people, racial minorities and now us.

Um, yeah.  This guy wasn’t just disbarred, they won’t even grant him a paralegal license.  Partially for overbilling his customers more hours than are actually physically in a day.  So congrats, GamerGate footsoldiers!  You flushed your Steam Summer Sale money down the toilet on a lawyer whose ability to actually interact with the Ontario Legal System is strictly limited.

You know, for being completely unethical.

KotakuInAction (the #GamerGate wing of subreddit) is choosing to remain completely oblivious to this fact in their news update.

A Bad Week To Be an Utter Asshole Online

June 11, 2015 /

This has been a rough week in the real world for me, but today something happened that put a big ol’ smile on my face.  First off, Twitter made it very clear where they stand on blockbots by effectively implementing a feature that does the same thing by allowing users to share blocked user lists.  This, of course, greatly upset our resident miscreants residing on Reddit’s preferred GamerGate hangout because our founding fathers bled and died so that righteous defenders of good gaming could bombard feminists with insults, anime porn and pictures of dismembered corpses.  But hey, turns out that was just the appetizer!

Later, Reddit announced that they were going to close 5 subreddits, all of whom have populations that are sub-5000, with the exception of Fat People Hate, a message board dedicating to finding pictures of fatties and mocking them, with an occasional side order of actually sending a brigade of shit posters to harass said fat people and occasionally try to push them towards suicide.  The announcement made it clear that the subs that were shut down were frequently those who engaged in abusive or harassing behavior.  The choices raised some eyebrows.  For example, CoonTown (it’s an awful link – just don’t click it) is still up – admins would later explain that that’s because CoonTown tends to keep its vile shit localized to its own subreddit, instead of brigading others.

Naturally, KotakuInAction (the #gamergate subreddit) is supernervous, to the degree that they’ve been making contingency plans in case they get banned as well.  Not because GamerGate ACTUALLY harasses people.  That’s completely a misunderstanding fed by media hype.  As an example of said media hype, here’s a story of how a college student was utterly bombarded by harassment at the hands of #gamergaters for daring to talk about them at a game conference.  And here they are brigading the /planetside subreddit because a mod banned a player who made a transphobic slam, and would only let him back in if he wrote a 500 word essay.

Anyway, this was after two more utterly embarrassing episodes for Gaming Assholishness.  First off, they managed to look like utter hypocrites by cheering for Ubisoft excluding Kotaku from coverage because Kotaku has had some hard-hitting coverage of Ubisoft in the last year – including Kotaku calling attention to and refusing to take part in embargoed reviews after Ubisoft’s attempts to snow their customers on the half-baked status of AC:Unity.  

At any rate, KiA and Twitter tonight are schadenfreude delights today

Anne Rice and Brigading

June 4, 2015 /

Just in case the recent imbroglio wasn’t weird enough, Anne Rice (perhaps accidentally) aligned herself with #GamerGate by slamming Randi Harper in Twitter, pointing to an article on ‘Stop the Good Reads Bullies’, a site dedicated to shaming people who abuse . This has resulted in a flurry of responses to Anne, including a veiled rebuke from Neil Gaiman.

It also earned a ringing endorsement from the crazy uncle of neoreactionary cultural conservatism.  In many ways, these are old battles that just oddly crossed paths.  Anne Rice has long had a history of activism against people who abuse author rankings on sites like Good Reads and Amazon by brigading, for example.  Whereas Randi’s objectionable posts were from a pre-GamerGate crusade that her and other feminists had against Vivek Wadhwa, a (male) advocate for female empowerment who apparently had a habit of occasionally stepping in it.

In 2015, Wadhwa was criticized publicly by several women in technology for the way in which he was speaking on behalf of women in technology. One example mentioned was that at an event, he had used the slang word “floozies”[87][88] when referring to technology companies needing to take hiring women more seriously, in the context of his advocacy for tech companies to include higher-ranking women on interview panels for female candidates. Wadhwa responded to the criticism, writing that he had not known what the word “floozy” meant due to his poor grasp of American slang, as an immigrant, that he had apologized at the event as soon as his misstep was pointed out to him, and that he had lost sleep over this.

To be honest, I’m so unfamiliar with the Wadhwa case that I don’t know if I have much of an opinion on the matter, and to be honest, I’ve tried to care a  couple of times, but I just can’t be bothered to give a fuck.  Work’s been a bear, you know?  For all I know, Randi was right here, or she was a bully.  Here’s my point, though.

Harper is the target of Anne Rice’s wrath, which means that Anne Rice’s opinions are now being uncritically and enthusiastically supported and touted by the #gamergate hardcore on Twitter.  The hypocrisy of GamerGate followers in this regard is an impressive new low for them, because Brigading shit is one of their favorite things to do.   Check out, for example, the reviews of Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest.  Or the grossly disparate ranking for the Nightline story about GamerGate.  Or the fact that KiA actually manipulated IMDB’s ranking system just so they could write negative (and frequently dishonest) reviews about noted #gamerGate villain Anita Sarkeesian’s work.  And that’s before you get into them using their numbers to bully and harass individuals with dogpiling, harass organizations and events with coordinated hashtag campaigns,  and attempting to bully the press into their point of view with dishonest boycott campaigns.  These, by the way, are frequently NOT the acts of third party trolls, but are indeed happily orchestrated and bragged about on sites like KotakuInAction.

I’m pretty happy whenever I see prominent voices speak out on online bullying.  If Anne Rice really wants to repudiate horrible, petty online bullies, though, then I welcome her to take on the big game and call out the voices currently attempting to hoist her on their shoulders.  Because if an honest anti-bullying advocate is offended by Harper’s advocacy,  GamerGate’s coordinated campaigns of brigading and bullying over the last 8 months must be utterly stomach churning.

Tilting at the DiGRA Windmill

May 22, 2015 /

This past weekend, DiGRA held their annual games conference in Germany, which can mean only one thing: clearly it was time for #GamerGate to send in the welcoming committee, flooding the hashtag with a load of unwelcome hate for the attendees to enjoy – a playbook that #GamerGate has seemed to decided to copy from their attempts to do the same to GDC and the Calgary Expo.  Because it turns out, if you are trying to reach a whole bunch of people who are skeptical about your cause, the best thing you can do is to hijack their hashtag and fill it with anime, porn, and mockery of their life’s work.  In this case, it didn’t work out so well – the usual cranks didn’t discover the conference was happening until it was almost over, and since they were on European time, most of the worst flooding happened while the academics were all out partying.   At any rate, it proved to be another excellent excuse for those of us in the know to educate people about the AutoBlocker tool.

DiGRA has about as much to do with ‘ethics in games journalism’ as a plate of oatmeal cookies.  The haters are merely riding ridiculous conspiracy theories founded by a YouTube eCeleb named Sargon of Akkad who attempted to forge a link between the organization and journalists last autumn, particularly the ‘Gamers are Over’ articles which the gamergate teeming throngs continually willfully misinterpret as an attack on all gamers, as opposed to an open condemnation of the minority of gamers who were attacking Anita and Zoe, followed by a call to the rest of gamers to not ‘give press to the harassers. Don’t blame an entire industry for a few bad apples.’   But I digress.

The point is that DiGRA has been  a tertiary satellite of this whole #GamerGate thing since late last year, when the hardedged footsoldiers of the Gate embarked upon military jingoistically titled “#Operation Digging DiGRA”, an op where they would fact check and peer review DiGRA’s papers in order to search for bias, error and, of course, the influence of the evil feminists in the world of academia.  As near as I can tell, they never found much – possibly because there was nothing to find, but in fact it probably largely due to them realizing that reading many academic papers is about as interesting to most lay people as watching paint dry.  Still, DiGRA had the all-time  best response to this – they offered and encouraged gamergaters to read their papers and send in or publish their comments, if those participants were willing to participate with academic rigor!  Probably because academics, too, know that laymen find reading academic papers about as interesting as watching flies fuck.

At any rate, I don’t want to cast any real aspersions of how dumb you’d have to be to have a lot of knowledge about the inner workings of the industry and academia’s relationship to it, and still think that DiGRA posed any kind of existential threat to the ‘Gamer’ populace as a whole.  So of course Mark Kern was involved, offering such chestnuts such as decrying some presentations as libelous, and implying that anyone who hasn’t shipped a game before isn’t worth listening to.  I think I also saw somewhere that he demanded to know how DiGRA is funded, but ironically, Mark has blocked me on Twitter, so confirming is a pain in the ass.

The truth of the matter is that we went from a world that had no game studies or game creation college programs, to fully fledged programs aimed at helping students build, examine and understand the mechanics, in a shockingly short period of time.  Hell, I helped create one of these college programs myself at a community college here in Austin, although the program I worked on had a lot more hands-on vocational skills we need in local studios in Austin, rather than the navelgazing that DiGRA excels in.  Still, this eruption of new college programs across the world actually demonstrates how games have fully risen from being a backroom oddity played by antisocial nerds to being massively important cultural forces that the whole world enjoys.  Which is to say, DiGRA is a result of the fact that games are, in modern society, a hugely important cultural product that merits that level of examination and study.  Which is to say, people who truly love games should celebrate DiGRA’s existence, not fear it.

At any rate, you would think that some Gators would be excited that one of the prepared talks was about a study showing that game use doesn’t correlate to increased sexism.  This study conflicts with the findings of some others, and clearly the methodology of the various studies will need to be compared and contrasted in order to explain the discrepencies between the findings, or identify the next study that needs to happen to resolve these differences.  Still, this is how knowledge is SUPPOSED to grow, not by choosing a stance and then ignoring all information that conflicts with your belief system.

On Tokenism

May 18, 2015 /

Hidden among Adrian’s tirade against Polygon for the mindcrime of daring to care about SJW issues, is this chestnut.  This is not a particularly new argument, but Adrian captures it more eloquently than most.

Note that I am not sure that adding “strangers from the strange lands” to the game would solve anything for the chronically offended. Based on everything I learned about them in the last year, and I learned a lot, if you put a person or a few from any non-white race, they would be called “token characters”. It is the Token Minority trope after all — and, as we know thanks to the megaphoned dilettantes, tropes are bad, mmkay?

The only way to please the outrage factory would be to have every race, every gender, every minority imaginable represented equally. As long as the hero, Geralt, is not a straight white male. And whoever replaced him, they would certainly not be allowed to be nicknamed The White Wolf.

If you think I am exaggerating, then you haven’t been paying attention lately, have you? I so envy you — and I’m not even kidding.

TLDR: We shouldn’t care about adding diversity to games because it’s hard.  And it’s hard because you can’t make those blasted Social Justice Warriors happy anyway.  I’ve seen many variants of this discussion point over the last few months – often in much more profane terms, I proffer, and as such have had much time to reflect on this point.  Here are several thoughts that spring in counter to thoughts similar to these.

Continue reading

In a World Where Devs Get Offended by 8.0s

May 15, 2015 /

Adrian Chmielarz throws out his gauntlet, right from the start.

I consider Polygon’s review of The Witcher 3 poisonous to the industry: to gamers, to game developers, to game journalists.

Oh, geez, what horrible thing did Polygon say in their review, which earned an 8/10?

The result is still a game that often feels like a stunningly confident, competent shot across the bow of the open world genre, folding in an incredibly strong narrative and a good sense of consequence to the decisions that present themselves throughout, presenting a fun bit of combat creativity into a genre that desperately needs it. With that going for it, The Witcher 3 is a great game though it isn’t a classic — and it can carry a somewhat qualified recommendation.

Those monsters!  No, wait, what?  Let’s cut back to Adrian.

Continue reading

On the Abuse of Developers

May 8, 2015 /

Over in my old stomping grounds on SWTOR, yesterday the lead community manager was forced to scold players for being self-entitled jerks.

However, following the posts John made yesterday, a few players formed a witch-hunt against John. These players tracked him down on some of his personal accounts and in some extreme cases, even those of his family members with the sole purpose of harassing, insulting, and threatening him based on those forum posts. The purpose of our forums, of our subreddit, and other official channels is to have a dialog. We know that sometimes we may disagree, and that’s ok. We want to have those hard conversations, we want to talk about what we can do to improve, and to pass on our thoughts on how we see things from the Development side. But taking that conversation off of official channels to make personal attacks against Developers is completely unacceptable.

Please understand John didn’t need to communicate his perspective about the class. John and the Combat team knew giving their views on Sentinels and Marauders, in some cases, would not be received well, but he did it anyway. The alternative, is that we stay silent.

Emphasis his, but I’m in full agreement – and in no way am I considering this unique to that game’s community.  Game developers want to be able to talk to their fans, but when the response to us talking is not criticism but steps outside of our work lives and into our home lives, the natural impulse of developers is to shut down that communication.  And when that happens, the dev attitude pretty much is forced into ‘you’ll take what you get and you’ll like it’.

I’ve written in the past about what we’ve lost in the recent catastrofuck – the desire for developers,  to engage wanes when they think that there is actual real risk – risk to their job, or risk to their family – from engaging with their playerbase.  But this is a problem that predates recent events, and runs parallel to them.  Jennifer Hepler and Jade Raymonde.  Ask the Call of Duty dev who was piled on by death threats for nerfing a gun.  Or the Bungie executive who was swatted.  Or for that matter, Brad Wardell, who I can remember mentioning at some point (I can’t find the link) that angry customers started reaching out to his family.

Criticism is fine.  Disagreement is fine.  Being opposed to changes in your favorite game is fine.  Designers aren’t always right.  Players aren’t always privy to all of the reasons that developers need to make changes.  Shit happens.  But when people stop arguing based on facts and start reaching directly for an attempt to indimidate, this ends up with a chilling effect for player/developer communications in the future.

The SPJ Kerfuffle

May 8, 2015 /

So last week, the Society for Professional Journalists had ethics week, complete with their own hash tag (#SPJEthicsWeek).  Once GamerGate got wind of it, they – in their typically fair-minded and even-handed manner – proceeded to dogpile the hashtag to such a degree that the organizers of the event felt compelled to abandon the hashtag.  As one person from the SPJ wrote:

Abandoning the Twitter hashtag was simply the best course of action once the posts became sexist, homophobic, threatening, pornographic and – frankly – disgusting. I received some concerning messages, which were mostly deleted within a few hours. One person told me on Twitter, “man have you seen the giant mudslide of reckage[sic] we know as your (expletive) wake?”

This is, of course, not a new phenomenon.  #GamerGate recently dogpiled the Calgary Expo.  They recently dogpiled the GDC hashtag, and then got the vapors — lawd have mercy! — when the game development community openly rejected and shrugged off their attempts at intimidation and obfuscation.  #GamerGate dogpiled AbleGamers, for the crime of saying ‘we’d really like to NOT be associated either way with this brouhaha.’  In short, attempting to bully people on twitter is pretty much the MO for this hashtag.  In fact, leaders of their cause will happily direct these efforts, and then act SHOCKED when overzealous followers take it too far. Continue reading

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