Category: Gamergate (Page 4 of 10)

On the Topic of an Utter Lack of Self Awareness

May 1, 2015 / Damion Schubert

Over the weekend, the Boston Magazine (edit: whoops, not the Globe) did an article which paints rather convincingly the image that GamerGate Firestarter Eron Gjoni is, in fact, the ex-boyfriend from hell. You know, as if ‘directing an international hate mob onto his exes’ girlfriend with malice and glee’ wasn’t enough.

Over the past several months, Gjoni has been working on a sequel to “The Zoe Post.” When I spoke to him in February, he had created a quick-and-dirty follow-up, which he described as “a full unminced explanation of why” he wrote the original, perhaps packed with even more of Quinn’s private information, and God knows what else. He was worried that he’d get thrown in jail for violating the restraining order, and so had set the sequel, like a time bomb, “to auto-publish if I don’t disable it 24 hours after any court date.”

Helpful tip: lots of people have had their hearts broken. Lots of people have dated people who they think are crazy, evil, or otherwise bad news. However, if you find yourself planning to do something like the above, willfully ignoring a restraining order, you are the bad guy. Period. Of course Eron doesn’t see it that way. Eron is offended that the writer doesn’t seem to care that the Zoe Post is provably true (according to Eron) – look at the Facebook logs! Dear Eron: that’s actually not the relevant part of the story. The fact that Eron did not try to deny anything in the article having to do with the malice he wrote the original Zoe Post, nor the plans he outlined above, establishes that Eron is completely oblivious to the effects of his actions. And, for example, why a court was utterly justified in their actions against him.

In related news, I wrote last week that the Honey Badgers were kicked out of the Calgary Expo. They are now trying to fundraise so they can sue the Calgary Expo for their removal. Funny thing, though, is that their affiliated men’s group, A Voice For Men, has NO PROBLEM kicking out elements they find disruptive from their own conference. As pointed out by We Hunted the Mammoth:

They keep saying, “No feminist better try coming here!” Local police have dispatched four officers, and the conference attendees have deputized even more security from their own ranks. “Security” wears black polo shirts, and there are a lot of black polo shirts, but since the line is slow, security decides to sweep us all in with a request to return for a “check.” Nobody does. Only one feminist later attempts entry, an activist who goes by the handle “Dark Horse Swore.” The black shirts eighty-six her.

Hypocrisy is nothing new to any game-related discussion, but those following this odorous hashtag really do take the cake with the completeness of their projection and lack of self-awareness. To wit, take a look at this graphic that was being passed around today on twitter, which is basically a full primer of the hypocrisy that is what is left of the very tiny GamerGate fringe group. A response to the points on the graphic.

1. (SJWs say) “You disagree with me? I will destroy your livelihood then”
Said the group who attempted to end the careers of Ben Kuchera, Nathan Greyson, Leigh Alexander, Sam Biddle among many other journalists, as well as try to engineer the firings or trying to organize boycotts against game developers who have spoken against their point of view, including myself, David Gaider, and CJ Kershner.

2. (SJWs say) “Please show support and donate to my Patreon.”
Here’s the Honey Badgers asking for money for their legal defense for the right to invade a private organization’s group for the express purposes of disrupting it. Here’s Eron asking for money for the legal defense of his god-given right to continue launching hate mobs at his ex-girlfriend. Here’s the Patreon for the Sarkeesian effect. Here’s Liana K’s patreon. Here’s Sargon of Akkad’s. I actually don’t care about ANY of this – I find that kickstarter and Patreon are perfectly acceptable ways for people who have ideas that are not necessarily mass market to find an audience and make a living. I do find the hypocrisy of attacking one side or the other for it.

3. (SJWs are) Openly racist.
The evidence cited here is pretty cherrypicked and thin. Much thinner than, say, how the White Supremacists of Stormfront see kinship with gamergaters and see it as a recruiting opportunity. Or KingOfPol going into full-on Holocaust Denialism in a GamerGate-themed podcast. Or that bloke on the Sarkeesian Effect spouting racist shit between begging people for money. I know, I know, these guys are rare nutballs who don’t speak for all gamergators. Funny how that logic applies on THAT side of the table.

4. (SJWs say) Sexism against men doesn’t exist.
A nice equivalent here is listening to gamergators try to say that sexism and threats of women in the games industry does not exist. Such as when they accused Anita of not ACTUALLY calling the cops, or when they accused Brianna of not feeling so threatened she felt the need to flee her home, or when they pretty much accused Zoe of making everything up.

5. (SJWs say) It’s okay when I do it!
Oh, where to begin. With how GamerGate excuses the extreme polemics of Milo, as well as disgraced former game journalists like Pinsof, because they happen to agree with them? Or how they happily make black lists of media sites and game companies to avoid or boycott, but then get the vapors if anyone on the other side says the word ‘blacklist’? Or how they hammer on the press for making even minute mistakes, but have no problems themselves leaping to conclusions and using Encyclopedia Dramatica for a source?

6. (SJWs say) <Unpopular groups> don’t deserve free speech.
This is the group that is literally rooting for the demise of sites like Polygon and Rock Paper Scissors because those sites have politics that they disagree with. This is the group who decided that maybe Jack Thompson, who actually DOES want to ban some video games, may have a point, solely because he disagrees with Anita, who merely wants to culturally critique them and see them improve. The people arguing for greater feminist representation in vidya games aren’t arguing for an end of video games, but there are definitely gamergaters who are arguing for an end to anything that may be considered academic or cultural criticism of video games — because lordy me, a game designer might actually read one of these and listen!

7. (SJWs) Won’t allow open discourse.
Hahahahahahaha! This is the gang that attempts to effectively shut down social media for anyone who attempts to disagree with them via dogpiling , and openly cheer when they manage to do so so viciously that the stated individual flees Twitter or, in some cases the industry. Gamergate doesn’t even allow much open discourse INSIDE THEIR OWN GROUP, as people who find themselves deciding to not toe the party line quickly find themselves torn to shreds.

8. (SJWs) use ‘internalised’ unironically.
Okay, you got me on this one. Seriously, who gives a fuck? I could make an entire fucking bingo card of stupid catchphrases that KotakuInAction uses unironically or otherwise incorrectly.

Professional Victims at the Calgary Expo

April 22, 2015 / Damion Schubert

It’s everyone’s most favoritest example of rank hypocrisy on the net nowadays: a group of GamerGate sympathists lie about their organizations motives to get floor space at the Calgary Expo, hide the fact that they belong to an organization that sells T-shirts with rape jokes and that they’re affiliated with one of the scummiest MRA websites on the web, immediately start selling paraphenalia related to a hashtag that many gamers, especially women, feel is threatening or offensive due largely to the hashtag’s origins in harassing female professionals to the point of national notoriety, and then start going to panels on Feminism in order to grab the mic time in order to talk about how they feel feminism is a sham. Just as a note – if you do one of these things, maybe you’re fine. Two, you’re on thin ice. All five, and you’re way beyond the hat trick of being misogynistic jerks. People who run conventions have shit to do, and they don’t have time to worry if whether or not MAYBE you’re going to cross the line. Good for the Calgary Expo for trying to keep that shit clean.

You can read the widely cited account on the Mary Sue, but for my druthers the best writeup is the frequently excellent Amanda Marcotte.

Here’s a question: If geeks and nerds are fantastic as they are and should be allowed to carry on, why would you deliberately lie about who you are in an effort to disrupt a convention? Disrupting the convention and trying to ruin it for the participants shows that they do not believe that geeks and nerds are fine and should be left alone. On the contrary, they are clearly offended that geeks are having geeky discussions about feminism and representation in comics and other nerdy endeavors, and they want to shut that discussion down. Harassing people, by definition, is not leaving them alone.

Silly Amanda. It’s the OLD geeks and nerds – you know the ones who are mad at Mortal Kombat for getting female body types to be down to the point where they’d at least be reasonable for playboy models. All those new ones – you know the ones who have lady parts, would like slightly fewer half-baked rape references – these are the ones who aren’t TRUE geeks and nerds, those are a problem. Clearly, despite the fact that comic book stores are still dominated by male heroes and male-leaning entertainment by about a 9 to 1 ratio, attempts to have a panel that talks about correcting this MUST BE STOPPED.

If you want to commemorate this historic moment in the march towards the rights of reactionary internet goons to harass the fuck out of women online so severely they flee geekdom, YOU TOO can purchase a t-shirt and express your pride! And if you believe in these standards, I hope you wear it, as it makes it much easier to figure out who to avoid at cons.

But of course, the real thing that amuses is that, according to the Mary Sue article, the Honey Badgers fully expected to get kicked out. They got kicked out Then started merchandising that shit ASAP. This is, for those not paying attention, exactly the sort of ‘professional victimhood’ that they like to claim feminists they disagree with, such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, are up to.

As for the GooberGrape masses who have reached Lot’s Wife levels of saltiness about the topic in the last week, feel free to start up your own convention, because clearly GDC and CalgaryExpo will not be the first who will ask you to at the very least keep your very crappy attitudes towards other con goers to yourself. Feel free to include blackjack and hookers. Because you’ll need some sort of entertainment, as most game companies and press will choose to maintain a wide berth. Hey, that might be why your previous attempts to create your own outlets didn’t pan out.

Jenn of Hardwire is more sympathetic to the kicked out, and tries to go more in-depth into the allegations.

That isn’t the type of behavior one would expect from an entity touting to be for equality under an #ExpoEquality campaign.

Yeah, it sure is a mystery. Look, there’s no shortage of jerks and assholes with unconventional politics – on ALL sides of the spectrum – at a major con. And let’s face it, no comic con is going to be a beacon of feminism – hell, the artist signing areas of these things typically is one massive cheesecake factory for eager nerds wanting half-naked harley quinns to plaster on the wall (man, do con-goers love harley quinn). To get kicked out, you have to be percieved to be a major risk of disruption. People who raise red flags are going to be on a short leash.

And if you proudly fly the GG banner, that’s a big ass red flag.

Fallout of the Block Bot Post

March 19, 2015 / Damion Schubert

Update (10:53): Katherine Cross has also written excellently on the issue (as she is prone to do), and Scott Jennings points out that Mark’s insistence to right to reply does not extend to enabling the comments on his blog.

Mark Kern has, after some prodding by the internet at large in the wake of my article yesterday, finally gotten his own blog, and his very first post is a response to my blog post.

First off, thanks to @ZenofDesign for agreeing to post a link to my rebuttal to his article about me. This is only fair and I’m glad to see that he is sharing it with his readers.

Sure, Mark!

Mark Kern Really Wants GamerGators To Be Able To Yell At Harassment Victims

March 18, 2015 / Damion Schubert

Today, Mark Kern is fighting a heroic battle to force the people who have faced withering online harassment and abuse to sit there and take that abuse or quit Twitter, rather than having access to tools that allow them to protect themselves.

I realize it’s been a couple of weeks since we talked about Mark Kern, the former Team Lead of World of Warcraft who would later grow to distrust the press because they had the gall to investigate crazy rumors and write articles about his magical crazy expensive bus. Mark Kern recently reappeared on the landscape 4 months after GamerGate started, and since then he’s been a real peach of a human being:

As you can tell, Mark Kern is at this point a parody of delusion -if he showed up on a Sitcom, you’d dismiss his unique brand of ignorant obstinance as too unrealistic to be believable. In today’s episode of ‘Mark Kern tilts at windmills then declares he’s oppressed’, he is desperately fighting for the right to be able to yell at people who have actively declared they don’t want to hear what he has to say.

GamerGate has a fun tradition whenever someone gets in their crosshairs, and that is to have everyone on the #gamergate hashtag know about it quickly and efficiently, and have all of those people fill the target’s Twitter feed with so much crap that Twitter ceases to be a useful tool, and where your first reaction is to go hide under the covers of your bed with the lights off. In many cases, the crap filling your feed is innoculous questions, or feigned offense (‘well, I never!’). These people will insist that harassment ISN’T actually happening, and that they’re just being civil and exercising their free speech. They ignore the fact that in many other cases from OTHER more enthusiastic and less civil gators, it takes the form of insults, beratement, veiled job threats, death and rape threats, roundabout questions about your family and friends, and even doxing and gorror porn.

There are many names that have been thrown around for the practice – brigading and Sea Lioning – but ‘dogpiling’ is probably the most accurate. And GamerGate is by no means the only group that dogpiles – those opposing gamergate are far less organized and focused, but still have been known to unleash their targeted wrath at times as well. Still, GamerGate is more effective at dogpiling than most. A few months ago, the collective community performed #OpSkyNet (GGers don’t take a dump without a snazzy Operation name), where all members of Gamergate made an active attempt to follow each other on Twitter. I should probably point out to college kids looking for thesis ideas – there is good evidence that this had some extremely wacky social dynamics as a result.

For starters, it turned the hashtag into even more of an echo chamber than it already was, for example, by increasing the % of your feed that was now wholly supportive of GamerGate. It made it impossible for casual observers to follow the feed at all, due to the massive number of retweets flooding out good content (I weeded out about 90% of the gators in my feed to get it back to readable again). The close-knitness of the community also resulted in vicious dogpiling attacks happening at astonishing speed.

I got to be the target of a good ol’ dogpiling a couple of times during the last few months. The most notable was when I proposed that GamerGate could do some good if they’d lay off the harassment and form a consumer organization. And yet, I know that what I got was mild compared to many women, which I have documented here. For those needing reminders, here’s Zoe talking about her harassment. Here’s Anita showing some of the very worst of one week of harassment. Here’s Sarah Butts describing the systematic attempts to make her online life hell. Here’s Jenn Frank with video of her twitter feed being hit so hard that she decided to stop writing about games for a while.

GamerGaters defend their right to do this as defending their free speech. This is an insult to people who actually understand what free speech is and why it’s important – it is more accurate to describe these actions as a calculated and deliberate attempt to sabotage the free speech of their targets. What they are attempting to do is to yell so loudly and negatively at people who disagree with them that those people choose to shut down their opposition and leave. It is an attempt to chill the free speech of people, especially in this case those who may have feminist or SJW points of view. These are the people that Mark Kern and co. are fighting so earnestly for.

Fortunately, #OpSkyNet also had the accidental result of also making Blockbots work much more effectively on #gamergate than they otherwise would have.

The GG Autoblocker is a relatively simple beast. It simply is a script that scrawls through exposed Twitter data, until it finds accounts that follow any two people from a very short blacklist of people – accounts like @Nero, @FartToContinue and @RoguestarGamez. These are accounts who have a history of, whether accidentally or intentionally, unleashing dogpile attacks on people who catch their ire. Put another way, they have VERY ENTHUSIASTIC followers. Anyway, if you follow two of those people, you’ll end up on Randi’s block list. Which for 99.999999% of all twitter users, means absolutely nothing.

Mark Kern is on the block list. Until yesterday, so was I. Getting off of the list is actually a relatively straightforward process if you’re not a douche – send a mail to the appeals board. They’ll look at your posting history and if your posting history isn’t full of harassing or dogpiling behavior, probably let you off the hook.

But here’s the thing – the only way you will be blocked by the autoblocker is if someone has signed up for the block service. This is a very small number of people – probably in the low thousands. These people have all actively declared they want less speech. They are all people who have opted out of gamergate discussions. They don’t want to hear it.

Mark believes its an abridgement of his right to free speech that he can’t talk to these people.

Many of these people were convinced to install the blocker after getting a taste of the GamerGate dogpiling experience. Elizabeth Sampat – a vocal opponent and favorite target of Gamergate – at GDC described the experience of turning on the blocker as a godsend. Once they discovered she’d been laid off, her twitter turned instantly into a toilet of awfulness. The blocker returned Twitter to a functional communications forum for her – useful, because she’s a writer, and communication is a core part of her job.

For this story, I asked Randi Harper if there were notable spikes in the use of the Autoblocker. She said there was one huge spike – GDC, when Mark Kern and co. were urging GamerGators to brigade the GDC hash tag – and they did, with all sorts of appalling filth. This maps well to my experience of being stopped in the halls of GDC by people wondering where they could find that thing I’d blogged about. Put another way, pretty much everybody who has installed the blocker has, in the past, encountered what GamerGate has to say when it has free speech, and decided they never want to hear from it again. Free speech had its chance for these people.

Mark Kern wants to sue to shut down tools like these, so that these people will be FORCED to hear the message of him and his allies. It is the height of myopic arrogance, and it’s appalling.

No one would argue that you should be forced to read mail from the people who want to sell you penis enlargement pills. No one would argue that you should be forced to read all traffic from all reddits if you read any reddit. And no one seriously believes that the Do Not Call list – a filtering list run by the freakin’ government, for christs sake – seriously runs afoul of first amendment rights. Penis enlargement companies and telemarketers have a right to the microphone, however, they do not have the right to enslave every possible listener into their audience to hear their insipid message.

The best way to think about these blockbots is that they are just spam filters, only instead of blocking out penis enlargement creams and offers from Nigerian princes, they block out name-calling, gaslighting, rape and death threats, creepy inquiries about your family, and the occasional spicy bit of gorror porn thrown in there for fun. Yes, sometimes a good tweet gets lost in the mix. Guess what – that happens with email spam bots too.

Dogpiling is spam. People have a right to defend themselves from spam, ESPECIALLY when it seeks to attack or terrorize them.

The denizens of GamerGate – who simply insist that this well-documented dogpiling does not exist – beg to differ. Grimachu ( author of several… boundary-stretching games) has sent Randi a laughable letter of intent to sue. Mark Kern also started to talk about getting lawyers and/or the EFF involved. Which led to this highly amusing conversation on Twitter.

Yes, it turns out that the EFF believes that freedom of speech includes the ability for people to be able to use the internet without fear of being harassed or intimidated. Which makes sense. Once you understand the power that is earned from being able to communicate freely without fear on the internet, then fighting harassment and abuse on the Internet quickly becomes one of the defining civil rights movements of our time. Far more so than ensuring that every troll has a right to bury your feed in a river of sea lioning and toxic hate.

Mark and others fighting to preserve the right to harass unwilling listeners believe they have discovered an end-around – by claiming that people maintaining these lists are effectively libeling those on it as harassers.

It’s not a very good end around.

Lost in all of this debate about what is legal and what isn’t is the fact that Twitter is, still, a private network, and as such, they get to dictate what is acceptable speech and what isn’t acceptable speech. They have, in the past, been incredibly lax on addressing the issue of harassment — something that the CEO recently acknowledged and declared as a company mission to fix. They have, on the other hand, welcomed and encouraged tools like BlockTogether that help fix these inefficiencies.

Sadly, we probably have to hope that more celebrities like Ashley Judd and Curt Schilling’s daughter receive more well-publicized abuse, and put pressure on Twitter to get their house in order. Until Twitter cleans up their own house, we have user created tools like the block bots as the only thing that keeps Twitter from being utterly poisonous except to whichever faction of debaters can aggregate the loudest, angriest, and most shameless group of posters willing to go all out to destroy their opponents. If nothing changes, the only way that this path can end is with Twitter being a nuclear wasteland of horribleness, as all reasonable people flee to places where they can debate the issues of the day without seeing necro porn (yes, the gorror porn did, in fact scar me for life). If Twitter just lies back and waits for that to happen, then Twitter will die – and it will deserve to do so.

There are concerns with the block bots. One key example is that block statistics probably factor into Twitter suspension and banishment decisions, and thus being included in someone’s block bot can put your account into a more frail space without you realizing it. Also, the block bots aren’t integrated into the service, which means that they’re hard to find for the harassed and hard to understand and get off of for people who feel wrongfully placed on them. Twitter should be putting in better tools for filtering and blocking in themselves. Until then, though, people who have been put through the ringer on these blockers have only these simple tools.

Whether or not Mark Kern has more noble goals in mind, it is a lie that these tools somehow inhibit his right to free speech. Whether or not Mark Kern has more noble goals in mind, opposition to the block bot really is, at it’s core, demanding that harassment victims sit there and take what’s coming to them.

That may not be what Kern is consciously trying for, but it certainly is what the trolls want. Combine that with their insistence that victims also not talk about or report their harassment, and the agenda becomes very clear. The opposition to the block bots is this virulent for one simple reason: they are very effective at what the harassed want them to do: stopping incoming dogpiling and abuse.

DC Fixes a Diversity Snafu, Angry Nerds Attack the Creators

March 17, 2015 / Damion Schubert

Just as a follow-up to my earlier missive about diversity in geekdom, particularly comics geekdom. Today, DC Comics released a Batgirl cover they had planned. The Batgirl cover was meant as an homage to the joker, and in particular his role in paralyzing Barbara Gordon – the original Batgirl, in The Killing Joke. Unfortunately, the cover was largely tonally dissonant from the new more fun, less dark Batgirl.

DC Cancels Controversial Batgirl Variant, Cites Threats of Violence (And Forgets to Say They Were at People Who Criticized Cover)

Anyway, the internet did not respond well to this.

The “Batgirl” #41 variant quickly received criticism for highlighting a dark period in the character’s history, especially when juxtaposed with the current youthful, more optimistic direction of the series under the creative team of co-writers Cameron Stewart & Brenden Fletcher and artist Babs Tarr. Multiple websites ran editorials critical of the image, and the hashtag #changethecover drew dozens of posts on Twitter and Tumblr asking DC to not release the variant.

People Missing the Point of Research

March 11, 2015 / Damion Schubert

The latest super happy fun circling the #GamerGate hashtag is that there are those among them who are dancing a jig because professionals have admitted that the flash mobs circling the hashtag have made it harder for archivists and social scientists to research the field of gaming.

Hey, dipshits, having clean and impartial research of gaming is actually good for gaming.

It has been instrumental in, for example, countering the lies and hyperbole from people like Jack Thompson, who were literally making shit up in hopes of shutting down or suing major studios and making a buck for themselves in the process.
It turns out that research is pretty handy at making better games.

I realize that going anti-academia is all the rage now, but seriously, screw people who hope that hiding our history and stunting research in this pivotal field of art somehow benefits game developers or gamers.

Yes, the Media Affects People

March 9, 2015 / Damion Schubert

Today, esteemed youtube personality TotalBiscuit opined about societal effects of video games and other media.

I am consistently bothered by this throw-away phrase “media affects people” as if its some kind of argument winner, an inarguable statement of fact. In reality it’s lazy, it’s too vague, it’s pseudo-intellectual at its worst.

Speaking of lazy, I should note that research on the effects that media has on individuals and society as a whole in various forms has been going on for — oh, DECADES now. It’s seriously a dedicated branch of study, and even the tiniest google search would have found it for him. If he wasn’t too lazy to throw bombs without actually wondering if maybe this criticism isn’t coming from somewhere.

I was thinking of responding in length, but it turns out that I am ALSO lazy. Fortunately, this reddit poster gave a long, factual analysis of the known research, much of which would have mirrored several of the most important studies that I would have pointed out. Some of these I haven’t read yet (surprisingly – I do try to keep up), but the one regarding the increase in aggressiveness in vulnerable personality types seems of particular interest to me

That being said, renown scholar and gentleman TotalBiscuit left a lot more room in the discussion by wondering where research was regarding other media. As mentioned previously, there are some truly infamous ones, some of which you are likely to learn about in any psych 101 or communications 101 class :

Of course, all of this is common sense – we reflect the opinions and attitudes we see very, very quickly. Advertising is big business largely because the media is incredibly effective at changing people’s minds – and for that matter, so is YouTube gaming content. Few doubt that the recent portrayals of gay people on television, led by high profile events such as Ellen Degeneres’ coming out, is a huge factor in the astonishing collapse of all opposition to gay rights in America.

And even some renown YouTube personalities believe, for example, believe that, say, an episode of SVU can change people’s opinions on gamers and is worth getting angry about. This isn’t unfounded – I can’t find the link right now, frustrating, but research has shown that, for example, rural whites who get most of their information about black people from watching fictional television tend to have a much darker outlook on African Americans than those who encounter them regularly in their daily lives.

Yes, media affects people. The exact details of how are still being researched – and likely will be endlessly in the future. The level of responsibility we expect media creators to own is still up for debate, but so far, little has been found that is so alarming that legislation removing first amendment protections merits consideration. But it is well in the world of enough that activists should feel comfortable asking a company like Blizzard to change some avatars in hopes of of incurring positive change.

GDC 2015 Wrapup

March 8, 2015 / Damion Schubert

I had a great time at GDC this year – it’s the first time that I’d been there for a while, and once I’d spent some time there, I regretted the years that I missed it. There were some great talks – I’m hoping to come back to a couple later if I have time, especially Riot’s excellent talk on their efforts to clean up their community – but as usual, the best talks were at the bars and restaurants, the breakfasts, lunches, dinners and late night parties, where some of my most favorite genius level game developers freely were willing to swap ideas and points of view, as long as the cups remained full.

And that’s the part about the games industry that is really cool. Game development is, at its core, a Research and Development field. Believe it or not, players really DO get bored and sick of seeing the same game over and over again – just as sick as we get of building them. Pushing games to the next level isn’t just about pushing pixels and polygons, it’s about always getting better and finding new angles. Making games is hard technology and big business, but above and beyond that its quite clearly art – and one where pushing the state of the art has always been god damned exciting for me and everyone who loves the craft.

What really smart people need is NEW INPUT, something that varies from the voices that they read, hear and work with the rest of the year.

Gamergate was a frequent topic in these impromptu discussions, but usually a brief one, and unless you were at a session directly about harassment, the only topics that came up frequently were the hashtag spamming, the thin-skinned overreaction to a Design Legend playing with a ‘prepared’ sock puppet, and Mark Kern’s bizarre recent career self-immolation – i.e. all the very most recent self-inflicted wounds of the cause. Even recent awesomely funny events like Skull vs Bathtub made nary a mention in conversations full of drunken gossip. Most game developers are well detached from the controversy — their opinion can probably be summed up with ‘are we really still talking about this awfulness?’– but the glimpses they got this week were not favorable towards the trolls, and most of us were much happier to spend this precious time we had with long-seperated colleagues picking their brains on topics of greater interest to progressing the art and science of game development. Like, you know, Cock Hero.

Seriously, far more time at these informal gatherings discussing much more interesting questions, both deeply practical as well as wonderfully theoretical. Is PC AAA actually still viable for new blockbuster success, or were World of Tanks and League of Legends flukes? Will future MMOs be relegated to kickstarters, or will we see another major nine-figure one like WoW anytime soon? Is mobile-darling and superbowl-ad-sporting ‘Heroes’ Charge’ really just a complete ripoff of a game from China called Dao Ta Chuan Qi, and if so, are lawyers getting involved? Why is the Asian casino mobile market nowhere near as successful as the American one? What are the ramifications of combining machine learning with teledildonics? Can the new Harmonix Rock Band product conquer the enormous issues of hardware and licensing that pushed the entire genre of gaming with fake plastic guitars to the brink of extinction? Is assymetrical gaming actually going to be a ‘Thing’? How long until someone figures out how to make an Oculus Rift experience that is both awesome at parties and yet doesn’t make the average user want to puke after 15 minutes of play? You’re startup is going to try what now? Does it have money yet? Who wants drinks? Where’s the next party?

These discussions are like catnip to me, and getting the perspectives of other people who have other expertise is vital to keeping the idea train flowing. It’s no wonder that GDC continues to be a huge part of the business of making games – we’re still awaiting word that this year’s exact population quote, but estimates of 25000 I believe put it at the biggest yet. Efforts to describe it as shrinking are laughable – this year, even the Monday summits were packed –as are efforts to describe it as an SJW hugbox. I was about as likely to find myself in a discussion about improving breast bounce physics, blood spatter, console device specs and monetization as I was to talk about social justice themes.

A small but significant number of people sought me out to thank me for writing on Zen, particularly since August, which I always responded to awkwardly, when in fact I was feeling enormous gratitude that at least some of you out there are paying attention. And despite the fact that I actively sought out Zoe, Randi, Brianna, Leigh and others related to recent events just to shake their hands, I was way more excited about running into Mark Rosewater again, at which point I promptly turned into a blubbering fanboy.

But that being said, there’s one thing that’s significant this year in that regard. In the past, the social justice themes such as Zoe Quinn’s panel discussion on how developers can protect themselves from awfulness and the #1ReasonWhy panel would have been seen as odd side discussions, a tiny side track attracting smaller fringier audiences. This year, these talks were full, and felt like part of the core of the curriculum. Developers are now going to talks and tracks that they were ignoring before. It FEELS like the events of the last 8 months have elevated the importance of these topics to the point where everyone in the industry accepts that these are no longer fringe concerns, but part and parcel of being in the industry. For better or for worse. Nothing captures that more eloquently than the other speech at the GDC awards, the one by Daniel Vella that condemned harassment and urged developers to stand together against it – a talk that earned a standing ovation.

The last 8 months have been awful for game developers in the games industry overall. GDC was quite the opposite in almost every way. It was a reminder that the art and science of making games is still awesome, and the tribe I’m doing it with is still a pretty incredible group of people. Quite simply, it’s a reminder that I love making games, and I never want to stop.

On Brigading the GDC Tag

March 3, 2015 / Damion Schubert

GamerGate followers have decided to brigade the #GDC2015 twitter tag with their usual hysteria, disregard for threatened women, nutball conspiracy theories, unsubstantiated attacks on IGF, unrelated bullshit attacks on ‘SJWs’ unrelated to gaming, ad hominem attacks on those attempting to help expand gaming markets and generally appalling bullshit. Because that’s totally way to win a skeptical audience of game developers to your side.

Central to this effort was Mark ‘totally not a gamergator’ Kern. Congratulations, Mark! You’ve managed to torch the communications efforts of the flagship development conference of your industry!

So we owned the GDC2015 tag today to raise awareness, that was good. The conv. are already starting and will go through GDC. Give em room.

— Mark Kern (@Grummz) March 3, 2015

Too late, Mark realized his mistake and started to try to misaim his wrath at games journalists, which as mentioned before, is him completely missing the point of the last six months. While game developers continue to be harassed by this contingent (including no small amount of shit thrown at Zoe Quinn – a GAME DEVELOPER who spoke today), Mark continues to enjoy the internet fame that comes from providing cover to this brigading. (UPDATE: late drunken reporting gave a bad link. However, there were several non-factual takedowns posted with this being one example. Old link left unchanged).

You can use this one instead, targeted more to intended audience: #GDCPRESS

— Mark Kern (@Grummz) March 3, 2015

Too late, Mark. Too late. And incidentally,still incredibly thoughtless for the people who are just trying to do their jobs. And it does nothing to address the actual issue – the harassment that many developers feel – especially women – caused by overly aggressive jerks piling onto them. You know, harassment like the tweets you encouraged and enabled today being aimed at what should be one of the most joyous weeks in the year for most game developers.

I’ll answer this, @Grummz – most of the female devs in my list are afraid of speaking up not because of the press, but because of harassers. — Damion Schubert (@ZenOfDesign) March 2, 2015

Developers who would like for this tag to be functional and useful again may want to consider the use of GoodGamerAutoblocker. I have been told by multiple other developers now (none of which who were using the tool on Sunday) that it’s been quite effective.

And for those of you who claim the block bot is censorship, freedom of speech doesn’t mean the audience has to listen to whatever the fuck is coming out of your mouth. The people who have done so have heard your pitch and decided, for whatever reason, that they don’t like what #gamergate is selling.

Lum the Mad Pokes Head Up, Sees His Shadow, Chews Out Mark Kern

February 26, 2015 / Damion Schubert

Scott has some kind words for Mark Kern.

My previous coverage of Mark Kern’s bizarre attempts to try to blame #gamergate on the gaming press despite all logic or evidence otherwise: Here, here and here.