Erik Kain of Forbes Magazine says that on the topic of GamerGate, I understand it among the best. Which is high praise, as he’s been fairly plugged into the controversy from the outset, and is actually reasonably sympathetic to some of the undertones of the cause, where as I am mostly a caustic chronicler and critic of the subject. I’ve slowed down my writing on it quite a bit as the cause has started to flatline and I’ve discovered that I could be using that free time to instead do more productive activities such as watching paint dry, but anyone who wants to know what he’s talking about may want to look for articles with the GamerGate tag.
Category: Gamergate (Page 6 of 10)
AbleGamers is a charity that I have some familiarity with. I actually spoke on a panel for AbleGamers in 2012 at PAX, when I also accepted the award for Accessible Mainstream Game of the Year on behalf of the SWTOR team. Their mission has always been noble, and from my viewpoint does three things:
- Help raise money so that kids with disabilities can buy peripherals allowing them to game.
- Help raise awareness among developers that design choices can limit their game’s reach among those with disabilities.
- Help the differently-abled identify games that can be played with people despite their disabilities.
Designing with disabilities in mind is often put off way too late in the development cycle of the game. It’s often easy to do if you include factors early in development, but hard when you factor it in late. Common examples of things that should always be included but aren’t include: colorblind-friendly UI design or alternate mode (8% of males are RG colorblind – this is significant!), ability to remap literally any command to allow for alternate control mechanisms, and including close captioning and not depending on audio cues for key playability. You know, all those things in the options menu that you never turn on.
So, how is #GamerGate going, you might ask? I’ll be honest – I went out of town for five blissful days for a board game convention, which is pretty much as close to a religious experience as I get. During that time, I was far too transfixed by dice and wooden meeples to give any fucks about what was going on. This was me thinking about gamergate while at BGG.con:
Well, there was the part where the dynamic duo dug Jack Thompson out of his court-sanctioned exile so that they could declare him quite reasonable and sadly misunderstood. Well, that required me to come up for air to give my two cents.
But seriously, the board game con was a few thousand game players – sure board gamers, but literally, other than one person who saw my Sea Lion T-shirt and broke out laughing, and said ‘fuck gamergate’, not one mention the whole time. You would never know Gamergate was a thing. It was blissful, and once I came back, I tried getting back into things, and to be honest, my heart wasn’t in it.
Seriously, it’s like a fever had broken. Now, a huge part of that is because GamerGate has, since the week of the Red Wedding, veered into Shirtstorm and the Jack Thompson fiasco, pretty much devolved into being an endless miasma of anti-SJW fuckwittery and, even more than that, endless, endless web drama that is more obsessed with defending Gamergate’s right to exist than anything remotely related to, you know, that ethics thing. But hey, don’t get me wrong, the GGers are having fun.
But it’s a pissant, petty, nihilistic sort of ‘fun’. Here’s a little taste of the penny-ante bullshit that has been CONSUMING the hashtag on twitter, KiA and Gamerghazi. Continue reading
Dear GamerGate,
I know that you guys are starting to think about the Holidays, and what Black Friday stunt you can pull. I know, in particular, game developer outreach is top of mind right now with Operation Rebuild, where you attempt to send nice letters to game developers to let them know that YOU ARE ON THEIR SIDE. And that’s a tough deal for you guys, because in the past you have slutshamed them, brigaded them when they outreach, harassed them out of their home, released their hacked financial data, financially attacked their primary industry journal, tried to organize boycotts of their games if they disagree with you,and tried to get them fired if they tried to stop the constant slew of rape and death threats thrown at them on twitter. And many female devs still feel silenced by the very existence of Gamergate. It’s really no wonder that devs who aren’t too cowardly to hide their names have definitely broken in one direction on the subject. I guess what I’m saying is, ‘good luck with that’.
One of the more annoying things about #GamerGate is trying to explain how it definitely started as a harassment campaign, but has long since migrated past that. It really sounds like the plot of a terrible sitcom episode. Based on that, I wrote the following.
George suspects that his girlfriend is cheating on him with a games journalist. So he writes a shitpost about the guy, starting a protest of a bullshit ethics complaint. The movement takes off, as people who legitimately care about ethics in games journalism and progressive games writing pick up banners. It starts to steamroll out of control, as George’s dad takes up the cause like a religion.
Frank: I refuse to live in a world where I can’t kill the hookers in GTA after they have sex with me!
George: But… you don’t even have a Playstation, dad.
Frank: IT’S THE PRINCIPLE!
For those who view #GamerGate as a Macabre Theatre, this week was far less spectacular than last week. But that’s to be expected, I guess. Last week was a masterpiece of the surreal – it was GG’s Red Wedding. And let’s face it – you just can’t keep that up week to week. The audience would be exhausted.
In all honesty, Red Wedding Week was good for those Gamergaters who actually have noble ideals about ethics in games journalism, in that it did actually expel or minimize some of GamerGaters worst agents who were driving some of the stuff that riles up opposition and makes Gamergate look very bad. Enthusiasm on both sides has been waning. As such, events were much more subdued in the last week than previous weeks. Which manifested itself in a lot less horrible stuff happening.
But no shortage of very silly stuff. Continue reading
This week, humanity did something pretty cool. The European Space Agency landed a drone lander on a comet. It was a monumentally incredible and fantastic scientific achievement, and everyone associated with it should be very proud. Instead, we’re talking about a shirt.
This is Matt Taylor. He was part of the team that did it. This is awesome. He also made the decision to wear this shirt, which made a lot of people upset. The response to it resulted in the guy giving a ‘teary, heartfelt apology’ for his decision. Continue reading
Update: interested parties may also like this article by Sarah Jeong that talks about some other initiatives being developed by Twitter to improve the state of things
Andrew Sullivan is one of my favorite bloggers of all time. I’ve always loved his stuff, his infamous article on Obama converted me to the ways of hope and change, and the way that he wades fearlessly into any topic. But I fear on GamerGate, him and I see things in a different light, both with his initial entry , and even moreso with his most current alarmist coverage of WAM providing help to Twitter in getting rid of sexist assholes.
Let’s talk about the latter. There are a couple of things here that are overlooked. Continue reading
Some of you guys have been bugging me for an update on Gamergate. This is kind of depressing – none of y’all actually want to jump in the muck, but you’d love to know how it looks down here. I see how it is. I remember once upon a time, this blog was about game design issues. Now, it peels away my soul one layer at a time. The things I do for you people.
Still, I picked a great week to leave my job, because this is the week that GamerGate was the Night of Long Knives writ large. If you believe that life is a spectator sport, then this week was a NASCAR race, complete with spectacular car crashes throwing wreckage that decapitated random fans in the stands. If you don’t believe me, ask Milo, #Gamergate’s most notable and respected journalist.
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