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: Games Media (Page 2 of 7)
Target Australia’s decision to pull GTA V from shelves is surprising for a few reasons, the least of which being that the product has been on shelves with nary a buzz since September 2013. Not much has changed since then, other than the title’s rerelease on next gen platforms last month, the windows version coming in 2015, and the announcement that the PC version will have first person mode, which apparently makes for some spicy sex scenes. And by ‘spicy’, I mean, ‘holy uncanny valley, batman!’ And, ‘you people do know you can get real porn on the Internet, right?’ Also, it really seems like the biggest badass in Los Santos should last longer than 25 seconds.
Nobody asked, but: here are, in my opinion, the best game reviews of all time.
3) “Chess”, by Greg Kasavin.
2) “World War II Online” by Lum the Mad.
1) “Anne McCaffrey’s Freedom First” by Old Man Murray.
Anyone have any better candidates?
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.
When #GamerGate kicked in, I strongly advocated for the people who actually cared about ethics in games journalism to use the energy to create a consumer organization (Initial proposal here, answers to criticisms here). The central, and perhaps most important part of the idea, was the website, something I called “GamesOmbudsman.com”, which would focus on basically reporting on games industry press – basically watching the watchmen. What I envisioned was something similar to Politifact, but centered on the games industry.
So it’s not a surprise that I am intrigued and cautiously optimistic about the website GamerGateFacts. GGF’s mission statement is in their sidebar.
GGF does not have an agenda against journalists, feminism, leftist politics or even the gaming press as a whole.
The only agenda GGF espouses is one that stands against lies, corruption, censorship and cronyism and any who choose to defend or further them.
And, well, these guys are trying, and are not that far off the mark. I do have some criticisms for them (see below), but what I see here is a very promising skeleton of an idea that could serve the game community well for years in the future. Here’s what I like (i.e. this is good, don’t change it).
I like Oliver Campbell. As far as #GamerGaters go, he’s a moderate, reasonable guy, and he comes at the topic of ethics in games journalism with relative experience and logic for a consumer movement that frequently has no idea what ethical journalism looks like. That being said, every now and then, he says something extremely silly.
Once this situation rolls into the holidays, and OTHER businesses start getting affected? Heads will metaphorically roll.
— Oliver Campbell (@oliverbcampbell) October 28, 2014
Killing Christmas is kind of a favorite fever dream for the far end of GamerGate, with some treating it as some sort of End Boss like event (GamerGaters like game analogies, unsurprisingly). A similar sentiment was echoed by the short-lived Operation Krampus, a cause they abandoned around the time that they realized they’d declared so many media outlets boycotted that Krampus would effectively mean that Game Publishers could only give review copies to Return of Kings.
Anyway, this is just me talking here, but I find Oliver’s future pretty far-fetched. Why?
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article shaming the press for basically ignoring GamerGate. I was not alone, with Frank Cifaldi being one notable example who made literally dozens of tweets like the one below.
Another day, another non-gaming site reporting on Gamergate in the way actual game sites apparently can’t http://t.co/pQws6Nj4S6
— Frank Cifaldi (@frankcifaldi) October 10, 2014
Erik Kain, a Forbes journalist who has written more sympathetically to the #gamergate cause, has also made that note from the other side. Continue reading
Chris Kluwe, who continues to be one of my favorite people in the universe, has a very vitriol-laced take on the situation:
Thus, when I see an article titled “Gamers are dead,” referring to the death of the popular trope of a pasty young man in a dimly lit room, it fills me with joy, because it means WE FUCKING WON. So many people are playing games now that they are popular culture. They are not going away. All sorts of cool things, that I like, are now things that a whole bunch of other people like! There’s enough space now for people to make games that are strange and disturbing and maybe highlight a different perspective of the world, because gaming is no longer a niche activity, it’s something that everybody does. There is room for art in video games. That’s awesome!
Someone used the term #Gatesplaining in twitter today. This is a term that really needs to catch on. But now, onto other links!
So, in between the Brianna Wu media tour and the emergence of #StopGamerGate2014, #GamerGate for the first time in weeks actually attempted to bring up something that was almost something something kinda like Journalistic Ethics. As you may know, #Gamergate declares that journalistic ethics and integrity is what this is all really about (although that’s built on a total sham, is ignorant of actual problems and allergic to actual journalistic ethics). But hey, maybe they got it better this time!
Oh dear.
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