Vultures circle GamerGate

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Oh god Matt, you spit hot fire.

I’d like to see this updated or serialized to include more of the right-wing vultures: an update on @-nero’s old tweets, Christina Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young, and some of the pickup / men’s rights leaders.

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Boingboing! The site so nice, they named it twice. And frequently end up publishing the article twice :smile:

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It’s caused by a wanky regex I made to insert an ad in the middle of the article. If we forget to include the trigger text it looks for, it repeats the content instead.

In other words…

… I successfully implemented the “now you have two problems” part of regular expressions.

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The supporters of the movement aren’t “right-wing conservatives” - they’re rabid reactionary misogynists. The whole thing is so fucking transparent that I can’t believe anyone is trying to portray the gamertaints as a game journalism ethics movement with a straight face.
Best case scenario, they lack any awareness at all of their own motivations (or they’re “useful idiots” who have jumped on a bandwagon without having paid attention to what it actually is).

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If they actually gave a fuck about ‘journalistic ethics’, surely there are better targets than video games anyway for fuck’s sake? I mean, Rupert Murdoch’s right there, people…

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The venn diagram of the overlap here is probably not EXACTLY a circle, but I bet it’s pretty close.

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There is a third position on Gamergate. The position that neither “journalistic integrity in game media” nor “sexism in video games” add up to anything worth spending much time on. Video game journalism sounds like a joke- there’s no news in video games- just advertorial. And you can’t claim that video games don’t make people grab guns and go out and shoot people, and then turn around and claim that they make people sexist. Video games are just video games. They are ephemeral entertainment.

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I suppose there is a third position… It’s still wrong, though. Better luck next time!

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That was some fine work, young social justice jedi warrior.

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That’d be absurd, if anyone were actually saying that. If there are, I certainly haven’t seen it. Could you point to anything to support this? Note: saying that some games are a product of and feed into a sexist culture is different from what you said.

Just as there’s no news in movies, art, sports…

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Christ, what a pack of assholes.

Adam Baldwin’s embrace of GamerGate is a reminder that you should never let your affection for a fictional character blind you to the fact that the actor who plays them might be less appealing; many capable artists are assholes. (Although it’s also the case that Jayne is only lovable in fiction; if he were a real person, he’d be in urgent need of shooting.)

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Maybe we’ll be closer to finding out if what you said is true or not soon.

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My days of not taking Adam Baldwin seriously are nowhere near coming to a middle.

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That’s not what anybody is claiming. The claim is that video games, in their content and production, reflect the institutional sexism in all society. We shouldn’t accept it anywhere, and that includes in our mass media products, be they movies, literature, or games.

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Well, specifically targeting games journalism would make sense if that’s something you care about. But even for game journalism, the targets for gamertaint are all wrong - when they manage to target games journalists (and not game developers or other random women), they’re going after people who have been active in promoting good journalistic practice (like Rock, Paper, Shotgun), not groups with histories of ethically suspect behavior (like, well, most of games journalism).

My assumption is that rabid reactions are indeed probably all misogynists. My issue was more with the understatement of calling them “right-wing conservatives,” which makes them sound like they could be somewhat less reactionary than their actual batshit wacko, anti-feminist positions.

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I mean, I agree with the substantive point that those behind GamerGate are all douchebags, but I thought Andrea James taught us about Twitter being just for heckling and “smugfuckery”?

You’re begging some questions, here.
It’s not a “third” position, given that the movement isn’t actually about journalistic integrity in game journalism, for one. It’s about harassing and sending rape/death threats to female developers and journalists. Which makes your assertion that “sexism in video games” isn’t worth spending time on to be rather bizarre/sociopathic. As to there being “no news” in video game journalism - there certainly is, if you seek it out. We’re talking about what is essentially a new medium here, worthy of the full range of critical discourse that film and literature get (even if, on the whole, it’s not yet quite worthy of that kind of attention, necessarily). Also, we have plenty of studies that show that although “ephemeral entertainment” may not turn people into killing machines, it absolutely shapes people’s perceptions of “others,” that is, different ethnicities, sexual orientations and genders, that impact how real people are treated in more subtle ways. That’s leaving aside the issue of representation in media and games acknowledging that their audiences aren’t all white males.

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A Vulture Responds (warning, you will give him traffic):

http://www.dangerandplay.com/2014/10/20/publishers-statement-regarding-mike-cernovichs-twitter-conduct/

The only thing I got from that article is that Mr. Cernovich apparently doesn’t know the definition of the word 'thoughtcrime".

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