Gamer Felicia Day on Gamergate

I’m sorry, it was not sargon, but king of pol: http://www.hitbox.tv/video/270061

1 Like

Thank you.

I was asking about streams that you referred to, the reasonable ones with the reasonable debates about this topic. But you briought them up, not me. I was asking you to provide a link to one or more, since you have previously found them.

And so I understand your misunderstanding! Again, thank you!

1 Like

Well, Long John Baldry moved to the West Coast too, but somewhat north to Vancouver Island. He might have been a mole too, but I don’t think it would have mattered: I don’t see that either MI6 or the KGB would have had much use for the secrets of the BC Legislature… :smile:

1 Like

I think were still on topic, especially since gaters seem to rally around gamer as identity.
My thinking is this is a twofold problem

First problem: Gamer as identity

Or anything as identity really, the idea that identity dictates your actions and not the other way around is a disturbed way to look at the world.

Anybody who wants to draw a line between people who play Angry birds and “Real Gamers” must necessarily believe that in order to be a real gamer, you need to act a certain way.

To be told that anybody can come in and just call themselves a gamer is to be told just how fragile this type of identity really is. You get rage.

Second problem: Splitting

I’ve posted this link a few times now, here it goes again:

The idea is that we can easily be fooled into black and white thinking, where one side is all good, and the other side is all bad.

4 Likes

Actually I’m more interested in what you have to say.
Whats your opinion on all of this? I’m specifically interested in your view of what GG stands for.
Do you think the threats have their root in misogyny or are they directly related to games journalism somehow?

Cultural Observations of the GG thingee


I like this line of thought…oops!

I’d say a strong factor might also be the ability to develop the skill to see the other’s point of view, a precursor to empathy.

2 Likes

So much this. Existentialism FTW.

1 Like

So essentially you are telling women to be quiet and to stay out of certain spaces if they don’t want to get harassed, aka you are blaming the victim and silencing them all at once.

3 Likes

Wow. So you aren’t taking this at all seriously, are you? Shocker that a man wouldn’t. Real shocker.

1 Like

We need a Boing Boing Press™ to publish this! (Get on it BB! :D)

3 Likes

Careful- That’s a good way to get people mad at you these days.

2 Likes

so basically you’re full of shit.

1 Like

We have a culture that actively discourages empathy, because we’re rugged individuals, and we can’t be slowed down by helping others on our way to the top. It’s not surprising we have issues like GG crop up, full of people who think that when they are upset that the way to handle that is to lash out and destroy the lives of others.

[edited to add] But here is the flip side of that notion of having empathy… it means seeing people doing shitty things as human beings and trying to get at why they do what they do. Here is a discussion on this directed at GG:

Not to godwin the thread, but it’s the “Ordinary Men” view of nazis. In popular culture, nazis are your go to bad guys. Iron Sky, Indian Jones, even Schindler’s List, sort of treats them as deeply amoral and evil. They are cartoon cutouts of evil, with no humanity. But there is the notion that we need to understand them as human beings. We need to understand Eichmann as a person, we need to understand the men who carried out the most bloody massacres as Einsatzgruppen as human beings who did horrible things, not monsters. Because that’s empathy too, understanding. It’s easier to hold a persons feet to the fire, much harder to do that to an amoral monster… on some level maybe they want to be understood as trollies, because then they can continue to do as they’ve been doing.

6 Likes

I’ve had a few conversations in which I had to explain the difference between Asperger’s Syndrome and sociopathology – to my mind, they’re practically opposites – and following that, I prefer to make a distinction between empathy and compassion. Because it’s one thing to have a hard time recognizing what another person is feeling, and quite another to be unable to care what another person is feeling, and having trouble with the former doesn’t imply difficuly with the latter.

1 Like

I think you misunderstand… My point isn’t that we should feel bad for the guys pulling this BS because they are just confused little men-children, because we absolutely shouldn’t. I’m trying to say that making people into monsters doesn’t help OUR cause, which is trying to illustrate what they’ve done to others and how it’s hurt them. We should ALWAYS call them out on their bullshit, precisely because they are human beings, meaning that they can possibly be directed to another path, a better path.

Empathy means we work to understand others, sympathy means we feel the pain of others, and compassion means action. The less we’re able to connect with others through sympathy and empathy, the less we’re able to able to enact compassion in the world.

I think you guys know me well enough to know I’m not saying we should just let these assholes continue on as normal, but until there is some proven sociopathy and if we assume only that mindset (psychology?), which I’m not sure we can figure out a way to redirect this whole thing. and true enough, some of these guys are kind of beyond saving and aren’t worth our time precisely because they are sociopaths and they won’t change anyway. But I think already, we’ve seen a shift in this “movement”… some people are already starting to recognize the reality of the whole thing.

Basically, there are probably psychopaths or sociopaths involved in this, but we can’t assume they all are, even if their actions (in a virtual environment, especially) as evidence of that. I say empathy, not compassion and I’m not conflating the two, really. The more we push the point home of how destructive they’ve been towards their fellow human beings, the more the dividing line between sociopathy and those who are not sociopathic will probably shake out.

I’m not sure I’m making any sense… I just don’t think that people who engage in bad behavior should be assumed evil, I guess.

[edited to add] Plus, when we only think of them as monsters or sociopaths, we let them off the hook, as the article stated. I don’t want to do that.

2 Likes

My general theory is that 99.8% of humans want the same thing: To work at something meaningful, love their families, and generally be left the fuck alone to go about their business. Tell somebody that X is threatening one of those things, and they’ll start looking to fight back. Tell them that Y will help achieve those things, and they’ll join up.

The Russian and Chinese revolutionaries never said anything about gulags and cold wars- They promised equality and abundance. The Nazis were sold on proving they were a strong and noble people who could recover from the hardship forced on them by others after WWI and oh by the way, it’s all the fault of the Jews. Look at most white supremacist literature and you won’t see a single word about other races- It’s all “pride in their heritage” and “preserving their culture”. It’s not until after you drink the kool-aid that they fill you in on the “by getting rid of the brown people” part.

So I’m reasonably certain that there are plenty of people who heard “corrupt journalism” and “want to take away GAME_X”, and threw themselves into the cause only to hear once they’ve gone all in that it was all the fault of feminists and SJWs and other Outsiders. At that point, they’re too invested to think otherwise.

With that in mind, I suspect that trying to call them on misogyny is counterproductive, in that it just reinforces the us-vs-them mentality they’ve adopted- The way Christians adopt the whole persecution complex when you try to explain that other people have rights too. The real solution would be to pull the rug out from under the initial assumptions, to try to convince them they’re hurting their own cause, to break their frame of reference. Only when you’ve managed to crack that worldview can you effectively show them a better one.

Try to empathize and understand where they’re coming from. Then use that superior knowledge to crush them. Like a Machiavellian Buddhist.

3 Likes

I’ma leave this here for any gamergaters who don’t think this is about misogyny:

Felicia Day wrote this.
Chris Kluwe wrote this.
They went after Felicia Day.
Enough said.

Felicia Day wrote this.

Chris Kluwe wrote this.

They went after Felicia Day.

Enough said.

12 Likes

I’m unsatisfied with how I explained the deceptiveness of that gater’s topsy.com numbers. I worry it wasn’t clear enough (I could barely understand it and I wrote the fucking thing) so I’m going to have another go at this and I’m going to use the same methodology as the gater.

Here’s that gater’s search request: #GamerGate -SJW -ZQ -@femfreq -femfreq -“Sarkeesian” -“Anita” -Quinnspiracy -@Quinnspiracy -“Zoe” -“Quinn” -“LW” -“LiterallyWho” -“LiterallyWu” -“LW1” -“LW2” -“LW3” -feminism -feminazi -“Brianna” -“Wu” -SJW -women -woman

Here’s the gater’s link: http://topsy.com/analytics?q1=%23GamerGate&q2=%23GamerGate%20-SJW%20-ZQ%20-%40femfreq%20-femfreq%20-“Sarkeesian”%20-“Anita”%20-Quinnspiracy%20-%40Quinnspiracy%20-“Zoe”%20-“Quinn”%20-“LW”%20-“LiterallyWho”%20-“LiterallyWu”%20-“LW1”%20-“LW2”%20-“LW3”%20-feminism%20-feminazi%20-“Brianna”%20-“Wu”%20-SJW%20-women%20-woman&via=Topsy

As you can see there are 1,736,213* tweets with the #gamergate hashtag and 1,564,693 of them contain no reference to the LWs. This means that the gater was indeed right: only 9.8789722% of #gamergate tweets mention the LWs. Looks good, doesn’t it?

Not so fast. We can’t just assume that the rest of the tweets discuss the alleged corruption scandals and DMCA abuse. We need to make sure so let’s perform the same search request but let’s substitute the alleged corruption scandals and the DMCA abuse for the LWS: #gamergate -grayson -nathan -mordor -wb -warner -bethesda -mcv -ausgamers -ea -gameplanet -joab -gilroy -patricia -hernandez -igf -indiecade -gamejournopros -mailing -list -dmca -takedown -kotaku -destructoid -rock -paper -shotgun -rps -sagal -chloe -pinsof -allistair -gonzalez -yanier -niero -dahlen -chris -deesing -jonathan -riendeau -danielle -green -holly

Here’ the link to my search: http://topsy.com/analytics?q1=%23GamerGate&q2=%23gamergate%20-grayson%20-nathan%20-mordor%20-wb%20-warner%20-bethesda%20-mcv%20-ausgamers%20-ea%20-gameplanet%20-joab%20-gilroy%20-patricia%20-hernandez%20-igf%20-indiecade%20-gamejournopros%20-mailing%20-list%20-dmca%20-takedown%20-kotaku%20-destructoid%20-rock%20-paper%20-shotgun%20-rps%20-sagal%20-chloe%20-pinsof%20-allistair%20-gonzalez%20-yanier%20-niero%20-dahlen%20-chris%20-deesing%20-jonathan%20-riendeau%20-danielle%20-green%20-holly&via=Topsy

As you can see there are 1,736,213 tweets with the #gamergate hashtag and 1,699,347 of them contain no reference to the alleged corruption or DMCA abuse. This means that only 2.123357% of #gamergate tweets mention the alleged corruption or DMCA abuse. It also means that the LWs are mentioned more than 4 times as frequently as the alleged corruption and DMCA abuse.

* at the time this research was done

8 Likes

That’s the name of my new band…

1 Like