It’s almost as if they view this entire thing as some sort of sick game. Seriously.
Yeah, that is the Red Herring, the false flag, the argument that they use to justify much darker set of actions, imho.
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It sounds like your friend has picked a hopelessly toxic environment to try and make a fairly marginal point in.
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Personally I do identify as a gamer, but I have no time for GamerGate. And I’m glad that famous gamers, like Felicia Day, are standing up and saying the same thing.
GamerGate’s origins are rooted in misogyny, and regardless of the intentions of those who have joined it since, it’s irrevocably tainted and will always be divisive and destructive. There are some issues with bias and corruption in games journalism, but the targets picked by GamerGate (female indie game developers, “social justice warriors”, feminists, anyone critical of GamerGate) are pretty obviously not representative of that problem. If that’s what you really care about, go after GameStop, IGN, the big AAA publishers, etc. (and FFS use a new name to disassociate yourself from all the abuse that’s now associated with GamerGate).
Being a gamer is important to me, and I do get annoyed when people make lazy jokes about how gamers all live in their parents basements or, more recently, are all raving misogynists. But GamerGate is making that worse, not better and I’m sick of this tiny, angry minority trying to define the identify of all gamers.
Also, for the record, I don’t feel in the slightest bit threatened or insulted by Anita Sarkeesian and I welcome her comments on gaming, which I’ve found reasonable and insightful. She has never insulted gamers as a group and is not attacking gaming. Like any critic, she finds specific faults with specific examples of the medium. Her criticisms are no more an attack or an insult than any decent (i.e. critical) game review. Stop being so damn defensive.
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There are a fair few people who are really, passionately concerned with the quality of games journalism. Oddly enough, most of them are games journalists, and Gamergate hates most of them.
Just for example, check out Kieron Gillen’s 2005 piece “The New Games Journalism,” which basically laid the blueprint for everyone who’s been passionate about writing about games for the last decade. Kieron Gillen went on to found the wonderful, thoughtful, hilarious PC gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun, which is currently on the top of Gamergate’s boycott list because one of their writers was falsely accused of giving Zoe Quinn’s game a good review in exchange for sex, and several other writers said unkind things about that.
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Yeah. That becomes a matter of professional pride, then.
I’ve said it time and again, though - games journalism is just a subset of specialist trade journalism, and a certain amount of payola is endemic to the entire sector. When advertising becomes the main way of financing operations, there are always going to be a certain number of publications that bend over backwards to please the advertisers. I’m not sure what you do about it, other than “caveat emptor”.
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It takes guts to stand up and admit that you are afraid of being bullied. Yet nobody likes a bully, so they really need to be called out on it. Like many other bullies, the boys running Gamergate intuitively grasp that they need to be seen as victims themselves in order to have any credibility.
It’s the same pattern on a national level. Israel has to pretend it’s being oppressed by its neighbours so it can bully Palestine. The US has to pretend it was attacked first, to justify its oil wars. When the police kill unarmed civilians, they have to claim they were afraid of being hurt themselves to justify deadly force.
It’s risky standing up to a bully, most especially if the other victims are afraid to stand out, you risk standing alone. But it’s even riskier in the long term, to not stand up to a bully.
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David Futrelle over at We Hunted The Mammoth has a 35 second video that sums it up.
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In the previous thread I mentioned John Bain (aka Total Biscuit), one of gamergate’s (secretly SJW, heh) heroes, a number of times. I even suggested Humbabella try to contact him if she wanted to speak to a moderate gater. The reason is that I’ve been kind of obsessed with one of Bain’s tweets where he claims that most gaters are “left as they come.” (I misremembered it as “left as hell.”)
I had been racking my brain trying to figure out how he came to that conclusion. In all of the gater comments I’ve read, only one time did I see a gater say that they’re in favor of better representation of women in games and better journalism. And I’m not talking about screenshots of cherry-picked comments, I’m talking about entire threads. I’ve read entire comment threads about gamergate and I must have read more than 100 gater comments in these threads and only one time did anyone make that comment. Either I’ve had an incredible streak of bad luck in finding threads where these leftist gaters post, these gaters are keeping quiet about their feminism, or there aren’t very many of them. Of course I recognize that this is anecdotal, and therefore not worth much, which is why I resorted to analyzing data from topsy.com which, unlike human perception, is objective.
Anyway, I think I may have figured out why Bain believes this, and it’s one of the latest arguments from gamergate. A gater on Ars Technica posted a link to this. Two gaters asked 145 other gaters to take the Political Compass quiz to determine their political leanings. 83% (120 of 145) fell somewhere on the “left libertarian” part of the grid.
I have one big problem with this survey: I don’t have enough information. What was their methodology? Was this a random sample? If so, how did they perform the randomization? How did they determine this was a representative sample? How did they determine that the sample was of statistically significant size? How did they determine that these were, in fact, different people and not sockpuppets? Was this double-blind? Did those being asked know the purpose of the survey? Did those doing the asking know the purpose of the survey? What was the exact wording they used in approaching these people? How did they deal with issues around self-reporting? How easy is it for a test-taker to cheat the quiz to produce a desired result?
They need to show us all of their data, not just the final results, and explain their methodology before this can be fairly evaluated. At first glance, it looks very anecdotal.
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I was at the London Anarchist Bookfair on Saturday. From what I was hearing (from the few people who cared enough to mention it) gamergate was not popular.
Very easy. You don’t even need to do the test if you already have a URL to the results, you can simply change the co-ordinates in it to say what you want.
This is my result from a BB post a few days ago. I answered according to what I believed, no manipulation.
I believe in the free market now.
No questions answered today, but three new results.
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Yeah I’m being a little facetious, I understand the quality of games journalism would be significantly important to a lot of people. It just seems to have become the de facto justification for identifying with this movement though, and in that context feels disingenuous.
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I should add that being left wing does not exclude the possibility of mysogyist behaviour.
Warning! Trigger warnings on all links!
For example: The Socialist Workers Party (UK) has had a large decline in membership in the last two years over one prominent member having sexually assaulted other members, and rape apologists trying to silence people (some of the more vocal apologists were female).
Another example: the Industrial Workers of the World are asking members to boycott the Morning Star who threatened to sack a journalist who was reporting on a domestic violence case involving a Rail, Maritime and Transport union’s General Secretary candidate.
This is just from Britain in the last couple of years.
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I remember that SWP business. Nasty shit.
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Here is the problem - libertarian used to be left of liberal. It was co-opted by Ron Paul and now means more right wing than the GOP. It’s not a problem with the results it’s a problem with identifying what exactly the data actually means.
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I think libertarian was co-opted by capitalists in the 1960s. There are still left wing groups who use libertarian in there name like the WOMBLES though (no, not those wombles. White Overalls Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggles).
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I have just searched for gamergate in some of the more prominent left wing forums and found one thread on RevLeft (Which has a reputation amongst the left for being where crazy ideas accumulate).
It consisted of two people pushing gamergate, some more being concerned about the mysogyny and the rest asking “so what has this got to do with class struggle?”
I have strong doubts about a lot of those political compass results.
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I don’t know who that MBD feller was, but he sure cleaned up this town…
Further evidence of the need for a researcher/gumshoe badge nomination…
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I’ve been following this debacle from the beginning and the inflection point that I find fascinating: GG kicked into overdrive and became as much about identity politics as about misogyny after Leigh Alexander published the “Gamers are over” piece in Gamasutra. That’s when the thundering herd came on board, giving the monsters a bunch of earnest human shields. “Gamers are over!? Why I’ll show them. This is about ethics!”
Which, coming from a community whose response to those complaining of the avalanche of death/rape threats that they receive generally say: “This is the internet. Grow a thicker skin.”
The mind truly boggles.
Or an old account with an insecure password that got hacked.
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And to clarify, I meant no content that was about anything I could identify as an issue involved in gamergate. No mention of a person who did one thing or another, no complaint about integrity. A fair bit of it was quoting someone who disagreed with them insulting someone and saying “this is why we need to continue/stop gamergate.” One person was organizing charity donations - that’s content for sure, but it didn’t help me in trying to answer my own qualitative question of “what is appealing about gamergate to people who continue to support it?”
Like I said, though, I’d be interested in whether twitter hashtags tend to be about 90% ‘water’. That doesn’t matter to the point that we should be paying attention to the 10% with content rather than the 90% for analysis, but if I had to guess I would think that gamergate isn’t especially light on content, and in nearly every twitter movement there are tons of people just doing shout-outs and whatnot.
Two people asked 145 other people sounds like you’d get 147 people who mostly agreed with one another, barring other information. Though I have to say that they mostly look pretty authoritarian and right-wing from where I am:
I think it’s extremely tricky to make a political compass that actually works. It can tell you how much of current political ideologies you’ve bought into, but a lot of people have extremely compartmentalized thinking. People have no problem supporting political party X and espousing their ideas while not living any of those ideas or even supporting them in a conversation that isn’t explicitly about politics. “I’m in politics mode,” means you answer the “right” way, “I’m not in politics mode” means you forget that stuff entirely.
