Well, this is not surprising.
Consumer campaigns and boycotts work. They’re an effective campaigning tool, because advertisers hate being associated with anything that might hurt sales. And they work even when they are wielded by people you seriously dislike.
I’d be happy to see this woman fire this guy.
But I suspect it won’t happen because the culture is to protect white careerist men, even when they act upon remarkably poor judgment. This is basically a repeat of the Komen blunder.
Frankly, I understand them wanting to distance themselves from the whole thing, and I don’t really blame them for having no principles and being spineless. Starting a sentence with a conjunction, though? FUCK YOU INTEL.
How cynical you are. It’s almost as though you regard the Boingboing commentariat as one monolithic bloc, rather than a somewhat random selection of people, some of whom might disapprove of one thing, and some might disapprove of another. Which is a funny thing for one of the commentariat to think, really.
As to Intel, withdrawing their ads from Gamasutra was a cack-handed move, and faux-pologizing on a Friday at 5:30 was another (does that even work any more?). Let’s wait to see what they do next before deciding what we think for us, eh?
That was my favourite line.
Mine too.
I must be missing something, are there no links in all this to what these ads looked like or said?
I checked out of gamergate quite deliberately and must have totally missed this.
That’s not good enough. I’m telling Intel it should re-instate the ads.
So if I, I dunno, steal your favorite pen, and then apologize very politely but don’t give it back, we’re square, right? I mean, I apologized. What more do you want?
(Sigh. Yes, I know you’re driving trollies. I feel like I ought to get the point out there for the actual human beings, though.)
Yep, you’re missing something all right. This was never about the contents of any of the ads, this was about Intel withdrawing them after being targeted in a bully campaign, thereby depriving Gamasutra of ad revenue.
Some commenters here are really confused about what the issue even is.
If the pen belonged to you in the first place, there’s not much I can do.
Withdrawing sponsorship is not the same as stealing.
Well thanks. I hope those human beings realise that if you were wrong about stealing, then you’re assumption that I’m driving trollies is also wrong.
Withdrawing sponsorship is not the same as stealing.
So, are you now saying that it’s your position that Intel did nothing wrong? Because that’s the only way your argument says anything against the point you were responding to.
That bit where you are implying that Intel did nothing wrong is something you should be explicit about, is all.
I’m pretty sure that most wouldn’t. I’m also pretty sure that any apology that doesn’t include that step isn’t an apology at all, it’s lip service of the most hypocritical kind.
Hmmm…that’s a tricky one to answer.I totally understand why Gamasutra feel upset to have lost a sponsor when they obviously felt they were doing the right thing.
Conversely, I can also totally understand why Intel wants to remove it’s support for any website that has explicitly taken a ‘side’ in this debate. As has been said before, gamers are a big market for Intel. It’s in their best interests to not be seen to be taking any side at all so as not alienate either side.
Sure, they could have handled it better: their apology really should have been issued at the same time they withdrew their sponsorship, not afterwards. And you could also argue that by withdrawing sponsorship they have potentially already alienated one side.
I’ll probably get flamed for this, but I (personally) feel that (from a business perspective) they made the right move by standing back from the whole thing. As long as they do this consistently for all sites that take a ‘side’.
I think most of us can agree that this whole ‘Gamergate’ thing has revealed an ugly side of gaming and journalism that many of us weren’t privvy to previously. If I was a sponsor, I’d probably remove my sponsorship until the whole thing had reached some kind of conclusion.
:-/
Sigh. I should really know better by now than to try analogies on the Internet without six miles of qualifiers and disclaimers.
All right, forget the pen. The problem is, you’re claiming that if someone is upset by Action X, they should be completely placated by an apology even if Action X continues, and that it’s somehow hypocritical to both condemn Action X occurring and condemn Action X continuing. That claim makes no sense. If you think Action X was fine to begin with, then say so. Don’t try to blow smoke up our asses with moon logic.
The thing is, gamers aren’t that big a market for Intel. They’d be a big market for most businesses, but Intel’s market is everyone on Earth who uses a computer. Hardcore gamers may spend more on Intel per capita, but they’re still a fairly small segment of Intel’s overall market. And, out of that subset, the subsubset that actually identifies with Gamergate enough to change their purchasing habits is even smaller.
Compare what Intel gains by courting that subsubset with what Intel loses by being associated a pack of awful, predatory misogynists in the public eye.
Intel didn’t “stand back” from the argument. They endorsed one side in the most explicit manner possible. Some fights it’s impossible to be neutral in, but the least active, explicit choice available to Intel was to pretend they’d never heard of Gamergate and continue doing whatever they had been doing; at most, they could have been accused of ignoring the issue entirely. Instead of ignoring the issue, they actively chose a side, and it’s probably going to bite them in the ass.
Sort of, except it hasn’t actually revealed anything ugly about gaming journalism, because none of the things Gamergate has revealed were actually problems. It started with a bald-faced lie, and when that lie was called out, they started flailing around for absolutely anything they could find except actual journalistic corruption. The very worst accusation that Gamergate has been able to come up with is that one journalist suggested to his peers that they should all give Zoe Quinn some exposure, and then changed his mind and said they shouldn’t.
Meanwhile, America’s biggest gaming magazine is still owned by America’s biggest games retailer, and YouTube Let’s Players are still openly accepting payments for good reviews, and Gamergate hasn’t made a peep about any of it, because Gamergate doesn’t actually care about journalistic corruption unless they can spin it into misogyny.
You keep saying “side” as if the two groups are arguing about the same thing. They are not.
One group is fed up with casual sexism, rampant harassment, and defenses of male superiority.
The other group thinks that gaming journalism is the bigger evil and should be fixed first.
That’s a classic example of false equivalence.
By withdrawing their ad campaign, Intel has explicitly endorsed the false equivalence, “We don’t know what’s more important, equality among the sexes or trustworthy game reviews. We’ll just sit over here until dust settles.”
Fauxpologized. It contained the magic word “if” (“if anyone was offended” etc.) Plausible deniability FTW!
… also I can tell by the phonemes that it is a fake.
*brandishes hammer
muwahahahaha, I’m crazy with power and painkillers!
Not to nitpick, but the group mentioned here actually revels in casual sexism, rampant harassment & defences of a false male superiority. Gaming journalism is their beard.
If you look at the chain of events its not unlike the dustup between climate scientists & climate change deniers after a large email leak allowed the deniers to take a bunch of shit out of context & use that to further their agenda of regression by claiming the science agencies were wholly flawed based on the fact that scientists don’t agree on everything, have politics & argue, despite being 100% certain of the core mission.
