If you mean by pointing out that gamers were responding with anti-women insults, rape & death threats & targeting women who dare point out how bigoted it all is, yeah they ‘insulted’ them.
5 Likes
Intel chips are in Mac Books. Is this the kind of publicity Apple wants? ‘Buy a Mac Book and support misogyny’. I just bought two for the business. Very expensive but the team wanted them. Not going to buy more as long as they use Intel’s products or Intel doesn’t recant.
If the point of #gamergate is to criticize gaming media, then I don’t think this is you being old, I think this is you being on the side of at least 99.9% of the population who can’t understand why anyone would care (which includes the vast majority who play video games).
I think it’s great that the world includes all kinds of people - even people who care passionately about the integrity of gaming journalism. But I think even the majority of people who do care a lot about gaming journalism can see why this conversation has gone totally off the rails they wanted it on and would realize it’s time to let this banner die. So while I’m being super careful not to say that there isn’t or can’t be anyone who genuinely cares about the non-misogynist issues behind gamergate, it’s hard to believe that the majority of the people still on it aren’t just there to complain about women.
5 Likes
I’m pretty sure (from things they say) that near all the Gaters who are angry at the Gamasutra article have never read it. macdaddy is a case in point.
The article includes links to recent direct examples of that kind of negative behavior which demonstrates obvious, wanton misogyny within gaming. It wasn’t just making specious claims. In addition, it includes a link to an article that discusses the number of women who are a part of the gaming community - and since 45% of gamers are women (as of last year) there’s no reason to ignore us as a valid part of the marketplace. (Women game dev’s have been around since 1978.)
The article also didn’t generalize the gaming community. In fact, it says this:
Right, let’s say it’s a vocal minority that’s not representative of most people. Most people, from indies to industry leaders, are mortified, furious, disheartened at the direction industry conversation has taken in the past few weeks. It’s not like there are reputable outlets publishing rational articles in favor of the trollies’ ‘side’. Don’t give press to the harassers. Don’t blame an entire industry for a few bad apples.
The point that Leigh Alexander was making was that it’s far more positive to not be having a discussion with someone like mcdaddy. Instead, it’s better to walk away and talk about the more important topics at hand. In that article, she wasn’t talking about gaming-at-large. She was talking about a specific subgroup (like the Tea Party is not the GOP is not Democracy).
From her conclusion:
These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers – they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had.
She was voicing her frustration with a group of people willing to emotionally and physically injure others - all for the sake of fringe identity.
4 Likes
It’s extremely obvious from their comments that they generally don’t read things. The CBC just ran an article yesterday on how women who write about videogames are subject to abuse in a way that men who writer about videogames are not. Aside from that line, the article never said “men”, “male”, “gamer” or “misogyny.” It just neutrally reported facts about threats and abuse received by a few individuals. It basically reported it in the passive voice because it never even talked about who was doing it (they are people on the internet).
What was in the comments, “Shame on the CBC for slinging this man-hating crap.”
5 Likes
If you want to tell Intel pulling ads from Gamasutra was stupid & morally blind: https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/us/en/forms/corporate-responsibility-contact-us.html
One thing I’ve noticed about the Gamasutra article is how the title is altered when it gets pulled across for discussion in other publications. The title is:
‘Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over.
That clearly is a discussion about a label. Those quotes around ‘Gamers’ get dropped by a lot of people reprinting the title (it wasn’t posted at all by BB). Without the quotes, the title reads this way:
Gamers don’t have to be your audience. Gamers are over.
She does use the word without quotes in a standalone sentence at the end of the article. It can be found in this paragraph - which begins with a quoted use of the word.
“Gamer” isn’t just a dated demographic label that most people increasingly prefer not to use. Gamers are over. That’s why they’re so mad.
That’s where people are probably pulling the un-quoted version from - not the title, but some people are posting the title as “Gamers are over.” and it seems that’s where some of this animosity is coming from. Without those quotes, the title reads as an attack on the gaming community at large. In their eyes, there’s no reason for them to read past the title.
Another place to find ‘gamer’ articles is through the links provided here in this article from Slate magazine. There’s been plenty of discussion about what’s changing and why, and unfortunately I agree, the people arguing against these articles aren’t even looking past the titles or a few pull quotes.
2 Likes
“If you ignore its entire reason for existence, then that reason doesn’t matter!”
If you honestly believe this–and you may–then you have been successfully trolled.
If they don’t want to be labeled, then maybe they should stop proudly labeling themselves.
If you care about corruption in gaming media–and I do–then you need to stop using the name “GamerGate” and freeze out anyone who does. That name stands for malicious, unfounded driving trollies under the guise of legitimate concern, and it stands for completely ignoring actual corruption. Where was GamerGate when Eidos got Jeff Gerstmann fired for a bad Kane & Lynch review? Where was GamerGate when magazine after magazine, site after site, transparently gave the best reviews to their best advertisers? GamerGate didn’t care about those things. GamerGate sat back on the couch and ate chips.
But GamerGate was galvanized into furious action by the news that one female developer traded sex for a positive review of one small free game–news which, by the way, was provably one hundred percent false.
This is utterly baffling to me. It’s like if I started a Hitler Campaign for Animal Rights and then acted all bewildered and self-righteous when people suggested I was a Nazi. If you care about gaming media corruption, stop supporting these festering shits and support the news sites that actively call out and resist and fight against corruption, and call for higher standards in gaming journalism–sites like Rock Paper Shotgun, which GamerGate is actively trying to destroy because they sometimes say that chainmail bikinis are stupid.
7 Likes
Ooh, another one pops up!
3 Likes
so far the major things to come about from gamergate seem to be:
rampant misogyny
death threats against women in general and zoe quinn in particular
rape threats against women in general and zoe quinn in particular
threats accompanied by zoe quinn’s address and phone number
yeah, i’d say gamergate should be ignored.
7 Likes
I am concerned for the health of our Don’t Push Your Luck Dragon. Eating so much in such a short space of time cannot be good for anyone.
4 Likes
given that you are the 15th or 16th brand new account to try to spread the word about those righteous and woefully misunderstood boys at gamer gate i find little to your rant that has much credibility but do carry on if you must.
3 Likes
Absolutely criticizing women is fair game - disagreeing with a woman’s opinions, being critical of a woman’s arguments, saying a game a woman made is lousy. None of that should be presumed to have anything to do with misogyny.
As I’ve indicated above, I think doing so from the gamergate tag is very likely to make people suspicious of your motives, though. At this point so many people associate the tag with actual misogyny that the tag pretty much acts as a flag to let people know not to pay attention. If someone wanted to make a reasonable point at a town hall meeting, they probably shouldn’t be wearing a “KKK” t-shirt because other people would immediately think their point has some racist motive - and those people could be forgiven for thinking that no matter how calm and reasonable the commenter was being. That may seem like too strong an analogy, but for the people responding to gamergate at this point, that’s pretty much how low it seems because of the death and rape threats against Zoe Quinn and others.
I’ll also say this: I entirely believe that some people supportive of gamergate have been targeted by awful tactics (people are awful) but neither I nor anyone else who doesn’t like the tag or the use of it has thrown in with this lot in any way. We haven’t accepted a label or a symbol that they have, we have nothing in common. Just like a person who really genuinely cares about integrity in gaming journalism should not be assumed to have anything in common with the vicious assholes who infected gamergate if they did not use the gamergate tag or associate themselves with anything having to do with it.
Because of the deceptive tactics that gamergate supporters have used, though, for now reasonable people are going to wonder if any discussion of that subject isn’t just cover for some misogynists trying to hijack a conversation. It’s a rotten thing that these people have done to everyone - obviously primarily to the people they actually threatened and harassed but also (to a much lesser extent) to people who actually care about the thing they claim to care about. People being violent bastards hurts everyone, and one of the casualties is our ability to have a reasonable conversation about the issues that they used as cover for being violent bastards.
6 Likes
7 Likes
It took a while, but I think we now have a replacement for the #RickRoll
@-reply someone on twitter and use the #Gamergate tag
I think I will start doing this to obnoxious promoted tweets.
2 Likes
Oh no. I was really hoping they were going to give it up, or they were going to let it down.
7 Likes
Let me see if I get the GG position here.
When critics comment on feminist tropes in games, that’s attempted censorship of developers.
But when GG contacts the advertisers on a website because they disagree with an article there, that’s just “consumer activism”.
So critique is censorship, but advertiser boycott is just exercising your voice.
This boycott campaign is absolute refutation of any claim that GG stands for freedom of expression, which is something I see GG claiming all the time.
6 Likes
I finally got around to looking up Depression Quest on Steam yesterday, and discovered that it was a free download, and apparently has been for months at least. Before that, Quinn had promised to donate the proceeds to support groups for sufferers of depression, which is of course the subject of the game.
If the goal of this conspiracy was to distribute a free game and foster awareness of chronic depression, I’ve got to say this is the least menacing conspiracy in the history of the world.
7 Likes
Like almost everyone who says they stand for freedom of expression, they really stand for people who express their ideas and against people who express ideas they don’t like. On that front, GG is just par for the course.
1 Like
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/32778.html
Actions have consequences (or: why I’m not fixing Intel’s bugs any more)
A lot of the kernel work I’ve ended up doing has involved dealing with bugs on Intel-based systems - figuring out interactions between their hardware and firmware, reverse engineering features that they refuse to document, improving their power management support, handling platform integration stuff for their GPUs and so on. Some of this I’ve been paid for, but a bunch has been unpaid work in my spare time[1].
Recently, as part of the anti-women #GamerGate campaign[2], a set of awful humans convinced Intel to terminate an advertising campaign because the site hosting the campaign had dared to suggest that the sexism present throughout the gaming industry might be a problem. Despite being awful humans, it is absolutely their right to request that a company choose to spend its money in a different way. And despite it being a dreadful decision, Intel is obviously entitled to spend their money as they wish. But I’m also free to spend my unpaid spare time as I wish, and I no longer wish to spend it doing unpaid work to enable an abhorrently-behaving company to sell more hardware. I won’t be working on any Intel-specific bugs. I won’t be reverse engineering any Intel-based features[3]. If the backlight on your laptop with an Intel GPU doesn’t work, the number of fucks I’ll be giving will fail to register on even the most sensitive measuring device.
On the plus side, this is probably going to significantly reduce my gin consumption.
[1]
In the spirit of full disclosure: in some cases this has resulted in me being sent laptops in order to figure stuff out, and I was not always asked to return those laptops. My current laptop was purchased by me.
[2]
I appreciate that there are some people involved in this campaign who earnestly believe that they are working to improve the state of professional ethics in games media. That is a worthy goal! But you’re allying yourself to a cause that disproportionately attacks women while ignoring almost every other conflict of interest in the industry. If this is what you care about, find a new way to do it - and perhaps deal with the rather more obvious cases involving giant corporations, rather than obsessing over indie developers.
For avoidance of doubt, any comments arguing this point will be replaced with the phrase “Fart fart fart”.
[3] Except for the purposes of finding entertaining security bugs
4 Likes
