Popehat's #Gamergate rants

boing
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Actually, yes, I’d say half of my discussions about gamergate has taken place in person.
I know the people I talked to are not statistically sound, considering that I don’t hang out with rapists or murders who might threaten internet personalities at the drop of a hat.

Aside from my fallible, personal observations about the composition of the group, the point I’m making is that you’re taking your findings from Twitter and Youtube and instead of saying “I have data backed evidence that most Twitter and Youtube users resort to violent threats when talking about Gamersgate” you’re saying that “I have data backed evidence that most Gamersgate discussions are violent threats.”
You’re asking a question and the framing the answer in a way you see fit. Just as I did after looking at your report

So yes, I have no data, but I am questioning the integrity of your conclusion because it doesn’t have an objective tone and doesn’t convey all of the facts.

I don’t want to simply criticize your methodology, but I’d also like to address what I believe your point of view is because you might be bringing up some good ideas. I understand that you’re saying men harassing women on the internet with threats is an undesirable thing. I totally agree. Beyond that, I’m not sure what your social complaint is about. It could be that you’re recognizing how the movement has gotten out of control on twitter and that if there are any civil supporters of gamersgate, they really shouldn’t use gamersgate as their banner any more because it has been rebranded with hate. I agree with you there as well.

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I’ve literally never mentioned a man with a proper pronoun in any of my posts.

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Oh is that what someone else is doing, but not you?

FTFY

literally, it’s about ethics in statistics jornalism.

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Well, no, that’s not it. You should read what you disagree with. What @MBD’s saying is that gamergate focuses more on a few women than it does on any ethical issue in journalism. The analysis didn’t cover threats.

The movement has not been “rebranded” with hate. It started with hate, pulled in some people who probably wouldn’t have wanted to be associated with hate if they’d understood what was going on, and then continued to be about hate with a lot of talk about other things. I’m sure when KKK members hang out a lot of them spend more time talking about football than they do about racist violence.

You can say that tweets is not representative of what a twitter hashtag is about if you want, but that doesn’t sound like a reasonable objection to most people.

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So? You referenced several women, who you do not know personally (presumably, or you’d be citing first-hand experiences), by their first names.

Do you also talk about Barack, George, Bill, Ronald, Jimmy and Richard?

If you’re a fan of James* films, do you express a preference to the depiction of Sean, Roger, Timothy, or Daniel, and wonder what it would have been like if Patrick had actually gotten the role?

* Bond. James Bond. Jimmy to just about everybody.

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Yes, actually.
When Ring of Fire comes on the radio, I always audibly say “You tell 'em Johnny.”
Bluring the line between celebrity and contemporary can be fun.

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Well, that’s the same thing.

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You’re just jealous I’ve got the coveted commemorative suspension badge!

comomorative suspension badge.png856×459 32 KB

^PS Notice the distinct lack of a dignity badge :wink:

@IronEdithKidd sadly, I made it myself as a statement. Chrome’s inspect element function allows you to make a webpage say anything you want it to for screenshot purposes. Here, I’ll give you one too (even WITHOUT a typo!):

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@GilbertWham you and the rest of the regulars will be blown away to find out that my debate team won the state final. Then in high school they made us stay after school instead of missing class to do debate, so I quit. Clearly my laziness trumps my argumentativeness.

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Humbella, you bring up some good points.
I’m not going to be able to keep up with all the replies I receive, but I respect yours.

To keep it simple and show something that’s contrary to the narrative that gamersgate posters are bent on harassment and woman hating, I think the movement on 4chan that identifies as gamersgate supporters is better organized and more positively focused than the twitter posters.
This image, from the depths of 4chan, has started being circulated relatively recently.
imgur.com/0PDayxn.png
I’m really not sure what else to say.
I probably don’t have much else to say past this.

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That’s probably for the best. Because that 4chan image is hilarious. Sure, they don’t have to police “rogue agents” who are harassing women because …

Puhlease!

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It looks like someone would really like to try to make gamergate about games journalism and distance it from hate mongering, but I don’t think they’ll have much luck. The guide, as a response to someone saying that gamergate is a hate group, reminds everyone that #gamergate is a games journalism scandal.

But it is a scandal that never happened. If everything in there is true, if people who follow gamergate are just gamers, and gamergate is just a scandal, then why is the hashtag continuing after the scandal turned out to be just a jerk casting aspersions on his ex with the intent (or to be super charitable with depraved indifference) to get her harassed? The scandal was not a scandal, it was a horrible person being horrible to another person.

This also interestingly assumes that people who say they hate Sarkeesian and want to kill her are there to derail the conversation, they are “shills” instead of misogynists.

I still just don’t know what this is about. The gamasutra/Intel thing was an example of a successful action by gamergate, but I read the piece and I just couldn’t see who it was insulting towards except for people who say and do actual misogynist things online. It said that gaming wasn’t an insular activity done by an in-group of basement dwellers, that those old sterotypes of “gamers” didn’t work anymore but that there was a small vanguard who didn’t like the change and were attacking women to stop it. That’s not only factual, but it also strongly reflects the feelings of a lot of people who grew up playing games when games were not popular, watched games come into their own as a legitimate cultural medium, and now are watching as the term “gamer” once again becomes a bad word because of a small cadre misogynist assholes.

That success of gamergate made me intensely angry. Videogame forums are the dung-heaps of the internet where no meaningful discussion can take place and it has always been so. As someone who is serious about games I’ve just taken as a given that any public space where games are talked about is too angry and foolish to bother with. I feel like angry, extremely entitled people are the public face of gaming, and gamergate has spread that message into the mainstream media. I read about women getting death threats from video games players on the CBC. My wife, who doesn’t play games, asked me about it. No one understands how someone could be getting death threats over criticism of video games. It makes no sense. No one understand how people could be that upset about scandals in games journalism.

If the goal of the movement is to make people stop bullying and putting down gamers then it’s accomplishing the exact opposite of what it means to. If you want to be respected you show you are respectable, you don’t police the way people talk about you - no one has ever earned respect that way.

I realize I went all train-of-thought here, but I’m just so frustrated. It frustrates me that gamers are trying to feel powerful by silencing people who say things they don’t like. Even if you take away the threats, the whole thing is just awful.

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OMG! They followed through on that badge. This is probably the funniest thing I will see all day. :slight_smile:

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But now I have to figure out how to get suspended!

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Ooo! Ooo!New BBS game: have an argument with @teapot on a hot-button subject voted for by the Peanut Gallery ( in the event of a tie the default is Apple vs Google), winner is the first to a 24-hour suspension :smiley:
We could have betting, and marks out of ten and like that. Whaddaya say, @teapot :wink:

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Yeah. They don’t seem to realize that you can’t take something with an origin as tainted as GamerGate and remove all the bad parts to leave an ethical journalism movement. It just isn’t going to work.

So why don’t they start a new clean movement? Sadly, some of them seem to honestly believe that the rest of us are insincere when we say that we’re all for ethical journalism. They think we’re only suggesting that they start a clean ethical journalism campaign in order to derail all the progress they’ve made (cough cough).

Yeah. I was playing video games in the 1970s, and have played them continuously since then. I remember when gamers would get together to talk about how to get girls interested in gaming (and D&D), so we’d have something to talk to them about. This generation of asshole kids raised on Xbox Live and Call of Duty needs to STFU and go away.

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So the post is about what GG is about, the very first item on that post warns to watch out that no one try to set goals (So its not about ethics in game journalism?) and that no one try to “Change the narrative” (the one Gjoni lied about?)

The second post says that no gamer has ever harassed a woman.

You have been trolled!

I’ll refrain from laughing at you, and instead ask you to join me, in laughing with you at how ridiculous this all is!

So why do you think that the majority of the tweets are about everything other than “ethics in games journalism?”
If you say that things aren’t happening on twitter, then why does the post you put up say that #Gamergate is a game journalism scandal?

Look, the funniest thing about this is that in the reviews I’ve seen for Bayonetta, there’s been a nod to Sarkeesian by actually addressing the sexism inherent in that game. (It hasn’t been addressed well, so maybe we need better games criticism #gamercrit), but the gaters have actually willingly invoked the Streissand effect.

And I mean willingly, because clearly, if everybody really wanted ethics in games journalism, then they’d have to be told how pointlessly sexist some games are. Which is true. And if you only agree that its a point of view, its still a point of view to be held by many people. So unless you don’t want to hear that and would silence that point of view, then you’re not really for ethical anything.
/Rant

TL;DR (Not really)
The only way you make sense is if you are part of the continuing effort to re-brand GG as about “ethics in games journalism”. What you say only makes sense if you are attempting to change the narrative.
Anybody saying that GG has not harassed women, needlessly and pointlessly, and that even if it has “Its really about ethics in game journalism” is lying.
There can be no people who are pro GG and “are still looking into it”

How this all started is well documented, Gjoni himself went back on much of what he said.
anybody claiming that GG wasn’t sparked by this event is lying. (If he’s deluded, then he’s not worth talking to until he gets his facts straight.)

If this feels like a personal attack, let me assure you that its not, you can argue why you want “ethics in games journalism” and you can also argue about how you should go about turning GG into something about “ethics in games journalism”, you can’t argue that it is something its not, you don’t get to make up your own facts.

Put simply, if GG was about ethics in games journalism, we’d at least have seen some examples of unethical games journalism.
We’ve seen none.

They could make some demands made of games review sites.
Again, None.

We’d see them boycotting games that have been unethically promoted.
We’ve only seen attempted boycotts of game sites advertisers.

It makes no sense to say that GG is about ethics in games journalism and then look around and see that they’ve only succeeded in driving women out of their home and stopping them from critically, and ethically, talking about video games!

Laugh with me, c’mon! Laugh with me! Its fucking hilarious!

/Rant, again.

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Don’t worry, I’m slowly chipping away at that problem, one post at a time! :smile:

fuckpissshit

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If you take #Gamergate at its word, that it’s really about ethical journalism, and ask what ethical problem they’re concerned with, you find that the only problem they really talk about is that feminists are publishing criticism in an effort to influence game designers to eliminate sexism in game content. Which is not even remotely unethical, and furthermore is an effort I emphatically support.

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