heh. interesting.
Since the beginning of #GamerGate I would say, I have been a prominent “Face” of this Consumer Revolt for some time now.
If one wanted to stage a Consumer Revolt, over Gaming Jounalism, couldn’t one just install AdBlock and be done with it?
I don’t see any boycotts of actual AAA games…
I used to participate in Hold The Line, which began as a group criticizing Bioware for the ending of Mass Effect 3 and petitioning for a revised ending; it broadened its mission into a general critique of the computer game industry, including considerable criticism of games journalism and advocacy for independent criticism, and now describes its mission as “gamer advocacy”. When ME3 was a big deal, the group actually got some media attention for its (very mild) protest actions. (For instance, to mock the palette-swapped outro of ME3, HTL sent Bioware cupcakes with red, green, or blue frosting.)
Before Gamergate, I’d lost interest in the group, and until just now when I thought to check, I’d actually been under the misapprehension that it had disbanded, but it’s clearly still active. I’m surprised to find that I don’t see any mention of Gamergate in the forums – I’d have to guess the admins are deliberately avoiding discussion of it for some reason.
Anyway, as you’ll quickly notice from looking at the site, the general tone is progressive, and in particular supports diversity of representation in gaming. A large proportion of the active participants are women. And that was the case from its beginning as a consumer revolt over Mass Effect 3.
Heh. Was just coming to post this.
MacKenzie Kelly was an Republican running for City Council in my home city of Austin in District 6. She ran on a pro-gamergate platform.
This just gets weirder and weirder.
The schadenfreude is strong with this update!
Holy. Crap.
I mean, there are implosions, and then there are full on, black-hole-creating implosions. And then there’s that.
A good start to a Monday 
No man, it’s a killdozer!
The alternative would be to recognize that what he said was a question that people wanted answered! How dare Nelsie try to control his own message?!?!?!?
In most places the law disagrees with you. A judge ultimately decides if the alleged action in combination with the victim’s emotional reaction constitutes a crime.
Also: mailing a weapon to a person with a letter saying you want them to die (by their own hand) is a threat merely by virtue of it being sent to the person’s home address.
I think all of this is a load of shit but defending actions that are indefensible isn’t gonna help your team, bud.
Sure. You also have the right to wear a hat that says ‘I am a douchebag’. Same exact effect on how people will see you.
…particularly mods on KiA who also modded really skeevy second reddits like /r/Breakfeminazis, your number one porn site for fantasizing about dominating defeated SJWs.
I looked (so you don’t have to), and that is literally what it is. Just… wow.
Doesn’t their crusade for “ethical journalism” and against “misandry” make LamerBate SJWs themselves? Or am I missing some crucial semantic distinction? It seems that it’s just their (ill-informed) take on justice.
A friend of mine and I have been debating this issues, how the rise of identity politics has muddied the waters, and allowed the right to embrace their language to claim they are being systematically discriminated against. Given that they are not really be discriminated against, their claims fall well short of being social justice.
Obviously I don’t think they are. But I mean seem to identify as a group with goals which are basically social justice by their own weird definition. The label could apply to themselves, apart from them choosing not to see it this way.
I know what you meant… it’s kind of interesting that they don’t, I agree. they certainly feel as if not being misogynistic assholes or being told that they are being such is somehow unjust. But they are very much against the concept of social justice… I’m sure they cluck to themselves about how the civil rights movement “went to far” and that feminism only served to undermine men’s “rights” to be total douchenozzles… “men should be men and women should be women”, that sort of nonsense. I think they actively reject the concept of social justice, because they think it undermines their own positions in society…
“Social justice warrior” and “SJW” have a history of usage that precedes #GG, and there are specific people and groups that were referred to by these terms.
Generally, “social justice warrior” has been a semi-derogatory label for advocates of identity politics, in the context of social media. As I pointed out in the Sup Marxists? thread, identity politics is a branch of political activism dating back roughly to the late 70s and 80s, and one frequently at odds with more “traditional” (for lack of a better word) branches of the radical left, specifically in that they do not assume solidarity among the oppressed as a fundamental principle and regard calls for unity with suspicion.
The older uses of “social justice warrior” that I’ve seen were actually mostly radical leftists criticizing them, and this continues to the present. That’s mostly in terms of critiques of strategy, theory, and so on, though there are some personal antagonisms involved, as you might imagine. It’s important to note that SJWs are principled opponents of sexism and racism, but I don’t think it’s accurate to use SJW as a general term for opponents of sexism, racism, etc.
There’s a small group of specific people, political activists active on Twitter and other social media, who are most often referred to as SJWs; I just recently found out that they’re all contributors to a magazine, Model View Culture.
More recently, as far as I can tell, this group of people have been targetted by right-wing trolls from 4chan and 8chan, in several “campaigns” that preceded #GG.
As far as I can tell, none of the primary targets of #GG – Quinn, Sarkeesian, Alexander, Wu, and so on – had any association with this particular group, and I’m not sure they’re even entirely aware of the pre-existing arguments. My sense is that the right-wing trolls pretty much bundled all their opponents together in the sort of semi-conspiracy theory we’ve been criticizing.
Makes sense, I guess. Thanks for some background on the term.
There probably is a bit of a spectrum here. Quite a few people have bristled at me for being egalitarian while simultaneously being too individualistic to embrace identity politics. It often puzzles me how people create and/or choose their categories.
Because they think it confirms their position.
I meant that being more open to especially women in gaming is what makes them feel undermined. They associate social justice with feminism and attacks on their supposedly pure domain of gaming…
