GamerGhazi is intrinsically misogynistic. It started that way, it continued that way. It claims to be about “ethics”, but apart from Zoe Quinn, the bete noires have been Anita Sarkeesian - who isn’t even a journalist - and Leigh Alexander, who’s done NOTHING that would warrant an accusation of journalistic misconduct. Except writing an op-ed-piece that gators wildly misinterpreted and use as a pretext to try and ruin her career and hound her out of the industry.
GamerGate is a misogynistic hate movement. Deal with it.
That’s every bit as much as paranoid as the people that think game journalists conspired together to bombard gamers with “gamers are dead” articles. Or that Zoe Quinn is controlling the indie game industry with her womanly wiles. Gamergate was started by Adam Baldwin and picked up fire on twitter. This kind of stuff has happened with dozens of other hashtags.
It’s nothing special. Wack jobs and vultures will always flock to any kind of gathering of minds on the internet. Milo Yiannopoulos and Christina Sommers are good higher profile examples.
I thought we were talking about narrative in that point of discussion? Is it too much to ask you to actually stick to points of discussion instead of going off on wildly tangential straw men?
Death threats are what have driven people from their homes. Not any kind of wider narrative resulting from gamer gate.
I did not say that she asked for it. Only that her actions precipitated it. Which is indisputable fact. She attacked a platform that people have been using to attack and threaten people and was attacked and threatened. If she had If she had said the same kinds of things pre gamer gate, the likelihood of her being threatened would have been much lower.
[quote=“InnerPartisan, post:19, topic:42806, full:true”]
Uh, because personal information absolutely does imbue threats with additional gravity. “Go die in a fire” is not a legitimate threat. “You live at [street address] in [city], and I’m coming to kill you” ABSOLUTELY is.
Ho easy it is to get doxx is completely irrelevant - especially considering that the target in this case is a woman who’s running her own company, so she has to have some contact information publicly available.[/quote]It is very much relevant how easy it is to get doxx. I would agree completely that if there was some evidence someone was expending actual time and effort in composing a threat then it would be very alarming and elevate a threat considerably above those of others. It is easy to type invective into a message box; people do it all the time. But is it not just as easy to copy-and-paste text from one window to another?
The fact that anyone is unable to separate the two is not a “problem” but instead is an indication of the nature of “gamergate,” because it started out as misogynistic rage targeted against one person and spread to encompass other undeserving targets. That’s what it is. “Gamergate” isn’t a platform, it’s a bunch of misogynistic bullshit pretending it’s about something legitimate. If you think Adam Balwin somehow started gamergate gamertaint, you’ve either not been paying attention or you’re being disingenuous.
We’ve seen the chat logs in which #GamerGate was planned and coordinated. And, by the way, it was the same people who’d organized the ‘#EndFathersDay’ campaign in an effort to mock feminists – which backfired on them.
For that matter, I’ve read the emails from the gaming journalist email list. There was no evidence of a conspiracy.
They aren’t separable. GG was a cover for criminal harassment, nothing more. There was no legitimate political issue at stake. The association of Quinn with journalistic nepotism was a complete, deliberate fabrication.
You just joined an hour ago to tell us we should be ignoring this? Hmm…
Did you READ what was clearly posted? Yes, they posted her address, but they also sent her death threats. I am sick and fucking tired of this shit being blatantly obvious for all to see, and yet ass hats like you ignore the important shit in favor of nit-picking uselessly.
Your entire comment is useless. “Just let it die.” Uh, let me guess: You’re not a woman. And you’re certainly not a woman on the internet. Ignoring it won’t make it go away.
Which brings us to the important question: what can we do to make this stop? Obviously, condemning the attacks and proclaiming our support for the attacked, and talking about the larger social issues, are useful, and the more, the better. Is there more we can and should do?
Is this comment serious? A man trying to mansplain to people, mostly women, what the tech industry is like for those women? And explaining away the concerns of women in tech by saying “Well, as a man, my experience was totally different from what you’re explaining to me, so I think you’re wrong. My experience is correct. My experience was so nice! As a man. So very nice. And there were some women there, you know, so obviously women were at least like, hired sometimes. But my experiences: Those are important. And they were fine. So quit you’re bitchin’, women. My experiences were fine, so why are you complaining?”
I’m not sure what the answer to that is. It’s complex. Keep speaking out. There also needs to be repercussions for this shit. And, the discrimination against women isn’t just in the gaming industry; it runs deep. It’s not just an issue with gaming. NO MATTER HOW MANY PEOPLE – including a few clueless ass hats in this thread – try to claim it’s “just this” or “just that” and has nothing to do with misogyny, doesn’t change the fact that it is, in fact, about misogyny and the institutionalized discrimination against women in certain fields.
I honestly don’t know. there is a serious problem here, and I think that it’s at a point where people are fanning the flames trying to precipitate an explosion. We’ll have a cycle of doxxing replied with vitriol until someone gets hurt, and, at some point, we’ll all be standing around asking wtf we were thinking.
I’m mostly of the opinion that “gamergate” is an excuse to cause Zoe Quinn grief because lots of folks don’t like women in gaming and also because Zoe Quinn has an abrasive personality and happens to be a woman. Yes, folks like Linus Torvalds are more abrasive, but he’s a dude and gets a pass for it, which is infuriating, really. People have been complaining about this double standard since long before “gamergate”, though.
At the same time, I feel bad for the folks who were complaining about journalistic ethics long before this whole business, since they now have to deal with the crazy people on their side. They are legitimate ethical issues in the gaming industry (censorship, nepotism, payola) and this kerfuffle means that a whole lot of people aren’t going to take them seriously because of “Gators” and, in particular, because of the false, inflammatory accusations leveled at ZQ.
So now, we have mess generating much heat and not much light… there was less light before, granted, but it was a lot cooler then too and it was possible to have actual nuance in our debates about gaming, feminism and ethics.
