People say things that sound threat-like fairly often without really meaning much. The tone changes entirely if the statement starts to include things to indicate that the speaker has taken steps toward making the threat a reality. It’s the difference between “I want you dead,” and “I want you dead and I’ve taken the first step toward making that happen.” Remember, “credible” just means believable.
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Mod note: No tone policing, that’s my job.
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Your whole purpose on this thread is to minimize the the death threats made against an innocent woman. No one cares about the minutia of “Gamgergate” given that these hateful threats have been made. . . and yet you blather on about nonsense.
You’re right though, not every gamer is a misogynist prick. Some hate women enough to threaten them. The rest simply think it’s silly to complain about that.
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=shrug= It’s your sandbox.
THIS. The games industry has issues, yes. Issues that they acknowledge and are actively working on. And if you work in the games industry, you see how viciously entitled gamers can be. These guys are 99% the end-users, not the creators.
Once you clear away the death threats and the misogyny, the trolling and the hatred, the organised attacks on companies that support female developers as well as the badly thought out and false equivalences, the appeals to truthiness, the manipulative and forced misdirection of intent, the hypocrisy and malevolence; gee, they really make a good point.
Said nobody, ever.
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Well what was she wearing when she was raped? I think that’s important to know. /s
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When we were starting a company, we complained to our angel investor that we were getting death threats. He said that was normal, because if you weren’t getting death threats you weren’t really in the game. when our backer had started a company, his partner had taken money from loan sharks without his knowledge, and our backer had hidden in Portugal for a couple months because a particularly murderous biker gang was after him. Those are death threats.
The threats being discussed here are more on the order of “OK let’s buy a barky little dog for protection.”
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Perhaps, but the problem when dealing with these kinds of threats is that it can be very hard to tell when your “barky little dog” might have to defend against a rabid one - the state of mind and resolve of the people making the threats is harder to read than that of loanshark enforcers. There is a long history of threats of this nature being misgauged with tragic consequences.
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It plays merry hell with Ghostery, that.
Well I used to live in high-rise, and during that period I had an elaborate barricade and alarm on my front door and a big butcher knife on my desk. I also used to check the underside of my car for explosives. My partner could not own a gun, so I gave him a 1 meter piece of iron pipe. Shortly after that someone tried to break into his house through a basement window (unheard of in his neighborhood) while they were home, but his alarm system scared off the intruders.
If these people think they are experiencing a similar level of threat, maybe they need to pool their resources and construct an actual fortress that will protect them from these threats are about to burst through from the internet and into corporeal reality. I’ll chip in $5.
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Hey can we get another post about how threatening people only matters if it comes from organized crime or something like that? The first two seem to have fallen flat.
Give it another go, okay?
btw, you may do better with partners that can find a pipe, eh?
edit for /s LoL
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Thank you very much for your thorough mansplaining of why women should ignore thousands of death threats linked to the publication of their home addresses.
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This thread, like those before, continues to be a drag on my soul.
If you are weary of being angry, like I, here’s a simple reminder that laughter can be so much better than anger.
(relevant, as right now A.Sarkeesian is getting spammed with death threats as she’s at Geek Girl con, and one of these evil bros doesn’t believe her).
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Cripes, I wouldn’t buy a used car from either of those two - shake hands on a deal, and you’d need to count your fingers afterwards.
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Legion of Doom vs. the Social Justice Warriors? Sounds like something from a 19A0s tag-team title fight.
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Hang on, so your argument is “I’m familiar with the stress and terror of being threatened in your home, therefore fuck people who are threatened in their homes”? Is this opposite day?
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Thing is, in some ways, those threats were easier to deal with. You know where they’re coming from and why. The people making them are [best Godfather voice here] businessmen. There’s kind of a clear line between “this is why they’re angry” and “this is what they want”. Plus, it’s a situation that cops will walk in on and be able to figure out quickly.
With these internet threats, you honestly don’t know whether it’s coming from a 13 year old kid trying to impress his buddies, or a guy with a dozen heads in his freezer and a hard on for making snuff films- And the police aren’t likely to make assumptions the way they would if the threat came from a known criminal.
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You know, it’d be really cool if you’d actually respond to the words I’ve written instead of misrepresenting what said. Because if had, you’d realize that I’ve been criticizing people both for and against gamergate.
What you and others don’t seem to realize is that by responding to gamergate as a generalized group, you lend legitimacy to their belief of themselves as victims. Thus you polarize any discussion where you would wish to effect actual change. You alienate people that would otherwise support a good cause like ending harassment of game devs.
Take a look at this two year old kotaku article on game devs being harassed and look at the
discussion in both the article and the comments:
There’s not even a remotely comparable amount of vitriol or “you’re either for us or against us”
arguments being thrown around. Nowhere near the amount defensive or knee jerk responses. And
yet even with that more reasoned approach to the issue, we haven’t made a whole lot of
progress.
The discussion of this in the context of gamergate is a step back even further. Even less will be accomplished until people are able to discuss these problems on their own merit instead of within the context of entrenched demographics throwing rhetoric back and forth at each other with any moderate opinion thrown to the wayside.
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