GamerGate WTF?

[Rageaholic]

I'm potentially opening a can of worms here, but seriously, WTF? I haven't been following this too closely, but a couple of days ago, after hearing so much about this, I had to figure out what all the shitstorm was about.

So apparently some bitter ex boyfriend of a game developer had some nasty things to post about her online. This leads to rumors about her sleeping around to get game reviews and the internet eats them up. Now there's some movement devoted to gamer journalistic integrity or something and this Zoe Quinn is considered public enemy number 1. And she's still getting crapped on 2 months after this!

I don't get it. Of all the people to warrant this much hate, why would it be someone who might have had an affair to boost game reviews? Unless there's something I'm missing... ?

[Kheldarson]

Basically it's been picked up by the men's activist groups, and they've been going wild with it.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-ways-g...e-world-worse/ and http://www.mommyish.com/2014/10/16/g...sian-misogyny/ discuss it pretty well.

[Rageaholic]

Holy shit, these people went after Felicia Day. All because she posted her concerns with GamerGate. Just when I thought this whole thing couldn't get any stupider.

Some of these gamer gate people are pulling the "we're not all like that" card and while that may be true, I'm still not buying this movement. Especially since they're acting like they've uncovered some huge conspiracy.

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

To be fair, I've been following this from the start and it's a clusterfuck of ideologies and issues that's been reduced at this point to feminists vs. MRA's.

Really, the subheading of Gamergate is a bunch of things.

There is the actual incident which is about the pay to play gaming press. People are concerned about this (it annoyed me before this incident) to various levels.

There's Anita Saarkesian, who singlehandedly is doing more to prove misogyny just by existing and being threatened constantly at this point.

Then there's the main issue, which at this point is feminists insisting its about misogyny and MRA's insisting its about the press. In my estimation, more ink has been spilled invalidating the other issue in a "your issue doesn't matter or is irrelevant, but mine does matter" manner than anything.

If you've followed this thing long enough, you've seen more attempts to spin than a general election campaign.

So far I've learned young white mails are/are not the primary focus of the gaming industry, gamers are/are not defined as young white males, white boys are/are not misogynists, yadda, yadda, yadda. Honestly? It's about writers selling copy. No one is advancing any workable solutions, no one is conceding any points, and what people believe tends to fall exactly along the lines of political spectrum you'd expect.

[lordlundar]

That is probably the best summation I've heard on this mess. Two packs of loudmouth extremes shouting past one another and accusing everyone that doesn't agree as being the enemy. Meanwhile anyone trying for reasonable discourse is shouted down and harassed by both groups. The extremists are more intent on winning than trying to find solutions which is sad because those who are not extremists being lumped in with them are really saying the same things about the problems. They're just not being heard or ignored due to the extremists on both sides.

[Hyena Dandy]

My views of it are... Complicated. I know people who think it'll save gaming, I know people who think it's a horrible mess trying to drive women away. I think it's a damn headache not worth my time.

I think that some people are upset for a very good reason. A lot of feminist criticism in games has been lackluster. Game reviewers are, for the most part, people who got some following or impressed with their reviews, but aren't really great critics. The reviewers are not given enough time to actually give critical analysis to games that even PLAYING them is a full time job.

I think a lot of people in the reviewing business have struggled to provide cultural commentary, and often come off as condescending and insulting to a portion of their readership. I know I was super pissed off by Moviebob's Big Picture/Game Overthinker crossover. Similarly by his "Expendables" review a few years back, which, though a movie, was still pretty insulting to anyone who liked the movie.

I think that people got kind of sick of feeling attacked for liking the games that they liked, and that became a powderkeg ready to explode. Some damn fool thing in the balkans kicked it off, and there was a huge fight.

Meanwhile, there are also people who really are just jackasses, and they saw an opportunity to direct that explosion in the right direction. Some people just want to cause chaos, or are allowing their grudges to say "Hey, here's a chance to fuck over that person!" Angry people are being guided by anger. I can certainly empathize with their anger, since they felt they were being attacked and insulted for having an opinion, for liking games, or some type of game, or whatever. Then they lash out, which is a mess, and get pushed by people who are already actively malicious, and people fight back. And it's a mess.

[Kheldarson]

My main thought on this is that the ex that started this shitstorm must be loving every minute of it...

[gremcint]

I've seen the idea of "saving gaming" brought up elsewhere but I still don't see what it needs to be saved from in regards to the people GG is attacking. the ones ruinging gaming are the big companies wandering around with their heads up their ass not the reporters. Even so it doesn't feel like gaming needs saving very much to me. Console gaming maybe but again it's more that the companies can't understand people buy a video game console to play video games and everything else is gravy.

[Rageaholic]

I've seen the idea of "saving gaming" brought up elsewhere but I still don't see what it needs to be saved from in regards to the people GG is attacking. the ones ruinging gaming are the big companies wandering around with their heads up their ass not the reporters. Even so it doesn't feel like gaming needs saving very much to me. Console gaming maybe but again it's more that the companies can't understand people buy a video game console to play video games and everything else is gravy.

Pretty much this. I don't play many video games, but I never got the feeling it needed saving and if it did, the Zoe Quinn thing seems so small scale that I don't see it would be the focus. I just don't see how one person allegidly sleeping around and an EX boyfriends rant can trigger this much of a shitstorm.

GamerGate is looking like the tea party. Claiming to stand for one thing while being a haven for other stuff (in this case MRA idiots).

[KabeRinnaul]

My favorite statement on all of GamerGate remains the editor's introduction to the Cracked.com article that Zoe Quinn herself wrote:

A few weeks ago our message board and general inbox were bombarded with demands we address something called the "GamerGate Scandal", posts written with the urgency and rage one would associate with, say, discovering that Chipotle burritos are made entirely from the meat of human babies. It's apparently a big deal in some circles, so we followed the links and read the piles of data presented, and had to stop and take a deep breath just to grasp it all. "Gentlemen," we said amid the stunned silence, "do you realize that if what they're saying is true, then this is still the most pointless fucking bullshit anyone has ever forced us to read?"

[Rageaholic]

LOL that editors note is pure gold. Well deserved snark.

[lordlundar]

I just don't see how one person allegidly sleeping around and an EX boyfriends rant can trigger this much of a shitstorm.

It itself it wasn't. I said in another thread and it's been mentioned here all of this crap has been a powder keg ready to explode for a long time. And in of itself the rant wasn't even the real catalyst. The real catalyst was that a number of sites who have readily put up far worse content not only did not cover it (fair enough, largely a personal choice and not one I take issue with) but that any and all discussion on it was completely banned. Not just moderated with the assholes being banned (as they should) but ANY discussion was banned and anyone even talking about it got permabanned no matter how civil they were. Reddit's /r/gaming was particularly bad with several thousand posts wiped out, most engaging in civil discussion. When confronted with just how bad the sites and their staff were behaving in the manner (mostly respectful but definitely some assholes, same as any criticism) the response was several articles on these sites attacking essentially anyone who was called a gamer.

That's when the explosion hit. Despite the claims of acting with the best of intentions, had the discussions been allowed to happen in a proper moderated environment, it would have largely blown over after a couple of weeks at most. It was how poorly it was handled that caused the blowout, not the original incident.

[Rageaholic]

^

Wait did these boards ban discussions on review bias, the Zoe Quinn crap, or both? If it's the review bias, than I could see some shitstorm (though it still sounds like it was the Zoe Quinn thing that triggered this). But if it's the Zoe Quinn thing, than I wonder why the mods would react this way.

(though I should probably read up on this myself, though I tend to avoid Encyclopedia Dramatica)

[lordlundar]

It was any mention of her that didn't put her on a pedestal that got locked down and the user banned. Even people asking for clarification on the matter had it happen to them. Like yourself, a lot of people were wondering what was the motivation behind such actions and were trying to find out. Then the articles came out.

In fact, most people didn't even know what the hell was happening when the mass lockdown hit it was that far below the radar. It could have been any event that had these sites doing it, it just happened to be this one. What had happened was the Streisand effect in action.

(And I would avoid wikipedia for info on this. There is a moderator going on a witch hunt on anyone detailing events that don't paint it as a hate group.)

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

The Wiki editor wouldn't suprise me.

I think it was 2008-2010 when the Wiki article on MRA's (not the same thing, but the same political groups are involved in Gamergate) was mainly about the 60's, the philosophical underpinnings of feminism that gave birth to the academic MRA movement and then the criticism of it.

I'm not sure when but when I checked it last year, that entire article had been replaced by a heavily sourced (in feminism, that's easy because there's just so much out there to source) but cherry picked articles creating a very specific picture of a hate group or a tone deaf one. As of a few months ago, you could still find the old article in the internet wayback machine. Not sure if it's still there though. Many of the sources characterizing MRA positions are from feminist or feminist leaning sites which if you're going to be fair about it, is roughly equivalent to letting the Republican party write the Democratic party campaign literature.

It skips the 60's, touches the 70's and assumes the late 90's variant was the same thing as. Which is odd, because if you want to get into the history of it one is a movement from within men in the feminist movement to focus on their issues and the other is borrowing the name.

That's a long way of saying... not shocked. Seriously though, if you like rhetoric, actually reading the sources of that page are hilarious.