Be Excellent To Each Other

I think you'll find you dropped the mic. You want back in on this conversation, slink back over and pick it the fuck back up.

I have my own mic. I dropped that one for effect.

I took this to mean he is watching the team he normally plays for.

It is, however, open to interpretation.

Yes. That is what I meant.

Carry on Myp, we're doing well in this argument, although personally, when we dropped the mic I think that was the wrong choice, we should have put up a better argument and stayed in the game. We'll do better next post i'm sure.

We're having another baby!

You look so different in the papers, the media must photoshop the heck out of you.

Which one are you?

Here you go, Trooper:

midnightresistance.co.uk/articles/plight-grown-ass-gamer

I liked it better when we posted this the first time.

You would!

We've not read it yet, but we might like to read this, Trooper: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/09 ... ore-232091

So, something kicked off big time on Twitter this morning. Check @freebsdgirl's timeline for details. I may have got myself involved. Oops.

something big ... twitter ... ?

If you've been following then the gamersgate stuff has not really stopped - with things like Anita Sarkeesian being forced to cancel a talk at a school in the last week due to specific threats

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/58528 ... u.html.csp

Yesterday also saw (unrelated to Gamersgate) a developer get annoyed with Steam not showing his game correctly on the store and him threatening to kill Gabe Newell

So Valve told him they would not be selling his game and pulled it from the store

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2014/10/21/v ... ell-online

(He has now resigned in the hope that Steam will allow the company that he was a part of to still sell their game)

I got schooled today on lots of topics:

Feminists are the real sexists because female porn stars earn more than male ones and that female gamers get more Twitch viewers than men.

One person's opinion is no longer anecdotal evidence when it's published in a reputable news source, because it then becomes other people's opinions too.

When asking for proof on statements, was refused, but when I linked to studies proving the opposite, they were dismissed as 'paid-for' or discreditable publications (like the Pulitzer Award-winning Guardian).

It really was a terrifying glimpse into the soul of the insane. I quite enjoyed it, but wouldn't want to do it every day.

I've read some of the twitter responses to some of the people involved and those who were trying to reason with the other side but it just really shows how nuts some of these people are.

“we value ethics in journalism, and will alter our content in whatever way you feel best supports those values.”

http://www.clickhole.com/article/summar ... y-cha-1241

A pro gamergate round up of Gamergate for those who don't know. Personally I think its becoming more like a conspiracy theory than an exposure on journalistic ethics.

Too much stuff to read now, last thing I want is not be offensive enough as I've missed some key points.

Tomb raider games enough said

That's quite long, but rather good.

It talks in overly verbose circles with an over-emphasis on using as much pseudo-psychological rhetoric as possible.

If you didn't know game journalism can be dodgy, you must have been living under a rock for the past 25 years (shakes fist at SU and Kamikaze-fucking-Bear).

Having worked in, been chewed up and then spat out by games media, yes there are obviously huge structural problems with games journalism.

However the braying lunatics of gamergate are pretty clearly not actually complaining about the real issues.

They are saying "keep politics out of games", but what they really mean is "keep politics that don't pander to me out of games".

They're almost exclusively targeting women, and the notion of anyone conducting rudimentary feminist criticism (something which every single mature medium gets).

They're campaigning to get advertisers to stop supporting websites doing clearly good work (and indeed exposing questionable relationships between the industry and youtubers) simply because they had the audacity to publish an article they disagree with.

During this time, IGN have literally announced a program of collusion with Microsoft over Halo coverage, and gamergate has turned a blind eye to it. Presumably because Halo is a toy that gamergaters like.

I find it fascinating that the same people that castigate others for making sweeping generalisations about others then talk in the same breath about what 'gamergaters' clearly all think.

I'm sure every member of the Nazi party wasn't a horrific racist murderer, that doesn't make it unreasonable to tar them all with the same brush. All gamergaters may not be carrying out the horrific attacks on women and the gaming press, but by associating themselves with the movement they are tacitly condoning it, and that's just as bad.

If that's directed at me, I specifically said "the braying lunatics of gamergate", never said I was talking about everyone.

It's just that the contingent who are most vocal and who are directing the conversation fall into that group.

Obviously there are people with far more moderate positions than those I outlined. Perhaps their main concerns are over journalistic integrity, but they are pretty clearly allied with people who are conducting a hate campaign.

Even if we very generously* assume that anyone rallying around the Gamergate tag was ever genuinely attempting to address issues with journalistic ethics the entire 'movement' is now synonymous with vicious, violent, utterly unacceptable misogyny and hatred. Anyone still attempting to stand under it's banner is either a vicious, violent, utterly unacceptable misogynist who genuinely likes what it's become; or is simply too stupid to realise that the enormous volumes of tar they're being brushed with while standing there is blackening their message to nothing and, in fact, making any genuine issues that much easier to ignore.

*And this would be a very generous reading given that, suspiciously, the original flashpoint was the now disproved idea of a female dev swapping sex for positive coverage.

I was going to say the same thing but about the BNP. There are members of the BNP who are probably not Racist, but you wouldn't blame people for thinking they were, because they have joined the BNP.

Malc

Yeah, I can't really credit anyone (save perhaps for those in the industry and on the wrong end of it) in their right mind being sufficiently bothered purely about some dodgy game reviews to want to do much of anything about it, let alone take it up as a cause.

I wouldn't say that, game journalism should be ethical and should be taken seriously, especially now with the massive value of the industry, and there are genuinely worrying levels of collusion that've been exposed in the past. The problem with Gamergate is that it didn't spring from any of that and instead is a massive firestorm reaction to what was thought to be a single female indie developer shagging a single journalist for positive coverage. Even if it'd moved on from there and started looking at the wider issues with the bigger publishers I could respect it, but nope; our next stop is death threats to Anita Sarkeesian and hounding Brianna Wu out of her home. The mask of journalistic ethical concern lasted about five fucking minutes before slipping to reveal the same old scared wanking monkeys behind it. Terrified out of their wits that someone might make some games they weren't interested in; which is really all this boils down to. No one's going to halt production of fucking Call of Manshooter 15 just because a woman in a room on her own is designing the next Gone Home for Christ sake. So as well as being jaw-droppingly unpleasant to watch the whole thing is just the most pointless load of screaming and shit-flinging I've ever seen.

And this sums up how I felt about the independence campaign.

I still haven't been following this, but didn't the aforementioned female dev admit to having sexy-time with pretty much everyone involved but was also unapologetic about it?

Nope, nothing even remotely like that happened. I suggest you do some reading before propagating further nonsense.

Also, 'admits'? Pretty sure sleeping with someone shouldn't be something you have to 'admit' to, whether you're a man or a woman, in the gaming press or anywhere else - as long as it's willing on both sides.

Does anyone believe that's the risk though?

I do think Anita 'give me money to make shitty videos' Sarkeesian is full of shit, however, and the feministic logic of her videos has been comprehensively debunked.

I normally can't stand this guy, but his videos on this subject are compelling.





I'm not propagating anything, dickhead, I'm asking a question and looking for a response.

But surely it's a bit of a self-regulating thing. If a site continually gives its readers a bum steer then it'll eventually fall out of favour. And individual reviewers will eventually be able to forge a reputation as reliable, they won't be inclined to want to shoot themselves in the foot by giving average games 9/10 type reviews. I can't imagine there being some similarly massive scandal if it emerged that someone had been paid for a favourable film review. Everyone just assumes that some reviews are reliable and others aren't.

This has been covered in numerous places, but it's about the non-psychos clearly benefitting from aligning themselves with the psychos. Every time a dissenting voice is silenced by a militant member of the group (or militant faction as there are loads of them), the entire group benefits. There's no attempt to separate the two and form a distinct anti-fuckwit branch, because then the 'reasonable' types have to engage with people who aren't already terrified or oppressed.

There's a cartoon that puts it really well too, but I can't remember where I saw it.

Felicia Day's post which caused her personal details to be leaked :

http://thisfeliciaday.tumblr.com/post/1 ... gamer-gate






So there are many posts in this thread which cover the background of this and for the Zoe Quinn stuff your basically going back to the very start - go to the beginning of this thread where a number of people covered the original question

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10186

This is the problem in a polarising argument. One side will use a pretext to utterly blacken the other and use that foundation to invalidate all ongoing arguments made by them. If the opposing side then attempts to factionalise over points of disagreement, their cause is further neutralised because there have no contiguously-united front of support.

I don't really give a diddly fuck if the accusations are true, not least because it wouldn't be the first time that some form of back-room dealings have been used to promote or alter the public perception of a product. It would be naive to think that this doesn't go on all the time in ways that aren't readily obvious to overly-obsessed gamers online. But the social dynamics of warring groups on the internet remains fascinating, if not a little tired and obvious in their tactics.

Incidentally - a person makes a post and gets 'doxxed' by an individual dickhead, and the outraged world is happy to condemn the whole movement. Is this so radically different from extremist muslims giving the rest of them a bad name? People go to great lengths to point out how an individual action that alleges support to a given ideology is NOT representative.

The court of public opinion is just so self-evidently hypocritical when applying its logic on who to righteously damn in these situations.

You're comparing a centuries old worldwide religion to a group of arseholes who voluntarily rallied round a label that was tainted from day one (and where 'day one' was a few weeks ago). If you can't see those are two wildly different contexts then I really don't know what to say to you.

So I've looked back at this thread and from Gaywood's earlier post it seems that yes, she did undisputedly sleep with a variety of people, but that those same people (i.e. those allegedly involved) did not have the influence or direct correlations to the disputed reviews/promotion that was claimed.

So something 'remotely like this' did actually happen. Great contribution to the thread there myp.

It's an en masse, organised process. Reams upon reams of IRC chats and forum discussions have been made publically available showing just how much organisation and planning, and how many people are involved in all of these attacks. They aren't one off. It's a large organised group deliberately attacking anyone who speaks out against them or what they are doing. They're targetting media outlets and women who dare to speak out in horrific and vile ways. Calling it an 'warring groups on the internet' is papering over a group of people using vile, illegal tactics and another group of people being reasonably horrified about what's happening.

It's nothing like extremists giving Muslims a bad name. A better parallel would be extremists giving ISIS a bad name. There will be some members of ISIS who are part of it because they believe in political change in the region. By willingly associating themselves with those who use violence and murder, they are not a maligned group, they are idiots.

Different context, exact same principle. Whether it's an old religion or a recent collective of gamers, the notion of not tarring them all with the same brush over the extreme actions of a few is inconsistently applied. There are plenty of 'gamergaters' that are trying to uphold a perfectly legitimate view that in no way is associated with the constant accusations of misogyny.

I don't need to be sympathetic with either group to point out how that's precisely the case, and that even if you disagree with the 'group of arseholes', you should recognise that.

No, dickhead, it did not. Read this, you complete goon:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/ ... -Spotlight



She had a sexual relationship with someone who didn't review her game. The game that she was giving away for free. If this is all about ethics, why was the (female) dev the subject of harrassment, and not the journalist?

Because misogyny, that's why. Gamergate is fucking toxic - as a movement they are basically terrorists at this point.

Only because that's how you want to represent the narrative here, because you would prefer to believe that all members of the group are unequivocally evil and any alignment with them is inarguably condemning. I'm sure many refuse to identify with the doxxing/harassment tactics described, and actually do want to give a legitimate voice over the impartiality of games journalism.

Sure, those people would definitely be better off ditching the gamegate tag, except it's clear that any new tag they try to go under for legitimacy will instantly be conflated with gamegate by their detractors, and they'll be back having the same problem of struggling with credibility as before.

I can ignore your ill-informed drivel on most subjects, but not this one, I'm afraid.