Rules 1 & 2 of Gamergate Controversy Club

Vorpy

Mind you, I'm really late for this. Like, super late. But still, the 4chan idiots vs the PWUTI war has died down, so I came from the flesh harvest to ask questions about the GamerGate Controversy:

1) Why did so many sites ban the topic, instead of the users who showed their true colors whenever the topic was brought up? The moment somebody tore off their cloak, dagger in hand yelling "ZOE-ZOE IS MY LORD" or "Fuck Anita I Won't Do What She Tells Me!", they should've been ousted from the community. Same with the people who flew the DOAX banners and blew trumpets in honor of Melody Hensley. Like, it was a popular topic that people were going "what the fuck is Gamergate" and the mods came in going "WE WILL NOT DISCUSS THIS FURTHER, GOOGLE IT IF YOU'RE SO INTERESTED", looking over their shoulders really paranoid-like, going "OH LAUDY IZE THINKS THE MAN-CHEEL-JREN ARES OUT THERE, WEETIN FER DE GEEMERGEET TO BE DISCUSSID-ED", while tightening their hammy bandanas and continuing to sweep while the Masta walks by.

"Georgette, you talkin about dat here gamer gate discussion?"

"Oh Noes, boss. I wuz talking to our here horses. Making sure they stayed in line."

"Horses don't care about internet controversies, Georgette. They're animals, not stupid."

The boss continued on his way, cautiously looking at the horses, swearing he saw for just a split second, that their face was illuminated by the glow of cellphones.

---

2) The site's ad revenue would have still gone up even if they did let the discussions take over and get out of control. Sure, corruption in gaming journalism and the amount of death threats and harassment involved probably wouldn't make anyone interested in clicking on ads, but if the site gets lucky, and somebody who really sympathized Zoey saw an ad for cheaper Health Insurance on their discussion board, they might be motivated to check it out...maybe? I don't know, I saw some sweet ads for a webcomic I read on there now, something about music. White haired elf girl I think.

3) I had a third point, but I'd break the whole Do not talk about GamerGate thing, along with the whole Fight Club joke I was going for.

4) Do not talk about the failed fight club joke.

5) Final Question: Can we talk about it plz? -madoka cat face- &VV& I can't do it because I forgot his name

5.5) I'm sorry I lied about watching and liking Madoka back before I got b&. It's art-style is a hit and miss for me. Never got past episode 3. I pir&ed it

Stormtroper

GamerGate gave us this:

(Also, it's Kyubey, and its face is: ／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼ )

lrdgck

For some reason, I just had that awkward feeling Vorpy and Insanity should marry each other.

MadassAlex

The gist of things:

• There was clear misogyny, particularly but not entirely directed at Anita.
• There were also rational criticisms of Anita's work, which were good but could easily fuel the fire when taken up by the wrong crowd.
• The GamerGate crowd was made of two intermingling subgroups, which were basically "Anita/women suck" and "games journalism is terrible".
• The second group was responding to a number of concurrent articles on various gaming websites declaring the "gamer" identity dead, based on the reaction against Anita's forthcoming (at the time) video series and taking it as a marker of general misogyny. 

Ultimately, Anita's videos were okay (but not exactly the university-level material she suggested they would be), gaming journalism continues to suck, misogyny in gaming culture was thrown into the limelight, and everyone basically forgot about everything after a while because the degree of outrage over a mediocre feminist commentator was beyond stupid. There were suggestions that Anita fanned the flames herself for an economical source of promotion, plus any number of other allegations and whatnot. Somewhere in there, as though to prove the point, an ex-boyfriend of a female game developer (who releases her games for free, last I heard) made allegations about her sex life; evidence never eventuated. 

Everything sucked and no-one won, except for the people that learned that gaming culture was erring towards the hypermasculine too often and too much. In terms of actual industry changes, I don't think anything was accomplished, because we haven't exactly seen a wave of female protagonists emerge. Female main characters are still mostly an optional RPG thing through character creation, with defined main characters remaining overwhelmingly male. 

Mind you, this was years back and I didn't terribly care even at the time. So I've forgotten or was always ignorant about certain details.

Stormtroper

It's perhaps a good idea to link to the very heated thread we had on that, the closest thing to drama we had in over two years (I was completely prepared to put up an Akyuu avatar and start writing for the Drama Chronicles thread, and I wanted to name the entry "GamerGatecrash").

As for my views about it, I can't remember all that well, and the draft for the one post I wanted to make in that thread got caught in the lock, but I remember my opinion was more or less the same as Glenn's, and that I wished GamerGate had been less focused on winning an internet war against the SJWs for the keks and more like this.

One thing though, the gamers-are-dead articles look as stupid right now as they did back then.

InsanityAddict

Girl meets boy, girl gaslights boy, boy turns callout confessional into TMZ and doesn't post it to Tumblr or SRSmen but instead to SA and Penny Arcade forums. Nobody reads it anyway, /v/'s ranting is seemingly validated, standard chan death and rape threats occur, prima donna indies circle wagons.

 Chans do not understand that artist and critic circles have always been a circlejerk throughout history, journos reverse cause and effect with regards to why currently society allows sexist games, people expect journos to give a nuanced overview of this in 1500-words-or-so articles when even academic tomes over the course of decades have debated this without conclusion, folks believe that bannings and DMCAs are a good way to get something to blow over, Teridax-esque trolls latch onto the debate, every end of the political spectrum uses it to plug their Kickstarter or Patreon.

Basically this occurs:

https://popehat.com/2012/03/12/the-difference-between-us-and-them/

All social science on games is shite, nobody's come up with a way that defines objective journalism and all socially aware analysis of vidya is either freshman quality or utterly experiential fanfic tier, how social media platforms deal with doxing and death threats is basically obscure and whimsical, nobody can decide on what a good diverse character is, offendatrons all turn out to have been offensive idiots in the past and now suddenly style themselves as moral authorities, 50 or so peeps in Twitter manage to control the news with hashtags and Trump memes because all journos are on Twitter and everything that happens there is thus important, everybody infights and rakes muck, but at least you'll discover a number of good leftie bloggers (De Boer, Auerbach). Also, everybody has a typical mind fallacy about how you should deal with online criticism like emotional coping mechanisms are the same across the board, and no-one knows how to deal with mass society on the internet. 

I have some of the Dutch involved peeps on FB now. Pro is a heavily autistic brony who doesn't understand sarcasm and the anti is a poly marxist who keeps spamming a dudette who leans slightly pro with requests for debate. I'm sticking with middle-of-the-road XKCD style for now: https://xkcd.com/774/ .

glennmagusharvey

Yeah, Vorpy, you kinda missed our in-house Gamergate argument.  @ninjaclown turned out to be really pro-GG while @Zennistrad is very anti-GG.  I eventually came down on the side of anti-GG, though I think the whole flamewar was/is pretty stupid, but I fault pro-GG for not focusing better on real journalistic ethics issues such as the problem with review copies and publisher power, or the whole enthusiast press running on and feeding hype, as opposed to going after indie games and taking a culture war perspective.

The whole flamewar kinda blindsided me at first, which is funny -- though probably because I rarely even play the sorts of games that people are talking about in these arguments.

Honestly, GG as it happened was basically just a manifestation of an existing culture war over a gradual change in the customer base of gaming -- a gradual expansion and acknowledgement of audiences far beyond the "hardcore" crowd.  This, of course, included people curious about videogames as an art form and as a means (or not as a means) of social commentary, and there's also been a backlash against this, especially by people who may have seen gaming as a "safe space" where they can indulge some behaviors and interests that other people find unsettling or offensive.

The flamewar was sparked by this one case of a developer allegedly sleeping with a game journalist, but if it were only about that, it would be over in a day or two.  No, the tinder was already sitting there.  It had already kinda blown up with the Mighty No. 9 Dina controversy shortly before GG became a thing.

Eventually it just got all co-opted by people who argued past each other, and then some political nutjobs (such as Milo Yiannopoulos) got into the fray and made it worse.

InsanityAddict

More delicious drama: one of the muckraker/altright/troll chat groups got a leak recently, and it's just hilarious to see them flailing about in response- https://encyclopediadramatica.se/TheRalphRetort#.23OPWreckItRalph

Zennistrad

I was initially more on the fence with GamerGate (though leaning more towards opposing it), and it was the acceptance of Milo Yiannapoulos of Breitbart.com in a movement supposedly about ethics in journalism that convinced me that, whatever side I was on, I wanted it to not be GamerGate.

This is a man whose very first article on the developing Zoe Quinn controversy was to reveal her real name ("Zoe Quinn" being a pseudonym) when she wasn't using it publicly at the time. That alone is a violation of journalistic ethics, and he only got worse from there.

That said, I think talking about it now is old hat. It's pretty much a shambling corpse of what it once was, and any relevance that it still has can be distilled to the shittiness of individual figures and general talking points that aren't exclusive to GamerGate.

Stormtroper

Can't say I didn't root for the true believers in Gamergate.

artist and critic circles have always been a circlejerk throughout history

Not 3D modellers, we have an artistic inferiority complex.

More on topic, I think one thing we can learn from that thread is that as a forum just because we think a flamewar is dumb doesn't mean we won't be dumb about it.

(By the way, I didn't say anything at the time since the thing must've been left to blow over, but I was bothered by the fact that ninjaclown didn't get to defend himself due to the threadlock after being publicly insulted. I certainly wouldn't have liked that if it had happened to me. Can we allow users stand up for themselves if something like that happens again?)

vandro

My sympathies lied with the True Believers in gamergate, still does. But in the end PR is all that matters, so it doesn't amount to much. My distaste for manichean posturing cemented it for me. I guess that means I'll have to stop self-identifying as a lefty.

Bee

When I hear ethics in game journalism, I still tend to think more of big reviewers getting paid off by big companies to write glowing reviews of shitty AAA games -- EGM's infamous 9/10 for Colonial Marine comes to mind.  Like, I guess I've spent too much of my life seeing the biggest problems come from money trails inevitably leading to people with fucktons of money.

Honestly, a random indie game I wasn't interested in getting shilled by a journalist I'd never heard of from a source I never read, even if the sexual favor scandal had been true, wouldn't have registered as a blip on my radar.  I've seen indie devs do some very real shady shit -- they're people of all stripes like anyone else -- but they're so reliant on word of mouth recommendations that it tends to fall apart long before one ill-gotten rave review by a random dude does much damage.

Like, if Gamergate was actually about ethics, they would've castigated the male journalist as badly as Quinn.  Seeing how he was barely mentioned at all beyond being used as a channel to attack Quinn, I really do have to assume the whole thing was an outlet for misogyny.

glennmagusharvey

Stormtroper wrote: »

(By the way, I didn't say anything at the time since the thing must've been left to blow over, but I was bothered by the fact that ninjaclown didn't get to defend himself due to the threadlock after being publicly insulted. I certainly wouldn't have liked that if it had happened to me. Can we allow users stand up for themselves if something like that happens again?)

Feel free to use this thread to argue about Gamergate again, I guess, now that some time has passed since the earlier argument.

lrdgck

Like I once said, the creation of Hatred the video game may be considered a weird kind of Gamergate's trans-Atlantic echo.

glennmagusharvey

The Hatred issue definitely got subsumed into Gamergate and made GG more about the anti-political-correctness and anti-censorship political stances than it needed to be.

lrdgck

Also the reason it came to be, if I'm not mistaken, was because of echoes of Gamergate reaching us here. That's why I brought it up, 'cause I think it's kind of funny. If I am mistaken then it it kind of funny anyway. Some guys got the idea, apparently over the echoes of culture war going on further west, that they too should do their part, conveniently by creating a video game that's pretty much a serious Postal. Then there was that minor affair when someone on the other side failed to grasp the difference between "anti-communist" and "literally a Nazi", and lulz and butthurt were both had.

InsanityAddict

Something something deaths by mismanagement versus purposeful extermination something something RAC dog whistles. 

Stormtroper

Hatred somehow managed the achievement of making violence in video games controversial again. Yay for Jack Thompson.

^^ What's that thing about nazi anti-commies?

lrdgck

This is gonna be more than a single sentence.

As far as I remember: some commentary (before the game was released) noted one of the Hatred guys was seen in a T-shirt glamorizing the anti-communist resistance in the late 40's, and described that in terms of a hate crime game developed by neo-Nazi sympathizers. Now, that guy probably was the kind you can meet on a crazy right-wing rally, and these folks admittedly wouldn't end up on that T-shirt if they weren't darlings of the various right-wing crazies. (Oh, and if Hatred avoids the title of a hate crime game, it's
pretty much solely by the nitpicky virtue of you killing everyone, as opposed to a more specific target. But I digress.) But the catch is, no matter what else you can say about them (the resistance guys - and you can say a couple of varied things), they weren't Nazi. So, that commentary left a sour taste even if otherwise it's a pretty meh issue.

Anyways, it's fun to see what ripples GG makes.

KnowsNothing

I'm not sure how people missed this, but you do know that every single journalist, dev, etc etc involved in the actual corruption stuff and the follow up articles etc got laid off hard? 

The big corporations that owned the sites and the FTC descended hard on them afterwards and essentially laid off everyone and blacklisted them from working in the industry, so now all of them either work for the hardcore anti-GG places (because the actual feminists, trans etc etc had been denouncing them the entire time and wanted nothing to do with them either) or have left the industry entirely.

Leigh Alexander for example, the lady who wrote the dead gaming article thingy now works for some small blog group after she got booted as chief-editor of gamasutra, Zoe Quinn or whatever the hell her name is couldn't get a job if her life depended on it, Nate or Nathan or what his name was, the married guy she slept with got booted hard as well, and the list goes on and on and on, they almost totally cleaned house, the only ones who stayed were the guys who managed to stay neutral throughout the entire period (and as the anti-GG folks had been getting progressively more insane and firing anyone not joining up with them, coupled with the fact that several neutral folks who left because the others were getting very close to getting into illegal territory there was not a lot of people remaining).

And of course after that the FTC rewrote their advertisement guidelines in regards to online content so as to make what they had done illegal as hell.

So overall the real pro-GG folks who just stayed quiet and patient and actually contacted the correct people to let them know what was happening frankly came out on top by about 10 miles.

(And overall gawker lost over 11 million in lost revenue, lol)

Zennistrad

Call me skeptical. Gaters tend to be absolutely convinced of the rightness of their cause so it only makes sense that they would drastically overestimate their impact.

For example, the FTC guideline claim? What GamerGate actually did was get the FTC to update their FAQ... by asking a question frequently. I'm not entirely sure how that's considered a noteworthy accomplishment.

But if that really makes you feel better, congratulations I guess.

Vorpy

Mighty No. 9 Dina controversy

whats this

is it about breasts

glennmagusharvey

Vorpy wrote: »

Mighty No. 9 Dina controversy

whats this

is it about breasts

If you squint hard enough, I guess you can get a "yes" out of that question.

Bee

Mighty No. 9's community manager, Dina Something, basically decided to be the person at the Thanksgiving table who starts shouting nonstop about politics.

Like, as much as I personally agree with the vitriol she directed at GG (or at least at first -- she kinda went completely nuts after a while), community manager of a tenuous crowdfunded project is so not the place to do it.

glennmagusharvey

Okay, I should probably have elaborated.

People started skewering Dina for reasons aside from what she said.  Specifically, she drew a female version of MN9's main character, Beck, and people then took that as a sign that she wanted to use MN9 as a pet project for pushing "SJW" issues by doing things like shoehorning female protagonists into videogames.  At some point it was even argued that because Mega Man is male, therefore Beck should be male, and it would (somehow) destroy the creative vision of the game to make Beck female.  (Not to mention that (1) robots don't have gender, (2) Beck was never made female, and (3) 20XX has a female lead anyway.)

As for stuff she did say, I'm not that familiar with it, but apparently she said something stupid at some point that (allegedly) exposed that she had little experience with the Mega Man series and fandom, and thus probably shouldn't have been appointed community manager anyway.

Then there were allegations of nepotism, saying that the devs picked her only because she was in Japan, or something like that.  I have no idea how true these things are at all.

In any case, I heard that after some time she was no longer community manager anyway.

Also, FWIW, the Dina controversy happened before GG.

Bee

Yeah, like the shit that kicked it off was completely innocuous and utterly unworthy of controversy.  She wound up not helping in the slightest, though.

Much as I wish I could just freely tell misogynists to fuck right the hell off whenever, this is not the sort of shit you say in a CM position, especially not a crowdfunded one, to the people paying you:

glennmagusharvey

Bee wrote: »

Yeah, like the shit that kicked it off was completely innocuous and utterly unworthy of controversy.  She wound up not helping in the slightest, though.

I didn't mean to imply that she wasn't at fault; just that some of the complaints leveled against her were pretty ridiculous.

Do note that basically all of this is secondhand information, as I actually didn't bother hanging out on the MN9 forums.  That said, I tend to be someone who feels that the internet frequently overblows the magnitude and importance of controversies.

Edit: ^ lol, idiocy

InsanityAddict

Still not as bad as this clown: http://mashable.com/2014/03/06/kickstarter-comic-burns-books/

If you pay attention to KiA and Ghazi, once a two weeks or so they'll have a thread about affiliate links that aren't disclosed (threads are either "anti-GG publication does not comply with guidelines" or "here's a real ethical lapse and GG is nowhere to be found"), and they spam the people until it is put in clearly. The mutual unpaid FTC watchdog effect isn't that bad to have.