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Thoughts on the Zoe Quinn controversy, "Gamergate", the "death of gamer culture", etc.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Seriously, when will people ever learn to not use judgemental words and simply state facts as is?
Like, instead of calling someone a "liar", state that someone allegedly lied about [topic].
Also,
>Brings up Breitbart several posts after we mocked it.
Welp, the thread has jumped the shark, although we've run out of new material anyway. Thanks for playing.
When that kind of rhetoric doesn't get people elected or 20 million listeners per week.
Just to point out though, "allegedly" is often a weasel word.
I missed the earlier discussion and Ninjaclown relinked it two posts above my reply for whatever reason, it and I was commenting on it.
Yes, indeed, it's a weasel-word, and it's for precisely the situation when I have heard one or more accounts that something has happened but am not yet willing to put my own credibility on the line to claim that it did.
^^Sorry, that point was not directed towards you, but meant to be added to yours in regards to Ninjaclown infodumping while seemingly ignoring the discussion up until this point. I agree with your points.
New material is constantly popping up. We've still got the FBI follow-up to the threats, the dox dump from the GameJournoPros group and the fallout from the 4chan moratorium to wait on, with 8chan's /v/ being the new fallback place.
In case I have to repeat it, I am just posting stuff as I learn about it because it's fascinating to me on a human level. Censorship is one the things I absolutely despise, and if I hear about mass bannings and locked forums forbidden to talk about one specific topic, that sounds hella fishy to me. It's one of the reasons my family left China decades ago, because they were told their social roles and what they were/were not allowed to say, do, which political institutions they were allowed to become part of, etc.
Sorry for talking about myself, I actually hate that too. As someone mentioned, focusing on personal background distractions from the real issues behind the scandal, which is the lack of integrity in journalism and subsequent coverup.
No, it's okay. In fact, I think it's a good thing you're describing why you're interested in something, so that allows the rest of us to understand your perspective on it.
Also, I am quite well aware breitbart is little more than conservative tabloids, but I post things on specific points when I believe they are valid. It's terrible knowing valid proof of unethical behaviour comes from freaking 4chan and similar sites, because most people can dismiss them as harassing "innocent" people as usual. I believe that's the reason many people are on the fence about gamergate. It's like KKK uncovering a conspiracy, they're right but they're also the freaking KKK, why should people believe them.
My problem is still the part where "a woman had sex" is unethical behaviour.
Can we at least get some nuance between that position and "hurr she intentionally cuckolded him because of the double standards of feminism"? The dude and dudette are both terrible at communication, manipulative, passive-aggressive, and it's a textbook trainwreck of co-dependency and mutual emotional abuse. If this shit was genderflipped, Joe Quinn would be propped up as the next toxic Schwyzer clone, followed by a flood of harassment towards all his bedpartners from /v/ and assorted websites. You bet your butt stories about the indie scene protecting male figureheads that have superficial progressive credentials would surface.
Yeah but see none of that actually has anything to do with journalistic ethics. Her boyfriend was justified in dumping her sorry ass, sure.
If a male game dev was accused of "tearing the industry apart" because he cheated on his girlfriend, I would find that equally ridiculous, and if he were receiving harassment anything like what Quinn is receiving I would be pissed off about that too. We all know neither of those things would ever actually happen though.
From what I've seen, I think the biggest peeve is the sheer censorship. Whether the accusations are justified or not, people want the chance to debate these issues, whether in forums, videos, livechats, articles and counter-articles, whatever. Censorship is the complete opposite, it means "shut up, your race/gender/profession/political background deems you unfit to even mention the subject". Not being allowed to speak up is the worst feeling in the world, at least to me, because it means someone in a higher position of authority is talking down to you and reminding you that you hold no power. Do some people throw shit on both sides? Of course, it's The Internet. People shouldn't be distracted by the mud slinging people or shunning entire sides of a conflict by generalizing them all to be "social justice feminazis" or "crying man-children". That's not justified in any situation. Sorry if I sound like rambling.
^^It would happen, just from the other end of the aisle, and on a smaller scale(SJWs still do not have a hub with the sheer numbers of 4chan). It would get less publicity for Joe Quinn, zilch haxxor antics, the focus would be on bothering employers/trying to get the person banned from cons instead of harassing the family and most of the Gamers-R-Dead outlets would focus on /v/ going after all of his bedpartners, while the MRA/libertarian side of things would decry the demonization of male sexuality to a ridiculous degree.
^This level of discourse has always occurred, there is no such thing as a clean debate devoid of underhanded tactics, websites who interpret their rules creatively to surpress dissenters, mobs bullying people from social media, mischaracterizing positions and having backdoor discussions to present a united front.
^^ No, I agree with you that people should distinguish between the messenger and the message.
The problem is, the credibility of the message -- and correspondingly, whether one would want to publicly support it in a place of public discourse -- is affected by the credibility of the messenger. But the credibility of the message then also further influences the credibility of the second messenger who subsequently adopts that message. And thus begins a long chain of rotten apples spoiling entire barrels, when there are apples to be spoiled -- in other words, information whose truth value may be in dispute, and which cannot be easily verified by first-person contact with the primary source.
The closest equivalent case I can think of at the current moment is Stardock CEO Brad Wardell being accused of sexually harassing Alexandra Miseta. To be fair, the case was dismissed with an ambiguous conclusion, but in the big picture, it was a small drop compared to the Zoe Quinn case and few people even bother tracking Wardell's antics nowadays. So there's my example. Do you have a non-hypothetical case study that a male developer would be treated the way she was?
The thing that baffles me most about all this is that, what is it called, the Streisand effect I think, where you draw attention you yourself by saying there is no problem, so of course average people will want to know exactly what "there is no problem" is *cough* Tiannamen Square *cough*. If the accused publications just apologized and fired those journalists who did not fully disclose their intimate relationship with their subjects that result in conflicts of interest it would have blown over, or they could ignore it so no average person knew or cared what was going on. They could have avoided all this. Instead, various media figures banding together to lock and ban their own websites en masse did the exact opposite and attracted scrutiny to themselves. They really shot themselves in the feet.
Not that I don't agree with the Streisand effect being the primary cause of the whole mess, but what do you mean by "conflict of interest"? I ask that because people seriously lack perspective as to what constitutes a conflict of interest. Case in point, the disproportionate focus on indie devs compared to larger gaming corporations who actually have the power to manipulate, say, Metacritic.
From what I gather, I think the internet have been calling it the Five Guys aspect, Quinn managed to win personal favours from several figures in games journalism to accomplish things like winning an indie dev contest where the judge was someone she slept with, or convincing them to band together from competing publications to protect her reputation despite their profession by nature demands their neutrality. There's many sources if you do a google search, but it's near impossible to find a video or page without a title that immediately tells you which side on the controversy they are.
This mailing list was recently leaked that suggests many journalists are compelled to defend her. The strange thing that eludes me is exactly what do journalists from competing publications have to gain from defending one person who is not a fellow journalist, which while unethical I would at least understand.
In addition, there was this screencap of anonymous game journalists saying they were kept silenced out of threatening to be fired if they "stepped out of line". Normally I would tell you guys it's 4chan, so use your own discretion, but 4chan's mass ban and thread lock in the wake of similar mass bans at other forums (I thought any post on 4chan was allowed no matter how reprehensible unless it was illegal like child porn) leads me to believe some damage control is being attempted, but I won't speculate who and on whose behalf. Reminds me of how political parties attempt damage control by threatening certain members not to speak out (hypothetical situation, I'm not talking about specific parties or countries).
That underlined section calls into question their reliability. Those are potentially libelous accusations to make, and the fact that you aren't willing to immediately post the sources yourself is a red flag that indicates a lack of confidence in them. Also, if you think the title matters so much, you've pretty much admitted there's a vested interest in making the accusations. "Some bloke at the pub" saying something doesn't prove anything.
I'd seriously like to move on from Zoe Quinn, since if it's really about game ethics, she's nearly irrelevant to the discussion and we already know that the controversy against her was astroturfed. People are just trying to flog a dead horse at this point with regards to her manufactroversy.
You're thinking of the 4chan sub-board /b/ the other boards have more specific rules about what can be posted, but things such as Doxxing and invasions/raiding are also against the global site rules. Of note, Moot cites raiding as the reason gamerghazi threads are being deleted and people are being banned. Just looking at the reddit primer on it I can see why he would cite that rule.
I would honestly love to stop talking about Quinn, because from what I've read she was only the catalyst. It's all the more confusing to me when sites like Cracked post an article written by her suggesting she was the focus of the controversy, then later similar articles with a spin like "gamers don't respect women" until I found out her article brought a surge in their traffic. I have no concrete proof, but the current pattern indicates Cracked will write inflammatory articles if it brings in traffic. Sad really, I once respected their science articles.
Okay, now I'm done talking about her, haha.
Ahem.
Ahem
...you just realized that?
Game developer no, closest thing that pops up in my mind is how Tiger Woods was raked in the media, but that's not an ideal comparison because a)prominent tabloid target and b)celebrity inoculates from that shit c)his mistress got the gist of the death threats.
You want citations, fine, but I honestly believe this will devolve into an argument over which of our links are more valid or unbiased than the other. So be it.
The allegations started from this post by a distraught ex-boyfriend (thus beginning what is called the Quinnspiracy), where internet users began to gather up evidence that this Quinn person had been involved in questionable dealings such as (but not limited to) pretending to be harassed by an imageboard because it had the stereotype of the game playing basement dweller, lied about being having sensitive information leaked (she later deleted the post), joined then accused other female game developers offering to make games for free of misogyny to destroy their credibility and add financial strain from legal battles (and then tried and failed to bribe them to hush up) only to promote her own game event that does not exist and has a page that donates to her paypal account, Totalbiscuit was attacked by Quinn's fans for a blog post and had a DMCA notice takedown Quinn sent herself. She has also lied about donating to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.
I would truly recommend Internet Aristocrat's Quinnspiracy videos, they are a great introduction explaining how deep the corruption goes. And I didn't even mention the "Five Guys" she had favours from which leads to...
GamerGate. The Fine Young Capitalists, the female game developers Quinn tried to destroy manage to recover explain how games journalism became sensationalism driven, many journalists posted similar articles criticizing their readerbase on the same day while defending Quinn, multiple threads on Reddit banned by a mod who was an associate of Quinn, journalists are being blacklisted for not adhering to an agenda, a leaked email discussion between various journalism sites debating whether or not to defend Quinn in articles (who is not a journalist, so that would be a conflict of interest ie close relations between journalists and subjects). I haven't even gotten to the five people in particular, that would take another post, and frankly I'm ready to sleep at this point.
For now, I'll finish with the fact that game devs are tired of being pushed around, being attacked such as getting "doxxed" (having personal documents leaked) (the autistic developer who I already linked another post, Glenn agrees it's a good post), being accused of racism/sexism/bigotry when there is none and there are devs who cannot openly support GamerGate out of fear for their careers. I may have more to say on it later.
One final thing, I think this post explains how people can be mislead by agenda driven media and thus disbelieve GamerGate at first.
That long ass post was to prove I have done my best to thoroughly read up on this movement, because it was censorship happening in real time and controlled by one or a few groups in authority. I have no problem if anyone disagrees, it's simply the conclusion I have reached that GG has more valid concerns.
Vivian James cosplay: http://hideo-brojima.tumblr.com/post/95795147744/uh-i-found-an-old-wig-and-this-just-happened
Let's dissect this from the top:
>it's unclear whether or not she actually cheated on her ex due to the it's-complicated limbo: what's clear is that she sucks at interpersonal communication, self-care and practicing what she preaches about clear consent. Attribute this to malice or stupidity as you see fit
>the Wizardchan false flag was set up by the CWCWiki forums, since Quinn got in a slapfight with them in December she naturally assumed it was them
>the hack has all the makings of a panic attack action
>the TFYC fiasco was mostly the work of the gaggle of SJW followers she collected in the wake of the December slapfight: she did dick all to reel in these goons, however
>the DMCA notice could technically be from someone trying to stir the pot, since her doxx were leaked at an earlier time and could have been used to false-flag the false-flag, though panicky control-everything response seems the more likely scenario in this case
>the donation wasn't a lie: http://theflounce.com/ifred-national-suicide-prevention-lifeline-state-relationship-zoe-quinn-depression-quest/
>Quinn's game jam is still planned at a future stage, presumably: this is again in line with her being absolute shit at communication
>the indie scene is an incestous clusterfuck of dysfunctional hipsterbeards with largely the same progressive views: this is basically every bohemian art scene ever, where promotors, critics and artists go to the same parties and hook up all the time. this also explains why they're utter shit at PR and adhere heavily to the Geek Social Fallacies(defend the tribe at all costs), which isn't strange in the face of the typical chan bigotry("hurf durf get gassed, feminazi slore", "Sarkeesian is evidence that you should never send a Turk to do a white man's job", etcetera)
In short, never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, and face the fact that both sides of this fiasco are playing dirty(or at least attempting to, and fucking up at every turn).
Given how InternetAristocrat reacted to an earlier situation involving a Mighty No. 9 forum staff controversy, and just from the first ten or so seconds of his video about Zoe Quinn / GamerGate /etc., I am disinclined to place my trust in him.
(For what it's worth, I watched his earlier video.)
Also, his videos are long, and not succinct.