Gormongous

Reading the 8chan threads linked in that post, I'm shocked again by people stating over and over in different ways that no belief can be sincerely held if it disagrees with one they hold. William Gibson must be the victim of a conspiracy, of manipulation, of brainwashing. He must be trolling, he must be under pressure, he must be afraid. He can't actually believe what he says, because it's not what they believe. It was said a while ago in this thread, but it bears saying again: I worry about the incidence of mental illness in #GamerGate. A lot of these people are clearly neurodivergent in a way that is causing them distress and dysfunction, but do not acknowledge it and have instead become attracted to a movement filled with delusional thinking. I have no idea how to do outreach there and it upsets me to no end.

I understand that position and have some sympathy for it, but like you said near the end, it doesn't really hold up at all now. "There are a few extremists in our otherwise reasonable movement" and "There are a few reasonable people in our extremist movement" are situations in opposition to each other, but a lot of publications positioning themselves on the sidelines seem content to treat themselves as functionally the same, like just one instance of extremism is enough to tar everyone else (and one instance of reasonableness is enough to legitimize everyone else), in which case a centrist stance is the only reasonable one. I almost prefer Polygon's "This whole thing is so fucked up, we didn't know what to do" better than portraying the stakes of the issue in a certain way to make their position of convenience also the most correct one to have. I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree with you entirely, but what exactly is your reasoning that the paucity of cogent talking points against #GamerGate is fueling the movement? I don't know for sure, but I assume from my various interactions online that the same biases and reliance on single-stream media that have caused the movement to cohere also serve to exclude conflicting narratives, regardless of clarity and incisiveness. Both the best summaries and the least confrontational summaries that I've read, Deadspin being the most notable of the former, are flooded with comments parroting the same talking points as day one of the movement. There is no change and certainly no consciousness-raising evident there. The best I can say is that there is some more sophistication to how those same points are articulated, but we can source those directly back to 4chan- and Reddit-led efforts to clean up the movement's image. There's no evidence I can find that opportunities for a dialogue have been missed, not without total concession to the reality and legitimacy of #GamerGate's claims.

Quoted for truth. I understand GiantBomb's interest in not engaging with #GamerGate, because it risks making them a target for hate and bogging down their site, but to paint that as the smart and courageous decision is a little disingenuous. When has a hate group ever been derailed from its agenda by the refusal of its putative opponents to acknowledge it? Not in my knowledge. I also am still skeptical of the "both sides are too extreme" argument. If there was a #GamerGate advocate getting even remotely the same level of hate as Sarkeesian or Quinn, why do we not know about it? #GamerGate is so much more organized than its many detractors, surely it would be a simple matter to tell 8chan or Reddit their sob story and get it all over Twitter, but instead we have loads and loads of hearsay, like "My friend's cousin was told to go die by an anti-GG Twitter account" and "My brother-in-law's coworker lost his job because of his support of GG," which are impossible to verify but still too many outlets take at face value in the interest of appearing balanced. It's so frustrating, especially because baiting #GamerGate into acts of open misogyny and harassment is as easy as falling down some stairs.

That's an interesting point. People always talk about "gameplay first," but there'd be rioting in the streets if you were just using a laser pointer to intersect different moving rectangles of various colors. The highly political (that is, offensive) nature of the theme is essential to this game's alleged appeal. They don't just get to handwave that away.

Not to detract from the actual discussion going on here, but Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn.

One of my friends here did geocaching for a second date. The relationship worked out, at least in the short term, and he never believed her when she said it was in spite of the geocaching.

Make no mistake, he's still petulant about it and admits to nothing specific, but he does back down, which is rare enough these days.

Actually, looking at the full conversation on Twitter, it's all several dozen people just laughing at the guy as he becomes more and more confused and defensive, before Walker apologizes for allowing the ridicule and the guy accepts his own mistake with some small grace. It's sad as hell that this is not that far from better interactions I've seen surrounding #GamerGate.

To bring the topic back to something else, here's a really detailed breakdown of the sources for the language used in the latest death threat against Sarkeesian. I need to thank #GamerGate and the MRA movement for turning me onto We Hunted the Mammoth.

I hadn't seen it yet, but it's unbelievable. "Your death threats are unjustified, but enough about that. The cause for which you are making death threats is totally justified." I'm surprised he didn't plug Penny Arcade by name as an alternative to the "contradiction in terms" that is games journalism. I know I should be used to fringe publications using #GamerGate to build a larger audience by now, but still! What an ugly little empire they run.

Nah, it's about not hurting the feelings of people who are trying to ignore death threats made by other members of their subculture in order not to have to say or do anything about them. Let me say again: if you feel guilty or ashamed for being a gamer, it's because of the people doing bad things in your name, not the people pointing out the bad things being done.

Why would anyone be mad at Sarkeesian and not the person who threatened to shoot up a school because a feminist game critic was going to give a speech there? One of those two is blackening the name of "gamers" everywhere and it's not the person retweeting a bald fact.

I think that focusing on Sarkeesian is really misguided. You know who should have known better? The people who threatened to shoot up a school. Sarkeesian choosing to retweet a tweet that simply states what happened is so insignificant in comparison as to be a non-issue here. Why should she have to police her behavior as though it's been remotely responsible for anything that's been happening?

Yeah, and my institution actually pays fairly well compared to other places. As an adjunct professor, you get paid anywhere from $500 to (maybe, on very rare occasions) $4500 to teach one class for one semester. If you want something approaching a living wage, you'll probably have to teach three classes a semester, which is pushing eighty hours a week of work to prep and grade. Meanwhile, you're getting maybe two percent of the revenue that the college or university makes from the class that you create, teach, and support entirely on your own. This is the state of the academy in America right now. Honestly, I can't think about it for more than a couple minutes at a time. There's so much anger and anxiety there for me.

Maybe he's just been reading up on recent police responses to assaults on women. I mean, after all, a victim looks like a victim. Also, in more seriousness, I am stunned by how many (male) Twitter personalities have observed the harassment being perpetrated on Twitter against women and decided that the correct response is to tell these women, "Oh yeah, that happens to me sometimes. Just walk it off." How has receiving hundreds of death threats daily been normalized for these people? How is this normalization not the social issue of the year? I agree. I almost suspect that we've all concluded they just want attention because what else could any reasonable person expect to get from their behavior in that situation.

I hate to play the card back at you, but no, I read your post just fine. You've inserted a lot of exclusionary language into your paraphrases of what I said to make it seem like I'm talking about the defining characteristic of this specific reactionary movement rather than a characteristic, just one that occurred to me and of which I haven't seen much discussion. I also said absolutely nothing about what is and isn't important moving forward in terms of outward-facing activism, because I agree with you there, but if you want to paint me otherwise, I suppose that's fine, too. However, I do take some issue with the notion that because hate groups can coalesce around anything, what they actually coalesce around is not germane to the broader discussion. To bring it back to my academic specialty, it's almost universally agreed that the sub-Roman kingdoms from the fifth century onward would eventually have been united under the rule of a single one, which just happened to be the Franks. The fact that it could easily have been the Burgundians, the Lombards, or the Visigoths doesn't diminish the historical interest in knowing why it was the Franks. Likewise, the fact that it is more or less inevitable that misogynistic hate groups mobilize on the internet under some banner does not diminish the social interest in knowing why one of those banners is video games.

I wish there were a teaching adjunct union I could join without becoming a literal pariah in higher education. My five-year assistantship runs out next academic year and, though I'd like to keep teaching at a college level, I am really having trouble with the idea of working forty hours a week for $3,000 a semester while also finishing my dissertation, especially when my institution is making $200,000 in tuition per class assuming all twenty spots are filled by students.

No, I don't think it's "taking Phelps/Ropers at their word" to accept that there is something in the Bible, however unintentional to its putative creators, that enables their specific breed of hate. Again, I am not proposing a causal relationship, but a reduplicative feedback loop where certain types of people with certain kinds of beliefs find certain kinds of messages in certain types of media, an intersection that plays a part in creating these specific kinds of hate groups. There is no internet hate group trying to protect the blockbuster movie from the indie scene, no internet hate group trying to defend young adult fiction from the critical establishment. #GamerGate is about video games and women and harassment because of discrete factors that we should also try to identify, not just some historical accident that is only meaningful as part of a bigger picture. That's the main thing that bothers me about summary articles, like the Jacobin one posted by Archie a dozen pages back, that try to integrate #GamerGate into a historical meta-narrative. They add context but remove specificity, when both are needed for a holistic approach to neutralizing such movements.

Can we spin this out a bit further, then? What discussion of Phelps that I've read definitely acknowledges that there's a bilateral dimension to their rhetoric of hate. Their hate informed their reading of the Bible, and the Bible informed their understanding and expression of hate. There's an interdependency like I see with #GamerGate and video games. It's certainly not a causal relationship and I feel the same trepidation as Smart Jason in articulating anything that could be perceived as such, but there are elements in games, especially in the intensive consumption of a certain type of game combined with the mental and emotional ramifications of a self-isolating lifestyle, that have no doubt driven a lot of the hatred we've seen here in particular directions that are entirely missing from virtually every other realm of media discourse besides maybe comics, which also happens to share many of the generic issues of video games. As a whole, I'm somewhat cautious defining hate just as a homogeneous force that's existed throughout history. That's certainly true, to a greater extent than I can usually acknowledge for the sake of my own sanity, but it's also true that hate manifests itself in certain places and ways according to very specific circumstances that are important to be understood by us if we hope to answer it. I think the intersection of video games, patriarchy, and internet culture has been fertile soil for this specific reactionary hate group like a global depression or the expansion of the voting franchise has been for others.

I would really like if you did, though I wouldn't blame them for not wanting to get back into it a third (or fourth?) week running. You're especially right to bring in the idea that gaming has made empowerment synonymous with violence. I don't know how much further it goes, more just because I worry. Also, the sheer panic of #GamerGate surrounding #StopGamerGate2014 is a little heartwarming to me, but only because I'm sick undo death. I read a fairly long Reddit thread desperately trying to figure out which troll/hacktivist collective is responsible for it, with several "firsthand sources" naming groups like GNAA only for their members to show up and disavow knowledge. The inability of so many people on Twitter, 8chan, and Reddit to understand that this is not some kind of raid but a direct consequence of #GamerGate's preference for terror tactics over winning hearts and minds is nothing less than stunning to me.

Yeah... When these things happened before I had this forum, it was really easy to let Facebook and the comments sections of various articles be my way to take the temperature. If I had to do that for #GamerGate, I would probably be despairing right now. But I have you guys to center me and I'm confident that we're all together fighting the same fight here against hatred, cruelty, and misogyny. Regarding the shooting threat and the 8chan post Henroid linked, I'm really shocked at the conviction of these people that violence just has to be the way to win this culture war. They'll keep sending graphic death threats to women and whoever supports them, even though those very threats are the most common means by which the movement is discredited. It makes me wonder if that early Cracked article, which made a point of ridiculing #GamerGate for using Dark Souls to explain its determination, is right that video games are not only the pretext for this movement but also the reference for its tactics. Some quests can be completed through dialogue, but not many, and killing people is always the most efficient way to progress through the main plot and stop the ancient evil. I wouldn't normally subscribe to such a simplistic model of behavior, but nevertheless I'm beginning to think that the typical adolescent male tendency towards violence, reinforced by the tropes of the video games they play, is taking a conspicuously prominent role in #GamerGate's "problem-solving" efforts.

Basically everything that people predicted would be wrong, incomplete, or buggy is wrong, incomplete, and buggy. The vaunted proto-cultures are lacking basic information and regularly fail to generate melting pots and dynasties. The Charlemagne events are railroaded as all-get-out and make his empire almost a certainty unless he dies or the events break. The new "custom title" system has instant de jure drift upon creation, so the current de jure map and system might as well not even exist for the player now. The "assassination" button has been removed, but plots are otherwise unchanged and now targets can go into hiding, so killing someone that you can't just imprison and execute is effectively impossible. Jihads and crusades are firing in the eighth century. Retinues have been heavily nerfed, both in terms of manpower and cost, but troops for events and adventurers are largely unchanged. The religion, culture, and political map is an incomplete mess, with more out-of-place than in place. Allies are incorrectly flagged as hostile to you in some wars. The much-awaited "dynastic chronicle" is a computer-edited version of the event log at the bottom of the screen, even less detailed and interesting than the feature in Europa Universalis III. There's not a single positive thread on the front page of their forums right now. Even Paradox advocates in the negative-to-neutral threads are mostly sticking to the talking point of "hey, it's better than Rajas of India was on release," which is kind of like comparing the Iraq/Afghanistan War favorably to Vietnam. I have no idea what's happening with Paradox now, but they've lost a seven-year customer with this half-baked, scatter-shot, design-from-the-gut shit. They'll have to earn the right to have my money spent on them again.

Well, the tweet validates the fundamental belief of all #GamerGate people and then implies that that belief is connected to a global conspiracy that has made the evening news, all in an offhand attempt to co-opt their movement. It reads as half-baked pandering to me. I would love for someone to tell whoever runs the Wikileaks twitter that #GamerGate has no problems with huge corporations and that most of its targets are independent journalists criticizing mainstream practices. That would be a nice oopsie.

That makes me trepidatious. I used to follow Erik Kain regularly, but his response to #GamerGate was a stubborn insistence on the middle path, which he didn't reevaluate but rather just restated with increasing volume when the misogynist terrorism of the movement continued. After the third editorial from him that week to the tune of "there's still something to salvage here, gamers, if you'd just stop the overt harassment," I decided my RSS reader was too crowded for him anyway. I'm not surprised that he's part of this entire ill-conceived project (which I really can't believe: "Women and Their Abusers, Point/Counterpoint").

My main issue, and one that the podcast kind of dances around, is that the endgame is almost nonexistent. As you reach the last fifty turns or so, you're occasionally and diffidently informed of whatever victory conditions you're near, but you have to dig through several menus in order to find out what those conditions exactly are. They're a flat list of percentages, of course: the amount of land held, the amount of top-tier techs researched, the amount of time spent at peace. The AI seems unaware of these conditions and of everything else, which is almost a mercy compared to Civilization V's sometimes illogical and always annoying meta-aggression, but it does mean that you can coast into an easy victory whenever you feel like it without there being much of a gotterdammerung with any of the major players. Over a half-dozen full games, I've never felt hard-pressed to win before my opponents do. My most recent game, there were still several provinces that my resource-starved opponents had left unoccupied while I bumbled towards the tech victory. The one before, I conquered the entire world with a single army without any of my opponents making an effort to counter my rapid expansion. Both were on Hard but weren't hard. I'm not asking for an endgame dogpile, because those are invariably awful, but Endless Legend often comes off as though it's more surprised than you that the game ended when it did. I expect this is something they'll improve for their next effort as much as they've improved the factions from Endless Space.