Flynn

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Posts posted by Flynn

  1. Posted

    That's how I feel too.

     

    Wil Wheaton said it:

    The existence of a discussion about how women are portrayed in gaming, and whether that affects how welcomed women feel in the gaming community, isn’t an attack on you, Mister #NotAllMen. In fact, it isn’t and never was about you. And I won’t even dig into the insanity of expecting a review to be “objective”, when reviews are, by their nature, subjective.)

     

    I want games to be accessible to everyone, and as long as a small but loud minority of people can act like shitlords with impunity, large swaths of gaming will be accessible only to the most vile and wretched group of trolls. The more people game, the more games we’ll have available to us to play. The wider the demographic of gamers, the more diverse styles of games we’ll get to play. The sooner we who are the majority of decent people stand up and demand that people who are terrible in gaming be held accountable for their actions — actions which would, in many cases, be criminal if perpetrated in-person — the sooner we can all hold our heads up high and say, You’re damn right, I’m a gamer, and I’m damn proud of it.

     

    http://wilwheaton.net/2014/11/regarding-anonymous-gaming-trolls-tabletop-and-more/#more-4780

  3. Posted

    Yeah the Game_Jam article quotes a few sentences from Zoe Quinn and as far as I know nobody including Total Biscuit has any dispute with the facts as presented.  Yet Total Biscuit harps on this issue. Maybe he was friends with Zoe when he took down that quote, how can we know for sure?  These are the important matters GamerGate wants to iron out to make games journalism ethical.  It's bizarre.  Does he really have just no sense of perspective or is he just that much a jerk?

     

    On a lighter note, Jonathan Mann sings his GamerGate comments: 

  5. Posted

    So who the shit is this Mike Cernovich guy and why is he famous? I tried to look it up but it seems like all of my points of reference for why he's a big deal comes from his embarrassingly bad website or people making fun of things he wrote on the website. He's a lawyer, so he's probably not famous for that. What has he done other than have a huge fucking neck?

     

    He's doing pro bono lawyer work for Zoe Quinn's ex (who wrote the thing that fired GamerGate off). He also paid to get access to her court documents and then posted them, then hired a private investigator to look into her, etc.  

     

    He also got a lot of GamerGate fame by challenging the Gawker guy who made the bullying comment to a boxing match.  This was widely celebrated as a heroic deed (tweeted out by Total Biscuit for example) and he went all in on this tactic and started bullying people with charity donations: https://storify.com/x_glitch/when-the-gamergate-mob-targeted-anil-dash-for-no-r

  6. Posted

    Arthur Chu gives a heartbreaking take on GamerGate:

     

    But today Felicia Day crosses the street if she sees two guys in “Call of Duty” shirts. Today Felicia Day knows there are “fans” of hers diligently working to track her down, violate her privacy, collect her address. Today if Felicia Day saw a weird, depressed, standoffish Arthur Chu at a reception … she’d probably just walk briskly past me on the way to her car.


    And that 23-year-old version of me, today, would storm out and head home, hating himself the whole way back. And today if he logged online he’d have a roar of voices from his fellow gamers feeding that resentment — telling him to blame his problems on “elitist,” “popular” voices in the hobby, on out-of-touch women who don’t understand him, like Felicia Day and Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn.


    They’d tell him to vent his feelings about the “corrupt elites” ruining everything, that his energy could be usefully applied in barraging advertisers with emails and flooding celebrities’ Twitter accounts with probing questions. He’d get recruited into a pseudo-military outfit complete with “operations” and “targets.”

    And the world would become just a little bit worse.

     

    http://www.salon.com/2014/10/30/that_creepy_guy_from_the_internet_how_gamergate_shattered_faith_in_the_geek_community/

  7. Posted

    Older article, still feels very relevant:

     

    The most common framing of this situation among what you might call the 'anti-feminist' camp is that of patriotic Gamers rallying together to defend their beloved pastime from a bunch of women (and brainwashed men) who want to lay down rules about what you can and cannot put in a game. I've already written about what a fundamental misunderstanding that is, and I'm not going to repeat myself here. But aside from how baseless it is, it also reveals a very profound misunderstanding of who they are dealing with. I've been playing games ever since I was a child. I'm a very vocal supporter of games. I've spent years of my life studying them and building a career out of making games and contributing to games culture. I am clearly a 'gamer' by any reasonable definition, and yet I am frequently portrayed as being on the side that wants to destroy gaming. Things like this are why I find it difficult to take these accusations seriously.

     

    And of course, the same can be said of pretty much everyone being accused of trying to destroy games. A vocal minority of gamers seem to take it upon themselves to draw lines and exclude journalists, critics, game developers - people with a demonstrable history of love for video games, who (in most cases) have been contributing constructively towards games for most of their lives - from their own narrow definition of 'gamer', purely because they have incomprehensible opinions about how gaming relates to wider culture. When someone like Tim Schafer is getting "suicide suggestions" from people who claim to LOVE GAMES, then there's some incredible mental gymnastics going on.

     

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

  9. Posted

    While I haven't been posting jokes in this thread and I'm generally not a fan of memes, it's not because I'm trying to 'convert' anonymous GamerGate readers, should they exist, either.  This is a place to talk about stuff, right?  Should that be a concern?  I'm pretty much down to venting despair over the last two months myself.

  10. Posted

    Here's a bookmarklet that will try to translate hulk-speak into plain old English: http://simonganz.com/2013/04/the-dehulkifier/

    The part where he talks about the Sopranos was surprisingly powerful.

     

    I read the whole thing again with that converter.  It really gets at why GamerGate has made me so down on gaming and gamer culture and the feedback cycles that sustain this thing.

     

    The only positive thing from all this is seeing everyone in games who I follow and love come out so strongly against GamerGate.  Total Biscuit was actually the single person I had been following who was the exception.

  12. Posted

    Or Jonathan Blow:

     

    If you support harassment either directly or implicitly by group affiliation, please don't play my games. I do not want to make games for an audience of internet trolls, harassers, and boys who won't grow up. If I made my living from an audience like that, I would feel dirty and start looking for another line of work. So when a GGer tells me they won't buy my game because something just said does not sufficiently caress their oh-so-precious ego, I feel relieved actually. It means I am doing the right things in life.

    Pro Tip: If you claim to care about ethics, it is a wee bit of an inconsistent platform to try and use financial pressures to push people into acting against their ethics (and especially to take glee in that / get an ego boost.) I mean, it's obvious to everyone that GG is not at all about ethics, but I am mentioning just one of the many ways it's obvious.

  13. Posted

    Lead Writer of Dragon Age: 

     

    I’ve seen the @femfreq videos as well, and I’ve commented on them previously. When I did so, I got a deluge of exactly this type of response: “But she’s cherry-picking her evidence!” “Her views are biased!” “Everything about those videos is garbage, and she needs to be stopped!”

     

    Okay. Let’s pretend for a moment that, for those of you who feel this way, you’re absolutely right. My question is this:

    Why the fuck do you even care?

     

    Is there such a profound shortage of shitty opinions on YouTube or elsewhere on the Internet that the appearance of this one constitutes a crime in the making? Have you asked yourself why it’s this particular opinion that drives you up the goddamned wall? What do you tell yourself, if and when you stop for that moment of introspection?

     

    I was recently talking to a colleague who suggested a notion that’s stuck with me. It’s the idea that many of these people don’t think of feminism as a thing. Or, if it is a thing, it certainly has no bearing on them or on the game industry. It’s not real. A made-up problem.

     

    Since it’s not a real issue, so is the idea of women being subject to any kind of systemic abuse or oppression. “Hey, I’m a gamer—I’ve been ridiculed and marginalized as well. Why does nobody care about my problems? Everyone has issues, so why do I suddenly have to be the bad guy? You guys are oppressing me!”

     

    http://dgaider.tumblr.com/post/100838707464/wakeuplena-john-epler-you-either-havent

  15. Posted

    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.

     

    Came across this today from https://twitter.com/pixiejenni about why dialog is so impossible:

     

    http://geekessays.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/gamergate-patriotism-and-c-s-lewis/

     

    This is the crux of my issue with GG. Instead of recognising that its rallying cries are based on a selfish love – on an urge to defend what they see as theirs (true or not) – it instead claims it to be about ethics, justice – these higher, apparently transcendent goals. You cannot have dialogue with a movement that sees itself as this – as Lewis says, the only thing a side with those transcendent goals wants is annihilation of dissent.

    GG cries for ethics, for justice. But it harbours in its ranks and gives platform to the unethical, the unjust. It asks for less censorship, while encouraging the blacklisting of opinions they disagree with. It asks for less corruption, but keeps crying out the ‘youtubers are not journalists’ line when shown corruption there. It decries the use of metacritic in developers’ payrates, but attacks the journalists who scores are on it, rather than the publishers who hold the power. It holds up #notyourshield as a sample of its own diversity, all while upholding people like Milo who don’t believe transwomen to be women. As Lewis suggests – when you shout one thing, but act in an other way, you should not be surprised when people don’t want to hear you.

  16. Posted

    Jeff acknowledges people have been jerks on both sides, which I'm fine with.  He hits the most important parts: The targets of gamergate itself are not promoting ethics in journalism and are not about ethics in journalism.  Gamergate is making things worse.  "

    So when "GamerGate" rose up to cover over a campaign of harassment with a veneer of concern for the ethics of games journalism, it more or less set off every single disgust alarm I have. Though I'm sure some good people have been roped into this mess under this guise, the ethical concern portion of all this is largely a farce, a fallacy.

    Having people toss all discussion about ethics in games journalism under a bus to hide politicized harassment campaigns is sad for me, but I'll be fine. Games? Game developers? That's what's actually at stake. I'm not sure what the actual end goal of GamerGate seems to be, but it seems to be somewhere between "destroy the careers of anyone who would make a game that falls outside of a certain-yet-unspecified scope and/or topic" and "let's burn it all down because it's fun to see how much trouble we can stir up."

  19. Posted

    if i can take a moment of banality, it's a bummer that we're in a world where somebody named "Total Biscuit" wields some kind of significant power. 

     

    I don't have a problem with silly aliases on the internet.  One of it's more endearing qualities I think.  That's the last place I'd take issue with Total Biscuit.

  22. Posted

    The thing is, the bile that gets directed at Leigh is nothing new. She's had to deal with this sort of toxicity since forever. She is like the matador's red flag for shitty dudes.

     

    I vaguely recall a podcast in the long distant past where she said something about "the kinds of people who enjoy the writing in Bioware rpgs" and totally having a knee-jerk defensive reaction (I was playing Dragon Age at the time and loving it).  In retrospect I wonder why I had such a strong response  -- I'm sure I've been a hundred times more snarky in off the cuff remarks before and especially if drinking.  I could have read the tone as particularly offensive in part because I was more inclined to see women as outsiders in gaming, so it sounded like an outsider talking down on games and the people who like who like them.  Certainly with the gamers-are-dead article *today* I don't think if a man had written the exact same article they would nearly have gotten as much shit.

     

    And the asymmetric format of twitter can really magnify tensions.  You see a mean tweet and think woah, that seems pretty hurtful. Then you realize: there are 100 people shouting at that person, but you only see the lone frustrated tweet they let out in response.