Vainamoinen

In the top 100 of things gamergate supporters are likely to forget, "It was proven that Anita Sarkeesian contacted the FBI for death threats" is probably somewhere among the first 30 entries. I wonder if Kern's similar claim here will ever be considered worthy of gamergate investigation.

Doesn't convince me at all, unfortunately. As with the recent study (Breuer et al.), the phrasing of the questions could render that data totally unusable. Phrasing matters. Gamergate supporters have all too often said that they're all for inclusion both in their games and in front of the screen. As a gamergate supporter, you can absolutely welcome diversity in games!* * as long as the game isn't based on any kind of historical era, wasn't meant to be a more Tolkienesque fantasy, isn't about sports, doesn't try to make an SJW political message out of it, doesn't force you to play anything but a straight male white main character (or 'gives you that option' respectively), as long as time honored game franchises are not changed in any perceivable way and 'gamer girls' offer themselves as willing girlfriends and/or fuck buddies. In other news: The Sarkeesian Effect makers have split up again! This time, it's serious.™ Cringeworthyness galore upon watching Owen's video. He's apologizing to Anita Sarkeesian for his partner Aurini, who wanted to 'reveal' in this film how Anita clearly was sexually abused by her father. Now that would have upped the inherent harrassment quite a notch... but seriously, even Owen can't really ignore that by its title alone, that 'documentary' is intended to be harrassment and harrassment only.

I'd be all for it... really, I'd be for it. The term 'gamergate' is shoved into the discussion, and I'm all ready to abandon it. We have a pretty universal activist problem in geek culture. To mere narrative, people react in a hyperbolic and highly emotional way. Mere details are supposed to 'ruin' an entire work of art. Criticism is directed against the creator/author directly, thanks to the wonders of the internet. And it often centers on only one central and possibly vulnerable person. Insults, threats, harrassment are common. Customers are asked to boycott franchises or entire companies. And all that is common regardless of the individual ideological motivation. All that may happen with feminism in mind. It may happen with free speech in mind. It may happen with the sole goal of harrassment in mind. Sure, video game culture sure takes that basic problem to the next level: Narrow and distorting perspectives from the US political sphere applied to ancient literary motifs of diversity and inclusion. Conspiracy type theories are concocted as to an organized or planned shift in narrative ideology. Attacks are diversified to include not just creators, but also academia, journalism and other media critics. "Corruption" becomes a concept that works without money involved. Women are targeted and women's interest and involvement in the media dismissed. An objectivity in art critique is asked for that is entirely alien to art. And essentially all criticism is seen as coming from forces outside the medium. If the problem is reduced to the activist, 'social outrage' problem, we approach the problem from a far broader perspective and definitely include what Alexander calls "shit bigots". I'm all for that. Yet of course the 'special distinction' of these problems is there in video game culture. Call it gamergate, call it cultural suicide of video games. That distinction would be lost.

Yup. I saw this posted in a forum, and the next post praised the good find. Another wonderful entry for the gamergater wiki or deepfreeze.it...

They readily believe this... http://thegg.net/general-news/leigh-alexander-and-the-sunset-fiasco-the-aftermath/ ...and they readily believe this... http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/06/29/breitbarts-milo-yiannopoulous-convinces-gullible-mras-hes-been-hired-as-a-mens-studies-professor-by-oberlin/ In both cases, there's no sense in going the "disprove the bullshit" route. On the contrary, a bit of applause for this level of stupidity is in order. What an achievement.

Gamergate: FIRST, you force a black journalist off twitter... ...and THEN, you really kick off the harrassment. Hey, I know shit about Steam as well! So obviously, I'm not a gamer in any perceivable way.

Sad to see AMD's final throes are a gamergate endorsement by Roy Taylor (AMD "Corporate Vice President Alliances", whatever that means). I am unable to gather a lot of outrage for this... I've had ATI cards in my desktop PC exclusively for 15 consecutive years, particularly as I wanted to counter the emerging Nvidia monopoly these last years. So it's just sadness when I look at the once proud company. But I can't really go on buying ATI cards when AMD doesn't advise their employees against speaking out for a harrassment campaign.

Yup, had exactly that leaflet in my post box. I have seldom read such a spectacular load of FUD. Wrote a lot of refutations on it, sent it right back to them, Gebühr bezahlt Empfänger. The best part was the "think of the kids" part. Because the fact of the matter is, THESE are our kids: White old men, afraid of the future. HAH! White old men, afraid of the PRESENT!

Actually, I can imagine Mark Kern wandering around E3 with a pack of those hate posters and a stapler... he's just the right kind of pathetic.

Whoa, those graphics.

Meanwhile, in gamergate... http://www.polygon.com/e3-2015/2015/6/18/8806411/anti-feminist-frequency-pamphlets-appear-on-poles-around-e3-convention

Castle in the Sky had robots. Not giant, but still.

The turtle has no name. And shouldn't there be a red panda in it?!

Anything that even remotely resembles a release window after that new trailer and announcement?

From the people who brought you #freebleeding ... comes a new and exciting trending hashtag, which is obviously entirely gamergate related... #WrongSkin. Courtesy also of Milo Yiannopoulos, Mark Kern and Mike Cernovich. One of these days, gamergate supporters should wake the fuck up. Fair enough! However, Marc Maron's text here is combined with Gavin Aung Than's pictures, which characterise social media less as "kid shit" and more as a drug. And that's what we're seeing, that's what I wanted to demonstrate: An addiction to, on the whole, meaningless expressions of appreciation through 'likes'. And I'm still much on the fence whether I'd even want to regard these kinds of achievement type instant gratification systems as "acknowlegement and encouragement". A ten word comment should still mean a million more.

Zoë's made a companion site for that one! http://www.gamesareforeveryone.com/

Something like it, maybe. Good analogy here.

Yeah... fuck reddit, but praise the mods that at least give some kind of shit about organized harrassment. http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/mcy7l/today_i_received_nonstop_phone_calls_and_emails/

This post is real.

Whoah. Needs correction in the first line: ... I have no idea whether it's even relevant at all that Ubisoft hasn't expressly invited kotaku to their press conference. It's not like that room has unlimited space, and it's really not as if kotaku was quality media (though they have made some progress this last year... I think, as a counterreaction to gamergate). It's the gg reaction that is so telling: Censorship, control of the press, selection of the press to achieve favorable coverage, death of internet journalism portals is all great as long as gamergate's enemies get the shaft. Every time something bad happens to a declared enemy of gamergate, gamergate must assume that it was gamergate related, their "victory", and that they "fought".

After these four pages, I'm still safely on the "it's excusable" side on the Witcher issue, with no actual moral obligation on the side of CDP (I don't think that this stance stifles criticism or is a "silencing tactic", not at all. Criticism and complaint without accusation and insult, that's what most people are doing here). I've seen some really strong points made as to why that inclusion wouldn't just have been a great opportunity for CDPR, but would also have added to the credibility of their vision. And that may be a bit of a change from how I perceived it earlier. To reiterate and build on the points that I agree with: the Witcher map is just too huge for lily white exclusively, the supposed epic scope is thus diminished and the vision less credible. The influences on the saga are definitely not just Polish folklore, so that makes for a very bad excuse. Even if it were, the historical adversaries of the Polish people would have been whitewashed out of the picture. "Historical accuracy" has nothing to do with it. Nothing against a story that focuses on a real life historical or cultural scenario, but that's not The Witcher. Being spread throughout the world, it doesn't even make sense that the fictional race representatives are all shown to be white. Dark skinned Elves e.g. make total sense. from the viewpoints of technology and clothing, The Witcher may not even be a middle ages scenario... more like the Rennaissance. Now... would The Bard's Tale 4, with its clear outspoken focus on Scottish culture and focusing on just a single city, also benefit from great diversity...? I do, and I particularly bring up the 'sex as the ultimate success' point in connection to Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Also seldom discussed, but very gamergate relevant: Why is the fact that almost every video game tells us that every conflict can be solved through deadly weapons not considered highly political in the present debate? I also share the "square one" sentiment. I'm fairly certain that we'll get there though, and some steps are inevitable. There will be developers – and gamergaters, of course – who will bring this discussion back to step one, to 1.0, as if no arguments were ever brought forward, with every utterance and every game. Yet if a reminder doesn't help, the solution to that is to ignore these people.

I know! And I'm proud. Still, I need to read all your stuffz to actually reply. Might be another few days.

I... ...what have I kicked off here...

Instead of focusing on the constant sexualisation of female characters in CDP's The Witcher 3, the discussion has veered into the direction of racism. Now, I don't really see a necessity for representation in fantasy settings if conflicts of race are already strongly mirrored in the presented fictional races (but, yeah, I could not be any whiter). However, when critics ask "...and why not?", gamergate supplies few answers – all very hollow. http://www.polygon.com/2015/6/3/8719389/colorblind-on-witcher-3-rust-and-gamings-race-problem http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2015/06/04/witcher-3-and-diversity/ "Cyberpunk 2077" will probably offer a far better solution – as gamergate's counter arguments do not even apply. Still, I'd even prefer they didn't let you customize the main character and just went with someone of color (and preset personality).

We've been discussing this at length over at the RTG forum. Ragnar Tørnquist sees particularly shorter, more narrative driven games endangered (in a series of tweets), and I tend to agree here. And Valve is not careful about fostering abuse. In fact, they encourage clear cut abuse by defining it as not being abuse: I wonder what Telltale has to say to this, as it could be quite threatening to their business model. Their 'first episodes' are quite often less than two hours nowadays. Season pass means that players feel like owning five episodes, but not getting 80% of their purchase for months. Participation in sales during a running Season is normal for Telltale. What keeps customers from playing the first episode, then handing the game back and wait for the summer sale? Valve has vowed to improve their support... and ta-dah, they're doing it on the backs of developers. SURPRISE. God forbid they hire more staff, god forbid.