Vainamoinen

I absolutely agree, with just a small twist. I've abandonned the idea that gamergate started August 28th, 2014. At the very least, the movement started with the attacks on the Tropes vs. Women Kickstarter in 2012. It was just labeled last August. And it will still be the same movement when gaters relabel it eventually (one of these months, they may find out they've named their cult after an exemplary slutshaming tweet). Yes of course that shit has always been there. Sad Puppies 1 and 2 may reflect that idea. The relationship between GG and SPG is diffuse of course — but somehow, I think the number of assholes is limited enough that we might find the same people fighting in both wars. I'm still certain that sci-fi, as a time-honored narrative form with diversity and cultural analogy at its very center, is making mincemeat of the puppies, with an adequate backlash on the 'other' cultural war.

Gamergate is branching out. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/the-culture-wars-come-to-sci-fi/390012/ http://grrm.livejournal.com/417521.html Personally, I welcome how the same people who constitute gamergate's ideological foundation now openly branch out the anti-diversity hence "corruption" witch hunt to encompass Sci-Fi literature, maybe soon even the entirety of geek culture. That could have quite wonderful results. Gamergate's claims are now contrasted against a far older, far more grown up narrative medium the fans of which have actually been on the forefront of diversity for a long time. Gamer culture is, after all, not synonymous with geek culture. I am quite hopeful that the "Sad Puppies'" attacks led against the Hugo awards will prove to be desastrous to their instigators. Sci-Fi was attacked, so we WILL see a considerable backlash from funny hair & hat people, one that might even affect gamergate.

I listened to just about a minute in some places of the video, and stumbled on exactly this. Maybe "SJW" means "funny hair and hat person". Like, FH&HP. That's a great signature, really.

Gaters have a new favoritest study of allest of timest, and it hails from Cologne! It was great reading the article on reaxxion, which reviews the study on the basis of the abstract alone. I myself didn't read the study because I don't exactly have 51$ ready, but judging from the information in this fairly nifty and balanced overview, the problem I have with the study lies in the questions asked in the telephone survey, in their relevance and in their directness. They asked people to rate their agreement with these three statements: "The man should be responsible for all major decisions made in a family" "In a group of male and female members, a man should take on the leadership" "Even if both partners work, the woman should be responsible for taking care of the household" In my opinion, that is an extremely high entry bar for sexist notions. My expectation would be that even rampant sexists wouldn't overtly agree with those statements due to obvious societal stigma (particularly not in Germany); and in the context of this whole discussion, this kind of sexism simply isn't that relevant. The questions do not serve the underlying study. Today we're not facing people who say "men should be in charge of a family", they're saying "the video game medium was created by men for men, and it should remain like that forever". And, Doug, is there any particular reason you're mentioning giantbomb.com...??

Looking forward to the respective GG articles!

Absolutely. I do vote, but increasingly do not see how any party in my country would ever 'deserve' that vote. Nor do I perceive a 'least crappy' one. Do I vote strongly in favor of total surveillance, or strongly in favor of Putin asskissing? Whatever I do in the voting booth, I just walk away with guilt. There really is no reason to make the people who choose not to vote feel guilty as well. Yes, that would be a fallacy. Thank god no one said that.

I find that quite often the best informed people choose not to vote. That non voter stigma has to go, really. You're neither ignorant nor terrible. If voting means eating one among five pieces of shit, why would you ever do that? And if you can only choose from two, well... why even get up for that.

Another round of talking about remote terrorism instead of the issues in video games. Congrats, gaters. Your guide to classifying gater replies: "Gamergate didn't cause that" — max. gater IQ 70 points "It wasn't gamergate people" — max. gater IQ 55 points "This is unrelated to gamergate" — max. gater IQ 40 points FUCK GAMERGATE. That is all.

Heh, was just thinking about taking the latest Sarkeesian video right to a gater forum. "Hey, look, she's talking about games she likes, about positive examples, in a whole new series of gaming positivity!" That certainly would have exposed a lot of bigotry, but would have helped no one. :( Yet here it is for your enjoyment. In my personal opinion, it's a good one and a great pick, and I say that with ample dislike for Sword & Sworcery's gameplay.

Worst. corruption. performance. ever.

Oh that can be good. Any kind of strongly anti capitalist, anti consumerist ideology in the gamergate mix could bring the movement to its knees. If "let the market decide" is over, so is gamergate. Exhibiting excellent written English skills, but apologizing for the state of your language? Why, you must be a fellow German! :) Attacking the enemy concept of the Social Justice Warrior indeed means attacking the movement at its roots. However, these roots are extraordinarily strong. Almost their entire ideology is founded on it, and the few who would love to abandon the term SJW itself still show a faith in hate mobs demanding censorship in art (Bain et al.). Maybe there isn't really a way to "convince" a gater of anything. However, convincing people may not be a prerequisite to ebb gamergate away. Gamergate will change with time. Its members will never think they've ever been wrong, but they still might, with diverse currents streaming into their ideology mix, change to become something different. Gamergate is in extreme ideological disarray, with a whole lot of opportunist forces trying to push through to lead the movement where they wish. That might be a fatal weakness. The hashtag will be abandoned, having been tainted from minute one, while the revolution will eat its children. And every new tide of gaters will have a slightly different stance on the matter. Until eventually, the people who have once united under the slutshaming tag actually do as they preach — welcoming diversity and accepting women as valid participants in the hobby. Should that actually happen, the movement formerly known as gamergate has "won" over "the SJW" in a sense, because sure as hell, they will start seeing less and less of their enemy figure as a matter of perspective. That doesn't necessarily happen, but I think it CAN happen.

Hey, wow, did anyone post this in here before? It's pretty self referential to post here, but, heck. http://www.camposanto.com/quarterlyreview/volume-2/issue-1/lost-boys/

Remember guys, if women who play games wouldn't date you, there's really no reason that they continue to play games.

The "rape" part is too easy a mark, so I won't focus on it. Bain's fanbase is mobilized and is attacking trans people on twitter, and of course the original finders of the tombstone especially. The wonderful Katherine Cross is attacked. 8chan is in action. Deep shit. (1) I find it considerably odd that Bain doesn't recognize the "joke" as fan/backer created content, because this information is part of the original tweet that brought the thing to his and Obsidian's attention. A 12 minute rant based on mere seconds of failed reading comprehension. And he really dwells on this incorrect bit, again and again. "We should support the artist when it comes to making jokes like this". "You are telling an artist to censor himself". "This is attempting to bully an artist into taking something out of a game". "I respect that artist's right to shape that world first and foremost". "[the joke] really does add to the universe". This is so utterly embarrassing for Bain! I really wonder why he still keeps this thing online. The transphobia here is debatable, it really is. But the stubborn stupidity? (2) First up, we have one of gamergate's pillar arguments, the "historically accurate" fallacy. No, "these kinds of jokes" are in no way historical. No, we wouldn't have found them on a tombstone in the Middle Ages. No, "Pillars of Eternity" is not set in the Middle Ages. Yes, there was plenty of transphobia back then, and yes, you can absolutely show that in a game, but perspective matters. And context matters. A random "joke" that will absolutely not be perceived as part of the game's lore (by most players who know about the Kickstarter campaign) can not have the necessary context. It stands on its own. This is decidedly non sequitur humor. Historical accuracy has nothing whatsoever to do with it. (3) Argumentative pillar number two is the 'bad characters have to exist in stories and exhibit bad traits' argument, as uttered by Ragnar Tørnquist when his character Mira from Dreamfall Chapters was attacked (wikia entry mostly written by yours truly). Bain seems to remember that well, and is able to recall the name of the game, but obviously knows nothing about Dreamfall Chapters, Chapters' makers and storytelling in general; and he knows nothing, nothing about the character in question. For the character of Mira, it's all about context, because Mira is not a bad person, regardless of her unbearable treatment of the autistic business partner and friend she found on the streets of Bombay as a kid, raising him herself. Yet, no, Mira is not reinforcing any stereotype. She's shocking us out of our wits, because we want, we really want to like her, and can't because of the gross abuse she hurls around. Mira is gloriously written, she is a deeply offensive character, and STILL we've only had about two or three people over on the RTG forums who made a fuzz. The mostly very positive reaction to Mira shows what a godawfully stupid idea the Social Justice Warrior conspiracy narrative is, because, I assure you, if the Social Justice Warrior exists, the RTG forum is full to the brim of them. In using Mira as an example, Bain voids his argument. (4) The argument that the "man who killed himself" for sleeping with a trans person can be interpreted as the butt of the joke (4:15) has a certain "wow" potential. Well, Bain, if that is your interpretation, how exactly can that joke show the gritty grittyness of the gritful transphobic oh so Middle Age world to you? Oh no, sorry, that is not your interpretation. Neither is it anyone's. Deep sexual shaming remains with both "characters" of the "joke". (5) And, finally, here's the "it's just fiction" and "I distinguish fantasy from reality" argument. Stories don't really matter, phew, we can all go home now and drink a few beers. It is here where we take a deep breath and then do our darndest not to follow John Bain back deep down to version 0.1 of this whole reinforcing gender stereotype discussion. I honestly don't know where Bain was going with this anyway; we all distinguish fiction from reality, but the topic never was that someone would interpret this "joke" as a real life case. (6) As a sidenote, there's a vicious little misinformative rabbit pulled from Biscuit's top hat when he speaks about the Batgirl comic cover at 2:55 ("after a series of death threats and a campaign by those who were offended by this Ultimate cover..."). Nope, sorry Bain. You've got it wrong once again. Said Batgirl writer Cameron Stewart on twitter: See... comics have their gaters too.

Help me a bit please. I'm looking for one of those infamous gamergate infographics, a very early one that detailed which companies gamergate/gamers 'want' and which ones they do not need.

The strategy does shed some light on how the display of opinions on the internet works, and that may even be on topic. The burning question, of course, is how many people are indeed associating with gamergate, and how many halfway sane people remain? Both numbers could be vastly exaggerated by just a few prominent voices.

Unghhhhhh. Trolling Adam Baldwin on twitter is not helpful in any way. But it is, on occasion, hilarious.

The author's note to John Green's The Fault in Our Stars reads as follows. Gamergate, by default, is a bunch of idiots with no idea whatsoever how stories work. They are, however, dead sure that their game stories would slowly but surely reflect and infuse them with political ideas. That, of course, destroys the unwritten contract between storyteller and listener as described by Green; they're so hell bent on finding a political subtext that even the most basic motifs of philantropy and inclusion, which we find in stories since antiquity, suddenly are political statements. THEY ARE NOT. Stories transcend the political. The ideas, the ideology, the philosophy found in stories transcend the political. Remove the ideas, the ideology, the philosophy and they're not stories any more. That is one of gamergate's actual goals, whether they are aware of it or not. By wanting the political out of their games — whatever that is even supposed to mean — they want stories out of their games. Incredible how Chmielarz still licks Bain's boots in that respect. He should know better. But I guess they have far too much in common concerning their stated view of women gamers. (edit: And now I have understood that the weird acting up on the forum when I tried to spell out p.c. is probably one of Jake's little censorship jokes. Well done, sir, well done.)

Since the very first time I heard of 4chan, it was in connection with the formation of hate mobs. And, yes, we can absolutely say that it has its own culture. Once I banned a 4chan moderator over at the Telltale forums who was oh so surprised that terrible insults could ever get him banned. Whatever free speech entails, it stops when people gather to coordinate harrassment attacks. That's what happened when gamergate started, naturally, only this time some mods actually got scared. It is not unreasonable of Kerzner to assume that gamergaters were 'surprised' by that censorship because of what they were used to on that forum.

While I still have to write up a longer piece about Liana Kerzner's three part strawman series on Tropes vs. Women, the "Moot vs. Gamergate" article is quite interesting — in a good way. Not that those lot of words are communicating the pinnacle of a sophisticated theory here. 4chan actively created a culture of abject assholes, but as soon as legal as well as moral accountability seemed to pop up at the horizon, Christopher commanded cesspool censorship. That's pretty much exactly what I was saying for six months.

Who exactly is "we" in that context...?

...where can I find those six tweets by Adam Baldwin? I'm really terrible at twitter, sorry. : (

Hmmmm. I'll get back to you on that at year's end. Blizzard? They're still the Lost Vikings guys to me. ANYTHING THAT CAME AFTERWARDS, I didn't play. Okay, maybe a few hours of Diablo back in the day.

Really? The guy's making a 16bit voxel J-MMO thingie now, because he doesn't have the money for anything else. Gaters hate voxels. Far too indie. I still say they'll throw him under the bus at his first wrong move.

I don't think so, but it still doesn't matter. A father who sees his kids mentioned in this whole fiasco, whatever the context, SHOULD go red alert immediately. Gaters are not playing around, they need witches to put on the stake, daily. Their_reign_is_fear. Mentioning Kluwe's children is just about the same as doxing. Sometimes real names and addresses can be found easily online, but it is only the reposting of that information that gives harassers ideas. Mark Kern is only just collecting the shards of his reputation by finally gathering some gaters around his as of yet pitiful campfire. The only way to get more is to be an asshole and to attack the people perceived as enemies by some gamergate currents. The man's an opportunist idiot, and even gaters are usually intelligent enough to see through his crap. When he's useful to the cult, however... exceptions are made. Temporarily. They're not keeping such a tool on board for long.