Denial

Apparently, this was previously enough to convince a number of influential gamergaters that Nick Denton had raised an army of mercenaries: It turned out that dogboner had not been totally on the level with them.

Apparently GG is terribly excited today because KingofPol received PROOF! that Nick Denton of Gawker has been paying people to infiltrate Gamergate and sow dissent in the ranks. Furthermore, 8chan's Hotwheels says it checks out and is totally legit! That evidence is: This is remarkable.

Oh man, Sargon of Akkad doing oldmanshoutsatclouds.jpg at Clickhole is amazing. Perhaps his superior manbrain is just too highly evolved... On a tangent, this has reminded me that there is a page collecting MP3s of every DOTA 2 character saying "shitty wizard", which is inordinately cheering.

At this point it's sort of metronomic. Today, KingofPol, one of the most voluble of the Gamergate tweeters and YouTubers, explained at length that the Holocaust was smaller than you think today on a live stream, while the other preeminent citizens of Gamergate on the stream laughed and egged him on. Of course, some Gamergaters have been saying that his opinions about the Holocaust are his own business, and have nothing to do with games so are not relevant, and that the stream was not hashtagged Gamergate and so is not relevant to consideration of the consumer revolt demanding ethics in journalism. That feels like it may be a tough sell outside Gamergate.

I mean, the other thing - and it seems almost too obvious to be worth saying - is that Gamergate, from the early stages, wanted to end Danielle's career. If they've moved on from there, it's because they got bored, but AFAIK she's been the subject of harassment, and probably as a result of this will continue to be so for a long time to come...

I feel like in the Gamergate version of the Secret World the black ooze is the hero, and the Templars, Illuminati and Dragon are ivory-tower elitists whose politically-motivated reviews are damaging the sales of the Orochi Corporation's products...

If I have enough posts, I'd be up for Spacebase-DF9. (I know! I've been busy...)

How's everyone doing on the Steam Halloween Sale? My current shopping basket is: Eldritch Year Walk Bloody Good Time Overlord The Novelist (which I am assuming, given it's in the Halloween sale, is actually Ghost Dad: Reloaded) Sir, You Are Being Hunted (which I already own, but am happy to buy again to get it onto Steam) How to Survive The Long Dark Lots of other good stuff in there that I already have on Steam - and Transistor is also half price this weekend, for non-Halloweeny reasons.

That number just keeps growing, doesn't it?

Kinda - Anil Dash isn't a journalist - he's a technologist and blogger, which makes his targeting by Cernovich even more inexplicable. Sarah Jeong is a lawyer and writer on the political left who had previously Storified her trolling of Gamergate. David Auerbach is a Slate technology writer, who has been been getting a lot of love from Gamergate for his pieces - he wrote the "How to End Gamergate" piece that Chris Plante was describing as "reverse shot journalism", since it basically proposes the press prostrate themselves before Gamergate and do everything they want, at which point the moderates will be satisfied, and the only people left will be the harassers. The things I found funny were a) Auerbach for some reason asking Sarah Jeong to extract an apology from Anil Dash, and Jeong very wisely asking not to be involved, Dash then saying "OK, sorry, have a good night", in effect, and the florid "thank you for apologizing and rescinding that slander" in response - which struck me as a classic of that very overwritten "I said good day!" style you often get in Internet arguments - and c) the subsequent charge of the Gate Brigade, deploying their customary lingo - "ableism", "trust fund baby" and so on. It just felt like a microcosm of several different forms of Twitter horror in one continuous stream - the random tagging in of a mutual acquaintance, the "how dare you, Sir" language and the attempts at Social Justice Judo from the Gaters. That said, everyone else who's seen it just finds it incomprehensible or depressing, so I may have ODed on GG at this point. Meanwhile, the Gaters are currently lovebombing David Pakman, who was taken to task by Zoe Quinn for apparently both refusing to take no for an answer to his request for an interview and for doing so publicly (he has apologized, and said that Hootsuite gave him her tweets in reverse order, so he didn't see the request to go private until it was too late.). This is a tactic that has worked before - finding someone whose adherence to the "let's address both sides" golden mean has prompted irritation from people who have been the subject of harassment by Gamergate, and trying to persuade them to say more nice things about Gamergate in exchange for relentless positive reinforcement and extra hits. It has worked before as a tactic, but it feels like it probably gets harder to pull off the closer to full-time staff journalism you target.

Notable only for Gamergate, I think - before that a minor-league PUA and juicer salesman.

(As an aside, I'm not sure I get the Sarah Jeong/Gawker connection...)

I think taking issue with Gamergate is ablist, because 8chan was founded by a disabled person. cf accusations of sexism and racism for taking issue with anything said by a Gamergator, because women and people of color support Gamergate #notyourshield.

I'm not sure, but I'd guess that it's a reference to "shot reverse shot" in filming - the technique where you shoot one person speaking from the perspective of the person notionally looking at them, and then switch to the other person speaking apparently from the perspective of the first person. So, a "reverse shot writer" would be someone appearing to speak back to an initial speaker. In this case, I think the initial speaker is the initial reporting of harassment and abuse, and the reverse shot is David Auerbach counterpointing. I get what he means - that Slate is known in journalistic circles for promoting a kneejerk contrarianism - but I'm not sure exactly how the metaphor maps to that. Certainly, Slate was always going to be a natural home for an article that said, in the voice of Owen Wilson, "Everybody thinks that Gamergate isn't about ethics in game journalism. What this book presupposes is... what if it is?" Related, this is one of the funniest exchanges in the social media history of Gamergate.

Meanwhile, Gamergate continues to show a deft grasp of image management.

OK, obviously a lot of bad things have come out of GamerGate. But the fanart is tremendous.

Well, if you believe that Leigh Alexander et al are literally attempting to kill gamers using a magic spell, it's fair to point out, I guess, that nobody has yet actually attempted physically to kill game journalists using the only tools they, without access to magic, possess.

Yep! That would be precisely the necessary approach. The problem being, of course, that if you calibrate your responses entirely on the presumption that people are moral children driven entirely by their tender feelings, it's pretty much impossible actually to have a grown-up conversation. I think, ultimately, you just have to take the risk that some people are not going to be able to cope with feeling slighted, and, while acknowledging that this is very sad, concern yourself primarily with minimizing the damage caused by their acting out rather than trying to predict and shape your discourse to what might offend emotionally fragile people.

Marxist?! Are they old man Republicans hanging out in their country homes now? What on earth. "Marxists", and especially "cultural Marxists", is one of about a gajillion right-wing conspiracy theory synonyms for "basically, Jews". Doesn't always mean that. Often does. Although whether someone uncritically repeating it is aware of that is another question...

I wouldn't say cynical so much as pessimistic. Suellentrop, like anyone who works at a quality broadsheet and wants to write abut video games, has to make the cultural argument for video games every time he wants to write something for the print edition, I'd imagine - often pushing against editors with little experience of games. If games are perceived to be the domain of socially inept and violently misogynist young men with no interest in current affairs, that makes it a tougher sell.

Actually, it's about ethics in games journalism.

If memory serves you don't get fragments, but I found that it meant I could do Admiralty missions more effectively, which meant I could afford a better engine and guns and explore further so it kind of worked out, and I got fragments from further places and from dissecting lifebergs. OTOH, I'm currently , so I'm grinding money rather than stat improvements.

On the lighter side of the news: The Mary Sue Madden Giferated choice parts of Chris Kluwe's article, and it is glorious.

Pretty much business as usual on the fakes - the hate campaign against Jennifer Hepler involved poorly composited fakes of comments she had allegedly made on the Bioware Social Network, also.

Oh God those poor people.