Denial

Oh, sure - it's here.

I think there's a lot of truth in that - there is a Tumblr purporting to record incidents of harassment against Gamergaters, in which the bar for harassment is set very low - to include harsh disagreement, mockery and blocking. It also has the usual GG problem of uncritically reproducing debunked or obviously fake information, of course. One problem, of course, is that when GGers report harassment or threats, people don't generally phone their local police department to try to prove that they are lying about it, so statistical data one actionable threats is harder to establish. Whereas we now know as a simple matter of fact that the FBI are treating threats against Sarkeesian and Wu at least as evidenced.

Ah, yeah - I know that quest, and it can be sort of infuriating, because The real-time combat is clearly still being balanced, but it's a big improvement on the card-based combat in the pre-Steel versions. Now instead of bumping into enemies to start a fight in a separate window, you have firing arcs and a "heat-up" time in the main game - you need to keep the enemy in your gun's arc for a set time to be able to fire, and for longer to be sure of hitting them. There's also more narrative and quests now, which I think will make the early stages less gruelling - one problem (which the quest line I suspect was designed to try to offset) is that money is very tight early on without quests, in part because doing regular missions may barely pay for the fuel it costs to get to the relevant island, and some of the enemies can basically one-shot you before you upgrade. I started again in Steel, and have now upgraded to the cargo freighter, have the weapons to go up pretty confidently against most of the sea-beasts, and have basically set up as a haulage and espionage contractor... My tip would probably be

Just to close the loop on this - donating to charity is a nice thing to do, generally, and a giving nature is often considered a redeeming quality in an individual. However, charities actively don't want to be given highly public donations by organizations in the headlines for the wrong reasons, no. It creates an awkward situation for them both ethically and in PR terms. It looks like most of the charity fundraising down by GG is on Crowdrise - so either the charities are getting the payment passed through, less Crowdrise's fees and processing fee, in real time through WePay, or they are getting an aggregated monthly donation through the Giving Network. Either way, it's likely that there is nothing connecting those donations, from an accounting perspective, to Gamergate. Plus, Gamergate only became anything like publicly visible in the last week or so, really. So, while individual charitable donation is often seen as indicative of good character, highly visible donations aimed at deflecting or obfuscating poor public perception is... not... a... shield, and it's not something charities look for or welcome, as a whole. "Redemption" of course is a moral concept, and that's another question. Your personal morality may see the worth of an individual as the good that they have done weighed against the bad - however, one common problem of that kind of transactional moral structure is that it's hard to ascribe confident moral weight to actions ex nihilo.

Huh. Is this the first time this dude has encountered a special thanks list? Wait, does that mean he's never finished a video game and watched the credits? Huh. Casuals.

Oh my.

A horse can run roughshod, a mob can't. Unless the mob is wearing horseshoes. Is Gamergate a mob of centaurs? That might actually explain a lot.

I think the apology thing is a very powerful part of the narrative - at various points I've seen people say "this could all be over if you just apologized", or I guess latterly "this could all have been over if you had apologized, but it's too late now"... However, I don't know what a satisfactory "apology" would look like. The fact that Kotaku did its best to meet the proto-Gaters halfway - by amending its Patreon policy and investigating the cases cited - doesn't seem to have gotten it off any boycott lists. Possibly in those terms an apology would mean firing Nathan Grayson and Patricia Hernandez? It's hard to know... It's sort of academic, because most of their complaints were with opinion pieces, and in most cases publications not only wouldn't apologize for an opinion piece unless they felt there had been a break in the editorial or ethical chain from inception to publication, but couldn't, without signalling that their editorial team could be bullied into compliance. (Which of course is Gamergate's objective, which makes the whole "ethics in journalism" thing even weirder...)

The only time I've come across Oliver Campbell before was the nontroversy over The Stanley Parable, when he called Davey Wreden out for a visual gag involving setting an African child on fire. Which is odd, of course, because it's exactly the kind of thing that Gamergate is supposed to oppose - changes being made to avoid offending members of ethnic or cultural minorities constituting censorship. (I mean, I don't think this is censorship, but Gamergate precisely does, inasmuch as it can be said to think anything; this kind of interaction is one of its core complaints. Derek Yu is fairly regularly told by Gaters (and before that proto-Gaters) that he must stand with them against Anita Sarkeesian, because she forced him to change his artistic vision for Spelunky by introducing rescuable men and dogs as well as women. His patience in explaining every time that he wasn't forced to do anything, he appreciated the criticism and he thinks Spelunky is a better game thanks to a change he wouldn't have thought of himself is frankly mind-blowing. See also Neil Druckmann and The Last of Us. It tickles me hugely that the creative leads on arguably the best AAA action-adventure and the best indie platformer of recent years both explicitly credit Anita Sarkeesian with helping them to improve their work.) However, as we've seen with Yiannopoulos and Cernovich, GG is very forgiving of past transgressions as long as you are visibly and volubly supportive. Conversely, as we've seen with Liana Kershner and Devi Ever, stepping out of line is a pretty high-risk strategy, especially if you have previously been #notitsshield...

Yeah - this I think is the thing. Both Gamergate (inasmuch as Gamergate can be said to say anything), in a PSA poster they created, and now Totalbiscuit have said that the advice from law enforcement is not to share the fact that you have been threatened, but neither has said where this advice actually comes from. And, of course, in a situation where most of the death threats seem to be directed at female critics of Gamergate, that would also have the effect of concealing that fact. Boogie actually went a step further and appealed to journalists not to report when women shared the threats they were getting, but I'm not sure he'd thought through the implications of that statement...

Twitlonger appears to be down. I think it's trying to protect me.

Dude, Anita Sarkeesian is not the problem here.

To lighten the mood a little, Chainsawsuit.com put this webcomic up, which seems to resonate: Also, a Twitter version of Eliza, a chat bot originally created in 1966, picked up on the Gamergate hashtag yesterday. Gamergaters have been engaging her ever since.

PSN is down for me, still... but is there a case for farming parties? Dull, but potentially rewarding!

And, of course, Vox Day joins Gamergate.

Dang it! Sorry I had to drop out - unexpected arrival...

The Escapist piece is interesting because of all the things that weren't picked up on by Gamergate, against the things that were, in re: the quality and ethical issues around games journalism. For example, it appears to have been written by the general manager and publisher of The Escapist, Alexander Macris, but is ascribed to "Escapist Staff" - which seems like it would be a pretty useful disclosure, because of Macris' staunch support of Gamergate and regular engagement with gaters, and because generally "staff" means people who report to the editor, not people to whom the editor reports. (More generally, publishers are usually very cautious about contributing editorial to a publication at all, much less unnamed, because the role of the publisher is to ensure the operations of the publication are able to continue - which often involves negotiations with advertisers and sponsors. However, in this case "publisher" may be an honorary title - it's not clear what Macris' duties at Defy Media are, however.) That, for me, helps to explain why the critical voices - like Greg Costikyan, Tadgh Kelly and Damion Schubert - get the rote question form, whereas the Gaters get customised questions, and also the general tone of the questioning. And it puts Greg Tito in a very difficult position...

That I'd definitely agree with - and it's one of the ways in which, if Gamergate actually has a message, the way they've gone about this has basically ruined their chances of getting that message out. The relentless use of the hashtag almost certainly flagged it as campaign spam for Twitter's trending algorithms (which are going to knock out hashtags tweeted many times a day from a relatively small number of recently-created IDs). And the insistent sealioning meant that pretty quickly anyone not to some extent in lockstep with them (enough to get lovebombed rather than hassled and insulted, at least) gave up on having anything resembling a sensible conversation. So, a lot of people I know have either just blocked/muted literally hundreds of Twitter IDs by now, or have installed a filter that removes all mention of Gamergate - reckoning that, since people who want to discuss it without getting sealioned don't use the word anyway, very little signal is actually lost. Obviously, gamergaters are very upset at the idea of being blocked, muted or filtered, but they've also conspired to make it very easy and largely consequence-free to do.

Like, the thing here is that a lot of people are not in "this argument" by choice - they are in it because they either are currently or are at risk of being selected as targets. That is, mainly indie devs and journalists, mainly although not exclusively women. The GaymerX thing seems to be a good example of that. As far as one can tell, they were initially contacted by some gaters who wanted them to come out in favor of Gamergate, with the implicit threat of dropping the hashtag on them (bear in mind that GaymerX is run on a shoestring by a small staff). They responded with a conciliatory attempt at minimum appeasement, which led to a group of their traditional supporters essentially asking why they were suddenly praising a group that seemed antithetical to their philosophy. At which point they admitted that they had been afraid of a full-scale attack, and stated that they did not support Gamergate. At which point the hashtag started spinning that GaymerX had been bullied by SJWs into recanting their earlier and sincere support. GaymerX didn't ask to be involved in that, nor did the people who were startled and disappointed when they tried to avoid getting monstered.

Citation required, I think.

Well, it's meant to be a viral promotion enhancer - the idea is that you give it posting privileges for your Twitter account, and at a set time it uses that to tweet the same message from all the accounts that signed up to that "Thunderclap", in the hope of getting the hashtag trending. Of course, there are a couple of problems with that. One is that so much of Gamergate is using either alts or burner accounts, or only set up Twitter accounts to participate in Gamergate and only follow other Gaters, that the actual reach of this "Thunderclap" was in practical terms pretty limited. (Compare with, say, the Phonebloks Thunderclap - genuinely viral, and probably the service's high watermark.) In fact, a third of the 1,800,000 people it was supposed to reach were contributed by three users - Totalbiscuit, Adam Baldwin and Boogie.

Me too! I've been idly starting anew with a Titan, but have a lvl 27 or so Hunter. Disclaimer, I am really bad with gamepads.

With the what now?

There's a good piece by Dr Nerdlove on enthusiastic consent here. The term in the California bill, though, is affirmative consent, I believe, rather than enthusiastic consent, which I think is a little different - enthusiasm is hard to judge legally, whereas affirmation - whether somebody verbally consented to a sexual act - is relatively quantifiable. The University of California campuses are already using the form of words "affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious decision by each participant to engage in mutually agreed-upon sexual activity." I think there are inevitably edge cases around that - at what point can someone say that they perceived consent as unambiguous, for example (which is where "enthusiastic" is a useful term) - but if that encourages people to err on the side of caution (which here means securing unequivocal consent) that doesn't seem like a terrible thing. The idea that college students might be prevented from having sex by the "unromantic" need to give and receive affirmative consent seems to me to be a fundamental misunderstanding of college students and what they are prepared to go through to get sex.

I think this is a very acute framing, since the backlash against Gamasutra isn't about misleading information, or harmful misreporting, or libellous content. It's about an opinion piece. Portraying this as a consumer revolt only works if the consumer is supposed to be protected against ever reading anything that upsets them. Which is problematic, partly because people get upset by lots of different things, and also because a commitment not to publish anything that might upset somebody is almost certainly going to fall foul of any other standards of ethical conduct also being argued for.