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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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Breitbart published the not-actually-secret secret list of game journalists. It took all of like thirty seconds for some anon to start harassing Brad Shoemaker for his "crimes" on Tumblr.

 

Oh dear. I don't follow his tumblr. Is it just him being friendly with developers or something like that?

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Oh dear. I don't follow his tumblr. Is it just him being friendly with developers or something like that?

 

I meant that the harassment took place on his Tumblr, which is mostly just answering anonymous asks about Dota and posting pictures of guinea pigs.

 

 

 

 

The gaters really do attract the most quality supporters (archive.today link to RS McCain's blog).

 

For anyone who has no idea who this guy is (like me), all you need to know is:

 

[T]he media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us.

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Oh dear. I don't follow his tumblr. Is it just him being friendly with developers or something like that?

I guess Breitbart went ahead and just released who was on that mailing list of games journalists and someone decided to send him an ask decrying him for "breaking countless laws." (Also, like Tegan pointed out, the list wasn't exactly a secret. I'm pretty sure Brad had mentioned in passing there was a list he was on on a Bombcast, like, ages ago.  Fake gamer boys, I swear.)

 

Edit to add: GB's now weighed in with a full editorial from Jeff.

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Breitbart published the not-actually-secret secret list of game journalists. It took all of like thirty seconds for some anon to start harassing Brad Shoemaker for his "crimes" on Tumblr.

 

Wait, what list is this again? There have been a lot of lists bandied about.

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The gaters are apparently trying to find any respected creative types who will back them now. Some of them were surprised when the co-creator of Oglaf wasn't a supporter (super awesome NSFW webcomic if you go googling it).

post-33601-0-90236800-1413580843_thumb.jpg

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Was coming to post that. Some good stuff, but also elements worthy of criticism (there's an attempt to defend their silence, as well as a quite notable "two extreme sides" bit at the end). But it's good that they finally wrote a significant piece denouncing GG.

EDIT: Especially in comparison with GameSpot, which almost simultaneously released a similar letter, which was basically "Harassment is Wrong. PS, we don't intend to write any further on this."

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Wait, what list is this again? There have been a lot of lists bandied about.

 

The ~secret list of games journalists~ who run articles by one another for professional critique and discussion paid off SJW SJW follow the money corruption SJW conflict of interest

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"The person who made a comic about a dominatrix who causes a man to ejaculate cum demons is hardly able to call gamers 'sexist'."

 

What does that even mean? Not the cum demons, that all makes sense. How does that weigh in to your ability to call out sexism... at all?

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The gaters are apparently trying to find any respected creative types who will back them now. Some of them were surprised when the co-creator of Oglaf wasn't a supporter (super awesome NSFW webcomic if you go googling it).

oglaf.JPG

Ughhh this kind of shit just shows exactly how these people have no clue what they are talking about. That first tweet on there, good lord.

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"The person who made a comic about a dominatrix who causes a man to ejaculate cum demons is hardly able to call gamers 'sexist'."

 

What does that even mean? Not the cum demons, that all makes sense. How does that weigh in to your ability to call out sexism... at all?

Because depicting sex is equal to sexism? Who the fuck knows. Sounds like someone attempting to adopt the 'language of the SJW' without having a clue what any of it means.

 

Looks like people were badgering Anthony Clark (Of Nedroid) into weighing in on GamerGate too. Hint: The guy who created Beartato isn't going to support your shitty hate movement.

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"The person who made a comic about a dominatrix who causes a man to ejaculate cum demons is hardly able to call gamers 'sexist'."

 

What does that even mean? Not the cum demons, that all makes sense. How does that weigh in to your ability to call out sexism... at all?

 

I think it's because that from their perspective, they see no difference between the sex positivity of Oglaf and the explotativeness of, say, DOA: Beach Volleyball. So since they can't distinguish, in their eyes the "SJWs" hate everything sexy or sex-themed, not just the part that's explotative or misogynist. 

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Was coming to post that. Some good stuff, but also elements worthy of criticism (there's an attempt to defend their silence, as well as a quite notable "two extreme sides" bit at the end). But it's good that they finally wrote a significant piece denouncing GG.

EDIT: Especially in comparison with GameSpot, which almost simultaneously released a similar letter, which was basically "Harassment is Wrong. PS, we don't intend to write any further on this."

 

The message board thread on that is literaly growing faster than I can read it. 419 post as of 10 minutes ago.

 

Jeff said about what I've been thinking, which isn't surprising because I follow GB mainly because he and Brad have many of the same opinions (both in games and out of games) as me. I think there's evidence to support the "two extreme sides" thoughts, especially at this point when a lot of the moderates have dropped out of the discussion. As has been mentioned by a few less-volatile GGers recently, death threats have been flying both directions recently. I certainly believe that most of the problem lies with the toxic core of the GGers, but I don't think anyone is innocent.

 

I think the best part of the message is the idea that if you really are one of those #notallgamergaters, you might have a good point, but it's mired in all this muck and you really should take a step back, drop the GG tag, and start over with a more civil base. There are interesting ethics discussions to be had, but you can't build on a foundation of manure.

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I think it's because that from their perspective, they see no difference between the sex positivity of Oglaf and the explotativeness of, say, DOA: Beach Volleyball. So since they can't distinguish, in their eyes the "SJWs" hate everything sexy or sex-themed, not just the part that's explotative or misogynist. 

 

Probably, and that even means they have to co-opt their perception of what SJ is about in order to denounce somone, but will obviously reject SJ as soon as it's harmful to their intent.

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Yeah that's pretty funny. Anyone with half a brain who reads Oglaf would notice the extremely wide range of diversity he includes in his comics, and they're not degrading to any group/gender/orientation.

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Jeff also mirrors what I've been thinking most of the time.  The truth of the matter is there are of course going to be extremists on both sides.  That will always happen no matter what the conflict is.  In the same way that many GamerGaters say that those issuing death and rape threats don't represent them (which I don't really agree with but is beside the point), neither do a couple of outliers in the other direction represent all SJWs (I am making an assumption that these people exist, I have no actual evidence).  But I don't take Jeff's words as a "middle ground" stance.  He's pretty firmly against GG.  I totally believe that there are people who genuinely do care about ethics and inclusion and all the "legitimate" things that GG says they represent.  I also think that a lot of those people got swept up into the movement, either out of ignorance or against their will.  But that was when it started.  At this point, when enough people who didn't care at all about games in the first place start calling your movement a hate group, whatever you THINK it's about doesn't really matter because the rest of the world is only looking at the terrible shit that's been done.  If they really cared about ethics and games, they'd have ditched the GG handle long ago and called it something with actual meaning.

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"The person who made a comic about a dominatrix who causes a man to ejaculate cum demons is hardly able to call gamers 'sexist'."

 

What does that even mean? Not the cum demons, that all makes sense. How does that weigh in to your ability to call out sexism... at all?

 

I read it as someone trying to indict the creator of Oglaf as sexist against men. I don't know how a comic depicting a dominatrix making men cum demons would do that (somehow interpreting it as literally demonizing a subjugated male's sexuality?), but it's how I read it.

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Was coming to post that. Some good stuff, but also elements worthy of criticism (there's an attempt to defend their silence, as well as a quite notable "two extreme sides" bit at the end). But it's good that they finally wrote a significant piece denouncing GG.

EDIT: Especially in comparison with GameSpot, which almost simultaneously released a similar letter, which was basically "Harassment is Wrong. PS, we don't intend to write any further on this."

 

But yeah, I'm proud of Jeff for writing that. One of the first comments on the reddit thread to it spoke to "How could a victim of the exact ethical issues we're talking about take a stance against us", which felt kinda good to see. Maybe this one will break through.

 

But I also think silence in regards to some shouldn't be automatically condemned. Some people try to assume the best in everyone, and want to properly do their homework on something before completely going to one side of an issue. I started out on the anti-GG side, but I wasn't speaking up for the first few weeks other than wanting the harassment to stop. It wasn't until I did my research that I then came to discover, oh shit one side has nothing to stand on.

 

The problem is, the anti-GG side has done an altogether terrible job of laying out talking points, in actually pointing out the lies and hypocrisy of GG, or explaining why this diversity is something that you really do want, or any of the things that seem obvious and rote to a feminist but to most people seem like an overexaggeration.

 

This isn't me making excuses for GamerGate, that shit's been tarnished the whole time and is a serious shitheap. This is just in defense of those who did keep quiet, because frankly we didn't do a good job helping them learn why GG is so full of shit.

 

 

Yeah that's pretty funny. Anyone with half a brain who reads Oglaf would notice the extremely wide range of diversity he includes in his comics, and they're not degrading to any group/gender/orientation.

 

She!

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O rly

 

For some reason I thought I saw a male name on that site when I started reading last month. My mistake.

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That GB thread is still going like wildfire. There have been quite a few resoned responses (due to a decent amount of moderation I'm sure.) For those sane people that don't have time to wade through it all, you can see some good stuff by checking out Vinny and Patrick's forum post history:

 

 

http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/vinny/forums/

http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/patrickklepek/forums/

 

Edit: It's nice that my favorite corner of the internet (video content wise) is also having a fairly sane discussion on this subject. I was getting antsy that no one had said anything.

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Just curious because I'm never on twitter: Has anyone started a #NotAllSJWs? If not, I wanna lazyweb that. Somebody start #NotAllSJWs please. As a guy who hasn't tweeted in like 6 months, I am probably not the one to start a new thing.

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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."

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O rly

 

For some reason I thought I saw a male name on that site when I started reading last month. My mistake.

 

Actually he and she!  Oglaf is the work of two people as far as I know.

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Given the amount of MRA language I've seen from Gamergate, I'd bet actual money the real grievance is that gaming has tolerated the presence of people who think that women are evil, because it never came up and there wasn't much reason to change. As gaming has become mainstream, there's been a move to change that, which genuinely does threaten gaming for them as a place where they can safely believe that women are evil and not be challenged.

 

Let me tell you, it's frustrating reading these statements and seeing thoughtless reparroting that Gamergate might well be a movement about ethics in journalism. It never was. It's a smokescreen. We have proof of this. They made it up and we have the IRC logs from when they made it up. All of this information is available. Did they just not look hard enough?

 

Also frustrating: Giant Bomb and others saying 'silence doesn't imply complicity'. You might want that to be true, writer, but we know both perpetrators and victims don't believe it. We know that abusive people justify their abuse because they're the vocal part of a silent majority. We know that victims respond in outsize ways to statements of support, even fairly banal ones (I've been there, I've personally experienced it).

 

And I don't think statements saying 'don't harass people' mean anything because Gamergate doesn't believe it's harassing. It believes it's delivering justice and finally doing something about these evil women trying to take this safe space away from them. Which is why they can be "against harassment" but when someone suggests to prove it by donating to Zoe, Anita and Brianna, they recoil in horror.

 

Also why has no-one interviewed that one guy on NeoGAF who realised Gamergate was a hate group?

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