"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[tegan]

Related to Oglaf and Anthony Clark on the previous page, it seems like Gamergaters are reaching out to increasingly irrelevant and uninterested parties to champion support for them and being surprised to learn that people who don't care about video games can pretty clearly see Gamergate for what it is: a hate movement. I guess David Willis' Twitter has been crazy enough to warrant this:

 

 

 

It's the alt text that makes it.

 

dudes on twitter are all 'so disappointed you're anti-gamergate' and i'm like 'i'm so disappointed you think i'm a terrorist'.

 

 

(I seriously have no idea why they would think Willis would be on their side since he mostly just talks about Transformers and Batman and nearly everyone in the Shortpacked cast is a woman, a POC, LGBT, or some combination thereof)

[Problem Machine]

GG has so thoroughly built into the myth that it's representing a silent majority that they're always caught flat-footed on realizing that anyone actually disagrees with them, despite the growing nearly universal contempt for the movement.

http://waxy.org/2014/10/gamergate_schadenfreude/

[Gormongous]

GG has so thoroughly built into the myth that it's representing a silent majority that they're always caught flat-footed on realizing that anyone actually disagrees with them, despite the growing nearly universal contempt for the movement.

http://waxy.org/2014/10/gamergate_schadenfreude/

 

Reading the 8chan threads linked in that post, I'm shocked again by people stating over and over in different ways that no belief can be sincerely held if it disagrees with one they hold. William Gibson must be the victim of a conspiracy, of manipulation, of brainwashing. He must be trolling, he must be under pressure, he must be afraid. He can't actually believe what he says, because it's not what they believe.

 

It was said a while ago in this thread, but it bears saying again: I worry about the incidence of mental illness in #GamerGate. A lot of these people are clearly neurodivergent in a way that is causing them distress and dysfunction, but do not acknowledge it and have instead become attracted to a movement filled with delusional thinking. I have no idea how to do outreach there and it upsets me to no end.

[your name here]

They believe that everyone on the other side is part of a conspiracy. Patrick Klepek writes about indie games and social issues because he is on the dole from big indie, and not because those are genuinely his interests. Nobody actually believes in social justice, all of gaming press is just wrapped around the thumb of a broke indie dev. It's amazing how much conspiratorial thinking is going on to make them always right. Death threats are false flags because nobody on the good side would seriously do anything bad. So, it must have been the bad side. Arguments are then born out of that sentiment, rather than out of a desire to uncover the truth. That's a kind of thinking that everyone engages in occasionally, but with GG, it seems that there's no feeling that that sort of thinking is bad. To them, it doesn't matter if it's false because the SJWs deserve whatever they get.

 

What I really don't understand is why the supposed "rational side" still jumps to the defense of the hostile side. Like, on the giant bombcast, all they essentially said was "People shouldn't issue death threats or intimidate people into leaving their jobs." How could anyone disagree with that? But, you still had people (lots of people) claiming that this was an attack on GamerGate, a movement for promoting journalistic ethics, and definitely not a harassment campaign.

[clyde]

What I really don't understand is why the supposed "rational side" still jumps to the defense of the hostile side. Like, on the giant bombcast, all they essentially said was "People shouldn't issue death threats or intimidate people into leaving their jobs." How could anyone disagree with that? But, you still had people (lots of people) claiming that this was an attack on GamerGate, a movement for promoting journalistic ethics, and definitely not a harassment campaign.

I assume that it's all astroturfing. I keep think about that sea-lion comic. I've seen that response by gaters happen in twitter-replies and comments on internet articles probably 50 times in the last month. I've lost my patience with it. Either they want to be part of a movement without considering the harm of it, or they want to silence voices that are valuable to me. I really don't care which it is. If their priorities are that myopic, selfish, and/or oppressive, then I have no desire or need for their opinion.

[Twig]

I'm sure this has been linked before (I know I saw something from this guy somewhere and it was probably from here) but this Storify is pretty good coverage of how gubbergump is just a new name for what's already existed for a long time.

 

https://storify.com/a_man_in_black/gamergate-is-a-misogy

[Bjorn]

I was super angry after having read the Giant Bomb piece yesterday, and having calmed down a bit, I want to address a part of that.

 

In many ways, that's been the most frustrating part. To watch talented folks like Jenn Frank get pushed right up to a breaking point and for the rest of us to have nothing better to combat this with than "hey, I know you think you're waging some kind of holy war and solving some kind of real-world issue but stop this" feels like the most empty and toothless statement around. It's easy to feel helpless and I don't have a real solution to this. I'm not sure that there is one, honestly.

 

To me, this pairs right up with the "Silence isn't complicity" line a bit further down.  Of course there are things you can do.  You can visibly support the most vulnerable members of the community.  Invite Sarkeesian, Wu, Quinn or Frank on to the show.  You don't even have to dedicate that time to their harassment.  As the Thumbs showed with Sarkeesian, you can just have them on to talk about games.  Do a video about Quinn's work, or one of Revolution 60 (Spacekat's new game).  I can't think of a good reason to NOT do a Quick Look of Rev60. 

 

This is going into its third goddamned month.  60+ days of bullshit for the people targeted.  It's been covered repeatedly by national and international news outlets.  I find it to be a laughable defense, when a bunch of dudes whose job it is to be opinionated and who run one of the more popular gaming sites in the US can't manage to think of a single thing they can do, and so revert to silence.

 

[tegan]

 

 

 

How much of a self-deluded scumbag do you have to be to think that you knew Ryan Davis better than his best friends?

[Bjorn]

A Canadian AM radio station is running interviews with some of women harassed by gaters (Wu, Quinn and Allaway).  The gaters response is to harass the station and go after advertisers. 

[shammack]

I'm mostly in agreement with Jeff Gerstmann's statement, but it's weird to me that he'll take such a hard-line stance about things like Yoshi being a piece of shit or Majora's Mask being a bad game, but is apparently not willing to direct that energy into something that actually matters. Like, if there's ever a time when it's acceptable to just completely shut down the other side of the "debate" and not budge, it seems like this is it (given that we KNOW that the journalism crap was just made up as an excuse to justify the misogyny). He's right that his response feels toothless, but it didn't have to.

[Merus]

I worry about the incidence of mental illness in #GamerGate. A lot of these people are clearly neurodivergent in a way that is causing them distress and dysfunction, but do not acknowledge it and have instead become attracted to a movement filled with delusional thinking. I have no idea how to do outreach there and it upsets me to no end.

 

I can confirm that there's at least one #GamerGater that is neurodivergent. We had to cut him out of our circle of friends because he had delusions that other people were harassing the people he had crushes on (including me, excitingly).

[Bolegium]

I highly suspect that many instigators of gg (especially the ones self described as doing it for the 'lulz') deliberately prey on vulnerable people. As much as they vocally and intentionally aim to inspire anger amongst their feminist 'enemies', they derive just as much enjoyment from riling up their antifem 'allies'.

I wish gg and notyourshield realised that the people who started this shit are laughing at them as well. Their only 'goal' is to get everyone angry and fighting each other. They know there's a large population of self described gamers, but they don't actually care about 'gamers' they just want them to be angry like they want everyone else to be angry.

[Erkki]

Well those are probably two of the most interesting pieces written about this so far, in a large part for actually approaching it from new angles.  I was completely ignorant of the Disco burning. 

 

Holy shit. I grew up with a lot of this anti-disco sentiment (many of the boys I played with in my neighborhood were into metal, and had older brothers/fathers whom I guess this came from). I even used to draw some anti-disco comics with my best friend in the first grade. And I think some residue of all of that is still with me influencing my music taste today, more than 20 years later. I hadn't realized the roots of all of this before now.

[clyde]

I kinda want to start a new twitter-account that follows only gamer-gators. Since there's only 351 of them, I can collect them all.

I've swung wildly from not caring about their opinions to wanting to collect them.

Maybe I can battle them by tweeting ambigious manifesto-statements that include two of them at a time. Like "Hey @dumbass124 real gamergaters believe in ethics like @hornypony552 does! Maybe she will teach you."

[tegan]

If there are more Pokémon than there are gamergaters I would be just tickled.

[miffy495]

New plan, everybody chooses six of them and pits them against six that other people have chosen.

[clyde]

If there are more Pokémon than there are gamergaters I would be just tickled.

https://twitter.com/thequinnspiracy/status/523686044274012161

[SuperBiasedMan]

"@Gam3rBro4Justice, I choose you!"

[Justin Leego]

https://twitter.com/thequinnspiracy/status/523686044274012161

 

That's quite a bit lower than the Thunderclap number that came up not long ago, makes me think there's something funny going on with Keynote's user stats.

[Roderick]

GamerGate podcasting news: I recently recorded a half hour long GamerGate special of my geek podcast, along with Dutch feminist and fan culture specialist Nicolle Lamerichs. It's in Dutch, but considering the recent explosion it seemed appropriate to post. In it we discuss the basics of the matter, and inevitably strongly condemn it.

 

http://geekersopjespeakers.podomatic.com/entry/2014-10-17T23_03_14-07_00

[Erkki]

Wow, I hadn't been following this shit lately, especially as I don't use Twitter that much any more, but I caught up with the last two weeks of posts in this thread over the weekend and holy shit, this gamergate movement is so absurd that it hurts my brain to even try to come up some rational explanation for it. To read the 8chan threads linked by waxy.org for example, they seem as convinced that they are the good guys here as we here know that the truth is the opposite.

 

I have to admit, though, that when I started reading this thread yesterday, being unaware of any actual recent developments, I was kind of bothered by some people here taking single tweets or posts by one person and equating that to "gamergate says this", but I've now come to understand that if we were to not do that, it would appear as somehow giving legitimacy to some part of the movement, which should really be condemned entirely. There is no single thing worth saving about it. Their ethics concerns still haven't progressed much further from the Zoe Quinn "conspiracy".

 

There really is no point here to consider separately the gamergate movement and some extreme people in it that are probably making the death threats and carrying out the harassment, because not many in the gamergate movement seem to want to distance themselves from that, even as a PR move, which a few smarter people in the movement seem to be suggesting.

[Nachimir]

It's become especially culty since mainstream media outlets turned on it. Short of persuading high profile figures like TotalBiscuit, I think the ablation that's inflicted on it might be as good as it gets. There's enough out there now that few people will be suckered into following it unless they're already paranoid types. A few things strike me as much more important in the wake of it:

 

Recognising the core hate group who will now be moving on to find another way to foment harassment of feminists (In case you missed it, really informative storify linked by Merus earlier). This is a group who've been doing this for much longer than GibberGhast has been around, and will continue to harass women, trans people, feminists and allies out of anything they can.

 

Recognise how GG sucked in the downtrodden. Being a white guy is not automatically a ticket to social acceptance, and a lot of GeezerGerms power was in its appeal to bullied and excluded kids/young adults. Reasoning some of them out of the position they're now in is going to be a fucked up and difficult job, if it's possible. There have been things I found it impossible to not laugh at, but near the very beginning Pippin Barr responded to the term "misogynerd' spreading and said that it's important not to adopt the language of bullies. He was right, and the entrenching that's happened around that language since is really fucked up (to be really clear: I'm not conflating bullying language with that bunch of articles about the gamer social identity, as GG did).

[Merus]

Reasoning some of them out of the position they're now in is going to be a fucked up and difficult job, if it's possible.

 

The best approach I'm aware of is a three-stage approach, used to try and get young, impressionable kids out of cults: discuss abusive groups and what they look like (framing it in such a way that they can easily say 'well obviously Gamergate isn't that); then once they've bought into what abusive groups look like, show them how Gamergate actually acts; then, once their confidence is shaken, point them towards someone who's left the group that can talk about their experiences and what it was like for them when they left, to make it easier for the current member to choose to reject. Which is why I keep saying someone needs to interview that guy on NeoGAF.

[Bjorn]

I have to admit, though, that when I started reading this thread yesterday, being unaware of any actual recent developments, I was kind of bothered by some people here taking single tweets or posts by one person and equating that to "gamergate says this", but I've now come to understand that if we were to not do that, it would appear as somehow giving legitimacy to some part of the movement, which should really be condemned entirely. There is no single thing worth saving about it. Their ethics concerns still haven't progressed much further from the Zoe Quinn "conspiracy".

 

Just to address this specific part, I know that for a lot of stuff I shared, I tried to make sure they were things that were being echoed heavily (retweeted a lot, active reddit threads, fair number of replies, etc).  It is really easy to take a single asshole and try to use him as a ass-paintrbrush, but I think by and large we've tried to avoid that.

 

As for trying to get some of these people out of it, sadly, I doubt there is a lot online that we can do.  I would tend to suspect that someone needs to intervene in person with them.  I think that parent article that was shared earlier was particularly important for showing how parents are trying to intervene in the lives of the teens who are involved. 

[RubixsQube]

Jesse Singal wrote a pretty standard takedown of gamergate for The Boston Globe, and got called out on it, with many people saying "POORLY RESEARCHED, GO TO KOTAKU IN ACTION TO SEE THE TRUE GAMER GATE" 

 

So he did. And then he wrote a comment there about it. And it's great.