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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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I'm going to try to work "paint-huffing shitgoblins" into my daily vocabulary now.

 

It's a very good swear indeed. Easily the best compound one I've read in years.

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I'm a sucker for slackjawed pickletits & slopebrowed weaseldicks, mostly because you can trade of the latter part of these insults and use them interchangeably between the two: slackjawed weaseldicks or slopebrowed pickletits.

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Not at all, a reactionary movement is the opposite of that. A reactionary movement is about the retention of a changing status quo, or reverting back to a previous status quo that has been lost. That's specifically what the phrase means. Some people have misunderstood it, as they think any movement that is a reaction to something is automatically a reactionary movement. The phrase actually has a very specific meaning.

Upon further reading, I see that you are entirely correct! I concede this point, and thank you for teaching me something.

 

Okay, so I started to write a different response to some of your earlier posts, but lets back up for a minute. What do you believe the concerns of GamerGate are, and how do you think that pro-gg people have pursued corrective action for those concerns? One of the problems with having a discussion about any of this is understanding each person's frame of reference, and I'm not sure what yours is. Mine is pretty clear from even going back over the last few pages and seeing my thoughts about gg.

Well... GG has the infuriating tendency to avoid actually agreeing on what, specifically, their goals and values are. And I try, as your name here said, to approach every pro-GG person with the thought, "oh look, a person with their own set of complex emotional experiences who has decided, for reasons yet unknown, to post with a hashtag." That being said, in following this stuff from a bunch of different angles, especially /r/KotakuInAction and its associated wiki, I've seen a number of ideas which are so consistently put forth by people who consider themselves part of GG that I think it's accurate to hold GG as a whole generally accountable for them (by which I mean, if you disagree with more than a few of these ideas, it's probably not accurate say that you're part of GG). Amongst them: the idea that there is widespread, malignant nepotism in mainstream games journalism; the idea that a relatively small number of people more or less control this journalism, and censor legitimate news and opinions which do not fit their own ideological narratives; the idea that many games journalists and reviewers are unfairly harsh or unreasonably subjective when covering games which they find offensive (and vice versa for games which validate their ideologies); the idea that reviewers in general are doing a terrible job of disclosing prior relationships with the makers of the games they're reviewing; and... I'm getting tired of listing these. I guess I can dig up some more if you want.

 

What corrective action they've pursued: other than simple discourse and signal-boosting, GG has taken a very concentrated hit-them-in-the-wallet approach. This includes boycotts and, more significantly, email campaigns encouraging companies to pull their ads from sites which they perceive as being part of the problem (mainly Gawker-owned sites), with an extra push any time someone not on their side says something injudicious on Twitter.

 

I think that answers your questions.

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I actually feel better after reading that.  Like physically feel better and less angry, like punching or yelling into a pillow.

I also found it similarly cathartic! I'm always down for creative swearing, too.

 

So, Return of Kings, an MRA/PUA website is looking for a #GamerGate correspondent. By their own admission, they have no interest in gaming, and they're upfront about being critical of it in the past. So this is entirely a power play, a means of furthering their fight against 'SJW's, all of which they state. It's highly unlikely that #GameGate will turn this opportunity down, in spite of their claims of not being a misogynistic movement. Which is depressing.

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Well... GG has the infuriating tendency to avoid actually agreeing on what, specifically, their goals and values are.

Do they? It's almost universally purported to be, as you yourself point out, about journalistic ethics (quinn totally had sex for favors!), depoliticizing video games (feminism is ruining my video game!), and destroying nepotism (people who know each other shouldn't talk about each other!). I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone whose "goal" didn't fit into that set of categories. But the only actions they ever actually perform are to harass people for being against them. Time and time again. It's not a mystery. They say they're about one thing, but all they really ever DO is shit down everyone's throat for daring to disagree. Sometimes that shit is rape and death threats, sometimes it's doxxing, sometimes it's astroturfing at advertisers, etc. The "good" eggs at this point have no excuse for their complicity with the "bad" eggs. They're all in the same basket.

 

If they claim or appear to be unaware of the shit going on around them, let them know. Link to those summaries of what GG claims to be happening compared to what's actually happening. Apprise them of the many unlawful activities GG has participated in. If they pull the ol' #notallgaters shtick, they are part of the problem. That's all they deserve. Fuck 'em.

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Most things that Gamer Gate stands for sounds nice on paper, until you remember that the hashtag was started by a washed up actor after reading a blog post written by a disgruntled ex who was clearly trying to shame his former girlfriend. Anything that comes out of that initial vileness cannot be good. Plus, these "ideologies" are really just reviewers from different backgrounds saying they want better representation in games. Labeling it as an ideology gives it a much more nefarious sounding bent and acts as a dog whistle for those with misogynistic feelings.

Any legitimacy this movement has is lost every time the hashtag gets repeated.

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Milo wrote an incredibly dumb and laughable piece today:

https://archive.today/LuHMK

 

As a friend said: Definitely real life executives and not a face drawn on his left hand. Or, "I'm a professional journalist and can't reveal my sources, but I can drop incredibly heavy handed hints narrowing them down to a really quite small group of people".

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Christ. If there's one thing I'll never forgive GG for, it's putting Milo in a position where I actually have to bear witness to his idiocy. I liked things much better when I could ignore him entirely.

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Amongst them: the idea that there is widespread, malignant nepotism in mainstream games journalism; the idea that a relatively small number of people more or less control this journalism, and censor legitimate news and opinions which do not fit their own ideological narratives; the idea that many games journalists and reviewers are unfairly harsh or unreasonably subjective when covering games which they find offensive (and vice versa for games which validate their ideologies); the idea that reviewers in general are doing a terrible job of disclosing prior relationships with the makers of the games they're reviewing; and... I'm getting tired of listing these. I guess I can dig up some more if you want.

 

These are just the ones to which you give credence, though. It's important to be aware of your biases.

 

GG being a reactionary movement is important, because reactionary movements routinely lie about what they want. By trying to draw links between something they think society values, like ethics, bullying, improving the economy, good music, what have you, they try to link that to what they actually care about, which they (usually correctly) feel society is rejecting, like patriarchy, systemic racism, or homophobia. Those individual points might be of varying relevance, but if other people didn't stop and go, 'hmm, that seems like a good point', they'd drop it fairly quickly.

 

Like the Boston Globe journalist pointed out, if you look at the front page of GG hangouts they're dominated by attacks on specific women. Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu are not journalists. If GG was 'about' nepotism in journalism, or liberal media control of journalism, or reviews, or lack of disclosure, then why are they even remotely relevant months later?

 

This is setting aside that games journalism is an inherently compromised field, being a field started as a PR move, and even today beholden to PR departments for information. Given that, games journalism's doing pretty well comparatively, with a reasonable effort to separate reviewers from PR influence and a strong belief in a divide between advertising and editorial. It's unrealistic to expect people to not become friends in a small industry, or even in a large one; that'll influence coverage, but then the games that people are interested in isn't a meritocratic process either. And as I think has been proven, objective game reviews aren't very useful as a decision-making process because beyond 'does the game work' assessing its quality means deciding on a heuristic for assessing that quality, which will inevitably be subjective. Which kind of fun is this game trying to invoke? Is that the kind of fun it should be invoking? Impossible to answer in an objective or systematic fashion.

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These are just the ones to which you give credence, though. It's important to be aware of your biases.

 

GG being a reactionary movement is important, because reactionary movements routinely lie about what they want. By trying to draw links between something they think society values, like ethics, bullying, improving the economy, good music, what have you, they try to link that to what they actually care about, which they (usually correctly) feel society is rejecting, like patriarchy, systemic racism, or homophobia. Those individual points might be of varying relevance, but if other people didn't stop and go, 'hmm, that seems like a good point', they'd drop it fairly quickly.

 

Yeah, you're entirely right to point out that finding the "reasonable/rational core" of #GamerGate is not done by taking all the most common claims they make and eliminating the unclear, unreasonable, and unachievable ones. The reasonable-seeming ones exist at least in part as a vehicle to push the acceptance or at least recognition of the unreasonable ones. It's a symbiotic relationship that's key to understanding #GamerGate holistically as a movement. The fact that individual people in the movement are willing to throw certain claims under the bus when challenged is almost irrelevant to determining which claims are important why.

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I've been lurking in this thread for a while because everyone's had very nuanced and intelligent things to say that either better articulated thoughts I've had and/or taught me a few things! This is my first post in this thread, so I hope I manage to say something that contributes.

 

I think the answer to the question "What do GGers want?" is never satisfying because they give the one they know sounds good which is: A code of ethics on every site (Escapist often cited as the gold standard) and for that site to adhere to it. Ignoring the fact that many sites already have a code of ethics.

 

I recently emailed a GGer whom follows me on Twitter the question I've had: If you could press a magic button and everything you wanted to change in the industry happened right now, what would it look like? Then, in this situation how would it make your life better? So far no response, but I'm very curious.

 

I've also been trying to figure out what their end game when they say stuff like "THIS TRAIN DOESN'T STOP" and "THE FIRE RISES" and their attacks on sites' advertising. If they succeeded in driving all the sites they hate out of business, what then? Then I presume, they'd just get news from the sites that don't talk about social issues... which is something they can do right now.

 

Why don't they? My guess is that first they want an apology/revenge for getting their feelings hurt by articles they think were written to attack gamers to which I think Jonathan Blow had the best response.

 

@Laroquod Nobody "smeared all gamers as sexist". Only people with poor reading comprehension skills think that happened.

— Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow) October 16, 2014


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Yeah, at one point I had thought the point to pulling the ad off Gamasutra was to get them to post content more in line with what GG wants. But in conversation with some gg people it turned out they wanted Gamasutra to die. It was a site that didn't serve their needs, so they didn't want it to exist. The childishness really surprised me, but it shouldn't have. It's the same childishness that doesn't want there to be games that aren't the games they like and doesn't want gamers that aren't the gamers they like.

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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...)

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I think the answer to the question "What do GGers want?" is never satisfying because they give the one they know sounds good which is: A code of ethics on every site (Escapist often cited as the gold standard)

Leaving aside the issue that I take with holding up a site that emboldened a borderline hate movement as ethical (obviously GGers wouldn't see that one the same way I do), I've also heard rumors that Escapist is pretty bad about actually paying contributors a lot of the time. I suppose GG wouldn't see anything wrong with that either, though, since they don't seem to think writing is a job people should get paid for. I know that you weren't saying this was a view you personally hold, but I thought that was a point worth addressing.

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I don't know if this has been addressed yet, but why isn't the show addressing this further? Throw up their hands? Said everything they want to? Provide a tiny window of sanity in the gaming sphere? Sparing Danielle what's probably the thing she's dealing with more than any other single thing? 

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I expect that they might talk about it more, but I honestly appreciate the way Idle Thumbs handled their discussion. It was long, in-depth, and timely. They explicitly condemned it and explained why, and as a bonus even brought Anita on later to just talk about games and, in a way, put their money where their mouth is.

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I don't know if this has been addressed yet, but why isn't the show addressing this further? Throw up their hands? Said everything they want to? Provide a tiny window of sanity in the gaming sphere? Sparing Danielle what's probably the thing she's dealing with more than any other single thing? 

 

I think it's probably these two.

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Well... GG has the infuriating tendency to avoid actually agreeing on what, specifically, their goals and values are. And I try, as your name here said, to approach every pro-GG person with the thought, "oh look, a person with their own set of complex emotional experiences who has decided, for reasons yet unknown, to post with a hashtag."

 

I meant to get a more in-depth response typed up earlier, but work and social plans ended up nixing that.  But I think that several other people's replies covered some excellent ground.

 

I'm continuing to try and think about gg from other angles than the ones we've predominantly covered already in this thread.  And a line from Kathleen Hale's rather disturbing essay has been lodged in my brain for the last few days:

 

Silverman, an avid fan of Howard Stern, went on to describe a poignant moment she remembers from listening to his radio show: one of the many callers who turns out to be an asshole is about to be hung up on when, just before the line goes dead, he blurts out, in a crazed, stuttering voice, “I exist!”

 

That desperate cry of, "I exist!" has some role to play in gg.

 

"Listen to me!" 

 

"I matter!" 

 

Oliver Campbell, in his earlier linked piece directly addresses this.  His first stream, where people showed up and wanted to listen to him, hear his thoughts, ask him questions and actually listen to him.  His reaction to it sounds...intoxicating and rejuvenating at the same time.  He talks about not being able to imagine speaking for as long as he did, and yet he did and continues to, stream after stream.  There are a lot of people in the world who feel voiceless, even if that isn't entirely true.  I mean, any American feeling "voiceless" is rather hollow and privileged when you consider people from any number of other places in the world.  But it doesn't mean that feeling doesn't have some validity to it.  I'm sure it must feel intoxicating to go from a place of feeling alienated to, practically overnight, feeling like you not only have a voice, but a loudspeaker, and can make people listen to it.  There's a powerful motivation there to ignore where the loudspeaker came from, to pretend that you're not part of the mob that ran roughshod over a bunch of people's lives in order to be heard.  Because that would invalidate everything you think you need to say.  I also don't know how to explain to some of them that the rest of the world does not hear their voice anyways, just the screaming of the mob in a thousand voices.

 

Also, that Hale piece has kind of stuck in my brain, I went down a brief hole over the weekend reading the book world's reactions to it.  I feel like there are some similarities there brewing, that while it is distinctly different than gamergate, shares some if its DNA. 

 

I've also had a few ciders tonight, and it's entirely possible the above was just a rambling mess.  If so, please ignore and move on. 

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Apart from the use of 'ran roughshod' (you cannot run only ride), it was a pretty coherent piece.

 

But because I have now found one flaw in one sentence, your entire argument is now invalid.

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I am currently talking to an old friend of mine about some comments about Anita Sarkeesian he made on Facebook. It is painful because it came up in a thread between him and three of our other mutual friends. It actually made me grimace when it started because the three of them are all overweight, single, white males in their mid to late twenties, who are into games. It made me cringe because the cliche sometimes is true.

 

Anyway I singled him out in a private chat conversation simply because the other two are so far gone down an MRA hole that dealing with them is just an invite for all out hostility.

 

The conversation isn't over yet but I might post it up (with identities obscured) once it is done.

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I got into a similar conversation, beginning with a friend posting a news story about the snapchat privacy breach with a caption something like "Reminder, if you use 4chan you are scum who tacitly supports this"; the first comments were people saying "How dare you call us scum freedom of speech" quickly degenerating into "OMG censorship it's not practical for Reddit or 4chan to keep child porn and doxxing out" and then, no exaggeration, actually went to "You might as well ban roads because people use them for crimes, and all pornography too just in case it's children", but it took a really sudden personal turn when they started to talk about how much the original poster had hurt them, they thought they were friends, etc.

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I saw two friends I haven't seen in ages comment on an Irish newspaper article about GamerGate and I Was massively disappointed to see just how deep in they were. (one totally buys the idea that an indie female game developer would sleep with people to leverage good reviews) It's shitty, because I don't know them that well, I have no idea how receptive they'd be. My only experience with GamerGaters has been totally unproductive. I just hate the feeling of realising how close all this to me rather than distant terrible people.

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