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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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 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.

 

This is what I've found. You ask what happens once the changes they want have been made and there's nothing.

 

E.g. Danielle says she's friends with Chris, who did the sound for Gone Home. She still loves the game (because it is objectively (ha!) good). She still gives it a 10.

 

The only reason "moderate GG-ers" want that initial disclosure is so they can say "this opinion is irrelevant" if they don't want/like the game in question, which is, oh hey, exactly what they already do now.

 

There is absolutely nothing worthwhile to the "ethics" some claim to want. They don't like games that aren't about high scores, they don't like having the things they enjoy questioned and they don't like that a website that has to put up 10 news stories a day can't write 10 stories about Assassin's Creed (because honestly, what can you say?) so chooses to talk about things they don't consider relevant to them.

 

They may not be children but they're extremely childish. The same media they've been going to for years now talks to other people as well as them. What are the chances a lot of these people are very clingy and controlling in relationships?

 

Dear Gamasutra, if I can't have you, no-one can.

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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.

 

Nuh-uh! Both words are used in the phrase, and ran/run have actually been on the rise while ride/rode are in decline.

Your lack of knowledge about common English phrases clearly demonstrates that you are unqualified to talk about ethics.

 

 

 

Jokes aside, I hope the conversation with your friend went well.

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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.

  

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.

Same here, but I'm not too surprised. He is one of the moderate ones and believes all the sexism and harassment should stop, but believes GG has been wrongly maligned.

We've been PM'ing each other, but I've taken a break because he wasn't moved an inch.

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Nuh-uh! Both words are used in the phrase, and ran/run have actually been on the rise while ride/rode are in decline.

 

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.

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I've actually been pleasantly surprised by some of my more trolly friends' disdain for the GG movement.

 

And then I've been unpleasantly surprised by some of my nicer friends' defense of people like TotalBiscuit.

 

So basically all my friends are reacting the complete opposite of how I'd expect.

 

Except for one guy who was like "Yo this Sommers lady knows what's UP there ain't no sexism in video games!" He is pretty much exactly the same as always. He did seem to turn around by the end of that thread, thanks to a few of his friends (people I don't know) who scolded him for saying stupid shit.

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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.

 

No way man.  Gamergate is full of trolls, and everybody knows that trolls and centaurs don't get along.

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OMG that clickhole article might possibly be the most on point thing written yet.

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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.

 

Gamergate is a diverse collection that includes not just centaurs, but mermaids, mermen, fauns, minotaurs, satyrs, sphinxes and anthropomorphic hedgehogs.

#notyourfantasyshield

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Amazing: arguments on the gamergate reddit page where people can't decide if that clickhole article is making fun of them or not.

 

Confirmed: average member has poor reading comprehension skills.

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I feel like an idiot after looking at The Onion being listed at the bottom after complaining about it for a few tweets.

However, that the opposition has yet to pick up on how they're praising a parody article says a lot about them.

 

Oh my.

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Thread link  to Reddit's reaction to the Clickhole piece (through archive.today) if anyone wants to see it in all the glory.


Also, remember, this is totally, and completely about ethics (archive link to the Ralph Retort) and has nothing to do with Quinn or any kind of obsession with her and her sex life.
 
 
Lastly, the SPLC linked to a gamergate article in one of its Hatewatch posts. Pro-gg folks enter the comments with links to the Ralph Retort and Breitbart as "proof" the SPLC is wrong.

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I lost internet for a day and a half. I figured I'd catch up on things and... eh, I'll pass up on GG shit because I figure it hasn't changed all that much.

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Also, remember, this is totally, and completely about ethics (archive link to the Ralph Retort) and has nothing to do with Quinn or any kind of obsession with her and her sex life.

 

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.

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To issue of "what they want", which Bjorn touched on pretty nicely about "american voicelessness." If you skim off the virulent entitlement and MRA stuff, I think you have a lot of a common, distinctly American problem, which is income inequality and austerity induced diminished opportunities. I find the comparison to modern right wing/tea party/punching down stuff to be apt. 

 

What is the "nepotism" complaint if not a complaint about lack of opportunity? "All these people know each other and give each other jobs, and not me because I don't know the right people."

 

When you look at the resistance to the change of the status quo of production, I think you can look beyond just cultural values, and into a fear of people producing things they don't understand/can't participate in. Young people are culturally typically liberal. I think another unspoken facet of this is a sense of losing access to what was once familiar. 

 

No doubt that with these things comes a heavy veneer of white / male privilege that requires self reflection.

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Also, remember, this is totally, and completely about ethics (archive link to the Ralph Retort) and has nothing to do with Quinn or any kind of obsession with her and her sex life.

This fucking article! Grayson's name on a list of 50 people is 'incontrovertible proof that [he] was an intimate of Zoe Quinn'?! And saying 'This game would have been dead in the water months ago without you all' about all those people somehow translates into Zoe saying, “DEPRESSION QUEST DEAD IN THE WATER WITHOUT GRAYSON”? I don't understand how these people can function in society! It makes me want to tear off my arm and beat myself with it.

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I saw some pro-gg folks sharing this piece around as "proof" that Wu, Sarkeesian and Quinn are making up the threats against them.  Which completely misses the point.  This guy harvested 20 hours of twitter mentions for the three, 1500 total tweets, of which 99 were positive and the rest he classified as negative (just no death or rape threats).  About 23 negative tweets an hour, or a negative message every 2.5 minutes.  That's assuming a fairly even distribution between the three, which may not be accurate, but still probably good for an estimate.  And that's just the publicly available Twitter.  Doesn't count direct messages, emails, Facebook page posts, iOs reviews, Steam reviews, etc.  During the busy times, it must add up to hundreds of shitty messages an hour.  Obviously you have to ignore a lot of it, but you can't ignore everything. 
 

Going into this I thought the biggest damage would be the high-profile death & rape threats, but the problem is much worse than that. Besides those threats there is also the death by a thousand cuts of demeaning and slanderous tweets.

 
I just don't fucking know how they do it.
 
 

This fucking article! Grayson's name on a list of 50 people is 'incontrovertible proof that [he] was an intimate of Zoe Quinn'?! And saying 'This game would have been dead in the water months ago without you all' about all those people somehow translates into Zoe saying, “DEPRESSION QUEST DEAD IN THE WATER WITHOUT GRAYSON”? I don't understand how these people can function in society! It makes me want to tear off my arm and beat myself with it.

 

But remember, ETHICS! Obviously that is a piece of perfectly ethical work produced by a fine journalist. And making clickbait is a sin second only to doxxing, and that piece has clearly used a well crafted headline that communicates only solid, incontrovertible facts.

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This will be a partial response since this conversation moves pretty fast for me.

 

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.

Certainly; but these aren't very specific. What would it look like (to a GG proponent) for journalistic ethics, etc, to be "fixed"? At what point has the movement succeeded? In short -- as kickinthehead and others have asked -- at what point is it no longer necessary to keep GG, as a movement, alive? Presumably, the proponents of GG don't want to keep emailing advertisers, debating people, and tweeting #GamerGate for years and decades to come.

 

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.

I think it's unfair to say those are the only actions they perform. Wrongheaded or not, their attempts to educate themselves and others about this stuff, to engage their opposition in debate, to catalogue evidence that favors them, and to signal-boost their own side with objectively positive action (donations to Pacer Center) are not nothing.

 

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.

In answering Gormongous's question about what GamerGate's concerns are, my investigative tactic has been to go to what seems to be the hub of pro-GG sentiment (KiA), see what the top posts are, see what people are agreeing or disagreeing with, see what sort of stuff they appear to self-police, see what sites and articles and people they're linking to, read the wiki (which serves as a sort of manifesto, as well as a timeline and repository of relevant links), and see what verifiable action they've taken. I have also attempted to do the same with the other GG-related subreddits (mainly /r/GamerGhazi), as well as a few forums, such as this one.

In answering the question about what corrective action they've taken, I have tried to keep my eyes open for stuff which is verifiable, or which GG in general admits to, or which GG in general (or its more influential members in particular) seems to encourage (either explicitly, or implicitly via their culture). Unfortunately, this can get into pretty subjective territory. In all things, I try to employ the principle of charity, Hanlon's razor, and the presumption of innocence.

It seems that Gormongous and you (and others) disagree with my assessment of GG's goals and actions. I am interested in hearing what your methods are for discerning GG's goals and actions.

 

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.

I agree with all of this.

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I think it's unfair to say those are the only actions they perform. Wrongheaded or not, their attempts to educate themselves and others about this stuff, to engage their opposition in debate, to catalogue evidence that favors them, and to signal-boost their own side with objectively positive action (donations to Pacer Center) are not nothing.

You're right. They do all of those things, too. So that they can further harass. And, indeed, in doing some of those things, they are actually just harassing in a less obvious way.

 

There IS no redeeming quality of the GamerGate movement. Not a single one. It is not worth looking for the good in a festering pile of shit, so I'm not sure why people would try it here.

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So my conversation ended.

 

Probably going to cut the guy adrift on facebook as I am still confused as to what he was getting at but if anyone is interested in reading it I have a messy copy/paste.

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You're right. They do all of those things, too. So that they can further harass.

Clarification: are you attributing this motivation to a vocal minority of GG, the majority of GG, or every member of GG? And, are you denying Hanlon's razor?

 

There IS no redeeming quality of the GamerGate movement. Not a single one.

Donating to the Pacer Center is not a redeeming quality?

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It seems that Gormongous and you (and others) disagree with my assessment of GG's goals and actions. I am interested in hearing what your methods are for discerning GG's goals and actions.

 

Earlier you pointed to KiA as being an example of a place to look for examples of what it is that gg wants to achieve, and I'll agree that compared to something like 8chan, KiA is the reserved and calm place to go. But as for understanding motives and desires, I'd like to point you towards the mod team that runs KiA. We Hunted the Mammoth pointed out that one of the mods of KiA also mods another subreddit that is dedicated to rape and bdsm fantasies featuring the conquest and humiliation of feminists, including Sarkeesian specifically. That same mod seems to run a Tumblr (that I won't link to) that features additional porn aimed at the humiliation and punishment of women.

Now I'm someone who is super sex-positive, and quite supportive of people who incorporate BDSM into their sex lives.  But I'm also well aware of the differences between people who practice it consensually for mutual enjoyment, and the people who...don't.  For whom the fantasy is actual rape and domination.  And a pretty major fucking line is crossed when you're making up rape fantasies and photoshopped porn specifically targeting individual feminists. 

 

Two other KiA mods are also mods at a subreddit dedicated to sharing and mocking pictures of "ugly" feminists.

 

Obviously #notallgamergaters, but even for the theoretical "good" ones, it's hard to take them seriously when they don't see a problem having a mod for one of their biggest public forums who also mods a forum that MAKES hateporn about Sarkeesian.  Because really it's all about ethics, and journalism. 

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I think there is a discernable historical pattern that can be drawn on top of Gamergate. Most reactionary movements function in much the same way, whether you're talking about GG, Ferguson, Occupy Wall Street, or the Tea Party. Now keep in mind that when I'm talking about GG, I'm specifically talking about the "movement" that presumably started when Adam Baldwin created the hashtag and people were attempting to use it to talk about ethics (putting aside the efficacy of this attempt).

 

The pattern is pretty basic. Initially, it's grassroots and generally anti-establishment. In this case, the "establishment" is super broad namely anyone that can be perceived as a journalist. Everyone seems to be caught up in the zeitgeist of fighting this establishment, but doesn't really have clearly defined goals. As the campaign rolls on, it becomes clear that without goals the movement can't really move forward. At the same time, some element of the establishment gets a whiff of a galvanized, enthusiastic group. The establishment-esque element aligns itself in such a way that their goals seem like what the goals of the movement are, and boom the movement is co-opted as political fuel for a coexisting fire. What does this look like in other cases?

 

Ferguson - co-opted by Democrats and civil rights groups, the movement has been focused on getting primarily blacks registered to vote.

Occupy Wall Street - co-opted by both Democrats and Republicans, who used it as a narrative to alternately empower labor unions and hype up class warfare

Tea Party - co-opted by Republicans, who essentially turned it into an activist wing of the Republican party that integrated the "young libertarian" agenda of the movement in minor ways like changing views on the Federal Reserve

 

I don't really think this is bad in general, but it takes the spirit of activism and converts it into something almost unrecognizable in most cases. So, who's the establishment-esque actor that is co-opting GG? The extremely conservative patriarchal element that loves stuff like MRA on Reddit. What started out as an activist effort to promote ethics in a broad sense has become a campaign to attack the same people who have been attacked again and again by anti-women groups. Is it truly a coincidence that Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and many others just happen to have been attacked in the past by people with a similar agenda to what GG has become and GG itself?

 

I think not.

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