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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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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?

 

Donating to the Pacer Center is not a redeeming quality?

I am attributing this motivation to the GamerGate movement. This is what the movement was created to do. It was not created for the purpose of actually giving a shit about journalistic ethics. That is just the method that the founders of GamerGate used to rope in a bunch of don't-know-betters so that their numbers can grow and they can actually legitimately use the "vocal minority" excuse.

 

If someone is a member of GG but doesn't participate in harassment, they are complicit to the bullshit the other members perform. They are maybe "not as guilty", but they are still guilty as fuck and need to learn better. They've had ample opportunities to do so, and are at this point either willfully ignorant (bad) or have just accepted that the movement to which they've attached themselves is incredibly toxic (worse).

 

I don't give a shit how many charities an asshole donates to. An asshole is an asshole.

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I am continually baffled by the support the "movement" of gg gets, given that there are no actual ethical problems in games journalism they have identified, and they have no goals other than "more ethics". I really like how clickhole put it (from http://www.clickhole.com/article/summary-gamergate-movement-we-will-immediately-cha-1241 if it hasn't already been linked in here):

 

What do members of Gamergate want?

One need only spend three or four hours perusing Gamergate message boards to know that the main thing members of the movement want is ethics in gaming journalism—there aren’t enough ethics, and so, one way or another, there will have to be more ethics. They might want other things too, but we had a hard time figuring out what they were.

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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.

 

I feel I need to jump in here and point out that this definitely did not start out as an activist effort to promote ethics in a broad sense. It was a concentrated effort to attack Zoe Quinn for "being a (cheating) slut", but, as can be seen in the IRC logs from before #GamerGate became a thing, the "activists" carefully constructed the message that this had to somehow be seen as unethical journalism on the part of numerous co-conspirators so that they could get public opinion in their favor. Then, instead of attacking the journalists for this seeming unethical behavior, they just harassed Zoe Quinn about it.

 

Then it blew up, Adam Baldwin coined the #GamerGate tag, the message changed into the more broader ethical crusade.. and well, here we are!

 

I'm sorry for repeating this, you're all probably fully aware of this, but the origins sometimes seem to get lost in this big shit show.

 

EDIT: Not that I disagree with the rest of JonCole's post! It's a great post and he's absolutely right about how the movement got co-opted by anti-women groups.

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Donating to the Pacer Center is not a redeeming quality?

 

If it was an action for good PR that largely masked ongoing harassment, then yes it's not. That actually makes the donation terrible because it goes towards facilitating much worse things than the donation would help to curb.

 

And whether or not you think it masked harassment, it is absolutely true that the donation was to make GG look good. Why else would a movement do it?

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I feel I need to jump in here and point out that this definitely did not start out as an activist effort to promote ethics in a broad sense. It was a concentrated effort to attack Zoe Quinn for "being a (cheating) slut", but, as can be seen in the IRC logs from before #GamerGate became a thing, the "activists" carefully constructed the message that this had to somehow be seen as unethical journalism on the part of numerous co-conspirators so that they could get public opinion in their favor. Then, instead of attacking the journalists for this seeming unethical behavior, they just harassed Zoe Quinn about it.

 

Then it blew up, Adam Baldwin coined the #GamerGate tag, the message changed into the more broader ethical crusade.. and well, here we are!

 

I'm sorry for repeating this, you're all probably fully aware of this, but the origins sometimes seem to get lost in this big shit show.

 

EDIT: Not that I disagree with the rest of JonCole's post! It's a great post and he's absolutely right about how the movement got co-opted by anti-women groups.

 

I guess I was trying to address this in this sentence:

 

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

 

To put a finer point on it, I think there was a time in the middle of what you're talking about and what it it now where the people we've been asked to sympathize with again and again because they're in GG for "good reason" were actually more or less acting in good faith when they were roped in by the bad actors you're talking about. When it was the movement that is now glorified but is really only a memory as compared to how the current iteration of GG is.

 

I really do think there is a reason to recognize the early attacks on Zoe Quinn as effectively separate from GG because GG people earnestly seem to think that the two are not directly related but are willing to admit that they were subsequent.

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I guess I was trying to address this in this sentence:

 

Quote

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

 

To put a finer point on it, I think there was a time in the middle of what you're talking about and what it it now where the people we've been asked to sympathize with again and again because they're in GG for "good reason" were actually more or less acting in good faith when they were roped in by the bad actors you're talking about. When it was the movement that is now glorified but is really only a memory as compared to how the current iteration of GG is.

 

I really do think there is a reason to recognize the early attacks on Zoe Quinn as effectively separate from GG because GG people earnestly seem to think that the two are not directly related but are willing to admit that they were subsequent.

 

Ah, yes. Fair enough.

 

EDIT: Damn you new page!

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B0lb8wNCEAA1tm5.png

 

Hnng... *brain melts*

 

I can't even begin to deal with this line of thinking. "Our" culture? Feminists demand entrance?

 

Aside from the rampant harassment and death threats, that they like to attribute to a few bad apples, this message from "moderate" GamerGaters is what's starting to bother me the most. As if they're representative of "gamers". As if somehow everyone else is "demanding" fucking entrance. As if feminists weren't also a part of this culture less than a decade back. As if their "consumer revolt" is somehow representative of all "gamers" and everyone else is literally the same people that made fun of them as kids.

 

I can't even.. :( :(

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I'm glad that these things are being made explicit though. This sentiment existed as a vague pathos and is slowly becoming more and more specific and focused, which may be causing people to push away when they see how ridiculous it is.

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Yeah the big problem right now is there are a lot of people with a lot of bad assumptions getting into arguments with strangers without really thinking through their own assumptions.

 

Like, this whole argument about which group is more inclusive. That's actually not that useful of an argument. It's probably better to ask which approaches to inclusivity work for whom? Like, the idea that your group will hear any argument out doesn't make it more inclusive for certain groups of people. During the Bush administration you had a lot of political leaders discussing the pros and cons of torture in a very calm, sober style. But this capacity to hear out these arguments didn't make the U.S. a more inclusive society if you're of the Muslim faith, and these arguments are implicitly about people that share your faith.

 

And I think this assumption that women are only coming to the gaming table now is harmful to any chance for meaningful dialog. I hope more people read Playing at the World. Like, women have been involved in hobbyist gaming since the early days of D&D, and yet they've been in men's blind spot for the same amount of time due to various circumstances. But because people are so ignorant about the history of gaming they don't even realize how ridiculous their arguments sound.

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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."

 

The nepotism complaint makes me think of the average Americans who argue against a tax on the richest 1% because maybe someday they'll be in that position. I guess that could be a reason GGers started that thing about corruption in the IGF and the system being stacked against those who aren't friends with the right people. But ultimately I think these are all just good *sounding* excuses to attack the people they hate e.g. attacking Polygon because of its Gone Home "corruption" or attacking the IGF because they awarded Phil Fish.

 

This thing has gone on so long I think there are also people in this who are just fighting just for the sake of it, kind of like in that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode Battle Lines where the world has been at war for so long that they've forgotten why they're fighting, but they continue to do it every day. 

--

 

Oh and one more thing I've been thinking about that I saw Danielle tweet on Monday: "Left wing and right wing video game websites."

 

This idea is both interesting and kind of scary to me. It's interesting in that it might be an inevitability if the games industry continues to grow and sites are born to serve that type of readership. But it's also frightening because it would mean cementing this conservative position into something that is just another part of the industry. Ugh, but thinking that people only divide into one of two groups is a dangerous thought to have unto itself.

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Hnng... *brain melts*

 

I can't even begin to deal with this line of thinking. "Our" culture? Feminists demand entrance?

 

Aside from the rampant harassment and death threats, that they like to attribute to a few bad apples, this message from "moderate" GamerGaters is what's starting to bother me the most. As if they're representative of "gamers". As if somehow everyone else is "demanding" fucking entrance. As if feminists weren't also a part of this culture less than a decade back. As if their "consumer revolt" is somehow representative of all "gamers" and everyone else is literally the same people that made fun of them as kids.

 

I can't even.. :( :(

 

I don't like that post making me angry, so I'm going to try to be amused instead that he has to appropriate the concept of cultural appropriation from people of color in order to make the argument that left-leaning people, including people of color, are appropriating gaming from gamers. Never mind colonialism, imperialism, post-colonialism, or any of the other historical forces that make cultural appropriation an actual thing. It's #GamerGate, if a concept makes superficial sense and buttresses the movement, use it! Also, do feminists want to be gamers or kill gamers? Make up your mind!

 

Okay, I failed at not being angry, so now I'm angry. I am so damn tired of Joe H. Caucasian claiming ownership and therefore representation of all gaming. I've been gaming since the second grade when I got a Sega Genesis. Even before then, I asked my mom to visit her friend Monica all the time, even though her son Tristan was a huge bully who beat the shit out of me, because Tristan owned an SNES and sometimes let me play it once he got tired of sitting on me. I have never not been playing games since. When I got a computer, it was only a couple years before my friends were having LAN parties every month. It didn't matter if you were white, black, Hispanic, guy, or girl. Everyone played and had a good time. And now some dude with clearly unresolved emotional issues surrounding his childhood wants to tell me that, because I'm a feminist now, I never was a gamer? How does that even hold up long enough to make it out of someone's mouth?

 

It's the repeatedly selfish failures of imagination that make #GamerGate hard for me to bear from day to day, although that's because I'm not a woman and therefore don't need to fear for my life from these people. So many people seem to think the #GamerGate argument that it was right for them to spam Intel to pull its advertising from Gamasutra because Alexander said they weren't her audience anymore is airtight, because who else buys Intel products besides gamers? Well, I do (or I did) even though my belief that women shouldn't be treated like shit in order to make me feel better about being lonely as a kid apparently disqualifies me from being a gamer. I've bought (or directly influenced others to buy) four Intel processors in the past three years, but of course that doesn't count because it's politically inconvenient for #GamerGate. I'm politically inconvenient for #GamerGate, so they ignore my existence except when they want to speak for me in order to co-opt my actions. Fuck all this shit.

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And apparently it took less than an hour for the doxx.

 

How do these people not see that there's no easier way of validating the disdain that mainstream culture and media has of their movement than doing exactly what a person admits they've spent weeks afraid of being done?

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How do these people not see that there's no easier way of validating the disdain that mainstream culture and media has of their movement than doing exactly what a person admits they've spent weeks afraid of being done?

 

Apparently some of them do, because they're sure that it's one of their detractors that doxxed Felicia Day. As if there's not enough reasons to condemn Gamergate.

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Apparently some of them do, because they're sure that it's one of their detractors that doxxed Felicia Day. As if there's not enough reasons to condemn Gamergate.

 

Ah, #GamerGate... It's No True Scotsman: the Ideological Movement.

 

Seriously, I think a reason that people are getting tired of dealing with all of this, beyond the culture of fear and violence that it's spreading, is that supporters of #GamerGate are largely impossible to debate. Anything that currently reflects well on them is part of the movement, anything that currently doesn't isn't. That's probably the biggest issue I have with CustooFintel's questions, because he asserts that the reasonable claims represent the "true" #GamerGate and unreasonable claims represent the extremist fringe. Why isn't it the reverse? Crazy shit like Zoe Quinn the puppet master, dozens of journalists conspiring to push a message like "gamers are dead," and Anita Sarkeesian faking the threat to shoot up a school probably represents #GamerGate better, because those things are more in line with its documented actions over the past couple months, and the rational-sounding stuff about ethics is just the marginalized fringe of the movement that only serves to distract from its actual consequences.

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So there's something that's really been bothering me a lot in the last few days. A bunch of apparently "neutral" parties have been saying "Well both sides have been extreme so lets just find a middle ground." I have literally seen nothing objectionable from anti-GG parties. I'm not saying it hasn't happened, just that I haven't seen it. I'm curious if any of you have seen anything that might qualify. Obviously it must not be very common so comparing the two is ridiculous, but do they have anything they can point to apart from the imagined issues with journalistic integrity?

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Donating to the Pacer Center is not a redeeming quality?

 

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.

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So there's something that's really been bothering me a lot in the last few days. A bunch of apparently "neutral" parties have been saying "Well both sides have been extreme so lets just find a middle ground." I have literally seen nothing objectionable from anti-GG parties. I'm not saying it hasn't happened, just that I haven't seen it. I'm curious if any of you have seen anything that might qualify. Obviously it must not be very common so comparing the two is ridiculous, but do they have anything they can point to apart from the imagined issues with journalistic integrity?

 

You can point to a couple of individual things, but ultimately that would be missing the point.  GG is a movement of people who voluntarily decided to associate with that banner.  There's no equivalent for the "other side", no movement or banner to unite underneath.  Barring every single shithead on Earth deciding to align themselves with GG, there will be shitheads on "the other side" by default.

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I understand that, what I'm wondering is have there been any publicized occurrences of GamerGate participants being attacked through the same techniques that have become associated with their own methods. IE doxxing, death threats, campaigns of abuse, etc. I'm not aware of any and I'm pretty doubtful of their existence, but I want to be able to say with confidence one way or the other.

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So, who else is learning new, terrible things from the internet thanks to all this mess? For me, this video (which is a good watch for anyone like me who's still trying to make sense of this whole thing) taught me that 'sea lioning' is an actual thing that actual jerks do when arguing in bad faith. And suddenly the comic with the sea lions makes a new kind of sense. I'm not sure if I'm happier with this knowledge, or anything else in that video.

 

Nope, not at all. Between this and reactivating my Twitter account, I'm not happy with any of the things I've done, learned, or heard thanks to GG.

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I understand that, what I'm wondering is have there been any publicized occurrences of GamerGate participants being attacked through the same techniques that have become associated with their own methods. IE doxxing, death threats, campaigns of abuse, etc. I'm not aware of any and I'm pretty doubtful of their existence, but I want to be able to say with confidence one way or the other.

 

I feel like many of them take the multitude of blogs, articles, and tweets denouncing GG as a hate group as signs of "bullying".  Its part of the words that were sent to Intel/Adobe to get them out of Gamasutra/Gawker.  They see all of it as a campaign of abuse against gamers instead of a condemnation of deplorable actions by human beings.

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It seems like 'sea lioning' is named because of that comic, because it's describing a tactic that was familiar but didn't have a good name.

That video is super great, I came here to post it. Best line:

Quote

the use of terror tactics, even if only by a minority, has created an environment of fear that all [GamerGate] members enjoy the privilege of.

I also love how it unpacks that attitude SAM talks about, where they see their identity as being under 'assault' from outsiders. It's a misplaced, but real, sense of anger and grievance.

I think I've got that same anger, directed at what I feel is a more accurate place: the early 80s push to sell home computers and games as being 'for boys', despite the D&D-inspired games of the 70s attracting a substantial female audience.

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I feel like many of them take the multitude of blogs, articles, and tweets denouncing GG as a hate group as signs of "bullying".  Its part of the words that were sent to Intel/Adobe to get them out of Gamasutra/Gawker.  They see all of it as a campaign of abuse against gamers instead of a condemnation of deplorable actions by human beings.

 

This is one of the most laughable things I've seen, especially since it seems to be inexorably linked with that disgusting Mark Cernovich character.

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