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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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Oh, Ethan Carter guy wasn't done. There's a part 3.

In part two we learn that the entire foundation of video games was laid by 1979, and anything from that year or later cannot be considered a foundational element of the development of video game design, or the narrative structures of video games.

In part three, we are treated to an exercise in creative writing in which a woman being murdered by her husband serves as the catalyst for change and growth for a third man who was unable to save her. To see this story as having any sexist or misogynistic elements, that means you have doomed yourself to living in a world that can only be seen through the lens of sexism, and the lens of sexism is wrong. Because facts. Or feelings. Or something.

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Explaining gender stereotypes away by projecting them on rectangles.

 

Wow, I am so convinced now. That sure gave me a new perspective, those evil rectangle tropes have become pretty excessive in the meantime.

 

This guy got far too close to his buddy Biscuit.

 

 

/edit: Biscuit's trying to coach the gaters quite a bit [at least if genuine, but I think so. It's hard to write up that shit.]. Short version: If you gamergaters would stop acting like gamergaters and started ignoring what gamergate is really about, maybe even focused on journalist ethics for a bit, you swell guys could really win at gamergate! Oh John, how do you get in your panties every morning. But hey, the penny dropped on issues of harrassment and "the SJW" it seems. He even understands where that crap is coming from. Took him only just half a year.

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To be fair, there is this quadrilateral parable and I understand it's not entirely wrongheaded.

 

There's definitely a lot of weird baggage in the unquestioned assumption that we should all be interested in and working towards unity, similar to the discussion that was happening in the Feminism thread about Chait's article and the idea that "but I'm a liberal too!" should work as a shield against criticism. The fact that we all play games isn't a particularly strong connection and it gets increasingly bizarre that people want to establish this kind of forced bond. Why should a rift in games be a bad thing then? Seems to me that if we can create a physical obstacle between decent folk and douchelords, it can't possibly be wide and trap-laden enough.

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The fact is that most of it comes from the fact that most of us play games but some people are REALLY uncomfortable with other groups playing said games, much less looking at them in a critical way. It's fear and insecurity and it falls along much larger sociopolitical lines due to how gaming has been marketed up until now. 

 

What is interesting is this is precisely what happened with Warcraft, other than the coordinated harassment campaign that started under the pretenses of revenge against an ex. Once more people started doing critical writing about Warcraft, despite all of us being fans of it, people started to get REALLY agitated. Like giant forum posts on the official forums agitated, and harassment in comments and on Twitter. People want to comfortably engage with a game without being made to feel like they are a bad person for engaging with problematic media despite that not being the intention of the critical work, but that never quite got through. 

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Explaining gender stereotypes away by projecting them on rectangles.

 

Wow, I am so convinced now. That sure gave me a new perspective, those evil rectangle tropes have become pretty excessive in the meantime.

 

This guy got far too close to his buddy Biscuit.

 

 

/edit: Biscuit's trying to coach the gaters quite a bit [at least if genuine, but I think so. It's hard to write up that shit.]. Short version: If you gamergaters would stop acting like gamergaters and started ignoring what gamergate is really about, maybe even focused on journalist ethics for a bit, you swell guys could really win at gamergate! Oh John, how do you get in your panties every morning. But hey, the penny dropped on issues of harrassment and "the SJW" it seems. He even understands where that crap is coming from. Took him only just half a year.

My favourite quote from the comments:

 

"I don't particularly like the threads TB was talking about but at the same time if we were doing what he suggested and researching journalistic wrongdoing instead of shooting the breeze here this place would become tumbleweed pretty quickly."

 

Yeah...

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Boy, now I am glad I didn't buy Vanishing of Ethan Carter, that is pretty bad.

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Oh no. ):

 

I hadn't bought it yet either but it was definitely on my list.

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Boy, now I am glad I didn't buy Vanishing of Ethan Carter, that is pretty bad.

:( :(  :( :(

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This Ken Levine thing puts a new perspective on several personalities in GG, who now look like they're desperately trying to be ersatz Andrew Ryan.

 

Actually it would be really nice if GG fucked off to a secret city under the sea and never bothered anyone else again.

 

Wait is 8chan... Rapture? Only they're still lashing out against decent society.

 

Someone probably made this comparison 6 months ago.

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AAAGH FUCK FUCK FUCK this article does that FUCKING thing where they put "pull quotes" in but they AREN'T ACTUALLY PULL QUOTES, they are just WORDS IN THE ARTICLE that aren't repeated anywhere. FUUUUUUUCK that shit.

Hahaha that was driving me crazy too. I was halfway through before I realized "hey wait those words aren't... damnit"

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AAAGH FUCK FUCK FUCK this article does that FUCKING thing where they put "pull quotes" in but they AREN'T ACTUALLY PULL QUOTES, they are just WORDS IN THE ARTICLE that aren't repeated anywhere. FUUUUUUUCK that shit.

*best Sigmund Freud voice*

Tell us how you really feel.

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AAAGH FUCK FUCK FUCK this article does that FUCKING thing where they put "pull quotes" in but they AREN'T ACTUALLY PULL QUOTES, they are just WORDS IN THE ARTICLE that aren't repeated anywhere. FUUUUUUUCK that shit.

Actually,

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Publishing death threats, harrassment, sexist/misogynist/racist comments and emails supposedly points at a systemic problem.
 
Yes, there is outrage after publication, congrats Levine, and there is a great dose of courage needed to face that outrage.
 
If there is no publication, these threats become mere hearsay and the problem is swept under the carpet.
 
No way, I say. This is the time we shame harrassers out of the medium. It is the time to go public.

 

 

:( :( :( :(

 

Yes, you supported Adrian Chmielarz and the Astronauts. That's not too bad though. As I said, Chmielarz is latching on to gamergate topics while making games of a type that is explicitly attacked and despised by gamergaters. And while Chmielarz is the CEO of his company, there still are members of his team that might not share his confused, pseudo intellectual and self glorifying opinion.

It's clear by now that we can't vote against opinions and ideologies by holstering our wallets – then again, neither can gamergate. Voting against individual people might be even more difficult. Not sure it's the way to go.

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Before Gamergate had a name...

 

(Full story in link)

 

 

Is this the woman who was the community manager for Mighty # 9? If so, I remember that. It was fucking brutal, at the same time you had mega man fans going 'you need to know your audience if you are going to speak to them'

 

Fucking travesty.

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It's clear by now that we can't vote against opinions and ideologies by holstering our wallets – then again, neither can gamergate. Voting against individual people might be even more difficult. Not sure it's the way to go.

 

The hell I can't

 

(My Steam wishlist is forty titles long, I have over a hundred games I own but haven't played - haven't even played - and Vanishing of Ethan Carver got positive but not enthusiastic reviews. I'm not so much never buying that game as putting a whole bunch of things ahead of it, except that I'm honest enough to say that it probably means I'm never buying that game.)

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This popped up in my Twitter feed, as a reminder that Milo whats-his-ass is continuing to be exactly that - an ass.

 

B-MXe8hCUAATZpL.png

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Counter point: Relaying something you went through in life isn't publicity. It's being a human wanting to make a connection / provide a cautionary tale, etc. "Publicize" is a very aggressive word that means an agenda is in play.

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It's also worth noting that Randi Harper (of GGautoblocker fame) pointed out that even though Levine says he is just "telling you what the cops told me," it directly contradicts everything police told her while she was working with them. Not publicizing means less thrill for the perpetrators perhaps, but like all "Don't feed the trolls!" advice it also ends up working in their favor since the idea that you must stay silent about this isolates their targets and makes them bottle up all that shit inside them since externalizing any of it is seen as a victory for your harassers. Harmful stuff.

 

I don't think anybody is really suggesting that Levine is being hostile or deliberately wrongheaded about any of this, just that he's the latest in a series of people not really affected by any of this giving unqualified and unhelpful advice. It's not the intention that I mind, in other words, it's the all too familiar thoughtlessness of yet another guy butting in with false equivalences about both sides being wrong and platitudes about being nice to each other.

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It's also playing into a narrative that Gamergaters have been trying to play up for some time.  Because "law enforcement suggests you shut up" (not true), that means publicizing the threats you get means that you're just trying to achieve "professional victim" status and proves that you're not taking the threats seriously (because if you were, you would have approached police who are going to supposedly tell you not to do that).

 

It was a really big thing when we were only a month or two into GG, specifically against Anita if I'm remembering this mess correctly.  You're publicizing that you got threats, which means you're not really taking the threats seriously, so they don't really count.

 

I don't doubt that a police officer might have actually said that to Levine, but it was probably just the officer offering a personal opinion and not official departmental advice.  Much in the way that numerous women have tried to report harassment to police only to be told "Well, just stay off the internet."

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