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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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I feel like it's one thing for her to have a cup of coffee with him and it's another to say on Twitter that she had a cup of coffee with him. Brad Wardell goes out of his way to Twitter search anyone who speaks poorly of him and "punches down" by pointing his follower mob at people. I don't really know why Brianna feels the need to lend him any kind of credibility in a public fashion even if she finds him okay on a personal level.

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Does she mean truce between her and him over some previous ill will or is this meant to be a truce to tell other people they can take him out of the 'shitty person' category?

 

I don't see a problem if it's the former, it being her prerogative, but I would be uncomfortable with her trying to declare that for other people. Though yes, I know it's likely a bit of a mix but I'm unsure what she mainly intended.

 

This is quite a shitty presumption to make about someone I barely know and it's totally steeped in several layers of bias but she reminds me of a guy I went to school with who was very pushy on his opinion of what was best. It was mostly to do with stuff like 3D animation just being all round better than 2D because no matter what you can do more in 3D. To him, that was just clearly the case, so he'd push and argue for that idea. I feel like sometimes I see that quality in Wu, the forceful determined certainty that makes her an effective spokesperson for things she cares about but also means that if she's clashing with any aspect of my politics or worldview, it's going to be uncomfortable because she has the same level of certainty with it while I'm clearly going to be sceptical.

 

That doesn't mean she can't hold a different opinion, but it does mean I'm going to be unhappy that she's going to feel like her opinion is The Opinion. ...assuming that I've made a solid judgement of an internet personality I know in passing.

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Edit: Changed the images to hotlinks because they were fucking massive.

Checking in on KiA because why not, this is front page'd at the moment.

https://i.imgur.com/atxVUqR.png

Which... I mean... do parts of this not perfectly describe how GG has been operating this entire time? Who outside of GG has been "attacking organisations that publish stories they don't like." The only instance that springs to mind is that Polygon article that "attacked" Christian H. Sommers when she made that stupid video about Anita and "hipsters with women's studies degrees," which, while it definitely struck me as a little weird at the time, was completely deserved. Which other "organisation" have the media attacked? GG? You mean the movement that is characterized by not being organized?

Then there's this, which is sitting on around 3000 upvotes, which means they're on the front page again. Ugh.

https://i.imgur.com/MWJ5rCe.png

Like, I'll be the first to say that Brianna has said some ridiculous things (except you probably won't hear me saying that because I care more about the fact that she's constantly hounded than I do about my personal opinion about her public persona), but is it really so difficult to understand that class and wealth are not the only forms of privilege imaginable? To wit, it's pretty obvious to read that the pertinent forms of privilege she's referring to are not being a woman in tech, or a trans woman, or an outspoken feminist, or any of the many things Wu has been targeted for for months, which is prooooobably why Kern might fail to grasp that the "media spin" he's rallying against was maybe, possibly, sort of... accurate? But as always, people who don't understand concepts like privilege come at them in the same way they think social justice proponents do, which is to view privilege as a linear scale with no privilege at one end and ALL THE PRIVILEGE at the other, and in this case Kern wins the oppression olympics because he grew up with less money.

3000 upvotes.

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https://i.imgur.com/MWJ5rCe.png

Like, I'll be the first to say that Brianna has said some ridiculous things (except you probably won't hear me saying that because I care more about the fact that she's constantly hounded than I do about my personal opinion about her public persona), but is it really so difficult to understand that class and wealth are not the only forms of privilege imaginable? To wit, it's pretty obvious to read that the pertinent forms of privilege she's referring to are not being a woman in tech, or a trans woman, or an outspoken feminist, or any of the many things Wu has been targeted for for months, which is prooooobably why Kern might fail to grasp that the "media spin" he's rallying against was maybe, possibly, sort of... accurate? But as always, people who don't understand concepts like privilege come at them in the same way they think social justice proponents do, which is to view privilege as a linear scale with no privilege at one end and ALL THE PRIVILEGE at the other, and in this case Kern wins the oppression olympics because he grew up with less money.

3000 upvotes.

 

It does seem ridiculous, but then again.... those tweets are completely out of context. Part of this is a wider issue with twitter use anyway, but I'm pretty sure taking out a couple of tweets and throwing in a Jackie Chan image doesn't constitute any kind of thoughtful analysis.

 

The word "privilege" is thrown around far too much, and that comment seems (out of context) to be fairly immature and silly to say the least (even if Kern himself is from what evidence I've seen a bit of an idiot) but it isn't a bloody competition. 

 

Going back to the point earlier in the thread, the whole thing here is that Brianna Wu should do and say what she wants to do and say. The only people arguing that "SJWs" like us slavishly support her every statement are GGers obsessed with her. Sorry for basically repeating the point, but in relation to that second image, just... ugh. So what if she said something ill considered or downright unpleasant? I guess that means we get the boobs back in our games. I don't know.

 

I value this community. Thanks for being here y'all.

 

I have been in and out over the last year and honestly, I missed this place quite a bit. Being part of a mature and interesting conversation about this rubbish is almost disorienting. Very pleasant.

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Going back to the point earlier in the thread, the whole thing here is that Brianna Wu should do and say what she wants to do and say. The only people arguing that "SJWs" like us slavishly support her every statement are GGers obsessed with her. Sorry for basically repeating the point, but in relation to that second image, just... ugh. So what if she said something ill considered or downright unpleasant? I guess that means we get the boobs back in our games. I don't know.

 

KOOL AID WEARING OFF!!! LISTEN AND BELIEVE FIELDS WEAKENING!!!

 

:spiraldy:

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Progressive Game-Industry Twittertm is exploding about Wu right now. People are very angry and sad about the Wardell meeting. People aren't merely disappointed in her, people are distancing themselves from her entirely. Public unfollowings, the whole shebang. And from people who I might describe as radical, maybe, but certainly not unreasonable. From the perspective of someone like me, who has a lot of very progressive friends in the game industry but who isn't really part of that whole world, it's very confusing.

 

Enough people I respect have denounced Wu that I have to assume that this is some sort of camel-breaking straw, and that there's more to criticize here than is... actually being criticized. I see references to ablism everywhere, does anyone know what that's actually about?

 

It may also simply be the case that the people I follow on Twitter are way more staunchly anti-capitalist than I thought, and that the real sticking point was her claiming to share some of his "business philosophy". That seems like a very strange thing to say publicly about the CEO of Stardock.

Anyway, this whole thing has been more confusing than anything. Most of this (like Twitter in general nowadays) has taken the form of subtweeting, so I read an awful lot of emotional reactions before I even figured out what they were reactions to. 

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On the ableism thing, it was about an autism/aspergers tweet, that I was pretty sure was actually just a photoshopped hoax?  Unless I'm either mistaken about that, or she's said other things.  The unfollowing, denouncement, etc., all seems rather silly. 

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On the ableism thing, it was about an autism/aspergers tweet, that I was pretty sure was actually just a photoshopped hoax?  Unless I'm either mistaken about that, or she's said other things.  The unfollowing, denouncement, etc., all seems rather silly. 

 

I can't speak authoritatively on this, but I think it's her repeated statements that the remaining adherents of #GamerGate are all just "crazy" or "psychopaths," which stigmatizes mental illness by conflating it with the behavior of those monstrous assholes.

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While I was trying to find out what the Wardell/Wu thing was about, I came across this Twitter post, in which Wardell take Wu to task for suggesting that people not buy Stardock games. Interestingly, he is very happy to join in with the usual suspects - histrionic, attention-seeking, undeserving of attention - but when things start getting hardcore transphobic he pulls up. I think there's some survival instinct there.

 

Likewise, on the 26th he's talking about wearing his GamerGate T-shirt, and a few days later he's having coffee with Brianna Wu. What's changed? Well, I imagine one element is simply that he is becoming aware that he isn't going to get what he wants from GamerGate. The two things he particularly lined up alongside GG with were 1) that games journalism needed to be taught to watch its step with devs and studios (informed in part by his own experience with Kotaku and others) and 2) that there should be a correction where devs and studios who were getting, in his opinion, coverage disproportionate to their achievements (due to their gender/race/politics) received less coverage and more deserving devs and studios got more.

 

2) has pretty much crashed, on fire, into a lake of petroleum at this point. The public profile of devs like Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu has been boosted hugely, as has the profile of writers like Leigh Alexander and Katherine Cross and cultural critics like Anita Sarkeesian. Meanwhile, a press has sprung up that does indeed cover these more "deserving" devs and studios, but a) nobody reads them and b ) few devs of any note or quality want to be associated with them. There's only so many times NicheGamer or TechRaptor can interview the same half-dozen people. That leaves... well, The Escapist, really. That's Gamergate's big win.

 

1) I think might have looked more like a winnable war - until GDC, and Mark Kern's hashtag hijack hijinx. If you arrived at GDC and found that devs were expressing vocal frustration with GG for screwing up their hashtag in order to attack journalists, you don't, I imagine, need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. And, related, Mark Kern seems to be prepared to go a lot further to get positive attention from GamerGate.

 

And, I guess, in practical terms, Stardock has product out. Product that the core audience of Gamergate - young men - probably aren't very into. I imagine Idle Thumbs' forum is more progressive than many, but I doubt that it's a ludicrous outlier, and people here have been expressing uncertainty and doubt about buying Offworld Trading Company because of its publisher here. In terms of bottom line, there's probably a limit to how useful GamerGate is here. 

 

So, it doesn't seem ridiculous to me that Brad Wardell might want to put in some time on this, and do it about now. Wu's motivations I think _are_ trickier, but I can see the argument for giving leading GamerGaters a chance to bend their swords into ploughshares and quietly extract themselves from the mess they've helped to create. It's the truth and reconciliation approach, in a way. Whether that's the right approach... well, that's trickier. But. Nobody is behaving wholly irrationally here, it seems to me.

 

[Edit to remove ironically but unintentionally ableist language.]

Edited by Denial

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As someone who mentioned today that I was disappointed with Wu, trust me when it's coming from a place of long-standing issues. It's incredibly hard to approach or discuss things with people when they fuck up normally, especially when they start becoming an already-tormented figure. I hope it goes without saying that Wu doesn't deserve harassment and I believe she's a human being just like me, who is capable of fucking up and flawed, but she's consistently practising politics I have not agreed with and pulled some weird stuff with my podcast (which I should have addressed at the time, but I have an unfortunate problem with being steamrolled sometimes) which lead me to quietly mute and block her on Twitter anyways, long before Goobergate really got going. The thing is just that now, all of the little bits of things a lot of us have wanted to address for a while have built up and everyone is venting their spleen and all that.

 

It's complicated, it's upsetting on literally all sides. I hate criticizing feminists, I hate criticizing women. And all of us have gotten lumped together, regardless of political alignments or radical beliefs because we were all under threat of GG despite none of us being monolithic. There's so many women I don't agree with, who I still believe are human beings, that I just ignore addressing because frankly, at the end of the day, not every battle needs to be fought. I did that angry shit part of my life a couple years ago, that's not my stance anymore. But if someone consistently hurts people, it's hard NOT to say something. But a lot of it still gets backchanneled because it's incredibly hard as a woman to assertively confront anyone, let alone someone who is massively popular and has a lot of support. 

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If Wu believes that she can provide leading GGs an 'out' by endorsing Brad Wardell, and she also believes that the only people left in GG are detached from reality (which is not quite what she said but let's be generous here), why would she think that giving them an exit strategy would work? I think she's trying to find any way she can to make the awful-go-round stop, and if that means forgiving people who've shown no hint of remorse and don't deserve pity, then she'll do it.

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I don't begrudge her trying to make it in a harsh industry by sucking up to dudes but there's seriously way less shitty dudes to make pals with, I guess. I'm of the radical notion, and maybe it's because I don't have to make a living off the games industry, that shitty dudes need to be on an island, not part of a diplomatic mission. I'm not an ambassador to "treat women and other marginalized people like shit" town, I'm "you should already be doing that" but that's why I'm not a very nice feminist.

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I don't begrudge her trying to make it in a harsh industry by sucking up to dudes but there's seriously way less shitty dudes to make pals with, I guess. I'm of the radical notion, and maybe it's because I don't have to make a living off the games industry, that shitty dudes need to be on an island, not part of a diplomatic mission. I'm not an ambassador to "treat women and other marginalized people like shit" town, I'm "you should already be doing that" but that's why I'm not a very nice feminist.

 

Yeah, that was mostly my reaction. Also, there is a lengthy and somewhat gross history of prominent figures in a movement meeting with longtime critics and detractors, then telling everyone that they're not that bad, regardless of how they've treated and continue to treat others in the movement, just because they were decent to them personally. I mean, it's great that Wardell has a liberal policy for maternity leave, but that's not incompatible with deeply internalized misogyny, so is it particularly relevant information, especially when he was flaming people literally last week for disagreeing with him on issues of social justice?

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 I'm not an ambassador to "treat women and other marginalized people like shit" town, I'm "you should already be doing that" but that's why I'm not a very nice feminist.

 

I think you are just exhibiting symptoms of being a pleasant and rational person confronted with a hellscape of burning dumpsters and finding the idea of negotiating for a spot in one distasteful. 

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I haven't been following anything related to GG since the first time Brianna Wu was getting hit with abuse, so correct me if I'm wrong here. Are people here finding her at fault for holding business meetings with members of the GG movement, i.e. Brad Wardell? The guy's come up in a lot of weird topics over the years, but what's he done this time?

 

At some point business reasons take precedent is my guess, and they likely hold more weight in an industry where there isn't really a lot of money going around. 

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I think you are just exhibiting symptoms of being a pleasant and rational person confronted with a hellscape of burning dumpsters and finding the idea of negotiating for a spot in one distasteful. 

I need this over my desk, done in needlepoint or something. 

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I have trouble  putting myself myself into words here, but I'm very troubled by this constant analysis and discussion of how people should/shouldn't act when it comes to things like this whole kerfuffle.

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I was planning on coming back to this thread and saying there's no such thing as a perfect victim, and how much of this distaste for Brianna Wu that people aren't quite so interested in swallowing is probably going to be used against her, and against other GG targets.

 

But then the expectation that you should be able to at least listen to other people doesn't seem so onerous to me, so I think people who can't even meet that low bar probably shouldn't be considered leaders, or deserve influence.

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But then the expectation that you should be able to at least listen to other people doesn't seem so onerous to me, so I think people who can't even meet that low bar probably shouldn't be considered leaders, or deserve influence.

 

I mean, for me, the issue is that Brianna Wu heavily implied that Brad Wardell could be an ally of hers, despite his history of harassment and abuse, just because she didn't have a horrible time with him at coffee and because they see eye to eye on how to manage a business. Beyond the pleasure of his company, what exactly is the worth of seeking out Wardell as an ally moving forward? The only thing that a victim of #GamerGate like Wu and a voice for #GamerGate like Wardell ostensibly have in common is the need to get past the crises of the past six months so that they both can go back to making and selling video games without having to be public figures in the process. I understand why they both crave a return to the status quo, and while I won't criticize Wu's motives for it like I will Wardell's, I still don't think that hers are particularly noble, not that they have to be. That's really all I have to say about it.

 

 

EDIT: Brianna Wu isn't doing business with Brad Wardell. Where are people getting this? She requested that they meet to bury the hatchet over them fighting on Twitter, which I guess Wu "started" by telling people not to buy Wardell's games if he supported #GamerGate, and then they talked about being business owners. It wasn't a business meeting, unless "business meeting" means any social interaction in which you talk about your job. It was the internet equivalent of a diplomatic photo-op. Wu is very explicit about that in the link Nachimir provided.

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So... people are upset because they thought Wu meant she was now "OK" with the Stardock guy, when really it's just that in an adult world, you kinda have to do business with people you hate and try to civil?

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Man, this is going to be a lot of jerk things to say, but I figure I should just say them. Brianna Wu has always seemed like a huge butthole to me. Even before Gamergate I feel like she was constantly looking for attention from either creating conflict or drawing attention to her harassment. Any time I hear her talk outloud she just seems like she wants to steamroll everyone and be the center of attention and the voice of all that is right. Not that Gamergate people should be harassing her, but she purposefully made incendiary gamergate tweets trying hard to draw their attention. She was successful and then found herself embroiled in all the the harassment and death threats that Anita and Zoe has suffered from it. Yet she seemed to always be the loudest about it. It's weird, but it's almost like she loves this stuff. To me, she's just another loud person on Twitter, the place where drama drama drama happens.

 

Also I feel like everyone is supporting her game due to shitty treatment and the lack of diversity from developers, but seriously the game looks of extremely poor quality in terms of both graphics and design. I remember couple or few years ago seeing some preview articles of her game and thinking that is probably not how the final build is going to look, but oh boy is it.

 

I don't even have an opinion over who she has coffee with. It's dumb people get mad at it, she can talk to whoever she likes. I'd like to stop hearing about Brianna Wu drama already unless it has something to do with her game.

 

I suppose I wish she'd just handle stuff professionally the way Leigh Alexander does (even during that shitty Giant Bomb fanatic garbage in the past) but then Brianna Wu wouldn't be Brianna Wu.

 

On another note, I wish we could go back to the days where devs weren't constantly rattling off their knee jerk opinions on Twitter and making all of this game industry "news" a bunch of impossible to follow drama.It's like everyone is forever watching intentionaly watching this off the cuff public chat room every person of note now uses it for. Originally Twitter just seemed like a nice place for news announcements for game companies and for celebrities to talk about what they ate for lunch. I miss when the same type of people would save this stuff for more thought out blogposts, interviews, and articles. Not that those have disappeared, but it's all just noise on Twitter.

 

I suppose this whole post has nothing to do with feminism.

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I suppose this whole post has nothing to do with feminism.

 

Yeah. It was actually about ethics in games journalism.

 

 

SWISH!

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