"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Henroid]

Someone's kids are being targeted (by mean-spirited comments or actual threats; I don't know, and frankly it doesn't matter), and Kern is being a putz saying it's freedom of expression.

 

Too much freedom on this goddamn world, if you ask me.

[syntheticgerbil]

Oh, I thought he was defending some kind of work of art or a game or show or something without seeing the original link. Yeah that makes sense about how ridiculous it is then. I am pretty sure threats aren't works of art.

[BusbyBerkeley]

Some anime avatar was making fun of Kluwe's children and saying they would be regret reading his twitter in college or something? It could have been read as harassment/threatening for sure. That grum guy sounds straight up like a robot there. 

[Vainamoinen]

Some anime avatar was making fun of Kluwe's children and saying they would be regret reading his twitter in college or something? It could have been read as harassment/threatening for sure.

 

I don't think so, but it still doesn't matter.

 

A father who sees his kids mentioned in this whole fiasco, whatever the context, SHOULD go red alert immediately. Gaters are not playing around, they need witches to put on the stake, daily. Their_reign_is_fear. Mentioning Kluwe's children is just about the same as doxing. Sometimes real names and addresses can be found easily online, but it is only the reposting of that information that gives harassers ideas.

 

Mark Kern is only just collecting the shards of his reputation by finally gathering some gaters around his as of yet pitiful campfire. The only way to get more is to be an asshole and to attack the people perceived as enemies by some gamergate currents.

 

The man's an opportunist idiot, and even gaters are usually intelligent enough to see through his crap. When he's useful to the cult, however... exceptions are made.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Temporarily. They're not keeping such a tool on board for long.

[Reyturner]

Kern seems like he's trying to get Kluwe to recite some kind of loyalty oath before he's willing to condemn the gators talking about his kids. Opportunistic and idiot are good adjectives for this guy.

[Bjorn]

I doubt the gaters ever turn on Kern, he's a Real Game Developer™, which makes him as valuable as gold to them.  Part of their narrative is that there are secretly huge swaths of developers who agree with them, but are afraid to speak out because of the Feminist Gaming Illuminati, so they need every one they can get.

[Vainamoinen]

I doubt the gaters ever turn on Kern, he's a Real Game Developer™,

 

Really? The guy's making a 16bit voxel J-MMO thingie now, because he doesn't have the money for anything else.

 

Gaters hate voxels. Far too indie.

 

I still say they'll throw him under the bus at his first wrong move.

[Bjorn]

He worked on Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft, his reputation is immortal and unable to be tainted. 

[Apple Cider]

Other than wasting millions of VC dollars on projects that never got finished and then eventually being kicked off his own game. 

[pkirkner]

I pretty much stopped paying attention to Blizzard once WoW was released, but wasn't Kern on the business side of the house? I don't remember much of him from my Warcraft / Starcraft fanboy days in the mid-to-late 90's and early aughts, but that's my vague recollection.

[Vainamoinen]

He worked on Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft, his reputation is immortal and unable to be tainted. 

 

Hmmmm. I'll get back to you on that at year's end.

 

Blizzard? They're still the Lost Vikings guys to me. ANYTHING THAT CAME AFTERWARDS, I didn't play. Okay, maybe a few hours of Diablo back in the day.

[Deadpan]

Depends on what you mean by "keep on board" I guess. I'm sure there a plenty of gaters who'd call him irrelevant and an unfortunate presence tainting their movement, but they'll say that about just about any figurehead, even mere seconds after parroting their talking points.

 

It's that whole implausible deniability of their no leaders bullshit.

 

(I'll be convinced they actually themselves get rid of people instead of just losing folk who wised up when they turn on Milo for his recently dyed hair)

[Apple Cider]

He actually dropped out of Blizzard before WoW even got to Vanilla so he hasn't been a part of the company in any meaningful sense in a very long time. 

[BadHat]

So in more "supposed allies are being cockheels" news, Maddy Myers is getting attacked on Twitter for having a dim view on the 'anti-Gamergate' subreddit, GamerGhazi. In case you needed any more proof that thinking Gamergate is terrible doesn't make you any more righteous.

 

Wanted to touch on this because Maddy's comments kind of mirror a lot of things I was feeling as an observer (and have already written about in this thread). Jay Allen said it in response to her, but it really does feel like misery tourism sometimes. The reaction to her comments on ghazi were pretty disappointing, as well. The most highly voted comments (which I'm never sure how seriously to take) in a discussion thread about the criticism disregarded her view because they found her complaints unimportant compared to having a safe space to talk about stuff, or because GG had been targeting people "well before ghazi," like that dispels the notion that they could still be using it to find people. On the whole many of their objections are too simplistic and defensive to allow for the nuance required to actually take her views on board, which kind of proves her original assertion that there are a lot of well-meaning idiots there (or at least, I took that to be the implication).

 

Not that her views are beyond criticism, but again, nuance. One of the things she touches on is that GG likes having ghazi around because it makes it easier for them to find targets. I'm not sure how true this is, but I had a way simpler take on this. GG likes ghazi being around because it gives them an antagonist. It turns "anti-GG" into something tangible, instead of their own contrived bogeyman. GG is fuelled by antagonism, and ghazi plays into their narrative uncomfortably well. That said, ghazi could be way worse, and they do a pretty admirable job of policing themselves when things get out of hand, but still, it's messy. I don't think they've earned the right to disregard criticism, especially from victims of GG, just because they made a sport out of pointing and laughing at their victimisers.

 

Also, and this has nothing to do with anything, but Maddy is great and I enjoy her writing immensely. So... I'm biased.

 

Edit: If you're confused then Maddy's remarks begin with this tweet. And then I guess follow the rest in the replies or something I don't know WHAT IS TWITTER SERIOUSLY

[Henroid]

The GaymerX group is getting bombarded by GamerGate on Twitter, from 20ish mentions a day to 1500 all of a sudden. GG of course claims it's being made up, despite the data you can track. My source was here, which has pictures embedded:

 

https://twitter.com/jere7my/status/576978968710160386

 

One of the GGers qualifies the only valid GG tweets as coming from Adam Baldwin. Which, y'know, is a load.

[Deadpan]

It is pretty telling that some of the responses to the criticism I've read on Ghazi are indistinguishable from GG talking points. There's the pointless assertion that not the entire subreddit is "like that," basically the #NotAllGhazi to match #NotAllGamers, there's indignation about this being a hurtful generalization and insult, which gets awfully close to the histrionic "Death of Gamers" outrage, and more than a few people were dismissing her concerns (and sometimes a little more than that) in the name of fighting the good fight. Throwing women under the bus while paying lip service to helping women? Let GG keep that cynical garbage all to themselves folks.

 

People being more interested in seeing a good fight than helping folk is something that Maddy herself wrote about back in January last year, when we were talking about toxicity opposite discussions among critics, a long time before GG came along and a) froze all of these conversations b ) set them back about a million years first. This is just one of these reminders that just because bigots hate your guts doesn't necessarily mean you're the perfect exemplar of progressivism and aren't part of the problem in other, more subtle ways. These massive, glaring issues obviously need to be addressed, but they also give people wrong ideas about what things like sexism look like, since that isn't lmited to open and unabashed misogyny. It's kind of how people think of racism as some KKK bogeyman, and so they never consider the internalized stuff they might still be carrying around. Instead, they get mad at you for comparing them to such vile people.

 

So those who were fighting for more diversity and better representation in games before it became a fashionable necessity were rightfully worried all through this that condemning GG would become the new ritual for video game progressives to pat themselves on the back. It's important to condemn it for sure, but unfortunately it means the next time one of these discussions starts people are going to point to it and say "What do you want, I already did my part," which is no good. We're already seeing that here, I guess.

[Merus]

I stumbled across this guy, Fredrik deBoer, who has a really sensational critique of social justice as she is spoken that I'll drop in the appropriate thread, but I bring him up here because of this blog post discussing the private school white privilege classes that takes a side-swipe at Gamergate as it goes, specifically its ability to co-opt 'oppression' as a metaphor: essentially, they can do it because talk of oppression has become unmoored from actual harm.

[Apple Cider]

I think GamerGhazi direct capping and linking to Maddy Myers tweets on the subreddit was a creepy tactic because it basically provided people a contextless way to go harangue her. Reddit is shit, people. I don't care how many "good" subreddits you have on there or whatever, Reddit is a giant shithole that ALSO houses KiA and even more horrific things. GamerGhazi is like erecting a giant house right next to your enemy so you can see what they are doing from the comfort of your own home and then not doing jack shit when they go outside to whack someone.

[Gaizokubanou]

So those who were fighting for more diversity and better representation in games before it became a fashionable necessity were rightfully worried all through this that condemning GG would become the new ritual for video game progressives to pat themselves on the back.

 

Self congratulation isn't even a problem IMO.  There is lot of that going on here as well and it's just fun at best (who doesn't like being praised?) or at worst, mostly harmless.  I'm more worried about dog-piling and employer tattling, based on some dumb but ultimately, just dumb (mistakes can vary in degrees) tweets or other forms of online conversation (not that online is magical, it's just easier to archive), becoming the part of the ritual.

 

The point was to remove those elements from being used as vehicle of bigotry, not to just add on another criteria to it.  

 

I was able to converse here about my differing opinion on TB (my opinion on him did sink a bit recently but it's still notably better than the average view here ) a while back and that's props to you guys for keeping chill while for you knew I was just trying to flamebait (it was like my 4th post?)... but it did cross my mind that I was potentially setting myself up to be flamed, a worry which turned out was thankfully unwarranted here.  But that worry is always present when with this topic with strangers from what I consider to my relatively 'neutral' feel on this topic.

 

On Maddy, she's been on my twitter feed recently and I enjoy reading her writings.  Shame to see her being piled on.

[Vainamoinen]

The GaymerX group is getting bombarded by GamerGate on Twitter, from 20ish mentions a day to 1500 all of a sudden. GG of course claims it's being made up, despite the data you can track. My source was here, which has pictures embedded:

 

https://twitter.com/jere7my/status/576978968710160386

 

One of the GGers qualifies the only valid GG tweets as coming from Adam Baldwin. Which, y'know, is a load.

 

...where can I find those six tweets by Adam Baldwin?

 

I'm really terrible at twitter, sorry. : (

[Tanukitsune]

Just to be sure, is GamerGhazi just another name for GamerGate?

[Gaizokubanou]

Just to be sure, is GamerGhazi just another name for GamerGate?

 

I thought it was 'direct opposition' to GamerGate?

[Denial]

I think I see the confusion: Gamerghazi is both a term used by opponents of Gamergate to mock the overblown metaphorical use of -Gate. Since -Gate refers to a scandal in which genuine corruption was revealed, and ultimately brought down a president, -Ghazi is used to reference the Benghazi "scandal", i.e. an artificial scandal created by Republican politicians and conspiracy theoriss. It's also the name of a subreddit dedicated to finding and mocking/protesting actions by Gamergaters.

 

So, "s/he supports Gamerghazi" could mean "s/he supports Gamergate", or "s/he supports the existence of a particular subreddit that exists to mock Gamergate".

[Henroid]

This is why I stuck to "GamerGate" and "everyone else on the planet."

[Tanukitsune]

It's kinda hilarious/sad that GamerGaters use GamerGhazi because they think they are making up conspiracies about them when one of the sparks that started the whole debacle was them convincing themselves that there is some gamer conspiracy in the game industry that doesn't exist with Anita, Zoe and the others.