"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[lizzyinthesky]

https://medium.com/@upstreamism/to-fair-minded-proponents-of-gamergate-7f3ce77301bb

[clyde]

Totilo seems to be saying that the no-Patreon-funding guideline is not a no-coverage-of-Patreon guideline.

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1s85v81

[Denial]

I think he's trying to make it clear that the change of policy at Kotaku doesn't justify or excuse the harassment of Jenn Frank or Felix Maya Kramer.

 

 It is wildly unfair to hound any reporter for as contentious an issue as whether funding a developer through Patreon is an ethical breach. It is, at worst, a gray area, one that some reporters will choose to avoid and that others won't. What next? Trying to ruin the career of writers whose Instagram reveals that they once accepted swag from a game publisher?

[Merus]

It helps that I present as clearly male on Twitter (even more so now than when I had a somewhat androgynous avatar), but the most that happened when I contributed my despair to the #GameGate tag is a bunch of favourites from friends.

 

The infuriating thing is that if they actually cared about journalistic ethics, the way to proceed would be to find journalists who clearly cared about it and ask who with money they have to pressure to get them to stop trying to influence journalists with free shit.

[Gormongous]

I have to say, the first thing really to make me smile from everything that's happened has been the latest Daft Souls podcast, where Gav Murphy gradually wears down Matt Lees with jokes about starting a fight club to fix all this misogyny shit until they're both talking about it half-seriously by the end.

 

 

It starts around 56:15. Sorry if this is off-topic, I just needed to feel good about all the hate for just a little while.

 

I think he's trying to make it clear that the change of policy at Kotaku doesn't justify or excuse the harassment of Jenn Frank or Felix Maya Kramer.

 

Yeah, there's definitely hints of an awareness in his response that any concession to the reasonableness of #GamerGate claims just ends up fueling more harassment. I admire him for trying to take a more moderate stance, but I don't know that the people who're cheering about "winning" this mess will read it as that.

[Jordan A]

I'm sorta with Gav on the fight club idea. I mean, violence doesn't solve anything, but the last few weeks have been so frustrating and draining and I'm not even in the industry. I'm just watching this shit happen.

 

Give me one of the anonymous eggs on Twitter, and we can punch on. I might end up with a 12 year old boy, or I might end up with a 700-ton MMA fighting killbot. I'm willing to spin that wheel.

[Twig]

Gav Murphy gradually wears down Matt Lees with jokes about starting a fight club

What man I thought it was the other way around the whole time. Man I've gotta start getting their voices straight in my head!

 

Also glad to see other people listening to Daft Souls it's my favorite Big New Thing. ):

[Problem Machine]

General Manager of Escapist Magazine "salutes" online abusers for their "noble accomplishment."

via @crono_maniac

[clyde]

The tendency of egg-avatars being the face of indignant demands for intolerance reminds me of Danielle talking about the baby(fetus?) in the sink who rattles through conservative-dad denigrations.

[Synnah]

There have been a lot of really good think-pieces on the whole affair (Upstreamism's post on Medium, Liz Ryerson's piece from yesterday, Devin Faraci's article about where the anger and frustration of the gamer comes from), but it feels like the majority of #gamergate's supporters are just going to dismiss them out of hand, because they're written by journalists or developers, and thus they're 'corrupt'. I don't really know what the end-game is when you're dealing with a group of people that is largely so closed to any form of reasoned argument, and who are being orchestrated by the coagulated mass of bodies that is 4chan. It's so frustrating and depressing to have a bunch of people shouting 'Down with journalistic corruption!' while people are being harassed out of the industry under the same banner, and for the one hand to be seemingly oblivious to what the other hand is doing.

 

The Idle forums have been pretty much keeping me sane throughout all this. Reasoned, intelligent discussion is the perfect antidote to the confused shitstorm happening outside.

[Denial]

 I don't really know what the end-game is when you're dealing with a group of people that is largely so closed to any form of reasoned argument, and who are being orchestrated by the coagulated mass of bodies that is 4chan. It's so frustrating and depressing to have a bunch of people shouting 'Down with journalistic corruption!' while people are being harassed out of the industry under the same banner, and for the one hand to be seemingly oblivious to what the other hand is doing.

 

It's interesting. I don't think you have to do much to get lovebombed; the Escapist guy has arguably overegged the pudding, there. All you really need to do is downplay the harassment angle (cf Totalbiscuit's retroactively hilarious assertion that all right-thinking people know that hating women is wrong, and there's no need to go on about it), and do a fist-to-forehead bit about what this is really about. You want to do enough to get the praise from Twitter (which is _tremendously_ validating, btw), but not be cut out from the mainstream of acceptable journalistic community or repulse the larger community of readers who are responding with what at this point must be well-worn horror at the harassment.

[Nachimir]

I think the end game is that most get distracted and drift away, but the hardcore group of harassers who instigated it remain. Some communities get better at policing abuse, others double down on harbouring it. More women are driven from Twitter and games, the systemic and opportunistic harassment continues on a smaller but nevertheless harrowing scale.

 

Traffic on most gaming news sites is way up compared to August, but they've been crowing over Alexa graphs showing it down. But: Alexa isn't that reliable, they changed the way they compile stats recently, the slump in the graphs starts long before #GameGhazi, and an August slump is a well known phenomenon for video game sites. Hooray for correlation!

 

I finished screen capping their etherpad conversations, because it got really difficult to stomach after a while. Once they found out they were being screenshotted and tweeted, they complained that it was showing their words out of context. Because sure there are nice, ethical ways to praise astroturfing and declare that Jenn Frank "had it coming". Here are all the shots I took:

http://puu.sh/bkcsX/21bac6cae7.jpg

http://puu.sh/bkcsA/4f90eb1f6f.jpg

http://puu.sh/bkUiD/232db02262.jpg

http://puu.sh/bkXvc/8a71d42dbf.jpg

http://puu.sh/bkXH5/07b4e7ffba.jpg

http://puu.sh/bl0Cn/43eb6a24b0.jpg

 

Edit: I couldn't resist another look ¬¬

Here they are fabricating their own story over Jenn quitting games writing:

http://puu.sh/bmwTc/0d3917ece1.jpg

That's possibly unintentional, but when a primary source is so public and readily available, I think it shows how for some of them, their ideology sways how rigorously they want to check something out.

 

 

Last one:

[Twig]

We talk about this a lot in IRC, and we all agree those screenshots would be fucking hilarious if real people weren't getting hurt. How do people actually believe that? I actually watched a live conversation for a bit, and based on that... none of those screenshots are "out of context". Blech. It's disgusting.

[feelthedarkness]

no fair! they're using our dumb words to say we're stupid!

 

also, I could be wrong, but that escapist statement looks like sarcasm to me. 

[Synnah]

That they think there's anything at all 'extreme' about the 'SJW's that are opposing them is telling. Have they obsessed so much about us that we have become bogeymen to them? Because I don't see the extremism in calling for an end to online harassment and better representation in games. It's crazy to me.

 

I think the chat about Gaming's Feminist Illuminati goes some way to explaining why this happens; the T-shirt itself is a joke about how guys like them think that there is an actual Feminist Cabal, but then the joke feeds back into itself and they assume it's proof that they were right all along. The fact that http://gamingsfeministilluminati.com/ is just photos of people wearing the T-shirts does little to enlighten them.

[Denial]

also, I could be wrong, but that escapist statement looks like sarcasm to me. 

 

You're wrong, FWIW - which doesn't mean it's _sincere_, but doesn't mean it's sarcastic. I think Alexander Macris may be positioning the Escapist to try to scoop up the people who are insisting that they are done with sites like Kotaku, Destructoid, IGN, Giant Bomb etc. It'll be interesting to see how big that audience actually is...  I have my suspicions.

 

The Escapist is pretty well-positioned for that, since its flagship products are largely already video podcasts, so is a more native fit with the YouTuber culture. It's been a long time, in online publishing years, since Julianne Greer was running it as a weekly online magazine of longform pieces on video games...

[Bjorn]

I think the end game is that most get distracted and drift away, but the hardcore group of harassers who instigated it remain. Some communities get better at policing abuse, others double down on harbouring it. More women are driven from Twitter and games, the systemic and opportunistic harassment continues on a smaller but nevertheless harrowing scale.

 

Thanks for all the screenshots, and for actually taking the time to go watch what some of them are saying.

 

 

also, I could be wrong, but that escapist statement looks like sarcasm to me. 

 

I had hoped that was the case last night, but no, it's looking like he's dead serious.  He's replied a few more times to clarify his position.

[clyde]

If I ran a game-enthusiast blog that gave scores, I would right a post about how scores are confusing and impassioning to the more immature and abusive portion of gamers, so we will no longer include them in our reviews due to the harassment of the last few weeks and in the name of ethics and integrity in journalism.

[feelthedarkness]

Oh, gross! 

 

I am not interested in striving to undo the damage that a political movement has done to itself. I think I shall watch Captain Picard again instead.

 

Good god. Yeah, Picard had a real low tolerance for progressive/dissenting opinions (in the tv show).

[Nachimir]

Thanks for all the screenshots, and for actually taking the time to go watch what some of them are saying.

 

np. Encouragingly, as they've run out of revisions and switched to successive etherpads; traffic, users, and edits have all been tailing off. Also, days later, they're still debating and saying "We don't have a clearly stated goal, what's our actual goal?"

 

Despite the Escapist thing feeling like a victory, they keep asking those questions and failing to express an answer.

[itsamoose]

Kris Graft at Gamasutra put up an interesting opinion piece regarding the identity crisis that games enthusiasts and developers are currently experiencing.  I think his calling this situation an "Identity Crisis" is spot on, it takes me right back to all those developmental psych classes I should have paid more attention to.

[lizzyinthesky]

Kris Graft at Gamasutra put up an interesting opinion piece regarding the identity crisis that games enthusiasts and developers are currently experiencing.  I think his calling this situation an "Identity Crisis" is spot on, it takes me right back to all those developmental psych classes I should have paid more attention to.

The title makes me think of bad, overly angsty DC comics crossover events myself. Which is not unfitting

 

[Merus]

I am really hoping Bob Chipman can find a good home somewhere else - maybe Badass Digest? He's probably smart enough to write for Badass Digest.

 

Anyway he's pretty much the only thing worth watching on the Escapist.

[Hermie]

Yeah, I hope Jim Sterling and Moviebob at least raises the issue with The Escapist.

Traffic on most gaming news sites is way up compared to August, but they've been crowing over Alexa graphs showing it down. But: Alexa isn't that reliable, they changed the way they compile stats recently, the slump in the graphs starts long before #GameGhazi, and an August slump is a well known phenomenon for video game sites. Hooray for correlation!

 

So what you're saying is that instead of trusting the definite word straight from the source, they're believing a secondary source that largely makes things up, because it fits better with the narrative in their head?

SURELY they wouldn't be THAT naïve?

[sclpls]

The irony just dawned on me that a campaign that has been coordinated on 4chan is demanding more transparency from other outlets.