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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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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.

 

 

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?

 

 

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.

 

Talking about others is such a fun pasttime that I doubt it'll ever stop, and I think it's cool so long as it stays as small talks.

 

Seriously, gossiping is amazing.  But please just don't take it too far, keep it verbal and keep it relatively private.

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Interesting to consider whether Tim Schafer or Joss Whedon would also be described as "purposefully ma[king] incendiary gamergate tweets trying hard to draw their attention". Or, you know, just talking about what was going on

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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.

At least for me personally I'm just reading it as general criticism so we're aware of problematic behaviour. Feminist Frequency videos are not explicitly telling game developers "Don't do that" so much as they're highlighting why things they do are problematic so people are more aware of it. I read this thread as largely being the same as that, but you may not see it that way.

Also synth, there are parts of that I agree with. The game just... Does not look good visually and has awful character designs that Wu literally did when she was a teenager if I remember right. But bear in mind inherent sexism that might be making you judge her harsher or more suspicious of her just because she's a woman, and woman aren't meant to be assertive public figures. That makes it tricky for me in these situations, I don't feel like my gut response is a fair judgement because I know it's generally unfair even if it's possible it could be 'correct' here.

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Interesting to consider whether Tim Schafer or Joss Whedon would also be described as "purposefully ma[king] incendiary gamergate tweets trying hard to draw their attention". Or, you know, just talking about what was going on

Well to be clear, I specifically mean that day she made that image meme and was constantly posting it plus lurking 8chan and then posting screenshots of the conversations. Seems more involved than just talking about what's going on. I don't really know anything about Joss Whedon's twitter and generally dislike him and his body of work, so I can't speak to whatever is going on there, but Tim Schafer doesn't post anywhere as often as a lot of people mired in this forever Twitter drama. Brianna makes dozens of tweets a day usually on stuff like this for months on end while Schafer posts maybe once a day and usually Double Fine news.

 

That's why I specifically name dropped Leigh Alexander for a comparison. She's always great.

 

Anyway if you guys think I have inherent sexism about Wu's abrasiveness or game, I suppose claiming I just don't like her personality or game regardless of gender won't help much. I don't feel like this is a gut reaction considering I've had a couple of years of Brianna Wu exposure to go off of.

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I don't mean you specifically Synth, inherent sexism is just a fact of life for people in general. We can be conscious of it and reduce it so that it affects our decision making less but I don't think it will go away. At least not in the space of a generation.

EDIT: Also having years to react to doesn't make it less of a gut reaction unless you regularly sit down to analyse her behaviour and come to a decision about it. The length of time matters less than the fact that your opinion is based on a response to stuff as it happens rather than a specific effort to examine everything closely.

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Just as gamergate consists of a multitude of ideological currents (e.g. submissive consumer, conspiracy theorist, MRA, misogynist, US centric Republican, opportunist etc.), opposing gamergate doesn't exactly put you in a box or entails mindlessly supporting some "anti gamergate" figureheads in everything they say or do.

 

Tim Schafer's reaction to the controversy was 100% awesome, and he has my deepest respect for going in the trenches, but I still think Double Fine is burning through far too much money.

I've never taken to Brianna Wu; I'm pretty sure Joss Whedon didn't quite understand the issues; I wish Anita Sarkeesian was a slightly better presenter.

Leigh Alexander is a wonderful, capable and extremely important voice in the controversy. Still she never apologized for tweeting that damn pirate site with the gog installers.

The voice I most identify with is probably Katherine Cross.

 

I'll keep a critical eye out for that "alliance". Not too sure about what the results will be, or whether there will even be any results besides either side crying hypocrisy.

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I hadn't heard of Katherine Cross before the whole GG shitshow and gaining that familiarity is one of the few good things to come out of GG for me. So often I'll be just touching on an idea and starting to articulate it in my own mind only to find that she's just written an article meticulously exploring the subject.

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 that day she made that image meme and was constantly posting it plus lurking 8chan and then posting screenshots of the conversations. Seems more involved than just talking about what's going on. 

 

She didn't make it. She retweeted it. After that, 8chan coordinated a campaign to used the meme to send her death and rape threats, and eventually specific death threats including her address, which she documented with screen caps to have evidence of what was happening to her. It escalated in 24 hours from Brianna Wu retweeting a meme to gamergaters chasing her out of her home. She did not bring this on herself.

 

A lot of people tweeted jokes about gamergate at that time: it was and still is fucking ridiculous. When Brianna Wu did it, they turned it into a crusade. She was no more involved than anyone else making fun of them on twitter in the aftermath of their disgusting harassment of Zoe Quinn. It could have happened to anyone. (Well, any woman, at least.)

 

I'm not really a fan of Wu's perspective on gaming outside of gamergate and women in tech issues, but I followed what was going on in 8chan and KiA very closely. She was not poking them more than anyone else who was looking on aghast from the sidelines, unsure of how to react except to laugh at the absurdity.

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I hadn't heard of Katherine Cross before the whole GG shitshow and gaining that familiarity is one of the few good things to come out of GG for me. So often I'll be just touching on an idea and starting to articulate it in my own mind only to find that she's just written an article meticulously exploring the subject.

 

...and her opinion on the WaWu ceasefire is, well, not positive.

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I think Cross' take is pretty reasonable, though - it's possible to see someone you like, and whose work you approve of and respect, making what you think is a bad decision without ceasing to like or respect them.

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I don't like Brianna Wu but I'm extremely hesitant to also buy that she engineering her own harassment, that pitting two women's reactions to harassment is a good idea, or that Twitter is somehow where all the drama lives because people have real personalities and lives on there and use it to socialize. The idea that it's a news feed only and people are mucking it up with being people means you should probably enable muting/blocking better, probably? It's one of the few places I get to interact with my friends and the gaming community has made that impossible over the last 6 months because of all of the harassment. 

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My only issue with Brianna Wu was that she was really incendiary, along with David Gallant and a few really close friends but that's kind of just an opinion I've developed recently.

In the heat of all of it, I also ranted on twitter and made fedora jokes, but in hindsight I doubt it made any difference other than make me seem like a shithead, and I didn't really receive any death threats or harassment ever (note my gender on twitter is kept unspecified).

I also don't see why saying that someone was egging people on makes the harassers any less culpable. Isn't it possible to voice an opinion the way you want it without shitting on people?

I asked in the social justice thread about the whole "male tears" thing and though I find it really funny, it feels to me kind of like shooting arrows at someone who picks them up and shoots them back at us.

People who claim to be moderates deliberately take this as proof that "oh feminism is discriminatory against men" or "your feminism isn't REAL feminism", either because they don't understand feminism, disagree with the idea of unconscious ideology, pick it apart piecemeal to seem opinionated in a way that is different from me, and/or just hate women, but in every case wants to find every belligerent part of a positive movement and use it against it. I think this is a not insignificant part of why stuff like gamergate and MRA works, and idk if being dicks is justifiable anymore.

 

EDIT: wait "p o l i t i c a l l y c o r r e c t" is comedy censored on this site?

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Yo, people are allowed to be angry and make fun of pathetic nerds. Is it really her shooting arrows that will be picked up or is it her picking up arrows that were already shot at her?

Feminists are allowed to be angry. We don't all need to be level headed ambassadors all the time. Fuck that.

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People who claim to be moderates deliberately take this as proof that "oh feminism is discriminatory against men" or "your feminism isn't REAL feminism", either because they don't understand feminism, disagree with the idea of unconscious ideology, pick it apart piecemeal to seem opinionated in a way that is different from me, and/or just hate women, but in every case wants to find every belligerent part of a positive movement and use it against it. I think this is a not insignificant part of why stuff like gamergate and MRA works, and idk if being dicks is justifiable anymore.

 

Ever since the whole GG thing started I've been periodically popping in to see whats up, but rarely go beyond that.  I just can't see how any forward progress can be made in an environment which, in some ways, is designed to keep people screaming at each other particularly when one side is so belligerent in it's pursuit.  Not to mention the mode of most discussion on the internet nowadays is to try to constantly come into a topic at a slightly different angle, as if finding this one line of logic would finally break the whole thing wide open.  I just don't see how any new ideas or positions are going to convince people who have demonstrated an extreme desire not to be swayed from their opinions.  Instead I've been doing what I can to encourage more young girls to go into tech, volunteering at a local middle school to do some coding workshops, attending women in STEM focused events, etc.  My hope is that by the time everyone is done yelling back and forth about it, I'll have quietly done my part to bring about the future everyone has been arguing over.  On one hand I do see the need and even the desire to call GG on their shit, but on the other I see an opportunity to get a lot done by staying just on the edge of it.  The cynical part of me thinks that GG is just the distraction we need to get things done, and the empathetic part of me hates that guy.

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Feminists are allowed to be angry.

 

I can understand if some of us are, I absolutely do. But it's_not_helping. :mellow:

 

Maybe that's one of the reasons I lean away from Wu and towards Cross...

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Yo, people are allowed to be angry and make fun of pathetic nerds. Is it really her shooting arrows that will be picked up or is it her picking up arrows that were already shot at her?

Feminists are allowed to be angry. We don't all need to be level headed ambassadors all the time. Fuck that.

 

See, I was afraid of sounding like a concern troll, so I kind of hope that what I'm trying to express seems to come out of good faith.

 

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be angry at all, I'm just saying is making fun of pathetic nerds necessary? Doing a Tim Schaefer and meeting with Jontron to settle things personally doesn't help anyone, and seeming civil doesn't make you right, but still I can't see how you can ignore politics and expect to make a political difference.

 

This might be an XY question and I'm being incredibly unrealistic/extending the metaphor way too far but isn't it better to shoot bullets instead of arrows? Make right arguments that are less likely to be used as ammunition against you and refrain from stuff that can be?

 

I'm definitely wrong in only implicating Brianna Wu in this, since ignoring the fact that the people initiating shit is gamergate is stupid, and the fact that twitter is kind of an impossible platform to do what I'm suggesting, but I can't help but feel like the last few months haven't been very productive.

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I don't think it comes across as concern trolling, but it is pretty unambiguously a tone argument, so... yeah. Not sure what one does with that.

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I don't think it comes across as concern trolling, but it is pretty unambiguously a tone argument, so... yeah. Not sure what one does with that.

 

 

I guess so.

 

I've always thought that tone arguments were shit because they're used in bad faith or designed to make one side look bad. I don't intend to be trying to condemn people or behavior, and I really hope it doesn't come off as telling people to shut up. I was just wondering if it's even possible to fight back in earnest without slinging shit, though I guess that doesn't really apply here either because gamergate is the actual shit catapault.

 

I've just kind of had it with people yelling over twitter.

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The spectre of sexism shouldn't keep us from criticizing women. I have a hard time talking negatively about women because I'm always fearful of doing it for the wrong reasons, but that's a weak excuse. Sometimes people do things that you find wrong and as long as you can articulate why, you should.

There are a lot of people, men and women, who have weirdly, almost gleeful, used this GG nonsense to make themselves known. It's a pattern I've seen repeated with any major social flare-up. It makes me uncomfortable because while I agree that harassment is wrong and that GG is dumb, I don't agree with they way it gets discussed. There's an individualistic streak to it that feels wrong and honestly, kind of manipulative. In many ways, the GG rhetoric and the rhetoric of some of these vocal Leftists on Twitter are exactly the same and I should be able to say that without being labeled a sexist.

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I will say this much, my life improved when I stopped paying attention to gamergate stuff on Twitter. I do not RT stuff, I don't ever talk to shitheads, I generally just don't engage on any level whatsoever. I also don't make concessions about sexism in the gaming industry in general since that's honestly more problematic than gamergate, GG is just the angry mob. But my life has so many more things to focus on and work to do that doesn't involve that cesspool. 

 

But I also don't agree about ignoring stuff that people say publicly or that I need to personally calm down about stuff when I'm not really angry vs. frustrated or disappointed. 

This is the same sort of stuff I deal with over in the feminist activist circles of Twitter in general. 

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More broadly, and more positively, I think that actually quite a lot of good has come from this. There is always going to be a set of people who are shocked, shocked I tell you, at unladylike behavior on Twitter - every time Shanley Kane says anything, she gets a bunch of helpful advice telling her to be more like Martin Luther King. However, vocal opposition is actually kind of useful, as long as one stays on the right side of simple abuse. The one big positive effect of Gamergate, as is becoming increasingly clear, is that it's going to make it a lot more difficult - not impossible, but difficult - for senior people in games media and games publishing to ignore gender-based harassment. 

 

Like, it took a while, but people like Jim Ryan are explicitly, by name, citing Gamergate in the discussion of the need to be oppose harassment in gaming. And, increasingly, people who currently have anything to lose (and the sense they were born with) seem to be tiptoeing away from the brand...

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There are a lot of people, men and women, who have weirdly, almost gleeful, used this GG nonsense to make themselves known. It's a pattern I've seen repeated with any major social flare-up. It makes me uncomfortable because while I agree that harassment is wrong and that GG is dumb, I don't agree with they way it gets discussed. There's an individualistic streak to it that feels wrong and honestly, kind of manipulative. In many ways, the GG rhetoric and the rhetoric of some of these vocal Leftists on Twitter are exactly the same and I should be able to say that without being labeled a sexist.

I agree completely. I'll retweet interesting articles about China and other history nerd stuff, and occasionally link to a political article I like but Twitter is very limited when it comes to actual mature interactions, thus exacerbating these problems. It doesn't help that some seem so eager to rally around individuals, whether that's the odd number of Giantbomb users with a picture of Gerstmann or Shoemaker as their avatar on the GB site, people that consider Wu to have some kind of obligation to the rest of us, or people that think Mark Kern is not a shameless opportunist.

It's a weird thing and it just emphasizes that Twitter can be an echo chamber that doesn't accomplish very much. And as for being rude to people, well, there's far too much childishness going around. Being right doesn't entitle you to grandstand or just be rude.

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She didn't make it. She retweeted it. After that, 8chan coordinated a campaign to used the meme to send her death and rape threats, and eventually specific death threats including her address, which she documented with screen caps to have evidence of what was happening to her. It escalated in 24 hours from Brianna Wu retweeting a meme to gamergaters chasing her out of her home. She did not bring this on herself.

She didn't make them but reposted a bunch, that's fine it's still a bunch of stuff. I can't figure out if she deleted tweets on that day because there's a bunch of stuff missing between October 9th and 11th. If I recall right there was some retweets where the /gg/ moderator at 8chan was deleting her info from the board. Either way, I am not saying she brought anything on herself, people can say whatever they want, but it certainly doesn't make me like her in anyway whatsoever. To me it's just more Twitter noise from the people who post like 20 opinionated bites a day on Twitter steeped in conflict. She still does every day.

 

Anyway, I'm really not saying she engineered her own harassment. I guess I can put it in the way I feel about Phil Fish. The guy made continuous abrasive and incendiary remarks. Everyone continued to bully Phil Fish. I didn't think that was funny and I wanted people to leave Phil Fish alone. However I don't like Phil Fish because of the things he says and he seems like a major asshole.

 

...or that Twitter is somehow where all the drama lives because people have real personalities and lives on there and use it to socialize. The idea that it's a news feed only and people are mucking it up with being people means you should probably enable muting/blocking better, probably? It's one of the few places I get to interact with my friends and the gaming community has made that impossible over the last 6 months because of all of the harassment. 

It's a problem for me because so much of this constant Twitter banter is gaming news we are supposed to all pay attention to in terms of harassment and such, but you can't ever read anyone's tweets because searching is so tedious. It just ends up being people's personal chatroom but with dozens of other people publicly chiming in in between.

 

Like this for instance: https://twitter.com/chrisremo/status/517840096066691072

 

It's so hard to follow (besides how inane Total Biscuit is) because there's like a billion @username and you have to check the username because it never matches up with the name they use and then there's so many people just trying really hard to get in on a fight and blab even more than the original posters. For someone that doesn't use Twitter but likes to have a grasp of what's going on, it's a very poor platform to do it yourself. So then people have to make all this storify stuff to subvert it, but even that is a headache because I am not sure if everything is completely pasted there. I just can't stand Twitter and I don't understand why people like to just participate in this public free for all. It's also just a big unmoderated mess where GGers can make a ton of fake accounts and just do whatever they feel like. This is why it's old persona of being used as a news platform (and what celebrities eat) long ago was so much easier for me to understand.

 

Like, if people put all of their personal asides on Facebook you wouldn't have any Joe chiming in and just keep it to your friends list. It also would never have to be public either if you didn't want it to be.

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 In many ways, the GG rhetoric and the rhetoric of some of these vocal Leftists on Twitter are exactly the same and I should be able to say that without being labeled a sexist.

 

So, you know, at the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, non-stop transphobic harassment of Brianna Wu is not the same as "the rhetoric of some of these vocal Leftists". I mean, to my knowledge. Maybe we follow different leftists? Also, I don't think "I want you to stop trying to get people to send the police to my house" is exactly a... socialist position.

 

To be honest, this thread has taken a turn for the odd.

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