"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Gormongous]

Another female developer has gotten death threats, called the cops, and has been forced to leave her home for fear of herself or her family being harmed (trigger warning for violent misogynist language in her screencaps): https://twitter.com/Spacekatgal/with_replies

 

Oh fuck no, Brianna Wu? She's one of the strongest, smartest, most fearless women out there. God, fuck this "movement."

 

 

EDIT: Okay, I read her tweets and she is totally unphased by the harassment, even though she's taking measures to ensure her own safety:

 

Hey 8chan/#gamergate. I make video games for a living. You make internet comments.

I just shipped a game I wanted to make MY ENTIRE LIFE to rave reviews. I get letters from women every day saying my work inspires them.

The only difference in 8chan/#gamergate and the asshole Southern racists I grew up surrounded by is they had the balls to leave the house.

 

She's actually so strong that she kinda scares me, on Isometric and on Twitter, but I'm so damn glad she exists anyway.

[aeolist]

And jeez now there's a fucking ton of people saying she's faking it, and even more saying "it's not related to #gamergate/that person doesn't represent us!"

 

Which, you know, since you're a leaderless anarchic hate mob you don't represent it either and can't say whether that person is or is not part of your group.

[Gormongous]

And jeez now there's a fucking ton of people saying she's faking it, and even more saying "it's not related to #gamergate/that person doesn't represent us!"

 

Which, you know, since you're a leaderless anarchic hate mob you don't represent it either and can't say whether that person is or is not part of your group.

 

"If we ever do anything positive, it's us. If we ever do anything negative, it's not us. The best intentions of #GamerGate count for everything. We're the unaccountable movement for accountability!"

[Henroid]

The point of bringing it up to GamerGate isn't to say it's them doing it. It's to say "THIS Is what Leigh Alexander and others have been saying is shit." And yet GG still reacts with "stop saying it's me doing it waaaaaaaaaah"

[Blambo]

Its kind of easy to forget thay Gamergate arguments are bullshit on top of the bad faith, no matter how much political maneuvering they attempt. I'm starting to feel that playing their game is legitimizing their argument to outsiders.

[BusbyBerkeley]

That's how I've felt since the very beginning.

 

Zoe is now on twitter calling out people who have been silent on the whole thing, and she's absolutely right.

[Merus]

I really do wish people would read into reactionary movements. One of the core parts of reactionary movements is that they always seem to be making good points but never really following through, because the whole point of the movement is to find anything and everything to justify their rage at their loss of power. They can't follow through on any of the ethics questions they've raised because the reason they raised them is to give themselves a veneer of respectability. The lunatic right fringe of American politics don't give a shit about what went on in Benghazi other than how it proves that they were right about what happens when you let a black Democrat in the White House. Mussolini supported unions! Luddites started unions! The Dark Enlightenment want diversity in news! None of these people thought this was the most important part of their work.

 

Brianna Wu being threatened out of her house is bullshit, though. It's being driven, basically, by The Escapist deciding that gamergaters needed their story aired, and published two articles, with 7 anonymous female developers under the headline 'Female Game Developers on Gamergate' and a dozen gamergaters under pseudonyms under the headline 'Game Developers on Gamergate'. It got worse, somehow: it turns out half the people they interviewed were in the #burgersandfries channel saying shitty shitty things about Zoe Quinn.

[Henroid]

That's how I've felt since the very beginning.

 

Zoe is now on twitter calling out people who have been silent on the whole thing, and she's absolutely right.

She's right about Phil Fish being right. This is fucking bullshit and fuck all those adult-baby GGers.

[Gormongous]

I really do wish people would read into reactionary movements. One of the core parts of reactionary movements is that they always seem to be making good points but never really following through, because the whole point of the movement is to find anything and everything to justify their rage at their loss of power. They can't follow through on any of the ethics questions they've raised because the reason they raised them is to give themselves a veneer of respectability. The lunatic right fringe of American politics don't give a shit about what went on in Benghazi other than how it proves that they were right about what happens when you let a black Democrat in the White House. Mussolini supported unions! Luddites started unions! The Dark Enlightenment want diversity in news! None of these people thought this was the most important part of their work.

 

I kind of wanted to go into this same thing about reactionary movements, now that Tegan's let the Godwin out. The Nazis got power mostly because they beat up union-supporting communists and socialists on sheer principle. Wealthy capitalists and industrialists, eager for any edge in the global depression, believed from this that the Nazis could be used to counterbalance the unions, so they gave the movement a lot of money, which was instead used by the Nazis to open up bread lines and public works jobs that were lauded by everyone for actually "doing something" about the poverty and unemployment in interwar Germany. With the popularity and support that came from their charity, the Nazis were easily able to crush the communists and socialists, then used the money and manpower that was freed up to turn on their capitalist and industrialist benefactors, ultimately claiming sole credit for the revitalization of the country. We know where it goes from there, mostly.

 

Hitherto, I've been content to see that no reputable website has been dumb enough to court a violent, amorphous, and out-for-itself movement like #GamerGate for a simple boost in traffic, but I could not be more disappointed now at The Escapist's eagerness to play the part of the capitalists in the above story. They certainly aren't getting my traffic anymore, for all the good it does.

[Merus]

It is a damn shame because I really like Bob Chipman and Jim Sterling's good for an occasional watch.

 

The thing about Godwin's Law is, well, the Nazis were a reactionary movement so there are a lot of things they say they believed that they jettisoned as soon as it was no longer useful to them. (Also that it's a lot easier to make comparisons between GamerGate and Nazis now that weev, who is an actual neonazi with a swastika tattooed on his chest, is involved)

 

See: this is the problem with not wanting politics in games. When an actual political movement turns up, you make mistakes you wouldn't have to make if you had been paying attention to politics.

[Bjorn]

Good lord, take a few hours to watch a baseball game and the Internet explodes again.  It's like this shit will never end.  Though it looks like between the Escapist and Wu, a lot more people are speaking up tonight?  I think, just scanning Twitter.  And fuck the Escapist.  I was already mostly avoiding them (though I am reading the female devs responses right now, but that'll be the end of it), but their update to the male game dev story is pure bullshit.

 

Editor's Note #2: We have removed the testimony of Slade Villena, known as RogueStar, after we've received evidence that he has harassed some contributors to The Escapist. Due to our strong policy against all harassment and abuse, Villena's opinions will no longer be presented alongside those of his colleagues.

 

If it hasn't been linked, this Storify gathers a bunch of useful stuff, including Greg Tito of the Escapist saying that RogueStar's opinions are valuable and worth printing even when confronted directly with evidence about his role in gg.  (The Storify is by @alexlifschitz fwiw).  It also points out that devs who were super vocal against GG were not invited to participate in the Escapist's little essay panel. 

 

Also, I had no idea that Revolution 60 was out.  Downloading that now. 

[Merus]

If only The Escapist actually meant that all the other people they interviewed were collegial with Villena, even though many of them are clearly just as bad. 

[Bjorn]

Arthur Gies of Polygon decided to call out Twitter and GG tonight.  An excerpt:

 

[Bjorn]

Will Tuttle of Microsoft is also online tonight, kind of condemning the Escapist for that piece, and the anonymous MS employee who was included.  Most of the interesting stuff is in his replies timeline.

 

 

[Bjorn]

Wooo, triple post!  Sorry, but I keep finding stuff.   I'm both happy, and terribly saddened, about the Escapist running all the female dev essays.  They're terrific, and I'm glad they were published.  But it's crushing that the people running the Escapist, and much of the readership, apparently doesn't value their opinions enough to give some actual fucking credence to their accounts (I made the mistake of looking at the comments).

 

Also, Brendan Keogh wrote something good that's worth reading. 

[tegan]

The thing about Godwin's Law is, well, the Nazis were a reactionary movement so there are a lot of things they say they believed that they jettisoned as soon as it was no longer useful to them. (Also that it's a lot easier to make comparisons between GamerGate and Nazis now that weev, who is an actual neonazi with a swastika tattooed on his chest, is involved)

 

Oh man, now that The Escapist is supporting GG so hard and GG is supporting weev, does that make him some sort of Yahtzee Nazi?

[Brannigan]

Yahtzi

[Merus]

Oh man, now that The Escapist is supporting GG so hard and GG is supporting weev, does that make him some sort of Yahtzee Nazi?

 

I knew I liked you

[Blambo]

Weev is some sort of Actual White Supremecist right?

[tegan]

Weev is some sort of Actual White Supremecist right?

 

 

[Pepyri]

Woah. I had seen some places they were giving him reverence, but I thought he was just another random hacker that tends to get worshiped by the tech crowd because he served time for hacking.

 

This is just woah.

[Henroid]

Last night I directly engaged GG for the first time in a couple weeks on Twitter. It was almost nearly a big mistake. I couldn't find anyone for a LONG time willing to discuss what was going on in good faith. Most of the replies were ridiculous defensive shit, including one guy who told me to stop "harassing" him because I was replying to him (not even close to aggressively). My favorite though was a guy who just kept using talking points at me. I gave him a pretty long set of tweets that were evenly worded about misunderstandings and such, and I just got preaching in return.

 

Then fiiiiiiinally one GGer actually spoke to me. We talked about the idea of GG starting a website they can manage and police to show people they're serious about condemning harassment and such. He argued it'd be an echo chamber at first, but I told him it'd start that way certainly but would catch notice if it was policed into being a positive discussion zone. The only thing he had over on me was that if it was a small site startup it'd be prone to DDoS and other kinds of attacks, which have been going on during this shit.

 

It still feels like the decent people have abandoned trying to make the GG tag legit. And when I say decent people, I mean they're still mistaken / wrong about shit going on.

[Salacious Snake]

Here's the guy in charge of the Escapist (known online as Archon and the guy who reached out the GG people) interviewing Adam Baldwin: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/10/06/news/interview-adam-baldwin-gamergate-politics-ranger/

 

Here's a storify of some of the escapist nonsense: https://storify.com/alexlifschitz/escapist-drama

 

When this shit first broke out, I was like "how is Susan Arendt letting this happen?!" 

[Twig]

After Zoe dropped her bomb way back, with all the 4chan IRC chat logs, someone suggested and tried to drum up support for a different hashtag to step away from the stigma of a campaign built on harassment. (I think it was #EthicsInGames or #GameEthics, something like that.) Obviously, it didn't go anywhere.

 

It continues to amaze me that these people who purport to condemn harassment of all forms continue to back up a campaign built on one.

 

Well it doesn't actually amaze me because I think the vast majority of the "people" are just a coordinated mass of dupe accounts from a smaller group. The problem lies in things like The Escapist embracing the movement and... themselves failing to actually embrace what the movement is ostensibly about.

 

EDIT: My opinion on what to do about this or how to handle it changes on a daily basis. Sometimes more than once a day. This shit is so dumb it's making me dumb.

[tegan]

It continues to amaze me that these people who purport to condemn harassment of all forms continue to back up a campaign built on one.

 

I don't think I'm willing to give anyone still using the hashtag the benefit of the doubt anymore. If they were genuinely concerned about "journalistic ethics," you'd think turn their attention to significantly more alarming conflicts of interest that go on in the world of game criticism, but none of them EVER bring that shit up because it doesn't involve a woman's sex life.