"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Bjorn]

I understand the trains of thought by Gormonguos and Jason, but I don't think the language of video games actually has anything to do with this in any meaningful way.  It has changed the words they are using (with a focus on things like "winning"), but the aiming of violence towards those you have dehumanized and othered dates far, far before the introduction of video games into our lives.  The language is just set dressing, a decoration.  Extreme religious fundamentalists will use the languages they know, just look at groups like the Phelps clan (hell, damnation, the devil, death), but the inherent message of hate, violence and the inevitable victory over their enemies is all there.  Gamers have just gussied up their very similar hatreds with the words they know, but the message is the same.

 

WaPo has an interesting take on this though, that the gaters are just part of the latest culture war that is taking place across multiple fronts:

 

Among the questions at issue: Are enough women, people of color and LGBT people represented on the page and screen and working behind the cameras and monitoring where pop culture gets produced? How much should sports leagues police the private behavior of athletes and team owners? What responsibility do storytellers have when they depict extreme violence? How does fiction influence our perception of American military and intelligence operations? And what is the relationship (if there is one) between the quality of a work’s politics and the quality of its art?

Many of the flash points in the new culture wars are the same issues of identity politics that roiled universities in earlier decades. But rather than slugging it out in academic presses through works like Martin Bernal’s “Black Athena,” which situated classical civilization’s roots in Africa, or polemics like Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” the battlefields are low culture and the combatants are consumers, mass media critics and creators.

 

I actually haven't read it all yet, as it's late and I'm tired.  But it was interesting as far as I did get. 

[Gormongous]

I understand the trains of thought by Gormonguos and Jason, but I don't think the language of video games actually has anything to do with this in any meaningful way.  It has changed the words they are using (with a focus on things like "winning"), but the aiming of violence towards those you have dehumanized and othered dates far, far before the introduction of video games into our lives.  The language is just set dressing, a decoration.  Extreme religious fundamentalists will use the languages they know, just look at groups like the Phelps clan (hell, damnation, the devil, death), but the inherent message of hate, violence and the inevitable victory over their enemies is all there.  Gamers have just gussied up their very similar hatreds with the words they know, but the message is the same.

 

Can we spin this out a bit further, then? What discussion of Phelps that I've read definitely acknowledges that there's a bilateral dimension to their rhetoric of hate. Their hate informed their reading of the Bible, and the Bible informed their understanding and expression of hate. There's an interdependency like I see with #GamerGate and video games. It's certainly not a causal relationship and I feel the same trepidation as Smart Jason in articulating anything that could be perceived as such, but there are elements in games, especially in the intensive consumption of a certain type of game combined with the mental and emotional ramifications of a self-isolating lifestyle, that have no doubt driven a lot of the hatred we've seen here in particular directions that are entirely missing from virtually every other realm of media discourse besides maybe comics, which also happens to share many of the generic issues of video games.

 

As a whole, I'm somewhat cautious defining hate just as a homogeneous force that's existed throughout history. That's certainly true, to a greater extent than I can usually acknowledge for the sake of my own sanity, but it's also true that hate manifests itself in certain places and ways according to very specific circumstances that are important to be understood by us if we hope to answer it. I think the intersection of video games, patriarchy, and internet culture has been fertile soil for this specific reactionary hate group like a global depression or the expansion of the voting franchise has been for others.

[Pepyri]

I thought this post was a good summary you could always link people who start throwing a bunch of the usual rhetoric at you: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=134397896&postcount=12285

 

I got more heavily involved in posting on it today than I have before. It's starting to feel like the misinformation GG has been putting out there has started to falter, especially in the face of such wanton threats as what Anita got.

[Smart Jason]

Extreme religious fundamentalists will use the languages they know, just look at groups like the Phelps clan (hell, damnation, the devil, death), but the inherent message of hate, violence and the inevitable victory over their enemies is all there.  Gamers have just gussied up their very similar hatreds with the words they know, but the message is the same.

 

I think the problem is that games are an insular community and will remain so, more so than other forms of media or culture which may also give rise to extremism. This ties into a lot of the pontificating, academic arguments I've been having for years, but as long as games are something that are so silly and violent the community itself will be subject to fracturing as it has with GamerGate - which I don't view as a vocal minority but a true articulation of the fact that we have a serious privileged white male problem in our most robust communal habitats like Reddit and 4chan.

 

I'm an atheist but I have the perspective to recognize the inclusiveness of religion and see the Westboro Church, which you'd cite, as a splinter group. But the idea of an analogue to that for video games - i.e., someone who doesn't play games but understands the culture enough to be fluent and knowledgeable of the denominations in which we've now been forced to assemble - is absurd. To an outsider, the hobby itself is still too easily dismissed and I think the complaints that games are too unsophisticated, violent, and culturally monolithic all go hand in hand to keep the general audience for them essentially similar and therefore essentially volatile.

[Bjorn]

Can we spin this out a bit further, then? What discussion of Phelps that I've read definitely acknowledges that there's a bilateral dimension to their rhetoric of hate. Their hate informed their reading of the Bible, and the Bible informed their understanding and expression of hate. There's an interdependency like I see with #GamerGate and video games. It's certainly not a causal relationship and I feel the same trepidation as Smart Jason in articulating anything that could be perceived as such, but there are elements in games, especially in the intensive consumption of a certain type of game combined with the mental and emotional ramifications of a self-isolating lifestyle, that have no doubt driven a lot of the hatred we've seen here in particular directions that are entirely missing from virtually every other realm of media discourse besides maybe comics, which also happens to share many of the generic issues of video games.

 

As a whole, I'm somewhat cautious defining hate just as a homogeneous force that's existed throughout history. That's certainly true, to a greater extent than I can usually acknowledge for the sake of my own sanity, but it's also true that hate manifests itself in certain places and ways according to very specific circumstances that are important to be understood by us if we hope to answer it. I think the intersection of video games, patriarchy, and internet culture has been fertile soil for this specific reactionary hate group like a global depression or the expansion of the voting franchise has been for others.

 

I think you're probably right, there's something more complex and interesting at play than it just being the language of games, or a historic language of hate.  A lot of interesting parallels have been drawn between religion and our modern mass consumption driven society.  There are probably similarities in the way those groups express hate when they have chosen, or been led, down that path. 

 

Ugh, I'm too tired to chase down that thought.  If this hasn't gone some completely different direction, I'll pick it back up in the morning. 

[Henroid]

I thought this post was a good summary you could always link people who start throwing a bunch of the usual rhetoric at you: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=134397896&postcount=12285

 

I got more heavily involved in posting on it today than I have before. It's starting to feel like the misinformation GG has been putting out there has started to falter, especially in the face of such wanton threats as what Anita got.

Sadly I'm not convinced any of them will listen. I've directly pointed out things like the errors in claims about the IGF award, links and all, and they still charge on the same point despite being wrong.

 

It's like all these people who didn't live highschool normally, not getting immersed in gossip (and thus learning how to manage it / react to it), are getting to it late in life. Only their actions are fucking extreme in comparison. These people just didn't grow up normally and that sucks because you can't really fix it beyond a certain point.

 

And for all we know, they could actually be highschoolers.

[Merus]

Can we spin this out a bit further, then? What discussion of Phelps that I've read definitely acknowledges that there's a bilateral dimension to their rhetoric of hate. Their hate informed their reading of the Bible, and the Bible informed their understanding and expression of hate.

 

This seems like awful thin ice, given that there are plenty of Christians who read the Bible entirely differently and see how it's about protecting and embracing those that have been marginalised. I think you're taking the Phelps-Ropers at their word when they say that their conception of the Bible is an accurate one, which has exactly the same problems as taking gamergaters at their word when they say they're for gamers, or about ethics in journalism.

 

There is a bilateral component to the Westboro Baptist Church, but it's feeding off the Southern Baptists. They're an extreme expression of the evangelical idea that your relationship with God is the only important part, and your relationship with society that Jesus spent an awful long time talking about was basically a typo.

 

I like to ruin parties by explaining, in great detail, with sources, how evangelism is the world's largest cult.

 

This is also why I was so heartened to see ex-gamergaters coming out of the woodwork. If we're smart, we can set up a quick exit counselling for gamergaters - demonstrate how reactionaries and hate groups work and their rhetoric, then present examples of what gamergaters have been doing that looks incredibly shitty when keeping in mind how hate groups work, and then finally have ex gamergaters ready to explain their story, so they don't cognitive dissonance their way right back into the heart of the shitmachine. It's how they get people out of cults these days, and it feels like a concrete way to actually do something.  

[Gormongous]

This seems like awful thin ice, given that there are plenty of Christians who read the Bible entirely differently and see how it's about protecting and embracing those that have been marginalised. I think you're taking the Phelps-Ropers at their word when they say that their conception of the Bible is an accurate one, which has exactly the same problems as taking gamergaters at their word when they say they're for gamers, or about ethics in journalism.

No, I don't think it's "taking Phelps/Ropers at their word" to accept that there is something in the Bible, however unintentional to its putative creators, that enables their specific breed of hate. Again, I am not proposing a causal relationship, but a reduplicative feedback loop where certain types of people with certain kinds of beliefs find certain kinds of messages in certain types of media, an intersection that plays a part in creating these specific kinds of hate groups. There is no internet hate group trying to protect the blockbuster movie from the indie scene, no internet hate group trying to defend young adult fiction from the critical establishment. #GamerGate is about video games and women and harassment because of discrete factors that we should also try to identify, not just some historical accident that is only meaningful as part of a bigger picture.

That's the main thing that bothers me about summary articles, like the Jacobin one posted by Archie a dozen pages back, that try to integrate #GamerGate into a historical meta-narrative. They add context but remove specificity, when both are needed for a holistic approach to neutralizing such movements.

[Merus]

I feel like you didn't even read my post.

 

Like, you're talking about how specificity is important and it's not always the same kind of thing that's involved, and then decide that in the case of the WBC it has to be the media they consume i.e. the Bible, when I just said that yes, there is a reduplicative feedback loop but it's because they're a more extreme version of the Southern Baptist movement, which is in itself a shitty echo chamber trying to reconcile the Bible and systematic racism and coming to all sorts of bullshit conclusions as a result.

 

And then I start talking about how you actually get people out of movements that are driven mostly by self-reinforcing beliefs, and here you are saying that isn't important and we have to stare at these games real hard. No, we have a pretty good idea of how these work. You can make it out of basically anything, so long as you have a group (even as small as two) alienated from more stabilising influences, that have a strong unifying bond, that will push each other to ever more extreme acts.

 

The whole reason people are tying it to the bigger picture is because we have lots of examples of these movements happening over and over again, and that gives us a picture of what we're dealing with in a form that means we can actually learn from history.

[Gormongous]

I feel like you didn't even read my post.

 

Like, you're talking about how specificity is important and it's not always the same kind of thing that's involved, and then decide that in the case of the WBC it has to be the media they consume i.e. the Bible, when I just said that yes, there is a reduplicative feedback loop but it's because they're a more extreme version of the Southern Baptist movement, which is in itself a shitty echo chamber trying to reconcile the Bible and systematic racism and coming to all sorts of bullshit conclusions as a result.

 

And then I start talking about how you actually get people out of movements that are driven mostly by self-reinforcing beliefs, and here you are saying that isn't important and we have to stare at these games real hard. No, we have a pretty good idea of how these work. You can make it out of basically anything, so long as you have a group (even as small as two) alienated from more stabilising influences, that have a strong unifying bond, that will push each other to ever more extreme acts.

 

The whole reason people are tying it to the bigger picture is because we have lots of examples of these movements happening over and over again, and that gives us a picture of what we're dealing with in a form that means we can actually learn from history.

 

I hate to play the card back at you, but no, I read your post just fine. You've inserted a lot of exclusionary language into your paraphrases of what I said to make it seem like I'm talking about the defining characteristic of this specific reactionary movement rather than a characteristic, just one that occurred to me and of which I haven't seen much discussion. I also said absolutely nothing about what is and isn't important moving forward in terms of outward-facing activism, because I agree with you there, but if you want to paint me otherwise, I suppose that's fine, too.

 

However, I do take some issue with the notion that because hate groups can coalesce around anything, what they actually coalesce around is not germane to the broader discussion. To bring it back to my academic specialty, it's almost universally agreed that the sub-Roman kingdoms from the fifth century onward would eventually have been united under the rule of a single one, which just happened to be the Franks. The fact that it could easily have been the Burgundians, the Lombards, or the Visigoths doesn't diminish the historical interest in knowing why it was the Franks. Likewise, the fact that it is more or less inevitable that misogynistic hate groups mobilize on the internet under some banner does not diminish the social interest in knowing why one of those banners is video games.

[prettyunsmart]

I have a quick question for the thread (sorry to intrude on the ongoing discussion). Since I'm now known as my department's resident "person who thinks about video games too much," a colleague asked me to talk with her class about this whole mess. I as wondering if anybody had suggestions for articles to give them to read in preparation, or directions to lead the discussion. It's an English class about digital media, but there are a fair number of journalism students in it, so the "Ethics and Journalistic Integrity" bit might come up a fair amount.

 

Some things I'm pretty sure I want to talk about:

• A  brief history of this whole ordeal (and in particular the ways in which the conversation has been directed by 4Chan/8Chan/etc. throughout)
• Highlighting the harassment targeted at particular individuals (I'm currently thinking of focusing on Anita and Brianna Wu primarily, but the Jenn Frank/Guardian debacle could also be good to talk about)
• The brief history of media criticism/the enthusiast press (to combat the narrative that people knowing people is uncommon or a terrible ethical breach)
• Leigh Alexander's list of actual ethical conversations we should be having
• NPR's ethical guidelines, as revised in 2012 (in order to start a conversation about the problems with media coverage that takes the "telling both sides!" approach, particularly in cases like this)
• And I guess, generally the difficulties associated with political discourse online, and how seemingly innocuous ideas ("yeah, video game reviews should be less corrupt") can have wide-ranging and problematic associations.  

[Denial]

To lighten the mood a little, Chainsawsuit.com put this webcomic up, which seems to resonate:

 

 

Also, a Twitter version of Eliza, a chat bot originally created in 1966, picked up on the Gamergate hashtag yesterday. Gamergaters have been engaging her ever since.

[brkl]

I can't find actual examples of anyone engaging the bot.

[Synnah]

Here are a few.

 

Does this count as passing the Turing test?

[Henroid]

Also, a Twitter version of Eliza, a chat bot originally created in 1966, picked up on the Gamergate hashtag yesterday. Gamergaters have been engaging her ever since.

I'm so glad I saw this before going into work. Day made. And it just started!

[Bjorn]

I have a quick question for the thread (sorry to intrude on the ongoing discussion). Since I'm now known as my department's resident "person who thinks about video games too much," a colleague asked me to talk with her class about this whole mess. I as wondering if anybody had suggestions for articles to give them to read in preparation, or directions to lead the discussion. It's an English class about digital media, but there are a fair number of journalism students in it, so the "Ethics and Journalistic Integrity" bit might come up a fair amount.

That's cool, and best of luck! I don't even know what to suggest, it's such an insane hydra. So much of this has played out in social media and forums, and the journalistic write-ups of it all miss something. If I was going to give them some pre-work, I might be tempted to tell them to go down the rabbit hole and spend ~30 minutes on Twitter with #gamergate, or go to 8chan, or NeoGaf. Instead of seeing third-hand accounts, encourage them to see all the original source material, and see how they react to it.

[clyde]

That's cool, and best of luck! I don't even know what to suggest, it's such an insane hydra. So much of this has played out in social media and forums, and the journalistic write-ups of it all miss something. If I was going to give them some pre-work, I might be tempted to tell them to go down the rabbit hole and spend ~30 minutes on Twitter with #gamergate, or go to 8chan, or NeoGaf. Instead of seeing third-hand accounts, encourage them to see all the original source material, and see how they react to it.

This is an interesting idea. Having a discussion after they all get impressions from asunder sources could be a great opportunity to bring up the touchstones prettyunsmart mentioned when they are most relevant. I don't know how comfortable I would be instructing students to go to 4chan though.

[feelthedarkness]

just read them the manifesto. where they sincerely used the word cupidity. 

[Smart Jason]

I have a quick question for the thread (sorry to intrude on the ongoing discussion). Since I'm now known as my department's resident "person who thinks about video games too much," a colleague asked me to talk with her class about this whole mess. I as wondering if anybody had suggestions for articles to give them to read in preparation, or directions to lead the discussion. It's an English class about digital media, but there are a fair number of journalism students in it, so the "Ethics and Journalistic Integrity" bit might come up a fair amount.

 

Some things I'm pretty sure I want to talk about:

• A  brief history of this whole ordeal (and in particular the ways in which the conversation has been directed by 4Chan/8Chan/etc. throughout)
• Highlighting the harassment targeted at particular individuals (I'm currently thinking of focusing on Anita and Brianna Wu primarily, but the Jenn Frank/Guardian debacle could also be good to talk about)
• The brief history of media criticism/the enthusiast press (to combat the narrative that people knowing people is uncommon or a terrible ethical breach)
• Leigh Alexander's list of actual ethical conversations we should be having
• NPR's ethical guidelines, as revised in 2012 (in order to start a conversation about the problems with media coverage that takes the "telling both sides!" approach, particularly in cases like this)
• And I guess, generally the difficulties associated with political discourse online, and how seemingly innocuous ideas ("yeah, video game reviews should be less corrupt") can have wide-ranging and problematic associations.  

 

A Chris Remo tweet just brought this article to my attention, which seems to be a pretty excellent overview piece.

[sclpls]

I have a quick question for the thread (sorry to intrude on the ongoing discussion). Since I'm now known as my department's resident "person who thinks about video games too much," a colleague asked me to talk with her class about this whole mess. I as wondering if anybody had suggestions for articles to give them to read in preparation, or directions to lead the discussion. It's an English class about digital media, but there are a fair number of journalism students in it, so the "Ethics and Journalistic Integrity" bit might come up a fair amount.

 

Some things I'm pretty sure I want to talk about:

• A  brief history of this whole ordeal (and in particular the ways in which the conversation has been directed by 4Chan/8Chan/etc. throughout)
• Highlighting the harassment targeted at particular individuals (I'm currently thinking of focusing on Anita and Brianna Wu primarily, but the Jenn Frank/Guardian debacle could also be good to talk about)
• The brief history of media criticism/the enthusiast press (to combat the narrative that people knowing people is uncommon or a terrible ethical breach)
• Leigh Alexander's list of actual ethical conversations we should be having
• NPR's ethical guidelines, as revised in 2012 (in order to start a conversation about the problems with media coverage that takes the "telling both sides!" approach, particularly in cases like this)
• And I guess, generally the difficulties associated with political discourse online, and how seemingly innocuous ideas ("yeah, video game reviews should be less corrupt") can have wide-ranging and problematic associations.  

 

As far as articles go, that Deadspin one is probably the most thorough I've seen so far.

 

Oh, Smart Jason beat me to it.

Edited October 15, 2014 by sclpls

[JonCole]

fwiw, thefncrow beat both of you two the Deadspin article two pages ago (though not specifically in reference to prettyunsmart's question).

[Bjorn]

[Smart Jason]

How to Victim Blame, by TotalBiscuit

 

(If thefncrow already posted this too I'm starting a hashtag campaign.)

[feelthedarkness]

Shut Up and Take It, the TotalBuiscuit Guide to Dealing with Harassment. 

[sclpls]

Because the police have traditionally been a shining beacon of providing support to women.