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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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To anyone keeping up with this stuff, if you see shit about how Occupy Wall Street "supports" GamerGate, it doesn't; Justine Tunney, one of its supporters (falsely) who hijacked the Twitter feed long, long ago and has since become a crazy nut who believes a servant class should exist in society, is using the account to give the appearance. Everyone knows she runs the account and it's not a secret, but she actually tried to pass it off yesterday as, "Oh good OWS supports GamerGate." And it's like, "You fuck, you literally make those tweets."

 

Man, I've seen some of her tweets about servant classes, and they're the kind of things that would be in pretty poor taste if said ironically, but apparently she's serious? It's wholly unsurprising that she's one of the interviewees in The Sarkeesian Effect teaser. Don't watch that, by the way; the sound quality will make your ears bleed. Watch Matt Lees' director's commentary of it: 

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Wow, that Chris Suellentrop article was rather cynical. Also that title is total clickbait, since he's not speaking about the death of video games at all. I think saying Gamergate has put the nail in the coffin of intellectuals ever having a chance of offering their respect to what the medium can achieve really says more about the close mindedness of these supposed types who only read books and sometimes see an art film. I'm not even sure that stereotype exists, since there's plenty of intellectuals of a younger generation who play games and continue to play games. See: www.idlethumbs.net/forums/

 

Since he cites Frozen and the majority of garbage comics, which are also newer mediums than books and music, does he not realize that U.S. animation and comics are already bloated with enough infantile tripe that these hypothetical intellectuals would also tend to repel from? There's always going to continue to be good stuff buried in landfill of media created by the suffocating power of capitalism and nothing is new and these beret wearing art gallery lounge types we're worried of scaring off probably aren't really interested in checking out anything beyond their comfort zone as it stands right now. I'm sure they instead have a lot of expensive wines to sip or Mozart albums to play from their gramophone to fill their time.

 

I don't know, I think of the last few years as ultimately being a good thing for games and geek stuff in general, since that's where talent is moving these days and it should hopefully change for the better, even if you have to step on the toes of a bunch of angry little boys.

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Well there's also the mass exodus of women from games writing and development which impact we'll probably never know the full extent of, but yeah whatever fuck the 'intellectual snobs'.

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And if this goes on for years? Which it will because reactionaries, generally, don't wake up one day and go 'oh, my entire life is a lie'.

 

The amount of people who have already left the industry, who've already decided not to get involved, is inevitably going to hurt all those 'good things' you talk about. They only exist because of an environment of diversity, and we've already seen that Gamergate doesn't care who they'll hurt if it means crushing diversity, voices calling for diversity, and voices calling for anything other than for the industry to go back to the intellectually bankrupt period of the PS2 era.

 

Why be involved in video games if that's what the audience is?

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I wouldn't say cynical so much as pessimistic. Suellentrop, like anyone who works at a quality broadsheet and wants to write abut video games, has to make the cultural argument for video games every time he wants to write something for the print edition, I'd imagine - often pushing against editors with little experience of games. If games are perceived to be the domain of socially inept and violently misogynist young men with no interest in current affairs, that makes it a tougher sell.

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And if this goes on for years? Which it will because reactionaries, generally, don't wake up one day and go 'oh, my entire life is a lie'.

I guess I don't see it going on for years. The Gamergatrs have made fools of themselves since day one and don't really have a clear message besides harassment. With all of the time they spend on this crap I don't even think they spend any time playing games.

 

I mean to say is that even though some people quit, which is incredibly unfortunate, I hope they will be back and there has definitely been proven to be an audience out there for a wider variety of games that are more inclusive. I'm still optimistic even though all of this current shit sucks so bad.

 

If the quoted statistics in all of these outside articles are true, there's still a significant amount of women playing games, and they still provide a good deal of profit, so it all can't be abandoned for more Dead or Alive sequels at this point.

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I think you're discounting that this has happened before. We're recovering from the decision to market computers and computer games exclusively to boys, when in the 70s computer games were seen as an extension of D&D, which had a significant female audience. Infocom had little difficulty attracting a female audience, and many early computer game pioneers were women.

 

What happened, by and large, is that women thought they were wrong to have liked games, that there was something wrong with them, and stopped.

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So, to the detriment of my own peace of mind, I submerge myself in KotakuInAction fairly regularly. This is the much more moderate, restrained face of GamerGate - the guy politely asking for $20. When an "MSM" writer critiques the movement, he's pointed there, rather than 8chan - so I object to the characterization of the latter as their united front. If we ever wanted to indulge them, it should be based on the dialogue found on KotakuInAction, not the culture on 8chan or elsewhere which seems to force a social pressure onto its users to speak in slurs and hatespeech and so on.

 

Something I would like to see media coverage address is the fact that GamerGate itself is in the process of changing its message. We've seen (and rightfully mocked) them cling to this general line that GamerGate opposes harassment in an effort to distance themselves from the hate campaign carried out, if not in its founding then certainly in its name. We also know about the false equivalence they've created by maintaining the insistence that there is harassment on both sides and that those who have allegedly been harassed by GamerGate are professional victims, using the experience for publicity, sympathy, and financial gain. Having always come from a place of manic persecution, they've commandeered the idea of being bullied and latched onto the idea that they're an anti-bullying cause due to Sam Biddle's (who writes for Gawker's tech site Valleywag) stupid tweets - but this has transitioned to the more insidious belief that feminism itself is a systematic means of bullying.

 

However, in the wake of all these "Actually, it's about ethics..." jokes of the past two days, it's most and dreadfully important to point out that, in their own words, GamerGate seems more than ever willing to drop the pretense that this is about ethics in games journalism and savor the idea that they are indeed fighting a battle against the encroachment of social justice within society as a whole.

 

Gamergate is fighting something larger than Gawker and the Alexanders and she-who-shall-not-be-named of the world. It's the culmination of 40 years of the creep of feminist / marxist influence creeping its way into institutions and out into the world where it affects us.
I really think this may prove to be the opening salvo in a much larger cultural war, a war that they want. A war that has been going on in the hard sciences for a long time but will now spill out to the mainstream. They own the narrative, the lobbying power, academia etc. but the gamers and rational scientists have something that the other side does not; competency.
I think gamergate will show, and has shown that people can fight back against this nonsense and win. Even if it doesn't achieve everything, there will be victory in showing that rational minded people exist and are willing to push back. This gives me hope for the future.

 

Thanks for saying this. I'm glad to see other people are aware of the big picture.
We need better messaging for the long haul (and trust me, this will be a slog that takes months/years). We need something less boring than "ethics in game journalism". SJW-lead censorship is where it's at.
If Gawker goes down (which is still not likely), we'll have a torrent of outside interest. We need to be ready for that. We have to be able to sell the movement to a newbie in one sentence. Anything about "games journalism" won't cut it then.

 

I think you're missing the point.
We've been winning since the start. There is no "lose condition" for us.
Understand that publishers will remember that we are their audience. At the very least, anti-humanist influence has been set back several years. The only way they get anything done against us is burning down their own territory, because scorched earth is all they know how to do. They can't win a drawn-out fight against prepared opponents. They have to divide, conquer, and burn the land around them. The thing is, you can't salt the earth when we're arguing that's how it should be, but they're doing it anyways.
If this keeps ups, more and more of them will voluntarily leave to try and hijack some other industry. That's good for us, especially in the short-term. Every day we continue is a new victory for us, just because we don't go away.
Secondly, as part of their scorched earth campaign, they tried to escalate their reinforcements, counting on infiltrated organizations to back them up. Well, they got hit, too. Their reinforcements cared little for them, and shelled everyone indiscriminantly.
The "nuclear option" is "everyone's opinion of games and gamers drops back a decade until they're considered toys and the people that play them are children". But you know what? We were better off back then, and people left us alone. Just like people saw film and television as an easy way to "reach the masses" and preach, so too does games become a target as it reaches popularity. A bad reputation means nothing for us, but most of the opposition wants nothing to do with this industry unless they can come in and "save" its reputation and then ride that to mainstream success. I've said it before: they literally see themselves as the next Roger Ebert just by getting in just in time for the take-off.
So yeah... the "bad" condition hurts them more than us, and it might even be an improvement. An industry crash is probably imminent anyways, and it's going to hit AAA and Indies the hardest, because they've abused our trust the most. You know who will do well in spite of a crash? Mid-sized developers like CDPR, RSI, Warhorse, and Portalarium. Only one of those is anti-GG at all, and it seems to be a miscommunication more than anything. At least, I hope Garriot just sees "we love inclusive and moral gaming" and thinks they mean the kind of stuff he writes. Ultima is a great example of good games that are about being a good person and what that means. I have to assume Garriot doesn't believe/understand in the bigoted stuff Anita and others believe. More on point, foreign developers are going to ride it out pretty easily, because they don't have millions banking on a blockbuster cycle or preying on people's pockets with Patreon. They make games and sell them, and they actually need to be competitive and put out good products for attention.
Again, keep going, but the longer we stick around the bigger our victory. Eventually we'll become something of a fixture. Gamers as a united voice. And when they realize it doesn't die off, and that we're around forever, and we're the same people that basically fueled the giants of the industry for decades, they're going to be opportunistic elsewhere. There's no coming away from this where the enemy isn't weakened significantly, but you're right, we need to keep going. They're not dead yet, and they may never be, but we need to retake our mountain fortress and fortify it.

 

Without meaning to whitewash the crimes that have been committed, it seems that this uniting tenet of anti-social justice is now central to GamerGate, and (to hear them say it) both harassment and ethics in games reporting are equally distant from that core issue. Suffice it to say, this is what I wish I could see broadcast by those willing to cover GamerGate in the media - if they're unwilling to call it a hate movement, say that they are a united force against liberalism, feminism, and so on.

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Oh so we let them be radicalised

 

great

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..."everyone's opinion of games and gamers drops back a decade until they're considered toys and the people that play them are children". But you know what? We were better off back then...

This opinion is so insane to me I am having a hard time accepting it. I guess they believe there are a fixed number of games that can exist? And so every time someone makes a game they don't want that's one fewer game for them? How does one arrive at this opinion?

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This opinion is so insane to me I am having a hard time accepting it. I guess they believe there are a fixed number of games that can exist? And so every time someone makes a game they don't want that's one fewer game for them? How does one arrive at this opinion?

 

Bear in mind, they are looking at diversity and representation in games - the buckling to Anita Sarkeesian and the feminist cabal - as an infestation toxic to their hobby. Not unlike Anita would like games to be rid of elements of sexism and bigotry, they want games to shed the burden of any social agenda (see: the boycott of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel). Obviously, the analogy breaks down on account of the fact that the former has cultural ramifications when presented in media and the latter is simply the privileged just trying to preserve the status quo.

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Without meaning to whitewash the crimes that have been committed, it seems that this uniting tenet of anti-social justice is now central to GamerGate, and (to hear them say it) both harassment and ethics in games reporting are equally distant from that core issue. Suffice it to say, this is what I wish I could see broadcast by those willing to cover GamerGate in the media - if they're unwilling to call it a hate movement, say that they are a united force against liberalism, feminism, and so on.

 

I actually saw something like this on the Facebook wall of an acquaintance last night. At the time, I wrote it off as the imbecilic ravings of a wannabe intellectual because he was all over the map from comment to comment, pulling in anything that justified his belief that there was a greater cultural design and purpose to the hatred and terrorism of #GamerGate, especially the lack of higher-level education among his readers (despite having a lower-tier degree than me or my acquaintance). Reading those manifestos, his repeated cry of Kulturkampf makes a lot more sense, not in and of itself but with regards to the evolution of the movement. There's no more predictable response to the rejections and defeats that #GamerGate has experienced at the hands of Western culture as a whole than to broaden its historical scope into a struggle of generational proportions. I really wonder how these so-called gamers will feel some months on, when they realize that their allies are the same people who would gladly outlaw Call of Duty given their druthers. The enemy of my enemy, indeed.

 

This opinion is so insane to me I am having a hard time accepting it. I guess they believe there are a fixed number of games that can exist? And so every time someone makes a game they don't want that's one fewer game for them? How does one arrive at this opinion?

 

I have no idea. We often compare the rhetoric of #GamerGate to reactionary movements like the fascists and the Nazis, but that final paragraph that Jason quoted sounds like mid- to late-1944 Japan, defeatist to the point of fixating on moral victories instead. I guess they love video games more than us, because they are willing to destroy them? Someone should tell them about the Judgment of Solomon.

 

 

EDIT: Also, what does that guy in the first of Jason's quoted posts even know about the hard sciences? I'm close friends with a dozen graduate and post-grad students in biology, physics, and chemistry. All of them and all their departments are obsessed with the horrible gender problem from which their institutions suffer, where incompetent male scientists are promoted over competent female scientists, often by the former claiming co-authorship or even authorship of the latter's work. Any chair of the aforementioned departments would give three toes and a kidney not to have to kowtow to the racist, sexist, and classist preconceptions of their tenured faculty and to raise their US News and World Report ranking accordingly, so for this one dude to claim it as the front lines of the "culture war" and not a ludicrous backwater of it is, uh... I know I shouldn't get mad, because it's just the typical nerd thing of trying to claim the high ground by virtue of some abstract "rationality" that is really intuition and anecdote in practice, but what the actual fuck.

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I think you're discounting that this has happened before. We're recovering from the decision to market computers and computer games exclusively to boys, when in the 70s computer games were seen as an extension of D&D, which had a significant female audience. Infocom had little difficulty attracting a female audience, and many early computer game pioneers were women.

 

What happened, by and large, is that women thought they were wrong to have liked games, that there was something wrong with them, and stopped.

I don't know why you think I'm ignoring that because I'm not trying to convey that. I just feel like in the last eight years or so, games have changed for the better in so many ways. I just refuse to be pessimistic about it.

 

Quoted article:

Gamergate is fighting something larger than Gawker and the Alexanders and she-who-shall-not-be-named of the world. It's the culmination of 40 years of the creep of feminist / marxist influence creeping its way into institutions and out into the world where it affects us.

Marxist?! Are they old man Republicans hanging out in their country homes now?  What on earth.

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Marxist?! Are they old man Republicans hanging out in their country homes now?  What on earth.

 

I'm almost certain that "Marxist" is thrown in there to make sure everyone experiences the correct reaction to the accompanying "feminist" descriptor. In the eyes of reactionary movements everywhere, both are ideologies predicated on equality of outcome that have a multi-generational history of hypocrisy and failure. Any other distinction that can be made between the two is irrelevant.

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Not unlike Anita would like games to be rid of elements of sexism and bigotry, they want games to shed the burden of any social agenda 

I feel like this runs into the criticism=censorship thing that seems so common among #gameboys. Anita isn't arguing for sexist games to be banned or whatever, she's just expressing that they are lame. I mean, I'm sure you already know that, but it's frustrating that they don't seem to.

 

 

What the fuck is your avatar.

 

Edit: Oh I get it.

Yesssss.

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I think you're discounting that this has happened before. We're recovering from the decision to market computers and computer games exclusively to boys, when in the 70s computer games were seen as an extension of D&D, which had a significant female audience. Infocom had little difficulty attracting a female audience, and many early computer game pioneers were women.

What happened, by and large, is that women thought they were wrong to have liked games, that there was something wrong with them, and stopped.

I advise taking a break from anything GG for a few days. I don't mean fuck GG by that, I mean "fuck that particular flavour of despair".

I'm currently in the middle of working 20 hour days on a video games festival that's explicitly built around the ideas that games are for everyone and everyone can make games. It's full of kids. We made a spaceteam bridge that they're busy modifying and adding more shiny bits to. I'm currently building a room for Mountain with beanbags and a bunch of arcade buttons on the walls to trigger the musical notes. When I curate stuff at EGX that gets accused of not being a game, it looks a bit aggressive and confrontational. Here, it's the kind of thing the festival does and its audience, built over the past nine years, understand and enjoy that.

By the end of the week we'll have had a who's who of GG boycott lists visiting and doing stuff, including Zoe Quinn and Leigh Alexander. Especially in light of recent months, we've had to prepare a lot, from making ties with local police to putting anti-harassment policies in place and training people, but here with the festival running no one is talking about GG, they're just getting involved in showing, playing and making stuff. These kids are not going to grow up thinking games are for boys, their parents are here and are seeing that games and developers are nothing like the vitriolic puke they've been reading about, and the festival directors are really fucking committed to making games more accessible.

We all have moments of exposure to the worst in games audiences, ones that make us think "Oh shit, are we actually trapped with this bunch of people?" If you look at GG stuff all day you'll feel doomed, but we are not. Fuck all of Milo's bullshit about "senior executives who want to remain nameless"; I know festival directors, curators, collective organisers, developers and players from all over the world who are super fucking committed to making games inclusive. Developing a lunatic fringe is just a part of growing up, games will learn to dismiss it as it deserves. We counter it by starting other, much better things for other, much better people.

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yeaaaaaaaaah, I know

 

but I keep thinking about Zoe Quinn's twitter and how obviously terrified she is, and I feel like I should be able to do something

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However, in the wake of all these "Actually, it's about ethics..." jokes of the past two days, it's most and dreadfully important to point out that, in their own words, GamerGate seems more than ever willing to drop the pretense that this is about ethics in games journalism and savor the idea that they are indeed fighting a battle against the encroachment of social justice within society as a whole.

 

[...]

 

Without meaning to whitewash the crimes that have been committed, it seems that this uniting tenet of anti-social justice is now central to GamerGate, and (to hear them say it) both harassment and ethics in games reporting are equally distant from that core issue. Suffice it to say, this is what I wish I could see broadcast by those willing to cover GamerGate in the media - if they're unwilling to call it a hate movement, say that they are a united force against liberalism, feminism, and so on.

The third of your quotes here is just about the most depressing thing I've ever read. I don't understand how people get like this.

 

I'm currently in the middle of working 20 hour days on a video games festival that's explicitly built around the ideas that games are for everyone and everyone can make games. It's full of kids. We made a spaceteam bridge that they're busy modifying and adding more shiny bits to. I'm currently building a room for Mountain with beanbags and a bunch of arcade buttons on the walls to trigger the musical notes. When I curate stuff at EGX that gets accused of not being a game, it looks a bit aggressive and confrontational. Here, it's the kind of thing the festival does and its audience, built over the past nine years, understand and enjoy that.

I keep seeing people tweeting about Game City, and it makes me sad that I didn't go! Also thanks for writing this; it's optimistic and encouraging.

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The third of your quotes here is just about the most depressing thing I've ever read. I don't understand how people get like this.

 

I keep seeing people tweeting about Game City, and it makes me sad that I didn't go! Also thanks for writing this; it's optimistic and encouraging.

 

It's on every day until next Saturday :)

 

I keep thinking about Zoe Quinn's twitter and how obviously terrified she is, and I feel like I should be able to do something

 

 

I think this is a really important thing to think about. We can't collectively guarantee someones personal safety, but how can we support such public victims of harassment? I suspect in such public and specific cases, the best thing we can do is work towards having a better culture by calling out the bad and building more of the good.

 

The owner of Page 45 told me fifteen years ago about the audience they sell comics to, and that they call it "the real mainstream". Their customers have a roughly 50/50 gender split, and age ranges from young kids all the way to elderly people. They did it by selling comics in a friendly, accessible way; forcefully making their shop avoid any of the exclusionary comic shop cliches like till cliques, making it look like a regular bookshop in terms of furniture, shoving all of the superhero stuff at the back, and filling the front two thirds of the shop with all of the interesting contemporary fiction, art books, zines etc. they saw comics retailing neglecting when they set up in the mid-90s. It's worked, and that it's been so evident for so long has always given me hope when games have seemed too puerile and regressive.

 

We're closer to that real mainstream audience than you think, but many of the existing events and publications we have don't understand and won't contribute much to it. Gaters are surely doing damage in denying games excellent voices, but they've taken major blows to their credibility in the past week, and it seems like not one mainstream outlet has been fooled by them. There are ways we can fight back, even if it's rare that we can support their victims personally. There are events like GameCity, Wild Rumpus, Fantastic Arcade; organisations like Babycastles and Mount Royal Game Society; places like Bento Miso in Toronto. They're springing up worldwide and are mostly not on gaters radar because they're ability to target is necessarily as simplistic as how they build support, and there are too many of them already. While GG may succeed in burning down bits of the industry and tarnishing the image of gamers, there are many, many more people who care about building safe, inclusive spaces and are working very hard at it.

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GG are not the gaming audience and do not represent anyone apart from themselves. Their numbers are miniscule and they have no influence in terms of which games will sell and which will not. If they had, they wouldn't be so angry. All we really need is protection for their targets. We need it because people haven't really realised how dangerous the Internet can be in this regard, but that's changing. AFAIK Britain made new legislation to control Internet harassment very recently. If law enforcement and companies such as Twitter start taking harassment seriously, much of the harm these movements can inflict will disappear.

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Q: How many GamerGaters does it take to change a light bulb?

A: One, but they all claim the lightbulb did it to itself

 

Q: How many GamerGaters does it take to change a light bulb?

A: What evidence do you have that it was a GamerGater that changed the lightbulb?

 

Q: How many GamerGaters does it take to change a light bulb?

A: That's not funny!

 

Q: How many GamerGaters does it take to change a light bulb?

A: GamerGate is opposed to burnt out light bulbs!

 

Q: How many GamerGaters does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Trick question, GamerGaters can't change anything.

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