"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Henroid]

So what you're saying is that some of the gg folk you've spoken to don't understand moderation and diversity.

Actually yeah, pretty much that. And I would also say that investment into a medium / pursuit doesn't have to be absolute or expert-knowledge in level. It's fine for people to play just mobile games and say they play video games (because they do and are). A lot of 'arguments' I've seen from GamerGate are about the "gamer" culture being claimed by those who aren't 'gamers,' or that they're ruining video games, etc. And it's like, how is it being ruined? By more diverse products / inclusion? Chris has said in past episode of IT (and this is years ago) that the video games people grew up loving aren't going away as a result of these newere kinds of games existing.

[Henroid]

If I call myself a gamer, it is neither dumb, nor outdated. It is a word I use to describe a part of myself.

 

I feel like a broken record. Guys, just because you don't want to identify with a word doesn't mean other people aren't allowed to. It's not "dumb" if I consider gaming important to me. It's not "dumb" to use a word to easily identify that importance. It's only dumb if I don't acknowledge or allow for things outside of that part of my identity to exist for both myself and others.

It's one thing to consider it important, and another to build your life around it purposefully narrow in scope. Not to say that you are, but I'm saying that's what GamerGate has claimed over and over when it comes to what being a "gamer" is. Only they take it to the "no true Scotsman" level.

 

At most, I'd really ask you to consider the toxicity attached to "gamer," both prior to and after GamerGate. Because even before GamerGate the term had some stigma, but now it's just poisoned to a point of no antidote in the world having an effect on it.

 

Video games have defined my childhood, less my adolescence, but then again in my adulthood. It's very much an important part of who I am and where I've been. But when I'm asked to describe myself, it's hardly the first thing nor only thing I talk about. I prefer to consider myself an enthusiast. It's not a matter of caring what people will think of me because I play video games and discuss them a lot and read about them a lot; it's about the attached issues of being a 'gamer' giving misconceptions of who I am.

[Twig]

I feel like a broken record again.

 

I'm not going to let a bunch of nameless shitfucks on the internet ruin a word for me. I am a gamer, and I always will be. Gaming is important to me in ways that it is clearly not important to you. Unless you can suggest a better word? Nobody else could.

[Gormongous]

Guys, we have this conversation with Twig at least at least every other month. Isn't enough to let everyone make their own informed decisions with regards to identity politics? I haven't identified as a gamer since early high school and doubt I ever will again, but I understand Twig's own reasons for continuing to use that label and hope him all the best with it. Having reasonable people who identify as gamers for strong personal reasons distinct from #GamerGate's raisons d'etre is a good thing ultimately, even if it'd suit some of us better to see everyone fleeing the label like rats from a sinking ship.

[Bjorn]

Gaming is important to me in ways that it is clearly not important to you.

 

This is a sentiment that I really identify with, and a reason I've by and large stayed out of the discussion about the word gamer.  I have a diversity of interests and passions, but ultimately games have played such a pivotal role in my entire life, that it's an identity that fits really well for me (along with several others, but gamer is certainly one of them).  The gamergate crap has tainted the word for me, but then I reflect on the roll that games have played in my life (and particularly the human relationships which have been influenced by gaming in some way), and I'm like you, I think, "Fuck those fucking fuckwits for fucking up my fucking word.  They can't have it."

[Twig]

This is a sentiment that I really identify with, and a reason I've by and large stayed out of the discussion about the word gamer.  I have a diversity of interests and passions, but ultimately games have played such a pivotal role in my entire life, that it's an identity that fits really well for me (along with several others, but gamer is certainly one of them).  The gamergate crap has tainted the word for me, but then I reflect on the roll that games have played in my life (and particularly the human relationships which have been influenced by gaming in some way), and I'm like you, I think, "Fuck those fucking fuckwits for fucking up my fucking word.  They can't have it."

Yeah. YEAH!! That's exactly it.

 

Gormongous: I'm sorry. I should've just not responded. It's one of my Buttons, I guess. Just rubs me the wrong way every time I see it.

[Flynn]

That's how I feel too.

 

Wil Wheaton said it:

The existence of a discussion about how women are portrayed in gaming, and whether that affects how welcomed women feel in the gaming community, isn’t an attack on you, Mister #NotAllMen. In fact, it isn’t and never was about you. And I won’t even dig into the insanity of expecting a review to be “objective”, when reviews are, by their nature, subjective.)

 

I want games to be accessible to everyone, and as long as a small but loud minority of people can act like shitlords with impunity, large swaths of gaming will be accessible only to the most vile and wretched group of trolls. The more people game, the more games we’ll have available to us to play. The wider the demographic of gamers, the more diverse styles of games we’ll get to play. The sooner we who are the majority of decent people stand up and demand that people who are terrible in gaming be held accountable for their actions — actions which would, in many cases, be criminal if perpetrated in-person — the sooner we can all hold our heads up high and say, You’re damn right, I’m a gamer, and I’m damn proud of it.

 

http://wilwheaton.net/2014/11/regarding-anonymous-gaming-trolls-tabletop-and-more/#more-4780

[Gormongous]

Gormongous: I'm sorry. I should've just not responded. It's one of my Buttons, I guess. Just rubs me the wrong way every time I see it.

 

I'm not being critical of you. I just feel that, while Leigh Alexander's deconstruction of "gamer" as an identity is interesting, it's not meant to be proactive, and trying to talk good people out of identifying as gamers is at best pointless and at worst counterproductive.

[deleted user]

_

[Mangela Lansbury]

The deconstruction of the gamer identity shouldn't prevent people from identifying as a gamer. It's still the most useful word we have for saying "I am a person who cares a lot about video games," and I don't see another word coming around to occupy that space. It's a healthy thing to label yourself with and, while there is a vocal part of the gamer-identifying pulsation that is just a bile-spewing abyss where human decency goes to die, they aren't everyone who qualifies as "gamer" -- and that's kind of the point of the thing, and mostly what they feel so threatened by. To me, the idea of the death of the gamer is more about the stigma (perceived or real) attached to the mental image it calls forth and how that needs to go away because it's outdated than wholesale abolition of the use of the word. It means that people who spend their commutes playing mobile games should start identifying as a gamer more than it means that people should stop identifying as gamers.

[Zeusthecat]

Unless you can suggest a better word? Nobody else could.

 

I enjoy interactive media. I am an interactor.

[Merus]

No, guys, it's "game-chum". The word is now "game-chum".

[Reyturner]

How about we keep "gamer" and call the gators "ludomales".

[JonCole]

"game-boy"

[Smart Jason]

With the influx of PUA types, I'm surprised they don't go with "players."

[Mangela Lansbury]

A piece on Anita Sarkeesian popped up on Berfrois today and I'm not sure how I feel about it. Its rhetoric gets dangerously close to the "she's not a REAL gamer!" stuff of gators (among other things), but I think there's something to a few of his points. It might be the first critique of Anita Sarkeesian that I walked away from thinking, "Hey, maybe that guy wasn't just a raving lunatic. There might actually be something to a few of the things he said." His problem seems to be more with gender analysis in general than with Anita herself, which is a bit problematic and a bit right, and it's easy to poke holes in a lot of his arguments (isn't the presumption that games are art objects present in examining them AS art objects? why consume feminist critique and then complain that the critique you just consumed was feminist? is selling out even a thing anymore?), but there's something more insidious/unsettling in it that I can't quite put my finger on.

 

Still, it was weird to go to go to a place I go to read about books and art and shit and see Sarkeesian staring back at me.

[Synnah]

It's a healthy thing to label yourself with and, while there is a vocal part of the gamer-identifying pulsation that is just a bile-spewing abyss where human decency goes to die, they aren't everyone who qualifies as "gamer" -- and that's kind of the point of the thing, and mostly what they feel so threatened by. To me, the idea of the death of the gamer is more about the stigma (perceived or real) attached to the mental image it calls forth and how that needs to go away because it's outdated than wholesale abolition of the use of the word. It means that people who spend their commutes playing mobile games should start identifying as a gamer more than it means that people should stop identifying as gamers.

 

This is the thing that annoys me the most about GamerGate; they've constructed a reality for themselves in which they're the only people who can identify as 'gamers', which allows them to believe that they represent everyone who considers themselves a gamer. You see this in their rhetoric all the time, and you see them talking as if the people who oppose them aren't gamers in any way (Which, when you consider that their most vocal opponents are indie developers and games journalists, is kind of insane). I think this narrative mostly comes from the way the mainstream media decried the movement, which allowed them to stick a big 'OUTSIDERS' label on anyone opposed to them (But of course it's fine for non-gamers like Milo and Cernovich to come out in support of them). Things like their stupid Gamer Bill of Rights are poisonous because they presume to speak for everyone who thinks of themselves as a gamer, which I still do. But I definitely want more people to be able to think of themselves as gamers, which is apparently the opposite of what GG wants.

 

 Edit:

 

The conflation of 'nerd' and 'gamer' in this infographic gets on my nerves. I thought we solved the 'nerd, geek or dork' thing back in 2003? We (mostly) reclaimed those words, and as far as I was aware, a nerd was someone who was academically gifted but socially awkward, and a geek was someone who was knowledgeable and passionate about a specific subject (And also socially awkward). Not only does it treat 'nerd' and 'gamer' as interchangeable, but it seems to confuse nerds and geeks. Semantics aside, though, these guys need to get their persecution complexes straight.

[Ben X]

as far as I was aware, a nerd was someone who was academically gifted but socially awkward, and a geek was someone who was knowledgeable and passionate about a specific subject (And also socially awkward). Not only does it treat 'nerd' and 'gamer' as interchangeable, but it seems to confuse nerds and geeks.

 

YES! Nerds are the ones who can do crazy maths problems in their heads, geeks are the ones who know every Star Wars character name.

[Griddlelol]

 There are lots of people into geek culture, and into gaming, who aren't academically excellent, and for that matter there are lots of gamers who are not particularly into nerd culture.

 

I think that's what gets me a lot. How academic and nerd is conflated. I remember an undergrad showing some prospective students around my lab and said "this is where all the nerds work." So it's easily done, but it still irritates me. 

[Gormongous]

I think that's what gets me a lot. How academic and nerd is conflated. I remember an undergrad showing some prospective students around my lab and said "this is where all the nerds work." So it's easily done, but it still irritates me. 

 

I agree completely! There was a lot of extremely dumb stuff on that infographic, but nothing bugged me personally as much as it being taken for granted that "nerds" excel in academia. I've found that most "nerds," whatever they mean by that, do well in secondary education because they're generally more self-motivated and intensive when it comes to intellectual endeavors, but there's a rapidly decreasing advantage to that from college onward. By the postgraduate level, the tendency of "nerds" towards adversarial relationships, fixation on details, and synthesis-free conclusions makes them no better or worse than any other self-identified subculture, even the dreaded "jocks," at what they do. The only way to make it work is to stretch "nerd" until it means simply "someone with a high degree of interest and expertise in a specific field of study," which is... I don't know, whatever.

 

I really have no words for how stupid that infographic is. There are so many thumbs on its scales to make gamers/nerds not only a coherent group with universal characteristics but also one that suffers as many disadvantages as men and women combined, it's impossible for me to take seriously. If it were really that unremittingly terrible to be a gamer/nerd, no one would choose to be a gamer/nerd instead of millions of people choosing to be gamers/nerds. That's all there is to it, I'm sorry.

[osmosisch]

A piece on Anita Sarkeesian popped up on Berfrois today and I'm not sure how I feel about it.

I feel mostly annoyed, to be honest. The only real argument/question I see is "but why isn't she saying positive things/giving suggestions on how it *should* be" - which is not the point of the videos. They are meant to illustrate and highlight. In one video she even does go so far as to show how a positive damsel design could work.

It's valid to want FemFreq's videos to be more than they are, but that's not a knock on the videos per se, just a request for more.

Harping on the quality of Anita's presentation doesn't seem to go anywhere if you ask me, and besides that he mostly seems to complain that she uses strong terms to call out what's wrong with gaming culture, which, guess what, there's things wrong that deserve strong terms.

[Nachimir]

I thought we solved the 'nerd, geek or dork' thing back in 2003? We (mostly) reclaimed those words

 

Yeah, absolutely.

 

I've spent some of the past few months thinking about this and still struggle to sum it up succinctly. Because of people's own patience toward me in the past, I have a lot of time and patience for desocialised people. Desocialisation may not be an inherited condition like Asperger's, but dealing with the self-centred behaviour it generates in sufferers without getting angry requires a similar outlook of not taking it personally.

 

Gater persecution complexes seem to be based around tenaciously clinging to notions of being victimised even while the world moves on, and remind me of two things: Myself, before I realised I was the only common factor in many situations that were making me feel bad, and this one guy I worked with in a bar who never had that realisation. He was an archetypal nerd/geek/goth type who'd obviously been bullied in the past and let that harden into a prickly facade. He often made obnoxious comments and voiced hatred of women. The rest of us talked about it and decided it might pass if we made him feel included and tried not to judge, then spent months doing that. Whatever happened before had gone so deep inside him though, that if he could be brought back from it, we weren't the people to do it. There was a cathartic week where we all admitted to each other that we thought he was just a terrible person, and as soon as we stopped tolerating his behaviour he quickly left the job with a freshly fuelled up persecution complex.

 

I really want there to be more things that healthily support bullied people. Otherwise, it's just things like gamergate and pick up artist communities that'll keep hoovering them up and mobilising their discontent, and they all have the same message packed into them: "You don't need to change, it's the worlds fault". There's a difference between these people and those like Milo, who've truly committed to their worst traits and personally value them.

[feelthedarkness]

I really have no words for how stupid that infographic is. There are so many thumbs on its scales to make gamers/nerds not only a coherent group with universal characteristics but also one that suffers as many disadvantages as men and women combined, it's impossible for me to take seriously. If it were really that unremittingly terrible to be a gamer/nerd, no one would choose to be a gamer/nerd instead of millions of people choosing to be gamers/nerds. That's all there is to it, I'm sorry.

 

Not to mention that it says that "women are not burdened by Marriage/family" which is false many times over, starting from an early and still persistent idea that women are chattel to be sold, i.e. "what was a dowry?" Then you have to overlook almost all of modern capitalism where a women's career had to be halted for family.

 

Also, the government protecting women thing would probably come as a surprise to any woman who tried to join the military in the previous 100 years, or go to a planned parenthood, or expect some kind of legal protection from being assaulted or denied equal wages.

[Justin Leego]

Yes, the question to ask in that circumstance has to be "why has it been necessary for the government to provide 'extra' protection for female members of society?"

[Bjorn]

A piece on Anita Sarkeesian popped up on Berfrois today and I'm not sure how I feel about it.

 

That thing is kind of a hot mess, more thinking out loud than trying to craft any kind of coherent statement or argument. It's also just kinda whiny. "Why does she have to talk about the binary so much? Why can't we talk about aaaaaaaaart?"