"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Twig]

I was about to make a joke about who cares about the difference between nerds and geeks but then I realized that'd come off pretty hypocritical after my gamer rants.

 

But you're still a buncha dorks!

[Problem Machine]

The Objectivity Myth: Why Games Need Gonzo Journalism by Maddy Myers

Shame about the technical problems, but I thought it was a pretty interesting talk anyway

[sclpls]

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.

 

Yeah, I get the impression of someone that isn't familiar with the nature or purpose of critique. I get not wanting to engage with critique. It really is an unpleasant thing to engage with if you aren't of a certain disposition. I think people that create things need to engage with critique so they can continue to do meaningful work, but people that simply enjoy art, writing, games, or whatever else don't need to, and that's okay.

 

Anita's videos are way less harsh than your typical piece of literary criticism, and her videos are far less biased (having an author that has written a book awfully close in subject matter criticize another author is pretty standard practice). The amount of hand holding demanded by gamergate is pretty eye rolling.

[sclpls]

I was about to make a joke about who cares about the difference between nerds and geeks but then I realized that'd come off pretty hypocritical after my gamer rants.

 

But you're still a buncha dorks!

 

I feel like these terms are about as hopelessly meaningless as the term hipster. You can probably come up with a reasonably precise and useful definition if you really want to put your mind to it, but the proliferation of hack writing pretty much guarantees that these words are going to be ground into oblivion.

[tegan]

My favourite thing about these assholes is that their militaristic language and thinking that beating Dark Souls is an actual accomplishment worth bragging about.

 

I feel like every one of them have fully bought into the bullshit marketing telling them how badass they are that's been going on for years.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyTlxHwuPZY

[feelthedarkness]

I feel like every one of them have fully bought into the bullshit marketing telling them how badass they are that's been going on for years.

 

Seriously! They talk about this on the podcast once in a while, and I find it interesting how weird it is that you'd be like "yeah, i'm GREAT at this!" when somebody designed a thing to enable your greatness. How many of these bad asses are in the top 30% of the LoL/DoTA/SC2 curve? That would still just be one end of a standard deviation and not remotely "elite"

[Erkki]

I think there's nothing bad about feeling a bad-ass about small things you do [in games], but you should realize that it doesn't make you a bad-ass in general. The last time I felt a real bad-ass in games was in Mount & Blade Warband, when I started to get the hang of chamber blocks and even won some duels against guys like Bear and Technoviking* and I don't remember who else. I was probably not in the top-anything, but there were some moments that were pure awesome. Like the day (or was it a whole week) when some clan turned it all into a joke and played zulus, wearing no armor and equipped only with spears (a really hard weapon to use) and throwing spears. I joined them for some hours and it was glorious. There were other times when I managed to learn some stealth techniques and successfully use them to help guarantee victory to my side. It felt glorious and I don't think there's anything ridiculous about it. But I also know nothing of it really applies outside of that game. And I played for more than a hundred hours to get to a level where I was getting good.

 

But also the same is true for many other things besides gaming. You can be good at some real life stuff, but it doesn't necessarily apply to anything else. Or it probably will, if you get really good at something, you learn about learning to be good at something. Games can do that too, I think. One of my colleagues once said that he doesn't understand how people who are not programmers can function in society because you learn so much of how stuff works by proxy of programming. Well, I think the same can be said about almost any profession, and probably about any hobby that is taken seriously enough. Except I think there is a way of taking a hobby both very seriously and very superficially at the same time, and I think these gamergate gamers are doing that.

 

* I know those names don't tell you anything, I'm just writing them down so I don't forget.

[Twig]

I definitely feel like a badass whenever I beat a platformer that most people complain about the difficulty and I'm like pff this is cake you suck at video games nerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd and then I point and laugh for hours and hhhooouuurrrsss. Ahh, it's good to be bad. Ass. Or just ass. Who even knows anymore.

 

...Sorry I'm in a silly mood today.

[SuperBiasedMan]

There's probably nothing wrong with a game saying that you're a badass but there's enough games devoted to pushing the idea that there could be a Feminist Frequency style dissection of many examples. When it's a trend then games are often taking advantage of an insecurity to instill an appeasing facade that keeps players coming back again and again to the same games that make them feel awesome despite the fact that real life does not.

 

Real talk, I played a lot of Spelunky and TF2 in the lows of time when unemployment slump was making me feel like a shitty wizard. I did it because I feel pretty good at those games and so it makes me feel like I know what I'm doing. Now imagine people playing a multitude of these games, not realising that's what they're doing and never actually breaking out of the cycle.

 

 

EDIT: Also Intel have resumed advertising on Gamasutra. So much for the minor victories of GG.

[Henroid]

IntelGaming has reversed its pull from Gamasutra, and on top of that, has a tweet (or series of?) where they'll donate x amount of dollars per retweet to Girls Who Code.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Here's the tweet to retweet:

https://twitter.com/GirlsWhoCode/status/531883286055124992

[Christopher]

IntelGaming has reversed its pull from Gamasutra

 

Is this confirmed anywhere but Frank Cifaldi's screenshot? I think he might be wrong. That doesn't look like a targeted campaign from Intel. It looks like one of those services that gives users ads based on their internet history.

 

I hope he's right, but . . .

 

edit: Nevermind, confirmed by Gamasutra.

[deleted user]

_

[Ben X]

Here's the tweet to retweet:

https://twitter.com/GirlsWhoCode/status/531883286055124992

 

If someone retweets my retweet, that also counts, right?

[Justin Leego]

I'm sure I saw that news posted as a 'win' for GamerGate, except without the part about Intel resuming its advertising campaign on Gama.

[Gormongous]

I'm sure I saw that news posted as a 'win' for GamerGate, except without the part about Intel resuming its advertising campaign on Gama.

 

Yeah, on Twitter and on Reddit I have seen people claiming that Intel was inspired to do this fundraising campaign after seeing #GamerGate and the good it's done. I don't see any evidence of that besides some people really wanting it to be what's happening. It seems like they and many others in #GamerGate are testing the limits of that quote attributed to Joseph Goebbels: "The truth is a lie repeated."

[BigJKO]

RogueStar, sour because of repeated suspension from twitter, vows to toggle his "shadow network," which I can only imagine is a euphemism for 'wanking'.

 

http://pastebin.com/4JZJqgmu

 

[feelthedarkness]

Oh, I agree with you guys that there is nothing wrong with feeling slick when playing a game, but I think it's a worthwhile distinction to make that single player games are constructed to make you feel like a bad ass, and then tell you that you are a bad ass when you complete the challenges they designed to be completed. I don't know many games with challenges that are designed to actually foil a player using the tools at hand.  (which makes stuff like Spelunky Eggplant run extra remarkable!)

[SuperBiasedMan]

If someone retweets my retweet, that also counts, right?

Yep! They're technically still just retweeting the original.

[Ben X]

Cool, thanks SBM!

 

(We need someone with the initials SCM now, to continue the trend of you and SecretAsianMan. SometimesCrazyMan?)

[Erkki]

SuperCatMan

[Ben X]

You can't re-use words!

[Bjorn]

SillyCatMonster

[Denial]

So, not sure where exactly this fits, but it feels relevant here because it's basically still feeding in to the Gamergate crowd...

 

 

I'm starting to wonder if there's something in the human eye - like rods and cones - that controls whether or not people can see death threats directed at woman, and what we have in Gamergate is the consequence of modern science not being able currently to detect that element or its absence.

[Twig]

I like how every time he says something more and more of his outer shell evaporates to reveal the sexist squid monster beneath.