9 ms·

Wasn't there a thing called Gamergate related to that a few years back? I only followed it from afar, but best I can recollect it seemed like there was a lot mo

Wasn't there a thing called Gamergate related to that a few years back? I only followed it from afar, but best I can recollect it seemed like there was a lot more to sexism in gaming than just within the industry itself.

d0lph 8y ago
That is one side of it.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  Just for the record: GamerGate was 100% founded on harassing women. The "ethics in games journalism" thing was only ever a front to build popular support, which unfortunately worked. I'm happy to post more details if you're unconvinced. If you're legitimately concerned about journalistic ethics in the gaming world (which is a real thing), you should really avoid the "GamerGate" moniker as much as possible. EDIT: My vote total is bouncing up and down like a rubber ball, so I'll just go ahead and post the details I mentioned. GamerGate was founded around an incident where Eron Gjoni made a blog post accusing his girlfriend Zoe Quinn, who makes free video games, of cheating on him with several men, whom he named. Most of them were also game developers. One of them, Nathan Grayson, was a games journalist. He once wrote an article with a single paragraph about one of Quinn's games, released (by Gjoni's timeline) months before he allegedly slept with Quinn. This narrative somehow became "women developers everywhere are sleeping with writers to promote their shitty games and it's destroying gaming and must be stopped." This wasn't even an accusation Gjoni made; it was a conclusion jumped to by his readers. Ethics in games journalism is a legitimate issue. Major publishers have been buying good reviews with cash and perks for almost as long as there's been a gaming industry. No one's ever cared enough to make a lasting fuss about that. It wasn't until a woman who writes tiny, free games was accused falsely of buying good reviews that the cry of corruption went up. I think that illustrates firmly what the real priorities were here. Some well-meaning people have taken GamerGate's message at face value and been motivated to expose actual ethical issues. That's laudable, but doing it under the GamerGate banner devalues the entire message. EDIT AGAIN: crooked-v's post and link about the controversy around the GamesJournosPros mailing list is also valuable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306791
  - ng12 8y ago
    "GamerGate" wasn't about anything in the sense that there were no goals, leadership, or organization. It's a lot like the "Alt-Right", it's a movement that only exists because the media reported that it did.
    - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      A group is defined by its members. Thousands of harassers claimed to be acting for GamerGate. You can't sweep that under the rug just because there was no formal leader.
    - lindydonna 8y ago
      And yet, they performed targeted attacks against a number of prominent women in the games industry, so much that these women had to relocate multiple times for fear of their personal safety. Interestingly, the FBI got confessions from some of the attackers, and decided not to prosecute. http://www.businessinsider.com/gamergate-fbi-file-2017-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/gamergate-fbi-file-2017-2 Just because they didn't have a central organization, doesn't change the fact that it was a movement that caused a lot of damage. In fact, there's a parallel with the Alt-Right. Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization.
      - ng12 8y ago
        > Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization. I'd argue there's a more interesting parallel with political terrorist organizations: they often start out as non-violent groups until subsections radicalize over time, therefore attracting a set of new members who further radicalize the group. Think Hamas, PKK, etc. It's pointless to argue whether GamerGate was about "ethics in journalism" because there's the set of people who care about that and the set of people who like to threaten women over the internet, and it's not clear which one are "GamerGate" and which ones aren't.
- d0lph 8y ago
  Apologies for pointing out that it might not be as black and white as the above poster stated.
vertex-four 8y ago
Gamergate was largely an attack on women in gaming. What we know of as Gamergate was largely started by a supposed incident in which a woman had sex with a video game reporter, and at some point that reporter mentioned or did a review of one of her games - the focus being more of an attack on her than the reviewer, of course. This incident, of course, never actually occurred - it was made up by a romantic partner of hers, as it turns out the reporter in question never actually mentioned or reviewed her after the sex was meant to have occurred.
- setr 8y ago
  From what I remember, she slept with multiple reviewers, and the whole thing became public when her boyfriend at the time complained online about being cheated on; I also remember there being quite a bit of controversy over the general illegitimatecy of game reviews, and that both parties were attacking each other on totally different arguments. The pro-gamergates claiming it was about corruption of the industry, and the anti-gamergates claiming it was an attack on women in video games. Thats what I understood from my far-away vantage point, at least. But its difficult to imagine it was just the latter; there's not enough sexism in gaming for it to blow up so easily, I think. (She was hardly the first woman in gaming to operate unethically).
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    > she slept with multiple reviewers That's a false accusation. What actually happened was that an angry ex-boyfriend accused her of sleeping with a gaming journalist to get positive reviews. No such positive reviews ever happened. The journalist in question made a single off-handed mention of one of her games (in a non-review context) before they'd ever actually met in person.
    - hueving 8y ago
      >That's a false accusation. The phrase you're looking for is "unfounded accusation". Unless you are the woman in question or you were stalking her 24/7, you can't falsify it.
crooked-v 8y ago
Gamergate was a movement for "integrity in gaming journalism" that actually ended up mostly being about (a) harrassing female journalists and female industry figures under false pretenses and (b) vigorously whining whenever journalistic figures dared to treat games as art instead of being the nth repeat of Nintendo Power-style "journalism".
cautionarytale 8y ago
There was, and like so many other things these days, it's pointless listening to partisan summaries. If you want to know, dig and read the source material.
Nadya 8y ago
You'll get a bunch of posts on this topic, but I guess if people repeat a lie often enough and with a big enough megaphone it becomes "the truth" because the majority of their information on the topic comes from the media spouting "the truth". If you want any sort of unbiased responses on this topic you can't look at it from afar or from responses (including mine) - it will actually require some independent research and a willingness to read both sides.
- AlexandrB 8y ago
  I see stuff like this posted all the time and I start to feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I was there when Gamergate started. I read the original post by Quinn's boyfriend. I followed what happened in the next 4-6 months with unhealthy obsession. I even had several debates on Twitter with people who professed to be concerned about ethics in journalism. My conclusion: there is little to no evidence of the kind of collusion that was alleged by gamergate. Indeed, most of the corruption that was (and still is) out there was big name publishers inviting reviewers to lavish review events or blacklisting reviewers that give unfavorable scores - something gamergate seemed to care little about. Not an indie developer sleeping his/her way to the top. Gamergate also seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose and form of games criticism - frequently demanding "objective" reviews. As if that's something that's possible or even desirable in an artistic medium. Finally, at some point the whole movement was co-opted by reactionary and conservative commentators whose agenda had nothing to do with gaming and everything to do with pushing traditional gender roles and anti-SJW mania. Basically the "PC police" complaints from 15 years ago transplanted into a new host community that was ripe for it.
  - patrickmay 8y ago
    Interesting. I was there at the beginning, too, and like you I followed it in detail. My view is that, from the beginning, Quinn's supporters turned it into an anti-(stereotypical)gamer culture war. The GameJournosPro mailing list and multiple articles with nearly identical spin coming out on the same day are pretty good evidence of collusion. I strongly encourage anyone still interested in the topic to watch some of Christina Hoff Sommers videos about it. She demonstrates that it is possible to discuss the actual issues without demonizing one's opponents.
aikah 8y ago
look up gamejournospro on Google. gamergate would have not existed if not for a bunch of "journalists" colluding in a private mailing list, more interested in pushing intersectional activism than reporting news. one cant insult its audience and the expect the latter not to rebel against that. "gamers are dead" / "gamers don't have to be your audience" is what led the divorce between the gaming press and half its readers. off course these "journalists" caught red handed are not going to report on their misdeeds. they'll quote tweets then claim they are victim of the internet mob.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  > gamejournospro https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/09/addressing-allegations-of-collusion-among-gaming-journalists/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/09/addressing-allegation... The "controversial" content was a single message to a politically neutral industry mailing list suggesting an open letter of support for Zoe Quinn in the face of harrassment, which was rejected by the other members of the mailing list as inappropriate for journalists.
  - aikah 8y ago
    the author of that article himself is a member of that mailing list. you can't find a more biased source. can you? check deepfreeze the web site.
  - themaninthedark 8y ago
    https://techraptor.net/content/secret-game-journalist-mailing-list-gamejournopros-exposed https://techraptor.net/content/secret-game-journalist-mailin... Here is a link from a neutral source instead of one of the people who was accused of collusion.
    - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      The passages quoted there are considerably less incendiary than the text surrounding them claims, e.g. the very first one concludes that they shouldn't use their professional sites to fight harassment, only their personal accounts. Fighting against lies and harassment is not "pushing an agenda and silencing one side of the issue"--and I want to remind you, again, that the corruption allegations against Quinn are provably lies. Regardless, in the worst case, since the GameJournoPros mailing list has not been publicly released that I'm aware of, your source and mine are equally cherry-picking to support their views. You should be aware, however, that the source of your cherry-picks is Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo has, ironically, also been implicated in organizing journalists to push a narrative, only his journalist friends are literal, self-described Nazis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Leaked_Breitbart_emails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Leaked_Breit... So I would be very, very wary of taking him at face value on any subject involving women or politics.
patrickmay 8y ago
That's the narrative that one side of the controversy pushed (and some are still pushing). It's a lot more complicated than that, with plenty of bad actors claiming to be on the side of the angels and a lot of 4chan trolls stirring the pot. If you want more information than you'll really be able to read, check out the FAQs on Reddit's r/KotakuInAction. Before buying into the above mentioned narrative, you might want to learn more about how the GameJournoPros mailing list was involved and which side received credible bomb threats. Christina Hoff Sommers has some good YouTube videos about it (i.e. https://youtu.be/5RVlCvBd21w https://youtu.be/5RVlCvBd21w). This is a major issue with some online "progressives" who are incapable of any nuance about it. Be warned if you want to have a rational conversation.
- 2xlbuds 8y ago
  KotakuInAction is an alt-right cesspool. It contributed to the rise of breitbart, and Milo Yannopolis got famous by writing articles about gamergate targetted to their audience.
  - patrickmay 8y ago
    That assessment reveals more about your personal politics than it does about that subreddit. Like I said above, there are a number of self-styled "progressives" online who are unable to have a rational discussion on this topic.
    - 2xlbuds 8y ago
      I speak as someone who checked it occasionally during the whole debacle - gamergate quickly became a referendum on feminism and women's place in the games industry, and I was disgusted by what I read, so I stopped going there.
      - themaninthedark 8y ago
        If it is a referendum on woman place then why are feminists like Christina Marie Hoff Sommers accepted?
sctb 8y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306452 and marked it off-topic.
makomk 8y ago
Sort of, though probably not in the way you might think. Gamergate's basically dead but a few of its more vocal supporters still keep track of when its higher-profile male opponents fall from grace due to accusations of sexual harassment, abuse and rape. There have been quite a few now. Some are even in jail.

d0lph 8y ago

That is one side of it.

PhasmaFelis 8y ago
Just for the record: GamerGate was 100% founded on harassing women. The "ethics in games journalism" thing was only ever a front to build popular support, which unfortunately worked. I'm happy to post more details if you're unconvinced. If you're legitimately concerned about journalistic ethics in the gaming world (which is a real thing), you should really avoid the "GamerGate" moniker as much as possible. EDIT: My vote total is bouncing up and down like a rubber ball, so I'll just go ahead and post the details I mentioned. GamerGate was founded around an incident where Eron Gjoni made a blog post accusing his girlfriend Zoe Quinn, who makes free video games, of cheating on him with several men, whom he named. Most of them were also game developers. One of them, Nathan Grayson, was a games journalist. He once wrote an article with a single paragraph about one of Quinn's games, released (by Gjoni's timeline) months before he allegedly slept with Quinn. This narrative somehow became "women developers everywhere are sleeping with writers to promote their shitty games and it's destroying gaming and must be stopped." This wasn't even an accusation Gjoni made; it was a conclusion jumped to by his readers. Ethics in games journalism is a legitimate issue. Major publishers have been buying good reviews with cash and perks for almost as long as there's been a gaming industry. No one's ever cared enough to make a lasting fuss about that. It wasn't until a woman who writes tiny, free games was accused falsely of buying good reviews that the cry of corruption went up. I think that illustrates firmly what the real priorities were here. Some well-meaning people have taken GamerGate's message at face value and been motivated to expose actual ethical issues. That's laudable, but doing it under the GamerGate banner devalues the entire message. EDIT AGAIN: crooked-v's post and link about the controversy around the GamesJournosPros mailing list is also valuable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306791
- ng12 8y ago
  "GamerGate" wasn't about anything in the sense that there were no goals, leadership, or organization. It's a lot like the "Alt-Right", it's a movement that only exists because the media reported that it did.
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    A group is defined by its members. Thousands of harassers claimed to be acting for GamerGate. You can't sweep that under the rug just because there was no formal leader.
  - lindydonna 8y ago
    And yet, they performed targeted attacks against a number of prominent women in the games industry, so much that these women had to relocate multiple times for fear of their personal safety. Interestingly, the FBI got confessions from some of the attackers, and decided not to prosecute. http://www.businessinsider.com/gamergate-fbi-file-2017-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/gamergate-fbi-file-2017-2 Just because they didn't have a central organization, doesn't change the fact that it was a movement that caused a lot of damage. In fact, there's a parallel with the Alt-Right. Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization.
    - ng12 8y ago
      > Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization. I'd argue there's a more interesting parallel with political terrorist organizations: they often start out as non-violent groups until subsections radicalize over time, therefore attracting a set of new members who further radicalize the group. Think Hamas, PKK, etc. It's pointless to argue whether GamerGate was about "ethics in journalism" because there's the set of people who care about that and the set of people who like to threaten women over the internet, and it's not clear which one are "GamerGate" and which ones aren't.
d0lph 8y ago
Apologies for pointing out that it might not be as black and white as the above poster stated.

vertex-four 8y ago

Gamergate was largely an attack on women in gaming. What we know of as Gamergate was largely started by a supposed incident in which a woman had sex with a video game reporter, and at some point that reporter mentioned or did a review of one of her games - the focus being more of an attack on her than the reviewer, of course. This incident, of course, never actually occurred - it was made up by a romantic partner of hers, as it turns out the reporter in question never actually mentioned or reviewed her after the sex was meant to have occurred.

setr 8y ago
From what I remember, she slept with multiple reviewers, and the whole thing became public when her boyfriend at the time complained online about being cheated on; I also remember there being quite a bit of controversy over the general illegitimatecy of game reviews, and that both parties were attacking each other on totally different arguments. The pro-gamergates claiming it was about corruption of the industry, and the anti-gamergates claiming it was an attack on women in video games. Thats what I understood from my far-away vantage point, at least. But its difficult to imagine it was just the latter; there's not enough sexism in gaming for it to blow up so easily, I think. (She was hardly the first woman in gaming to operate unethically).
- crooked-v 8y ago
  > she slept with multiple reviewers That's a false accusation. What actually happened was that an angry ex-boyfriend accused her of sleeping with a gaming journalist to get positive reviews. No such positive reviews ever happened. The journalist in question made a single off-handed mention of one of her games (in a non-review context) before they'd ever actually met in person.
  - hueving 8y ago
    >That's a false accusation. The phrase you're looking for is "unfounded accusation". Unless you are the woman in question or you were stalking her 24/7, you can't falsify it.

crooked-v 8y ago

Gamergate was a movement for "integrity in gaming journalism" that actually ended up mostly being about (a) harrassing female journalists and female industry figures under false pretenses and (b) vigorously whining whenever journalistic figures dared to treat games as art instead of being the nth repeat of Nintendo Power-style "journalism".

cautionarytale 8y ago

There was, and like so many other things these days, it's pointless listening to partisan summaries. If you want to know, dig and read the source material.

Nadya 8y ago

You'll get a bunch of posts on this topic, but I guess if people repeat a lie often enough and with a big enough megaphone it becomes "the truth" because the majority of their information on the topic comes from the media spouting "the truth". If you want any sort of unbiased responses on this topic you can't look at it from afar or from responses (including mine) - it will actually require some independent research and a willingness to read both sides.

AlexandrB 8y ago
I see stuff like this posted all the time and I start to feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I was there when Gamergate started. I read the original post by Quinn's boyfriend. I followed what happened in the next 4-6 months with unhealthy obsession. I even had several debates on Twitter with people who professed to be concerned about ethics in journalism. My conclusion: there is little to no evidence of the kind of collusion that was alleged by gamergate. Indeed, most of the corruption that was (and still is) out there was big name publishers inviting reviewers to lavish review events or blacklisting reviewers that give unfavorable scores - something gamergate seemed to care little about. Not an indie developer sleeping his/her way to the top. Gamergate also seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose and form of games criticism - frequently demanding "objective" reviews. As if that's something that's possible or even desirable in an artistic medium. Finally, at some point the whole movement was co-opted by reactionary and conservative commentators whose agenda had nothing to do with gaming and everything to do with pushing traditional gender roles and anti-SJW mania. Basically the "PC police" complaints from 15 years ago transplanted into a new host community that was ripe for it.
- patrickmay 8y ago
  Interesting. I was there at the beginning, too, and like you I followed it in detail. My view is that, from the beginning, Quinn's supporters turned it into an anti-(stereotypical)gamer culture war. The GameJournosPro mailing list and multiple articles with nearly identical spin coming out on the same day are pretty good evidence of collusion. I strongly encourage anyone still interested in the topic to watch some of Christina Hoff Sommers videos about it. She demonstrates that it is possible to discuss the actual issues without demonizing one's opponents.

aikah 8y ago

look up gamejournospro on Google. gamergate would have not existed if not for a bunch of "journalists" colluding in a private mailing list, more interested in pushing intersectional activism than reporting news. one cant insult its audience and the expect the latter not to rebel against that. "gamers are dead" / "gamers don't have to be your audience" is what led the divorce between the gaming press and half its readers. off course these "journalists" caught red handed are not going to report on their misdeeds. they'll quote tweets then claim they are victim of the internet mob.

crooked-v 8y ago
> gamejournospro https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/09/addressing-allegations-of-collusion-among-gaming-journalists/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/09/addressing-allegation... The "controversial" content was a single message to a politically neutral industry mailing list suggesting an open letter of support for Zoe Quinn in the face of harrassment, which was rejected by the other members of the mailing list as inappropriate for journalists.
- aikah 8y ago
  the author of that article himself is a member of that mailing list. you can't find a more biased source. can you? check deepfreeze the web site.
- themaninthedark 8y ago
  https://techraptor.net/content/secret-game-journalist-mailing-list-gamejournopros-exposed https://techraptor.net/content/secret-game-journalist-mailin... Here is a link from a neutral source instead of one of the people who was accused of collusion.
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    The passages quoted there are considerably less incendiary than the text surrounding them claims, e.g. the very first one concludes that they shouldn't use their professional sites to fight harassment, only their personal accounts. Fighting against lies and harassment is not "pushing an agenda and silencing one side of the issue"--and I want to remind you, again, that the corruption allegations against Quinn are provably lies. Regardless, in the worst case, since the GameJournoPros mailing list has not been publicly released that I'm aware of, your source and mine are equally cherry-picking to support their views. You should be aware, however, that the source of your cherry-picks is Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo has, ironically, also been implicated in organizing journalists to push a narrative, only his journalist friends are literal, self-described Nazis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Leaked_Breitbart_emails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Leaked_Breit... So I would be very, very wary of taking him at face value on any subject involving women or politics.

patrickmay 8y ago

That's the narrative that one side of the controversy pushed (and some are still pushing). It's a lot more complicated than that, with plenty of bad actors claiming to be on the side of the angels and a lot of 4chan trolls stirring the pot. If you want more information than you'll really be able to read, check out the FAQs on Reddit's r/KotakuInAction. Before buying into the above mentioned narrative, you might want to learn more about how the GameJournoPros mailing list was involved and which side received credible bomb threats. Christina Hoff Sommers has some good YouTube videos about it (i.e. https://youtu.be/5RVlCvBd21w https://youtu.be/5RVlCvBd21w). This is a major issue with some online "progressives" who are incapable of any nuance about it. Be warned if you want to have a rational conversation.

2xlbuds 8y ago
KotakuInAction is an alt-right cesspool. It contributed to the rise of breitbart, and Milo Yannopolis got famous by writing articles about gamergate targetted to their audience.
- patrickmay 8y ago
  That assessment reveals more about your personal politics than it does about that subreddit. Like I said above, there are a number of self-styled "progressives" online who are unable to have a rational discussion on this topic.
  - 2xlbuds 8y ago
    I speak as someone who checked it occasionally during the whole debacle - gamergate quickly became a referendum on feminism and women's place in the games industry, and I was disgusted by what I read, so I stopped going there.
    - themaninthedark 8y ago
      If it is a referendum on woman place then why are feminists like Christina Marie Hoff Sommers accepted?

sctb 8y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306452 and marked it off-topic.

makomk 8y ago

Sort of, though probably not in the way you might think. Gamergate's basically dead but a few of its more vocal supporters still keep track of when its higher-profile male opponents fall from grace due to accusations of sexual harassment, abuse and rape. There have been quite a few now. Some are even in jail.