5 ms·

That is one side of it.

by d0lph 8y ago

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.
      - digi_owl 8y ago
        Modern day internet "activism" basically, and a legacy of the Anonymous circus.
      - themaninthedark 8y ago
        I know of at least one gamergate meetup that had a bomb threat called on it. https://kotaku.com/gamergate-meetup-evacuated-after-apparent-threat-1701761645 https://kotaku.com/gamergate-meetup-evacuated-after-apparent... Would it be fair to paint the critics of gamergate with the same brush? My best advice is to look at the majority of the people and see how they act, then make your own judgements.
- Chaebixi 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. GamerGate wasn't coordinated enough and lacked the centralized leadership to have been "founded" for a purpose or be a "front" to achieve specific clandestine goals. From what I gather, it was sort of like Occupy Wall Street in that there was really no there there besides a vague ethos shared by the people who took up its flag to pursue their disparate pet causes.
  - lindydonna 8y ago
    /s/founded/formed Now, is the rest of the statement true?
    - Chaebixi 8y ago
      > Now, is the rest of the statement true? No, clearly not. There are a lot more problems with the paragraph than can be solved by a simple substitution. The root problem is that it's very hard (almost impossible) to make statements about the whole of an uncoordinated, loosely defined group that are both specific and true. Also, when you think you can easily make such statements, it probably doesn't mean that you're right but rather your thinking is being driven by biases and group-prejudice.
  - fzeroracer 8y ago
    Saying that GamerGate lacked leadership is wrong. It had multiple important figureheads that directed the movement over time, starting with Eron who turned a personal affair into an open-internet vendetta under the guise of 'ethics in video games' (of which the reviews and corruption people claim simply does not exist). It blew up from there as many people became leaders of multiple subsections of GamerGate, many of whom we see today in the alt-right parts of the internet which I am sure is entirely coincidental. The difference between Occupy Wall Street and GamerGate is that GamerGate rallied behind multiple different leaders which would push the the movement towards various directions. This was all stuff I saw from personal experience.
- ksk 8y ago
  gamergate was not a thing till people decided to link two groups together. The second group is a group of assholes who like to harass women or really anyone on the internet they don't like. Nobody is going to defend them here, and there isn't a way for the first group to NOT be linked with them since news articles keep linking the two for obvious sensational reasons. >Just for the record: GamerGate was 100% founded on harassing women. >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. You seem to have back pedaled from your original absurd claim. That's progress I guess. --- Its hard to find any neutral source that aggregates all the factual information. Does this website cover everything? Do you have an alternate source? http://thisisvideogames.com/gamergatewiki/index.php/Timeline/Full http://thisisvideogames.com/gamergatewiki/index.php/Timeline...
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    > You seem to have back pedaled from your original absurd claim. Not at all. The GamerGate movement began with people looking to punish Quinn for her infidelity, and people who already hated her game jumped on the bandwagon to invent conspiracy theories to explain why it was well-reviewed. These people jumped to the demonstrably false conclusion that she had traded sex for reviews, and that narrative, unfortunately, went mainstream, and caught the attention of people who legitimately cared about journalistic ethics and weren't aware of the previous facts. And that's still continuing--you see a lot of well-meaning people in this thread who are still not aware how much of the sex-for-reviews narrative and the GameJournoPros narrative are outright lies. > Its hard to find any neutral source that aggregates all the factual information. Does this website cover everything? Do you have an alternate source? That site may work as a timeline, but whatever your position, I think we can agree that GamerGate's own wiki is not an unbiased source.
    - ksk 8y ago
      I don't believe that because someone holds a different point of view, they automatically lack integrity.
- setr 8y ago
  Wait, all you've suggested is that the movement began by means of an incorrect conclusion; but you havent shown anything regarding the rest of your claim: if those participating believed in the mistaken conclusion, and were enraged by that conclusion (the game journalism ethics part of it), then it wouldn't make any sense to describe it as "100% founded on harassing women". Your proof is not at all sufficient for your claim
d0lph 8y ago
Apologies for pointing out that it might not be as black and white as the above poster stated.

That is one side of it.

by d0lph 8y ago

That is one side of it.

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.
    - digi_owl 8y ago
      Modern day internet "activism" basically, and a legacy of the Anonymous circus.
    - themaninthedark 8y ago
      I know of at least one gamergate meetup that had a bomb threat called on it. https://kotaku.com/gamergate-meetup-evacuated-after-apparent-threat-1701761645 https://kotaku.com/gamergate-meetup-evacuated-after-apparent... Would it be fair to paint the critics of gamergate with the same brush? My best advice is to look at the majority of the people and see how they act, then make your own judgements.
Chaebixi 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. GamerGate wasn't coordinated enough and lacked the centralized leadership to have been "founded" for a purpose or be a "front" to achieve specific clandestine goals. From what I gather, it was sort of like Occupy Wall Street in that there was really no there there besides a vague ethos shared by the people who took up its flag to pursue their disparate pet causes.
- lindydonna 8y ago
  /s/founded/formed Now, is the rest of the statement true?
  - Chaebixi 8y ago
    > Now, is the rest of the statement true? No, clearly not. There are a lot more problems with the paragraph than can be solved by a simple substitution. The root problem is that it's very hard (almost impossible) to make statements about the whole of an uncoordinated, loosely defined group that are both specific and true. Also, when you think you can easily make such statements, it probably doesn't mean that you're right but rather your thinking is being driven by biases and group-prejudice.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  Saying that GamerGate lacked leadership is wrong. It had multiple important figureheads that directed the movement over time, starting with Eron who turned a personal affair into an open-internet vendetta under the guise of 'ethics in video games' (of which the reviews and corruption people claim simply does not exist). It blew up from there as many people became leaders of multiple subsections of GamerGate, many of whom we see today in the alt-right parts of the internet which I am sure is entirely coincidental. The difference between Occupy Wall Street and GamerGate is that GamerGate rallied behind multiple different leaders which would push the the movement towards various directions. This was all stuff I saw from personal experience.
ksk 8y ago
gamergate was not a thing till people decided to link two groups together. The second group is a group of assholes who like to harass women or really anyone on the internet they don't like. Nobody is going to defend them here, and there isn't a way for the first group to NOT be linked with them since news articles keep linking the two for obvious sensational reasons. >Just for the record: GamerGate was 100% founded on harassing women. >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. You seem to have back pedaled from your original absurd claim. That's progress I guess. --- Its hard to find any neutral source that aggregates all the factual information. Does this website cover everything? Do you have an alternate source? http://thisisvideogames.com/gamergatewiki/index.php/Timeline/Full http://thisisvideogames.com/gamergatewiki/index.php/Timeline...
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  > You seem to have back pedaled from your original absurd claim. Not at all. The GamerGate movement began with people looking to punish Quinn for her infidelity, and people who already hated her game jumped on the bandwagon to invent conspiracy theories to explain why it was well-reviewed. These people jumped to the demonstrably false conclusion that she had traded sex for reviews, and that narrative, unfortunately, went mainstream, and caught the attention of people who legitimately cared about journalistic ethics and weren't aware of the previous facts. And that's still continuing--you see a lot of well-meaning people in this thread who are still not aware how much of the sex-for-reviews narrative and the GameJournoPros narrative are outright lies. > Its hard to find any neutral source that aggregates all the factual information. Does this website cover everything? Do you have an alternate source? That site may work as a timeline, but whatever your position, I think we can agree that GamerGate's own wiki is not an unbiased source.
  - ksk 8y ago
    I don't believe that because someone holds a different point of view, they automatically lack integrity.
setr 8y ago
Wait, all you've suggested is that the movement began by means of an incorrect conclusion; but you havent shown anything regarding the rest of your claim: if those participating believed in the mistaken conclusion, and were enraged by that conclusion (the game journalism ethics part of it), then it wouldn't make any sense to describe it as "100% founded on harassing women". Your proof is not at all sufficient for your claim

d0lph 8y ago

Apologies for pointing out that it might not be as black and white as the above poster stated.