7 ms·

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 vide

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
      I am reasonably confident calling it flatly false at this point, given the absurd amount of fine-detail combing over of Zoe Quinn's life done by her harrassers that's still never come up with anything real to present.
    - makomk 8y ago
      It's neither of those things. It's not the accusation that was made at all; the original claim was that she slept with a reviewer who gave her game positive coverage. The entire gaming press debunked this based on the technicality that it wasn't actually a review, but that wasn't the claim that was going around. Supposedly they also weren't technically in that kind of relationship until shortly after the press coverage, but that went down less well as a counter-argument for obvious reasons. (This also wasn't the focus of the original blog post at all. To cut a decades-long story short, the reason that particular aspect caught people's attention was because there were a whole bunch of people who already very strongly distrusted the entire gaming press for reasons entirely unrelated to women. Then Reddit started shadowbanning anyone who mentioned the journo's name, hosters were pressured to shut down sites which covered it, the entire gaming press declared gamers as a whole misogynistic scum over it, and every escalation fanned the flames more in typical Streisand-effect fashion. In fact I don't think it was even mentioned in the blog at all, but I could be wrong.)
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - themaninthedark 8y ago
    It may have been before they met in person but they had been very friendly with each other. So much in fact that the journalist had beta tested the game for her and was put in the credits for doing so. https://www.mobygames.com/game/browser/depression-quest/credits https://www.mobygames.com/game/browser/depression-quest/cred...
- vertex-four 8y ago
  There is no evidence that anybody reviewed her after she slept with them, let alone that they were biased by it. Her boyfriend mentions multiple incidences of cheating in the post, but only one appears to be with a reviewer.
  - kj01a 8y ago
    > no evidence that anybody reviewed her after she slept with them > one appears to be with a reviewer Wat
    - vertex-four 8y ago
      People can be video game reviewers without reviewing any specific video game.
      - kj01a 8y ago
        I'm sure that's exactly what happened, and Zoe Quinn would never lie, no sir.
  - washadjeffmad 8y ago
    Since entertainment reviews across every industry have by and large become another component in whitewashed marketing, it's not really much of a distinction to make between tacit promotion by a reviewer and their review. When Weinstein told casting directors that actresses that rebuffed him were difficult to work with and promoted to films of those that didn't, I'm sure his biases weren't as transparent in light of his professional reputation. Was that not a breach of ethics on multiple fronts?
    - crooked-v 8y ago
      There was a single case of a journalist who mentioned one of Zoe Quinn's games in an article... before they had ever actually met. I fail to see the ethical breach there.
    - vertex-four 8y ago
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  I'm afraid you've been lied to. There's some details in my other post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306626
- Frondo 8y ago
  Whoever or however many people she's slept with is also very much between her and her partners -- bringing it out into the public is a boundary overstep and violation of her privacy. Slut-shaming is a bad thing and we would all do well to move past it asap.
  - magduf 8y ago
    If she's sleeping around with people who have nothing to do with the gaming industry, then sure, it's irrelevant. If she's sleeping with game reviewers who then review her games, it looks like a quid pro quo situation. Of course, there doesn't seem to be any good evidence this actually happened from what I read, but if it were true, then it's not slut-shaming.
allthenews 8y ago
The other side is that this "developer" made a game of questionable quality, which received a suspiciously good review, and when the gaming community dared to question the integrity of this review, the entire incident became symbolic of the typical kind of false, weponized victimhood characteristic of Anita Sarkeesan et al.. Suddenly any criticism levied at women in gaming development or gaming journalism is immediately sexist, regardless of merit. There is a clear conflict of interest when reviewers are sleeping with developers. Calling attention to this fact is not an attack on women or any such nonsense.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  > a suspiciously good review I'm sure you can provide a link and evidence of the "suspicious" part, right?
- vertex-four 8y ago
  What suspiciously good review? The reviewer who she was accused of sleeping with never reviewed her game. There was an intentional misinformation campaign regarding her in order to suggest that the harassment was in some way OK.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  > The other side is that this "developer" made a game of questionable quality, which received a suspiciously good review This is false. Details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306626
StanislavPetrov 8y ago
>Gamergate was largely an attack on women in gaming. That's completely wrong. While there are always trolls and bigots lurking everywhere, the vast majority of people were protesting the forced censorship of games by those who found them "offensive" or "not inclusive enough". The whole brouhaha was a microcosm of the ongoing debate that many are having in this country about free speech. There are many who want to eliminate free speech and pass "hate speech" laws that ban and/or criminalize speech that some find offensive. Some of us believe that in a free society people have the right to be offensive, bigoted, racist, or despicable in a wide variety of ways that we don't agree with. By extension we also believe that people should be able to make any games they choose to make, whether we find them offensive or not.
- vertex-four 8y ago
  To suggest that the targeted harassment of women (and the complete avoidance of significantly targeting anybody else) was the result of “a small minority of trolls” who didn’t have the support of everybody using that banner is laughable, especially given that GamerGate had an explicit start with the harassment of a woman.
  - StanislavPetrov 8y ago
    To suggest that Gamergate was about the "targeted harassment of women" and not censorship in gaming is a complete mischaracterization of the issue - one that has been repeatedly pushed by those on the pro-censorship side.
    - lindydonna 8y ago
      If that is true, you should be able to point to articles or statements where game developers advocated censorship. I've talked to Brianna Wu. I've followed her work. She has never advocated censorship.
      - ng12 8y ago
        What does Brianna Wu have to do with GamerGate? AFAIK she was a target because of her being a controversial character, not anything GamerGate-related.

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
    I am reasonably confident calling it flatly false at this point, given the absurd amount of fine-detail combing over of Zoe Quinn's life done by her harrassers that's still never come up with anything real to present.
  - makomk 8y ago
    It's neither of those things. It's not the accusation that was made at all; the original claim was that she slept with a reviewer who gave her game positive coverage. The entire gaming press debunked this based on the technicality that it wasn't actually a review, but that wasn't the claim that was going around. Supposedly they also weren't technically in that kind of relationship until shortly after the press coverage, but that went down less well as a counter-argument for obvious reasons. (This also wasn't the focus of the original blog post at all. To cut a decades-long story short, the reason that particular aspect caught people's attention was because there were a whole bunch of people who already very strongly distrusted the entire gaming press for reasons entirely unrelated to women. Then Reddit started shadowbanning anyone who mentioned the journo's name, hosters were pressured to shut down sites which covered it, the entire gaming press declared gamers as a whole misogynistic scum over it, and every escalation fanned the flames more in typical Streisand-effect fashion. In fact I don't think it was even mentioned in the blog at all, but I could be wrong.)
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- themaninthedark 8y ago
  It may have been before they met in person but they had been very friendly with each other. So much in fact that the journalist had beta tested the game for her and was put in the credits for doing so. https://www.mobygames.com/game/browser/depression-quest/credits https://www.mobygames.com/game/browser/depression-quest/cred...
vertex-four 8y ago
There is no evidence that anybody reviewed her after she slept with them, let alone that they were biased by it. Her boyfriend mentions multiple incidences of cheating in the post, but only one appears to be with a reviewer.
- kj01a 8y ago
  > no evidence that anybody reviewed her after she slept with them > one appears to be with a reviewer Wat
  - vertex-four 8y ago
    People can be video game reviewers without reviewing any specific video game.
    - kj01a 8y ago
      I'm sure that's exactly what happened, and Zoe Quinn would never lie, no sir.
- washadjeffmad 8y ago
  Since entertainment reviews across every industry have by and large become another component in whitewashed marketing, it's not really much of a distinction to make between tacit promotion by a reviewer and their review. When Weinstein told casting directors that actresses that rebuffed him were difficult to work with and promoted to films of those that didn't, I'm sure his biases weren't as transparent in light of his professional reputation. Was that not a breach of ethics on multiple fronts?
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    There was a single case of a journalist who mentioned one of Zoe Quinn's games in an article... before they had ever actually met. I fail to see the ethical breach there.
  - vertex-four 8y ago
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
I'm afraid you've been lied to. There's some details in my other post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306626
Frondo 8y ago
Whoever or however many people she's slept with is also very much between her and her partners -- bringing it out into the public is a boundary overstep and violation of her privacy. Slut-shaming is a bad thing and we would all do well to move past it asap.
- magduf 8y ago
  If she's sleeping around with people who have nothing to do with the gaming industry, then sure, it's irrelevant. If she's sleeping with game reviewers who then review her games, it looks like a quid pro quo situation. Of course, there doesn't seem to be any good evidence this actually happened from what I read, but if it were true, then it's not slut-shaming.

allthenews 8y ago

The other side is that this "developer" made a game of questionable quality, which received a suspiciously good review, and when the gaming community dared to question the integrity of this review, the entire incident became symbolic of the typical kind of false, weponized victimhood characteristic of Anita Sarkeesan et al.. Suddenly any criticism levied at women in gaming development or gaming journalism is immediately sexist, regardless of merit. There is a clear conflict of interest when reviewers are sleeping with developers. Calling attention to this fact is not an attack on women or any such nonsense.

crooked-v 8y ago
> a suspiciously good review I'm sure you can provide a link and evidence of the "suspicious" part, right?
vertex-four 8y ago
What suspiciously good review? The reviewer who she was accused of sleeping with never reviewed her game. There was an intentional misinformation campaign regarding her in order to suggest that the harassment was in some way OK.
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
> The other side is that this "developer" made a game of questionable quality, which received a suspiciously good review This is false. Details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306626

StanislavPetrov 8y ago

>Gamergate was largely an attack on women in gaming. That's completely wrong. While there are always trolls and bigots lurking everywhere, the vast majority of people were protesting the forced censorship of games by those who found them "offensive" or "not inclusive enough". The whole brouhaha was a microcosm of the ongoing debate that many are having in this country about free speech. There are many who want to eliminate free speech and pass "hate speech" laws that ban and/or criminalize speech that some find offensive. Some of us believe that in a free society people have the right to be offensive, bigoted, racist, or despicable in a wide variety of ways that we don't agree with. By extension we also believe that people should be able to make any games they choose to make, whether we find them offensive or not.

vertex-four 8y ago
To suggest that the targeted harassment of women (and the complete avoidance of significantly targeting anybody else) was the result of “a small minority of trolls” who didn’t have the support of everybody using that banner is laughable, especially given that GamerGate had an explicit start with the harassment of a woman.
- StanislavPetrov 8y ago
  To suggest that Gamergate was about the "targeted harassment of women" and not censorship in gaming is a complete mischaracterization of the issue - one that has been repeatedly pushed by those on the pro-censorship side.
  - lindydonna 8y ago
    If that is true, you should be able to point to articles or statements where game developers advocated censorship. I've talked to Brianna Wu. I've followed her work. She has never advocated censorship.
    - ng12 8y ago
      What does Brianna Wu have to do with GamerGate? AFAIK she was a target because of her being a controversial character, not anything GamerGate-related.