7 ms·

Not to mention the complete lack of journalistic ethics on Kotaku. They frequently post articles about games they have financial or personal ties to, without d

by Zikes 11y ago

Not to mention the complete lack of journalistic ethics on Kotaku. They frequently post articles about games they have financial or personal ties to, without disclosure. Edit: I made no mention of movements and have no hidden agenda. My concerns for journalistic ethics are sincere. Kotaku and other games journalist web sites have associated any criticism of these concerns with unrelated harassing activities from typical internet bullies that falsely claim to represent the people that voice those concerns, but are ultimately unrelated. I stand by my statement. The fact remains that there are journalists that have reported on games without disclosing financial or personal ties to the companies or developers representing those games. I invite you to set aside the politics and evaluate the facts.

aaronbrethorst 11y ago
For anyone who missed the reference, he means Gamergate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy#History
- FreakyT 11y ago
  I'm guessing that most people understood the parent comment's reference to that faux crusade for "ethics in game journalism", hence the (deserved) downvotes. Edit: When I posted this, the parent comment was only 2 sentences long.
  - rewqfdsa 11y ago
    It's not faux. Don't believe SJW lies. GG is for a world where gaming news is for news about gaming, not a vehicle for censorship.
    - eropple 11y ago
      > It's not faux. Don't believe SJW lies. I have to think, or have to hope to think, that at some point the silliness of a pejorative saying "pssh, those people want social justice" will hit you like a runaway bus. > GG is for a world where gaming news is for news about gaming This claim does not match the actions of self-identified GamerGate partisans. (Easily disclaimed as false flag attacks, right, because the world really is out to get you, I know, I know.) By all indications, GamerGate is "for," when it can be "for" something other than doxxing women and sending them death threats, a world where gaming "news" is, by and large, fed to you by the PR flacks of the industry publishers. You don't want news. You want reinforcement. Literally (Who) every one of the media personalities--no, not journalists--that get GamerGate love are telling you only what you want to hear, and to somebody with just a teensy bit of critical thinking, that becomes a real concern. Your epistemic closure and your desire for its continuation is your own problem, no one else's. > not a vehicle for censorship and denigration of gamer culture This is always the best. Do you ever pause to notice how nobody talks about music-listener culture or film-watcher culture or book-reader culture...? I guess I need an expert opinion. I'll ask my stepmother what gamer culture is like. Her Facebook news feed is full of game updates, after all, so who'd know better?
      - rewqfdsa 11y ago
        At some point, twisting words to suit your agenda will turn us all into gibbering idiots, unable to make meaningful statements about the world.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      With the exception of a single sentence in an otherwise inflammatory comment about Mongodb, everything† you've posted to HN --- at least, under this name --- has been either an emotional appeal or an attempt to stir up drama. Could you please stop? You leave little hints here and there that you know what you're talking about. Could you contribute more of that stuff, and less of this stuff? † I mean it: I took the time to fact-check this statement. I might have missed something, but I didn't miss it casually.
  - Dirlewanger 11y ago
    Yup, why focus on the comment (which raises a valid point and most likely no one here will address) when we can be presumptuous, project our own bias onto things, and pull a red herring out of thin air? Wouldn't be phased if you do the same to me.
    - FreakyT 11y ago
      At the time, parent's comment simply read: > Not to mention the complete lack of journalistic ethics on Kotaku. They frequently post articles about games they have financial or personal ties to, without disclosure. You assert that this is a "valid point", but I believe a better characterization would be that it is an extremely broad, unsourced claim.
      - Zikes 11y ago
        At the time, I felt that the sources were unnecessary. In many of the communities I am involved in those sources are frequently posted and discussed, and a statement such as the one I made is able to stand on its own. Posting sources would have felt like an attempt to hijack the discussion to steer it towards a specific industry's problems, rather than focusing on Gawker and Kotaku's association with the parent article's reported moral failings. Given the amount of discussion following my comment I can see that the topic is important or interesting enough to merit posting the sources, however I am currently away from my personal computer where I have access to the communities and resources to be able to provide those sources. If you are truly interested in the subject, later this evening I will post another reply to this comment with sources and articles.
  - tzs 11y ago
    What most people fail to understand is that there are at least 4 distinct groups currently involved in GG/anti-GG, possibly 5. 1. People who are in fact concerned about the sorry ethical state of game journalism. 2. Trolls and jerks who have jumped in to cause trouble, mostly by attacking women in groups #3 and #4. 3. The game journalists whose ethics are being called into question. 4. Assorted "social justice" activists. They showed up because the original spark that set all this off was a lying, vindictive open letter from an ex-boyfriend of female developer, accusing her and some journalists of unethical practices, and that caused the developer to receive some very inappropriate comments. The letter was fairly quickly discredited, but the incident did get may fired up to do something about long standing unethical game journalists, which had long been something people were annoyed about but never got organized enough to do anything about, which is what led to the formation of group #1. 5. Group #1 includes many female gamers. Many of them have been receiving death threats and rape threats. It's not clear if these are coming from people in group #4, or if there is a distinct group of trolls and jerks similar to #2 but who have decided to attack #1 instead of #3 and #4. Currently: • group #1 is concentrating on fighting #3, and trying to keep #2 out. • group #2 is attacking #3 and #4, and trying to make sure #1 gets blamed. • group #3 is trying hard to make sure people don't consider the points #1, by making sure to cover all the activities of #2, which they attribute to #1, and ignoring group #5's activities. • group #4 is fighting group #2's actions, which they often attribute to group #1. • group #5 is fighting the women in group #1. There may be other groups. The women in group #1 maybe should be considered a separate group, because in addition to fighting #3, many of them are also fighting #4.
    - Noelkd 11y ago
      I've been messing around with graphviz [1] and I thought I would make the parent comment into a graph [2]. You can see the code to generate the graph here [3]. If I've made any mistakes leave a comment. [1] http://graphviz.org/ http://graphviz.org/ [2] https://github.com/Noelkd/GamerGateGraphiz/blob/master/GamerGateGraphiz.svg https://github.com/Noelkd/GamerGateGraphiz/blob/master/Gamer... [3] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Noelkd/GamerGateGraphiz/master/GamerGate https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Noelkd/GamerGateGraphiz/ma...
makeitsuckless 11y ago
Gamergate bullies complaining about ethics is hilarious. Especially given the recent developments over at Reddit.
- kinghajj 11y ago
  Do you really believe that everyone who believes in the Gamergate story is a bully?
- nailer 11y ago
  gamergate is awful, but so is anti gamergate: they've also made bomb threats, sent syringes to peoples houses, doxxed, made sock puppet accounts, and threatened someone's family. People care /way/ too much about video games. Just don't get involved.
- vdnkh 11y ago
  Sentiment like this is a huge double standard that nobody seems to notice. When somebody says "All Muslims are terrorists" because an extremely small proportion of them ARE terrorists, you (rightfully so) get people saying that you're wrong. However, when somebody says "Gamergate supporters are misogynistic/racist/bullies/etc" everyone nods their heads in agreement and Kotaku gets a few thousand in ad revenue. However, it's a parallel case - a small but vocal minority are causing trouble. So why the double standard? Supporting GamerGate isn't morally fashionable [0]. Too many people (including yourself, it seems) are unable to deal with ambiguous or contradictory situations, and end up looking towards mass for guidance. GG isn't perfect, but their promotion of journalistic integrity is important. [0]http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
  - pron 11y ago
    I haven't played a video game for more than a few minutes in over a decade, and I had no idea what "gamergate" was until I read the summary on Wikipedia and maybe some article by a reputable news organization (I don't remember which), but isn't "everyone who's in the KKK is a racist" a much more apt comparison than "all Muslims are terrorists"? As I gather from the Wikipedia entry, gamergate is a hate group, so by definition anyone who's a part of it is a bully. I mean, saying gamergate is for "journalistic integrity" is like saying the KKK is "anti crime" because they may have, on occasion, lynched people who actually performed crimes. But since the KKK is only anti crime if said crime was committed by a black person -- and then their reaction is not one of protest but of violence -- you can't say that the KKK's stance on crime is "important". Similarly, gamergate only happens to be enraged -- and violently so -- not about journalistic integrity in general (or even in video-games coverage), but only when they sense that integrity happens to coincide with the interests of women. They promote journalistic integrity just like the KKK fights crime -- namely they make up a conspiracy to fight, and may on occasion, by total chance, happen to be partly right (in their claims, not in their actions, of course). Also, while most people are born into Islam (or convert to it because of some of its many ideals) people choose to join the KKK -- or gamergate -- only because they identify with a rather singular feeling: hate towards the movement's intended victims. One is not born a gamergater, and neither does one become a gamergater simply for believing that journalists should hold themselves to a higher standard. What I don't understand is, while the KKK may not like or endorse the "hate group" designation, they are well aware that they're not really crime fighters. Are gamergaters confused about that point? EDIT: While reading more about gamergate I came across the term SJW, which stands for Social Justice Warrior, which is something gamergaters are apparently against. How can a group of nerds be against social justice warriors? Are they against Batman? Do they hate Professor X?
tptacek 11y ago
I can't imagine an aspect of Gawker less interesting to discuss than how it covers video games.
- markcerqueira 11y ago
  It's a shame you're not moderating this entire discussion. If you don't have anything productive to add to this thread, leave a comment somewhere else?
- Zikes 11y ago
  I see it as being representative of the company as a whole. Regardless of the subject matter, if those ethical oversights are so frequent on one of their sites it's not unreasonable to wonder where else it might be present. In that vein, I believe it to be relevant to the article.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Feels like potential conflicts of interest in video game reviews is a pretty minor journalistic sin compared to, for instance, disapproving stories about celebrity photo leaks that link to the stolen photos. Or obtaining a stolen unfilmed Tarantino movie script and promoting itself as the best place online to read it. Gawker is like a tabloid without the scruples. We don't need to read tea leaves to see that.
    - Zikes 11y ago
      I agree. If there is to be a moral scale on which the two are placed, it would certainly tip towards the invasion of personal privacy. Video games are a $10+billion dollar industry, however, and Kotaku is a major publisher in that industry which may be directly funding many of Gawker's other "journalistic sins". I get the impression you are discounting Kotaku's actions or my bringing it up primarily because the subject is video games. If you have a poor opinion of that hobby, it may be affecting your judgment.
      - 11y ago
scythe 11y ago
> Not to mention the complete lack of journalistic ethics on Kotaku. They frequently post articles about games they have financial or personal ties to, without disclosure. Um, ahem, hackers, downvoters, internetizens, lend me your ears. Or eyes, fuck it. Let's assume for a second that GamerGate is awful. Some nontrivial proportion of the "movement" are bigoted trolls who threaten people over the internet, violate their privacy, and drag down the tenor of discourse on messageboards they inhabit. But consider that just maybe Kotaku actually has a pretty bad policy about conflicts of interest. How is someone supposed to post about this? 'Zikes didn't mention GamerGate. He didn't claim to support the movement or try to whitewash people's actions. All he did was to complain about article quality on a website which, for the record, I haven't read in months and have no opinion of (the only videogame I still play is Super Smash Brothers). Are we so tribal that simply expressing a view associated with a dishonorable group of people leads to some downvote-heavy flamewar about them? As I clicked "reply", 'Zikes's comment was black. When the textbox had loaded, he was downvoted into the grey. Calm down, people.
- Zikes 11y ago
  I've honestly never seen one of my comments swing so wildly or so quickly. I've seen -4 and +9 within minutes of each other, and it seems to be on a different side of 0 every time I refresh. It's certainly a polarizing topic.
- slavik81 11y ago
  His accusation is vague and non-specific. I have no love for Kotaku, but without being clear about what he's acusing them of, it contributes nothing to the discussion.
hellbanner 11y ago
Huh, didn't realize Kotaku & Gawker & Jezebel were owned by the same entity. Makes sense now.
rrss1122 11y ago
Kotaku is the least of their problems. Some of the worst stories I read on the internet consistently come from Jezebel and Deadspin.

by Zikes 11y ago

aaronbrethorst 11y ago

For anyone who missed the reference, he means Gamergate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy#History

FreakyT 11y ago
I'm guessing that most people understood the parent comment's reference to that faux crusade for "ethics in game journalism", hence the (deserved) downvotes. Edit: When I posted this, the parent comment was only 2 sentences long.
- rewqfdsa 11y ago
  It's not faux. Don't believe SJW lies. GG is for a world where gaming news is for news about gaming, not a vehicle for censorship.
  - eropple 11y ago
    > It's not faux. Don't believe SJW lies. I have to think, or have to hope to think, that at some point the silliness of a pejorative saying "pssh, those people want social justice" will hit you like a runaway bus. > GG is for a world where gaming news is for news about gaming This claim does not match the actions of self-identified GamerGate partisans. (Easily disclaimed as false flag attacks, right, because the world really is out to get you, I know, I know.) By all indications, GamerGate is "for," when it can be "for" something other than doxxing women and sending them death threats, a world where gaming "news" is, by and large, fed to you by the PR flacks of the industry publishers. You don't want news. You want reinforcement. Literally (Who) every one of the media personalities--no, not journalists--that get GamerGate love are telling you only what you want to hear, and to somebody with just a teensy bit of critical thinking, that becomes a real concern. Your epistemic closure and your desire for its continuation is your own problem, no one else's. > not a vehicle for censorship and denigration of gamer culture This is always the best. Do you ever pause to notice how nobody talks about music-listener culture or film-watcher culture or book-reader culture...? I guess I need an expert opinion. I'll ask my stepmother what gamer culture is like. Her Facebook news feed is full of game updates, after all, so who'd know better?
    - rewqfdsa 11y ago
      At some point, twisting words to suit your agenda will turn us all into gibbering idiots, unable to make meaningful statements about the world.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    With the exception of a single sentence in an otherwise inflammatory comment about Mongodb, everything† you've posted to HN --- at least, under this name --- has been either an emotional appeal or an attempt to stir up drama. Could you please stop? You leave little hints here and there that you know what you're talking about. Could you contribute more of that stuff, and less of this stuff? † I mean it: I took the time to fact-check this statement. I might have missed something, but I didn't miss it casually.
- Dirlewanger 11y ago
  Yup, why focus on the comment (which raises a valid point and most likely no one here will address) when we can be presumptuous, project our own bias onto things, and pull a red herring out of thin air? Wouldn't be phased if you do the same to me.
  - FreakyT 11y ago
    At the time, parent's comment simply read: > Not to mention the complete lack of journalistic ethics on Kotaku. They frequently post articles about games they have financial or personal ties to, without disclosure. You assert that this is a "valid point", but I believe a better characterization would be that it is an extremely broad, unsourced claim.
    - Zikes 11y ago
      At the time, I felt that the sources were unnecessary. In many of the communities I am involved in those sources are frequently posted and discussed, and a statement such as the one I made is able to stand on its own. Posting sources would have felt like an attempt to hijack the discussion to steer it towards a specific industry's problems, rather than focusing on Gawker and Kotaku's association with the parent article's reported moral failings. Given the amount of discussion following my comment I can see that the topic is important or interesting enough to merit posting the sources, however I am currently away from my personal computer where I have access to the communities and resources to be able to provide those sources. If you are truly interested in the subject, later this evening I will post another reply to this comment with sources and articles.
- tzs 11y ago
  What most people fail to understand is that there are at least 4 distinct groups currently involved in GG/anti-GG, possibly 5. 1. People who are in fact concerned about the sorry ethical state of game journalism. 2. Trolls and jerks who have jumped in to cause trouble, mostly by attacking women in groups #3 and #4. 3. The game journalists whose ethics are being called into question. 4. Assorted "social justice" activists. They showed up because the original spark that set all this off was a lying, vindictive open letter from an ex-boyfriend of female developer, accusing her and some journalists of unethical practices, and that caused the developer to receive some very inappropriate comments. The letter was fairly quickly discredited, but the incident did get may fired up to do something about long standing unethical game journalists, which had long been something people were annoyed about but never got organized enough to do anything about, which is what led to the formation of group #1. 5. Group #1 includes many female gamers. Many of them have been receiving death threats and rape threats. It's not clear if these are coming from people in group #4, or if there is a distinct group of trolls and jerks similar to #2 but who have decided to attack #1 instead of #3 and #4. Currently: • group #1 is concentrating on fighting #3, and trying to keep #2 out. • group #2 is attacking #3 and #4, and trying to make sure #1 gets blamed. • group #3 is trying hard to make sure people don't consider the points #1, by making sure to cover all the activities of #2, which they attribute to #1, and ignoring group #5's activities. • group #4 is fighting group #2's actions, which they often attribute to group #1. • group #5 is fighting the women in group #1. There may be other groups. The women in group #1 maybe should be considered a separate group, because in addition to fighting #3, many of them are also fighting #4.
  - Noelkd 11y ago
    I've been messing around with graphviz [1] and I thought I would make the parent comment into a graph [2]. You can see the code to generate the graph here [3]. If I've made any mistakes leave a comment. [1] http://graphviz.org/ http://graphviz.org/ [2] https://github.com/Noelkd/GamerGateGraphiz/blob/master/GamerGateGraphiz.svg https://github.com/Noelkd/GamerGateGraphiz/blob/master/Gamer... [3] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Noelkd/GamerGateGraphiz/master/GamerGate https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Noelkd/GamerGateGraphiz/ma...

makeitsuckless 11y ago

Gamergate bullies complaining about ethics is hilarious. Especially given the recent developments over at Reddit.

kinghajj 11y ago
Do you really believe that everyone who believes in the Gamergate story is a bully?
nailer 11y ago
gamergate is awful, but so is anti gamergate: they've also made bomb threats, sent syringes to peoples houses, doxxed, made sock puppet accounts, and threatened someone's family. People care /way/ too much about video games. Just don't get involved.
vdnkh 11y ago
Sentiment like this is a huge double standard that nobody seems to notice. When somebody says "All Muslims are terrorists" because an extremely small proportion of them ARE terrorists, you (rightfully so) get people saying that you're wrong. However, when somebody says "Gamergate supporters are misogynistic/racist/bullies/etc" everyone nods their heads in agreement and Kotaku gets a few thousand in ad revenue. However, it's a parallel case - a small but vocal minority are causing trouble. So why the double standard? Supporting GamerGate isn't morally fashionable [0]. Too many people (including yourself, it seems) are unable to deal with ambiguous or contradictory situations, and end up looking towards mass for guidance. GG isn't perfect, but their promotion of journalistic integrity is important. [0]http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
- pron 11y ago
  I haven't played a video game for more than a few minutes in over a decade, and I had no idea what "gamergate" was until I read the summary on Wikipedia and maybe some article by a reputable news organization (I don't remember which), but isn't "everyone who's in the KKK is a racist" a much more apt comparison than "all Muslims are terrorists"? As I gather from the Wikipedia entry, gamergate is a hate group, so by definition anyone who's a part of it is a bully. I mean, saying gamergate is for "journalistic integrity" is like saying the KKK is "anti crime" because they may have, on occasion, lynched people who actually performed crimes. But since the KKK is only anti crime if said crime was committed by a black person -- and then their reaction is not one of protest but of violence -- you can't say that the KKK's stance on crime is "important". Similarly, gamergate only happens to be enraged -- and violently so -- not about journalistic integrity in general (or even in video-games coverage), but only when they sense that integrity happens to coincide with the interests of women. They promote journalistic integrity just like the KKK fights crime -- namely they make up a conspiracy to fight, and may on occasion, by total chance, happen to be partly right (in their claims, not in their actions, of course). Also, while most people are born into Islam (or convert to it because of some of its many ideals) people choose to join the KKK -- or gamergate -- only because they identify with a rather singular feeling: hate towards the movement's intended victims. One is not born a gamergater, and neither does one become a gamergater simply for believing that journalists should hold themselves to a higher standard. What I don't understand is, while the KKK may not like or endorse the "hate group" designation, they are well aware that they're not really crime fighters. Are gamergaters confused about that point? EDIT: While reading more about gamergate I came across the term SJW, which stands for Social Justice Warrior, which is something gamergaters are apparently against. How can a group of nerds be against social justice warriors? Are they against Batman? Do they hate Professor X?

tptacek 11y ago

I can't imagine an aspect of Gawker less interesting to discuss than how it covers video games.

markcerqueira 11y ago
It's a shame you're not moderating this entire discussion. If you don't have anything productive to add to this thread, leave a comment somewhere else?
Zikes 11y ago
I see it as being representative of the company as a whole. Regardless of the subject matter, if those ethical oversights are so frequent on one of their sites it's not unreasonable to wonder where else it might be present. In that vein, I believe it to be relevant to the article.
- tptacek 11y ago
  Feels like potential conflicts of interest in video game reviews is a pretty minor journalistic sin compared to, for instance, disapproving stories about celebrity photo leaks that link to the stolen photos. Or obtaining a stolen unfilmed Tarantino movie script and promoting itself as the best place online to read it. Gawker is like a tabloid without the scruples. We don't need to read tea leaves to see that.
  - Zikes 11y ago
    I agree. If there is to be a moral scale on which the two are placed, it would certainly tip towards the invasion of personal privacy. Video games are a $10+billion dollar industry, however, and Kotaku is a major publisher in that industry which may be directly funding many of Gawker's other "journalistic sins". I get the impression you are discounting Kotaku's actions or my bringing it up primarily because the subject is video games. If you have a poor opinion of that hobby, it may be affecting your judgment.
    - 11y ago

scythe 11y ago

> Not to mention the complete lack of journalistic ethics on Kotaku. They frequently post articles about games they have financial or personal ties to, without disclosure. Um, ahem, hackers, downvoters, internetizens, lend me your ears. Or eyes, fuck it. Let's assume for a second that GamerGate is awful. Some nontrivial proportion of the "movement" are bigoted trolls who threaten people over the internet, violate their privacy, and drag down the tenor of discourse on messageboards they inhabit. But consider that just maybe Kotaku actually has a pretty bad policy about conflicts of interest. How is someone supposed to post about this? 'Zikes didn't mention GamerGate. He didn't claim to support the movement or try to whitewash people's actions. All he did was to complain about article quality on a website which, for the record, I haven't read in months and have no opinion of (the only videogame I still play is Super Smash Brothers). Are we so tribal that simply expressing a view associated with a dishonorable group of people leads to some downvote-heavy flamewar about them? As I clicked "reply", 'Zikes's comment was black. When the textbox had loaded, he was downvoted into the grey. Calm down, people.

Zikes 11y ago
I've honestly never seen one of my comments swing so wildly or so quickly. I've seen -4 and +9 within minutes of each other, and it seems to be on a different side of 0 every time I refresh. It's certainly a polarizing topic.
slavik81 11y ago
His accusation is vague and non-specific. I have no love for Kotaku, but without being clear about what he's acusing them of, it contributes nothing to the discussion.

hellbanner 11y ago

Huh, didn't realize Kotaku & Gawker & Jezebel were owned by the same entity. Makes sense now.

rrss1122 11y ago

Kotaku is the least of their problems. Some of the worst stories I read on the internet consistently come from Jezebel and Deadspin.