Page 1 of #GamerGate

A bit of background for those not following this saga, women comment on the lack of females in the gaming industry (outside of booth babes), talk about how most games use women as simplistic one dimensional objects, and how a small minority of male gamers think its perfectly acceptable to threaten them with rape and violence.

Bunch of neanderthal male gamers retaliate to all this by threatening the with rape and violence.

Latest story relating to this:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/227548/Another_woman_in_games_driven_from_her_home_by_harassers.php

Quote:
Brianna Wu is head of development at all-women game developer Giant Spacekat, the studio behind well-received mobile game Revolution 60. After receiving death threats last night from a Twitter user who accurately stated her and her husband’s home address, she informed police, who came to her residence. Wu’s Twitter states she and her spouse then went “somewhere safe” for the evening.

One of the several highly-disturbing tweets directed at Wu stated, “I’ve got a K-bar [a military combat knife] and I’m coming to your house so I can shove it up your ugly feminist c***.”
Funny how progress passes some people by.

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What's even funnier is the fact that the anti-Gamergate crowd have yet to denounce the rape and death threats aimed at female and transgendered #GG supporters. Nor have they denounced Devin Faraci's attempt to gawk at the losers on wizardchan (a website frequented by depressed nerds, and which has a permanent suicide helpline banner at the top of the page) on the eve of National Suicide Prevention day. Or the sending of a syringe containing some mysterious substance to Milo Yiannopoulis' home. Nope, not a word.

Protip: Brianna Wu is complete moron and her "threats" should be taken with a massive heap of salt given that she bragged about creating fake twitter sockpuppet profiles to spam offensive messages under the #Gamergate tag.

Also, I don't trust anybody who claims to have received such threats and then posts a link to their paypal/patreon just seconds later for gullible rubes to donate and pay the oppression away (like Anita, the worst person in videogames)

This item was edited on Monday, 13th October 2014, 11:31

Some interesting points here:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-10-15-whats-fueling-gamergate


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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/10/15/gamergate-feminist-video-game-critic-anita-sarkeesian-cancels-utah-lecture-after-threat-citing-police-inability-to-prevent-concealed-weapons-at-event/

I don't agree with everything Anita Sarkeesian cites as being issues, but I've seen a fair few of her videos and she makes a lot of solid points.

Quote:
Typically, Sarkeesian does not back out of events because of threats — last month, someone threatened to bomb the Game Developers Choice Awards if they honored Sarkeesian. They proceeded anyway, under caution — and Tuesday night she clarified her reasoning for canceling the event at Utah State.

This instance was different because of Utah’s concealed carry law: Anyone in the state, including college students, can carry a concealed weapon as long as they have a permit for the gun.

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I think she's essentially a shock jock and disagree with most of the expression of her views, but no one should feel threatened in such a way...

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Also worth a watch from yesterday...

Quote:
Gareth Williams says...
"Also worth a watch from yesterday..."
Very interesting, albeit long with a quite biased and crap interviewer..


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Si Wooldridge
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As usual, the people trying to spin this garbage false narrative of online harrassment and bullying are the biggest hypocrites of all...



This is during National Bullying Prevention month (in the US, at least). What wonderful progressive attitudes these people have...

Also, one response:

From what I can tell, this all started because a bunch of gamers obsessed with the corruption of video game journalists (if they think this is seriously a new issue, it shows how much of a bunch of noobs they are in the industry, it's been around since the industry began) started harassing a female indie developer about an alleged romantic relationship with a games journalist?

It seems now to be every grievance under the sun on the #gamergate side, with the usual retarded posts by gamers who still think its okay to throw around rape and other violent taunts to strangers, vs attacks on misogyny and sexism on the other.

I'm not saying that some annoyances of #gamergate defenders aren't legitimate, but it's easy as an outsider (and former online gamer back in the good old days when we all had PCs and the console kiddies were stuck playing SNES) to draw parallels here with various other unrelated disagreements.

If you replaced #gamergate with Muslim, the small very vocal verbal diarrhea inbreds with terrorists, and the feminists with westerners, it seems like a very similar structure. It's very hard to take the #gamergate grievances seriously when there are a bunch of idiots running around ruining their cause, and they aren't standing up and denouncing them.

You can moan about how the press are all focusing on the terrorists, and think it isn't your job or responsibility what they say, but when they are doing it in your name (and they certainly are doing it in the name of #gamergate), until you successfully distance yourself from these arseholes very few people are going to listen to what you care about.


But I still don't get what the whole outrage from #gamergate is all about. Maybe that's because it's been going on since the beginning of video games, and with the internet being what it is these days, if people really cared they can so easily band together and make an alternative if they don't like gaming journalism.

Though I guess that takes effort, and it's always far easier to rant and moan about how these things are given to you free (we used to have to buy magazines for reviews once!) aren't exactly what you want, as if you were some kind of god and others are just running around trying to make you happy.

(When I say you, I don't mean anyone here! It's the royal you whatever that is :))


On a related note, anyone remember how certain Sinclair magazines would publish exclusive specs on the next Sinclair computer which always turned out to not only never have existed, but was totally made up?

Or they gave a great rave review to a game which turned out to be completely different on release, because either they made the review up, or the version they based it on was a pre-release, or even sometimes a totally different version because the software house had two teams working on it at the same time (R-Type on the C64!).

Or they increased the scores of a review, or just didn't publish the review till the next issue, because of a fat cheque for advertising in that issue?


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Quote:
Rob Shepherd says...
"... they aren't standing up and denouncing them."
This is a popular misconception that refuses to die. Whenever somebody posts crap like that on Twitter/4chan/8chan etc, they are immediately told to gtfo and reported by a legion of other supporters. It is not possible to police every person that uses a hashtag, especially not when it routinely garners 30,000+ uses (on a bad day). The problem is the media's insistence on focusing squarely on the trolls (of which there is a tiny, tiny number compared to the thousands of actual #GamerGate supporters).

Of course, this is not helped by detractors like Brianna Wu, who deliberately make fake accounts and spam hateful messages in an attempt to damage the tag.

As for why this is suddenly an issue after years of this being the status quo, I would point you to the article from Gamasutra, Kotaku, RockPaperShotgun etc (the very same sites that have been accused of this culture of nepotism and cronyism). On the same day, they all released nearly identical articles propagating the grotesque stereotype that gamers are all white cis male scum and that because of what happened to Zoe Quinn, they were declaring the "gamer" identity to be dead. It was this clear misrepresentation of their own audience that was the straw that finally broke the camel's back. It was at this point that a lot of gamers kind of took offence at being tarred with the same brush as a small handful of trolls.

It later transpired that the whole thing was the result of collusion with leaked emails showing these idiots trying to deflect the issue with claims of misogyny. Then, when the movement started to gain the attention of a few right wing voices, they tried to again divert the debate into one of left vs right (because they know that "conservative" is a dirty word to radical progressives and automatically causes them to put up arms). Again, on the same day they published a slew of near-identical articles about how Christina Sommers (a noted, published and well respected feminist, who just happened to belong to a conservative think tank) had posted a video taking the side of #GamerGate. Naturally, every single headline made sure to feature the word "conservative".

It is also especially hypocritical that some of these writers, like Leigh Alexander for example, have a long history of spouting atrocious sexist and racial slurs (which she later deleted after realising that calling black people "hood rats" wasn't politically correct). Or Samantha Allen, who posted a blog explaining her literal hatred of all men and how she identified as a misandrist.

In short, there are two real issues at the heart of the movement.

1. Exposing the corruption in the games media, but also...
2. Defending the gamer identity from the awful generalisations that have been aimed at it (hence the #NotYourShield tag). At this point, the defence pretty much amounts to making fun of their endless hypocrisy and ineptitude, because it's pretty obvious that there is no actual merit to their claims.