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This thread started not so bad. It is getting worse. If you want to have this discussion on TL be respectful of your fellow users, we all live in the same house.
On October 17 2014 20:51 I_Love_Bacon wrote: It's hard to separate it. Hell I know because I still talk about it at times when I probably shouldn't because keeping one's mouth shut is not easy.
First of all, relax. You must of written 300 words per minute. + Show Spoiler +
This is all bull shit. GG isn't about Anita no matter how much you seem to think it is. She is background noise at best and is used to deflect from the actual issue at hand.
Dude, you brought her up. And I was just commenting to how absurd it is that people are so upset she exists. And you kind of proved my point ...
You're setting the bar for success pretty low. You're basically stating that because she wasn't frothing at the mouth and calling for male game devs to be castrated that her criticisms have more merit.
All her points, whether you agree with her or not, are explicitly illustrated and supported with examples. Her argument is reasoned and well-researched. It's structured, and builds towards an actually conclusion. You can bitch and complain that it's not exhaustive, but it's not meant to be. She has a thesis and she defends it well. It's certainly not lazy. That's more than can you say than most of her detractors, who rely on heresay or empty accusations or dismiss entire 3000 word articles with links and annotations simply because they think the publisher is a shill.
I'm sorry, but there's nothing intellectually dishonest about it, no matter how loud you shout it from the roof tops. Intellectual dishonest implies she's not earnest. She believes what she says. You just disagree with her.
Like I said, I don't blame you because there's a metric shit ton of them out there. Others use Anita's videos to justify THEIR hatred and then take to articles/twitter/whateverthefuckever. I can hate her work but, as I've said countless times, GG isn't about Anita.
Alright, I think I understand what you're saying here. You're issue isn't with Anita's argument. It's the idiots that amplify it and take it out of context. It happens on both sides. I absolutely agree. I do not condone stupidity.
Oh-so-false. Saying "she just a media critic" means you haven't done nearly as much research as you think you have. I'm not going to bring up the personal things about how she lies about being a gamer and some of the other talks she's given because I don't want my own opinion of them to taint them if you ever get around to them.
The "worst case scenario" is that a woman who has admitted she doesn't like games and doesn't play games has now been consulted by major studios about their games where she'll continue to push her biased/questionable message. As somebody on a site that was dedicated to hard core gaming I hope you can at least appreciate the absolute ridiculousness of that. Oh, and it should be more exhaustive given how much money she was given but I'll let that slide for now.
... aaannnd you're losing me. This is coming off as sour grapes, to be honest.
Maybe she lied about being a gamer. I have no idea what this accusation really means. The definition of being a gamer is very, very broad and means different things to different people. To someone like Anita, it probably meant playing a game a few hours on the weekend and even included roleplaying or board games with her friends. I don't really give a shit about her personal life, so I honestly don't know. But to a hardcore gamer, it literally means BUY EVERY MAJOR RELEASE AND PLAY NON-STOP UNTIL COMPLETION NEED MONSTER ENERGY DRINK. These people exist. That's a massive spectrum there.
Consultants from other industries and fields get hired all the time. Gaming is an expensive, high-risk business. Sometimes celebrity or creative consultants are brought on to boost the profile of a game. Sometimes they are actually technical consultants, like cinematographers or architects.
There is an obvious lack of realistic or even interesting representation of women in triple-A games. Maybe she'll get paid to consult on content. Maybe a developer will hire her as a token creative consultant, the way Will.i.am or Pharell seems to be the creative consultant on everything, in the hopes it will provide a halo effect around the game and attract a broader demographic.
In either sense, trust me — her influence will be smaller than you think. Games are not build by consultants. They're built by 50 to 100 people working 60 hours a week. I know a lot of people that work in triple-A gaming.
I know it sucks, but you're resenting her for identifying an issue in gaming that is rarely addressed, building a case for it's importance, representing herself as an expert on that particular issue, and being rewarded because it. That happens in almost industry because that's how society works. Trust me, as a designer, I have seen many younger, stupider people position themselves as experts on sustainability or social media experts — despite having very superficial knowledge — and fast tracking their careers.
You're resenting a person for carving a niche and building a name for herself. The world isn't a meritocracy. Her getting gigs you wish you had — or think other people should have — is your problem, not hers.
Now let's move on before we start bitching about Ben Affleck as Batman.
This is where your tinfoil hat is showing even more than before. Show me serious attempts to threaten Sarkeesian. Oh, the one that she screen capped 20 seconds after it was posted while not logged into twitter? The one at the university yesterday that the police deemed as not-credible? Know how many journalists/critics/developers have been killed over their opinion on games? 0
I'm going to pretend to be your conscience for a second:
"Threatening to shoot up a lecture hall is a serious offense. It is not a trivial threat, even if it's a lie. If you get caught you will get arrested.
"Also, if someone threatens to murder you, encourages others to harass or hurt you, and publicizes you're home address, it is perfectly rational to not feel safe. If you are driven out of your own home out of fear, it's okay to feel like you're being violated, because you are."
Trolls exist on the internet. This... surprises you? We live in a world where assholes "swat" people on Twitchtv and you're surprised that some shitheads leveled deaththreats and say stupid, vitriolic things on twitter? Once again, you're on a gaming website and you're surprised there exists people who make it their goal to push other people's buttons? Nobody after a game of SC told you to die in a fire or call you a faggot?
Why yes!
I know you're trying to dismiss the significance of online threats or abuse as trivial or 'less real', but that's a weak argument. And you're just admitting that games can lead to anti-social behaviour. As if stupidity is an excuse. Are you sure you're not an SJW at-heart?
This also falls into the main point of GG is the inability to criticize "these people" (journalists, SWJs, and everybody in between). Comments are deleted/disabled, reddit threads are deleted, people are shadow banned, and entire pieces are forced to be taken down and yet somehow GG are the ones who are being accused of censorship. Virtually every single person who writes above the 5th grade reading level and supports GG also calls for NO CENSORSHIP. Let her have here views; then let others rebut them if that's what they want to do. Isn't that's what supposed to happen? Why did this suddenly become a bad thing that bad reporting/criticism is pointed out? You know the other thing that Pro-GGs aren't doing? Making a gigantic production out of every threat posted to them on twitter despite their being plenty of choose from. They're not trying to play victims and garner attention/sympathy, they're trying to have an actual discussion.
HAHAHA! BULL! SHIT! Are you serious dude?
The one's complaining and whining the loudest have been the GG community. Check out KotakuInAction. In the past four hours, some Gawker reporter made a joke about bullying nerds, and they turned it into a witch hunt, had a little non-stop pity party, and now have a 'nerd' challenging the reporter to $10,000 boxing match!
How's that for production and spectacle? And what does it have to do with journalistic integrity? NOTHING.
I would never accuse GG of censorship. I would never do that. I'm accusing a subset of trolls using GamerGate as a political shield to threaten, intimidate and harass three women until they were forced to leave their homes and go into hiding. That's worse then censorship. It's the literal definition of terrorism. For two of them the only 'crime' they committed, technically, is having an fucking opinion. And now other female developers are afraid to speak out out of fear of reprisal. That's sad.
GG has been censored and blocked on several sites. No dispute here. I'm sure the publications have different reasons. But if I had to guess, I think the most common reason is that most sites, particularly online magazines, don't have the time or energy to moderate the inevitable fucking shitstorm. Nor are they obligated to. We're having a reasonable discussion, but if a bunch of turds took over the thread Team Liquid would shut our asses down and there's nothing they could do about it.
Reddit? My theory would be they were in the middle of catching a bunch of shit for their facilitation of Fappening, it hurt their reputation, put them in an embarassing legal situation, and because of the ties of misogyny to GamerGate (justified or not) they didn't want to touch it with a ten-foot-pole. You got screwed by pervs.
The only way for GamerGate to have completely autonomy and control over the discourse is to have their own platform. And so far, the quality and presentation of GamerGates concerns have been scattered and amatuerish.
There's a time and a place to discuss these things, but that's not what GG is. The people who claim it is only do so for 2 options: Either they're misinformed or they do it to push their own narrative.
Are you accusing me of being part of a conspiracy, or a secret dick? If it makes you feel better, it's the latter.
I can honestly say I am not anti-GamerGate, because I still don't know what the hell GamerGate is. The issues that actually seem worth discussing — the representation of women in games (both on and behind the scenes), the integrity of game journalism, and the future of gamer-culture as gaming becomes more and more significant to mainstream culture — have absolutely nothing to do with each other. They really don't. And it's the conflation of this issues by people that support GamerGate is what makes their perspective so easy to dismiss. A lot of their arguments and discussion is tainted with allegations, innuendo, or incessant lulz-humor that simply diminishes whatever legitimate point or grievance they might have.
Here's an example from the kotakuinaction reddit of one guy who thinks he's spitting truth bombs. He opens the article by whining while congratulating himself.
Written by @JamieBworth, rejected by Cracked for stupid reasons, and published here, with permission. Because fuck Cracked, this shit is hilarious and genius.
In actuality his writing is rushed and lazy; mostly editorial; and offers no new information that contradicts basic facts reported by mainstream source — thus rendering his premise of revealing 'misinformation' pretty much pointless.
Like I said, if Gaters want to be taken seriously, they can learn a lot about how to present an argument by watching Sarkeesian's videos.
If you don't know what GamerGate is, none of your opinions matters.
On topic:
A lot of misconception about GamerGate.
To put it in the most basic form: GamerGate is the gaming consumers' reactionary force to dissipate any biases in gaming reviews for a more wholesome competitive market.
A lot of you guys think that GamerGate requires some special membership to participate in. However, with the assumption that we all hope for a meritocracy system in the gaming industry, most of us are already, intentionally or not and even if you don't want to rally behind the hash tag or not, part of the GamerGate "movement".
However, this movement will mostly likely be a lost cause and let me tell y'all why.
In order to get rid of any media nepotism in the gaming community, we must look at all the parties involved that created nepotism in the first place. They are:
1. Producer of the game. Ex: Zoe Quinn. Laughing my ass off at people being ignorant on this one.
2. Game reviewer outlets. Ex: IGN, Kotaku, GameSpot that gave out favorable reviews because of sexual, monetary, and/or other reasons.
and lastly:
3. Any other people that support the gaming producer to further their own personal agendas. They are termed as "Social Justice Warriors", SJWs for short, basically the radical pro-feminism, pro-LGBT crowds that supported a certain game because both the game producers and their political beliefs aligns with each other for mutual benefit. Ex: Anita Sarkessian.
For corruption and nepotism to fully dispel in our industry, we have to get rid of ALL 3 parties. But here is the thing though, you can shame characters Zoe Quinn and Game reviewers/journalist all you want, the main beast you have to deal with are #3 of the list.
The question remains whether or not the integrity of gaming development can be saved w/ enough manpower in our side to get rid of all the parties or not.
So far, there have been a lot in-fighting in the community about who to blame it on. A lot of apologist by saying "Woah, you can't possibly go after X, Y, and Z. You have to go after A, B, and C instead!"
No the correct approach is to go after EVERYBODY involved, you can't afford to cherry pick the target.
Talk about misconceptions ...
Around the turn of the millennium gamers were trying to stop journalist to blame games for school shootings. This week "gamers" threatened with a school shooting to prevent a journalist from speaking out in public.
GamerGate is a toxic movement, a hate group, started by a sad little man who felt the need to get back at his failed relationship in public. Any sort of valid point it might have had went out of the window a long time ago. If you affiliate yourself with gamersgate, you stand with racists and mysoginists, you excuse harassers and abusers, you're a willing patsy and a horrible human being.
See none of those harassment would have occurred in the first place if characters such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkessian didn't go out of their way to scam everybody by faking the victimhood.
Its saying that African american folks in the civil right strike are "a toxic movement, a hate group" because they are harassing the the cacausian folks for their misdemeanor even though some slave owners do exactly deserve what was coming to them.
This is definition of self-delusion and victim-blaming folks. He's comparing Zoe Quinn and Anita to being slave owners. And that gamers are being persecuted by them. Like black people. For making a game about depression and having an alternative opinion on games.
Seriously.
Okay let's go down that road, yeah that's exactly what they did!
Anita have been broadcasting how egregious the gaming communities are with the women topic which have been debunked! She have been adamant in persecuting the entire industry.
Subsequently, the feminism media swallowed the wrong pill and presented it as fact and with their heavy hitter journalist on their side, furthered that damage.
You simple can't deny that and for that reason, one can definitely argue that an entire community have been dragged down to the dirt by these malevolent individuals with sufficient evidence to back up.
No one has 'debunked' anything because there is nothing to 'debunk.' She made a video series on games from a feminist perspective. This would be no different than an atheist making a video series on religious topics, or a 'nerd' doing a series on music and fashion.
These are all just perspectives folks. You can choose to ignore them or not. They actually are really valuable, because they broaden the reach of what you love, and depth or richness to it's discussion, and validate the significance of what you love to society and culture.
Yes, her videos made people extremely, extremely defensive. But that is not her problem. People need to grow up and realize having a differing opinion or perspective on something you like is not a personal attack.
The GamerGate community is so insulated and insecure that they have to play the victim card faster and more loosely more than any SJW so far. How's that for irony?
I think the problem here is that people feel she did not gain her perspective on video games from playing video games, but went into it with that perspective and then cherry picked examples out of context that would support that perspective.
She may be entitled to her opinion, but people are entitled to be pissed off when she uses poor journalism to try to get other people to adopt that opinion.
And using your analogies, you don't think people would get a little miffed if an influential atheist YouTuber started making religious videos under the pretense that they were not an atheist, and started making videos that make religion look bad by leaving out any of its redeeming qualities? Because that is a more specific analogy to what we are dealing with here, and I think people would get pretty pissed off, and rightfully so.
Still, like most other people have said, it's a shame that the trolls happen to be all on the same side of the fence, because it is clouding any real discussion of issues.
If that's the argument, than I think you have a point about her misrepresenting herself. But that doesn't necessarily negate the entirety of her perspective or arguments.
But I think one of the things that this 'culture war' is about, if you want to go there, is what defines a gamer, and who is entitled to having an opinion. To Anita, being a gamer might mean playing games on the weekends, and include board games and role playing games with her friends. To a hardcore gamer, it might mean following every trade magazine, buy every major release, playing 12 hours straight, etc.
In Anita's mind, perhaps she believes she's being honest — but then hit the cultural barrier of truly hardcore, rabid gamers. But her perspective, not only as a feminist, but as and entry-level gamer, DOES have value, in highlighting some of the issues and pain points that might prevent women from becoming hardcore gamers.
Personally, I think the answer to who gets to and doesn't get to have an opinion should be much broader than a hardcore gamer. Not because I am a PC-SJW warrior and want to impose my values onto you. But because that's how much I respect Gaming as an art form. It deserves wider appreciation, more diversity and a bigger audience. It deserves 'an art scene', even if you find it pretentious or douchey or no-fun (trust me, I'm designer and have to put up with hipster-douches all the time so I can relate).
The op-ed on game culture from The Escapist presents this view more clearly (see below). Not every car has be a Ferrari, and not only Ferrari owners should dictate what the market should be, because there's obviously potential for everyone to have and enjoy the benefits of cars. And if the car market just pandered to one demographic exclusively, there's a good chance that market wouldn't sustain itself. The cost of producing a triple-A game is just getting higher and higher with advance in technology, which is why there is interest in seeing whether or not there are aways to appeal to a broader demographic, and convert casual gamers (mostly women) to hardcore ones to justify the risk. That isn't a conspiracy, this is just good business. Maybe more developers should be stepping up to become the Pixar or Marvel of videogames.
On October 18 2014 04:58 WolfintheSheep wrote: Well, I see this thread has gone to the shitter already...
I think its halarious. the pro gamer game people think its about journalism and websites shitting on their readership while the anti gamer game people think its about sexism.
I thought the whole problem was about "game journalists" rating Volvos as Ferraris because of the wrong reasons, not about "gamers" not getting enough attention. I may be wrong, since i really don't follow this silly thing, specially the mysoginy part which looks obviously as a hardcore attempt to redirect attention out of the very biased "game journalists".
On October 18 2014 04:58 WolfintheSheep wrote: Well, I see this thread has gone to the shitter already...
I think its halarious. the pro gamer game people think its about journalism and websites shitting on their readership while the anti gamer game people think its about sexism.
I've spent a stupid amount of time reading this thread and related articles to figure out what the hell this is all about. I feel like I haven't learned anything. God knows that I'm not some paragon of feminism who has it out for Gamergate sympathizers, but this Gamergate stuff is just so incomprehensibly stupid in its utter lack of focus and internal logic. Seriously, what is this really about? Gamer identity? Loudmouth feminist assholes? Ethics in gamer journalism? None of these reasons presents a satisfying answer. Only the third reason is implicated by the instigating incident (Quinn doing whatever she did), but that particular incident is simply ridiculous in its significance when compared with the plethora of other examples of bad gamer journalism that are out there.
On October 17 2014 20:51 I_Love_Bacon wrote: It's hard to separate it. Hell I know because I still talk about it at times when I probably shouldn't because keeping one's mouth shut is not easy.
First of all, relax. You must of written 300 words per minute. + Show Spoiler +
This is all bull shit. GG isn't about Anita no matter how much you seem to think it is. She is background noise at best and is used to deflect from the actual issue at hand.
Dude, you brought her up. And I was just commenting to how absurd it is that people are so upset she exists. And you kind of proved my point ...
You're setting the bar for success pretty low. You're basically stating that because she wasn't frothing at the mouth and calling for male game devs to be castrated that her criticisms have more merit.
All her points, whether you agree with her or not, are explicitly illustrated and supported with examples. Her argument is reasoned and well-researched. It's structured, and builds towards an actually conclusion. You can bitch and complain that it's not exhaustive, but it's not meant to be. She has a thesis and she defends it well. It's certainly not lazy. That's more than can you say than most of her detractors, who rely on heresay or empty accusations or dismiss entire 3000 word articles with links and annotations simply because they think the publisher is a shill.
I'm sorry, but there's nothing intellectually dishonest about it, no matter how loud you shout it from the roof tops. Intellectual dishonest implies she's not earnest. She believes what she says. You just disagree with her.
Like I said, I don't blame you because there's a metric shit ton of them out there. Others use Anita's videos to justify THEIR hatred and then take to articles/twitter/whateverthefuckever. I can hate her work but, as I've said countless times, GG isn't about Anita.
Alright, I think I understand what you're saying here. You're issue isn't with Anita's argument. It's the idiots that amplify it and take it out of context. It happens on both sides. I absolutely agree. I do not condone stupidity.
Oh-so-false. Saying "she just a media critic" means you haven't done nearly as much research as you think you have. I'm not going to bring up the personal things about how she lies about being a gamer and some of the other talks she's given because I don't want my own opinion of them to taint them if you ever get around to them.
The "worst case scenario" is that a woman who has admitted she doesn't like games and doesn't play games has now been consulted by major studios about their games where she'll continue to push her biased/questionable message. As somebody on a site that was dedicated to hard core gaming I hope you can at least appreciate the absolute ridiculousness of that. Oh, and it should be more exhaustive given how much money she was given but I'll let that slide for now.
... aaannnd you're losing me. This is coming off as sour grapes, to be honest.
Maybe she lied about being a gamer. I have no idea what this accusation really means. The definition of being a gamer is very, very broad and means different things to different people. To someone like Anita, it probably meant playing a game a few hours on the weekend and even included roleplaying or board games with her friends. I don't really give a shit about her personal life, so I honestly don't know. But to a hardcore gamer, it literally means BUY EVERY MAJOR RELEASE AND PLAY NON-STOP UNTIL COMPLETION NEED MONSTER ENERGY DRINK. These people exist. That's a massive spectrum there.
Consultants from other industries and fields get hired all the time. Gaming is an expensive, high-risk business. Sometimes celebrity or creative consultants are brought on to boost the profile of a game. Sometimes they are actually technical consultants, like cinematographers or architects.
There is an obvious lack of realistic or even interesting representation of women in triple-A games. Maybe she'll get paid to consult on content. Maybe a developer will hire her as a token creative consultant, the way Will.i.am or Pharell seems to be the creative consultant on everything, in the hopes it will provide a halo effect around the game and attract a broader demographic.
In either sense, trust me — her influence will be smaller than you think. Games are not build by consultants. They're built by 50 to 100 people working 60 hours a week. I know a lot of people that work in triple-A gaming.
I know it sucks, but you're resenting her for identifying an issue in gaming that is rarely addressed, building a case for it's importance, representing herself as an expert on that particular issue, and being rewarded because it. That happens in almost industry because that's how society works. Trust me, as a designer, I have seen many younger, stupider people position themselves as experts on sustainability or social media experts — despite having very superficial knowledge — and fast tracking their careers.
You're resenting a person for carving a niche and building a name for herself. The world isn't a meritocracy. Her getting gigs you wish you had — or think other people should have — is your problem, not hers.
Now let's move on before we start bitching about Ben Affleck as Batman.
This is where your tinfoil hat is showing even more than before. Show me serious attempts to threaten Sarkeesian. Oh, the one that she screen capped 20 seconds after it was posted while not logged into twitter? The one at the university yesterday that the police deemed as not-credible? Know how many journalists/critics/developers have been killed over their opinion on games? 0
I'm going to pretend to be your conscience for a second:
"Threatening to shoot up a lecture hall is a serious offense. It is not a trivial threat, even if it's a lie. If you get caught you will get arrested.
"Also, if someone threatens to murder you, encourages others to harass or hurt you, and publicizes you're home address, it is perfectly rational to not feel safe. If you are driven out of your own home out of fear, it's okay to feel like you're being violated, because you are."
Trolls exist on the internet. This... surprises you? We live in a world where assholes "swat" people on Twitchtv and you're surprised that some shitheads leveled deaththreats and say stupid, vitriolic things on twitter? Once again, you're on a gaming website and you're surprised there exists people who make it their goal to push other people's buttons? Nobody after a game of SC told you to die in a fire or call you a faggot?
Why yes!
I know you're trying to dismiss the significance of online threats or abuse as trivial or 'less real', but that's a weak argument. And you're just admitting that games can lead to anti-social behaviour. As if stupidity is an excuse. Are you sure you're not an SJW at-heart?
This also falls into the main point of GG is the inability to criticize "these people" (journalists, SWJs, and everybody in between). Comments are deleted/disabled, reddit threads are deleted, people are shadow banned, and entire pieces are forced to be taken down and yet somehow GG are the ones who are being accused of censorship. Virtually every single person who writes above the 5th grade reading level and supports GG also calls for NO CENSORSHIP. Let her have here views; then let others rebut them if that's what they want to do. Isn't that's what supposed to happen? Why did this suddenly become a bad thing that bad reporting/criticism is pointed out? You know the other thing that Pro-GGs aren't doing? Making a gigantic production out of every threat posted to them on twitter despite their being plenty of choose from. They're not trying to play victims and garner attention/sympathy, they're trying to have an actual discussion.
HAHAHA! BULL! SHIT! Are you serious dude?
The one's complaining and whining the loudest have been the GG community. Check out KotakuInAction. In the past four hours, some Gawker reporter made a joke about bullying nerds, and they turned it into a witch hunt, had a little non-stop pity party, and now have a 'nerd' challenging the reporter to $10,000 boxing match!
How's that for production and spectacle? And what does it have to do with journalistic integrity? NOTHING.
I would never accuse GG of censorship. I would never do that. I'm accusing a subset of trolls using GamerGate as a political shield to threaten, intimidate and harass three women until they were forced to leave their homes and go into hiding. That's worse then censorship. It's the literal definition of terrorism. For two of them the only 'crime' they committed, technically, is having an fucking opinion. And now other female developers are afraid to speak out out of fear of reprisal. That's sad.
GG has been censored and blocked on several sites. No dispute here. I'm sure the publications have different reasons. But if I had to guess, I think the most common reason is that most sites, particularly online magazines, don't have the time or energy to moderate the inevitable fucking shitstorm. Nor are they obligated to. We're having a reasonable discussion, but if a bunch of turds took over the thread Team Liquid would shut our asses down and there's nothing they could do about it.
Reddit? My theory would be they were in the middle of catching a bunch of shit for their facilitation of Fappening, it hurt their reputation, put them in an embarassing legal situation, and because of the ties of misogyny to GamerGate (justified or not) they didn't want to touch it with a ten-foot-pole. You got screwed by pervs.
The only way for GamerGate to have completely autonomy and control over the discourse is to have their own platform. And so far, the quality and presentation of GamerGates concerns have been scattered and amatuerish.
There's a time and a place to discuss these things, but that's not what GG is. The people who claim it is only do so for 2 options: Either they're misinformed or they do it to push their own narrative.
Are you accusing me of being part of a conspiracy, or a secret dick? If it makes you feel better, it's the latter.
I can honestly say I am not anti-GamerGate, because I still don't know what the hell GamerGate is. The issues that actually seem worth discussing — the representation of women in games (both on and behind the scenes), the integrity of game journalism, and the future of gamer-culture as gaming becomes more and more significant to mainstream culture — have absolutely nothing to do with each other. They really don't. And it's the conflation of this issues by people that support GamerGate is what makes their perspective so easy to dismiss. A lot of their arguments and discussion is tainted with allegations, innuendo, or incessant lulz-humor that simply diminishes whatever legitimate point or grievance they might have.
Here's an example from the kotakuinaction reddit of one guy who thinks he's spitting truth bombs. He opens the article by whining while congratulating himself.
Written by @JamieBworth, rejected by Cracked for stupid reasons, and published here, with permission. Because fuck Cracked, this shit is hilarious and genius.
In actuality his writing is rushed and lazy; mostly editorial; and offers no new information that contradicts basic facts reported by mainstream source — thus rendering his premise of revealing 'misinformation' pretty much pointless.
Like I said, if Gaters want to be taken seriously, they can learn a lot about how to present an argument by watching Sarkeesian's videos.
If you don't know what GamerGate is, none of your opinions matters.
On topic:
A lot of misconception about GamerGate.
To put it in the most basic form: GamerGate is the gaming consumers' reactionary force to dissipate any biases in gaming reviews for a more wholesome competitive market.
A lot of you guys think that GamerGate requires some special membership to participate in. However, with the assumption that we all hope for a meritocracy system in the gaming industry, most of us are already, intentionally or not and even if you don't want to rally behind the hash tag or not, part of the GamerGate "movement".
However, this movement will mostly likely be a lost cause and let me tell y'all why.
In order to get rid of any media nepotism in the gaming community, we must look at all the parties involved that created nepotism in the first place. They are:
1. Producer of the game. Ex: Zoe Quinn. Laughing my ass off at people being ignorant on this one.
2. Game reviewer outlets. Ex: IGN, Kotaku, GameSpot that gave out favorable reviews because of sexual, monetary, and/or other reasons.
and lastly:
3. Any other people that support the gaming producer to further their own personal agendas. They are termed as "Social Justice Warriors", SJWs for short, basically the radical pro-feminism, pro-LGBT crowds that supported a certain game because both the game producers and their political beliefs aligns with each other for mutual benefit. Ex: Anita Sarkessian.
For corruption and nepotism to fully dispel in our industry, we have to get rid of ALL 3 parties. But here is the thing though, you can shame characters Zoe Quinn and Game reviewers/journalist all you want, the main beast you have to deal with are #3 of the list.
The question remains whether or not the integrity of gaming development can be saved w/ enough manpower in our side to get rid of all the parties or not.
So far, there have been a lot in-fighting in the community about who to blame it on. A lot of apologist by saying "Woah, you can't possibly go after X, Y, and Z. You have to go after A, B, and C instead!"
No the correct approach is to go after EVERYBODY involved, you can't afford to cherry pick the target.
Talk about misconceptions ...
Around the turn of the millennium gamers were trying to stop journalist to blame games for school shootings. This week "gamers" threatened with a school shooting to prevent a journalist from speaking out in public.
GamerGate is a toxic movement, a hate group, started by a sad little man who felt the need to get back at his failed relationship in public. Any sort of valid point it might have had went out of the window a long time ago. If you affiliate yourself with gamersgate, you stand with racists and mysoginists, you excuse harassers and abusers, you're a willing patsy and a horrible human being.
See none of those harassment would have occurred in the first place if characters such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkessian didn't go out of their way to scam everybody by faking the victimhood.
Its saying that African american folks in the civil right strike are "a toxic movement, a hate group" because they are harassing the the cacausian folks for their misdemeanor even though some slave owners do exactly deserve what was coming to them.
This is definition of self-delusion and victim-blaming folks. He's comparing Zoe Quinn and Anita to being slave owners. And that gamers are being persecuted by them. Like black people. For making a game about depression and having an alternative opinion on games.
Seriously.
Okay let's go down that road, yeah that's exactly what they did!
Anita have been broadcasting how egregious the gaming communities are with the women topic which have been debunked! She have been adamant in persecuting the entire industry.
Subsequently, the feminism media swallowed the wrong pill and presented it as fact and with their heavy hitter journalist on their side, furthered that damage.
You simple can't deny that and for that reason, one can definitely argue that an entire community have been dragged down to the dirt by these malevolent individuals with sufficient evidence to back up.
No one has 'debunked' anything because there is nothing to 'debunk.' She made a video series on games from a feminist perspective. This would be no different than an atheist making a video series on religious topics, or a 'nerd' doing a series on music and fashion.
These are all just perspectives folks. You can choose to ignore them or not. They actually are really valuable, because they broaden the reach of what you love, and depth or richness to it's discussion, and validate the significance of what you love to society and culture.
Yes, her videos made people extremely, extremely defensive. But that is not her problem. People need to grow up and realize having a differing opinion or perspective on something you like is not a personal attack.
The GamerGate community is so insulated and insecure that they have to play the victim card faster and more loosely more than any SJW so far. How's that for irony?
No, you are attempting to separate her and her perspective. And by the way, she isn't using exactly looking things through a traditional feminist point of view. Traditional feminist fights for women's equal rights as men not to denigrate men w/o malicious intent. That's not being a feminist, traditionally speaking but that's simply bullying and defamation.
So she needs to grow up, she needs to know that putting yourself out w/ malicious intent and false information will gets you bad rep. She needs to learn to cease scamming people out of their cash.
She has never denigrated men. With malicious intent. Unless you define being 'malicious' as having a point of view. She has probably gotten more and more defensive as trolls harass her. But who can fucking blame her?
She's not scamming anyone out of cash. Are you really that blindly arrogant that you believe everyone that agrees with her — and disagrees with you — is a mindless zombie? Who's prejudiced now?
This kind of rhetoric is why no mainstream media is picking up the GamerGate perspective. Because it's riddled with doublespeak, innuendo, pettiness and condescension. If these are GamerGates idea of 'facts' than the mainstream media is omitting, than the mainstream has done a bang-up job reporting on this issue, separating actual facts from subjective, editorial opinions.
After all, she is the criminal here.
This is literally, and figuratively, and categorically not true. She is a lady that carved a niche around an under-represented topic and audience and built a career around it. Whoopty-fricking-doo.
On October 18 2014 06:31 xDaunt wrote: I've spent a stupid amount of time reading this thread and related articles to figure out what the hell this is all about. I feel like I haven't learned anything. God knows that I'm not some paragon of feminism who has it out for Gamergate sympathizers, but this Gamergate stuff is just so incomprehensibly stupid in its utter lack of focus and internal logic. Seriously, what is this really about? Gamer identity? Loudmouth feminist assholes? Ethics in gamer journalism? None of these reasons presents a satisfying answer. Only the third reason is implicated by the instigating incident (Quinn doing whatever she did), but that particular incident is simply ridiculous in its significance when compared with the plethora of other examples of bad gamer journalism that are out there.
I missed you. Because I agree with you entirely. It's a hot mess and I'm ashamed that I've invested as much time and written as much as I have.
On October 17 2014 20:51 I_Love_Bacon wrote: It's hard to separate it. Hell I know because I still talk about it at times when I probably shouldn't because keeping one's mouth shut is not easy.
First of all, relax. You must of written 300 words per minute. + Show Spoiler +
This is all bull shit. GG isn't about Anita no matter how much you seem to think it is. She is background noise at best and is used to deflect from the actual issue at hand.
Dude, you brought her up. And I was just commenting to how absurd it is that people are so upset she exists. And you kind of proved my point ...
You're setting the bar for success pretty low. You're basically stating that because she wasn't frothing at the mouth and calling for male game devs to be castrated that her criticisms have more merit.
All her points, whether you agree with her or not, are explicitly illustrated and supported with examples. Her argument is reasoned and well-researched. It's structured, and builds towards an actually conclusion. You can bitch and complain that it's not exhaustive, but it's not meant to be. She has a thesis and she defends it well. It's certainly not lazy. That's more than can you say than most of her detractors, who rely on heresay or empty accusations or dismiss entire 3000 word articles with links and annotations simply because they think the publisher is a shill.
I'm sorry, but there's nothing intellectually dishonest about it, no matter how loud you shout it from the roof tops. Intellectual dishonest implies she's not earnest. She believes what she says. You just disagree with her.
Like I said, I don't blame you because there's a metric shit ton of them out there. Others use Anita's videos to justify THEIR hatred and then take to articles/twitter/whateverthefuckever. I can hate her work but, as I've said countless times, GG isn't about Anita.
Alright, I think I understand what you're saying here. You're issue isn't with Anita's argument. It's the idiots that amplify it and take it out of context. It happens on both sides. I absolutely agree. I do not condone stupidity.
Oh-so-false. Saying "she just a media critic" means you haven't done nearly as much research as you think you have. I'm not going to bring up the personal things about how she lies about being a gamer and some of the other talks she's given because I don't want my own opinion of them to taint them if you ever get around to them.
The "worst case scenario" is that a woman who has admitted she doesn't like games and doesn't play games has now been consulted by major studios about their games where she'll continue to push her biased/questionable message. As somebody on a site that was dedicated to hard core gaming I hope you can at least appreciate the absolute ridiculousness of that. Oh, and it should be more exhaustive given how much money she was given but I'll let that slide for now.
... aaannnd you're losing me. This is coming off as sour grapes, to be honest.
Maybe she lied about being a gamer. I have no idea what this accusation really means. The definition of being a gamer is very, very broad and means different things to different people. To someone like Anita, it probably meant playing a game a few hours on the weekend and even included roleplaying or board games with her friends. I don't really give a shit about her personal life, so I honestly don't know. But to a hardcore gamer, it literally means BUY EVERY MAJOR RELEASE AND PLAY NON-STOP UNTIL COMPLETION NEED MONSTER ENERGY DRINK. These people exist. That's a massive spectrum there.
Consultants from other industries and fields get hired all the time. Gaming is an expensive, high-risk business. Sometimes celebrity or creative consultants are brought on to boost the profile of a game. Sometimes they are actually technical consultants, like cinematographers or architects.
There is an obvious lack of realistic or even interesting representation of women in triple-A games. Maybe she'll get paid to consult on content. Maybe a developer will hire her as a token creative consultant, the way Will.i.am or Pharell seems to be the creative consultant on everything, in the hopes it will provide a halo effect around the game and attract a broader demographic.
In either sense, trust me — her influence will be smaller than you think. Games are not build by consultants. They're built by 50 to 100 people working 60 hours a week. I know a lot of people that work in triple-A gaming.
I know it sucks, but you're resenting her for identifying an issue in gaming that is rarely addressed, building a case for it's importance, representing herself as an expert on that particular issue, and being rewarded because it. That happens in almost industry because that's how society works. Trust me, as a designer, I have seen many younger, stupider people position themselves as experts on sustainability or social media experts — despite having very superficial knowledge — and fast tracking their careers.
You're resenting a person for carving a niche and building a name for herself. The world isn't a meritocracy. Her getting gigs you wish you had — or think other people should have — is your problem, not hers.
Now let's move on before we start bitching about Ben Affleck as Batman.
This is where your tinfoil hat is showing even more than before. Show me serious attempts to threaten Sarkeesian. Oh, the one that she screen capped 20 seconds after it was posted while not logged into twitter? The one at the university yesterday that the police deemed as not-credible? Know how many journalists/critics/developers have been killed over their opinion on games? 0
I'm going to pretend to be your conscience for a second:
"Threatening to shoot up a lecture hall is a serious offense. It is not a trivial threat, even if it's a lie. If you get caught you will get arrested.
"Also, if someone threatens to murder you, encourages others to harass or hurt you, and publicizes you're home address, it is perfectly rational to not feel safe. If you are driven out of your own home out of fear, it's okay to feel like you're being violated, because you are."
Trolls exist on the internet. This... surprises you? We live in a world where assholes "swat" people on Twitchtv and you're surprised that some shitheads leveled deaththreats and say stupid, vitriolic things on twitter? Once again, you're on a gaming website and you're surprised there exists people who make it their goal to push other people's buttons? Nobody after a game of SC told you to die in a fire or call you a faggot?
Why yes!
I know you're trying to dismiss the significance of online threats or abuse as trivial or 'less real', but that's a weak argument. And you're just admitting that games can lead to anti-social behaviour. As if stupidity is an excuse. Are you sure you're not an SJW at-heart?
This also falls into the main point of GG is the inability to criticize "these people" (journalists, SWJs, and everybody in between). Comments are deleted/disabled, reddit threads are deleted, people are shadow banned, and entire pieces are forced to be taken down and yet somehow GG are the ones who are being accused of censorship. Virtually every single person who writes above the 5th grade reading level and supports GG also calls for NO CENSORSHIP. Let her have here views; then let others rebut them if that's what they want to do. Isn't that's what supposed to happen? Why did this suddenly become a bad thing that bad reporting/criticism is pointed out? You know the other thing that Pro-GGs aren't doing? Making a gigantic production out of every threat posted to them on twitter despite their being plenty of choose from. They're not trying to play victims and garner attention/sympathy, they're trying to have an actual discussion.
HAHAHA! BULL! SHIT! Are you serious dude?
The one's complaining and whining the loudest have been the GG community. Check out KotakuInAction. In the past four hours, some Gawker reporter made a joke about bullying nerds, and they turned it into a witch hunt, had a little non-stop pity party, and now have a 'nerd' challenging the reporter to $10,000 boxing match!
How's that for production and spectacle? And what does it have to do with journalistic integrity? NOTHING.
I would never accuse GG of censorship. I would never do that. I'm accusing a subset of trolls using GamerGate as a political shield to threaten, intimidate and harass three women until they were forced to leave their homes and go into hiding. That's worse then censorship. It's the literal definition of terrorism. For two of them the only 'crime' they committed, technically, is having an fucking opinion. And now other female developers are afraid to speak out out of fear of reprisal. That's sad.
GG has been censored and blocked on several sites. No dispute here. I'm sure the publications have different reasons. But if I had to guess, I think the most common reason is that most sites, particularly online magazines, don't have the time or energy to moderate the inevitable fucking shitstorm. Nor are they obligated to. We're having a reasonable discussion, but if a bunch of turds took over the thread Team Liquid would shut our asses down and there's nothing they could do about it.
Reddit? My theory would be they were in the middle of catching a bunch of shit for their facilitation of Fappening, it hurt their reputation, put them in an embarassing legal situation, and because of the ties of misogyny to GamerGate (justified or not) they didn't want to touch it with a ten-foot-pole. You got screwed by pervs.
The only way for GamerGate to have completely autonomy and control over the discourse is to have their own platform. And so far, the quality and presentation of GamerGates concerns have been scattered and amatuerish.
There's a time and a place to discuss these things, but that's not what GG is. The people who claim it is only do so for 2 options: Either they're misinformed or they do it to push their own narrative.
Are you accusing me of being part of a conspiracy, or a secret dick? If it makes you feel better, it's the latter.
I can honestly say I am not anti-GamerGate, because I still don't know what the hell GamerGate is. The issues that actually seem worth discussing — the representation of women in games (both on and behind the scenes), the integrity of game journalism, and the future of gamer-culture as gaming becomes more and more significant to mainstream culture — have absolutely nothing to do with each other. They really don't. And it's the conflation of this issues by people that support GamerGate is what makes their perspective so easy to dismiss. A lot of their arguments and discussion is tainted with allegations, innuendo, or incessant lulz-humor that simply diminishes whatever legitimate point or grievance they might have.
Here's an example from the kotakuinaction reddit of one guy who thinks he's spitting truth bombs. He opens the article by whining while congratulating himself.
Written by @JamieBworth, rejected by Cracked for stupid reasons, and published here, with permission. Because fuck Cracked, this shit is hilarious and genius.
In actuality his writing is rushed and lazy; mostly editorial; and offers no new information that contradicts basic facts reported by mainstream source — thus rendering his premise of revealing 'misinformation' pretty much pointless.
Like I said, if Gaters want to be taken seriously, they can learn a lot about how to present an argument by watching Sarkeesian's videos.
If you don't know what GamerGate is, none of your opinions matters.
On topic:
A lot of misconception about GamerGate.
To put it in the most basic form: GamerGate is the gaming consumers' reactionary force to dissipate any biases in gaming reviews for a more wholesome competitive market.
A lot of you guys think that GamerGate requires some special membership to participate in. However, with the assumption that we all hope for a meritocracy system in the gaming industry, most of us are already, intentionally or not and even if you don't want to rally behind the hash tag or not, part of the GamerGate "movement".
However, this movement will mostly likely be a lost cause and let me tell y'all why.
In order to get rid of any media nepotism in the gaming community, we must look at all the parties involved that created nepotism in the first place. They are:
1. Producer of the game. Ex: Zoe Quinn. Laughing my ass off at people being ignorant on this one.
2. Game reviewer outlets. Ex: IGN, Kotaku, GameSpot that gave out favorable reviews because of sexual, monetary, and/or other reasons.
and lastly:
3. Any other people that support the gaming producer to further their own personal agendas. They are termed as "Social Justice Warriors", SJWs for short, basically the radical pro-feminism, pro-LGBT crowds that supported a certain game because both the game producers and their political beliefs aligns with each other for mutual benefit. Ex: Anita Sarkessian.
For corruption and nepotism to fully dispel in our industry, we have to get rid of ALL 3 parties. But here is the thing though, you can shame characters Zoe Quinn and Game reviewers/journalist all you want, the main beast you have to deal with are #3 of the list.
The question remains whether or not the integrity of gaming development can be saved w/ enough manpower in our side to get rid of all the parties or not.
So far, there have been a lot in-fighting in the community about who to blame it on. A lot of apologist by saying "Woah, you can't possibly go after X, Y, and Z. You have to go after A, B, and C instead!"
No the correct approach is to go after EVERYBODY involved, you can't afford to cherry pick the target.
Talk about misconceptions ...
Around the turn of the millennium gamers were trying to stop journalist to blame games for school shootings. This week "gamers" threatened with a school shooting to prevent a journalist from speaking out in public.
GamerGate is a toxic movement, a hate group, started by a sad little man who felt the need to get back at his failed relationship in public. Any sort of valid point it might have had went out of the window a long time ago. If you affiliate yourself with gamersgate, you stand with racists and mysoginists, you excuse harassers and abusers, you're a willing patsy and a horrible human being.
See none of those harassment would have occurred in the first place if characters such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkessian didn't go out of their way to scam everybody by faking the victimhood.
Its saying that African american folks in the civil right strike are "a toxic movement, a hate group" because they are harassing the the cacausian folks for their misdemeanor even though some slave owners do exactly deserve what was coming to them.
This is definition of self-delusion and victim-blaming folks. He's comparing Zoe Quinn and Anita to being slave owners. And that gamers are being persecuted by them. Like black people. For making a game about depression and having an alternative opinion on games.
Seriously.
Okay let's go down that road, yeah that's exactly what they did!
Anita have been broadcasting how egregious the gaming communities are with the women topic which have been debunked! She have been adamant in persecuting the entire industry.
Subsequently, the feminism media swallowed the wrong pill and presented it as fact and with their heavy hitter journalist on their side, furthered that damage.
You simple can't deny that and for that reason, one can definitely argue that an entire community have been dragged down to the dirt by these malevolent individuals with sufficient evidence to back up.
No one has 'debunked' anything because there is nothing to 'debunk.' She made a video series on games from a feminist perspective. This would be no different than an atheist making a video series on religious topics, or a 'nerd' doing a series on music and fashion.
These are all just perspectives folks. You can choose to ignore them or not. They actually are really valuable, because they broaden the reach of what you love, and depth or richness to it's discussion, and validate the significance of what you love to society and culture.
Yes, her videos made people extremely, extremely defensive. But that is not her problem. People need to grow up and realize having a differing opinion or perspective on something you like is not a personal attack.
The GamerGate community is so insulated and insecure that they have to play the victim card faster and more loosely more than any SJW so far. How's that for irony?
I think the problem here is that people feel she did not gain her perspective on video games from playing video games, but went into it with that perspective and then cherry picked examples out of context that would support that perspective.
She may be entitled to her opinion, but people are entitled to be pissed off when she uses poor journalism to try to get other people to adopt that opinion.
And using your analogies, you don't think people would get a little miffed if an influential atheist YouTuber started making religious videos under the pretense that they were not an atheist, and started making videos that make religion look bad by leaving out any of its redeeming qualities? Because that is a more specific analogy to what we are dealing with here, and I think people would get pretty pissed off, and rightfully so.
Still, like most other people have said, it's a shame that the trolls happen to be all on the same side of the fence, because it is clouding any real discussion of issues.
If that's the argument, than I think you have a point about her misrepresenting herself. But that doesn't necessarily negate the entirety of her perspective or arguments.
But I think one of the things that this 'culture war' is about, if you want to go there, is what defines a gamer, and who is entitled to having an opinion. To Anita, being a gamer might mean playing games on the weekends, and include board games and role playing games with her friends. To a hardcore gamer, it might mean following every trade magazine, buy every major release, playing 12 hours straight, etc.
In Anita's mind, perhaps she believes she's being honest — but then hit the cultural barrier of truly hardcore, rabid gamers. But her perspective, not only as a feminist, but as and entry-level gamer, DOES have value, in highlighting some of the issues and pain points that might prevent women from becoming hardcore gamers.
Personally, I think the answer to who gets to and doesn't get to have an opinion should be much broader than a hardcore gamer. Not because I am a PC-SJW warrior and want to impose my values onto you. But because that's how much I respect Gaming as an art form. It deserves wider appreciation, more diversity and a bigger audience. It deserves 'an art scene', even if you find it pretentious or douchey or no-fun (trust me, I'm designer and have to put up with hipster-douches all the time so I can relate).
The op-ed on game culture from The Escapist presents this view more clearly (see below). Not every car has be a Ferrari, and not only Ferrari owners should dictate what the market should be, because there's obviously potential for everyone to have and enjoy the benefits of cars. And if the car market just pandered to one demographic exclusively, there's a good chance that market wouldn't sustain itself. The cost of producing a triple-A game is just getting higher and higher with advance in technology, which is why there is interest in seeing whether or not there are aways to appeal to a broader demographic, and convert casual gamers (mostly women) to hardcore ones to justify the risk. That isn't a conspiracy, this is just good business. Maybe more developers should be stepping up to become the Pixar or Marvel of videogames.
Funny that you should mention Marvel, considering the latest "scandal" about the Spider Woman cover art.
The thing about demographic targeting is that it's extremely circular. You can have the exact same argument with genres and game types. The reason why AAA developers keep making the same style of FPS or 3rd party action game is because those keep selling in the millions. Or, oppositely you could say those are the only genres that sell in the millions because those are the only types of games AAA developers make.
Telling game companies that they would make more money by "broadening their appeal" is just as easily countered by saying that their focus is so narrow because decades of sales have shown where the money is. It's a chicken and the egg problem.
Which, really, is why the Indie scene is such a big deal right now in games. People who are looking for that broader appeal, or games that are outside of the AAA box, are turning to these small studios who are more willing to experiment and can make a living with tens-of-thousands of sales instead of millions. And when some of these niche games explode, like Minecraft, Bastion, or Super Meat Boy, the AAA developers are suddenly ready to jump back in as they see the money potential again.
And of course, the problem with the current Indie scene is that there are just too damn many of them being pumped out, and far too many of them are terrible. Which leads to a need for reviewers to point people to the quality.
Which leads to current problems, where the people who are supposed to be weeding out the diamonds in the rough are directing everyone's attention to unpolished, unprofessional work like Depression Quest or giving near perfect scores to games like Gone Home without any mention of its bloated price (a game which I loved, just as an aside, but would've been royally pissed if I'd paid the full $20 release cost).
Of course, I think the whole GamerGate thing is overblown. There do seem to be a lot of "professional" writers who shouldn't be treated as professionals anymore, and a lot of websites with low standards that will probably die off. But I don't think a consumer revolt is necessary for that, it's just something that will happen in the next few years because of natural market shifts.
On October 17 2014 20:51 I_Love_Bacon wrote: It's hard to separate it. Hell I know because I still talk about it at times when I probably shouldn't because keeping one's mouth shut is not easy.
First of all, relax. You must of written 300 words per minute. + Show Spoiler +
This is all bull shit. GG isn't about Anita no matter how much you seem to think it is. She is background noise at best and is used to deflect from the actual issue at hand.
Dude, you brought her up. And I was just commenting to how absurd it is that people are so upset she exists. And you kind of proved my point ...
You're setting the bar for success pretty low. You're basically stating that because she wasn't frothing at the mouth and calling for male game devs to be castrated that her criticisms have more merit.
All her points, whether you agree with her or not, are explicitly illustrated and supported with examples. Her argument is reasoned and well-researched. It's structured, and builds towards an actually conclusion. You can bitch and complain that it's not exhaustive, but it's not meant to be. She has a thesis and she defends it well. It's certainly not lazy. That's more than can you say than most of her detractors, who rely on heresay or empty accusations or dismiss entire 3000 word articles with links and annotations simply because they think the publisher is a shill.
I'm sorry, but there's nothing intellectually dishonest about it, no matter how loud you shout it from the roof tops. Intellectual dishonest implies she's not earnest. She believes what she says. You just disagree with her.
Like I said, I don't blame you because there's a metric shit ton of them out there. Others use Anita's videos to justify THEIR hatred and then take to articles/twitter/whateverthefuckever. I can hate her work but, as I've said countless times, GG isn't about Anita.
Alright, I think I understand what you're saying here. You're issue isn't with Anita's argument. It's the idiots that amplify it and take it out of context. It happens on both sides. I absolutely agree. I do not condone stupidity.
Oh-so-false. Saying "she just a media critic" means you haven't done nearly as much research as you think you have. I'm not going to bring up the personal things about how she lies about being a gamer and some of the other talks she's given because I don't want my own opinion of them to taint them if you ever get around to them.
The "worst case scenario" is that a woman who has admitted she doesn't like games and doesn't play games has now been consulted by major studios about their games where she'll continue to push her biased/questionable message. As somebody on a site that was dedicated to hard core gaming I hope you can at least appreciate the absolute ridiculousness of that. Oh, and it should be more exhaustive given how much money she was given but I'll let that slide for now.
... aaannnd you're losing me. This is coming off as sour grapes, to be honest.
Maybe she lied about being a gamer. I have no idea what this accusation really means. The definition of being a gamer is very, very broad and means different things to different people. To someone like Anita, it probably meant playing a game a few hours on the weekend and even included roleplaying or board games with her friends. I don't really give a shit about her personal life, so I honestly don't know. But to a hardcore gamer, it literally means BUY EVERY MAJOR RELEASE AND PLAY NON-STOP UNTIL COMPLETION NEED MONSTER ENERGY DRINK. These people exist. That's a massive spectrum there.
Consultants from other industries and fields get hired all the time. Gaming is an expensive, high-risk business. Sometimes celebrity or creative consultants are brought on to boost the profile of a game. Sometimes they are actually technical consultants, like cinematographers or architects.
There is an obvious lack of realistic or even interesting representation of women in triple-A games. Maybe she'll get paid to consult on content. Maybe a developer will hire her as a token creative consultant, the way Will.i.am or Pharell seems to be the creative consultant on everything, in the hopes it will provide a halo effect around the game and attract a broader demographic.
In either sense, trust me — her influence will be smaller than you think. Games are not build by consultants. They're built by 50 to 100 people working 60 hours a week. I know a lot of people that work in triple-A gaming.
I know it sucks, but you're resenting her for identifying an issue in gaming that is rarely addressed, building a case for it's importance, representing herself as an expert on that particular issue, and being rewarded because it. That happens in almost industry because that's how society works. Trust me, as a designer, I have seen many younger, stupider people position themselves as experts on sustainability or social media experts — despite having very superficial knowledge — and fast tracking their careers.
You're resenting a person for carving a niche and building a name for herself. The world isn't a meritocracy. Her getting gigs you wish you had — or think other people should have — is your problem, not hers.
Now let's move on before we start bitching about Ben Affleck as Batman.
This is where your tinfoil hat is showing even more than before. Show me serious attempts to threaten Sarkeesian. Oh, the one that she screen capped 20 seconds after it was posted while not logged into twitter? The one at the university yesterday that the police deemed as not-credible? Know how many journalists/critics/developers have been killed over their opinion on games? 0
I'm going to pretend to be your conscience for a second:
"Threatening to shoot up a lecture hall is a serious offense. It is not a trivial threat, even if it's a lie. If you get caught you will get arrested.
"Also, if someone threatens to murder you, encourages others to harass or hurt you, and publicizes you're home address, it is perfectly rational to not feel safe. If you are driven out of your own home out of fear, it's okay to feel like you're being violated, because you are."
Trolls exist on the internet. This... surprises you? We live in a world where assholes "swat" people on Twitchtv and you're surprised that some shitheads leveled deaththreats and say stupid, vitriolic things on twitter? Once again, you're on a gaming website and you're surprised there exists people who make it their goal to push other people's buttons? Nobody after a game of SC told you to die in a fire or call you a faggot?
Why yes!
I know you're trying to dismiss the significance of online threats or abuse as trivial or 'less real', but that's a weak argument. And you're just admitting that games can lead to anti-social behaviour. As if stupidity is an excuse. Are you sure you're not an SJW at-heart?
This also falls into the main point of GG is the inability to criticize "these people" (journalists, SWJs, and everybody in between). Comments are deleted/disabled, reddit threads are deleted, people are shadow banned, and entire pieces are forced to be taken down and yet somehow GG are the ones who are being accused of censorship. Virtually every single person who writes above the 5th grade reading level and supports GG also calls for NO CENSORSHIP. Let her have here views; then let others rebut them if that's what they want to do. Isn't that's what supposed to happen? Why did this suddenly become a bad thing that bad reporting/criticism is pointed out? You know the other thing that Pro-GGs aren't doing? Making a gigantic production out of every threat posted to them on twitter despite their being plenty of choose from. They're not trying to play victims and garner attention/sympathy, they're trying to have an actual discussion.
HAHAHA! BULL! SHIT! Are you serious dude?
The one's complaining and whining the loudest have been the GG community. Check out KotakuInAction. In the past four hours, some Gawker reporter made a joke about bullying nerds, and they turned it into a witch hunt, had a little non-stop pity party, and now have a 'nerd' challenging the reporter to $10,000 boxing match!
How's that for production and spectacle? And what does it have to do with journalistic integrity? NOTHING.
I would never accuse GG of censorship. I would never do that. I'm accusing a subset of trolls using GamerGate as a political shield to threaten, intimidate and harass three women until they were forced to leave their homes and go into hiding. That's worse then censorship. It's the literal definition of terrorism. For two of them the only 'crime' they committed, technically, is having an fucking opinion. And now other female developers are afraid to speak out out of fear of reprisal. That's sad.
GG has been censored and blocked on several sites. No dispute here. I'm sure the publications have different reasons. But if I had to guess, I think the most common reason is that most sites, particularly online magazines, don't have the time or energy to moderate the inevitable fucking shitstorm. Nor are they obligated to. We're having a reasonable discussion, but if a bunch of turds took over the thread Team Liquid would shut our asses down and there's nothing they could do about it.
Reddit? My theory would be they were in the middle of catching a bunch of shit for their facilitation of Fappening, it hurt their reputation, put them in an embarassing legal situation, and because of the ties of misogyny to GamerGate (justified or not) they didn't want to touch it with a ten-foot-pole. You got screwed by pervs.
The only way for GamerGate to have completely autonomy and control over the discourse is to have their own platform. And so far, the quality and presentation of GamerGates concerns have been scattered and amatuerish.
There's a time and a place to discuss these things, but that's not what GG is. The people who claim it is only do so for 2 options: Either they're misinformed or they do it to push their own narrative.
Are you accusing me of being part of a conspiracy, or a secret dick? If it makes you feel better, it's the latter.
I can honestly say I am not anti-GamerGate, because I still don't know what the hell GamerGate is. The issues that actually seem worth discussing — the representation of women in games (both on and behind the scenes), the integrity of game journalism, and the future of gamer-culture as gaming becomes more and more significant to mainstream culture — have absolutely nothing to do with each other. They really don't. And it's the conflation of this issues by people that support GamerGate is what makes their perspective so easy to dismiss. A lot of their arguments and discussion is tainted with allegations, innuendo, or incessant lulz-humor that simply diminishes whatever legitimate point or grievance they might have.
Here's an example from the kotakuinaction reddit of one guy who thinks he's spitting truth bombs. He opens the article by whining while congratulating himself.
Written by @JamieBworth, rejected by Cracked for stupid reasons, and published here, with permission. Because fuck Cracked, this shit is hilarious and genius.
In actuality his writing is rushed and lazy; mostly editorial; and offers no new information that contradicts basic facts reported by mainstream source — thus rendering his premise of revealing 'misinformation' pretty much pointless.
Like I said, if Gaters want to be taken seriously, they can learn a lot about how to present an argument by watching Sarkeesian's videos.
If you don't know what GamerGate is, none of your opinions matters.
On topic:
A lot of misconception about GamerGate.
To put it in the most basic form: GamerGate is the gaming consumers' reactionary force to dissipate any biases in gaming reviews for a more wholesome competitive market.
A lot of you guys think that GamerGate requires some special membership to participate in. However, with the assumption that we all hope for a meritocracy system in the gaming industry, most of us are already, intentionally or not and even if you don't want to rally behind the hash tag or not, part of the GamerGate "movement".
However, this movement will mostly likely be a lost cause and let me tell y'all why.
In order to get rid of any media nepotism in the gaming community, we must look at all the parties involved that created nepotism in the first place. They are:
1. Producer of the game. Ex: Zoe Quinn. Laughing my ass off at people being ignorant on this one.
2. Game reviewer outlets. Ex: IGN, Kotaku, GameSpot that gave out favorable reviews because of sexual, monetary, and/or other reasons.
and lastly:
3. Any other people that support the gaming producer to further their own personal agendas. They are termed as "Social Justice Warriors", SJWs for short, basically the radical pro-feminism, pro-LGBT crowds that supported a certain game because both the game producers and their political beliefs aligns with each other for mutual benefit. Ex: Anita Sarkessian.
For corruption and nepotism to fully dispel in our industry, we have to get rid of ALL 3 parties. But here is the thing though, you can shame characters Zoe Quinn and Game reviewers/journalist all you want, the main beast you have to deal with are #3 of the list.
The question remains whether or not the integrity of gaming development can be saved w/ enough manpower in our side to get rid of all the parties or not.
So far, there have been a lot in-fighting in the community about who to blame it on. A lot of apologist by saying "Woah, you can't possibly go after X, Y, and Z. You have to go after A, B, and C instead!"
No the correct approach is to go after EVERYBODY involved, you can't afford to cherry pick the target.
Talk about misconceptions ...
Around the turn of the millennium gamers were trying to stop journalist to blame games for school shootings. This week "gamers" threatened with a school shooting to prevent a journalist from speaking out in public.
GamerGate is a toxic movement, a hate group, started by a sad little man who felt the need to get back at his failed relationship in public. Any sort of valid point it might have had went out of the window a long time ago. If you affiliate yourself with gamersgate, you stand with racists and mysoginists, you excuse harassers and abusers, you're a willing patsy and a horrible human being.
See none of those harassment would have occurred in the first place if characters such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkessian didn't go out of their way to scam everybody by faking the victimhood.
Its saying that African american folks in the civil right strike are "a toxic movement, a hate group" because they are harassing the the cacausian folks for their misdemeanor even though some slave owners do exactly deserve what was coming to them.
This is definition of self-delusion and victim-blaming folks. He's comparing Zoe Quinn and Anita to being slave owners. And that gamers are being persecuted by them. Like black people. For making a game about depression and having an alternative opinion on games.
Seriously.
Okay let's go down that road, yeah that's exactly what they did!
Anita have been broadcasting how egregious the gaming communities are with the women topic which have been debunked! She have been adamant in persecuting the entire industry.
Subsequently, the feminism media swallowed the wrong pill and presented it as fact and with their heavy hitter journalist on their side, furthered that damage.
You simple can't deny that and for that reason, one can definitely argue that an entire community have been dragged down to the dirt by these malevolent individuals with sufficient evidence to back up.
No one has 'debunked' anything because there is nothing to 'debunk.' She made a video series on games from a feminist perspective. This would be no different than an atheist making a video series on religious topics, or a 'nerd' doing a series on music and fashion.
These are all just perspectives folks. You can choose to ignore them or not. They actually are really valuable, because they broaden the reach of what you love, and depth or richness to it's discussion, and validate the significance of what you love to society and culture.
Yes, her videos made people extremely, extremely defensive. But that is not her problem. People need to grow up and realize having a differing opinion or perspective on something you like is not a personal attack.
The GamerGate community is so insulated and insecure that they have to play the victim card faster and more loosely more than any SJW so far. How's that for irony?
No, you are attempting to separate her and her perspective. And by the way, she isn't using exactly looking things through a traditional feminist point of view. Traditional feminist fights for women's equal rights as men not to denigrate men w/o malicious intent. That's not being a feminist, traditionally speaking but that's simply bullying and defamation.
So she needs to grow up, she needs to know that putting yourself out w/ malicious intent and false information will gets you bad rep. She needs to learn to cease scamming people out of their cash.
She has never denigrated men. With malicious intent. Unless you define being 'malicious' as having a point of view. She has probably gotten more and more defensive as trolls harass her. But who can fucking blame her?
She's not scamming anyone out of cash. Are you really that blindly arrogant that you believe everyone that agrees with her — and disagrees with you — is a mindless zombie? Who's prejudiced now?
This kind of rhetoric is why no mainstream media is picking up the GamerGate perspective. Because it's riddled with doublespeak, innuendo, pettiness and condescension. If these are GamerGates idea of 'facts' than the mainstream media is omitting, than the mainstream has done a bang-up job reporting on this issue, separating actual facts from subjective, editorial opinions.
This is literally, and figuratively, and categorically not true. She is a lady that carved a niche around an under-represented topic and audience and built a career around it. Whoopty-fricking-doo.
There are wrong opinions and right opinions much like right perspective and wrong perspectives.
She have the wrong opinion and the wrong perspective and brainwashed people to join her.
By presenting herself as a gamer expert while she is not, that's lying to the public.
So she lied to sell her product, that's scamming right there. She deliberately went out of her way to paint the entire industry and men in defamation.
You have nothing to gain by white knighting her only to perpetuate such criminal behavior. So stop it before you embarrass yourself.
First of all, relax. You must of written 300 words per minute. + Show Spoiler +
This is all bull shit. GG isn't about Anita no matter how much you seem to think it is. She is background noise at best and is used to deflect from the actual issue at hand.
Dude, you brought her up. And I was just commenting to how absurd it is that people are so upset she exists. And you kind of proved my point ...
You're setting the bar for success pretty low. You're basically stating that because she wasn't frothing at the mouth and calling for male game devs to be castrated that her criticisms have more merit.
All her points, whether you agree with her or not, are explicitly illustrated and supported with examples. Her argument is reasoned and well-researched. It's structured, and builds towards an actually conclusion. You can bitch and complain that it's not exhaustive, but it's not meant to be. She has a thesis and she defends it well. It's certainly not lazy. That's more than can you say than most of her detractors, who rely on heresay or empty accusations or dismiss entire 3000 word articles with links and annotations simply because they think the publisher is a shill.
I'm sorry, but there's nothing intellectually dishonest about it, no matter how loud you shout it from the roof tops. Intellectual dishonest implies she's not earnest. She believes what she says. You just disagree with her.
Like I said, I don't blame you because there's a metric shit ton of them out there. Others use Anita's videos to justify THEIR hatred and then take to articles/twitter/whateverthefuckever. I can hate her work but, as I've said countless times, GG isn't about Anita.
Alright, I think I understand what you're saying here. You're issue isn't with Anita's argument. It's the idiots that amplify it and take it out of context. It happens on both sides. I absolutely agree. I do not condone stupidity.
Oh-so-false. Saying "she just a media critic" means you haven't done nearly as much research as you think you have. I'm not going to bring up the personal things about how she lies about being a gamer and some of the other talks she's given because I don't want my own opinion of them to taint them if you ever get around to them.
The "worst case scenario" is that a woman who has admitted she doesn't like games and doesn't play games has now been consulted by major studios about their games where she'll continue to push her biased/questionable message. As somebody on a site that was dedicated to hard core gaming I hope you can at least appreciate the absolute ridiculousness of that. Oh, and it should be more exhaustive given how much money she was given but I'll let that slide for now.
... aaannnd you're losing me. This is coming off as sour grapes, to be honest.
Maybe she lied about being a gamer. I have no idea what this accusation really means. The definition of being a gamer is very, very broad and means different things to different people. To someone like Anita, it probably meant playing a game a few hours on the weekend and even included roleplaying or board games with her friends. I don't really give a shit about her personal life, so I honestly don't know. But to a hardcore gamer, it literally means BUY EVERY MAJOR RELEASE AND PLAY NON-STOP UNTIL COMPLETION NEED MONSTER ENERGY DRINK. These people exist. That's a massive spectrum there.
Consultants from other industries and fields get hired all the time. Gaming is an expensive, high-risk business. Sometimes celebrity or creative consultants are brought on to boost the profile of a game. Sometimes they are actually technical consultants, like cinematographers or architects.
There is an obvious lack of realistic or even interesting representation of women in triple-A games. Maybe she'll get paid to consult on content. Maybe a developer will hire her as a token creative consultant, the way Will.i.am or Pharell seems to be the creative consultant on everything, in the hopes it will provide a halo effect around the game and attract a broader demographic.
In either sense, trust me — her influence will be smaller than you think. Games are not build by consultants. They're built by 50 to 100 people working 60 hours a week. I know a lot of people that work in triple-A gaming.
I know it sucks, but you're resenting her for identifying an issue in gaming that is rarely addressed, building a case for it's importance, representing herself as an expert on that particular issue, and being rewarded because it. That happens in almost industry because that's how society works. Trust me, as a designer, I have seen many younger, stupider people position themselves as experts on sustainability or social media experts — despite having very superficial knowledge — and fast tracking their careers.
You're resenting a person for carving a niche and building a name for herself. The world isn't a meritocracy. Her getting gigs you wish you had — or think other people should have — is your problem, not hers.
Now let's move on before we start bitching about Ben Affleck as Batman.
This is where your tinfoil hat is showing even more than before. Show me serious attempts to threaten Sarkeesian. Oh, the one that she screen capped 20 seconds after it was posted while not logged into twitter? The one at the university yesterday that the police deemed as not-credible? Know how many journalists/critics/developers have been killed over their opinion on games? 0
I'm going to pretend to be your conscience for a second:
"Threatening to shoot up a lecture hall is a serious offense. It is not a trivial threat, even if it's a lie. If you get caught you will get arrested.
"Also, if someone threatens to murder you, encourages others to harass or hurt you, and publicizes you're home address, it is perfectly rational to not feel safe. If you are driven out of your own home out of fear, it's okay to feel like you're being violated, because you are."
Trolls exist on the internet. This... surprises you? We live in a world where assholes "swat" people on Twitchtv and you're surprised that some shitheads leveled deaththreats and say stupid, vitriolic things on twitter? Once again, you're on a gaming website and you're surprised there exists people who make it their goal to push other people's buttons? Nobody after a game of SC told you to die in a fire or call you a faggot?
Why yes!
I know you're trying to dismiss the significance of online threats or abuse as trivial or 'less real', but that's a weak argument. And you're just admitting that games can lead to anti-social behaviour. As if stupidity is an excuse. Are you sure you're not an SJW at-heart?
This also falls into the main point of GG is the inability to criticize "these people" (journalists, SWJs, and everybody in between). Comments are deleted/disabled, reddit threads are deleted, people are shadow banned, and entire pieces are forced to be taken down and yet somehow GG are the ones who are being accused of censorship. Virtually every single person who writes above the 5th grade reading level and supports GG also calls for NO CENSORSHIP. Let her have here views; then let others rebut them if that's what they want to do. Isn't that's what supposed to happen? Why did this suddenly become a bad thing that bad reporting/criticism is pointed out? You know the other thing that Pro-GGs aren't doing? Making a gigantic production out of every threat posted to them on twitter despite their being plenty of choose from. They're not trying to play victims and garner attention/sympathy, they're trying to have an actual discussion.
HAHAHA! BULL! SHIT! Are you serious dude?
The one's complaining and whining the loudest have been the GG community. Check out KotakuInAction. In the past four hours, some Gawker reporter made a joke about bullying nerds, and they turned it into a witch hunt, had a little non-stop pity party, and now have a 'nerd' challenging the reporter to $10,000 boxing match!
How's that for production and spectacle? And what does it have to do with journalistic integrity? NOTHING.
I would never accuse GG of censorship. I would never do that. I'm accusing a subset of trolls using GamerGate as a political shield to threaten, intimidate and harass three women until they were forced to leave their homes and go into hiding. That's worse then censorship. It's the literal definition of terrorism. For two of them the only 'crime' they committed, technically, is having an fucking opinion. And now other female developers are afraid to speak out out of fear of reprisal. That's sad.
GG has been censored and blocked on several sites. No dispute here. I'm sure the publications have different reasons. But if I had to guess, I think the most common reason is that most sites, particularly online magazines, don't have the time or energy to moderate the inevitable fucking shitstorm. Nor are they obligated to. We're having a reasonable discussion, but if a bunch of turds took over the thread Team Liquid would shut our asses down and there's nothing they could do about it.
Reddit? My theory would be they were in the middle of catching a bunch of shit for their facilitation of Fappening, it hurt their reputation, put them in an embarassing legal situation, and because of the ties of misogyny to GamerGate (justified or not) they didn't want to touch it with a ten-foot-pole. You got screwed by pervs.
The only way for GamerGate to have completely autonomy and control over the discourse is to have their own platform. And so far, the quality and presentation of GamerGates concerns have been scattered and amatuerish.
[quote]
Are you accusing me of being part of a conspiracy, or a secret dick? If it makes you feel better, it's the latter.
I can honestly say I am not anti-GamerGate, because I still don't know what the hell GamerGate is. The issues that actually seem worth discussing — the representation of women in games (both on and behind the scenes), the integrity of game journalism, and the future of gamer-culture as gaming becomes more and more significant to mainstream culture — have absolutely nothing to do with each other. They really don't. And it's the conflation of this issues by people that support GamerGate is what makes their perspective so easy to dismiss. A lot of their arguments and discussion is tainted with allegations, innuendo, or incessant lulz-humor that simply diminishes whatever legitimate point or grievance they might have.
Here's an example from the kotakuinaction reddit of one guy who thinks he's spitting truth bombs. He opens the article by whining while congratulating himself.
In actuality his writing is rushed and lazy; mostly editorial; and offers no new information that contradicts basic facts reported by mainstream source — thus rendering his premise of revealing 'misinformation' pretty much pointless.
Like I said, if Gaters want to be taken seriously, they can learn a lot about how to present an argument by watching Sarkeesian's videos.
If you don't know what GamerGate is, none of your opinions matters.
On topic:
A lot of misconception about GamerGate.
To put it in the most basic form: GamerGate is the gaming consumers' reactionary force to dissipate any biases in gaming reviews for a more wholesome competitive market.
A lot of you guys think that GamerGate requires some special membership to participate in. However, with the assumption that we all hope for a meritocracy system in the gaming industry, most of us are already, intentionally or not and even if you don't want to rally behind the hash tag or not, part of the GamerGate "movement".
However, this movement will mostly likely be a lost cause and let me tell y'all why.
In order to get rid of any media nepotism in the gaming community, we must look at all the parties involved that created nepotism in the first place. They are:
1. Producer of the game. Ex: Zoe Quinn. Laughing my ass off at people being ignorant on this one.
2. Game reviewer outlets. Ex: IGN, Kotaku, GameSpot that gave out favorable reviews because of sexual, monetary, and/or other reasons.
and lastly:
3. Any other people that support the gaming producer to further their own personal agendas. They are termed as "Social Justice Warriors", SJWs for short, basically the radical pro-feminism, pro-LGBT crowds that supported a certain game because both the game producers and their political beliefs aligns with each other for mutual benefit. Ex: Anita Sarkessian.
For corruption and nepotism to fully dispel in our industry, we have to get rid of ALL 3 parties. But here is the thing though, you can shame characters Zoe Quinn and Game reviewers/journalist all you want, the main beast you have to deal with are #3 of the list.
The question remains whether or not the integrity of gaming development can be saved w/ enough manpower in our side to get rid of all the parties or not.
So far, there have been a lot in-fighting in the community about who to blame it on. A lot of apologist by saying "Woah, you can't possibly go after X, Y, and Z. You have to go after A, B, and C instead!"
No the correct approach is to go after EVERYBODY involved, you can't afford to cherry pick the target.
Talk about misconceptions ...
Around the turn of the millennium gamers were trying to stop journalist to blame games for school shootings. This week "gamers" threatened with a school shooting to prevent a journalist from speaking out in public.
GamerGate is a toxic movement, a hate group, started by a sad little man who felt the need to get back at his failed relationship in public. Any sort of valid point it might have had went out of the window a long time ago. If you affiliate yourself with gamersgate, you stand with racists and mysoginists, you excuse harassers and abusers, you're a willing patsy and a horrible human being.
See none of those harassment would have occurred in the first place if characters such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkessian didn't go out of their way to scam everybody by faking the victimhood.
Its saying that African american folks in the civil right strike are "a toxic movement, a hate group" because they are harassing the the cacausian folks for their misdemeanor even though some slave owners do exactly deserve what was coming to them.
This is definition of self-delusion and victim-blaming folks. He's comparing Zoe Quinn and Anita to being slave owners. And that gamers are being persecuted by them. Like black people. For making a game about depression and having an alternative opinion on games.
Seriously.
Okay let's go down that road, yeah that's exactly what they did!
Anita have been broadcasting how egregious the gaming communities are with the women topic which have been debunked! She have been adamant in persecuting the entire industry.
Subsequently, the feminism media swallowed the wrong pill and presented it as fact and with their heavy hitter journalist on their side, furthered that damage.
You simple can't deny that and for that reason, one can definitely argue that an entire community have been dragged down to the dirt by these malevolent individuals with sufficient evidence to back up.
No one has 'debunked' anything because there is nothing to 'debunk.' She made a video series on games from a feminist perspective. This would be no different than an atheist making a video series on religious topics, or a 'nerd' doing a series on music and fashion.
These are all just perspectives folks. You can choose to ignore them or not. They actually are really valuable, because they broaden the reach of what you love, and depth or richness to it's discussion, and validate the significance of what you love to society and culture.
Yes, her videos made people extremely, extremely defensive. But that is not her problem. People need to grow up and realize having a differing opinion or perspective on something you like is not a personal attack.
The GamerGate community is so insulated and insecure that they have to play the victim card faster and more loosely more than any SJW so far. How's that for irony?
I think the problem here is that people feel she did not gain her perspective on video games from playing video games, but went into it with that perspective and then cherry picked examples out of context that would support that perspective.
She may be entitled to her opinion, but people are entitled to be pissed off when she uses poor journalism to try to get other people to adopt that opinion.
And using your analogies, you don't think people would get a little miffed if an influential atheist YouTuber started making religious videos under the pretense that they were not an atheist, and started making videos that make religion look bad by leaving out any of its redeeming qualities? Because that is a more specific analogy to what we are dealing with here, and I think people would get pretty pissed off, and rightfully so.
Still, like most other people have said, it's a shame that the trolls happen to be all on the same side of the fence, because it is clouding any real discussion of issues.
If that's the argument, than I think you have a point about her misrepresenting herself. But that doesn't necessarily negate the entirety of her perspective or arguments.
But I think one of the things that this 'culture war' is about, if you want to go there, is what defines a gamer, and who is entitled to having an opinion. To Anita, being a gamer might mean playing games on the weekends, and include board games and role playing games with her friends. To a hardcore gamer, it might mean following every trade magazine, buy every major release, playing 12 hours straight, etc.
In Anita's mind, perhaps she believes she's being honest — but then hit the cultural barrier of truly hardcore, rabid gamers. But her perspective, not only as a feminist, but as and entry-level gamer, DOES have value, in highlighting some of the issues and pain points that might prevent women from becoming hardcore gamers.
Personally, I think the answer to who gets to and doesn't get to have an opinion should be much broader than a hardcore gamer. Not because I am a PC-SJW warrior and want to impose my values onto you. But because that's how much I respect Gaming as an art form. It deserves wider appreciation, more diversity and a bigger audience. It deserves 'an art scene', even if you find it pretentious or douchey or no-fun (trust me, I'm designer and have to put up with hipster-douches all the time so I can relate).
The op-ed on game culture from The Escapist presents this view more clearly (see below). Not every car has be a Ferrari, and not only Ferrari owners should dictate what the market should be, because there's obviously potential for everyone to have and enjoy the benefits of cars. And if the car market just pandered to one demographic exclusively, there's a good chance that market wouldn't sustain itself. The cost of producing a triple-A game is just getting higher and higher with advance in technology, which is why there is interest in seeing whether or not there are aways to appeal to a broader demographic, and convert casual gamers (mostly women) to hardcore ones to justify the risk. That isn't a conspiracy, this is just good business. Maybe more developers should be stepping up to become the Pixar or Marvel of videogames.
Funny that you should mention Marvel, considering the latest "scandal" about the Spider Woman cover art.
The thing about demographic targeting is that it's extremely circular. You can have the exact same argument with genres and game types. The reason why AAA developers keep making the same style of FPS or 3rd party action game is because those keep selling in the millions. Or, oppositely you could say those are the only genres that sell in the millions because those are the only types of games AAA developers make.
Telling game companies that they would make more money by "broadening their appeal" is just as easily countered by saying that their focus is so narrow because decades of sales have shown where the money is. It's a chicken and the egg problem.
Which, really, is why the Indie scene is such a big deal right now in games. People who are looking for that broader appeal, or games that are outside of the AAA box, are turning to these small studios who are more willing to experiment and can make a living with tens-of-thousands of sales instead of millions. And when some of these niche games explode, like Minecraft, Bastion, or Super Meat Boy, the AAA developers are suddenly ready to jump back in as they see the money potential again.
And of course, the problem with the current Indie scene is that there are just too damn many of them being pumped out, and far too many of them are terrible. Which leads to a need for reviewers to point people to the quality.
Which leads to current problems, where the people who are supposed to be weeding out the diamonds in the rough are directing everyone's attention to unpolished, unprofessional work like Depression Quest or giving near perfect scores to games like Gone Home without any mention of its bloated price (a game which I loved, just as an aside, but would've been royally pissed if I'd paid the full $20 release cost).
Of course, I think the whole GamerGate thing is overblown. There do seem to be a lot of "professional" writers who shouldn't be treated as professionals anymore, and a lot of websites with low standards that will probably die off. But I don't think a consumer revolt is necessary for that, it's just something that will happen in the next few years because of natural market shifts.
I ... agree. Yaaaaay!
I do think triple-A games are caught in a recursive, creative loop that needs to be broken. The industry is so unstable and high risk. For every cash-cow there is a game that falls flat on its face and shutters a studio. Which is why I can see why triple-A studios might want to broaden their appeal, or attempt to explore alternative times of lower-risk, easier to produce games.
This has nothing to do with anything, but I can understand why game journalist (and even serious developers) might applaud Depression Quest. It offers an alternative model to an interactive experience. I work in interactive books, and I do think there is a potential opportunity between books and text-based adventure that could be addressed. The greater sin journalists made, I feel, is categorizing it as 'a game'.
That shit happens all the time in art circles. Trust me, most CG and effects artists would balk at what is considered good 'video art'. I don't blame 'em. I don't hate on people trying to do something weird or quirky either.
On October 18 2014 01:52 Millitron wrote: I feel like "Racist" and "Misogynist" are this generation's "Communist". Everyone you don't agree with is one.
except for the fact that all the pick up guys, mensrights and redpill people actually are a bunch of idiots that fit exactly your description. That otherwise very smart people like TB pour oil on the fire by using the same jargon that is very typical of these communities really goes to show that there really is a problem inside the internet/gaming culture.
First of all, relax. You must of written 300 words per minute. + Show Spoiler +
This is all bull shit. GG isn't about Anita no matter how much you seem to think it is. She is background noise at best and is used to deflect from the actual issue at hand.
Dude, you brought her up. And I was just commenting to how absurd it is that people are so upset she exists. And you kind of proved my point ...
You're setting the bar for success pretty low. You're basically stating that because she wasn't frothing at the mouth and calling for male game devs to be castrated that her criticisms have more merit.
All her points, whether you agree with her or not, are explicitly illustrated and supported with examples. Her argument is reasoned and well-researched. It's structured, and builds towards an actually conclusion. You can bitch and complain that it's not exhaustive, but it's not meant to be. She has a thesis and she defends it well. It's certainly not lazy. That's more than can you say than most of her detractors, who rely on heresay or empty accusations or dismiss entire 3000 word articles with links and annotations simply because they think the publisher is a shill.
I'm sorry, but there's nothing intellectually dishonest about it, no matter how loud you shout it from the roof tops. Intellectual dishonest implies she's not earnest. She believes what she says. You just disagree with her.
Like I said, I don't blame you because there's a metric shit ton of them out there. Others use Anita's videos to justify THEIR hatred and then take to articles/twitter/whateverthefuckever. I can hate her work but, as I've said countless times, GG isn't about Anita.
Alright, I think I understand what you're saying here. You're issue isn't with Anita's argument. It's the idiots that amplify it and take it out of context. It happens on both sides. I absolutely agree. I do not condone stupidity.
Oh-so-false. Saying "she just a media critic" means you haven't done nearly as much research as you think you have. I'm not going to bring up the personal things about how she lies about being a gamer and some of the other talks she's given because I don't want my own opinion of them to taint them if you ever get around to them.
The "worst case scenario" is that a woman who has admitted she doesn't like games and doesn't play games has now been consulted by major studios about their games where she'll continue to push her biased/questionable message. As somebody on a site that was dedicated to hard core gaming I hope you can at least appreciate the absolute ridiculousness of that. Oh, and it should be more exhaustive given how much money she was given but I'll let that slide for now.
... aaannnd you're losing me. This is coming off as sour grapes, to be honest.
Maybe she lied about being a gamer. I have no idea what this accusation really means. The definition of being a gamer is very, very broad and means different things to different people. To someone like Anita, it probably meant playing a game a few hours on the weekend and even included roleplaying or board games with her friends. I don't really give a shit about her personal life, so I honestly don't know. But to a hardcore gamer, it literally means BUY EVERY MAJOR RELEASE AND PLAY NON-STOP UNTIL COMPLETION NEED MONSTER ENERGY DRINK. These people exist. That's a massive spectrum there.
Consultants from other industries and fields get hired all the time. Gaming is an expensive, high-risk business. Sometimes celebrity or creative consultants are brought on to boost the profile of a game. Sometimes they are actually technical consultants, like cinematographers or architects.
There is an obvious lack of realistic or even interesting representation of women in triple-A games. Maybe she'll get paid to consult on content. Maybe a developer will hire her as a token creative consultant, the way Will.i.am or Pharell seems to be the creative consultant on everything, in the hopes it will provide a halo effect around the game and attract a broader demographic.
In either sense, trust me — her influence will be smaller than you think. Games are not build by consultants. They're built by 50 to 100 people working 60 hours a week. I know a lot of people that work in triple-A gaming.
I know it sucks, but you're resenting her for identifying an issue in gaming that is rarely addressed, building a case for it's importance, representing herself as an expert on that particular issue, and being rewarded because it. That happens in almost industry because that's how society works. Trust me, as a designer, I have seen many younger, stupider people position themselves as experts on sustainability or social media experts — despite having very superficial knowledge — and fast tracking their careers.
You're resenting a person for carving a niche and building a name for herself. The world isn't a meritocracy. Her getting gigs you wish you had — or think other people should have — is your problem, not hers.
Now let's move on before we start bitching about Ben Affleck as Batman.
This is where your tinfoil hat is showing even more than before. Show me serious attempts to threaten Sarkeesian. Oh, the one that she screen capped 20 seconds after it was posted while not logged into twitter? The one at the university yesterday that the police deemed as not-credible? Know how many journalists/critics/developers have been killed over their opinion on games? 0
I'm going to pretend to be your conscience for a second:
"Threatening to shoot up a lecture hall is a serious offense. It is not a trivial threat, even if it's a lie. If you get caught you will get arrested.
"Also, if someone threatens to murder you, encourages others to harass or hurt you, and publicizes you're home address, it is perfectly rational to not feel safe. If you are driven out of your own home out of fear, it's okay to feel like you're being violated, because you are."
Trolls exist on the internet. This... surprises you? We live in a world where assholes "swat" people on Twitchtv and you're surprised that some shitheads leveled deaththreats and say stupid, vitriolic things on twitter? Once again, you're on a gaming website and you're surprised there exists people who make it their goal to push other people's buttons? Nobody after a game of SC told you to die in a fire or call you a faggot?
Why yes!
I know you're trying to dismiss the significance of online threats or abuse as trivial or 'less real', but that's a weak argument. And you're just admitting that games can lead to anti-social behaviour. As if stupidity is an excuse. Are you sure you're not an SJW at-heart?
This also falls into the main point of GG is the inability to criticize "these people" (journalists, SWJs, and everybody in between). Comments are deleted/disabled, reddit threads are deleted, people are shadow banned, and entire pieces are forced to be taken down and yet somehow GG are the ones who are being accused of censorship. Virtually every single person who writes above the 5th grade reading level and supports GG also calls for NO CENSORSHIP. Let her have here views; then let others rebut them if that's what they want to do. Isn't that's what supposed to happen? Why did this suddenly become a bad thing that bad reporting/criticism is pointed out? You know the other thing that Pro-GGs aren't doing? Making a gigantic production out of every threat posted to them on twitter despite their being plenty of choose from. They're not trying to play victims and garner attention/sympathy, they're trying to have an actual discussion.
HAHAHA! BULL! SHIT! Are you serious dude?
The one's complaining and whining the loudest have been the GG community. Check out KotakuInAction. In the past four hours, some Gawker reporter made a joke about bullying nerds, and they turned it into a witch hunt, had a little non-stop pity party, and now have a 'nerd' challenging the reporter to $10,000 boxing match!
How's that for production and spectacle? And what does it have to do with journalistic integrity? NOTHING.
I would never accuse GG of censorship. I would never do that. I'm accusing a subset of trolls using GamerGate as a political shield to threaten, intimidate and harass three women until they were forced to leave their homes and go into hiding. That's worse then censorship. It's the literal definition of terrorism. For two of them the only 'crime' they committed, technically, is having an fucking opinion. And now other female developers are afraid to speak out out of fear of reprisal. That's sad.
GG has been censored and blocked on several sites. No dispute here. I'm sure the publications have different reasons. But if I had to guess, I think the most common reason is that most sites, particularly online magazines, don't have the time or energy to moderate the inevitable fucking shitstorm. Nor are they obligated to. We're having a reasonable discussion, but if a bunch of turds took over the thread Team Liquid would shut our asses down and there's nothing they could do about it.
Reddit? My theory would be they were in the middle of catching a bunch of shit for their facilitation of Fappening, it hurt their reputation, put them in an embarassing legal situation, and because of the ties of misogyny to GamerGate (justified or not) they didn't want to touch it with a ten-foot-pole. You got screwed by pervs.
The only way for GamerGate to have completely autonomy and control over the discourse is to have their own platform. And so far, the quality and presentation of GamerGates concerns have been scattered and amatuerish.
[quote]
Are you accusing me of being part of a conspiracy, or a secret dick? If it makes you feel better, it's the latter.
I can honestly say I am not anti-GamerGate, because I still don't know what the hell GamerGate is. The issues that actually seem worth discussing — the representation of women in games (both on and behind the scenes), the integrity of game journalism, and the future of gamer-culture as gaming becomes more and more significant to mainstream culture — have absolutely nothing to do with each other. They really don't. And it's the conflation of this issues by people that support GamerGate is what makes their perspective so easy to dismiss. A lot of their arguments and discussion is tainted with allegations, innuendo, or incessant lulz-humor that simply diminishes whatever legitimate point or grievance they might have.
Here's an example from the kotakuinaction reddit of one guy who thinks he's spitting truth bombs. He opens the article by whining while congratulating himself.
In actuality his writing is rushed and lazy; mostly editorial; and offers no new information that contradicts basic facts reported by mainstream source — thus rendering his premise of revealing 'misinformation' pretty much pointless.
Like I said, if Gaters want to be taken seriously, they can learn a lot about how to present an argument by watching Sarkeesian's videos.
If you don't know what GamerGate is, none of your opinions matters.
On topic:
A lot of misconception about GamerGate.
To put it in the most basic form: GamerGate is the gaming consumers' reactionary force to dissipate any biases in gaming reviews for a more wholesome competitive market.
A lot of you guys think that GamerGate requires some special membership to participate in. However, with the assumption that we all hope for a meritocracy system in the gaming industry, most of us are already, intentionally or not and even if you don't want to rally behind the hash tag or not, part of the GamerGate "movement".
However, this movement will mostly likely be a lost cause and let me tell y'all why.
In order to get rid of any media nepotism in the gaming community, we must look at all the parties involved that created nepotism in the first place. They are:
1. Producer of the game. Ex: Zoe Quinn. Laughing my ass off at people being ignorant on this one.
2. Game reviewer outlets. Ex: IGN, Kotaku, GameSpot that gave out favorable reviews because of sexual, monetary, and/or other reasons.
and lastly:
3. Any other people that support the gaming producer to further their own personal agendas. They are termed as "Social Justice Warriors", SJWs for short, basically the radical pro-feminism, pro-LGBT crowds that supported a certain game because both the game producers and their political beliefs aligns with each other for mutual benefit. Ex: Anita Sarkessian.
For corruption and nepotism to fully dispel in our industry, we have to get rid of ALL 3 parties. But here is the thing though, you can shame characters Zoe Quinn and Game reviewers/journalist all you want, the main beast you have to deal with are #3 of the list.
The question remains whether or not the integrity of gaming development can be saved w/ enough manpower in our side to get rid of all the parties or not.
So far, there have been a lot in-fighting in the community about who to blame it on. A lot of apologist by saying "Woah, you can't possibly go after X, Y, and Z. You have to go after A, B, and C instead!"
No the correct approach is to go after EVERYBODY involved, you can't afford to cherry pick the target.
Talk about misconceptions ...
Around the turn of the millennium gamers were trying to stop journalist to blame games for school shootings. This week "gamers" threatened with a school shooting to prevent a journalist from speaking out in public.
GamerGate is a toxic movement, a hate group, started by a sad little man who felt the need to get back at his failed relationship in public. Any sort of valid point it might have had went out of the window a long time ago. If you affiliate yourself with gamersgate, you stand with racists and mysoginists, you excuse harassers and abusers, you're a willing patsy and a horrible human being.
See none of those harassment would have occurred in the first place if characters such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkessian didn't go out of their way to scam everybody by faking the victimhood.
Its saying that African american folks in the civil right strike are "a toxic movement, a hate group" because they are harassing the the cacausian folks for their misdemeanor even though some slave owners do exactly deserve what was coming to them.
This is definition of self-delusion and victim-blaming folks. He's comparing Zoe Quinn and Anita to being slave owners. And that gamers are being persecuted by them. Like black people. For making a game about depression and having an alternative opinion on games.
Seriously.
Okay let's go down that road, yeah that's exactly what they did!
Anita have been broadcasting how egregious the gaming communities are with the women topic which have been debunked! She have been adamant in persecuting the entire industry.
Subsequently, the feminism media swallowed the wrong pill and presented it as fact and with their heavy hitter journalist on their side, furthered that damage.
You simple can't deny that and for that reason, one can definitely argue that an entire community have been dragged down to the dirt by these malevolent individuals with sufficient evidence to back up.
No one has 'debunked' anything because there is nothing to 'debunk.' She made a video series on games from a feminist perspective. This would be no different than an atheist making a video series on religious topics, or a 'nerd' doing a series on music and fashion.
These are all just perspectives folks. You can choose to ignore them or not. They actually are really valuable, because they broaden the reach of what you love, and depth or richness to it's discussion, and validate the significance of what you love to society and culture.
Yes, her videos made people extremely, extremely defensive. But that is not her problem. People need to grow up and realize having a differing opinion or perspective on something you like is not a personal attack.
The GamerGate community is so insulated and insecure that they have to play the victim card faster and more loosely more than any SJW so far. How's that for irony?
No, you are attempting to separate her and her perspective. And by the way, she isn't using exactly looking things through a traditional feminist point of view. Traditional feminist fights for women's equal rights as men not to denigrate men w/o malicious intent. That's not being a feminist, traditionally speaking but that's simply bullying and defamation.
So she needs to grow up, she needs to know that putting yourself out w/ malicious intent and false information will gets you bad rep. She needs to learn to cease scamming people out of their cash.
She has never denigrated men. With malicious intent. Unless you define being 'malicious' as having a point of view. She has probably gotten more and more defensive as trolls harass her. But who can fucking blame her?
She's not scamming anyone out of cash. Are you really that blindly arrogant that you believe everyone that agrees with her — and disagrees with you — is a mindless zombie? Who's prejudiced now?
This kind of rhetoric is why no mainstream media is picking up the GamerGate perspective. Because it's riddled with doublespeak, innuendo, pettiness and condescension. If these are GamerGates idea of 'facts' than the mainstream media is omitting, than the mainstream has done a bang-up job reporting on this issue, separating actual facts from subjective, editorial opinions.
After all, she is the criminal here.
This is literally, and figuratively, and categorically not true. She is a lady that carved a niche around an under-represented topic and audience and built a career around it. Whoopty-fricking-doo.
There are wrong opinions and right opinions much like right perspective and wrong perspectives.
She have the wrong opinion and the wrong perspective and brainwashed people to join her.
By presenting herself as a gamer expert while she is not, that's lying to the public.
So she lied to sell her product, that's scamming right there. She deliberately went out of her way to paint the entire industry and men in defamation.
You have nothing to gain by white knighting her only to perpetuate such criminal behavior. So stop it before you embarrass yourself.
You keep using the word criminal as if positioning herself as an expert is illegal.
Newsflash: the world is not a meritocracy. People misrepresent themselves as experts to get gain traction an every profession. As a designer, do you know how many 'social media' and 'sustainability' experts I come across now? Some are better than others. Some know their shit. Some are faking it until they make it, so to speak.
You're coming off as an eighth grader that just realized life isn't fair, and that some people are more successful than other because of their salesmanship. And that's A CRIME.
Something like this was bound to happen after all the crap that feminists (with Anita Sarkeesian on the forefront) have thrown on gamers and the gaming industry lately.
Anita made her videos and got a lot of opposition for it, simply because her ideas were idiotic. Then she made it seem like she was a victim. She made a lot of harsh accusations against video game developers and gamers in her videos, questioning their morals, calling them sexist etc, so it was she who started all the antagonizing. A lot of ppl obviously got offended by it, and obviously a few bad apples went a bit far, but it had nothing to do with her gender. Ppl like her and her supporters seems to believe that women can't simply be "victims", like men can. In their world, when a woman gets opposition, it's because she's a woman, and not because of her opinions. That's the story that they're trying to sell, and it's all bullshit.
Anita receiving that award solidified that the video game media was not on the side of the gamers and the developers, so there's a lot of ppl out there who feel betrayed. This is a war and wars tend to get ugly.
InternetAristocrat made a good point here in the beginning of this video about the hypocrisy between how a male developer who was accused of inappropriate sexual behaviour was treated, compared to how the Zoe Quinn controversy was silenced.
I haven't paid attention to all of this since it started like 2 months ago, and even then I only took a glance at it, but it's not only about her cheating on her boyfriend, there's corruption as well, similar to Anita if I remember correctly, ie money donated to her "projects" going directly into her pockets. InternetAristocrat talks about most of it all in his videos. It's all out there for everybody to form your own opinions.
If you don't know what GamerGate is, none of your opinions matters.
On topic:
A lot of misconception about GamerGate.
To put it in the most basic form: GamerGate is the gaming consumers' reactionary force to dissipate any biases in gaming reviews for a more wholesome competitive market.
A lot of you guys think that GamerGate requires some special membership to participate in. However, with the assumption that we all hope for a meritocracy system in the gaming industry, most of us are already, intentionally or not and even if you don't want to rally behind the hash tag or not, part of the GamerGate "movement".
However, this movement will mostly likely be a lost cause and let me tell y'all why.
In order to get rid of any media nepotism in the gaming community, we must look at all the parties involved that created nepotism in the first place. They are:
1. Producer of the game. Ex: Zoe Quinn. Laughing my ass off at people being ignorant on this one.
2. Game reviewer outlets. Ex: IGN, Kotaku, GameSpot that gave out favorable reviews because of sexual, monetary, and/or other reasons.
and lastly:
3. Any other people that support the gaming producer to further their own personal agendas. They are termed as "Social Justice Warriors", SJWs for short, basically the radical pro-feminism, pro-LGBT crowds that supported a certain game because both the game producers and their political beliefs aligns with each other for mutual benefit. Ex: Anita Sarkessian.
For corruption and nepotism to fully dispel in our industry, we have to get rid of ALL 3 parties. But here is the thing though, you can shame characters Zoe Quinn and Game reviewers/journalist all you want, the main beast you have to deal with are #3 of the list.
The question remains whether or not the integrity of gaming development can be saved w/ enough manpower in our side to get rid of all the parties or not.
So far, there have been a lot in-fighting in the community about who to blame it on. A lot of apologist by saying "Woah, you can't possibly go after X, Y, and Z. You have to go after A, B, and C instead!"
No the correct approach is to go after EVERYBODY involved, you can't afford to cherry pick the target.
Talk about misconceptions ...
Around the turn of the millennium gamers were trying to stop journalist to blame games for school shootings. This week "gamers" threatened with a school shooting to prevent a journalist from speaking out in public.
GamerGate is a toxic movement, a hate group, started by a sad little man who felt the need to get back at his failed relationship in public. Any sort of valid point it might have had went out of the window a long time ago. If you affiliate yourself with gamersgate, you stand with racists and mysoginists, you excuse harassers and abusers, you're a willing patsy and a horrible human being.
See none of those harassment would have occurred in the first place if characters such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkessian didn't go out of their way to scam everybody by faking the victimhood.
Its saying that African american folks in the civil right strike are "a toxic movement, a hate group" because they are harassing the the cacausian folks for their misdemeanor even though some slave owners do exactly deserve what was coming to them.
This is definition of self-delusion and victim-blaming folks. He's comparing Zoe Quinn and Anita to being slave owners. And that gamers are being persecuted by them. Like black people. For making a game about depression and having an alternative opinion on games.
Seriously.
Okay let's go down that road, yeah that's exactly what they did!
Anita have been broadcasting how egregious the gaming communities are with the women topic which have been debunked! She have been adamant in persecuting the entire industry.
Subsequently, the feminism media swallowed the wrong pill and presented it as fact and with their heavy hitter journalist on their side, furthered that damage.
You simple can't deny that and for that reason, one can definitely argue that an entire community have been dragged down to the dirt by these malevolent individuals with sufficient evidence to back up.
No one has 'debunked' anything because there is nothing to 'debunk.' She made a video series on games from a feminist perspective. This would be no different than an atheist making a video series on religious topics, or a 'nerd' doing a series on music and fashion.
These are all just perspectives folks. You can choose to ignore them or not. They actually are really valuable, because they broaden the reach of what you love, and depth or richness to it's discussion, and validate the significance of what you love to society and culture.
Yes, her videos made people extremely, extremely defensive. But that is not her problem. People need to grow up and realize having a differing opinion or perspective on something you like is not a personal attack.
The GamerGate community is so insulated and insecure that they have to play the victim card faster and more loosely more than any SJW so far. How's that for irony?
I think the problem here is that people feel she did not gain her perspective on video games from playing video games, but went into it with that perspective and then cherry picked examples out of context that would support that perspective.
She may be entitled to her opinion, but people are entitled to be pissed off when she uses poor journalism to try to get other people to adopt that opinion.
And using your analogies, you don't think people would get a little miffed if an influential atheist YouTuber started making religious videos under the pretense that they were not an atheist, and started making videos that make religion look bad by leaving out any of its redeeming qualities? Because that is a more specific analogy to what we are dealing with here, and I think people would get pretty pissed off, and rightfully so.
Still, like most other people have said, it's a shame that the trolls happen to be all on the same side of the fence, because it is clouding any real discussion of issues.
If that's the argument, than I think you have a point about her misrepresenting herself. But that doesn't necessarily negate the entirety of her perspective or arguments.
But I think one of the things that this 'culture war' is about, if you want to go there, is what defines a gamer, and who is entitled to having an opinion. To Anita, being a gamer might mean playing games on the weekends, and include board games and role playing games with her friends. To a hardcore gamer, it might mean following every trade magazine, buy every major release, playing 12 hours straight, etc.
In Anita's mind, perhaps she believes she's being honest — but then hit the cultural barrier of truly hardcore, rabid gamers. But her perspective, not only as a feminist, but as and entry-level gamer, DOES have value, in highlighting some of the issues and pain points that might prevent women from becoming hardcore gamers.
Personally, I think the answer to who gets to and doesn't get to have an opinion should be much broader than a hardcore gamer. Not because I am a PC-SJW warrior and want to impose my values onto you. But because that's how much I respect Gaming as an art form. It deserves wider appreciation, more diversity and a bigger audience. It deserves 'an art scene', even if you find it pretentious or douchey or no-fun (trust me, I'm designer and have to put up with hipster-douches all the time so I can relate).
The op-ed on game culture from The Escapist presents this view more clearly (see below). Not every car has be a Ferrari, and not only Ferrari owners should dictate what the market should be, because there's obviously potential for everyone to have and enjoy the benefits of cars. And if the car market just pandered to one demographic exclusively, there's a good chance that market wouldn't sustain itself. The cost of producing a triple-A game is just getting higher and higher with advance in technology, which is why there is interest in seeing whether or not there are aways to appeal to a broader demographic, and convert casual gamers (mostly women) to hardcore ones to justify the risk. That isn't a conspiracy, this is just good business. Maybe more developers should be stepping up to become the Pixar or Marvel of videogames.
Funny that you should mention Marvel, considering the latest "scandal" about the Spider Woman cover art.
The thing about demographic targeting is that it's extremely circular. You can have the exact same argument with genres and game types. The reason why AAA developers keep making the same style of FPS or 3rd party action game is because those keep selling in the millions. Or, oppositely you could say those are the only genres that sell in the millions because those are the only types of games AAA developers make.
Telling game companies that they would make more money by "broadening their appeal" is just as easily countered by saying that their focus is so narrow because decades of sales have shown where the money is. It's a chicken and the egg problem.
Which, really, is why the Indie scene is such a big deal right now in games. People who are looking for that broader appeal, or games that are outside of the AAA box, are turning to these small studios who are more willing to experiment and can make a living with tens-of-thousands of sales instead of millions. And when some of these niche games explode, like Minecraft, Bastion, or Super Meat Boy, the AAA developers are suddenly ready to jump back in as they see the money potential again.
And of course, the problem with the current Indie scene is that there are just too damn many of them being pumped out, and far too many of them are terrible. Which leads to a need for reviewers to point people to the quality.
Which leads to current problems, where the people who are supposed to be weeding out the diamonds in the rough are directing everyone's attention to unpolished, unprofessional work like Depression Quest or giving near perfect scores to games like Gone Home without any mention of its bloated price (a game which I loved, just as an aside, but would've been royally pissed if I'd paid the full $20 release cost).
Of course, I think the whole GamerGate thing is overblown. There do seem to be a lot of "professional" writers who shouldn't be treated as professionals anymore, and a lot of websites with low standards that will probably die off. But I don't think a consumer revolt is necessary for that, it's just something that will happen in the next few years because of natural market shifts.
I ... agree. Yaaaaay!
I do think triple-A games are caught in a recursive, create loop that needs to be broken. The industry is so unstable and high risk. For every cash-cow there is a game that falls flat on its face and shutters a studio. Which is why I can see why triple-A studios might want to broaden their appeal, or attempt to explore alternative times of lower-risk, easier to produce games.
This has nothing to do with anything, but I can understand why game journalist (and even serious developers) might applaud Depression Quest. It offers an alternative model to an interactive experience. I work in interactive books, and I do think there is a potential opportunity between books and text-based adventure that could be addressed. The greater sin journalists made, I feel, is categorizing it as 'a game'.
That shit happens all the time in art circles. Trust me, most CG and effects artists would balk at what is considered good 'video art'. I don't blame 'em. I don't hate on people trying to do something weird or quirky either.
Except the Visual Novel industry has been going strong for like a decade, so it's not like Depression Quest broke any ground.
And really, my complaints about it aren't really about the fact that it exists and that people have interest in it (even if I think it's a fairly poor representation of depression). It's that any text-based game that's full of grammatical errors and typos should be called out for lacking any professional polish.
If you don't know what GamerGate is, none of your opinions matters.
On topic:
A lot of misconception about GamerGate.
To put it in the most basic form: GamerGate is the gaming consumers' reactionary force to dissipate any biases in gaming reviews for a more wholesome competitive market.
A lot of you guys think that GamerGate requires some special membership to participate in. However, with the assumption that we all hope for a meritocracy system in the gaming industry, most of us are already, intentionally or not and even if you don't want to rally behind the hash tag or not, part of the GamerGate "movement".
However, this movement will mostly likely be a lost cause and let me tell y'all why.
In order to get rid of any media nepotism in the gaming community, we must look at all the parties involved that created nepotism in the first place. They are:
1. Producer of the game. Ex: Zoe Quinn. Laughing my ass off at people being ignorant on this one.
2. Game reviewer outlets. Ex: IGN, Kotaku, GameSpot that gave out favorable reviews because of sexual, monetary, and/or other reasons.
and lastly:
3. Any other people that support the gaming producer to further their own personal agendas. They are termed as "Social Justice Warriors", SJWs for short, basically the radical pro-feminism, pro-LGBT crowds that supported a certain game because both the game producers and their political beliefs aligns with each other for mutual benefit. Ex: Anita Sarkessian.
For corruption and nepotism to fully dispel in our industry, we have to get rid of ALL 3 parties. But here is the thing though, you can shame characters Zoe Quinn and Game reviewers/journalist all you want, the main beast you have to deal with are #3 of the list.
The question remains whether or not the integrity of gaming development can be saved w/ enough manpower in our side to get rid of all the parties or not.
So far, there have been a lot in-fighting in the community about who to blame it on. A lot of apologist by saying "Woah, you can't possibly go after X, Y, and Z. You have to go after A, B, and C instead!"
No the correct approach is to go after EVERYBODY involved, you can't afford to cherry pick the target.
Talk about misconceptions ...
Around the turn of the millennium gamers were trying to stop journalist to blame games for school shootings. This week "gamers" threatened with a school shooting to prevent a journalist from speaking out in public.
GamerGate is a toxic movement, a hate group, started by a sad little man who felt the need to get back at his failed relationship in public. Any sort of valid point it might have had went out of the window a long time ago. If you affiliate yourself with gamersgate, you stand with racists and mysoginists, you excuse harassers and abusers, you're a willing patsy and a horrible human being.
See none of those harassment would have occurred in the first place if characters such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkessian didn't go out of their way to scam everybody by faking the victimhood.
Its saying that African american folks in the civil right strike are "a toxic movement, a hate group" because they are harassing the the cacausian folks for their misdemeanor even though some slave owners do exactly deserve what was coming to them.
This is definition of self-delusion and victim-blaming folks. He's comparing Zoe Quinn and Anita to being slave owners. And that gamers are being persecuted by them. Like black people. For making a game about depression and having an alternative opinion on games.
Seriously.
Okay let's go down that road, yeah that's exactly what they did!
Anita have been broadcasting how egregious the gaming communities are with the women topic which have been debunked! She have been adamant in persecuting the entire industry.
Subsequently, the feminism media swallowed the wrong pill and presented it as fact and with their heavy hitter journalist on their side, furthered that damage.
You simple can't deny that and for that reason, one can definitely argue that an entire community have been dragged down to the dirt by these malevolent individuals with sufficient evidence to back up.
No one has 'debunked' anything because there is nothing to 'debunk.' She made a video series on games from a feminist perspective. This would be no different than an atheist making a video series on religious topics, or a 'nerd' doing a series on music and fashion.
These are all just perspectives folks. You can choose to ignore them or not. They actually are really valuable, because they broaden the reach of what you love, and depth or richness to it's discussion, and validate the significance of what you love to society and culture.
Yes, her videos made people extremely, extremely defensive. But that is not her problem. People need to grow up and realize having a differing opinion or perspective on something you like is not a personal attack.
The GamerGate community is so insulated and insecure that they have to play the victim card faster and more loosely more than any SJW so far. How's that for irony?
No, you are attempting to separate her and her perspective. And by the way, she isn't using exactly looking things through a traditional feminist point of view. Traditional feminist fights for women's equal rights as men not to denigrate men w/o malicious intent. That's not being a feminist, traditionally speaking but that's simply bullying and defamation.
So she needs to grow up, she needs to know that putting yourself out w/ malicious intent and false information will gets you bad rep. She needs to learn to cease scamming people out of their cash.
She has never denigrated men. With malicious intent. Unless you define being 'malicious' as having a point of view. She has probably gotten more and more defensive as trolls harass her. But who can fucking blame her?
She's not scamming anyone out of cash. Are you really that blindly arrogant that you believe everyone that agrees with her — and disagrees with you — is a mindless zombie? Who's prejudiced now?
This kind of rhetoric is why no mainstream media is picking up the GamerGate perspective. Because it's riddled with doublespeak, innuendo, pettiness and condescension. If these are GamerGates idea of 'facts' than the mainstream media is omitting, than the mainstream has done a bang-up job reporting on this issue, separating actual facts from subjective, editorial opinions.
After all, she is the criminal here.
This is literally, and figuratively, and categorically not true. She is a lady that carved a niche around an under-represented topic and audience and built a career around it. Whoopty-fricking-doo.
There are wrong opinions and right opinions much like right perspective and wrong perspectives.
She have the wrong opinion and the wrong perspective and brainwashed people to join her.
By presenting herself as a gamer expert while she is not, that's lying to the public.
So she lied to sell her product, that's scamming right there. She deliberately went out of her way to paint the entire industry and men in defamation.
You have nothing to gain by white knighting her only to perpetuate such criminal behavior. So stop it before you embarrass yourself.
You keep using the word criminal as if positioning herself as an expert is illegal.
Newsflash: the world is not a meritocracy. People misrepresent themselves as experts to get gain traction an every profession. As a designer, do you know how many 'social media' and 'sustainability' experts I come across now? Some are better than others. Some know their shit. Some are faking it until they make it, so to speak.
You're coming off as an eighth grader that just realized life isn't fair, and that some people are more successful than other because of their salesmanship. And that's A CRIME.
No, that's life dude. Deal with it.
No I recognize that life is not fair. But it doesn't have to be unfair for the gaming community. No, it should be totally unfair for the criminal.
By supporting a criminal like Anita Sarkessian, you are an accomplice yourself.
This is what you are doing, you are advocating that a murder can be caught red-handed with hard evidence but hey because life is unfair, she/he can't be prosecuted.
Again, you are not helping the gaming community with that stance. So why are you still posting here? If you want to wreak the industry, do it elsewhere because TL isn't the place to do so.
If you don't know what GamerGate is, none of your opinions matters.
On topic:
A lot of misconception about GamerGate.
To put it in the most basic form: GamerGate is the gaming consumers' reactionary force to dissipate any biases in gaming reviews for a more wholesome competitive market.
A lot of you guys think that GamerGate requires some special membership to participate in. However, with the assumption that we all hope for a meritocracy system in the gaming industry, most of us are already, intentionally or not and even if you don't want to rally behind the hash tag or not, part of the GamerGate "movement".
However, this movement will mostly likely be a lost cause and let me tell y'all why.
In order to get rid of any media nepotism in the gaming community, we must look at all the parties involved that created nepotism in the first place. They are:
1. Producer of the game. Ex: Zoe Quinn. Laughing my ass off at people being ignorant on this one.
2. Game reviewer outlets. Ex: IGN, Kotaku, GameSpot that gave out favorable reviews because of sexual, monetary, and/or other reasons.
and lastly:
3. Any other people that support the gaming producer to further their own personal agendas. They are termed as "Social Justice Warriors", SJWs for short, basically the radical pro-feminism, pro-LGBT crowds that supported a certain game because both the game producers and their political beliefs aligns with each other for mutual benefit. Ex: Anita Sarkessian.
For corruption and nepotism to fully dispel in our industry, we have to get rid of ALL 3 parties. But here is the thing though, you can shame characters Zoe Quinn and Game reviewers/journalist all you want, the main beast you have to deal with are #3 of the list.
The question remains whether or not the integrity of gaming development can be saved w/ enough manpower in our side to get rid of all the parties or not.
So far, there have been a lot in-fighting in the community about who to blame it on. A lot of apologist by saying "Woah, you can't possibly go after X, Y, and Z. You have to go after A, B, and C instead!"
No the correct approach is to go after EVERYBODY involved, you can't afford to cherry pick the target.
Talk about misconceptions ...
Around the turn of the millennium gamers were trying to stop journalist to blame games for school shootings. This week "gamers" threatened with a school shooting to prevent a journalist from speaking out in public.
GamerGate is a toxic movement, a hate group, started by a sad little man who felt the need to get back at his failed relationship in public. Any sort of valid point it might have had went out of the window a long time ago. If you affiliate yourself with gamersgate, you stand with racists and mysoginists, you excuse harassers and abusers, you're a willing patsy and a horrible human being.
See none of those harassment would have occurred in the first place if characters such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkessian didn't go out of their way to scam everybody by faking the victimhood.
Its saying that African american folks in the civil right strike are "a toxic movement, a hate group" because they are harassing the the cacausian folks for their misdemeanor even though some slave owners do exactly deserve what was coming to them.
This is definition of self-delusion and victim-blaming folks. He's comparing Zoe Quinn and Anita to being slave owners. And that gamers are being persecuted by them. Like black people. For making a game about depression and having an alternative opinion on games.
Seriously.
Okay let's go down that road, yeah that's exactly what they did!
Anita have been broadcasting how egregious the gaming communities are with the women topic which have been debunked! She have been adamant in persecuting the entire industry.
Subsequently, the feminism media swallowed the wrong pill and presented it as fact and with their heavy hitter journalist on their side, furthered that damage.
You simple can't deny that and for that reason, one can definitely argue that an entire community have been dragged down to the dirt by these malevolent individuals with sufficient evidence to back up.
No one has 'debunked' anything because there is nothing to 'debunk.' She made a video series on games from a feminist perspective. This would be no different than an atheist making a video series on religious topics, or a 'nerd' doing a series on music and fashion.
These are all just perspectives folks. You can choose to ignore them or not. They actually are really valuable, because they broaden the reach of what you love, and depth or richness to it's discussion, and validate the significance of what you love to society and culture.
Yes, her videos made people extremely, extremely defensive. But that is not her problem. People need to grow up and realize having a differing opinion or perspective on something you like is not a personal attack.
The GamerGate community is so insulated and insecure that they have to play the victim card faster and more loosely more than any SJW so far. How's that for irony?
No, you are attempting to separate her and her perspective. And by the way, she isn't using exactly looking things through a traditional feminist point of view. Traditional feminist fights for women's equal rights as men not to denigrate men w/o malicious intent. That's not being a feminist, traditionally speaking but that's simply bullying and defamation.
So she needs to grow up, she needs to know that putting yourself out w/ malicious intent and false information will gets you bad rep. She needs to learn to cease scamming people out of their cash.
She has never denigrated men. With malicious intent. Unless you define being 'malicious' as having a point of view. She has probably gotten more and more defensive as trolls harass her. But who can fucking blame her?
She's not scamming anyone out of cash. Are you really that blindly arrogant that you believe everyone that agrees with her — and disagrees with you — is a mindless zombie? Who's prejudiced now?
This kind of rhetoric is why no mainstream media is picking up the GamerGate perspective. Because it's riddled with doublespeak, innuendo, pettiness and condescension. If these are GamerGates idea of 'facts' than the mainstream media is omitting, than the mainstream has done a bang-up job reporting on this issue, separating actual facts from subjective, editorial opinions.
After all, she is the criminal here.
This is literally, and figuratively, and categorically not true. She is a lady that carved a niche around an under-represented topic and audience and built a career around it. Whoopty-fricking-doo.
There are wrong opinions and right opinions much like right perspective and wrong perspectives.
She have the wrong opinion and the wrong perspective and brainwashed people to join her.
By presenting herself as a gamer expert while she is not, that's lying to the public.
So she lied to sell her product, that's scamming right there. She deliberately went out of her way to paint the entire industry and men in defamation.
You have nothing to gain by white knighting her only to perpetuate such criminal behavior. So stop it before you embarrass yourself.
You keep using the word criminal as if positioning herself as an expert is illegal.
Newsflash: the world is not a meritocracy. People misrepresent themselves as experts to get gain traction an every profession. As a designer, do you know how many 'social media' and 'sustainability' experts I come across now? Some are better than others. Some know their shit. Some are faking it until they make it, so to speak.
You're coming off as an eighth grader that just realized life isn't fair, and that some people are more successful than other because of their salesmanship. And that's A CRIME.
No, that's life dude. Deal with it.
Yeah I have to agree with Defacer here re: Anita. Being wrong is not illegal (thank fuck). At BEST, presenting herself as a gamer when she doesn't appear to be, is misrepresenting her product and frankly in the US you can get away with that a great deal. She embellished the truth in that regard (and I base that information on the footage in which she stated during a lecture that she was not in fact a gamer and didn't like games because she didn't like blowing peoples heads off).
Thing is, her not being a gamer is irrelevant. She could make perfectly salient arguments without it and it's best to criticise her work based on the points she makes rather than ad hominem. From watching her videos, some of the gaps in her arguments could be attributed to a lack of gaming experience. She does seem to have this annoying habit of ignoring the mechanics of the games themselves if they contradict her narrative, which is to me the sign of someone that doesn't play games all that much. Thing is who cares? If there's a problem with the argument, attack the argument, don't attack the person making it.
Except the Visual Novel industry has been going strong for like a decade, so it's not like Depression Quest broke any ground.
And really, my complaints about it aren't really about the fact that it exists and that people have interest in it (even if I think it's a fairly poor representation of depression). It's that any text-based game that's full of grammatical errors and typos should be called out for lacking any professional polish.
Yeah it's also not the first game to touch on issues of depression either (you could argue Actual Sunlight did a better job). I support DQ due to its message, I think that's important, but simultaneously it is a terrible videogame and if I were to critique it I'd shred it. I'm choosing not to because I can't be arsed with the hassle that would come from it.
On October 18 2014 07:03 Xiphos wrote: This is what you are doing, you are advocating that a murder can be caught red-handed with hard evidence but hey because life is unfair, she/he can't be prosecuted.
Today I've learned that having ill-informed opinions on a public platform is the equivalent of being a murderer. Should I suppose that sending death threats to silence Anita is the gamer equivalent of social justice? Or do the rights of the "gaming community" somehow transcend the limitations of the law?
If you don't know what GamerGate is, none of your opinions matters.
On topic:
A lot of misconception about GamerGate.
To put it in the most basic form: GamerGate is the gaming consumers' reactionary force to dissipate any biases in gaming reviews for a more wholesome competitive market.
A lot of you guys think that GamerGate requires some special membership to participate in. However, with the assumption that we all hope for a meritocracy system in the gaming industry, most of us are already, intentionally or not and even if you don't want to rally behind the hash tag or not, part of the GamerGate "movement".
However, this movement will mostly likely be a lost cause and let me tell y'all why.
In order to get rid of any media nepotism in the gaming community, we must look at all the parties involved that created nepotism in the first place. They are:
1. Producer of the game. Ex: Zoe Quinn. Laughing my ass off at people being ignorant on this one.
2. Game reviewer outlets. Ex: IGN, Kotaku, GameSpot that gave out favorable reviews because of sexual, monetary, and/or other reasons.
and lastly:
3. Any other people that support the gaming producer to further their own personal agendas. They are termed as "Social Justice Warriors", SJWs for short, basically the radical pro-feminism, pro-LGBT crowds that supported a certain game because both the game producers and their political beliefs aligns with each other for mutual benefit. Ex: Anita Sarkessian.
For corruption and nepotism to fully dispel in our industry, we have to get rid of ALL 3 parties. But here is the thing though, you can shame characters Zoe Quinn and Game reviewers/journalist all you want, the main beast you have to deal with are #3 of the list.
The question remains whether or not the integrity of gaming development can be saved w/ enough manpower in our side to get rid of all the parties or not.
So far, there have been a lot in-fighting in the community about who to blame it on. A lot of apologist by saying "Woah, you can't possibly go after X, Y, and Z. You have to go after A, B, and C instead!"
No the correct approach is to go after EVERYBODY involved, you can't afford to cherry pick the target.
Talk about misconceptions ...
Around the turn of the millennium gamers were trying to stop journalist to blame games for school shootings. This week "gamers" threatened with a school shooting to prevent a journalist from speaking out in public.
GamerGate is a toxic movement, a hate group, started by a sad little man who felt the need to get back at his failed relationship in public. Any sort of valid point it might have had went out of the window a long time ago. If you affiliate yourself with gamersgate, you stand with racists and mysoginists, you excuse harassers and abusers, you're a willing patsy and a horrible human being.
See none of those harassment would have occurred in the first place if characters such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkessian didn't go out of their way to scam everybody by faking the victimhood.
Its saying that African american folks in the civil right strike are "a toxic movement, a hate group" because they are harassing the the cacausian folks for their misdemeanor even though some slave owners do exactly deserve what was coming to them.
This is definition of self-delusion and victim-blaming folks. He's comparing Zoe Quinn and Anita to being slave owners. And that gamers are being persecuted by them. Like black people. For making a game about depression and having an alternative opinion on games.
Seriously.
Okay let's go down that road, yeah that's exactly what they did!
Anita have been broadcasting how egregious the gaming communities are with the women topic which have been debunked! She have been adamant in persecuting the entire industry.
Subsequently, the feminism media swallowed the wrong pill and presented it as fact and with their heavy hitter journalist on their side, furthered that damage.
You simple can't deny that and for that reason, one can definitely argue that an entire community have been dragged down to the dirt by these malevolent individuals with sufficient evidence to back up.
No one has 'debunked' anything because there is nothing to 'debunk.' She made a video series on games from a feminist perspective. This would be no different than an atheist making a video series on religious topics, or a 'nerd' doing a series on music and fashion.
These are all just perspectives folks. You can choose to ignore them or not. They actually are really valuable, because they broaden the reach of what you love, and depth or richness to it's discussion, and validate the significance of what you love to society and culture.
Yes, her videos made people extremely, extremely defensive. But that is not her problem. People need to grow up and realize having a differing opinion or perspective on something you like is not a personal attack.
The GamerGate community is so insulated and insecure that they have to play the victim card faster and more loosely more than any SJW so far. How's that for irony?
No, you are attempting to separate her and her perspective. And by the way, she isn't using exactly looking things through a traditional feminist point of view. Traditional feminist fights for women's equal rights as men not to denigrate men w/o malicious intent. That's not being a feminist, traditionally speaking but that's simply bullying and defamation.
So she needs to grow up, she needs to know that putting yourself out w/ malicious intent and false information will gets you bad rep. She needs to learn to cease scamming people out of their cash.
She has never denigrated men. With malicious intent. Unless you define being 'malicious' as having a point of view. She has probably gotten more and more defensive as trolls harass her. But who can fucking blame her?
She's not scamming anyone out of cash. Are you really that blindly arrogant that you believe everyone that agrees with her — and disagrees with you — is a mindless zombie? Who's prejudiced now?
This kind of rhetoric is why no mainstream media is picking up the GamerGate perspective. Because it's riddled with doublespeak, innuendo, pettiness and condescension. If these are GamerGates idea of 'facts' than the mainstream media is omitting, than the mainstream has done a bang-up job reporting on this issue, separating actual facts from subjective, editorial opinions.
After all, she is the criminal here.
This is literally, and figuratively, and categorically not true. She is a lady that carved a niche around an under-represented topic and audience and built a career around it. Whoopty-fricking-doo.
There are wrong opinions and right opinions much like right perspective and wrong perspectives.
She have the wrong opinion and the wrong perspective and brainwashed people to join her.
By presenting herself as a gamer expert while she is not, that's lying to the public.
So she lied to sell her product, that's scamming right there. She deliberately went out of her way to paint the entire industry and men in defamation.
You have nothing to gain by white knighting her only to perpetuate such criminal behavior. So stop it before you embarrass yourself.
You keep using the word criminal as if positioning herself as an expert is illegal.
Newsflash: the world is not a meritocracy. People misrepresent themselves as experts to get gain traction an every profession. As a designer, do you know how many 'social media' and 'sustainability' experts I come across now? Some are better than others. Some know their shit. Some are faking it until they make it, so to speak.
You're coming off as an eighth grader that just realized life isn't fair, and that some people are more successful than other because of their salesmanship. And that's A CRIME.
No, that's life dude. Deal with it.
I think it's fairly safe to just ignore Xiphos. He tends to be quite inflammatory on a lot of subjects.
On October 18 2014 07:03 Xiphos wrote: This is what you are doing, you are advocating that a murder can be caught red-handed with hard evidence but hey because life is unfair, she/he can't be prosecuted.
Today I've learned that having ill-informed opinions on a public platform is the equivalent of being a murderer. Should I suppose that sending death threats to silence Anita is the gamer equivalent of social justice?
Around the turn of the millennium gamers were trying to stop journalist to blame games for school shootings. This week "gamers" threatened with a school shooting to prevent a journalist from speaking out in public.
GamerGate is a toxic movement, a hate group, started by a sad little man who felt the need to get back at his failed relationship in public. Any sort of valid point it might have had went out of the window a long time ago. If you affiliate yourself with gamersgate, you stand with racists and mysoginists, you excuse harassers and abusers, you're a willing patsy and a horrible human being.
See none of those harassment would have occurred in the first place if characters such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkessian didn't go out of their way to scam everybody by faking the victimhood.
Its saying that African american folks in the civil right strike are "a toxic movement, a hate group" because they are harassing the the cacausian folks for their misdemeanor even though some slave owners do exactly deserve what was coming to them.
This is definition of self-delusion and victim-blaming folks. He's comparing Zoe Quinn and Anita to being slave owners. And that gamers are being persecuted by them. Like black people. For making a game about depression and having an alternative opinion on games.
Seriously.
Okay let's go down that road, yeah that's exactly what they did!
Anita have been broadcasting how egregious the gaming communities are with the women topic which have been debunked! She have been adamant in persecuting the entire industry.
Subsequently, the feminism media swallowed the wrong pill and presented it as fact and with their heavy hitter journalist on their side, furthered that damage.
You simple can't deny that and for that reason, one can definitely argue that an entire community have been dragged down to the dirt by these malevolent individuals with sufficient evidence to back up.
No one has 'debunked' anything because there is nothing to 'debunk.' She made a video series on games from a feminist perspective. This would be no different than an atheist making a video series on religious topics, or a 'nerd' doing a series on music and fashion.
These are all just perspectives folks. You can choose to ignore them or not. They actually are really valuable, because they broaden the reach of what you love, and depth or richness to it's discussion, and validate the significance of what you love to society and culture.
Yes, her videos made people extremely, extremely defensive. But that is not her problem. People need to grow up and realize having a differing opinion or perspective on something you like is not a personal attack.
The GamerGate community is so insulated and insecure that they have to play the victim card faster and more loosely more than any SJW so far. How's that for irony?
No, you are attempting to separate her and her perspective. And by the way, she isn't using exactly looking things through a traditional feminist point of view. Traditional feminist fights for women's equal rights as men not to denigrate men w/o malicious intent. That's not being a feminist, traditionally speaking but that's simply bullying and defamation.
So she needs to grow up, she needs to know that putting yourself out w/ malicious intent and false information will gets you bad rep. She needs to learn to cease scamming people out of their cash.
She has never denigrated men. With malicious intent. Unless you define being 'malicious' as having a point of view. She has probably gotten more and more defensive as trolls harass her. But who can fucking blame her?
She's not scamming anyone out of cash. Are you really that blindly arrogant that you believe everyone that agrees with her — and disagrees with you — is a mindless zombie? Who's prejudiced now?
This kind of rhetoric is why no mainstream media is picking up the GamerGate perspective. Because it's riddled with doublespeak, innuendo, pettiness and condescension. If these are GamerGates idea of 'facts' than the mainstream media is omitting, than the mainstream has done a bang-up job reporting on this issue, separating actual facts from subjective, editorial opinions.
After all, she is the criminal here.
This is literally, and figuratively, and categorically not true. She is a lady that carved a niche around an under-represented topic and audience and built a career around it. Whoopty-fricking-doo.
There are wrong opinions and right opinions much like right perspective and wrong perspectives.
She have the wrong opinion and the wrong perspective and brainwashed people to join her.
By presenting herself as a gamer expert while she is not, that's lying to the public.
So she lied to sell her product, that's scamming right there. She deliberately went out of her way to paint the entire industry and men in defamation.
You have nothing to gain by white knighting her only to perpetuate such criminal behavior. So stop it before you embarrass yourself.
You keep using the word criminal as if positioning herself as an expert is illegal.
Newsflash: the world is not a meritocracy. People misrepresent themselves as experts to get gain traction an every profession. As a designer, do you know how many 'social media' and 'sustainability' experts I come across now? Some are better than others. Some know their shit. Some are faking it until they make it, so to speak.
You're coming off as an eighth grader that just realized life isn't fair, and that some people are more successful than other because of their salesmanship. And that's A CRIME.
No, that's life dude. Deal with it.
No I recognize that life is not fair. But it doesn't have to be unfair for the gaming community. No, it should be totally unfair for the criminal.
By supporting a criminal like Anita Sarkessian, you are an accomplice yourself.
This is what you are doing, you are advocating that a murder can be caught red-handed with hard evidence but hey because life is unfair, she/he can't be prosecuted.
Again, you are not helping the gaming community with that stance. So why are you still posting here? If you want to wreak the industry, do it elsewhere because TL isn't the place to do so.
Please, do go on and tell me how I'm an accomplice to murder and am wrecking the gaming community. I was not aware I was this powerful.
See none of those harassment would have occurred in the first place if characters such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkessian didn't go out of their way to scam everybody by faking the victimhood.
Its saying that African american folks in the civil right strike are "a toxic movement, a hate group" because they are harassing the the cacausian folks for their misdemeanor even though some slave owners do exactly deserve what was coming to them.
This is definition of self-delusion and victim-blaming folks. He's comparing Zoe Quinn and Anita to being slave owners. And that gamers are being persecuted by them. Like black people. For making a game about depression and having an alternative opinion on games.
Seriously.
Okay let's go down that road, yeah that's exactly what they did!
Anita have been broadcasting how egregious the gaming communities are with the women topic which have been debunked! She have been adamant in persecuting the entire industry.
Subsequently, the feminism media swallowed the wrong pill and presented it as fact and with their heavy hitter journalist on their side, furthered that damage.
You simple can't deny that and for that reason, one can definitely argue that an entire community have been dragged down to the dirt by these malevolent individuals with sufficient evidence to back up.
No one has 'debunked' anything because there is nothing to 'debunk.' She made a video series on games from a feminist perspective. This would be no different than an atheist making a video series on religious topics, or a 'nerd' doing a series on music and fashion.
These are all just perspectives folks. You can choose to ignore them or not. They actually are really valuable, because they broaden the reach of what you love, and depth or richness to it's discussion, and validate the significance of what you love to society and culture.
Yes, her videos made people extremely, extremely defensive. But that is not her problem. People need to grow up and realize having a differing opinion or perspective on something you like is not a personal attack.
The GamerGate community is so insulated and insecure that they have to play the victim card faster and more loosely more than any SJW so far. How's that for irony?
No, you are attempting to separate her and her perspective. And by the way, she isn't using exactly looking things through a traditional feminist point of view. Traditional feminist fights for women's equal rights as men not to denigrate men w/o malicious intent. That's not being a feminist, traditionally speaking but that's simply bullying and defamation.
So she needs to grow up, she needs to know that putting yourself out w/ malicious intent and false information will gets you bad rep. She needs to learn to cease scamming people out of their cash.
She has never denigrated men. With malicious intent. Unless you define being 'malicious' as having a point of view. She has probably gotten more and more defensive as trolls harass her. But who can fucking blame her?
She's not scamming anyone out of cash. Are you really that blindly arrogant that you believe everyone that agrees with her — and disagrees with you — is a mindless zombie? Who's prejudiced now?
This kind of rhetoric is why no mainstream media is picking up the GamerGate perspective. Because it's riddled with doublespeak, innuendo, pettiness and condescension. If these are GamerGates idea of 'facts' than the mainstream media is omitting, than the mainstream has done a bang-up job reporting on this issue, separating actual facts from subjective, editorial opinions.
After all, she is the criminal here.
This is literally, and figuratively, and categorically not true. She is a lady that carved a niche around an under-represented topic and audience and built a career around it. Whoopty-fricking-doo.
There are wrong opinions and right opinions much like right perspective and wrong perspectives.
She have the wrong opinion and the wrong perspective and brainwashed people to join her.
By presenting herself as a gamer expert while she is not, that's lying to the public.
So she lied to sell her product, that's scamming right there. She deliberately went out of her way to paint the entire industry and men in defamation.
You have nothing to gain by white knighting her only to perpetuate such criminal behavior. So stop it before you embarrass yourself.
You keep using the word criminal as if positioning herself as an expert is illegal.
Newsflash: the world is not a meritocracy. People misrepresent themselves as experts to get gain traction an every profession. As a designer, do you know how many 'social media' and 'sustainability' experts I come across now? Some are better than others. Some know their shit. Some are faking it until they make it, so to speak.
You're coming off as an eighth grader that just realized life isn't fair, and that some people are more successful than other because of their salesmanship. And that's A CRIME.
No, that's life dude. Deal with it.
No I recognize that life is not fair. But it doesn't have to be unfair for the gaming community. No, it should be totally unfair for the criminal.
By supporting a criminal like Anita Sarkessian, you are an accomplice yourself.
This is what you are doing, you are advocating that a murder can be caught red-handed with hard evidence but hey because life is unfair, she/he can't be prosecuted.
Again, you are not helping the gaming community with that stance. So why are you still posting here? If you want to wreak the industry, do it elsewhere because TL isn't the place to do so.
Please, do go on and tell me how I'm an accomplice to murder and am wrecking the gaming community. I was not aware I was this powerful.
You are not.
Here is what you are doing:
Anita clearly scammed people into buying her narrative or rather, completely spurious narrative. She got money from bunch of people by brainwashing them. Then not only did she not fulfill her end of the bargain, she went on to fake death threat to gain sympathy points to frame herself as the victim. And later, it was found out that she lied about even reporting the case to any police.
Now legally speaking, the only criminal activity that she is the process of committing is being a scam artist.
But morally speaking, she denigrated an entire community of industry and also an entire gender.
So by supporting her, you are indeed covering up for her criminal activity and also supporting her case to tear down the industry.
EPT
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