I was a latecomer to the #GamerGate affair. Oh, as an interested party, I had been aware of it since the beginning, but it took a long time for me to comment on the issue. The reason, of course, is that I am not as hardcore about my gaming as many who are involved.
That isn’t to say I am a casual gamer either. Recently, I built an arcade cabinet out of plywood. That isn’t for the “casual” hobbyist, I can assure you. I play the same sort of games “hardcore” gamers play, I just play them less often. My time is much more limited. I have a family, a job that consumes a great deal of time and I am also a DJ. It’s a balancing act.
Not for the faint of gaming heart, I assure you.
Yet, this is also why #GamerGate is also so important to me. In the old days, if I accidentally played a terrible game, what of it? I had the time to burn. Today, I rely on the community, on reviews, journalists and ratings to help me decide which game to invest my time in. I have to trust that these people are being truthful in their assessments.
The Zoe Quinn affair proves that they are untrustworthy. Oh, Depression Quest isn’t the sort of “game” I would have been interested in anyway. But if journalists could be seduced into covering something that bad favorably, then how much of what I’m reading is complete bullshit?
But that was only the beginning of #GamerGate. Once the Social Justice Warrior crowd got involved, accusations of sexism, racism, transphobia and pretty much any other SJW buzzword were lobbed into the fray. This revealed a far greater threat to the gaming community than journalistic ethics.
Censorship.
Another SJW using their preferred battle tactic: censorship. This guy is basically saying “I won’t talk to you until you agree with me.” Because THAT is mature.
Gamers are some of the most diverse people I’ve ever known. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of the content of your character. Well, that’s pretty much all gamers are judged on. We don’t see each other, most of the time. I don’t know if the other person I’m fighting in Starcraft II is a man, a woman, trans, Black, White, Asian, etc… And I also don’t care. I care about winning the game, which is rare for me since I don’t have the time to invest in order to become a Starcraft God. That, and somebody decreed it to be the national sport of South Korea (gamers are diverse, remember?).
Gamers are also used to being insulted, teased and trolled. Many of them were bullied as children. As adults… well let’s just say they don’t censor their opinions. Join a CoD game and listen in. A friend of mine once referred to gamers as “the only people more offensive than you.” There’s a lot of truth to that statement. Yet it is a general offensiveness. It is not targeted at your race or gender. It is targeted at YOU, personally. Believe me, I know. In the days of Quake 3, I was a hardcore camper, and very, very good at it. Everybody knows a camper is going to attract some serious hate. Should I start a support group for campers? Camper prejudice!
Yeah… I’ve heard this plenty of times. Campers get more hate than anyone in gaming. Period.
So trying to censor gamers is an exercise in futility. Furthermore, calling gamers names isn’t going to work on most of them. We’re too used to that, at this point.
But the issue is still huge. SJWs wanted to extend censorship to the games themselves.
One of the common accusations of the anti-#GamerGate crowd is that everyone is a bunch of Right wingers. That’s patently false. In fact, Libertarianism seems to be much more common than Conservatism among gamers (I certainly lean that way myself). And many #GamerGate supporters are Moderates or even Liberals, just not SJW Liberals. Ironically, in crying for censorship in games, and “diversity panels” the SJWs are acting more like Conservatives than #GamerGate supporters are. Hard-Right Conservatives aren’t terribly fond of violent video games, after all.
They want more women in certain roles, more trans people in other roles, more “people of color” here or there. They have a hard time understanding that gamers don’t care about these things. If gamers see a Black man or a Transwoman as a lead in a game, wonderful. Does the game suck? If it does, they won’t play it. If it doesn’t, they will. But I don’t want the creative freedom of developers hamstrung by a bunch of SJWs on a personal crusade.
I mean, would the Grand Theft Auto series of games even exist if SJWs were at the helm? Absolutely not. That would have been torpedoed on day one. But we all know they are fun. And that’s what matters. The SJWs attempted to use this incident as evidence of our prejudice, of our hate, in order to advance THEIR agenda. We are the defenders here, NOT the attackers, as they portray us.
This game would not exist if SJWs had their way.
Consider the lunacy of the SJW position. They are angry because people are being oppressed in video game portrayals. They are angry because a “game developer” who made a terrible game got called out for doing so. They are angry because a woman who did terrible things to her boyfriend got criticized for her behavior. They are mad because we don’t like the idea of people sleeping with journalists for favorable coverage.
If Zoe Quinn had been a man sleeping with female journalists, what would the SJWs have said then, eh?
If we judge people on the content of their character then Zoe Quinn is a terrible person who made a terrible game. The journalists who took her “bribes” are similarly terrible people. And the SJWs trying to use this incident as cover for their censorship campaign are going to ensure that more terrible games, made by more terrible people, reviewed by more corrupt people, come to dominate our hobby. This cannot be allowed.
To that, I can only say: Fuck off.
To all my #GamerGate compatriots, whatever gender, race, creed and political persuasion, I can only say: Stay the course and we will win.
Lavos must die. Er… Anita and Zoe must be defeated.
I really, really wish we didn’t fall on opposite sides of the line on this.
Well, not necessarily opposite sides. I’m not an Anti-GamerGate guy, I’m a “knock this shit off you fucking animals” guy.
There are simple truths to this shit show that are unacknowledged even in this article.
Primarily, the “ethics violations” in question were debunked. Policies were put in place, investigations were conducted, allegations of wrongdoing were proven false.
GamerGate isn’t about ethics in Gaming Journalism.
It’s a digital Ferguson. It’s an excuse for animals to burn and pillage behind the anonymous shroud of the WWW.
Death threats have been slung, informative lectures have been cancelled, personal information has been splattered all over public forums, developers have been run out of house and home because a man got treated like shit by a woman and decided to step up on his digital soapbox, rather than sack up and hit the bar for some cheap beer and easy rebound sex.
Bullshit.
GamerGate, the hashtag, the movement, the very idea needs to die and be buried.
That’s my position.
I’ll edit to say that I don’t actively fight against GamerGate, I steadfastly ignore it. Fucking shit sandwich without the bread.
I do not share your faith in the investigations conducted, nor their results. A game dev slept with at least five journalists, all of which who then covered her game positively. The game was a complete piece of crap, a digital turd.
That being said, it COULD have ended there. One point we agree on is that the boyfriend was a pussy and should have gone to the bar, doused his sorrows in some booze and gone on with his life. But he didn’t, and a little sex scandal entered the industry.
It still could have ended there. Other gaming journalists at these media outlets could have spoken as you did here, declared the thing a shit sandwich, laughed at the morons dumb enough to sleep with Zoe Quinn, and went on with their lives.
My interest in the affair (pun) would have died a quick death had they done so. But no, the media outlets ATTACKED the people who were talking about the issue, not the dumbass journalists who did the thing. Even then, I could have chalked it up to another immature flame war on the internet.
But in the process of the attack, they accused the gaming industry itself of being sexist, racist, homophobic, etc… and jumped on the pro-censorship bandwagon (See: Anita Sarkeesian, et. al.). There’s a group of hard-Right folks who have been trying to blame violence on video games forever. They wanted to censor games all along. Now they are joined by the hard-Left folks who want censorship of a different kind: Social “Justice” and affirmative action.
Now THAT caught my interest, right away. As you know, I’m extremely opposed to the notion of censorship and the political causes of the hard-Left. So I ignored #GamerGate right up until the point that the pro-censorship people started crawling out of the woodwork. Once they did, I was forced to take a side.
As for death threats and the like… well that’s par for the course on the modern internet. Both sides are guilty of that. But, also, both sides have large groups of morons who I generally ignore for this reason. Those are your digital Ferguson types, and I am no part of them. I’m here because “Social Justice” is just mob rule, and attempting to censor my games and deliver control of the industry to the Left is a great way to piss me off. Hollywood, Universities and Big Publishing already went Leftist years ago. I’d rather not lose gaming too.
You know, after Ofc. Pantaleo and his brothers were cleared in Garner’s death, a march travelled through the streets of NYC chanting “(What do we want?) Dead cops! (When do we want ’em?) Now!”
Then, after Ofc. Liu and Ramos were murdered, the organizers of the march immediately “tried to distance themselves” from the mutt who did it. With a bunch of “it was figurative” and “we didn’t really mean it like that.”
Just the same, and largely unreported, was the killing of a witness at Ofc. Wilson’s indictment during the ensuing riots after the release of No True Bill.
The hashtag-activists and “peaceful” demonstrators “tried to distance themselves” from the chaos, “that’s not what we’re about.”
Bullshit.
GamerGate is the same way.
You don’t have a leg to stand on saying your way is the righteous route when the rhetoric your platform is based upon incites such activities.
I get it. There are concerns about ethics in journalism (shocker.) and the relations between game developers and newshounds.
Unfortunately, the GamerGate movement has incited such high emotion that we are again met with the situations we face in New York and Ferguson.
In the real world, the police officers were tried and convicted in the court of public opinion by those who have no experience, training, perspective, or business critiquing their actions, their lives were destroyed by hashtag-activism before a Jury ever convened. Race-baiters, anarchists, and profiteers drowned out the real concern long before the decision was made.
Thank God the Grand Juries in both courts chose to extrapolate from the EVIDENCE, and not the EMOTION.
Unfortunately, as there was no true crime, there will be no Grand Jury convening to lay to rest the problems that spurred GamerGate. But the rhetoric remains the same.
There is no hard evidence of actual ethics violations. As gaming journalism establishments have ONLY their ethics to keep them afloat, I’m inclined to err on the side of believing them, considering the long walk off a short plank they have ahead of them if proven they lied.
GamerGate activists run rampant around the itnernet, “trying to distance themselves” from the hackers, doxxing, and death threats. “That’s not what we’re about.”
Too bad your rhetoric is what inspired the actions.
Maybe we do need to analyze the actions of journalists and developers in the gaming community.
GamerGate will never be the platform to launch that discussion, it’s too much hype, too much emotion, and never enough fact.
What you do speaks so loud, I cannot hear what you say.
And, Adam Baldwin, for launching that stupid ass hashtag, you’re relieved of your Jayne duties until such a time as I determine you’re redeemed. I will have your hat, sir.
You will get zero argument from me where the police officers are concerned. Nor would I excuse the rioters and protesters from what they did. They called for the death of these officers.
They own that. They have blood on their hands.
I am honestly less concerned about the journalists who, let’s face it, we have known were corrupt for awhile than I am concerned about the Social Justice Warrior phenomenon. They want to thought-police everything.
Ben Kuchera, a writer for Kotaku, famously said “games aren’t just games.” He wants to police their content for perceived sexism, racism, etc… to make them politically correct. Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, Randi Harper and many others are on board with this, and pushing it hard.
Perhaps #GamerGate is the wrong tag to use for this, because of its use by some who are, charitably, of rather lesser intellectual capacity. Nonetheless, it is definitely a thing. And as flawed as the GamerGate people may be, they are the only boots on the ground available for the task. No one else is even talking.
And I’m tired of the Social Justice Warriors. They are lunatics. SJWs are the people who are participating in the Ferguson riots. They are the ones calling for dead cops — they also want censorship in games. They are totalitarian asshats convinced everything is the fault of some White Patriarchal boogeyman.
So, in a sense, this is an enemy-of-my-enemy situation. #GamerGate may be flawed, fucked up and have too many crazies in it, but they are fighting the SJWs and there are damned few others who are.
You and I fight them. But who else? If you’ve got some boots on the ground of the Culture War that you’re not telling me about, now’s the time, my friend.
On a side note, I don’t mind us being on opposite sides of this thing. We’re Americans. And you and I are civilized people, not like the rioting looters of Ferguson or the extremist Muslim loons. We can discuss things like rational men, rather than burning shit.
Of course, if my above response I feel the need to clarify I am speaking in generality when I say “you”, I am not addressing you directly in my attacks.
There is a lot more to GamerGate than you seem to understand. I bet the reason you don’t get it is because your head is up your ass and you got excrement for brains. Why don’t you do some actual research before you spew? It turns out, in the actual event, that this attempt to take over video games is a psychological operation directed from the very top of the food chain of power. It is no strange coincidence that Sarkeesian and Quinn turned up at the UN. It’s all about controlling everyone’s mind. Of course in your case there would seem to be no mind to control so you make it easy for them.
Those highly emotional people in gamergate you’re speaking of actually tend to be the same people. It’s just that they got burned by their own side and defected.
Despite being trans ‘herself’ Brianna Wu hates other transgenders. Not to mention a vast swath of anti-GG SJWs are TERFs (Trans-exclusionary Radfems) So, GG got transgenders.
Pixelgoth/Deviever threw her sex-positive anarchistic feminist punk friends under the bus and gave her patreon money to Anita as literal fucking Indulgence. (And they say they’re all atheist, lmao!) So, we got actual SJWs and black bloc ‘molotov line’ punks from there.
Then there’s people whom BACKED Anita in the kickstarter and are pissed she never delivered, like TheLEOPirate and Alpherior.
So yes, it IS a very enemy-of-my-enemy situation.
Thing is, SJWs in gaming were allowed to wall themselves off in their own little Indie Forbidden City. Unlike the radfems you’re used to, they had NO outside contact with the outer world. It became a literal ivory tower. And those who fall from the tower…well…they better climb back up fast, before they get lost in the faceless crowd of angry misogynists, right? Why else is their narrative so disconnected?
http://archive.today/sFtcH Here’s a great recent example of one of their cult leaders meeting his ‘adoring public’ of fellow lefties. Problem? They’re all not American nor white. UH OH, guess I can’t speak over them after all!
Incidents like this and the assault on Maddy Myers for calling GamerGhazi (a rival hashtag/subreddit they started to mock GG) useless and damaging, and also committing the cardinal sin of defending a ‘problematic’ game like Bayonetta, keep pushing them over to the pro-GG side, whether they want to be there or not.
And once there, they revolt against their former masters that much harder. It is very like the Robespierrian period of the French Revolution in that regards, and quite a few have been pushed away, turned, or left the internet altogether, just because they were not fanatical enough in their pro-censorship assaults or of condemning Gamergate. http://i.imgur.com/8GXpbBz.png
SJWs are literal Stalinists, cavorting with one another with smiles on their faces and daggers behind their backs. “Comrade Wilde, have you joined our narrative against that disgusting heteronormative revenge fantasy, Hatred?” “Yes, I reviewed it as a three out of ten!” and then suddenly, Kommissar Kuchera’s face falls. “You have given them only a below average score! This is still promoting them! Some of them are still taking it as a positive! I am sorry, but you have failed Your Motherland for the final time. I shall inform your matriarch you fell upon the field of battle against Gamergate’s greatest trolls. *shink!*”
There’s been quite a number of libertarian sites putting out articles that claim the majority of the current existence of Gamergate is the left eating the left. I can’t say I find cause to disagree with that.
http://freebeacon.com/blog/gamergate-makes-the-left-uncomfortable-because-gamer-gaters-have-adopted-the-lefts-tactics/
http://www.socialmatter.net/2014/10/23/gamergate-viewed-right/
http://mitrailleuse.net/2014/09/19/intellectual-bullying/
There’s no real better example of this than the so-called “Gamergate Harassment Patrol” which is staffed exclusively by the strangest of the strange, it’s majority transgenders, furries, foppish gay men, and other various forms of ‘-kin’ participating in massreporting both sides for infractions or engaging in tone-policing and correcting gender pronouns.
Quite a fascinating clusterfuck to watch, all things considered.