Since gamergate characterises any opposition to it whatsoever as being from 'SJWs', 4chan mods are thus 'SJWs'.
I am not convinced that repeating a lie a thousand times will make this claim the truth. The propaganda may have worked well back when gamergate was completely unknown to the general public, but we are past that, I think.
Also: It would be rather disingenuous to claim that gamergate are a bunch of harassers without acknowledging that prominent people within the movement have received things like syringes and knives in the mail... and been blackballed from the industry..
Kind of puts in perspective this "harassment", which at its worst, can be described as "people saying mean things on the internet".
http://deepfreeze.it - also all public record.
Who said there's no evidence?
It seems to me that if you want Gamegate to be taken seriously (though I think it is way to late for that) Gamergate needs to start cleaning out it ranks.
Which highlights the real issue. Gamergate has no central entity. So there are going to be people harrassing under the banner of Gamergate, and you can’t do anything about it. The name is tarnished, full stop. It will be almost impossible for Gamergate to do any good now, assuming it ever wanted to good!
Perhaps, but correcting misinformation wherever its seen should be the goal of anyone connected with the movement. Perceptions can change.
Gamers have been a marginalized group for pretty much as long as the hobby has existed, so this is nothing new. People lying about them, their hobby, making fun of them as losers and shut-ins and immature and criminals in training, this is all de rigeur. One more insult on the pile doesn't change much.
>Gamergate needs to start cleaning out it ranks.
How so? Other than shouting down harassers, I'm not sure what action you expect a bunch of people centered around a hashtag and an idea to take.
>It will be almost impossible for Gamergate to do any good now
I'd say they've done quite a lot of good already. Disclosure policies at multiple journalism outfits enacted, FTC rules on paid endorsements being clarified due largely in part to an emailing campaign, hundreds of thousands of dollars raised for various charities...
Absolutely, and the saddest part about all this is that entities with painfully overt agendas (The Verge/Vox, Ars Technica, etc.) were more than happy to report on all the negatives, and will still continue to, while reporting none of the good that's come out of it.
Same with people on this site for the most part: they've completely made up their mind about what Gamergate stands for and will hear nothing else about it. Which is hilariously ironic given how much this site likes to tote itself as a well-educated bunch. Groupthink/hivemind tendencies are always the same for any community of humans.
Unchallenged falsehoods in multiple media outlets -> Sourced by Wikipedia per their usual secondary source rules -> Shows up on the front page of Google where most normal people will see it.
You actually have to have an interest in this stuff and actually dig to see that the narrative is false/misleading.
igreulich is correct - the name has been very successfully tarnished. Problem is, moving on to something else is a move that has zero benefit (because the same problems would just happen again under any new name), so the hivemind wisely decided to stay put.
http://deepfreeze.it (exhaustively sourced list of complaints against game journalists and information on the movement as a whole)
http://techraptor.com (games news site, spawned in the wake of gamergate)
http://escapistmagazine.com (games news site, updated ethics policies after initial complaints, allows open discussion on the forums)
http://www.deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=monster
> The overwhelming majority of their coverage consists solely of reprinting verbatim the anecdotal and often unverified accounts from controversial figures who directly profit from being considered targets of harassment — Zoe Quinn being a good example.
> Often described as an indie developer, Quinn has produced very little aside from the low-effort, unpolished free text adventure Depression Quest. More notable about Quinn was the disproportionate attention she got from the gaming press despite her limited accomplishments, from journalists such as her financial backer Ben Kuchera of Polygon and her friend Patricia Hernandez of Kotaku.
http://www.deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=unfair
> Hernandez has also promoted two Kickstarters by GaymerX while being on friendly terms with the organization's president Toni Rocca and some of the other GaymerX staff. She has also given positive press, without disclosure, to her friends David Gallant and Zoe Quinn.
http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson
> Positive coverage of Zoe Quinn in three articles, without disclosing their friendship and eventual affair. Later covered Quinn again, disclosing they "dated briefly", but not that he had previously financially supported her.
Techraptor does the same.
http://techraptor.net/content/zoe-quinn-lying-journalists
> One of the first things that seems quite possibly true about Zoe Quinn is the fact that she plays heavily into self-victimization. Now I will concede that I am not entirely knowledgeable about the psychology behind self-victimization, but what it is defined as makes it fairly easy to identify.
> The most high profile example of this was Zoe Quinn’s claim that Wizardchan raided and doxxed (acquired and revealed personal info) her. That whole affair is best summed up here. Basically, the takeaway from that is that her accusations hold little if any merit at all. What is consistently seen throughout that is how easily she puts herself forward as a victim and asks for consolation from a variety of personalities and sites. Even if you only read the text surrounding the images of her tweets and other communications, you can see this.
This is supposed to be an example of a site that doesn't promote and continue harassment? I can see why people think gamergate advocates are the worst kind of fucking scumbag.
Those are not lies, or even misleading in the least. They are all trivially verifiable facts. All the sources are right there.
I'll go through the others if you wish, but I'd ask you to examine the evidence and point out problems with it before just dismissing it as lies. Heck, I might learn something here.
The fact some gamergaters don't like Quinn's game doesn't make it "garbage". It's not a traditional game. That doesn't mean that rating it highly is somehow a violation of ethics.
The idea that Quinn somehow used personal connections to get literally tens of thousands of people to highly rate her game violates Occam's razor.
Here's the thing - would those tens of thousands of people have seen it in the first place if Hernandez hadn't talked up her friend on Kotaku? Would that niche of a title have wound up on the site at all if not for the personal connection between those two?
I suspect the answers to both those questions are "no".
Have you ever actually made a video game yourself, or written a piece of literature? Do you appreciate the effort this actually takes?
> Here's the thing - would those tens of thousands of people have seen it in the first place if Hernandez hadn't talked up her friend on Kotaku?
Sure. For one thing, Quinn had at least that many Twitter followers. It's a game, also, that covers mental illness, which isn't a frequent topic. On that novelty alone, it was likely to get some attention regardless of who Quinn's friends were.
> Would that niche of a title have wound up on the site at all if not for the personal connection between those two?
There's a good chance it would. Depression Quest was novel. Kotaku likes showcasing novel and interesting things.
I got DQ mixed up with another Twine game I had heard of at the time. This post can be more or less disregarded. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10254524
\\End Edit
>Have you ever actually made a video game yourself, or written a piece of literature? Do you appreciate the effort this actually takes?
Using the same tool ZQ used to make her game - it's literally 5-15 minutes online. The effort was next to nil.
As someone who has actually worked on creating even a simplistic Zelda-clone, you're fooling yourself if you think it took any real amount of effort.
>written a piece of literature
The entirety of Depression Quest reads like simplistic hipster angst. Similar to "Will You Save Your Son", except at least WYSYS has some self awareness and was meant to mock this type of storytelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSm1Rn7Prcs
Maybe an hours' total of work for a low quality Twine game using a script written during a lunch break.
I think it's generous to even call it "low effort".
Play around with something like Inform7 or even Twine with the interest of making a full story - it still takes a lot of thought.
Still, having played it, I'm not a fan (and that goes double since I've fought with depression and do not care for her treatment of the material!), and I think it comes off as amateur hour. I think Steam could do a lot better than IF-style "games" in general.
Good point WRT her Twitter following. I had not considered that.
Writing something the length of Depression Quest, creating graphics, mapping out the story, quality assurance testing, composing music... this does not take 5 to 15 minutes. It is not nil effort.
If you think it's so easy, please, go ahead and recreate Depression Quest from scratch in 15 minutes.
At 40,000~ words + music/still graphics, DQ is a fair chunk of work.
Again, apologies. Definitely more than "next to nil" effort.
When she does it she's a dirty whore, cheating on her partner and exploiting and manipulating men. (and whether actually did this or not is irrelevant, we're going to keep saying she did and supporting that with total bullshit).
It's not okay. It might even be against FTC rules. Full stop, end of story.
By the way, why are we talking about whether if you do it is okay or not when just one post ago you were calling the (sourced, verified) accusations outright lies?
As to who Zoe did or did not sleep with- kind of irrelevant in the long run, but if you're going to bring up any mention of it as perpetuating a lie, I'm obligated to address that.
Eron, her ex, posted a ton of chatlogs on the original post that started this whole thing (including that stupid "five guys burgers" meme).
It doesn't look like a lie to me. If is, it's the most exhaustively fabricated and backed plot I've seen this side of a crazy soap opera.
I'm not asking you to agree with me, here. I'm asking you to exercise the same dispassionate, critical analysis you'd use on any other topic.
I understand you don't see it that way.
Someone is lying in this conversation alright, and it isn't me.
The links you gave were interesting, so thanks for that, but I don't appreciate your implication that I was "lying" because you misunderstand a conversation's thread.
http://i.imgur.com/TLuTJRk.png
Are you going to reply to the other post or not?
No. I'm not going to waste my time with people who lie.
You know what other names are tarnished? Liberals, Socialists, Democrats, Conservatives, Republicans, Christians, Muslims, ecologists, feminists, etc. Every sufficiently large movement has had its name dragged through the mud by its opposition. It's how things work. Gamergate is fine and continues to do good, whether the adversaries want to acknowledge it or not.
Harassed? Which members of gamergate have been forced out of their homes?
If a civil rights movement had started for the purpose of doing unacceptable acts, I would definitively judge the people who chose to associate with it. (Of course, I'd excuse a lot from a civil rights movement that I wouldn't excuse from a movement dedicated to fighting bad gaming journalism - regardless of the merits of their claims.)
I'm not sure why Karunamon agreed, but I largely passed on this point because that is an argument that would only distract from the overall point. I would assume Karunamon wanted to not get mired down in that point as well.
From what I have seen, I would say that it was not founded for that purpose, but there have been bad actors who have been a part of it.
>Of course, I'd excuse a lot from a civil rights movement that I wouldn't excuse from a movement dedicated to fighting bad gaming journalism
What are some behaviors you would excuse from one but not the other?
Essential, I apply the right of self-defense to a group much like it does to individuals. The justified intensity of the action is relative to the injury being fought against (up to and including "shooting back").
The ethics of gaming journalism certainly don't deserve more than dispassionate criticism and factual accusations of impropriety.
Of course, most members of gamergate do not believe they are in a harassment campaign, but why would they? The leaders of the movement will indulge them and tell them what they are doing is just.
No proof?
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Timeline_of_GamerGate#August_20...
These links might be helpful to you.
As with any Internet discussion, not every point may be immediately substantiated. Your comments in this thread haven't been either.
The parallels between the techniques employed by the anti-GG/SJW crowd and those of the Russian state propaganda are uncanny.
Strange times we live in.
Very ironic that you decided to link to that RationalWiki piece, actively edited by the notorious 'Ryulong' who was banned from Wikipedia largely in part by his bad behavior (rule-beaking, undoing edits, bias and unethical practices) on the GamerGate entry. (https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ryulong%20banned)
Wow, I mean come on!
Milo is a journalist, not a leader.
(Though maybe 'SJW mods' is just the new 'fascist mods')
The reason gamergate was banned from 4chan is they kept posting pics of zoe and moot hanging out at conferences and bars and such.
I mean it's pretty easy to see what camp you fall into, and you're basically ascribing a very shallow set of beliefs to an entire group of people - the exact same thing you're accusing that group of doing. Without knowing anything going on with the other side, I could see why people would get upset with that.
Edit: I should qualify this. Both sides of the issue have their shitshows distorting the debate with harassment and dirty tactics. At its core gamergate is a conflict between cultural authoritarians and libertarians. It is just the beginning of a wider issue, the old guard of the internet, those that believe in freedom of expression without repurcussion vs those who believe that speech on the internet should involve more social responsibility.
There is really no reason why they should not co exist. Gamergate is one of the examples however of what happens when both occupy the same space. Those who are afraid of their space changing vs those who refuse to occupy such spaces.
There's nothing stopping either ideals staying within their own space or creating their own, however the internet is a pressure cooker that inevitavly leads to a game of escalation and one up mansship where no compromise is accepted.
https://archive.is/4Tp9N#selection-7679.0-7679.603
He's downplaying it but the failures to disclose personal ties DID exist in many cases. He also references other ethical failings from Kotaku. None of this would have come to light without GamerGate. They regularly make references to pre-existing relationships now.
Note that this is a pretty important statement from Totilo but he makes it in the form of a comment. Many in GamerGate did appreciate him taking some form of responsibility though.
Don't get me wrong: I love you guys. You have made "SJW" a desirable thing to be. I'm just not big on this whole dishonesty kick.
That is my point. GamerGate isn't about harassment, it's about media, censorship, journalism, centralized vs. decentralized control and a bunch of other stuff.
The reason GamerGate functionally evaporated as quickly as it showed up, aside from particularly die-hard members of the useful-idiot troupe, is because most of your fellows went away once Stephen Colbert made fun of you. There's a reason why the influential string-pullers have been saying things like "give up and try again next year". Because they don't care about what you care about. The social credibility went away, and as soon as the social credibility went away that hard core couldn't do what they wanted to do with your help.
In the process of supporting their movement in the hopes that you get something out of it, you are hurting the defenseless. I hope you stop.
> None of the misogynistic toolbags have been chased from their homes, none of them have been confronted with credible threats to their lives and their families. It has not happened. The notion that it has is fictional at its core.
No one has had this happen to them. No one has been arrested on either side of GamerGate. There's no "credible threat" to anyone involved. The fiction you say exists on GG is evident in your own argument as well. No one is credibly being threatened.
And for reals, nobody has had this happen? I've had a friend crash on my couch after your fellow travelers have doxxed her, emailed her pictures of her house, and said that they'd come to her house and "slit [her] throat like a pig." So you can turn this sideways and insert it back where it belongs.
Honestly, your condescending tone, immaturity and personal attacks are things I can't get on-board with. Being righteously indignant doesn't help you make your case.
You choose, with open eyes and of free will, to help people hurt the defenseless, to hurt my friends. I can point at the people you hurt. They exist, in a way the shadows of fearful minds just don't. You are being a bad person. You should stop. But you won't, because to acknowledge one's own wrongdoings requires a sternness of character that is missing in some quarters of the human race, and no small amount of my own anger is at myself for believing I can change those who are too happy to be comfortable in their positions of power.
Edit: You keep editing your reply, but the fact of the matter is no one has been hurt. You keep repeating it like fact but there is no harassment. There's a NARRATIVE that says gamers harass people but that's the whole point of GG, the media is spinning this stuff out of whole cloth.
If what you said about your friend was true, surely you called the police? I would hope so. Since there's been no arrests or police activity related to GG, it's safe to say what you're saying is made up or the police didn't actually find it credible.
It's you that needs to open your eyes. You're being taken for a ride and you're supporting an authoritarian view point and censorship along the way.
Going to stop you here. [0] A prominent member of #GG was doxed and fearing for her children she took a hiatus from the internet/movement altogether. She's also received several lovely pictures of her face covered in semen and was constantly harassed for being a prominent part of Gamergate.
However unlike you and people like you being so quick to assign fault to GG for anything bad that happens to you, she didn't give fault to the anti-GG side, but rather the individual who did it.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2tbbkg/a_fi...
Seriously, we're not in the church here. It seems like a sensible matter to you and you seem angry, which will change nothing. So take a deep breath and go out to change your mind. There's nothing to win in this conversation and we will all be at the same place tomorrow. Take a break.
Kappa.
Including the stuff in his comment that happened before GamerGate and was widely known about and reported on before GamerGate?
"None of this" indeed.
Oh, and Totilo doesn't describe any kind of compromising relationship between Quinn and any of his writers, which merely underscores the fundamentally dishonest basis of the entire "movement". "ethics in games journalism" was always a pretext for "attack Zoe Quinn", which is why you idiots continue to bitch about "oh gosh someone in the games industry knows someone else" and not, you know, "major games publishers won't deal with critical outlets" or "major games publishers try to break through the Chinese wall between editorial and advertising by holding outlets hostage" or "non-disclosure of advertising funded by major publishers is routine on YouTube" or "the games industry is fundamentally corrupted by the widespread use of pre-orders rendering titles immune to reviews or even basic quality control" or "major publishers routinely use death marches, even though this is detrimental to both game quality and programmer wellbeing" or all sorts of other issues that actually matter worth a damn.
But no, you keep harping on about the utterly fucking trivial indie games industry, if it can even be called that.
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN, and your comments are generally breaking the site guidelines about civility. We ban accounts that do this repeatedly.
(Many other commenters have been breaking the guidelines too in this thread, and I'm not posting this because I agree with any of them.)
Also, saying there was no conflict of interest between Grayson and Quinn is bunk. He had hung out with her, flirted online, planned a trip to Vegas with her, and been thanked in the credits of Quinn's game. A journalist outside of the games industry would have let someone else cover the Game Jam, given that level of involvement.
Quinn should be blameless in this - there's no handbook of ethics for indie devs - but Stephen Totilo absolutely shouldn't.
People have written bits and pieces on this before
Nobody really cares.
Here's a post about EA giving early access to Reddit mods, who didn't disclose it. 2000 upvotes: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3c8wze/ethi...
There's definitely a constituency among gamers.
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN, and your comments are generally breaking the guidelines about civility. We ban accounts that do this repeatedly.
(Many other commenters have been breaking the guidelines too in this thread, and I'm not posting this because I agree with any of them.)
Having an agenda does not make me an unethical journalist. Nor does writing things that you do not like on an online message board. Try harder. Here's everything I've written in a professional capacity: http://arstechnica.com/author/peter-bright/. Which of these acts of journalism are unethical, and why?
[citation needed]
I don't think I've engaged with gators for several months.
> on the front lines of this debate
[citation needed]
I have been at best a minor footnote in the entire debacle.
> pushing for more leniency for journalists.
[citation needed]
I'm all for ethical journalism. But that is not a call for "objectivity" as I do not believe that journalism can be objective, nor is it a call for removal of "opinion" from both news and reviews.
> You are anti-audience in that respect
Did you consider that perhaps gators are not my audience?
> and yes I consider that unethical.
Writing for different audiences is _unethical_? Do words even have meaning in your world?
> You can have any agenda you wish but when that agenda hurts your readership's trust in you, it seems strange to continue to push it.
Did you never consider that your views do not in fact constitute the consensus opinion of my readership? If I were to lie to my readers and maintain a pro-gamergate persona, I daresay it would hurt my readers' trust in me far more than my current position.
I'm still waiting for you to list all the unethical things I have done. You know: stuff that, for example, demonstrates a conflict of interest or a deliberate misrepresentation of facts. Something that's an actual journalistic ethics issue. I mean, you were so very quick to claim that I was an unethical journalist. Can you not even substantiate the claim?
> Oh, and Totilo doesn't describe any kind of compromising relationship between Quinn and any of his writers,
But action was required on Kotaku's behalf because they weren't acting ethically. Here's another Totilo statement about how Kotaku messed up: https://archive.is/fL71k
He does admit wrongdoing. You're straight up saying he doesn't. How is that ethical?
> you idiots continue to bitch about "oh gosh someone in the games industry knows someone else"
That you find people's concern over undisclosed relationships in reporting something worthy of mockery is appalling and quite frankly all the evidence needed to show you're out to push an agenda that requires overlooking a very traditional staple of journalistic integrity.
What the fuck does that have to do with Quinn? Oh right: nothing.
> That you find people's concern over undisclosed relationships in reporting something worthy of mockery is appalling and quite frankly all the evidence needed to show you're out to push an agenda that requires overlooking a very traditional staple of journalistic integrity.
That you find it remarkable or notable that people who write about games know people who make games shows that you have very little understanding of the trade press. "I know this person" is not a relationship that needs disclosure.
There's no clear consensus on things like Kickstarter, by the way. While investment would be a clear ethical breach, Kickstarter is--by law--not an investment. Kickstarter backers are not acquiring any kind of stake in the company. There's no clear journalistic rule that would, for example, prohibit backing Kickstarters but still permit preordering games (and I've never once seen a gator demand that game preorders be disclosed).
Similarly, the distinction between, for example, making payments through Patreon, subscribing to a game such as WoW, or buying a DLC season pass is quite subtle, and there are no universally agreed, widely established rules on what is and isn't acceptable. This is a matter primarily of personal taste, not hard-and-fast rules.
In any case, _none of this supports your claim that I am an unethical journalist_. I've linked you to a page that should (assuming our CMS is working correctly) list every single article I have written. Which of those pieces is unethical, and why?
It seems quite uncivil to me to claim that I'm unethical and the not even bother to support that claim, but curiously enough, I don't see you complaining about that.
No you haven't. You almost got both of us banned from HN for being uncivil.
As for Quinn, no on here is talking about her or harassment other than the anti-GGers. I've been talking about Kotaku.
In response to ethical breaches in your articles (opposed to your activism which I've broken down already), I'd say all of your articles are suspect given your publicly stated stance on non-disclosed relationships.
How many of those articles are written about your friends without you disclosing it?
You brought up Kotaku in response to this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10253942
The context is very specifically Zoe Quinn.
> In response to ethical breaches in your articles (opposed to your activism which I've broken down already),
What "activism" have you "broken down"?
> I'd say all of your articles are suspect given your publicly stated stance on non-disclosed relationships.
You do understand, right, that your standards and expectations for disclosure have nothing to do with any recognized standard for journalistic ethics, right? Just open a newspaper or read a website.
> How many of those articles are written about your friends without you disclosing it?
You tell me! You're the one asserting that I'm an unethical journalist. Surely you have some kind of factual basis to justify such an allegation?
Pulitzer disagrees with you. From http://pulitzercenter.org/about-us/ethics-and-standards-poli...
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
Normal activities - outside work, investments, political activism - pose special problems for journalists. Often, it's best to avoid activities that might interfere with your ability to function as a journalist. Alternatively, you may be precluded from working on certain topics for the Pulitzer Center if you're personally involved.
A third alternative is public disclosure of any information that a site user might find relevant in understanding the content. Someone who is writing about a relative would need to disclose the relationship. A guest contributor writing about politics would need to disclose if he is associated with a candidate, and any employment or other financial relationship that could be viewed as related to the topic being reported.
Full disclosure of relevant information is standard practice for the Pulitzer Center - a necessary step but not always sufficient when a potential conflict of interest exists.
No they don't.
> Full disclosure of relevant information is standard practice for the Pulitzer Center
Wake me when political or economic writers disclose which candidates and politicians they know and voted for, or when film writers disclose the names of all the PR people who they talk to, or any of the other relationships that aren't routinely disclosed because they're not material. "relevant information" does not mean "anything and everything".
I repeat: your standards and expectations for disclosure have nothing to do with any recognized standard for journalistic ethics.
Moreover, did he consider that sometimes journalists should say things that the audience does not reflexively and unthinkingly agree with?
I mean, jeez, I disagree with you approximately all of the time, but that's because I'm right and you're wrong--err, because we come at this from different places and have different priors, that doesn't mean you're hisssssss anti-audience hissssssss.
The fixation on media telling them what they want to hear, regardless of any sort of truth or honesty behind it, and the drive to retaliate against people with the temerity to have an opinion that is not completely complimentary to straight white men is probably the worst part of this whole cancerous mess.
I've met Quinn a few times and I don't personally care for her, but the monstrous behavior of the children afraid that the games that sell bonkers numbers of copies will go away forever because a few feminists criticize them is so incredibly evil (while also managing to be so, so stupid) that I can only laugh.
That would require the radicals to not be the entire movement.
And with everything that happens online, there's thousands of people on either side, throwing mud at a small number of targets. An internet famous person gets treated like a politician or celebrity, without the benefits (and without necessarily having signed up to it).
And as with anything 4chan gets involved in, there was some pretty nasty trolling.
Judging what exists now by what existed over a year ago is hardly fair. People who actually harass people are now loudly shouted down wherever they're seen doing it.
This is frequently claimed but there's little evidence of it.
If you even dare to talk about gamergate publicly, you will be dogpiled. If you criticise them, you will receive rape and death threats.
Volume of replies does not harassment make.
>If you criticise them, you will receive rape and death threats.
This is frequently claimed but there's little evidence of it.
:%s/sealion/black people/Free speech != profitable speech. The journalists can say whatever they want. If they want to make a profit doing it selling to an audience they're simultaneously beating up, they'll have to deal with the antagonistic relationship they created.