Thats what I understood from my far-away vantage point, at least. But its difficult to imagine it was just the latter; there's not enough sexism in gaming for it to blow up so easily, I think. (She was hardly the first woman in gaming to operate unethically).
That's a false accusation.
What actually happened was that an angry ex-boyfriend accused her of sleeping with a gaming journalist to get positive reviews. No such positive reviews ever happened. The journalist in question made a single off-handed mention of one of her games (in a non-review context) before they'd ever actually met in person.
The phrase you're looking for is "unfounded accusation". Unless you are the woman in question or you were stalking her 24/7, you can't falsify it.
(This also wasn't the focus of the original blog post at all. To cut a decades-long story short, the reason that particular aspect caught people's attention was because there were a whole bunch of people who already very strongly distrusted the entire gaming press for reasons entirely unrelated to women. Then Reddit started shadowbanning anyone who mentioned the journo's name, hosters were pressured to shut down sites which covered it, the entire gaming press declared gamers as a whole misogynistic scum over it, and every escalation fanned the flames more in typical Streisand-effect fashion. In fact I don't think it was even mentioned in the blog at all, but I could be wrong.)
https://www.mobygames.com/game/browser/depression-quest/cred...
Her boyfriend mentions multiple incidences of cheating in the post, but only one appears to be with a reviewer.
When Weinstein told casting directors that actresses that rebuffed him were difficult to work with and promoted to films of those that didn't, I'm sure his biases weren't as transparent in light of his professional reputation. Was that not a breach of ethics on multiple fronts?
http://deepfreeze.it/outlet.php?o=Kotaku
At some point one of Kotaku's editors(maybe, its been a while) stated that there were no ethical violations.
Gamergate then worked to boycott Kotaku and get advertisers to move away from the site.
A great many people in Hollywood began to ignore Weinstein's claims after they became public (to the industry) knowledge, though this was unfortunately too late for some of his earlier victims like Asia Argento and Annabella Sciorra.
Slut-shaming is a bad thing and we would all do well to move past it asap.
That's completely wrong. While there are always trolls and bigots lurking everywhere, the vast majority of people were protesting the forced censorship of games by those who found them "offensive" or "not inclusive enough". The whole brouhaha was a microcosm of the ongoing debate that many are having in this country about free speech. There are many who want to eliminate free speech and pass "hate speech" laws that ban and/or criminalize speech that some find offensive. Some of us believe that in a free society people have the right to be offensive, bigoted, racist, or despicable in a wide variety of ways that we don't agree with. By extension we also believe that people should be able to make any games they choose to make, whether we find them offensive or not.
And of course none of that has anything to do with free speech issues - but it’s verifiably the start of when the #GamerGate hashtag was used. So somehow the movement supposedly entirely swivelled from ethics in video game journalism to being pro free speech at some undefined point, while its targets shared a common characteristic?
I've talked to Brianna Wu. I've followed her work. She has never advocated censorship.
This is false. No one proposed censorship. They proposed and created new games that were more inclusive. In doing this, they also criticized mainstream games. The narrative of censorship was invented by GamerGate.
And clearly, their version of events was so compelling that others repeat it as fact.
There is a clear conflict of interest when reviewers are sleeping with developers. Calling attention to this fact is not an attack on women or any such nonsense.
There was an intentional misinformation campaign regarding her in order to suggest that the harassment was in some way OK.
I'm sure you can provide a link and evidence of the "suspicious" part, right?
This is false. Details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306626
If you want any sort of unbiased responses on this topic you can't look at it from afar or from responses (including mine) - it will actually require some independent research and a willingness to read both sides.
My conclusion: there is little to no evidence of the kind of collusion that was alleged by gamergate. Indeed, most of the corruption that was (and still is) out there was big name publishers inviting reviewers to lavish review events or blacklisting reviewers that give unfavorable scores - something gamergate seemed to care little about. Not an indie developer sleeping his/her way to the top.
Gamergate also seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose and form of games criticism - frequently demanding "objective" reviews. As if that's something that's possible or even desirable in an artistic medium.
Finally, at some point the whole movement was co-opted by reactionary and conservative commentators whose agenda had nothing to do with gaming and everything to do with pushing traditional gender roles and anti-SJW mania. Basically the "PC police" complaints from 15 years ago transplanted into a new host community that was ripe for it.
Which is the majority of what I saw only weeks after the initial episode. Although it took the movement a few months before realizing that mainstream media outlets were going to lock step with the media outlets being criticized instead of independently researching at all. It's easier for me to cite a source that cites its sources than simply parrot them here [0] [1]. The blacklisting/censoring reviewers is also mentioned quite frequently ,on Twitter, at least. Not sure about on Deepfreeze.
>Gamergate also seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose and form of games criticism - frequently demanding "objective" reviews. As if that's something that's possible or even desirable in an artistic medium.
There is a place for critics, who develop their palettes of tastes, and review games based on that. You can find a critic you tend to agree with and hold their opinions with more weight. The problem surfaces when the critics all have the same (social) biases and aren't reviewing the game itself so much as they are reviewing the game as a form of media from a social commentary slant. Especially when the community doesn't give a shit about the social commentary slant and wants to know about the game. (Which is why Gamergate quickly devolved into a culture war - which is when I stopped following the movement as closely.)
But I disagree with your second point. You can create an objectively bad and poorly designed game. Riddled with bugs with little to no thought of how game mechanics should interact with one another. Throw in a jarring, repetitive soundtrack and poorly written dialogue/story full of typos. If you were able to picture what would be considered a completely trash game with no redeeming factors - you're certainly capable of doing the opposite.
This will be my last post on HN regarding this thread. If you'd like to continue discussion (although discussion around #GG tends to be quite fruitless as anyone with an opinion on it has long since chosen their side) you're free to email me or contact me through any other means I list on my website, found on my profile.
The GameJournosPro mailing list and multiple articles with nearly identical spin coming out on the same day are pretty good evidence of collusion.
I strongly encourage anyone still interested in the topic to watch some of Christina Hoff Sommers videos about it. She demonstrates that it is possible to discuss the actual issues without demonizing one's opponents.
Cites needed. The only results claiming BLM-related arsons and riots are online zines known to be fronts for white nationalist movements.
Edit: As a followup, a number of white supremacists set fires and framed the BLM for those fires, but were subsequently caught and are in various stages of the criminal justice process.
off course these "journalists" caught red handed are not going to report on their misdeeds. they'll quote tweets then claim they are victim of the internet mob.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/09/addressing-allegation...
The "controversial" content was a single message to a politically neutral industry mailing list suggesting an open letter of support for Zoe Quinn in the face of harrassment, which was rejected by the other members of the mailing list as inappropriate for journalists.
Here is a link from a neutral source instead of one of the people who was accused of collusion.
Regardless, in the worst case, since the GameJournoPros mailing list has not been publicly released that I'm aware of, your source and mine are equally cherry-picking to support their views.
You should be aware, however, that the source of your cherry-picks is Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo has, ironically, also been implicated in organizing journalists to push a narrative, only his journalist friends are literal, self-described Nazis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Leaked_Breit... So I would be very, very wary of taking him at face value on any subject involving women or politics.
Zoe was just accused of being a horrible person afik.
I too would be interested to see the full text of the list.
you can't find a more biased source. can you?
check deepfreeze the web site.
If you're legitimately concerned about journalistic ethics in the gaming world (which is a real thing), you should really avoid the "GamerGate" moniker as much as possible.
EDIT: My vote total is bouncing up and down like a rubber ball, so I'll just go ahead and post the details I mentioned.
GamerGate was founded around an incident where Eron Gjoni made a blog post accusing his girlfriend Zoe Quinn, who makes free video games, of cheating on him with several men, whom he named. Most of them were also game developers. One of them, Nathan Grayson, was a games journalist. He once wrote an article with a single paragraph about one of Quinn's games, released (by Gjoni's timeline) months before he allegedly slept with Quinn.
This narrative somehow became "women developers everywhere are sleeping with writers to promote their shitty games and it's destroying gaming and must be stopped." This wasn't even an accusation Gjoni made; it was a conclusion jumped to by his readers.
Ethics in games journalism is a legitimate issue. Major publishers have been buying good reviews with cash and perks for almost as long as there's been a gaming industry. No one's ever cared enough to make a lasting fuss about that. It wasn't until a woman who writes tiny, free games was accused falsely of buying good reviews that the cry of corruption went up. I think that illustrates firmly what the real priorities were here.
Some well-meaning people have taken GamerGate's message at face value and been motivated to expose actual ethical issues. That's laudable, but doing it under the GamerGate banner devalues the entire message.
EDIT AGAIN: crooked-v's post and link about the controversy around the GamesJournosPros mailing list is also valuable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17306791
Your proof is not at all sufficient for your claim
>Just for the record: GamerGate was 100% founded on harassing women.
>Some well-meaning people have taken GamerGate's message at face value and been motivated to expose actual ethical issues. That's laudable, but doing it under the GamerGate banner devalues the entire message.
You seem to have back pedaled from your original absurd claim. That's progress I guess.
---
Its hard to find any neutral source that aggregates all the factual information. Does this website cover everything? Do you have an alternate source?
http://thisisvideogames.com/gamergatewiki/index.php/Timeline...
Not at all. The GamerGate movement began with people looking to punish Quinn for her infidelity, and people who already hated her game jumped on the bandwagon to invent conspiracy theories to explain why it was well-reviewed. These people jumped to the demonstrably false conclusion that she had traded sex for reviews, and that narrative, unfortunately, went mainstream, and caught the attention of people who legitimately cared about journalistic ethics and weren't aware of the previous facts.
And that's still continuing--you see a lot of well-meaning people in this thread who are still not aware how much of the sex-for-reviews narrative and the GameJournoPros narrative are outright lies.
> Its hard to find any neutral source that aggregates all the factual information. Does this website cover everything? Do you have an alternate source?
That site may work as a timeline, but whatever your position, I think we can agree that GamerGate's own wiki is not an unbiased source.
Interestingly, the FBI got confessions from some of the attackers, and decided not to prosecute. http://www.businessinsider.com/gamergate-fbi-file-2017-2
Just because they didn't have a central organization, doesn't change the fact that it was a movement that caused a lot of damage. In fact, there's a parallel with the Alt-Right.
Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization.
I'd argue there's a more interesting parallel with political terrorist organizations: they often start out as non-violent groups until subsections radicalize over time, therefore attracting a set of new members who further radicalize the group. Think Hamas, PKK, etc.
It's pointless to argue whether GamerGate was about "ethics in journalism" because there's the set of people who care about that and the set of people who like to threaten women over the internet, and it's not clear which one are "GamerGate" and which ones aren't.
Would it be fair to paint the critics of gamergate with the same brush?
My best advice is to look at the majority of the people and see how they act, then make your own judgements.
Nobody is disputing the facts. The problem comes when people take disparate facts and weave a narrative that supports their own beliefs without any supporting evidence.
>Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization.
Only because they have a shared goal. There is no shared goal in gamer gate. The thing called "gamer gate" was filled with crazy and non-crazy people with wildly differing goals and beliefs.
Minor details like him not actually being part of Gamergate in any way and his videos being obvious jokes didn't stop the media reporting this as an example of Gamergate death threats against women. Meanwhile, in actual non-media reality Gamergate was split between people who thought his jokes were distasteful but not actually harassment and those who considered them over the line. Then when it became clear he was a fictional character, the narrative changed to one where Gamergate were now threatening him because they'd discovered he didn't really support their harassment of women. Of course, the Gamergate position all along was that he obviously wasn't serious, the fact it was like harassment made him unpopular, and it was still that other internet community sending death threats and harassment. (A community, if I'm remembering rightly, which went out their way to go after a bunch of Gamergate supporters for taking a stand against their harassment.)
The most important thing to understand about Gamergate is this: the entire media (and social media) anti-harassment campaign of the time was primarily about attacking Gamergate and criticism of the game critics in general. Everything else fell by the wayside. All the groups actually doing the harassment went unmentioned. The most powerful, long lasting meme to come out of this fight, "It's about ethics in games journalism", was entirely about crushing the idea that games journalism has ethics problems. About discrediting criticism of games journalism, not stopping harassment or death threats or anything like that.
(The second most important thing to understand is that the media coverage attracted a bunch of hangers-on who wouldn't otherwise have had anything to do with it, and some of them were exactly the kind of people you'd expect to be attracted by that kind of coverage.)
GamerGate wasn't coordinated enough and lacked the centralized leadership to have been "founded" for a purpose or be a "front" to achieve specific clandestine goals.
From what I gather, it was sort of like Occupy Wall Street in that there was really no there there besides a vague ethos shared by the people who took up its flag to pursue their disparate pet causes.
It blew up from there as many people became leaders of multiple subsections of GamerGate, many of whom we see today in the alt-right parts of the internet which I am sure is entirely coincidental. The difference between Occupy Wall Street and GamerGate is that GamerGate rallied behind multiple different leaders which would push the the movement towards various directions. This was all stuff I saw from personal experience.
He did nothing to direct Gamergate, most of what I saw him post in the early days was trying to put the cat back in the bag.
The second was that he was constantly active in various chat channels encouraging and pushing the movement forward while lying about his claims that he was trying to back away from it.
http://antinegationism.tumblr.com/
I would also be interested in seeing any logs of Eron in the chat servers, I was never on those so I only saw what was posted to Reddit.
This blogpost from 2014 has multiple examples of Eron posting under a trip on 4chan as well IRC logs.
The author of that post says that Eron abused Zoe but has not provided any evidence, do you know of anything to back that up? All the evidence that Eron posted was never denied by Zoe afik.
It is a well known fact that game companies pay people to write positive reviews.
One example (Microsoft): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeHjN4oWVfk
However, that was not the claims of corruption and reviews made during the course of GamerGate (ie that Zoe had slept with reviewers for positive coverage). None of GamerGate dealt with the actual issues of corporate influence on reviews and the policies thereof.
Now, is the rest of the statement true?
No, clearly not. There are a lot more problems with the paragraph than can be solved by a simple substitution.
The root problem is that it's very hard (almost impossible) to make statements about the whole of an uncoordinated, loosely defined group that are both specific and true. Also, when you think you can easily make such statements, it probably doesn't mean that you're right but rather your thinking is being driven by biases and group-prejudice.
If you want more information than you'll really be able to read, check out the FAQs on Reddit's r/KotakuInAction. Before buying into the above mentioned narrative, you might want to learn more about how the GameJournoPros mailing list was involved and which side received credible bomb threats. Christina Hoff Sommers has some good YouTube videos about it (i.e. https://youtu.be/5RVlCvBd21w).
This is a major issue with some online "progressives" who are incapable of any nuance about it. Be warned if you want to have a rational conversation.
> r/KotakuInAction
These are basically the same people under different identities. There was also a "secret" irc channel coordinating the harassment.
> credible bomb threats
Did the police ever untangle any of this? I can see http://uk.businessinsider.com/gamergate-fbi-file-2017-2 and http://uk.businessinsider.com/ethan-ralph-gamergate-leader-a...
Like I said above, there are a number of self-styled "progressives" online who are unable to have a rational discussion on this topic.