Why you're wrong about GamerGate.

It isn't really about corruption in journalism. It also isn't about hating feminism. GamerGate is about gamers, developers, and games media being harassed and bullied into being more politically correct.

The reason Zoe Quinn is a focus isn't because she slept with dudes, or because the people she had personal relationships with were media insiders. Her Depression Quest game sucked. It can barely be called a game. But thanks to her sucky game having a "progressivist" message it got positive media attention. However, if you said the game sucked, you were called either a sexist because it was made by a woman or called a bigot for hating a game about a clinical condition. Papo & Yo demonstrates that a game with a deep meaningful message can still be a game, and it was loved by gamers despite being made by, literally developer "Minority".

So the trailer for Hatred came out a week ago and this was GameSpot's first article on it. It starts off like any other article about a new game, except this one ends in tweets from people that I guess we're supposed to care about, lambasting the game for being too violent. Why? As I was writing that sentence, looking up the people to see if in fact we were supposed to care about them, I found out that one of those tweeters, Slashfic Lycandesy, is the co-writer of Depression Quest. The problem isn't that people criticize things they dislike; the problem is that they bring their dislikes right up to our doorstep. They aren't just loud, but they are actively obtrusive.

The game development house Fine Young Capitalists tried to hold a contest for women called Game Jam, giving them a chance to pitch their game ideas and the winner would have their game made and win a share of the revenue from the sales. It was an effort get more women into the game industry. But Zoe Quinn claimed the contest was oppressive to women and transgender women. Led by Quinn supporters, the contest was sabotaged and ultimately canceled.

This call to action is happening today. Sarah Silverman recently made a video to support equal pay for women, but had to rollback her jokes and apologize because she was accused of making fun of transgender women. Even when you're being progressive, you have to be just the right kind of progressive. I myself agree with most of what Anita Sarkeesian points out. I defend her viewpoints all the time in comments. With that said, I don't condone forcing your views onto others. She doesn't do it, but the movement that follows her is being quick to judge anything that doesn't conform. Bayonetta 2 was the recent target, which there's still a large disagreement on. However, those views on sexuality were the reason Polygon docked the game at least 20% in ratings if you compare it to average scores. This and the recent news from GameSpot condemning a game for its violence leads me to believe that either the media is already pushing progressivism, or they are afraid of backlash if they don't.

I am myself a pretty progressive guy. I'm a Mexican-American who thinks we need more minorities in games, and better representation of them too. But there's a line that's being crossed in the way these issues are being decided for us. I feel like all the love and attention Hatred is getting is because it's seen as retaliation for all the condemnation gamers are getting from outside for liking things that aren't "good". Gamers are good people, and I believe we and the games we play will evolve to be more inclusive on our own. We don't need it shoved onto us.

Disagree?

Someone that finally makes sense, i made a similar post not too long ago and i was criticized heavily for it

I agree, it's all an attack on gamer culture. Why do we need politics in gaming? It's a fantasy driven hobby that doesn't exist in the real world.

Why is it ok to kill massive amounts of people, but not ok to discriminate against women and minorities? In fantasy land, anything and everything should be accepted and expected.

Yea, another topic about this. It is too bad that is is now it sexism because I says it is and it will also be better for me.

I can turn the damsel in distress as something sexist against males.

Worse they misused that one study with like 53% of gamers are females and gamers are anyone that play any type of game.

it's not about sexism, there are several female developers and gamers that support gamergate. Just look at the hashtag of notyourshield. It's feminists saying crap about gamers. Most gamers aren't the ones threating people out there. It's the crazy stupid ones.

Yeah, I get Bigfoot to develop all of my games and the Unicorn express delivers them in a timely manner.

I just noticed gamespot has 200453 Destiny articles while 2 on others.

Could be a conflict of interest.

I guess that's a fairly reasonable point. But still, I would be careful to support 'Gamergate', especially when that whole movement might mean something different to different people.

These are issues that go beyond just gaming, and gamers. I don't think it's fair to lump all gamers together as a stereotype.

At the same time, games could and should be better about appealing to a wider audience.

The idea of 'gamers' is kind of a dying one - today there are so many different kinds of people that play games, that calling someone a 'gamer' is like calling everyone who frequents movie theaters a 'movier'.

I do think gamers need to stop telling game journalists how to do their jobs though. Bear in mind, the journalists could always be worse. They could be very fake, or take bribes and kick-backs left and right to promote certain games. So far most of the GS staff seem honest and genuine in their feelings about games, and I'm sure most others are as well. This is just a classic case of consumers thinking they can do better than the people they consume from.

I guess that's all I've got to add for now.

Gamergate is...mainly just a banner, at this point.

People invoke it to discuss a hundred different things. You're using it to argue that games shouldn't bow to the pressures of over-the-top political correctness. Another thread is using it to discuss how, whatever Gamergate is about, the movement has highlighted the disgusting misogyny within gaming culture. You'll find other threads talking about gaming journalism, others saying it's a hoax, others discussing whoever that lady was who allegedly slept with a journalist (or five, or whatever the current embellishment of the story is).

At this point, I don't think anyone is "wrong" about Gamergate. Nobody could agree on what it was about when it started, so I don't see why we should start trying to define things now. It is what it is - a convoluted mess of opinions relating to gaming culture.

I'm not using it as my own. I'm point out all the signs and using it as evidence. If someone says GamerGate is about corruption in games media, then why is Anita Sarkeesian a part of the GamerGate conversation? Why is #NotYourShield a thing that minorities and female gamers use to tell complaintants that they do NOT speak for us? The answer is because it's an issue larger than corruption.

It also isn't about gamers fighting back against women entering the gamingsphere. Women gave us Portal (Kim Swift IIRC) and Assassin's Creed, and we didn't go ape s*** angry at those games for being developed by women. Phil Fish is someone gamers harassed, not because he was a female (because he isn't, mind you) but because he was a d****bag. And gamers hated Zoe Quinn long before her private relationships were made public, because she had alleged being victim to harassment (she was, but only because she was a d****bag too, not because she was female) in order to get media attention to promote her game.

The writing is all over the wall. Had this conflict been about simple ethics in journalism, it would have stayed a fairly small movement focused around the media censorship protecting Zoe Quinn. Had it been about men angry that women are becoming gamers... well that's ludicrous. Any guy will tell you he's tried to bring his girlfriend/wife into gaming. We would love nothing more than this.

The reason there's such a surge in sexist rhetoric from gamers isn't because they're all actually sexist, it's pushback, protest, and retaliation for being invaded by a political correctness movement. I am not excusing this behavior from gamers, I am only explaining why it came out. To simply call the majority of gamers sexist is shortsighted and ignoring some very troubling issues in our new internet culture.

The political correctness movement can and has halted game development, and it looks like it's coming after Hatred. If the developers of Hatred are pressured into abandoning their game, isn't this a toxic form of harassment? And journalistic media is intended to report on public opinion, not to shape it. Yet Polygon criticized it for its wanton violence before it even got to the public.

When a trailer for Hatred showed up in the Polygon news inbox this morning, it was met with genuine revulsion. This is awful, awful stuff.

That isn't news media reporting on outrage. That's news media being the outrage.

I'm pretty sure GamersGate is about ethics in game journalism. That's what I'm going to believe at least. The majority of supporters of gamersgate say THAT is the what they are arguing about.

No One who keeps mentioning Gamersgate as anything other than a swedish digital distribution platform makes any sense.

Again what goes on in a very small part of the liberal american gaming media circus is meaningless to the rest of the world, again who gives a frag what Dumb and Dumber does or who Quinn decides to take into her bed.

Its a free world and i cant even begin to fathom why anyone would be interested in those 2 or the absolute left wings insane ideas.

Are you an active part of the gaming business? I'm not. As a gamer I'm not concerned about the business aspect of that any more than the business of making cardboard or lotion, car batteries or plastic.

Are you concerned that elements in your electronics are harvested in hostile areas by people who kill others in order to get them? There are tons of bad things that occur from making your life more comfy, but you can't carry the weight of every possible thing on your shoulders, now can you?

Why cherry pick something so trite as disproportionate numbers in the video game development work place of a gender in a first world hobby? I'd think you would have much more things to concern yourself with in this fucked up world we live in.

@JangoWuzHere: I found an article that breaks it down for you. If you don't believe me, you can just check this out:

http://reason.com/archives/2014/10/12/gamergate-part-i-sex-lies-and-gender-gam

My point was that video games and their developers do not exist in a vacuum. They were shaped by real world influences, so it would be wrong to think the real world has zero influence on video games or that video games have zero influence on the real world. Therefore, real world problems and themes can be addressed in video games and critique of those problems should be allowed not silenced.

If you're invested in the medium then why would I not a least take into consideration and think about: the harmful effects production of videogame hardware/software has on the environment, business practices which would shape what games are developed and changes made in games being developed, and themes/ideas conveyed in the game whether positive or negative. If you're not invested in the medium that much, then ignore those articles that bring up the issue; they shouldn't effect you. Let the developer decide what they want to influence them. Because when you let the developer decide whether or not they want to listen to Anita Sarkeesian, you end up with games like The Last of Us.

It has reached EU believe it or not. And the journalists have the same attitude as the american journalists. Nobody cares what Zoe Quinn does privately, it just happened to include journalists that are corrupt.

It's not just Swedish digital distribution. BMW, Adobe, Intel, etc have all distanced themselves from site like Kotaku and stopped advertising because of their message against gamers

@Minishdriveby: Who cares if video games have influences in the real world? Nobody ever cared if Moby Dick influenced society, so why care if Grand Theft Auto is dis-respectful to women?

Shouldn't video games, or any entertainment media for that matter, just be about enjoyment? I think it somewhat diminishes the escapism of media when you link them to real-world problems associated with the business aspect of things.

People are always free to discuss anything they want to discuss, but there's no need for those of us who enjoy this stuff to feel like we need to be aware of every process and consequence, or take active measures of involvement if we don't want to.

This social justice fad is a joke.

The same thing isn't sad about songs themselves or movies. It's more of how women or men appear themselves in the music industry for example

Listen, I don't condone the mob mentality of the current social justice movements on the internet. To me, it's a form of bullying that needs to stop. However, I also don't ignore their message. IMHO they make very good points about representations of women and minorities in games, and this type of morality has a place in gaming. If Anita Sarkeesian's talks about women tropes helped The Last of Us be as good as it was, then I'm all for it.

My only beef is in the way their message is being pushed. Even among their own progressive crowd, dissent is looked down upon. It's scary to me that you can be "not progressive enough" if you are progressive.

I might (might) be willing to hear GamerGate out if their supporters hadn't proven themselves to be utter filth on a multitude of occasions. As it stands, it's nothing more than a hate-mob, as evident by its response to anyone who dares disagree with their ideals and their tendency to absolve themselves of responsibility of all the awful things done in the name of Gamergate. You can't claim to be anti-harassment when so much of this "movement" engages in it.

The press isn't the one's who are wrong about GamerGate: It's GamerGate itself that doesn't know what it is. This post is proof of that given everyone else keeps harping on about ethics in journalism. It's a label co-opted by countless individuals to suit their own agendas, always shifting their targets, never coalescing into any cohesive goal. Hard to take it seriously when not even those who support it can get their facts straight.

Oh yes they are. That's one of the core problems GG is trying to address.

Well, common sense thinking people are in the minority nowadays

Do you have links to those companies saying its because of gamersgate? also i meant that Gamersgate is the name of a swedish DD platform

But we must travel in different circles because i haven't even heard a bleep about it, the only time i hear about it is if some troll stops by or if you or another regular starts to post about it again. And with the liberal minded Klepek and Wolf who seem to take it like you do. way way overboard.

Uh-huh. Sure. Because a bunch of people who've never worked in game journalism, let alone understand it, are going to be the ones to fix it.

I work in game journalism. I think about ethics more than is probably healthy, always staying conscious of how to avoid any potential conflicts of interest or breach of ethics or what have you. Everyone in this line of work has done the same at some point. Everyone has ideas of how they'd ideally fix game journalism for the better. GamerGate's ideas of how to fix game journalism are not a solution, nor do they even begin to address the very real ethical problems in videogames as a whole. If ethics were really so important, then start by attacking the real questionable practices of the industry instead of critics who are being critical of videogames and the culture surrounding them.

If this whole movement started just because someone said "gamers are over" (meaning, the hyper-enthusiast crowd is no longer the sole audience because games serve a greater variety of audiences now), then you guys have one massive persecution complex. Can't obviously handle a bit of criticism either, clearly.

I am an older game (45) and I think the current group of gamers that are part of gamer gate absolutely suck. Someone tries to talk about problems and they get retaliated against (Felicia Day is the most recent victim). This isn't about PC or stuff like that--it is just a manifestation of troll-ism. And I for one won't listen to gamer gate issues until people finally grow up. It is embarrassing.

Nobody on either side is 100% correct or without fault. Both sides have clearly shown ignorance, disingenuous dialog and poor judgement. I have no idea why anyone would group themselves with one side or the other.

Because minimal or shitty representations of anything other than white straight dudes can affect the ability of a decent number of people from actually enjoying the product. At the end of the day, it's real world people enjoying the video games.

Great, yes, the industry as a whole has an ethics problem. The fact that the EA wives club ever existed is proof of that. That and many other similar stories are the reason I gave up on my dream of being in this industry.

However, you are not immune to this. I can think of only one who ever mentioned the steam requirement for Half-Life 2 and warned their readers of all the problems it was causing on release. I can think of another who took their 0 - 10 scale and threw it out to give Half-Life 2 an 11. You grading scale for your reviews is not just a list of scores its a contract with us to give us some measure of your reliability. To throw it out for one title is what's know as selling out and in this case it wasn't for money it was to be a fan boy.

It doesn't help any that we almost never see you taking developers or distributors to task. They sold us one broken product after another for years. I can't remember one review or article that ever took developers or distributors to task for selling us a $50 game that doesn't work. Its a simple statement of fact that the installation and stability are far more important that what's in the game. If it doesn't run or constantly crashes who cares if its got great graphics or awesome gameplay.

If you or anybody else feel that way, and are under-represented in games, get an education on game development and make them yourselves instead of depending on others to do things for you.

@elheber:

I think you might be over complicating this situation. The anger we are seeing with all of this is nothing new and it been around for a long time.

Online gaming has never been a healthy place. From the very beginning we've had a serious problem with the way people treat each other. Terms like griefer, player killer, spawn camper, tea bagging, loot ninja, and many other are all tied to on line gaming and none of them are positive terms. We the number of negative terms describing one line gaming heavily out numbers to positive terms that is a really good indication that there is something wrong and a lot of anger being generated.

The most caustic example these days is probably League of Legends. And based on how little has been done over the years I suspect the only reason there is any attempt to get League of Legends under control is all the money changing hands due to it status in the cyber arenas.

To use the excuse "oh its the anonymity of the internet draw the troll out of all of us" is just a cop out. At first it would have been valid but we have 20 years of data gathered from dozens of games. More than enough to get something going with the help of sociologist and behavior specialists. I know something has been tried and it doesn't help any that we automatically attack it without offering any alternatives.

I have a place to start. Abandon MMO's that use the old school mechanics. Specifically the ones that generate fights over resource nodes, quest kills, force customers to stand around waiting for something to respawn, and the worst of them all - need and greed. For those who don't know, need and greed is basically a honor system ... on the internet. That should be more then enough to tell you that mechanic is an horribly bad idea. And yet one developer after another keeps using it despite knowing full well its caused all kinds of fights.

I guess what I'm saying is that we have the problems like gamergate because critics don't call foul enough, developers don't learn from the past, and everyone, including you and me, takes a "that's the way it is attitude".

Or just provide feedback to established game creators who will hopefully do a better job of serving their markets.

It's their creation, so they can do as they please with them. You're under no obligation to buy them.

You misunderstand. No one is complaining that they are being forced to buy games, or that game creators should be forced to do it some other way. They are complaining that they are being poorly or under-represented in the vast majority of video games in the hopes that game companies will listen and make a better effort to account for them.

I take issue with people who say you shouldn't harass women online. You shouldn't harass ANYONE online or off. If anyone is making a movement, let it be a full blown peace movement so everyone stops being dicks to each other. How can such a simple concept become so convoluted?

Agreed. It's like the fem movement is saying "you're a man, you can take it, but we're the superior gender and princesses who want equal treatment, but not really. We want equal treatment in all aspects, except we want chivalry not to die." or something like that. Wanting to have their cake and eat it too.

I don't know a lot about this gamergate thing, but I have hated absolutely everything I've read about it recently. It sounds like a cancer.

I think it's more like women get harassed at a far higher rate and the nature of that harassment is different than the harassment of men. Narrowing your focus on an issue doesn't mean you don't care about other issues.

I think I was a minor thing from the get go that's just steamrolled into a complete disaster.

It starts off as some critisism towards games journalists on how they are "clearly" biased in their reviews, and now has gone into full swing by attacking Women in the industry and quite possibly even women who plays games with threats of sexual assault or even death. Which has also started to be thrown at Journalists within the industry. And all happening under the "gamergate" banner and making everybody look bad. Intentional or not, you cannot refuse that it's spiraled out of control. If you do then you're blind and naive.

To those that contribute to the problem, get your shit together and start to act like you have some shred of manners and integrity. Cause frankly you're making yourself and the industry look pathetic.

Edit : As a final note, Gamer Gate today is pretty much identical to "Discogate" in the 70ties and just as stupid.

I think their intentions are split. Sure it's going against political correctness and censorship in video games but I wouldn't exclude game media corruption from their aims.

I don't think anyone who follows this from a neutral perspective can claim GG is related to harassment and bullying.

There's no actual evidence for it.

Plus the effort to dismiss a whole group of consumer complains with the unrelated actions of like, 3 trolls is an unfair and probably suspicious way to deal with things.

But on the other hand, reducing the doxxing and rape and death threats from a vocal contingent of people who have latched on to whatever the hell Gamergate actually IS can also bee seen as an 'unfair and probably suspicious way to deal with things.'

yeah the GG site is getting attacked by people of the other side wanting it to shut it down. They did it because of the bullying their own consumers. Which means gamers and GamerGate as a whole. Sites have attacked GamerGate and that's why they pulled out.

If you follow the GG hashtag you would hear about it. So you are comparing me to a troll? Nice, based on fucking what?

In my attempts to get a handle on the whole gamergate situation, (btw, there is an excellent thread chronicling gamergate, including videos, on mmo-champion found here.) I have noticed that although discussions from GamerGate supporters may often bleed into several related topics, the core tenets are pretty universal and fall into two categories.

One is the call for transparency and ethics reform in gaming journalism, particularly in such cases where corruption has been exposed, as in the Zoe Quinn sex scandal. (A situation highly fueled both by the coverup and subsequent slew of conveniently timed 'gamers are dead' articles released by nearly a dozen gaming sites within hours of each other, which openly insulted their own respective fanbases)

The second is a backlash against SJW's like Anita Sarkeesian, who have profited financially by injecting the radical feminist agenda into gaming by misrepresenting games, developers, and the gamers themselves, through highly manipulative distortions and outright lies.

If anyone wants to know why there is such an enormous backlash against Sarkeesian I suggest you watch her Damsel in Distress video, and then watch some of the video responses debunking her claims. Thunderf00t's Feminism vs. Facts videos are a good place to start.

I started investigating this whole affair with an open mind, but have since been convinced that the core concerns of gamergate are legit. This of course does not in any way excuse threats and harassment from either side. There may be a valid discussion to be had regarding the portrayal of women in video games, but it is nowhere to be found in the dishonest misrepresentations and outright lies of Anita Sarkeesian.

damn, i don't think i could have said it any better

*sighs* I remember the days when talking about video games didn't make my head hurt.

Gamergate drew me in when I found out about GameJounroPros. That is unacceptable and needs to be dealt with.

A big part of the problem is entitled idiots who think all games should cater to them and only them.

Some games have rich stories with political subjects, others are nothing more than toys you mess around with. If you just want to mess around then fine, but don't complain about devs forcing their views on you, nobody forced you to buy the game. Just play games you want to play and let other people play the ones they want to play.

Here's a concise video by SyrianGirlpartisan showing just how deep the rabbit hole goes.