I think that the KnowYourMeme article [0] is the closest thing to "favorable to gamergate + moderately unbiased" I've read. And while I do think it leaves out some of the horrible behavior on GG's side, at least it doesn't try to paint the media as being composed entirely of angels.
I feel like that is accurate to a point, but really doesn't accurately portray the /r/KotakuinAction and similar groups views. There's a very strong undercurrent of sexism and strange politics that played into it all from the very start. The "ethics" questions very much took a back seat as far as their actions as group in favor of a sort of reactionary response to social justice moments, women in staring roles in a game or movie, just about anything they could grab onto. Even things like a game not receiving a "score" that they disagreed with... They were big on memes about women with colored hair, harassment campaigns on twitter (and awkward / faked claims they were harassed), and so on, entirely disconnected from any "ethics" concern.
The fact that it was rooted in claims about a woman cheating on a man is no coincidence.
I appreciate that sites effort to remain neutral but I think at some point if a group's actions and behavior don't match their claims... then just reporting their stated motivation is actually inaccurate.
The one thing I am missing from that summary is a mentioning of what happen when John Bain died of cancer several years later. Several anti-GG people celebrated the death days after it was announced, which in the context of all that was said and done around GG was to me one of the worst behavior anyone committed.
The only good thing is that companies has been less acceptable for such behavior. One developer from bioware got fired for it, and it likely contributed when an other developer at Anet got fired.
I'm gonna say something that everyone uses to dismiss extremist views... and say I'm not going to try to do that.
I think that behavior was terrible, but also not really generally the views of folks who might be associated with "anti-GG".
Having said that...
One of the catches is that there wasn't an organized "anti-GG" side in the same sense there was a "GG" core group. To some extent the "GG" folks were the ones who defined who the "anti-GG" people were, and they strongly believed that there was an "anti-GG" group that behaved in the exact same way they did, but I don't think that really added up. Sometimes they defined an "anti-gg" person as just someone who gave a poor review to a game they liked, a woman who had a visible role working for a gaming company, or just liked having a female protagonist, or something pretty disconnected.
Most people that GG folks associated with "aniti-GG", really was more of an amalgam of various people and personalities who had various views .... but weren't centralized on a "anti-GG" identity, they were usually people associated with other things that had nothing to do with "video game journalism ethics". There effectively wasn't really an equivalent ying to the yang as far as groups and opposing views went. Certainly people "against" GG, but usually they were tied to other things too.
What was "anti-GG" didn't even have anything to do with "video game journalism ethics" and to some extent GG found these folks views or what have you unacceptable and sort formed that concept. "Anti-GG" was often a case of who "GG" thought they were and at times simply sought them out. Like I said no doubt some folks associated themselves with "anti-GG" but it wasn't quite a ying and yang. Many of the people initially identified as "anti-GG" by "GG" folks often talked about being against online harassment, and really had no clue what GG was until things grew quickly.
I feel like this process of taking an issue, expanding into an identity and tacking on ideas, then seeking out those views and people deemed unacceptable, and in some way trying to pick a sort of social media fight, is a very common thing with identity politics type behavior, and GG certainly fit that pattern. What was or wasn't "anti-GG" largely was defined by that process.
The definition of anti-GG that I used was basically people who celebrated John Bane and justified it by claiming john bane supported GG.
Not that John bane did that, as can be heard in the linked source in the above article, where he even address the same thing you say in that there were not an organized anti-gg. He describe basically three loose groups, those that harass which he think should be frozen out of the conversation, those reacted to those and "fed the trolls", and the third small category of people who simply wanted to discuss game ethics.
To be fair the discussion of game ethics was drowned out, through I think the same thing he said said back then is still very relevant today. We still have game reviewers that get punished by publishers and put on "black lists" if they give a game a bad review, or worse get takedown notices. We also got PC game reviewer like ACG using the ethical dilemma as the premise why patreon supported game reviews are better than those that get "sponsored" by the industry, which he start and finish every single video with...
But to go back, yes. There wasn't an organized "anti-GG" side. If I had remembered that part of the discussion I would had avoided using the word and instead spelled out what I meant.
When people talk about anti-GG they are talking about centralised groups of game journalists like the GameJournoPros private chat where video game journalists discussed and organised how to handle GG. This was after the journalists in that chat released articles with a similar gamers are dead narrative.
These are all substantiated facts that prove you wrong, I don't care that you are wrong for all I know you are a bot. But I wanted to show how to make an argument in good faith and substantiate your claims, it's up to you what you do with that.
To anyone who might view the above as an objective or credible source: it's written by people in the GamerGate movement, and substantiates many of its assertions with links to Breitbart and r/KotakuInAction, among others.
Both GG people and anti-GG people where harassed, received death threats, bomb scares and even physically attacked.
Both sides used this to try and play the bigger victim. This a bad argument as the counter is just to mirror it, playing up your own victim hood while down playing the others. No truth can be gained from this argument only a fight in bad faith.
The reason I brought it up is that the knowyourmeme.com does not cover the celebration when a cancer victim died, but it does cover the harassment, death threats and bomb threats. No physical attacks however, and I never heard of that so I would actually be interested to hear more about that part.
As a side not however, I personally treat anonymous threats a bit different from statements which is done with peoples real name next to the logo of the game studio that they work at. In part because here in Sweden we have a reality show which premise is to locate people behind anonymous threats and shame them, while also provide free lawyers to those few victims that get to be on the show in order to file civil suits. The accused troll is always either regretful or deny the accusation.
In contrast the people who celebrate the death of John Bane do not regret the statement nor deny it. They think they are justified in their behavior. To me that is significant.
> harassment campaigns on twitter (and awkward / faked claims they were harassed)
That /r/kotakuinaction organised harassment campaigns and that they faked harassment claims is a pretty harmful accusation, care to back it up with some evidence?
No I don't care to. It is a fact, they even organized it on that subreddit... it was out in the open at the time it occurred. Anyone who read that sub at that time had a chance to see them explicitly discuss and organize it.
Gamergate is really a topic that folks who want to belive are going to belive, and no amount of linking is going to change anyone's mind. You literally had folks posting their tweets from their account(s) and then if things went bad that same user would claim that same twitter account was a fake account someone else made to make them look bad.
It's just one of those things that I found not to be worth getting into a googling / link fight about, just as a personal policy.
People can make of that what they will / not belive me, but it not worth linking to it as I find folks will belive what they're going to belive anyway.
Also as personal policy, when someone asserts something, is asked for evidence, and then comes back with "it's really well known and I'm not going to provide evidence for it", I assume that means they looked for evidence and couldn't find any. Lots of things are commonly known in a subgroup despite having no primary sources.
That may not be the case here, but it's a better policy than taking things on faith in my opinion.
If you can't or wont back up your claim then its unsubstantiated not fact.
> Gamergate is really a topic that folks who want to belive are going to belive, and no amount of linking is going to change anyone's mind.
Another opinion I don't share. I would rather give people the opportunity to prove me wrong so that I can have the benefit of changing my mind and being right.
The "ethics in game journalism" was basically a weaselword for what they really wanted - women out of gaming. It's a lot like how "economic anxiety" elected Trump - it's a way to excuse people's inexcusable attitudes towards others.
Yeah it grew very fast, and pivoted really fast to be a sort of identity thing.
What is strange is that even for a while on their main gathering forums ... they denied even the source of the moment being the post about Zoe Quinn. It was a very fluid movement from the start, hate, us vs them, and other identity moments allow for that.
> I'm confused, isn't "Gamergate" like "Watergate"?
No, not really, but...
> That's like... are you on Watergate's side?
There were people on (the) Watergate (break-in)’s side. There are still, oddly enough, people proudly on that side (Roger Stone, for instance.)
Anyhow, since the Watergate scandal, naming things “-gate” to evoke Watergate and the widespread (though not universal) revulsion is common by opposing activists, but just because the name sticks doesn't mean the association does.
This is a comment chain from someone saying that the Wikipedia Gamergate article is horribly biased...
Edit: I think I misunderstood the parent. To be on GG's 'side' in this sense would be to be a gamer who believes that games journalism should abide by some basic ethical standards and/or be a horrible mysoginist who hates the idea of female characters and catering to people besides straight white men, depending on who you ask.
GG is a pretty heavy case of an "if by whiskey" argument from all sides (I don't want to say both, because it feels like there's a lot of sides there), and it's been blown up to horrific proportions in the politics of entertainment scene.
I recall Stallman's remark that even if you're not interested in politics, politics is interested in you, but it looks more and more like there's nothing you can do to meaningfully and safely interact with the zeitgeist, so why the hell would you try to be part of any kind of politics. It feels more like a force of nature than an actual human activity. More like a tornado than a debate of any sort - just close your doors and windows, keep quiet and hope it's not your house that gets destroyed.
Yeah I'm puzzled too. I think it's along the line of sexist racist trolls attacking women for being into gaming then wikipedia being against sexist trolling?
From what I understand the bias is that the Wikipedia article describes the controversy as "targeted harassment" with a side note of ethics in video game journals, even though there is a case to be made that the gamergate hashtag was started to point out unethical practices in game journalism which the accused took as harassment to save face.
"The accused took as harassment" implies that there was no harassing intent and... there's just no way that's true. People like Zoe Quinn were absolutely harassed, I don't see how anyone could argue otherwise. Even the original incident that sparked the whole controversy was bunk: that Zoe Quinn got a favorable review from a journalist because she was sleeping with him. He never even reviewed her game!
If Gamergate wanted to point out unethical practises in game journalism then holy hell was there a lot to work with. "Exclusive" reviews that are always positive, "sneak peeks" and so on that are openly and obviously traded for positive coverage. Video games journalism is so far deeply in bed with the major publishers in the industry it covers that it's absurd. But somehow, Gamergate became all about a small number of independent game developers who just happened to be women, and were (indisputably) the victims of harassment, rape threats and doxxing. Weird, that.
No. This is preposterous. I ended up on gamergate's hate list and they dumped so much filth into my reddit inbox I deleted my account and never looked back. And I'm a total nobody.
The harassment from the core GG folks was systematic and severe. In several cases it escalated to physical stalking of women where the police became involved.
And should we be surprised? This whole thing got started when one angry ex boyfriend wrote a rant and got the whole 4chan gaming world to start harassing and demonizing his ex.
But sure, go ahead and keep claiming "it's about ethics in gaming journalism" and that there's no harassment, just people being too sensitive or faking it.
Also, back when GamerGate was actually relevant, the article was very heavily controlled by someone who liked to track down the social media accounts of editors who disagreed with him, harass them off-site over it, and then accuse them of violating Wikipedia rules and threaten to get them banned if they complained about it on Wikipedia. I think he even managed to get a few of the people he'd harassed banned. Previously he'd done it over things like his personal interpretations of obscure anime plot points, and he brought those tactics to fighting against GamerGate.
To be fair, ArbCom did eventually decide they'd had enough and indefinitely ban him for this - much to the anger of all the folks proudly taking a stand against harassment by fighting GamerGate. (Though it took something like three attempts at bringing it before ArbCom.)
A common fallacy is "if there are two strongly opposing sides, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle" and the related "if there's two strongly opposing sides, there are ways in which they're both right."
But, this is a fallacy. Vaccines don't cause autism, the Earth isn't even a little flat, and GG wasn't in any way "about" ethics in games journalism — some people were led to believe it was, but they were useful idiots who were purposefully corralled to create a smokescreen. So I'd argue strongly against claims that the Wikipedia page is "biased" if it doesn't mention the ethics storyline. e.g.
It's understandable, for parties with less information, to think this was more balanced than it was, but I hope with appropriate information we could stop giving that side credibility.
Well, actually, it is a little flat. In fact it's quite flat; it has curvature (inverse radius) less than 1.6e-7 (0.00000016) per meter. In other words, it takes about 70 miles for it deviate from 'flat' by one degree.
(Golden mean is a fallacy, but that's not a very good example of it's fallacity.)
