Shadoer posted:

If by staying quiet, you mean the way virtually all successful civil rights movements were won then yes

I seem to remember gay rights activists being against censorship by companies and Martin Luthor King advocating against violence and vigilante activity.

Pyromancer posted:

Bible also has good messages even non-christians approve, does that mean they don't disagree with spanish inquisition in any meaningful way?

Cingulate posted:

This is poo poo. Defending one's right to see this is dumb. If you don't feel insulted by somebody trying to sell you this, you're ... much too nice.

Hadaka Apron posted:

David Auerbach is great and pretty much everything he's written about GG is required reading. I especially like his "How to End Gamergate" article that ran last October:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/10/how_to_end_gamergate_a_divide_and_conquer_plan.html

Although I think that a lot of the moderates in GG have left since he wrote this article.

Cingulate posted:

Didn't know what a Cid was so I googled it.



This is poo poo. Defending one's right to see this is dumb. If you don't feel insulted by somebody trying to sell you this, you're ... much too nice.

Cingulate posted:

I think GGers rarely consciously identify with this position. They probably actually care much more about the same nerdery you seemingly care about. They just really hate having their niche infringed upon, especially by she-devils.

InsanityIsCrazy posted:

Since we seem to be getting into big post territory, I'll just quote David Auerbach's latest entry following E3, which aligns pretty well with what I think:


TL;DR: indie devs and their journalist buddies are like the restaurants in Hells Kitchen that never learn from their mistakes and blame their audience when they fail. They were low hanging fruit.


I unironically missed you.

Tezzor posted:

Personally I think this is wishful thinking and I don't feel that this claim is factually accurate; the kind of laughable product-sponge loser who is so excited to have the opportunity to pay money for your product that he writes at length about how he was crying in joy over the Shenmue kickstarter is the kind of market that most industries could only dream of and it would be irrational for developers to not cater to them.

Ghost Head posted:

I think the new Cid character is fine

quote:

I think that on the whole my analysis of Gamergate holds up pretty well. Certainly better than most, though that's saying very little (endless "Gamergate is dead/over" pieces weren't ever candidates for the next Cassandra). But I did significantly overestimate the extent to which the right would coopt Gamergate, and I want to take a look at why I got that wrong. Though Dems had attempted to use Gamergate as part of a midterm "war on women" narrative, this was not particularly effective, and so after the election I expected the Republicans and conservative press to jump in and talk about a war on white male nerds or somesuch. Certainly, the left-wing press is talking about Gamergate far less now than it did before the election, while the mainstream press is ignoring it because it is simply not worth the trouble. But while assorted small fringe right groups have tried to coopt Gamergate without much success, the mainstream right didn't take up the mantle of Gamergate in any significant way.

So the question is why right-wing cooptation has not happened anywhere near the extent that I thought it would. The demonization that greeted any resistance to the manufactured Gamergate narrative (Hi!) made me think that we might see a breed of "Rand Paul Democrats" in the same way that you got Reagan Democrats as a result of the Great Society and the Civil Rights Act--except this time liberals achieved far less in the bargain. As I wrote in my column this week, this may well still happen, but it won't be because of Gamergate. While Gamergate displays widespread alienation from the loudest and most irritating parts of online left culture, Gamergate has not become the "conservative/reactionary"-identified movement that its detractors insist it was/is, and which I feared it would become. I attribute this to three factors:

1. Gamergate consists primarily of secular, vaguely liberalish types, alongside a mix of moderates, libertarians, and heterodox conservatives. None of them are particularly keen on right-wing dogma. It's a sign of just how sheerly toxic right-wing press is that none of these people are keen on touching Fox, Rush, Hannity, etc. Rather, you get Breitbart UK (the "UK" is important), Reason, Spiked, and a few bloggers at the Daily Caller. But that's as far as Gamergate will generally go. They do not want Fox to become their standard bearer. They trust the rest of the press less than they used to, but Fox is still a dirty word to them.

2. Contrariwise, orthodox right-wingers see Gamergate's mixed political leanings as unreliable and unpredictable, and so weren't hugely eager to bring them into the fold, lest they foment more right-wing civil war with their crazy views. You don't see Cathy Young too often on Fox News either (or Milo Yiannopoulos for that matter). The right is uneasy about Chuck Johnson for this reason; they like it when he goes after people they hate, but then he goes after Allen West. Independent, loosely affiliated actors make dangerous icons.

3. Most significantly, the right was able to adopt Gamergate's playbook without coopting Gamergate. The reactions you see to incidents like Bahar Mustafa and Sad/Rabid Puppies fall far more into the traditional left/right divide than GG vs. anti-GG. (And no, Sad/Rabid Puppies and Gamergate are not the same. Pay attention.) This suggests that while the right was hesitant to get engaged with Gamergate because of its associations with harassment, 4chan, hardcore libertarianism, trans* issues, and all sorts of godless heathen degenerate behavior (as you can see from that list, some of it approved by the left, some of it not), they were paying close attention to the strategies and tactics, and made sure to keep them in store for the *next* time that Oberlin nuttiness or identity politics or "social justice" or whatever coughs up an embarrassing story that the right could hang around the neck of "Democrats" or "feminism" or "liberalism." There was no need to invoke the name of Gamergate. Gamergate had too much moral baggage and ideological confusion for them--something I should have realized--but the content and tactics of Gamergate's critique of "social justice warriors" resonated with them loud and clear.

In some ways, this is a better outcome than what I expected. It gave the US left (including the Dems) time to mount their own counterargument to the social justice movement and thereby not appear beholden to it--the quick adoption of "social justice warrior" as a negative stereotype speaks to this. I'm sure Hillary will have her "Sister Souljah" movement sometime next year just as her husband did in 1992--instead of Sister Souljah, I imagine it will be some radical feminist.

The right, in fact, missed an opportunity last year to establish the "SJW" as a stereotype of all Dems and manufacture a narrative out of it. I'm sure they will still try to do this, but the Dems have some time to prepare for it and tamp down the endless outrage emanating from the most doctrinaire of the left-wing outlets. Hence the current raft of "Students are so emotional and scary!" articles from Laura Kipnis and TPM and Vox and the like, and Michelle Obama telling Oberlin students to STFU. Some lefties are starting to run out of the burning social justice house, claiming they didn't set fire to it: "I was abused by these social justice maniacs! I wasn't one of them!" Disingenuousness aside, that will make it harder for the social justice movement to be turned into an icon of All That is Wrong with the Democrats. There was a moment of opportunity where, had the right taken the risk of embracing Gamergate, they could have attracted a lot of left-leaning people by taking on an ideology that was peaking at that very time. This was, I believe, precisely Christina Hoff Sommers' thinking. It's too late to do that now. It might not have worked anyway (it was a risky strategy because of factors 1 and 2), but I was scared that it would.

My mistake, then, was thinking that because the Dems saw Gamergate as a short-term political football, the Repubs did as well. They didn't, because the timing was wrong for them. The Repubs were concerned with their base, just as the Dems were concerned with theirs, but Gamergate was only a relevant issue (pro AND con) for the Dem base. Had Gamergate rolled around a year or two later, I believe the right would have tried to take up the Gamergate mantle more aggressively to peel off support from Hillary, but 2014 was too early for it to seem like a good idea. The long-term outlook was too unpredictable.

Instead, you are seeing a slower movement to peel off anti-social justice Dems through less orthodox right-wing venues like the Washington Examiner (keep an eye on Ashe Schow, Dems; hopefully the right is too dumb to allow her to be effective), Breitbart UK, and possibly the Daily Caller. It provides the best opportunity for Republicans to make inroads among the millennials that they have totally lost on social issues. They can't come out loudly for gay marriage or anything, but they can inveigh against the anti-tolerance of certain obnoxious leftist factions, and I'm sure they will. But the left now seems to be trying to rein in those excesses well ahead of Hillary's candidacy, to prevent the Repubs from capitalizing on it too heavily. Who will win the race?

Panzeh posted:

I don't think GG or any of that had much to do with that.

Nobody was going to change how video games were made. Articles will be made. People will get mad on the internet. Life goes on.

Tokamak posted:

And Shenmue isn't even a good game.

Cingulate posted:

It's not, and that you think it is is a bad sign.

InsanityIsCrazy posted:

The reason I like Dave is he had the mental fortitude to try and make sense, politically, of this sordid affair:

I think that on the whole my analysis of Gamergate holds up pretty well. Certainly better than most, though that's saying very little (endless "Gamergate is dead/over" pieces weren't ever candidates for the next Cassandra). But I did significantly overestimate the extent to which the right would coopt Gamergate, and I want to take a look at why I got that wrong. Though Dems had attempted to use Gamergate as part of a midterm "war on women" narrative, this was not particularly effective, and so after the election I expected the Republicans and conservative press to jump in and talk about a war on white male nerds or somesuch. Certainly, the left-wing press is talking about Gamergate far less now than it did before the election, while the mainstream press is ignoring it because it is simply not worth the trouble. But while assorted small fringe right groups have tried to coopt Gamergate without much success, the mainstream right didn't take up the mantle of Gamergate in any significant way.

So the question is why right-wing cooptation has not happened anywhere near the extent that I thought it would. The demonization that greeted any resistance to the manufactured Gamergate narrative (Hi!) made me think that we might see a breed of "Rand Paul Democrats" in the same way that you got Reagan Democrats as a result of the Great Society and the Civil Rights Act--except this time liberals achieved far less in the bargain. As I wrote in my column this week, this may well still happen, but it won't be because of Gamergate. While Gamergate displays widespread alienation from the loudest and most irritating parts of online left culture, Gamergate has not become the "conservative/reactionary"-identified movement that its detractors insist it was/is, and which I feared it would become. I attribute this to three factors:

1. Gamergate consists primarily of secular, vaguely liberalish types, alongside a mix of moderates, libertarians, and heterodox conservatives. None of them are particularly keen on right-wing dogma. It's a sign of just how sheerly toxic right-wing press is that none of these people are keen on touching Fox, Rush, Hannity, etc. Rather, you get Breitbart UK (the "UK" is important), Reason, Spiked, and a few bloggers at the Daily Caller. But that's as far as Gamergate will generally go. They do not want Fox to become their standard bearer. They trust the rest of the press less than they used to, but Fox is still a dirty word to them.

2. Contrariwise, orthodox right-wingers see Gamergate's mixed political leanings as unreliable and unpredictable, and so weren't hugely eager to bring them into the fold, lest they foment more right-wing civil war with their crazy views. You don't see Cathy Young too often on Fox News either (or Milo Yiannopoulos for that matter). The right is uneasy about Chuck Johnson for this reason; they like it when he goes after people they hate, but then he goes after Allen West. Independent, loosely affiliated actors make dangerous icons.

3. Most significantly, the right was able to adopt Gamergate's playbook without coopting Gamergate. The reactions you see to incidents like Bahar Mustafa and Sad/Rabid Puppies fall far more into the traditional left/right divide than GG vs. anti-GG. (And no, Sad/Rabid Puppies and Gamergate are not the same. Pay attention.) This suggests that while the right was hesitant to get engaged with Gamergate because of its associations with harassment, 4chan, hardcore libertarianism, trans* issues, and all sorts of godless heathen degenerate behavior (as you can see from that list, some of it approved by the left, some of it not), they were paying close attention to the strategies and tactics, and made sure to keep them in store for the *next* time that Oberlin nuttiness or identity politics or "social justice" or whatever coughs up an embarrassing story that the right could hang around the neck of "Democrats" or "feminism" or "liberalism." There was no need to invoke the name of Gamergate. Gamergate had too much moral baggage and ideological confusion for them--something I should have realized--but the content and tactics of Gamergate's critique of "social justice warriors" resonated with them loud and clear.

In some ways, this is a better outcome than what I expected. It gave the US left (including the Dems) time to mount their own counterargument to the social justice movement and thereby not appear beholden to it--the quick adoption of "social justice warrior" as a negative stereotype speaks to this. I'm sure Hillary will have her "Sister Souljah" movement sometime next year just as her husband did in 1992--instead of Sister Souljah, I imagine it will be some radical feminist.

The right, in fact, missed an opportunity last year to establish the "SJW" as a stereotype of all Dems and manufacture a narrative out of it. I'm sure they will still try to do this, but the Dems have some time to prepare for it and tamp down the endless outrage emanating from the most doctrinaire of the left-wing outlets. Hence the current raft of "Students are so emotional and scary!" articles from Laura Kipnis and TPM and Vox and the like, and Michelle Obama telling Oberlin students to STFU. Some lefties are starting to run out of the burning social justice house, claiming they didn't set fire to it: "I was abused by these social justice maniacs! I wasn't one of them!" Disingenuousness aside, that will make it harder for the social justice movement to be turned into an icon of All That is Wrong with the Democrats. There was a moment of opportunity where, had the right taken the risk of embracing Gamergate, they could have attracted a lot of left-leaning people by taking on an ideology that was peaking at that very time. This was, I believe, precisely Christina Hoff Sommers' thinking. It's too late to do that now. It might not have worked anyway (it was a risky strategy because of factors 1 and 2), but I was scared that it would.

My mistake, then, was thinking that because the Dems saw Gamergate as a short-term political football, the Repubs did as well. They didn't, because the timing was wrong for them. The Repubs were concerned with their base, just as the Dems were concerned with theirs, but Gamergate was only a relevant issue (pro AND con) for the Dem base. Had Gamergate rolled around a year or two later, I believe the right would have tried to take up the Gamergate mantle more aggressively to peel off support from Hillary, but 2014 was too early for it to seem like a good idea. The long-term outlook was too unpredictable.

Instead, you are seeing a slower movement to peel off anti-social justice Dems through less orthodox right-wing venues like the Washington Examiner (keep an eye on Ashe Schow, Dems; hopefully the right is too dumb to allow her to be effective), Breitbart UK, and possibly the Daily Caller. It provides the best opportunity for Republicans to make inroads among the millennials that they have totally lost on social issues. They can't come out loudly for gay marriage or anything, but they can inveigh against the anti-tolerance of certain obnoxious leftist factions, and I'm sure they will. But the left now seems to be trying to rein in those excesses well ahead of Hillary's candidacy, to prevent the Repubs from capitalizing on it too heavily. Who will win the race?

The entirety of E3 this year had a focus on the sheer number of playable female leads. This, to some, was seen as their side gaining influence in the industry. Whether or not they were right is entirely speculative.


You hush.

InsanityIsCrazy posted:

The entirety of E3 this year had a focus on the sheer number of playable female leads. This, to some, was seen as their side gaining influence in the industry. Whether or not they were right is entirely speculative.

quote:

How come 2015 is suddenly so infinitely better than 2014, then?

I think there are two reasons for that.

First, I think the bias comes from the fact that there were probably more women on stage than in any previous year. It seems like there were six the last year, and I think we have seen more this year (anyone wants to compare, go ahead, I refuse to watch all the conferences again). And we’re not talking any fake non-gamer/dev speakers here, we’re talking real flesh and blood female developers. Their presence was noticeable, and they were all great.

Additionally, the bias might be amplified by the fact that this year the publishers were smarter about their trailers and gameplay previews. In previous years, most of the time if, say, Ubisoft had a game they wanted to promote, they kept it for their own conference. This year, they did promote such a game at their conference, but prepared something unique and worthy for the platform holders as well. So Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate was present in multiple conferences at E3 2015, and one of these presentations showed a female protagonist we can sometimes play as.

So I think that while games themselves did not really change on the whole, the slight refocus in game marketing might have affected the journalists’ perception of games.

Second, last year, some of gaming press, especially those who love to call themselves progressive, pushed the narrative that games are awful (see the earlier E3 2014 quotes), and that all that gamers want — when they’re not busy being dead — is to push women out of gaming. That didn’t quite work as well as they expected: gamers refused to die and it turned out that no one ever wanted to push women out of gaming.

No one likes admitting they were wrong. The remainings of the narrative, then, had to be reskinned. And so now we have it that the industry “finally listened and grew up”. Even if the change never really comes just because cultural critics crack the whip.

But you know what…

I kind of like this change.

It’s a step, or even a jump in the right direction.

I think celebrating what you like — even if that celebration is inflated and biased — is infinitely better than shaming what you don’t like.

I was happy, then, that the ultra-violent Doom or For Honor were left alone by the press, and this year no one complained about the “severed heads” or the lack of female assassins in Rainbow Six. Instead, with only a few exceptions, the usual suspects simply focused on the positives. And this particular desync between what they say and, well, facts, is one I can live with.

Cingulate posted:

I can easily think of a lot of examples where a true work of are (not just ... advertising for cigarettes?) seemingly prospered in spite of, or possibly even because of, art. However, I can also think of examples for art prospering much, much brighter than anything you just came up with in the absence of any censorship. Bach, Rothko, Wallace.
And your claim wasn't "sometimes, censorship inspires art". It was: across the board, some degree of oppression is better than none.

Ghost Head posted:

ok let me clarify. It's fine in the sense that it doesn't matter. It's not good if I get upset at inconsequential poo poo.

Ddraig posted:

I believe the original claim was

Slanderer posted:

I can't wait until Tim Shaffer makes gamergate blind with rage (to the applause of assembled game developers) again. That was a pretty fun joke that he made with a sock puppet, don't you think?

City of Tampa posted:

yeah I thoroughly enjoyed it when the rich white said that the opinions of people of color don't count if they don't agree with him, and in fact should be mocked.

And then a bunch of other rich white people applauded. That was awesome.

Cingulate posted:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3727984&pagenumber=135&perpage=40#post447191693

No need for belief!

City of Tampa posted:

yeah I thoroughly enjoyed it when the rich white said that the opinions of people of color don't count if they don't agree with him, and in fact should be mocked.

And then a bunch of other rich white people applauded. That was awesome.

Broniki posted:

people have been saying the "moderates have left" every month since this thing started not realising that gamergate has only gotten more moderate with time as its strategic goals were achieved, the 3rd party trolls latching on got bored and it downsized from a consumer revolt to a passive media watchdog/funny banter train on social media.

Slanderer posted:

I too cannot parse the literal and symbolic meaning of a sockpuppet, my man.

Cingulate posted:

If people try to sell this thing to you and you don't feel insulted, you're wrong. You're being insulted.

Slanderer posted:

What is Nazi Shaming? Is that a bad thing somehow?

Ghost Head posted:

What if I do not feel insulted by the thing that is intended to insult me?

Scantily clad cid is.....ok maybe not a precedent that should be set in other games, but on the other hand, so loving what? Is it a big deal really? How angry should I be on a scale of 1-10?

City of Tampa posted:

In this case a sockpuppet is what you call a person of color that disagrees with a rich white man, because their existence is extremely inconvenient to the narrative that he is trying to create.

Slanderer posted:

You're not projecting at all right now.

Tokamak posted:

this is currently the front page of Reddit's gamergate board:



"moderate"

Obdicut posted:

About this particular instance, or about the misogyny in our culture and the lovely representation of women in general?

Ghost Head posted:

About this particular instance.

Obdicut posted:

Not very. But it should remind you of the general misogyny and poo poo, rather than just treating it like an isolated incident with no relationship to anything else.

Effectronica posted:

City of Tampa posted:

you are the person that is proud of a rich white mans public erasure of the opinions and life experiences of people of color, and the reaction that other rich white people had to it. You made a post celebrating that.

Slanderer posted:

Please don't use what I didn't say against me. I am not your shield against criticism, poster "City of Tampa"

Slanderer posted:

I can't wait until Tim Shaffer makes gamergate blind with rage (to the applause of assembled game developers) again. That was a pretty fun joke that he made with a sock puppet, don't you think?

City of Tampa posted:

Ghost Head posted:

yeah and that's fine. But hopefully I can be trusted to bear that in mind while I enjoy FF15 and not be a shitlord or whatever for the crime of playing a game with a sexy mechanic.

Shadoer posted:

If by staying quiet, you mean the way virtually all successful civil rights movements were won then yes

I seem to remember gay rights activists being against censorship by companies and Martin Luthor King advocating against violence and vigilante activity.

Shadoer posted:

Yeah I do remember Malcolm X, the #1 person the right would always bring up during the Civil Rights campaign to show why the segregation laws needed to stay. The same fellow that then managed to be assassinated by black terrorists for becoming less radical.

Like really Malcomn X and the Black Panthers didn't do any favors to the Civil Rights movement and if anything hindered it.

Powercrazy posted:

http://deepfreeze.it/

Well when you support an institution that is the target of a movement to reform that institution, you become part of the institution. In this case she created a tool she styled as an "anti-harassment blocker" which actually supports the corrupt journalist mentioned in the link.

Additionally before you can attempt to reform an institution you have to demonstrate that it is corrupt, people like randi muddy the waters while contributing to the vrey problem she is claiming to be against, harassment.

Neurolimal posted:

The fact that many americans believe that MLK and his followers singlehandedly ushered in complete equality through pure nonviolence is not support for milquetoast slacktivism, but instead an indictment of the american education system.

E:

Martin Luther King Jr. posted:

It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.

quote:

="Martin Luther King Jr."]I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.