Dreylad posted:

the original gamergate thread in gbs was about that and this is what happened to it: exiled to a humourless subforum.

Popular Thug Drink posted:

so more spiteful internet politics nobody in their thirties cares about

Al Cowens posted:

Allow me to state my position without troll or ruse: White feminists are very racist authoritarians and are trying to erase my very existence both metaphorically (rendered invisible, incarcerated, denied freedom of expression) and more literally (dead). This wouldn't be so bad if they were impotent, but they have managed to influence the popular culture at large (video games are pretty popular) and it's starting to feel increasingly threatening. /pol/ wish they had the kind of power and public sympathy that Anita has. Thank heavens they do not.

It's not just video games, but GamerGate happens to be one of their obstacles.

Totalizator posted:

The word you're missing here is "slander"

Totalizator posted:

Slander deserves to be called out and exposed, no conflict with freedom of speech there. GG speaks out against gaming media that slanders gamers, I have no problem with this.

Totalizator posted:

Removing slander is exposing it? What?

Totalizator posted:

Apple pulling historical games to score points from the whole debate is the exact thing people are complaining about. There is no justification for taking down historical games because they contain a symbol. They backed out from that fortunately but this was the banning I was referring to. It's not like people who disagreed with it had a choice other then trashing their expensive phone, you can't just download a different app store, you're locked in to whatever political decision Apple makes or lose money. It showcased a real problem.

7c Nickel posted:

So if GamerGate is so left wing, how come the only sites that give them the time of day are either right wing heaps like Breitbart and lewrockwell.com, or MRA poo poo stains like A Voice for Men?

Shadoer posted:

The anti-side has taken the position that it's only censorship if the government does it. If you happen to pressure every game publisher and journalist to not cover something and push the product to the fringe of the market or outright oblivion, that's not censorship.

Shadoer posted:

Well that was a point brought up with Depression Quest before Gamergate was blown up. Several people had made recent text/choice games like that in the past which were far superior to Depression Quest, but only Depression Quest got tons of coverage and was greenlit on steam because it "advocated a good cause".

Obdicut posted:

I also know people who like 'pie'.

INH5 posted:

They openly did. But then this February, they fired Moviebob and hired several prominent GG supporters. They also around the same time made a statement that they are going to focus their coverage on video games instead of politics, which was obviously intended to pander to the GG demographic.

NutritiousSnack posted:

Lara Croft has been wearing a coat and pants for a decade now, with her breast size notable turned down.

This statement is so loving untrue it's easily the funniest post in this thread

From David Auerbach's twitter account because he got bored of writing about the idiots on both sides years ago.


"It's like if all the movie reviews in the local newspaper were written by film studies professors who only like Atom Egoyan and stuff like that but were paid to pretend to be excited for the new Transformers movie." --TheHuss

The "indie" press (for lack of a better term: Kotaku, Polygon, Gamasutra, and a slew of lesser outfits) have been unhappy with the E3. Gamergate hasn't been quite the focus, but it's been an undercurrent. Christian Nutt's focus on Gamergate in the E3 coverage (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/246125/The_ESA_clarifies_its_antiharassment_stance_future_of_E3.php) may seem perplexing. Why badger the ESA head now, ten months after Gamergate began, about why the ESA won't speak about GG? Especially when he clearly is Not Going to Say Anything?

There has been an undercurrent of rage from the non-mainstream gaming press toward the AAAs and the AAA press over the AAA refusal to rail against Gamergate and demonize its members. The adoption of ethics policies by IGN also smacked of appeasement to them. Over the months of coverage, there's been repeated sniping from all the journalists and many indie devs that the AAAs are just standing back and letting Gamergate happen, they're enabling the harassment, etc. (I'll just use "journos" to refer to that particular unhappy segment of the "indie" gaming press so I can stop typing "indie" in quotes.")

This rage is mostly impotent frustration. The journos wanted to use Gamergate as a lever for greater influence over the AAAs and to be included at the table for industry discussions. And given that the journos and their allies were increasingly out of sync with the majority of gamers, AAA support was their best bet for pushing their vision of what gaming should be, and, more baldly, for gaining influence. So if the AAAs were to say, "Gamergate is terrible, what can we do?", the journos could pipe up and say, "Glad you asked! Listen to us! Change your games like we say! Become art!" But the AAAs never asked. Despite the attempts of the journos to spin every AAA mention of harassment as a specific condemnation of Gamergate, the journos have continued to complain that the AAAs don't care about Gamergate.

The thing is, the journos are pretty much right. The AAAs *are* supporting Gamergate, at least tacitly. They don't want the journos to gain any more influence (or to stop losing influence), and they loathe this pseudo-academic "critique" stuff just as much as your average gamer. The thought of having to kiss the rear end of some PhD in order to gain an Indie or Social Justice imprimatur is insulting to them. They've got money to make. So by remaining silent on Gamergate and having IGN do the pageantry of adopting an ethics policy (no skin off their nose), the AAAs signalled that they were not in alignment with the journos. And they aren't. They are happy to see Gamergate take these people on--and that enrages the journos all the more. This wasn't a planned strategy on behalf of the AAAs, but it was an easy call to make once Gamergate was in play.

It's also important to understand the difference between amateur and professional corruption. If you talk to service workers at restaurants, they'll generally tell you that the worst treatment usually comes from small independent restaurants. Corporate chains and franchises tend to establish standards in order to ameliorate the possibility of lawsuits and to keep the corporate name's reputation intact. While treatment may not be great, there's an HR department ready to crack down if any one person gets out of hand. In a small restaurant, however, some crazy chef can be as much of a jerk as he wants, and no one can stop him as long as the place is successful. I can tell you horror stories. Capitalism is venal and heartless but it does tend to exert a smoothing effect with scale; excesses both positive and negative get ironed out and professionalized in the pursuit of making money efficiently. Albert O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph is a fantastic little book about the early theorizing of capitalism and how its proponents argued that financial interest was a much more predictable and much less harmful motive than most other motives that people ever acted on. Hirschman was pretty left and very smart: http://www.waggish.org/2005/albert-o-hirschman-the-passions-and-the-interests/

And it is fortunate for men to be in a situation in which, though their passions may prompt them to be wicked, they have nevertheless an interest in not being so.
--Montesquieu

Which is to say, corporate corruption is *professional*. The journos and their favored devs made such easy targets for Gamergate because their corruption was absurdly inept. The AAAs and mouthpieces like IGN and GameInformer and PCGamer run a professional outfit: sure, it's all a big PR con job, but they aren't going to have journalists reviewing games by people they're publicly friends with (or if called out on it, they'll apologize, add disclosures, blah blah), and they eventually realize to cut out the Doritos nonsense, even if a bit too late. Moreover, they aren't going to be dumb enough to run a bunch of articles on the death of gamers. (That would be the "passions" trumping the "interests.") As far as incompetent corruption goes, the journos were the low-hanging fruit. Investigation into AAA corruption would take boots on the ground that Gamergate doesn't have. The journos made it easy. Indie scenes have always celebrated themselves, but they usually don't make themselves targets to quite this extent.

So Gamergate has been pretty convenient for the AAAs. Gamergate is doing the dirty work of distracting, annoying, and quieting a chronic irritation for the AAAs, and the AAAs just have to sit back and keep quiet. This drives the journos crazy, but there's not much they can do about it, short of politely griping in articles like Nutt's (or impolitely griping on Twitter). Meanwhile, the AAAs are cutting off Kotaku and Polygon even as gamers stop paying attention to them. The journos' strategy has backfired. There must have been some collective delusion that they thought their influence could actually pull some weight with the AAAs, even with Gamergate as a potential lever. As I've said before, I don't know what they were thinking. They ragequit their audience.

"We really did wind up on an elitist 'strategy' for whatever strategy existed, which was none. What makes it elitist? Well, we never actually bothered to try and convince the gaming public along the way. The end result was this split we can now see: Most gamers hated all this poo poo."
--LoadingReadyRun poster

And another.

https://medium.com/@adrianchm/the-truth-about-e3-2015-and-female-protagonists-b006094e44b1


There were less female protagonists then last years E3, AAA doesn't give a poo poo about the press and actively snubbed them this year, and the push towards lack of sexualized women was here for around the better part of a decade but the sale of things like the Witcher 3 shows the market is still extremely friendly towards it.

gently caress I can point out towards stupid poo poo like SJW is now becoming more of insult towards among devs among devs and idiots on twitter they don't like, even after the whole "Social Justice Paladian LULZ!" thing they tried earlier. GamerGate has a lovely rep but that's inconsequential towards their opponents developing one of their own.

NutritiousSnack posted:

The underlying assumption is spelled out in the article itself in a very unflattering light that mocks outright mocks GG but is too subtle for people here to read. Consumers (this case GamerGate) and the press are busy fighting each other while AAA companies laugh, while a more corporate friendly media/ad outlet takes it's place.. Nothing is about that is mildly unreasonable.

Ddraig posted:

I'm not aware of the situation you're referring to. Is it perhaps on par or worse than the time the evil harpy queen mounted an assault on the wizards?

Effectronica posted:

This is blatant politics, and ideological besides.

Seriously, you, and the rest of the people whining about the graphics, are third-rate gamers and you should not be allowed to talk about gaming anymore.

The Snark posted:

The point remains that GamerGate is not comprised of just the harassers, or else that percentage would have been vastly higher, and that's just with alleged harassment. That's counting every last person who flagged every comment about GamerGate that wasn't to their liking as harassment.

Serf posted:

Exactly. And the idea of "hey wouldn't it be cool if we had more games where violence wasn't the primary method of interacting with the world" isn't one that I find inherently repellent.

quote:

A game industry that claims to support tolerance and respect is hypocritical as long as it produces and supports entertainment in which the wounding and killing of others is central to the amusement.

...

A game developer who claims to be a peaceful tolerant person while producing murder simulators is a hypocrite. I will not accuse them of being directly responsible for mass shootings and online harassment. But they are beyond a doubt guilty of neglecting to prevent such things.

revdrkevind posted:

Fair point. I meant that in a looser sense, as there have been real-world action taken to have games banned or etc.

Sephyr posted:

You know what I'd really like to see? Just once? A game in which the protagonist is moved entirely be ideology. No abducted love interest, no burned down home village, no parents slain by mustache-twirling villain, no being enslaved/kidnapped and out for revenge. Just a person with a strong set of ideas and out to challenge the world with them.

wiregrind posted:

You'd think with the current state of online security and surveillance, it wouldn't be that hard to track down the terrorist dorks who sent death threats to anita. I mean how much of a hacker are these guys and how incompetent is the police to not find anything yet

Mel Mudkiper posted: