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That whole Zoe Quinn thing

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Posted

Damn it. I was going to watch that video when I got home, Aethix. They took it down. 

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Posted

Looks like MundaneMatt took down the video because most of the content came from ShortFatOtaku's video on the subject, which they took down. Here's ShortFatOtaku's explanation from their channel:

 

 

Gamergate videos are gone for the forseeable future, and it looks like we won't be participating in gamergate related stuff anymore. Spoke with a lawyer and this is for the best.  We still support it personally but cannot be involved.  Good luck!!!!!!

 

The gist of the video from what I can remember is that some of the people behind the Indie Game Festival and Indiecade (including judges and I think organizers) had invested money in Fez and stood to directly profit from sales of Fez. Fez won awards in both IGF and Indiecade. So those people may be guilty of embezzlement or racketeering or some such crime. Basically, the video contained pretty heavy evidence of corruption in the indie game industry, which has been one of the major grievances from the gamergate movement since the very beginning

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Posted

Fez was a good game. It's totally a 1 hit wonder

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Posted

Clickhole proving they can make strawmen too!

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Posted

heh but for real has this debacle changed anything

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Posted

Nope. Status quo is...static. Moreover, places that would normally be apolitical are getting loaded up with polarization of viewpoints. No fun. Bums me out that it went like this.

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Posted

I mean I wouldn't call it a total strawman though.

 

As far as any of this gamergate stuff has gone, I've really only seen the BS about Zoe Quinn and then subsequently I only hear about women being attacked for even insinuating that the movement has a bias against women. So as far as I know, as far as has been exposed, including the initial video and nearly all the videos after, the journalism aspect is like 40% of it and the rest is how the "vocal minority" are making life hell for anyone who disagrees and spreading around that little bias that women are just worrying about nothing. Pretending it doesn't exist because it isn't your problem isn't the way to handle it.

 

Sure, maybe the core of the issue at first wasn't entirely sexism (though I retain the initial backlash totally at least 98% was) but people pointing that out has brought out the scum in the traps of the sinks across the internet. "No it's not!" cries the scum, "I'm going to break into your house and rape you for even thinking that!" And yeah those comments exist. You don't have to look much farther than Youtube for them. Since Youtube's new comment algorithm whateveritis also puts controversial comments at the top (dear god I hope these programmers sleep horribly at night knowing they wasted so many collective human hours) those become what you see the most and get the most exposure, causing a sense of false majority, which actually does encourage more people who might not be as horrible of people to lash out as full-on degenerates. I've seeen the cycle. I argue on Youtube semi-regularly.

 

The fact that the #GamerGate hashtag denied it was a sexist movement, saying that it's just a distraction from the real issue, puts blame on feminism and trivializes the sexist portion of the issue and then just riles people up even more. It shouldn't be that way, but people really hate it when you call peoples' sexism, apparently, so then it just becomes a shouting match with less and less coherency and exponentially increasing hypocrisy.

 

-----even if------ these horror stories were because of a small fraction of the "movement", the extremeness of their actions are, well, extreme. 1 douchebag threatening to rape and kill you and then sending you your address affects the mental state of any involved individuals a lot more than 100 people honestly just trying to fix the actual problem. It's unfortunate that the 1 douchebag can have that much power, but that's the way the world works. And even if it's a small number, let's say 20 douchebags, they've forever tainted this movement. The extremists will be remembered, and even the moderates may have enabled them to an extent. It's an unfortunate cycle of subconscious biases, ignorance, hypocrisy, and pride. It's got a Wiki page now, so that's neat.

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Posted

There's something I want to say about the doxxing and harassment issue here. There are doxxers and harassers on both sides of the issue. The difference is the doxxers and harassers claiming to support GG are anonymous nobodies who are decried by the movement as a whole. The doxxers and harassers claiming to support anit-GG are prominent people with their identities and reputations fully exposed (for example, Leigh Alexander and Zoe Quinn) and they enjoy the full support of the anti-GG movement. So which side would you say is more conducive to doxxing, harassment, and general hateful behavior?

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Posted

I typed a lot of things, and then I clicked on a link by accident and its all gone. I hate when that happens, and I don't usually retype it out cause the magic is gone. So I'll just say a short formulaic version

 

4chan=Anonymous Imageboard

4chan=Not a hivemind=common statement in defense of 4chan. Made no less true by this fact

GamerGate=/v/+/pol/

/v/=Angry Video Game enthusiasts

/pol/=Neo Nazi puppytards. Resourceful Neo Nazi puppytards.

 

GamerGate=Populated by many different splintering anonymous groups, therefore identity is defined by no one person

 

However. Anyone who is afraid of someone from one of those 2 boards threatening them with violence or rape should re-evaluate their worries. Rape and Death threats are an ever constant in the internet today, and on 4chan they're a dime a dozen. So common are they in fact, that they aren't actually all that common at all. To explain, someone who makes such a threat isn't taken seriously, and is usually harshly made fun of.

 

I have literally been in a thread where someone posted a screen cap of a google maps of my house. And I couldn't have given any less of a shit than I did then. Have you heard a single instance where a women's life has come under harm from something related to Gamer Gate? I haven't. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened, but the way the current anti Gamer Gate PR campaign is going I'd think something like that would be seized upon immediately. Please correct me if I'm wrong here, this is not me being a smart ass.

 

Whats happening here is an unmitigated split long in the forming, between to sides that are irreconcilable.

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Posted

Is GamerGate About Media Ethics or Harassing Women? Harassment, the Data Shows; Newsweek

 

I'll be the first to say that most internet threats are not to be taken seriously--but you should not encourage people to think it's just normal and okay. This incident is not indicative or expository of journalism corruption, but a fault in the video game community's line of thinking. I keep saying to people, why are we complaining about this now when it has been clear in the past that companies buy favorable reviews? It's because it involves women who have something to say and women who have sex. Anita Sarkeesian, despite her faults, only gets as much hatred because she is a woman who has something to say about video games. I cannot imagine under any circumstances, a male saying the same things and receiving the same threats in the same quantity. It might, in fact, just be forgotten forever. What Sarkeesian lies about in order to get money isn't more underhanded than what large publishers lie about to get money, and in fact they get a lot more money than her. There's a real conflict in priorities here. The fact that nothing's gotten any better since the incident truly shows that this is just people complaining pointlessly about one thing under the guise of another thing. There isn't organization, and as I see it, the majority is simply not actually concerned about corruption in the gaming community. 

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Posted

That newsweek thing has actually been debunked. And there's really nothing that can be said on the idea that a man who said the same things as Anita Sarkeesian wouldn't be harassed as much, since there's simply no data. However, what I do know is that the closest person to a male counterpart of Sarkeesian I can think of, Jack Thompson, was also sent death and rape threats. I wasn't able to find the examples I've read before, but I did find this article, which suggests that men are actually abused online more than women are and that both men and women are more likely to abuse members of the same sex than the opposite sex.

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Posted

Is GamerGate About Media Ethics or Harassing Women? Harassment, the Data Shows; Newsweek

 

I keep saying to people, why are we complaining about this now when it has been clear in the past that companies buy favorable reviews?

People have been concerned about this for a while. This is the straw that broke the camel's back. This camel has been loaded up since Kane and lynch.

 

 

Is GamerGate About Media Ethics or Harassing Women? Harassment, the Data Shows; Newsweek

 

It's because it involves women who have something to say and women who have sex. Anita Sarkeesian, despite her faults, only gets as much hatred because she is a woman who has something to say about video games. I cannot imagine under any circumstances, a male saying the same things and receiving the same threats in the same quantity.

But Anita is just a mouthpiece, a glorified Shock Jock for the Internet age. Jonathan McIntosh is the writer and producer for her show, and his twitter feed seems just as inundated as hers.

 

 

Is GamerGate About Media Ethics or Harassing Women? Harassment, the Data Shows; Newsweek

 

The fact that nothing's gotten any better since the incident truly shows that this is just people complaining pointlessly about one thing under the guise of another thing. There isn't organization, and as I see it, the majority is simply not actually concerned about corruption in the gaming community. 

The means by which GamerGate operated while on /v/ was to call sponsors and tell them they would not purchase their products while they supported X. Several major sponsors lifted support of various websites, but since then public opinion has changed. You have two sides mindlessly butting heads, and both pointing to the extremists in each others camps as emblematic of the whole. No net movement is made, and Gamergate is losing out from sheer attrition because it operates from  a place of anonymity.

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Posted

That newsweek thing has actually been debunked. And there's really nothing that can be said on the idea that a man who said the same things as Anita Sarkeesian wouldn't be harassed as much, since there's simply no data. However, what I do know is that the closest person to a male counterpart of Sarkeesian I can think of, Jack Thompson, was also sent death and rape threats. I wasn't able to find the examples I've read before, but I did find this article, which suggests that men are actually abused online more than women are and that both men and women are more likely to abuse members of the same sex than the opposite sex.

 

I've started having this habit of swirling my finger in the air as an expression of incredulity. I did that a lot during the Medium article. I've been fairly busy, so the only Medium article I have an impression of is some article I half-read whose starting premise was that white privilege doesn't work for white people, which is part of the reason I half-read it; I didn't find anything that actually confirmed that claim or started in the direction of it. It was just a long-winded article about how society invented the concept of whiteness. I'd agree with that, but that doesn't mean it doesn't affect us now.

 

I wouldn't call this "actually debunked", I would call this an opinion piece on an opinion piece. I'll agree with much of it, though: particularly that the methodology is flawed, and that media looks for sensation. Hypocritical to point this out, I'd think, since the one article I read had an inflammatory premise, which is one of the pillars of sensationalized media. However, both the sites provide no metric for what "neutral" counts as. "#gamergate is a thing", "hey, has anyone heard of #gamergate?" So both of them are flawed in that sense. With no provided metric for neutral, of course the positive/negative comments are important: they're the only established metric, and they're even still flawed based on lack of intent.

 

He also totally forgot to mention that Brianna Wu has more negative comments than all of their positive or negative comments combined. And sure, men might be "abused" online more, but that is totally downplaying the actual point: that women are abused much more by virtue of their sex, rather than their merits. There's a difference between hating on someone for their stupid opinions (Bill O'Reilly) and hating on someone because they have an opinion and are a woman, specifically crafting threats based on how you objectify different parts of their body, or maybe them entirely as human beings. Someone may threaten a man by saying he should burn in hell or that someone should shoot him in the head, but that possibility is much more slim than the oft-threatened rape of women. This is what annoys me about so-called egalitarians and men's rights activists: Both sexes have problems. That doesn't mean their problems are equal.

 

This guy practically doesn't understand statistics despite trying very hard to make it seem that way. 25% of #gamergate analyzed? That's a pretty damn good pool of data. Not many researchers can say they have researched 25% of any population; studies have been done on far less and still project to give us good models to follow. Then he does that really annoying thing where he tries to confuse the readers and make the statistics seem more complicated and trivial than they really are by taking percents of percents. "We're supposed to believe that this was concluded based on 1% of 25%?" etc. It's a propaganda tool. I'd like to see him try the same shit with large-scale sociological studies. And it's not like they sifted through 25% of the movement and specifically picked out the comments that would make up the graph. It's fairly safe to say that the extremes balance out just like with any other statistical analysis. And this guy just ignores some important things such as that the women's tweets completely overshadow the men's tweets. Anita Sarkeesian's negative tweets outweigh Nathan Grayson's and almost Stephen Totilo's alone. And she isn't even really involved in this ???? He tries to say that it depends on the measure and ignores contextual things like that, ignores the absolute data, and then tries to say proportional data is all that matters in the situation? In the case of proportional data, there really are very small pools to choose from in say, Nathan Grayson's case. What matters is what people care about more. It really looks like he's going out of his way to weave his own narrative, but he's right about one thing in that there isn't  really a metric for the intents here. Yet he still tries to conclude in that really obnoxious way in big bold text (as if it makes his claim more factual)

 

We’re still supposed to believe that GamerGate hates women because they dare to talk to women like they do men.

 

Which is another still-unfounded sentimental thing he has no evidence for? This is even more unfounded than the supposedly ridiculous claim that women are being harassed. This is soaking in bias. He's got two degrees of separation between this and claiming that men are the real victims, here. Like one asshole on the street making fun of a guy's taste in hats is as bad as one thousand assholes harassing a woman who dares admit she has had sex. But the measure depends! You have to look at the proportional data! I hate looking at this article.

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