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That whole Zoe Quinn thing

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Posted (edited)

It occurred to me earlier that in the wake of the more serious news stories, like Ferguson, the middle east, and Robin Williams that we never really took dedicated to discuss the big hubbub in Video Game Journalism recently. Maybe that's because its such a hot button issue, but in the interest of conversation I present this thread with all the pertinent links.

 

Original post

http://thezoepost.wordpress.com/

 

Discussion of the censorship of any conversation on the subject

http://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/2dylh4/psa_the_zoe_quinn_conspiracy_and_its_implications/

 

A long video going into the allegations of corruption in Video Game Journalism in relation to all of those things (This guy goes on rants towards the end but he sources most of what he says)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5-51PfwI3M

 

I'm just going to leave things here. I may jump in on the discourse later but I gotta work today

Edited by Necropolis (see edit history)

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Posted

Im posting this before reading the OP in full, i'll post more after if my info and/or opinion changes.

 

I heard about this when I read that Phil Fish's private info was released to the public by hackers for defending her. Everything up to and including his bank account info. He has quit gaming again, and is now selling his company Polytron and Fez rights to anyone interested. This really makes me sad, cause Fez is such an amazing game, and I feel like Fish has always been given more shit than he's ever deserved. 

 

From what I understand, yeah, Zoe Quinn cheated on her boyfriend, and yeah, that's kinda shitty. But it's nobody's business except hers, her (ex)boyfriend's,and potentially the person she had the affair with. People *supposedly* got mad because she *supposedly* had sex with a Kotaku guy to get a *supposedly* good game review. Except, from what I've read, that guy never reviewed her game. He like, mentioned it in an article once, but nothing like a review. I really don't understand why people are trying to ruin her life, but probably because they are the kind of people I could never agree with to begin with.

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Posted

There are a lot of questions over the Phil Fish hack, and right now. For one thing, the alleged hackers were apparently smart enough to hack into a massive hosting service that requires two-factor authentication for untrusted computers (meaning it would have been very difficult, if not outright impossible for the alleged hackers to crack the security), but so stupid that they posted the information on the website itself, where it would be taken down immediately after its owners regained control. Furthermore, Zoe Quinn and Phil Fish were allegedly hacked at the same time, which is suspicious. And they somehow retained access to their personal twitters so they could tweet about the alleged hack as it happened. Then there's the metadata on the released files, which makes it seem highly unlikely that the data from the zip files in question were pulled off of the server.

 

tumblr_nase60EzQD1tbk3two1_1280.jpg

 

At any rate, the one thing that is certain about this alleged hack is that neither /v/ nor 4chan is behind it. Right now the most likely explanation is that it was faked as a ploy for sympathy, but there's no definitive proof yet, just a lot of highly suspicious circumstances suggesting that this was not a real hack.

 

The scandal didn't explode just because she slept with game journalists (and having an undisclosed relationship with people who have the power to make or break your game is still a pretty massive breach of ethics, even if she didn't receive any obvious favors as a result). The scandal exploded because she used underhanded tactics to try to cover it up. A youtube user called MundaneMatt made a video discussing the incident and the questions it brings up about the state of gaming journalism. The video was taken down by a copyright claim from Zoe Quinn. The basis of this claim was that the video in question used a single still image from Depression Quest. An image that was publicly available. The fires were further fanned by subsequent attempts at draconian censorship from all kinds of places and the refusal of most game journalism sites to even touch the story except to try to paint Zoe Quinn's critics as evil misogynists.

 

Plus, as a result of this attention, a couple of other things have come to light about Zoe Quinn. The first is that she fabricated a harassment to get attention and framed Wizardchan for it. The second is that she lead an actual harassment campaign against the Fine Young Capitalists, who were conducting a project designed to help women get into gaming. She doxxed one of their members and essentially got the project shut down, and they've only been able to restart their campaign because of this scandal. Right now, 4chan is one of their biggest supporters.

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Posted

What we definitely know 100% from the ex boyfriend is that Zoe is a compulsive liar. Time and time again she lied until she was directly called on things. She has been shown on multiple occasions to backpedal and lie when she's in trouble so everything she says is suspect.

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Posted

There are rumors going around that even Anita Sarkeesian has been criticizing Zoe Quinn on a dummy twitter account. I have no idea how reliable this rumor is though, and it may be a load of BS, but it would be so perfect if it were true.

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Posted

Yeah, i've seen the account in question. Not sure its Anita but its really interesting. I'm really frustrated that anyone who criticizes Zoe is labeled a misogynist, because she's espoused so many social justice warrior beliefs. If anything shouldn't she be lambasted for being such a hypocrite? I don't know this is probably one of the biggest divisions between the gaming public and gaming journalists since DmC or Mass Effect 3.

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Posted

I saw that video by the Quinnspiracy theory, and it's maybe like 20% okay and the rest is mostly garbage.

 

The most annoying thing is that he emphasized that she slept with her boss, who is a married man. Her boss is both in a position of superiority, and has more to lose, because he is married. He is the scummier person in that transaction. She didn't force anyone to have sex with her. He also never once mentioned that people pay money to bias gaming journalism as well, or that doing so is just as scummy. He even suggested that gaming journalism has come to the point where all that matters is who sleeps with who. Yeah sorry, IGN is a lot of things, but I'm sure it's not a brothel. To me, that shows he really is more "concerned" about her "moral fidelity", and goes to show that people complain when women have sex, period. Most of that video is not about gaming journalism, it's about her tactics and why he thinks they're horrible. This shouldn't be any different from the other clearly biased game reviews pumped out by gaming journalism, which we've known for years is easily manipulable. It pisses me off that this is what gets us riled up about how stupid gaming journalism has become.

 

Like sure, she did some stupid stuff, but she's not the only one who pulls these stunts. Everyone's just pissed because it involves a woman having sex to get ahead. 

Cascade, Treemotan and pheonix561 like this

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Posted

I don't think anyone's saying this is the only time something like this has happened. I think the reason its worth remark is how specific and mapped out it is. We have this general idea that this is a corrupt medium that these companies are just shills, but this is the beast layed bare for everyone to see the gory details. Is this story raising heads because of these salacious details? Sure. But I don't see why we should lower our heads back down. This is a corrupt circlejerk system, maybe something can be done about that if we keep in mind the deed and not the do-er of it

Fierce Muffin likes this

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I'm not saying that because this girl just as bad, if not less bad than what we're used to, that corruption in widely-influencing industries shouldn't anger us. Yes, it should anger us. But everyone is clearly getting angry over a completely unrelated thing and contorting it to be the main point. Should you be mad that gaming journalism will accept bribes of that nature? Yes. Should you be mad that Zoe Quinn supposedly had sex separately with five people while in a relationship? Sure, if that's what sets you off. But you shouldn't use anger over gaming journalism as a cover to reinforce a double standard. It's also really annoying that the "Internet Aristocrat" claims that things like these are why gaming journalism has been full of feministic articles lately, as if that just completely invalidates any point the articles might make. Don't get me wrong, I think Particia Hernandez is a pretty horrible journalist in this regard, but he didn't mention that writers like her lack integrity, just that the articles are feminist, implying they're bad. And he says we're supposed to support "things we like" (as in, things he likes that he thinks we should all like) and emphasizes that Zoe Quinn's game is about depression, as if that just makes it inherently inferior and uninteresting.

 

What I'm saying is yes, we should be mad that gaming journalism has such low standards for bribery. I mean, sex isn't something that lasts you more than a day unless you're some kind of superhuman. Yes, we should be angry that gaming journalists accept bribes at all. But we should not in the least be hung up over Zoe Quinn. Here are my reasons.

 

1) She is not a multi-million dollar corporation. She is a single person trying to make a living.

2) She did it to promote a game that will not make her a millionare.

3) There are corporations that get away with this stuff all the time. We should be mad at them, and the gaming journalists who accept their bribes.

 

This won't make people boycott Kotaku, or IGN. It's not just going to make people boycott Zoe Quinn. It's going to make people harass her and exacerbate the situation, when she is not even the big bad here. She is one wrongdoer out of many, and she does not have the financial means or the know-how and connections to cover this up, and being a regular single person, she probably doesn't have the grit to stand all this pressure. She's just one, normal person who did a lot of things wrong and got caught.

 

Why should we propagate the idea that exposing Zoe Quinn is going to make anything better? It's not going to do shit. It's going to make people hate Zoe Quinn, with a little attention drawn to gaming journalism. This shouldn't be called the Five Guys incident, it should be called the One Guy At Kotaku Who Got Zoe Quinn's Game Attention, because he's the main instigator, isn't he? The one guy who made this related to gaming journalism? It's just called the Five Guys saga because they're all tied to Zoe through sex. We are getting mad at the person getting the benefits, not the people giving them out, and I can assure you that it is because she is simply a woman who had sex to get ahead.

 

Nathan Grayson's name should be on this incident, and even then it wouldn't call out the larger problem at hand.

Treemotan and Cascade like this

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Posted

Okay, like, lets just forget the internet aristocrat. I only posted him because he has centralized a large amount of information on this, and summarized several of the events rather well so anyone unfamiliar with the events can have an idea what's going on. The bits where he is talking to the people he's mentioning like a 24 hour news anchor make me cringe just as much as they do you. I don't think that the portion of people who are mainly concerned with the sexual exploits of Zoe Quinn are all, or even most of the people who are voicing their frustration. Zoe Quinn is just the centerpiece of a much larger issue, as you said. Multimillion dollar companies and producers can hire expensive lawyers and can throw their money at things until they disappear, so things like this will seldom if ever be revealed on the top levels of this industry. Near the mid/bottom tier where people like Zoe Quinn and Nathan Grayson, who's name has been mentioned, as far as I am aware in nearly all articles relating to this controversy, cannot, so it only makes sense that they would be targets when something like this happens. they are the only targets available. It really frustrates me that some people are only looking at this from a moralistic point of view, that Zoe Quinn is promiscuous, that Zoe Quinn cheated on her Boyfriend. How about the fact that any mention of this on Reddit is met with thread deletion, and then the Mods in question BRAGGED about how great it is to be a mod. How about Zoe's using SJW values when they are convenient for her to criticize others, but when it comes to her personal life, who cares? That's almost Orwellian. She's making it actively harder for actual Feminists. And her crusade against The Fine Young Capitalists? There is abuse of power here, and yeah, she may be small time compared to the guppies up stream, but it is what it is. What I'm saying here is that she is certainly not the worst case of this in the industry, but she is A case, that we have available to us right now. I really hope this isn't just the flavor of the month news story, I hope its the loose thread of a tapestry of graft that is the video game industry.

Fierce Muffin likes this

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Posted

HILE DISCORDIA!

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The video game industry, and video game journalism is a laughable joke anyway. Has video game journalism ever been anything except just advertising for major game companies? Getting mad at Zoe Quinn for doing what the entire industry has been doing since the beginning is ridiculous.

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The conversation has mostly shifted from Zoe Quinn at this point. She was just the straw that broke the camel's back. YouTube tier idiots will probably still post angry bullshit to her, but they aren't the whole. In the meantime enjoy the show unfolding before you. If this doesn't just die, I think we'll see some major changes in the industry, at least on this level. Positive or negative it'll be pretty exciting.

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Posted

And yet Zoe Quinn seems to be doing her darnedest to make it about her again. Recently, she "infiltrated" a public IRC channel about discussion of issue, took some screenshots, and claimed it was proof that gamergate was some vast conspiracy concocted by 4chan.

 

In other news, this happened:

 

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