39
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The small company at the center of ‘Gamergate 2.0’
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- Authors
- Megan Farokhmanesh, Reece Rogers, Ali Winston, Jaina Grey, Amanda Hoover, Angela Watercutter, Matt Kamen, Jason Parham
- Published
- Mar 14 2024
- Word count
- 1837 words
I believe a discussion is more valuable when it contains unpopular opinions presented in good faith, so here we go:
I believe that the narrative around Gamergate has been heavily distorted simply because gamergaters lost and history is written by the winners, and I understand any dislike towards SweetBaby because many see it as a symbol of decline further into a hypercommercialized and sanitized world of western mainstream media. Which, to be fair, is quite similar to Gamergate.
Gamergate first: I would never defend or rationalize harassment and death threats, but being a lurker in the according communities on reddit and sometimes 4chan at the time when it developed, I would estimate that pessimistically at most 5% of active sympathizers actually did anything of the sort, likely less, and it didn't seem like the majority approved of that either, though they likely did not care much.
The original impulse to start GG (the whole "five guys" thing) was a red herring, but it quickly discovered a weird clique of people writing for big gaming online media who previously seemed like a part of the community, but obviously were not and in fact their reaction to a small minority of people attacking them showed that they did not understand and likely were not even interested in understanding the community at all, let alone be part of it. They seemed completely untrustworthy, not actually very good at their job, and patronizing towards the people they wrote for. I'm not sure if the whole controversy around Anita Sarkeesian came at the same time or later, but my view of her is that she exploited what was a trend a the time and had an interesting and possibly valuable goal, but brought very little value for a lot of money, so she's in a similar category.
All of these people kind of represented "the establishment" that was moving gaming further into the mainstream, necessarily reducing innovation outside of aspects related to technology and budget (like graphics or voice acting) and diluting everything else, as it happens with all mainstream media. So they were unlucky to serve as a lightning rod.
I believe that the big rise in popularity of independent youtubers doing reviews, first impressions (RIP totalbiscuit) and other gaming-related videos at the cost of popularity of more traditional media like Gamespot, IGN etc. is in a significant part a result of Gamergate and that, as opposed to any harassment, it's 100% deserved. I think that Knowyourmeme of all things gives the most accurate short description of various events of Gamergate.
SweetBaby Inc. is basically the same - a lighting rod that represents a further shift in mainstream gaming that many people dislike, and that, contrary to opinions voiced around here, cannot just be dismissed as racism or sexism. I personally don't care about diversity itself (though I have doubts about its merit outside of media aimed at children, which only applies to some portion of gaming), but whenever I see some piece of media that feels like watered down, design by committee high-budget crap aimed at the lowest common denominator, but the one area where the creators obviously made an effort is perfect diversity and inoffensiveness, it evokes the idea that their priorities are completely lopsided and that they feel their customers need to be educated more than they need to have an okay game, or that they just don't care about quality at all and do diversity cynically because in a big part of the mainstream market it sells. I do find that quite annoying. In media that is actually well done I could not care less about diversity either way.
I also think many people don't realize that the western idea of diversity is not a universal thing, it's a relatively recent cultural trend in northern America, a bit less the anglosphere, and a bit less than that western Europe. It's not even the majority opinion in the US, where it originated. So, with a bit of exaggeration, SweetBaby symbolizes a statement of "we will push the culture of southern California on you whether you like it or not, because it's better than your own". Obviously this is not something people appreciate.
Personally this is something that I'm really tired of as well. I'd love to see actual cultural diversity, videogames set in the middle east made in the middle east, Mauritanian videogames about the history of nomadic tribes in western Sahara and other media presenting truly different points of view. That is not commonly happening because of differences in technological development, but fortunately at least occasionally we get magnificent Slavjank.
The reality is that the US is a cultural hegemon that affects the entire world. Being angry about it does not change anything. But I've had enough of mainstream US media, and for me personally SweetBaby represents empty corporate exploitation of good ideals much more than it represents a fight against racism or sexism. Not going to send anybody DMs on twitter because of it though.
I appreciate you talking about a tough topic in good faith. As a queer person, I share similar concerns about the commodification of identity. I've been lucky enough in my lifetime to see the widespread opinion of people like me go from outright hostility to something significantly more supportive, and it's frustrating that now that my star is rising a lot of marketers and ad agencies have glommed on to that to try and get more money out of people like me and those that support me. It smacks of the "empty corporate exploitation of good ideals" you identified.
That said, I am going to push back on some of your comment here in good faith myself, because I think our experiences and takeaways from GamerGate were very different. I was not an active participant in GamerGate, nor an active anti-GamerGater. At the time, I was just someone who liked talking about videogames online.
GamerGate pretty much put a stop to that. I stopped talking about games altogether because it sucked all the oxygen out of seemingly every conversation about games. To this day I remain pissed at them for poisoning the well on some genuinely valuable discussion points, because it still remains impossible to discuss certain issues without standing under their shadow. I don't think this gets enough scrutiny because GamerGate drove the "outside forces are ruining games" through line so forcefully that nobody sits down to appreciate just how much GamerGate completely shat all over gaming discourse as a whole (to say nothing of what it did for normalizing combative online interaction across the entire internet).
One thing I would encourage you to consider is that your experience relative to GamerGate's harassment was presumably non-representative because you were not a target. I had the unlucky misfortune of accidentally stumbling into their firing line once, and it was staggering:
I've been openly gay online since the late 00s, so believe me when I say that I have a pretty thick skin. I've been called a "fag" more times than I care to think about. At the time, I probably had a higher tolerance than most people for random internet hate, but what I experienced that day was unlike anything I'd ever witnessed before. It took my breath away.
You mentioned the tension of gaming journalists being out of touch and bad with their jobs as a galvanizing force for GamerGate. I think there's some merit there, but I think to frame that as the primary focus is to ignore the other major, arguably much larger galvanizing force of GamerGate: misogyny.
There was already a sort of longstanding, extant misogyny online. We weren't that far removed from the "TITS OR GTFO" era, after all. After I told my sister about the harassment I faced, she said that I had "committed the crime of being a woman on the internet." I am not a gaming journalist. I am an internet nobody. They went after me all the same, and they did so because I defended a woman and because they mistakenly thought I was one. That is not the hallmark of a movement based on sound, earnest principles aimed at reforming journalistic practices. That is something that is indicative of a movement that saw everyday, no-name women as targets.
Like you identified, it's very possible that it was maybe only 5% of the people involved in the movement. At the time I experienced it, however, it didn't feel like 5% of anything. It felt like 100% of everything. I am sure it felt this way to the many other people who entered their crosshairs too, the majority of whom were not individuals in the industry.
I don't want my entire response to hinge on that one thing though, because that was only one tiny (though significant) experience in the ocean that was GamerGate. I instead want to talk about something more relevant to their stated aims:
I mentioned that I loved talking about games online. I was excited for games as "an artform" and at people applying literary criticism techniques to games. I still remember when I first read Clint Hocking's take on ludonarrative dissonance in BioShock. It was a fresh, exciting, and altogether groundbreaking way to think of games and their meaning. Inspired by pieces like that, I made it a point to try and dive into, think about, and discuss games deeply -- the way people do with literature and film.
GamerGate put a stop to that because it became very clear that they were interested in targeting the fringes of gaming. I was already hanging out there, looking for new, novel, and innovative stuff. I played The Stanley Parable and Dear Esther before they were household names, back when they were just mods made as labors of love!
So, cue my surprise when Dear Esther became a GamerGate target. They invented the pejorative term "walking simulator" for it and games like it, initially meant to dismiss the title as not being a "game" at all. Dear Esther is so unassuming and so unthreatening that I couldn't imagine anyone responding to it in anger, much less rage, but I would find screeds about how it and games like it were outright ruining gaming as a whole. Gone Home got the same treatment. Neither of these were major releases from the industry -- representative targets for the ills of gaming at large. They were two small titles that tried to do something new, but GamerGaters shouted them down -- hard.
I bring this up because you mentioned that GamerGate was a reaction to "the establishment" of gaming and talked about the dilution of innovation. That absolutely is a phenomenon in the industry -- the soulless "hollowing out" of some gaming experiences. What I saw targeted by GamerGate, however, did not match that at all. They went after experimental games on the fringes -- the kind you'll now commonly find coming out of game jams or on itch.io. It was a gatekeeping effort -- in part because many of those games were being made by minority individuals. By far the most targeted game by GamerGate was Zoe Quinn's Depression Quest, and I genuinely cannot think of a game that is less representative of the gaming establishment than that one.
Anyway, I know I've said a lot, and I hope you don't see this as me trying to argue with you, because I'm genuinely not. If any of this comes across as bickering, please know that's a product of me being imprecise with my words and failing to convey the tone that I want to. What I want to convey more than anything is that it is relatively easy for someone to look at GamerGate from a distance and find a place to hang their hat. They worked very hard to make sure of that. There genuinely are concerns with gaming journalism and the establishment and commodification of art, etc. They pushed that angle hard because it made them look good.
It was my personal experience, however, that GamerGate, as it actually happened, completely divorced itself from any legitimacy on those fronts because it so aggressively and actively pursued ends related to the hatred, harassment, and gatekeeping of targets. Furthermore, because those targets -- fringe games and non-industry individuals -- were inconsistent with the stated goals of the movement, it ended up having a crisis of credibility. That's why people are here, now, rolling their eyes at the mere mention of it. Get close to GamerGate, and it's easy to see how they ran their believability into the ground.
You said that Gamergate lost and had its story overwritten by winners, but I feel that the truth is that GamerGate lost and there were no winners. I think online discourse, to this day, remains measurably worse because of GamerGate. I think it normalized some of the worst things about online discourse -- things that are now taken for granted internet-wide. I'm on Tildes largely because this is a place that has decided to actively reject those norms.
In the wake of GamerGate, I stopped talking about gaming online for a while and then when I finally came back to it, my joy for it was gone. I don't really care about games as art anymore. I'm not particularly excited by innovations or thoughtful criticisms. It's hard to un-see the ugliness in people that GamerGate surfaced, and it's hard not for me to associate that with the gaming community at large. Experiencing their hate and harassment first-hand made gaming, as a whole, un-fun for me and doubtless many others.
I empathize with you having a collision with assholes. That is rough. You make some interesting counterpoints, and also some interesting points we could probably write a book about discussing them.
Regarding the hostility towards women, I think it's a bit more complicated than that and there has to be some other cultural element in it, but I don't know what kind because this is not an area I've been that interested in and I'm not a woman. The reason I think this is the case is that there were areas where the online presence of women was not an issue at all despite some joking behavior that would have been seen as inappropriate now (but that can be said about a lot of things). For example at least in my country (Czechia) women in WoW guilds were common and usually welcomed. So were women in other nerdy areas like tabletop gaming or programming. These were populated by men with low social skills, but generally not hostile ones. To me it seems like online misogyny became pronounced only after nerd culture became mainstream, for some reason, and I don't think GG was specifically the starter, it must have existed before that.
The fact that journalists also generalized a lot did not help the conflict at all. Conflating the harassment with gamers and the gaming community in general and presenting the opinion in a coordinated fashion (through all the "gaming is dead" articles that came out around the same time) was a really dumb idea that annoyed a lot of people who previously had no idea what GG even was.
This is the topic that we could talk about forever. I agree that Dear Esther was shat on completely unfairly in some circles. But from what I've seen, the prevailing idea from people who normally dislike alternative games like this, even rabid anti-woke GG types (I still go to a forum that's relatively full of a certain type of anti-woke nerds, because they generally have really interesting and smart ideas about gaming when they're able to shut up about politics and culture), was that Dear Esther is actually good because the writing in it is better than the writing in 98% of all videogames. But they believed that most developers cannot write nearly on that level, and without that the genre truly is just a walking sim without much value on its own, so it's likely to start a trend that's overall negative.
However, from what I recall Dear Esther did pretty well despite that, I don't recall people hating on Stanley Parable with any regularity apart from people who actually played it and found out it just wasn't for them, and games in this vein were being released after GG in a frequency that seemed in tune with the size of their niche. I remember Firewatch being rather successful, but it's not a genre I'm that interested in.
Regarding ludonarrative dissonance and other new ways of analyzing videogames, this is the huge topic. On one hand what you say is true, it did give a new perspective on some games. On the other hand, in my opinion it was often done by people who did not actually understand the history of videogames that much and did not like them for their core reason of existence: the gameplay.
I make a distinction between videogames that serve as a vessel for art in the form of a different type of media, and videogames that could be considered art as a whole. Dear Esther is close to the first type, precisely because it's a "walking sim" with excellent writing. That does not make it any less valuable, but in my opinion this first type of games, which started emerging at some point thanks to usually either higher budgets or more people outside of the hobby getting into development, as was the case with Dear Esther, overshadows the second kind, which is more difficult to grasp.
As an example, I consider Thief a work of art, because the setting, graphic design, level design, AI, sound engine and various other gameplay elements create a coherent interactive experience unlike anything else that simply could not ever be achieved without it being a videogame. Games like Thief, System Shock or Deus Ex still stand tall and nobody was really able to build upon and innovate on the experience that they manage to create. The "new wave" of writing about videogames did not bring much useful in analyzing why these games are considered classics and how to at least repeat what they did.
And this is really the issue. The mainstream gradually moved away from these kinds of games because they're more demanding on the consumer and therefore sell less, and the indie scene came with something different altogether that's not really interesting for a large group of people either.
I see what you mean, I don't agree entirely, but I don't really disagree either - my point was mostly that the anti-GG people decided how GG was going to be presented on media, won the editing war on wikipedia, which resulted in a page that's incomplete and one-sided etc. Other than that I of course do agree that conflicts like that one make everything worse, but I don't believe that it was exclusively or even mostly the fault of GG specifically. In my opinion the beginning of culture wars on reddit was during the time of ShitRedditSays, a few years before GG. They, like the anti-GG people, had many legitimate grievances, but their attempts to stamp them out created first massive hostilities between subreddits, brigading, derailing threads etc. For me as a nonpartisan user it made the reddit experience unequivocally worse and these proto-culture wars that they started never stopped.
GamerGate stands out because it seemed more assholish, it did not have the benefit of supposedly supporting feminism and fighting bigotry. This is of course an important difference which cannot be completely ignored, but the methods GGers used were not different from what ShitRedditSays did a few years prior (who threatened admins with calling various media, attempted to remove advertisers from reddit with some limited success etc.).
That is not to say that SRS is what caused it all, rather I think that culture wars were unfortunately inevitable either way just because social media and the blue camp/red camp and various other strong binary divisions in the US and a few other places exist. It is possible that GG is what caused this for gaming specifically and that without it that particular field would have been more chill to this day, but I'm not certain about it.
Respectfully, if you haven't experienced it and you aren't interested in learning about the experiences of those who have, maybe you should reserve judgement entirely? It seems like you've formed much more of an opinion than is warranted based on the information that you have.
You didn't see much misogyny in your online spaces, besides some "joking behavior" that you, not being the target of it, have decided is not a problem. My experiences being a woman (a teen girl, actually) online at the time were very contrary to that. A lot of the "joking behavior" was actually quite upsetting, but to complain about it was to be labeled a joyless buzzkill and potentially spark a lot of drama that could be avoided by just being quietly uncomfortable and feeling like a constant other in a space where you're trying to build friendships.
There was also a lot of behavior that was not joking, but was written off as minor and rare and not emblematic of the space, regardless of how severely and often it actually happened. Often if we complained about that behavior we were blamed for bringing it on by "attention seeking", which we were considered guilty of if we were simply open about being girls or women on the internet.
It was easy not to see those things if you weren't looking for them or they weren't targeted at you. The fact that you didn't see it does not mean it was not happening. The fact that the jokes did not upset you does not mean that they were not upsetting. The fact that the men making them seemed innocently socially obtuse to you does not mean that they weren't engaging in harmful behavior, maliciously or otherwise.
I'm not asking you to completely flip positions on the subject, but I think if you're going to avoid knowing anything about it then you should also avoid forming an opinion at all.
I understand what you mean, and perhaps I should have formulated that part of my post differently because as I was writing it I realized it could be interpreted this way (and merely hoped it wouldn't).
But at the same time you don't know what my boundaries for an acceptable joke or low social skills or other potentially but not necessarily harmful interactions are, and you're making assumptions that would rely on all of them being wrong or me being blind to all of them. The fact that I'm less sensitive to those things is obvious, but I don't think any of the above is exactly true, and I'm not talking only about my own experience but also about the experience of woman friends. So I don't think this is true either:
Regardless, even if we say that the behaviors in the past were also commonly misogynistic, I think it's a fact that there was a change in how it was presented, how common it was in various subgroups etc., and it's also a fact that women were accepted in certain communities, like the WoW guilds mentioned - that is based entirely on information from women WoW (ex-)players that I know, not from my own experience.
I would caution using WoW as an example of a great and acceptable environment. I played WoW from classic through to Legion with effectively the entire time raiding (my memory of exactly when I quit is fuzzy, I swear I have blocked the final couple years of it from my memory). While many people were accepting of me as a teen then young adult woman I did experience misogyny and harassment that was gendered in nature on many many occasions, including having someone take a photo of me and photoshop my face into pornographic images.
Experiences with sexism online are incredibly prevalent and often times it is easy to look at the places where it "wasn't as bad" and inadvertently/accidently give them too much credit just due to the difference in harassment when comparing against some of the FPS spaces or places like 4chan.
This is not to say that my whole time in WoW was bad, but I would say I experienced sexism or harassment during every single expansion I played and it came from many sources such as guild members, ex guild members, random party members, and complete strangers. As someone who was in a leadership for a majority of my time playing I was perhaps more visible as a woman which may have contributed.
I'm curious why you think brown or female characters in a video game are intended to be educational rather than just, sometimes people are those things. AAA games can be bad for a huge number of reasons, and yet it's never occurred to me to wonder if one of them was because too many development resources went into writing dialogue for ladies. In any case, plenty of the games SweetBaby worked on were commercial and critical successes and generally well-liked. Feels like diversity is mostly a carefully chosen scapegoat here.
I don't see why games from the "US cultural hedgemon" can't be considered genuinely diverse. Brown people, women, gay folks, they live here too. They're part of the culture. They work at these companies. Part of what SweetBaby does is literally allow underrepresented storytellers to give their input. How is that not ok?
Are some cases of diverse casting just box checking? Probably, but so is every other element of AAA game development. It's an always online looter shooter with microtransactions because they thought that's what would be commercially successful. I don't think the color of the characters' skin is what pushed things one way or the other.
I'm not going to put much else into this thread as its not my place, but I wanted to interject that a lot of people have issues with conversations and culture like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibpWf3DqRHc&t=436s
This individual actually used to work for SweetBaby funnily enough, and I think people are just upset and fearful that this mentality is what's being normalized and even evangilized at a company like that.
I feel like the thought that some people think in a pipeline from 'a person has an arguably misguided position on race and safe spaces" => "they once worked at a company that did diversity consulting" => "this company provided consulting for $AAAgame" => "we have to boycott this game" is a bit absurd.
To me it seems like the classic GamerGate playbook of some guys being outraged about diversity or women and then actively searching for reasons to be mad that may have better chances of resonating with a more mainstream audience.
I'm not saying that you are doing this and statements like the one you linked are worthy of debate, but I do not believe that a discussion in good faith is the primary motivator for most people being outraged atm.
Edit: After finding a bit more of the context of this video, I don't even think that calling her "arguably misguided" is appropriate. She was talking about the development of an indie PoC queer dating sim, her passion project and not about the industry as a whole.
Sure, and that strikes me as a great replacement type of panic. What if we're the ones who are marginalized? I'll be concerned about that when the positions of political and economic power aren't 80% white.
"80% white" is a very US centric perspective though. Diversity means different things in different places, and gaming is a global industry. If a team was 80% white but everyone had a different native language, that sounds pretty diverse to me!
It's always useful to remember race is an arbitrary social construct that's extremely context dependent. A dark skinned Egyptian is legally white in the US.
As is basically the rest of Europe despite clearly having extremely different cultures and a history of prejudice against them as well.
Italians, Irish, and all sorts of Eastern European cultures have had a rough time in us history and some still would currently, but they all fall under “white” in modern discussions.
The US is about 60% white, including MENA groups that are classified as white by the US but excluding Hispanics.
Generally speaking, when people talk about "X% of positions of power being held by white people" for things like diversity, they would consider Hispanic/Latino people as PoC and would not count them as white in that context. But I also don't think the person saying "80% of positions of power are held by white people" is intending to make any sort of rigorous statistical statement regardless, so it's rather moot.
I also don't think that, in the larger discussion about representation in media like videogames, it makes much sense to discuss census statistics. Even tiny minorities deserve to have their experiences represented well in media, regardless of how large a percentage of the overall US population they are.
I can totally understand what you're saying. I find myself frustrated when I see gay male characters who are basically tokens or when they are very clearly from a woman's imagination. I really didn't enjoy Red White and Royal Blue, for instance.
But I also think it's kind of pointless to get angry at them. So what if it's not a realistic depiction? We're talking about fiction, after all; surreal characters are par for the course.
I do realize, however, that there is very different meanings in the kinds of things we are feeling. Racism has a very different flavor than homophobia. What feels like a whip to me might feel like a cat-o-nine-tails to you.
I wish that we had better authentic representation, but that kind of work just trickles out. Right now I'm thinking about Spike Jonze's career, where he has had to work so hard making happy feel-good movies so he could make the money to fund the films he actually wants to create. In particular he has a movie, Bamboozled, which comments much further on the perils of black representation in media.
I like to call this the diversity paradox.
People get upset when a character is a minority and being a minority is a big part of the character and relevant to the plot. Usually framed as forcing politics into the story. "Why do I have to deal with all this talk about racism/feminism/etc in my superhero/space/fantasy story?"
But then of course when you have a minority character who just happens to be a minority and it's not really relevant to the plot, you get the opposite complaint. "Why even make the character gay if you're not going to work it into the story? You're just checking a box"
People are just gay. It doesn't need to serve anything, just as a character can be female or poor or trans or white or have a stutter or a disability and not be commented on.
That's not really possible with a lot of character traits. If their gender isn't a factor, you don't make them agender. That would actually be considered doing the thing you're complaining about, since agender people are a minority. In the past if their gender didn't matter, you'd make them a cis-male, because that was considered the default. Making them any other gender is actually including exactly the same amount of information as making them a cis-male. The same goes for race, but even moreso. You can't make them raceless. You can make them white, which reinforces the idea that white is the default, or you can make them any other race, which is the same amount of information.
This is a WILD take! So characters are assumed straight by default unless there is a story-based reason for them not to be?? That’s insane.
Like, let’s imagine a new Star Trek series. You watch an exciting episode where the dashing Captain defeats the Romulans. At the end of the episode he retires to the captains quarters where he receives a video call from earth. It’s his husband. The captain says “Woof. What a day!” And the husband says “I dunno about your day but I had group of rowdy Nausicans at the bar today so it couldn’t be worse than mine.” “Oh yeah? Let me tell you…” credits.
So we learn the captain is gay. His husband runs a bar on earth. Does his gayness help him defeat the Romulans? No, it’s just a detail about his character. You could write the exact same scene above with a wife. So why make the captain gay at all you might ask: because some people are just gay. Statistically, there would have to be gay starship captains. Right? So ultimately, if you have a problem with this captain being gay for no other reason than he just is then you might want to ask yourself why you have a problem with that at all and if maybe what you have a problem with is gay people and then hopefully you follow that introspective rabbit hole a little deeper.
This doesn't invalidate your point of course, but I think it's important to point out that the person you're responding to didn't mention assuming people are straight at all.
Letting yourself read a wild take into someone else's words is a big mistake, and tends to lead to hostility.
Edit: You make a valid point, they did not claim that. I’ve retracted me previous reply to you.
Unless the captain's marriage becomes relevant at some later point like him having to save his husband or the husband helping out, that in my eyes would be textbook tokenism, and people would be valid to read it as "the rich suits in hollywood patting themselves on the back for having made a queer character in the most efficient way possible." If the bar owner was a wife instead of a husband, I would question why she is there in the first place too.
It's a very fine line to balance out, especially in visual media (TV less so than movies, but both have limited runtimes to accomplish what they set out to do) and I think both sides have valid arguments. Chekhov's gun comes from literature, the artform where you can be most liberal with additions irrelevant to the plot, but it applies doubly so to media where you have to be incredibly efficient with the stuff you present in your runtime like movies. But that in turn makes you vulnerable to the trap of defining minorities by their status as a minority. If Chekhov's gun has to be fired, well then the gay captain's gayness has to be relevant to the plot somehow, which is also a valid criticism because this way you end up with movies where people need to be gay to be in it rather than just characters who happen to be gay.
To me personally a great example of a minority done right are the Spider-Verse animated movies. Miles Morales is black and that is part of his character and depicted very well, but it's not relevant to the plot of him becoming Spider-Man. It is just who he is, and that is shown by making the audience listen to the music he listens to, for example. It permeates the plot, because plot is ultimately just characters doing stuff. So for example, to stick with your scenario, the gay captain phoning home to tell his husband of his day shouldn't be shoved in at the end of an episode, but it could be done as the establishment of the character to show that he phones home at regular intervals and is always on time with his calls. This way you show that he cares for his family and that he is methodical and takes care to be on time. You have packaged the info that he is gay within other information and this way you avoid the heavy handed approach of just saying it out loud and you turn his sexual orientation into something he happens to be.
FInally, to echo someone else in the thread: The person you're responding to didn't claim anything about anyone being a default orientation. They simply support a very straightforward execution of Chekhov's gun.
To be perfectly honest I feel like the latter half of your post contradicts the first half of your post. At the top you say the gayness must be relevant, but what you really seem to mean is that his marriage must be relevant. Because that’s what you interpreted later as the important aspects of his character. He’s a man who checks in with his spouse on earth, and being gay is just part of who he is.
You basically say the same of Miles (emphasis mine):
But up above you say (emphasis yours):
So which is it? Do characters “need to be” this or that or is it “just who [they are]”?
I think ultimately we agree, we want well rounded, fully fleshed out characters. And in some cases a character’s race or orientation or other form of identity may be relevant to the plot, if that’s the story you want to tell, but I think in other kinds of stories there can still be room for those characters.
I'm not making a claim to be in clear support of either. Writing is all about knowing when you can break the rules of the artform, when you have earned a shock surprise or a great moment, and there are pros and contras for each, and both have the capacity to be good or bad. Hell, your example directly could very well fit into a more slice-of-life show. It has its place. There are entire shows based around extremely low-stakes drama. There's even one out there right now called The Gilded Age, a high-quality HBO production where one of the most famous plot points was that someone served soup that wasn't hot enough to some important person.
I was just trying to say that both approaches and both desires are valid. And there have been a number of occasions in media where gay-coded characters which the fandom wanted to be gay turned out not to be likely because the suits that today would jump to the most efficient showing of such characterstics vetoed it yesterday and forced in a romance to prove how heterosexual someone is. In terms of conflacting the captain's sexual orientation with his marriage, you're right. But to show his sexual orientation differently would be pretty hard to do without falling into stereotypes.
We absolutely agree. In the end, I want something good and I want something entertaining.
Tbh, you're both right. There's no reason a character couldn't be anything other than an attractive straight guy, but there is an important caveat to this; for better or worse, 'attractive straight white guy from Hollywood' is the default expectation when it comes to film and TV. Any aspect of a character that diverges from that default is noteworthy, and once the character is considered different enough from the default, those characteristics are often used as a selling point to distinguish the product.
Therefore, although you're absolutely correct that any demographic can (and should) be represented, doing so is certainly conspicuous. Whilst I think it's a good thing to have better representation, the problem is that these creative decisions stand out when they're done poorly and thus feel tacked on.
In line with your Star Trek example, one example of it being done well (imo) was Mr Sulu having a husband and child in the Chris Pine Star Trek films. A more recent example I'm sure everyone is aware of is the last of us (granted, I felt that having two entire episodes based on a similar premise that didn't advance the plot was a bad call, but that's besides the point).
In contrast, Hogwarts legacy had a trans character, and whilst aspects of the character were told well, most of the writing felt a bit too heavy handed and forced in response to Twitter and JK Rowling, rather than an attempt at genuine storytelling. Now, it's worth acknowledging that those were only my initial thoughts; despite a genuinely fantastic opening section to the game, the rest of the writing was mediocre at best and any criticisms of the writing regarding Sirona are equally true elsewhere.
But that reinforces my point: I highly doubt anyone on this site would genuinely argue that representation is bad, but the fact is it sticks out and unfortunately, that makes it even more noticeable when it's poorly written, reinforcing the skewed bias many people have.
Isn't avoiding this the whole point of hiring a company like Sweet Baby?
Is this not why companies hire Sweet Baby Inc in the first place? My understanding is that the service they provide is helping ensure these characters are written as normal, complex people.
Honestly, it just sounds like you think any representation is inherently tokenization. Like, your logic dictates that a minority or marginalized character can’t just exist in a story without their existence being justified by the story, otherwise they are just a token. To me that feels even more like tokenization to have to go out of your way to say why it matters that a character is a minority. That sounds like a huge buy-in to cis/hetero/white hegemony to me.
Maybe you could clear this up by providing an example of a good and well written minority character that isn’t a token. I am opening to hearing you out and not trying to be hostile, I am just totally baffled by your position as laid out thus far.
I think there are different kinds of meaning for diverse. A group of people joining together from different ethnicities and perspectives is one. A game that shares a focused experience highlighting one ethnicity or culture that is not part of the western dominant alliance is another. The new Shogun series is set in Japan and although Blackthorne and Rodriguez and Tsukku/Alvarez are part of the story, the vast majority of the characters are Japanese and this gives it cultural richness.
A game set in Africa or New Guinea or China would be diverse from the perspective of the gaming majority, but the characters would likely not be diverse at all from each other. The game would provide a deep dive into a culture. I think OP might be asking for games that offer homogeneous historically grounded experiences of very different cultures and ethnicities to their own.
I think those of us in the US tend to assume the norm of highly mobile, cultures where immigration is prevalent such as the US, or Rome in the ancient world. Salad bowl diversity makes sense in that context.
Having said all that, there are overt racists saying similar things to OP but meaning they don't want to see black people in games
I thought I described that well enough in my post, and after me specifically writing about hypothetical videogames from the middle east or western Africa, which you even cite below, I fail to see how you could think that I don't see a good reason for brown people to be in videogames apart from being educational. I would love to see good meaningful representation that leads to good games. Even staying in the US, say a videogame about a black boy facing racism and poverty in Appalachia or gang culture in an inner city would be cool.
I have no problem with a perfectly diverse group of Californians making a game about a perfectly diverse group of Californians. I do have a problem when people consider this type of diversity the best or natural state of being that is supposed to be seen as an ideal everywhere, which is a thing that to some degree is happening and that SweetBaby Inc. represents. One of the issues with this is that as an eastern european, the experience of a black gay woman working in tech in California is much closer to the experience of a white heterosexual man working in tech in California than it is to my experience.
I don't need to have media being made specifically about my experience, never felt that need, but I do want more media different than that, and for that people need to understand that this type media is one valid way of doing this, but not a universal one or the best one. I also have a strong dislike towards sanitizing everything to be inoffensive and removing any edge, because I think it almost universally leads to making the media less interesting as a side effect, which is another thing that SweetBaby does.
I agree that the main issue is mainstream games being bad, period, and I thought I also voiced that in the post.
I have to disagree strongly about gamergate ever having been about anything real. It was, quite transparently, a case of lonely internet men acting out a fantasy about the women that aren’t interested in them forming conspiracies against them. Period.
Zoe Quinn barely made a dent on gaming culture before, she had like two quirky text adventures that got mentioned in lists of unusual indie games. The gamergate conspiracy claimed that there was essentially a scandalous wave of gaming journalists who slept with female indie devs who got favorable coverage in return but that, obviously, was ridiculous. I don’t even remember a second female game dev being in the news back then, let alone a third or anything you could consider “a pattern”.
The hate for Anita Sarkeesian was about her taking the boobs away. Like… there’s porn. That’s it, that’s the whole fucking story.
The whole thing is and has always been stupid and, ultimately, a power trip for insecure white men. I have not seen a single argument that would convince me otherwise.
At the end of the day, the Gamergate movement made itself a welcoming place for the worst kind of bigots, and they took over all the discourse. Any legitimate arguments they had were nullified by the fact that so many members were clearly there for bigoted reasons. An unwillingness to root out these elements doomed the entire cause.
Well, what can I say. I'm quite far from an incel, I don't think I'm particularly insecure, I've never harassed anybody online and I disagree with most of what you said, so there's a single data point at least.
You seem to actually put effort into arguing this point, so I'm gonna ask: What, concretely, is the thing gamergate "exposed"? Professional game critics having a liberal arts background? I do not think the (absolutely bizarre!) Five Guys manifesto is a "red herring", it's literally the whole story and everything that followed was a reaction to the following crusade not being appropriate or proportionate. Even the most damning accusations were of the kind of "some journalist donated to a patreon of a game dev he mentioned positively".
What annoys me about the cultural impact (beyond the fact that individual people got attacked) is that this happened at a time when games got really good, mostly thanks to indie devs and interesting, experimental takes on the medium. This would have been a great time for the medium to mature, critics to grow beyond mere entertainment reporters and conversation about games getting deeper. Instead we got this shit, places like /v/ exerting dominance in gaming discussion and forcefully (there was doxxing and death threats) setting back gaming discourse a decade or more. All in the name of "ethics in game journalism". Note that the Sweet Baby story is about a company... doing story consulting work. There is nothing even to "expose". Like, the "-gate" part implies something illegal or at least unethical being exposed. This is about having a brown woman as a side character in some AAA game. That is the absolute state of this movement.
Thank you for the write up as I was considering putting down something similar, but i'm sure would've been much lower quality.
Gamergate was the first time I really saw just how extremely useful social media is for drawing lines between people. It was the first "choose your own adventure" issue.
There are, in my eyes, very valid criticisms of how gaming journalism has been done. ESPECIALLY back then, but even now it's hilarious how bad mainstream reviews of games are to say, cars. If i bought a sports car and complained that it couldn't fit my family of 6 I'd be a laughing stock, but you saw similar levels of ignorance for games all the time. Wild claims about what was or wasn't possible based on some "journalists" 10 minutes with a thing they never would've liked or learned. The various claims around gamergate were, if true, just to show more of how screwed the environment was.
That said, I never have, and never will, condone death threats and harassment, and somehow, saying "well yes I think what the journalists did was dumb as I understand it, but there's a lot of fucking assholes on the internet using this as an excuse to be horrible" was just not an option?
I don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole and derail the topic, but I agree there's more nuance to this current situation than the title, or most of the discussion I see of it, allows.
There very much is a marketing bent trying to pander to the "woke". Pandering in my eyes is much like the fanservice I was just talking about in the Anime topic, where you have substituted quality for something low effort and easy to cash in on. The marketing equivalent of "DOES ANYBODY ELSE THINK PEPSI IS UNDERRATED?!" or whatever. When you get to these "design by checklist/focus group" style games you're probably not getting quality anyways, and these kinds of groups aren't looking to elegantly work in a character or discussion of a particular minority group. They're mostly helping some middle manager somewhere check a box.
That said, just like gamergate and honestly it's gotten worse ever since, there's a large contingent of people who've made it their identity to no longer care about the quality of the product or the implementation of it's themes or whatever, and just rage against anything they perceive as woke, and some subsection in horrific ways.
The journalism part was pretty much true. Gaming news companies were extremely beholden to game companies. They couldn't really do anything like investigative journalism. The only sources of gaming news were the game companies themselves.
If a game company didn't like your review of their last game, and decides to cut you off, you were out of luck. Someone else was going to get all the juicy previews, you couldn't write a review till the game was already on store shelves and your strategy section would be way behind.
If that weren't bad enough, your main source of advertising revenue was also the same game companies. Piss off one of the big dogs and you might start having trouble even affording to print your magazine.
So it was understandable why it sometimes seemed like the big companies were getting softball reviews when they released mediocre or even bad games.
I just don't understand why it had to come with death threats and sexism.
It was the other way around: the death threats and sexism used the spectre of ethical violations in gaming journalism as a pretext to make the movement seem more palatable. The "concerns" followed the hate.
yeah not a fan of this weird revisionism as though gamergate was ever legitimately about ethics in games journalism. KIA is still around guys, you can just go look at the old threads. It was weird misogyny against Zoe Quinn right from the start.
Games journalism sucking was also true, but no serious person aligned themselves with gamergate because gamergate was not a serious "movement", it was a flimsy pretense to harass women under the guise of complaining about games journalism and its kind of hilarious to even make this argument because someone did this at the time and very quickly disavowed the whole movement for being a bunch of weird misogynists. A Mr. John Bain? TotalBiscuit also thought "hmm games journalism sucks these gamergate guys have a point" and then looked into it more and went "oh no".
I mean, most things that catch that many people these days do. That's sorta the issue with large crowds and amplifiers like twitter.
A very common pattern I saw back then was "oh yeah I think gamergate has a point" "Oh so you're ok with sexism and death threats" "no? What are you talking about".
It all depended on what side of the story you'd been told, or seen, through things like twitter. At the end of the day i'd suggest that if you actually polled a majority of people on the facts of the issue you'd get an overwhelming majority agreeing on most of the points, but they aren't throwing #'s around every 40 seconds while screaming at someone else online.
I don’t know if you intended this as subtext or not, but in case you didn’t: that’s normal these days specifically because of GamerGate.
The internet has always been a somewhat hostile place, but GamerGate’s “innovation” on that formula was to apply mass coordination and exploit features of social media to drive a culture war, as well as targeting individual everyday people to create a wider chilling effect beyond those directly in their sights.
Twitter shares a ton of the blame too — GamerGate was like catnip to a platform that ran on engagement, conflict, and context collapse.
Even though GamerGate was nominally limited to the gaming community, it also had a wider negative effect on online discourse as a whole.
I imagine there are many of us here that have developed emergent and default “defensive” online commenting stances that stem from the fundamental assumption that the internet is a hostile place and that we could, at any moment, be subject to coordinated mass harassment. We have GamerGate to thank for that.
Yup, GamerGate was the deathblow to the old internet culture that largely required a default position of good faith. Every shitty part of the online culture war has its roots in GamerGate, it's where the playbook on targeted online misinformation was written in the run up to the 2016 election.
https://www.axios.com/2022/10/20/gamergate-right-online-harassment-joan-donovan-meme-wars
I think you are spot on here that Gamergate was the lightning rod in the perfect storm of all of that hate that had been culminating within online communities just waiting for the outlet for their frustrations.
I lurked 4chan's /b/ in the early days of its inception. They were doing coordinated "raids" long before Gamergate - such as the Pool's Closed Habbo hotel raids where they would have users make an avatar as a black man block access to a pool and often encourage participants to form a swatsika while they disrupted the enjoyment of the typical user. I think a lot of it was this general ennui that many teens and young adults had in the 2000s at a lack of clear direction in life, especially in a post 9/11 world. But because those more sophisticated hubs for mass communication and coordination weren't yet developed these proto-astroturfing events were relatively small scale and short-lived.
So you had these communities that could be quickly galvanized around something, especially if it was "for the lulz". Many of these people were frustrated with the status quo and rightfully so - it had consistently failed them as the rich shrunk the middle class and pitted them against the destitute. And this came full front when Steve Bannon recognized the untapped potential of the gamer community, predominantly composed of young, disenfranchised men who were gradually losing the many cultural comforts afforded and assumed in the 20th century. On top of this, social media was really hitting its heyday with the ubiquity of Facebook and Twitter, eventually fomenting themselves as part of the "online public square". For better and for worse, social media has been effective at rapidly disseminating ideas.
As always - there is no doubt that many individuals were attracted by the idea of integrity in gaming journalism. It sucked, I never payed attention to any journalists because many of them felt like they had sold out. The culture around gaming as it became a massive industry had quickly lost its soul. Many people felt like they had been left behind in a subculture that had shaped them as many companies started churning out vapid garbage as part of a the mindless cash grab that is capitalistic entrepreneurialism.
So the disillusion with gaming culture was well-earned. But that listlessness wasn't truly directed at gaming journalists nor the executives/companies responsible for this degradation of the gaming community. That definitely seemed to be the initial focus, but the more things went on the more it became apparent the majority of pro-gamergate people were worried about feminist perspectives in gaming culture and political correctness. The backdrop was always journalism and corporate integrity, but it seldom felt like that actually addressed, especially as it dragged on. Again, as a young adult, I would lurk these communities sympathetic to many ideas about corporatism in gaming, but it never felt like it was about having tangible actions to work towards.
It all seemed to revolve around building an online persona that could articulate points that could maintain your ego while attacking the character of your interlocuter. Seldom did I feel like I was having genuine discussion because so much of it, as you put it, was rooted in defensive online cposturing. What a horrible way to go on! I think many communities from the initial days of gamergate have splintered off but they still rely on the hate to fuel them.
Also, turned out a lot of video game journalists writing for different publications were all on the same "Game Journos Pros" mailing list. Which doesn't suggest anything by itself, backchannels for industry gossip have always existed, but at the time very much resembled collusion between different writers to push the same message.
I would posit "the dress" as the prototype of this phenomenon, although of course it was ultimately a trivial issue.
The dress post-dates the beginning of Gamergate, iirc.
I feel like the dress is different because it’s an optical illusion. You really do see different things if you look at it.
Gamergate didn’t have one image representing it. It had THOUSANDS of micro arguments and endless amounts of hearsay
The dress was absolutely bizarre because it was like half of people had never seen a photograph without perfect lighting and color correction.
Gamergate as a movement is just ugliness personified. I can link to hundreds of threads from the early days of KiA that are just mean, nasty, venomous and ugliness on steroids and it’s probably gotten worse since then. I’m not talking about the harassment campaign here, this is just the discussion surrounding it.
It’s entirely possible to have principled objections to what you’ve outlined but that is not what the public face of gamergate was and we have all the receipts we could want to prove it. What you’re doing is wishful thinking at best and an attempt at historical revisionism at worst.
In addition to what everyone else has said, I would say this:
Sometimes there is no good-faith unpopular opinion. Trying to posit a good-faith presentation of this, as well as the OG Gamergate, makes me automatically suspicious of the intentions of you, supporting replies, and everyone whom upvoted you (especially that exemplary).
All this handwringing over diversity is often white men who don't grasp that they aren't a majority, and leverage rascist or sexist arguements to justify why even a slight reduction in the 'whiteness' of things is a problem. I'll highlight TMNT: Mutant Mayhem. There was so much vitrol under the guise of 'source material' about 'wokeness' and 'agenda' about one simple thing: That April was black. Set in a city where the majority of people are black. See also all the butthurt about 'black elves' in LOTR material...in a fantasy world.
Nobody whom has described 'wokeness' as a bad thing has ever presented a coherent arguement that didn't boil down to racist or sexist dogwhistling.
Frankly, Europe has a lot of ethno-centric rascism of its own to sort out, and doesn't exactly hold a neutral stance on the matter. Diversity is a human-centric principle, and is not generally controversial to anybody who isn't a bit of an ass.
OP said they are in eastern europe, so I would bet that white people are a majority there and that one particular culture and language are dominant.
I despise racism, but I do respect the desire to see forms of diversity that are rooted in cultures that are multiple centuries old where people don't move very much from home. Our immigrant centric highly mobile diversity is not the only way to show representation. It is also possible to represent foreign culture. I don't know if it would be a good idea or appreciated, but I would love the chance to play a a hunter gatherer warrior from somewhere. I just named and then deleted a few examples because I think they might find it disrespectful, but such a game could be created without singling out specific cultures.
And few would disagree with you. Genuine representation of different people and cultures is great.
But that's not what the Gamergate crowd is concerned about. The criticisms that are being leveled against the game companies by these "movements" are "fuck black people, fuck gay people, and fuck women" with barely a smattering of concealment.
And that's kind of what I'm addressing. There is a place to have these conversations, but to call this anything other than a harassment campaign is putting lipstick on a pig.
That would be correct, and I would like to add that being from a tiny country with its own not-entirely-western culture means that consuming media that are centered on different cultures than our own is the norm. The idea of "whiteness" creating any kind of shared experience probably applies in the anglosphere, but not really here, a white American is still a foreigner with a significantly different life and history from my own.
I don't disagree, but want to make one point.
I'm from the US, but whiteness extends beyond the anglosphere. Latin America and the Caribean had color based slavery and there is still social status and preferences associated with color in a variety of cultures. The Belgian Congo was a notoriously abusive colonial society. However, countries that didn't do colonialism or slavery over the last 500 years are different.
Ninja turtles complaining was especially weird because April looks completely different in every version of the turtles media.
Well I gave out at least one of the exemplary if there’s more than one and I already posted my reasoning so if you find me suspicious for that perhaps explain there
???
"Gamergate 2.0". Oh god, not these losers again. Can we just not? As if the poor folks who make video games don't have enough to worry about.
The original one was smart enough mix some legitimacy to confuse people passively hearing about it and not following up for accuracy. (oh some lady slept around to get a game reviewed, yea that's an ethics issue).
But using "wokefication" is like a straight-up dogwhistle that nothing they have to say is legitimate...it's just a pure harassment campaign.
Time to make a giant graph of who all is involved and add them to a bunch of blocklists?
I work as a translator/localizer (or should I say "wokelizer" 🙄.) And recently had a project that I felt I had to use a pseudonym for because while I was doing preliminary research I found that another studio got a ton of heat for translating a previous game in the series and making it "woke". Their crime according to these fans: using Gen Z slang and AAVE.
I saw the Steam community already getting up in arms about the next game having a woke translation and starting to work on a "more authentic" fan translation half a year before the game even came out.
These people are seriously unhinged.
Archive link
Am I understanding this right? The company is being harassed because they have racial and sexually diverse characters?
Yup that sounds about right. The original Gamergate was a harassment campaign because a woman made a game that discussed feelings.
A good writeup on the original.
I remember the original, this is the first I'd heard of this one. I viewed it at the time as a typical tech industry piling on a woman who had some success, which is why this feels kind of discordant to me.
They're being harrassed because they offer sensitivity readings for games who already want racially and sexually diverse characters. All parties asked in the article state there is no requirement to follow the advice and it is done entirely at the discretion of the studios who asked for advice.
The Gamergate 2.0 justification is just a reason for people to be hateful shit bags.
From my understanding, it's deeper than that. There was a steam group made to list all the games Sweet Baby Inc a consulting firm was involved with because some of the games they have consulted with have crossed the line for some people (making up new Spanish words and removing or changing things in games to suit different countries ideals for gender issues as in Spiderman 2). After that group was made, Sweet Baby and the people who follow them came together to harass, and even tried to get them banned from steam account and all, the user who made the group. The motion failed and has now had this massive blowback in their faces from all the gamers who are tired of having political correctness and gender issues forced into their games from these consulting agencies.
Tldr: Sweet Baby Inc kicked a giant dormant bee hive, and now the murder hornets are running loose, leading to companies saying they are now the victims of the story.
Tale as old as time, really.
I don't know anything about the current situation outside of the posted article, but, honestly, this sounds like the exact same pretext that Gamergate used as a cover story. That movement relied on misdirection to let its harassment go unchecked, and one of the biggest misdirections was the idea that the people doing the harassing were justified and principled in doing so.
It was always framed as lowly gamers vs. lofty media, to make it sound like it was a group of relatable little guys nobly taking down awful people in power. That wasn't true. It was an ugly internet bloodbath -- inflicting pain was the purpose of it, though nominally they said it was about "reform." Gamergate outright reveled in harassment and discrimination while hoping that people bought the lie that it was really about "ethics in gaming journalism." Enough people did that it was able to continue far longer than a hate mob ever should have been able to.
I don't want to be too forward with you, but it feels like you could be falling for that same misdirection here. The beats are all the same -- nearly identical.
I have no affiliation to either direction, I just know what I've seen about the build-up of this and am basing what I said on that. To me it looks like the big companies are actually at fault here for pushing agenda, which seems in line with another situation in anime recently and localization workers.
To me, the push for inclusiveness is going a bit over board for me personally as it seems shoved down our throats at this point.
TIL why the Spanish in Spiderman 2 is so butchered. I understand the instinct to make Spanish gender neutral, but it can make the language incredibly hard to understand. If a nonbinary person wants to use -e instead of -a/-o for themselves, that's totally fine. However, defaulting to -e for every word is a massive change...
The first gamergate nearly got me. The idea that game devs and journalists were in bed together (literally in that one case) was infuriating and the industry is exploitative enough as it is! I wanted something done about it, but things switched gear so quickly and suddenly it was all women’s fault and young white men were the exclusive victims. Non-white characters started to become evidence of this big conspiracy and I had to take a step back and think wtf is this? Weren’t we angry about the lack of journalistic integrity?
Sometimes I wonder if that was like a sliding door moment for me, however I think the kind of bigotry that came out is just incompatible with who I am.
Later, when I discovered those Steve Bannon quotes about an army of angry young men ready to be funnelled into the alt-right I was weirdly relieved to find that it wasn’t totally organic and far more worried that this was probably just the start.
Italics mine, this just about sums up the state of mind many of his ilk have in my previous experiences--outrage at the implication or possibility that festers into a perceived reality. To say nothing of how disingenuous it is to harbor such hostile feelings without even trying a demo, or if a demo isn't available then watching a full playthrough without edits or commentary. If neither is feasible? It's fine to not have an opinion or something. Maybe GOW:R is a cesspool of forced diversity. I wouldn't know because like him, I haven't played it. All I know is Richard Schiff voices Odin, which I thought odd at first, but rolled with it. That's all I need to know unless my interest in the game changes.
It’s been bizarre seeing this blow up so fast. Some random Brazilian guy made a Steam curator group listing Sweet Baby Inc affiliated games. It had a handful of members when all of a sudden Sweet Baby Inc employee Chris Kindred incited a harassment campaign by telling all his Twitter followers to “report the fuck out of this group.” In the most impressive example of the Streisand effect in years, the Steam group exploded in popularity, and the entire internet is now aware of SBI. I don’t even understand why Kindred did it. Is he not proud of the work they’ve done? Why would he care if people knew which games SBI worked on?? It’s all so strange.
It's not that strange. The Steam curator list was not the beginning of this story, nor was it a one-off act by "some random Brazilian guy." It was part of an already growing movement amongst "anti-woke" circles to target Sweet Baby. It was created on January 29th and here's a popular KIA post about SB from several months before that, which includes 4chan screenshots going back even farther.
It's true that Kindred embarassed himself and his company with a bad judgment call, but it's obvious why he did it. It's also obvious that this Gamergate is exactly the same as the old one: reactionary identity politics with a thin veneer of concern about games, ethics, or anything else.
Is this “growing movement” in the room with us right now? There’s no conspiracy here. You can look at the curator list yourself. It’s just a list of “not recommended” games. That’s it. There’s no justification for attempting to create a targeted harassment campaign and I take particular issue with your defence of it as “obvious.” That’s not a normal thing to do. It wouldn’t be obvious to me or any other normal person.
I didn't say anything about a conspiracy, and I provided adequate proof of the claim that I did make.
I didn't say this either. Why aren't you willing to engage with anything that I actually said?
The most recent post on the discussion board for the group is from an admin who explicitly asks the group’s 100,000+ members to stop harassing others.
What went on in that Steam group? If it was even a tiny fraction of the vitriol and threats we saw during Gamergate, then reporting it was probably the right call.
I have a very hard time empathizing with people getting worked up over diversity stuff, especially in situations like this where the solution is so blindingly obvious: just don't buy the damn game. No one is forcing you to play bland corporate drivel, and you're not entitled to have sequels to beloved franchises turn out exactly how you want. Just ask any fan of Sonic the Hedgehog.
There's certainly a lot of corporate pandering going around, but there always is. That's what they do. I get the feeling that this recent pushback on "wokeness" is largely down to people getting pissy that the corporate ghouls aren't pandering exclusively to them and no one else.
You can see for yourself. It’s just a list of “not recommended” games. There’s nothing in there deserving of being reported. There’s certainly never justification for a targeted harassment campaign.
This is a great mini-summary. Thanks for it. Streisand effect for sure.
I don't have any ire toward SBI. My own company does narrative consulting from time to time. But this situation is pretty strange and I hope it flames out shortly and doesn't grow into GG2.0 for real.
Is this the group that's called "Sweet Baby Inc detected" and is putting "Not Recommended" on all the listed games? I don't condone the harassment campaign but I'm not how sure how you don't realize why he wouldn't be pleased by the group.
A normal person would feel sad if someone didn’t like their work. My incredulity is starting a harassment campaign over it. That’s not normal.
People are allowed to boycott whatever they want, even if its for a really stupid reason.
Why do people always resort to this form of argument? I never said they couldn't boycott it. This isn't about what people are allowed to like or dislike.
I'm sorry I didn't mean to come off as hostile, I'm sorry if it sounded like that. I think people may have read your comment as condemning the steam group. I don't think people were upset about him not appreciating the steam group, I think people were upset that he called for mass-reporting of the group to de-platform it just because he was unhappy that people didn't enjoy his companies work.
Understandable, I get this is a heated topic but I don't like how these replies were misunderstanding what I wrote.
I get tempers are hot about this whole thing. I also disagree with mass reporting it but I can also understand why he might be angry with the group. It's one thing for a group to dislike a work for a particular reason related to game play but another when it seems more like their reason is because it's boosting the representation of minority identities.
There's a difference between me disliking a restaurant because the food sucks because I think they add too much salt and me disliking a restaurant because the food sucks because I don't like the chef's race.
But what happens in these cases are people arguing that people are allowed to think a restaurant's food sucks when that's not really the issue. It's just a smokescreen for harassment and hate just like the original GG.
So I agree with you. But if we extend this reasoning to its logical conclusion, people are allowed to express their frustration with blanket rejections and boycotts on games too. You can certainly make arguments that coordinated responses against individual boycotts may be disproportional, but those are part of the open market of ideas.
I don't think encouraging your following to fraudulently report a group (having a curator group like this is not against steam's TOS) in an effort to de-platform them is an appropriate response.
You're allowed to say "I don't like that these shithead gamers are boycotting my games", but I don't think you should be allowed to say "Lets all do our best to remove this group from existance because I don't like it."
If it's a vector for hate or death threats, as the previous round was, that's plenty legitimate for a private platform to deal with as appropriate.
There's no evidence this small steam group was a vector for any direct harassment (at least before being targeted by the SweetBaby guy.) Or if there is, I haven't seen it.
So when you write, "I don't think you should be allowed to say...", are you speaking about what one ought to do or do you have something in mind when it comes to curtailing those actions? Like I think the mass reporting is a bit much, especially if it's not against the TOS, but I don't really see what can be done about it.
If there is targeted harassment in terms of death threats, constant messaging, and the like I am totally against it. People should be shamed for such behavior. But on the other hand of coordinated behavior, when it's done responsibly, can be a great tool to shed light on something.
People are allowed to boycott things for whatever they want. There are groups that list Denuvo games for example, it isn’t a harassment campaign.
I never said they couldn't boycott it and I didn't call it a harassment campaign either.
It appears I replied to the wrong comment by accident. I meant to reply to @JasSmith.
I think I count as a "gamer" (but I play less than I used to). I usually have a game or two I play a few nights a week, and I watch a good amount of Twitch and smaller gaming-related youtubers. Am I one of the few that never got involved, in any capacity, with GamerGate? To this day I don't even really know what it was about. Every thread on the subject I have to re-educate myself.
Having been refreshed thanks to the very well written comments there, why did people care so much about gaming journalism integrity? I don't read any gaming journalism. I just play games with my friends (through the years: Pokemon, then a ton of Runescape, then a ton of Minecraft and various first-person shooters, now a lot of DayZ).
I also understand there's some kind of dark underbelly of gaming where there's misogyny. I'm curious why that is. It's all very strange and I don't understand what's really going on but have no interest in digging into it to see for myself. Frequently I have to get brought up to speed on whatever asinine misogynistic stuff is taking root in American culture. Like the whole pumpkin spice latte hate. I ordered one years ago and learned that my love of warm spices in coffee had intersected with other people's hatred of young women (and apparently young woman = bad is some kind of base fact?).
There are people in this comment section washing away what Zoe Quinn did, saying she was simply a target of misogony or that she had no impact on gaming culture.
Zoe Quinn was key. It was her ex-boyfriend exposing that she was entering an unethical relationship with a game reporter for positive games coverage. This unravelled a whole look at the games industry as a whole. Zoe played the victim perfectly, and later on falsely accused Alec Holowka of abuse which cased him to commit suicide as he was struggling with other mental disorders when those accusations were levied against him.
Her ex-boyfriend made that stuff up. The reviewer she had a relationship with didn't review her game. Let's not whitewash someone organising a retaliation mob against their ex on 4chan.
Not that that ever mattered to gamergate. It was never about the truth, and the 'ethics' thing was just a cover to legitimise the movement. Did people join believing that it was actually about ethics? Sure, but that doesn't change what they were tricked into.