It's been well over a decade. The dust has settled and time has moved on, but the Gamergate Exclusion Zone remains a dangerous and unsettling place. Toxicity lies dormant in all available surfaces...
Exemplary
It's been well over a decade. The dust has settled and time has moved on, but the Gamergate Exclusion Zone remains a dangerous and unsettling place. Toxicity lies dormant in all available surfaces of discourse. Touching anything in the area puts you at risk. Its radioactive fallout brings indiscriminate harm to any who choose to tread there.
It will, unfortunately, remain this way for a long time.
I watched the first two hours of this video before having to stop on account of life things, as one does. I will probably finish it, because for some reason the idea of an audiobook-length history of Gamergate appeals to me in the same way as picking at a scab does.
It's not a bad video. I appreciate the creator trying to bring nuance and context to a difficult and fraught topic. I genuinely think he's trying to be fair.
But I also think he's putting way too much emphasis on his research and journalistic approach. This undermines his credibility pretty strongly because I think both of those are significantly flawed. The fact that he also repeatedly talks himself up as a way of taking pot-shots at industry journalists sinks it even further. The video is written with the barbs and humor of an opinion piece yet he wants us to consider it serious reporting as well, and, in this case I think those two things are dissonant.
I say this not to say it’s a garbage video. It’s not (well, speaking for what I’ve seen so far).
I say this because I think it fails to live up to its own standard and engages in some of the same behaviors it criticizes.
Admittedly, this is an unfair conclusion to draw definitively because I haven’t watched the whole thing. However, I do feel like two hours of my time and attention is fair play for at least starting to develop opinions, and I don’t think that, barring some meta twist on his rhetoric, my main concern is going to somehow resolve itself by the end.
I started typing a lot more getting into lots of specifics, but I deleted it. I realized I was just retreading the same tired toxic ground, and I hate that. I want to be done with Gamergate, even if Gamergate isn’t done driving its conflict (which, based on this topic, it clearly isn’t).
I don’t like wandering into the Exclusion Zone these days because I don’t think anything good can come from it. For anyone.
I think the fact that good discourse around Gamergate is still effectively impossible is a testament to how terrible it was and what a rotten legacy it has left.
If that interests you, I'd much sooner recommend A Case Study in Digital Radicalism by Ian Danskin. It's shorter, for what that's worth, although given the nature of video essay viewership, maybe...
I watched the first two hours of this video before having to stop on account of life things, as one does. I will probably finish it, because for some reason the idea of an audiobook-length history of Gamergate appeals to me in the same way as picking at a scab does.
If that interests you, I'd much sooner recommend A Case Study in Digital Radicalism by Ian Danskin. It's shorter, for what that's worth, although given the nature of video essay viewership, maybe that's a negative?
Another kfwyre banger. Although I will say that at least with radioactive fallout, you can shelter in a bunker and wear a respirator when outdoors. I’m not sure there’s much you can do to mitigate...
Another kfwyre banger. Although I will say that at least with radioactive fallout, you can shelter in a bunker and wear a respirator when outdoors. I’m not sure there’s much you can do to mitigate GG fallout lol.
It's a six hour video but it's from a YouTuber whose content I like so I've decided to watch it. Neverknowsbest reads sources and gives an overview of what happened. Key takeaways: 00:49:28 Before...
It's a six hour video but it's from a YouTuber whose content I like so I've decided to watch it. Neverknowsbest reads sources and gives an overview of what happened.
Key takeaways:
00:49:28 Before Gamergate there were warning signs against overreaction to criticism and cliquey circles.
01:03:50 "If you don't allow legitimate criticism from within you encourage illegitimate criticism from outside"
3:41:37, 4:40:36 Journalists covering up the story, not reading source and clearly taking a side is appalling behavior. You really have to read everything yourself because apparently, not even media will. I wonder, can you even trust these people today?
The video is not about "who was right in Gamergate". It's about "how Gamergate was driven by media's inability to question Zoe Quinn".
05:42:28 The funniest thing in the video was lying about your own mother dying. Twice.
There's enough lessons here not to repeat something like Gamergate again but politics trumps over notions of accountability and fairness so it probably will happen again.
Ok, I'm just straight up debunking this right now: Gamergate was nothing more than a trolling harassment campaign against women born and fostered by 4chan. Every other mildly plausible discussion...
Exemplary
Ok, I'm just straight up debunking this right now:
Gamergate was nothing more than a trolling harassment campaign against women born and fostered by 4chan.
Every other mildly plausible discussion about it was fostered as a cover for it, entrapping otherwise well-meaning people into a hot mess of almost completely manufactured outrage.
I'll drop this as a counterpoint by the excellent Innuendo Studios: Why are you so Angry?
I say this as one of those people caught up by the "games journalism integrity" people.
And a personal note: This is not national policy or geopolitical events. It's friggen video games. Journalistic integrity is a joke, and it always has been. The stakes are virtually 0, especially with even a passing semblance of a return policy.
I feel like maybe we've been in this discussion before, so I'm not writing an essay here, but I disagree with both your opinion and your attitude towards the video. Maybe it's different in the US,...
I feel like maybe we've been in this discussion before, so I'm not writing an essay here, but I disagree with both your opinion and your attitude towards the video.
Maybe it's different in the US, but where I'm from the quality of gaming magazines and online media was always low in the literary sense, but they were relatively trustworthy and mainly it felt like the people who wrote for them were videogaming fanatics - certainly not journalists, not worthy of any literary awards, with a bit of an underdog vibe, but reasonably trustworthy and so it felt like they were one of us. (I no longer feel like I'm part of that "us", but I see nothing wrong with it either)
Gamergate revealed that for several big gaming media this is not true at all, they are not one of us, they are untrustworthy, they in fact seem to despise us and they form weird backroom cliques which they use to attack our culture.
That is the big issue. Zoe Quinn was just a red herring pretty much. Most GG sympathizers never harassed anyone, they just felt betrayed and angry because of firstly this discovery and then the completely one-sided coverage of the full blown culture war that ensued.
Also I find it quite frustrating how people are presented with a reasonable explanation for why GG happened, became so big so suddenly and never really vanished completely and instead of trying to learn from that their reaction is "no, this must be wrong, these people are evil and therefore no reasonable explanation may exist". Despite what I say above I would prefer something like gamergate to vanish and never happen again, but as long as the majority of people have this attitude, I think we're bound to repeat it.
It’s pretty much people stuck in that 2010s mode of progressivism.
I find it quite frustrating how people are presented with a reasonable explanation for why GG happened, became so big so suddenly and never really vanished completely and instead of trying to learn from that their reaction is "no, this must be wrong, these people are evil and therefore no reasonable explanation may exist".
It’s pretty much people stuck in that 2010s mode of progressivism.
I mean, no? I can look at the table of contents and reliably identify that anyone who takes the “the sacrosanct nature of games journalism has been violated” claim seriously is just blinkered and...
I mean, no? I can look at the table of contents and reliably identify that anyone who takes the “the sacrosanct nature of games journalism has been violated” claim seriously is just blinkered and has no idea what they’re talking about. It’s clear that was the narrative used to gin up the hate and do the little motte-and-bailey thing, but it’s also clear that this was entirely made up bullshit to weaponize online troll mobs.
You don’t have to be a wokie woke to recognize when people all of a sudden having really strident opinions about a topic that doesn’t concern them at all and that they didn’t know existed 15 minutes before they got rage-baited into it is probably not authentic. And it’s not as if we haven’t had decade of processing those events and seeing the exact same dynamics play out about myriad different things since using the same playbook social media outrage mongers perfected during GamerGate. People lost their shit about Lizzo playing a flute. They lost their shit about having to wear masks or get vaccinated for a pandemic. We’ve been a decade into people getting ragebaited by social media into losing their shit and just repeating a canned line about some higher moral principle behind it that isn’t just a fit of pique.
Acting like “oh but we have to take the stuff they claim to be pissed about seriously though” is basically asking me to be stupid on purpose. We’re a decade into people foaming at the mouth over the most inane shit imaginable but we’re supposed to assume that the ur-example of this dynamic might have had a kernel of something legit underneath it and not just be an early instance of idiots getting wound up by rage-baiters taking advantage of social media algorithms to facilitate mass-cyberbullying?
I think the reducing their statement down to the idea that it's just "things [they] disagree with" and not "things this specific reactionary group of people claim is the problem rather than this...
I think the reducing their statement down to the idea that it's just "things [they] disagree with" and not "things this specific reactionary group of people claim is the problem rather than this long lost of things they got upset about" is to create a strawman.
For example, I think complaining about "historical accuracy" only when it comes to casting black actors is stupid, but not "because I disagree with it." More gamer-wise, I think engaging about whether "GTA is woke now" because it has a Latina character gives legitimacy to an argument that is absolutely bullshit.
You could ask NaraVara if it's only because they disagree with the people, I suppose, but you assumed it and used that to dismiss their response and failed to engage with any substance because of it.
No, it’s pretty self-evidently stupid. I understand there’s a lot of people who want to find an excuse to not have to admit to themselves that they were ignorant and allowed themselves to get...
No, it’s pretty self-evidently stupid. I understand there’s a lot of people who want to find an excuse to not have to admit to themselves that they were ignorant and allowed themselves to get suckered and whipped up into a mob, but that doesn’t change the facts.
I find it very hard to believe that everyone was just so upset to discover that a bunch of websites were trying to keep their advertisers happy. Something that wasnt exactly a secret, and not...
I find it very hard to believe that everyone was just so upset to discover that a bunch of websites were trying to keep their advertisers happy. Something that wasnt exactly a secret, and not really a big deal anyway.
I find it very easy to belive a bunch of turbo nerds got mad that women were daring to stick their nose in their sacred hobby and jumped at the chance to be assholes about it.
Genuinely making sure I understand you correctly: it is your opinion that if we go and look at what the majority of the faces of gamergate are talking about in the years since, we will find a...
Genuinely making sure I understand you correctly: it is your opinion that if we go and look at what the majority of the faces of gamergate are talking about in the years since, we will find a focus on companies influencing the rating of video games and ethics in game journalism, and not making openly homophobic/transphobic/misogynist statements about video games and the surrounding industries or otherwise engaging in right wing “culture war” talking points?
Probably not, people who are still talking about gamergate are a tiny minority among all the people who were more or less quiet supporters in its heyday, and they're bound to be more extreme if...
Probably not, people who are still talking about gamergate are a tiny minority among all the people who were more or less quiet supporters in its heyday, and they're bound to be more extreme if they're still at it today.
Also it was not just about the ratings. As I said, one of the important points in gamergate history was realizing that for unknown reasons that go way beyond gamerate itself the journalists seemed to hate "gamer culture" as a whole and attempted to coordinate in pushing "gamers" out of the hobby, or at least reducing their importance. It obviously went way beyond "trying to keep their advertisers happy". Which is why I said it's the exact opposite for me - getting angry at this is completely believable and even expected.
They didn't say people who were still talking about Gamergate, they said what the major past faces of Gamergate are talking about today.
Probably not, people who are still talking about gamergate are a tiny minority among all the people who were more or less quiet supporters in its heyday, and they're bound to be more extreme if they're still at it today.
They didn't say people who were still talking about Gamergate, they said what the major past faces of Gamergate are talking about today.
Yeah, that's a fair distinction, I was quite tired when I wrote that. I don't have the answer, it seems like the direction of the question may be "they're all grifters who either dug even deeper...
Yeah, that's a fair distinction, I was quite tired when I wrote that.
I don't have the answer, it seems like the direction of the question may be "they're all grifters who either dug even deeper or switched to other hateful culture war topics since then". This is undoubtedly true in some visible cases, but I'm not convinced it's the majority. I don't think this question can realistically be honestly answered because it would require a lot of digging and possibly a debate about where to draw the line of being significant enough.
In my opinion the masses who somehow participated or just sympathized with the movement are more important, and among those I do believe most were not disgusting bigots or grifters.
Who is a "gamer" and what is your definition of "gaming culture?" Because after calling myself a "gamer" for a good chunk of my life, today I've pretty much abandoned the label due to the ugly...
Who is a "gamer" and what is your definition of "gaming culture?" Because after calling myself a "gamer" for a good chunk of my life, today I've pretty much abandoned the label due to the ugly connotations GamerGate gave it.
Yeah I spend a disproportionate amount of time enjoying and thinking about video games, but don't call me a "gamer."
I'd much rather discuss contents of the NeverKnowsBest video so if you disagree with any of the claims he made then please quote them. Gamergate turned into a culture war. The alt-right took over...
I'd much rather discuss contents of the NeverKnowsBest video so if you disagree with any of the claims he made then please quote them.
This is not national policy or geopolitical events. It's friggen video games. Journalistic integrity is a joke, and it always has been. The stakes are virtually 0, especially with even a passing semblance of a return policy.
Gamergate turned into a culture war. The alt-right took over and Trump got elected and we have to live with consequences of it to this day so I don't think the stakes are zero.
Journalistic integrity shouldn't be a joke then otherwise stuff like this is going to repeat.
It's a six-hour video. No one is going to put in that effort if they think it's bad. Plus, you provided a summary. That is open for discussion now that that toothpaste is out of the tube.
I'd much rather discuss contents of the NeverKnowsBest video so if you disagree with any of the claims he made then please quote them.
It's a six-hour video. No one is going to put in that effort if they think it's bad. Plus, you provided a summary. That is open for discussion now that that toothpaste is out of the tube.
Vord is responding to the larger framing of the video, which is relevant. Attempting to assign homework in response just means you're not considering what they had to say. It's also a little...
Vord is responding to the larger framing of the video, which is relevant. Attempting to assign homework in response just means you're not considering what they had to say. It's also a little hypocritical to complain about someone not watching a video you've shared when you don't appear to have watched the series they linked either.
And while I'll agree that journalistic integrity is important, and that trust matters even with something low-stakes like games, Gamergate was not about integrity. It was started by the alt-right as an explicit harassment campaign, and "ethics in journalism" was the white-washing they used to get more people to join in on the harassment.
It happens to everybody at some point, so please do not take it personally when I say that if you believed Gamergate was about journalistic malpractice, you've been fooled. Whether the author of the video you posted was themselves fooled or not, I leave to you.
I didn't complain. I said I want to discuss NeverKnowsBest video because that's what I submitted. If they want to talk about Innuendo Studios video series they are free to start a new topic. I...
It's also a little hypocritical to complain about someone not watching a video you've shared when you don't appear to have watched the series they linked either.
I didn't complain. I said I want to discuss NeverKnowsBest video because that's what I submitted. If they want to talk about Innuendo Studios video series they are free to start a new topic.
Attempting to assign homework in response just means you're not considering what they had to say.
I could say the exact same thing.
I think GG wasn't just one thing but there were multiple threads running at the same time: harassment, doxxing, anti-sjw, anti-feminist, anti-censorship, anti-establishment and complaining about journalists as well (03:03:02).
In this case, though, it kind of is. Because it’s press releases and reviews about toys, not actual journalism. The expectation that it should be regarded as journalism is children on Reddit who...
Journalistic integrity shouldn't be a joke then otherwise stuff like this is going to repeat.
In this case, though, it kind of is.
Because it’s press releases and reviews about toys, not actual journalism. The expectation that it should be regarded as journalism is children on Reddit who don’t understand how the world works getting easily confused by ragebait.
The idea that people were sincerely outraged about Zoe Quinn beggars belief because she made a random indie game that nobody cared about aside from a few scenesters at Kotaku. The only lesson here is how easy it was to drum up people into having strong opinions about things that don’t matter at all and don’t impact them at all to the point of developing a social media psychosis around it.
That psychosis is what let Trump get elected, and pretending there is any legitimacy to the random outrage these grievance mongers gin up doesn’t serve anyone. We need to call it out as ragebait induced psychosis. Nothing at the bottom of it is real or worth caring about.
I find it a tad upsetting that journalistic integrity keeps getting brought up about this, even today. Because you're right, this is ridiculous! But it makes it sound legitimate, because yeah,...
I find it a tad upsetting that journalistic integrity keeps getting brought up about this, even today. Because you're right, this is ridiculous!
But it makes it sound legitimate, because yeah, people should be able to trust media. Even in hobbies. Funnily enough, Gamergate itself does support that in a roundabout way — the impact of the bullshit was dramatically outsized and got a fair amount of broader attention, so it makes it clear that sufficient mistrust and hobby drama can matter far beyond the scale of the hobby itself.
But none of that matters, because it was utterly unjustified drama about things that got made the fuck up. So that agreeable concept that would otherwise be a valuable take is instead being used to launder misogyny. It's insane.
Even more so considering how we've seen the same tactic trotted out in every culture war episode since. People spontaneously developing a passion for historical accuracy in film when it lets them...
Even more so considering how we've seen the same tactic trotted out in every culture war episode since. People spontaneously developing a passion for historical accuracy in film when it lets them dogpile a black actress, women's basketball when it lets them dogpile trans kids, etc etc etc. After all these years it's just pattern recognition.
I actually take umbrage with the concept that people should be able to trust media inherently. Anything is media. The only thing anyone needs to do to create media is money or the backing of a...
I actually take umbrage with the concept that people should be able to trust media inherently. Anything is media. The only thing anyone needs to do to create media is money or the backing of a monied organization. As a result media can and often is used to push propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies. The idea that media should be trustworthy itself makes media more dangerous and less trustworthy because it becomes more of a target for manipulation.
You need to be able to trust something though. Human society is built on trust to some degree. Anyone who doesn’t trust anyone/anything either has a serious psychiatric condition or will succumb...
You need to be able to trust something though. Human society is built on trust to some degree. Anyone who doesn’t trust anyone/anything either has a serious psychiatric condition or will succumb to the biggest charlatan as long as they fit with their vibes.
Yes, that doesn’t mean you should trust categorically. Trust is something built over time by demonstrations of good faith and acts of service. It requires demonstrations that the efforts they are...
Yes, that doesn’t mean you should trust categorically. Trust is something built over time by demonstrations of good faith and acts of service. It requires demonstrations that the efforts they are giving are for the good of the public.
People who don’t trust anyone may have problems, but untrustworthy media actively creates problems on a societal level.
This is meandering pretty far from what I was actually talking about, which I felt was pretty clear. But to spell it out: I meant "media" as in journalists/news outlets, and I meant "trust" as in...
This is meandering pretty far from what I was actually talking about, which I felt was pretty clear. But to spell it out: I meant "media" as in journalists/news outlets, and I meant "trust" as in "being able to let your guard down because this person/group has never deliberately lied to you." Nobody can be suspicious forever, unless they want to die from stress.
If that is your definition of trust than trust is something that one literally cannot determine for themselves if they have. There are almost certainly people who still trust CBS news after Bari...
If that is your definition of trust than trust is something that one literally cannot determine for themselves if they have. There are almost certainly people who still trust CBS news after Bari Weiss, but she has doubtlessly directed her people to misdirect and lie to the audience.
It's a really underrated option on anything with an activity sort, imo. Posting is bumping, so it something is stupid, consider whether it is too stupid to be worth extra people noticing it.
It's a really underrated option on anything with an activity sort, imo. Posting is bumping, so it something is stupid, consider whether it is too stupid to be worth extra people noticing it.
If it was simple then I think the video would be much shorter. It's split into sections so you can watch any particular one, or just watch what I timestamped or reply to one of my takeaways.
If it was simple then I think the video would be much shorter. It's split into sections so you can watch any particular one, or just watch what I timestamped or reply to one of my takeaways.
I mean, the stakes are not virtually zero, but they are very, very low compared to what gamergate became. Most movements, no matter how abhorrent, usually start with a tiny grain of legitimate...
I mean, the stakes are not virtually zero, but they are very, very low compared to what gamergate became.
Most movements, no matter how abhorrent, usually start with a tiny grain of legitimate grevience. Taking gamergate in its totality, it's safe to say it was a right wing, misogynistic movement used by racists, sexists, transphobes, and general far right people to push society in general further to the right, and is in large part responsible for Donald Trump being elected.
At the same time though, video games are the most lucrative entertainment industry in the world, and it's by a long shot. There are hundreds of billions of dollars floating around video games, it directly employs hundreds of thousands of people, and it wields massive cultural influence.
Journalism around it is as big of a deal as journalism around sports, movies, fashion, music, or tv. Is it as important as journalism uncovering political corruption or human rights abuses? No, but it still has a lot of influence on a lot of people's livelihood. It still matters, and in a perfect world, you could look into questionable conflicts of interests without it turning into a fascist firestorm that makes women fearful for their lives.
Games journalism follows basically the same standards as journalism in those areas. This is all called “enthusiast” press and depends entirely on the journalists having tight personal connections...
Journalism around it is as big of a deal as journalism around sports, movies, fashion, music, or tv.
Games journalism follows basically the same standards as journalism in those areas. This is all called “enthusiast” press and depends entirely on the journalists having tight personal connections with the people they’re covering. You think Anna Wintour isn’t getting wined and dined by fashion houses every minute of the day during Fashion Week?
If people wanted to talk about ethics in journalism it might help if they actually knew a single thing about what journalism is, or what ethics is, or literally anything at all.
So what? Maybe gaming was different just because it was a new, younger medium with this type of behavior not being accepted as the status quo yet like in those other industries. I don't understand...
So what? Maybe gaming was different just because it was a new, younger medium with this type of behavior not being accepted as the status quo yet like in those other industries. I don't understand what's this idea that there could not have been legitimate anger over this.
If people wanted to talk about ethics in journalism it might help if they actually knew a single thing about what journalism is, or what ethics is, or literally anything at all.
Are you gatekeeping the idea of "don't fuck or take money from people whose products you're reviewing without disclosing it"?
For all the talk of how old and irrelevant this drama is, the discourse here is really illuminating.
WOAW! The website that festoons every square inch of the screen in ads for video games might have structural conflicts of interest impacting the video games it’s reviewing!? I’m shocked. SHOCKED!?...
WOAW! The website that festoons every square inch of the screen in ads for video games might have structural conflicts of interest impacting the video games it’s reviewing!? I’m shocked. SHOCKED!?
This is how enthusiast press works. The only people who read it are into the hobby. The only people who pay for it are the people who sell to people who are into the hobby.
Are you gatekeeping the idea of "don't fuck or take money from people whose products you're reviewing without disclosing it"?
You’re right. Journalists should have no interest or opinions regarding the subject of their beat and zero personal connections or relationships within the field so as not to introduce BIAS. And somehow we should take action on this by spamming abuse threats to a random lit crit writer and any foid with a tangential connection to the games industry.
At bottom what was going on here was envy and the same stew of undifferentiated resentment finding an outlet. For all the whinging about woke it’s the exact same dynamic of outrage mobs looking for an acceptable target for their bullying.
No no, not being into the hobby, being on payroll to promote products of a specific company or person. Sorry for the confusion. No no, again sorry for making you think that this is what I think....
No no, not being into the hobby, being on payroll to promote products of a specific company or person. Sorry for the confusion.
Journalists should have no interest or opinions regarding the subject of their beat and zero personal connections or relationships within the field so as not to introduce BIAS
No no, again sorry for making you think that this is what I think. Of course interest is fine and even close connections or friendships, they should just be disclosed. Or does the knowledge of journalism contradict that?
And somehow we should take action on this by spamming abuse threats to a random lit crit writer and any foid with a tangential connection to the games industry.
I think that this idea of yours is really dangerous actually. Nobody should be spammed abuse threats. What's a foid?
Foid is a derogatory term for women that came incel culture and is being used here to, I assume, speak to the perspective of the people doing the harassing. For more, see From Stacys to Foids, a...
Foid is a derogatory term for women that came incel culture and is being used here to, I assume, speak to the perspective of the people doing the harassing.
It's interesting how your flippant dismissal displays the exact haughty attitude that this video tries to dispel. And you would know that, if you would have watched even the first 15 minutes of...
It's interesting how your flippant dismissal displays the exact haughty attitude that this video tries to dispel. And you would know that, if you would have watched even the first 15 minutes of it.
But you didn't. Because you think you know better.
They didn't watch 15 minutes of the video, but took it upon themself to open their "rebuttal" with "Ok, I'm just straight up debunking this right now". That's my problem! You can't debunk...
They didn't watch 15 minutes of the video, but took it upon themself to open their "rebuttal" with "Ok, I'm just straight up debunking this right now". That's my problem! You can't debunk something if you don't have a god damn clue what it is even saying!
Hell, the video is even in agreement with most of their points, but it bothers to look closer at the entire clusterfuck that is gamergate because simply saying "Gamergate was nothing more than a trolling harassment campaign against women born and fostered by 4chan" doesn't really explain why it got so big!
We've had harassment campaigns born out of misogyny before and since, but they usually don't blow up this much!
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread (by the same person you're replying to, even), this is a huge ask to begin with on a six-hour video, let alone when you're talking about someone who considers...
You can't debunk something if you don't have a god damn clue what it is even saying!
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread (by the same person you're replying to, even), this is a huge ask to begin with on a six-hour video, let alone when you're talking about someone who considers the video to be likely to be disinformation.
Frankly though, even if the video does agree as you say, there's a framing issue at hand. Trying to talk about ethics in journalism in the context of Gamergate, which was explicitly a harassment campaign that used that very concept to launder itself, is a dangerous thing that has to be done very carefully. You have to make sure it's abundantly clear to everyone in the room that Gamergate was a harassment campaign, because if anyone thinks otherwise, the harassment campaign is duping them successfully. And we've got enough misogyny already.
I'm not sure the video has done that, and OP's post certainly has not. Considering the rampant bigotry, lying, and duplicity involved in Gamergate, that immediately calls good faith into question. That's probably why vord posted what they did — and considering how much people here do not seem to be clear on how Gamergate was a harassment campaign, I think they were very correct to make that post.
As a closing note: vord was debunking a false conception of Gamergate. If the video agrees, then they were not debunking the video.
Simply opening the video and just watching the very beginning is not a huge ask. It is simply demanding the same standard of checking what a linked source is actually saying before barging in and...
Simply opening the video and just watching the very beginning is not a huge ask. It is simply demanding the same standard of checking what a linked source is actually saying before barging in and announcing that everybody else is wrong and you are right and because so are oh so right you don't even have to check what claim was even made.
That's the bullshit I can't stand. This erecting of holy cows of ideas that are taboo to ever be even examined, let alone questioned. A topic that is the very point of the intro of the video here. It points out how everyone has very strong opinions about Gamergate, but nobody ever bothered to actually look!
We pride ourselves here on tildes that we actually read the articles before we comment, even if they are long. Shouldn't we do the same here?
I’m sorry but this woe is me act is just self-pitying nonsense. Saying this take is bad isn’t because it’s attacking a “holy cow of ideas” it’s because it’s a dumb take from someone who doesn’t...
This erecting of holy cows of ideas that are taboo to ever be even examined, let alone questioned. A topic that is the very point of the intro of the video here. It points out how everyone has very strong opinions about Gamergate, but nobody ever bothered to actually look!
I’m sorry but this woe is me act is just self-pitying nonsense. Saying this take is bad isn’t because it’s attacking a “holy cow of ideas” it’s because it’s a dumb take from someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. The idea that “nobody ever bothered to actually look” at a phenomenon that basically everyone here was there for and, in a small way, probably motivated many people here to depart Reddit and critically reexamine their social media habits is insane! Everyone knows what it was. It’s not that they didn’t look, it’s that they don’t buy the excuse-making.
Like why would anyone spend 6 hours slogging through a video whose table of contents very clearly isn’t saying anything interesting and ignoring the main things about it?
I watched the first fifteen minutes and was given at least 8 minutes about an 11 year old child who was sexually assaulted and abused (and physically abused by her parent) that ends with the...
I watched the first fifteen minutes and was given at least 8 minutes about an 11 year old child who was sexually assaulted and abused (and physically abused by her parent) that ends with the implication that 4chan at least knew something was wrong about the situation. But doesn't acknowledge that some of the people there thought what was wrong was the child being alive based on the death threats they received.
All while replaying the videos of a child sexual abuse victim who said the online harassment has ruined their life, all to criticize the media.
IMO this was not well done, not ethical, certainly not journalism, and not a good use of my time.
It frankly makes me distrust the creator more than before I watched, and regardless of his follow up statements including where he describes himself as left but hating the "culture war" which feels rather eyeroll worthy to me. (I'm also curious exactly how gamers were "disenfranchised" but not curious enough to watch this.) Because journalists being snobs was actually worse! I get his point but think the way he made is shitty.
So hopefully i have "earned" the right to comment on this now, but personally I was absolutely uncompelled and would not recommend this to others based on the repetition of trauma to a sexual abuse victim alone.
Said child is also deadnamed and misgendered in the video and at least deadnamed in this thread.
You see, this is perfectly fine! We don't have to agree with oneanother about wether or not we liked the video, the point that was made in it or how it was made. But you at very least opened the...
You see, this is perfectly fine! We don't have to agree with oneanother about wether or not we liked the video, the point that was made in it or how it was made.
But you at very least opened the video and formed an opinion based on what was said in it. You didn't barge in here trying to stifle any and all discussion of the video by claiming you know better than it or anybody else without even opening said video.
Now, regarding your reply, the most productive discussion would be over your statement how "he describes himself as left but hating the "culture war" which feels rather eyeroll worthy to me". Because honestly, that's how I would describe myself as well. Although, I say this as a 31 year old cis-white guy from Germany, so I certainly come at this topic with a different perspecitive than you.
I disagree that this a productive use of conversation and find this reply patronizing as hell. The lack of care about a victim of abuse from someone who apparently considers himself to be doing...
I disagree that this a productive use of conversation and find this reply patronizing as hell.
The lack of care about a victim of abuse from someone who apparently considers himself to be doing journalism demonstrates a failure of ethics both personal and professional.
Not engaging with that as unproductive speaks poorly of your response, IMO, on top of the patronizing tone. As if it was more productive to go "well, guess we see it different because I'm from Germany".
Yeah, sure. Guess we do.
This did not do whatever you thought it did, and I did not post for your backhanded praise.
That's a very uncharitable interpretation. Deadnaming aside (I agree that this should have been handled better), I think it's handled gracefully and drives the point home very effectively which is...
That's a very uncharitable interpretation. Deadnaming aside (I agree that this should have been handled better), I think it's handled gracefully and drives the point home very effectively which is that media/journalists ignored the said sexual assault and abuse of the child for years and instead scapegoated 4chan trolls. I think that's a really important point to make and the events are old enough that we should be able to report on it without it being an egregious breach of ethics.
that ends with the implication that 4chan at least knew something was wrong about the situation.
I don't agree that it was handled gracefully. Re-airing the videos of an 11 year old, ignoring the death threats and other harassment from the same internet denizens, and using the whole situation...
I don't agree that it was handled gracefully. Re-airing the videos of an 11 year old, ignoring the death threats and other harassment from the same internet denizens, and using the whole situation to make a point where he is sarcastically insulting the media makes it clear to me, personally, that he doesn't take the impact on the victims seriously. (Also by not giving a heads up about child sexual abuse or mental health including resources for people needing support, things that are journalistic standards these days.) There are ethical ways to report on past abuse, this isn't it, IMO.
I said I got his point. I do. I don't agree with how he made it and if he's holding himself up as a journalist at all (as someone else said from later in the video,) he's failed in the process of making these claims. I don't think "charitable" has anything to do with it, as this is criticism. I didn't like the first fifteen minutes, I think it showed poor ethics. I can't speak to the rest of the video because that "hook" made me want to walk away. I also wasn't expecting to get 8 minutes of a child sexual assault story either which is interesting in that it registered not at all to the person recommending the first 15 minutes.
Not sure how you would come away only with this.
I didn't come away with "only" this. I did however hear him say how Adrian Chen was mocking the 4chan users who were begging for someone to notice something was wrong...
But didn't mention the 4 chan users who were explicitly harassing and threatening a child for any reason, who doxxed the child's name, home address, phone numbers, etc. The framing sets the media up to be failures who care more about trolling than about sexual abuse - and I'm not even contesting that as it would require more research on the timing than I'm willing to do - and frames 4chan as people acting for the greater good.
4chan is more complex than its worst people but if you're going to use such an incredibly serious and traumatic case for your introductory example and you use it in such a biased and IMO callous manner in the first 15 minutes, then I have no interest in watching the following 345 minutes.
It's not directly associated with GG afaik, it's the Damien Slaughter case. The creator used it to make a point about the media as their intro and I think did so poorly.
It's not directly associated with GG afaik, it's the Damien Slaughter case. The creator used it to make a point about the media as their intro and I think did so poorly.
The difference is that I could read|skim the script for a six hour video in 5-10 minutes, but I can't meaningfully skim the video itself in that time. The information density of written text is...
read the articles before we comment
The difference is that I could read|skim the script for a six hour video in 5-10 minutes, but I can't meaningfully skim the video itself in that time. The information density of written text is just way way higher.
I think longform videos are fine for people who have the time, want to be entertained and enjoy the style of the presentation, but for conveying information they are simply a bad format and as a starting point for discussion they are just too time-consuming, since I don't think it's reasonable to expect that other people engage with hour long media just to understand a point I want to refer to.
Oh, skimming the transcript for 5-10 minutes would be totally fine, like I said before, spending that same amount of time just watching the beginning of the video would be fine. My issue is...
Oh, skimming the transcript for 5-10 minutes would be totally fine, like I said before, spending that same amount of time just watching the beginning of the video would be fine. My issue is entirely with barging in without having looked at the video at all.
I'm getting the impression across your comments that you may've come here from a background of someone who's been able to largely ignore Gamergate? Hard to say, but I feel like this video might be...
I'm getting the impression across your comments that you may've come here from a background of someone who's been able to largely ignore Gamergate? Hard to say, but I feel like this video might be the first to catch your interest on the topic, and you may've come in here with the accidental assumption that others were likewise and so their confidence is unearned if they haven't watched.
I bring this up to point out that that's an assumption; if you re-read those comments with the lens of "this person is commenting about Gamergate using their knowledge from other videos," they'll probably read better. Most of this thread isn't even directly criticizing the video — it's a big hubbub about Gamergate itself. Which I think is the direct result of the framing issue I mentioned above.
I don't think anyone would've minded talking about the complexities of how a deliberate harassment campaign fooled so many people, had it been that the discussion had occurred with appropriate care. We just didn't get that, and the end result was a video/post that gave a first impression of implying Gamergate wasn't about harassing women. That kinda ambiguity makes people bristle, and reasonably so, given how often the alt-right has used it to smuggle their bigotry.
All that said, if my initial feelings were correct and you'd like to understand more why us folks have bristled some, I can recommend this breakdown gladly; it's self-contained, comes in just under an hour, and if it interests you I also kept in the wider playlist which covers alt-right tactics more generally too. You might notice this is the same author who vord linked, and while the series they linked is also good, I believe the author in question has some regrets about that work by comparison.
So my background is that I'm 31 years old and as such was in prime rage-age when this whole thing blew up. Back then (as in "before GG") I would have even describe myself as a capital G "Gamer"....
So my background is that I'm 31 years old and as such was in prime rage-age when this whole thing blew up. Back then (as in "before GG") I would have even describe myself as a capital G "Gamer". And I was and still am a left leaning person.
But yes, as you correctly assessed, I wasn't active in either side of the debate. Because even back then it all somehow made no sense at all. As a lot of comments in this thread say, who gets so worked up about videogame journalism? This is not a topic that should have blown up as much as it did. It doesn't make sense that over 10 years later, this entire topic is still (as kfwyre stated so wonderfully) a nuclear exclusion zone. All this over videogame journalism?
I remember reading posts from both sides and thinking "Well there definitely was some shady shit going on here with these journalists. And some of these initial replies seem kinda missing the point. But what the fuck is it with all this hatefull rethoric against all these women??? And why is the other side pretending that there was absolutely no fault whatsoever and that they can do no wrong?" Not that I think that any of the hate and threats and harassment was at all warranted. But as I said somewhere else in this thread, we've had harassment campaigns born out of misogyny before and since, but they usually don't blow up this much! It very much seemed like a dangerous overreaction from both sides!
So I kept my distance, trying to figure out what either side was upset about and what caused this clusterfuck that has gotten way bigger than it had any right to ever get. But I never got anything that could really explain it. Both side over the years calcified in their oppinions so much that I only ever found the same old tired points. It was always only ever portrayed as either just an artificial misogynistic harassment campaign or a completly serious concern about "ethics in game journalism". Neither portrayal ever seemed belivable to me. Like so many comments here have already pointed out, it's like saying WW I simply happened because of archduke Franz-Ferdinants assasination. But then I go "Ok, so an Austria-Hungarian crownprince was assasinated by a serbian nationalist. But why are France and Britain fighting Germany 2 years later???" There is more to it than just the main incedent. There is context that explains why something blew up as much as it did.
And 10+ years later, finally here is a video that tries to dive into this mess of misogyny and strawmen and explore this context, only for someone to barge in and shouting "it was only ever just misogyny, stop talking about this!" And thats why I bristled.
I have also watched a lot of Innuendo Studios back then (and for a while after), including the "Why are you so Angry?" and "Alt-Right-Playbook" series. I think "How to radicalise a Normie" is still in my youtube favorites playlist. I have stopped watching them for two related reasons. First, it was sometime in the Alt-Right-Playbook series that I noticed that they didn't just describe the tactics of the alt-right (accurately, in my opinion, from what I can still remember), but also presumed to knew the thought processes and motivations behind them. And to a level that very much rubbed me the wrong way. It felt to me much more like someone unintentional building a strawman that they can hate, than someone actually going to the other side and trying to understand what is actually going on there.
But the point where I stopped being able to take them serious, was with their anti-racism video where they stated (again from memory, so appologies if I get the details wrong, it has been a few years) that there are only anti-racists and racists. That unless you actively work to eliminate racism wherever you can, you are profiting from the racist system, therefore are collaborating with the racists and therefore are racist yourself. And I very distinctively remeber thinking "What the inquisitorial bullshit is that!?" Because it left abosolutly no space for any dissent, or any questioning of priorities, methods or anything else. You think that climate change should be given a higher priority? Nope, you are now racist, because you should always actively work against racism! Think that maybe in you country it is more important to reform the health insurance system because it is running out of money and doctors are struggeling to keep their practises open because the legally mandated compensation rates given out by the insureance companies haven't been adjusted in the last 30 years? Nope, racist again!
So I am sorry, but I can not in good conscience take Innuendo Studios serious. Even now we have people in this very thread stating "If you don't allow legitimate criticism from within you encourage illegitimate criticism from outside" isn't a good position to take, because it would give a platform to the alt-right, equivocating any and all criticism of the left to be alt-right, no matter who makes it or how. And that would be my main criticism of the left for the past 10 years: the complete inability to allow any and all legitimate criticism from anywhere. If you say anything against the currently held believes, you are branded and ostracised.
It sounds like you had a pretty visceral reaction to that video, because that's a pretty big misinterpretation. The point that was being made was that any attempt to take a "neutral" or...
Exemplary
Because it left abosolutly no space for any dissent, or any questioning of priorities, methods or anything else. You think that climate change should be given a higher priority? Nope, you are now racist, because you should always actively work against racism!
It sounds like you had a pretty visceral reaction to that video, because that's a pretty big misinterpretation. The point that was being made was that any attempt to take a "neutral" or "uninvolved" stance on racism is to tacitly participate in it, because you're leaving your own biases and privileges unexamined, and that will affect you and those around you. This doesn't mean you have to fight racism every waking second of your life — it just means you have to be cognizant of it and how it works. Or, as the word used to go, you had to be woke.
More generally though, I think you've gotten frustrated because you've found friction in discussions without having had the reasoning behind the reticence explained to you. A thorough breakdown would take me far longer to write up than I have the energy for, but I can give some brief reasoning:
Some participants in the discussion may not be so genuine as they claim and will deliberately poison the well (or may have started the discussion themselves to utilize the above point)
Publicity and attention are a kind of power, meaning any bad faith actors openly pushing the topic will benefit from their mere visibility in it. This is one reason why some right-wing talking heads love "debating" university students so much
Discussing difficult topics in a public space means running the risk of pushing away those who've been traumatized by the problem you're discussing — this has happened on Tildes already on more than one occasion, and it has lost us several fantastic users
All of these are good reasons to be hesitant to discuss something. It doesn't become impossible, but the more these reasons apply, the more careful you need to be. I'm sure you can see from this very thread some ways in which a lack of care in framing can cause some serious problems, and this is the milder end; worse options include people being fooled into thinking Gamergate somehow really was about ethics, or the slow development of the metaphorical Nazi bar.
Incidentally, those same reasons are going to be why I'm going to slow down my posting in this thread, by the way. As I stated in various ways both here and earlier, this discussion was started off very poorly, and I think this thread is running a severe risk of rehabilitating the image of a topic that deserves no such thing, so the value of my posting is quickly approaching the point where it is outweighed by the harm of bumping the thread.
Still, I hope you found my comments helpful, and I hope next time you find yourself at odds with someone who doesn't want to talk about something, both you and they will better be able to understand each other.
I should start with saying that I'm sorry if I came across overly aggressive yesterday, I hope I was able to explain why I got as bristley as I got :) Your comments across this entire topic where...
I should start with saying that I'm sorry if I came across overly aggressive yesterday, I hope I was able to explain why I got as bristley as I got :)
Your comments across this entire topic where (as far I can see) all helpful, constructive and well-intentioned. We may not see eye-to-eye on this topic, but I would love it if we could continue our discussion, even though I 100% understand why you want to take a step back from it. So please don't feel preassured to reply.
So assuming this is the end of our thread, I try to explain my stance in contrast to your points.
You are most correct, I indeed had a very visceral reaction to that video :)
But I don't think it's much of an misinterpretation. More of an reductio ad absurdum. Because I would definitly call my stance on racism to be "it's bad, don't be racist". But aside from that, I'm not actively involved in the "racism vs anti-racism" topic. As my examples hopefully showed, I'm more informed, interested and active in the topics of healthcare in Germany and climate change. As such, I would group myself in the "uninvolved" group of the spectrum. The problem then is that I was told that that makes me a racist. That unless I actively dedicate my time on the topic of anti-racism, I am to them as morally reprehensible as the KKK. I understand the intention of "examine your own biases", but packaging them into an framework of "you're either with us or against us" just isn't ok. It fosters an inability to question your own methods or even goals. To me it's essentially a version of fundamentalism, and I'm against all kinds of fundamentalism.
With regards to your second point: I agree, in principle, with pretty much every point you make. My counterargument would essentially be that these last 3 years I thought that tildes was a place to have these kinds of diffucult discussions and examinations of dangerous topics, because I thought we where small enough to not attract the kind of unwanted attention that would otherwise poison the well.
But past year or so I got more and more the feeling that more and more topics would be shouted down before any valid discussion was allowed. Again, not necessarily by you, I hope I didn't give you that impression.
So once again, thank you for all your comments on this topic :)
That standard I think can be reasonably applied to videos under 20 minutes. The friggen intro was almost that. This is a 6 hour video about a topic that I experienced in-depth when it happened. I...
That standard I think can be reasonably applied to videos under 20 minutes. The friggen intro was almost that.
This is a 6 hour video about a topic that I experienced in-depth when it happened. I learned more about what happened towards the end and even had 'but there were good things brought up' moments in the decade since.
I feel confident asserting what I asserted because I've been down almost every one if those ToC items before.
At the most generous, the 'real' core of games journalism is nonsense. It's like acting shocked that trade rags for cars get stipends from car companies for favorable reviews.
It has happened in virtually every medium that game reviews ever took well before "Gamergate", and was more or less an open secret to anyone who dared scratch even the slightest surface.
Would I be shocked if Roger Ebert got kickbacks for good reviews? No. I frankly don't trust him as a reviewer for my tastes and as such, I just moved on to a different review source.
Would I be shocked if Roger Ebert got kickbacks for good reviews? No. I frankly don't trust him as a reviewer for my tastes and as such, I just moved on to a different review source.
Vord specifically said that "Gamergate was nothing more than a trolling harassment campaign" (emphasis mine), and the entire point of the video (as far as I've watched it, I've only gotten to the...
Vord specifically said that "Gamergate was nothing more than a trolling harassment campaign" (emphasis mine), and the entire point of the video (as far as I've watched it, I've only gotten to the 2h mark so far), is that there is more to it.
Yes, it was a "trolling harassment campaign against women", it was a major part of it. But there was also more to it! And I'm not talking "ethics in game journalism", that's just as much a thought terminating cliche as "the lord acts in mysterious ways", "dead internet theory" or "AI water usage". There is more to Gamergate than just misogyny, it's almost the inflection point for the entire culture war in the US that eventually resulted in Trump.
I think the implied narrative of "oh, if only we had been more ethical in games journalism/responsive to gamergate" we could have avoided Trump is asinine. Gamergate is a result of cultural trends...
I think the implied narrative of "oh, if only we had been more ethical in games journalism/responsive to gamergate" we could have avoided Trump is asinine.
Gamergate is a result of cultural trends and the people attempting to exploit them, it did not in any way cause them. Something else could have easily served as a lightning rod.
Of course it would be, that's why I'm not making that implication! The core would be more correctly summarised as "establishment vs anti-establishment", but with the added complication that you...
I think the implied narrative of "oh, if only we had been more ethical in games journalism/responsive to gamergate" we could have avoided Trump is asinine.
Of course it would be, that's why I'm not making that implication! The core would be more correctly summarised as "establishment vs anti-establishment", but with the added complication that you where suddenly no longer allowed to ask "wait, what did actually happen here???".
Sorry I did not mean to say you were making that implication, I just see it repeated a lot. I don't really see that? It's trivial to understand what happened? I reject the premise there is any...
Sorry I did not mean to say you were making that implication, I just see it repeated a lot.
suddenly no longer allowed to ask "wait, what did actually happen here???"
I don't really see that? It's trivial to understand what happened? I reject the premise there is any deep meaning to learn.
This is kind of like saying "WWI was about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and there's nothing deeper to learn" though, isn't it? It was a massive cultural event with mountains of existing...
This is kind of like saying "WWI was about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and there's nothing deeper to learn" though, isn't it? It was a massive cultural event with mountains of existing context and explosive consequences. Yes, it was obviously bad, and yes the cover story is obviously an excuse, but that doesn't mean that nothing substantial actually occurred. I think it's worth looking at with a critical eye, as much as any other significant happening.
Maybe you're misreading or I am not very good at conveying my point but I'm trying to argue the opposite: the assassination of Franz Ferdinand tells us little about the causes of WW1 because it...
Maybe you're misreading or I am not very good at conveying my point but I'm trying to argue the opposite: the assassination of Franz Ferdinand tells us little about the causes of WW1 because it was essentially lighting a fuse that was already primed.
Now I'm not a historian so forgive me if that does not hold up in your analogy but it seems apt in my cursory knowledge at least.
That's what I meant really, the catalyst matters much less than the aftermath and in both cases there were many many pre-existing issues that just needed an excuse to blow up and out of...
That's what I meant really, the catalyst matters much less than the aftermath and in both cases there were many many pre-existing issues that just needed an excuse to blow up and out of proportion. In the GG case, I think that dismissing it entirely as "sweaty and inept nerds hate women" is missing the forest for the trees. I understand why people want to put it behind us and of course the victims deserve respect and should never have been forced to go through that. Nobody reasonable is arguing otherwise. But it is kind of a thought terminating cliche to leave it at "gamers are mysoginists" and I do think there was more to it that is worth examining.
Just to add: I am not saying everyone, or indeed anyone in particular, absolutely must spend their time investigating the topic. It makes perfect sense to find it too distasteful to engage. I don't agree with shutting down meaningful discussion with "it's extremely simple and you're wrong and foolish if you think it's any deeper than a puddle." Not that you're saying that, but I did see a few comments along that vein in this thread.
Of course people are free to do whatever they want with their free time, but I truly don’t think it’s a valuable exercise. A very minor incident got blown out of proportion by a lot of people...
Of course people are free to do whatever they want with their free time, but I truly don’t think it’s a valuable exercise. A very minor incident got blown out of proportion by a lot of people looking for a punching bag. The incident itself is boring. The cultural trends that drove it were largely already in motion. What else is there to really say?
And yes, by the time gamer gate occurred, the seeds of the culture war had already been largely sown. Things like SRS and its counter brigades are far more interesting from a perspective of explaining the origins of the online culture wars than gamer gate is.
I just can't imagine giving a fuck about this from the actual journalism integrity angle. Gamers get their news/journalism from greasy guys on Twitch/YouTube and randos on reddit.
I just can't imagine giving a fuck about this from the actual journalism integrity angle. Gamers get their news/journalism from greasy guys on Twitch/YouTube and randos on reddit.
They do nowadays, but what about 2014? The gaming outlets had magnitudes more cultural cache if not respect back then. GamerGate is a big reason why the transition in the state of affairs in...
They do nowadays, but what about 2014? The gaming outlets had magnitudes more cultural cache if not respect back then. GamerGate is a big reason why the transition in the state of affairs in gaming journalism took place. It really was a different world back then.
This just seems implausible. Big journalism outlets have been on the decline everywhere, not just gaming. It seems far more likely that games journalism has been prey to the same structural...
GamerGate is a big reason why the transition in the state of affairs in gaming journalism took place.
This just seems implausible. Big journalism outlets have been on the decline everywhere, not just gaming. It seems far more likely that games journalism has been prey to the same structural factors affecting everyone else.
This was an event that saw a vast swathe of the online public actively pissed off at the traditional gaming outlets. So pissed off, GG is credited for the formation of the modern alt-right and is...
This was an event that saw a vast swathe of the online public actively pissed off at the traditional gaming outlets. So pissed off, GG is credited for the formation of the modern alt-right and is seen as least partially responsible for the presidency of Donald Trump. Accelerating the decline in online gaming journalism is one of the lesser consequences of that shitshow.
I don’t think they had “respect.” They had money because people were still splashing around a lot of investment capital for online media that has since been gutted. But for the most part comments...
I don’t think they had “respect.” They had money because people were still splashing around a lot of investment capital for online media that has since been gutted. But for the most part comments on games websites constantly complained about “bias” and there was a lot of console war whining and accusations being slung around since basically as long as the internet has been around. What eventually happened was the same sentiments that fueled endless console warring got channeled into cultural/tribal grievance mongering instead and then a bunch of opportunistic CHUDs who didn’t give a shit about games or gaming at all got in on the grift to add fuel to the fire.
There were only ever a handful of people who took the gig somewhat seriously as journalists. The Gawker/Kotaku alums, Polygon writers, and a few others slowly got more and more professional over time. But then a lot of people during the “Great Awokening” decided that they didn’t want to write about games or the games industry anymore and preferred to focus on online activism instead using the video games beat as an anchor. This has been, IMO, a net negative for the quality of cultural commentary.
I’d love it if there was actual sophisticated literary criticism of video games from people who actually knew what they were talking about. But when even the most basic, reductive, warmed over takes on Feminist Frequency were getting inundated with hate mail it should have been obvious that we would be getting nothing of the sort.
Hence, as I said in my comment, if not respect, they still had cultural cache, which is really the point I'm making. In 2014, Twitch had just been renamed to Twitch and YouTube was still on its...
Hence, as I said in my comment, if not respect, they still had cultural cache, which is really the point I'm making. In 2014, Twitch had just been renamed to Twitch and YouTube was still on its ascent. Gaming outlets still mattered in the public consciousness; GamerGate does not become nearly as huge of a nightmare as it did without gaming outlets still having cultural significance.
I think the discourse today has characters on YouTube, twitch, and Twitter who just marinate in that type of toxicity all the time as part of doing business. There was a brief period of blogs with...
I think the discourse today has characters on YouTube, twitch, and Twitter who just marinate in that type of toxicity all the time as part of doing business. There was a brief period of blogs with pretensions of doing journalism but it’s all SponCon now. So they’ve assimilated the mechanics of Gamergate discourse and it’s just part of them now.
IDK I remember watching Total Biscuit and similar sources for everything. I don't think there has been any phase for me in which I went to IGN or whomever for reviews. But maybe I'm not enough of...
IDK I remember watching Total Biscuit and similar sources for everything. I don't think there has been any phase for me in which I went to IGN or whomever for reviews. But maybe I'm not enough of a "gamer" gamer.
And I remember website hopping between spots like IGN and Kotaku. Youtubers were certainly on their way up, but the institutions were very much in play then.
And I remember website hopping between spots like IGN and Kotaku. Youtubers were certainly on their way up, but the institutions were very much in play then.
There is a universe where the niche topic of 2014 video game journalism drama for 6 hours could be interesting (something like /r/hobbydrama), but this is simply not that universe. Gamergate was...
There is a universe where the niche topic of 2014 video game journalism drama for 6 hours could be interesting (something like /r/hobbydrama), but this is simply not that universe. Gamergate was an artificially created culture war event that had its main purpose to destroy the lives of random women / feminists. It had nearly nothing to do with games, journalism or ethics.
Doing a "gamergate" video in 2026 and not having the main focus be on the harassment, the manufactured outrage machine and the destruction of countless people's lives is video essay malpractice at best and an attempt to further harassment at worse.
There's no way I'm watching a six hour video on virtually anything, much less gamergate. That said, I think there probably are interesting angles to examine how a drama post containing one little...
There's no way I'm watching a six hour video on virtually anything, much less gamergate. That said, I think there probably are interesting angles to examine how a drama post containing one little miniscule seed of a story (conflict of interest in a story about a virtually unknown video game) is turned into a cultural turning point.
"The internet does misogynistic harassment" is probably the least interesting thing about gamergate at this point. Partially because it's been covered to absolute death, and partially because we've seen the pattern repeat thousands of times since.
In 100 years though, that post could very well be seen as a hugely impactful turning point marking the American descent into open fascism, so examining the mechanisms behind that could be interesting.
That said, I'm not gonna watch a six hour long video to find out. This new breed of YouTube video essayists really need to learn how to edit.
Yeah, I feel like this could potentially be an interesting video to watch, especially since I didnt even really follow along with Gamergate the first time around. But six hours is too long a...
Yeah, I feel like this could potentially be an interesting video to watch, especially since I didnt even really follow along with Gamergate the first time around.
But six hours is too long a commitment for me to gamble, especially since it already seems like the spice factor of this comment section is starting to rise right off the bat.
By the time I finish watching the whole thing the comments will likely be too far gone for me to want to weigh in.
I think it was accidental rather than "artificially created". It didn't start with a thread: "Hey, let's harass some women today" but it snowballed from a lover's scorn story into a culture war....
Gamergate was an artificially created culture war event that had its main purpose to destroy the lives of random women / feminists. It had nearly nothing to do with games, journalism or ethics.
I think it was accidental rather than "artificially created". It didn't start with a thread: "Hey, let's harass some women today" but it snowballed from a lover's scorn story into a culture war. The hostility already existed but there's more that needed to happen for this to blow up. Let's see what the video says:
On the night of August 15th, Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, would make a 9,000 word post to Something Awful detailing their recent breakup. (...) it was quickly deleted and he was banned. (...) Eron then published this to WordPress instead
The earliest threads were on /v/, but moderators deleted them and would continue to delete them for days. So, discussion moved to R9K and then later the politics board. Neither of which seem particularly familiar with who Zoe is, but both had a strong dislike of social justice warriors. In the first R9K thread, there's almost no mention of ethics or corruption in gaming. Most seem to interpret this as a story about SJW hypocrisy and were fairly hostile to Aaron as well, who they also saw as an SJW.
Still, at this point, the story was spreading slowly. People in these threads were trying to change that, but the rest of the internet didn't have much reason to care that the creator of some small indie game had cheated. Yet attempts to spread the story did manage to spread the censorship. (...) it was censorship which drove the growth of this story. In its first days, people became angry over being censored. This acted as confirmation around existing narratives of corrupt press and SJW favoritism. The sense of a cover up made Zoe look guiltier. And all of this made more people aware of the original story through the Streisand effect. (...) even as the story grew, many places just doubled down on trying to censor it. Every large gaming forum outside of The Escapist deleted any mention of this event. Most 4chan boards deleted all mention with 4chan's creator later supporting a stance of total site-wide censorship. And many subreddits also deleted it for a while at least.
People did not like being silenced and it did not work. The story of a small indie game creator cheating didn't disappear. It became Gamergate. And along the way, it picked up momentum (...)
As the controversy grew, the controversy grew like a hydra sprouting new heads whenever one was chopped off, including pulling in pre-existing division over Anita's Tropes verse women in game series, which released a new episode around the same time. Still, it was the ethics in games journalism head that was the most important. You can see the rise of this narrative through the first posts in the R9K threads. The first shows no sign of games journalism. The second now mentioned Zoe having slept with journalists. And by the third, there's mention of a Kotaku member and the claim he reviewed her game, which wasn't true and wasn't something said in the Zoey post or by YouTubers covering this. (...) For many in the online gaming world, there was already a war between entitled gamers and corrupt press. And this was already connected to social justice warriors and their detractors. So, not only did this new scandal confirm people's existing beliefs, but it seemed to continually be proven true by all the censorship. Remember, the main politics behind this for most involved was anti-establishment anger at the people seen as having power online like journalists, SJWs, and forum moderators.
Internet Aristocrat's or Mr. Metokur's 18th of August YouTube video was the first big coverage of this and feels like a perfect distillation of what the Gamergate side believed and cared about. (...) This message would find an audience and far beyond just 4chan.
I'll form my opinion once I can finish the video. For people who are still doubtful I think this comment from the Reddit user should at least convince why this 6-hour long video about a...
I'll form my opinion once I can finish the video. For people who are still doubtful I think this comment from the Reddit user should at least convince why this 6-hour long video about a 10-year-old topic probably has something new to say. I'll quote here:
I am a leftist who has worked in media and progressive politics for about a decade. I watched the video. It changed my perspective from "hard binary" to "shades of grey" on the facts of what happened without turning me into a MAGA chud.
I think at his core, this is an egalitarian, left leaning person trying to uncomfortably sift through the skeletons in our cultural closet that no one wants to acknowledge in order to clean house and regain a moral high ground. Albeit there are also things in the video where I agree he over hammers the point.
I admittedly, in 2013-2014, was not as attuned to gaming journalism as much as I am now and 100% bought "our side's" "woke" narrative and have been outspoken about it ever since. This video made me realize, I never personally dug to the root of the issue beyond the names in the headlines and I have formed my opinion based on existing narratives that were breaking out of gaming world containment and into the political world around 2015. Heck, I've read multiple books on the gaming industry and politics since and even those didn't skim past the headlines of "CHUD gamers just hated that women were involved in gaming and 100% falsely claimed this was about 'ethics in gaming journalism' to try to cover their misogyny."
But from a journalist perspective, the ethics dilemmas laid out in the video are indeed a problem that remains unaddressed by "team woke" in this whole mess.
He's even charitable and acknowledges that these were young people in a new industry who probably weren't thinking hard enough about the ethics of not disclosing interpersonal relationships in their writing. The in-group power dynamics he discusses around the social circles of indie scene developers and the journalists covering them was like, "oh duhhhhh" once I saw the details laid out. What's described (with lots of evidence) is the same dynamic I've seen in every music, art, media, and journalism scene I've been around since I was a teenager: Don't speak up when the actions of someone with more power in the scene than you feel wrong, because you'll lose your slot on the totem pole and risk being ostracized from the scene/industry. Regardless of whether we agree with their political or cultural values, these are indeed cultural in-groups that people jockey for positions and power in. I've been there. The stakes and importance feel so hugely overwhelming when you're deep in it, even if it's not representative of a large amount of people.
This little in-group's ethical deillemas escaped containment because it happened at a rapidly evolving and strange time in internet history in a burgeoning art form that was less sequestered to progressive/liberal/academic corners than other art scenes who know not to mention the unspoken rules and power dynamics at play. I think that is a legitimate thing to critique.
What happened next is that both sides went insane and formed their own partisan narratives.
But "our side" had the bigger mainstream media and culture microphone (at the time... things have shifted a lot since then) and won over a certain narrative that was indeed full of truths about harassment, but shrugged off a lot of other details. The shades of grey I now see are an understanding that there were at least a few people at that time who saw those details being shrugged off and things worthy of critique that weren't 100% rooted in baseless misogyny. The right just did a good job leveraging something that began as minor, anti-establishment grievance into a bigger and more hateful campaign to help them win a culture war on behalf of an authoritarian oligarch class.
Offtopic, can we move pass this attitude of dismissing something just because it's too long, or criticizing somebody's position without having done the work of learning what their position is first? I find it ironic that it's a Reddit user who shows more nuance and understanding that we do here, given how the goal of this place is to have more thoughtful discussion.
It's such tired bullshit. Sorry, but it is. I'm not what I would describe as 'woke'. My response to gamer gate was at the time, and remains to this day: who fucking cares you terminally online...
It's such tired bullshit. Sorry, but it is.
I'm not what I would describe as 'woke'. My response to gamer gate was at the time, and remains to this day: who fucking cares you terminally online weirdos.
It was manufactured by the kind of people who are heavily invested into "streamer drama", trying to create a tempest in a teapot. Some people talk about GG as if it was an investigative journalist scandal at the center of a massive AAA game and the heart of game media when in reality we are talking about the review of a text-based fringe-of-fringe indie game and a very junior reporter (freelancer?) at a relatively small media company. Some people complain about censorship when the primary censors are actually unpaid moderators on 4chan and reddit who surprisingly actually knew better than to stand in the middle of a jilted lovers story. Again, who fucking cares you terminally online weirdos.
One point I've not seen anyone else make yet: Sounds great as a line, but no. If there's one thing I've learned from alt-right bullshit, it's that grifters will spew bullshit regardless of...
One point I've not seen anyone else make yet:
"If you don't allow legitimate criticism from within you encourage illegitimate criticism from outside"
Sounds great as a line, but no. If there's one thing I've learned from alt-right bullshit, it's that grifters will spew bullshit regardless of censorship. Best not give them a platform.
EDIT: I've now realized that if I'm going to make this point, I also need to make it clear given the topic that Gamergate's claims regarding censorship were illegitimate. Posts were taken down because they ranged from useless drama to outright doxxing. Even if the above pithy statement were true, it would not apply here.
Both y’all are correct. Alt-righters will spew BS 100% of the time. But, it’s a lot easier to people to believe in it if they feel they cannot verbalize their criticism (and will latch onto...
Both y’all are correct. Alt-righters will spew BS 100% of the time. But, it’s a lot easier to people to believe in it if they feel they cannot verbalize their criticism (and will latch onto someone who does).
And to clarify, I’m not a fan of GG. Even in 2014 I was questioning why folks were going after a tiny game dev and not the big AAA publishers (and not getting good answers).
Sure. But what if they are joined by a disaffected individual that gives merits to their claims? Discussion threads were deleted so the claim was legitimate. Whether the deletion was reasonable is...
grifters will spew bullshit regardless of censorship
Sure. But what if they are joined by a disaffected individual that gives merits to their claims?
Gamergate's claims regarding censorship were illegitimate. Posts were taken down because they ranged from useless drama to outright doxxing
Discussion threads were deleted so the claim was legitimate. Whether the deletion was reasonable is a different question. I don't think all the 24k comments in one of the Reddit threads (2:56:19) were doxxing. This whole thing was useless drama and yet it happened and had a big impact.
In hindsight it seems the story blew up because of suppression attempts. Maybe without deletions it wouldn't have gotten so bad? Who knows...
I know people are disagreeing with this heavily. And I agree to the extent that this was drama that got overblown. But, I do agree with the notion that there was this idea that we have to elevate...
I know people are disagreeing with this heavily. And I agree to the extent that this was drama that got overblown.
But, I do agree with the notion that there was this idea that we have to elevate and protect Quinn and other people like Anita Sarkesian. And there was this pretense that the progressive side of things was doing at the time. Which was to say they’re actually really smart, and Depression Quest was this masterpiece, and Sarkesian was a great cultural commentator. Eventually both figures were abandoned and everything got recalibrated, and now people pretend like a lot of that stuff didn’t happen.
It is interesting how big a story of an ex getting revenge grew.
Yeah. I remember reading the original Zoe post and coming away with it thinking 2 things: Zoe Quinn seems like a pretty shitty, manipulative person in the context of romantic relationships. But...
Yeah. I remember reading the original Zoe post and coming away with it thinking 2 things:
Zoe Quinn seems like a pretty shitty, manipulative person in the context of romantic relationships.
But more than that,
The guy who wrote it seems very immature and butt hurt about the whole thing.
Its funny looking back on it with the life experience I have now, and I think both of those things still hold true for me.
Still, I've seen a lot of commentary blaming the OP of the Zoe post for all of the fallout of gamer gate, and unless you're assigning clairvoyance to the guy, I don't see how there's any way he could have predicted the insane butterfly affect that resulted from his actions. Was the post immature? yeah. was it whiny? yeah. But it's something a lot of people would do in the same circumstances.
So yeah, Zoe is (or at least was) a pretty shitty person to her boyfriend back then, and the boyfriend was pretty immature and shortsighted for posting it, but gamergate became a gigantic toxic nightmare far bigger than either of their sins very quickly afterwards. Zoe bore the brunt of it, which she didn't deserve, but it's not exactly her ex boyfriend's fault either.
Neither of those takeaways have much to do with ethics in games journalism though.
It really seemed disproportionate, didn't it? It was explained to me at the time, and I remember being so underwhelmed and confused as to why it had grown into this behemoth.
gamergate became a gigantic toxic nightmare far bigger than either of their sins very quickly afterwards.
It really seemed disproportionate, didn't it? It was explained to me at the time, and I remember being so underwhelmed and confused as to why it had grown into this behemoth.
I mostly stayed out of it, but I never heard of depression quest or "ethics in games journalism" till it was dying down and people were trying to make sense of it. Everything I saw was "how dare...
I mostly stayed out of it, but I never heard of depression quest or "ethics in games journalism" till it was dying down and people were trying to make sense of it.
Everything I saw was "how dare these women come in here and tell us how to do video games". The sane response was "women are allowed to talk about games too and nothing they're saying should be that controversial "
Normally, I probably would not watch a video about GamerGate or any 6hr video. However, this is NeverKnowsBest -- his videos do range from like 2-6hrs usually since they're detailed retrospectives...
Normally, I probably would not watch a video about GamerGate or any 6hr video. However, this is NeverKnowsBest -- his videos do range from like 2-6hrs usually since they're detailed retrospectives or histories (though he can bring it to 1hr for a single game). I've watched his 3.5hr romance video twice. I appreciated his 2.5hr retro on Dragon Age as a fan since Origins and it got me to play Veilguard (he wasn't glazing it I just got the DA brain worm). I first engaged with his history of RPGs and history of JRPGs. So he's one of the few whose long form videos I do like and feel they've got more to them than overly long summaries (though some could easily be broken up into a playlist series).
So I'm strapped in for 3hrs at 2x, getting into the Anita section now. The "but actually" isn't a claim that "GamerGate wasn't about X" but that it's actually a detailed dive and covers history to a degree that few to none have done despite the books written on the topic, though I'm sure the title is intended to get clicks. As he says, understanding GamerGate without looking earlier is like interpreting a war after the first battle without context leading up to it. It's weird not to bring up DoritoGate in discussing it, yet many sources don't seem to mention it, reviewing coverage of the earlier Damien Slaughter and Jennifer Hepler harassment campaigns is revealing context as well.
Gamersgate was mostly about audience misalignment. It was a big deal in the vertical of "games media", which isn't that big of a vertical to be clear. In that 2013ish time, it was really the peak...
Gamersgate was mostly about audience misalignment. It was a big deal in the vertical of "games media", which isn't that big of a vertical to be clear. In that 2013ish time, it was really the peak of games media online, with ad revenue in a major bubble, and challengers not quite ready. Meanwhile, the population of people who played video games became increasingly working class and older as it got cheaper and more focused on adults.
You can tell the way the mainstream games outlets covered games changed afterwards, for better or for worse. It wasn't just gamergate, but that time was really the cataclysm for traditional games journalism. The ad revenue bubble popped, and alternate media like youtubers took much of the oxygen from outlets like IGN. It's been nothing but layoff after layoff, with no sign of recovery.
In that kind of environment, you can't afford to leave half of your audience pissed off at you, for reasonable or not reasons.
In a vacuum, its weird that gamergate is seen as this moment, because it's centered about an obscure game no one has ever heard of, and the conflict of interest at play isn't really that clear...
It wasn't just gamergate, but that time was really the cataclysm for traditional games journalism.
In a vacuum, its weird that gamergate is seen as this moment, because it's centered about an obscure game no one has ever heard of, and the conflict of interest at play isn't really that clear cut.
To me, the actual moment regarding an industry reckoning about ethical games journalism should have been one with a much more substantial story at its center: the firing of Jeff Gerstmann from Gamespot.
For those who are unfamiliar, Jeff was an editorial director at gamepot in 2007. He published a negative review of the game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, a AAA game published by Eidos interactive. The issue for Gamespot was that they had just signed a marketing deal with Eidos, branding the whole website with a Kane and Lynch theme.
What followed was Jeff stating Giant Bomb, and a mass exodus from Gamespot by Jeff's colleagues over to Giant Bomb.
This was a real story about games journalism conflicts of interest, with real money behind it, and real careers impacted. It was a big story at the time, but not even close to what gamergate became.
If there was a real moment to examine gaming journalism, it was in 2007, not 2014. It wasn't about a woman though, and there was no salacious relationship story to go along with it. As a result, the real fuel for gamergate wasn't present: misogyny.
Not everything has to have a villain. An audience mismatch can exist, and be punishing, even when there is foul play (or serious one, at least). The audience mismatch is that "gamers" became...
because it's centered about an obscure game no one has ever heard of, and the conflict of interest at play isn't really that clear cut.
Not everything has to have a villain. An audience mismatch can exist, and be punishing, even when there is foul play (or serious one, at least).
The audience mismatch is that "gamers" became increasingly a population of adults, and working class adults, without college degrees, who just statistically are more misogynistic, more suspicious of "feminism", more critical of what is considered "artsy" content.
All journalists are very much college educated, and of that social class. The Anita moment is the moment when that audience really revolted against what they saw as journalists who didn't represent their views. And that is, what it is. The journalists who continue to be employed today learned to hold their tongue and write more in what a large proportion of the audience wants.
In some ways, this is a microcosm of what happened broadly in US politics. Biden can literally bail out the Teamsters (the biggest union in the US), while Trump is destroying them economically, and yet who do the Teamsters support in 2024? Mr. Trump. No way they're voting for a woman.
Gamergate was a harassment campaign that used good-sounding concepts to dupe a wider audience into joining in. Any other framing is secondary at best, and should acknowledge that fact first. I...
Gamersgate was mostly about audience misalignment.
Gamergate was a harassment campaign that used good-sounding concepts to dupe a wider audience into joining in. Any other framing is secondary at best, and should acknowledge that fact first.
I wish it didn't, but such is the world we live in.
It absolutely was. Zoe Quinn made a freeware game. Didn't charge a penny for it. And the gameplay was more like a series of multiple choice questions in a "choose your own adventure" text based...
It absolutely was.
Zoe Quinn made a freeware game. Didn't charge a penny for it. And the gameplay was more like a series of multiple choice questions in a "choose your own adventure" text based storytelling format, except positive options get crossed out when your mental state gets worse.
And she got hate because apparently she was sleeping with a games journalist who published an article about her game? So?
CNet got less hate for firing Jeff Gerstmann from Gamespot over a negative review of Kane & Lynch. And even when CNet ironically acquired Giant Bomb and basically acknowledged that Gerstmann was unfairly sacked over Eidos threatening to pull ads, there was even less outrage. Getting bought out by the parent company that initially flipped the middle finger over journalistic standards should have immediately led to a boycott of Giant Bomb if gamers had the same level of standards they showed towards Zoe Quinn but alas, they're hypocrites.
Heck, Future Publishing releasing falsified 9/10 reviews for Driv3r in exchange for early review copies got even less outrage than that...
Anita Sarkeesian crowdfunded and made a very badly-researched series about how tropes negatively portray women in video games and probably gave thunderf00t enough fuel to see him through several nuclear winters. Her episode on Hitman Absolution for example painted the game as encouraging you to murder scantily-clad women when the game actively penalizes you for killing anybody other than your target.
Crowd funding feminist analyses of games was all it took for Sarkeesian to get rape and death threats thrown at her, showing GG was only ever about harassment and misogyny.
If Gamergate has taught me anything, it's that the discourse from both sides were toxic as fuck. I've seen supporters and opponents of the movement get doxxed and swatted everywhere on Twitter.
But also, it taught me that if an e-celebrity or major content creator is big enough, criticising them when they pass away becomes a cardinal sin. Case-in-point: John "Totalbiscuit" Bain, a supporter of GamerGate known for getting into some really toxic flame wars whilst he was still alive.
That is whole point of the video IMHO. This comment you wrote, a balanced opinion on the work done by people and situation of it, would get you labeled an alt right woman hater. There would be 50...
That is whole point of the video IMHO. This comment you wrote, a balanced opinion on the work done by people and situation of it, would get you labeled an alt right woman hater. There would be 50 replies calling you a piece of shit who wants women out of gaming. "What do you mean 'poorly researched?' do you hate women? Why don't you want women in gaming? I'm sorry are you claiming zoe quinn isnt a REAL game developer because you are calling her amazing game a 'choose your own adventure'? You do realize it's about depression, it seriously helps people, are you saying you want people to be depressed?"
This was the problem, this is what the video calls out over the course of it. Nobody could call zoe a cheating pos, her boyfriend, for the crime of being male that has feelings, was labeled a crybaby. He should have just broken up, worked out, and become a better man, not try to go through his feelings and tell anybody about what she did to him, just another misogynist trying to tear down a powerful woman.
IMHO this is what drove the current right wing gaming nightmare we have. Alt right grifters started coming in and latched on to this very traffic generating, easy to label man vs woman thing. Meanwhile every single gaming related website and subreddit either nuked all discussion from orbit or you would be attacked if you didn't fall in line to the agreed narrative. Honestly that is evident reading through the comments here. So if you wanted to hear any kind of discussion that said, wow this is a really shitty analysis of gaming, the only place you were going to get it was the extreme right commentators, who bundled it along with a ton of shitty opinions.
I'm also really tired of people saying the narrative is written on gamergate and it doesn't matter because games are not serious. It's the same way that if I talked about my very small fiend group exploding at one point in my life people telling me 'that is all high school drama', it's extremely dismissive of what a person is going through, or what a community is going through.
Gamergate did destroy traditional gaming media as we know it, whether that was going to happen or not, this was the big axe that finally gave us what we have now. But that media for me was a huge part of my life, since the 80s I read gaming magazines, then websites, daily. I knew the writers, the opinions, what was in, what was out, all of that. This blew up in 2014 so that was 25 years of my life reading their stuff, and yeah, it did matter. And all those people wouldn't let us talk about it.
But ultimately I think the widespread censorship and 'you are with us or against us' attitude is what drew the line in the sand, either you stand with the 'shut up we are perfect, don't question what i do' people or you are stuck with alt right commentators.
I think this is a pattern that is old as time, where topics get bundled and forever associated with a group, even though they are not related at all and big enough to deserve their own deep dive, and human nature makes you pick one or the other, rather than examining each situation individually, as that requires too much effort.
Even if you want to describe it like that, it’s nonetheless a harassment campaign that worked - that caught on, that had the power to dupe people. Every day there’s tens of thousands of harassment...
Even if you want to describe it like that, it’s nonetheless a harassment campaign that worked - that caught on, that had the power to dupe people.
Every day there’s tens of thousands of harassment campaigns that people try to start, but most fizzle out. Gamergate blew up because it struck a nerve among enough people that they felt the need to vibe in it. A lot of “gamers” felt some kind of anger or irritation in the back of their mind against the media at the time and gamersgate was the outlet.
If you tried to do the opposite today, start a harassment campaign against games media for being too misogynistic, it probably wouldn’t go anyway. And that’s interesting, and worthy of study.
"Audience misalignment" is a great way to describe it. I will definitely use this term in the future. There's another layer to it, too. In the 90s and 00s, gaming companies marketed games heavily...
"Audience misalignment" is a great way to describe it. I will definitely use this term in the future.
There's another layer to it, too. In the 90s and 00s, gaming companies marketed games heavily to young boys, so much so that they essentially created the synthetic "gamer" identity. In the 10s, gaming companies started to market to broader audiences, and also a greater diversity of voices rose to prominence online. A bunch of anomic young men felt like their identity was being stolen from them. Put that together with the very strange media environment of 2014, and something like GamerGate was probably bound to happen around that time.
I always said back then that the big problem (well, one big problem) with GamerGate was that it lacked a class analysis. The targets of their ire were "cultural elites", when it should have been big corporations. But these young men subconsciously thought of the big gaming corporations as their friends, because they were the source of this "gamer" identity in the first place. And the fact that this was an actual identity partially explains why they were so sensitive to the opinions of game journalists. They demanded to be taken seriously. But at the same time, they wanted reviews to be "objective", which basically just meant that they wanted product reviews, not critical analysis.
GamerGate was structurally very similar to other "paranoid style" movements, like the Know-Nothings and the Red Scare; except it was spiritually even more void, because it was also a phenomenon of consumerist entitlement.
As someone that very much was a 'gamer', it was honestly before companies created it. It honestly was a thing, you paid a price socially in the 80's and 90's to be a 'gamer'. Mainstream media's...
As someone that very much was a 'gamer', it was honestly before companies created it. It honestly was a thing, you paid a price socially in the 80's and 90's to be a 'gamer'. Mainstream media's representation of you was basically steve urkle on family matters, which was probably the best you'd get. If you used computers you were an outcast/loser/nerd/geek whatever. Something wrong with you for doing it. Then as you got older and still played games you were equated to knocking toddler toys around as an adult still and in some sort of adult regression because you didn't go to football games and cosplay as a bird or something. But I do remember at the time someone wrote an article about gamers is kinda dead and it's mainstream now, and I remember hating it because it felt true. In a way it was a marker that the old internet was dead too, the mass censorship, the policing with comments everything you say, the 'you didn't include or consider every identity know to mankind in your writing so you must be a piece of shit' response to everything.
I think it is historically significant in in how the internet was divided up, but probably a smaller story than that of the rise of the social media giants for the overall structure of the internet. However I will say I do firmly believe it's the cause of the alt right infection into gaming, or at least it showed them there was a way in and now they are unfortunately here to stay.
I'm about at the end of Anita arc. Quite interesting history leading up to it. It made me recall my own time on Reddit back when the whole backlash against EA, horse armor and microtransactions...
I'm about at the end of Anita arc. Quite interesting history leading up to it. It made me recall my own time on Reddit back when the whole backlash against EA, horse armor and microtransactions happened. What stood out to me was one particular quote from one of the articles at the time that dismissed it as "due to EA being an LGBT friendly company" (paraphrasing). It seems absolutely bizarre to me and apparently the whole Gamergate thing was reported on in mainstream news in America, something which I obviously missed and perhaps it explains such kneejerk "it was all a bunch of manufactured sexist outrage and nothing else" reaction. To me, the anti establishment narrative that the video constructs hits much closer to home.
Thank you for the excellent share, I will for sure finish the whole thing. That being said, I love this type of deep dive long form essays anyway, so I don't blame anyone for not engaging with it.
It's been well over a decade. The dust has settled and time has moved on, but the Gamergate Exclusion Zone remains a dangerous and unsettling place. Toxicity lies dormant in all available surfaces of discourse. Touching anything in the area puts you at risk. Its radioactive fallout brings indiscriminate harm to any who choose to tread there.
It will, unfortunately, remain this way for a long time.
I watched the first two hours of this video before having to stop on account of life things, as one does. I will probably finish it, because for some reason the idea of an audiobook-length history of Gamergate appeals to me in the same way as picking at a scab does.
It's not a bad video. I appreciate the creator trying to bring nuance and context to a difficult and fraught topic. I genuinely think he's trying to be fair.
But I also think he's putting way too much emphasis on his research and journalistic approach. This undermines his credibility pretty strongly because I think both of those are significantly flawed. The fact that he also repeatedly talks himself up as a way of taking pot-shots at industry journalists sinks it even further. The video is written with the barbs and humor of an opinion piece yet he wants us to consider it serious reporting as well, and, in this case I think those two things are dissonant.
I say this not to say it’s a garbage video. It’s not (well, speaking for what I’ve seen so far).
I say this because I think it fails to live up to its own standard and engages in some of the same behaviors it criticizes.
Admittedly, this is an unfair conclusion to draw definitively because I haven’t watched the whole thing. However, I do feel like two hours of my time and attention is fair play for at least starting to develop opinions, and I don’t think that, barring some meta twist on his rhetoric, my main concern is going to somehow resolve itself by the end.
I started typing a lot more getting into lots of specifics, but I deleted it. I realized I was just retreading the same tired toxic ground, and I hate that. I want to be done with Gamergate, even if Gamergate isn’t done driving its conflict (which, based on this topic, it clearly isn’t).
I don’t like wandering into the Exclusion Zone these days because I don’t think anything good can come from it. For anyone.
I think the fact that good discourse around Gamergate is still effectively impossible is a testament to how terrible it was and what a rotten legacy it has left.
If that interests you, I'd much sooner recommend A Case Study in Digital Radicalism by Ian Danskin. It's shorter, for what that's worth, although given the nature of video essay viewership, maybe that's a negative?
Another kfwyre banger. Although I will say that at least with radioactive fallout, you can shelter in a bunker and wear a respirator when outdoors. I’m not sure there’s much you can do to mitigate GG fallout lol.
Alright, I think 30 hours of arguing about Gamergate yet again is more than enough. Locking the topic, please find something better to do.
It's a six hour video but it's from a YouTuber whose content I like so I've decided to watch it. Neverknowsbest reads sources and gives an overview of what happened.
Key takeaways:
There's enough lessons here not to repeat something like Gamergate again but politics trumps over notions of accountability and fairness so it probably will happen again.
Ok, I'm just straight up debunking this right now:
Gamergate was nothing more than a trolling harassment campaign against women born and fostered by 4chan.
Every other mildly plausible discussion about it was fostered as a cover for it, entrapping otherwise well-meaning people into a hot mess of almost completely manufactured outrage.
I'll drop this as a counterpoint by the excellent Innuendo Studios: Why are you so Angry?
I say this as one of those people caught up by the "games journalism integrity" people.
And a personal note: This is not national policy or geopolitical events. It's friggen video games. Journalistic integrity is a joke, and it always has been. The stakes are virtually 0, especially with even a passing semblance of a return policy.
I feel like maybe we've been in this discussion before, so I'm not writing an essay here, but I disagree with both your opinion and your attitude towards the video.
Maybe it's different in the US, but where I'm from the quality of gaming magazines and online media was always low in the literary sense, but they were relatively trustworthy and mainly it felt like the people who wrote for them were videogaming fanatics - certainly not journalists, not worthy of any literary awards, with a bit of an underdog vibe, but reasonably trustworthy and so it felt like they were one of us. (I no longer feel like I'm part of that "us", but I see nothing wrong with it either)
Gamergate revealed that for several big gaming media this is not true at all, they are not one of us, they are untrustworthy, they in fact seem to despise us and they form weird backroom cliques which they use to attack our culture.
That is the big issue. Zoe Quinn was just a red herring pretty much. Most GG sympathizers never harassed anyone, they just felt betrayed and angry because of firstly this discovery and then the completely one-sided coverage of the full blown culture war that ensued.
Also I find it quite frustrating how people are presented with a reasonable explanation for why GG happened, became so big so suddenly and never really vanished completely and instead of trying to learn from that their reaction is "no, this must be wrong, these people are evil and therefore no reasonable explanation may exist". Despite what I say above I would prefer something like gamergate to vanish and never happen again, but as long as the majority of people have this attitude, I think we're bound to repeat it.
It’s pretty much people stuck in that 2010s mode of progressivism.
I mean, no? I can look at the table of contents and reliably identify that anyone who takes the “the sacrosanct nature of games journalism has been violated” claim seriously is just blinkered and has no idea what they’re talking about. It’s clear that was the narrative used to gin up the hate and do the little motte-and-bailey thing, but it’s also clear that this was entirely made up bullshit to weaponize online troll mobs.
You don’t have to be a wokie woke to recognize when people all of a sudden having really strident opinions about a topic that doesn’t concern them at all and that they didn’t know existed 15 minutes before they got rage-baited into it is probably not authentic. And it’s not as if we haven’t had decade of processing those events and seeing the exact same dynamics play out about myriad different things since using the same playbook social media outrage mongers perfected during GamerGate. People lost their shit about Lizzo playing a flute. They lost their shit about having to wear masks or get vaccinated for a pandemic. We’ve been a decade into people getting ragebaited by social media into losing their shit and just repeating a canned line about some higher moral principle behind it that isn’t just a fit of pique.
Acting like “oh but we have to take the stuff they claim to be pissed about seriously though” is basically asking me to be stupid on purpose. We’re a decade into people foaming at the mouth over the most inane shit imaginable but we’re supposed to assume that the ur-example of this dynamic might have had a kernel of something legit underneath it and not just be an early instance of idiots getting wound up by rage-baiters taking advantage of social media algorithms to facilitate mass-cyberbullying?
You are making the incorrect assumption that things you disagree with are "stupid".
I think the reducing their statement down to the idea that it's just "things [they] disagree with" and not "things this specific reactionary group of people claim is the problem rather than this long lost of things they got upset about" is to create a strawman.
For example, I think complaining about "historical accuracy" only when it comes to casting black actors is stupid, but not "because I disagree with it." More gamer-wise, I think engaging about whether "GTA is woke now" because it has a Latina character gives legitimacy to an argument that is absolutely bullshit.
You could ask NaraVara if it's only because they disagree with the people, I suppose, but you assumed it and used that to dismiss their response and failed to engage with any substance because of it.
No, it’s pretty self-evidently stupid. I understand there’s a lot of people who want to find an excuse to not have to admit to themselves that they were ignorant and allowed themselves to get suckered and whipped up into a mob, but that doesn’t change the facts.
I find it very hard to believe that everyone was just so upset to discover that a bunch of websites were trying to keep their advertisers happy. Something that wasnt exactly a secret, and not really a big deal anyway.
I find it very easy to belive a bunch of turbo nerds got mad that women were daring to stick their nose in their sacred hobby and jumped at the chance to be assholes about it.
Without any irony: it's the exact opposite for me.
Genuinely making sure I understand you correctly: it is your opinion that if we go and look at what the majority of the faces of gamergate are talking about in the years since, we will find a focus on companies influencing the rating of video games and ethics in game journalism, and not making openly homophobic/transphobic/misogynist statements about video games and the surrounding industries or otherwise engaging in right wing “culture war” talking points?
Probably not, people who are still talking about gamergate are a tiny minority among all the people who were more or less quiet supporters in its heyday, and they're bound to be more extreme if they're still at it today.
Also it was not just about the ratings. As I said, one of the important points in gamergate history was realizing that for unknown reasons that go way beyond gamerate itself the journalists seemed to hate "gamer culture" as a whole and attempted to coordinate in pushing "gamers" out of the hobby, or at least reducing their importance. It obviously went way beyond "trying to keep their advertisers happy". Which is why I said it's the exact opposite for me - getting angry at this is completely believable and even expected.
They didn't say people who were still talking about Gamergate, they said what the major past faces of Gamergate are talking about today.
Yeah, that's a fair distinction, I was quite tired when I wrote that.
I don't have the answer, it seems like the direction of the question may be "they're all grifters who either dug even deeper or switched to other hateful culture war topics since then". This is undoubtedly true in some visible cases, but I'm not convinced it's the majority. I don't think this question can realistically be honestly answered because it would require a lot of digging and possibly a debate about where to draw the line of being significant enough.
In my opinion the masses who somehow participated or just sympathized with the movement are more important, and among those I do believe most were not disgusting bigots or grifters.
Who is a "gamer" and what is your definition of "gaming culture?" Because after calling myself a "gamer" for a good chunk of my life, today I've pretty much abandoned the label due to the ugly connotations GamerGate gave it.
Yeah I spend a disproportionate amount of time enjoying and thinking about video games, but don't call me a "gamer."
I'd much rather discuss contents of the NeverKnowsBest video so if you disagree with any of the claims he made then please quote them.
Gamergate turned into a culture war. The alt-right took over and Trump got elected and we have to live with consequences of it to this day so I don't think the stakes are zero.
Journalistic integrity shouldn't be a joke then otherwise stuff like this is going to repeat.
It's a six-hour video. No one is going to put in that effort if they think it's bad. Plus, you provided a summary. That is open for discussion now that that toothpaste is out of the tube.
Vord is responding to the larger framing of the video, which is relevant. Attempting to assign homework in response just means you're not considering what they had to say. It's also a little hypocritical to complain about someone not watching a video you've shared when you don't appear to have watched the series they linked either.
And while I'll agree that journalistic integrity is important, and that trust matters even with something low-stakes like games, Gamergate was not about integrity. It was started by the alt-right as an explicit harassment campaign, and "ethics in journalism" was the white-washing they used to get more people to join in on the harassment.
It happens to everybody at some point, so please do not take it personally when I say that if you believed Gamergate was about journalistic malpractice, you've been fooled. Whether the author of the video you posted was themselves fooled or not, I leave to you.
I didn't complain. I said I want to discuss NeverKnowsBest video because that's what I submitted. If they want to talk about Innuendo Studios video series they are free to start a new topic.
I could say the exact same thing.
I think GG wasn't just one thing but there were multiple threads running at the same time: harassment, doxxing, anti-sjw, anti-feminist, anti-censorship, anti-establishment and complaining about journalists as well (03:03:02).
In this case, though, it kind of is.
Because it’s press releases and reviews about toys, not actual journalism. The expectation that it should be regarded as journalism is children on Reddit who don’t understand how the world works getting easily confused by ragebait.
The idea that people were sincerely outraged about Zoe Quinn beggars belief because she made a random indie game that nobody cared about aside from a few scenesters at Kotaku. The only lesson here is how easy it was to drum up people into having strong opinions about things that don’t matter at all and don’t impact them at all to the point of developing a social media psychosis around it.
That psychosis is what let Trump get elected, and pretending there is any legitimacy to the random outrage these grievance mongers gin up doesn’t serve anyone. We need to call it out as ragebait induced psychosis. Nothing at the bottom of it is real or worth caring about.
I find it a tad upsetting that journalistic integrity keeps getting brought up about this, even today. Because you're right, this is ridiculous!
But it makes it sound legitimate, because yeah, people should be able to trust media. Even in hobbies. Funnily enough, Gamergate itself does support that in a roundabout way — the impact of the bullshit was dramatically outsized and got a fair amount of broader attention, so it makes it clear that sufficient mistrust and hobby drama can matter far beyond the scale of the hobby itself.
But none of that matters, because it was utterly unjustified drama about things that got made the fuck up. So that agreeable concept that would otherwise be a valuable take is instead being used to launder misogyny. It's insane.
Even more so considering how we've seen the same tactic trotted out in every culture war episode since. People spontaneously developing a passion for historical accuracy in film when it lets them dogpile a black actress, women's basketball when it lets them dogpile trans kids, etc etc etc. After all these years it's just pattern recognition.
I actually take umbrage with the concept that people should be able to trust media inherently. Anything is media. The only thing anyone needs to do to create media is money or the backing of a monied organization. As a result media can and often is used to push propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies. The idea that media should be trustworthy itself makes media more dangerous and less trustworthy because it becomes more of a target for manipulation.
You need to be able to trust something though. Human society is built on trust to some degree. Anyone who doesn’t trust anyone/anything either has a serious psychiatric condition or will succumb to the biggest charlatan as long as they fit with their vibes.
Yes, that doesn’t mean you should trust categorically. Trust is something built over time by demonstrations of good faith and acts of service. It requires demonstrations that the efforts they are giving are for the good of the public.
People who don’t trust anyone may have problems, but untrustworthy media actively creates problems on a societal level.
This is meandering pretty far from what I was actually talking about, which I felt was pretty clear. But to spell it out: I meant "media" as in journalists/news outlets, and I meant "trust" as in "being able to let your guard down because this person/group has never deliberately lied to you." Nobody can be suspicious forever, unless they want to die from stress.
If that is your definition of trust than trust is something that one literally cannot determine for themselves if they have. There are almost certainly people who still trust CBS news after Bari Weiss, but she has doubtlessly directed her people to misdirect and lie to the audience.
are you saying we must watch six hours of a video before we can respond to the simple situation?
I mean not commenting is an option
It's a really underrated option on anything with an activity sort, imo. Posting is bumping, so it something is stupid, consider whether it is too stupid to be worth extra people noticing it.
If it was simple then I think the video would be much shorter. It's split into sections so you can watch any particular one, or just watch what I timestamped or reply to one of my takeaways.
I mean, the stakes are not virtually zero, but they are very, very low compared to what gamergate became.
Most movements, no matter how abhorrent, usually start with a tiny grain of legitimate grevience. Taking gamergate in its totality, it's safe to say it was a right wing, misogynistic movement used by racists, sexists, transphobes, and general far right people to push society in general further to the right, and is in large part responsible for Donald Trump being elected.
At the same time though, video games are the most lucrative entertainment industry in the world, and it's by a long shot. There are hundreds of billions of dollars floating around video games, it directly employs hundreds of thousands of people, and it wields massive cultural influence.
Journalism around it is as big of a deal as journalism around sports, movies, fashion, music, or tv. Is it as important as journalism uncovering political corruption or human rights abuses? No, but it still has a lot of influence on a lot of people's livelihood. It still matters, and in a perfect world, you could look into questionable conflicts of interests without it turning into a fascist firestorm that makes women fearful for their lives.
Games journalism follows basically the same standards as journalism in those areas. This is all called “enthusiast” press and depends entirely on the journalists having tight personal connections with the people they’re covering. You think Anna Wintour isn’t getting wined and dined by fashion houses every minute of the day during Fashion Week?
If people wanted to talk about ethics in journalism it might help if they actually knew a single thing about what journalism is, or what ethics is, or literally anything at all.
So what? Maybe gaming was different just because it was a new, younger medium with this type of behavior not being accepted as the status quo yet like in those other industries. I don't understand what's this idea that there could not have been legitimate anger over this.
Are you gatekeeping the idea of "don't fuck or take money from people whose products you're reviewing without disclosing it"?
For all the talk of how old and irrelevant this drama is, the discourse here is really illuminating.
WOAW! The website that festoons every square inch of the screen in ads for video games might have structural conflicts of interest impacting the video games it’s reviewing!? I’m shocked. SHOCKED!?
This is how enthusiast press works. The only people who read it are into the hobby. The only people who pay for it are the people who sell to people who are into the hobby.
You’re right. Journalists should have no interest or opinions regarding the subject of their beat and zero personal connections or relationships within the field so as not to introduce BIAS. And somehow we should take action on this by spamming abuse threats to a random lit crit writer and any foid with a tangential connection to the games industry.
At bottom what was going on here was envy and the same stew of undifferentiated resentment finding an outlet. For all the whinging about woke it’s the exact same dynamic of outrage mobs looking for an acceptable target for their bullying.
No no, not being into the hobby, being on payroll to promote products of a specific company or person. Sorry for the confusion.
No no, again sorry for making you think that this is what I think. Of course interest is fine and even close connections or friendships, they should just be disclosed. Or does the knowledge of journalism contradict that?
I think that this idea of yours is really dangerous actually. Nobody should be spammed abuse threats. What's a foid?
Foid is a derogatory term for women that came incel culture and is being used here to, I assume, speak to the perspective of the people doing the harassing.
For more, see
From Stacys to Foids, a Discursive Analysis of the Incel’s Gendered Spectrum of Political Agency
It's interesting how your flippant dismissal displays the exact haughty attitude that this video tries to dispel. And you would know that, if you would have watched even the first 15 minutes of it.
But you didn't. Because you think you know better.
They probably didn't watch the first 15 minutes because it's a six-hour video so even committing to 15 minutes seems wasteful for most people.
They didn't watch 15 minutes of the video, but took it upon themself to open their "rebuttal" with "Ok, I'm just straight up debunking this right now". That's my problem! You can't debunk something if you don't have a god damn clue what it is even saying!
Hell, the video is even in agreement with most of their points, but it bothers to look closer at the entire clusterfuck that is gamergate because simply saying "Gamergate was nothing more than a trolling harassment campaign against women born and fostered by 4chan" doesn't really explain why it got so big!
We've had harassment campaigns born out of misogyny before and since, but they usually don't blow up this much!
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread (by the same person you're replying to, even), this is a huge ask to begin with on a six-hour video, let alone when you're talking about someone who considers the video to be likely to be disinformation.
Frankly though, even if the video does agree as you say, there's a framing issue at hand. Trying to talk about ethics in journalism in the context of Gamergate, which was explicitly a harassment campaign that used that very concept to launder itself, is a dangerous thing that has to be done very carefully. You have to make sure it's abundantly clear to everyone in the room that Gamergate was a harassment campaign, because if anyone thinks otherwise, the harassment campaign is duping them successfully. And we've got enough misogyny already.
I'm not sure the video has done that, and OP's post certainly has not. Considering the rampant bigotry, lying, and duplicity involved in Gamergate, that immediately calls good faith into question. That's probably why vord posted what they did — and considering how much people here do not seem to be clear on how Gamergate was a harassment campaign, I think they were very correct to make that post.
As a closing note: vord was debunking a false conception of Gamergate. If the video agrees, then they were not debunking the video.
Simply opening the video and just watching the very beginning is not a huge ask. It is simply demanding the same standard of checking what a linked source is actually saying before barging in and announcing that everybody else is wrong and you are right and because so are oh so right you don't even have to check what claim was even made.
That's the bullshit I can't stand. This erecting of holy cows of ideas that are taboo to ever be even examined, let alone questioned. A topic that is the very point of the intro of the video here. It points out how everyone has very strong opinions about Gamergate, but nobody ever bothered to actually look!
We pride ourselves here on tildes that we actually read the articles before we comment, even if they are long. Shouldn't we do the same here?
I’m sorry but this woe is me act is just self-pitying nonsense. Saying this take is bad isn’t because it’s attacking a “holy cow of ideas” it’s because it’s a dumb take from someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. The idea that “nobody ever bothered to actually look” at a phenomenon that basically everyone here was there for and, in a small way, probably motivated many people here to depart Reddit and critically reexamine their social media habits is insane! Everyone knows what it was. It’s not that they didn’t look, it’s that they don’t buy the excuse-making.
Like why would anyone spend 6 hours slogging through a video whose table of contents very clearly isn’t saying anything interesting and ignoring the main things about it?
I watched the first fifteen minutes and was given at least 8 minutes about an 11 year old child who was sexually assaulted and abused (and physically abused by her parent) that ends with the implication that 4chan at least knew something was wrong about the situation. But doesn't acknowledge that some of the people there thought what was wrong was the child being alive based on the death threats they received.
All while replaying the videos of a child sexual abuse victim who said the online harassment has ruined their life, all to criticize the media.
IMO this was not well done, not ethical, certainly not journalism, and not a good use of my time.
It frankly makes me distrust the creator more than before I watched, and regardless of his follow up statements including where he describes himself as left but hating the "culture war" which feels rather eyeroll worthy to me. (I'm also curious exactly how gamers were "disenfranchised" but not curious enough to watch this.) Because journalists being snobs was actually worse! I get his point but think the way he made is shitty.
So hopefully i have "earned" the right to comment on this now, but personally I was absolutely uncompelled and would not recommend this to others based on the repetition of trauma to a sexual abuse victim alone.
Said child is also deadnamed and misgendered in the video
and at least deadnamed in this thread.Edited to update the last sentence.
You see, this is perfectly fine! We don't have to agree with oneanother about wether or not we liked the video, the point that was made in it or how it was made.
But you at very least opened the video and formed an opinion based on what was said in it. You didn't barge in here trying to stifle any and all discussion of the video by claiming you know better than it or anybody else without even opening said video.
Now, regarding your reply, the most productive discussion would be over your statement how "he describes himself as left but hating the "culture war" which feels rather eyeroll worthy to me". Because honestly, that's how I would describe myself as well. Although, I say this as a 31 year old cis-white guy from Germany, so I certainly come at this topic with a different perspecitive than you.
I disagree that this a productive use of conversation and find this reply patronizing as hell.
The lack of care about a victim of abuse from someone who apparently considers himself to be doing journalism demonstrates a failure of ethics both personal and professional.
Not engaging with that as unproductive speaks poorly of your response, IMO, on top of the patronizing tone. As if it was more productive to go "well, guess we see it different because I'm from Germany".
Yeah, sure. Guess we do.
This did not do whatever you thought it did, and I did not post for your backhanded praise.
That's a very uncharitable interpretation. Deadnaming aside (I agree that this should have been handled better), I think it's handled gracefully and drives the point home very effectively which is that media/journalists ignored the said sexual assault and abuse of the child for years and instead scapegoated 4chan trolls. I think that's a really important point to make and the events are old enough that we should be able to report on it without it being an egregious breach of ethics.
Not sure how you would come away only with this.
I don't agree that it was handled gracefully. Re-airing the videos of an 11 year old, ignoring the death threats and other harassment from the same internet denizens, and using the whole situation to make a point where he is sarcastically insulting the media makes it clear to me, personally, that he doesn't take the impact on the victims seriously. (Also by not giving a heads up about child sexual abuse or mental health including resources for people needing support, things that are journalistic standards these days.) There are ethical ways to report on past abuse, this isn't it, IMO.
I said I got his point. I do. I don't agree with how he made it and if he's holding himself up as a journalist at all (as someone else said from later in the video,) he's failed in the process of making these claims. I don't think "charitable" has anything to do with it, as this is criticism. I didn't like the first fifteen minutes, I think it showed poor ethics. I can't speak to the rest of the video because that "hook" made me want to walk away. I also wasn't expecting to get 8 minutes of a child sexual assault story either which is interesting in that it registered not at all to the person recommending the first 15 minutes.
I didn't come away with "only" this. I did however hear him say how Adrian Chen was mocking the 4chan users who were begging for someone to notice something was wrong...
But didn't mention the 4 chan users who were explicitly harassing and threatening a child for any reason, who doxxed the child's name, home address, phone numbers, etc. The framing sets the media up to be failures who care more about trolling than about sexual abuse - and I'm not even contesting that as it would require more research on the timing than I'm willing to do - and frames 4chan as people acting for the greater good.
4chan is more complex than its worst people but if you're going to use such an incredibly serious and traumatic case for your introductory example and you use it in such a biased and IMO callous manner in the first 15 minutes, then I have no interest in watching the following 345 minutes.
I hate to drag things up, but I don’t remember this CSA case associated with GG. Can you clarify/remind me?
It's not directly associated with GG afaik, it's the Damien Slaughter case. The creator used it to make a point about the media as their intro and I think did so poorly.
Gotcha, thanks.
The difference is that I could read|skim the script for a six hour video in 5-10 minutes, but I can't meaningfully skim the video itself in that time. The information density of written text is just way way higher.
I think longform videos are fine for people who have the time, want to be entertained and enjoy the style of the presentation, but for conveying information they are simply a bad format and as a starting point for discussion they are just too time-consuming, since I don't think it's reasonable to expect that other people engage with hour long media just to understand a point I want to refer to.
e: wording
Oh, skimming the transcript for 5-10 minutes would be totally fine, like I said before, spending that same amount of time just watching the beginning of the video would be fine. My issue is entirely with barging in without having looked at the video at all.
I'm getting the impression across your comments that you may've come here from a background of someone who's been able to largely ignore Gamergate? Hard to say, but I feel like this video might be the first to catch your interest on the topic, and you may've come in here with the accidental assumption that others were likewise and so their confidence is unearned if they haven't watched.
I bring this up to point out that that's an assumption; if you re-read those comments with the lens of "this person is commenting about Gamergate using their knowledge from other videos," they'll probably read better. Most of this thread isn't even directly criticizing the video — it's a big hubbub about Gamergate itself. Which I think is the direct result of the framing issue I mentioned above.
I don't think anyone would've minded talking about the complexities of how a deliberate harassment campaign fooled so many people, had it been that the discussion had occurred with appropriate care. We just didn't get that, and the end result was a video/post that gave a first impression of implying Gamergate wasn't about harassing women. That kinda ambiguity makes people bristle, and reasonably so, given how often the alt-right has used it to smuggle their bigotry.
All that said, if my initial feelings were correct and you'd like to understand more why us folks have bristled some, I can recommend this breakdown gladly; it's self-contained, comes in just under an hour, and if it interests you I also kept in the wider playlist which covers alt-right tactics more generally too. You might notice this is the same author who vord linked, and while the series they linked is also good, I believe the author in question has some regrets about that work by comparison.
So my background is that I'm 31 years old and as such was in prime rage-age when this whole thing blew up. Back then (as in "before GG") I would have even describe myself as a capital G "Gamer". And I was and still am a left leaning person.
But yes, as you correctly assessed, I wasn't active in either side of the debate. Because even back then it all somehow made no sense at all. As a lot of comments in this thread say, who gets so worked up about videogame journalism? This is not a topic that should have blown up as much as it did. It doesn't make sense that over 10 years later, this entire topic is still (as kfwyre stated so wonderfully) a nuclear exclusion zone. All this over videogame journalism?
I remember reading posts from both sides and thinking "Well there definitely was some shady shit going on here with these journalists. And some of these initial replies seem kinda missing the point. But what the fuck is it with all this hatefull rethoric against all these women??? And why is the other side pretending that there was absolutely no fault whatsoever and that they can do no wrong?" Not that I think that any of the hate and threats and harassment was at all warranted. But as I said somewhere else in this thread, we've had harassment campaigns born out of misogyny before and since, but they usually don't blow up this much! It very much seemed like a dangerous overreaction from both sides!
So I kept my distance, trying to figure out what either side was upset about and what caused this clusterfuck that has gotten way bigger than it had any right to ever get. But I never got anything that could really explain it. Both side over the years calcified in their oppinions so much that I only ever found the same old tired points. It was always only ever portrayed as either just an artificial misogynistic harassment campaign or a completly serious concern about "ethics in game journalism". Neither portrayal ever seemed belivable to me. Like so many comments here have already pointed out, it's like saying WW I simply happened because of archduke Franz-Ferdinants assasination. But then I go "Ok, so an Austria-Hungarian crownprince was assasinated by a serbian nationalist. But why are France and Britain fighting Germany 2 years later???" There is more to it than just the main incedent. There is context that explains why something blew up as much as it did.
And 10+ years later, finally here is a video that tries to dive into this mess of misogyny and strawmen and explore this context, only for someone to barge in and shouting "it was only ever just misogyny, stop talking about this!" And thats why I bristled.
I have also watched a lot of Innuendo Studios back then (and for a while after), including the "Why are you so Angry?" and "Alt-Right-Playbook" series. I think "How to radicalise a Normie" is still in my youtube favorites playlist. I have stopped watching them for two related reasons. First, it was sometime in the Alt-Right-Playbook series that I noticed that they didn't just describe the tactics of the alt-right (accurately, in my opinion, from what I can still remember), but also presumed to knew the thought processes and motivations behind them. And to a level that very much rubbed me the wrong way. It felt to me much more like someone unintentional building a strawman that they can hate, than someone actually going to the other side and trying to understand what is actually going on there.
But the point where I stopped being able to take them serious, was with their anti-racism video where they stated (again from memory, so appologies if I get the details wrong, it has been a few years) that there are only anti-racists and racists. That unless you actively work to eliminate racism wherever you can, you are profiting from the racist system, therefore are collaborating with the racists and therefore are racist yourself. And I very distinctively remeber thinking "What the inquisitorial bullshit is that!?" Because it left abosolutly no space for any dissent, or any questioning of priorities, methods or anything else. You think that climate change should be given a higher priority? Nope, you are now racist, because you should always actively work against racism! Think that maybe in you country it is more important to reform the health insurance system because it is running out of money and doctors are struggeling to keep their practises open because the legally mandated compensation rates given out by the insureance companies haven't been adjusted in the last 30 years? Nope, racist again!
So I am sorry, but I can not in good conscience take Innuendo Studios serious. Even now we have people in this very thread stating "If you don't allow legitimate criticism from within you encourage illegitimate criticism from outside" isn't a good position to take, because it would give a platform to the alt-right, equivocating any and all criticism of the left to be alt-right, no matter who makes it or how. And that would be my main criticism of the left for the past 10 years: the complete inability to allow any and all legitimate criticism from anywhere. If you say anything against the currently held believes, you are branded and ostracised.
edit: some minor spelling corrections
It sounds like you had a pretty visceral reaction to that video, because that's a pretty big misinterpretation. The point that was being made was that any attempt to take a "neutral" or "uninvolved" stance on racism is to tacitly participate in it, because you're leaving your own biases and privileges unexamined, and that will affect you and those around you. This doesn't mean you have to fight racism every waking second of your life — it just means you have to be cognizant of it and how it works. Or, as the word used to go, you had to be woke.
More generally though, I think you've gotten frustrated because you've found friction in discussions without having had the reasoning behind the reticence explained to you. A thorough breakdown would take me far longer to write up than I have the energy for, but I can give some brief reasoning:
All of these are good reasons to be hesitant to discuss something. It doesn't become impossible, but the more these reasons apply, the more careful you need to be. I'm sure you can see from this very thread some ways in which a lack of care in framing can cause some serious problems, and this is the milder end; worse options include people being fooled into thinking Gamergate somehow really was about ethics, or the slow development of the metaphorical Nazi bar.
Incidentally, those same reasons are going to be why I'm going to slow down my posting in this thread, by the way. As I stated in various ways both here and earlier, this discussion was started off very poorly, and I think this thread is running a severe risk of rehabilitating the image of a topic that deserves no such thing, so the value of my posting is quickly approaching the point where it is outweighed by the harm of bumping the thread.
Still, I hope you found my comments helpful, and I hope next time you find yourself at odds with someone who doesn't want to talk about something, both you and they will better be able to understand each other.
I should start with saying that I'm sorry if I came across overly aggressive yesterday, I hope I was able to explain why I got as bristley as I got :)
Your comments across this entire topic where (as far I can see) all helpful, constructive and well-intentioned. We may not see eye-to-eye on this topic, but I would love it if we could continue our discussion, even though I 100% understand why you want to take a step back from it. So please don't feel preassured to reply.
So assuming this is the end of our thread, I try to explain my stance in contrast to your points.
You are most correct, I indeed had a very visceral reaction to that video :)
But I don't think it's much of an misinterpretation. More of an reductio ad absurdum. Because I would definitly call my stance on racism to be "it's bad, don't be racist". But aside from that, I'm not actively involved in the "racism vs anti-racism" topic. As my examples hopefully showed, I'm more informed, interested and active in the topics of healthcare in Germany and climate change. As such, I would group myself in the "uninvolved" group of the spectrum. The problem then is that I was told that that makes me a racist. That unless I actively dedicate my time on the topic of anti-racism, I am to them as morally reprehensible as the KKK. I understand the intention of "examine your own biases", but packaging them into an framework of "you're either with us or against us" just isn't ok. It fosters an inability to question your own methods or even goals. To me it's essentially a version of fundamentalism, and I'm against all kinds of fundamentalism.
With regards to your second point: I agree, in principle, with pretty much every point you make. My counterargument would essentially be that these last 3 years I thought that tildes was a place to have these kinds of diffucult discussions and examinations of dangerous topics, because I thought we where small enough to not attract the kind of unwanted attention that would otherwise poison the well.
But past year or so I got more and more the feeling that more and more topics would be shouted down before any valid discussion was allowed. Again, not necessarily by you, I hope I didn't give you that impression.
So once again, thank you for all your comments on this topic :)
RTFA needs to be updated to include videos imo.
That standard I think can be reasonably applied to videos under 20 minutes. The friggen intro was almost that.
This is a 6 hour video about a topic that I experienced in-depth when it happened. I learned more about what happened towards the end and even had 'but there were good things brought up' moments in the decade since.
I feel confident asserting what I asserted because I've been down almost every one if those ToC items before.
At the most generous, the 'real' core of games journalism is nonsense. It's like acting shocked that trade rags for cars get stipends from car companies for favorable reviews.
It has happened in virtually every medium that game reviews ever took well before "Gamergate", and was more or less an open secret to anyone who dared scratch even the slightest surface.
Would I be shocked if Roger Ebert got kickbacks for good reviews? No. I frankly don't trust him as a reviewer for my tastes and as such, I just moved on to a different review source.
You know he’s been dead for over a decade right?
This is a decent point, but it's probably more likely that people don't spend limited energy on videos they have strong reason to believe are bunk.
I feel it should be noted that nothing you complain about here suggests that vord is wrong. Did you watch the series they linked?
Vord specifically said that "Gamergate was nothing more than a trolling harassment campaign" (emphasis mine), and the entire point of the video (as far as I've watched it, I've only gotten to the 2h mark so far), is that there is more to it.
Yes, it was a "trolling harassment campaign against women", it was a major part of it. But there was also more to it! And I'm not talking "ethics in game journalism", that's just as much a thought terminating cliche as "the lord acts in mysterious ways", "dead internet theory" or "AI water usage". There is more to Gamergate than just misogyny, it's almost the inflection point for the entire culture war in the US that eventually resulted in Trump.
I think the implied narrative of "oh, if only we had been more ethical in games journalism/responsive to gamergate" we could have avoided Trump is asinine.
Gamergate is a result of cultural trends and the people attempting to exploit them, it did not in any way cause them. Something else could have easily served as a lightning rod.
Of course it would be, that's why I'm not making that implication! The core would be more correctly summarised as "establishment vs anti-establishment", but with the added complication that you where suddenly no longer allowed to ask "wait, what did actually happen here???".
Sorry I did not mean to say you were making that implication, I just see it repeated a lot.
I don't really see that? It's trivial to understand what happened? I reject the premise there is any deep meaning to learn.
This is kind of like saying "WWI was about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and there's nothing deeper to learn" though, isn't it? It was a massive cultural event with mountains of existing context and explosive consequences. Yes, it was obviously bad, and yes the cover story is obviously an excuse, but that doesn't mean that nothing substantial actually occurred. I think it's worth looking at with a critical eye, as much as any other significant happening.
Maybe you're misreading or I am not very good at conveying my point but I'm trying to argue the opposite: the assassination of Franz Ferdinand tells us little about the causes of WW1 because it was essentially lighting a fuse that was already primed.
Now I'm not a historian so forgive me if that does not hold up in your analogy but it seems apt in my cursory knowledge at least.
That's what I meant really, the catalyst matters much less than the aftermath and in both cases there were many many pre-existing issues that just needed an excuse to blow up and out of proportion. In the GG case, I think that dismissing it entirely as "sweaty and inept nerds hate women" is missing the forest for the trees. I understand why people want to put it behind us and of course the victims deserve respect and should never have been forced to go through that. Nobody reasonable is arguing otherwise. But it is kind of a thought terminating cliche to leave it at "gamers are mysoginists" and I do think there was more to it that is worth examining.
Just to add: I am not saying everyone, or indeed anyone in particular, absolutely must spend their time investigating the topic. It makes perfect sense to find it too distasteful to engage. I don't agree with shutting down meaningful discussion with "it's extremely simple and you're wrong and foolish if you think it's any deeper than a puddle." Not that you're saying that, but I did see a few comments along that vein in this thread.
Of course people are free to do whatever they want with their free time, but I truly don’t think it’s a valuable exercise. A very minor incident got blown out of proportion by a lot of people looking for a punching bag. The incident itself is boring. The cultural trends that drove it were largely already in motion. What else is there to really say?
And yes, by the time gamer gate occurred, the seeds of the culture war had already been largely sown. Things like SRS and its counter brigades are far more interesting from a perspective of explaining the origins of the online culture wars than gamer gate is.
I just can't imagine giving a fuck about this from the actual journalism integrity angle. Gamers get their news/journalism from greasy guys on Twitch/YouTube and randos on reddit.
They do nowadays, but what about 2014? The gaming outlets had magnitudes more cultural cache if not respect back then. GamerGate is a big reason why the transition in the state of affairs in gaming journalism took place. It really was a different world back then.
This just seems implausible. Big journalism outlets have been on the decline everywhere, not just gaming. It seems far more likely that games journalism has been prey to the same structural factors affecting everyone else.
This was an event that saw a vast swathe of the online public actively pissed off at the traditional gaming outlets. So pissed off, GG is credited for the formation of the modern alt-right and is seen as least partially responsible for the presidency of Donald Trump. Accelerating the decline in online gaming journalism is one of the lesser consequences of that shitshow.
I don’t think they had “respect.” They had money because people were still splashing around a lot of investment capital for online media that has since been gutted. But for the most part comments on games websites constantly complained about “bias” and there was a lot of console war whining and accusations being slung around since basically as long as the internet has been around. What eventually happened was the same sentiments that fueled endless console warring got channeled into cultural/tribal grievance mongering instead and then a bunch of opportunistic CHUDs who didn’t give a shit about games or gaming at all got in on the grift to add fuel to the fire.
There were only ever a handful of people who took the gig somewhat seriously as journalists. The Gawker/Kotaku alums, Polygon writers, and a few others slowly got more and more professional over time. But then a lot of people during the “Great Awokening” decided that they didn’t want to write about games or the games industry anymore and preferred to focus on online activism instead using the video games beat as an anchor. This has been, IMO, a net negative for the quality of cultural commentary.
I’d love it if there was actual sophisticated literary criticism of video games from people who actually knew what they were talking about. But when even the most basic, reductive, warmed over takes on Feminist Frequency were getting inundated with hate mail it should have been obvious that we would be getting nothing of the sort.
Hence, as I said in my comment, if not respect, they still had cultural cache, which is really the point I'm making. In 2014, Twitch had just been renamed to Twitch and YouTube was still on its ascent. Gaming outlets still mattered in the public consciousness; GamerGate does not become nearly as huge of a nightmare as it did without gaming outlets still having cultural significance.
I think the discourse today has characters on YouTube, twitch, and Twitter who just marinate in that type of toxicity all the time as part of doing business. There was a brief period of blogs with pretensions of doing journalism but it’s all SponCon now. So they’ve assimilated the mechanics of Gamergate discourse and it’s just part of them now.
Okay...? What does that have to do with my point?
It’s not about cultural cachet it’s structural things about how people engage in the culture.
I really think you're talking past me here, and I don't think we're gonna get anywhere productive by continuing. Have a good one.
IDK I remember watching Total Biscuit and similar sources for everything. I don't think there has been any phase for me in which I went to IGN or whomever for reviews. But maybe I'm not enough of a "gamer" gamer.
And I remember website hopping between spots like IGN and Kotaku. Youtubers were certainly on their way up, but the institutions were very much in play then.
There is a universe where the niche topic of 2014 video game journalism drama for 6 hours could be interesting (something like /r/hobbydrama), but this is simply not that universe. Gamergate was an artificially created culture war event that had its main purpose to destroy the lives of random women / feminists. It had nearly nothing to do with games, journalism or ethics.
Doing a "gamergate" video in 2026 and not having the main focus be on the harassment, the manufactured outrage machine and the destruction of countless people's lives is video essay malpractice at best and an attempt to further harassment at worse.
There's no way I'm watching a six hour video on virtually anything, much less gamergate. That said, I think there probably are interesting angles to examine how a drama post containing one little miniscule seed of a story (conflict of interest in a story about a virtually unknown video game) is turned into a cultural turning point.
"The internet does misogynistic harassment" is probably the least interesting thing about gamergate at this point. Partially because it's been covered to absolute death, and partially because we've seen the pattern repeat thousands of times since.
In 100 years though, that post could very well be seen as a hugely impactful turning point marking the American descent into open fascism, so examining the mechanisms behind that could be interesting.
That said, I'm not gonna watch a six hour long video to find out. This new breed of YouTube video essayists really need to learn how to edit.
Yeah, I feel like this could potentially be an interesting video to watch, especially since I didnt even really follow along with Gamergate the first time around.
But six hours is too long a commitment for me to gamble, especially since it already seems like the spice factor of this comment section is starting to rise right off the bat.
By the time I finish watching the whole thing the comments will likely be too far gone for me to want to weigh in.
I think it was accidental rather than "artificially created". It didn't start with a thread: "Hey, let's harass some women today" but it snowballed from a lover's scorn story into a culture war. The hostility already existed but there's more that needed to happen for this to blow up. Let's see what the video says:
I'll form my opinion once I can finish the video. For people who are still doubtful I think this comment from the Reddit user should at least convince why this 6-hour long video about a 10-year-old topic probably has something new to say. I'll quote here:
Offtopic, can we move pass this attitude of dismissing something just because it's too long, or criticizing somebody's position without having done the work of learning what their position is first? I find it ironic that it's a Reddit user who shows more nuance and understanding that we do here, given how the goal of this place is to have more thoughtful discussion.
It's such tired bullshit. Sorry, but it is.
I'm not what I would describe as 'woke'. My response to gamer gate was at the time, and remains to this day: who fucking cares you terminally online weirdos.
It was manufactured by the kind of people who are heavily invested into "streamer drama", trying to create a tempest in a teapot. Some people talk about GG as if it was an investigative journalist scandal at the center of a massive AAA game and the heart of game media when in reality we are talking about the review of a text-based fringe-of-fringe indie game and a very junior reporter (freelancer?) at a relatively small media company. Some people complain about censorship when the primary censors are actually unpaid moderators on 4chan and reddit who surprisingly actually knew better than to stand in the middle of a jilted lovers story. Again, who fucking cares you terminally online weirdos.
https://i.imgur.com/rvcTAcv.jpeg
I'm actually a terminally online normie, I'll have you know.
I should know who I am by now...
One point I've not seen anyone else make yet:
Sounds great as a line, but no. If there's one thing I've learned from alt-right bullshit, it's that grifters will spew bullshit regardless of censorship. Best not give them a platform.
EDIT: I've now realized that if I'm going to make this point, I also need to make it clear given the topic that Gamergate's claims regarding censorship were illegitimate. Posts were taken down because they ranged from useless drama to outright doxxing. Even if the above pithy statement were true, it would not apply here.
Both y’all are correct. Alt-righters will spew BS 100% of the time. But, it’s a lot easier to people to believe in it if they feel they cannot verbalize their criticism (and will latch onto someone who does).
And to clarify, I’m not a fan of GG. Even in 2014 I was questioning why folks were going after a tiny game dev and not the big AAA publishers (and not getting good answers).
Sure. But what if they are joined by a disaffected individual that gives merits to their claims?
Discussion threads were deleted so the claim was legitimate. Whether the deletion was reasonable is a different question. I don't think all the 24k comments in one of the Reddit threads (2:56:19) were doxxing. This whole thing was useless drama and yet it happened and had a big impact.
In hindsight it seems the story blew up because of suppression attempts. Maybe without deletions it wouldn't have gotten so bad? Who knows...
I know people are disagreeing with this heavily. And I agree to the extent that this was drama that got overblown.
But, I do agree with the notion that there was this idea that we have to elevate and protect Quinn and other people like Anita Sarkesian. And there was this pretense that the progressive side of things was doing at the time. Which was to say they’re actually really smart, and Depression Quest was this masterpiece, and Sarkesian was a great cultural commentator. Eventually both figures were abandoned and everything got recalibrated, and now people pretend like a lot of that stuff didn’t happen.
It is interesting how big a story of an ex getting revenge grew.
Yeah. I remember reading the original Zoe post and coming away with it thinking 2 things:
But more than that,
Its funny looking back on it with the life experience I have now, and I think both of those things still hold true for me.
Still, I've seen a lot of commentary blaming the OP of the Zoe post for all of the fallout of gamer gate, and unless you're assigning clairvoyance to the guy, I don't see how there's any way he could have predicted the insane butterfly affect that resulted from his actions. Was the post immature? yeah. was it whiny? yeah. But it's something a lot of people would do in the same circumstances.
So yeah, Zoe is (or at least was) a pretty shitty person to her boyfriend back then, and the boyfriend was pretty immature and shortsighted for posting it, but gamergate became a gigantic toxic nightmare far bigger than either of their sins very quickly afterwards. Zoe bore the brunt of it, which she didn't deserve, but it's not exactly her ex boyfriend's fault either.
Neither of those takeaways have much to do with ethics in games journalism though.
It really seemed disproportionate, didn't it? It was explained to me at the time, and I remember being so underwhelmed and confused as to why it had grown into this behemoth.
I mostly stayed out of it, but I never heard of depression quest or "ethics in games journalism" till it was dying down and people were trying to make sense of it.
Everything I saw was "how dare these women come in here and tell us how to do video games". The sane response was "women are allowed to talk about games too and nothing they're saying should be that controversial "
Normally, I probably would not watch a video about GamerGate or any 6hr video. However, this is NeverKnowsBest -- his videos do range from like 2-6hrs usually since they're detailed retrospectives or histories (though he can bring it to 1hr for a single game). I've watched his 3.5hr romance video twice. I appreciated his 2.5hr retro on Dragon Age as a fan since Origins and it got me to play Veilguard (he wasn't glazing it I just got the DA brain worm). I first engaged with his history of RPGs and history of JRPGs. So he's one of the few whose long form videos I do like and feel they've got more to them than overly long summaries (though some could easily be broken up into a playlist series).
So I'm strapped in for 3hrs at 2x, getting into the Anita section now. The "but actually" isn't a claim that "GamerGate wasn't about X" but that it's actually a detailed dive and covers history to a degree that few to none have done despite the books written on the topic, though I'm sure the title is intended to get clicks. As he says, understanding GamerGate without looking earlier is like interpreting a war after the first battle without context leading up to it. It's weird not to bring up DoritoGate in discussing it, yet many sources don't seem to mention it, reviewing coverage of the earlier Damien Slaughter and Jennifer Hepler harassment campaigns is revealing context as well.
Can you please edit the deadname of Dami Slaughter out of your post?
ETA: thanks.
Sure, no problem, updated. I checked before posting and followed suit with how he referred to the campaign in an interview.
Gamersgate was mostly about audience misalignment. It was a big deal in the vertical of "games media", which isn't that big of a vertical to be clear. In that 2013ish time, it was really the peak of games media online, with ad revenue in a major bubble, and challengers not quite ready. Meanwhile, the population of people who played video games became increasingly working class and older as it got cheaper and more focused on adults.
You can tell the way the mainstream games outlets covered games changed afterwards, for better or for worse. It wasn't just gamergate, but that time was really the cataclysm for traditional games journalism. The ad revenue bubble popped, and alternate media like youtubers took much of the oxygen from outlets like IGN. It's been nothing but layoff after layoff, with no sign of recovery.
In that kind of environment, you can't afford to leave half of your audience pissed off at you, for reasonable or not reasons.
In a vacuum, its weird that gamergate is seen as this moment, because it's centered about an obscure game no one has ever heard of, and the conflict of interest at play isn't really that clear cut.
To me, the actual moment regarding an industry reckoning about ethical games journalism should have been one with a much more substantial story at its center: the firing of Jeff Gerstmann from Gamespot.
For those who are unfamiliar, Jeff was an editorial director at gamepot in 2007. He published a negative review of the game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, a AAA game published by Eidos interactive. The issue for Gamespot was that they had just signed a marketing deal with Eidos, branding the whole website with a Kane and Lynch theme.
What followed was Jeff stating Giant Bomb, and a mass exodus from Gamespot by Jeff's colleagues over to Giant Bomb.
This was a real story about games journalism conflicts of interest, with real money behind it, and real careers impacted. It was a big story at the time, but not even close to what gamergate became.
If there was a real moment to examine gaming journalism, it was in 2007, not 2014. It wasn't about a woman though, and there was no salacious relationship story to go along with it. As a result, the real fuel for gamergate wasn't present: misogyny.
Not everything has to have a villain. An audience mismatch can exist, and be punishing, even when there is foul play (or serious one, at least).
The audience mismatch is that "gamers" became increasingly a population of adults, and working class adults, without college degrees, who just statistically are more misogynistic, more suspicious of "feminism", more critical of what is considered "artsy" content.
All journalists are very much college educated, and of that social class. The Anita moment is the moment when that audience really revolted against what they saw as journalists who didn't represent their views. And that is, what it is. The journalists who continue to be employed today learned to hold their tongue and write more in what a large proportion of the audience wants.
In some ways, this is a microcosm of what happened broadly in US politics. Biden can literally bail out the Teamsters (the biggest union in the US), while Trump is destroying them economically, and yet who do the Teamsters support in 2024? Mr. Trump. No way they're voting for a woman.
I'm not sure why anyone would have ever cared about ethics in journalism since, like...1993 or something, idk.
Gamergate was a harassment campaign that used good-sounding concepts to dupe a wider audience into joining in. Any other framing is secondary at best, and should acknowledge that fact first.
I wish it didn't, but such is the world we live in.
It absolutely was.
Zoe Quinn made a freeware game. Didn't charge a penny for it. And the gameplay was more like a series of multiple choice questions in a "choose your own adventure" text based storytelling format, except positive options get crossed out when your mental state gets worse.
And she got hate because apparently she was sleeping with a games journalist who published an article about her game? So?
CNet got less hate for firing Jeff Gerstmann from Gamespot over a negative review of Kane & Lynch. And even when CNet ironically acquired Giant Bomb and basically acknowledged that Gerstmann was unfairly sacked over Eidos threatening to pull ads, there was even less outrage. Getting bought out by the parent company that initially flipped the middle finger over journalistic standards should have immediately led to a boycott of Giant Bomb if gamers had the same level of standards they showed towards Zoe Quinn but alas, they're hypocrites.
Heck, Future Publishing releasing falsified 9/10 reviews for Driv3r in exchange for early review copies got even less outrage than that...
Anita Sarkeesian crowdfunded and made a very badly-researched series about how tropes negatively portray women in video games and probably gave thunderf00t enough fuel to see him through several nuclear winters. Her episode on Hitman Absolution for example painted the game as encouraging you to murder scantily-clad women when the game actively penalizes you for killing anybody other than your target.
Crowd funding feminist analyses of games was all it took for Sarkeesian to get rape and death threats thrown at her, showing GG was only ever about harassment and misogyny.
If Gamergate has taught me anything, it's that the discourse from both sides were toxic as fuck. I've seen supporters and opponents of the movement get doxxed and swatted everywhere on Twitter.
But also, it taught me that if an e-celebrity or major content creator is big enough, criticising them when they pass away becomes a cardinal sin. Case-in-point: John "Totalbiscuit" Bain, a supporter of GamerGate known for getting into some really toxic flame wars whilst he was still alive.
That is whole point of the video IMHO. This comment you wrote, a balanced opinion on the work done by people and situation of it, would get you labeled an alt right woman hater. There would be 50 replies calling you a piece of shit who wants women out of gaming. "What do you mean 'poorly researched?' do you hate women? Why don't you want women in gaming? I'm sorry are you claiming zoe quinn isnt a REAL game developer because you are calling her amazing game a 'choose your own adventure'? You do realize it's about depression, it seriously helps people, are you saying you want people to be depressed?"
This was the problem, this is what the video calls out over the course of it. Nobody could call zoe a cheating pos, her boyfriend, for the crime of being male that has feelings, was labeled a crybaby. He should have just broken up, worked out, and become a better man, not try to go through his feelings and tell anybody about what she did to him, just another misogynist trying to tear down a powerful woman.
IMHO this is what drove the current right wing gaming nightmare we have. Alt right grifters started coming in and latched on to this very traffic generating, easy to label man vs woman thing. Meanwhile every single gaming related website and subreddit either nuked all discussion from orbit or you would be attacked if you didn't fall in line to the agreed narrative. Honestly that is evident reading through the comments here. So if you wanted to hear any kind of discussion that said, wow this is a really shitty analysis of gaming, the only place you were going to get it was the extreme right commentators, who bundled it along with a ton of shitty opinions.
I'm also really tired of people saying the narrative is written on gamergate and it doesn't matter because games are not serious. It's the same way that if I talked about my very small fiend group exploding at one point in my life people telling me 'that is all high school drama', it's extremely dismissive of what a person is going through, or what a community is going through.
Gamergate did destroy traditional gaming media as we know it, whether that was going to happen or not, this was the big axe that finally gave us what we have now. But that media for me was a huge part of my life, since the 80s I read gaming magazines, then websites, daily. I knew the writers, the opinions, what was in, what was out, all of that. This blew up in 2014 so that was 25 years of my life reading their stuff, and yeah, it did matter. And all those people wouldn't let us talk about it.
But ultimately I think the widespread censorship and 'you are with us or against us' attitude is what drew the line in the sand, either you stand with the 'shut up we are perfect, don't question what i do' people or you are stuck with alt right commentators.
I think this is a pattern that is old as time, where topics get bundled and forever associated with a group, even though they are not related at all and big enough to deserve their own deep dive, and human nature makes you pick one or the other, rather than examining each situation individually, as that requires too much effort.
Even if you want to describe it like that, it’s nonetheless a harassment campaign that worked - that caught on, that had the power to dupe people.
Every day there’s tens of thousands of harassment campaigns that people try to start, but most fizzle out. Gamergate blew up because it struck a nerve among enough people that they felt the need to vibe in it. A lot of “gamers” felt some kind of anger or irritation in the back of their mind against the media at the time and gamersgate was the outlet.
If you tried to do the opposite today, start a harassment campaign against games media for being too misogynistic, it probably wouldn’t go anyway. And that’s interesting, and worthy of study.
Thank you. We should be approaching this topic in that way. Especially when so much time has passed and it's a part of history now.
"Audience misalignment" is a great way to describe it. I will definitely use this term in the future.
There's another layer to it, too. In the 90s and 00s, gaming companies marketed games heavily to young boys, so much so that they essentially created the synthetic "gamer" identity. In the 10s, gaming companies started to market to broader audiences, and also a greater diversity of voices rose to prominence online. A bunch of anomic young men felt like their identity was being stolen from them. Put that together with the very strange media environment of 2014, and something like GamerGate was probably bound to happen around that time.
I always said back then that the big problem (well, one big problem) with GamerGate was that it lacked a class analysis. The targets of their ire were "cultural elites", when it should have been big corporations. But these young men subconsciously thought of the big gaming corporations as their friends, because they were the source of this "gamer" identity in the first place. And the fact that this was an actual identity partially explains why they were so sensitive to the opinions of game journalists. They demanded to be taken seriously. But at the same time, they wanted reviews to be "objective", which basically just meant that they wanted product reviews, not critical analysis.
GamerGate was structurally very similar to other "paranoid style" movements, like the Know-Nothings and the Red Scare; except it was spiritually even more void, because it was also a phenomenon of consumerist entitlement.
As someone that very much was a 'gamer', it was honestly before companies created it. It honestly was a thing, you paid a price socially in the 80's and 90's to be a 'gamer'. Mainstream media's representation of you was basically steve urkle on family matters, which was probably the best you'd get. If you used computers you were an outcast/loser/nerd/geek whatever. Something wrong with you for doing it. Then as you got older and still played games you were equated to knocking toddler toys around as an adult still and in some sort of adult regression because you didn't go to football games and cosplay as a bird or something. But I do remember at the time someone wrote an article about gamers is kinda dead and it's mainstream now, and I remember hating it because it felt true. In a way it was a marker that the old internet was dead too, the mass censorship, the policing with comments everything you say, the 'you didn't include or consider every identity know to mankind in your writing so you must be a piece of shit' response to everything.
I think it is historically significant in in how the internet was divided up, but probably a smaller story than that of the rise of the social media giants for the overall structure of the internet. However I will say I do firmly believe it's the cause of the alt right infection into gaming, or at least it showed them there was a way in and now they are unfortunately here to stay.
I'm about at the end of Anita arc. Quite interesting history leading up to it. It made me recall my own time on Reddit back when the whole backlash against EA, horse armor and microtransactions happened. What stood out to me was one particular quote from one of the articles at the time that dismissed it as "due to EA being an LGBT friendly company" (paraphrasing). It seems absolutely bizarre to me and apparently the whole Gamergate thing was reported on in mainstream news in America, something which I obviously missed and perhaps it explains such kneejerk "it was all a bunch of manufactured sexist outrage and nothing else" reaction. To me, the anti establishment narrative that the video constructs hits much closer to home.
Thank you for the excellent share, I will for sure finish the whole thing. That being said, I love this type of deep dive long form essays anyway, so I don't blame anyone for not engaging with it.