Gamergate

[manofonetitle]

So a few of my friends are supporting this thing that happened last year (or the year before, not sure when it started) called gamergate. It's kind of all they talk about whenever we get onto group chats or skype together, but I was wanting to know what you guys thought of it.

If you have no idea what gamergate is, then here's a brief video explaining it.




Personally, I don't really subscribe to the whole movement (for the longest time I didn't have much information to go off of and by the time I learned enough about it, but the movement seemed to kind of dwindle down), but even then I still find it interesting how it became as big as it did.

Thoughts?

[WeaponTheory]

No matter how many times I try to understand what GamerGate is about...I still can't comprehend what the hell GamerGate is about.

[manofonetitle]

It's a lot to summarize, and I can only go off of my recollection, but I'll give it a try:

Gamergate was started as a hashtag used by gamers to expose foul play among professional game reviewers. Like, reviewers on major websites getting paid by publishers to talk about only the good aspects of the games they were reviewing along with getting free shit. A group of gamers were all like "this is bullshit!" and formed a group called Gamergate, where they mostly called out a bunch of reviewers on said bullshit. Things were going fine until they discovered even more bullshit, which leads into the whole "gamergate is misogynistic" period of gamergate history.
Some time a year, maybe two years ago, a female game developer named Zoe Quinn was called out for giving sexual favors to a writer for some well known gaming blog which created way too positive of a review for Zoe's game. The way this was revealed was because her ex-boyfriend posted the whole story online after they broke up for the very incident. Dayum. Gamergate noticed this and all of a sudden, the gamergate hashtag started being used in tweets calling Zoe Quinn a giant cuntbag in a roundabout way of saying, (also heard about a dox of some kind and death threats though I don't really know the details of those). So after the public sees all these 'gamers' use the gamergate hashtag to 'harrass a woman over the internet', all of a sudden, people start writing articles about how gamergate is a misogynistic troll army. This was also during the time where major game news sites had writers posting about how gamers are losers (backlash to that was pretty hilarious imo). While this was going on, the gamergate members that were not white males made youtube videos posting about how they're sick of the media portraying gamers (especially those involved in gamergate) as fat white neckbeards who hate women (which started the hashtag #notyourshield).
Then we have Arnita Sarkeesian, a feminist vlogger who makes videos where she critiques videogames based on how they treat women. The stuff she says is pretty crazy, she doesn't even play videogames yet she judges them because she runs a feminist blog. If you've never heard of her, she's pretty much the new Jack Thompson (only instead of being a lawyer saying violent videogames makes kids violent, Anita is saying sexist videogames turns boys into rapists, seriously she even made a claim that Princess Peach's character is hatred against women or some shit). But the big reason people hate her is because she's claimed to have gotten death threats that count in the hundreds over the internet, but those claims aren't exactly being backed up and others have countered that a lot of those threats were made by alternative twitter accounts that she created. Not only that, but she uses that story about her death threats as a crutch to get attention by news channels and started a funding campaign to stop online harassment and earned something like millions of dollars from it. Basically, people are claiming that she's a professional victim, and judging by how nutty her online content is, I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. She probably did actually receive a few death threats online though because apparently she's become so influential that games are starting to be affected by them. Apparently the artist for Firewatch confirmed that they were spurred by Anita's videos to change aspects in their story to make it more PC. And when Anita made a video about GTA5 being sexist and harmful, Target and Walmart and some other major retailer pulled it off their shelves in a few countries. I'm sure there's more but basically, she and other feminists that criticize video game representation of women have caused some games to become more PC and some games to not even ship overseas from Japan. Oh and she hates gamergate because they called her out on her shit.

So that's my recollection of what gamergate is about. Again, I don't really subscribe to it, mainly because I feel the same way about gamergate as I do about feminism. It started out as a good cause, but eventually turned into a big confusing, unnecessary mess. The loudest members who take action under each banner are either obnoxious, immature, or have no idea what they're even talking about. My opninion in a nutshell is pretty much what weapon said:


So yeah, just wondered if you guys had any thoughts about the issue or anything to discuss on it.

[CNS]

http://gawker.com/what-is-gamergate-and-...1642909080

You're a fool moot. Don't support this regressive bullshit.

[Shervik]

I dont understand anything, and why are they donating money so that women can make video games? is it impossible to get hired if you are a woman?

[WeaponTheory]

lol oh yeah. I remember the stink about the Zoe chick fucking five guys to promote her depression videogame.

Amazing how that blew up and got to the level it did.

[manofonetitle]

(02-22-2016, 12:00 PM)CNS Wrote: http://gawker.com/what-is-gamergate-and-...1642909080

You're a fool moot. Don't support this regressive bullshit.

I dont support it. I just find the story interesting. I guess you didn't read the big post I made

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(02-22-2016, 12:00 PM)Shervik Wrote: I dont understand anything, and why are they donating money so that women can make video games? is it impossible to get hired if you are a woman?

Not at all. I've personally met several female game developers in the past and according to them, while the industry isn't largely composed of them, they still have just as good a chance as anyone to get hired as long as the work in their portfolio is good.

[Shervik]

(02-22-2016, 04:42 PM)manofonetitle Wrote: Not at all. I've personally met several female game developers in the past and according to them, while the industry isn't largely composed of them, they still have just as good a chance as anyone to get hired as long as the work in their portfolio is good.

then why would they need money?

[CNS]

Your refresher on the issue is what Gamergate ostensibly wants you to believe. It's call for ethics in games journalism is a front for blatant misogyny and is a blowback to the notion that the core demographic for video games is changing. They conveniently start it all with the same person: Zoe Quinn. Not to mention the unilateral distrust of Kotaku, where the journalist Quinn slept with, Nathan Grayson, writes articles for. The simple fact that no Gamergater cares to acknowledge is this: their interaction didn't exist. While it's true they started a relationship, it was well after Quinn's game had been released, a game Kotaku never reviewed or made articles about. This entitlement movement was started by Quinn's spurned ex-boyfriend, who decided to ruin her life after the breakup. A decision, by the way, he has no regrets over.

And if you really want a great idea of how their crusade operated, look no further than the Shadow of Mordor controversy, where Warner Bros. gave certain sites access to the finished product early so said sites could get more traffic for their early reviews. The flip side of that was they were not permitted to be too critical of the game and not to mention or show any of the potentially game breaking glitches it might have. This became a big story on all the major gaming sites when it the truth came out, but the Gamergaters were far too busy harassing Quinn and other women with rounds of doxxing and death threats. Hell, the one guy who could conceivably be behind the movement if its intentions were pure, Jeff Gerstmann, was vocally opposed to it.

I'm glad you don't support it and all, but the discussion has already played itself out. Gamergate is essentially a hate group and the people who started it are vile scumbags that need to mature and think before they speak.

[manofonetitle]

(02-22-2016, 06:33 PM)CNS Wrote: Your refresher on the issue is what Gamergate ostensibly wants you to believe. It's call for ethics in games journalism is a front for blatant misogyny and is a blowback to the notion that the core demographic for video games is changing. They conveniently start it all with the same person: Zoe Quinn. Not to mention the unilateral distrust of Kotaku, where the journalist Quinn slept with, Nathan Grayson, writes articles for. The simple fact that no Gamergater cares to acknowledge is this: their interaction didn't exist. While it's true they started a relationship, it was well after Quinn's game had been released, a game Kotaku never reviewed or made articles about. This entitlement movement was started by Quinn's spurned ex-boyfriend, who decided to ruin her life after the breakup. A decision, by the way, he has no regrets over.

And if you really want a great idea of how their crusade operated, look no further than the Shadow of Mordor controversy, where Warner Bros. gave certain sites access to the finished product early so said sites could get more traffic for their early reviews. The flip side of that was they were not permitted to be too critical of the game and not to mention or show any of the potentially game breaking glitches it might have. This became a big story on all the major gaming sites when it the truth came out, but the Gamergaters were far too busy harassing Quinn and other women with rounds of doxxing and death threats. Hell, the one guy who could conceivably be behind the movement if its intentions were pure, Jeff Gerstmann, was vocally opposed to it.

I'm glad you don't support it and all, but the discussion has already played itself out. Gamergate is essentially a hate group and the people who started it are vile scumbags that need to mature and think before they speak.

You know, I don't really disagree with you about the hate group thing, because at this point it does feel like gamergate got hijacked by immature misogynists, because for the past, i dunno, six months I've done a search on the hashtag, all the comments from people supporting it are just hateful. When I started looking into it over a year ago, it seemed like there was more of a middle ground with a considerable amount of women supporting it, but then there were the people who kept using the gamergate hashtag to harass people, so the whole thing became fucked up. I don't think it started out as a hate group, but it feels like a bunch of hateful people on the interwebs joined the bandwagon specifically to fuck with people and now it's name is tarnished.

It's kind of a weird issue because it's one of those topics that is impossible to get into without having some kind of bias. On one hand, I see people who claim to be pro-gamergate act like complete dicks to people to the point where it's scary, and on the other hand I see people who are anti-gamergate do the exact same thing to people who aren't anti-gamergate.

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(02-22-2016, 05:54 PM)Shervik Wrote:

(02-22-2016, 04:42 PM)manofonetitle Wrote: Not at all. I've personally met several female game developers in the past and according to them, while the industry isn't largely composed of them, they still have just as good a chance as anyone to get hired as long as the work in their portfolio is good.

then why would they need money?

because who doesn't want more money?