Comment on It looks like someone at Activision is leaking Slack screenshots to right-wing X users
ICastFist@programming.dev 2 weeks agoI thought the first gamergate was about gatekeeping women away from games games journalism. Imagine getting mad at trans people existing in a game where shapeshifting monsters and magic exist.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
It was, but Baldur’s Gate was the first game they had a beef with, and it was mostly because they made an Interquel to connect the first two games and one of the female characters was written out of character because a new writer NOT INVOLVED WITH THE ORIGINAL GAME OR ITS TEAM thought the old version of her was sexist and degrading…
The also included joke idle lines that referenced Gamergate and poked fun at it. “It’s all about bringing honor back to knighthood!” (ethics and journalism was the original quote)
While I do believe Gamergate did have some legitimate grievances and myself was part of the early movement (I was kicked out of a facebook group connected to it for “Being a fake girl gamer” who “Just pretends to like games to find a boyfriend”, which… kinda legitimized all the criticism flung its way for me)
The rewrite of the BG Character was a legitimate grievance, since it doesn’t matter how much you personally dislike how the character is written, you still need to be faithful to what came before it while working within the same continuity or you create a plot hole and alienate fans of the character.
However these two things were buried, because the introduction of a random NPC who could be asked about her background was a bigger outrage than these two things.
Other times Gamergate had a legitimate grievance -Game Journalists writing articles about liking Postal 2 as a game, but being in their words “being almost ashamed to admitting it” because it’s “Not politically correct enough”
-Kotaku writing articles that legitimately asked if beating a woman in a video game should legally be counted as rape
-Anita Sarkeesian blatantly lying in an effort to make a career out of demonizing video games like Jack Thompson before her (But as a Journalist instead of a Lawyer) (The lies are too numerous to list, but two that I caught her on personally was claiming that an oversexualized ad for Persona 4: Dancin’ All Night had been used as an official con badge for an event she was covering… It turned out to be a flier she attached to her Con ID just for the outrage machine… and there was a time she wrote off the Hitman franchise for being sexist as she claimed it “encouraged violence against women”, when in reality, the game actively penalizes you for doing anything but taking out your target as silently as possible, with as little collateral damage as possible, and the targets… while I’m not 100% comfortable saying they’re exclusively male, I legitimately can’t think of any female targets off the top of my head, and even then Hitman Targets typically have a backstory showing why they deserve a death from Agent 47 usually involving them making a decision that was financially profitable for them but cost the life of another)
Other times they did not have a legitimate grievance
-Lesbians exist! (Outer Worlds)
-Black people exist! (World of Warcraft)
-Fat people exist! (World of Warcraft)
-Visual Novels exist! (Oh don’t get them fucking started on Depression Quest, a game that literally doesn’t cost anything)
-Female Video Game Developers Exist!
-Transpeople exist! (Hogwarts Legacy, Baldur’s Gate, Guilty Gear, and for some reason the unreleased Fable reboot was accused of having, without evidence a trans protagonist… even though it’s a series largely based in customizing your own hero and deciding their moral compass)
-Female Ratchet’s boobs aren’t big enough, and she was designed by a transguy
-The New Fable has a protagonist that isn’t even implied to be trans, but they’re
-There’s a trans character
-Gail Simone doesn’t like being mansplained to about comic books she literally fucking wrote.
-One of two Optional Lead characters of an Assassin’s Creed game is female! (Which is even funnier considering it was accused of being an executive mandate… When interviews revealed that they originally wanted the game to ONLY have the female character, and her male rival who can ALSO be chosen as a player character… was the one added by Executive Mandate)
-Mortal Kombat isn’t sexy enough because the women have actual designs instead of just wearing underwear, even though they’re still just wearing underwear… and the original designs are literally unlockable (Even for this group I still don’t get it)
-Homosexuals exist (Mortal Kombat X - This one killed me because Kung Jin has one line that hints at him being gay and it’s so subtle I figured it was talking about a girl, the writer had to clarify… Yet people immediately screamed Kung jin was “rubbing the LGBT Lifestyle in people’s faces!”… This game literally has a scene in which an evil necromancer is being held hostage by the US Military to prevent the return of an Elder God who has threatened revenge on the Guardian Deity of Earth… that itself is interrupted by Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade complaining to each other about their failed marriage… meaning the HETEROSEXUAL UNION IS THE ONE BEING SHOVED IN MY FACE!)
-A black guy doesn’t like slavery (Mortal Kombat 11, no seriously they whined about Jax canonically disagreeing with America’s Institution of Slavery)
-Women with facial hair exist! (Horizon Zero Dawn)
-People called the movement’s founder anti-semetic and homophobic despite him being a gay jew… A gay jew that is constnatly saying homophobic and anti-semetic shit and claims to either be Catholic or Jewish depending on which suits him better, claimed to be married to a black man who is oddly absent from his life, and then “divorced him” and became an “ex-gay”
AND THE LIST GOES ON
Basically, GamerGate had SOME legitimate concerns, but, their bad takes far outnumbered the good takes and were mostly just “MINORITY IS IN A THING, THAT’S BAD!”, which hurt any legitimate cause they may have had, and makes it obvious the real goal was to push gamers to the Far Right
Sidenote: To whom it may concern, I actually hated when they made Bridget a transgirl in Guilty Gear. I mean Transpeople are based, but… given that her backstory is basically “Anime John Money Experience”, it rubs me entirely the wrong way and I liked her “femboi” incarnation a lot better. IT would have been cooler if her unnamed sibling in an ironic twist, turned out to be a transgirl, if they really wanted to appeal to Transgender Bridget fans. Having Bridget herself be trans is very uncomfortable when you remember that she was raised as a girl, told she was a girl, and made to present as such solely to try to fool the concept of fate.