Submitted 8 months ago by hedge@beehaw.org to gaming@beehaw.org
This growing group of people want to believe themselves a new incarnation of Gamergate, a harassment campaign started in 2014 that targeted women speaking out against misogyny in the video games industry.
I’m so glad journalists aren’t giving them false legitimacy. There’s a user that posts gaming news to another lemmy community and they said it was a “harassment” campaign (the quotes being theirs) and… yikes
It certainly is more mask off this time around. They aren't trying to hide behind euphemistic slogans like "ethics in game journalism". Now they are just blatantly open about their anger that women and minorities are being represented in games and how that's a bad thing.
There certainly was some actual "ethics in video game journalism" discussion early on that I felt was legitimate, but that got drowned out pretty quickly by the misogynists (which, from what I gather, was the entire point - it seems the misogynists started the whole thing and used the "ethics in game journalism" thing as a front to try to legitimise their agenda).
I think the discussion about the personal relationships game journalists have with developers in general was a reasonable one to have. It unfortunately ended up just laser focusing on Zoe Quinn supposedly trading sex for good reviews, which was untrue, sexist and resulted in nasty personal attacks. But I think it was worth at least examining the fact that game journalists and game developers often have close relationships and move in the same circles, and that game journalism can often be a stepping stone to game development. Those are absolutely things that could influence someone's reviews or articles, consciously or subconsciously.
And another conversation worth having was the fact that gaming outlets like IGN were/are funded by adverts from gaming companies. It makes sense, of course - the Venn diagram of IGN's (or other gaming outlets') readers and gaming companies' target audience is almost a perfect circle, which makes the ad space valuable to the gaming companies. And because it's valuable to gaming companies, it's better for the outlets to sell the ad space to them for more money than to sell it to generic advertising platforms. But it does mean it seems valid to ask whether the outlets giving bad reviews or writing critical articles might cause their advertisers to pull out, and therefore they might avoid being too critical.
Now I don't think the games industry is corrupt or running on cronyism, personally. And I certainly don't believe it's all run by a shadowy cabal of woke libruls who are trying to force black people, women (and worse, gasp black women shudder) into games. But I do feel it was worth asking about the relationships between journalists, developers, publishers and review outlets - and honestly, those are the kinds of things that both game journalists and people who read game journalism should constantly be re-evaluating. It's always good to be aware of potential biases and influences.
The fact that the whole thing almost immediately got twisted into misogyny, death threats and a general hate campaign was both disappointing and horrifying. And the fact that it led to the alt-right, and that you can trace a line from it to Brexit and to Donald Trump becoming US president, is even worse.
There were a lot of valid conversations to be had about journalistic integrity. Which made it all the more damning that Gamergate never once had any of these conversations, ever.
It’s nice to see someone acknowledge that it started it as an actual, important conversation about the shady monetary influence that game publishers has on gaming news sites. That’s what made the hijacking and eventually media branding of Gamergate even worse, because the media bought into their narrative that this was the same conversations, by the same people, and everyone sort of threw the baby out with the brigaded bathwater.
If you look up histories of Gamergate now, sites like Vox actually talk how it began on 4-chan and later 8-chan as a troll campaign, but no one ever really talks about what it was they were hijacking.
I think a lot of those conversations, like publishers’ power over reviews via withholding review copies (as perhaps most famously, Bethesda did to Kotaku), and what it meant as a reader to trust the sites that hadn’t been blacklisted, got totally forgotten after the dust had settled.
It also says a lot about our mass media, and it’s willingness to elevate and legitimize troll campaigns for the clicks.
As far as I remember, the name was coopted after the fact so the original intent was there
Not really. It was initially called the Quinnspiracy, after Zoe Quinn, author of Depression Quest, an e-choose-your-own-adventure-book that got some coverage in videogame journals.
Shit blew up when her ex made massive accusations about sleeping with the journalists in question. Then some actor coined the term Gamergate, and their targets expanded to then-journalist Anita Sarkeesian (I think she works more as a DEI advisor now) and indie game developer Brianna Wu.
It started as a harassment campaign and they used ethics in games journalism as a recruitment tactic
Everyone has their own view of a movement, my introduction to gamersgate was through total biscuit and it was about ethics in gaming journalism but it then got derailed by a bunch of idiots and the people wanting more factual journalism and fewer paid reviews left because they didnt want to be associated with what gg had become.
Christ, Gamergate is still around? :/
It helped bring trump into office in 2016, so they are ginning it up again for the election year.
The problem is, this never needed to grow to the point where some people call it that. Some people not wanting to buy games a group of people worked on doesn’t make it a hate campaign; but calling them out in an attempt to shut them down eventually did turn it into one, a one with way more people’s support at that.
Their Steam curator page used to have around 2000 followers until all those articles calling them out were published, and literally no one gives shits about curators in the first place. Now? They have 250k, and some people started giving shit about it.
Lol, no one’s putting a gun to people’s heads to make them act bigoted. If your response to being accused of racism is “Oh, yeah? I’ll show you racism!” then you’re just showing your true colors.
They also leave out half of the story: The whole thing already started in October. After months of harassment one of the employees snapped and called their shit out. But they leave that part out, claim they got attacked out of nowhere and play the victims.
The media focusing on these fringe groups lends legitimacy to them and puts a spotlight on them, which in turn draws people on their side but unaware of them, to them.
“This thing is making people I don’t like mad, so I’m going to support this thing, because I like making those people mad.”
By attacking it when your attacks can’t actually harm the group per se, all you’re really doing is giving it visibility. No one’s saying it’s creating racists/ bigots, but it is giving them a more powerful platform, since they’re no longer just a bunch of bigoted individuals, but are now Gamergate™, whose dumb ideas the media will publish articles about.
Think about it this way - those 248k people who respond to seeing an article accusing a group of racism with “sign me up”, are not the same people being accused to begin with.
Honestly, i have no qualms with the original steam curator. All he did was point out that SBI was involved in the game or not. People have the right to buy or not buy a product for whatever reason. The curator and its group would have remained obscure and practically irrelevant if one SBI employee didn’t call for harassment against Kabrutus on twitter. All they had to do was to let people quietly not buy games they were not interested in but they called for mob justice on the curator. And i can’t help giving the gamer side just a drop of legitimacy this time because every article on the whole debacle forgets that this is what sparked the fire.
This is largely propelled forward by teenage boys and YouTubers and steamers who cater to teenage boys.
I remember being a young boy and getting enraged at Jack Thompson. It felt like he was going after me personally.
These youngsters perceive their primary identities—male, white, and gamer—as under siege. The mere hint of such challenges triggers a stress response, flooding their brains with cortisol. Consequently, when they retaliate by harassing developers, they experience a rush of dopamine. It completely turns off their higher thinking, they’re only interested in the next hit.
although with the Jack Thompson thing there was actual censorship afoot, and I wasn't worried after the supreme court ruled video games were protected free speech. but yes that kinda did set the stage and was why it was gamers in particular
Gamegate was 10 years ago. It was terrible then and really ruined the Internet. Assholes learned of they were big enough assholes they could get what they wanted. Social media companies learned that assholes get more attention and get them more money. Traditional media learned that reporting on the social media assholes got them more attention. Now it's all assholes all the time everywhere.
"Make your own games!"
"Okay!"
"No! Not like that!"
It is a "mostly only exists in the minds of those reporting it" thang just as it was originally. Yup, same nazi fucks posting their teen fascist fan fic last time are posting it this time and just as then, and as always back through time. No one would even know the less than a dozen wack jobs existed if the media didn't amplify their message for rage bait clicks.
There’s a PlayStation community I was subscribed to whose main mod posted a gamergatey rant over the weekend with a number of factual inaccuracies. I wanted desperately to assume they were just benignly uninformed, but it didn’t turn out that way.
I’m not interested in subscribing to a community at risk of being affected by that kind of toxicity, so I had to leave. Which is a bummer because I liked having PS-specific news in my feed.
Prior to Twitter being bought by Musk, I was pretty active on there due to being part of NAFO. Typically I would call out Russian disinformation regarding the invasion of Ukraine, but I noticed some of these Pro-Kremlin accounts had associations with gamergate. One individual had something like “gamergate survivor” in his profile and I proceeded to call him out for it. In came the false narrative and derogatory language, but I’m guessing my shitposting responses got to him. Within minutes of interacting with this guy, someone was trying to get into my account. Fortunately I had MFA setup, but the mere fact that this so called gamergate survivor launched an attempt to hack into my account tells me I struck a cord with him mocking the whole movement. It’s so damn childish.
Ironically, I was binge watching The Alt-Right Playbook today, and one of the videos explained that behavior with them happens all the time with unhinged trolls. “Every time you try to debate with a reactionary, you’re gambling with other people’s safety.” If they get butthurt over something you said, they’ll very likely crank up the ante on either you or someone like you. Sometimes they’ll try to hack your account, other times they’ll try to swat you, as they tried with me one time.
I don’t have time to read the article, is this another one of those articles that defends Sweet Baby Inc without acknowledging any of the reasons why they are getting backlash? Like all of the tweets from SBI employees that either use racist/anti-LGBT slurs and advocating for the mass genocide of gay people or the fact that this whole thing started because SBI started a harassment campaign towards the creator of a steam group despite not having any information that actually proved that the group was in the wrong and also ignoring the fact that the group was created by someone from Brazil and claiming that the group was created by right-winged conspiracy theorists.
I don’t have time to read the article, but I do have time to unleash a paragraph stream of consciousness that asks questions that may or may not be delusions on my part
Just out of curiosity, have you even seen any of the tweets that I’m referring too?
So I just read the article and I was right and I’ll be editing my comment to reflect that.
Also, I did just re look at the tweets, they weren’t calling for the mass genocide of gay people, they were calling for the mass genocide of jewish people. The problem was that the tweet was linked with another tweet where they used the F-slur, so I forgot they said “jews” and not the F-slur. I’m going to have fix that too.
Lol love how no one is shitting on The Verge when it’s a topic they agree with.
Hello. The Verge is shit and manipulative in the way they framed this, but SBI is a beat up. It’s the usual gamers not really knowing how games are made.
I hope your visit to the Dr goes okay, OP!
Statistically, white men still dominate the video game space in terms of who is playing, making, starring, and writing about games.
Starring in, surely.
who is playing
This is either wrong or misleading. Women make up 48% of gamers. That isn’t a majority quite, but mem certainly aren’t dominating either. When you throw race as a demographic into this maybe it changes or maybe they just relied on how they feel about it, but I think it’s misleading either way.
Does this include Candy Crush an mobile gaming? I’d say that people who play something on their phone every now and then won’t be foaming from their mouths because of something like this. Then again, they don’t buy the games that we’re talking about here so that’s why I’m asking (I checked your link but couldn’t find this info)
video games being mostly men was a thing but hasn't been for over a decade now
I’d like to know what source that page is using. What does it count as “gaming”? Because too often, these stats include both intentional and incidental gaming. Those are my terms because I don’t know what the official terminology is, but it’s a distinction that I know gets talked about in serious circles and it’s worth making here. When people talk about who is a “gamer”, they instinctively always mean people who have made a deliberate decision to sit down and play a game now. They don’t mean “oh I’m bored, let me pull out the phone and play a round of Candy Crush”.
Computerchairgeneral@fedia.io 8 months ago
The thing that gets me about this is that it's always some nefarious outside group pressuring devs to make their games "woke" or whatever. It never seems to occur to these people that the people making the games might actually hold those beliefs and aren't being forced to put them in games at gunpoint. Also, did the guy complaining about Ragnarok play GoW 2018? The fact that Kratos isn't the same person he was in the old series is basically the entire point.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 8 months ago
I always love that. It’s some liberal plot all the time. Like video games artists aren’t some of the most lgbtq folk I’ve ever seen lol
metaStatic@kbin.social 8 months ago
How many diverse representational check boxes are drug out on the street and shot so they can sell their uninteresting dross in China?
They don't have values they have a marketing strategy; and it's because of that marketing strategy that those check boxes are totally 1 dimensional, boring, and replaceable.
Actual diversity doesn't look or feel like a personal attack.
Go watch She-ra and tell me the gay dads aren't integral to Bow's character and try to tell me that isn't the exception to the vast majority of cardboard cutouts whose ONLY character trait is a single DEI check box.
Uranium3006@kbin.social 8 months ago
for disney, the rank and file are pushing against their own bosses. the gay you're seeing is what they got away with after their bosses tried to cancel shows. I don't know about video games but if you say so I believe you about it. I wonder what internal fights are going on?
AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
I always feel a little bit sorry for rage bigots like this, because of how dull their world and experiences must be. Like if he felt that the new Kratos felt narratively unsatisfying, or that his journey felt unsatisfying, that’d at least be an opinion with the potential to be interesting. But nah, it’s just “things are different”, with embedded implication that different = bad.