GamerGate's Image Problem

RexMundane

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Mr.Doh said:
RexMundane said:
Okay then, lets play along. In spite of all of this stemming from Zoe Quinn having the vagina that broke the camel's back in all this, and the harassment she's received as a result, and that the hashtag was created when Baldwin was sharing the video about her, let us assume there was never any similar sentiment involved in this at all, and this was only only only ever about journalism and ethics.

So how's Anita Sarkeesian fit into all this? She's not a journalist guilty of emailing other journalists, not an indiedev accused of sleeping her way to the top, nothing more than a commentator. So why's she so important GG has to damage control and pretend they're not talking about her by using a nickname? Why's Milo climbing up her ass and claimind she's lying about police reports using the hashtag? If this is so about her that you need to keep saying how much it isn't, how does she even get brought up?

PS - I assume you didn't mean to say #gameethnic while defending against charges of prejudice, but come on, it's a little funny you did.
#gameethnic was a tag that devised as a diversionary tactic. It didn't work. I'm just making a joke on it.
...no, see because you meant to say Ethic, but you said Ethnic which means... ah, forget it.
 

RexMundane

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Mr.Doh said:
RexMundane said:
...no, see because you meant to say Ethic, but you said Ethnic which means... ah, forget it.
My mother tongue is not English. So you will have to pardon me.
But was my answer satisfied you?
Sorry, assumed it was merely a typo and not a language difficulty, didn't mean any offense, just thought it was amusing.

That said, it's all well and good to try and distance yourselves from attacking Anita now, but I've been following this a while, and that's what the attitude was two weeks ago when the whole "she never contacted the authorities" mess happened, so I don't see a change. It's well and good to say you learned from the experience, but the next week when the GDC Bomb Threat story broke the immediate assumption was that she made it up to divert from Milo's emails, instead of it being exactly six months to the date since it happened and the GDC could talk about it now. Gate lost it's mind and got back to attacking her again, and then the facts come out and "oh, well we've learned a lesson" again. Are you telling me you believe that if another story about her comes up, and another flimsy excuse to attack her again appears, that the whole thread is going to politely avoid mentioning her?

And as far as #GameEthics being a diversionary tactic, this is frankly why I have a hard time taking Gate seriously at all. Nobody is saying you can't use both (afaik), just if you have reasonable arguments, why not make them there as well? Look, whatever you think of Gate and it's motives, you have to acknowledge that it has a toxic public perception. If you have points you want to make, by all means make them elsewhere. This insane insularity, never leave the hashtag, never list our goals, never have someone in control (and incidentally, if you don't think Milo has you eating out of the palm of his hand, you are sorely mistaken), this is cult behavior. If you're unwilling to reach out and meet halfway, why should they come to you?
 

WindKnight

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One thing I have to ask (and sorry if this has been covered already), but given GG tends to misrepresent and take anything negative said about hem as an attack, why are they hailing Milo Yiannopolous a hero when he wrote this [http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/08/14/Players-as-young-as-12-and-13-are-being-raped-by-dorky-weirdos-on-Grand-Theft-Auto] article on an unpleasent GTA Online mod?

I mean, in several places he's outright saying things a certain feminist hasn't said but is actively accused of saying.
 

Mouser_House

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Dragonbums said:
The only thing I never understand is that if the /b/ board on 4chan is bringing the entire board to such a low level that even the admins of the site wouldn't be surprised if they all got arrested for it's very existence...why don't they finally put that thread to rest.
The site admin needs to pretty much permanently close down /b/, /r9k/ and /pol/ but as soon as he does this they're all going to retaliate and raid and DDoS the rest of the site for weeks, maybe longer.

The site has been around for over a decade so it's had time to gather up shitty people in its "containment boards." Now with the hacker celeb leaks, the publicity makes the site look uglier than ever, no matter what kind of steps the admin takes to archive threads and up security. The smart 4chan users are counting down until the site gets purged/sold/raided by Sweden. They're ready to jump ship.

On the one hand it's probably for the best that the mods got tired of GG threads spamming the report function and finally gave them the boot. On the other hand, it's pretty bizarre that they'd get punished before /b/, /r9k/ or /pol/ did. Or is it? It's because late GG was still just a small fraction of /v/ users with some refugees from reddit and neogaf mixed in. Kicking them off the site was easy enough. And they are definitely not an army of hackers.
 

Jaegerbombastic

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RexMundane said:
And as far as #GameEthics being a diversionary tactic, this is frankly why I have a hard time taking Gate seriously at all. Nobody is saying you can't use both (afaik), just if you have reasonable arguments, why not make them there as well? Look, whatever you think of Gate and it's motives, you have to acknowledge that it has a toxic public perception. If you have points you want to make, by all means make them elsewhere. This insane insularity, never leave the hashtag, never list our goals, never have someone in control (and incidentally, if you don't think Milo has you eating out of the palm of his hand, you are sorely mistaken), this is cult behavior. If you're unwilling to reach out and meet halfway, why should they come to you?
The #GameEthics tag was never meant to discuss the issues Gamergate brought up while being free of the previous hashtag's supposed taint. It was meant to derail the conversation. We have screenshots of the original creator of the tag where he outright says it. And, if you actually look at the posts in the tag, there was very little talk about the issues of the relationship between certain indie devs and games journalists. In fact most of the tweets are no more than pats on the back on how #GameEthics was oh so cooler than #Gamergate with no actual discussion. It was blatant astroturf, hence why it died after a couple days.

Again, why are you so adamant that Twitter is a good place to hold these discussion while a livestream is somehow tainted?
 

RexMundane

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Mr.Doh said:
Here's the thing about the 6 month bomb thing, everyone i know were never under the assumption that Anita made it up. We were however mad at KOTAKU for publishing such a huge story 6 months late, 5 minutes right after Nero's mailing list came up. You'd thought a story about bombing would be publish a bit earlier than that. And we also mad at KOTAKU for using Anita as a shield AGAIN, for how many time now. Of course, some people gonna say that it is Anita and all that, but we tried our best to police ourselves here. The link to SilverString Media is still one of our sore spots that needed to address. Hence why all those factored in to why we can be a bit jumpy when talking about her.
It wasn't "late" though, it was the earliest that the relevant parties could have made any comment. It's not just "6 months" as an approximate, it was exactly 26 weeks later and any gag order or otherwise police sanctioned silence on the issue would have lifted. As it was just a threat and not an actual bomb where lives were at stake, and since the "bomber" clearly just wanted attention, the best thing would be to deny it to him, hence the silence for this much time. There was no reason to bring it up before the gag ran out.

As far as the timing, I'm not going to pretend I can prove Kotaku didn't release it at the moment they did in order to try and divert from Milo, pushing it earlier than need be for whatever reason. But similarly, to get just as conspiratorial, can you prove Milo didn't know that was the day the GDC story was going to hit? I mean think about it, that FOIA request would have gone through, the emails from the SFPD mention the incident in March, so he could easily have known about it, so is it possible that it's the other way around? That Milo was trying to pre-empt the GDC story, only to claim after the fact that it was a false-flag? I mean neither of us has proof either way on this, it's all speculation, my point is why assume the worst out of hand either way?

Jaegerbombastic said:
Again, why are you so adamant that Twitter is a good place to hold these discussion while a livestream is somehow tainted?
Jesus hell when on earth did I Defend Twitter as a forum for reasonable dialogue?

And to clarify my point from yesterday, which I had thought would have been obvious, "livestream" isn't a problem, "hostile livestream" is. Some kind of 3rd party moderator (whoever that'd be in this situation) trying to keep conversation on point and all sides having equal time to make their case to a receptive audience? Fantastic.
 

Caostotale

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Joska said:
Caostotale said:
Houseman said:
Gamergate has an image problem like Batman has an image problem.
Makes sense to me, as I've come to see Batman as representing insufferable levels of far-right anarcho-capitalist fantasy, a bullshit ideal for anti-democratic sociopaths and technocrats everywhere.
And people who really hate due process. I mean not really, Batman is an awesome piece of fiction. Batman in the real world would be a complete disaster and a definite indication of mental illness for the supposed batman.
Exactly, and this is what seems to be the most silly thing about Gamergate. Whatever their platform was initially built on and whatever it represents now, all of its momentum is based on some vague conspiratorial sense that the gaming market is somehow failing due to the presence of specific 'outsider influences' and 'supervillains' and that they have to purge the gaming media to set things right again. They have to save gaming from itself because the consumer base simply doesn't know better and has been completely led astray or scattered chaotically by that handful of blacklisted writers. At no point do they stop and consider the blunt fucking truth that consumer bases grow and change over time and that the gaming industry would be suicidal if it ignored those forces and clung to some 'gaming fundamentalism', nor do they stop and consider the fact that 99% of the purchasing gaming audience gives a fuck about gaming media to begin with. But nope...these clowns have just declared themselves Bruce Wayne or John Galt and all those journalists need to be thrown into Arkham or kept out of Galt's Gulch. I feel like a lot of the people who are finding the movement completely exacerbating feel that way because we're confident in an idea that the world doesn't operate based on cartoon or comic book rules (a ruleset that always ends up needing some degree of far-right authoritarian behavior on the heroes' parts, as things like the actual market, due process, etc... are just too untrustworthy).
 

Calbeck

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Mr.Doh said:
RexMundane said:
...no, see because you meant to say Ethic, but you said Ethnic which means... ah, forget it.
My mother tongue is not English. So you will have to pardon me.
But was my answer satisfied you?
Could have fooled me, your English is better than many Americans I've met. -:D
 

kyp275

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RexMundane said:
It wasn't "late" though, it was the earliest that the relevant parties could have made any comment. It's not just "6 months" as an approximate, it was exactly 26 weeks later and any gag order or otherwise police sanctioned silence on the issue would have lifted.
Uh, gag order? police sanctioned silence? You may want to take it easy on them TV shows. Gag orders in LE matters are issued by a court, usually to prevent details of an impending trial leaking to the public and tainting the jury pool. The police certainly don't have the legal authority to impose such an order, what happens sometimes is that the media will self-censor to prevent aiding the suspect in an active/continuing criminal incident with too much up to date info.

Neither of which applies in this case. As a matter of fact, bomb threats are often immediately reported on, even ones that turned out to be a hoax, precisely because of how important it is to evacuate and prevent people from going there. When was the last time you heard a news report that says "Breaking News! xxxx school received a bomb threat.... 6 months ago!"

As it was just a threat and not an actual bomb where lives were at stake, and since the "bomber" clearly just wanted attention, the best thing would be to deny it to him, hence the silence for this much time.
Can you maybe explain why a threat against an individual should be taken seriously and publicly condemned, but a bomb threat to a convention which threatens the live of a substantial number of people (ironically involving the same individual) "is just a threat", and shouldn't be published as to deny the perpetrator's crave for attention?


There was no reason to bring it up before the gag ran out.
Again, unless you know about a pending criminal trial that no one else on the planet knows about, there isn't any gag order.
 

Calbeck

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Caostotale said:
Exactly, and this is what seems to be the most silly thing about Gamergate. Whatever their platform was initially built on and whatever it represents now, all of its momentum is based on some vague conspiratorial sense that the gaming market is somehow failing due to the presence of specific 'outsider influences' and 'supervillains' and that they have to purge the gaming media to set things right again.
Um, sorry, haven't heard ANYONE on the GG side making this pitch. At all. I literally have no clue where you cobbled it together from.

Part of the problem about your claim is that it's much too complex of a "plan" for a bunch of cats with no herder to even agree on in the first place. To be a "movement" thing, that plan or a close simile would have to be plastered all over the GG networks --- but you and you alone are where I'm hearing it from.

Which leads me to conclude that this is your view of the movement, and you are simply reinforcing what you would like to believe by asserting that it is fact.

I get the same from Mormons who tell me I should read their Book.

EDIT: Seriously, "purge" the game media? How the hell would we do THAT?!
 

Calbeck

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kyp275 said:
Can you maybe explain why a threat against an individual should be taken seriously and publicly condemned, but a bomb threat to a convention which threatens the live of a substantial number of people (ironically involving the same individual) "is just a threat", and shouldn't be published as to deny the perpetrator's crave for attention?
Um... yeah... I can kind of confirm that if a "bomb threat" is called in to police from a convention, you will get:

* The Police

* The Fire Department

* The Bomb Squad

* any Media with radio scanners listening for the above three.

You see, I'm the "Mad Bomber" of ConFurence 4. It was a costume prop which the hotel chief of security chose to treat as real. Stupid of me to have a prop like that at all, sure, but what was REALLY funny was when one of the cops asked why he'd called in a threat on "an obvious toy".

His response? "We gotta get these faggots outta the hotel."

Cop was gay. Reported it to the hotel management. The security chief was blackballed from working in California again.
 

RexMundane

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kyp275 said:
RexMundane said:
It wasn't "late" though, it was the earliest that the relevant parties could have made any comment. It's not just "6 months" as an approximate, it was exactly 26 weeks later and any gag order or otherwise police sanctioned silence on the issue would have lifted.
Uh, gag order? police sanctioned silence? You may want to take it easy on them TV shows. Gag orders in LE matters are issued by a court, usually to prevent details of an impending trial leaking to the public and tainting the jury pool. The police certainly don't have the legal authority to impose such an order, what happens sometimes is that the media will self-censor to prevent aiding the suspect in an active/continuing criminal incident with too much up to date info.

Neither of which applies in this case. As a matter of fact, bomb threats are often immediately reported on, even ones that turned out to be a hoax, precisely because of how important it is to evacuate and prevent people from going there. When was the last time you heard a news report that says "Breaking News! xxxx school received a bomb threat.... 6 months ago!"

As it was just a threat and not an actual bomb where lives were at stake, and since the "bomber" clearly just wanted attention, the best thing would be to deny it to him, hence the silence for this much time.
Can you maybe explain why a threat against an individual should be taken seriously and publicly condemned, but a bomb threat to a convention which threatens the live of a substantial number of people (ironically involving the same individual) "is just a threat", and shouldn't be published as to deny the perpetrator's crave for attention?


There was no reason to bring it up before the gag ran out.
Again, unless you know about a pending criminal trial that no one else on the planet knows about, there isn't any gag order.
I will concede I used the term "gag order" incorrectly. The police likely asked the GDC while the investigation was pending not to release information for six months as it wouldn't be helpful, and would likely only embolden the culprit. When the six months were up, the GDC made the announcement, and the press reported on it after that point when they first heard there was ever a threat.

And you know what, that's all largely assumptions based on relevant facts that have emerged since, and how these things are usually handled, sure. But it's a less ridiculous assumption than whatever insane conspiracy GG could concoct to explain GDC filing a false 6-month old police report at Kotaku's behest within 15 minutes of a post on Breitbart as some kind of meaningless diversion which, by staggering coincidence, happened exactly six months to the day after the incident.
 

Jaegerbombastic

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Mr.Doh said:
And to clarify my point from yesterday, which I had thought would have been obvious, "livestream" isn't a problem, "hostile livestream" is. Some kind of 3rd party moderator (whoever that'd be in this situation) trying to keep conversation on point and all sides having equal time to make their case to a receptive audience? Fantastic.
TotalBiscuit tried exactly that, but then the journalists involved dropped. This was right before Milo's initial report on GamJournoPro came out.

Also, how is one forum of debate set up by one of the sides (the streams) "hostile) and one forum of debate that was setup as astroturf (#GameEthics) isn't?
 

Caostotale

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Calbeck said:
Which leads me to conclude that this is your view of the movement, and you are simply reinforcing what you would like to believe by asserting that it is fact.
Yes, it was meant as a loose theory/criticism, but I'm still sure I could go to any Gamestop in the area and, after polling consumers for a week, maybe present 5-10 people who have any opinion on this bullshit whatsoever (and further, I would predict 80% of that 5-10 subset are simply aware of the debate but don't actually care either way about it).

I get the same from Mormons who tell me I should read their Book.
Yeah, man, saying my off-the-cuff and half-improvised forum post is the same as the practices of an organized religious campaign totally isn't hyperbolic or ridiculous...

EDIT: Seriously, "purge" the game media? How the hell would we do THAT?!
From day one, I've imagined that nothing would make the Quinnspiracy or GG people happier than to see those proven 'corrupt' (i.e. Quinn, the people she supposedly slept with, Anthony Burch, etc...), as well as those dread SJWs (Moviebob, Jim Sterling, Leigh Alexander, Anita Sarkeesian), all deserved to be fired from game journalism firms , publicly shamed for doing the gaming world some 'gross' disservice (i.e. the only strategy that could apply to someone like Sarkeesian, who works for herself), or otherwise disenfranchised.

'Purge' might be too strong a word...fine...I'll amend it to a call to 'purify' gaming media.
 

RexMundane

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Jaegerbombastic said:
Mr.Doh said:
And to clarify my point from yesterday, which I had thought would have been obvious, "livestream" isn't a problem, "hostile livestream" is. Some kind of 3rd party moderator (whoever that'd be in this situation) trying to keep conversation on point and all sides having equal time to make their case to a receptive audience? Fantastic.
TotalBiscuit tried exactly that, but then the journalists involved dropped. This was right before Milo's initial report on GamJournoPro came out.

Also, how is one forum of debate set up by one of the sides (the streams) "hostile) and one forum of debate that was setup as astroturf (#GameEthics) isn't?
They weren't prepared to talk about Milo's article on the email dump that just broke, accused literally everyone of wrongdoing, didn't reveal specifics, and yet was naturally going to end up dominating the discussion. Why the hell wouldn't they pull out? And for the record, TB's holier-than-thou attitude in that video didn't do him any favors as far as seeming reasonable.

edited for clarity.