IceForce said:
Tono Makt said:
Silvanus said:
Tono Makt said:
From the start of GamerGate, Jim and Bob decided to let their personal politics interfere with their work and customer relations [...]
What did Jim do wrong?
The show was always opinionated; it was kind of the basis of it. What edged it into becoming an interference with the work?
It wasn't the show for either Bob or Jim - it was the reactions on Social Media and Twitter in particular.
The main issue I have with this is the fact that you've identified the source of the problems as being on social media and twitter, and NOT in their actual writings and videos.
Don't get me wrong, Bob's behavior on twitter was pretty disgraceful. But, as long as it stayed there and didn't creep into his work, then that doesn't make it unethical. And since it wasn't unethical, then technically it should have been of no interest to Gamergate.
Their actions on Twitter (Bob in particular) are part of their Brand. Their Brands were associated with the Escapists' Brand. There can only be a limited degree of Brand separation at the best of times, and that degree gets even smaller when the Brands are using their literal names - "MovieBOB and the JIMquisition". When one part of the Brand is acting disgracefully (as in the case of Bob), it necessarily has a knock-on effect to the rest of the Brand.
This knock-on effect would have been less if Bob was using just his legal name - Bob Chipman - on the site, and his MovieBob was his freelance/personal/YouTube Channel/Twitter handle/etc. name. (sort of like me and Tono Makt) Or if he was using an entirely different identity for this (like seems to be somewhat the case with his Game Overthinker stuff, but I could be quite wrong about that - I have loathed his Game Overthinker stuff since I first found it when the Big Picture came out in what, 2009? - so the only time I look at the GO stuff is when someone has posted it with a caption like "Get what this IDIOT is saying now!") which was divested from his MovieBob identity. But as they were literally the same Identity, what he did in one will have legitimate effects to the other.
When one aspect of the Brand is affected, the entire Brand is affected. Sometimes this is good - everything Bob did was helped by the popularity of MovieBob and later the Big Picture. They got views, they got support, they got traffic because of the Escape to the Movies stuff, which is good - I personally liked the Big Picture far more than his Escape to the Movies, and I probably wouldn't have looked at them if I hadn't enjoyed his Escape to the Movies. At the same time, when he screws up as badly as he did on Twitter under the MovieBob name, that affects the rest of the brand as much, if not moreso, than the good stuff from before.