Poll: I want to change the Gamer reputation.

[grassgremlin]

So it IS a separate hashtag trick. *slow clap*

If you're willing to talk to me like a reasonable adult, I'm all ears.
However, if you guys want to keep making assumptions about my character then I don't think we'll ever get anything done.

I get it though. I get the conclusion you're trolling and that's really annoying.

 

[Nirallus]

Its a good idea, but none of the gators I've encountered are willing to do it because oh noes, they'll the momentum if they arse the effort to get rid of violent fuckwits and bigots from their ranks. But no, don't say that they're bigots or anything, because thats only for a few people, a few people that they take no effort to separate themselves from.

What makes you think we have the power to purge the internet of trolls? Goon/GNAA types will shit up the new hashtag just as easily. The journalists will attack it just the same, because it really is this simple: They were called out on unethical behavior, and they've shown that they will stop at nothing to deflect from that.

 

[Something Amyss]

If you want, you can borrow #istandwithbatboy.

Batboy brings with it all the journalistic integrity of the Weekly World News.

 

[Davroth]

I don't like harrassment.
I don't like seeing women deciding they don't want to belong as gamers.
I don't like to see queer people feel like they don't belong as gamers.
I don't like to see minorities feel like they don't belong as gamers.

So basically we are in 100% agreement then?

The problem you guys seem to miss is that "tumblr feminisms" is caused by decades of abuse.
I understand why people have extreme views.
Why women hate men.
Why black people hate whites.
Why queer folk hate straight or cis-gendered people.

Yeah, it's is crazy. I agree. I wish these people get help.

I condemn all kinds of hate, and I wont entertain hate. It doesn't matter if hate is justified or not, if you choose to turn hate into a significant part of your personality, you are not worth talking to. And the only hope I have is that those people grow up being very very ashamed of themselves.

It's tough to feel like you belong when everyone tells you you're not.
It's hard not to see it as misognistic when Gamergate grabbed Zoe Quinn by the throat and told her she was a "whore, a slut, a ****" for sleeping with men. Not it wasn't enough just point out collusion. You had to call it five guys. You had to joke about her sex life. Whether it's true or not didn't matter. Whether she is a good person or not didn't matter.

You turned someone who did something wrong on the internet into public enemy number one.
The you shout ethics. I would believe it if four women weren't getting death threats so conveniently when these issues are hottest. The reason why we connect them to you is because these are convenient.

If you can call 12 articles of "Gamers are Dead" out as some collusion, despite most of them being taken way out of context, then I can call you out for death threats made during these past three months.

I see, this is a very very common misconception about what the controversial part of the "Quinnspiracy" was, which I still can't believe in unironically her twitter user name. The controversial part was that people were forbidden to talk about it. That was beyond jarring since the same people who revelled in any sex scandal related to the games industry when it implicated a man, no matter how much actual meat was to the story. There are a lot of good examples for that. However this one came around, and noone wanted to report on it, and noone was allowed to talk about it. That was controversial. That was what ended up being the initial spark of GamerGate.

It has been well documented that Zoe Quinn has been recieving death threats way before any of this. I dare say trying to connect that to GamerGate is misguided.

It's tough. You hear me. Freaking tough to go. Okay, GG isn't that bad when you prove me wrong 1000% of the time.
There was a time I was for GG, you know. I still sympathize with GG. I still talk to them. It's hard. Way hard when people still hurl the same lies around and I'm trying to show facts. I get a few people I reason with.

It's hard talking to a leaderless group when everyone is so different in what they want. Yesterday, all I got was calls to have all journalists fired and how Anita Sarkeesian is the devil. I lost a friend because I did not agree with him when he said I had no right to be offended.

I feel like GG wants the entire internet to be 4chan. We hurl racial and homophobic slurs around. When you criticize someone, make sure to call them a "****, fag, ******" just to get the point across how much you hate their guts for having a opinion.

Honestly? Both on Twitter and on here, the only ones I see using that language are rather obvious troll accounts that usually get swiftly flagged as such. Anyone can open a troll account, sadly due to the nature of twitter, anyone can do the exact same thing. And if your friends were the ones who were having those kinds of discussions, maybe you had rather problematic friends? I can't really judge. I mostly interact with GamerGate on here and reading twitter.

My gosh, I can't stand Davis "Why Blacks Fail" Aurini and Milo Yolo-long-last-name. The latter, his trangenderism article broke me as a human being. http://yiannopoulos.net/2014/08/15/transgenderism-is-a-psychiatric-disorder-its-sufferers-need-therapy-not-surgery/

You literally expect me to support this?
We may have similar opinions. Tumblr feminism IS brutally insane. I agree with that sentiment, but hell no will I follow a group with people like that as there "Based" friends.

I hate those people as well. Sadly they are the only ones who want to stand by this cause. Again, you will learn in time should this take off. It's disheartening. More then once, I wanted to turn my back on all of this for good, for precisely that reason.

But for precisely that reason, I only take from them what information I can verify, and nothing else. If I had a choice, that would be a different story. I'm just not seeing it. Nothing seemed to stick so far, and no big name seemed to be willing to take a pro-ethics stance aside from rightwing journalists and the like.

Yup, I hate that. So again, looks like we are in, what, 90% agreement at the end? ^^

 

[GloatingSwine]

The journalists will attack it just the same, because it really is this simple: They were called out on unethical behavior, and they've shown that they will stop at nothing to deflect from that.

Except they weren't called out on any of the unethical behaviour that actually matters.

If you wanted people to believe in GamerGate as a genuine consumer movement, then it would be IGN quaking in its boots right now, but as far as I can tell they're happily sucking on the same PR tit they always have been, the same paid for "first looks" that regurgitate the press releases, the same advertisements for content alongside "critique" of the same content, the same hype disguised as preview, and now GamerGate has highlighted the power of advertisers to control editorial and done so by making it appear that that's what the public not only accepts but actively wants they'll do so even more.

But that's not what's happening is it. There's no mention of the payola that infests the mainstream games press, there's no campaign against GameInformer, wholly owned by a retailer!, I mean how much less ethical can you get than a publication ostensibly producing purchasing reccomendations which is owned by the people the product is likely to be purchased from.

These are the real ethical concerns that should be informing GamerGate, but they aren't, are they. It's almost as if the "movement" is an enormous case of internet butthurt because a person said a mean thing about "gamers" (ps ethical journalism must necessarily allow these things to be said) and not about ethics at all.

 

[grassgremlin]

I hate those people as well. Sadly they are the only ones who want to stand by this cause. Again, you will learn in time should this take off. It's disheartening. More then once, I wanted to turn my back on all of this for good, for precisely that reason.

But for precisely that reason, I only take from them what information I can verify, and nothing else. If I had a choice, that would be a different story. I'm just not seeing it. Nothing seemed to stick so far, and no big name seemed to be willing to take a pro-ethics stance aside from rightwing journalists and the like.

Yup, I hate that. So again, looks like we are in, what, 90% agreement at the end? ^^

I want to offer that choice honestly. If you feel distressed about the "gamer issue" I want you to have a choice to support the parts that are important to you. Let's all focus on how the gaming press is fundamently broken. How we can help fix it and how we can construct our arguments to get the point across.

If anything the press should not be reporting sex scandals unless they are direct effects to the industry. They also have to be unbiased but also careful. Sex scandals are iffy. The best thing to do is handle them professionally. No tabloid rhetoric about sex lives and other shenanigans. Just how does this effect games. Reporting on a dev being fired or something to that extent for a sex scandal is much better then talking in detail about the people they had sex with.

We should not be reading about "juicy" tidbits like cheating and other crap. Keep that with tabloid news.

 

[grassgremlin]

If you want, you can borrow #istandwithbatboy.

Batboy brings with it all the journalistic integrity of the Weekly World News.

Lol. Is batboy a thing? XD
I could call the site Batboy Gaming if it's not taken.

Edit: Awww, I googled it and it was already taken.

 

[Something Amyss]

If you want, you can borrow #istandwithbatboy.

Batboy brings with it all the journalistic integrity of the Weekly World News.

Lol. Is batboy a thing? XD
I could call the site Batboy Gaming if it's not taken.

Edit: Awww, I googled it and it was already taken.

The face of the journalistic revolution.

 

[grassgremlin]

If you want, you can borrow #istandwithbatboy.

Batboy brings with it all the journalistic integrity of the Weekly World News.

Lol. Is batboy a thing? XD
I could call the site Batboy Gaming if it's not taken.

Edit: Awww, I googled it and it was already taken.

The face of the journalistic revolution.

Oh my gosh. This person's got some ideas right here. ;p

 

[Something Amyss]

Oh my gosh. This person's got some ideas right here. ;p

I'm full of ideas. Or full of something. People always say I'm full of "it." I think that means ideas.

 

[Nirallus]

What makes you think we have the power to purge the internet of trolls? Goon/GNAA types will shit up the new hashtag just as easily. The journalists will attack it just the same, because it really is this simple: They were called out on unethical behavior, and they've shown that they will stop at nothing to deflect from that.

Which is why I suggested many times, the first of which being in the first or second week of September, that you create a group where you can moderate the participants. And every time I suggest that, oh noes, it too hard! Even though its not really, as I know that there are gators with experience managing forums, and if they're as serious and numerous as they claim, they could crowdfund enough for a forum for months in just a few days. It could be set up in a week, easily. Abandon Twitter, abandon sites where you can't moderate your users. Even if you don't abandon Twitter, preface each tweet with a link to these forums as a way of displaying membership in the website.

Also, what unethical behavior exactly? There still hasn't been anything that GamerGate has actually come up with to support the idea that its teeming with corruption. And for the record, editorial opinions that you don't like is not "unethical", it is not "corruption". The most recent "evidence" of corruption I've seen presented by gators is that Zoe Quinn gave a thanks to somebody in the credits of her game, somebody who had playtested it. Oh noes, something every single game does, how corrupt!

That "somebody who playtested it" was a journalist at a gaming website who gave it good press. But there are plenty of other examples, well-documented on page one of the megathread. It was shown in the leaks from GameJournoPros (whose members compare it proudly to JournoList) that journalists and editors from ostensibly rival companies get together behind the scenes to discuss which stories to run and which ones to kill, all for the purpose of pushing a coordinated narrative. A dozen op-ed articles were released on one day from separate sites, which all said the exact same thing. If that journalistic time-on-target barrage doesn't indicate collusion I don't know what would.

You brought up the Tea Party in an earlier post. The current shitstorm also reminds me of that, but for a different reason. In the leaked email from JournoList, some reporters advocated the strategy that if anyone criticized the Democratic Party, or had questions about Obama's qualifications, do not engage them. Instead, call them racist. It was obvious even (or especially) to an outside observer, even one who didn't know about JournoList, that it eventually became the standard deflection. When JournoList was exposed journalists were fired, or they resigned before they could get fired. When the same thing happens in gaming, the journalists involved just shrugged and wondered what the big deal was. Genuine ignorance of "what the big deal is" would be bad enough, but it's even worse to imagine the alternative: They know that journalists are not supposed to collude, but they feel it's OK if they do it because they're on the right side.

If you see nothing wrong with that, as the GJP's themselves seem to, imagine if they engaged in the exact same behavior on behalf of the right (e.g. engineering a moral panic over violence and nihilism, rather than misogyny). If that still doesn't convince you then nothing will.

As for the topic of this thread: The only way to effectively police who does and doesn't get into the new hashtag, or forum, or whatever, would require people to forfeit their anonymity - Thus crippling the movement before it begins. And GamerGate supporters have done plenty to try and prove that the harassers are a small number of people who just wear the hashtag when they want to stir up shit. Exposing a clickbait gaming "journalist" in Brazil as a major source of the death threats to Anita Sarkeesian. Consistent condemnation of chickenshit death threats has become routine, and it has made no difference at all in the eyes of the press. That's why I hold out so little hope that a separate group might accomplish anything at all. The media will say "You're just a whitewashed version of those GamerGate misogynerds", and you can provide all the hard evidence to the contrary that you want, they will not change their story.

 

[grassgremlin]

If you want, you can borrow #istandwithbatboy.

Batboy brings with it all the journalistic integrity of the Weekly World News.

Lol. Is batboy a thing? XD
I could call the site Batboy Gaming if it's not taken.

Edit: Awww, I googled it and it was already taken.

The face of the journalistic revolution.

Oh my gosh. This person's got some ideas right here. ;p

Wanted to let you know, my husband would be willing to help create the website. He wouldn't be able to do the graphics, but he can at least code it and create it.

Oh, thank you. I'll send you my skype information if he wants to talk to me further about it.
Like i said this my first time in doing site development, but I'm willing to put as much work as I can into it.

What would be a good way for you, through messaging here? or email.

 

[Skatologist]

I get you, I wanted to join too and I told a handful of people what I wanted to do. I was even planning on making a twitter just to start a new hashtag. I was going to call it #OpenGame and #OpenGamers, allowing for all that journalistic integrity while also permitting personal opinions on reviews for these sites. We should DEFINITELY want to reform what a gamer is and does by calling out poor actions and admitting it has been here for quite some time. Also, maybe assert an ever so slight pressure on major developers by stating something along the lines of many within our ranks that wish to have more diverse story telling and experiences and we are willing for them not to blow out so much on graphics and other things. And keep the interest of the casual gamer, the ones who rarely if ever browse forums like these, at a high priority so that they aren't lied to or exploited by anyone.

Other hashtag idea #DeadGamersSociety eh probably, not, that one may be counter productive to what we want and many won't take the name.

EDIT: I suppose we should also get others to support this, but really only those tied to gaming. The reason I know that movement smells funny to me is becuase of who supports it that I consider people who have no interest in games including a Voice for Men, RoK, Breitbart, and many conservative sites and personalities. Our hashtag should only be for gamers, sure, people outside I guess can support us, but recognize that what we are doing IS NOT focused on the ever so infuriating internet "debate" between modern feminists and modern anti-feminists.

 

[Victor Takamori]

Oh look another divide and conquer attempt.

Good luck.

 

[grassgremlin]

I get you, I wanted to join too and I told a handful of people what I wanted to do. I was even planning on making a twitter just to start a new hashtag. I was going to call it #OpenGame and #OpenGamers, allowing for all that journalistic integrity while also permitting personal opinions on reviews for these sites. We should DEFINITELY want to reform what a gamer is and does by calling out poor actions and admitting it has been here for quite some time. Also, maybe assert an ever so slight pressure on major developers by stating something along the lines of many within our ranks that wish to have more diverse story telling and experiences and we are willing for them not to blow out so much on graphics and other things. And keep the interest of the casual gamer, the ones who rarely if ever browse forums like these, at a high priority so that they aren't lied to or exploited by anyone.

Other hashtag idea #DeadGamersSociety eh probably, not, that one may be counter productive to what we want and many won't take the name.

EDIT: I suppose we should also get others to support this, but really only those tied to gaming. The reason I know that movement smells funny to me is becuase of who supports it that I consider people who have no interest in games including a Voice for Men, RoK, Breitbart, and many conservative sites and personalities. Our hashtag should only be for gamers, sure, people outside I guess can support us, but recognize that what we are doing IS NOT focused on the ever so infuriating internet "debate" between modern feminists and modern anti-feminists.

You're right. If you're not interested in gaming in the slightest, you shouldn't be involved with this.
It's for gamers by gamers. And I mean that as in "those who play video games regularly" and not the other things.

Talking to @notthebees about webdesign and am accepting any help we can get.

 

[Godhead]

If you want, you can borrow #istandwithbatboy.

Batboy brings with it all the journalistic integrity of the Weekly World News.

Lol. Is batboy a thing? XD
I could call the site Batboy Gaming if it's not taken.

Edit: Awww, I googled it and it was already taken.

The face of the journalistic revolution.

Weekly World News is the most reliable news source in the world. They uncovered Bin Laden YEARS before the US government.

 

[Fappy]

Oh my gosh. This person's got some ideas right here. ;p

I'm full of ideas. Or full of something. People always say I'm full of "it." I think that means ideas.

Sexiness. You're full of sexiness. That's what they mean, Zach

OP: I sympathize with the sentiment, but I think it may be "to soon" to do something like this. People hurt by this whole controversy will be a lot less willing to listen to what you have to say until things begin to die down, imo.

 

[Internet Zen Master]

My suggestion?

Support Boogie2988 #EndtheHate hashtag.

The guy is neutral/leans pro-GamerGate, but his primary goal in all of this is to get a peaceful resolution for this fustercluck. Hell, most GGers I've talked with support the guy.

Still, at this point any hashtag that starts calling for more ethics in game journalism is going to get attacked and demonized by Gawker et al.

 

[Davroth]

I want to offer that choice honestly. If you feel distressed about the "gamer issue" I want you to have a choice to support the parts that are important to you. Let's all focus on how the gaming press is fundamently broken. How we can help fix it and how we can construct our arguments to get the point across.

If anything the press should not be reporting sex scandals unless they are direct effects to the industry. They also have to be unbiased but also careful. Sex scandals are iffy. The best thing to do is handle them professionally. No tabloid rhetoric about sex lives and other shenanigans. Just how does this effect games. Reporting on a dev being fired or something to that extent for a sex scandal is much better then talking in detail about the people they had sex with.

We should not be reading about "juicy" tidbits like cheating and other crap. Keep that with tabloid news.

But you don't really offer that choice if you bring people like Matt Lees and Jim Sterling into the boat. They have dismissed those kinds of ethical problems more then once by now, instead deflecting the problem by pointing elsewhere.

Again, I completely agree about sex scandals, and that's kind of the entire point. It's not that most of the people in GamerGate want more sex scandals to be reported on, rather, the situation was so jarring that it called a lot more attention to the kind of tabloid journalism rampant in games journalism. And I'm sorry, but reporting on unconfirmed allegations of harassment and potentially ruining someone's professional life is nothing short of despicable. That's tabloid journalism at its worst. Even if you print a clarification, the damage is already done. Not that anyone bothered to print clarifications.

 

[Something Amyss]

Weekly World News is the most reliable news source in the world. They uncovered Bin Laden YEARS before the US government.

If Gamergate were to take their approach to journalism, they would have won already.

Sexiness. You're full of sexiness. That's what they mean, Zach

And don't you forget it!