I’m surprised it took so long, and surprised the industry were not at the forefront getting this kind of thing setup, after all it is ‘their’ industry these women are working in!
‘Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifschitz found Crash Override’:
Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifschitz have founded Crash Override, an online support network for victims of harassment, doxxing and other forms of abuse.
The company, which describes itself as an “online anti-harassment task force”, is offering a wide range of support services to people who have been targeted by online harassment, from a friendly ear to legal consultation and advice on how to contact the relevant authorities.
One thing this #GG has done is terribly conflated actual impropriety(having a financial stake) and some tenuous connection, business, personal, or otherwise. How would you even disclose something like this? Is every review to have an italicized paragraph appended to it of trivia, all in service of satisfying the patently disingenuous?
Scuzz
3003
So what percentage of actual gamers do you think cares anything about #gg? 10%-30%-50%. My guess would be the lower figure, and most of them have no idea what it is about. I think the term has been used enough that while many might have heard of it they have no concept of what it means.
My point…On forums like this GG has been a big deal, but not elsewhere, not for your average gamer. GG is a blip on a news channel, assuming they watch a news channel. Or it was a joke on Comedy Central.
JoshV
3004
I may be misinterpreting Forge, but I think he was using you as an example as to how silly all the, “Someone is slightly related to someone else in some way, therefore bias and they shouldn’t write on it” BS is. I don’t think it was meant as a jab at you, Brad, or Stardock.
Anyway, Ubisoft is a big company, I’d only be annoyed if said journalist with the Ubisoft girlfriend was reviewing a game she personally worked on. Anything else seems a bit overkill, to think he couldn’t somehow split his feelings for his girlfriend from the conglomeration that is Ubi.
CraigM
3005
Well #GG may seem over for those not in the crosshairs, it unfortunately is still a thing out there. Here’s why ‘swatting’ someone isn’t a joke people, because something can die. https://twitter.com/dominictarason/status/557251398140952576
Right now this is the only link to this particular incident I’ve seen, though I’ve not gone looking (too disturbing). That said there seems to be some message board kudos from the usual GG hives, indicating this may be valid.
I know swatting predates GG, and it is one of the sickest things internet culture has created. Seriously, every sick bastard who swats someone should be in jail for a very long time.
Alstein
3006
10% is a very high estimate. Guessing that of the folks who care, it’s pretty much an even split. Then you have folks who view both sides as having a large number of scummy individuals.
On message boards it’s probably 30-50%, depending on board.
The swatting probably originated from baphomet, a 8chan subforum that is trying to “recreate the old days of /b/” and have been doxxing, raiding, you name it. A few well meaning types on KotakuInAction suggested countering them and were promptly doxxed with a warning for KIA not to stick their nose in baphmoets business. They mainly target SJWs, but will target anyone or anything if generates lulz. They aren’t GG per se, but certainly can be described as the mutant spawn of GG.
Less than 10% for sure, if you’re excluding gaming message boards. And I suspect an even smaller percentage of actual gamers are concerned that Kingdom Come doesn’t have black characters in medieval Czechoslovakia, or whatever the politicized gaming media is complaining about at the time.
Soma
3009
I don’t know what “swatting” means (ok I’m not too up to interweb lingo) so I googled. A pro gun site reported that this happened in Oklahoma. The sheriff was shot 3 times, twice in the bulletproof vest and once in the arm. He lives.
Swatting is dangerous and irresponsible. Anyone who knowingly calls a false report in on someone in the hopes of having a heavily-armed bunch of cops show up and kick down the victim’s door is a complete asshole.
This incident from back in August happened live on Twitch.
No one was hurt, but you can see how it could’ve easily gotten out of hand.
Timex
3011
That case of swatting is pretty crazy… cause apparently he actually opened fire on the cops? And they found a bomb in his house? But he wasn’t arrested?
That sounds kind of weird.
Alstein
3012
Swatting is attempted murder in my eyes. I know someone got 5 years for it recently from the feds, which was well deserved.
Quaro
3013
Imagine being awoken from deep sleep by police charging in. One time someone did that to me, I was totally confused for a minute. I starting randomly sprinting down the hallway, some remnant of a dream I guess. A real recipe for disaster if police think you aren’t complying with ‘get on the ground’ commands.
It was a jab. It’s a drum he beats frequently so long as a certain Stardock CEO is involved. He brought it up when Desslock said outlets should avoid “a reasonable apprehension of bias”.
And honestly, I thought he meant the GalCiv manual ten years ago. I had no idea he was trying to insinuate something about the donations regarding my cancer, particularly since the connection is so tenuous.
-Tom
True story:
Back in the 90s I offered to mow the lawn of the Infoworld EIC in exchange for Object Desktop coverage (as a joke obviously). Years later, they did ultimately review that product and next time I visited Infoworld, I had dinner at the EIC’s house and I had a picture taken with his lawnmower. All as an inside joke between friends.
Back then, people weren’t hypersensitive on these issues because there was no doubt, even for a second, about the integrity of those covering these things.
I’m friends with a lot of game tech and game journalists and editors. You spend 20+ years doing something you get to know each other and you have a lot in common with them. But the journalists I know don’t pull their punches. They’re professionals. When they write articles or review a product they’re doing their job and overall, they do a pretty good job of it imo.
Tom and I have been friends for 15+ years. But it didn’t stop him from being highly critical of Elemental. His review was negative but it was fair (though, as some may recall at the time, I didn’t recognize the problems with the game early on). Also, Tom recused himself from reviewing GalCiv II even though, as others pointed out, no one knew he wrote the manual. He simply recused himself because he’s a professional.
The whole GG “corruption in journalism” thing is a tempest in a teapot. I know game journalism isn’t “corrupt” in the way the GG people think it is or at least, to the level they think it is. There are problematic freelancers, like there are in any in any industry, but they are the exception. The problem is the reaction some have had to the criticism by labeling huge swaths of people misogynists and injecting their politics into their hard news. But that’s a different discussion.
LMN8R
3016
No, it literally started as a harassment campaign. There is no nuance to its creation.
Adam Baldwin - actor, asshole - is the first person to ever use the hashtag GamerGate. He used it in a tweet that shared out a video talking about Zoe Quinn’s sex life, and lies about how she slept with games writers to get coverage about her game.
It’s pure harassment. Spread lies about a woman’s sex life and professional conduct to destroy her character. Pretend that it’s about “ethics in games journalism” to try to give it legitimacy.
It doesn’t matter that other people latched onto it with noble intentions. It doesn’t change anything about how it actually started.
I have an idea lmn8r, if you keep pushing the negative it will become a positive. Just a suggestion like.
In that example the “politicized gaming media” consists of one blogger who then was then harassed an death threated to the extent he had to delete his Twitter account, followed by two articles that covered the insane rabid reaction to this one blogger. Imagine if people had entered into a civil discussion and used research, facts, reason and logic to counter this one blogger… you probably never would have known it happened.
A bunch of virgils were arguing with a bunch of trolls over five guys. A thousand virgils then descended on twitter and a hundred forums and declared all gamers to be part of a toxic culture, and then proceeded to insult all gamers by acting like complete virgils.
Gamers objected to virgil acting like virgils, and being called all sorts of insults by virgil, and fought back, turning gamergate from a few hundred people sending a few thousand tweets into the behemoth it was.
To this day, the virgils insist it was about zoe quinn, and not the virgil subculture acting like complete and utter virgils.
You and I don’t live in the same universe.
