1561

He should totally update the metapedia article about that.

1562

Aszurom- Do you understand why I’m skeptical that you were born in Ohio? You don’t write like a fluent English speaker and your grasp of American culture appears to be solely derived from copy-pasting the shit you find on pro-GamerGate subreddits.

1563

He already said he was from Ohio, you don’t need to rub it in.

1564

This may come as a shock to you, but this is the Internet, and even though Qt3 counts among its posters a lot of extremely well-spoken native English speakers, 99% of the native English speakers on the Internet don’t write especially well.

Or Ohioans, for that matter.

1565

I guess you played it more than me then, because I didn’t know the references. I just thought the song was fun.

Also, hey, Japan. I love their giant robots and kaiju. Everything else is pretty weird.

You’re just picking on me because you know me too well. :-P

Ok, so aside from Skyrim what games would you recommend that actually do present women in an acceptable, maybe admirable way? Stuff that’s not Japanified beyond my range of understanding.

1566

I’m still kind of fixated on this equivalency between Youtubers and radio DJs as far as payola goes.

That’s very interesting, because there’s a lot of legal precedent there. That’s been kicked around since what, the 50s? I don’t understand legal things enough to guess at it, but maybe Desslock could bring the wisdom here. If a game publisher decided to sue him for accepting money to promote another game over theirs, would that actually stick in court? Could a parallel to radio or television be made with a Youtube promotional “performance” of the material?

If there’s a legal basis for claiming damages due to unlawful practices there, it’s probably the best issue that gamergate has currently.

I’d say maybe the #2 issue following that would be the shenanigans at the Indie awards things. If they could show nepotism conclusively there, there’s promotional stuff and prize money that can be claimed as tangible damages.

Like I keep saying, gamergate has to prove tangible damages somehow, or they’re just spinning in place.

1567

I was actually wondering the same thing about you, considering your style of writing.

1568

Ok, so we’ve been around and around and around this thing.

Time for a poll.

Assuming:

  • There are feminists who feel that the games industry needs to step up to the challenge of figuring out how to work with female characters in a way more representative of the western ideal of the empowered, equal, and self determining woman.

  • There are indie developers, writers, and customers who are concerned that the games media isn’t doing the type of impartial coverage that is assumed an important part of the social contract that is inherent in wearing a “journalist” hat. They want the media to be transparent about who paid who, what potential bias inducing factors are present, and be open to external confirmation of their honesty in those matters.

  • There are people who have a concern the games industry could have too much demand placed on them, beyond reasonable expectations of equality and fairness. These concerned people aren’t anti-progress but do want to protect the industry from being bullied unreasonably by those who want to take things way too far.

Those are three groups of people who use the gamergate hashtag and are involved in some aspect of the events. I have listed what I feel to be the three divisions of people who have “the greater good” in mind, and not anything destructive, negative, or harmful to anyone. They want to expand, reform, and protect what they believe in for noble reasons, all of them.

The question:

How can these three groups, who I don’t see as having conflicting goals at all, come to an agreement that they’re all working for the common good? Feminists can continue to put the spotlight on the limited writing of female characters and negative portrayals. The Media can be asked to clean up their act and be on the level about what they do and why, so we have more fair-play in coverage and awards. Finally, the people who are concerned about the social progressives taking it too far and moving into unreasonable bullying could find a middle ground where they actually talk to the feminists and reach an understanding about their concerns and how to prevent them from happening.

Is it possible in some way to have a three-way handshake? Or even two of them? I know the “ethics” and “feminism” folks are about progressive reform, and have a common ground there. Seems that there’s a lot of activity happening to actively prevent that conversation from taking place. How could we get those two groups to stop talking in different directions and have any sort of a summit?

Packman isn’t having much luck with trying to be neutral, but that’s because the people who are agreeing to go on to speak with him aren’t interested in finding neutrality. That’s apparent from the after-dialogue. Gamergate has no spokesman. I think Sarkeesian would be a good choice for the feminist side because she doesn’t seem unreasonable, she just doesn’t tolerate being trolled and threatened. But can she say “I’ll talk to the people who aren’t part of the threats, because there are gamergate people who are trying to do good on the other side of the table too.”?

1569

I don’t agree there are three groups. In any case, is the definition floating around for what SJW is really something like a group of people another group finds annoying and stupid because they don’t like their stance?

And yes, MLK Jr. would be considered a SJW I think, mostly because at the time racists issues were seen as an annoying uncomfortable thing a lot of people would rather not talk about. Ethics in journalism feels like an attempt to divert attention from a conversation that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. I say this because there have been many opportunities to try and discuss this, actual cases where the issue came to light, and not so much as a blink from the groups that are spending a lot of time trying to punish anyone who might speak against GG now.

1570

I know and met him. He’s American. I think you are over-analyzing text. I don’t know if he was born in Ohio but he has neither a Southern or East-Coast accent. I don’t even know what he’s arguing for or against because most of his posts in this thread are the tl;dr nature so I skim, as I do most of the posts here, but he’s not a foreigner posing as an American.

1571

Well, I’m trying to isolate the reasons that people who aren’t bigots would be opposed to feminist engagement with the games industry. The immediate reason that comes to mind is that there have been issues with social justice being misused in the past. The same reasons that it is so effective when properly applied are also why it’s so incredibly damaging if used in error, or in a manner that is out of scale to the problem being engaged.

Consider the case of an incorrect perception of an event, an innocent party being identified as a target, or someone purposefully creating a false accusation of some misdeed. The internet in general, all parties, aren’t so good on fact checking in advance of getting offended and springing into motion. The mechanism of social justice protest can be pretty devastating, and isn’t something you’d want coming your way if you were undeserving of being clobbered with the social hammer. So, I can see that there’s some concern that this weapon might be improperly wielded, or over-applied.

It’s not like there’s any regulatory agency that can say “Ok, enough, disengage because they’re compliant now, or weren’t in the wrong after all.”

So yeah, there’s a faction of people who say “We saw really bad stuff happen because of this somewhere, and we’re scared it could happen here. What do we do?”

1572

Maybe they should take that up with the actual game journalists.

  • There are people who have a concern the games industry could have too much demand placed on them, beyond reasonable expectations of equality and fairness. These concerned people aren’t anti-progress but do want to protect the industry from being bullied unreasonably by those who want to take things way too far.

These are unserious people who can be safely ignored by all.

1573

Aszurom- Your decision to learn new words from teenagers with Asperger’s has once again let you down, as that’s not what “nepotism” means.

Also,

Well, I’m trying to isolate the reasons that people who aren’t bigots would be opposed to feminist engagement with the games industry.

what the fuck is wrong with you? Why on Earth are you so fucking invested in this patently dishonest narrative of there being two sides to this story? It takes normal people like 5 minutes to see through the #Gamergate bullshit. You’re coming up on WEEKS of these aggressively offensive counter-factual thought experiments!

Do you understand that to the outside observer, when discarding the following explanations for your behavior:

  1. Non English Speaker
  2. Complex performance art trolling

the single explanation that explains your posting remaining is

  1. Reactionary misogynist, just like the rest of GamerGate?
1574

Here is good little overview from 2002. It feels similar, if you replace the independent promoters/pluggers with the game PR companies, but maybe not exactly the same.

I’m glad you mentioned those. They have bothered me for a long time. Again, just like I felt attending GDC, I just felt like I was an outsider when it came to awards, not that anything with them was necessarily illegitimate. It just seemed like a club I was not allowed to join because of factors beyond my control.

1575

I dunno, Soapy… there are some people around here who’d very strongly dispute that those “unserious people” could be safely ignored. Given the experiences that I’m personally aware of, it’s akin to having the “We’ll doxx and send you death threats” trolls hounding you when the fringe contingent of progressives decide to come after you.

Are they normal, rational folk? Nope. They’re the wacky 1%. But they’re the ones that kinda get the branding bad for everybody. Very similar to how the pro-GG doxxing threatening trolls made everybody in GG get called “all the same”. You and I know it’s bullshit, but if you ever get bitten by that sort, you’re forever shy of the banner they rode in carrying.

That’s a very real stigma that is going to have to be addressed if this thing is ever going to wind down any time soon. So much “blanket policy” assumptions on both sides, and it’s a real impediment to even beginning a conversation.

1576

nep·o·tism
ˈnepəˌtizəm/
noun
noun: nepotism

the practice among those with power or influence of favoring relatives or friends, especially by giving them jobs.
synonyms:	[B]favoritism, preferential treatment[/B], the old boy network, looking after one's own, [B]bias, partiality[/B], partisanship

There, I googled that for you.

If you’re going to accuse me of ignorance, don’t do it with a display of your own ineptitude.

1577

You’re trying to oversimplify the problem because you are trying very hard to dice it up in a way that still makes GG relevant and in a way that it still makes sense.

Here’s the problem with the approach, aside from those of us who remain skeptic GG actually has a serious point-of-view that isn’t a mask for the unsavory attack anyone who says anything we find stupid or annoying crowd.

There are probably a number of people who think that it might be worthwhile to ask a few questions about the way games portray women, why victims are so forgettable, why male characters and female characters all are usually catered to one group when statistics already prove this is not the largest gaming group anymore. At the same time, those individuals might wonder why some reviews come off as little more than marketing spiel, how some reviewers reference features that aren’t even in the game at the time of the review, and why there is so much time and money spent on hype and very little after the release. Then there are the blacklists, the problems with tying bonuses to subjective reviews. Now this does not mean reviewers should stop acting like humans, stop adding opinions, be told not to share their point of view. On the contrary, if games are art, you would expect to see a large spectrum of opinions and responses to what is shown. Oh yeah, and this group finds nothing redeemable in people who attack women, who dox their dissenters, or otherwise engage in brutish, dangerous bully tactics.

So which of your three groups does that person fit into?

1578

I think you very accurately described my personal stance right there.

I didn’t say there were exclusive groups. The whole point is to say that all three points of view are fully compatible and can be integrated in a sane way. The polarizations are those three categories.

What I’m trying to figure out is why there are a bunch of people yelling
“NO! It’s about harassing women!”
“NO! It’s about ethics!”
“NO! The social marxists are trying to destroy the culture!”

Yet, the people who are yelling those catchphrases at each other seem incapable of processing what you just described. Why is that? It’s absolutely maddening. It’s the very thing that drove me to take the thread from being about journalism micro/macro scale into the realm of “what are the views, how do you defend them?”

How do you get past that stonewall that’s coming from all sides? You and I clearly both agree wholeheartedly that it’s a complex issue and people are capable of processing different components of it. So what is blocking that from being possible out there?

Pretty much my entire point in the last 10 pages of this thread. Trying to arrive at that by talking to people who hold opposing views but are actually discussing it - which is far more than you can get outside of this thread in the twitterverse. I’d bet 75% of the entire gamergate participation is really in that middle-ground, but they’re feeling a need to choose to stand on one side of the street or the other. It’s like you can’t participate without declaring allegiance to one flag or another.

I do have a theory that because gamergate is “leaderless” that there’s nobody on that side who can speak for the movement authoritatively - and thus you can’t have a conversation with “gamergate” even if you wanted to. Well, you “could” but the people trying to still run an ethics engagement aren’t publicly exposing themselves for conversation.

1579

LOL I’m telling you guys, not a native English speaker. Actually there’s a fair bit of Amish and Mennonite population in Eastern Ohio, maybe he’s just doing a The Village thing and he encountered modern American society in like July for the first time.

Do you not know what synonym means? The definition was the sentence above that list of words you partially bolded, you know, that stuff about giving relatives jobs? Nepotism.

What jobs are being parceled out to relatives and friends of powerful people?

Edit: And now he’s completely misinterpreted Nesrie’s post about anti-GG people as if it was agreeing with him? What on Earth is going on with this dude.

1580

We can argue if “Gamers Are Over”, but #GamerGate is dead. There’s no more #GamerGate. It worked it’s way around the “Mom’s Basement” of the internet for a few weeks, sent a few death threats, had some laughs, but then the mainstream media found it. So Salon, Colbert, Gawker, Mother Jones, etc. all spooled up their “it’s about ethics in video game journalism” jokes for a minute, but now that’s all played out.

There’s no more anything to go on here. The lasting effects were a good boost to Sarkeesian’s media profile, and I guess Total Biscuit ruining any chance of his career going beyond his current role as reviewer/native advertising liaison. There’s nothing else to talk about.