1581

Congratulations for being the very first person I’ve put on ignore here.

1582

For the first time ever, I agree with Virgil. God help me.

Gamergate isn’t a functional anything anymore. It’s residual.

IGN did update their ethics policy today. Many sites have done so in the past month in a show of good will. That’s kinda what all the ethics people wanted. Now they have nothing else to complain about until they catch one of them breaking those codes - and they can take it up with them per-incident now.

There are still those “Gawker must fall” people, and that’s about the only fight that’s left. I think their point was made as well. Not to Gawker because they pride themselves on being incorrigible. But every other site that saw how much trouble it caused them will consider that if they get engaged for breech of their stated codes now. Mission accomplished, I’d say.

Finally, feminism. Lots of people talking about it, and I think mass awareness like this is more than Sarkeesian had hoped for. She won.

The only people who are going to actively clash now are zealots vs zealots, and they can have each other.

Nesrie made THE statement I’ve been trying to hear in here for the whole thread. Why did we take 53 pages to arrive at a mutually inclusive statement that encompasses all the positive goals and rejects the negatives? Why can’t the people who are still barking at each other on twitter get there? Why does it have to be “not about your thing, but really about my thing!”? I was really hoping to figure that out, but I don’t think it’s going to arrive here.

But, at least we got something said by someone that I’m 100% willing to accept as my correct answer about where the gamergate incident’s final destination should be.

1583

From my perspective, this overshadows all the rest. I’ve been dealing with the harassment from the gaming community for years. I’ve stopped playing entire genres to avoid this crowd that has decided to put women into two groups, those they they want to harass into their sexual fantasies, and those they think aren’t worthy and wish to push down and berate. Marketing, ethics, how developers might feel when asked why bikini armor is still thing… none of that is important to me when it comes to watching this mob run around on the internet threatening and terrorizing women and anyone who even hints at their defense.

I cannot see how there can be a discussion, a serious insightful discussion while mob tactics are in play. No amount of but hey, they’re not really us, they’re just the loudest group that targets everyone that disagrees with us but really it’s not us statements is going to change that. And the hey, there wer e some threats thrown at us too so really their threats don’t matter much or maybe they’re just made up anyway. No. I think discussions need to be had, but GamerGate is too tainted to have that discussion.

1584

Some people fear alien abduction. They are approximately as justified in their fear as people who fear creeping feminism in gaming.

1585

What Nesrie said. Thing is, we wont ever have that discussion because for some reason GG is still a thing and the people who could do something about it decide that they’re going to defend it instead of just shitcanning it and starting over.

1586

Yeah, I personally thought all hope of conversation about journalism died instantly the moment Brianna Wu’s incident happened and how much rage spun up surrounding it.

It’s disappointing that what ultimately was proven in gamergate is that it only takes a handful of bad operators playing both sides against each other to completely destroy all chance of progress. Who knows who did the doxxing and threats. I’ve got theories. Doesn’t really matter though, because what matters is that it happened and wasn’t able to be attributed to the correct parties. And there’s the giant flaw in a leaderless anonymous movement - zero accountability means everyone is assumed to be the guilty party.

I would bet that there were at maximum 10-15 people who were actively making the attacks. Viewer counts on some of the youtube streams were 5000+ viewers. We could guess at true numbers of supporters and detractors, but the result is the same… 1 in 10,000 participants being a troll of that magnitude is enough to end the good outcome.

My own personal impact is that I dropped my username across the entire web, scrubbed my linkedin, facebook, reddit, any possible reference that could trace my new set of usernames to my personal identity. I used to be fairly loose with my personal info because why did it matter. Now I’m completely reversed in that point of view. I’ve seen just how much can be done with that info by people who are determined to disrupt your life. So, that’s gamergate lesson 1 for me personally.

Moving forward, I do think the discussion about how women are engaged online will be forefront for quite some time. I really hope it is. From the male point of view, it’s our wives, girlfriends, daughters, coworkers, etc. that are subjected to that. It’s not impersonal. The root of that problem is in the zero accountability nature of the Internet, or at least the false perception by the masses that it’s so.

What does that say about western culture? When fear of judgement is removed from the equation, is that how we behave? Perhaps that’s why we rely on society structure to police out the undesirables in the real world where accountability is unavoidable.

1587

Oh, and FINALLY someone did make a new hashtag specifically to discuss the incidents around the treatment of indie developers.

Unfortunately, that individual who “assumed leadership” of that is radioactive and nobody’s going to go near him. He blew all his cred by being a continuous tantrum for the past month.

But… I do have hope that people are going to watchdog the industry more closely post-hashtags. The people who really care about that topic are going to be vigilant for a good while.

1588

See I don’t think this is true. This toxic element in the gaming community has been around for years. It’s not 10 or 15 people. They’re on twitter, facebook, all the gaming sites, any mainstream sites that have run articles in regard to this. You see them on youtube, kickstarter, and they’re still in games. This problem element is not minor. So many women wouldn’t run into the problem if it was. What’s kind of unique about this isn’t that these women are being harassed, that’s almost normal.

I want to repeat that because I think it gets overlooked all the time. It’s not rare to be harassed as a woman or a girl while being somewhere in the vicinity of the gaming community.

What’s unusual here is this group seems to have rallied and mobilized in a mass around this movement essentially taking it over. Yes, they’re still a minority. Most men are not misogynists, or trying to destroy the lives of women who say something they don’t like or label them as some sort of SJW because it’s easier to use labels instead of discuss actual talking points, but it’s not just a handful. It’s never been just a handful.

1589

—Edit

I was going to show some evidence that some of the people who claimed abuse actually did it themselves. As in “Tweet this threat to me for smash brothers game code!” - seriously. But, I’m going to just let that be. We could do this all day and I don’t want to start another debate about which threats were legit and which weren’t. Suffice to say, some were proven real by the FBI, and some were proven to come from the threatened person, also by the FBI.

Just watch who gets arrested in coming months and that story will tell itself.

1590

Well no ones talking about gamergate on 4chan anymore. I thought boredom would kill it, not anon live blogging a murder and suicide by cop.

1591

Man, the internet just keeps getting better by the minute. How long do you think they’ll let us keep it?

Good news though… Kotaku and Gawker have agreed to keep a close eye on each other to make sure there are no more problems.

1592

Aszurom- Well, now, in retrospect, do you think maybe your strategy of “credulously copy-pasting everything from r/KIA to QT3 as if it was BREAKING NEWS” was not the best method of learning about this?

But every other site that saw how much trouble it caused them will consider that if they get engaged for breech of their stated codes now. Mission accomplished, I’d say.

FFS. Seriously you had never heard of Gawker before this, right? Why are you trusting random GamerGaters to explain the situation to you? Have they proved trustworthy in the past?

1593

Note: #GamerGate is so deep on the spectrum there’s a significant number of them who think Colbert was on their side.

Also,

Literally all it is now is about how their feelings got hurt by an article THEY DIDN’T EVEN READ

1594

One thing that’s not really covered is the impact of the Amish on gamersgate. If only Amish bloggers would weigh in more on the subject.

1595

The thoughts on “journalism” in the pro GG camp at the link are very cute. They talk about games writers (AKA “journalists”) as if they they are licensed by the state, or are in a priesthood and not working for the same kind of bottom-line-profit-at-all-costs corporations that are making the games they report on.

1596

Well, #YoderGate is a whole different subject.

Amish are Dutch, not German. But there’s some crossover, hence my uncle Purl Yaeger. The other guy I worked with at the Akron post office when I was their sysadmin was named Weaver, but he said something about “uncle Purl” one day and I was like O_o. Turns out, he was some manner of cousin by marriage on Purl’s wife’s side of things. It’s not a common name.

Lehman’s is a fun place to go when I’m visiting home: https://www.lehmans.com/c-181-gas-refrigerators-and-freezers.aspx
People wonder how Amish have refrigerators if they don’t use electricity. Gas! Yes, there are natural gas refrigerators.

Funny story… buddy of mine took a job at a mom&pop computer store. Problem was it was in Applecreek, which is smack in the middle of Amish country. Now, Mennonites do use electricity and there are a bunch of them over there too, but seriously… you’re going to put a computer store in an Amish town?
Oh, crazy, it’s still in business somehow: https://www.facebook.com/pages/R-G-Computer-Services/302599179795747

Anyway, if you drive about 10 minutes from the house I grew up in, you’re looking at this:

1597

Dutch is a bit of a misnomer. Most of the Amish trace their roots back to the Palatinate.

1598

The Amish originate from Southern Germany, Switzerland, and France. Not the Netherlands.

edit - what IL said

1599

Aszurom, I grew up in New Philadelphia and went to Akron U. I know all those places you mentioned. ;)

The Amish originate from Southern Germany, Switzerland, and France. Not the Netherlands.

The term “Pennsylvania Dutch” is often mistakenly used when referring to the Amish in that region (and regions in Ohio). It’s because the language they speak is often referred to as such.

1600

Oh shit, you’re right. My wife’s like “You didn’t know that? Wut?”

Growing up, I was highly exposed to the term “Pennsylvania Dutch” because the Yaegers and Meyers at the family reunions were from over that way. I took “Dutch” literally. Eh, sometimes you don’t even know your own family.

In this context, the word “Dutch” does not refer to the Dutch people or their descendants, but reflects the Germans’ own name for the German people - “deutsch”.

Oh… well, that explains it. Anyway, nobody drove a buggy or had a big ol’ beard, but they were farmers and horse breeders. Since they were from pretty far east of us and I didn’t really like baling hay for fun, I didn’t hang out with them much.