1910

Well thank you. Seeing some of the people who, it seems like yesterday, were attacking and harassing on this very site are able to miraculously turn around and be shocked, shocked that others do what they do is quite a sight to see.

The thing is, it’s NOT equal. Go make a twitter account with a manly man name and a manly man picture and then tweet something in defense of Sarkeesian or whatever. Then do the same thing with an obviously girl name and a girl portrait. You will receive heaps more abuse, and more threats.

Then PROVE it. Go and make a Twitter account and write the exact same statement using the #gamergate tag. You’ve thrown down the gauntlet. Go for it. I’m genuinely interested in the results.

1911

It’s not an all or nothing thing. There is a huge level of toxicity online that manifests itself in a variety of ways.

I am not suggesting you haven’t run into this toxicity. That’s a strawman you are choosing to engage in.

The disgusting, horrible attacks targeting Zoe Quinn shouldn’t be happening at all. No one deserves what she’s getting. But suggesting that they are only because she’s a woman is nonsense. She’s a toxic personality who has gone out of her way to antagonize people over the years and there is no shortage of horrible people out there ready to bring down their idea of justice on people they’ve decided deserve it.

And i am going to call you out on one thing her Brad, don’t you dare try and place me with the people that threatened your life. I never called you, sent you e-mails or implied that I would ever cross a line. You keep bringing your piece up in this despite being asked not to do so, by others not me, but your behavior was not a shining example of a gentleman back then so stop acting like it was.

Just remember you wrote that before you or someone else accuses me of “victim blaming”. I get attacked online because I have an abrasive, obnoxious online personality. But that doesn’t let those doing the attacking off the hook. It’s that hypocrisy that really is at the heart of the #gamergate controversy - the double standard.

The reality is that people such as yourself are perfectly comfortable with attacking and harassing others online so long as it’s the right people being attacked and harassed. I am sure my presence as someone you and your friends happily targeted makes you uncomfortable. That’s on you, not me. Trying to suggest that I somehow deserved it says a lot.

You aren’t any better than the most of the people that are piling on Zoe Quinn. You’ve been perfectly content to engage in smearing those you’ve decided deserve it. So don’t act surprised that there are people who have decided that Zoe Quinn and others who share her world view “deserve” what they’re getting too. It’s an unfortunate element of Internet communities.

The #GamerGate vs. Journalism thing is our discussion here enlarged. Gamers are getting tired of every disagreement/criticism being turned into a political issue. What started out as a minor scandal (did an indie game developer get coverage because of her politics and personal relationships?) turned into a major movement precisely because people like you decided to portray those who had these concerns as misogynists when they clearly aren’t.

Personally, I would prefer to see people be a lot more tolerant of other points of view. Zoe Quinn doesn’t deserve the shit storm she’s getting. But then again, nobody does.

1912

I know this will probably fly right over you, but I will state them anyway.

I do no not share Zoe Quinn or Anita’s world view. Just because I think the topic of how women in and out of games are treated is worth exploring, does not mean I share their world view. I do not attack people, or threaten them, or try to smear their names just for the hell of it, or really at all. I certainly didn’t smear or really engage with the Mozilla example. All i did was say I am not sure that is the same scenario as we are talking about here, and I gave my reason why for that.

What I did do is engage with you and your problems before, and ever since then, you have been trying to rehash it here all over again because for some reason this has to be all about you and if ANYONE has a disagreement with you, your instinct seems to be to attack and label them with as many labels as you can think to try and discredit what they have to say. For some reason, you are equating disagreement with harassment, but really the only person in here trying to pick personal fights with other members is you. I am sorry you didn’t like what i had to say awhile ago, but that doesn’t mean you get to go around and try pigeon hole everything I say and experience and try to bunch me with a group of people so you can easily dismiss what I and others, have to say. You keep talking about tolerance, but you can’t even engage in a passionate debate with showing an ounce of tolerance towards whoever you have decided is the “other” side.

1913

To Nesrie and Brad Wardell, both of whose posts I really like reading, I would say the same thing right now. And like most of what little wisdom I’ve gleaned about life, it’s a quote from The Big Lebowski:

You’re not wrong, Walter. You’re just an asshole.

Please ease up on each other, guys. I’ve been supercomfortable with how awesome the discussion about this issue has been on Qt3, and how it’s presented different viewpoints without getting overly nasty. I’d really love to keep it that way.

-Tom

1914

Wow. Physician, heal thyself.

1915

No problem, Tom.

I’ve presented my perspective about as clearly as I’m capable of at this point.

Suffice to say, as long as the anti-#gamergate posters continue to argue that the majority of #gamergate supporters are somehow anti-woman they’ll continue to look like hopeless hypocrites.

1916

That is true about ZQ, at least I believe she is a toxic personality, but you have to admit that there is a sexual, misogynistic spiel to the abuse she’s getting, and that made things bigger than it would be if this was a man doing this.

I’ve gotten a taste of this in the past when people thought I was a girl in a game. I let it rock to see what happened. I’ve also had a couple of friends (one of whom is a fairly decent-sized name in the indie gaming scene) transition, and I’ve seen what happens with them, and it pissed me the hell off.

I also won’t say no one deserves a shit storm, there are always folks vile enough to deserve it. Some folks have way too low of a standard towards who is deserving, on that I’ll agree with you.
When is someone fair game? Is the Ferguson PD fair game, assuming you believe they blatantly are racist and abuse their power? Are the Kochs/George Soros? Could any game dev ever be fair game if they did something vile enough?

As for your other point- just because some folks see misogyny at every turn and were pooh-poohing the whole thing, doesn’t mean that a decent-sized component of the #gamergate folks weren’t misogynists, no better than say, the #gameovergate folks. (who are pretty vile themselves- I have a couple on my twitter feed, one I ended up muting because he wouldn’t shut up)

I won’t say they were the majority at its peak, but they are the majority now. Most of the more reasonable folks got tired of it and left to come back when it heats up again in the future.

This stuff is why this issue isn’t cut and dry, no matter how anyone tries to spin it.

1917

Sure Tom.

But I won’t let anyone try and label me as some man-hating crazy woman not worth listening to. It’s not who I am, and it’s not how I present myself here, not even in this topic. I am a gamer, and I work in IT, and this topic is relevant to me.

1918

Understood on both posts, and I’m not asking either of you to quit discussing the topic. I appreciate both your perspectives and they both belong in the conversation. I’d just ask that you two shake hands and try not to get too put out with each other based on past disputes.

-Tom

1919

Sorry, but there is no grey area here. Brad is literally telling her “I don’t believe that you were attacked, I don’t believe you that you were harassed, and I believe that you are directly lying about your experiences and I need to see your police reports and other proof before I do”.

Victim blaming does not get more open and shut than that. A distrusting mindset like that between two people trying to have a rational discussion is one of the entire reasons why these discussions blew up in the first place.

-People claiming Anita and Zoe are doxxing themselves
-People claiming they’re faking their death threats
-People claiming they’re purposely bringing attention to themselves to benefit in other ways

It’s just disgusting.

1920

Regarding IT specifically, women in my corporation are treated exactly the same as men. We are a number. you get one when you are hired, it is your login to everything. When it goes dead, you no longer exist. FEM/MALE is nothing, you are a name people click on to complain about things. They do not care if the name is Kiranmai, or Chris.

When you are not considered human, sex disappears. Hurray for corporations, equality for all through obfuscation of humanity.

This is the only IT job I’ve ever had, so maybe this is not accurate, but in my world, sexism cannot exist since you are just a part in a machine. I do work for one of the largest companies in the world though, and we use a lot of IT resources (poorly).

*Yeah. I had a bad work day today. Threatened by a large customer, and no paycheck on payday.

I wish art paid my bills. Or at least my material costs.

with regards to self doxxing, I can see a sociopath seeing that as a pretty elegant solution. I do not know if that is true, but my feeling after reading most of the garbage out there about this is Zoe would fall into a category of people I would cut out of my life, whom I’d expect that behavior from. I don’t know anything about Anita at all other than she got a ton of dough to buy games for some reason, and does some sort of pro-female viewpoint reviews on them. Without seeing her content to know what its all about on its face that sounds like a pretty cool gig and not a crazy weird thing to do, since that perspective is a bit lacking.

1921

Yeah, ZQ has always seemed a bit flakey (Not that she deserves any more harassment than anyone else because of it). But Anita Sarkeesian garners much of the same vitriol, and honestly she really isn’t doing all that much that’s antagonistic. Some simple criticism, and she even prefaces each video with the (paraphrasing) “This doesn’t make the games shown here bad, nor does it mean you are a bad person for playing them”, and yet she still gets a shitstorm every time. Sure, I suppose she could try to go the stoic route and try to ignore it all, but I don’t think she should be required to.

1922

Achievement unlocked: You have mastered the art of the straw man argument.

1923

Do you do phone work? A friend of mine the other day was just venting about how some creepy dude was saying she had a sexy voice, multiple times during the same call.

Also, just go watch a couple of the videos, they’re online via youtube, and fairly short. My favorite is the one where she makes fun of the new Bionic Commando. (Which, honestly, I really think SHOULD be made fun of, talk about dumbest plot point)

1924

Screw you, clairvoyant frog!

No, I agree. People should calm down and speak their points civilly - it’s tiresome and more damaging to your own credibility when you try to disregard other viewpoints by trying to diminish them as racist, misogynist, corrupt, etc. or think your personal experience gives you some lofty perspective that you can use to drown out dissenting voices. Sticking to facts and letting people make their own judgments is considerably more persuasive.

1925

Good heavens, no. The mirth is entirely directed at EJ Dickson for promoting this as if it was the second coming, and asking serious, hard hitting questions such as “What about moon cups?”

1926

Youtube usage by me is only for Gorburger. You show me a new episode, I’ll start using youtube again. It is otherwise useless.

And yeah, I have a bit of phone, mostly workflows or email or company wide instant messenger, most of my direct co-workers are Indian and their names can get confusing so I used to make female/male mistakes (to the point where I strictly use names now, which is sort of a nice outcome) As far as phone calls from an end user - they are either employees or suppliers. One knows how to behave, the other risks millions or billions by their comments so everyone behaves fairly well. I see more racist shit due to many of my co-workers being in India. Land of awesome food and unfortunately-for-phone-work thick accents. I could do my job in half the time if I did not spend so much effort pointing people to email or assisting in interpreting phone calls. And this is not our employee/contractors fault - the company we use for this has multiple tiers - we could pay for less accent and do not. This seems odd in and of itself to me though. The technical knowledge does not change, you can literally pay more for less accent, otherwise identical asset.

I’m unsure if non-IT people have the same issues. My position is odd and isolated from most of the IT community within my company. I never see or meet them (or anyone lately since i’m remote as of January)

I could also add that my office when I was in one was female dominant - not that it seemed unusual or an issue, but all but maybe 20% of our operations / managers were female MBAs. (no better than other MBA but just as good, same mix of ‘questionable person with MBA’ to ‘Awesome person who understands what everything is, does, and means’)

EDIT: and the above sounds disconnected from the female in a male world plight for sure - I get the concept, I’ve just literally never seen it. It may come down to employer: LA Times->Musicians Union->GIANTCORPORATIONTHATWOULDFIREMEFORTALKINGABOUTTHEM is my entire history, discounting highschool and art gigs. All my employers have been perfectly even handed. I’ve never seen any evidence of any bullshit because someone was female. I feel like my reaction to legit women’s issues in the workplace always has a hurdle of disbelief to cross,.

I wonder if this stifles support for women’s issues a little in general, as some people who would support women’s rights may feel sort of non plus’d by the facts in their heads - since they’ve never seen anything even remotely considerable as discrimination.

It is as foreign and false to me as belief in God - something I’ve only sincerely experienced twice. (I have plenty of Christian friends but only 2 actually live up to all the bullshit and come across as real, true, “Christians”, good people who the faith has helped and does help guide into a quality, happy, productive life. I do my best not to bitch about religion in front of them out of respect)

1927

Never heard about Daily Dot, is it a major player on the internets?

Edit:
Alexa ranks it as 981 in the US.
They must be doing something right though:

Or everything else just started sucking a lot more (Which might be true also).

Those Alexa stats are kinda interesting. Time to check some other sites.

(http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quartertothree.com )

1928

Well, people do lie to garner attention and sympathy, or falsely accuse people of crimes all of the time. Some people have been contacting the police services that Anita S repeatedly indicated she contacted and filed reports, and the police have said that she never contacted them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaXDLpjG3XU

For you guys following this more closely, did she have a suitable retort to that evidence? It’s pretty bad if she made it all up, since she also directly criticized the police by indicated they told her to quit her job, etc., which seemed pretty fishy and caused people to investigate her credibility.

If she actually made all this up, she could be criminally charged herself:
https://twitter.com/Nero/status/510207385018056704

1929

Agreed, while I think the backlash Quinn’s currently leading is showing people why she might not be a good spokesperson for women in gaming, the way some people can just turn ugly at the mention of Sarkesian has always been confusing.

But in a way I’m glad Sarkesian can still cause a ruckus because I think the reaction to her is very much a “get out of my room” kind of thing, while Quinn’s was more manufactured misogyny (I’m not sure that makes sense). Quinn reminds me of Suey Park or Adria Richards, she might release another game down the line but in a few months she’ll still be carrying on and nobody but the devoted or the hateful will be thinking about her. It feels like Anita actually kick starts conversation, angry conversation, really angry sometimes, but it can be productive whether you agree or not.

Also, unless it’s a parody, Phil Fish is back on twitter. Joy.