#gamergate

gaming
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Which is a lot different than saying that everybody is an idiot, on one, either, or both sides.

Let’s look at the issues from the so-called SJW side:

  1. Games are misogynistic.
    There’s no right way on this one.
  • Disney has been getting guff from feminists from a long time, because some of their villains are female and because their heroines seem stupid and vacuous. But the reviews on Pocahontas (from the feminist crowd) was worse than misogynism. it was dismissed because (supposedly) Pocahontas was portrayed as a gullible, uneducated aborigine. The depiction of nature-based spirituality in the movie was also dismissed as “a white man’s misinterpretation”.
  • Lara Croft, despite being a woman in a man’s role and being a respected professional and academic, is not a good example, because she has boobs and dresses skimpily. Somehow, this is put forward at the same time that Quinn’s so-called supporters are saying that gamers dismiss her because she is attractive and wears clothing that shows it off, with no sign of embarrassment.
  1. Games are an art-form, not an appliance.
  • I couldn’t believe this one when it came out. This is one of those black v white viewpoints that I despise. Games are both an artform and an appliance. We want to be entertained and stimulated with visuals and sounds (and sometimes touch). We also want the game to have features that enhance our game-playing experience.
  • The other issue here is that the underlying assumption that art should either show a form of truth acceptable to one group, over all others, or show a form of fantasy that favors the same group over all others. Should a game show a young girl being bullied? No, that’s misogynistic. Should a game show a female villain? Only if she has a socially-acceptable excuse for being a villain, or is a misunderstood champion for women’s rights. Women can not be victims (except victims of misunderstanding, I guess?). Women can not be strong enough to carve out their own roles unless it is a role that other women agree with.
  • This goes to one of my biggest complaints of so-called femininsts: "I’m all for empowering women who slavishly follow my own agenda.* “You’re not a feminist if you disagree with me.”
  • Gamers are misogynists.
    • This is separate from the first point. If we say “all feminists are castrating, testosterone-abusing psychotics who eat baby kittens for breakfast”, that’s wrong. But if we say it about men, that’s okay. Bullshit. Making an unfounded blanket statement about any group of people is prejudice and bigotry, no matter what their gender or alignment. (see double-standard)
  • Quinn and other women were unfairly targeted by Gamergate.
    • No shit. None of the men who disagreed with Gamergate were targeted like the women. Wil Wheaton and Chris Kluwe certainly were not harassed to the point of fearing for their lives (with Kluwe, it would probably would have suicidal to physically attack him). However, it does not help your feminist cause to paint the women involved as helpless victims (see double-standard).
  • Gamergate is a bunch of right-wing anti-feminists.
    • Sigh. Once again, black v white. The term Gamergate was coined by Baldwin, and a bunch of right-wingers immediately jumped on the bandwagon. Yes, most of these right-wingers had no respect (quite the contrary) for gamers previously. Yes, they used it to advance their own agenda.
  • But claiming that all, or even a majority, of gamers are one thing or another is just as bad as anything the so-called feminists are decrying.

Now, let’s look at the Gamergate side:

  1. The media unfairly promotes certain games over others.
  • This claim would be better received if the gamers had targeted those game companies that are “unfairly promoted”. Instead the games and developers that were targeted the most were indies.
  • This claim would also have gone farther if Gamergate had not immediately gone for the throat of any media outlet that disagreed with them. In addition, Gamergate also compromised and crippled a few fundraising campaigns on Indy-go-go and tried to do the same with Patreon (I can’t tell if this was successful or not).
  • This could better be summed up by “The media unfairly promotes games I don’t like, and unfairly denounces games I like.” This goes back to the art-form v appliance issue, and I find myself in sympathy with the gamers here. Some of you have seen my MMO development thread, where I specifically singled out developers who spend more on art than game-play (or common sense).
  • On the other hand, gamers tend to dismiss “chick games” and games that are more art galleries than games, regardless of whether they are good or not.
  • But “good” is a subjective matter, and should not be promoted as "Facts’, and this goes out to both sides.
  • Various claims against Quinn, et al.
  • These claims have been proven untrue. However, the majority of folks on the Gamergate side either haven’t noticed, or have ignored it altogether (sometimes with the excuse of “media conspiracy”).
  • None of these claims, had they been substantiated, warrant the threats and verbal/text assault on the characters of those involved.
  • Note to everybody: if you take the word of an ex-significant-other on anything, you will always be wrong. Trust me.
  • Most telling on this one was that Quinn was already being denounced by the gamer community regarding the release of her game Depression Heights near the time of Robin Williams’ suicide (a release that had already been scheduled, by the way). It did not matter that, rather than making a quick buck, she released it as “pay what you want” and a portion of the proceeds went to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. By the time Gamergate was in full swing, she had already been harrassed for eighteen months, including threats. This doesn’t contribute to a verdict of impartiality on anyone on the Gamergate side.
  • The attacks on Quinn, et al., were made by trolls, agenda-ists, etc.
  • So what? When you sleep with dos, as they say. When the moderates in your camp can’t be bothered to distance themselves from the “black bloc”, they have given tacit support to them. If you do not confront behavior, with reinforcement of negative consequences, you are enabling it. That is a principle that has been proven over and over again; even the newest parents have seen this one in play, mostly at bedtime.
  • When the majority of your movement actively moves against people who are publicly moderate, it becomes obvious that the moderates are the minority.
  • On the other hand, this is one of the biggest drawbacks of a “grassroots” movement, especially on the Internet: not only is there no quality assurance, there is no way to verify membership. Logos can be copy-pasted, and very few people know how to verify a PGP key, even if it was possible to keep someone from forging one (and if you make it public, they can).
  • The only way to combat this is to create an official channel to release information, with each submission reviewed by a specific group of people; heaven help you if one of those people goes off the reservation.
  • Gamergate has legitimate concerns.
    • When nobody on your side can present a decent, reasoned, intelligent argument, then you don’t have one. Period.
  • The legitimate concerns have not been a focus of Gamergate. Very few (if any) ethical “breaches” have been discussed thus far; instead the focus has been on attacking individuals, or attacking companies or organizations of which a specific individual is associated. Even the manifesto (The Gamers’ Bill of Rights, by Kelly Maxwell) which was published had very little to do with the supposed ethical breaches of mainstream and video media.
  • Video game media is “in bed” with developers.
    • What two consenting adults do in their bed is none of anyone’s business, as long as they are not hurting anyone else.
    • By necessity, video game journalists have to maintain professional relationships with developers. It’s the only way that they can continue to get advance access to games, so that they can review it in time for you to decide whether to buy it or not (in other words, a legal alternative to you downloading a copy from The Pirate Bay).
  • Every reputable media outlet that reviews video games has stringent ethical codes. If you believe an individual reporter/reviewer has broken that, you should report it to that individual’s boss. Broadcasting your butt-hurt all over the internet isn’t the action of a mature adult.
  • 4chan and 8chan are not the outlets to use to discuss things rationally. By using those outlets, you have already admitted there is little, if any, real value to your concerns.
  • We’re not misogynists, bigots, etc.
  • Once again, you have a poor way to show it.
  • The way that gamers constantly ignore or dismiss complaints of various stripes of bigotry is telling. And it’s not telling a very good story.
    • The truth is that there are some gamers who are not like this, and do their best to promote diversity.
    • The truth is that there are some gamers who want to keep gaming white, heterosexual, and male.
    • The truth is there are a lot of gamers who don’t give a shit, who laugh at the jokes (and sometimes perpetuate them) and generally act in the stereotype of gamers.
    • The truth is there are a lot of gamers that don’t give a shit because they are clueless when the jokes and snide jokes are passed around.
  • Once again, letting it pass unremarked is the same as enabling it.

My verdict (YMMV) is that both sides are wrong. One of the commenters on this, following the Gawker disaster, said that Gamergate is a “lose-lose” proposition for the media. He was wrong. It is a “lose-lose-lose-lose” proposition: the feminists lose, the moderates lose, Gamergate loses, and society loses.

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42

I forgot one of the arguments on the Gamergate side:

The only people who should review a game are its fans.

First, no. I can see the case for a reviewer to be a fan of video games: someone who hates them or has never played them would not be a good reviewer. As far the game itself, the features and entertainment value of the game should be reviewed by somebody who know what they are talking about.

But the last person I would ask about an iPhone is a Macvangelist. I am not going to ask a WOW addict for a review of the game. I want to see a review from someone who can look at it from the perspective of someone playing the game for the first time. If at all possible, it would be nice to see a review written from the perspective of someone who has never played video games, as a discussion of the features and mechanics only.

However, games can also be reviewed regarding their portrayal of society, the political viewpoint in the game, the gender roles and so on. Once again, this needs to be done by somebody who knows what the hell they are talking about. And no, it really shouldn’t be somebody with an axe to grind on either side. But, frankly, that’s pipe dream. Nobody who approaches it that way is ever going to get serious consideration - both sides will be dissatisfied and we will have another Gawker incident.

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I just can’t wrap my head around this part. Satire is only appropriate if it is no longer relevant? I would argue that “related to real-world violence or death” is an excellent angle on a game. Games and literature and other art and interactive engagements (how’s that for inclusive) let us examine something sideways, abstractly, that most people simply aren’t prepared to deal with directly. There may have been many great reasons not to publish this game; this one wouldn’t have made any list I could devise.

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I can relate to the “too, current, too emotionally charged”. This is rather similar to the suggestion by a marketing hack that I write gay romance novel where two of Sandusky’s victims, in the process of the trial, come to realize they are gay and are madly in love with each other.

It trivializes the real-world experience, in my opinion. If someone wrote a game where the player is the Ferguson police department and the point of the game was to shoot kids and hide the bodies, I think people would have a problem with that as well. This may not be a good example, as nobody was killed (yet) in Gamergate, but I think you can see where trivializing other people’s experiences comes in.

The game mechanic, on the other hand, is very interesting. Desborough does state that he is perfecting the system for use in future games.

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I have no problem with not publishing something because it is awful, but I have a hard time understanding why mere currency should be a disqualifier.

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In the end, it’s their decision, just seems odd.

Here is my last thought on gamergate for a while, and pretty good writeup CWX, I don’t agree on all of it but I think you hit most of the points. I do think it’s moved into a get out of my hobby thing with the core against the SJWs. And I think part of the reason it’s such a mess is the people who feel attacked are just flailing around trying to make everyone go away.

This is a culture war, it’s still being fought in books (But only due to Indie and Baen), but movies and TV lost a long time ago. Guess what, if I want to be misogynistic and create something misogynistic, I can. If I want to create an environment that favors young men over old women, I can do that too. If I want to make a product for left handed pencil sharpeners, then I can do that, and you can take your protests and shove them.

WTF, we have here on CoG an environment where we cater to certain kinds of people. Imagine if all of a sudden a bunch of Bronies came by here and hijacked every thread to talk about how the topic related to MLP. And then when we pushed back we were yelled at for not being inclusive, and we were less than human shitlords. Then the entire Bronie webosphere came here and curb stomped the forum until it was a My Little Pony fansite.

If people want to play a video game where all you do is grab boobs, they should be allowed to. If you think it’s sexist, don’t buy it. If you think there should be one where you grab men’s asses, don’t yell at the people making the boob game, go out and fund a butt game.

Quinn had also gotten in a slap fight with Fine Young Capitalists on their female developer thingie. At which point she started her own vapor ware conference, and the donations went to her personal pay pal account. The woman has some questionable tactics and is using feminism to make money. Quinn is a fellow traveler of Sarkeesian, trading their moral authority on feminism for cash.

I will guarantee that Wil got more death threats than Quinn did, and Baldwin likely got more than both. It’s just that the totally equal and strong women involved in the progressive side of things are apparently totally unable to deal with death threats. The men in these issues get them constantly, the women on the conservative side get them all the time. It’s the women saying they deserve to be treated equally that scream for special treatment here. These are bad things, and people shouldn’t do them, but for some reason it’s the progressive females that complain the most about it and seem helpless to protect themselves. Which seems to me to be a supreme irony, since a lot of their platform totally contradicts their actions.

How can you possibly sit there and tell me that you are equal or better than me when you can’t take the same heat in the kitchen as I do? How can you tell me that you are the stronger sex, or that you are right and I’m wrong, if bossy hurts you that much. When the courage of your convictions is ruined because a video game character is female instead of male, or vice versa? This is how you end up with people calling you cupcake, and snowflake, and get mansplained. These are the same people that look at you with a straight face one day and say women are in control of their sexuality , and then the next day tell me that when two drunk people have sex the man raped the woman.

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As far as I know, what happened was that FYC’s Indiegogo campaign got shut down because either the account was hijacked, or Indiegogo was getting too much pressure because Quinn was involved, or both (it’s still unclear, the last I saw Indiegogo was keeping their lips buttoned on the whole thing)

But yes, you are right. If people don’t like what is being presented, they can make their own. And they can watch it nosedive into oblivion, because it is not possible for a political action committee to script something worthwhile, much less all the little features we expect from games.

Frankly, I don’t think Quinn should be touting her interactive fiction as a game. The two are separate. The closest a game comes to interactive fiction is an RPG, which has to be a lot more flexible than interactive fiction. I’ve seen some “games” marketed as RPGs when they were only slightly-complicated interactive fiction. ( I recently played an indie “RPG” that didn’t even qualify as interactive fiction, because there were no choices presented - it was a film that you had to click to go to the next frame.)

If I want a game that has positive gay characters in it, or where people have the option of specifying gay or straight, I can’t walk into, say, Electronic Arts, flail around, click my heels three times while screeching “civil rights violation” and tell them that they are now, due to my impressive hoodoo skills, required to write a game like that and specifically hire Keith Haring as a consultant… I am going to be very very disappointed (besides the fact that Haring died almost 25 years ago).

In fact, I’ve always questioned the sanity of people who demand other people do something they themselves are not willing to invest the time (or effort) in. I also question the intelligence of those that knuckle under to these nutjobs.

If I want to make a game, it’s a matter of hard work (including lots of study time, it’s been years since I did any real programming). And, oh look, I have all these fictional worlds I could use for material. I have thousands of characters to use as villains, victims, and other NPCs. Yes, I would have to find an artist, unless I want to use the equivalent of South Park - but the current crop of indie games has “proven” that stick figure characters and badly drawn snarls of string are acceptable. Hell I could even use HeroMachine to do the art, and then South-Park it.

People like the so-called social justice warriors, who scream bloody murder that somebody else is required to pander to their whims, are not about social justice. They aren’t activists. They are tin-pot autocrats, trying to force everybody else to dance to their tune - except they don’t want to have to play the tune either.

We can’t even claim this is an example of “tyranny of the minority”, because I have seen far too many who demand that other people implement their “suggestions” for no other reason than they said so.

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Who says your dude in Call of Duty isn’t gay anyway? Or that Luigi isn’t gay? Or does it even matter when they are eating mushrooms chasing turtles looking for coins?

And anyone following #metalgate?

hahahahahahahahahahah. Good luck suckers, you thought gamers were backwards people who don’t give a shit. I’m sure they didn’t expect almost the whole industry to just say fuck you straight out. Calling Heavy Metal groups conservatives is kind of funny though.

I read an article where someone was talking about filling a room with a representative of all the groups that have been accused of sexism and bigotry lately. The Metalhead next to the rocket scientist, next to the hard core gamer, next to the cop, the firefighter, the rapper, the artist, the kickstarter, the politician, the athlete and men in general, just to see the looks on these people’s faces as they realize they are all the same to a true social justice warrior.

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Yeah, pretty much.

I can’t stand bigots like that. Bigots who hide their inability to see people by pointing fingers and screaming “bigot” or “abuser” or whatever are the worst.

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Their’s also been a recent conflagration because OneBookShelf, a online PDF (and Print on Demand) store for RPGs, card games war games, etc. chose to remove a specific card game from sale. This led to predictable outrage, cries of censorship, claims of a boycott, etc. , despite OBS not in any way being a monopoly in this niche industry. (I could probably set up a crappy knock-off of their system to sell PDFs in an afternoon for under $50 in add-ons to ecommerce packages. It might suck, but it’d do the job.)

One of OBS’ main guys, who is a few months off a Cardiac Event and was trying to take a vacation, apparently got harassed to the degree that he needed to interrupt his vacation, change his number, and was doxxed and thus will have to deal with *that( for an unspecified amount of time.

The card game’s creator apparently has a couple other somewhat questionable games up for sale (on OBS)

OBS also got in trouble as there were allegations that they pulled the game because another, larger publisher of theirs complained. This has been denied, but is widely circulated with the story.

Keep in mind, this is a tiny offshoot of the larger movement. It’s a step (or more) removed from the larger ‘Ethics in Journalism’ issue, or the women in games issue. And some people’s lives are being messed up over this.

I feel like the internet developed a weird sort of ‘vigilantism’ tradition but I worry people are acting without any real thought as tot he impact of what they’re doing.

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Sweet, digression time!

I have several times dipped my toes into interactive fiction, even going so far as to buy Aaron Reed’s Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7, but I’ve never really pulled the trigger on it. In terms of that border between IF and CYOA, Twine is pretty amazing. I have cranked out a simple one of those in a few hours with the old version; I’ve not yet played with the new one. No hardcore programming required for either. This is what the source for Inform 7 looks like, for example:

The Parliamentary Chambers are east of the State Rotunda. “Despite its grand name, this is one of the smaller chambers of the castle, because the kings were never inclined to brook too much advice. On each side of the room are two neat [oak benches], seating for perhaps thirty men – and, more rarely, women, and a few characters who could not be called by either term.” Some oak benches are enterable supporters in the Parliamentary Chambers. The benches are scenery. Understand “bench” as the benches.

That paragraph created the room, located it relevant to a location already defined, gave it a description, and then created an object (benches) and an alias (bench) for that object. The whole code is very much like that. It’s the only thing I’ve ever seen which is more immediately readable than python.

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That was CWX’s post a few up from here I think. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yes, missed that somehow. Too tired and busy lately, and Discourse seems to mess with my brain sometimes when trying to read a thread.

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Intel announces $300m towards “funding programs that support the positive representation if women and minorities in technology and gaming industries.”

Which apparently includes giving money to Anita Sarkeesian, angry feminist attack dog for hire.The same woman who declared Christmas songs to be misogynistic. Screaming about diversification and inclusion is a career choice in itself now, not just a career enhancer.

That’s a hell of a lot of Danegeld.

And someone tell me the difference between the SJWs picking someone, or some company to attack, and then getting paid off with jobs and grants, and actual Viking warriors attacking these companies. Firing the head of Mozilla didn’t make life any better for gay people, and it hurt the company in the long run. Intel handing out millions of dollars in grants isn’t going to magically make girls around the world put down My Little Pony play sets and pick up a slide rule and graph paper either.

Brendan Eich was the horse’s head in the bed, and Intel is the indirect result of that. I’m not indicating that it’s a conspiracy, or that this is all planned out, no more than gas prices are set by Exxon and BP every Friday morning.

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Danegeld was my association, too.

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Wow, LAw & Order SVU and #Gamergate…

Wow. Ripped from the headlines alright. And after screwing everything up they still manage to screw up even the happy ending. The abused female developer gives up at the end.

When did SJWs become the Moral Majority anyway?

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