[Karunamon]

Yeah, no. People claiming "harassment!" absent evidence is not proof of said harassment existing, doubly so when the people shouting the loudest have a profit motive for its supposed existence.

Also: It would be rather disingenuous to claim that gamergate are a bunch of harassers without acknowledging that prominent people within the movement have received things like syringes and knives in the mail... and been blackballed from the industry..

Kind of puts in perspective this "harassment", which at its worst, can be described as "people saying mean things on the internet".

http://deepfreeze.it - also all public record.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

> People claiming "harassment!" absent evidence is not proof of said harassment existing

Who said there's no evidence?

[igreulich]

Perception is reality. And it seems the perception is that Gahergate is a group of harrasors. You (not you personally) saying it is not will not change that perception.

It seems to me that if you want Gamegate to be taken seriously (though I think it is way to late for that) Gamergate needs to start cleaning out it ranks.

Which highlights the real issue. Gamergate has no central entity. So there are going to be people harrassing under the banner of Gamergate, and you can’t do anything about it. The name is tarnished, full stop. It will be almost impossible for Gamergate to do any good now, assuming it ever wanted to good!

[Karunamon]

You (not you personally) saying it is not will not change that perception.

Perhaps, but correcting misinformation wherever its seen should be the goal of anyone connected with the movement. Perceptions can change.

Gamers have been a marginalized group for pretty much as long as the hobby has existed, so this is nothing new. People lying about them, their hobby, making fun of them as losers and shut-ins and immature and criminals in training, this is all de rigeur. One more insult on the pile doesn't change much.

>Gamergate needs to start cleaning out it ranks.

How so? Other than shouting down harassers, I'm not sure what action you expect a bunch of people centered around a hashtag and an idea to take.

>It will be almost impossible for Gamergate to do any good now

I'd say they've done quite a lot of good already. Disclosure policies at multiple journalism outfits enacted, FTC rules on paid endorsements being clarified due largely in part to an emailing campaign, hundreds of thousands of dollars raised for various charities...

[Dirlewanger]

>I'd say they've done quite a lot of good already.

Absolutely, and the saddest part about all this is that entities with painfully overt agendas (The Verge/Vox, Ars Technica, etc.) were more than happy to report on all the negatives, and will still continue to, while reporting none of the good that's come out of it.

Same with people on this site for the most part: they've completely made up their mind about what Gamergate stands for and will hear nothing else about it. Which is hilariously ironic given how much this site likes to tote itself as a well-educated bunch. Groupthink/hivemind tendencies are always the same for any community of humans.

[Karunamon]

Thing is, it's hard to not to get the wrong idea. All the people complaining the loudest about Gamergate have serious media connections.

Unchallenged falsehoods in multiple media outlets -> Sourced by Wikipedia per their usual secondary source rules -> Shows up on the front page of Google where most normal people will see it.

You actually have to have an interest in this stuff and actually dig to see that the narrative is false/misleading.

igreulich is correct - the name has been very successfully tarnished. Problem is, moving on to something else is a move that has zero benefit (because the same problems would just happen again under any new name), so the hivemind wisely decided to stay put.

[DanBC]

Can you (or any pro-gamergaters) show me one site that you think counts as a pro gamergate site?

[Karunamon]

Here's a few:

http://deepfreeze.it (exhaustively sourced list of complaints against game journalists and information on the movement as a whole)

http://techraptor.com (games news site, spawned in the wake of gamergate)

http://escapistmagazine.com (games news site, updated ethics policies after initial complaints, allows open discussion on the forums)

[DanBC]

DeepFreeze.it repeats the lies about Zoe Quinn.

http://www.deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=monster

> The overwhelming majority of their coverage consists solely of reprinting verbatim the anecdotal and often unverified accounts from controversial figures who directly profit from being considered targets of harassment — Zoe Quinn being a good example.

> Often described as an indie developer, Quinn has produced very little aside from the low-effort, unpolished free text adventure Depression Quest. More notable about Quinn was the disproportionate attention she got from the gaming press despite her limited accomplishments, from journalists such as her financial backer Ben Kuchera of Polygon and her friend Patricia Hernandez of Kotaku.

http://www.deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=unfair

> Hernandez has also promoted two Kickstarters by GaymerX while being on friendly terms with the organization's president Toni Rocca and some of the other GaymerX staff. She has also given positive press, without disclosure, to her friends David Gallant and Zoe Quinn.

http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson

> Positive coverage of Zoe Quinn in three articles, without disclosing their friendship and eventual affair. Later covered Quinn again, disclosing they "dated briefly", but not that he had previously financially supported her.

Techraptor does the same.

http://techraptor.net/content/zoe-quinn-lying-journalists

> One of the first things that seems quite possibly true about Zoe Quinn is the fact that she plays heavily into self-victimization. Now I will concede that I am not entirely knowledgeable about the psychology behind self-victimization, but what it is defined as makes it fairly easy to identify.

> The most high profile example of this was Zoe Quinn’s claim that Wizardchan raided and doxxed (acquired and revealed personal info) her. That whole affair is best summed up here. Basically, the takeaway from that is that her accusations hold little if any merit at all. What is consistently seen throughout that is how easily she puts herself forward as a victim and asks for consolation from a variety of personalities and sites. Even if you only read the text surrounding the images of her tweets and other communications, you can see this.

This is supposed to be an example of a site that doesn't promote and continue harassment? I can see why people think gamergate advocates are the worst kind of fucking scumbag.

[mushtifaha]

> The name is tarnished, full stop.

You know what other names are tarnished? Liberals, Socialists, Democrats, Conservatives, Republicans, Christians, Muslims, ecologists, feminists, etc. Every sufficiently large movement has had its name dragged through the mud by its opposition. It's how things work. Gamergate is fine and continues to do good, whether the adversaries want to acknowledge it or not.

[Torgo]

Gamergate doesn't actually have "ranks", it is a multi-homed, decentralized mob. That is the genius/horror of it. Welcome to the future of memetic warfare, it has already reached escape velocity from 4chan.