[kevingadd]

No valid concerns about corruption or ethical question marks have been raised in this whole misogynist harassment-fest.

The few plausible accusations leveled so far have all been shown to be false.

A short summary of the ones I've seen:

Accusation: A developer 'slept with journalists for positive coverage'; the 'proof' was that a Kotaku author she slept with gave her game a positive review.

Reality: No such review ever existed. The author she supposedly slept with wrote about her game once, long before either of them ever met (nobody is able to dispute this timeline). Kotaku explicitly denied the accusation and supported this version of events.

Accusation: Victims of these harassment campaigns are faking all the harassment in order to get attention, get money, and somehow ascend to the highest echelons of game development.

Reality: Well even if the original harassment was 'fake' (have fun proving that), there's certainly real harassment now, in part from people who believe the original harassment was fake and want to punish them for it.

Accusation: Involved parties 'sabotaged' a game jam/charity drive for personal reasons/competition.

The only concrete variation of this accusation I've seen is 'The Fine Young Capitalists', a pretty sketchy thing that purports to be a charity game jam for women. Other than their shady business terms for the participants, if it's on the up-and-up it's a nice idea. Continuing on the premise that it's TFYC:

Reality: TFYC is basically a one-man funding campaign to theoretically do nice things. It's not operated by a well-established group with a clear track record. Before continuing, perhaps read this statement by TFYC's operator:

http://www.thefineyoungcapitalists.com/PeaceTreaty

By their own admission: Any actual sabotage was not actually committed by any of the harassment campaign victims, merely an unnamed 'associate'. The 'sabotage' went no further than a link to a publicly accessible facebook page. The damage done to the campaign was largely a result of the operator making transphobic remarks in some sort of interview (this is indirectly referred to in the above post). The harassment victims had nothing to do with it, and the appearance of transphobia is what drove the business partner away and cost them money.

Generally speaking, game development & games journalism are deeply intertwined, incestuous, corrupt industries. But guess what: None of these people are targeting any of the actual sources of corruption in big-budget AAA game development or coverage - many of those are really big, easy, obvious targets. By some incredible coincidence, they're targeting vulnerable minorities working on small game titles or game-related works, many of them women. Some of these targets don't even charge money for their work, making any actual harm from supposed 'corruption' near-zero.

[_delirium]

It's reaching Poe's Law conspiracy-theory levels now, where I can't tell which are parodies and which are real. One of the "exposé" images floating around proves that DiGRA (an academic game-studies conference) is an agent of the U.S. government, because someone who spoke there once was also in a CS research lab that got DARPA funding (which is most American CS research labs, incidentally). And the conference also publishes a bunch of papers on gender-and-gaming, proving they're out to ruin games.

The virulent misogyny is the worst, though, and extremely obvious. It's telling that with all the actual money questionably floating around in the industry that gamers are happy to ignore, people suddenly get worked up about the sex life of some obscure bloggers and indie devs earning $10/mo on Patreon. The real money is being thrown at trade mags by companies like EA and Ubisoft, and some of the more questionable practices involve unofficially hinging early demo access on favorable reviews. But that's apparently not interesting to dig into for "gamers".

[kevingadd]

Indeed. When the sockpuppets stroll over to my neck of the twitter woods (not often, since my userpic isn't a photo), it makes me a bit sad. Sometimes they seem like they have actual grievances about perceived defects in the game industry - and I feel for them! There's a lot wrong with this industry, and it's especially evident to me after over a decade in it.

The problem is that the vast majority of the noise in this stupid manufactured scandal is pure harassment. It's not targeting any of the actual roots of supposed corruption, it's not putting forward verifiable/falsifiable claims, it's not putting forward simple, rigorous arguments, and it's not examining behaviors.

Instead the movement targets random people for harassment, then expands the targeting to people who defend those targets. They iteratively move through the network trying to harass people until they give up, as if this somehow results in 'winning an argument'. Even if these targets were somehow the roots of corruption in the industry (sadly they aren't), booting a few people out doesn't fix anything - the corruption is inherent in how this industry is run, not the people in it.

For this stuff to extend so far, and result in doxxing and death threats to extended family and all sorts of other vile things - it's just gross. It doesn't even matter what the targets did, it's hard to justify this kind of behavior in any circumstances. The fact that it's all levelled against low-wage minority journalists & developers instead of wealthy evildoers is just bewildering.