[_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.