[vezzy-fnord]

It's a kneejerk response to the massive backlash that ensued out of the recent Zoe Quinn scandal and the debate on journalistic ethics in video game media that erupted as a result. It's actually been boiling for a long time, but Quinn was the last straw.

Censorship and silence didn't work, as the Streisand effect snowballed this into something far larger than it would have been otherwise. Now this is an attempt to divert attention away.

It's a curious thing, gaming journalism. It is perhaps the most puerile form of "journalism" there is. It would be insulting to even call it journalism, it's blogging, plain and simple. Video game media is also the only one I know of that insults its target demographic so frequently, in an attempt to look socially progressive.

[_delirium]

I find it suspicious that a scandal involving some blogger's personal sex life, and $10/mo Patreon sponsorships, is the source of the outrage. There is a lot of money floating around in game journalism, but "gamers" seem only outraged about small amounts of money going to women and anyone Redditors think is a "social justice warrior", seemingly especially when the people are fairly obscure and make nearly no money. How much sense does it make to target game-journalism corruption by starting with the people not getting a piece of the large corporate marketing budgets that are floating around?

It would be a more interesting exposé if people focused on actual corruption going on in the review/journalism scene. Things like EA's early-access review policies that unofficially hinge access to future titles on what scores a magazine gives. Or the large mount of money going to certain widely watched podcasts without disclosure. There was an exposé of that issue ~2 months ago (written by gaming journalists, no less) but barely anyone cared: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-07-16-blurred-lines-a... Or the kind of wining-and-dining, travel reimbursements, etc. that goes on around E3 and other trade shows.

I think it's mostly a culture war that is about game journalism pretty secondarily. Nobody cares about Ubisoft wining-and-dining a writer from The Escapist at E3, because that doesn't play into any preexisting culture war, and none of Ubisoft/Escapist/E3 are seen as "outsiders" to gaming culture.

[vezzy-fnord]

The recent GamerGate demonstrations do touch on all of these, actually. But it's not a centralized or particularly focused effort, at the end of the day. It's really the messy culmination of all the outrage over corruption in gaming journalism that people kept their mouths shut over, and all of it finally exploding. Multiple subcultures intersect in the whole ordeal.

Actually, the Quinn scandal was instrumental in people opening their eyes about one thing. Namely, that it's not only large corporate media behind this. Even independent media isn't safe or trustworthy, and both is corrupted, but in different ways. Independent media is more likely to foster nepotism, cronyism and lying by omission/censorship, whereas the big shots, having major access to publishers and trade shows, can obviously go further.

It has also caused a lot of people to re-analyze these people's intentions and revisit previous incidents, which in light of new information, no longer seem as clear cut. Just because one is an underdog (and that's quite relatively speaking, anyway) does not make them righteous.

Actually, many people already knew that there's lots of corruption going on at major writers. This is why so many gamers went to indie media, but then they realized that nothing is safe. The outrage is that ultimately, all of it is the same: passive clickbait supposed to milk attention. But now there's nepotism, too. It's the outrage from now knowing that there's no one who represents your side in the media, and that people who are only interested in gaming from a surface level are holding major positions.

Finally at the risk of setting a fire, it wasn't a simple matter of a "blogger's personal sex life". The implications were wider reaching into the aforementioned nepotism.