Maybe you are just trolling, or maybe you actually believe in what you say. I know I used to believe the "it's above games journalism" point of view, as I found it had plenty of merit.
In case it's the second one, I have to tell you something: it really isn't about truth in games journalism. I know a lot of people think it is, but it truly isn't. Gamergate's sword are its misogynistic views and its coordinated attacks, while it's shield is the "games journalism" angle. If you truly believe you can separate one from the other, trust me, you can't.
The number of people who disagree with GamerGate, who are willing to deeply go into their reasons why, is very very tiny in my experience. Usually all you get is "gamergate is about harassing women", a link to an instance where trolls have done precisely that, and nothing further. Absolutely nothing to directly rebut the constant refrain that most people in the movement are there to crap on female developers.
If you have some deeper insights, I'd love for you to share them here. I find GG to be unfairly maligned - and given the fact that they've picked a fight with primarily huge, monied interests with mass media connections, I can see why. It doesn't even need to rise to the level of massive conspiracy.
I agree with the stated purposes of GG: games journalism needs some serious balancing. For instance, that mailing list in which both journalists and producers are members is an example of a line that should exist and yet doesn't. Hech, even "game developer literally in bed with producers" is something that, properly approached (not the case AT ALL, of course), could have been a valid point.
And yet, what is GG known for? They are being openly misogynistic, attacking anyone who dares speaking against them in a pretty serious way. Anita Sarkeesian and Felicia Day, to name two famous women, were doxxed and harrassed just for speaking openly.
And just like you cannot say "X and Y belong to Anonymous, but Z doesn't", you cannot say "The misogynists are using GG as an excuse, but they are not true GGers", because they are GG (the same way that you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic).
So my point would be: If a group is full of jerks that are flocking towards a group erroneously, are they really in the wrong group?
And yet, what is GG known for? They are being openly misogynistic, attacking anyone who dares speaking against them in a pretty serious way.
Okay, so first off, "attacking" does not imply misogyny. Attacking a woman for any reason that's not directly related to her gender is not misogyny. Period point blank.
Secondly, "What GG is known for" is the perception, the thing I take issue with, "What GG actually does" is something else.
I find it somewhat telling that you (not sure if you did this on purpose or not) characterize the community's response to being called misogynists as "attacking", and you characterize the people throwing the accusations as "speaking against". I'm not sure that any reasonable person would respond with anything but derision at being pre-emptively labeled in this way. Are people not allowed to defend themselves?
What I'm looking for here are facts. It appears, and please correct me with something I can actually verify on my own if I'm wrong here, that basically three people are saying "i'm being attacked because X", without actually backing up that accusation.
The cycle appears to be:
* Person writes incisive article or otherwise does something skeevy (GJP email list)
* Community goes "WTF?"
* Person characterizes this response as harassment.
I see no evidence, none, other than the words of the people concerned (which for obvious reasons, is insufficient evidence), that GG is mass harassing them. THIS IS THE MISSING PIECE OF THE PUZZLE FOR ME. Every time I try to follow the evidence trail, it ends at, in effect "I say I'm being harassed, so I am", with a side order of "The extremists in a group define a group".
I do not accept either of those explanations as true or logical.
And as a follow up, even if we acknowledge the existence of that mass harassment, what effort does the rest of the GG community, the people that are actually part of the revolt for the purposes of journalistic impropriety, need to do that they have not already done?
Loudly state they don't support harassment? Already done. [1].
Form a group to ensure harassers are removed from their ranks? Already done. [2]
Try to assemble a code of conduct for people to follow? Already done. [3].
What else needs to happen?
The problem with your standard is that you allow any group to be trivially discredited by the existence of a minority of troublemakers, either real or invented by the discreditors. The same kind of thing happened to Occupy Wall Street, the difference here is that this is the internet, and we should be able to logically separate troublemakers from non troublemakers.
You don't want be convinced, and you won't allow it to happen. It's extremely obvious. No one is going to waste their time attempting to correct you. You have to correct yourself. Or don't.
Who were Anita Sarkeesian and Felicia Day doxxed by? Maybe they did it themselves, or their friends did it. Have you got any evidence at all that this is not what happened. After all damseling-in-distress is very lucrative these days.
Edit: Downvoters, where is your evidence, where is your evidence, where is your evidence, where is your evidence?
This double standard absolutely boggles my mind, especially in the company of the people who usually inhabit this website.
What evidence is there that prominent GG detractors are receiving harassment for their views? Exactly the same amount of evidence that prominent GG supporters are receiving harassment for their views, yet for some reason, this standard is only applied against some people and not others.
I want to know what that reason is, I want someone reasonable to explain that to me, and I hope beyond all hope it doesn't boil down to "because some of those people have media connections and some don't".
No, they're primarily picking fights with individuals and systematically distracting everyone from the actual corruption of monied interests. Every so-called ethics issue that GamerGate has highlighted has been a hugely overblown misinterpretation, while several major ethical issues, such as the attempt to tightly control what YouTubers could and could not say about Shadows of Mordor, were ignored by GamerGate.
Major industry organizations have been forced to step up their efforts to protect innocent developers from GamerGate.
I oppose GameGate because:
* Every issue they've brought up has, without exception, been a minor quibble at best and an outright fabrication on the part of GamerGate at worst
* GamerGate has, as a movement, systematically refused to decry the harassment or take any kind of practical steps to curb it
* GamerGate uses charities as cover for their actions, and then DDOS the charities when the charities refuse to be used like that.
* GamerGate is still, as a movement, entirely obsessed with three specific women
* GamerGate uses anonymity for plausible deniability of its celebration of things like developer's dogs dying (multiple instances), SWATing (multiple instances), bomb threats (multiple instances).
> the attempt to tightly control what YouTubers could and could not say about Shadows of Mordor
That story was broken by TotalBiscuit, a prominent YouTube game reviewer who's generally considered to be part of Gamergate by its opponents and has been under attack by them for supporting it for months. (I believe they're currently trying to get his Steam curator privileges pulled for supporting it.) The gaming press didn't even report on it until over a week after it'd already blown up in Gamergate circles, the PR company behind it had apologized and promised not to do it again, and the Youtubers who took the deal had been scrutinized. Even then, I think TB was the main driving force behind them reporting on it.
The whole narrative about Gamergate ignoring it started a while after the gaming press finally reported on it, so about two weeks after GG got those responsible to apologise and back down from their decision. (By which point there wasn't much new GG discussion of it because they'd won and it was old news.)
You know what's really funny? If it really was about three specific women, as you say, then misogyny is automatically ruled out. What is it? Hate of three "specific" women? Or is it hate of all women? Hahaha, you lot are your own worst enemy. BTW we just disagree with them but apparently that is hate these days.
Um, a narrow focus on three women doesn't exclude the possibility that they're generally misogynistic. (And it's an error to reduce "misogyny" to a conscious hatred of women, that's one definition of the word, but not what the word usually means.)
But you go right on saying that, person who made an account to post this one comment.
>GamerGate has, as a movement, systematically refused to decry the harassment or take any kind of practical steps to curb it
As somebody that has watched GG from the outside out of fascination, I don't think this point is true and I think think it points to a broader problem online that I feel is becoming increasingly troubling - a failure to recognize that trolls are attracted to conflict and not necessarily representative of anyone on either side of an issue.
What practical steps to curb the actions of anonymous internet trolls would you have considered sufficient?
Actually policing the movement and coming up with a coherent manifesto would be a good start. There's a lot more they'd have to do, but they've consistently refused to even consider trying it.
I specifically said celebrating those things; Brianna Wu's dog died of natural causes. It's immensely hard to tie the events to specific people, and by design GamerGate is too slippery to pin an individual's membership or non-membership. But there is undoubtedly involvement by people who solicit an association with the GamerGate movement.
If your anonymous imageboard thread gets regularly co-opted by trolls, maybe they're the real movement and you're the outsider.
People have elaborated on it for months. It's so thoroughly discredited in every way that if you don't see it now, you're not going to. Consider it "unfairly maligned" if you want - no one cares any more.
> People have elaborated on it for months. It's so thoroughly discredited in every way that if you don't see it now, you're not going to. Consider it "unfairly maligned" if you want - no one cares any more.
It's also the perception I have, mostly as a kind of observation of where the harassment seems to go (admittedly personal observation, not at all studying it systematically). I've spent a good amount of time mocking the gamergate set under my real name and nobody's done much to me. Trolling them is even a bit fun; it's sometimes a little unsporting, but sometimes it's amusing [1]. In related news, I'm a white male. Yet a number of my female colleagues have gotten torrents of abuse for much less criticism than I'm doing. That milieu seems to really smell red meat when someone who's a woman in tech says something they perceive as offending them. There is also a weird obsession with tracking down previous romantic/sexual partners of women who come across their radar, either for its own sake, or in hopes that the ex-boyfriend can be goaded into saying something negative. Whereas I can call them whatever I want with impunity. None of the gamergaters seem interested in tracking down a history of my sexual partners!
Besides being gendered, the other bit I've noticed is that it seems very anglosphere. We had a brief discussion in class here (Denmark) about gamergate, which I was initially very cautious about because I didn't want to be leading, but it ended up mostly fizzling because afaict students just viewed it as foreign and not their problem. They didn't seem to view it as an active debate here that they should be for or against, but rather some weird debate in America that they could only shrug about (weird debates in America that you can only shrug about are a dime a dozen). Well, maybe America plus some tagging along from CA/UK/AU. That perception is probably strengthened by the fact that the high-profile "pro-gamergate" articles have come from right-wing Anglo-American media outlets like Breitbart Media, whose politics start from a position that's pretty weird/foreign by local standards.
[1] There was a period when a bunch of people had a conspiracy theory about how DiGRA (http://www.digra.org/), a small and mostly ineffectual professional society for academics studying games, was taking over games. Being vaguely on the fringe of that organization provided good opportunities for trollish hashtagging (I attended a DiGRA conference once, which I believe made me a member for 1 year as a result of paying the conference registration fee). It was fun to imagine ourselves as all-powerful conspirators directing the future of games, when almost no game developers have even heard of the conference (much less read its papers), and the organization's powers are such that releasing a timely call for papers once a year remains an aspirational goal.
Yet a number of my female colleagues have gotten torrents of abuse for much less criticism than I'm doing.
Women get more attention in general, both negative and positive, both online and off. You spent your time trolling GG, I spent my time arguing for GG. Both of us were largely ignored. There are quite a few women arguing in support of GG and they also get a large amount of attention (positive from GG, negative from antiGG). It's human nature to pay attention to women.
... it seems very anglosphere.
Considering all of the companies involved are American, this doesn't surprise me. I don't even think the UK would bother with it much if it weren't for Milo. It just doesn't affect anybody outside of American culture, thank god.
There was a period when a bunch of people had a conspiracy theory about how DiGRA ... was taking over games.
HAHAHAHA, oh man. I've never heard of DiGRA until just now, but that's hilarious. You should put DiGRA Illuminati on your business card.
I think what yarrel meant, is that GamerGate was always about misogynistic views and attacks, as has been described in a number of articles about its origins.