sindri42:siryouarebeingmocked:brett-caton:siryouarebeingmocked: theodoretheninja:siryouarebeingmocke
sindri42:siryouarebeingmocked:brett-caton:siryouarebeingmocked: theodoretheninja:siryouarebeingmocked: complete-trash-and-despair:siryouarebeingmocked: twofacetoo:gamergate-news:Since when is GamerGate involved with Proud Boys? https://twitter.com/Lyde15/status/1328094518974013440 Since these people discovered they can’t actually argue, so they just string together buzzwords like a game of fucking Madlibs I’d argue Gamedropping presaged Trumpdropping and Inceldropping and all the other trends where people shoehorn in buzzwords for SEO. Ironically, Gamergate consistently polled mostly liberal, not right-wing.I like how she vaguely talks about “Gamergate’s spatter damage”. Oh, you mean professional journalistic ethics? The ones journalists were already supposed to follow? The ones the FCC changed their rules to address, thanks to Gamergate?Does ‘actions have consequences’ only apply to the right in this lady’s eyes? Are we seriously circling back to the “games turn people into terrorists” argument, except on the other side of the political wings now? Deadass? No, of course not.We circled back to it years ago. Loads of people made the same comparison during GG’s height. Including me. Can someone please give me the details of gamergate? All of google tells me it was fake and not to pay attention to it, but has no real info. What the hell happened? Short version: Some indie darling developer named Zoe Quinn made a pretentious game about depresssion. Gaming press loved it. Ex-boyfriend says she abused him and slept around, including with members of the gaming press.Many gamers demanded accountability and made memes.A bunch of gaming websites published articles along the lines of “gamers as an identity are dead” in a very short period of time. The logic was “everybody games, so you don’t need a separate label!” Which is sort of like saying “everyone eats, so why call yourself a foodie?”This pissed off many gamers, and they started looking into more shady connections. And there were plenty.Professional feminist victim Anita Sarkeesian blamed a death threat on GG. A threat the cops said wasn’t credible, and had no known GG connection. But that didn’t matter. By this point, the mainstream press had picked up the thread. There was - and is - a blatantly biased Wikipedia article.The third ‘victim’ was some dev nobody ever heard of called Brianna Wu. And that was it. Three alleged victims were enough to declare a major threat to women in gaming and the tide of harassment they were supposedly faced with for being women.(Some study found most harassment was directed at men. They just cared less.)There was something called ‘gamedropping’, where articles would pointedly mention Gamergate negatively, presumably for search engine rankings. Much like they do for Trump now.Sarkeesian and others eventually spoke in front of the UN.GG, which went out of it’s way to show it was highly diverse, was stereotyped as young straight white male trolls who hated diversity. The minorities and women were dismissed as sockpuppets or dupes or just ignored entirely. GG insisted it only hated forced diversity.The anti-GG folks kept trying to declare folks “leaders” of GG, enough for GG to make it a meme.People kept going ‘why not just change the name if you really care about ethics in game journalism?” In reality, “ethics in game journalism” had itself become a meme, used to mock people who tried to speak about the subject, who were obviously lying in the eyes of GG’s detractors.Anyway, the FBI investigated, said GG was innocent. And the FCC changed disclosure rules for online journalists. And Kotaku admitted that one of their writers did cover Quinn and have a relationship which he didn’t disclose, though he wasn’t fired. So, arguably, GG won. But it’s still bought up when some writer needs them clicks.Or some idiot like this Twit wants attention. I think gg win in that it exposed how corrupt games journalists were. Nobody trusts them any more, and their sites have collapsed. Anita sarkeesian popped out to bitch that women on “the mandalorian” had boob’s, and everyone laughed at her. She used to be taken seriously, and now she’s just there to say crazy things every now and then. They also decreased trust in the MSM. I know I got redpilled, as the kids say. Gamergate wasn’t the cause of any of the bullshit we’re seeing today, but it was foreshadowing.The incident that started things out was when one random dev nobody had ever heard of was revealed to have been trading sex with “journalists” for positive press. There was also overwhelming evidence of her being abusive toward romantic partners for years, but nobody cared because it was a man being abused by a woman and there’s just no story there. Anyway, when a tiny meaningless scandal like that happens you would expect all the competitors of those journalists to drive it into the ground to get rid of their competition and improve their own traffic figures, but that’s not what happened. Instead, damn near every game reviewer across every “competing” news site closed ranks to defend the “journalist”. And people were like ‘huh that’s a weird thing for them to be doing’ and started to look closer.And they discovered an organization called GameJournoPros, active from 2010 through 2014, where all the major game journalists got together before any of them put any stories out in order to collectively decide what narrative they were going to present. There was no actual competition, no differing perspectives and viewpoints, no honest assessments of the merits and flaws of any of the games they were reviewing, just a single narrative which they presented to you from all directions. If the GameJournoPros wanted people to buy a shitty game, they would make it look like hundreds of top industry professionals from all walks of life simultaneously played it and loved it all for different reasons. If the GameJournoPros wanted to destroy a brilliant new indie developer, they would make sure it either got zero attention from any corner, or put forth dozens of competing reviews calling it garbage. Mostly what decided a game’s ratings was the quantity of bribes that the publisher paid, but there were more than a few instances where fucking one of the members seems to have been the deciding factor. So gamers started saying ‘hey this is super unethical and kinda illegal?’ and the journalists didn’t have any logical or factual basis to argue against them, so they resorted to baseless ad hominum attacks. All gamers are racist. All gamers are sexist. All gamers are homophobic. All gamers are alt-right. Anybody who calls themself a gamer is basically a domestic terrorist, or at least a rapist. Any developer who makes games for gamers is evil and stupid, instead they should be making games specifically designed to cater to people who don’t actually play games. If you weren’t part of the community, and you didn’t deliberately do fairly deep research, you probably believed all the things they told you about GamerGate. Not a word of it was true. More than half of the threats received by the high profile “victims” of the movement were proven to have been sent by themselves. The rest were investigated by the FBI and determined to have absolutely no connection to GamerGate. But nobody let a little thing like the truth get in the way of their terribly compelling narrative, and any attempt to defend gamers was seen as an admission of guilt in classic kafkatrap form.So GG ignored public opinion struck back in a very simple and effective way: financially. The journalists were all online, getting paid by advertisers based on how many eyes they drew to the webpage. So the gamers started sending emails to those advertisers, quoting the attack articles and asking things like ‘are you sure you want your graphics card to be associated with people who are directly attacking anybody who buys your graphics cards?’. And the advertisers pulled out en masse. Multiple game journalist companies reported billions in lost revenue as a direct result of GG doing nothing but pointing out what they were doing to the people who paid them. Media companies hurried to break up the worst of the bullshit and impose new standards for journalism, and GamerGate quietly declared victory and faded away.So what does that have to do with today? Well, the only journalists who had any reason to shape up were the ones directly connected to video games. But the fundamental problem was the same in every area. This time around the joke is “fake news” instead of “ethics in games journalism” but the tactics are exactly the same. And it turns out that voters are a lot less likely to dig deep enough to figure anything out than gamers are.GG wasn’t the origin story of today’s villains. GG was a warning, an object lesson in how to identify the villains before they destroy you and how to limit the damage they inflict. And nobody bothered to pay attention. -- source link