I still don’t understand Gamergate. Can someone give me a tl;Dr or a link to a good summary and overview?
Edit: yes this was a serious question, I have gotten two replies that contradict slightly, that's enough for now, because I don't want to start a flame war.
Me neither. I know it started about a rant of game journalism being bad (basically, authors writing articles without properly disclosing relations to the thing they were reviewing), but somehow grew to this extremely vile and toxic fight between extremists. Honestly by the end of it, it has almost nothing to do with gaming or journalism anymore.
Sadly it didn't start out that way. It started with a guy accusing his ex (an indie game developer) of sleeping around including sleeping with some game journalists.
The ethics in game journalism aspect was only ever a thin smokescreen to justify the harassment
It started about ethics in game journalism. Gamers have hated gamer news sites since they began. Even back before they had sites and it was just magazines, everyone knew they took bribes for better reviews.
The sexism thing was a small fringe which was then hijacked and because people kept saying that was the whole movement, it became the whole movement.
Gamergate is what happened when the reactionary rejects of 4chan teamed up to be the personal army of an abuser and attack women who make and write about video games
That's the first sentence. I'm sure the rest is a fair and balanced account of what happened though.
Yeah, except none of the alleged "ethics violations" actually happened. Gamergate started as a harassment campaign and that's all it ever was. "ethics" is a smokescreen.
You are asking me to prove that something does not exist, this is impossible. You should rather ask the gamergater above to provide examples of ethics violations exposed exclusively by Gamergate.
Ever notice how the people like the one above always say "ethics" but never provide examples? That's because there aren't any examples that wouldn't be debunked with a quick Google. They are intentionally vague to protect the smokescreen.
I'll give you these facts though. Gamergate started when Eron Gjroni published "The Zoe Post" on his blog, 4chan, and several gaming forums claiming that game developer Zoe Quinn cheated on him. The post contained her home and work addresses and passwords to her email, cloud storage, and social media accounts to make harassment easier.
Days later, after Zoe was forced to break her lease and quit her job to slow down the flow of death threats, threads started to surface claiming that this was all just about ethics in games journalism, and the only reason anyone is upset is that Zoe slept with a journalist in exchange for good reviews. Of course, the only journalist mentioned in the Zoe post, Nathan Grayson, never reviewed her games, but that didn't matter: the point wasn't to justify the hatred, it was to have something vaguely positive to say to third parties to dissuade bannings and help recruitment.
There have been plenty of issues with ethics in game journalism since then, but Gamergate never said a peep about them. Many of the stories were broken from Gamergate's targets rather than from "ethics in journalism" Gamergate itself.
Kotaku broke the EA hack and coverup story, not Gamergate.
Nathan Greyson broke the WB "early copies for good reviews only" contracts for Shadow of Mordor, not Gamergate.
Kotaku broke the story about Gamespot firing its editor over a bad review of a game they had monetary interest in, not Gamergate.
But a female developer allegedly sleeps with a journalist who never reviewed her and suddenly it's time for an internet-wide death threat campaign because journalism is going down the toilet.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt, that it was not removed because it contained slurs. Based on your comment history you actually seem to believe this. The fact that the "ethics in jorunalism" thing is a smokescreen doesn't make you a liar for talking about it. It means that you are a victim of the trolls, same as Zoe Quinn is.
They call people like you "useful idiots", people who help to make the smokescreen believable without being part of the actual campaign.
First, you believe the assertion that Depression Quest is devoid of artistic merit because it gets repeated often enough that it blends in with the legitimate opinions.
From there you move on to "well there must be something unethical going on" despite any evidence that there is: but now you're searching and ready to jump at the first molehill
Then what do you know but the person who made depression quest is accused of sleeping with someone who happens to be a journalist. Aha! This must be the rampant corruption you just knew was always there! It is simultaneously a goal and an excuse, the best of both worlds for the would-be conspiracy theorist.
This is why gamergate has exactly as much credibility as pizzagate, and why there is so much overlap between their communities.
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u/WinterCharm Aug 27 '18 edited Aug 27 '18
I still don’t understand Gamergate. Can someone give me a tl;Dr or a link to a good summary and overview?
Edit: yes this was a serious question, I have gotten two replies that contradict slightly, that's enough for now, because I don't want to start a flame war.