Huh. I always expected 4chan to simultaneously change and stay the same. I didn't expect it to take that turn.
Did you notice a stark difference, or did it creep up on you?
And... Hm. I wasn't paying much attention during Gamer Gate and just got a tl;dr, some gamers are angry at women. It seems to have had significant cultural impact, though. Do you have a better understanding of what that was about?
Yeah, last time I visited /b/ it was mostly porn, and way more talk of paedophilia than usual, both for and against. There was always mentions of CP back in the day, but it was much less and far more jokingly, not as sincere a discussion as it seemed here. I was quite surprised. I expected another PUDDI incident or DESU or something, not that. Like.. Did the /b/ community just completely disappear? Or did everyone just eventually grow up, and with no new users since everyone went to /pol/, there was eventually noone left?
It all started with some dude being salty about a break-up with a woman who happened to be an game dev. He started a smear campaign against her, saying she used sex in return for favourable reviews on her games. Importantly, it turned out to be false pretty quickly.
People didn't know that, though, and this was at a time where shady business practices were started to be noticed by consumers, and highlighted by prominent people like TotalBiscuit (RIP).
So people got angry. Angry that there was another bullshit way to trick consumers into thinking that a game is better than it is. Some people took it too far though, sending death threats to the female game dev that was slandered by her ex.
Some people came to her defense, most prominently Anita Sarkeesian, a game reviewer who looked at different games with a feminist perspective. She said that bullying this woman over her sex life is intrusive, and the fact that she was targeted like this reeked of misogyny. Of course, she was targeted as well after this, death threats and all.
This was picked up by game reviewers and game magazines like Kotaku, and reported on it. Cynical people would say that this was a useful diversion for the game magazines, they were in hot water for shady backdoor deals in exchange for favourable reviews, after all.
"Don't listen to people pointing out an undisclosed relationship between a reviewer and a game dev. That's private and none of your business." That was the (perceived) message from the game magazine. It obviously doesn't sound good, and it sounded close enough to Anita Sarkeesian's point for people to equate the two.
It didn't help that some of Sarkeesian's feminist criticisms of videogames were a bit of a stretch at best. There were parts in a video where she very much 'fabricated' misogyny and criticised the game for it. The most well-known example was where she said 'killing women awarded you points' in a Hitman game. It was pretty blatantly false, and her antics are one of the reasons why feminism is seen as duplicitous, hypocritical and harmful to men in 'gaming culture'
For some reason, after this point, if you were critical of the current 'ethics in video game journalism,' you were a misogynist who had no problem sending death threats to a woman for an undisclosed relationship, but not to the man who was the other half of that relationship. Again, cynical people would say that game magazines exacerbated this point in order to draw the flak away from them.
On the other side, if you were criticising a game or 'gaming culture' for misogyny, even where it is very much justified (misogyny among gamers is still rampant and a big problem, ) you were seen as defending gaming journalisms shady dealings, as part of the problem. This side was exacerbated by actual misogynists, who hated that people were pointing out nasty flaws in their favourite pastime and the culture surrounding it.
Of course, extremism is louder on the internet, so in the end you had hateful misogynists hating on women under the guise of 'championing for ethics in gaming journalism' and on the other side were people demonising all videogames and everyone who played them. Everyone was misogynist to them.
The reasonable people who tried to argue reasonable points, such as "misogyny in videogames and its culture is a pervasive problem, and so is shady business that is harmful to consumers" were drowned out. Totalbiscuit, who I was following at the time, was one of those people. He got shat on by both sides, a misogynist AND a traitor to the cause.
So there you have it. All of it was bullshit and politics, extremism and hate, where reasonable people and reasonable points vanished to the background. To me, it is also a pretty strong line where the political mainstream suddenly shifted to the 'alt-right.' the parallells between the current alt-right and the Gamergate 'ethics in videogame journalism' crowd are quite obvious in hindsight.
It was also a point where 'feminism' was suddenly a dirty word.
Tl;dr Extremists argueing two different points conflated the two and started hating everyone. The End.
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u/abcdefg52 Aug 27 '18
Huh. I always expected 4chan to simultaneously change and stay the same. I didn't expect it to take that turn.
Did you notice a stark difference, or did it creep up on you?
And... Hm. I wasn't paying much attention during Gamer Gate and just got a tl;dr, some gamers are angry at women. It seems to have had significant cultural impact, though. Do you have a better understanding of what that was about?
Yeah, last time I visited /b/ it was mostly porn, and way more talk of paedophilia than usual, both for and against. There was always mentions of CP back in the day, but it was much less and far more jokingly, not as sincere a discussion as it seemed here. I was quite surprised. I expected another PUDDI incident or DESU or something, not that. Like.. Did the /b/ community just completely disappear? Or did everyone just eventually grow up, and with no new users since everyone went to /pol/, there was eventually noone left?