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What Gamergate is to me

Houseman

Zealot
Sanctuary legend
Messages
1,068
To me, to be a part of Gamergate means to stand up to those that want to do damage to your hobby.

In the beginning, Zoe cheated on her boyfriend with several other people. This wouldn't have mattered except one of those people was a games journalist and gave her game positive coverage. This led to a lot of discussion, discussion that was quickly censored.

For me, it started with the censorship. It seemed like every major hub across the internet had banned discussion of the Zoepost, and everything attached to it. Even 4chan, 4chan!, didn't allow discussion of the subject, which popularized 8chan. This censorship, to me, was horrible, and provoked me to dive deep into matters. During this dive, I saw collusion, infiltration, and manipulation. It could be said that I was radicalized, and now I see things in a different light, even things unrelated to gaming.

So here's what I see when I look at the gaming industry, through my gamergatorgoggles:

I see unethical journalists who aren't gamers and don't care about gaming. They damage the industry by helping out their friends instead of giving unbiased coverage. They create drama by demonizing developers, and even their own audiences by calling them sexist, racist, nazis, etc.

Being a part of gamergate is to stand up to this sort of nonsense. Journalists slapped gamers in the face by both insulting us directly, and by insulting our intelligence.

Can a game, or its developers be racist? Sure. Can we talk about that? Sure. Do I trust game journalists to accurately dig into the issue and bring me the facts that enable us to have a discussion? No. Most likely, that journalist is telling half-truths, intentionally misrepresenting statements, or flat-out lying. An example of this would be Kingdom Come's Vara, who was called a racist and a nazi because his game didn't have black people in it.

But let's say that you are a good journalist and you present nothing but the facts. Can we have a discussion then? Sure. Let's.

Remember that "Bully Hunters" thing? That's a good example. So some women team up with some clueless companies to sell product during a fake live-stream where they pretend that an on-call hit-squad of female gamers go and harass out-play a bully. There are several reasons why this was a target for GG:

1. Save the women!
Along with GG, there was a narrative in the media of "boys are pushing girls out of gaming" and/or "girls feel unwelcome in videogames". This event tried to back that up with misleading statistics extrapolated from a study with a small sample size. I think they said something like 3 MILLION female gamers have quit due to harassment. That's obviously ridiculous, and the host was called out on it by an actual professional who proved that her data was wrong.

2. There is a problem of harassment online
This is another one of the anti-GG media narrative points. Step 1 is to paint GG with a crime, so that you're justified in going after them. Could this be true? Sure. But GG will prick up its ears whenever this line is uttered, regardless. As with point #1, you'd better bring something solid to the table or else you'll just get picked apart. This is what happened after people looked to the hosts' twitter history and saw that the host is a harasser herself.

3. We need to step in and do something about it to change gaming!
Oh no you don't. We've had enough of non-gamers trying to meddle in gaming. We reject you.

So after things took their natural course, all their sponsors were contacted, alerted to this bad idea, and subsequently dropped out and withdrew their support. The host, who I had never heard of prior to this event, is now known to me as someone to avoid.

This was a good example of the ideals of GG put into practice. The professional who exposed the false statistics does not identify as part of GG, but she stood up against lies and manipulation to bring about truth. She stood up to nonsense. She provided ammo that GG went on to use in order to rightly discredit the rest of her sham.


Whenever someone says that they disagree, or stand against GG, I'm disappointed. I know they haven't done the research. I know they believe the lies told about us. They're mislead due to their own apathy or inattentiveness, and that's sad. Rarely, they're actually malicious, and then they need to be resisted.

Zoe doesn't matter. Whether or not the story told about her is true or false doesn't matter. She was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. The camel was clearly overburdened for a long time, and would have buckled eventually. Now that the camel fell, the can of worms it was carrying has broken open, and the worms are out. You can't put them back in.

So those are my thoughts. I'll be happy to expand on anything
 

Vendor-Lazarus

Arch Disciple
Sanctuary legend
Messages
937
That is why I support Gamergate too.
As well as the Alt-Right, which opposes the same ideologue but in politics and society as a whole (and grew out of, or rather was invigorated, by it).
The difference is that the smear-campaign that didn't work on Gamergate worked only too well on an unsuspecting and mainstream-media fed populace (which caused the Alt-Right to flounder and break into different groups).
The internet doesn't present the same weighted and intrusive bias.

But enough about that. This issue is about corruption and a forced narrative in Gaming.
Or it should be, but politics does tend to create a ripple-down effect.
 

Signa

Libertarian Contrarian
Sanctuary legend
Messages
764
For me, Gamergate didn't have much appeal to me when it started, so I missed A LOT of the initial drama around it. For a while, it seemed like everyone was suddenly complaining that water was wet (corruption in journalism? Why are you complaining now?). But as time went on, things started shaping differently. GGers were getting called sexist because of the sparking incident involving a girl, and then those Gamers are Dead articles caught my attention for a second. Eventually I was curious enough to get brought up to speed on the movement, and I realized it wasn't at all about games anymore, but a revolt against media mind control*. Games journalists weren't being very subtle about their behavior, but the same patterns could be seen in main stream media. This was HUGE when you got down to it. I honestly think the timing is what brought Trump to presidency, because the anti-establishment themes running throughout GG were starting to bleed everywhere. Just like how gamers said "we've had enough of this shit" a lot of voters started saying the same thing when they looked at Hillary.

*I just wanted to make sure everyone is clear how loosely I'm using the term here. I've always heard conspiracy theorists talk about being mind-controlled by the government and stuff, and we all know that foil hats is taking that concept to an extreme. I'm speaking in the cultural pressure/narrative sort of sense, where everyone reads the same news and is supposed to react to it the same way. Hence, the Gamers are Dead articles should have looked more like a symbol for "how things are, everyone sees it, and you just need to accept it. We're just the messengers, sorry," instead of the collusion that clearly was going on. People do buy these narratives, hence they become "mind-controlled."
 

andersonnnunes

Disciple
Messages
326
I never cared about it, despite it coming to my view from time to time. Mainstream media is not on my plate and my news consumption is heavily personalized (thanks to feeds).

You may like the book "Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality". It was too UK centered for me to care about most of it, but seems to delve in similar issues as gamer-gate.
 
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