#GamerGate and #NotYourShield - v- Social Justice Warriors

[DanaC]

I am really getting tried of this whole debacle.

For those not familiar with this clusterfuck of misogyny and hate - it seems to have started when the ex-boyfriend of a smalltime female games blgger/indie dev posted an 'expose' claiming that she had slept with journalists to get good reviews of her very, very tiny game.

The GamerGaters claim they are fighting against corruprtion in games journalism - but they only focus on female targets - primarily women who have had the sheer affrontery to criticise games and games companies for their portrayal of women in gaming.

Death threats, rape threats, personal details posted online - phonecalls to family members, elaborate rape fantasies complete with phoshopped pics of the women as rape victims - bomb threats.

One ofthe women (Anita Sarkeesian) posts a youtibe video series called Tropes -v- Women which examines games from a feminist perspective. She recently was supposed to give a talk at a university in Utah - and had to pull out because an anonymous fuckwit sent a threat that if she spoke there would be a mass shooting.

The other thing that seems to have angered GamerGaters was an article titled 'Gamers are Dead'. A provocative title to be sure - but it wasn't actually decrying gamers - it was suggesting that the traditional image of the gamer is out of date - and that the gaming industry is being slow to recognise that women and ethnic minorities are a part of the gaming community.

Any site carrying or even linking to that article was bombarded by GamerGaters - anyone advertising on sites carrying or linking to that article was bombarded by GamerGaters. More death threats, more doxxing.

Three women have had to leave their homes because of credible threats.

There seems a lot of evidence (chatlogs etc) that much of this has been cooked up by 4chan members - as an active campaign against these women. In their chatlogs they talk tactics - always say it's about journalistic integrity - use the #NotYourShield tag and pretend to be a minority or a woman supporting #GamerGate to make it look less like an assault on female gamers. The systamatic use of the term SJW (Social Justice warriors). And most importantly a stated goal that these women (named in the thread) should be forced out of the industry.

It's really, really pissing me off now. every time I read about gaming - it's this.

I've talked before on here about how I feel about gaming and the way as a female gamer I get frustrated with the sexism in gaming culture - being told girls aren't proper gamers, games being written and marketed in a way that makes them seem exclusively male (very few female characters and when they do appear they are either incidental or if they are playable they're the only ones on the battlefield fighting in their underwear).

Now it's gone full on anti woman in some traditional gaming circles. I've read some of the chat logs. I;ve watched some of the GamerGate vids on youtube - they made my skin crawl. They made me feel hated. They made me feel like I had no business playing a game like CoD unless I was prepared to stfu and never speak again about what I want in gaming.

This is a concerted assault to silence any and all who might criticise the lack of representation of women or ethnic minorities in games. Sites have been effectively shut down by DDoS tactics. Advertisers have pulled out of sites because they don't want to be targeted with a mass twitter,facebook etc campaign. Bloggers have been silenced.

And if there is any doubt that this about misogyny not journalistic integrity - one of them made a game in which the object is to beat Anita Sarkeesian bloody. With photoshopped pic of her face getting more and more mangled. And all the women who have been targeted have had their emails bombarded with images of them being raped.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news...-Women-Creator
http://dudehugespeaks.tumblr.com/pos...taliban-tropes
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/the-sec...stop-progress/
http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/0...their-irc-log/

[DanaC]

I should say at this point that one of the upsides of this clusterfuck is that the mainstream gaming press and many of the men involved in mainstream game production have been so horrified by the onslaught (particularly those who know these women and have worked with them) that they have started to speak out against this and it may have actually prompted a serious reexamination of how the industry treats its female fans and contributors.

As to whether the mainstream welcomes women - here's a little anecdote:

The game The Last of Us has a key female character - when the game was getting ready for launch it was put out by the publisher to a focus group prior to tweaking - the focus group was 100% male. The games makers had to insist that there was a woman in the group - so they included 1 woman.

The game producers then had to fight to include a picture of this key female character on the box. the publishers didn't want her on there.

Apparently publishers think that including the picture of a playable female character who is central to the plot would put off male players.

I was talking to a graphic designer the other day. She was one of only 2 or 3 women working in a games company and they had to design characters for a sci-fi type shooter game. There were loads of male characters in the game, all wearing full on sci-fi type body armour. There was 1 female 'baddie' and the male designer who worked on her drew her with thigh high boots, a veil, gloves and a bikini. The female designer objected aand asked why she was the only character that was fighting half naked and was made to feel like a feminazi killjoy. They just didn't get why that was disrespectful of women. They eventually compromised and put her in formfitting latex.

That women like Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe whateverhernameis face death threats and a career threatening mob for making those kinds of points is just appalling.

[DanaC]

It's got to the point now that anybody who speaks out gets targeted.

Every time I go to the Tech section of the newspaper there's another story. yesterday it was this:

Gamer and actor Felicia Day has had her personal details posted online just minutes after making her first public statement about Gamergate – in which she expressed fear about saying anything at all, in case she was targeted as a result.

A lot of people, mainly women, but also some men, are scared of talking about the GamerGate issue - in case they become targets. This is ruining people's careers and lives.

How fucking ridiculous is that?

[Clodfobble]

Lot of angry young men in the world. We like to tell ourselves that the more modern civilizations sublimate the testosterone, but sometimes I think they just pack it under greater pressure until it has to spew out into whatever ridiculous outlet is available.

The internet has made harassment far too easy.

[DanaC]

One of the things that really sticks in my craw is the way a lot of these young men think that female gamers are interlopers on their turf. I was gaming before many of them were born.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

Lot of angry young men in the world. We like to tell ourselves that the more modern civilizations sublimate the testosterone, but sometimes I think they just pack it under greater pressure until it has to spew out into whatever ridiculous outlet is available.

The internet has made harassment far too easy.

Yep. Totally agree.

I'm currently on a break from gaming, and have been for about the last 2-3 years. I get too obsessed when i am into a game and that's really not good when trying to write a PhD thesis :P

The last time I was into gaming, it was two games mainly that I played - both MMOs - Darkfall and Mortal Online. I was very involved in the game forums too. The MO forums were a lot more wlecoming of emale players than the DF forums as i recall.

With MO, the game was very much still in development. I had two paid accounts and also donated money to the development fund (not a lot, just £50). Because it was still in dev, there were lots of feedback/dev threads. One of them was about character design - and in particular the introduction of NPC characters to the cities. They'd brought in a bunch of male NPC character models and a single female NPC character model. Needless to say the female NPC was a scantily clad, hotbabe slavegirl type. So we had a long discussion about that character design and that branched off into a discussion of female characters in games generally. Maybe it was because the game community had a higher average age than in DF, but it turned into a really interesting discussion. Some of it frustrated me (I maintain and always have that, having been a gamer in the early 80s when both boys and girls played and then seen the scene change to a mosly male one) that there is no natural reason for girls not to play games. Some of the male contributors were convinced that women are biologically less likely to want to play fighting games - I found that frustrating. I say that those games attract mainly male players because they are mainly male characters, and marketed mainly at male players - with the only female characters being hyper sexualised - this effectively makes them seem an unfriendly place for women.

I also found it frustrating when younger lads told me that girls weren't proper gamers - as I say, Ive been gaming for longer than some of them have been alive. But even so - for the most part it was a civil debate with excellent pioints raised on both sides, and by both male and female community members. One of the best arguments in favour of more inclusivity of women came from a male community member. Some of the best arguments against the hper sexualised portrayals of women in games came from male community members who were sick of being treated by games makers as if they were drooling adolescents who just wanted wank material. They were arguing for better female charaters - they wanted more depth and they wanted to be able to play this stuff with their wivesand girlfriends.

As i am coming towards the end of the PhD I've started taking notice of games again. I'm reading games reviews and making a mental list of the games I want to catch up with once I have some free time (no surpside that a lot ofthem are zombie survival games:p). And I've started tootling about on gaming sites and forums. But fuck me the atmosphere has soured. There's been some small progress in terms of portrayal of women in games, but the gaming community seems to have taken a step back in some quarters. Their response to more participation of women, and of women starting to demand that their needs be met within game production has been to launch a war.

Bit depressing really. I really thought by now things would have gone the other way. Why is it such a threat to some men that they may have games in which the female characters have actual roles in games and might not be wearing a metal gstring on the battlefield?

[DanaC]

just to clarify: I should point out that the majority of gamers are not wankers. Most male gamers are not misogynistic twats who get threatened by the idea of grrls invading their treehouse. This is a minority of Gamers - it's just they make a disproportionate amount of noise and are therefore able to make a forum/community seem very unwelcoming of women.

[mbpark]

Gaming has evolved from the days where UT would complain about IBM users with MWave sound cards/modems had lag when playing networked Quake due to the same DSP being used for the modem and sound card.

For some of the people out there who do not know who I am: I've been logging into incarnations of this board since 1992 and started doing so using a Commodore 64. I've been around .

There are several changes since the old days of gaming:

1. Gaming forums and 4Chan: The gaming forums have turned increasingly racist, homophobic, and misogynistic over the years. Every few years, starting with Something Awful, another site comes up that turns up the insults. 4Chan is the latest in a long line of sites.

2. Porn. It's available in much more mass quantities than the BBS days. This has desensitized many people to actual human contact.

3. Trolling. What was once a distraction is now something pursued by a small but very vocal minority of gamers, who congregate in places like 4Chan or 8Chan. They follow several "master" trolls, who orchestrate many of these attacks. The undisputed master is Weev, who orchestrated the attacks on Kathy Sierra several years ago. There are several "agent provocateurs" stirring up the more easily led of the gaming community in GamerGate via the abovementioned forums. These people create memes and control others for the lulz.

3a. Trolling attacks such as "swatting", which is where you send the SWAT team in on people you dislike using prank calls simulating a hostage situation, doxing (where you post personal information on others), hacking and defaming have become celebrated and normal.

4. The "lulz". People do the above for the lulz, which are laughs at the expense of someone else.

Gamergate is not about ethics at all. If it was, they'd go after the red herrings like Rob Enderle. It's about a group of angry young men who idolize people like Weev who are stirred up by agent provocateurs to attack that which is different, and who really hate women. Not that they need them with the forums, games, and extra stimulation.

There are people out there who love to manipulate others and try to manipulate society itself, like Weev. Many of the GG people baying like dogs on the message boards are just the foot soldiers for them. There is a greater war on women and opinions, and this is one front. This is about self-appointed "elites" trying to silence dissent, women, and anyone they do not like on "their" Internet.

Back to school work.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I don't game, never have, but I'll vouch for Mitch's credentials.

[Happy Monkey]

Gamergate has done what I thought impossible - made me ambivalent about a Firefly renuion. Somehow, knowing that the actor is a raging asshole spoils the fact that the character is, as well.

[DanaC]

Brilliant post, mb.

The undisputed master is Weev, who orchestrated the attacks on Kathy Sierra several years ago.

I remember that. Wasn't she the one who came up with the 'Koolaid Point'?

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by mbpark

Not that they need them with the forums, games, and extra stimulation.

This is an important factor, I think. In previous generations, there was nothing but real women, and you'd better do whatever it took to get those women. Now there are just enough porn and entertainment substitutes to prevent the young men from committing to personal change, but not enough to truly satisfy them, so they stay bitter and resentful and can't figure out why.

[sexobon]

Originally Posted by DanaC

... Why is it such a threat to some men that they may have games in which the female characters have actual roles in games and might not be wearing a metal gstring on the battlefield?

Metal gstring? THAT'S OUTRAGEOUS! Unless, of course, they're nonmagnetic so they don't set off any mines.

[DanaC]

Ha! Hmmmm...magnetic metal bikini powers - there's a thought :P

Here is an awesome, awesome post from Chris Kluwe:

Fuck me, I think I'm in love :P

Also - I used to play Ultima Online and I used to play it at night to play wih the Americans (accidentally ended up in an American guild during a fit of insomnia induced nightplaying) - so - I might have encountered him. Fuck, I may have pked him :p

Dear #Gamergaters,

Do you know why you piss me the fuck off?

Because you’re lazy. You’re ignorant. You are a blithering collection of wannabe Wikipedia philosophers, drunk on your own buzzwords, incapable of forming an original thought. You display a lack of knowledge stunning in its scope, a fundamental disregard of history and human nature so pronounced that makes me wonder if lead paint is a key component of your diet. You think you’re making piercing arguments when, in actuality, you’re throwing a temper tantrum that would embarrass a three-year-old.

(#Gamergate, for those unaware, is what happened a bit over a month ago, where an angry neckbeard posted demonstrably false allegations about his ex-girlfriend, claiming she slept with video game site reviewers for better scores for her games (again, demonstrably false), and then a whole bunch of other angry neckbeards on the Internet went full Denis Dyack and spitfrothed themselves into national attention by making an array of threats on numerous female game developers, including ones about their death, tried to hide behind a shield of “it’s about journalistic ethics because they said gamers are dead,” and generally proved why the Internet needs to be burned to the ground and the ashes salted.

There’s this herd of people, mainly angsty teenage caucasian men (based on an informal survey of 99 percent of the people who feel the need to defend this nonsense to me on Twitter), who feel that somehow, their identity as “gamers” is being taken away. Like they’re all little Anne Franks, hiding in their basements from the PC Nazis and Social Justice Warrior brigades, desperately protecting the last shreds of “core gaming” in their unironically horrible Liveblog journals filled with patently obvious white privilege and poorly disguised misogyny. “First they came for our Halo 2’s, and I said nothing.”

These paint-huffing shitgoblins think they’re “gamers,” and it pisses me the fuck off.

I grew up playing games. When I was six years old, back in 1987 (so long ago!), I got an NES, and there was no looking back. I played Battletoads, and learned that “faster computer reactions” is a cheap substitute for “harder difficulty.” I played Final Fantasy VI on the SNES, and watched an opera play out through a video game. I played Metal Gear Solid on PS1, and thought my game was freaking the fuck out. I logged on to Ultima Online the day the shards went up, and got pk’ed, and tried to figure out what this giant sandbox could actually do. I played just about every MMO after that as well, and first person shooter, and JRPG, and on and on (except for sports games; I hate sports games).

I am a gamer. I’ve had 24-hour LAN parties, fragging people in Duke Nukem and Quake, pounding Mountain Dew to stay awake, WinAMP playlist blasting my favorite songs at high volume. I’ve traded Nintendo Power facts and tips with my friends on the playground, and tried to figure out where the next boss was, or the best strategy to use (complete with horseshit stories from that one friend who just loved making things up and —NO! — you cannot save Aeris, goddammit). I’ve been made fun of by the jocks, even when I was on the football team.

Gaming is part of who I am, I can promise you that.

Thus, when I see an article titled “Gamers are dead,” referring to the death of the popular trope of a pasty young man in a dimly lit room, it fills me with joy, because it means WE FUCKING WON. So many people are playing games now that they are popular culture. They are not going away. All sorts of cool things, that I like, are now things that a whole bunch of other people like! There’s enough space now for people to make games that are strange and disturbing and maybe highlight a different perspective of the world, because gaming is no longer a niche activity, it’s something that everybody does. There is room for art in video games. That’s awesome!

You slopebrowed weaseldicks with zero reading comprehension and even less critical thinking skills who think an article claiming “Gamers are dead” is something bad? Fuck me sideways with a sandblaster.


-snip-

Every time I see one of you slackjawed pickletits link me something like “I’m a moderate #Gamergate’r,” or “#Gamergate in sixty seconds YOUTUBE CLIP,” or “Here’s an anecdotal story from this one woman we found that completely negates an entire history of misogyny and abuse of women, not just in videogaming but in the entirety of human existence so support the REAL GAMERS,” it pisses me the fuck off because you are ruining something I enjoy. When people — everyday people who watch the coverage on CNN of Anita Sarkeesian having to cancel a speaking engagement due to death threats — think of “gamers,” they are going to think of you, and that irritates me. It enrages me. I want to punch down a wall, and I like my walls. They’re nicely painted.

When people think of “gamers,” I want them to think of Child’s Play, and athletes who play competitive League of Legends, and all the normalization we’ve accomplished over the years. I want them to think of feminism, and games as an art form — something more than mass entertainment. I want them to think of all the amazing things that video games have done, and can do, because that means we get to keep playing more games. But as long as you hemorrhoidal gunt stains continue this asininity, they won’t, and it makes me want to pick you all up collectively and shake you until your rectum leaks out what little brains you possess because YOU’RE SO FUCKING DUMB.

We are winning the culture war. There are multiple TV shows about nerds as role models. For fuck’s sake, in House of Cards, Kevin Spacey plays a goddamn U.S. Representative who relaxes by playing first-person shooters! The only danger to the things “gamers” enjoy doing (i.e. playing new games), is the threat YOU YOURSELF have created, because for some reason you think sharing your toys with others is going to make the world explode.

Read the rest here. Definitely worth it. Pertinent, heartfelt and hilarious:

https://medium.com/the-cauldron/why-...f-a7e4c7f6d8a6

[xoxoxoBruce]

Thus, when I see an article titled “Gamers are dead,” referring to the death of the popular trope of a pasty young man in a dimly lit room, it fills me with joy, because it means WE FUCKING WON. So many people are playing games now that they are popular culture.

I wonder if this is the problem, what rankles the boys who felt calling themselves a Gamer set them apart. The one thing in their life that they felt made them special, has become mainstream.