Current Events > Rian Johnson calls out Gamergate

(+) Yeah! (+)

Delirious_Beard posted...

damn you got me

feel free to screencap this for all your buddies over there

Dude I don't even post on Reddit. I hate that site. And I don't save GameFAQs crap. I mostly save memes. Like this:

https://imgur.com/Q3I4bpf
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scar the 1 posted...

Esrac posted...

St0rmFury posted...

Tbh, I still have no idea what gamergate is about.

Honest answer. It depends on who you ask and when you asked them.

It's one part ethics in journalism, two parts complaining about SJWs/far left activism in media and university, and three parts talking about whoever's talking about Gamergate now.

If you go to KotakuInAction, the Gamergate subreddit, you'll find topics about all those things.

Topics accusing journalists of being unethical for something like not disclosing that they or someone they are associated with is professionally connected to the topic they're writing about.

Topics complaining about/making fun of sjw students and professors, twitter users, and news/opinion writers.

And topics about anyone who's talking about Gamergate lately. For example, there is a topic on there now talking about Rian Johnson talking about Gamergate. They refer to these incidents as "game dropping" (like name dropping, but for gamergate).

These topics are often in the form of "this public figure/press writer on this social media/article is trying to blame Gamergate for <insert current scandal here>. Or "this guy is repeating lies and misinformation about Gamergate".

If you ask people who oppose Gamergate, it's a racist, misogynistic hate group of white men that constantly runs harassment campaigns against any and all minorities in the movie, comics, and gaming industries.

What always bothered me regarding the credibility of Gamergate's concern was that the anger was always directed towards the journalists, and never the evil corporate overlords who actually hold all the power in the industry. Maybe I just missed it, but some indie devs and game journalists aren't really the big baddies here.

The difference to me is you can expect devs to pull every dirty trick in the book for sales, their job is to sell games. The press' job on the other hand is to inform the public. So one is doing their job in a shitty way, while the other is doing the opposite of their job. Not that one is worse than the other, just that they are two different things. I don't think the plan was to go after indie devs, they just happened to be more likely to be the ones caught in these conflicts of interest.

why is a movie maker whining about gamergate? gamergate has nothing to do with movies

scar the 1 posted...

UnfairRepresent posted...

People: "There's a serious problem with corruption on every level in the industry which would not be accepted in any other industry such as movies, books or films. All because games aren't taken seriously. We need to change the attitude that goes to towards releasing, advertising, discussing and creating games."

Also people: "So let's go after the journalists and indie devs who are strongarmed by corporate publishers instead of going after the people with power, because we still like to play those games. Oh and while we're at it let's use threats, doxxing and a very toxic tone towards women and minorities."

That didn't really happen though.

If anything the opposite is true. People were threatened, attacked and doxxed just for being "Sexist Freak" Gamergators complaining.

Meanwhile the people saying they were endangered by the Gamergators seemed to get considerably less abuse than the average Youtuber.

Take a guy like Angry Joe who is routinely sent death and rape threats just for reviewing games.

It's such a lazy deflection of valid criticisms to

1. Pretend "your people" got threatened when they didn't or if they did, that it was unique to them and from the group "you don't like"

And

2. Pretend that means any and all criticism is now invalid.

In your mind is 9/11 now okay because some of the reaction/statements/opinions to it from some enraged Americans was absolutely horrific and insane?

It's such a weird and frankly lazy and stupid way to look at life.

Very simple question: Should a reviewer who has a personal connection/attachment to a game disclose that when talking about a game?

Yes or no?

If yes, then you agree with Gamergate. But you won't say that, you'll go "OMG you sexist Doxxing vagabonds!"

Because 17/18 times they don't. Totalbiscuit before he died always dramatically made a point about this to show off just how easy it was to do. Every time he talked about like DOTA or something he was like "Full Disclosure, my friends made this and I'm involved in setting stuff up so keep that in mind."

That's why I'm sympathetic to the group. It's no different than saying "All those Martin Luther King guys are just criminals because Is saw one rob a liquer store!"

No you just saw a black guy rob a liquer store and are being lazy and judgemental.
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Gamergate

That's still a thing...?


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ClockworkHare posted...

Gamergate

That's still a thing...?

not only that, it has a spinoff now. Comicgate

Gonna have to agree with Delirious Beard.
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There isn't a single writer or director in all of Hollywood that I can think of that I absolutely hate anywhere as much as I hate this hack pos.

And this is a world Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman exist in.
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Rad_Chad posted...

awwww the sjw exec's little trained monkey is crying

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I have talked about how much I dislike this guy for what he did to Finn. And really didn't get into the deep political bullshit. But at this point it is clear, they are using politics to defend the movie and cast the people who dislike the movie as these bad people. Fuck him, RJ is the racist.
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YMIHere posted...

The difference to me is you can expect devs to pull every dirty trick in the book for sales, their job is to sell games. The press' job on the other hand is to inform the public. So one is doing their job in a s***ty way, while the other is doing the opposite of their job. Not that one is worse than the other, just that they are two different things. I don't think the plan was to go after indie devs, they just happened to be more likely to be the ones caught in these conflicts of interest.

Yeah but they're the ones doing the shit. It's not OK just because you can expect them to do it. They're the ones putting pressure on game journalists to act unethically in the first place. And they're the ones with money and power to put the journalists out of a job. The publishers are the ones who can put insane conditions on a game reaching a certain number on metacritic, and if it doesn't get there the devs suffer immensely. The publishers are the ones who can strangle access to events, reviewer copies, ad revenue, etc for the game journalists. Yet people are getting upset at the guys getting strongarmed.

And then by some freak coincidence there's a lot of misogyny, just like pretty much any other toxic online community.
I'll gladly concede that there's a problem with game journalism, and it's been well known long before Gamergate blew up. Wasn't it famously ranked by Reuters or someone really, really low? But addressing the symptoms instead of the cause seems like it won't help much.
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Well there was a ton of pushback recently against EA for their BS, though EA is so terrible it's kinda sad how much it took for notable pushback.

I think the journalist thing is more likely to provoke reactions because it directly attacks the people who end up reacting to it. I still remember all the "gamers are dead" and shit, and I mean, you keep calling people nazis and shit and dismissing them as bots and trolls and racists baselessly, that's probably going to sooner provoke reactions and defensiveness than a company fucking people over because gamers as a whole are just amazingly bad at voting with their wallets and would sooner throw money away on pre-orders to then spend a year or more time bitching about the game they bought, or rabidly defending it despite knowing it's crap because of some weird sunk cost fallacy and failure to own up to a mistake they made.
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Kineth posted...

He's right.

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scar the 1 posted...

Esrac posted...

St0rmFury posted...

Tbh, I still have no idea what gamergate is about.

Honest answer. It depends on who you ask and when you asked them.

It's one part ethics in journalism, two parts complaining about SJWs/far left activism in media and university, and three parts talking about whoever's talking about Gamergate now.

If you go to KotakuInAction, the Gamergate subreddit, you'll find topics about all those things.

Topics accusing journalists of being unethical for something like not disclosing that they or someone they are associated with is professionally connected to the topic they're writing about.

Topics complaining about/making fun of sjw students and professors, twitter users, and news/opinion writers.

And topics about anyone who's talking about Gamergate lately. For example, there is a topic on there now talking about Rian Johnson talking about Gamergate. They refer to these incidents as "game dropping" (like name dropping, but for gamergate).

These topics are often in the form of "this public figure/press writer on this social media/article is trying to blame Gamergate for <insert current scandal here>. Or "this guy is repeating lies and misinformation about Gamergate".

If you ask people who oppose Gamergate, it's a racist, misogynistic hate group of white men that constantly runs harassment campaigns against any and all minorities in the movie, comics, and gaming industries.

What always bothered me regarding the credibility of Gamergate's concern was that the anger was always directed towards the journalists, and never the evil corporate overlords who actually hold all the power in the industry. Maybe I just missed it, but some indie devs and game journalists aren't really the big baddies here.

That isn't an entirely inaccurate criticism and I think it goes back to Gamergate's origins immediately following the "Gamers are Dead" articles.

We had a bunch of articles disparaging the gamer identity that all occurred within the span of a couple days, suggesting a collaborative gaming press that was hostile toward gamers. The GameJournosPro group being leaked lent credibility to that suspicion and calcified Gamergate's opposition to the gaming press.

Regarding game companies, I think the general opinion among GG is basically "we want them to be able to make the games they want without censoring content or being relentlessly attacked by sjw writers". So, you can expect them to react negatively when Nintendo Treehouse heavily alters dialogue in Fire Emblem translations or someone at Kotaku writes an article shitting all over Soul Calibur 6 because Ivy is still in it.

The ethics in journalism part is there, but it does take a back seat to resisting the social justice activist types who have cropped up in gaming over the years to hate on it over sexy women and violence. The sorts that whine about how gaming needs to "grow up" or that we need games that aren't fun, but push social justice. Think guys like Jonathan McIntosh.

Did you have a specific violation by game publishers in mind? I know bad behavior by them does sometimes come up on KIA. The whole EA pushing lootboxes and pay to win and that Shadow of Mordor youtuber debacle.

I do think the claims of threats and misogyny are exaggerated. As I recall, in the early days, there were GGers who went out of their way to report threats and such on social media and even Kotaku put out an article begrudgingly acknowledging that. I've also seen praise and positive responses on KIA to women in the industry.

I'm sure there is sexism in GG,but in the sense that any group will have some.
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It does help his case when the same group of morons is harassing anyone that had anything to do with TLJ
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The gaming and game-journalism industries will literally never let go of "gamergate" because, objectively speaking, it was 'about' ethics and quality in gaming journalism (whether they were right about their targets or if so and so was good or bad etc is beside the point of why it existed). Whenever someone condemns a developer or a review site, they can just say "woooow look at Gamergater here Gamergate hates all women you are a misogynist and a Nazi and therefore discredited"

They were still going on about it regarding TotalBiscuit after he was fucking dead
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Gamergate was the biggest embarrassment in gaming history. You have a bunch of 24-35 year olds crying about zoe quinn having sex. Then the excuses were sjws were taking over. It was one of the beginnings of the alt right becoming more and more verbal.
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Curtains313 posted...

Gamergate was the biggest embarrassment in gaming history. You have a bunch of 24-35 year olds crying about zoe quinn having sex. Then the excuses were sjws were taking over. It was one of the beginnings of the alt right becoming more and more verbal.

That's not what it was about but keep drinking that kool-aid.
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Conflict posted...

Curtains313 posted...

Gamergate was the biggest embarrassment in gaming history. You have a bunch of 24-35 year olds crying about zoe quinn having sex. Then the excuses were sjws were taking over. It was one of the beginnings of the alt right becoming more and more verbal.

While I'm all for mocking alt-righters, if you watch the video I posted that doesn't really sound like a fair summary of the scandal

Keep in mind this was a sort of line-in-the-sand event where people either sided with review sites and believed that people were being harassed and assassinated for being women or were against them and went tinfoil hat against all media

It's hard to find people that can step back and look at the whole thing because both sides are extremely aggressive about "converting" people
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Gamergate deprived the journalists of their income and made them look completely inept. Of course the gaming press (which has a lot of overlap with BuzzFeed and gawker type sites) are never going to give GG a fair shake. So if the average person thinks its about harassment, I don't blame them. Incidents like this recent one just keep revealing how inept and biased the writers are, whether or not anyone gives a crap about GG.
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Gamergate is yet another piece of evidence to put on the pile that shows the internet is humanity's greatest mistake.
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Gamergaters are, for the most part, bitter incels.
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Delirious_Beard posted...

not a coincidence that there's a ton of crossover with the alt right and incel community within the pro gamergate one

that subreddit and 4chan being the most prominent voices really isn't surprising

Only a delerious ultra lefty could come up with something so wrong.
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ColdOne666 posted...

Delirious_Beard posted...

not a coincidence that there's a ton of crossover with the alt right and incel community within the pro gamergate one

that subreddit and 4chan being the most prominent voices really isn't surprising

Only a delerious ultra lefty could come up with something so wrong.

It's like you proved some of his point with the whole "lefty" comment.
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I don't think anyone gave a shit this much about gaming journalism until this shit. And yall act like yall wouldn't give fake good reviews to a woman for giving you sex. I know I would.
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Esrac posted...

We had a bunch of articles disparaging the gamer identity that all occurred within the span of a couple days

This always struck me as the impetus for the movement taking off. That was a real bad look, especially since it started with Patricia Hernandez, who was rarely a favorite of the community.

I've read a whole bunch of these articles and honestly, they're all relatively tame, and most are written better than Hernandez's version. Basically the idea was "don't let the industry define and dictate who you are and how you act" and "don't just accept how the public sees you and let that isolate you from others". Specifically, they called out the harassment campaigns and the picture that painted of the gaming community, such as it was.

But Hernandez's article got out of the gate first, which was quite a bit harsher than most of the others, and here we are.

In the end, GG as a movement suffered from a lack of centralized direction and vision. It needed some proper leaders to get behind it quickly and early and it didn't. They let the opposing names get out in front of the media, and those names were allowed to paint the picture for the public. Further, there was little to no work within GG to push away the "anti-SJW" message so those viewpoints were allowed to run rampant, which pretty deeply subsumed any just cause against the bogeyman of gaming journalism.

And now, whenever a new online movement comes up with similar undertones (ie. this ComicsGate malarkey), it will be referred back to as an embarrassing footnote.
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Getting mad over gamergate was stupid as fuck. Imagine getting mad at some no name game reviewer giving a good review to a game because the woman who made the game had sex with the reviewer.
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All these years later and I'm still struggling to find a reason why people give this much of a shit about video game reviews.
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Lol "gamergate"

NERD RAAAAGE
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Like, did the "coordinated hit pieces attacking gamers!" really impact you all enough yo the point where you felt personally offended? Because I'm pretty certain gamers in their 20s and 30s have always been looked at weirdly, don't let others opinions bother you and grow the fuck up.
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ALL WE WANT IS FAIR REVIEWS ON GAMES!!!!

Shut the fuck up. These are the same people who went apeshit mad when Twilight Princess got an 8.8. Fucking pathetic.
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Veggeta X posted...

Getting mad over gamergate was stupid as fuck. Imagine getting mad at some no name game reviewer giving a good review to a game because the woman who made the game had sex with the reviewer.

That's not what started GamerGate. This is (all posted on the same day):

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Then why is that every time I hear, read or even watch on why people are so upset it's because they just want fair journalism on video games?
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The Great Muta 22 posted...

All these years later and I'm still struggling to find a reason why people give this much of a shit about video game reviews.

Might help if in any time during those years you might have listened to any one of the people explaining why it matters.
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Who?
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The Great Muta 22 posted...

Like, did the "coordinated hit pieces attacking gamers!" really impact you all enough yo the point where you felt personally offended? Because I'm pretty certain gamers in their 20s and 30s have always been looked at weirdly, don't let others opinions bother you and grow the fuck up.

When just about every publication under the sun that purported to be for the gaming community insults, lies to and lies about said community, it's a hell of a lot more personal that when right wing religious types banged their anti-gamer drum throughout the 90s. Those attacks were coming from places that claimed to represent and defend the gaming community, and once did just that. And why did they do this? Because a small group on 4chan were gossiping and being stupid like 4channers tend to do? It's like going to your favorite pizza joint, one of the cooks getting into an argument with a troll yelper, then screaming at the entire restaurant's clientele that they're all disgusting, fat slobs. So yes, getting called all manner of shit by those people does personally offend me.

And man. Look at the comments in this thread using insults like 'nerd' and 'grow the fuck up' to people who care about their hobby on a website dedicated to said fucking hobby. To paraphrase TotalBiscuit, "If you're using words like nerd as a insult while being part of an industry and community that's rife with them, you're completely tone-deaf."
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FaultyGourry posted...

that purported to be for the gaming community insults, lies to and lies about said community

The fallacy here is assuming that the articles were directed against the entire community and not the toxic elements of it.

Not a single article said "You. Yes, you. Are the problem with gaming." Toxic people just took it personal because the toxic qualities resonated with them, and boy did they not like being called out.
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If he doesn't want a room at Gamer gate then don't get a room there.

I hate the ________gate conspiracy crap. Watergate was the name of the hotel. Adding gate to the end of your conspiracy isn't clever it's lazy.
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You know, if you actually look at the articles from the so-called "anti-gamer" week, they weren't even really addressing gamers so much as all the gatekeeping bullshit of people who see themselves as "real" or "hardcore" gamers and putting themselves above the "casual" gamers or whatever. And they weren't even attacking so much as they were saying that the world is changing, and the gamer market is broadening. "Casuals" will continue to be a bigger and bigger part of the gaming community and game companies will not be paying as much attention to the "hardcore" players. This has been happening by the way.

People claim that it's really about ethics or exposing corruption or whatever but all you have to do is look at the gamergate subreddit and you can see what a crock of shit that is. It's nothing but people complaining about feminism and SJWs, and most of it isn't even game related.
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CyricZ posted...

FaultyGourry posted...

that purported to be for the gaming community insults, lies to and lies about said community

The fallacy here is assuming that the articles were directed against the entire community and not the toxic elements of it.

Not a single article said "You. Yes, you. Are the problem with gaming." Toxic people just took it personal because the toxic qualities resonated with them, and boy did they not like being called out.

No, they just insinuated 'gaming culture' is full of entitled, neckbeard misogynists and tied that to the term 'gamer' and pushed the narrative that anyone who disagreed or dared criticized anything was part of that. And they did this because they didn't like /v/ gossiping about one of their own. Can you think of any other industry where insulting your consumer base would be an acceptable practice?
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Doe posted...

Conflict posted...

Curtains313 posted...

Gamergate was the biggest embarrassment in gaming history. You have a bunch of 24-35 year olds crying about zoe quinn having sex. Then the excuses were sjws were taking over. It was one of the beginnings of the alt right becoming more and more verbal.

While I'm all for mocking alt-righters, if you watch the video I posted that doesn't really sound like a fair summary of the scandal

Keep in mind this was a sort of line-in-the-sand event where people either sided with review sites and believed that people were being harassed and assassinated for being women or were against them and went tinfoil hat against all media

It's hard to find people that can step back and look at the whole thing because both sides are extremely aggressive about "converting" people

That's what makes Gamergate that much more pathetic to me, because you can easily do both.

You can look at the instances of incel fuckfaces harassing women, trolls trying to doxx feminists and sending death threats and such - real, observable events - and still think that gaming websites are inherently biased or tainted by corporate sponsorship, and that a massive upheaval or reform would do some good for everybody. Though even then, you could sympathise with the staff of a gaming website who had to put up with this dogshit - because as shitty and egregious as some of the sites could be, the online pony-sig/anime-sig crowd was inevitably more toxic and objectively created worse content to consume.

The thing about Gamergate and some of its biggest faces is that it all came to prominence via internet basement-dweller rage. Anita Sarkeesian was some nobody YouTuber with a small following, and she only gained as much attention as she did because people rallied against her "Tropes vs Women" videos and kept her name relevant. Zoe Quinn was alleged to have fucked a reviewer for a game review, but the last I heard, the link between her and the reviewer was tenuous at best and raised as supposed fact by a jilted ex. Sarkeesian was given a platform by the Gamergate types, and Zoe Quinn was some lady who wanted to make some games in Twine - she was brought to prominence by her mistreatment, but folks like to play it off as her milking a non-issue for attention. Like she didn't wake up one morning after living a basic, boring-ass life to find some 4chan neckbeards telling her to drown herself in bleach.

Meanwhile, IGN and sites like it would take brand deals involving full-size banner ads, and just throw any old fucker onto a game whether they enjoy the genre or even understand it. Throw a JRPG fan onto a copy of X-Com, and you get a shitty review. Get someone who likes puzzle games and story-based games, and throw them onto God Hand. You get a review that misrepresents the product, and it can lead to games not selling well. When a reviewer doesn't like a game that's sponsored the site, and expresses that in a review, they can get fired. Professional reviews were - and can still very much be - a joke. And there was a good base of people who just wanted some positive change to these systems, and who saw Gamergate as a good way to bring about this change, by protesting.

But that was undermined by a shitty, exploitative side of Gamergate who used the event to just be toxic shitheads and just all-around oxygen thieves. I'd go as far as to call it a majority, because I didn't see a single Gamergater online without an anime sig and a rant about "stupid feminazi bitches". It's why I wouldn't give a pass to Charlottesville protestors who marched with Nazis - even if you did believe in a good cause, you stood shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of reactionary, radically angry fuckfaces. That's your image now, and their sins taint your movement.
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The term "gamer" had problems in the public eye well before the articles. Anyone who wasn't insulated deep within the gaming community could see that.

Then game journalists say "Hey, man. This is what they're saying about us. Are we gonna take it?" The answer was "Hell no we're not going to take it from YOU!" because they didn't want to believe the world at large thought so little of them.

FaultyGourry posted...

Can you think of any other industry where insulting your consumer base would be an acceptable practice?

Which is why assuming this was the intent is so fallacious. No one in their right mind would do such a thing, yet toxic and misled gamers just assumed that here's the exception, because they couldn't see past their own anger over being called out.
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St0rmFury posted...

Tbh, I still have no idea what gamergate is about.

Same lol. No one has ever properly explained it to me.
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And I mean shit, you can see the remnants of Gamergate-types in today's world, like "pizzagaters". Good angle to the story, people want to expose child sex crimes, but it stems from some insane theory about Hillary Clinton bankrolling and colluding with a Washington pizza place to house influential and powerful people with sick sexual tastes. All wrapped up in a bow of "Oh, we're trying to accomplish a good thing!" - and inevitably there will be good people buying into it, because they want to stop child sex abuse. They believe in a good cause.

But a driving force behind the whole thing is some conservative fanbase of morons who ascribe some insane conspiracy-level shit to it, to have the same movement cater to the unsympathetic crazies of the world. The type of bold asshole who walks into an establishment and fires a few rounds into the roof in the name of public safety and righting supposed wrongs.
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thelovefist posted...

Gamergaters are, for the most part, bitter incels.

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CyricZ posted...

FaultyGourry posted...

that purported to be for the gaming community insults, lies to and lies about said community

The fallacy here is assuming that the articles were directed against the entire community and not the toxic elements of it.

Not a single article said "You. Yes, you. Are the problem with gaming." Toxic people just took it personal because the toxic qualities resonated with them, and boy did they not like being called out.

That's just confirmation bias. If you call a group of people assholes, and they respond with the resounding fuck you, you don't then get to then claim that's evidence that all of those people are in fact assholes. What you're basically arguing, is that when they said that gamers are shit people, that anyone who disagreed must have been a shit person, because any good and moral and upstanding person would have just immediately agreed and stopped calling themself a gamer. it leaves no room for disagreement. It completely closes the door on the possibility that maybe some of those articles were wrong.
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Gamergate was pretty fucking stupid.
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Tmk posted...

St0rmFury posted...

Tbh, I still have no idea what gamergate is about.

It's about calling out corruption in games journalism. Games journalism instead claims it's about nazism, violence, bigotry, harassment and terrorism.

because it was

the "corruption in games journalism" was just a weak smokescreen that all intelligent people saw right through
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