Slashdot Mirror
Combating Recent, Ugly Incidents of Misogyny In Gamer Culture
ideonexus writes: 2490 gamers, developers and journalists have signed an open letter supporting inclusiveness in the gaming community after indie game developer Zoe Quinn received backlash and harassment when her ex-boyfriend posted false accusations that she traded sex for favorable reviews of her game and feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian was driven from her home after receiving death and rape threats for her videos illustrating the way some mainstream games encourage the commoditization of and violence against women. The harassment has prompted geek-dating advice columnist Harris O'Malley to declare the backlash the "Extinction Burst of Gaming Culture," the last reactionary gasp before the culture shifts to become more inclusive.
There's no such thing as politically correct. There's no such thing as a right not to be offended. Both of these run counter to freedom of speech.
Nobody's going to force me to "include" people that I don't agree with, period. If you don't like it, fuck off.
That being said, the asshole ex-boyfriend should be turned into a eunuch and ridiculed for being such a wuss for the rest of his life.
I don't know anybody who has any idea who these people are, nor do they give one shit about any of this stuff. They just play games. I don't think these "cultures" and "communities" are nearly as big as people think they are. It's limited to a VERY small set of people commenting and participating in all this high-school drama. Of course, once it's on twitter and the internet in general, everyone thinks its way bigger than it actually is.
News flash -- It's not.
It doesn't seem to be pervasive. We've all seen the recent stats on similar stories. Over half of all gamers are female. Less than 1/5 are under the age 18. The stereotypical teenage boy gamer is a small component of the "gamer" culture.
I doubt this is "Misogyny In Gamer Culture". I think instead this is just a few vocal idiots.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
It wasn't just "false accusations" from her ex-boyfriend. It was accusations from many of her boyfriends and other people that she slept with coupled with her story not making any sense and having plenty of holes in it. Oh, and also no proof that any of it took place.
As for Anita Sarkeesian? Well, after seeing how lying about being a victim worked out so well for Zoe, it's not exactly a big stretch to say that maybe she did the same thing. I mean, all those tweets coming in, from only one user, faster than anyone could type them, and immediately after receiving them we're supposed to believe that Anita logged out of her account and just so happened to search for those exact tweets, then took a screenshot of them as proof that she was "stalked and driven from her home by a raid."
There's a few things that aren't adding up here.
Sad thing is that there's so much truth to the allegations against Zoe that has been drowned out by the idiots and trolls who want to offend or think that their way works. She even admitted flat out on twitter to having sex for publicity, and yet not a single time has the issue journalistic integrity of video game reporting been raised. There exist obvious and blatant conflicts of interest in several of her endeavors and the media that actually cares to report this ignores this fact. That slashdot plays along is not surprising, this website has a long reputation of pandering to that crowd and backing down on real facts cases like these. It's much easier to just play along right?
Consider also that Zoe Quinn was outright accused of sexually harrassing a fellow dev at a wedding, whereupon she immediately began the process of what they call "victim blaming" and riled her army of fans/supporters to berate and verbally assault him. There is a huge double standard for the controversy surrounding zoe quinn, and everything she's done wrong is being swept under the carpet because "omg internet bullies".
I don't care if she had sex with fucking 10,000 guys; that's not the issue at heart here. The 'allegations' are actually facts, and what I care about is that she slept with those people for publicity she did not deserve, that was taken from more deserving games. AAA devs don't care because money, but for indie devs this is extremely important because if it becomes a good ol' boy system in video game journalism then good games that deserve the spotlight will miss out even more than they do. And, also, bad games that don't deserve shit will continue to flood steam and make the front page. Stop supporting videogame-political machines.
That's ridiculous, and you're a troll. The reason people hate Anita Sarkeezian is not because she is a woman, but because she purposefully misrepresents facts in games and posed as someone that enjoys games when there is video evidence of the contrary. She lied to the people that financed her videos and then did not even deliver, not to mention that it's such poorly made crap that a high school student could have done better. Zoe Quinn got backlash because she is a morally bankrupt scumbag that slept with other people in her industry and journalists that promoted her game. She also made up the Wizardchan incident and basically got a bunch of lonely virgins to take the heat for something they did not do. In both cases the hate they received is due to their actions and character, not because they are women. Oh, by the way check out that list of "developers" most of them aren't developers themselves and are only tangentially connected to those companies. These people are actively trying to ruin gaming as a hobby. They politicize everything and try to make an issue over the smallest things. They deserve all the hate they get.
The hypocrisy of third wave feminism should, at the very least, be pointed out, and it's a straw man to call doing that misogynistic.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
How can there be video evidence that she doesn't enjoy games? Does it show a video game killing her parents?
I knew it was going downhill for a long time, now it's dead, because it's been taken over by the Social Justice Warriors.
That's pretty laughable given the amount of evidence. Her ex-boyfriend didn't post false accusations. Among the things that were posted were Zoe's own words, tweets, facebook message, ok cupid posts, etc. Is Slashdot also ran by SJW's that refuse to see things for what they really are?
The author of the Vice article also has connections to Zoe Quinn, Anita, and the other white knight/SJW "journalists." Did you not even bother doing research on this before making a crap slashdot post?
That's the beauty of facts. They still remain facts even if you disagree with them.
Are we talking about the same Zoe Quinn? The Zoe Quinn who shut down a gamejam specifically targetted at helping women coders, because she perceived it as in competition with her own fundraising efforts?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Let me answer your question with a question: why do you feel the need to psychoanalyze someone you know nothing about other than his use of the abbreviation "SJW"? Surely YOU would not engage in thinking all people who use those three letters in a sequence are the same, would you?
No, but just about "every last women who picks up a controller" will be threatened with violence or rape by a gamer.
http://fatuglyorslutty.com/category/death-threats/
That ^^ ... is a fucking problem. I sure as shit don't have to deal with crap like that when I'm online.
Even if not a single person ever followed through on their threats, it creates an incredibly hostile atmosphere that few would want to endure therefore creating a cultural divide and effectively excluding women from the activity.
And, somehow, even if that was deemed acceptable, even if we all said "ok fine gaming is to be a sausage fest for all time", do you really think the attitudes given voice by these in game messages somehow vanish once the sender puts down the controller and joins the rest of us in the real world?
Posting anon because I enjoy my job.
For some reason, slashdot has mostly ignored this topic for the past couple weeks, and now we get an article that revels in moralistic naysaying while ignoring what keeps this going.
The recent "ugliness" is not just a product of sexism and misogyny. To be fair, women have been harassed. To be even more fair, not all women who have been harassed have been harassed by "gamers".
The fiasco that has now grown into "Gamergate" (not my term) is not easy to relate in few words, but I will summarize that it is a reaction by enthusiast gamers against a clique of prominent video games journalists, writers, and indie developers who have been using their personal connections to promote each other's works and political ideology, as well as exclude those who do not toe the line.
It began when the ex-boyfriend of indie developer Zoe Quinn made a blog post detailing with evidence how Ms Quinn cheated on him with at least five other people, as well as perceived attempts by her to emotionally manipulate him. (http://thezoepost.wordpress.com/) Among individuals named in the post were Nathan Grayson (a writer for Gawker Media's Kotaku and former writer at Rock, Paper, Shotgun) and Robin Arnott (a judge at the Indiecade independent games competition that later went on to give Ms Quinn's game an award). Initially, this post was ignored by games journalists, and was circulated in online gaming forums. However, many forums deleted any and all topics concerning the matter, including the largest reddit thread deletion in history (with over 20K comments deleted; http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2dz0gs/totalbiscuit_discusses_the_state_of_games/) concerning youtube commentator TotalBiscuit's response to Ms Quinn allegedly using a false DMCA request to take down one of the first videos discussing the subject (http://themundanematt.tumblr.com/post/95428752119/dmca-notice-and-removal).
Investigation by redditors and members of various boards on 4chan soon uncovered that Ms Quinn allegedly pointed her twitter followers to critique a new game charity designed to help female game designers have their ideas actualized because she felt the charity's profit-motivated goals and its policy towards transwomen (biological males who identify as women) were oppressive (http://static.fjcdn.com/large/pictures/60/24/6024fb_5271447.jpg). When the creator of the charity attempted to seek promotion from major gaming journalist sites, he was told that since Ms Quinn had issues with the charity, no promotion would be possible (knowyourmeme.com/photos/814183-quinnspiracy).
While specific written pieces promoting Ms Quinn's work were actually short in supply, further investigations showed that the relationships of other journalists to their subjects were less tenuous. Patricia Hernandez of Kotaku was shown through previous twitter conversations to have lived with and possibly had a romantic relationship with Anne Anthropy, an indie developer she directly promoted in several articles. Ben Kuchera of Polygon, among others, was shown to be a supporter of Ms Quinn on Patreon, a site designed to crowd-fund stipends to content-creators. In response to these issues, the two above mentioned games journalism sites posted clarifications and/or updates to their positions on conflicts of interest, noting that they would attempt more honest journalism in the future, as well as in the case of Kotaku disallowing writers to contribute to subjects' Patreon accounts.
This is when hell started breaking loose. Prominent games journalists and indie developers cried out on twitter that Kotaku and Polygon
In this thread, the "accusation" is that the accusations against Zoe have truth to them. The accusation takes the form of a comment, not an article in its own right. Your "[citation needed]" post is out of place.
If you're curious about it, look it up. If you dispute it, dispute it. This is a website where people comment about the article, and often about things completely unrelated to the article. Some work on your part is required, the comment thread isn't a place for you to whine about not being spoon-fed. For your [citation needed] comment to be taken at all seriously, you have to at least add that you searched for it and couldn't find it, so you don't believe it's true without more work on OP's part, thus [citation needed].
As it turns out I was curious about the accusation as well so I searched for some more information. Took me about 10 seconds to find some interesting things:
http://www.escapistmagazine.co...
http://thezoepost.wordpress.co...
http://imgur.com/a/4VOcx
http://pastebin.com/Ph22THkJ
I love when people use the acronym "SJW," it's even more efficient than "misandry." It says "I am unapologetically backwards as fuck on a wide variety of issues, to the point that I am upset at the existence of people who are opposed to my backwardness."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Fictional stereotypes? This is a story about feminists labeling an entire group of people misogynists. They clearly don't have a problem with using the paint brush set to "wide".
Additionally there have been and still are feminists that claim that all heterosexual sex is rape. Which would make pretty much all men rapist. So again, not fictional.