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Intel Drops Gamasutra Sponsorship Over Controversial Editorials
An anonymous reader writes Processor firm Intel has withdrawn its advertising from Gamasutra in response to the site's decision to carry feminist articles. The articles had drawn the ire of the self-described "Gater" movement, a grass-roots campaign to discredit prominent female games journalists. Intel was apparently so inundated with criticism for sponsoring the Gamasutra site that it had no choice but to withdraw support. An Intel spokesperson explained that "We take feedback from our customers very seriously especially as it relates to contextually relevant content and placements" and as such Gamasutra was no longer an appropriate venue for their products."
By feminist articles you mean "Gamers are dead" and "Guide to end gamers" articles?
The summary and article are both completely misleading. It's not a political movement. There's nothing political about it, they want a higher standard of journalism. The journalists have been using minorities and women as shields from criticism, hence, #notyourshield.
It isn't about feminism (esp. waves 1 or 2 of feminism), but about journalistic integrity. Third wave feminism actively seeks to undo the equality that waves 1 (and to some extent, 2) of feminism got for women. If you look into the facts, you can see that the journalists:
1. Have close personal relationships - sexual, financial, even living environment - with the subjects they write about. They do not recuse themselves appropriately.
2. They actively collude to push their personal politics.
3. Do not actually like or care about games or gaming.
4. Effectively take bribes.
5. Ostracize those that don't toe the party lines. So they're an asset if you're with them and a huge roadblock if you're not with them. They control most gaming events and actively work to shut down those that they don't control.
6. Dissenting opinions are never expressed in their pieces and facts are scant at best. It's all based on feelings.
7. They do not verify their sources and an egregious example is found directly in TFA. Nobody bothered to verify Anita Sarkeesian's story and somehow it keeps getting parroted as a fact. There have only been a couple people that looked into this and have found that the details are muddy at best and nonexistent at worst. As a result, she's come up with the phrase "listen and believe," but I'm much more a fan of "trust, but verify."
These things would be stomped out in any real journalistic setting. They're clearly violations of ethics and have nothing to do with feminism and only tangentially about feminist pieces where no facts are presented and no opposing opinions or alternative interpretations are presented. It's a stonewall for rationality and an attempt to co-opt gaming like so many institutions before have been co-opted by this PC crowd.
The *only* reason anybody thinks it's about feminism is the fact that the journalists tried to paint the side demanding better journalism as "misogynists" and the fact that they can screenshot your average Internet troll.
A real journalist better start looking into the factual portion of this soon, otherwise these obvious biases are going corrupt media in general and you're going to have something much, much bigger on your hands. You *can not* rely on these journalists for facts so nobody should start with their articles. Since discussion about this is censored almost everywhere (guess who did that?), you're going to have a tough time looking into the facts. It's worth it, there's something seriously rotten going on.
...The articles had drawn the ire of the self-described "Gater" movement, a grass-roots campaign to discredit prominent female games journalists....
The GamerGate movement had nothing to do with that at all, nor has it been about feminism. It actually started when a male Kotaku journalist published an article about a female game developer that he was sleeping with without disclosure, an act that is generally intolerable in any credible journalistic circle. From there, the mainstream gaming media outlets started with "defending it" to "attacking 'gamers'". It was almost funny how coordinated it was, because on August 28th almost every one of the gaming sites posted a "Gaming is Dead" article in unison (http://gamergate.giz.moe/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/1409546711940__large.jpg) when they were unable to squash it.
This article is a perfect example of the problem. It's near impossible to get a truthful story, because it turns out that most of the big names in games journalism have similar skeletons in the closet.
The bias in the summary is overwhelming. Gamergate has nothing to do with feminism in video games and everything to do with journalistic ethics and integrity, specifically the close relationship many gaming journalists appear to share with the gaming industry they cover. Yes, Gamergate started as a story about a young woman who made a game and reportedly slept with several game journalists who went on to write positive articles about her game, donate money to her Patreon, and, in one case, a man she had a close relationship with was a judge at an indie award show, and whadayaknow, her game won an award.
The story of that woman (I will not say her name for fear of censorship as on Reddit and 4chan) revealed the unethical relationships game journalists had with game developers, but that was only the beginning. Recently it came out that EA had discovered that about 40,000 of its user accounts' passwords were stolen, but they asked the game journalists who knew about it not to report it, and they happily obliged since they were friends.
The collusion and intense cover-up of the corruption inside gaming media by various media sites has been astounding, and the article and summary here and another example of that. The anti-gamergate crowd seems to hold onto the initial perceived misogyny in order to push an agenda. I will repeat one more time: this is not about feminism. It is about ethics.
Long story short: ex-boyfriend accuses indie game developer of sleeping around to get good reviews for her shitty game. His annoying screed offers no proof or reasons, so tons of people back him up because idiocy.
For anyone interested, here is a link to the article Intel pulls ads from Gamasutra over. It is ... colourful in its descriptions of gaming to say the least.
About ten or so articles like this appeared over the course of a few days at the end of August across most of the top game news sites. Apparently, a lot of gamers were upset enough to write into site advertisers to request they stop sponsoring the offending site with ads. Intel have evidently made a dash for the door out of a building the owners have decided to set on fire.
The author of the piece, Leigh Alexander is a described feminist critique of video games and video game culture, as well as wider "geek" cultures. Her personal views on geeks and their fandoms are ... equally colourful.
I am not convinced that this person is not an ultra-conservative plant sent to discredit feminist and progressivism in geek and gaming culture. If she is, she's making a spectacular effort at doing so. This entire furore is doing real damage to the genuine participation of women in the video game and even wider tech. Intel's pulling of ads might help take the oxygen out of this fire before the industry gets burned.
May the Maths Be with you!
And what precisely is the "SJW" movement. As far as I can tell, the so called "SJW" movent may as well be called the "don't be a cunt" movement. Somehow this is being portrayed as a bad thing by some people.
Interesting way to put it. To counter, I would like to share with you this wonderful picture: http://gamergateharassment.tum...
In case you are wondering, it has so far been a pretty common tactic from the SJW side to dox and threaten opponents to silence.
And if you think that this is the only incident where gamers get threatened (there's also a delightful log where SJWs send death threats to a 12 year old for not agreeing with them) here is a larger collation: http://gamergateharassment.tum...
Enjoy the moral fiber of the SJW. :)
This has nothing to do with what anyone wrote. It is about the fact that there is a fairly well organized groups and their sustained attack against an imaginary foe. Go read their guide on Github, it's full of information about how to misrepresent the situation and the site's position to manipulate advertisers into withdrawing their material.
The whole thing would have died down months ago if it were not for the anti-feminists keeping it going with endless videos and tweets, all talking about a war that isn't actually happening.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The controversy is called Gamergate, and it is strange that the summary doesn't mention it by name. I've never heard "gater" used to describe it before. The anti-Gamergate side has a history of trying to alter the name--they've tried "Game Ethics" and hilariously "We Love Videogames")--in an attempt to take control of the narrative, so maybe that's happening again here.
This is a good summary of the events so far (though decidedly from the pro-Gamergate side):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
The wikipedia article is not much help, as it has adopted the anti-Gamergate narrative that the movement is about misogyny. Many of the primary sources cited are the same ones whose journalistic integrity has been called into question.
Here's an interview with a law and ethics professor about some of the journalistic behavior involved, and whether it's OK:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Probably the most disgusting (and damning) behavior of the anti-GG side is the attempt to silence discussion, from the fraudelent DMCA notice to the initial media blackout, and ongoing widespread censorship of user forums/comments.
Exactly.
Misogyny is bad, but when a whole bunch of different "gaming journalism" sites start pushing one social issue because all the editors and writers conspire (no exaggeration) to re-engineer their community people will complain.
Many of the people being blasted as misogynists are just gamers who made the mistake of expecting gaming journalism to follow some sort of professional journalism ethics. They aren't sending death threats to anyone, just protesting the smearing of the gamer community. Gaming review sites are just corporate owned, cargo-cult shadows of what real journalism is, and they didn't create the communities they make up their readership. It doesn't matter whether the message they are shoving down gamer's throats is a positive, inclusive one. That's no excuse for shaming gamers en masse and subsequently failing to save face when their readers revolt by admitting they did anything wrong. Instead these "journalists" began mustering social justice warriors across the internet to battle the greatly-exaggerated boogeyman of misogynistic gamers that they created.
Intel is smart to listen to their core market, people who buy games.
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
Horse shit.
Your right to free speech extends only to GOVERNMENT restriction of speech. Private venues are fully within their rights to limit your speech all they want in their venue. Don't like it? Leave.
Oh, they're leaving all right. And warning everyone about how pro-censorship those venues are.
As a side note, one of the initial sparks setting off the firestorm was Zoe Quinn's fraudulent DMCA takedown request against a youtuber (MundaneMatt) talking about the controversey. The government is arguably somewhat involved in that one important case.
The problems is that there are two sides to the story. And it's difficult to find sources that will decently explain both of them. One side claims that Zoe faked everything and slept with lots of people to get good reviews and get mods of all sorts of websites to censor anything negative said about her. It is likely true that she was involved with at least one person in the review industry, but not expressly for the purpose of getting good reviews.
The other side claims that it is the result of an ex-boyfriend doing his best to vilify her which caused a decent sized chunk of the gamer community to believe it was now alright to treat to woman like garbage. People, often using spambots, have posted her home address on countless websites (the real reason for most of the moderator censoring), and posted copyrighted nude images of her. She received a number of (idle) threats of rape and violence, and thousands of people on message boards and such started calling her just about every negative term I've ever heard used against a person.
Anti-zoe people were hurt because she became the target both for the reasons why the game review industry is so horrible (who hasn't purchased at least one shitty game do to inaccurate, overly positive reviews?), and the representation of every woman that ever hurt them personally. A large number of guys are drawn to gaming because they are not too good at interacting with women. For a subset of these guys, these problems with interaction have lead to bitter misogyny. In a number of threads and articles, a number of these guys have attacked anyone trying to defend her, claiming that those people either were currently sleeping with zoe, hope/wish that defending her will let them get to sleep with her, or they are loser-white-knights and Social Justice Warrior bitches who need to fuck off and leave us true gamers alone.
So yeah, it's a mess, and this bitter subset has gone and made the gamer community look really bad.
So basically a bunch of kids are acting like they didn't leave high school? What a shock.
Be seeing you...
Since I haven't posted many sources, here is an excellent, succinct Reddit comment which will give you a whiff of why these social justice warriors don't deserve your support. They recklessly antagonise everyone spreading blatant falsehoods, and even other feminists argue against them and are slandered. This isn't about helping women, it's about aggrandising egotists.
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
No, the original spark that lit the fuse on a pre-existing powderkeg was her starting a lynch mob against a forum for people with depression so severe the suicide crisis hotline is on literally every page of the website. Add in her history of domestic abuse, sexual harassment, and attempts to shut down a feminist game jam and you've got something people will want reported honestly. Instead gaming journalists colluded (as internal emails prove) to push an abusive screed against white male "basement dwellers" and "obtuse shit slingers".
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
If you care about women's voices and prejudice you shouldn't be calling "good" a website whose editor in chief is a blatant racist that threatens black men (using a racial slur) with violence for daring to eyeball her wrong.
Leigh Alexander and her ilk have been targeting women and minorities for doxxing, threats, and harassment so severe that two people (one a black game developer) have already been fired because of harassment and four more have had attempts made to get them fired. One of those was a prominent feminist supporter who received threats of mutilation and rape to her workplace. That's not even getting into the more than twelve other doxxings at this point including a transgender developer whose financial accounts were hacked. I've personally watched as a woman who built schools for little girls in pakistan tweeted about how she was afraid of reprisals for daring to be a "gender traitor". It's insane.
Here are some interviews with thirteen developers, industry insiders, and the feminist group whose female game jam was almost shut down before gamergate:
http://www.nichegamer.net/2014...
http://techraptor.net/2014/09/...
http://apgnation.com/archives/...
The problem with protesting journalists is that journalists can and will write whatever they want about the people protesting them.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."