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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An anonymous reader writes Processor firm Intel has withdrawn its advertising from Gamasutra in response to the site's decision to carry feminist articles.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."
So called gater movement needs to fuck off and die.
There are people who don't like Anita Sarkeesian or Carolyn Petit or a lot of other people who make it their overbearing agenda to misrepresent reality and gamers and focus 155% on perceived feminism in video games or perceived gender-damaging things. Those people aren't a grass roots movement, or gaters, we're just people who hate bullshit and don't tolerate it. Never heard of these gaters referred to as a group before but wow, give me a break.
I've written at length about this particular topic - it's a bane on the existence of the internet at the moment.
I am not endorsing abusing the woman by any means, but she wrote a deliberately inflammatory article which decided to single handedly lump all gamers in as trouble and make the label gamer a "dirty word" In doing so, she alienated a *LOT* of people who previously had no stake in this entire saga.
People are doing the wrong thing on both sides of the fence on this debate. As someone who has followed it for 6 weeks and dealt with excessive censorship in regards to discussing it too, I recommend simply avoiding this one, it's nasty.
Posting Anon, I really can't be bothered with potential backlash (and this post is hardly spiteful but you never know at the moment)
their advertising because the site will carry female journalists and articles about female gamers? That sounds like the type of decision that backfires on a company.
>> "Processor firm Intel has withdrawn its advertising from Gamasutra in response to the site's decision to carry feminist articles. "
Nope. Intel removes advertising after Gamasutra lead a charge of articles saying gamers were dead. Obviously Intel are quiet taken with PC gamers and the millions they spend on CPU's each year. As Gamasutra was no longer a site targeted at that demographic they decided not to waste the money advertising to people who aren't there.
>> "The articles had drawn the ire of the self-described "Gater" movement, a grass-roots campaign to discredit prominent female games journalists. "
Nope. it's a campaign is to rid Gaming of shitty, biased, corrupt journalists who conspire against their supposed audience. Like whichever anonymous cockroach submitted this article. These same journalists like to hide behind feminists and minorities to avoid criticism.
>> "Intel was apparently so inundated with criticism for sponsoring the Gamasutra site that it had no choice but to withdraw support."
Nope. Intel realised that advertising on sites that are aggressive and hateful towards the demographics being targeted by an ad campaign is counter-productive and a waste of marketing budget.
As ever anti-GG brigade are there telling lies and twisting the truth. So which PR company did this submission company come from Slashdot? We know you know. Anonymous my arse.
They only care that people are complaining, it's a PR thing. They are pulling their advertising because there is some controversy going on with the site, so it's easier to pull out then pick a side and anger people. Intel would plaster their logo on the side of churches if they knew that people wouldn't complain about it.
I know that the submitter lifted this line from the article, "campaign to discredit prominent female games journalists", but I read the earlier articles on this subject. The attempt was not to "discredit prominent female games journalists." The attempt was to discredit specific female games journalists, at least one of whom acted in a manner which was calculated to stir up outrage and was possibly unethical (for those of you who want to argue about whether or not her behavior was unethical, I am not interested in spending the time looking at what she did in order to reach a conclusion).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Intel has pulled an advertising campaign from video gaming website Gamasutra after it reportedly received a number of complaints from self-identified gamers upset that the site was championing fair gender representation in video games.
When you write:
However, Women's Rights activist/advocates should be firmly expressing their disdain towards this horrible movement of Femi-nazi's.
Why? When people point out that "gamer" no longer includes just a small hard-core subset of males who orgasm over every new video card and think that all female characters in games should have "vital statistics" that would put a Barbie doll to shame, they're not being "femi-nazis." The appeal of games like Minecraft (58% female) shows that the word "gamer" is either an archaism or needs to be updated to include the new reality.
If the old guard doesn't like that women are "invading their space", they need to realize that it's simply not just "their space" any more.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I can relate, in parts. To the anti-feminists, that is.
I'm sick and tired of getting feminism shoved down my throat absolutely everywhere. There's new laws, most companies have policies, our language is being policed for misunderstood "gender-equality" and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I'm in full support of women fighting actual oppression. If you can't vote just because you're female, I'm with you on that. If you can't drive a car because you're a female, I'm with you on that. If your boss tells you that short skirt is the appropriate dresscode, while he insists on long trousers for your male colleagues, I'm with you on that.
But the feminazis who insist that absolutely everything has to be exactly 50/50 male/female, then for all I care you can fuck off and die.
Also, let's be honest, many of the most vocal feminists quite publicly state that their goal is not 50/50, but female dominance.
Women in video games is one of the "soft topics". Yeah, it's ridiculous what armor female characters wear sometimes. But you're blind, deaf and stupid if you think it's a gender thing. Look at the male characters - they are all Schwarzeneggers, too. According to my female friends, I'm quite handsome, but most video game characters beat me hands down in both beauty and body shape. It's the same as in movies and magazines - we get idealized, unnaturally enhanced versions of humans.
Could video games improve their representation of women? Sure, they could. But the subject is by far not as simple and clear-cut as voting rights or such.
And frankly speaking, I play video games to relax and shut down. You could keep your politics out of my entertainment and work on improvements in the real world. You know, the one that matters.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
They're concerned about being sued by readers for repetitive stress injuries stemming from eye-rolling at these articles.
"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"
I am not going to attribute this to ignorance, this is plain malice trying to discredit #gamergate
as the stuff people were complaining about.
Intel has pulled an advertising campaign from video gaming website Gamasutra after it reportedly received a number of complaints from self-identified gamers upset that the site was championing fair gender representation in video games.
Wow, could this have been written to represent one side any more strongly?
Another would be that video game players(intel's customer) are kind of sick of feminist extremists posting articles about about how all gamers are a bunch of basement dwelling woman haters.
This medium seems to get attacked a lot by people who don't understand it. Which I kind of understand. If you saw someone playing GTA you'd probably think they're a murderous psychopath.
First we had Jack Thompson blaming games for school shootings. And now we have third wave feminists blaming games for some kind of rape epidemic.
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 poor oppressed straight white man. Saddest thing in the fucking universe.
Amen to this. I know it's a controversial position to take,but women have equality (if not superiority) to males. The only reason women don't run the world is because they choose not to. They choose to have children instead. Fair enough, but you can't have it both ways, ladies. And as for the lack of equality in gaming, IT, tec., women simply have different interests. We hate to admit things are biological these days (seems to upset the PC liberals), but women naturally are drawn to more childcare type positions (nursing, teaching). Big deal. And right now, the law is so stacked against men it's not even funny. Domestic abuse? The woman wins by default. Child support, child custody, alimony? Again, men get screwed big time. All of this is in addition to chivalry by males (paying dinners, etc.) and of course, biologically, women still have mate choice, so they can (and many do) use their bodies to have power over men in morally repulsive ways. And I feel really sorry for young men growing up right now, especially those being raised ny single mothers. They are so feminized, by their parents and the school system, which favors women by punishing men for being active and forces them into a more passive feminized role. Sorry this seems to have turned into a rant, but this really needs to be said, because you almost never hear the opposite point of view (at least not in the mainstream).
Either gamers are all sexist pig men who rape women at every change they get, or gamers are a mix of people and all these feminist gamer rape articles are BS.
You can't have it both ways. The feminists use gamer to mean whatever they want. Oh look, a sexy female game character: gamers are rapists.
Oh look, minecraft is a game. Gaming needs a safe space because women game.
Oh and btw, where are all the complaints when a game character is a muscled 6 foot tall guy who can lift a ton?
The problem with these feminists is that they complain constantly about games that they find sexist.
Other people like to play those games.
Don't like a game? Don't play it and shut up. Let other people enjoy their pastime.
...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.
The issue is video game reviewers and sites providing unearned positive praise for a product due to:
- Bias from personal relationships, including those of a sexual nature
- Political pressure to over-represent games which claim to be the product of a given minority group
If the 'customer' in this case, is the person expecting a fair and non-biased review of upcoming and current games, they are not served by these biases, especially when they're not revealed from the beginning. This is a basic failure of journalistic integrity.
This was further compounded by a backlash that centered around censorship of any discussion of these issues, no matter how applicable or tangentially related, which pointed these issues out, which is seen as patently unfair - not to mention draconian.
Perhaps the worst part of it all is that those trying to hide this discovery - or promote their side with no argument - chose something ethically sound to stand against, Women's Rights. This is unfortunate, because women's rights have nothing to do with this issue, and pretending it does only weakens future ACTUAL complaints that involve Women's Rights.
Read this article five times, and then promptly fire the brain-dead fuckwit who decided to pull your ads because of complaints from a mob of psychos.
"These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers -- they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had. "
Intel has pulled an advertising campaign from video gaming website Gamasutra after it reportedly received a number of complaints from self-identified gamers upset that the site was championing fair gender representation in video games.
When you write:
However, Women's Rights activist/advocates should be firmly expressing their disdain towards this horrible movement of Femi-nazi's.
Why? When people point out that "gamer" no longer includes just a small hard-core subset of males who orgasm over every new video card and think that all female characters in games should have "vital statistics" that would put a Barbie doll to shame, they're not being "femi-nazis." The appeal of games like Minecraft (58% female) shows that the word "gamer" is either an archaism or needs to be updated to include the new reality.
If the old guard doesn't like that women are "invading their space", they need to realize that it's simply not just "their space" any more.
You are missing the point.
Most gamers, male and female alike, just want to play video games. They want to be able to simply ask, "Hey, wanna play Street Fighter/Quake/Halo/Warcraft/etc?" without any drama, and 99% of the time that is how it goes amongst friends. Random idiots online are trying to get a rise out of you, don't pay attention to them. For most gamers, it doesn't matter if someone is male or female. There are plenty of creepy males and females online, but they're not the norm.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/girls-and-software is related to the above statement.
Apparently, also, Anita Sarkeesian, being a horrible human being undeserving of the attention they get, may have very well fabricated the death threats against herself. http://www.staresattheworld.com/2014/09/anita-sarkeesian-fabricate-story-contacting-authorities/
The major, and salient, point is the fact that there is an endemic corruption in journalism as pertains to gaming. Not just that, but most of them, except for IGN strangely enough, are connected to a sort of PR company (Silverstring Media) that is more focused on generating controversy than on anything related to gaming, equality of sexes, improved representation of strong women in video games, etc.
They're pushing a hardline, militant form of feminism, attempting to pervert the word further to gain more legitimacy, Feminism used to be about equality of the sexes, removing all institutionalized discrimination and attempting to foster an environment more conducive to viewing each other as equals, or perhaps even, view each other as just other human beings. Rather than "that black dude", or "that asian chick", etc, you think of them as people like yourself.
Another equally important point is the over-exaggeration of all gamers (and I myself view anyone who sets aside some of their free time specifically for playing a video game of SOME SORT (computer, console, handheld, cellphone even!) to be a gamer, hardcore gamer being the more nebulous term) as being mysogynists and constant desire to sexualize women in games as if their lives depended on it. I understand, in say, Dragon's Crown that the male characters are probably not even close to every woman's fantasy of their perfect man, and that the female characters (except the thief, whom is more modestly dressed) are quite sexualized... But I can accept the ridiculousness, you know why? It's all part of the game's style and aesthetics. Most of it is ridiculous!
Take a look at Mount & Blade, without any modifications mind, and play as a woman. You put on plate armor, it's the same shape as men's armor, because boob-plate would be ridiculous in a game attempting some realism (and make melee blows more likely to strike the center of the chest). There are other games like that, and other games that are on the more ridiculous sexualization side, though I feel it'd be better to
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!
The majority of the gamers who wrote Intel agree with you. In fact, the entire furore over the past month seems to have cemented the idea of "gamer" as a inclusive, universal identity into the collective mind of the gaming community across the web.
However, that was not the argument the Gamasutra and other articles made. The gaming press collectively declared that "Gamers were dead", that gaming as a descriptor was obsolete, that the "identity was dead", or referred only to a obsolete subset of exclusionary, female unfriendly, "selfish", "conservative", "tribalistic", and -- implied by the accompanying stock images -- fat angry unkempt adult males.
Meanwhile, games companies, marketing firms and online game fansites were still actively using the term to refer to everyone who, well, plays games. Even Forbes magazine was shaking its head in disbelief at the game media's attack on its own consumers. People are now asking how much damage recent controversies may have done to the public image of the gaming industry.
A $80 billion dollar industry which had achieved almost universal consumer acceptance and success may have just been torpedoed as a woman-hating "Cathedral of Misogyny" by its own press publications. Intel is cutting its losses before the conflagration spreads to the rest of tech.
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
She wasn't saying that "gamers" as individuals are over, but that "gamers" as a specific culture is over. I think she's right. Gaming has gone so mainstream that saying you're a "gamer" doesn't really mean anything anymore. I don't buy the newest and shiniest hardware (I suspect the same with most /.ers), so am I gamer or not? Can you tell? She's just saying that she doesn't write for the "gamer culture" because it's dying out. Now she writes for the modern gamer culture which is damn near anyone. I think she's making a point that the gamer purists who fit the old mold are mad they aren't the focus anymore.
I read your post all the way through, and you make some very good points. Misandrists are an extreme reaction to misogynists, and reverse discrimination violates the rule most of us learned as kids, that two wrongs don't make a right. People who attack someone based on their gender are idiots, doesn't matter whether they're men or women. But Intel pulling advertising over a bunch of griefers? Of either sex? That's equally idiotic.
Hard-core, bra-burning anti-male feminism was a reaction to the barriers women had to overcome. There's still plenty of sexism, lots of "glass ceilings" and silly assumptions related to competency for various tasks depending on your gender and stuff, but I'd like to think we're making some progress as time goes on.
And not just for women. 20% of all nurses are now men. And let me tell you, when you're ill, really ill, you don't care about the gender of the person helping you.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The mass censorship of gamers over the last month has raised questions about how well functioning that immune system really is. Gamers and the game media have never gotten along. But the degree to which gamers were thrown out of sites for talking about Gamergate was disturbing, and the "trivial" nature of gaming as a subject matter does not soften the blow.
Gamers were ejected from all major game news sites/blogs, almost all major game forums, news media outlets, subjected to shadow bans and mass deletions across the whole of Reddit, barred from editing Wikipedia, and finally -- in the the most absurd capstone to the whole farce -- all gamergate discussion was banned from 4chan, a place which still openly permits the posting of severed human body parts and rabidly anti-semetic hate speech. What few remaining forums for discussion were left ended up being DDoSed.
What happened during gamergate was what we were told could never happen to free discussion on the web: Site by site, the lights on the internet went out for video gamers.
In retrospect, it could only have happened for something as "trivial" as video games, and to a group as "subcultural" as the gaming community. But it has happened; It is still happenning. The entire concept of the Internet as a "fifth estate" or a forum for open debate has been severely discredited by recent events. If video gamers are unable to discuss or dispute that "Gamers are dead", or that games are not misogynist on the internet, then what can be discussed or disputed?
If the internet has an immune system, I don't see the patient recovering yet, and even in the event of a return to "health", the complications of this acute inflammation of censorship will be with us for a long time. This may yet end up being a watershed for the medium and our assumptions about it. Something has just gone very, very wrong.
May the Maths Be with you!
I read your post all the way through, and you make some very good points. Misandrists are an extreme reaction to misogynists, and reverse discrimination violates the rule most of us learned as kids, that two wrongs don't make a right. People who attack someone based on their gender are idiots, doesn't matter whether they're men or women. But Intel pulling advertising over a bunch of griefers? Of either sex? That's equally idiotic.
Hard-core, bra-burning anti-male feminism was a reaction to the barriers women had to overcome. There's still plenty of sexism, lots of "glass ceilings" and silly assumptions related to competency for various tasks depending on your gender and stuff, but I'd like to think we're making some progress as time goes on.
And not just for women. 20% of all nurses are now men. And let me tell you, when you're ill, really ill, you don't care about the gender of the person helping you.
Since you use the term "bunch of griefers" I will assume that you have never heard of Leigh Alexander. You will be hard pressed to find a more vehement, vitriolic, and chauvinistic person even if you lived 500 years. In fact, here's a shortlist of some of the more interesting things http://theralphretort.com/game...
I especially like where she states (way back in 2010 already) that all core gamers are maladjusted losers looking for maladapted coping via games. It's hard to find a broader brush than that.
If anything, Intel pulling out is not enough.
"Hey guys, when you're alone on an elevator with a woman you've never met before, leaning in close and inviting her to an orgy is kinda creepy. Don't do that."
Yes, and that's a fairly insulting thing to say to a stranger. It's like if I walked up to you and asked you to stop beating your wife and neglecting your daughter. It presupposes: 1) That you obviously ARE a wife beater, and 2) that you must stop that. If you show insult, the response to that only mentions point #2: "What, so you think beating your wife is okay? Are you just a complete asshole?" The incorrectness of point #1 is not questioned, nor is the insult that assuming that people in a group conform to a stereotype of a small minority.
So yeah, go into a large group of people and shout "Jesus, why are all you people such fucking assholes??" Yeah, it should come as no surprise that you get a negative reaction.
Either gamers are all sexist pig men who rape women at every change they get, or gamers are a mix of people and all these feminist gamer rape articles are BS.
You can't have it both ways. The feminists use gamer to mean whatever they want...
That's a false dichotomy. And did you realise you are talking about "the feminists" as if they are single monolithic group right after you just finished complaining about how people think gamers are a single monolithic group?
Oh and btw, where are all the complaints when a game character is a muscled 6 foot tall guy who can lift a ton?
The super-masculine super soldiers are designed to appeal almost exclusively to the power fantasies of teenage boys. Are you honestly trying to tell me you've never heard feminists complain about that? I mean, isn't fear that the nasty feminists will take your boobs and you space marines away exactly what this is all about?