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For Game Developers, It's About the Labor of Love
Nerval's Lobster writes With "GamerGate" and all the debates over who counts as a "gamer," it's easy to forget that games are created by people with a genuine love of the craft. Journalist Jon Brodkin sat down with Armin Ibrisagic, game designer & PR manager for Coffee Stain Studios, the Swedish studio that made Goat Simulator, to talk about why they built that game and how it turned into such a success. Brodkin also talked to Leszek Lisowski, founder of Wastelands Interactive, about the same topic. While these developers might debate with themselves (and others) over whether to develop games for hardcore gamers, or jump on the mobile "casual gaming" bandwagon, they'll ultimately in it because they love games — a small but crucial detail that seems too easy to forget these days.
So, next time you get death threats against you and your family, I hope everyone dismisses you as a low-life playing the "victim card". Grow the fuck up.
It's about unethical journalists. And those same journalists have been trying for weeks now to deflect this focus away from them and pretend it's about sexism, changing gamer culture, etc. so they themselves don't have to answer for a decades-long games journalism tradition of "journalists" being in bed with the very companies they're supposed to be covering (through advertising, bribes, press releases disguised as "previews," etc.)
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
From everything I've read about the subject:
The journalist did mention her game. It wasn't a review but was definite positive exposure for a game that would not have gotten if they were not close friends. The reason her sex life became an issue was that it seemed to involve a lot of journalists and marketing people. Conflicts of interests and what not. The sex aspect was central but not because of the sex; more the close personal relationships (which sex is). Of course there were a lot of jokes about it. Additionally there was a bunch of stuff about journalists funding games and judges from some indie game competition having monetary reasons to want certain games to win.
Is your second point about the 10 or so articles put out by separate publications that totally aren't colluding to write their own narrative declaring that "gamers are dead" and everyone that disagrees with them is part of that group? I can see why you think that's not about journalism... Or is it about the mailing list they were all a part of discussing stories and what to print?
The interesting thing is those female developers all seemed to have friendships with the people implicated in the whole ordeal. Other female developers and gamers that weren't part of that same friend-group don't seem to share your one-size-fits-all-women mentality. Lady makes fun of people but it's harassment when they responded and made fun of her? How do you expect people to respond when you accuse them of something they didn't do. Should they not say "we didn't do that"? None of the threats have been shown to come from this junk at all. In fact, from what I've read any identified threats have come from third-party assholes just trying to stir shit up. It is always advised not to advertise death threats because that just gives the threatener what they want and encourages more but a few of these women seem more interested in broadcasting their threats than reporting them to the police. Is this what you mean by "they're asking for it"?
The SJW thing in ancillary to the journalism. The journalists happen to be part of the "SJW" clique and used trigger words like "misogyny" to get people's brains to shut down so they could deflect blame. The whole thing has a striking similarity to the "donglegate" fiasco from a few years back.
Literally identical death threats - word for word ignoring names and addresses - were sent to GamerGate supporters.
Weirdly you've never heard about those and no one "had to flee their house" over them, probably because they were directed at men who are used to the crap you get on the Internet.
The death threats are coming from trolls who want to smear gamers and promote drama. Drama that Brianna Wu was promoting as well, up until the same trolls targeting GG got her too.