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SXSW Cancels Panels On Harassment Due To Harassment (sxsw.com)
New submitter rMortyH writes: Two panels on online harassment in gaming scheduled for the upcoming South by Southwest festival have been cancelled due to online harassment and threats. According to a statement from SXSW Director Hugh Forrest, "... in the seven days since announcing these two sessions, SXSW has received numerous threats of on-site violence related to this programming. ... If people can not agree, disagree and embrace new ways of thinking in a safe and secure place that is free of online and offline harassment, then this marketplace of ideas is inevitably compromised."
Within game journalism. Hosted by The Open Gaming Society. Lynn Walsh was slated to speak.
Had nothing to do with harassment, unless the fact that Gawker apologists keep sending them bomb threats and trying to portray them as some kind of anti-women terrorist group counts. They pulled the same shit at an SPJ meeting, crickets from the press.
FWIW, the cancelled panels and some info from Googles cache:
SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community
We are attempting to organize a panel that we’d like to hold at SXSW 2016’s Interactive (Gaming) conference. The panel will focus heavily on discussions regarding the current social/political landscape in the gaming community, the journalistic integrity of gaming’s journalists, and the ever-changing gaming community, video game development, and their future. We will encourage honest critique and open dialogue between panelists and audience members, and will attempt to create a space where we can all speak on the social-political issues.
Speakers:
Lynn Walsh
Mercedes Carrera
Nick Robalik
Perry Jones
Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games
A panel from experts on online harassment in gaming and geek culture, how to combat it, how to design against it, and how to create online communities that are moving away from harassment. The panel will dive into data around abuse in larger gaming communities. One of our panelists will talk about about ways to actually develop the social aspects of games - including UI decisions and how they can influence accuracy and usage of reporting abuse. Another will dive into UX design choices to stymy harassment in social media spaces.
Speakers:
Caroline Sinders
Katherine Cross
Randi Harper
From what I've seen there was 1 panel for each side. #SavePoint by the open gaming society Level Up panel organized by Randi Harper Both sides were harassed. Both canceled. OGS statement here: http://www.theopengamingsociet...
The "panel" included Randi Harper - one of the most notorious trolls on the internet. I can only guess she's considered an expert because she has engaged in so much abuse that she can spot it a mile away.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-j...
This person is a horrible human being who should not be given any kind of soap box from which to speak.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I will continue to play violent game because its fun. No body will tell me what I should or should not play.
Not a native english speaker, I presume?
No one is telling what you should play. Let's take Anita Sarkeesian. The people she's actually criticizing are game DEVELOPERS for overusing tropes.
That's it.
But YOU are taking her criticism of GAMES and developers personally.
"She's saying I'm a bad person when she says the games are bad."
But she's not saying the games are wholly bad, she's criticizing the tropes. That's it. Your problem is that your identity is too tied up in the games. In other words, you need to grow up.
Anita Sarkeesian reviewed a bunch of games, or more accurately started a kickstarted to make "Tropes versus women in videogames" and got a shitstorm of harassment. Are you claiming she wasn't in fact a victim of harassment?
Would that be, before or after she said she doesn't play video games? Oh she got some harassment, of course in her world criticism = harassment. She even said as much in front of the UN. And of course one can't forget that she refuses to debate anyone, or anything she says. But wants her garbage to be put in place in schools, and used as teaching material. Well that seems great, how'd that work out for Jack Thompson and his "games cause people to become psychopaths" bit.
And Zoe Quinn got a shitstorm of harassment over a review allegedly paid for by sex, except the review doesn't exist. So she got a shitstorm of harassment for something that never happend. Still going to claim she wasn't a victim of harassment?
You still can't figure it out huh? It wasn't a review, it was favorable coverage. She got mentions over a pile of other indie games, not once but several times. Those articles were written by the same person, without disclosure. And if I remember right, I posted the links on that to you the last time. You simply got all upset and stuck to the "but it was a review" which of course is what anti-gg people have been saying for a year, which gg folks haven't said. Of course one can't forget the amount of harassment that she's engaged in, like doxing the owner of a credit collection company, or Of course you have to be pretty damn pathetic to dox a bunch of 30 year old loners and virgins who are already a mental wreck. Of course she also belonged to helldump(part of SA), which was a notorious group of doxers who drove at least one person to suicide. Yeah great face, for anti-harassment.
Of course, one can't forget that PC gamer deleted all of Tyler Wilde's articles either. You know why? Because he was shacked up with Anne Marie Lewis who was a Ubisoft comm. associate. PC gamer believed that the articles were biased, and deleted them all and went further to have all existing search results on those articles purged.
It seems what happened is a bunch of bullies picked on some people and are now deeply upset that other people sympathise with the victims of the harassment. Well crap, what did you think would happen?
Well it appears people didn't want to hear anything about her, or her little talk going by the polling that SXSW had up. So she went crying off to twitter when she discovered that the GG panel was approved, and they pulled it on both.
But I can't really blame SXSW. Considering the amount of crap that GG has put up with in the last year, it becomes more of a safety issue for pro-GG individuals. Since there have been at least a dozen confirmed bomb threats where GG has had their talks, panels and so on in the past. The most recent of course was the SPJ Airplay event, where the building was evacuated because of another credible threat that someone wanted to blow up pro-GG people.
Can't forget people like Geordie Tait either, who said he wanted to use sarin gas to kill pro-GG people at PAX.
Om, nomnomnom...
The problem is that the threats they keep getting seem to be sent by GamerGate to itself.
Well your first link here let me help you out a bit. That bit from Oliver Campell, that was anti-GG individuals who sent themselves death threats. Not Gamergate individuals sending themselves threats. And of course, if you've ever done a FOIA or ATI, then you already know that vague requests are automatically ignored. But then again, you might not know this but there are several people back in the early days of Gamergate, who have T/S clearances and were doxed by anti-GG individuals. That's enough to refuse any requests on information, simply because the information was related to classified information.
The second link, good old ghazi making shit up to support their narrative. Of course the person in question wasn't a gamergate supporter, they used the gamergate hashtag 35 times. To put that in perspective, the #gamergate hashtag on twitter alone has over 3m+ tweets now, there's 50k+subs on Kotakuinaction, that sub alone gets 500k-4m unique visits a month, it's in the top 50 busiest subs on reddit for subscriber size. That of course isn't even counting boards on 8chan, and voat. Here's the good part, they were a prolific writer for left-leaning sites including DailyKos, Feministing, and the guardian as contributors among other sites. He of course also claimed to be a jew, an isis supporter, a neo-nazi, a feminist, wrote as a feminist, and so on as well.
They also advocated the restriction of speech, freedom of speech, radical support for freedom of speech, attacks against individuals who were not of their ideological orientation and so on. Among a whole pile of other things.
Om, nomnomnom...
That is patently false. http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US...
You idiot. She was making a wider point about games that were overtly misogynistic, and said "what if someone made a game where you have to kill all men", as in how terrible would that be and what outrage it would cause among anti-feminists, and how hypocritical it is when they are fine with games that are about raping or killing women.
Stop being so PC and reacting to every carefully edited down quote as if it is a personal threat. Do your research before getting offended.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC