She has claimed (in an NPR interview) "These representations are really harmful to women". Which is at odds with the claim that she doesn't think the games are necessarily bad.
No, really, it isn't - or at least, it doesn't add anything meaningful that we don't already know from both the disclaimer, and the title of the series.
The title of the series is "Tropes vs Women". The discussion therefore is of tropes, components of video games that are negative to women in some way - maybe they harm them, maybe they turn women off and make women feel unwelcome in gaming. That's, I think, pretty clear what the name implies.
Sarkeesian is stating that she believes, for example, hundreds of games having a damsel in distress, who's presented as a helpless object to be acquired, ultimately damages women.
Now the damsel in distress trope is a good one to make an example of, because it's common, and because nobody in their right mind would say a single instance hurts women in any way. If it were "Dude in distress" (as an example of something rare) in a small handful of games, we wouldn't care. It only becomes an issue because so many games repeat the message, over and over again. If there was a 50% chance of the game you're playing having a "Dude in distress" thing somewhere, and a less than one % chance of it being Damsel, it'd start to get to you after a while, and you'd feel a little like games aren't aimed at you.
Likewise gender identifiers. Ms Pacman wears a ribbon bow? So what? Not harmful to women.
Almost every female character in a cartoon like universe wearing a ribbon bow, and having one personality, "female", as opposed to males in the same universe who instead wear personality identifiers and have, well, personalities? That's obviously a problem. Even assuming neither of these have an affect on how people think (I'm of the opinion they probably don't FWIW, you don't have to have that argument with me), it certainly would make women feel unwelcome in gaming.
In some ways, the disclaimer is the point Sarkeesian is making. It's not the individual games that are bad. It's not the players that are bad. You can play GTA V quite happily and be a good person, and Rockstar can be good people, and it can be a good game. What's not good is that there are hundreds of games, of which GTA V is one, re-enforcing a message that isn't even deliberately put there by Rockstar (the series is intended to be a parody of "US culture" as seen from Scotland, after all) about women, ownership, status, and so on.
So no, the quote you're hearing is not saying any individual game, or even games as a group, are bad. She's saying, as the title of her series says explicitly, that the tropes that end up in games are bad.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Such a disclaimer is not necessarily true.
Well, obviously it's a lie given she's a FEMINAZI who wants to cut off every male's testicles, AMIRITE?! YEAH!!
I don't know if you intended to, but you confirmed my point, FWIW... listen, I've watched the videos, the disclaimer is setting context, and once given, nothing she says in any way contradicts that disclaimer. Really. Honestly. I swear to you this is true. As someone who sat through all six videos.
(Which wasn't hard, except maybe for the last one because of some of the imagery she showed, not her fault.)
At some point you have to take what someone says about the message they're trying to give at face value. If you see something that appears to contradict it, you have to step back and ask whether it really does, or whether you misunderstand the point. I speak this as someone who was roundly flamed for saying "Look I know a lot of people are saying X should happen because of Y, but I disagree, it should happen because of Z", and Slashdotters, having decided all supporters of X must agree with Y, simply didn't believe me, and ignored Z, or pretended it was the same as Y when it wasn't.
So I have personal experience here.
That's just something anti-GGers like to say; nobody still believes that...
I still hear it. And I just responded to someone claiming that Leigh Alexander's "'Gamers' don't have to be your audience" post predated (and part caused) GamerGate, so there's that.
But I'm glad you've at least gotten past those problems with the narrative. I hope you'll keep an open mind, and accept that not everyone on the so-called SJW side is as two dimensional as you currently I think believe.
Never said you were a channer. I implied I suspected you may be a useful idiot contrarian. The channels are mostly the troll and MRA "base". KIA has some of these with useful idiot contrarians, and then there's Twitter where the opportunists add to these groups.
You wrote a lot of nonsense about the history of GamerGate. I corrected you. I'm sorry you don't like the truth, but what you wrote was utter nonsense.
And like I said, you've had time now to know that. Just as you've had time to know that nobody anywhere of any significance considers the presence of war in games to be controversial - if that's seriously your reason for promoting GG's version of history, complete with time travel.
If you want we can continue this discussion, but before we do, I'd like you to tell me the physics behind time travel, so we can determine how Grayson was able to mention Depression Quest as a result of his affair one month before having it, and how Adam Baldwin could possibly have created GamerGate in response to Leigh Alexander's "'Gamers' don't have to be your audience" post before she'd even written it.
There seems to be a willingness on the Internet for many to determine what someone is before reading what they've written or looking at their actions, which makes it very hard to have an intelligent conversation.
Look at Sarkeesian. She literally begins each of her videos making the point she's discussing common themes, she's not saying it's bad to play a game with such a theme, or that the games are necessarily bad (I forget the precise wording, but it's pretty clear.) She gives numerous examples of each trope. She very obviously enjoys playing games and isn't singling out anything for special treatment. There's stuff to agree with, stuff to not agree with, the occasional error of fact but rarely one that undermines any central point she's making, and so on. Her videos are friendly, non threatening, not insulting, and she's ultimately promoting a very constructive agenda.
But she called her group Feminist Frequency, and, well, all Feminists are Andrea Dworkin amirite? (These days, having read no Dworkin but seen the usual suspects constantly attack her I actually wonder if Dworkin is Dworkin... seriously I have no idea...)
So anyway Sarkeesian's demonized. Everything she says is taken out of context so she can be insulted. People who have never seen her videos feel the need to pretend they have so that they can insult her. Apparently, did you know she "cherry-picks" evidence? Yes! (If you watch the videos, you'll see that this just doesn't make sense as a criticism - I don't mean she does or doesn't, I mean it's like saying you don't like Ford Fiestas because they're pedantic and garlicy.)
So... I'd like to think otherwise, but I'm guessing the GP will never be able to read those Tweets he's posted in context, as they were intended to be written. There's a blinker there. I keep seeing the same thing over and over again. When Wu said "Listen GamerGaters, someone just got killed by a 4channer, can you please stop telling me not to take death threats seriously" the GGs claimed she was saying all GGs were involved in that murder. When Wu posted an article with stats showing she was getting more abuse than anyone else on Twitter, and Quinn responded with surprise, GamerGate's response was that this was a "cat fight"/"victimization contest".
Over and over and over again, it's the same story. Which is why these nuts still believe that Grayson wrote a review of Zoe Quinn's game, and that Adam Baldwin was responding to Leigh Alexander when he coined the "GamerGate" hashtag. That's the only way it could have happened, because to believe otherwise is to reject the image they've painted of Quinn and Alexander in their heads.
You forgot developers concerned about the silencing, censoring, and threatening all developers that don't come from the San Francisco Chosen Ones with destroying their careers if they dare to speak in favor of Gamergate.
No, I didn't forget about a group that doesn't exist. Those who'd self identify as that group would be the useful idiot contrarians that I _did_ mention.
Read about the IGF, or the "dead of gamer" articles made in the span of a single day. That was what officially started gamergate.
No it isn't. What officially started GameGate was a tweet from Adam Baldwin publicizing a video about Zoe Quinn's sex life. That's the first mention of GameGate. Pretty much everyone acknowledges that this is the case.
Now, I know you're going to be shocked by this, but it's generally considered, at this time, against the laws of physics for time travel to happen. I know you're shocked because you're promoting GG's history of events, and GG's history of events comes up with some remarkable assertions that imply time travel has been invented. For example, in GamerGate history, Grayson was given special time travelling powers by Zoe Quinn that had him go back in time and mention her game in one article, briefly, and in the other some TV show she was involved in.
In GamerGate history, likewise, GamerGaters themselves were able to go back in time, though apparently without having any sexytime with hot SJW gamedevs, and make a video about Zoe Quinn's sexlife and have Adam Baldwin publish it before the "Death of "Gamer"" articles that supposedly all appeared on one day afterwards. It is not known why they would feel the need to do this. But I gather in your history Leigh Alexander responded by also travelling back in time to alter her article so that instead of saying Gamers are dead, it said 'Gamers' and an associated culture full of misogynistic bullshit, implicitly referencing the sudden interest in Quinn's sexlife by a group of misogynistic self-identified gamers, are dead.
All of this time travel is interesting but it didn't happen. Baldwin didn't reference Leigh Alexander's future post. He promoted a video that purported to be an expose of one female developer's private life. He had no way of knowing Leigh Alexander would write her post, and neither did the makers of the video he promoted. And that video wasn't caused by concern about a journalist actually being sexually bribed, but because a whole bunch of misogynistic idiots read an abusive tell-all by an ex, and decided to believe it rather than ask themselves what kind of an a-hole would do this kind of thing to an ex.
Oh, and Leigh Alexander wrote a post that covered the same topic as many other journalists did at the time because it was a thing: similarly, if you look in the newspapers on 9/12 2001, you'll find they all have very similar stories on their front pages, and the commentary is very similar too, and all seems to be covering one topic.
Now, so what, you ask? Even though I've now schooled you and you've checked, because you're "open minded" and "just asking questions" and all that horseshit, you feel I'm being awfully unfair because you didn't know until I just told you that this was the order of events, you just kind of assumed because, hell, 4chan (later 8chan)'s regulars have a reputation for honesty, integrity, and strong fearless impartial research. And gosh darn it, ol' Squiggie's such a meanie for using sarcasm and stories about "time machines" to make the point.
Well I kinda don't believe you. Sorry dude. I mean, it's always been right there. It was ALWAYS about abusing Zoe Quinn. You know it. You know what Baldwin's tweet was about. You knew early on there was no real story about journalistic integrity.
Even if you were a contrarian useful idiot, you've had plenty of time to figure out that the "official" GamerGate story of GamerGate, the version you're promoting, is impossible.
I've seen the 8chan posts. I've followed KIA. I know who's being played like a piano.
One added point, just throwing it out there: probably the most infamous troll who harassed a woman online he didn't know with threats of death and violence, and then got caught, is weev. His trolling would have started in his late teens/early twenties. So we have no reason to presume the age of those attacking Wu, Sarkeesian, and Quinn are under 20.
There is a difference between having your address available somewhere, and it being brought to the attention of an angry mob.
I would, as I did in that thread, also caution you against putting yourself in the head of someone who's actually getting doxxing coupled with death threats, no matter how smart and knowledgable you assume the target to be.
As it is, Wu has had three choices: ignore them, run away, or fight back. She's doing the latter, and it seems to work. The latter is also the right choice if you want to improve things and prevent this from happening to other people. Good for her.
Slow Down Cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 4 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator.
Then she goes on to write vile and offensive descriptions of every man on the planet and is shocked at getting a bad reaction ?
True, who can forget when she said in that infamous Tropes vs Women episode: "This brings me to Hitman. If you like Hitman, which I've never played because I hate video games, you're a rapist. There, I said it. Hitman forces the player to kill strippers and other women. You know who also made video games? Hitler. We should immediately kill all gamers."
(Part of me expects this now to join the anti-Anita folklore...)
They've been saying that for about a week, and a sizable number of the figureheads left this week. Even Milo appears to have given up on them.
I wouldn't have added it to the summary if I didn't think it was essentially true I might add. I'm seeing a reduction in pro-GG posts. The trolls who form the epicenter on 8chan are, I think, both burnt out and seeing a sizable amount of what they were trying to do flame out without doing anything. The opportunists are leaving seeing the movement as toxic. The MRA people have better things to think about than video games. And the useful idiot contrarians were always a soft group that are unlikely to hang around a dying movement.
How about the one just below: "I know many guys don't think about this, but there's a reason women go to bars in groups. It's a safety thing."
I see a theme in this - she seems to be assuming all men are rapists until proven otherwise.
You want to explain how the latter follows from the former? Because it doesn't. She's pointing out a sizable number of women feel unsafe in bars. That's true. Ask a few women you know. Then ask them if they think most men are rapists.
I think you've invented a "Brianna Wu, Feminazi" character in your head, and you're now grasping at anything you can, no matter how silly, to make everything she says fit that character.
Unfortunately, one of the downsides of this is that you are probably someone who needs to listen to people like Wu, Sarkeesian, and similar voices more than most, and you (probably) never will.
These women are telling you where they see the problems are that are preventing them from being full participants in the same world as you. Now, you can go full MRA and decide you don't care, that it's not an issue that women aren't full participants, they can be second class citizens and whatnot.
But... maybe you're not like that. Maybe if I said the word "Misogynist" right now in connection with anything even vaguely related to something you agree with, you'd immediately (like many GGers) jump out and yell "NOT ALL MEN! HOW DARE YOU CALL ME A..." etc.
And if that's the case, please, for fuck's sake, listen to these women like a normal person would. Don't read in conspiracies and insane views that aren't being stated, because most likely they don't exist.
I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm asking for an example of someone significant and representative claiming that a vast conspiracy of gamers WANTS TO KILL THESE WOMEN.
So far as I can figure out your reply, you're saying I might have implied somewhere, if read upside down, underwater, with a brick replacing the brain, that GamerGate is a conspracy. I didn't, but humor me, what of it? If I did say it was a conspiracy, where did I say they wanted to KILL THESE WOMEN?
GamerGate's supporters want Anita, Brianna, and Zoe scared and upset. Most don't want them killed, from what I can see.
GamerGate is not a conspiracy and I never suggested as much. It's an unholy combination of trolls, MRA activists, opportunists, and contrarian useful idiots, but a conspiracy? That would make it sound like each group is working in coordination with the other.
I prefer to think of GamerGate not as a "conspiracy", or a "movement", or a "force", but as a "Train wreck".
That's a flat out lie. Even with no knowledge of context, there's no way to read the tweet as saying that.
Context: Wu has been told multiple times by GamerGate's supporters that the death threats are no big deal and she's making a big fuss about nothing. Hence "Police investigating 4chan link to murdered woman. Gamergate, tell me again how my life isn't in danger."
She's asking GamerGate to stop dismissing her concerns as hysterics.
That's not victim blaming...we are just identifying the cause and effect
Hmm.
FWIW, I think there are multiple ways to deal with abusive online, and putting yourself in the head of someone being abused and expecting them to follow a script that you happen, right now, to think sounds like the best approach is unreasonable.
At the end of the day, Wu is getting death threats. She's responding to them, not the other way around - the death threats were first, her publicizing them came second. Complaining she might get less if she shuts up like a good girl and doesn't stand up for herself ignores that fundamental fact.
As it is, she's found an alternative way to shut them up. It's the subject of this article. Now me, I don't know about you, but I think if there are two "Shut them up" options, one of which is "Don't say anything for fear of getting them upset with you again", the other being a variant of "Fight back", I think the second is more socially useful. I think it's the right thing to do. So if she has the strength to, good for her.
Good for her anyway. The world needs more Brianna Wus. She didn't like the lack of games aimed at people like her so she started her own games studio. How cool is that? The fact she's going after these assholes seems like a logical continuance of that.
I'm sorry, but are you really comparing bemoaning the lack of women in gave development, and the lack of games aimed at diverse audiences, with supporting white supremecism?
Unless I'm totally misunderstanding you, you appear to be saying Wu is to blame for getting rape and death threats because she spoke quite reasonably in favor of games aimed at a more diverse audience, and more women in game development, and even started a studio to put her money where her mouth is.
Remember, that's why she's being shat upon. She's not said anything against men, or gamers, or any other group. She's just said she wants to see more women gamers and game developers, and games aimed at more audiences.
If you think that deserves death threats, I seriously think you need to reconsider your values.
I believe they are after more than one person. Wu has been the target of multiple death threats and there's nothing to suggest they're all from the same person AFAIK.
The affect/effect thing is my error, I copped to it earlier:)
I find it hilarious that someone can believe in a vast conspiracy of gamers to kill these women
Please identify this person. Which person is claiming that a vast conspiracy of gamers wants to kill these women?
Plenty of people, rightly, blame those hiding behind the GamerGate label for creating the hatred behind the threats, but nobody is suggesting that every single member of GamerGate, or even most of them, supports actual murder. Terror, yes. It is obvious in everything the average GamerGate says and does that they want these women scared. They don't even try to hide it.
What we do believe, and we see, is a sustained campaign of terror against those GamerGate's majority has declared the enemy (which oddly enough doesn't seem to be a list with many journalists on it.) We Anita, Brianna, Zoe, and others, getting huge numbers of hate messages every day. We see all three constantly lied about. And when someone inevitably gets a little too enthusiastic and starts sending actual rape and death threats, GamerGate's supports overwhelmingly respond by claiming the reports are false, made up, or that the victim asked for it.
We see that because we can see that. You only have to search for their user IDs on Twitter to see it.
The "friends with a journalist" thing really kind of was justification after the fact. I'm not entirely sure whether Grayson was mentioned in the infamous Five Guys video or not, but the reality is that the entire thing started as an attack on Zoe Quinn, who, as you mention, had fairly positive coverage for her unusual Depression Quest game, and the beginnings of that attack, beyond general dislike of the game and the idea it should be treated as one, was an ex-boyfriend posting an "expose" into her sex life.
I think GamerGate has tried, repeatedly, to rewrite what it's about, and how it started, but no matter how it's covered, it appears really to be a superset of four groups: trolls (extremely visible on 8chan, they're not even hiding it for the most part. "Thanks Doc". Goatse inspired GG logo. Long strategy screeds where they admit the only aim is to get "SJWs" to fight amongst themselves - which hasn't happened), opportunists (Milo, that approved Feminist from the Enterprise Somethingorother, KingOfPol, to some extent David Pakman, etc), MRAs (I mean, open MRAs), plus a group of kinda useful idiot types, usually in their 20s, pride themselves on being "contrarian", suckers for the "It's about Ethics" crap especially as there always has been concern about the gaming press, so it's easy to jump on board saying "Wait, I have concerns about journalistic ethics too!"
That's an interesting coalition, there's evidence the opportunists are backing away now the label is pretty close to universally toxic, the trolls will eventually find something else, and that leaves the MRAs and contrarians, and I don't think either group are organized enough to continue it.
Well, I sincerely hope you're right about the age range of the people doing this, but at the same time, I find it a tad unlikely. There's some very obvious deep seated resentment of women going on right now that these women are at the center of, and it seems improbable that the death threats are completely 100% unrelated.
Why should some mass of teenagers suddenly decided they're going to make a point of attacking high profile "pro-women" geek women? The "lulz" argument only makes sense for the short time it takes to realize they're not out there issuing death threats when the subject is global warming or football, and outside of lulz we're left with not a lot of reasons that would apply to teenagers.
Yes, I have started following her on Twitter. She is abrasive. No, I wouldn't agree though that she's "histrionic" or "goes out of her way to get attention".
She's been the target of a sustained attack campaign for a while now. I can't say if it started before or after Adam Baldwin decided a video detailing Zoe Quinn's sex life was a "*Gate" and deserved a new hashtag to be associated with it, but the death threats followed her retweeting someone else's mash up of some of the more ludicrous attacks sent her way.
But, FWIW, yes, you're victim blaming. You're seeing someone responding to attacks and claiming that makes them, what was the term you used, "histrionic"? Quite honestly, even if she was, she wouldn't deserve the death threats, and she wouldn't deserve screenshots forged tweets designed to make people hate her distributed around the Internet.
...of course, that's kinda the issue, right? Because if she's that bad, you certainly don't have to fake a fucking tweet from her to get others to agree what a terrible person she is.
If this were about people laughing at women, generally being sexist, or even calling them bad names, you'd have a point.
This is about extreme harassment - death threats, attempts to fake evidence to get other mobs involved, etc. Not laughing at people. Not calling them names. Not disagreeing with them.
The original submission was worse. And in fact I cut and paste from it (to make a comment earlier) and accidentally included more mistakes. So I take the blame for this one...
1. Why do we seriously need threats prison time to get people to knock off threating to rape and murder people, or threats of lawsuits to have people not forge the kind of libelous "evidence" that drives such hatred in the first place?"
2. What happens to those without the resources? I'm guessing most of those who suffer this kind of extreme harassment aren't rich enough to own game studios.
I'm sorry. I'm not going to let you define me as a person based on my skin color.
Given the AC makes it clear, in the very first paragraph, that he's not, is there any reason why we shouldn't write you off as a troll right now?
By all means feel free to reread it and issue a mea-culpa, we all get into angry debates from time to time to the point we misread the opponent. But right now the way things are it's like you really don't want to hear any pro-diversity viewpoints, and so are equating "There is value in having multiple races and multiple genders because it is one factor in improving the number of different life experiences and thus knowledge of how the world works your employees have" to "You white cis men are all the same".
Slashdot Mirror
No, really, it isn't - or at least, it doesn't add anything meaningful that we don't already know from both the disclaimer, and the title of the series.
The title of the series is "Tropes vs Women". The discussion therefore is of tropes, components of video games that are negative to women in some way - maybe they harm them, maybe they turn women off and make women feel unwelcome in gaming. That's, I think, pretty clear what the name implies.
Sarkeesian is stating that she believes, for example, hundreds of games having a damsel in distress, who's presented as a helpless object to be acquired, ultimately damages women.
Now the damsel in distress trope is a good one to make an example of, because it's common, and because nobody in their right mind would say a single instance hurts women in any way. If it were "Dude in distress" (as an example of something rare) in a small handful of games, we wouldn't care. It only becomes an issue because so many games repeat the message, over and over again. If there was a 50% chance of the game you're playing having a "Dude in distress" thing somewhere, and a less than one % chance of it being Damsel, it'd start to get to you after a while, and you'd feel a little like games aren't aimed at you.
Likewise gender identifiers. Ms Pacman wears a ribbon bow? So what? Not harmful to women.
Almost every female character in a cartoon like universe wearing a ribbon bow, and having one personality, "female", as opposed to males in the same universe who instead wear personality identifiers and have, well, personalities? That's obviously a problem. Even assuming neither of these have an affect on how people think (I'm of the opinion they probably don't FWIW, you don't have to have that argument with me), it certainly would make women feel unwelcome in gaming.
In some ways, the disclaimer is the point Sarkeesian is making. It's not the individual games that are bad. It's not the players that are bad. You can play GTA V quite happily and be a good person, and Rockstar can be good people, and it can be a good game. What's not good is that there are hundreds of games, of which GTA V is one, re-enforcing a message that isn't even deliberately put there by Rockstar (the series is intended to be a parody of "US culture" as seen from Scotland, after all) about women, ownership, status, and so on.
So no, the quote you're hearing is not saying any individual game, or even games as a group, are bad. She's saying, as the title of her series says explicitly, that the tropes that end up in games are bad.
Well, obviously it's a lie given she's a FEMINAZI who wants to cut off every male's testicles, AMIRITE?! YEAH!!
I don't know if you intended to, but you confirmed my point, FWIW... listen, I've watched the videos, the disclaimer is setting context, and once given, nothing she says in any way contradicts that disclaimer. Really. Honestly. I swear to you this is true. As someone who sat through all six videos.
(Which wasn't hard, except maybe for the last one because of some of the imagery she showed, not her fault.)
At some point you have to take what someone says about the message they're trying to give at face value. If you see something that appears to contradict it, you have to step back and ask whether it really does, or whether you misunderstand the point. I speak this as someone who was roundly flamed for saying "Look I know a lot of people are saying X should happen because of Y, but I disagree, it should happen because of Z", and Slashdotters, having decided all supporters of X must agree with Y, simply didn't believe me, and ignored Z, or pretended it was the same as Y when it wasn't.
So I have personal experience here.
I still hear it. And I just responded to someone claiming that Leigh Alexander's "'Gamers' don't have to be your audience" post predated (and part caused) GamerGate, so there's that.
But I'm glad you've at least gotten past those problems with the narrative. I hope you'll keep an open mind, and accept that not everyone on the so-called SJW side is as two dimensional as you currently I think believe.
Never said you were a channer. I implied I suspected you may be a useful idiot contrarian. The channels are mostly the troll and MRA "base". KIA has some of these with useful idiot contrarians, and then there's Twitter where the opportunists add to these groups.
You wrote a lot of nonsense about the history of GamerGate. I corrected you. I'm sorry you don't like the truth, but what you wrote was utter nonsense.
And like I said, you've had time now to know that. Just as you've had time to know that nobody anywhere of any significance considers the presence of war in games to be controversial - if that's seriously your reason for promoting GG's version of history, complete with time travel.
If you want we can continue this discussion, but before we do, I'd like you to tell me the physics behind time travel, so we can determine how Grayson was able to mention Depression Quest as a result of his affair one month before having it, and how Adam Baldwin could possibly have created GamerGate in response to Leigh Alexander's "'Gamers' don't have to be your audience" post before she'd even written it.
There seems to be a willingness on the Internet for many to determine what someone is before reading what they've written or looking at their actions, which makes it very hard to have an intelligent conversation.
Look at Sarkeesian. She literally begins each of her videos making the point she's discussing common themes, she's not saying it's bad to play a game with such a theme, or that the games are necessarily bad (I forget the precise wording, but it's pretty clear.) She gives numerous examples of each trope. She very obviously enjoys playing games and isn't singling out anything for special treatment. There's stuff to agree with, stuff to not agree with, the occasional error of fact but rarely one that undermines any central point she's making, and so on. Her videos are friendly, non threatening, not insulting, and she's ultimately promoting a very constructive agenda.
But she called her group Feminist Frequency, and, well, all Feminists are Andrea Dworkin amirite? (These days, having read no Dworkin but seen the usual suspects constantly attack her I actually wonder if Dworkin is Dworkin... seriously I have no idea...)
So anyway Sarkeesian's demonized. Everything she says is taken out of context so she can be insulted. People who have never seen her videos feel the need to pretend they have so that they can insult her. Apparently, did you know she "cherry-picks" evidence? Yes! (If you watch the videos, you'll see that this just doesn't make sense as a criticism - I don't mean she does or doesn't, I mean it's like saying you don't like Ford Fiestas because they're pedantic and garlicy.)
So... I'd like to think otherwise, but I'm guessing the GP will never be able to read those Tweets he's posted in context, as they were intended to be written. There's a blinker there. I keep seeing the same thing over and over again. When Wu said "Listen GamerGaters, someone just got killed by a 4channer, can you please stop telling me not to take death threats seriously" the GGs claimed she was saying all GGs were involved in that murder. When Wu posted an article with stats showing she was getting more abuse than anyone else on Twitter, and Quinn responded with surprise, GamerGate's response was that this was a "cat fight"/"victimization contest".
Over and over and over again, it's the same story. Which is why these nuts still believe that Grayson wrote a review of Zoe Quinn's game, and that Adam Baldwin was responding to Leigh Alexander when he coined the "GamerGate" hashtag. That's the only way it could have happened, because to believe otherwise is to reject the image they've painted of Quinn and Alexander in their heads.
No, she's found a way to stop them. That's what this story is about. It's in the summary. Or did you just read the headline?
She's had the bounty open for five days. During that time, based upon the last few months, she'd expect to get death threats. She hasn't had any.
No, I didn't forget about a group that doesn't exist. Those who'd self identify as that group would be the useful idiot contrarians that I _did_ mention.
No it isn't. What officially started GameGate was a tweet from Adam Baldwin publicizing a video about Zoe Quinn's sex life. That's the first mention of GameGate. Pretty much everyone acknowledges that this is the case.
Now, I know you're going to be shocked by this, but it's generally considered, at this time, against the laws of physics for time travel to happen. I know you're shocked because you're promoting GG's history of events, and GG's history of events comes up with some remarkable assertions that imply time travel has been invented. For example, in GamerGate history, Grayson was given special time travelling powers by Zoe Quinn that had him go back in time and mention her game in one article, briefly, and in the other some TV show she was involved in.
In GamerGate history, likewise, GamerGaters themselves were able to go back in time, though apparently without having any sexytime with hot SJW gamedevs, and make a video about Zoe Quinn's sexlife and have Adam Baldwin publish it before the "Death of "Gamer"" articles that supposedly all appeared on one day afterwards. It is not known why they would feel the need to do this. But I gather in your history Leigh Alexander responded by also travelling back in time to alter her article so that instead of saying Gamers are dead, it said 'Gamers' and an associated culture full of misogynistic bullshit, implicitly referencing the sudden interest in Quinn's sexlife by a group of misogynistic self-identified gamers, are dead.
All of this time travel is interesting but it didn't happen. Baldwin didn't reference Leigh Alexander's future post. He promoted a video that purported to be an expose of one female developer's private life. He had no way of knowing Leigh Alexander would write her post, and neither did the makers of the video he promoted. And that video wasn't caused by concern about a journalist actually being sexually bribed, but because a whole bunch of misogynistic idiots read an abusive tell-all by an ex, and decided to believe it rather than ask themselves what kind of an a-hole would do this kind of thing to an ex.
Oh, and Leigh Alexander wrote a post that covered the same topic as many other journalists did at the time because it was a thing: similarly, if you look in the newspapers on 9/12 2001, you'll find they all have very similar stories on their front pages, and the commentary is very similar too, and all seems to be covering one topic.
Now, so what, you ask? Even though I've now schooled you and you've checked, because you're "open minded" and "just asking questions" and all that horseshit, you feel I'm being awfully unfair because you didn't know until I just told you that this was the order of events, you just kind of assumed because, hell, 4chan (later 8chan)'s regulars have a reputation for honesty, integrity, and strong fearless impartial research. And gosh darn it, ol' Squiggie's such a meanie for using sarcasm and stories about "time machines" to make the point.
Well I kinda don't believe you. Sorry dude. I mean, it's always been right there. It was ALWAYS about abusing Zoe Quinn. You know it. You know what Baldwin's tweet was about. You knew early on there was no real story about journalistic integrity.
Even if you were a contrarian useful idiot, you've had plenty of time to figure out that the "official" GamerGate story of GamerGate, the version you're promoting, is impossible.
I've seen the 8chan posts. I've followed KIA. I know who's being played like a piano.
One added point, just throwing it out there: probably the most infamous troll who harassed a woman online he didn't know with threats of death and violence, and then got caught, is weev. His trolling would have started in his late teens/early twenties. So we have no reason to presume the age of those attacking Wu, Sarkeesian, and Quinn are under 20.
There is a difference between having your address available somewhere, and it being brought to the attention of an angry mob.
I would, as I did in that thread, also caution you against putting yourself in the head of someone who's actually getting doxxing coupled with death threats, no matter how smart and knowledgable you assume the target to be.
As it is, Wu has had three choices: ignore them, run away, or fight back. She's doing the latter, and it seems to work. The latter is also the right choice if you want to improve things and prevent this from happening to other people. Good for her.
True, who can forget when she said in that infamous Tropes vs Women episode: "This brings me to Hitman. If you like Hitman, which I've never played because I hate video games, you're a rapist. There, I said it. Hitman forces the player to kill strippers and other women. You know who also made video games? Hitler. We should immediately kill all gamers."
(Part of me expects this now to join the anti-Anita folklore...)
They've been saying that for about a week, and a sizable number of the figureheads left this week. Even Milo appears to have given up on them.
I wouldn't have added it to the summary if I didn't think it was essentially true I might add. I'm seeing a reduction in pro-GG posts. The trolls who form the epicenter on 8chan are, I think, both burnt out and seeing a sizable amount of what they were trying to do flame out without doing anything. The opportunists are leaving seeing the movement as toxic. The MRA people have better things to think about than video games. And the useful idiot contrarians were always a soft group that are unlikely to hang around a dying movement.
Also, uh, Netcraft confirms it. ;-)
You want to explain how the latter follows from the former? Because it doesn't. She's pointing out a sizable number of women feel unsafe in bars. That's true. Ask a few women you know. Then ask them if they think most men are rapists.
I think you've invented a "Brianna Wu, Feminazi" character in your head, and you're now grasping at anything you can, no matter how silly, to make everything she says fit that character.
Unfortunately, one of the downsides of this is that you are probably someone who needs to listen to people like Wu, Sarkeesian, and similar voices more than most, and you (probably) never will.
These women are telling you where they see the problems are that are preventing them from being full participants in the same world as you. Now, you can go full MRA and decide you don't care, that it's not an issue that women aren't full participants, they can be second class citizens and whatnot.
But... maybe you're not like that. Maybe if I said the word "Misogynist" right now in connection with anything even vaguely related to something you agree with, you'd immediately (like many GGers) jump out and yell "NOT ALL MEN! HOW DARE YOU CALL ME A ..." etc.
And if that's the case, please, for fuck's sake, listen to these women like a normal person would. Don't read in conspiracies and insane views that aren't being stated, because most likely they don't exist.
Read the F. summary. Yes, they've stopped.
I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm asking for an example of someone significant and representative claiming that a vast conspiracy of gamers WANTS TO KILL THESE WOMEN.
So far as I can figure out your reply, you're saying I might have implied somewhere, if read upside down, underwater, with a brick replacing the brain, that GamerGate is a conspracy. I didn't, but humor me, what of it? If I did say it was a conspiracy, where did I say they wanted to KILL THESE WOMEN?
GamerGate's supporters want Anita, Brianna, and Zoe scared and upset. Most don't want them killed, from what I can see.
GamerGate is not a conspiracy and I never suggested as much. It's an unholy combination of trolls, MRA activists, opportunists, and contrarian useful idiots, but a conspiracy? That would make it sound like each group is working in coordination with the other.
I prefer to think of GamerGate not as a "conspiracy", or a "movement", or a "force", but as a "Train wreck".
That's a flat out lie. Even with no knowledge of context, there's no way to read the tweet as saying that.
Context: Wu has been told multiple times by GamerGate's supporters that the death threats are no big deal and she's making a big fuss about nothing. Hence "Police investigating 4chan link to murdered woman. Gamergate, tell me again how my life isn't in danger."
She's asking GamerGate to stop dismissing her concerns as hysterics.
Hmm.
FWIW, I think there are multiple ways to deal with abusive online, and putting yourself in the head of someone being abused and expecting them to follow a script that you happen, right now, to think sounds like the best approach is unreasonable.
At the end of the day, Wu is getting death threats. She's responding to them, not the other way around - the death threats were first, her publicizing them came second. Complaining she might get less if she shuts up like a good girl and doesn't stand up for herself ignores that fundamental fact.
As it is, she's found an alternative way to shut them up. It's the subject of this article. Now me, I don't know about you, but I think if there are two "Shut them up" options, one of which is "Don't say anything for fear of getting them upset with you again", the other being a variant of "Fight back", I think the second is more socially useful. I think it's the right thing to do. So if she has the strength to, good for her.
Good for her anyway. The world needs more Brianna Wus. She didn't like the lack of games aimed at people like her so she started her own games studio. How cool is that? The fact she's going after these assholes seems like a logical continuance of that.
I'm sorry, but are you really comparing bemoaning the lack of women in gave development, and the lack of games aimed at diverse audiences, with supporting white supremecism?
Unless I'm totally misunderstanding you, you appear to be saying Wu is to blame for getting rape and death threats because she spoke quite reasonably in favor of games aimed at a more diverse audience, and more women in game development, and even started a studio to put her money where her mouth is.
Remember, that's why she's being shat upon. She's not said anything against men, or gamers, or any other group. She's just said she wants to see more women gamers and game developers, and games aimed at more audiences.
If you think that deserves death threats, I seriously think you need to reconsider your values.
I believe they are after more than one person. Wu has been the target of multiple death threats and there's nothing to suggest they're all from the same person AFAIK.
The affect/effect thing is my error, I copped to it earlier :)
Please identify this person. Which person is claiming that a vast conspiracy of gamers wants to kill these women?
Plenty of people, rightly, blame those hiding behind the GamerGate label for creating the hatred behind the threats, but nobody is suggesting that every single member of GamerGate, or even most of them, supports actual murder. Terror, yes. It is obvious in everything the average GamerGate says and does that they want these women scared. They don't even try to hide it.
What we do believe, and we see, is a sustained campaign of terror against those GamerGate's majority has declared the enemy (which oddly enough doesn't seem to be a list with many journalists on it.) We Anita, Brianna, Zoe, and others, getting huge numbers of hate messages every day. We see all three constantly lied about. And when someone inevitably gets a little too enthusiastic and starts sending actual rape and death threats, GamerGate's supports overwhelmingly respond by claiming the reports are false, made up, or that the victim asked for it.
We see that because we can see that. You only have to search for their user IDs on Twitter to see it.
Yeah, pretty much. Some comments:
The "friends with a journalist" thing really kind of was justification after the fact. I'm not entirely sure whether Grayson was mentioned in the infamous Five Guys video or not, but the reality is that the entire thing started as an attack on Zoe Quinn, who, as you mention, had fairly positive coverage for her unusual Depression Quest game, and the beginnings of that attack, beyond general dislike of the game and the idea it should be treated as one, was an ex-boyfriend posting an "expose" into her sex life.
I think GamerGate has tried, repeatedly, to rewrite what it's about, and how it started, but no matter how it's covered, it appears really to be a superset of four groups: trolls (extremely visible on 8chan, they're not even hiding it for the most part. "Thanks Doc". Goatse inspired GG logo. Long strategy screeds where they admit the only aim is to get "SJWs" to fight amongst themselves - which hasn't happened), opportunists (Milo, that approved Feminist from the Enterprise Somethingorother, KingOfPol, to some extent David Pakman, etc), MRAs (I mean, open MRAs), plus a group of kinda useful idiot types, usually in their 20s, pride themselves on being "contrarian", suckers for the "It's about Ethics" crap especially as there always has been concern about the gaming press, so it's easy to jump on board saying "Wait, I have concerns about journalistic ethics too!"
That's an interesting coalition, there's evidence the opportunists are backing away now the label is pretty close to universally toxic, the trolls will eventually find something else, and that leaves the MRAs and contrarians, and I don't think either group are organized enough to continue it.
Well, I sincerely hope you're right about the age range of the people doing this, but at the same time, I find it a tad unlikely. There's some very obvious deep seated resentment of women going on right now that these women are at the center of, and it seems improbable that the death threats are completely 100% unrelated.
Why should some mass of teenagers suddenly decided they're going to make a point of attacking high profile "pro-women" geek women? The "lulz" argument only makes sense for the short time it takes to realize they're not out there issuing death threats when the subject is global warming or football, and outside of lulz we're left with not a lot of reasons that would apply to teenagers.
Yes, I have started following her on Twitter. She is abrasive. No, I wouldn't agree though that she's "histrionic" or "goes out of her way to get attention".
She's been the target of a sustained attack campaign for a while now. I can't say if it started before or after Adam Baldwin decided a video detailing Zoe Quinn's sex life was a "*Gate" and deserved a new hashtag to be associated with it, but the death threats followed her retweeting someone else's mash up of some of the more ludicrous attacks sent her way.
But, FWIW, yes, you're victim blaming. You're seeing someone responding to attacks and claiming that makes them, what was the term you used, "histrionic"? Quite honestly, even if she was, she wouldn't deserve the death threats, and she wouldn't deserve screenshots forged tweets designed to make people hate her distributed around the Internet.
If this were about people laughing at women, generally being sexist, or even calling them bad names, you'd have a point.
This is about extreme harassment - death threats, attempts to fake evidence to get other mobs involved, etc. Not laughing at people. Not calling them names. Not disagreeing with them.
The original submission was worse. And in fact I cut and paste from it (to make a comment earlier) and accidentally included more mistakes. So I take the blame for this one...
1. Why do we seriously need threats prison time to get people to knock off threating to rape and murder people, or threats of lawsuits to have people not forge the kind of libelous "evidence" that drives such hatred in the first place?"
2. What happens to those without the resources? I'm guessing most of those who suffer this kind of extreme harassment aren't rich enough to own game studios.
Nobody's saying you are.
Given the AC makes it clear, in the very first paragraph, that he's not, is there any reason why we shouldn't write you off as a troll right now?
By all means feel free to reread it and issue a mea-culpa, we all get into angry debates from time to time to the point we misread the opponent. But right now the way things are it's like you really don't want to hear any pro-diversity viewpoints, and so are equating "There is value in having multiple races and multiple genders because it is one factor in improving the number of different life experiences and thus knowledge of how the world works your employees have" to "You white cis men are all the same".