Blarghagh

Alum, your post is rather big so I'm not going to quote it. My only real response to it is that I'm acutely aware of the movement's size and the more unsavory elements of the movement and have actually received a fair amount of abuse from them myself. Yet as a game developer I have been much more guarded with my identity since this controversy started not because of 8-chan's wretched hive of scum and villainy but because of the other side. I've gotten internet death threats before and they don't worry me, what does worry me is anti-#GamerGate's tendency to contact peoples employers, send ambulances to people's homes and make false sexual harassment claims to the police. As a personal matter for me (so not immediately relevant to anyone else) I find that to make the industry much more unwelcoming than the white noise of chan culture. I also like to focus on the people in #GamerGate who actually do care about ethics because nobody else seems to be acknowledging them, favouring letting harassers guide the conversation.

You clearly have never worked at an indie game developer. Most people become game developers because they have a passion for it anyway. Here's an interesting point. I read that the average time people spend working in the game industry is 4 years, which is an incredibly low number especially factoring in your Carmacks and such that have always been at it. Instead of focusing on it being unfriendly to women, maybe it should be pointed out that it's pretty much unfriendly to everyone. Here's an example from a few years back that really isn't that far out of the norm.

I didn't say the fact they are women is irrelevant, just not the operative factor. It means that, as evidenced by Phil Fish, it's an ideological issue and not a gender issue. That ideology may pertain to gender, but the gender of the victims isn't the most important thing to focus on. You clarify yourself that they may decide to bolt because they see the gaming industry as an unwelcoming environment. Then you make a bit of a leap to say that it actually is highly unwelcoming to feminists. If the reason they see it that way is because of #GamerGate, then it's quite likely their exposure to #GamerGate has come from the media (i.e. "the narrative"). That's not even getting into the fact gaming fandom and the game industry are being conflated here. At most, from #GamerGate one could infer that gaming fandom is unfriendly to feminists. The actual game industry has remained largely unaffected (and silent) regarding #GamerGate. You were speaking about it with Longknife in the same terms of how there aren't enough women in STEM because the actual work environment is unfriendly to women. #GamerGate doesn't affect that in any relevant way I can see, if I'm totally honest. Let's think again in terms of the #GamerGate "sides". Perhaps it was for "PR" or "out of Spite", but the "pro-" #GamerGate has gotten several women's charities and games by female developers funded. They got games by female developers greenlit. They push the voices of female developers involved to the forefront, even if it is only those that agree with them. What about the "anti-" #GamerGate "side"? They tried to block all those things from happening, and actively marginalize female voices who voice their own opinion if it doesn't agree with them ("sockpuppets") - all of their own initiatives look to have failed, at least from my point of view. In terms of actually doing things that are friendly to female developers, so far "pro-" #GamerGate looks to be getting ahead? EDIT: Oh man, so many posts while I was writing this. I'm going to stop until I can actually focus on it, spent too much of my workday lounging around here.

That's why I phrased it as a question. The only one from his list I've actually read it Patrick Rothfuss The Wise Man's Fear - which I thought was very inferior to it's predecessor, The Name of the Wind, because I don't need fantasy books about a kid dealing with student loans for most of the book. I have enough of that in real life. An uninteresting story that was extremely well told because Mr Rothfuss has an amazing gift for prose.

I certainly think it's meaningfully different. The operative part in your post is "woman are chased away" with feminist being a qualifier but that doesn't work because the operative part is feminists, with women being a qualifier. What high profile feminist personality in the game industry actually left the game industry? Phil Fish. Who else? None as far as I know, but to be fair I'm not completely certain about Zoe Quinn and whether or not she's still making games. I'm not trying to defend the part of #GamerGate that harasses, I just think #GamerGate making the industry less welcoming for women as a whole at this point is a pretty unsubstantiated claim. I'm sure there are cases of the game industry being unwelcoming to women, but I haven't seen anything to justify a claim that it's symptomatic of the core industry rather than cases of individual sexism from men. I believe recent research showed that game development employs a lot more women than most comparable fields [citation needed]? I think there is a lot of hyperbole involved in gender discussions and it's more interesting to look if there are actual facts. Your friends seem to have been "chased away" by the "narrative" instead of anything that is actually relevant or true as far as I can see. I'm not saying the current situation is adequate, by the way. I'd love more women and minorities in game development. I'm just not sure the way some people are trying to go about it is helpful rather than damaging.

Does that count as "women being driven away" or "feminists being driven away", however? Both are very different situations. Phil Fish isn't a woman, after all, and when all is said and done he is the one that has been "harmed" most by #GamerGate and is the one that actually left the game industry. That sounds very much like STEM is unwelcome to men by what the "narrative" seems to be. All the other feminists involved in the controversy right now just seemed to have been spurned on to fight back and stay - that seems hardly "chased away".

Does Stardust count? That's one of my favourite fantasy novels, though it's closer to fairy tales and such than it is to modern high fantasy.

I don't know, of the current atmosphere the actual outcries I've yet to find one that rings true. For example, there was a campaign recently to boycott Stardock because Stardock didn't support women in the game industry. Yet Stardock famously employs a larger percentage of women in high profile jobs than most of the game industry. So even if there are problems with sexism in the game industry (and STEM, though as a game dev I consider calling game development STEM ridiculous, at most some of the engine programmers count) whatever is going on right now in context of the #GamerGate debate, the "anti" side is not helping. I also find it interesting that all the women who report being harassed are all hardcore feminists. Of course, any harassment is bad, that goes without saying, but I find it interesting that the focus remains on women when the people being harassed have a much more specific features which explain why they are harassed and not others.

What do you think about this video, Alum?

Could we be nice before I have to get out the pruning shears? I've done it before. I'd like to point out the thread rules set by the first post in the thread.

Huh, really. Because I've never met a Dachshund that wasn't just an adorable, friendly thing. I've been attacked by Jack Russels before though. Those seem to have it out for me.

Viciously bitten by a dachshund?

Word of mouth is extremely important, but what gets your game to the communities who might generate word of mouth? Get your game on steam these days, and sure, you'll have a few people who find it by accident or recommendation from a friend, but "word of mouth" is often overestimated as a force. Why do you think independent films go to festivals? Word of mouth doesn't start until there's exposure, and for independent games that is usually through journalism. There are exceptions, but only very few and those are generally runaway successes like MineCraft. The whole reason YouTube Let's Players have become important enough that they are given brand deals even by big publishers is because even for them, exposure is key. They are word of mouth generators. You say they shouldn't rely on game journalists, but that doesn't mean that currently they don't. EDIT: Goddammit, everytime I respond to one person the next one's already up. Alum, you're correct to a certain point but that's exactly the problem. Currently, whether for true or false reasons, games journalists are seen as untrustworthy regarding their coverage of independent developers. It makes it essentially the same as for big publishers - consumers cannot trust whether a game review because they cannot be sure that a publisher hasn't paid for it, or if the developer isn't the writer's ex-roommate. But it's also unfair to developers - did their game get passed over for some girl the journalist used to have a thing for? Due to the appearance of impropriety, consumers cannot trust the journalist. But while a publisher has a big advertising budget to still get exposure, what is there for indies? EDIT EDIT: Also, I don't want to dethrone anyone. I argued against that. I want ethics policies in places that matter and EiC's that enforce them.

Well, in my opinion, gaming journalism is a joke, but it's essentially a harmless joke. On the other hand, publishers being incompetent, greedy and risk-averse to the point of games in certain genres being essentially interchangeable has harmed and will continue to harm the industry as a whole. I don't consider them a harmless joke. They may not hold power over publishers, but they hold power over independent developers which, to me personally, is a far bigger deal than whoever is making gaming's version of Transformers. It's why I care about this at all. Personally I hold that it's gone too far for that, they have damaged their integrity through years of corruption and publisher over consumer advocacy, and they remain commited to nepotism, regressive gaming and unethical behaviour. They have tainted their entire profession and alienated the average consumers whom they look down upon as untermensch, better now to have publishers and developers pull all advertising and pioneer a new more efficient and fit for purpose model, that is worthy of a multi billion dollar industry. If innocent writers are consumer focused rather than hatemongering and unethical, then they will have a place in the new model, free of the taint of their old profession. Who is "they"? They remain committed to nepotism? You keep generalizing. That's not helpful. That's what anti-#GamerGate does. Wasn't #GamerGate about personal accountability? Isn't this whole thing about how guilt by association isn't a thing?

That seems like desperate measures. Amentep is completely correct. I think the problems in general lie more with the editors and policy makers. There are few journalists I actually have a problem with, but I'm more concerned with what the editors allow. The repeated refusals to adequately update ethics policies on some sites, that's what I think is problematic. I'm completely fine keeping a majority of writers who have never done anything wrong, as long as the policy changes and there is a clearer divide between op-ed and consumer advocacy.

There's a certain amount of power in journalists that comes with affecting such scores, regardless of who gave them that power. IMO. That concern is essentially being dealt with, however, with so many websites dropping scores and initiatives like BasedGamer coming up.

That's a difference of discipline and methodology - that would be equivalent to 'failing' a Pew survey (the authoritative institution for polling American political beliefs) because they didn't do eye tracking, or because they didn't do a long-form interview with each person about what they mean about 'democracy'. It's also naive if you think every study is or should be 'scientific' - because our society doesn't consider science the only way to knowledge. Getting away from the generals, just asking people about what they see and how they interpret things can be a valid way to do research - it just changes what kinds of questions you can answer. In this study, it looks like the point was to discover how gamers interpret their own experience and how they think about their own approach to games. Oh, and you can't do long form interviews and observations with 300 (the accepted N for quantitative, survey-based social science) unless you are a huge institution and you want to spend a huge amount of money on every single study like this. Not to be provocative but purely to be accurate, if we use existing academic standards, it is you or aluminium that has "failed to comprehend it on a basic level", because you are expecting it to answer questions on a different level then accusing it of having no methodology. After all, I'm assuming the author didn't write this study as an answer to the GamerGate controversy or its attendant questions. It is a valid, if not stellar, study that makes a basic, preliminary examination: do LGBT, etc. gamers take their avatars in games to be a 1:1 representation of themselves, or any such kinds of 'identification'? Findings suggest this does not seem necessarily the case. Presented in a conference by the way, and not in an academic journal. If a more finished study is available I assume that would be more helpful to anyone in this thread. My criticism would be, as I said, that 'identification' means so little, and most gamers knew this already. (Actually, this reflects a lot of the problems with studies on games - it's still so underdeveloped that they're still having to 'test' things many gamers would say is already obvious, because, you know, to be 'scientific' you can't just go by gamers' common sense, which isn't uniform anyway...) That's all true, especially that science shouldn't be the sum of human knowledge, but I do think a certain point of factual confirmation is neccesary when dealing with asking people how they "feel" about something (which is essentially what this study did) because if my experience with cognitive therapy have taught me anything it's that what people say or even think they're feeling is not neccesarily what they are feeling. Add that to the fact that the simple action of asking a question often puts people in the mind of reconsidering and thinking about what their answer should be pretty much means that such a study is never going to amount to any useful information. This study and many others (especially, as you say, in the game industry) are never going to amount fo anything but mere speculation using such methods. My experience is very limited, of course, so I'm totally open to being told I'm wrong.

To clarify Meshugger's post, this isn't a random twitter post but research from Alexander Macris, founder (one of?) the Escapist. Adrienne Shaw is a fairly well known figure in game studies as an academic field (which remains small and underdeveloped). Its methods aren't a huge problem. Within cultural / media studies, where this study would fit, it is seen as sufficient (though whether those wider standards are OK is another issue). 'Identity' is often a very limited term, though, and when you use that word with your interviewees and to do your analysis you often end up getting into loops where it just catches too many things in its net. What does "I identify with this character" mean, anyway? A lot of things, depending on the circumstance. Which is one of the reasons that paper boils down into something what most gamers know: playing or creating a character, LGBT or not, doesn't mean 'identifying' with them necessarily. *shrug* That's essentially what I mean. The research isn't good enough to justify any conclusion, which is why the conclusion is mostly vague "doesn't neccesarily" stuff. Even at the terrible local college I went to, that wouldn't have flown. An example from my time there would be that I got an instant fail for asking people what they saw first on the screen, rather than doing or at least adding something scientific like eye tracking to confirm their statements. I assume this is an American college?

I didn't see the video, but that study isn't very thorough either. A lot of methods and conclusions are questionable.

What bothers me most is the part where I took out all sources of power, yet it still just "resumed" as if it was in sleep mode.

Because the people who named it are idiots, I guess? I think it's the idea that culture must be equal for everybody - i.e. equal rights and representation for minorities in culture and media. A black, gay, trans or disabled person should be able to enjoy everything on the same level as an abled white cis male.

Left my computer on tonight to render, woke up and for some reason it was turned off. Turned it back on, kept asking for boot disk because it couldn't find windows. Rebooted it a couple of times, took the battery out and the power off and everything, still kept asking for boot disk. Put in bootdisk, bootdisk gives error. Computer turn off. I turn it back on, it starts "resuming windows" and windows opens up just as it was when I went to bed, all my renders done. What the f... I don't know what that was, but I'm backing up everything I have as we speak.

That's an odd divide, who says some of those cultural marxists don't play video games all the time?

Merged the new topic that was created last night (in my timezone) with this one. This might result in a couple of posts that are hard to read, but I caught it too late (since I was sleeping). My apologies.

[citation needed] Are you actually expecting GooberGrunters to do fact-checking? What you're dealing with here is, essentially, a paranoid conspiracy theory, and like most conspiracy theories, reason and facts are no match for it. Try convincing a 9/11 Truther that the World Trade Center wasn't brought down by a controlled demolition and see how much success you have. There's no convincing them that those windmills they're tilting at are not, in fact, giants in disguise. [citation needed]