Blarghagh

Yeah, I saw that happen in my feed. Why she felt the need to actually acknowledge people who are essentially high level trolls I don't understand. You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize I've seen these things before. I recall that Disney's movie "Frozen" got some serious criticism from Gawker media because it was based on scandinavian Sami elements but featured no Sami people as everyone in it was white This is what the majority of the Sami people look like:

See, another case of this draconian attitude destroying artistic freedom AND inclusiveness. I've made the point before that with these people around, some game devs just don't think it's worth the risk to include inclusivity options - if somebody doesn't like a male character, it's just badly written. If somebody doesn't like an inclusivity option, you get to deal with all kinds of baseless sexism, racism and homophobia charges. If you don't have inclusivity options, all you'll get is the occassional "man what a sausage fest" jab, but by god if Lara Croft has a male mentor figure you'll get slammed for it. This game could have been terrible or it could have been gaming's Schindler's List, but we'll never know because self-righteous gatekeepers kept them from even trying. Gaming will never be inclusive with Gawker and Silverstring around.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/18/am-i-being-catfished-an-author-confronts-her-number-one-online-critic I thought this was a fascinating article about an author who gets consistently "trolled".

That sounds neat, but I'm still somewhat disappointed that it wasn't actually the wine that was haunted. Groupon is actually quite neat, got quite a few cool things from there already.

Yeah I didn't literally mean they were represented by those people, it was a jab at the morons who think trolls represent #GamerGate.

Yeah, see, this is the kind of person that represents anti-#GamerGate, I think I'd rather be represented by misogynists. Other than the one where he literally says "let them suffer", all of them are verifiable. I literally just looked them up on his Twitter.

Oh come on, this can't be a real thing. This has to be a joke. Mr. Biscuit is just pulling our collective legs here, right? Even the SJWs couldn't possibly be delusional enough to make claims about weaponized charity, could they? Actually, they already made this claim when GG funded TFYC woman game jam campaign. EDIT: I didn't get around to listening to TB before, but I totally agree with him. If you find a charity effort to be a personal attack on you, you are the worst kind of person. You are a bigger problem than any misogynist.

Haunted Wine?

That's probably the most accurate video regarding tumblr I have ever seen.

See, if it's being phrased as a call for accuracy, I can get it. "they cast the wrong person because she doesn't look like the character" is not even close to being the same as "they cast the whitest black girl ever so it's racist". Maybe it's what they mean, but if they immediately jump to political correctness in a way that is ironically racist then they're being, ironically, racist.

Huh, Volo spoke something that is actually a FACT. I totally agree, telling a mixed race woman that she's "not black enough" is horribly racist.

I think they broke Volo. They're definitely overplaying their hand here. The whole controversy made people give their rhetoric the benefit of the doubt, but pretty soon life is going to come along and go "oh that's bunk and you're dumb".

TotalBiscuit (sounding a bit weird due to coming out of surgery) does a lot of talking about GamerGate here. EDIT: https://soundcloud.com/totalbiscuit/causes Need to actually give the link here...... time for bed, I'm becoming careless.

Sorry if I missed it. At one point the thread grew two pages while I was typing a reply.

She also threatened Hotwheels with legal action where none is really possible. http://www.littletinyfrogs.com/article/458579/Biowares_Damion_Schubert_owes_me_an_apology Brad Wardell is angry at someone slandering him again, too bad he kicks butt and takes names. EDIT: Mercedes Benz dropped Gawker media as a place to advertise over the comments of Sam Biddle (the "nerds need to be bullied into submission" thing). EDIT EDIT: TotalBiscuit dropping bombs over the Hatred controversy. "Tell me more about your moral highground as you call a team of developers "living garbage". And even gamers are concerned about "How this game will make us look". Are we not past this? Am I back in the 90s? Shall we fire up our copy of Nighttrap for another senate hearing? I am not concerned that The Human Centipede makes film look bad so I am not concerned that Hatred makes games look bad." HATRICK EDIT: https://www.crowdrise.com/GamerGateStompsOutBullying/fundraiser/loping

An echo chamber filled with different kind of echoes? I'm not sure if that really qualifies as an echo chamber. EDIT: I may have been unclear, the intention of this post was: I'm not sure what you mean with that.

Who said this wtf? 10 years ago was 2004. We still had Samus Aran, we still had Perfect Dark, we still had Tomb Raider. If you want to dial it back to a time of extreme racism or sexism, you'd need to dial time back to...a time before games existed...Best ("best") you can realistically hope for is a time when a homosexual protagonist would get run out of town. I love how most gamers were super supportive of Ellie in the DLC for The Last Of Us. It really surprised me. Overall, gamers have been showing they're capable of great things in the last couple of years. The amount of charity drives is through the roof. It's one of the reasons I totally flipped my lid when the whole "gamers suck" shebang hit the media.

Not really, just a jab at the term equalists, as a reference to a cartoon that has a group of self-proclaimed "equalists" (equality in a completely different context) as villains. Completely harmless and no attack meant.

Thanks for that! In all seriousness, this thread has given me something to think about regarding the nature of trolls and dealing with them so I'm going to drop that topic as a process it and come back to it if I come up with anything genuinely interesting to say. (Did I make this jab before? I think I made it before. Sorry if I repeated myself.)

I'll believe it when I see it. I've been a message board junkie since I was eleven and the trolls were the only thing that never changed (other than getting worse). EDIT: Well yeah, those who have diagnosed psychiatic disorders are getting treated. Or do you mean recognized?

And I still believe that pushing the same amount of responsibility to the "moral outrage machine" instead of the trolls doing the harrassing is a skeevy attitude. (Also, let it be noted that I've pointed out in my first post on the matter that I don't believe you intended to do any victim-blaming. I'm not a big fan of arguing in bad faith.) Here's how I see it: I don't think that douche that doxxed and threatened Brianna Wu is a normal person. I think that person must have some kind of sociopathic disorder where they are addicted to negative attention or causing pain or whatever. It's like an alcoholic, except in the place of alcohol there's douchebaggery. And what Gawker media and even mainstream media has been doing, quite effectively, even if they don't intend to do so, is enabling this addiction. He saw another dev espousing a feminist message and put two and two together "if I attack this woman, the media will give me what I want". Obviously I condemn the guy, but I also condemn the media for giving him what he wants. At best, they have this "I don't negotiate with terrorists!" outlook and they don't realize they embody a figurative spawning pool for them. At worst, such as is the case with Leigh Alexander, they willingly and maliciously throw these victims under the bus and let the trolls descent upon them to prove their point. A "megaphone" indeed. Listen, I condemn harassment but focusing on how one condemns harassment in the age of internet anonymity is just not useful. Therefore, I have to focus my ire on the next part that is to blame. Trust me, I've tried. I've been in the "trenches", I've reported about a thousand twitter trolls in just the last two weeks because I want GamerGate to be better. It does nothing. All the people I know who support the goal of journalistic ethics and are trying to make GamerGate a good thing? They have their heads in their hands because they keep being told "you can't talk about it while there are trolls" but it's impossible to remove them. It's not a viable or valid thing to ask. At this point, they're a force of nature.

I think it's a vicious circle. The harassers go to work on someone and get their jollies, they get condemned and enjoy it, and the cycle repeats itself. Perhaps not giving the harassers the attention they crave would be a good way of going about this? Condeming them doesn't seem to be stopping them, if anything its only made them worse. I understand the immediate urge to seek new solutions when ones that have been tried have proven to be useless, but this kind of attitude is still putting responsibility on the harrassed party not only for their own issues, but also for gaming culture becoming objectively poorer with minority devs deciding that the current climate is actively hostile to them, and therefore they should leave. This reeks of victim-blaming and I think it should be called out. Oh push off . I'm not blaming any victims. I'm blaming the media that blew it completely out of proportion, polarized everyone, gave power to the trolls and lured them out of the woodwork to come down on the victims in force, and everyone who bought into that ridiculous narrative It's all well and good to spin the wheel of politically correct discrediting and land on victim blaming but that doesn't make it anything else. The reason the victims continue to be victims after the trolls are done with them is because Gawker medias cronies keep giving the trolls a platform to get attention for it. Of course I condemn the trolls and I believe every single threat against any of these people should be met with consequences, but with internet anonymity being what it is that's about as useful as condemning the rain. It's been my concern in the first place. It's all fine and dandy to go "gamers are troglodytes" but in reality I've never seen more people being against the mythical "SJW" than this debate has made them. It's going to take years before anyone can talk about any sort of social issues in fandom without being dismissed out of hand. The conversation is over because it "can't take place while harassment happens". The troglodytes are not so much blinking in the sunlight as they are laughing that their day in the sun has come. The reason I joined GG when it originally broke was because the opponents are hurting every cause they support by polarising, entrenching, misrepresenting and generally painting a giant target on the heads of everybody they report on yelling "trolls, go here for your lulz". The trolls have won and the moral outrage machine considers it a victory and I'm pissed because they hurt everything we've worked for.

I've been following this scene for a looooong time. Since rec.games on Usenet in the '90's at least, and BBS's from before that. Things have changed, big-time. Games are no longer a weird nerdy niche thing. If someone asks what my hobbies are, I can list "games" without getting more than the very occasional weird look. (I never minded them, but I do notice the difference.) Games are reviewed in major mainstream press. There are shows about gaming on major mainstream TV. Competitive gaming is starting to be recognized as a sport. That means that the weird little bubble that is 'gamer culture' has popped. It's no longer safely insulated from the rest of the world. That means that the kind of raging, overt, and often entirely unconscious racism and sexism that's apparent even in this thread -- although probably not to many of the people who do it, having only been exposed to the kind of culture that has the same values -- no longer passes without comment. Anita Sarkeesian would not have been conceivable five or ten years ago. Five years ago, if someone who's not white, or a woman, said on a forum like this "You know, I'd like it if more women or people of color showed up in games, as protagonists and main characters instead of just tokens," she would have been (1) completely alone and (2) run out of town on a rail. Now? The violence of the backlash against her is stronger than ever, but only because the usual methods aren't working anymore. She's not completely alone: she has people chiming in and supporting her. When the backlash runs to the ridiculous extents it has in GG and with Sarkeesian, to name just two incidents, this makes mainstream news -- and they aren't buying the manboon story. These neckbeards with fedoras ranting about "misandry" are weird, and they never realized it because in the gamer bubble their views were, until now, hegemonic and unchallenged. For the past few years, they've had to face a real challenge to their ridiculous views, and like the manboons they are, they've only dug their hole deeper. There are about 17,000 people hating on Sarkeesian on Reddit. That's an insignificant fraction of the people who play games. It's that majority who matters. The KainParkers, Orogun1's, pseudonymi, and Meshuggers of this world are being squeezed into insignificance, clutching their fedoras and throwing this gigantic temper tantrum that we're seeing. It's a zit. It's being popped, and there's bloody pus all over the place. Sadly there are some real pathogens in there and I fervently hope nobody will actually get killed before this is over, but ultimately that's all that it is. A zit. Popped. A while longer, and gaming will meld into mainstream culture and will be regarded no differently from films, TV, or books. The weird isolated misogynistic bubble where anything goes because hey, Internet will be history. It's the same thing in the atheist and skeptic communities too, by the way -- too other hitherto unsullied preserves of white, nerdy men. All those women and people of color elbowing their way in, demanding representation on their own terms. Same discourse, same conflict, same ugliness, same dynamic... and same direction. It'll be a while yet. A few years, maybe. And it'll very likely get worse—superficially at least—before it gets better. But yes, we are winning. The manboons can't stop it, however much poo they sling and however hard they scream. And I'm enjoying every step of the way. Wow PrimeJunta, you're a worse drama queen than any GamerGater. Either way, still haven't explained why you think the GamerGate you hate is losing. The part GamerGate that is genuinely asking for journalistic integrity? They could be losing. The part of GamerGate that is just using that as a front for harassment and trolling? They've already won. Those trolls have dictated literally every segment of this debate. They want attention? Well, now they've got oodles of it. They want to shut someone up? What have we heard from Zoe Quinn, Phil Fish or Anita Sarkeesian lately? What appearances were they scheduled for but had to drop? They want to keep women out of gaming? Well, all this ridiculous narrative about gamers being a misogynist hate group of basement dwelling neckbeards and development is a boys club that will keep women out has caused at least one female game design student I know personally to switch majors and I've seen a pretty large amount of messages going "what woman in their right mind would want to become a game designer". It's going to stay a boys club for a significant amount of time longer because of the big brouhaha over a couple of **** posting anonymous messages. Which pisses me off more than anything else, because we were bloody well making progress and all that work is now for nothing because the moral outrage machine blew everything out of proportion to give trolls exactly what they want. In this debate, the trolls learned exactly how in control they are. They control what people are allowed to say ("we can't talk about this until the harassment stops!"), they control what people do ("I'm selling polytron because I'm sick of it!"), they control what messages go out ("I'm not speaking at this event because some kid on the other side of the planet said he'd shoot me") and they control any movement they manage to co-opt. And because they are absolutely, undeniably in control, none of the things you want will come to pass. All because you and every other cog of the moral outrage machine bought into a ridiculous narrative because you're, at your core, a misanthrope who sees only the worst in people. So go ahead, "beat" GamerGate. I'm sure the loss of a hashtag will mean something huge to those trolls.

How do you figure?

Somebody on the internet once doxxed me because I said Ewoks were worse than Jar Jar Binks. Which just goes to show that if you get threatened, it doesn't give legitimacy to your argument.