Zoe Quinn Scandal aka. Killing Gaming Journalism 101

It was a private conversation on facebook though, it would be different if it had happened at work. Im sure it didn't start there and escalated to that point. It was inappropriate sure, but theres nothing wrong with it in itself (if the conversation goes there). The guy was going through the loss of his brother at the time and seeked comfort i imagine.

We're all misogynistic manchildren constantly seeking out the warmth of the closest vagina because we desire to climb back into the womb.

Cookie Eating Huskarl said:

We're all misogynistic manchildren constantly seeking out the warmth of the closest vagina because we desire to climb back into the womb.

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You didn't mention the vagina dentata, the most important part.

There really is no right way to proposition a woman for cunnilingus. I feel this is something we all need to work together on to amend.

The escapist issued a publisher comment which is pretty good. Also has a silent apology to wizardchan apparently.

Other gaming sites are currently doing exactly this.

I really enjoyed that video. God that was a wonderful rebuttal by Mr. Starkey.

I'm reading the Escapist publisher's note right now, and I feel like they're focusing too much on the "branching out" of gaming to the more mainstream. This form of inclusiveness isn't causing the issue. It's people like AS who butt-in trying to change hardcore gaming based on relatively little facts and people trying to generalize a subculture in the same derogatory terms they used in the 80's (and which should have died there). It's simply too easy to make fun of the "nerds."

BadaBoomBadaBang said:

I really enjoyed that video. God that was a wonderful rebuttal by Mr. Starkey.

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Really? Maybe it's just that I have pretty much no context on the discussion, but I didn't actually a see a rebuttal in there anywhere. Unless you are talking about that ad hominem? It seems to me as though she might have 'started it', though it's quite hard to tell from her babbling, but I wasn't aware that flinging **** was okay just because you weren't the one who started it.

In fact, I don't really know why it's even relevant to this thread in any way, but whatever.

Edit: Unless that was just to draw a comparison to the current matter at hand? In that case it does fit, definitely, for the lack of anything coherent on either 'side'.

Egad, she's so thick and inarticulate that it sucks to share the same gender as her.

Cookie Eating Huskarl said:

The escapist issued a publisher comment which is pretty good. Also has a silent apology to wizardchan apparently.

Other gaming sites are currently doing exactly this.

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Reading that right now.
I shouldn't have clicked on any of the links on the first page. All that "gamers are over" bull**** is infuriatingly irrelevant click-bait and yet at the same time the very same self-righteous ego-stroking they're trying to criticise, add to that a unhealthy dose of "Imma smurtest then u!!!111" and you've got everything that's wrong with the bloody journalism bit of the industry in a nutshell.
It doesn't help that the central points are ****ing obvious to anyone with half a brain anyway, making the entire effort superfluous.

Oh ye gods...
"depicting domestic abuse in WatchDogs is muh-soginy."
That Anita woman is even worse than I thought.

Wellenbrecher said:

...anyone with half a brain...

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A group which includes almost no one from either side of this whole thing.

You're very funny, yes, yes.

No, it's not. Let's be realistic:
Everything has idiots. Every hobby has reclusive autistic persons who can't interact with anyone but their hobby. This is in no way, shape or form unique or special or in any way excessive in "gaming". It's a useless debate if your idea is "but people that play videogames are the worst", simply because it's not true.
There are antisocial, white, misogynistic folks who do nothing but shout at strangers and tinker with their car.
There are antisocial, white, misogynistic folks who do nothing but shout at strangers and watch and criticise movies.
There are antisocial, white, misogynistic folks who do nothing but shout at strangers and play videogames.
There are antisocial, white, misogynistic folks who do nothing but shout at strangers and tinker with their car.
And so on, and on and on and on.

The most infuriating thing about this whole crap is that a few years ago all these ****s that are moaning and wanking off to and about the "death of gamers", wrote about who great and ok and completely normal and socially acceptable it is to play games as everyone ****ing does it.
It's a ****ing fad, dressed in useless-college-degree-type English, gratuitously sprinkled with lots of "white knight" seasoning.

That's what I said---everyone who is vocal on either side is stupid. You've got the death-of-the-gamer idiots on one side and the awful GamerGate idiots on the other side. The rational people have mostly shut up because they realise how stupid the whole thing is.

Hm? Trying to have proper journalism reporting about a multi-billion dollar industry - or rather the things that make the industry so big, not the industry itself - that actually has some integrity towards their customers is "awful"?
The whole thing is "bigger" than that Zoe person and the Sarkeesian woman is irrelevant to the issue as well, but journalists being completely embedded with the bloody publishers and then selling the game to their readers is a real thing and an issue that should be discussed.
See that disgusting PS4 event prior to release where Sony paid for the flight, the hotel and gave everyone a free PS4, which miraculously resulted in a lot of positive reviews from those very people.
Or IGN and co paying their bills by showing adds for the products they're reviewing (remember that guy that got fired for giving Duke Nukem too low of a rating? Yeah...).
Or that Dorito/Mountain Dew thing?

Corruption in games journalism is very much a problem, but it seems to me almost everyone who associates themselves with this Gamergate thing is mainly interesting in harassing and threatening people they disagree with.

Corrupt journalism is best fought with legitimate journalism, not twitter hash tag campaigns.

It's also worth noting that all your examples of corruption (and all the ones I could name) stem from big publishers being corrupt. Big publishers are not the people Gamergate is going after.

There was this guy who worked in the gaming industry for 20 years who claimed that at some point he was offered an "escort" paid by Activision at some point.

He had written a lengthy post about the gaming industry and corruption when he quit the industry. You can find it here. It is fairly enlightening and quite interesting.

Docm30 said:

Corrupt journalism is best fought with legitimate journalism, not twitter hash tag campaigns.

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True, but as this seems to be mostly a case of "consumers vs producer" at this point in time, that's the best they have.

It's also worth noting that all your examples of corruption (and all the ones I could name) stem from big publishers being corrupt. Big publishers are not the people Gamergate is going after.

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Hm? Sure.
But publishers being immoral bigots out to scam folks out of as much money as legally possible is entirely expected at this point and the bloody journalists accepting the offers and then being dumb enough to start bragging about it in social media (as for example in the PS4 case) is entirely another point. IMO, not sure where you seem to see a distinction.

SootShade said:

BadaBoomBadaBang said:

I really enjoyed that video. God that was a wonderful rebuttal by Mr. Starkey.

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Really? Maybe it's just that I have pretty much no context on the discussion, but I didn't actually a see a rebuttal in there anywhere. Unless you are talking about that ad hominem? It seems to me as though she might have 'started it', though it's quite hard to tell from her babbling, but I wasn't aware that flinging **** was okay just because you weren't the one who started it.

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Some insight into the video.

The woman brought up that the argument that the man brought up in that the behavior of the pedophile ring ran by foreigners in the recent UK child abuse scandal is certainly not of a British/English (I'm not too familiar with the dichotomy of the two, so I'll just use both until corrected) culture in origin and stated that it would be fair to put an assumption that the criminals brought said pedo culture with them (he politically incorrectly called it "Their punjab culture" IIRC) and that therefore the man was a racist. I believe when the video started, her claim of him being racist fell apart and she then moved on the call him greedy and insinuated that he dodged taxes to be able to afford his yatch. Her entire tirade was one big ad hominem, so the man then responded by first ripping her apart on the cultural aspect (I think that was in the video) on how white people actually have distinct cultures, and he went on to provide a few examples of British/Englishness in the culture. Of which one was the selfless behaviors displayed when it was required of them. That led into his jab of her supposedly abandoning one of her talks when she learned she wasn't getting paid. The woman then starts backpedaling, as per the video where she claimed that it was the organizers who abandoned her because they couldn't afford to fly her out last minute. The man then revealed that he had emails from the organizers that claim otherwise and that she should answer the question of did she or did she not abandon a talk position because she wasn't going to personally profit from it financially. Then the rest should connect to the video, including the part where the woman unironically went full monty python on the crowd.

The description in the video was somewhat biased towards the woman with the description of how rude the man was. To a person from a country with actual institutionalized problems of racism, his statement wasn't quite racist. Inaccurate yes, because he's making an assumption of the regions the criminals came from have an entrenched culture of pedophilia (the punjabis don't, he's thinking of a few large sects of Afgans. Also the criminals weren't Punjabis I thought). Given the situation, in my hometown, people would had found her in a ditch in 3 parts the next day because the local culture is always "If someone wants/likes to play victim, some psycho somewhere will gladly oblige to their fantasies of doing so". It's a stupid first world thing really. Why do you think these politically driven activist never try to do their activist activities in actual risk zones for once?

TLR - Woman claims white people culture means nothing because she personally can't name what it is to be British, professor in history and culture rips her a new one, she then responded by doing one ad hominem attack before the professor rips her apart in that front as well before she spun the accusation into a personal attack towards her and succumbed to playing victim like a monty python skit.

Wellenbrecher said:

But publishers being immoral bigots out to scam folks out of as much money as legally possible is entirely expected at this point and the bloody journalists accepting the offers and then being dumb enough to start bragging about it in social media (as for example in the PS4 case) is entirely another point. IMO, not sure where you seem to see a distinction.

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What I'm saying is that this Gamegate thing seems to be focused almost entirely on the fact that certain journalists and certain indie developers have the gall to know each other. As far as I can discern they aren't focused on any actual examples of corruption, which almost always stem from large publishers and not the types of people they're focused on.

I hate to bring Zoe Quinn back into it, but the whole thing seems to have started because of apparently made-up claims of her being involved in journalistic corruption. If a journalist briefly mentioning a game made by someone he knew and possibly (though apparently not) slept with is the kind of corruption these people are focused on, I have a very hard time taking them seriously. Where was Gamergate (or Gamersgate or whatever) when Jeff Gerstmann and Rab Florence were fired for, respectively, not being corrupt and for exposing corruption?

The whole thing smacks me as people using a legitimate issue as a front for harassing people they don't like. The fact that it's centred on Twitter is proof enough. Twitter is a platform that exists solely to harass and threaten people.