This doesn’t seem to have cropped up on the board as of yet, but this is highly pit-worthy.
If you work as a video-game “journalist”, don’t use nerd as an insult. Don’t insult video-games or gamers. Don’t say “video-games are dead”. Don’t call your readership “fat”, “smelly”, “scum”, or, of course, nerds.
I honestly find it baffling that supposedly professional journalists need this explaining to them.
While we’re at it, just to be ambitious, perhaps you could try not creating a climate of fear wherein it becomes unsuprising to see people using throwaway accounts to act as whistle-blowers because even the slightest deviation from the party line will get them fired.
Perhaps try not creating a tangled skein of corrupt financial and sexual ties between your “journalists” and game developers and other people they cover.
And obviously Zoe Quinn, who started it all by cheating on her boyfriend and causing him to release information on all this to the public.
She:
- Slept with her boss;
- Slept with a member of a board of judges which gave her (by all accounts awful) game an award;
- Slept with a journalist who recommended her game;
- Slept with at least a couple of other industry figures
- Sabotaged a project called “Women in Gaming” by accusing them of being “oppressive”, allegedly got them kicked off twitter, "accidentally DDoS"ed them and generally persecuted them;
- Leant on her friends in the media to stop them getting coverage for Women in Gaming;
- Sabotaged a Game Jam so she could run a replacement, for which she then solicited donations to her personal paypal account, she still claims to be working on it;
- Got her friends in the media to plug her Game Jam on the day of its announcement;
- Sexually harrassed someone, who was then bullied into silence by one of her sidekicks;
- Repeatedly begged on the internet by claiming financial hardship, including a fake mugging;
- Got her game on steam by faking persecution of herself by a group called Wizard Chan, persecution which took the form of two posts posted to the Chan by one of her known associates, ironic given that her game is called Depression Quest and is about living with depression, while Wizard Chan is a place for the depressed (she also banned people with depression who criticised it from post on the game’s homepage);
- Took donations from journalists;
- Used a false DMCA notification to take down the first video posted to youtube over the controversy;
- Leant on her friends in the media to silence discussion of this blossoming scandal, including the largest ever mass-deletion on reddit;
- Claimed naked pictures of her on the internet were oppressing her, although she had posed for them knowing they would be published;
and various other things, she is truly a nasty piece of work.
The fallout from these revelations was that other journalists were also outed, one who had plugged a game made by a woman she was living with, for example. The various gaming sites involved all investigated themselves and decided themselves had done nothing wrong, but one banned journos from donating to devs the cover, which was denounced as “misogynist” by some of the people who had been benefiting from it.
And that, of course, is where the bizarre abuse I am pitting came from, people who were resentful at being found out and were petulantly lashing out at the public who had discovered their misconduct.
There is one piece of good news, though: 4chan, which one journo denounced as a “cathedral of misogyny” raised over $9000 for the Women in Gaming project that Zoe Quinn had sabotaged. And then another $30000.