What is so hard about “Oh wow. That’s awful?” That all people are looking for.
The Wiki entry for Depression Quest was also silent on any controversy when I last looked (though the Talk page has quite a bit). I just wrote it off to Wikipedia politics.
The article linked was explicitly about the “proof” that GamerGate and #Notyourshield were orchestrated by 4Chan and in no way organic movements among gamers. Many of the things said in the IRC channel may have been awful (I’d go so far as to say were awful) but for people legitimately interested in the ideas of gaming journalism ethics, the feminist debate on gaming and the act as speaking as the voice for women or minorities, saying “That came from a 4chan IRC channel!” isn’t going to suddenly reverse their opinion.
I never saw the OP’s name before, but after reading his post in the Ray Rice thread, this explains a lot.
He has a serious problem with women.
Also, based on his profile, he calls himself an “idler”, which I guess means Unemployed… And he could very well be a gamer. And a smelly one at that.
I don’t know. I guess we’d have to ask his mom. (Unless he has beat her senseless, of course. But it would be an accident, where she was maliciously attacking him and he was just defending himself.)
The point you miss is that the journalistic ethical violations being decried largely don’t exist. Knowing that your only evidence came from 4chan trolls very much ought to make you question your assumptions. That it doesn’t is a problem.
There is just no epidemic of games journalists who favorably review games because they are friends (or more) with the developer. The whole idea is something 4chan made up so they could slut shame a woman whose game they didn’t like. Any ethical problems are corporate in nature, and are being ignored, just like they always have when Mountain Dew and Doritos sponsor crap.
The whole thing is akin to the Republican idea of ID cards for non-existent voting fraud, not the Tea Party.
And you also miss that a large number of people still fighting still believe a lot of this BS, including the OP of this thread. He’s far from the only one treating the 4chan claims as legitimate.
The real issue of Gamersgate, in my opinion, is how easily gamers were led to believe this crap. That’s what we should be addressing. Sure, make noises about journalistic ethics, to prove you aren’t violating them, but then lets discuss the real problem.
Hear fucking hear!
I really have little opinion on it at all. I couldn’t give a dry shit about “journalism ethics” in video game reporting – they’re fucking video games. I like video games and therefore usually follow threads about them out of general interest but I don’t read reviews or bother checking IGN or Kotaku unless someone else links to them. But people have been grousing about the topic of unethical games journalism far longer than anyone’s known the name Zoe Quinn. If you think 4Chan just made that debate topic up in the last couple weeks (rather than slapping a catchy name on an existing complaint), you haven’t been paying attention. Which is fine because, again, “video games” but you’re still wrong.
It’s too bad you clipped off the second paragraph that **BigT **wrote. Yes, there are ethical issues in game journalism, but they concern the cozy relationship between media outlets and big publishers. However, the specific ethical “lapses” that Gamergate is about are entirely specious. Reviewers are not giving positive reviews to their friends, or promoting game in exchange for sexual favors. It’s a completely made-up problem so a bunch of misogynists can have fun slut-shaming.
Current articles and comments on GamerGate show that many people are treating it as a broad condemnation of ethical lapses in gaming journalism (vs purely about personal relationships though that was a major catalyst) and concern over the feminist debate pushing out any other topic in gaming. If you think you’re going to wave an IRC log at them and make them change their mind on these topics, have at it.
The “OMG journalism ethics !!” angle is all the more moot that Depression Quest is a free game.
Even if Zoe Quinn had mind controlled the entire Internet with her vagina and forced everyone to not only plug her game, as friends do, but praise it higher than Game of Thrones without Daenerys… she would *still *not have made a cent, and you, the poor deceived victim of these wildly unethical shenanigans would have not lost a thing, save perhaps the 5 minutes it would have taken you to look at the game, click on it a few times just to make sure it’s not worth a second look, and once more to uninstall it.
That’s it. That’s the scandalous damage caused by the absolute worst case scenario. 5 minutes of your life wasted. Oh, the humanity.
So folks who pursue *that *particular angle of the drama in dead earnest: get a fucking grip and cut the shit, will you ?
[QUOTE=Jophiel]
concern over the feminist debate pushing out any other topic in gaming
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I’m sure that’ll majorly impact the release date of Call of Duty:Showdown at Dudebro Ranch :dubious:. Jesus Christ, are you serious ?
Me? No. I’m not seriously worried about it. I’m not even casually worried about it. Are people advocating for GamerGate and #NotYourShield serious about it? Probably.
My point is that this current drive to “prove” that these things all started on a 4chan IRC channel and use this information to convince others of… (something?) is a bit silly and misguided.
Although, your example is a good reason why I thought all the “Gamers are dead!” self-congratulatory fluff pieces were ridiculous.
Yeah, there’s a lot of stupid people out there who will cling to their own prejudices in the face of facts. This is true of every controversial issue, ever. So what?
So there’s probably a better avenue for handling it then waving around IRC logs and thinking that that’s going to change anyone’s opinion.
What avenue do you think that might be?
Dunno. I’m not especially vested in figuring it out. But if you think you’ve struck gold with this IRC logs thing, have at it. If you agree that it’s not really fruitful then I suppose people with a deep commitment to the whole thing should probably look elsewhere.
I hate to do the “just post the word ‘cite?’ in response to a claim” thing, but…
Cite?
Good luck with that.
I’ve seen articles saying “gamer” as a cultural construct that people identify as needs to be killed, but I doubt anyone is calling for the death of actual gamers.
Quinn made a Slashdot joke about how she’d DDOSed a website, and people accuse her of a hacking conspiracy. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if someone, having read all this horrible nonsense, snarked that gamers needed to die in a fire, and now folks are talking about the death threats.
I could be wrong, which is why specifics would be nice.
I guess we should attack Slashdot, then. It DDOSes sites so often that it’s even called “the Slashdot Effect.”