Gamergate

The BBQ Pit
361

Well, whatshisname who made this thread radically overstated their position.

Well, apparently you’re not the only one to learn something about terminology. They got swamped with traffic and went down. Apparently that doesn’t count as DDOS, even though it’s basically the same mechanism. My bad. I ascribe no malicious intent for that, and to my knowledge, neither do TFYC.

No, one of her fans was. But you’re right, placing any blame for that on her really is stupid.

And it plays no role that her criticism is dishonest and flawed? Like, really really flawed? See, if it was just a difference of opinion, I wouldn’t have a problem. But Quinn was wrong. Factually wrong to a wide degree. And when TFYC contacted her on numerous occasions to try to set things right, even offering to work with her to make the policy more acceptable in her eyes, she snubbed them. You don’t see her as having any culpability here?

362

More people have said more factually wrong things on this message board today alone than whatshername has in her entire life. We have a literal fascist posting to this board right now. If you think whatshernames opinions are a huge deal by comparison then your perspectives are skewed.

363

DDOS is, I think by definition, a malicious crime (in the US, it’s a federal crime, according to Wikipedia). She made a joke about it. Treating her joke as a serious admission is foolishness, and I’m glad you’re not doing that.

I’ve not seen persuasive evidence that she was factually wrong. Can you, in one paragraph, explain in your own language what specific facts she was in error about?

If it was flawed, in your opinion, she has no responsibility. If she was factually incorrect, she bears a tiny bit of responsibility. But the sponsor is free to do whatever she wants with her money, including withdrawing it for no reason at all. Unless Quinn was deliberately lying about TFYC, she’s not really responsible for what the sponsor did; and if she was deliberately lying (or engaging in reckless disregard for the truth), it seems that there are legal avenues TFYC ought to pursue.

364

Hey, that’s cool. I’m a feminist who, many times, disagrees with Sarkeesian. I didn’t like her Bayonetta video either because of its wholesale dismissal of the character (though the marketing campaign she criticized was pretty bad).

That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a dismissive woman who downplays the harassment of Sarkeesian and Quinn as well as parrots the “professional victims” party line. Like I said, she legitimately made some good points, and I’ve seen good rebuttals of some of Sarkeesian’s points from women and feminists. But it takes a bit of an extra mile to outright dismiss them as hysterical self-absorbed professional victims.

Edit: And before you say it, no, there’s still nothing “new” there. I’m sure female self-described MRA Girl Writes What is probably on board with that rhetoric, too. But, I find it funny that their characterization of these people is “reasonable, thoughtful feminism” which is clearly code for “agrees with me.” Sarkeesian can’t just be a reasonable person who’s wrong, she must be an insane professional victim drowning out the sane, reasonable feminists who are in short supply.

365

HArdly “finally”. It’s not like the gamgergate crowd have been deftly scouring the net for such, rather they don’t care if feminists agree with them. Also, Hoff-Summers is hardly a feminist. She calls herself that, but she’s been more popular with anti-feminists since at least the 90s.

The left traditionally represents the downtrodden. Of course, as with many leftist causes these days, there are some libertarians as well, butting in. Conservatives, on the other hand, aren’t popular. The recent “women against feminism” hashtag wasn’t popular with MRAs because they were traditionalists, who wanted men to work to support them and fight for their honour and all that bullshit, and blamed feminism for those absurd things being obsolete.

366

I claimed it said Wikileaks supports gamergate. It does. It shows their tweeting their support, it shows Julian Assange denouncing the corrupt forces opposing gamergate on reddit (he was asked a question by someone banned for supporting gamergate). Anyone interested can go and look for themselves, or go to twitter and reddit and look there.

The DDoS thing wasn’t even mentioned in the post, so no you weren’t referring to that. Liar. Recursive and transparent liar.

Looks like Richard Dawkins, who has had run-ins with the SJWs before, is on our side too. Your side, the side of corruption and nepotism, has gained moot, the proprietor of 4chan, who is deleting all GG threads and has purged the mod ranks of anyone of long-standing on the board, allegedly.

367

Yeah, “imploded”. Or, on the other hand, reached their funding goal and achieved everything they planned to, and currently on track to release the game that was chosen.

Her efforts, to turn the press against them and prevent them getting publicity, to dox them, to get them off twitter, were in vain.

These are simple facts. I don’t understand how feminists operate in a way completely in opposition to the truth.

368

It’s only plausible to be so misguided. At a certain level of misguidedness it becomes clear that it was malicious, especially from a woman with a history of attacking others for her own benefit, with Wizardchan and the Pepsi Game Jam.

She’s not their shield.

369

Well, Sarkeesian has a history of involvement in scams and pyramid schemes, and she has repeatedly told outright lies in her videos, not to mention pretending to have played games where she actually just stole the footage from other people. So no, she’s not just reasonable but wrong, she’s intentionally dishonest and unreasonable.

370

It’s possible she aped footage for some games because of how cherry picked some of the examples are, and if she did (without permission of course) that’s wrong, however, I have an extremely hard time believing she’s intentionally duping the public.

You know she has a Master’s from York University, right? She’s written a thesis on feminist cultural issues in sci-fi and fantasy television. (And I’ve read it, it’s pretty well written, agree or disagree it’s not half-assed at all). I mean, even if I take you at your word that has been involved in pyramid schemes in the past, people generally don’t spend years, and probably money, getting a thesis-seeking Master’s just to fleece people with internet videos.

371

What you actually said was:

It’s possible that you’re just a terrible writer: that sentence suggests that the Wikileaks article contains all the following information. If that’s not what you meant, then I retract the specific allegation of liar here, exchanging for it, “You don’t write clearly.”

There’s some small possibility you’re an idiot who doesn’t understand pronouns and antecedents, and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Let’s review the conversation in three consecutive posts:

Perhaps you meant “it” to refer to something besides the DDOS that was the topic of conversation–but if that’s what you meant, and if you hadn’t been an idiot, you would have used a word besides “it.”

As I said, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, and say that you might be too stupid to be lying, and provisionally retract that charge of lying as well.

372

And all they had to do was sell their soul to the lovely misogynists at /v/.

373

That article uses some insider terminology I don’t get, and posts screengrabs of twitter conversations from the middle without prevailing context. Can anybody please explain to someone who has no idea how game designer culture works what these issues are:

  1. TFYC says ZQ has some kind of objection to their policy on transexuals. They say they want to make sure applicants aren’t men claiming to be women, and her tweets are somehow undermining their business. Looking at the tweets, the ones that are 10-12 words long, it seems more like she’s goofing on them, not calling for boycotts or anything. How come they think her tweets are endangering their mission?

  2. They prominently feature a tweet where she says something to the effect of “Oops it looks like our conversation somehow killed an exploitative startup’s website LOL” They don’t explain how she actually did it. Did her tweets somehow inspire a vast audience to click on their site and overload the bandwidth? Was it a permanent shutdown or did the site just slow down for a few hours? Is she so popular and powerful she can just obliquely mention somebody’s website and cause its destruction? How are her offhanded 10-12 word tweets worse than somebody ranting on their blog?

  3. “On the Aug 27, Zoe contacted us via email asking why TFYC said she doxxed us. We explained that she had retweeted Maya’s doxxing information.” What the fuck does that even mean? I googled doxx and found the Urban Dictionary’s explanation that it means to expose someone’s true identity. So, when substituting the definition for the term, that statement becomes “Zoe contacted us via email asking why TFYC said she exposed our true identity. We explained that she had retweeted Maya’s information that exposed our true identity.” What’s so bad about that? Don’t the TFYC want people to know who’s in their organization? They’re trying to find qualified applicants, and part of the process is networking, which involves people knowing each others’ names. Or do they mean something else?

  4. They say ZQ attempted to bribe them when she said she’d put in a good word for them at some conference if they take back the claim that she doxxed them. Again, what the fuck is so devastating about this doxxing shit? Plus, a lot business deals are stomach-turning, but that’s the nature of the beast. Why turn down a good reference, especially after the assumption that ZQ’s previous bad references harmed their business?

374

You’re right. I like TFYC, and I think what Quinn did was kinda shitty, but it’s really small potatoes. I personally don’t like the climate that the SJW crowd imposes on the indie scene, and I feel that this case in indicative of that. Smapti may be a colossal tool, but I hardly think that his woefully shitty opinions do as much harm. I realize that this whole issue is kind of an odd thing to get in a huff about, but who cares? I debate American voter ID despite the fact that I probably will never vote in another US election. I don’t see what the issue here. I don’t think it’s a huge deal. Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t talk about it.

She complained that their policy was transphobic. There was absolutely nothing transphobic about their policy; demanding not even some form of evidence that you actually are transgendered but merely that you were transgendered when you applied should not be considered unreasonable by anyone. She complained that they expected women to work for free to make the game. The women they asked for volunteer work would get an 8% cut; it was made clear that this was a charity project with most of the rest of the proceeds going to various charity groups. What’s more, the women volunteering the ideas were expected to provide very little beyond basic design sketches; the work of actually designing the game and fleshing it out fell to the team at TFYC, so this critique of hers was doubly wrong. Beyond that, I’m not sure what other criticism she offered.

Meh, YMMV.

Well, I didn’t watch the video. That kind of shit is terrible, and for every valid criticism Thunderf00t has (I really like that guy when he’s not being a prick), each time he says “professional victim” he loses me. These people got death threats. They’ve been the target of real, documented online harassment campaigns. Let’s not diminish that. Let’s not pretend that didn’t happen. Now there’s pretty fucking clear evidence that it did actually happen, and that these women suffered pretty greatly for it. No matter how much fame they’re getting, I doubt it’s worth this.

Please stop agreeing with me. You’re making me think I’m a terrible person.

375

Congratulations, you’re an idiot. An idiot willing to judge a very large community entirely by a handful of bad apples therein - bad apples they can’t filter out because the community is entirely anonymous. Need I remind you that the entire point of TFYC’s project was “let’s show that women can make awesome video games”? The entire point. Yeah, if you hate women, there’s no better way to show it than donating $5,000 to a project by feminists with the sole goal of empowering women and bringing more women into the industry of your favorite hobby. Yeah, that totally sounds like something a bunch of misogynist women-haters would do. :rolleyes: Do you even know anything about /v/? Or 4chan? Like for example that the mods have explicitly banned all discussion of Gamergate and Zoe Quinn? I don’t think so.

Many of them worked pseudonymously. This is not uncommon in the indie scene. And if you’re trying to stay pseudonymous, you usually don’t want people to figure out who you are. Let alone where you live. Even those who go by their real name tend to keep that stuff very secretive. It’s especially problematic when the context is someone popular talking about you being a bad person, and a lot of their followers being mad at you.

376

OK, stop right there.

Did FYC agree to use Vivian James as their mascot or not?

When it comes to 4chan, you are not talking about a ‘few bad apples’. You are talking about the majority of a rage group out of control. Anyone reasonable on 4chan was vastly drowned out or left the group a long time ago.

I’m getting sick of the ‘few bad apples’ whining. THROW THOSE APPLES AWAY!

377

No. They agreed to include her as a character in a game, because that was one of their agreed-upon stretch goals. This is a legal obligation on their part, mind you. Just for reference, 4chan contacted TFYC beforehand. Notice how explicitly stated in their goals is to “show that we’re not all women-haters”? They knew full well that FYC was a feminist group. That their goal was to help women. And they wanted in on that, because they felt that TFYC was wronged, and that they were sick of being called misogynists. What’s more, Vivian James is a quintessentially female character. She’s just one of us gamers. There’s nothing offensive, sexist, or wrong about her. She’s basically what you’d end up with if you told /v/ “okay, we need a female character who basically represents us”, because that is literally how she came to exist.

And yet, a small group of people from /a/ from not that long ago made a game that touched me emotionally more than any other piece of media I’ve read, watched, or played (a game full of deep, interesting, 3-dimensional female characters, it might be added). A variety of people on /co/ run their own comics, many of which are actually really, really good. /v/ is a massive video gaming community, actually running just about as fast as the more infamous /b/. Like I said, you know nothing about /v/ or 4chan, other than the negative stereotypes that you got from (presumably) the “random” board. Yeah, it’s largely full of shitheads, but in this case, a bunch of people from 4chan who were sick of being painted as shitheads banded together and donated over $20,000 (my previous figure was off by a bit) to support a feminist group. Full stop.

Jesus Tittyfucking Christ you have no clue what you are talking about. 4chan has no usernames. It has no profiles. You don’t have a 4chan account. When you go to post there the only identifier is your IP, and that’s all they have to ban you with. What’s more, they have a quite radical policy on free speech - if it’s not illegal, and if it’s not a raid, it’s usually fine. They have a very different board culture to any forum that actually has users. There is no “throwing those apples away” because the only people who can ever tell who posted what are the moderators. Yeah, this inherently leads to assholes. But you know what? To claim that everyone there is an asshole, or a misogynist, or a rape apologist just because they aren’t actively censoring those who are is just stupid. Hell, half of 'em are probably just there for the porn. A non-trivial number of them ponied up a significant amount of cash to, again, in big red letters so you pay attention, support a feminist project to help women. You know nothing about what you’re criticizing, and it shows.

378

Mailing list revealed from the gaming journalism elite, demanding they batten down the hatches regarding a possible incestuous ethics problem.

In other news ThundefOOt a critic of Anita Sarkeesian had his twitter account suspended due to a flood of complaints. Never said anything threatening, violent . Just very critical of Sarkeesian. I would expect any time now Ms Sarkeesian to put out a statement on twitter condemning this type of behaviour right just because he’s a critic ?

379

Can you link to the places where she made these criticisms? If it’s in the middle of a series of imgur links, I’ll ask instead for you to type out the sentence or paragraph in which she makes these criticisms. I ask because I’ve heard these claims about her criticisms made, but I don’t think I’ve seen actually what she said.

380

Not going to watch a video on this stupid shit, but why would you expect this Sarkeesian person to get involved in this ThundefOOt’s business? Why should she care if or how he was banned? Is this guy an employee of hers?