Okay, that clears up the whole Women in Gaming thing and I partially retract my earlier comments on them.
I still don’t agree with condemning a charity for taking money from 4Chan, though. For one, 4Chan is made up of actual people, not a hivemind. Some of whom may have actually wanted to do good. I support any organization’s wishes to choose to not accept money from or associate with certain places, but personally, if Hitler wants to donate to my Holocost Relief charity then hell yeah I’ll take his money and try to do awesome things with it.
I still remember Wonkette reporting on the 2006 bribery scandal that involved hookers, the intelligence community and Republican congress critters. At the same freaking Watergate Hotel.
There was only one choice: They called it the Watergategate.
<Hamlet> Oh! We are slain!</Hamlet> Curious - what are you doing here amongst us pedantic burned out hippies? Surely you have better things to do with your hip, now, with-it-ness?
An eye roll worthy undercurrent in the ocean of rage over this is the idea that feminists are somehow hurting the gaming industry. It’s not stupid e-drama, trolling, and clickbait, oh no – the games will be affected you guys! Any day now you won’t be able to play anything but the adventures of vaguely ethnic wheelchair bound lesbian gardeners. Sign me up.
<Lebowski> This will not stand, ya know, this aggression will not stand, man.</Lebowski>
Tough crowd. You’re shadow boxing and I’m not sure why. It’s harmless tongue in cheek fun. Didn’t ya notice I followed the pedant crack with my own anal correction? That deserves a gold star sticker. Or at least a jar of paste. I ain’t picky.
Dude, DUUUDE ! She’s a feminist. A feminist. Don’t you know these people secretly rule the world (the video game world in particular is a known bastion of feminazism) and use the blood of sexually frustrated, narcissistic men to bake their matzo ?
Ah yes, it wasn’t Nixon who started Watergate, it was Woodward and Bernstein.
Of course no-one gives a shit, other than her now ex-boyfriend, that she was having lots of sex. More power to her elbow. I’m sex-positive. Sex? Thumbs up!
It is the “additional criticisms”, actually the main criticisms, that people care about. They’re the ones that get the attention among her enemies, the sex criticisms mainly get mentioned by her supporters when they try to straw-man, as you are doing. Although by your stated standards she could murder a bus full of orphans and as long as she raped one of them too then talking about it would be “classic misogyny”. The murders, you know, are just “additional criticisms”.
Some people might think that SJWs would be interested in one of their more prominent members:
Being accused of sexual harrassment;
Doing something that meets her own radSJW definition of rape;
Sleeping her way to the top;
Writing an apologetic for a rapist because he donated money to her Game Jam and she didn’t want him to get bad publicity.
But no, she’s a woman so she gets a free pass for all of her misdemeanors.
I didn’t front-load my criticisms. Those aren’t the main issue, just chronologically the first to come to public attention.
As for the boyfriend, who could hardly be as sleezy as her, he hasn’t really tried to stir up an wrath. Fuck, his follow-up post even claims that her work is important and her game is “good”. Both of these claims are fucking absurd. Clearly he is still unreasonably favourable towards this Quinn woman.
He didn’t go on a public smear campaign, he posted on a couple of threads on other websites for break-up stories. They got deleted as part of her censorship campaign, so he posted it on a blog. One extremely long blog post doesn’t really count as a campaign, now does it? Other people spread it around because they were annoyed by the censorship.
As for “some random Z-list game developer”, yes she developed only one truly awful game, but more relevant is her prominence in SJW circles and her prominence in indie-dev circles, hence being on the Pepsi Game Jame, hence her friendship with so many journalists and other developers.
Her ex didn’t orchestrate anything, he posted something on his blog. Maybe she was sent some rape threats, if you want to consider it to be possible to make a real rape threat through fucking twitter. More likely she was just reporting everyone who disagreed with her, which overloaded the system. She might have even faked the threats like Sarkeesian has done in the past. And like she herself has done in the past, specifically faking internet harrassment to win sympathy (the Wizard Chan thing).
Do you think her little choose-your-own-adventure deserved mention or recommendation? Zoe did admit on twitter to having sex for publicity and her boyfriend provides evidence of her admitting to using sex to get ahead. Getting her shit game exposure is what it’s all about.
Incidentally he wrote two articles on different websites mentioning her game while they were having sex, and evidence has surfaced that he lied to his editor about the dates of their relationship to make it look like their wasn’t a conflict of interests.
He also said her game was good, so he’s still lying to make her look better than she is. In any case, even barring conscious favouritism, I don’t believe you can hire someone you’re fucking and it have no impact at all on your decision. That’s why this sort of inappropriate relationship is unacceptable, not because she goes into an interview and offers a quid pro quo.
No, she won an award. Multiple sources have reported that, and I’ve never seen anyone else deny it.
Again, the evidence is that he isn’t bitter. More like pathetic and yearning, given how unreasonably generous he is towards her at every turn.
Also, not slut-shaming. He’s upset because she cheated on him, which isn’t just being a slut, and everyone else is upset because her sex was corrupt, not because she was a slut. More like a whore.
Have you actually read the twitter feed in question? She repeatedly claims that the women won’t be paid for their games, even saying the Fine Young Capitalists want women to make games without getting paid. In reality, of course, they’re not expected to make games, and do get paid.
The highest ranked ideas were all from people with no background in programming, so they couldn’t make the game themselves. 8%, frankly, is a lot more than most game give to people who have the idea, but don’t do any of the work. Most games budget that at zero. If they could actually make their own games they would, this is why they need the FYC. The disposition of proceeds was never any sort of secret.
Charitably, she was an idiot who made a mistake about how the Women in Gaming project worked, then doubled-down and tried to destroy them rather than admitting she made a mistake, less charitably she intentionally set out to destroy them because they were potential competitors with her announced Rebel Game Jam.
Didn’t collapse, and is currently approaching its funding goal, thanks to donations from the Cathedral of Misogyny. No unanswered questions, no vague promises.
Did she dox them? Yes. Did she “accidentally DDoS” their website? She certainly says so on her twitter feed. Were the FYC denied media attention, and told this was because of the disapprobation of Zoe Quinn? That is what they say, and it’s established that she had relationships with those journalists and a vendetta against the FYC, so that’s a plausible claim and probable.
In short, you are a liar. Is Zoe Quinn sucking your cock?
What happened to “collapsing” in “vague promises”? Oh yes, you’re a fucking liar.
None of this is relevant to the Women in Gaming thing, which was perpetrated by her network of white knights and fucktoys, the DMCA stuff was only much later. Although I don’t think she deserves much praise for ceasing to commit criminal misuse of the DMCA system only after it had failed to work.
You are asd stupid as you are dishonest. The Game Jam she sabotaged was the TV show one, and yes it was so she could run the Rebel Game Jam, which she announced immediately thereafter, although she’s still done nothing more than collect money for it. Not technically so she could run a replacement, rather so she could claim she was going to run a replacement and then embezzle the funds.
Your lies regard the FYC project have already been exposed.
It’s probably just a scam so she can line her own pockets. It’s also not “for women”. It was also not a response to the “collapse”, which never happened, of the Women in Gaming project. As for her actually making a game, I’ll believe it when I see it.
She subsists on handouts anyway, and clearly has no ability to develop games.
That’s not why, no, it’s because she deserves no attention. Z-list dev announces maybe one day doing a Game Jame at place TBD, at time TBD. Not news.
He quit (again) after being hacked in a tangentially related incident. In any case the relevant fact is that someone accuses her of something and there’s an immediate backlash to silence the victim by her network of contacts. A microcosm of the grand scandal.
He has been her twitter white knight from the beginning of the incident, he claimed to be hacked at the same time she did, he flounced away at the same time she did, it’s hardly a stretch to link the two. Also, one of the two men she had sex with in the industry that you didn’t mention was his co-developer on his game Fez.
So yes, sidekick.
Funny how that works, isn’t it? Threaten to destroy his life if he threatens Zoe and suddenly he’s all evasive about it.
…according to Phil Fish.
Uh-huh.
By fucking them? No, she’s part of a network, she’s got her allied SJWs, she’s got her White Knights like yourself, she’s got her fuck-toys and funders. Doesn’t need money for that.
I’m sure there’s some real harrassment, but both Sarkeesian and Quinn have verified instances of faking harrassment against themselves.
The evidence, something you have no respect for, confirms that she was never harrassed by the Wizard Chan people, rather she and her cadre faked it. And yes, her game failing to get onto what would be its main distribution platform (because it’s no good) would be more than enough motive for so venal a person.
Nonsense.
A mistake? So Quinn honestly thought she owned the copyright to someone else’s video? Yeah, okay. You want to pretend she’s pathologically stupid or mentally rather than just greedy and self-interested, fine.
It’s her friends in the ranks of the mods, of course. The tweets exchanged between them are freely available, and have the mod bragging about how great it is to be a mod and be able to delete anything you like, then asking her out to dinner. After a bit of the old quid pro quo, perhaps. She instigated it, but mod-man looks like a real turd.
In any case, this is the whole point. Her friends were willing to delete whole threads and comments by the thousands to cover for their friend and to conceal their own wrong-doing rather than actually performing their roles as moderators in a proper and disnterested manner. Hence the deletions on reddit, on Something Awful and so on, hence the lack of coverage in the media before the backlash started.
No, Jennifer Lawrence seems to have taken a photo on her phone, if she put it on the net it was probably through cloud-sync which is password protected. She didn’t go and intentionally, publicly post naked photos of herself. She didn’t pose for a whole shoot of naked pictures.
As she is a professional liar, and has a history of such fakery, I hesitate to believe any of her claims.
As for the “old guard”, don’t you think it’s odd that your coinspiracy theory rotates entirely around normal people, and the victims of your conspiracy are the poor, hard-done-by game developers and journalists getting paid to insult their customers?
Anyway, no, you’re an idiot, pale males like games and don’t like being insulted, end of story.
4chan don’t have a deep commitment to anything other than lulz.
I also don’t believe anyone made $6000 trading those nudes, as they were all freely available. That and, you know, your repeated dishonesty throughout this post.
WTF, blindboyard? Merneith went through your OP point by point, demolishing it pretty thoroughly. Yet you only reply to other posters and only take him on about his reply to another poster’s throw-away comment? That pretty much tells me what I need to know.
ETA : I see that you have been composing a reply. I withdraw my post. Apologies.
Full explanation and context, for the people at home who still haven’t twigged blindboyard’s shtick : she was having a twitter conversation with someone about FYC’s initiative and its perceived inanity. Which in turn made the people following the conversation curious about it, and check the FYC server out, eventually collapsing it under the load. When she realized what had happened, she lol’d to the someone in question about their having caused an inadvertent Slashdotting/Colbert bump.
And that’s the whole story.
But of course, that’s not sinister at all. Better to innocently imply that she deliberately and maliciously shut down their site. With scare quotes, misrepresentation of statements and all. Because she’s a NASTY WHORE !
Augh. Here I am reviewing everything and wanting to make a thread about it, and this fuckwit shows up and does it first, putting emphasis on all the wrong things. Oh, and he has a background in MRA. So the well is already pretty thoroughly poisoned. Great. Fuck it, let’s try to do this again.
The big issue here is not “Zoe Quinn fucked a bunch of guys” (although I do find it a bit nasty given that she personally defines infidelity as rape, as in a relationship consent is given under the condition that you are faithful to your partner - I find that stupid, but it’s hardly unfair to apply her moral standards to her). That’s not the issue any more, or at least shouldn’t be. But the fact is that there’s been all kinds of shit that came to light here about her behavior that was… shall we say, less than kosher. A coworker abused her of molesting him at a wedding. There’s the issue with her intentionally sabotaging a game jam to further her own game jam, then taking the funds for her own game jam into her own personal paypal account (and so far, there’s been virtually no movement on this game jam, making people wonder if it’s even going to happen). There’s the issue with the “women in gaming” fiasco, where she sabotaged that because it was anti-woman (no, no it was not, you stupid reactionary bitch). And above everything else, there’s this.
Nobody is talking about it.
At least, nobody in the gaming press. Sure, some bloggers are, and the MRA douchebags are loving every part of this, but the press? Nope.
Seriously, though. Imagine if a male game developer sexually harassed a female game developer at someone’s wedding, and then when accused responded with, “Oh yeah? Well you weren’t even invited to the wedding” in a dismissive, laugh-it-off-with-friends-haha-what-a-loser type of fashion. What do you think the headline at Kotaku would be the next day? Imagine if a male game developer got a group of his friends to attack a game development program aimed at helping women make video games for charity. Escapist, RPS, Gamasutra, and the like would fucking explode. But none of this gets covered. Why? Because Zoe Quinn is not a man. She’s a woman.
Now, how deep you want to get into conspiracy territory is up to you. I don’t think she fucked her way through enough people to ensure that kind of favorable coverage, and I don’t think she got particularly much favorable coverage from the people she fucked. I don’t want to make it about that. Rather, the issue is a more general one, to do with Social Justice Warriors and how the media reacts to various things.
Specifically, most of my thoughts can be contained very well in this blog post (TL;DR version here). Not by me, and I don’t agree with everything, but it’s written by an insider in the industry, and he has to go anonymous because he’s afraid of the backlash from going against these people. And why wouldn’t he be? Look at TotalBiscuit (he posted this and got harassed by your typical SJW tumblr crowd for it). Look at Jontron (who called something retarded, and got mobbed to the point where you could visibly see it affecting his health in his videos). Oh, and a quick side note? This kind of harassment didn’t help further their careers or catapult them into the spotlight. :rolleyes: This is a point that the author of the aforementioned blog post also makes:
This later played itself out with the hashtag #notyourshield, which was used by minorities and women gamers to signify that they had no interest in being represented by this crowd. It’s become kind of a thing. That is at the crux of gamergate. These three issues - that the environment has become incredibly dangerous and oppressive for those who say or do the wrong thing, that there’s a colossal double standard, and that the gaming media is perpetuating it. Quinn has done all manner of really nasty shit. It ain’t just slut-shaming! But the gaming media refuses to touch it - even with very solid evidence. However, David Jaffe makes an unfortunate gaffe about blowjobs in an interview and he gets his own front-page article on Kotaku and a ton of people trying to alienate him from the industry because he’s a misogynist. He’s not a fucking misogynist. He was taken out of context and regrets what he said. Hell, The Escapist published a story about Quinn being raided by Wizardchan (before the update it was even more in her favor) completely uncritically, despite the story being total bullshit.
That’s sort of the issue here. It all ties back to this particular strain of social justice warrior - people like Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn - and the fact that the gaming media absolutely uncritically sides with them. I think it has to do with protecting their own reputations - after all, don’t want to get labeled a misogynist because you think the latest Tropes vs. Women episode was really, really dishonest when it pretended that the game encourages you doing something that it in fact explicitly penalizes you for. And it all ties into another issue which really bugs me about these people - every time Anita gets death threats, she gets a huge popularity boost.
…Guys, what the hell happened to “Don’t feed the trolls”?
Seriously, when did that become such a fucking foreign concept? When did it go from, “Oh, you’re getting threats from random nobodies on your youtube channel? Ignore them, they’ll go away” to, “Oh you poor dear, better drag every anonymous nobody out into the open and show the world how horribly abused you are by these people who do not know you and would lose interest sooner or later”? I have a youtube channel talking about conspiracies and religion with something like 50 subscribers and 10 videos, and I’ve gotten threats of violence. I ignored it. If I had thought they were legitimate threats, and that I had to fear for my life, I would have gone to the police. What I would not have done (and according to Thunderf00t, who actually went through this process when he made videos on Islam, this is something the FBI explicitly tells you) is publicize it. You shouldn’t be retweeting it. You shouldn’t be airing it to the world. Tell the FBI and don’t talk about it in public. By telling the world (and thus the person making the threats) about it, you make the investigation harder and you simply encourage the trolls. Like, right now on Zoe Quinn’s twitter, she’s posting a bunch of screencaps from IRC chatrooms that are planning to raid her. Hey, that’s good evidence the FBI could use to go after these guys! Shame you, yanno, let them know you were watching first and foremost and gives them time to cover their tracks. You fucking moron.
Everything about this just pisses me off. The gaming press has basically cowtowed itself to the social justice warriors and the massive double standard they hold, and everything is worse as a result. You know what would have happened if the first article discussing Zoe Quinn had, yanno, done some fucking research instead of just taking her word for it that she was being attacked by Wizardchan? They would have found out that it was bullshit, not published the article, and this mess would have been a whole lot smaller. I probably never would have heard about the various misdeeds Quinn did. But now there’s this backlash, because the press clearly has some real issues with objectivity. And of course, all of this is being swept under the rug - after all, the real story isn’t how people are mad about this and what the media’s been doing wrong, it’s about how Zoe Quinn is being harassed by trolls.
No.
Fuck. That. Shit.
This isn’t going to go away until it’s addressed, and putting on another fucking pity party for someone who, by all accounts, has done some really nasty shit is no excuse for avoiding it. I mean, for fuck’s sake, listen to this crap.
…Yeah. No, no I don’t think I will. If the media isn’t willing to fucking do it (but they will gladly delve into the personal and professional lives of men who do far lesser acts), then we sure as hell will.
Recommended reading:
I don’t! I’ve been following this for a while, and reached the conclusions that:
Online gamers can be just as misogynistic as their worst critics say, and the ones who are apply a great deal of time and energy to exercising that misogyny. Vivian James is a brilliant example of that. And I do mean brilliant, because it’s clever…but it’s still essentially about making fun of feminism.
Videogame reviewers seem to largely operate on a model that requires industry funding, explicit or implicit. It’s more true for them that it is for, say, movie reviewers, and I have no doubt it leads to a significant level of complicity and favorable treatment. Still, 5,000 tweets about “why aren’t people talking about corruption in game reviewing” is just a wall-of-text effort to try to bury the importance my first point.
Zoe Quinn isn’t a particularly nice person.
So, nobody looks great from here, but these are in order of how strongly I feel about them.
screechneedle scratching record I’m sorry, how is “if you buy my game and let your girlfriend win at it, she’ll suck you cock” not misogynistic ? I’m not even talking about the whole “women are machines and if you provide the correct input they will reward you with sex” angle (even though it’s an endemic view of women among young internet males, and even fully realized within video games themselves - Bioware, I’m looking at you). No, what clawed at my balls till they bled was the “if you *let *her win”.
Because hur dur, gurlz can’t game good, and gurlz need validation from boy, amirite guys ?
It’s just one stupid comment, but it’s still representative of an entire toxic and, yes, misogynistic/sexist mindset. Either Jaffe is himself possessed with this mindset (which is reprehensible) or he really is not but assumes* you and I *are and cynically stoops down to our level (which is even worse). In either case, I really don’t blame anybody who blasted him over it. And let’s be honest for a second here : if *Kotaku *of all places thinks you’re up your own ass when it comes to gender politics, you’re probably busy tasting hair.
David Jaffe is the creator of Twisted Metal and God of War and a generally recognized big name in the business.
Zoe Quinn… is not. It’s not an exaggeration when I say that when the majority of game journalists first heard about this, their initial reaction was, “Who the fuck is Zoe Quinn?” She is no one. She is a bedroom coder who has a small (but apparently very vocal) fan following. The only mention of Depression Quest on Google News in the days before GamerGate were a few sites announcing the game’s release in light of Robin Williams’ suicide. There was no review blitz, there were no interviews, there was nothing. Because Zoe Quinn was not a name that anybody knew until her ex-boyfriend decided to tell the the world he hated her.
Got a link? I’m not blowing smoke, Ubisoft discontinued their private press event in 2008. Whatever those guys recorded, it wasn’t at an Ubisoft-sponsored event.
I don’t especially care about Quinn one way or the other but I will say that Depression Quest is a terrible, terrible game. Plodding, dull and looks like a circa 1985 high school computer class assignment to make a “Build Your Own Adventure” in BASIC to teach you GOSUB routines. RPG Maker games show more developer skills. “Punch the monkey to win an iPod” banner ads showed more game development skills. It’s not entertaining as a game nor is it especially compelling or educational as a learning tool (unless you love walls of dry, poorly written text). It’s just bad.
Why harp on it? Because I can’t imagine WHY this “game” would deserve any “first looks” or screen time at all on any gaming websites or highlighting at any events. Of course, that doesn’t require “sex for journalism” – people could write about it because they think the game’s “message” overrides its absolute failure as a game or because if they write about it, they’ll be praised for talking about how evolved gaming is these days. Either way, I’d probably respect the gaming journalism industry more if they at least got sex out of shilling for that shitty thing.
Like I said, search Google News. There are only a handful of articles about the game before the GamerGate blowup and nearly all of them talk about the game’s release so soon after Robin Williams’ suicide. Williams was a pretty big gamer himself, so the connection was an easy one.
If anybody’s interested, the Steam reviews for Depression Quest are a good example of gamer cranks harassing somebody. There’s nearly 2000 of them, which is an awful lot, I think, for a recently released freebie interactive fiction game about mental illness. They’re overwhelmingly negative. That’s not odd, I don’t think, although it disproves the idea that she has a lot of minions or that she’s being protected by gaming institutions. Here’s some “positive” reviews:
