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Business Points: Fear of a Feminine Market
Sterica
YesRegistered User, Moderator mod
YesRegistered User, Moderator mod
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkz8BLBJ9_IWe're gonna try a thing here where I do a thread on a topic and we discuss it for a bit. Then the thread gets closed at some indeterminate point and we move onto to another big headline. Maybe the thread will last to page 100, and maybe I'll close it after a week regardless of how far it gets. Naturally, consistently bad behavior will get it closed significantly faster, but I know you all won't do that, right? So this is the thing we're doing, and I'm calling it Business Points because I enjoy cute titles for things.
Okay, so for the past few weeks there has been a thing regarding the sacred institution that is Gaming Journalism and a indie developer by the name of Zoe Quinn (best know for the game Depression Quest). Basically, an ex-boyfriend of hers just dump a whole mountain of private conversations on social media, images, texts, and probably her D&D characters. It was a massive doxxing, the point of which was to level an accusation of a severe conflict of interest on the part of Quinn. Namely that she was in a relationship with a reviewer (or reviewers because who the fuck knows at this point). Journalism in video games has not been looked up fairly since basically ever, and this has led to outcry over corruption in the industry. Naturally, there has been resistance to this movement, with a large number of people trying to cover up the story and change the subject to something else.
...and if you believe that, I have a big pile of bitcoins to sell you.
What's really happening is a massive heaping of abuse, laser-focused on one woman because some very bad people feel they got the right dirt on her. A metaphorical flood of misogyny that has been building up over the years just waiting for rush out. Besides the lack of evidence that the person she was seeing even reviewed her game, Depression Quest (and all of Quinn's games) are sold for the wallet-breaking price of zero dollars. So even assuming Quinn did manage to woo some dude into giving her stellar reviews, it all amounts to more people grabbing her free games. Taking a jump into her money bin is not to be as fun as Uncle Scrooge's. Not to mention all of the other rampant corruption in the industry that goes ignored on a regular basis. If this is what sets you off, then I have some bad news for you about the reality of the journalism industry.
Besides Quinn getting the whole internet yelling at her and sending pictures of her to random internet people (yes, this is a thing that happened), people defending her have also been harassed. The infamous Phil Fish was voraciously defending Quinn on Twitter and ending up getting hacked and doxxed. This doxxing upped the ante, which apparently included really personal information like his bank account information for him and his company. Fish completely jumped off the internet and even deleted his Twitter for a duration until it was safe to pop back out. Others devs such as CliffyB have also been leaping to Quinn's defense but, more importantly, other women have been slowly reconsidering staying in the business, some directly because of harassment they have received because of this incident, and several have openly stated that they are leaving over this mess. In an industry that is already having issues with attracting women, this is not a good thing...to put it mildly.
This snowballed further when Anita Sarkeesian released the latest in her Tropes vs. Women videos during roughly the same period, and people decided to dogpile on her. This is included a death threat that forced her to leave her home, and generally riled up the internet some more. Devs like Tim Schafer got criticized because he suggested people check out her videos. Tim Schafer couldn't avoid taking heat for stuff as benign as this, so you know things are getting kind of ridiculous. Throughout PAX shit got even weirder with the arrival of the #gamergate hashtag and a torrent of stuff that a person couldn't distinguish between sincere or trolling (although fortunately nobody did anything at PAX itself). One of the most recent happenings is Jenn Frank is leaving the scene after shit about this made it on Al Jazeera of all places.
Oh, and at some point women overtook men as the largest demographic in the industry. Something to consider.
So that's the situation. There's probably stuff I'm forgetting, as it seems like every week something new is going on, and I'll add any major happenings to this post as they occur. This is not good, and it's not a healthy place for the industry to be in, especially when there are so many more important things going even in just the industry like working conditions, the ballooning demands of AAA titles to sell, and well the whole industry being hostile to women. It also shows that we're just not there from a maturity aspect if we this is our response to criticism of video games from an artistic perspective. It is is a desperate wish of many people that games be taken seriously as an artform, but there is a massive backlash the second you touch on any topic that isn't cold and mechanical like controls; framerate;or fluffy, extremely subjective things like "fun." It's a place where speaking out gets you drowned in a heap of rather hideous abuse. Then you have the normal issues (lack of female representation in games vs. males, the oversexualization, and so forth) and it just paints a picture of a industry that is not only hostile to women, but also to anyone that even tries to raise the subject much less share their opinion about it. This is not a good long-term situation, and steps need to be made to rectify it so some kind of parity can be achieved in both the industry and the games we play.
But hey, what are your thoughts on this? Inquiring minds want to know*!
*Might not be true.
Here are the rules. If you don't follow them...well, I heard Tube is looking to refurbish his skull throne.
- No namecalling except "silly goose" and ONLY THAT. You cannot call someone a "stupid goose" or a "silly duck" or even a "wacky waterfowl." This includes accusing people of trolling. Yeah, this is already a rule, but it bears repeating.
- No ad hominem attacks. Namecalling is not ad hominem. It is disregarding someone's argument because of a personal attribute they have, be it real or perceived. Let me give two examples.
"You all need to stop listening to Mario saying the glass is half-full. He's a stupid plumber so you can't trust what he says."
"Yeah, Luigi says the glass is half-empty, but are you going to believe a silly goose like that?"
THE FOLLOWING NOT AN AD HOMINEM
"Waluigi says the glass is only a quarter empty, but I took some measurements and the glass is 12 inches tall and the empty portion is six inches, not three. Waluigi is kind of silly goose for saying that." - "My wife/girlfriend/sister/mom/aunt/body pillow says X is Y." is practically an empty post. Don't do it.
- Your post needs substance. A YouTube video and little else is not substance. This includes image macros and witty gifs! If you need a video or image as a supporting part of a greater post in which you post some valuable insight or share a lengthy opinion, then I will let it slide. If we're going to chat via video clips and gifs then we might as well move to Tumblr or 4chan. This includes posting tweets unless some major event happened and that's the easiest way to share the news.
- Chances are that you are not a moderator, so don't try to police the thread. If someone is obviously breaking a rule, the don't engage. Report their ass and move on, as chances are their goal is to get a rise out of your and drag the thread into a multi-page slap fight. Reporting the post and not acknowledging the person will avoid so many conflicts and deny shitty trolls their precious giggles.
- Addendum to the last point: disagreement is not a reportable offense, and people that abuse their report button can have it taken away.
- Feminism is a massive topic outside the scope of G&T. Let's keep it narrowed to the video game industry, because frankly that's big enough to keep us occupied for years. If you wish to discuss further than that, then check out D&D.
- @ceres is helping out with this so, for the purposes of this thread, just treat her as any other G&T mod.
- There is not going to be a lot of slack with this thread, and there won't be any hesitation to throw out some serious infractions and/or boot people from the thread.
- Not everyone has an encyclopedic knowledge of this stuff, so take things slow and don't make with the whole faux-incredulous "Oh my god they're doing [X]!" shtick. Basically assume people are arguing in good faith.
Also, don't call it gamergate. It makes Nixon mad.
Sterica on
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Which I'm guessing means this stuff has gone beyond threats or info leaks on the internet.
I just wanna say that what see here is the clash of progressive politics against an anti-PC crowd represented heavily by 4chan. The audience is changing, so there is a big fear and resentment from all sides.
There is an inability from the media to create bridges in the culture war. Do they feel like they need to?
BTW, the gaming press is against hatespeach. Who defines what hatespeach consists of?
That's all I can say right now.
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
Jesus.
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
That's interesting. Where did they get the data as far as player demographics are concerned?
>.<
...I have to ask, is anyone really even surprised anymore? It was only a few weeks ago that Hafu - a really excellent Twitch TV broadcaster who mostly does competitive Hearthstone videos - had private, intimate photographs of her leaked out, the aftermath of which has been that she's had to heavily restrict her chat feature & you now cannot go anywhere on Twitch (anywhere without submode chat, anyway) without being reminded of 'Hafu nudes lolz' because the reprehensible fucking invasion of privacy has become a gamer meme.
I'm starting to become half convinced that the games industry is actually secretly controlled by the guys who wrote FATAL & maybe Zak Smith.
The issues surrounding sexism, misogyny & otherwise totally inappropriate representation of / interaction with women in gaming seem more & more to me like a ship that just cannot be righted. Like it only can exist in an upside-down state, much like how the universe can only exist in an expanding state, except with a lot more gratuitous butt-or-boob-centric camera angles. What to try and speak up? Enjoy being DDoS'd and harassed by the gamer lynch mob. What to try and push change forward by developing your own more progressive content? Enjoy being labelled a 'walking simulator' and slowly being pushed out of the major conventions. Want to run your own convention? Enjoy the 200~ member gathering & condescending appraisal from the rest of the industry.
There's a lot said about how the industry needs to 'grow up' and 'get serious'. The thing is, I think it did grow-up; it just grew-up to become a hateful community of egotistical attention-seekers, who have gotten very serious about thinking & expressing that they represent a new pinnacle of human culture (though, in fairness, that latter part is perhaps more due to the libertarian sympathies of Silicon Valley & the general tech sector than strictly gaming).
Just, why now, and why this woman? Is this sorta to the recent leak of celeb pictures?
PSN: BrightWing13 FFX|V:ARR Bright Asuna
Seeing how family and loved ones get attacked once you put your name out there, or in Phil Fish's case all of his private information, it seems like too much of a risk that I don't think I could take.
I want there to be another way where people can be vocal and support these individuals, but seeing what happens when they do is depressing.
I just want to say that I genuinely admire everyone that gets hatemail day-by-day and is able to keep trucking along, and that my heart goes out to those that choose to go elsewhere (and I hope that it works out for them)
Zoe, right? I'm under the impression she visited several places around the web to promote / get feedback on Depression Quest . Among those, 4chan. Seems she got trolled.
Then the ball rolled with Klepek and Navarro saying some things and they received trolling in the form of youtube dislikes to Giant Bomb videos.
And the ball kept rolling ...
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
I don't care about Zoe Quinn. If you search my post history, you'll see I gave Depression Quest a glowing review before the shitstorm landed, and I still stand by that. Regardless of whether Things are true or not, it was a game that personally resonated with me, and I respect her for making it.
What glued me personally to the "scandal" was the fact that it was being censored everywhere. I don't give a shit about people's personal lives, but censorship bothers me, ESPECIALLY when it seems to be politically motivated. I only started paying close attention to The Whole Thing when not only threads, but entire websites were getting taken down for the sin of even talking about the issue. As soon as I noticed the censorship of it on pretty much every gaming site ever, it became difficult for me to empathize with either side. Max Temkin was randomly accused of rape by some woman on facebook he knew in college, and immediately publicly denies it? Totally newsworthy, let's talk about how awful he is. Zoe Quinn, and holy shit, maybe the whole indie-game-scene might be engaging in unethical practices? How dare you even suggest such a thing, get off our site, you're banned. The double-standard just bothers me.
Quinn does not deserve to be harassed and anyone harassing her is an asshole. But there's a fair number of non-assholes who have a legitimate concern about how this was, for a few weeks, forbidden ground that would get you banned from most gaming websites for even mentioning that it might be something worth talking about. I would assume most regular users of the internet are aware of The Streisand Effect, but apparently not. The "story" would have probably blown over in a week if not for the attempt to circle the wagons and censor it from the entire internet, which is inevitably doomed to fail.
Anyway, I'm not looking to start an argument, just my two cents on the whole deal.
It was an ex, releasing personal information in an ugly, public way.
Except that nothing was actually censored by anyone aside from the personal information that nobody ought to have had access to in the first place.
Also, the idea that 'the entire indie game scene', as if it's some monolithic entity, is engaged in a conspiracy to lure-in credulous reviewers with femme fatale developers so they can get high Metacritic ratings for free games is kind of a stretch, and until overwhelming evidence is presented to support it, there's no reason to do anything other than dismiss it as more Internet garbage.
That's Matt Lees. http://jamsponge.tumblr.com/
I need to second this. Friend of mine is an acquaintance of Zoe on a professional level, and this whole thing rankles him to no end. So he's been super vocal about his support. They got bored this afternoon and just flooded his damn Twitter with this bullshit.
The primary victims of this crap have done the sensible thing and disengaged for the moment. The mob is flailing and looking for random targets now.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
These two things are not equal. So anyone except the most fringe side would have to write a condemning story about this storm of internet assholes, and guess what that does: It brings the internet assholes to you. All your social media will be completely taken over, including links to stolen personal info and nudie pics, you get to join the death threat club, your comments/forums will be flooded, people will try to hack you.
If I was part of a games news website, I would think real hard about letting that storm hit me too. It would be a ton of work for staff having to moderate it, you would lose some of your readership over it for sure, and because it includes near automatic personal invasion it would take some real dedication to even hit the 'post story' button. And what's the upside?
Even the Guardian, a top british newspaper, who tried very hard to be nonpartisan when laying out the facts but made the gruesome mistake of having it written by a female games freelance journalist, was pretty obviously distraught by the result. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/01/how-to-attack-a-woman-who-works-in-video-games They wrote a followup article that is real harsh, but it is written by a man so the comments all go on about the first article and Zoe Quinn instead. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/03/gamergate-corruption-games-anita-sarkeesian-zoe-quinn
There is a longstanding rule of internetting: Don't read the comments. In all but a very few bastions, comment sections / forums are places of misogyny, racism, trolling, vitriol, hate speech and abuse. And this whole debacle has made me think how empowering that is for these assholes: From the looks of it most of the internet agrees with them, and only little groups of "leftwing thirdwave feminist cliquey elites" (in this case independent gamewriters and makers, who usually get paid fuck all so they patreon to be able to eat) oppose them. The bulk of the internet must be right. And the fact that very large websites refuse to moderate themselves is a large part of this(Reddit and 4chan being notorious, but youtube is real bad about their comments, and twitter is terribe at reporting abuse, meaning it stays up long and is easier to replace than to file the report). That is why even a little gain like Fark implementing misogyny rules just before this took off are actually big gains.
Like many other people I often get the feeling that issues like homophobia, misogyny and racism will only be truly solvable when enough of the people who's awful opinions are too deeply rooted to be challenged finally die off. I fervently hope this is not the case in the video gaming community, and there are many signs of hope, but I'm not holding my breath.
This isn't something like the demographic divide in politics, with one group growing up in an unsustainable Reagan era & the other growing-up in the burned-out aftermath; for starters, the people doing this are teenagers, young adults & a few sorry species of grown men - it's not like a bunch of geriatrics that'll be gone in 5-10 years. They're here for the long haul.
Even if they weren't, though, it's a problem (or set of problems) that is bigger than the current toxic communities. It's a lack of ability / interest to enforce things like anti-harassment laws on the Internet; it's the grant of entitlement to sexism not only as part of entertainment, but as a form of entertainment in and of itself; it's the buy-in on behalf of the industry that the toxic folks need to be catered to, or at the very least, that gaming communities just need to 'police themselves' - that good 'ol libertarian nonsense that has never worked to create a decent space and will never work. The list goes on.
Until the core problems are dealt with, any given toxic element can come or go and there will be many, many more trailing behind it.
I honestly think a sizable chunk of the hate machine would vanish if that happened. Not all of it and for a number of reasons, but it wouldn't hurt.
This may be absurdly naive though.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
Honestly I imagine a large chunk of those kids learn this from their parents.
- My parents did not really know what I got up to online other than what I told them, albeit I think I can say I never did anything awful.
- If I was engaged in awful, and they discovered this, I would be figuratively crucified. Possibly literally.
So I believe there is a subset of the current hate machine that fits this category, but probably smaller than I'd like.
I've heard whispers and rumours that this particular assault on a woman is really about corruption in games journalism.
Just like, I suppose, Sarkeesian repeatedly getting death threats is really about people being scammed on Kickstarter or something.
I have a lot of trouble believing that sudden internet shitstorms like this are anything other than the putrid raging of misogynists.
I'm not sure how accurate this is, depending on what you want to class as "censorship". This Reddit thread featured almost all of the twenty five thousand posts in it being deleted - the majority of them didn't contain any personal information, and were instead just caught in a blanket deletion.
My impression (which is probably entirely wrong) is that that single thread massively and needlessly encouraged interest in the situation.
Honestly, i think this would almost instantly & magically cure 70-80% of the bullshit. And you could clear out another 20% if people thought there was a credible risk of their employer, friends and/or family members finding out what they were spewing on Twitter or whatever.
The problem is that you can't really do either of those things without a monstrous invasion of user privacy - one that would very likely create more problems than it solves.
Particularly because the research linked in the OP kinda states that around 70% of gamers are adults
Most of these people are adults
I'd also like to say, generally, since it always comes up in these types of threads (and has come up already, and probably will again) is that the deleting of ugly words or posts is not censorship. Censorship is a very specific thing, i.e., the limitation or elimination of public speech by the government. To my knowledge, that hasn't happened here.
You have no right to public speech on sites like Reddit or other privately-run websites. Moderators who remove posts or block accounts are not censoring anything--they are following the rules and restrictions of a private business with the primary goal of generating revenue and not be a soapbox for crazy people. Businesses can limit their customer pool however they like. No shirt, no shoes, no service.
Furthermore, people can and should expect consequences for poor and ugly speech, including counter-speech and being banned or removed from a private forum for being a total twat. That's how free speech works.
I feel terrible for women like Sarkesian as individuals, but historically speaking the first people through the wall on social justice issues have always taken a beating. 'First they ignore you' etc.
I'm less concerned about games 'journalism.' Games journalism isn't anything new really, it's just yellow journalism covering a fairly incestuous industry. There's some good stuff out there, most of it's shit, ultimately who cares?
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Outlaw guns and only outlaws will have them, outlaw internet anonymity and only trolls will have it.
Yup, because I must believe that this is true, and any studies to the contrary must somehow be flawed, to get through my day.
I just can't drink enough in the day to cope with the idea that fully grown adults say the shit i read in open Twitch chat / LoL chat / Twitter all of the time. :P
I'm with Jay here; that's really what "gives" a lot of these geese any power is this wall they can hide behind where they think it's okay to spew such hate. I feel like maybe 9/10th's of the people using any sort of hatespeech would never say something like that someone's face, and with the 1 who does, well, I'd really like to know who those people are so I can avoid the ever-living fuck out of them.
The only thing I'm not sure I agree with (I'm still just learning about all these events) is that aside from some of the vindictive content being released, I don't necessarily think this would have been a unique situation for a woman. If a similar situation occurred with a guy...let's say someone at CliffyB's former company released a file with emails showing he was dating an IGN reporter who happened to review a game of his glowingly...I think a similar shitstorm likely would have occurred. Admittedly we probably wouldn't be seeing Twitter posts of his junk floating about, but I think the stupid doxxing of people that defend them or the harassment that's been happening would have probably still happened. It would just be slightly less vile and toxic.
I'm echoing a sentiment I posted yesterday, but the best thing you can do is to send supportive messages to those under attack.
Engaging is good when it's with individuals interested in honest discussions and maybe changing their minds. Arguing with an internet mob is a waste of your time.
Actually, when you engage these assholes online, they actually win by default. They have nothing to lose, whereas you're wasting your time (legitimizing their position even) when you could be focusing on positive action.