The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

A Brief Comments Thread Related Note

I’ve tried to keep a very laissez faire attitude towards the comments thread on this blog.  It was a stance I took when I proposed GAMR – I felt that the best way to show off the idiocy that was eating at the anti-consumer movement known as GamerGate was to let their comments speak for themselves.

Along the way, though, the comments on this blog took a turn, from being a place where people with divergent opinions could healthily disagree to one where attacks were getting uncomfortably personal.

Today I started deleting comments that have, in my opinion, crossed the line.  This has centered on one inflammatory person, and some posts from people who responded to this person in kind and who, in all honesty, should know better.  One of those posts was, in fact my own.  Know that, definitely in the short term, my tolerance for that kind of bullshit is going to drop to about zero.  And to the nameless, faceless person who caused all this to happen by launching bombs at people from the safety of anonymity, I invite you to go start your own blog if you want to keep posting in the manner you are now, because the stuff you were posting most recently isn’t going to pass muster here anymore.

I still welcome those who have divergent opinions, and I still have several pro-GamerGate voices who post on here who I feel do contribute to the conversation in a way where the tone can still be civil, constructive and interesting.  I’ve in fact invited one such person to do a front page post (we’ll see if he accepts my offer.  I don’t want Zen of Design to become an echo chamber, but I also don’t want the comments thread to be a poo throwing exercise either.

9 Comments

  1. Trevel

    My apologies for line-crossing. then.

    • Damion Schubert

      My post was not meant to wag fingers – many people were baited by this troll and took it, myself included. I just wanted to give an explanation for the shift in tone. So don’t sweat it.

  2. bbz

    Thank you, Damion, for the change. A Person was making your site unreadable. I was about to give up.

  3. Dom

    I think your intervention could be a prelude about moderation, in and out of video game and maybe a plug about the problem of player killing, something that plagued the older MMOs.

    Also, I think it could be a great opportunity to discuss the prerequisites to a conversation. One of the striking points of GG was the lack of interest or basic understanding of journalism and ethics among a movement explicitly “concerned” by those topics. The movement was unable and unwilling to address it own claimed interests. Regardless of the reasons, it made any discussions about ethics in journalism impossible to happen.

    I think this problem is common when dealing with intrinsically anti-intellectual movements. The only real difference is the ratio malice/ignorance.

  4. Vhaegrant

    It’s unfortunate but it does seem inevitable 🙁
    The internet at large doesn’t seem to be the best of places to elicit diplomatic, self-censored exchanges of opinion.

    • Adam Ryland

      The internet is fine for dialogue. People just can’t stand people disagreeing them.

      I don’t care what Damion does. Its his blog, but let’s not lie to ourselves and pretend he, you and probably don’t want just another echo chamber.

      • Damion Schubert

        I would dispute your characterization, and point out that in the decade or so that this blog has been running, I’ve needed to get this aggressive actively one time – this time. I think the internet is enriched when people can have a civil and interesting exchange of ideas, even if they differ, and I’d be bored as shit if everyone here just agreed with me and each other all the time.

      • Vhaegrant

        I might have been leaning on hyperbole a little too much in my statement 😉

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