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

Sarkeesian Effect Duo Reanimates Defeated Corpse of Jack Thompson

Dear GamerGate,

I know that you guys are starting to think about the Holidays, and what Black Friday stunt you can pull.  I know, in particular, game developer outreach is top of mind right now with Operation Rebuild, where you attempt to send nice letters to game developers to let them know that YOU ARE ON THEIR SIDE. And that’s a tough deal for you guys, because in the past you have slutshamed them, brigaded them when they outreachharassed them out of their home, released their hacked financial datafinancially attacked their primary industry journaltried to organize boycotts of their games if they disagree with you,and tried to get them fired if they tried to stop the constant slew of rape and death threats thrown at them on twitter.  And many female devs still feel silenced by the very existence of Gamergate. It’s really no wonder that devs who aren’t too cowardly to hide their names have definitely broken in one direction on the subject.  I guess what I’m saying is, ‘good luck with that’.

I know that it also seems like the world is against you.  It’s your own fault, you know, for… er…. declaring that you were going to take on the world.  Still, it’s a rough place to be.  On your side is the insanely right-wing and hilariously incompetent Breitbart, the insanely right-wing Daily Caller, the insanely woman-hating Return of Kings and the other insanely woman-hating – to the point of falling for idiotic hoaxes – site A Voice For Men. And even they can be critical, as judged by RoK offshoot Reaxxion telling you all the ways you’re screwing up.  I know you can’t always choose your allies.

But Jack Fucking Thompson?  Seriously?

You may remember the two clownshoed idiots putting together the Sarkeesian Effect, a documentary considered a complete and total laughingstock by most observers (Fifteen THOUSAND DOLLARS!) to the degree that even many GamerGate fanatics have distanced themselves from the duo. Yeah, these guys have interviewed Jack Fucking Thompson for their film.  They found him quite reasonable.

GamerGate, trust me when I say that one of the worst ways you can bring devs over to your point of view is to resurrect the defeated corpse of Jack Thompson, and bring him over to your cause.  Jack Thompson is the enemy of games, and the enemy of reasonable discourse about them.

Now, it just so happens that I have recently been taking blog entries from my OLD blog, and importing them into this new one.  And just last week, I got to 2005, which was prime Jack Thompson mania.  Here’s a small sampling:

People really interested in this nutjob should really go through the archives of GamePolitics.com, which has tracked him for years.  Jack Thompson’s early career was no better, being driven by a bizarre obsession with his political opponent, Janet Reno, and leading to his high-profile attacks on 2 Live Crew.  Jack Thompson’s career ended in disgrace.

On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of the Florida Bar other than himself.[7] In July 2008, Thompson was permanently disbarred by the Supreme Court of Florida for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants

So, no.  Jack Thompson was not quite reasonable. He was a nutball.  And he certainly was no champion of those who care about Ethics in — well, anything, really.  But he was a nutball who got the topic of games censorship and violence in video games onto the television screen and into friggin’ Congress.

Those who compare him to Anita miss the point.  Anita has never, to my knowledge, tried to politically or legally, have games censored.  She’s attempted to sway minds with her ideas, her speech and her videos –and sometimes she’s right and sometimes she’s wrong.  That’s how free speech and criticism is supposed to work.  Jack Thompson was a threat to the very idea that games were protected speech under the first amendment.   If Anita ever changes her mind and starts pursuing political and legal action against games, you can bet the game developer community will take back her Ambassador Award, and start heading her way as an angry mob.  Just like we did with Jack.  I’ll personally hand out torches and pitchforks.

Those distancing themselves from the Sarkeesian Effect are right to do so here.  Fighting Jack Thompson was important to those who actually love video games.  Defeating him was a significant victory for people who actually love games.  And game devs are going to look at anyone who tries to bring him back to the arena as someone who does not.

114 Comments

  1. illsubliminal

    This is so good. It’s such a shocking twist, yet at the same time so utterly predictable how tin-eared and devoid of irony these two dopes, and their backers, are.

    And remember, this isn’t a documentary by two outliers who Gamergate can cast aside. It’s two outliers, supported by the money of 406 donors. So what’s that, 408 outliers?

    • Wavinator

      Would not relevance depend on the size? If there are only 408 of 500 then that says something (whatever it says). But if there are 408 out of 15,000, I wonder what that means.

      • illsubliminal

        The point is, it’s not two guys, it’s two guys financialy backed by enough people to fill a theater. Sure, if Gamergate are legion (which I doubt), that’s a small percentage, but it’s in no way cherry-picking.

        Sarkeesian has more than 6,100 backers on Kickstarter, incidentally. What does that say about frick and frack’s 406 backers, I wonder?

        • Wavinator

          If we are to believe theories of framing, it speaks volumes to the success of well packaged messaging, photogenic presentation, the growth of critical theory versus objective argument and a well placed tapping into the rising moral panic that seems to come and go over video games.

          Or were you thinking maybe superior numbers meant superior point of view? Because I can assure you if the unholy likes of Fox News picked up on the efforts of Owen & Aurini (they have names, dehumanization ProTip #1) I’m sure all the rules of framing theory would apply and the production values alone would blow Ms. Sarkeesian’s number of backers out of the water.

          • Damion Schubert

            So for what it’s worth (and I tried to frame it this way in my article), I’ve found that:

            (a) While there are plenty of GamerGaters in the movement who hate Anita/feminists/etc, they are not all GamerGaters. They are, however, pretty indicative of the GamerGaters who hang out on KiA and 8chan.
            (b) Even those guys found the Sarkeesian Effect boys to be idiots.

            I think a better comparison would be to compare these guys’ take (9k? per episode, and not one’s been funded yet?) to the TFYC. The TFYC is also a flawed organization, and no, they are NOT a charity, but they still landed 70K.

            Which means that even most GGers are keeping their distance from this clown show. Which, I’d stress, is good instincts.

      • INH5

        That also assumes that every donor is a GGer. While I’m sure there is considerable overlap between the groups, I highly doubt that every single donor is an active, hashtag tweeting, card-carrying GamerGater.

        Besides, while I’m sure the makers of the documentary have used the hashtag plenty of times in order to promote their work, it really hasn’t been discussed much in the GG boards until now. And even now, most of the reactions seem to be less “Jack Thompson was right all along!” than “look, Anita is too out there even for Jack Thompson!”

        Because it is totally possible to agree with someone about one thing while disagreeing with them about something else.

        • illsubliminal

          A couple of points here:

          — I do wonder how many of those 406 backers have developed an acute case of buyer’s remorse after seeing that video of Gentleman Jack.

          — the folks who are arguing that Anita is “too out there for even Jack Thompson,” are displaying a staggering, comical inability to understand just how out there Jack Thompson was back in the late 1990s through early 200s. I mean, we’re talking about a guy who inserted himself into multiple murder cases, who filed a lawsuit arguing that Sony, Take Two and Rockstar knew or should have known that GTA would incite people to murder. He tried to bring criminal charges against retailers selling GTA IV. He filed suit to bar the release of the game Bully. He announced plans to sue to prevent the release of Manhunt 2 and GTA IV as public nuisances. He filed suit after suit after suit to flat-out ban the release of games, not just prevent their sales to minors.

          By contrast, what has Sarkeesian done? Expressed her views in some videos and speeches? Said some stuff about some games that you disagreed with? Scolded some advertising practices? Maybe made a few misinterpretations along the way?

          Anyone who argues that “look, Anita is too out there even for Jack Thompson!” is actually arguing, “look, I’m too ill-informed and stupid to have a credible opinion on anything.” And there are plenty of GG luminaries (the type of people whose views and observations are retweeted hundreds of times by other Gators) made that very argument you reference.

          • illsubliminal

            I’d love an edit function for the typos, incidentally.

          • Wavinator

            I know well what Jack Thompson has done. Based on the words of Mr. McIntosh and Ms. Sarkeesian, I’m waiting for what they will do. Will they be as sloppy, grandiose and overt as Mr. Thompson? Doubt it because I believe them to be very smart true believers.

            We are to believe
            * “Players are meant to derive a perverse pleasure from desecrating the bodies of unsuspecting virtual female characters. It’s a rush streaming from a carefully concocted mix of sexual arousal connected to the act of controlling and punishing representations of female sexuality” (verified by galvanic skin response and phallometric measurements, I’m oh so sure)

            * children and adults both are “internalizing harmful messages”

            * if you believe you are not, this is proof that you lack self awareness: “Paradoxically and ironically, those who most strongly believe that media is just harmless entertainment are also the ones to uncritically internalize harmful media messages”

            * “toxic masculinity” caused school shootings (so much for depression awareness)

            * “In gaming lingo, ‘fun’ is often code for feeling powerful, and feeling powerful is is code for doing violence to people and living things”

            Now take the tenor of their words and add it to those whom they would likely regard as ideological allies. From other quarters we are told that we live in a “rape culture.” We are told that half of the human race is under sustained assault and culturally reinforced suppression. Even abusive clothing can destroy the scientific aspirations of an entire generation!

            If the tone and tenor is correct, what moral, empathic person can fail to act, even in a small way? If these things are true, how can one sit idly by while real harm is happening?

            If, however, we have real societal problems exist but are not an impending existential conflagration– that is to say, if we have social challenges to solve and reasoned time to considering how best to solve them– then one should wonder greatly why it is that there are those in our midst pulling the fire alarm and hammering home a message of moral panic.

            It’s for this reason that an equivalence between Thompson and Sarkeesian (and I would add McIntosh) is deserved.

          • Consumatopia

            No, sorry, every one of those bullets is at least arguably true.

            Some of them are inarguably true. I have a perverse fascination with crazy people on the Internet (and I pay attention GG, weird, huh?) and I read Elliot Rodger’s manifesto. It’s a hundred plus pages of aggrieved sexual entitlement. “toxic masculinity” doesn’t mean masculinity is itself toxic. That’s not how English grammar works. It means Rodger was under the influence of a particular kind of masculinity that was toxic. Which is absolutely undeniable. It’s so undeniable, that if I were to make a bulleted list of crazy things Wavinator believes, as you did for Sarkeesian/McIntosh, denial of Elliot Rodger’s toxic masculinity would have to be very high on the list.

            “In gaming lingo, ‘fun’ is often code for feeling powerful, and feeling powerful is is code for doing violence to people and living things”

            Are you seriously trying to deny the presence of violent power fantasies in video games? I mean, whether or not you think those fantasies are harmful, you’re going to deny that they exist?

            You seem very incredulous of the idea that media could influence our values. Let me ask you: where do you think our values come from? If our values aren’t influenced by the cultural ideas that we surround ourselves with, then where do they come from? Are we just born with them?

          • Wavinator

            @Consumatopia – Apologies if this is disordered, I couldn’t reply directly to your post.

            Elliot Rodger’s manifesto. By what objective measure do we weigh the words of a madman? Is there a falsifiable Charles Manson cultural influence scale?

            Things are not true simply because you assert them. Nor are you allowed to generalize from a sample of one. If you insist on making the same claim that has been made by critics of plays, novels, comic books, movies, TV shows and now games, you MUST PROVE THEM.

            “Are you seriously trying to deny the presence of violent power fantasies in video games?” Measure it and validate the measurement. The assertion is no more valid than stating that fun is a response to a schedule or rewards, or the pleasure of competency or relief from self defense.

            “You seem very incredulous of the idea that media could influence our values”
            I am very incredulous without fMRI or epigenetic data of the supposed influence of any SPECIFIC claim of the impact of an idea or image on the human mind (eg bikini armor causes misogyny)

            “where do you think our values come from?” A better question is what falsifiable measure will you use to determine the impact of an idea on a person’s values.

          • Consumatopia

            Things are not true simply because you assert them.

            I’m not saying it is, anymore than you said Sarkeesian’s statements were false or difficult to believe just because you listed them incredulously. You misread me.

            I am asserting that they are obviously false to any reasonable person. I didn’t claim to prove that. I’m just leaving that assertion for reasonable people (not you) to verify.

            Elliot Rodger’s manifesto. By what objective measure do we weigh the words of a madman? Is there a falsifiable Charles Manson cultural influence scale?

            You read things by measuring them. You go look Rodger’s manifesto. You find out that he said he was going to kill people because women weren’t giving him the sex that he believed he deserved. If you’re a reasonable person, you’ll realize that this is a toxic kind of masculinity.

            “Nor are you allowed to generalize from a sample of one.”

            You don’t have to generalize. Even if Elliot Rodger is the only example, Sarkeesian’s claim is true. Rodger shot multiple people because of toxic ideas of masculinity.

            “If you insist on making the same claim that has been made by critics of plays, novels, comic books, movies, TV shows and now games, you MUST PROVE THEM.”

            No, actually. One of Thompson’s sins was that he claimed he had scientific evidence on his side when he didn’t. There’s nothing inherently wrong with letting intuition guide your media and ethical choices. You can make claims without proving them–in fact, you have proven very, very few of the claims you have made.

            “Measure it and validate the measurement”

            No. Sarkeesian didn’t claim that “fun” was always a violent power fantasy. She didn’t claim that this was so X% of the time. She didn’t make a quantitive claim. She just said it was “often” true. And any reasonable person reading us (woe be onto them) who knows anything about video games would have to admit that she is correct.

            me: “You seem very incredulous of the idea that media could influence our values”

            “I am very incredulous without fMRI or epigenetic data of the supposed influence of any SPECIFIC claim of the impact of an idea or image on the human mind (eg bikini armor causes misogyny)”

            Okay, that’s scientism, not science. Obviously, every stimulus that the human brain perceives MUST affect the human brain, or you couldn’t perceive it. If the fMRI doesn’t detect an influence, that’s a problem with the fMRI.

            Our minds and culture are too complicated to be completely described by current science. Science, today, cannot settle the question of how violent or sexist images in media changes our behavior. We all have different intuitions about what’s true, and we all have every right to argue why one set of intuitions is more plausible than another. This is the rational way to deal with a world that is too complicated for complete scientific understanding (at least to science as it exists today.) Fuck, dude, read The Black Swan or something.

            To put it another way, if you want the rest of us to act under the assumption that media has no effect on our behavior, you need falsifiable data to make that claim just as much as any else does in making their claim.

            “where do you think our values come from?” A better question is what falsifiable measure will you use to determine the impact of an idea on a person’s values.

            No, actually, that’s a shit question. Sometimes we have to make decisions in life in the absence of falsifiable measures.

            So the better question is still “If our values aren’t influenced by the cultural ideas that we surround ourselves with, then where do they come from?” Are you capable of answering that question?

          • Consumatopia

            “You read things by measuring them.”

            I meant to say you don’t read things by measuring them. Your focus on “measuring” and “falsifying”, in this context, is absurd.

          • Wavinator

            @Consumatopia

            I appreciate the lengthy response and you make good points, some of which I think were mine but which lead to different conclusions. Specifically, the claimant is responsible proving the claim. If the claimant cannot prove the claim, we are free to dismiss the claim.

            If I understand the philosophical underpinnings of Sarkeesian’s theory (and I admit I seriously may be misreading it) its core appears to be based on assertions that depend heavily on consensus. I accept that we cannot make all decisions in life with falsifiable information, and there is a role for intuition.

            However, where we possibly part ways is in that intuition deserves no role in public policy. If I am claiming a social harm, I must demonstrate that harm or at least raise enough significant questions that we act in ways to test for harm. Deployment of neonicotinoids and rapid bee colony collapse, for example, or carcinogens may be examples of the latter.

            For social theories with little demonstrable data, I struggle to see how anything other than social consensus holds sway, and how we are to evaluate two diametrically opposed theories.

          • Wavinator

            @Consumatopia

            Also re: Elliot Rodger’s manifesto.

            Either this example is insignificant, in that sure it’s “toxic masculinity” for one person, or its useful because one can make significant societal generalizations from it.

            If it is significant, in that it “says something about men”, then would it be fair that writings from the Earth Liberation Front or the Unibomber’s Manifesto say something about the Left?

          • Consumatopia

            If someone said “millions have died because of toxic ideas of leftism”, I would assume they were referring to Stalin or Mao, who did indeed have toxic ideas of leftism, and not the entire left.

            “However, where we possibly part ways is in that intuition deserves no role in public policy. If I am claiming a social harm, I must demonstrate that harm or at least raise enough significant questions that we act in ways to test for harm. Deployment of neonicotinoids and rapid bee colony collapse, for example, or carcinogens may be examples of the latter.”

            When it comes to games, I don’t think Sarkeesian has actually proposed legislative or bureaucratic changes. She has asked developers, consumers and critics to change their behavior, and I don’t think the standard of evidence you are asking for is at all necessary to make that request. If her intuitions do not accord with your intuitions, you are free to dismiss her.

            But changing the subject to environmental pollution, I think you’re saying that in the absence of demonstrable harm, we may not alter public policy.

            But you could just as easily make the opposite claim: the Precautionary Principle. You should not interfere with the environment unless you can provide evidence that the intervention is safe.

            I don’t think either of these principles are actually rational if strictly adhered to, but exploring that seems beyond the scope of this thread.

            Ultimately, intuition isn’t avoidable in human reasoning, including that about public policy. We cannot prove any fact about the material world we live in–any reasoning we give in favor of one of our beliefs must depend on other beliefs that we take as assumptions. When beliefs differ, we can engage in discussion to find out exactly which of our assumptions differ. If we’re lucky, we might eventually find evidence that convinces one or the other of us to change assumptions so that consensus is reached. But depending on the assumption in question, that might not happen in a human lifetime. Such is life in our imperfect, post-Tower-of-Babel, pre-Singularity world.

            To take an example, educational curricula are guided by a combination of evidence, intuition, and tradition. When a school board decides how much money they want to put on history, music or art, it’s not really plausible that they could quantify the comparative values of each of those. You might be able to find studies that discover side benefits, like history makes people better at writing or music makes people better at math. But you’re not going to be able to prove that people who know history are better citizens, that music and art make our lives fuller.

          • Wavinator

            “If someone said “millions have died because of toxic ideas of leftism”, I would assume they were referring to Stalin or Mao, who did indeed have toxic ideas of leftism, and not the entire left.”
            Ok fair example, but it moves the point I’m trying to make comfortably into history. Let me use a claim in the spirit of one of Sarkeesian’s infamous tweets:
            “Not a coincidence it’s always leftists committing ecoterrorism. The pattern is connected to ideas of toxic leftism in our culture.”

            Maybe this is true elementally, in that anyone who is committing ecoterrorism has a toxic idea of leftism. But is it useful? Not really, because it obscures the “what should we do” aspect of the problem. For spree killings, it is likely to be far more valuable to address problems like mental illness, conflict resolution, personal crises assistance / counseling, gun control, etc. Even if it’s useful, that usefulness is likely outweighed by the risk of straying into polarizing infighting and moral scolding, much as discussing “toxic feminity” would be with respect to female suicide bombings.

            “I don’t think Sarkeesian has actually proposed legislative or bureaucratic changes.”
            Agreed, despite my concerns.

            “I don’t think the standard of evidence you are asking for is at all necessary to make that request”
            Ok fair enough, I think we just disagree here.

            I actually agree with your point wrt Precautionary Principle, and that’s the point I was trying to make about the phenomenon of bee colony collapse. But in that example it’s important to note that many things like viruses, bacteria and climate change have been ruled less likely. IOW even though neonicitinoids aren’t PROVEN to be causing the alarming drop in bee population, when we rule out other possibilities and correlate the rise of the pesticide’s use we come to the conclusion that it’s the likely suspect. The EU has acted on this basis, which I think is fine.

            But if someone wants to make what appears to be an extraordinary claim, such as effectively asserting that male videogame players are becoming aroused when killing digital women, as Sarkeesian has done, you’ll pardon me if I demand something other than critical theory as evidence.

          • Consumatopia

            Well, ecoterrorists are by definition environmentalists, and female suicide bombers are by definition female. School shooters are not by definition male. Yet in reality almost all of them are. Surely gender has something to do with school shooting (and lots of other violent crime). Have we really not disproven the null hypothesis that males and females are equally likely to be school shooters?

            Of course, we haven’t proven that this statistical connection between gender and school shooting is cultural or anything to do with ideas. But the alternative seems even more offensive and polarizing–that males commit more mass shootings because of biology.

            I want to clarify one thing. When I said “I don’t think the standard of evidence you are asking for is at all necessary to make that request”, I’m not referring to actual content of what Sarkeesian is claiming. I’m saying that it’s perfectly okay to persuade other people by appealing to their intuition rather than by citing statistical evidence.

            Of the Sarkeesian claims you cited, the one about arousal and violence is the one I have least confidence in. Note, though, that she said “Players are meant to derive … “, i.e. she’s talking about the intentions of designers in soliciting reactions from players, more so than the actual reactions from players. I’m not sure that Sarkeesian is right about this claim, but in the absence of brain-scanning intention detection technology, I think it’s fair to look at artistic works and try to guess the intentions behind them, even if we are often wrong.

          • Demon Investor

            @Consumatopia
            Please stay away from using terms used in statistics, as you’ve seemingly no idea how to use statistics. And no without using any statistics taking other socio-economic variables and hidden varibles into account, you’ve proven nothing. Especially in a cases where sex has an influence on how people treat someone (“Teach our boys not to rape!”), the sex becomes partly a proxy variable, measuring the misdeed of idiots the individual suffered.
            And go ahead and ask yourself what might be better for the weak mind of a young child, being told that he’s seen as a suspect, for shit someone else did, or being told that he’s just fine, but that there are people out there who are not fine and who do bad things like…

          • Consumatopia

            “Please stay away from using terms used in statistics, as you’ve seemingly no idea how to use statistics.”

            I have to at least hand it to Wavinator, he or she is far more reasonable than DemonInvestor. Please never tell anyone what words to use, as you are absolutely terrible at reading.

            “And no without using any statistics taking other socio-economic variables and hidden varibles into account, you’ve proven nothing.”

            Actually, no. The null hypothesis is that there is no causal relationship in any direction, or any hidden variables, connecting gender and mass shootings, that it’s just a coincidence, and there is a 50/50 chance of the next mass shooting being perpetrated by a female. You are the one misusing statistical terms.

          • Demon Investor

            @Consumatopia
            Okay go ahead and hand me the statistics you’ve done. Oh right you didn’t do any actual research…
            My bad, sorry for trying to engage the great statistics in your head with an actual critique, why just comparing genders is nonsensical.

            Keep on posting shit, at least it’s a great way to point people towards what’s wrong with a lot of scoial sciences at the moment.

          • Demon Investor

            Just as another note, i hope your great statistics made sure to check genders and not sexes, as it would otherwise not fit the whole narrative of it being “masuclinity”.

            But i already know the answer for that question. No ones following the logical consequence of multiple genders, in that behaviour no longer exists in a binary world.

          • Consumatopia

            DemonInvestor, you are either completely misunderstanding what I said, or you are utterly deluded.

            I did not make a causal claim. I said:

            “Have we really not disproven the null hypothesis that males and females are equally likely to be school shooters?”

            Do your really think that the next school shooter is equally likely to be female as male? If not, your entire argument is with somebody in your head. Which is usually the case in any interaction I have with you.

          • Consumatopia

            “Okay go ahead and hand me the statistics you’ve done.”

            Here’s your homework, DemonInvestor:

            Look up how many mass shootings there have been. Look up how often the shooter is female. Use the binomial distribution to compute the probability of this happening if the null hypothesis (shooters equally likely to be male or female) were true.

          • Demon Investor

            @Consumatopia
            1. Gender is not equal to sex.
            2. Behaving in a certain way, while being of a certain sex, doesn’t make that behaviour the result of following a certain role model, as individuals stray from such.
            3. You spoke about toxic masculinity, which is so to say part of the gender identity, when we’re discussing something someone said in a gender theory perspective.
            4. You address nothing of the above, while using terms, which are most often used in a scientific enviroment.

            So you’re using a language based in science or better said actual research, while just having a believe, as you provide no actual research.

            And no i don’t believe that the probality for the sex of the next shooter is equally distributed. Even though speaking genders i’ve simply no clue.
            And while that is in agreement with the hypothesis you made, it’s not saying anything about the point you wanted to make, about it being a result of toxic masculinity. And it’s not even saying anything about sex being a big influence at all, as long as you don’t do any actual research.

          • Consumatopia

            “And no i don’t believe that the probality for the sex of the next shooter is equally distributed. ”

            Then we are in agreement about the specific null hypothesis I listed. Your charge that I misused statistical terms was bogus. Without a very serious apology on your part for that false accusation, I am not inclined to sort out the rest of your incoherent points.

            The only use I made of those statistics was to claim this “Surely gender has something to do with school shooting”. So if there are “other socio-economic variables and hidden varibles”, then my (very trivial) statistical claim is true.

            I did not claim that statistics verify Sarkeesian’s claims, because Sarkeesian did not make any quantitative claim. I explained above why non-quantitative claims are still legitimate, meaningful claims. You do not seem to have grasped my argument on that front, as none of the rest of what you say is actually a meaningful response to anything I said.

          • Demon Investor

            @Consumatopia
            Factual research are different things. One is a good proof the other is just a feeling. And feelings are not enough for accepting hypothesises.

            You’re again claiming:
            – Sex = Gender; When you tell me i should look at their sex.
            – We can ignore omitted variables; Which we can’t, as there could be different reasons for why it looks as if only “the” male gender – which is nonsensical in a non-binary system – was behaving that way.
            – It would be a proof for toxic masculinity to find gender/sex as one influence factor for those shootings, while we can easily find an explanation in it being a reaction toward special socio-economic variables only a male lives through and less of the result of a male rolemodel, which they want to follow, or which is perpetuated by anyone specific. Or how it could simply stem from a non-toxic part of masculinity in the same sense that male suicidea look different than female, not because of a mental illness, but because of less fear for pain or such – which can be quite positive in different situationes.

            You’re trying to handwave such away, when one simply cannot handwave that away. And the only apology you might get from me, is not asking you for the framework you used for hypothesis – which i had to guess. And where you happily showed me that i was right in guessing that you tried to make a point about genders and not sexes.

          • Consumatopia

            “You’re again claiming:”

            I claimed absolutely none of those things. There’s no point even responding to any of those misreadings, as I know you’ll just misread me again.

            “And the only apology you might get from me, is not asking you for the framework you used for hypothesis – which i had to guess.”

            Instead of guessing, you could have just read when I said: “Surely gender has something to do with school shooting (and lots of other violent crime). Have we really not disproven the null hypothesis that males and females are equally likely to be school shooters?”

            PS: no, that quote does not assume gender=sex.

          • Consumatopia

            Okay, I gotta point this out:

            “When you tell me i should look at their sex.”

            I never told anyone to look at anyone’s sex. (Note: male/female refer to both gender and sex.) Every single one of your points seems to be addressed to an imaginary person. And you even seem to be losing your argument with that imaginary person. We’re done. Just go on arguing with that imaginary person without me.

          • Demon Investor

            Okay you’re either not aware of the difference between sex (biological gender) and gender (meaning socially formed gender), or you’re not aware what you’re writting yourself.

            “Look up how many mass shootings there have been. Look up how often the shooter is female. ” A direct quote from you.
            So let me interpret that:
            ‘Look at the statistics given out by police and look at the sex they state there. [Then come back to me telling me something about the gender influence.]’.

            And just to repeat it our feelings are not enough for accepting hypotheses or not.

          • Consumatopia

            “So let me interpret that:”

            No. That interpretation is YOURS. You own it. It’s your fault.

            If you want to believe that there is a significant discrepancy between gender and sex ratios of mass shooters (because there are many trans mass shooters?), I hope that works out for you. I will, however, link to your posts here if you ever reply to me again anywhere on the Internet. So that others understand that it’s not worth any time talking to you. And for the lulz.

            “And just to repeat it our feelings are not enough for accepting hypotheses or not.”

            Non-quantitative claims can be defended with non-quantitative arguments. You decide for yourself whether the argument is good enough to convince you of its claim. If you don’t agree, get back to me after you read this.

          • Damion Schubert

            Jesus, this subthread. Also, sorry that my blog’s reply systems sucks. Look, I agree with Anita. There is something seriously amiss and out of balance with mass shootings. Of note:

            * The grand majority (>98% since 1982) of them are male.

            http://www.npr.org/blogs/theprotojournalist/2013/09/24/225689775/why-are-most-rampage-shooters-men

            * America has WAY more of them than any other country. Like, it’s not even close.
            * Many sociologists have noted that many have had extreme ideas, frequently ideas associated with extreme gender stances (i.e. MRA stances – think Elliot Rodgers), or extreme political/religious stances (think McVeigh and Fort Hood)
            * All of this is happening against a backdrop of otherwise massively DECREASING day-to-day violence (meaning, we’re getting overall less crime, but more mass murdering wingnuts)

            The idea that ‘toxic Masculinity’ might be the cause for this is one hypothesis, and is not saying that ‘men are bad’. It’s saying ‘a tiny, TINY percentage of men seem to go bad, and they seem to go bad in a way that involves hating women and loving guns as the solution’. Simply put, some men run off the tracks and the problem merits investigation. On the flip side of the fence, no one would say that ‘post-partum depression’ is somehow offlimits to discuss because it affects women by and large.

            What causes it? Who knows? The idea that it happens more in America than in other places strongly suggests that there’s some sort of cultural explanation for the phenomenon. Is it games? Likely not, since the most violent games have strong worldwide audiences (as do hollywood movies). Is it our television? Is it our politics, which are far more right-wing than most countries?
            We just don’t know yet.

            But we do know that something is wrong. And that something is manifesting itself in a problem that simply does not exist in other countries, and that is that we have way more mass murders, and the guys doing them are overwhelmingly male, to a degree that can in no way be considered statistically insignificant.

          • Demon Investor

            @Damion
            You make good points. And i agree with almost all of them.
            Though i still think it’s detrimental to try to center ones argument of this shootings on their gender or gender role models, when other influences might be more important (meaning even though it’s quite male sepcific, the gender seems to be not the biggest influence, as we’d otherwise had much more shootings).
            In the same manner it’s often less about race/ethnicity when we look at crimes mostly commited by a certain race/ethnicity but more because of certain perspectives and socio-economic influences.

            @Consumatopia
            I’m calling you out on your methodology. Improve on your methodology and i won’t complain about your arguments.
            It’s really that simple.
            Deriving qualitative arguments by quantitative data, which doesn’t fit the overall framework, is simply not a viable methodology. In the same manner ignoring the differentiation between gender and sex cannot work when you try to make a qualitative argument within a framework where that differentiation is of most importance.

          • A person

            If women do something bad in higher numbers is it “toxic femininity”?

            The whole idea is stupid.

            Women get plastic surgery more often than men. Toxic femininity? Women drown their young kids more often than men. (I have no idea if this is true but let’s pretend for sake of argument.) Toxic femininity?

            Observing that one sex / gender does something bad and ascribing the cause of that to their sex / gender has no rational basis, unless you are making a purely semantic argument.

            When black people commit crimes (at higher rates than white people in the US, or at least are arrested at higher rates) is that “toxic blackness”?

            If you hunt around you can find a million differences between genders / races / etc with regards to crime, education or whatever else.

            Women don’t enter STEM fields as much as men – damn you toxic femininity!

            The idea that there’s a form of masculinity that is toxic is pure pop psychology.

          • A person

            It’s also interesting to note that in the US we vilify masculinity and also have male mass shooters – instead of blaming masculinity you could just as easily blame the vilification of masculinity.

            This is basically evo-psych bullshit – theories that sound plausible but have no actual evidence behind them. Maybe there’s something in the water that interacts chemically with testosterone. That’s no more or less plausible.

          • Consumatopia

            “I’m calling you out on your methodology. Improve on your methodology and i won’t complain about your arguments.”

            You called me out, but unfortunately you were wrong, as you admitted above.

            “It’s really that simple.
            Deriving qualitative arguments by quantitative data, which doesn’t fit the overall framework, is simply not a viable methodology.”

            Good thing I didn’t do that.

            “In the same manner ignoring the differentiation between gender and sex cannot work when you try to make a qualitative argument within a framework where that differentiation is of most importance.”

            “framework” is just you throwing words around, but, no, that difference is not important to anything I said in this thread.

            Sorry, I know you really want your criticisms of me to make sense. I would kind of prefer that too. But they do not.

          • Consumatopia

            I guess this subthread might be slightly less terrible if I ignore DI’s repeated misreadings and make a couple of substantial points:

            * Speaking as a cis het dude, I have definitely felt far more pressure to conform to masculine ideals (sometimes even anti-social masculine ideals) than I have to suppress masculine traits. This is why I never take “War on Boys” arguments seriously–I’ve always gotten more crap from male peers than I have from female authority figures, and given the rise in attention to bullying that still seems to be true in the younger generation.

            * I think Charlie Brooker on mass shootings made sense http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4 One could make a reasonable (but not unanswerable) argument that Brooker’s points imply that we shouldn’t connect toxic ideas of masculinity to mass shootings even if the connection is real because it only serves to legitimize the shooter’s deadly narrative. That argument becomes much weaker when the crime crosses the line from spree killing to hate crime, e.g. Anders Breivik or Elliot Rodger.

          • Demon Investor

            @Consumatopia

            You might want to reread some of your posts, at least in one you draw from me pointing out that the distribution of sexes is non equal that i’m agreeing with your claim about gender distribution, which is wrong.

            And i point out to you a last time, no research i’ve found so far has really looked into the gender of the criminals. Everytime it was a forgeone conclusion that their sex was the same as their gender. In the same way it’s seemingly a foregone conclusion for you that sex (as i’m again quite certain you’ve not data on their gender) is not a (bad) proxy (so to say confounding) variable for something only affecting males, which is not a masculinity ideal or in their gender.

            I’ll apologize for my tone and for misreading/interpreting your post about the homework. Yes you didn’t specify if you meant gender or sex, given though how easy it is to get gender data on death people i made an assumption, is pretty normal to make.

          • Consumatopia

            “You might want to reread some of your posts, at least in one you draw from me pointing out that the distribution of sexes is non equal that i’m agreeing with your claim about gender distribution”

            Please stop referring to my posts, because every time you do so you misrepresent them.

            I’m saying, and said, that you’ve admitted that your original accusation that I misused “null hypothesis” was wrong, and you did. You need to reread both my posts and your own. You didn’t bring up this gender/sex nonsense until later, “Just as another note…”.

            “Yes you didn’t specify if you meant gender or sex”

            I stand corrected! You actually said something correct about a post of mine! Amazing!

            I doubt very much that there is a significant discrepancy between gender and sex ratios of mass shooters. If you think there is, I urge you to investigate this bizarre hypothesis of yours. Seriously, if that’s true–if the gender balance of mass shooters is actually equal once you account for 48% of mass shooters being male-to-female trans, which nobody noticed until you came along–though it seems like exactly the sort of thing the media wouldn’t be able to ignore–then you could build a journalistic and/or academic career on that alone. You could sell so many books. You could finally reveal the SJW conspiracy that keeps this a secret! But until that day, we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that point, because I’m done talking about it.

          • Damion Schubert

            The idea that America somehow vilifies masculinity is ludicrous to the extreme.
            We have way more machismo going on here than many places in the world

            You have somehow convinced yourself that feminists are more influential here than they really are.

      • INH5

        Plus, there’s the fact that the documentary isn’t actually about GamerGate, and the subject doesn’t seem to have come up in the interview segments that we saw. We have no idea what Jack Thompson’s views on this subject are, or if he’s aware of this controversy at all. So how is this supposed to be connected, exactly?

        • illsubliminal

          Isn’t actually about GamerGate? Mr. Aurini seems to differ in his tweets, which all carry the hashtag.

          https://twitter.com/Aurini/status/534791799970467841

          https://twitter.com/Aurini/status/534784132702687233

          https://twitter.com/Aurini/status/534789080987738112

          • INH5

            Yep, he’s using the hashtag to promote his work by reaching out to the audience of the people who use it. He’s hardly the only person to do that. But the content of the video itself isn’t directly related at all.

            The point I’m trying to make is that it is completely dishonest to say, as Chris Kluwe and many others have said, that this means that Jack Thompson has endorsed GamerGate or allied with GamerGate or anything like that.

          • Hepi

            This is GG, the Church of Scientology of the video game world.

            So most likely they will both enthusiastically embrace Jack Thompson while simultaneously accusing other people of accusing them of enthusiastically embracing Jack Thompson to discredit them.

          • John Henderson

            Is @farttocontinue part of #gamergate ? https://storify.com/a_man_in_black/gamergate-supports-jack-thompson

          • INH5

            All @farttocontinue said was “wow, even Jack Thompson thinks Anita Sarkeesian is out there.”

            As did pretty much everyone else in the storify. @a_man_in_black is being totally disingenuous with his summaries, like he usually is.

            You people do realize that it is entirely possible to agree with someone about one thing while disagreeing with them about other topics, right?

            Because I’m get really tired of this guilt by association stuff.

          • John Henderson

            “All @farttocontinue said was “wow, even Jack Thompson thinks Anita Sarkeesian is out there.””

            That is true. It’s also a statement worthy of ridicule. Why should anyone who actually wants to play video games without fear of governmental intrusion care what Jack Thompson thinks about anyone? Why would anyone who knows who Jack Thompson is expect him to be anything but totally self-serving?

            Disingenuousness is endemic to Twitter, but those tweets are worth pointing out. It’s utterly ridiculous that JT is being cited by anyone in anything but an utterly negative light, and I mean ridiculous in the sense that they served to be ridiculed.

            So, is @farttocontinue part of GG? If so, ha ha, what a rube.

          • INH5

            “It’s utterly ridiculous that JT is being cited by anyone in anything but an utterly negative light, and I mean ridiculous in the sense that they served to be ridiculed.”

            So how do you feel about all the mainstream gaming publications who said pretty much the same thing when Jack Thompson criticized Cooper Lawrence for not doing enough research after the Fox News “Sex Box” debacle?

            For example: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/01/29/jack_thompson_defends_mass_effect_sex_scene/1

          • John Henderson

            I feel that Jack Thompson is ultimately a self-serving loon whose commentary is not worth citing. If it appears in any publication, its only remarkable point is to say, “hey look this evil motherfucker decided to talk about games, again.”

            Also, if you recall completely, JT ended up suing Kotaku and its parent company because its fans said mean things about him in article comments. Brian Crescente followed that with an interview that isn’t online anymore, in which he asked about a game with sex in it that he hadn’t decided to make political and legal hay over, that being Mass Effect.

            In conclusion, JT is a litigious SOB and no one should care what he thinks or says about video games, past or present.

            http://www.joystiq.com/2007/04/26/thompson-sues-kotaku-owner-over-comments/

        • illsubliminal

          From their Patreon page:

          The goal of this film will be three-fold:
          1. To introduce #GamerGate to a wider audience of non-gamers.
          2. To give a voice to those who have been victimized by the Social Justice “moral authority”.
          3. To fully expose the depths of this corruption.

          So yes, the documentary is actually about GamerGate.

          I’ll grant that Jack didn’t “endorse” GG here. However, he was sought out and interviewed for a documentary whose literally number one goal is to “introduce #GamerGate to a wider audience of non-gamers.”

          • INH5

            I stand corrected. Still, the Patreon opened on August 23 back when GamerGate was just “the Zoe Quinn controversy”, and given how movie pre-production works they must have started planning this before the whole thing started. So I suspect this is just a marketing ploy. Or maybe they’ve actually changed some of their plans for the film in response to the controversy. I haven’t researched the movie further, and I don’t plan to, so I can’t say.

            This still doesn’t change the fact that the interview, or at least the parts that were shown in the trailer, wasn’t about GG and should not be taken to mean that Jack Thompson is now an ally of GG or anything like that.

  2. Wavinator

    Ha! Jack Thompson! The nuclear option. I did laugh at that.

    I posted a serious question in your last thread but maybe it’s ok to TL;DR it here re: @radicalbytes and @femfreq, that is: Doesn’t anyone who believes that games create moral harm have a duty to oppose that harm, be it through activism or even legislation? That clip you linked seemed to suggest so wrt advertising.

    Okay, and because I’m an anal retentive programmer type & can’t resist, regarding the innumerable sins of GamerGate:

    * slutshamed – Without dipping into those people’s messy personal lives, I thought slut shaming had to do with a woman’s body image, dress and so forth, not gruesome allegations of gaslighting, adultery and emotional abuse.

    * brigaded – Shame on people for being rude to you (seriously). But sum up your posts of late. Are you really a neutral voice? GamerGhazi proudly lists you in their camp if I read that link you supplied correctly, and I do understand the fear (real or imagined) of divide, subvert and conquer methodology. That’s all to say maybe you were not the right voice.

    * released their hacked financial data – Wasn’t this already public information? http://gamesnosh.com/fez-investors-outed-judges-2011-igf-award/
    Maybe I’m wrong and it’s a Twitter TOS violation, but I see a highly questionable pattern of banning in the wake of WAM’s pilot program. I see claims from the banned of being required to atone for violations without being apprised of what those violations were. If true, would you find that odd?

    * financially attacked their primary industry journal – Absolutely no apologies there wrt Alexander, but then I should thank her for galvanizing me. Actually a Christmas card to her would be apropos.

    * tried to organize boycotts of their games if they disagree with you – Didn’t the writer call some of their customers terrorists?

    * ggautoblocker firing attempt – Reminds me of the #NotYourShield firing success. Too much ends justifying means going on.

    * And many female devs still feel silenced by the very existence of Gamergate – I saw a Blizzard employee floating the idea of using the ggautoblock as a future employment filter (mirroring talk in GameJournoPros of blacklisting a games reporter I guess). Silencing and the impulse to silence appears to be rampant.

    * devs who aren’t too cowardly to hide their names – And what, exactly, would they have to fear? I will give you that aside from a few articles in Guardian Liberty Voice and Forbes, the anti-GG side has been admirably successful in controlling the narrative. Maybe that’s because the pro-GG side doesn’t have as many well connected intersectional/comms majors, or maybe because the facile cry of alarm at harassment easily obliterates nuance in this era of the 24-hour news cycle.
    Whatever it might be, I like MLK’s quote here: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Justice tends not to look like dehumanizing the other side.

    * broken in one direction on the subject – My good man, have you never played a game where you were outnumbered a thousand to one? Without auto-aim or all that other handicapping rot? We’re GAMERS, we’re used to impossible odds! 😀

    Seriously, though, as long as the conflation of GamerGate == Harassment holds, those numbers mean nothing. Hell, I and most I’ve interacted with are anti-GG if it means harassment, doxxing and death threats.

    You said that Ms. Sarkeesian is gone if she bends toward censoring. I don’t think so. I think the bend is quite gentle, and is already happening. Insert frog and pot analogy here.

    • BadHat

      Mind elaborating on that last point?

    • Dahakha

      “Doesn’t anyone who believes that games create moral harm have a duty to oppose that harm, be it through activism or even legislation?”

      Yes they do, only…Anita does not believe that games create moral harm. She believes that there are elements in games that are harmful, and she is opposing *that* harm, with her work – which is a form of activism. Good try, though.

      “Didn’t the writer call some of their customers terrorists?”

      If the shoe fits…
      (Yes I am saying that GG is/was a terrorist movement. It’s pretty hard to deny, given that at least two people have been terrorised to the point of being driven from their homes by GG.)

      • Wavinator

        “Anita does not believe that games create moral harm.” Then we will have to agree to disagree wrt my read versus yours. I read advocacy that games are proximal causes of misogyny, marginalization, oppression (wrt comments on sexism & “patriarchy”) and sexualization of violence (cf Tropes vs. Women [“Players are meant to derive a perverse pleasure from desecrating the bodies of unsuspecting virtual female characters. It’s a rush streaming from a carefully concocted mix of sexual arousal connected to the act of controlling and punishing representations of female sexuality”]). We are then to accept that we “uncritically internalize” these causes, which are contributing factors for social ills.

        So “nice try” response (???) aside, you actually prove my point. I may not have expressed it well, but my goal was to try to adopt the mindset of those who believe what she believes and follow through to its logical end.

        “Yes I am saying that GG is/was a terrorist movement.”

        Well, then, we arrive at an impasse. The bald-faced assertion that GamerGate is a terrorist movement is laughable, but let’s tackle it anyway. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

        If GG is a terrorist movement, then what is to made of social justice advocates who have enthusiastically backed calls for genocide and violence? (using their teeth to make Wii motes, deat camps, etc. etc. it goes on and on, for ex http://i.imgur.com/BbFrNwS.png)

        Of swatting and death threats against GG supporters?

        Of suggestions of blacklisting and economic starvation? Of getting real people to lose their jobs?

        What is to be made of mass silencing of dissent?

        Here’s a radical idea: How about roundly condemning bad behavior on all sides and eschewing dehumanization? Or we can play “who has the most blood on their hands” or some other oppression scoring game.

        • Dahakha

          Alright. I’ll bite. We’ll see if you are actually open to learning and understanding, or just sealioning.

          ” I read advocacy that games are proximal causes of misogyny, marginalization, oppression [blah blah etc]”
          Games are causes of misogyny etc only in that they are a part of our society, mass media, that contains certain harmful…let’s call them ‘tropes’…in the same way that movies, or music videos, or tv shows, or advertising are causes of misogyny etc. The misogyny etc is not in games, or movies, or tv, but in certain aspects of those media. Those aspects are what Anita is calling attention to, and advocating the reduction or end of. It’s like a person with cancer. You don’t say that they are cancer; you say they have cancer. It is a part of them, but it does not define them, and it is not the whole.

          “We are then to accept that we “uncritically internalize” these causes, which are contributing factors for social ills.”

          We internalise these harmful ideas because they are ubiquitous in our society. They are everywhere – in movies, on tv, in advertising of all sorts, from the very early years of our lives onwards. They are normalised. Those ideas occurring in our games is simply another instance of the normalisation; it reinforces the status quo. It takes deliberate examination and critical thinking to identify that they exist and that they are harmful to people in certain demographics. Every example that Anita brings up in her Tropes Vs Women series is an instance of how deeply ingrained those ideas are into the medium, just like every example she uses in her other pop culture critiques are instances of how deeply ingrained those ideas are into the tv, or movie, or advertising media.

          I know that you are trying oh-so-transparently for that ‘gotcha’ moment of getting those who share Anita’s beliefs to claim that they want to censor games (or movies, tv, whatever) but that is just not going to happen, because you fundamentally don’t understand what the problem is – and from what I’ve seen, you (and your GerbilGroan friends) simply don’t want to.

          “If GG is a terrorist movement, then what [blah blah etc]”

          Despite what GimpGown fervently believes, there is no organised opposition to it. There is only GrumpGoon, and the rest of the world. There is no group, or representatives of a group, that has called for anything except for GreatGlob to go away. Of course there are idiots who do stupidly harmful things – you really expect GumpGas to adopt ALL the lunatics in the world?

          I’m only dignifying the death threats and alleged swatting as valid here, because those others truly are laughable. Seriously, blacklisting and economic starvation? Mass silencing of dissent (which isn’t even happening)? THAT’s what you want to call terrorism when people are being driven from their homes, bomb and shooting threats are made at public events?

          How about this for a radical idea: open your fucking eyes. See what you have become. Stop aligning yourself with actual terrorists, neo-nazis, white supremacists, and MRAs and come back to the real world.

          • A person

            @Dahakha

            Among anti-GG there is at least one actual Nazi and one guy who has been going on a tear about how we need a second, less Jewy holocaust.

            We also have people like John Henderson laughing at women when they report threatening behavior, and our own beloved Damion using Twitter to harass women repeatedly after they’ve asked him to leave them alone.

            Open your own fucking eyes champ.

          • InnerPartisan

            @A person:
            “Among anti-GG there is at least one actual Nazi ”

            No, there isn’t, and the fact that you’re calling him a Nazi just shows what a bunch of fucking hypocrites you people are.
            Anyway, GamerGhazi is absolutely chock-full of Neoreactionaries and other literal fascists. It doesn’t even *begin* to compare.

        • Wavinator

          @Dahakha
          “open your fucking eyes”
          “blah blah etc”
          “GimpGown”
          “GerbilGroan”
          “GrumpGoon”
          ” know that you are trying oh-so-transparently for that ‘gotcha’ moment”
          “sealioning”

          A fruitful discussion requires assuming good faith on both sides, but, sadly, given the unwarranted characterization you’ve employed we likely have nothing to discuss. It’s not a matter of two minds with opposing opinions that would benefit from open discussion and who could possibly agree to disagree.

          No. Notice your tone and disposition. Are you correcting me as would a teacher a student, or speaking with a self-aware individual who could possible differ in thinking, but who might benefit from altering their world view based on new information?

          “open your fucking eyes”? I think I have, and it is this annointed, authoritarian mindset that demonizes, dissociates and disparages which has for the first time made a lifelong Democratic voter question those he would have blithely considered allies.

          “terrorists” – Proof?

          “neo-nazis, white supremacists” – Funny, I’ve picked through logs, read KotakuInAction, been on Twitter for months, wandered 8chan a few times (crude place) and I don’t see these guys. If true, I highly doubt its representative.

          “MRAs” – Men’s Rights Advocates? I see a few, those advocating for fairness in courts & actively pushing back against radical feminism, and yes even those who appear to be outright misogynists. I don’t follow them AFAIK, but they likely more than balance out the #killallmen crowd.

          You have written nothing that I do not already understand about Ms. Sarkeesian and Mr. McIntosh’s views. Their theories hold little merit without proof, and you and they have made nothing but assertions. You MAY be correct, but it is intellectually dishonest in the extreme to assume correctness without falsifiability.

          I remain mystified as to why this is threatening. Is codified condescension and resentment more alluring than truth? Is the truth, once found, unassailable?

          If this is to you “sealioning” then I probably have my answer.

          • John Henderson

            You don’t have room to talk about “tone” if you support Gamergate in any way, shape or form. Argue points that matter, don’t nitpick and don’t be a busybody. Or in this context, a sealion.

          • Wavinator

            @John Henderson
            Oh please, spare me the sanctimonious self righteousness. Yes, actually, I do have room and right to talk about tone, and I will, thank you, if for no other reason than to remind the supposed moral beacons who believe they are on the right side of history in this discussion of how a moral beacon should behave.

            Now, did you have a relevant point to raise?

          • John Henderson

            Absolutely no one is a moral beacon. Reminders are one thing, but spitballing is another. The goal should be to improve understanding and share perspective. Tone is secondary to that.

            My point is that yes, you are sealioning. If all you have to harp on is tone, you have nothing to say and are creating noise. Stop that.

          • Wavinator

            @John Henderson
            The very concept of “sealioning” is the latest intellectually dishonest tactic invented by those too timorous to hold up their point of view. It’s censorious and embarrassing.

            #GamerGate members are consistently slandered for abusive behavior and harassment (without proof). I’m here on a board where most people don’t agree with me, making points and learning from the other side.

            If you don’t have anything to contribute, why not leave it to someone else?

          • A person

            At this point it’s safe to ignore anyone who uses the term “sealioning.”

            The reason the comments section exists is for people to leave comments. There’s nothing nefarious about that, it’s what the system is designed for.

            To accuse someone of “sealioning” for posting comments in an open comments section is beyond stupid.

            I love that this guy is saying “argue points that matter” when everything he posts is one irrelevant derail after the next.

            Abuse any more women online lately John Henderson? What’s the funny animal term for someone who does that?

          • Consumatopia

            Thank you for crystalizing exactly what’s wrong with sealioning.

            “A fruitful discussion requires assuming good faith on both sides, but, sadly, given the unwarranted characterization you’ve employed we likely have nothing to discuss. It’s not a matter of two minds with opposing opinions that would benefit from open discussion and who could possibly agree to disagree.”

            Nobody has the right to demand that other people assume that they’re acting in good faith.

            “No. Notice your tone and disposition. Are you correcting me as would a teacher a student, or speaking with a self-aware individual who could possible differ in thinking, but who might benefit from altering their world view based on new information?”

            Nobody has the right to demand other people assume they would benefit from discussion with them.

            Look, the reality is that if you’re in GG, and you aren’t just acting in bad faith, then you could benefit from a lot of education. Imparting that education to you is a thankless task. So any discussion you have with someone who opposes GG, you should consider a favor that they are granting to you. You do not own our time.

          • Wavinator

            @Consumatopia
            Apply everything you said to yourself. If you don’t assume good faith, why have the discussion other than to be right?

            Notice how I interacted with you. I attempted to clarify, learn from the other side, concede points, agree to disagree. That’s civility.

            If you somehow believe you have nothing to learn, that you are engaged in a thankless, onerous task, the white man’s burden of the digital age as it were, then don’t bother replying.

          • A person

            @consumerdopia

            Posting a comment in a section specifically meant for posting comments is not “sealioning.” You’re embarrassing yourself.

            @Wavinator
            “If this is to you “sealioning” then I probably have my answer.”

            They consider “sealioning” to be presenting an argument they aren’t intelligent enough to respond to.

          • John Henderson

            Sealioning is when you try to raise arguments tu quoque, to the point where everyone might as well treat you like a bleating dumb animal who somehow gained command of language and has no concept of boundaries.

            Damion’s the one trying to be reasonable, /on his own blog/. And rando shithead sealions are trying furiously to nail themselves to crosses over it.

            Gaming culture is not going to be benefited by Gamergate except as a reminder for how shitty people can be in the face of pointed criticism they can’t handle.

          • A person

            Damion is the one sealioning women on Twitter.

            Try again champ.

          • Consumatopia

            “Notice how I interacted with you. I attempted to clarify, learn from the other side, concede points, agree to disagree. That’s civility.”

            Yeah, actually, you did deal fairly reasonably with me above. It was pleasantly surprising.

            But you still don’t have the right to make the demands that you did of Dahaka. It’s up to Dahaka to decide whether he/she has anything to learn from you.

            “If you somehow believe you have nothing to learn, that you are engaged in a thankless, onerous task, the white man’s burden of the digital age as it were, then don’t bother replying.”

            Please understand that the vast majority of the time someone tunes GG out–what GG calls “censorship” or “blacklisting”–this is exactly what’s going on. People are tired of refuting the same mistakes.

          • Dahakha

            @Wavinator
            Why, exactly, should I be expected to assume that you are arguing in good faith, when countless others like you, on countless other forums and comment threads, have shown their lack of good faith when using the same tired old arguments and tactics?

            Your very support and identification with GG is itself an indication of, at the very least, your total lack of good judgement. Your refusal to see that remaining in a group that is synonymous with terror, hate, harrassment, all kinds of bigotry, and seeking to corrupt games media – to the point where some of the worst extremists in the world flocked to join the movement – reflects poorly on your character, is a very good reason to assume that you are arguing in bad faith.

            The first thing that I addressed in my initial reply to you was a leading question, meant to imply that if we follow the “logic” to it’s conclusion, we would find that Anita is in fact well on the road to being the next Jack Thompson, happily swinging a banhammer on all kinds of media for no good reason. If that is not an argument in bad faith, what is it? You’re trying to get us to concede that Anita (and by extension, those of us who support her critiques) is on the censorship warpath. That she wants to, or will want to, ban games from being made or sold. The thing that makes it a bad faith argument, though, is the fact that you used a factually incorrect statement as a proposition (i.e. that Anita thinks that games create moral harm). I explained why in my reply to that question. You chose to dismiss that and continued to proceed along your thought experiment of “adopting the mindset of Anita and her followers” using your false initial premise.

            On to the tone argument. It is a truth that I have come to experience myself, that I have seen feminist activists write about, that when you make any argument or critique or assertion or even reference to the widespread bigotry in all media, and our culture in general, there comes a procession of (usually white, cishet men) people who demand more proof, or make a song and dance about how it’s #notallX, or otherwise attempt to “prove” that the writer is wrong. It gets to the point where being patient and addressing the same arguments, the same techniques, the same “logic” and the same (often wilful) ignorance is tedious and exhausting. It is not anyone else’s job to educate you in feminist thought. If you expect to come to the table with genuinely original arguments, *especially* without a very good grounding in feminist thought, you are most likely going to be horribly disappointed. If people get shirty with you for making these bad faith arguments, even if you honestly believe they are good faith ones, then it is because you are not the first one to have tried it. If you are genuinely interested in trying to adopt the beliefs of Anita and her supporters, then you need to do your homework. Expecting the people you are arguing with to give you a complete background education on the feminist thought that informs their position, just so that you can understand where they are coming from, is incredibly insulting.

            That covers the “teacher mode” part of the tone thing. The ridicule of the movement via it’s name, is basically there because it is a ridiculous movement. It is even getting to be beyond a parody of itself. If it wasn’t for the real harm it has caused, it would be a hilarious spectacle. And quite frankly, it’s either ridicule or flat out anger and hostility. I have no respect for anyone who continues to identify with GG after all they have done. I am happy to believe that you are genuinely horrified by the shit that has gone on since GG started, and that for you, actually it is about ethics in games journalism. But you are not going to accomplish anything good by remaining in that movement, and clearly you are happy to knowingly provide a smokescreen for the terrorist elements in the movement. So while you remain aligned with those poor excuses for people, you reap the hostility and ridicule that they attract.

            ““terrorists” – Proof?”
            This is classic sealioning. Seriously, it is almost exactly ripped from the comic. I gave you proof – the death and bomb threats, the actual terrorising of women to the point of being driven from their homes – that is well documented and known. Yet here you are asking for it. Or more of it, because it clearly isn’t enough for you. In an oh so civil, polite manner, of course.

            The neo-nazis and MRA’s you obviously haven’t seen declared as such on those sites you listed. Nobody’s going around with usernames like “JohnfromStormfront”. But they are there. They have their own forums, in which they discuss how to ally themselves with, or utilise, GG for their own purposes. We Hunted The Mammoth has a number of posts documenting the MRA stuff, and a google search for “Stormfront Gamergate” will give you some idea about the white supremacist side of things. Obviously I’m expecting you to dismiss those sources out of hand for some reason or another, but that’s not my problem.

            “You have written nothing that I do not already understand about Ms. Sarkeesian and Mr. McIntosh’s views.”

            Clearly false, since I corrected your perception of Anita’s views and you ignored it. If you insist on conflating the idea of wanting to reduce and possibly remove games, with the idea of wanting to reduce and possibly remove certain elements of games, then of course you do not understand her views. Given that this was the crux of the original argument between us, the fact that you ignored or dismissed what I have written about it in favour of focusing on my tone and the self-evident claims of terrorism, suggests that you aren’t actually approaching this argument in good faith at all.

            “Their theories hold little merit without proof, and you and they have made nothing but assertions.”

            Again with the demand for proof. Which, according to you, must be measurable and falsifiable. Never mind that culture isn’t really measurable. Never mind that the evidence is all around us. Never mind that Anita’s work demonstrates the validity of the assertion. Never mind that many, many feminist (and other!) sites have been posting example after example after example of the ubiquity and severity of the misogyny in media of all sorts, for years. Never mind the studies that show, time after time, that women are seen as lesser than men in many ways. You will always demand more proof. How many examples do you need before you are convinced that they are not merely baseless assertions, that they – while in some cases may be exaggerated – have a core truth to them? Some truths do not need to be measurable, in the sense that you want them to be.

    • Kes

      Those frogs didn’t jump out of those pots because they’d had their brains removed. Intact frogs were shown to have the wherewithal to jump out.

    • Hepi

      This post reminds me of why I got the ggautoblocker after 6 weeks of listening to these people and trying to understand what they were on about.

    • Consumatopia

      “Doesn’t anyone who believes that games create moral harm have a duty to oppose that harm, be it through activism or even legislation? ”

      No, it doesn’t. There are plenty of things that I think are immoral that I also think I would create even more harm by trying to put a stop to them. There are plenty of foreign leaders I believe are evil people, that doesn’t mean I support invasion of their countries. Westboro Baptist intentionally causes undue suffering to grieving families, that doesn’t mean I have to try to ban them (though it does mean I support counter-protestors). 24 is blatant propaganda for torture, that doesn’t mean I want it banned.

      “That clip you linked seemed to suggest so wrt advertising.”

      It’s my understanding that both industry and the U.S. federal government regulate advertising that is aimed at children (the kind she was talking about in that clip), at least over the broadcast airwaves.

    • Tylor

      There’s one thing that’s always bugged me about the “We’re Gamers” line of thought. Maybe it’s just that I’m a huge RPG fan, but siding with the scenery chewing guys with a skull motif who bring back the old evil that was vanquished but not entirely destroyed? That never works out well. The best you can really hope for is that you don’t get in the way when the heros show up to defeat the ancient evil and the guys who summoned it and restore peace and prosperity to the land.

      I mean, seriously, that’s the ending of like half of them. And we’re seeing it play out here, complete with the skull fetish and the summoning of an ancient evil.

      • Wavinator

        Much hay is made about Thompson, but I have so seen nothing credible other than comparison with Sarkeesian, some admittedly which is nothing more than character assassination, other stuff which is very apt.

        But look also at the war imagery, though, for further insight. I find it interesting that individuals who seemed to either want to push out gamers and declare them dead tapped a largely apolitical, passive culture steeped in the mythos of struggle (the same war culture the educated elite appear to deride). Bad politics indeed.

        If you’re wondering, however, about the skull & star, that’s in solidarity with the repeated abuse of Twitter’s spam to censor a user that had that as his avatar. It might be a mistake to read too deeply into that.

  3. Damien is a bully

    My God Damien, can you try to write one thing about GamerGate that isn’t dripping with smearing condescension, misrepresentation and outright lies? You got called out on lying about Brad Wardell, called out on mansplaining to a woman about why she should feel terribly oppressed, and you never show the slightest hint of contrition. You are a bully, Damien, you are contributing to the poisoning of the discourse surrounding GamerGate, and therefore helping it continue.

    • Damion is a bully

      Sorry, I meant Damion and sneering condescension. See, I’m capable of admitting fault even before presented with incontrovertible, documented evidence I was wrong.

    • Damion Schubert

      So … what you’re saying is that you’re not actually going to address my points, you’re just going to say I’m a ‘bully’ — for giving voice to the bullied in my article above, I assume — and not give any examples.

      I am unswayed.

      Tell me, are you this opposed to bullying when it is done by Milo? By KiA? By 8Chan? I bet you’re not.

      • Damion is a bully

        Your “point” is entirely invalid. Nobody in GamerGate is embracing Jack Thompson. I read most of the reactions on KiA, the Escapist and /gg/, and pretty much every comment was about how Jack Thompson’s still a douche, but even a stopped clock can be right twice a day. And your post is so riddled with fallacies and factual inadequacies, I wouldn’t know where to start. Wait, yes I do, you say Nero’s our only journalist, conveniently ignoring Oliver Campbell, William Usher, Georgina Young (who’s not pro-GG, but anti-anti-GG)… Then you use fallacious reasoning to claim anyone not specifically in GamerGate is therefore opposed to it. Likewise, you ignore the many devs on our side, you try to associate us with RoK and a bunch of other things which have pretty much zero with GamerGate. I could go on, but I hardly see the point seeing as you are little more than a Ghaze troll by this point.

        • John Henderson

          “Nobody in GamerGate is embracing Jack Thompson.”

          Gamergate has no membership. This is a worthless statement.

          “I read most of the reactions on KiA, the Escapist and /gg/, and pretty much every comment was about how Jack Thompson’s still a douche, but even a stopped clock can be right twice a day.”

          Case in point. You had to go to three different places to gauge reactions of “Gamergate”, and your conclusion was, Gaters think Jack Thompson … might be right? Sometimes might be right?

          If that’s your conclusion, then as Damion said, Gaters either don’t know, don’t care or are too deluded to understand why that position is a loser. Jack has had his day in the sun, 15 years ago. He’s a kook.

          • Damion is a bully

            John Henderson, no my point is Damion is saying that GG is embracing Jack Thompson. Nobody in GG has anything but contempt for Jack Thompson. The only point people are making is that even he can see that what Sarkeesian is saying about games is encouraging soft-censorship. That’s all.

          • John Henderson

            “soft censorship” is still trying to make the parallel between what Anita advocates (criticism) and what Jack advocated (legal censorship.) It is utter bullshit.

            What you said was, which is still your userid, is that “Damion is a bully”. More bullshit. You are a bullshitter. Stop that. Be counted on your own terms.

            “GG” is not a thing, and never was. There are just people on the Internet who like to pretend they have false agency so they can create noise and chaos.

      • Damion is a bully

        >Tell me, are you this opposed to bullying when it is done by Milo? By KiA? By 8Chan? I bet you’re not.

        I missed this bit. What bullying would that be? Or are you just making baseless accusations again. And what do you think you’re achieving with your own bullying mockery? Because I tell you it’s having the opposite effect. I pledge right now to never leave GamerGate as long as you continue lying, misrepresenting, mocking and attacking us, contributing to the dehumanisation of GamerGate supporters. Get some perspective, Damien. Geordi Tait calls for the GENOCIDE of GamerGate supporters, and your one comment is, “dude, not helping.” And who is the more oppressed group, the one with the entire mainstream media lying about them, or the one desperately trying to get its real message out?

        • Damion is a bully

          I mean which is the more oppressed group, the one which has the support of the entire mainstream media, or the one which the mainstream media is lying about.

          • John Henderson

            Gamergate isn’t a “group”. It’s a hashtag that an anonymous mob hides behind and pretends false agency.

            If you have a point, make it and be counted. That’s all anyone should be doing, ever.

            But, to your point, do you feel personally threatened by Geordie Tait? Related: do you live on an island with a volcano on it?

          • Damion is a bully

            John Henderson, GamerGate is a group of people, these are people you are talking about, they have feelings. I feel incredibly hurt when Geordi Tait calls for me to be sent to the gas chamber, wouldn’t you? I’m incredibly hurt when the designer of some games I have a fond attachment to can’t conceal his contempt for me, when I have done nothing to draw his ire. I have feelings. I breathe. I’m not some anonymous monster.

          • John Henderson

            “I feel incredibly hurt when Geordi Tait calls for me to be sent to the gas chamber, wouldn’t you?”

            No.

            “I’m incredibly hurt when the designer of some games I have a fond attachment to can’t conceal his contempt for me, when I have done nothing to draw his ire.”

            You should examine the nature rather than just declaring your hurt feelings to be the root of the discussion.

            “I have feelings. I breathe. I’m not some anonymous monster.”

            What’s your name, then? Be counted as something more than just a rando. If anyone else’s opinion really mattered to you, that’s what you’d do. If not, that’s your choice. But don’t expect that your particular POV to matter if you don’t choose to be counted as a person with a name.

  4. Dan

    I’m quickly loosing interest in this whole gamergate thing but just wanted to make one point.

    I think it was a low blow to call the anonymous person at Microsoft a coward. If that person spoke publicly they would loose their job and likely be ostracized from working at any large studio.

    And that to me is very indicative of were the power is in this whole sorted debate. Though there is apparently one former MS employee who doesn’t have their livelihood on the line at the moment and they have publicly supported that anonymous person at MS.

    https://twitter.com/Bane_Alex_Uk/status/534713686758555648

    • Damion Schubert

      He’s either a coward, a liar, or practically aware that the movement is doomed. Either he is massively overrepresenting the amount of game industry support that gamergate has (he was quoted as 95% in his previous interview with the Escapist), or he knows he is utterly full of shit. Also, fear of doxing, firing, and blacklisting did not stop any of the other devs I listed above from speaking their mind.

      For what its worth, if you come out and speak in favor of ethics of games journalism, or against bashing ‘gamers’ as a concept, or even criticize Anita’s work (I’ve done the latter here multiple times, and I’ve also praised her), you likely have nothing to fear.

      What he’s afraid of is endorsing #GamerGate, which is a tacit admission that the movement is so tainted that it is impossible for it to be a part of any serious conversation moving forward. The companies you need the most on your side (Sony, Blizzard) refuse to even discuss the terms other than framed by the harassment that surrounds the movement (and yes, some of that is from outside the industry, but some of it is definitely coming from inside your house).

      • Dan

        So he/she is a coward, liar, or……….aware he/she may have an unpopular opinion? That frankly is how your first paragraph reads.

        For what it is worth ‘ethics in game journalism’ is a side issue, as you have pointed out in previous blogs.

        And yes I agree the person does not want to be seen as explicitly endorsing #GamerGate. To say that it is a tacit admission that the thing is so ‘tainted’, is an assumption on your part.

        Throughout history people did not want to be directly tied to a movement for many reason other than ‘the movement is evil’.

        I mean come on, you know that it would severely jeopardize this persons job. That is the primary reason he/she is staying anonymous. It was uncalled for to call this person a coward.

      • Dan

        Wanted to give a different response. My first one was a bit off the mark. Where you said:

        “For what its worth, if you come out and speak in favor of ethics of games journalism, or against bashing ‘gamers’ as a concept, or even criticize Anita’s work (I’ve done the latter here multiple times, and I’ve also praised her), you likely have nothing to fear. ”

        I would agree if this were any other time. But right now saying you don’t think the websites should have bashed gamers will be interpreted as pro GG. And that seemed to be the persons chief issue.

        I just think that it is not to much of a leap to say that this guy probably worries for his/her job. That being the main reason he/she did this anonymously. Also according to this person there are some others that feel similarly and well he/she did more that they did.

        As for not wanting to be seen explicitly endorsing GG, well I completely understand that. I personally have reservations on supporting GG directly. Hell I don’t even know what that means to support them. Go on twitter and say “I support #gamergate”?? It is not like there is some rally or organization you can donate to.

        I sympathize with certain elements of GG but don’t want to directly associate with it. Much of GG reminds me a bit of the Occupy Wall street thing. Which is to say an unruly mob that isn’t making a whole lot of sense. Such as their mail campaigns to go after certain companies.

        Soooo I sympathize with this MS person being supportive of some of the issues but not wanting to say ‘yeah I’m pro GG’.
        Hence, I don’t think the person is a coward, I think the person just realizes that they are navigating some dangerous waters.

        Having privately talked with a few that do support GG I have noticed that many of them just felt insulted by these websites. I know I did. Given the history of gaming, can you really blame people for being a bit sensitive to media criticism?

  5. Consumatopia

    I’m just disappointed that video didn’t have any skulls!

  6. Damion, please have a heart

    Hi Damion, I’m the guy who called you a bully. I apologise for getting heated, but my point was that these are real people you’re talking about, and you’re treating them like dirt.

    I’m going to tell you how I came to sympathise and eventually identify as being part of GamerGate.
    My first exposure was with the gamers are dead articles. Whatever the media wants to say, some of them, particularly the Gamasutra one, were an attack on the gamer identity. It’s hard not to feel the vitriol dripping from their metaphorical pens. But I’m too old to care about that sort of thing so it was hardly enough for me to take up a cause.

    But then I saw a lot of hurt adolescents lashing out and a lot of games journalists responding with vitriol and contempt. The words of a named, supposed professional games journalist carry a lot more weight in my mind than some impulsive teenager. That was enough to pique my interest.

    And as I went digging I realised how much the articles and the subsequent coverage were completely misrepresenting the issues. The perfect example is Eron Gjoni.

    Every article represented the zoepost as “the hateful revenge porn of a jilted ex-boyfriend”, and said he’d as much as posted it to 4chan knowing that Zoe would get abuse as a result. But that’s not what it was at all. Eron is a self-proclaimed SJW. Many domestic abuse victims have read the post and agreed that what he went through in the relationship bears the hallmarks of domestic abuse. His intention was to warn the world about what he saw was a manipulative person. Don’t believe me? How about his female friend who was with him the day he posted it? https://medium.com/@srachel_m/gamergate-launched-in-my-apartment-and-internet-im-sorry-not-that-sorry-13e5650fd172

    My point with this is not to villainise Zoe Quinn. I hold her no ill-will except some resentment about her continuing to lie about us. It’s not to excuse what happened to her – nobody deserves what she’s been through. It’s not to excuse Eron’s actions – we can all agree it had a whole lot of unintended negative consequences. It’s not to argue that the media should have covered the story – though it is the perfect example of double standards considering the Brad Wardell case you now know well. It’s to show that from day one, you’ve only been getting one side of the story, and a distorted version at that.

    But the tipping point to me, as I said, was the way GamerGate has been reported on in the media. I’m not talking about how the media is covering the harassment angle but ignoring the ethics in journalism angle. I’m talking about the way the actions of a few anonymous trolls are being used to demonise a large, diverse group of people. I’m talking about the way none of the SWATting, death threats, abuse, harassment, doxxing, intimidation tactics etc… that has been perpetrated on GamerGate supporters has been reported on at all. That’s like covering a war and only mentioning there are casualties on one side. I’m Australian, we have an impulsive need to back the underdog. And the underdog in this case is the side the media is refusing to give a fair hearing.

    As a result of this, you get lunatics like Geordi Tait calling for genocide of GamerGate supporters, using exactly the same logic Hitler used to justify sending the people he sent to the gas chambers, and you practically condoning this. You get people comparing GamerGate supporters to ISIS, the KKK, ebola, nazis, murderers…and people barely bat an eyelid.

    There’s a word for what’s happening here – dehumanisation. And I’m sorry to say, but I feel that you are contributing to this. You get all your information from GamerGhazi, a sub dedicated to misrepresenting, smearing and mocking GamerGate, and as a result the image you have built up in your mind of a GamerGate member is a subhuman.

    Note, I’m not talking about the trolls actually sending abuse etc. I join you in condemning them, they should have their internet privileges revoked and maybe even be sent to jail depending on the severity of their actions. I’m talking about these people – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzwGIHUCtjU – the human beings that are being eviscerated daily for wanting to take a stand for better standards of games journalism.

    My point with this is not to convert you to GamerGate. It’s not to convince you to stop opposing it. It’s to remind you that there are two sides to this story, these are real people you are talking about, and your words have potential consequences. I, like you, would love for GamerGate to end. But that’s not going to happen when all the rhetoric between the two sides is so poisonous.

    • John Henderson

      “Whatever the media wants to say, some of them, particularly the Gamasutra one, were an attack on the gamer identity.”

      No it wasn’t. Even if you read what Leigh Alexander wrote, she was talking about bad behavior and bad attitudes. If you actually identify as what she described, then you might want to seriously examine what being a “gamer” means. She wasn’t trying to reach an olive branch to anyone, and was angry and harsh. But if you feel threatened by that, then look inward, not outward. The world is not out to get you.

      “I’m talking about the way the actions of a few anonymous trolls are being used to demonise a large, diverse group of people.”

      If people have anything to say, they should do so. They shouldn’t feel like they ought to need a hash tag to give themselves false agency. There is absolutely nothing under the “gamergate” tag that hasn’t been complained about for years. If you feel a certain way, that’s fine, make your case and be counted. Be as brave as Anita Sarkeesian, and put your name on what you say.

      Or don’t, and be lumped in with those who just want to create chaos and noise. Those are the choices you make. This is the Internet, and no one knows or cares who you are, and only ought to care what you say if you can make your case.

      “As a result of this, you get lunatics like Geordi Tait calling for genocide of GamerGate supporters”

      Do you live on an island with a volcano? If not, then you should not feel threatened by anything Geordi Tait says. He wasn’t helping, but please keep that in perspective.

      “I, like you, would love for GamerGate to end. But that’s not going to happen when all the rhetoric between the two sides is so poisonous.”

      So stop using the tag. Gamergate is done. There was never anything to it. There were just a bunch of jerks wanting an excuse to do bad things to other people on the Internet, and a bunch of disaffected video game players that frankly deserve another way to define themselves other than, “I play video games therefore I am.”

      Conversations about who video games ought to be made for, how women are depicted in them, how they are marketed, and criticisms about their content may go on. Markets will change and grow in interesting ways, and empires will gradually rise and quickly fall. People will play the games they want to play, and continue being generally disappointed until they learn more about how the sausage is made.

      In other words, this is where we are in history, and the world will keep turning.

      • Wavinator

        @John Henderson
        “Leigh Alexander … was talking about bad behavior and bad attitudes”

        Not entirely. Consider: “‘Game culture is… young men queuing with plush mushroom hats and backpacks and jutting promo poster rolls. Queuing passionately for hours, at events around the world, to see the things that marketers want them to see. To find out whether they should buy things or not. They don’t know how to dress or behave. Television cameras pan across these listless queues, and often catch the expressions of people who don’t quite know why they themselves are standing there. ”

        “Be as brave as Anita Sarkeesian, and put your name on what you say.”
        I find the continual divide and conquer mentality suspicious, especially when directed at people who can’t pull strings to get on a national TV show, can’t have glowing press written about them and can’t control a media narrative which turns average people into villains.

        “Do you live on an island with a volcano?”
        You’re making excuses. #GamerGate is to atone for trolls, but the anti-GG is not required to rebuke people lauded for calling for genocide and personal violence.
        Harassment, threats, doxing and abusive censoring have no place in this discussion, and anyone engaging in ANY of this behavior needs to be condemned.

        “So stop using the tag. Gamergate is done.” Hahaha! Now where, exactly, have I heard that before?

        “Markets will change and grow in interesting ways, and empires will gradually rise and quickly fall.”
        Why is there such a strong need to ideologically colonize this new media? Why the need for a lock-step narrative promoting a specific breed of politics? I mean, I share the politics, but I don’t want conservatives or liberals promoting an agenda in what was largely an agenda-free medium.

        • John Henderson

          “‘Game culture is… young men queuing with plush mushroom hats and backpacks and jutting promo poster rolls. Queuing passionately for hours, at events around the world, to see the things that marketers want them to see. To find out whether they should buy things or not. They don’t know how to dress or behave. Television cameras pan across these listless queues, and often catch the expressions of people who don’t quite know why they themselves are standing there.”

          Is that you? If so, you should feel bad about yourself and strive to do better.

          Is that not you? Then provide good examples of what “game culture” means. Don’t just rest on “she said mean things with a broad brush and I fear she might have been criticizing me personally even though she doesn’t know me.”

          “Harassment, threats, doxing and abusive censoring have no place in this discussion, and anyone engaging in ANY of this behavior needs to be condemned.”

          Yes, and so should concern trolling. But useful discussions are happening now. Should we just turn up the volume on condemnation? I’m sorry, I can’t hear you because everyone’s complaining about how mean everyone is to each other on the Internet.

          “I mean, I share the politics, but I don’t want conservatives or liberals promoting an agenda in what was largely an agenda-free medium.”

          When you have people, you have politics. You cannot ignore politics any more than you can ignore people. Game players have a bad habit of ignoring the humanity of other people. This has made what passes for culture, toxic. Those who care about it should strive to make it better, rather than try to fight pointless spitball wars. Chaos and noise doesn’t get anything done.

          ““So stop using the tag. Gamergate is done.” Hahaha! Now where, exactly, have I heard that before?”

          This website. It’s done, move on.

          • Wavinator

            @John Henderson
            “Is that you? If so, you should feel bad about yourself and strive to do better.”

            According to who? You? Ozymondias upon who’s works we should look upon and dispair?

            What gives you the right to judge how others live their lives? If they’re NFL fans or NASCAR fans, if they read outdated poetry or geek out on emulators, fly model planes or build radios from scratch, who in the hell anointed YOU cultural arbiter capable of judging the value of a human being’s life?

            You live on a pale, blue dot, friend, a speck in space. Everything that you will ever do, everything that you will ever accomplish will come to DUST. Your name will be forgotten, your works forgotten, your loves and losses all DUST.

            How dare you judge what others do with their limited time on this Earth. If they’re not harming you, what gives you– whose name is writ in water just like the rest of us–the right to judge?

            “Yes, and so should concern trolling.” Your a contradiction. First you moralize about who does or doesn’t have room to speak based on a blinkered notion of having the moral high ground against every GamerGate member because of harassment. Now you’re equating so-called “concern trolling” with said harassment. So I take it you don’t regard the harassment as all that important if it’s on the level with “concern trolling?”

            “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you because everyone’s complaining about how mean everyone is to each other on the Internet.”
            So you’re saying then that you don’t share the opinion of GamerGate members who condemn harassment?

            “When you have people, you have politics. You cannot ignore politics any more than you can ignore people.”
            Care to tell me the raging political issues in horticulture? Woodworking? Fly fishing?

            It may come as a surprise to you, but you are in the minority. The vast majority of us reject the idiotic notion that every element of the personal is political, and are very happy to lay down roiling issues of conflict and consensus seeking for a few minutes or hours of good, old fashioned fun.

            “Game players have a bad habit of ignoring the humanity of other people.”
            Garbage. Unfounded, idiotic garbage.
            This spew is precisely what keeps me in GamerGate, and I find countless self-righteous scions of culture like yourself mindlessly repeating it. No, it’s not game players who have a bad habit of ignoring the humanity of others, IT’S YOU and all those who sympathize with your point of view.
            I’ve grown up with these players. I’ve sat next to them, talked with them, broken bread with them, slept with them, married one, helped raise two. Your blanket generalization is a slap to the smiling faces that live in my heart, these people who are my friends and family.
            I’m trying to keep some civility here, but on this I can’t. You were annoyed with my complaint about tone earlier? Well consider it unfiltered and from the bottom of my heart when I say that if this comfortable, morally lazy view of your fellow human beings is one you hold sincerely, then you and Leigh Alexander and all the other cultural colonists can go fuck yourselves.

            Kindly.

          • Consumatopia

            “Everything that you will ever do, everything that you will ever accomplish will come to DUST.”

            You don’t know that. SETI looks at the color of stars and galaxies to detect advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI8rYMuLNeA That could be us in a billion years, if we make the right choices.

          • Wavinator

            @Consumatopia
            All things are possible. Not all things are likely, and the rapture for nerds is unlikely to be one of them.

          • Wavinator

            … in our lifetime, anyway.

          • John Henderson

            Wavinator:
            Eat shit, rando.

          • Consumatopia

            Yeah, of course, I don’t expect to be around next century. But human civilization survives into the distant future, it will be because of decisions that we here, today, make. So it isn’t necessarily the case that everything I ever do or will accomplish will turn to dust, even if it is almost certain that I personally will turn to dust.

          • Wavinator

            @John Henderson
            Hahaha. “have a bad habit of ignoring the humanity of other people” indeed and childishly apoplectic when confronted with the dark side of their own humanity.

            @Consumatopia
            “So it isn’t necessarily the case that everything I ever do or will accomplish will turn to dust, even if it is almost certain that I personally will turn to dust”
            Ha, good point. I do, though, think that the impulse to devalue the lives of others (for some reason particularly acute among those who think themselves more cultured/valuable) always needs to be checked with a geologic view of time. Otherwise it’s too easy to be overrun with self importance.

          • Consumatopia

            From my perspective, the geological perspective actually raises the stakes of our choices today. Everything in an expanding light cone growing from your particular location in spacetime is potentially influenced by you. The future may not remember us, but it will be shaped by us.

            From a more down-to-Earth perspective, I’m not endorsing the mushroom hat passage, but as someone who has a bit of an addiction-prone personality, I think it’s good to ask yourself “why am I doing this? What am I even looking for here?”

    • Damion Schubert

      DPHAH —

      So, I just read my article again. If I bullied anyone in the article at all, it’s the founders of the Sarkeesian Effect, and Jack Thompson. These guys deserve all of the scorn and ridicule the world can pour onto them. Because their ideas are bad for gaming, and bad for society as a whole. I won’t apologize for that. Counterspeech NEEDS to happen to keep these guys from getting an intellectual toehold.

      If you are really as opposed to bullying as you say you are, then YOU’RE ON THE WRONG SIDE. Eron is a great example: Zoe Quinn may be the worst girlfriend this side of Fatal Attraction, I don’t know (although her current paramour seems to like her fine). Whatever her stance is, Eron decided that the perfect response was to drop that atomic bomb of bullying, harassing ex-boyfriend tactics — posting his dirt, then once 4chan (later 8chan) jumped on it to become TheQuinnspiracy and then GamerGate (both of which, I note, were also tremendous bullying enterprises), he actually left his job so he could focus more on guiding their bullying efforts. Read the very first paragraph of my post – that’s all of the bullying that GamerGate has done JUST TO GAME DEVELOPERS who have dared to stand up for what they believe is right.

      You want to point out that Liana called me out for mansplaining something to her? Fine. I’ll own that. Do you also call out Milo for the various truly terrible things he’s said to her? How about Ralph Retort’s hit piece on her? My actions were thoughtless and rude, I’ll grant. Milo and Ralph were miles beyond that, into bullying and harassment.

      As for the fact that the media doesn’t cover anything about gamergate except the harassment angle, that’s simple. It’s because they’ve never done anything that’s newsworthy other than harass people. Gamergate is a tiny movement, in the grand scheme of things, and it doesn’t help much that they go out of their way to be assholes to just about every member of the press who dares investigate them. They had one boycott win that was significant (Intel) and that was rolled back. They’ve discovered no major gaming journalism scandals, and the changes they’ve managed to get (minor changes to ethics statements that have no means of enforcement) aren’t newsworthy.

      If you hate bullying, then you’re on the wrong side. Those of us who are standing in opposition to gamergate aren’t doing it because we hate ethics in games journalism. We’re doing it because the core of gamergate is a group of gamers who cannot accomplish anything without harassing or bullying those with different opinions and ideals than they do.

  7. Mizahnyx

    Today I had a sudden realization…

    – They were one of the triggers behind the early Jack Thompson censorship attempts on gaming
    – They fight against political-correctness-policing and censorship
    – They never were widely known to harass, harm, pile on or intimidate women or minorities
    – They gave us even a new widespread genre of games (MOBAs)
    – In summary, they are everything #GamerGate aspires to be, but they can’t because GG is an unmoderated forum, taken over by extremists…

    I’m talking about the modding community. I think now that the best place for a dissenter of extremist feminism that wants to realize his/her/$PREFERRED_PRONOUN vision is probably the modding community, not GG.

    • John Henderson

      That and, modders actually create something that at some level is meant for someone else to use and enjoy. No games are getting made while people shit up the Internet with trolls.

  8. Laurence Tilmant

    Dear SJW Senior Game Devs AKA Damion Schubert

    About Gamergate

    I am a boring accountant clerck working for a small accountant firm in Quebec that probably don’t care or don’t know about GamerGate or simply won’t fire me for using a hashtag on twitter. That’s why I use my real name. But that not case for all of us.

    Anti-Gamergater devs label themself as a the victim, where in reality, junior devs and interns had been threaten on twitter to be blacklisted by senior game devs if they ever use the hashtag.

    You won’t lose your job, advancement or be blacklisted if you express anti-gamergate sentiment, like Kershner, who have played the tough guy by saying “we don’t negociate with terrorists” (and not for expressing “disagreement” like you put it). Because it is true that GGer have recently beheaded five video game journalists and killed two canadians soldier like ISIS.

    Kershner, losing his job? Cry me a river, he won’t lose his job. Nor Khris Brown or George Reese. But if you are a easily replaceable devs who don’t have a “Golden Parachute” contract, you will get trouble. Just using the label “coward” to describ devs who want to remain anonymous is just one sign of this Omerta.

    About Anita Sarkeesian and Johnathan McIntosh

    True, Sarkeesian and McIntosh have never demanded censorhip from the government in their videos… because they cant, not after the 2011 US supreme court decision. So there are using social shaming to impose self-censorphip among developpers. Like accusing Rockstar, a «naughty » game devs who refuse to be a white knight, for «contributing to a hostile environment ».

    And please, stop saying that Sarkeesian cares deeply about video games because she said the opposite in 2010 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afgtd8ZsXzI

    You don’t need to be a gamer to criticism video games, like the author Cheryl K. Olson and Lawrence A. Kutner of Grand Theft Childhood. Buy when you don’t have any backround in psychology or psychiatry and try to earn sympathy and credibility by claiming ” I am one of us and I care” when you deny that claim two years prior your kickstarter campaign, raising question is NOT sexism.

    Why nobody like me care about Sarkeesian and McIntosh, who are just a couple of hipster anarcho-communism seeking consultancy jobs in the game industry? Media coverage and propaganda can kill games, like Six Days in Fallujah, Thrill Kill and Kakuto Chojin. So when I see a social activist saying the same BS from the past 30 years about video games, using the same tactics as the Fox News of this world, we should expose them and denounce them. Even if they label themself as feminists.

    • A'isha

      Every time ‘gaters drag out the accusation that Anita Sarkeesian can’t be an honest fan of video games and want to improve them in 2012 because she once said she wasn’t a fan of violent shooter games in 2010, then turn right around and defend Milo Yiannopoulos for saying “If you’re a grown man with hands clamped to an Xbox controller instead of a pair of tits you need a good slap” literally the day before the #gamergate hashtag was coined because he’s a gamer now, I just laugh in bitter derision.

      • Laurence Tilmant

        Diversion, is it a school yard? I never mention Milo. Btw, Milo acknowledge his past declarations and didn’t delete them (unlike Sarkeesian and McIntosh with their deleted bayonetta youtube video)

        Read my comment again: You don’t need to be a gamer to study or critic video games content. However, when you claim you are a Gamer in your Kickstarter video to earn credibility in your project AND two years prior to this video you say, and I quote, “I am not a fan of Video Games, actually I have to learn a lot about videogames [because] I don’t want to go around and shoot people”, it is legitimate to question the real intentions behind those (mediocre) videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afgtd8ZsXzI

        Scott Shackford, summarize the situation perfecly
        « Do feminist gamers really want more games with better representation of women or do they want validation by destroying or eliminating the games that don’t provide what they want? »

        • John Henderson

          When did you stop robbing old ladies’ panties?

          Anita Sarkeesian has never advocated for eliminating anything. She critiques things. To suggest that people regarded her gaming credentials as the primary reason to fund her two-year-old Kickstarter campaign is disingenuous.

          The summary is as facetious as my question above.

          You don’t have to like what Anita says, and personally I think she’s overhyped. But she doesn’t owe you or anyone else an explanation for her viewpoint, and she’s brave for presenting it with her own name on it.

          • Laurence Tilmant

            No it is not disingenuous, normative argument, If her gamer status is irrelevant, then why she banked on it in her kickstarter video? Rhetorical question, because it was important for the audience and the fundraising.

            About censorhip
            It is the same argumentative structure from the pro-criminalisation pro-censorship anti-porn feminist of the 70s.

            If you believe that Video Games ( or Porn) contribute to sexism, sexism lead to Misoginy, misoginy contribute to the toxic masculity, toxiv masculity encourage angry young white men to shoot women, then the only conclusion is censorship and social shaming Mao-Style to prevent violence against women.

            Dont believe me? Here some of her Tweets

            Video game contribute to misoginy

            “Video Games, Misogyny, And Terrorism: A Guide To Assholes”

            Some important points via @ForbesTech “The Video Game Industry Has Only Itself To Blame For Misogyny And Harassment”

            Misoginy lead to toxic masculity
            Remember this misogynist rampage next time you claim online threats are “just boys being boys” or “just how the internet is”

            I was interviewed for BBC’s documentary “Blurred Lines” about our culture of misogyny

            Toxic masculinity cause mass shooting of women

            Exactly. RT @EvilCleverDog: @femfreq even the wording of the threat you received was very similar to what [Elliot Rodger] said in his video

            True. RT @FeministXY People still insist Elliot Rodger wasn’t misogynist, many will dismiss threats against women even after someone dies.

            Mass shootings are one tragic consequence of a culture that perpetuates toxic ideas of masculinity. This is how patriarchy can harm men too.

            Not a coincidence it’s always men and boys committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of toxic masculinity in our culture.

            And finally, we must take action: Public-Shaming, dismantle the boys club and taking your sexist games away:

            The “just don’t play it” mantra is nonsense, sexist depictions of women in games are not just harmful to women, they’re also harmful to men.

            Rockstar: When gameplay from your product is regularly used to harass women it might be a sign you’re contributing to a hostile environment.

            Look, for those in positions of power and privilege, silence IS, in fact, complicity. You can’t be neutral on a moving train.

            To reiterate: The whole gaming industry must take a stand against these attacks on women in gaming. Silence is no longer an option.

            The only way [to fit in] [is to] dismantle the boys club, tears those barriers down.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL0aGv45vGM&index=33&list=UU7Edgk9RxP7Fm7vjQ1d-cDA

            Mcintosh and Sarkeesian are sharlatans that promote obscelete junk science (post-structuralism) to understand (or analyse) human behavior. They don’t hesitate to put social pressure on anyone who disagree with them by exploiting their martyrdom. This is not science, this is a cult, a cult that deserve to be discredit and denounce.

          • John Henderson

            lol gaters gonna gate. froth some more!

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