Chris Kluwe, who continues to be one of my favorite people in the universe, has a very vitriol-laced take on the situation:
Thus, when I see an article titled “Gamers are dead,” referring to the death of the popular trope of a pasty young man in a dimly lit room, it fills me with joy, because it means WE FUCKING WON. So many people are playing games now that they are popular culture. They are not going away. All sorts of cool things, that I like, are now things that a whole bunch of other people like! There’s enough space now for people to make games that are strange and disturbing and maybe highlight a different perspective of the world, because gaming is no longer a niche activity, it’s something that everybody does. There is room for art in video games. That’s awesome!
Jesse Singal wrote this utterly awesome take of being a legitimate journalist trying to engage in gamergate, which touches on many of the themes I’ve mentioned here. A must-read.
I believe Smilomaniac. I also believe the various Reddit and 8chan posts and the folks in the Hangout; I think Gamergate is primarily about anger at progressive people who care about feminism and transgender rights and mental health and whatever else is getting involved in gaming, and by what gamergaters see as overly solicitous coverage of said individuals and their games.
And here’s the thing: That’s fine! It’s an opinion I happen to disagree with, but it’s a coherent, concrete viewpoint. Say what you will about the tenets of anti-progressivism, dude, but at least it’s an ethos.
Let me address Gamergate advocates directly for a moment: Right now, journalists trying to be fair-minded about your movement simply can’t win. Again, if I’m arguing with someone from the NRA or the NAACP or some other established group, I can point to actual quotes from the group’s leadership. With you guys, any bad thing that happens is, by definition, not the work of A True Gamergater. It’s one of the oldest logical fallacies in the book.
Tadhg Kelly thinks Gamergate is dying. I disagree, but he does have some salient points as he tries to draw out what lessons one might learn:
The hashtag is still going, as are the fervent speculations and plans for operations on 8chan and Reddit, but the movement that is #Gamergate is exposed for what it always was: A core of angry men hidden within a softer (and far more naive) crowd that liked to think of itself as diverse. The shield dropped when someone went too far, someone threatened a school shooting. Someone else threatened another woman in games out of her home. And the response from the key gaters boiled down to an extended “I absolutely don’t condone that sort of thing even if they are asking for it“.
You mean “We keep saying it’s angry young men, and picking out angry men to claim represent it, and any day now, they’re going to start believing us and go away.” They’ve never had the press on their side, they’ve never even been trying to fight a PR war, yet somehow, they keep growing.
Seriously, there are legitimate beefs to make with GG (like they have much too narrow a version of “Corruption” in mind, and eliminating political views from game design and critique is a bad idea). So why keep pretending it’s going to die “any day now” so you don’t have to engage? I don’t think they’re getting bored yet, they scored another scalp in their advertiser boycott while those obituaries were being written.
Yes, I know, “harassment”. There are at least 50K of them, you really think that more than a tiny minority are involved in harassment? From what I can see, they’re the only ones actually *doing* anything to try and stop harassment.
–Dave
The origin of the movement, predating the “gamers are dead” articles, was 50% misogyny, 50% luls, 0% anything else. The spike in harassment, exactly the sort of harassment that one should expect when people are spreading conspiracy theories about individuals with comparatively little power, coincides exactly with the rise of the movement and has been ongoing ever since.
Now a bunch of people decided to show up to that movement later and bring their own grievances that were somewhat legitimate, though still mostly confused. Even if their grievances were 100% correct, it would still be a shitty thing for them to do. Just because people who don’t like misogyny decided to march alongside a bunch of misogynists doesn’t mean the rest of us have to “engage” them. It doesn’t mean the victims–not just of the explicit threats, but of the mobbing, of the conspiracy mongering, and of the invasion of privacy–have to erase their memories and pretend that the movement didn’t have it’s origins in targeting them. Each and every single person choosing to retweet Gamergate is making the concurrent harassment campaign worse, painting targets on new people, whether pro-or-con.
Maybe GG will last forever. That would be unfortunate. It doesn’t mean that anyone is obligated to engage this shitshow, or even that such engagement would do any good.
Because GG might be growing, but the set of people who will always hate the #GG tag, inside and outside GG, is growing faster. We aren’t going away, either. If anyone wants to discuss legitimate grievances, they would be well-advised to dissociate themselves a tag with such tainted origins.
“inside and outside GG”
I meant inside and outside gaming.
Can we at least stop waiting to discuss anything that is n some way associated with GG until it goes away? Because it doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to do that.
So lets have a dialog about journalism and ethical standards for websites and PR. Let’s have a discussion about the role of ideological critique. Let’s talk about harassment in the abstract, rather than as a weapon. This exercise in poo-flinging has kept everything else off the table for months now. If GG won’t stand down, are we just going to let it keep everything hostage?
–Dave
That is the first sentiment I’ve agreed with you on, Dave. I would like the media sites to initiate that discussion, preferably with a simple statement of where they stand as journalists, what they see as the major issues and what they think can be done by the gaming community at large to address those issues. I’d like them to banhammer any comment (or commenter, if they are egregious) that brings up demands for: apology; explanations of already debunked or refuted or covered issues like the mailing list thing; specific writers’ heads; the “removal of politics” from games journalism; or any mention of the major victims of GG – especially (but not limited to) Anita, Zoe, Fish, and Wu. That last one, I feel is important to clarify that bringing them up in a “look what happened to them” context is also bannable in my books. In a discussion, on games media sites, about journalistic ethics and conduct, those names are nothing but flamebait now.
“So lets have a dialog about journalism and ethical standards for websites and PR.”
Good idea.
“Let’s have a discussion about the role of ideological critique.”
I guess we can, but I’m not sure how productive it would be, since ideological critique is good. People should question implicit and even unintentional political influences and viewpoints in the arts and media. Some ideological critiques out there are poor critiques, but this an issue of taste and writing quality, not ethics or corruption. Note that complaining over political correctness is a (totally legitimate!) ideological critique.
More fruitful, I think, would be to discuss what’s wrong with metacritic–assuming that reviews intended for different audiences can be averaged together into meaningful information. Perhaps we could create an alternative in which people choose which critics have taste that aligns with their own. Maybe we could even have “review curators” like Steam, in which prominent voices in gaming offer lists of critics they respect. This raises potential complexities of its own (just like Steam curation), but it makes a lot more sense internet mobbing specific critics because they dared to deviate from consensus.
“Let’s talk about harassment in the abstract, rather than as a weapon. ”
There’s no “in the abstract”, because harassment on the Internet, especially in gaming, has had been linked to gender long before GG. And I suspect to find related answers to the two questions “Why are women harassed disproportionately on the Internet?” and “why do so many gamers obsess over bizarre conspiracies involving women or feminism?”.
Actually, re: abstract harassment, the fifth point in that Tadhg Kelly piece had some good ideas.
Harassment is a systemic issue, not just a matter of bad apples. Something about our culture and technical infrastructure enables and encourages it. I think Wu is right when she argues that change here has to start at the top–that decisions made at tech and gaming companies have made this stuff worse.
Ideological critique can be done well, in a way that actually informs design and let’s us know how we can make games that are more emotionally engaging, or it can be done badly, as moral scolds. The first is good, the second is useless.
And we do need to include Metacritic. If we can’t get bonus clauses that reference Metacritic deprecated, then there is a very real potential for them to become a “chilling effect”. If bewbies becomes a statistical -5 on Metacritic, then it’s pretty inevitable that developers will downplay or remove sexualized content in order to increase their chances of getting those bonuses.
Sure, it’s only isolated cases of ideological POV’s in game review scores so far. Do we have to wait until the damage has been done?
Harassment in the abstract: Game design, specifically MMO design, actually has a lot of prior art to draw on for how to reduce harassment through design. We’ve been wrestling with the problem for nearly 20 years, but we haven’t really compared notes. Maybe we can work on some kind of “Best Practices” white paper through the ESA or IGDA?
–Dave
I can see that “moral scolds” are useless from a design perspective, but from a player’s perspective they can be useful if you happen to share the reviewer’s moral perspective. For example, that Polygon Bayo 2 review, I’ll admit that I’m probably the kind of player that review is aimed at. I’m okay with sexy action games, but there’s some line at which leering camera angels are going to seem awkward to me.
And more than that, I think in pluralistic society we have to learn to live with other people’s moral scolding. We don’t have to comply with it, but we don’t have any right to insist that they stop. Suppose there were websites that were reviewing video games from a Christian or Islamic perspective. You almost certainly aren’t designing your video games from an Islamic perspective, so that’s going to gum up your Metacritic rating, for sure.
It’s a serious problem, but it’s not unique to gaming–look at how hard some movies work to get PG13 instead of R, or the way tentpole action films avoiding putting in anything that would offend Chinese censors.
As far as bewbies go, I think we’re a long way before they’ll be a net minus on any games MC average. Some reviewers will punish them, more will reward them. For now. (Though, as far as artistic freedom goes, I’m not sure it’s any better if the boss demands more bewb rather than less.)
But the MC damage is already happening. I mean, suppose you make a game that 50% of players consider their favorite game, but 50% of players absolutely hate. That game will get a crappy Metacritic score. It will also fly off the shelves like hotcakes, because the players who hate the game don’t “anti-buy” it. Averaging all the reviews together has a homogenizing effect–a game only wins if it appeals to all or almost all reviewers.
Re: industry practices on harassment, to be honest I’m a lot more optimistic that the games industry will eventually figure out this stuff than the larger tech industry. Ultimately, the game’s industry’s financial incentives are aligned with fixing the problem–if the problem isn’t fixed, people will stay away from games. As you say, MMOs realized that a long time ago.
But that logic doesn’t hold when we’re talking about Twitter, Google or Facebook. They’re all too big to boycott. There’s more they could do to fix the problems, but there’s billions of dollars at stake and it would take way more than public shaming to force them to change course. My prediction: there will be Congressional hearings on cyberbullying and trolling before this is all said and done. Hopefully, gaming will manage to get its house into order before then.
Metacritic bonus clauses are essentially a way for the developer to put in a claim to get paid for critically acclaimed games that don’t sell well.
Sales is obviously the more important metric to the publisher, and if it isn’t the more important metric in your contract, your contract is a bit whack.
So, anyone who tilts their game design for critical support over the market demands either has perverse incentives built in to the contract, or is a bit off (since if you are going to use external forces to dictate game design, use the ones that pay more).
This leaves us with Metacritic being crucial in the case that the game doesn’t sell as well as hoped (so swinging for the market failed), with the critical acclaim being the fallback for the developer.
Now, there are ways that could be negotiated around (for example, specify a set of possible review sites in the contract, or specify that the publisher picks 3 and the developer picks 3, and take a straight average, out of the set of Metacritic approved sites), but if you are giving yourself a financial stake in “what critics think of my game”, then that means, *yes* you are choosing to adjust your game design (or not) with that in mind.
You don’t get to have a “critics love us, so we should get more money even if we didn’t sell well” clause (which, make no mistake about it, is inherently a developer friendly clause, since it didn’t make any money for the publisher) and then complain that the critics have a say in how much you get paid and that isn’t fair.
You want the critics to not have a say? Trade that clause for a higher royalty on sales, and let the market decide.
“Suppose there were websites that were reviewing video games from a Christian or Islamic perspective.”
Why suppose?
https://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/reviews/68-console/playstation-4/5711-daylight-ps4
Fascinatingly this gives a separate “morality score”, so in many ways it’s actually more progressive than Polygon.
I believe some sites, Polygon most notably, do mark down for boobs. I don’t think many sites mark up. There’s no hedonistic counterbalance to moral scolds.
I would love to see that exist, though, just to see heads explode.
“The game is pretty pedestrian but the camera leers over hot female bodies, 9/10.” Seems just as fair.
“Morality score” is exactly the wrong thing to call it–it might not be an issue of morality, but of taste or comfort. The reality is that I would probably enjoy Bayonetta 2 less because of what Polygon was talking about. This does not mean that I think the game itself or people playing it are immoral.
I guess if we were talking about “Rapelay”, we would be talking about a Morality Score. I probably wouldn’t be interested in looking at the other score, in that case.
Actually, the real reason that “morality score” is dumb is because how a critic evaluates sex, violence etc depends on the context of the work it is in. There aren’t any objective rules that determine how much is too much in a work, that something that every critic and every player decides for themselves.
While I’m posting a crapload of replies to myself, I guess I should add that while what Dave Weinstein wrote convinces me (a non-expert) I still think there’s room for metacritic to screw things up in so far as *players* are depending on it–if players go to the site, see a number in the upper 70s/lower 80s, think “bad game” and look for something else to play.
No, we’re going to do what’s been going on in the past week, which there’s finally breathing room to do: Cease acknowledging GG and anyone who would use it for false agency.
Speak for yourself and say what you want about it. Work for real insight and understanding rather than noise and chaos. Or, shut the hell up and let the adults talk.
I have to respond to your post here because this comment embedding engine is pants.
“How can a game be blatantly broken or incomplete at launch, but the reviews from pre-launch never mention it? It seems like it’s become standard for pre-launch access to include restrictions that give the publishers (or their contract PR firms) approval authority for those reviews. Not every outlet is accepting those restrictions, but they don’t seem to push back about them, either.”
Prelaunch coverage tends to be much more tightly managed than launch coverage, but you’re right that some sites accept restrictive terms. The problem with pushing back publicly is that it tends to poison the well for any sort of future contact. Sometimes, PR firms will make demands so egregious that they become public, or something like the Kane & Lynch debacle will happen, but much of this gets negotiated behind closed doors and it *really* comes down to the size and strength of the publication in question.
There are websites and magazines out there that will quietly and politely invite companies that try to pull these stunts to get bent and there are those (typically smaller up-and-comers with less $$$) that will play along to one degree or another.
As for why bugs don’t get mentioned? That could be a host of reasons, from “Didn’t encounter,” to “Didn’t actually play that far into the game,” to, yes, “Wanted to stay in good with the reviewer.” The guy who reviewed Shadows of Mordor for Kotaku talks about how he saw his own Nemesis Orcs rising from the dead when he reviewed the game, but when he brought it up to the dev, they basically told him it was an utter fluke. He didn’t know it was a possible bug at all until he saw others reporting a similar problem.
“Anybody that works in the industry knows that the biggest problem for the rank and file is the quality of life issues (eternal crunch, no job security, moving every 2-3 years), but that has literally never been featured by any major outlet for a decade (since EA Spouse). How does that happen?”
I know Kotaku has done some ongoing coverage of what it’s like to work in the gaming industry, but if you want the truth on this — and Damion, maybe you have an opinion here — I’d guess it’s because employees rarely want to talk about it. Not only is there a fear of losing one’s job, America is a country where working hard is seen as practically next to Godliness — and in industries where everybody beats their brains out day after day, lobbying for something approaching sane treatment risks a backlash. Argue that everyone deserves to be treated more like people and less like machinery, and you risk internal criticism from people saying: “You just aren’t man or woman enough to hack it. Get out of the way and let somebody who cares about gaming do your job.”
In a situation like this, a general report on how working as a game developer can be its own kind of hell is a tough sell. Readers want to know if this is an issue at EA, or Gearbox, or Valve, or Ubisoft. But absent specifics and particulars, journalists are going to be leery of just making a bunch of accusations — and the people who are willing to talk about this privately will not give permission to reveal those specifics and particulars because if they do, they’ll get shitcanned.
(This doesn’t mean that the situation shouldn’t be talked about, because it should be. But I think it’s part of why it doesn’t get talked about very much).
I don’t know anything about IGF, and so can offer absolutely no comment there, save to note that Silicon Valley and the entire tech community is *way* too far up its own ass when it comes to meritocracies and judging contests. Michael Arrington is a bit notorious for this.
I agree solely based on what you’ve stated that there’s a problem with IGF.
From my perspective, one of the greatest and most pervasive threats to journalistic integrity is the fact that it’s only getting harder to make money. That might seem counter-intuitive, but the truth is, large publications with huge reader bases have more bargaining power than small ones do. If you have people lining up to pay money to advertise on your platform, you don’t care if a company pulls its ads over a bad game review.
My personal and honest answer regarding journalist — PR relationships is that we walk a tightrope. There has to be trust between you and a PR person. They have to believe that if they talk to you off the record about a game or a problem that it’ll stay off the record. They have to believe you’ll be fair about a product and not try to do a hatchet job on something.
But that fairness and respect can’t cross the line into automatically believing what a company says or giving its products a good review because you’re friends with the developers or the PR people in question. Friendship with developers or PR people in industry’s you cover is not an automatic problem, but it does require vigilance and ongoing evaluation of a situation to ensure you remain objective.
It’s the journalists’ job to consider the company’s viewpoint and to evaluate the merits of a product or an argument, but our responsibility is ultimately to our readers. Total objectivity is a myth, but thoroughness and thoughtfulness are not.
Yeah, from what I can see, GG really wants to see a sense of respect for the readership, that the journalists see themselves as representatives or intermediaries in the dialog between creators and consumer, rather than gatekeepers to or colleagues of the PR department.
There’s been a fundamental breakdown in trust, the “core gamer” feels that the journalists have chosen to take an adversarial position, “hipsters” too cool to be concerned with the nerds. Wanting to take over games as “nerd chic”, too good for actual nerds.
–Dave
What you just described is again, not anything like an issue of journalistic integrity (although I think you’re on to something here).
What #GamerGate wants is a press that will always take its side, will tell it it is a wonderful and special snowflake, always agree with it, never challenge it, and never do anything to disagree with its judgement.
That isn’t a cry for journalistic integrity, it’s a demand for a fan club devoted to telling you how wonderful you are.
Dave,
“So lets have a dialog about journalism and ethical standards for websites and PR.”
As a journalist of 14 years — sure thing!
What would you like to talk about?
Can we admit that the websites function essentially as a extension of the PR/Marketing efforts of the major publishers? There’s some extremely sketchy things going on as just the normal way of doing business.
How can a game be blatantly broken or incomplete at launch, but the reviews from pre-launch never mention it? It seems like it’s become standard for pre-launch access to include restrictions that give the publishers (or their contract PR firms) approval authority for those reviews. Not every outlet is accepting those restrictions, but they don’t seem to push back about them, either.
Anybody that works in the industry knows that the biggest problem for the rank and file is the quality of life issues (eternal crunch, no job security, moving every 2-3 years), but that has literally never been featured by any major outlet for a decade (since EA Spouse). How does that happen?
With all the kerfluffle, we’ve seen reports of IGF contestants being outright told that they were never really in the running, because they didn’t have the right “message”, and the narrative of their team didn’t check the right boxes. Other cases where developers knew without a doubt that the judges assigned to their games literally never played them for more than a few seconds (because they had tracking metrics built in or were otherwise phoning home) have come up. Is there actually an unstated set of rules for the IGF? Why has that never been a significant issue for the press to discuss?
What I found frustrating about GG was their focus on some extremely personal and low-level examples of “corruption” in the rounding error that is the “indie scene”. Why is everyone ignoring the elephants in the room?
–Dave
None of the things you mention have anything to do with #GamerGate. In fact, #GamerGate points to cases where the reviews are *against* games by large publishers and decries them, and many of the #GamerGate supporters have spoken glowingly of *house* organs like Nintendo Power, which by definition are not journalism.
That’s the thing, there are real issues with journalism in games (and indeed, any enthusiast press, since they are dependent on the support of the people creating the products for information). But #GamerGate doesn’t seem to care about any of that — if it did, it would have gone incandescent at the payola in the streamer space. Instead, non-issue for #GamerGate.
None of the IGF stuff is new either; surprise, volunteer judges sometimes phone it in, and have for at least a decade (and yes, including not bothering to play games which could track if they were played because they were online).
So yeah, there really are issues about a captive press. But #GamerGate doesn’t appear to care about real issues. And the tactics #GamerGate uses (specifically, organized attempts to use advertiser pressure to control what the press say) are in diametric opposition to *any* kind of journalistic integrity.
Any attempt to have this discussion with Gamergate, or even with them around and acting the way that they are, is a shrill non-debate with an echo chamber of bad ideas. You literally cannot discuss ethics right now in an open and candid way. Because they make that discussion impossible.
“Never even been trying to fight a PR war”
—-
Seriously? That’s *all* they’ve been doing; hell, go look at their discussion forums and see the planning going into it.
This guy is one of you favorite Damien? http://mweb.cbssports.com/general/writer/gregg-doyel/24628550/chris-kluwe-cant-be-moral-crusader-after-his-cruel-twitter-rant?v=1&vc=3
Oh man. Yaww-fucking-aaawn. Another lame attempt to derail the conversation. So he did some pretty distasteful shit in the past, that from even the article’s account seems to be an anomaly in his otherwise laudable behaviour, and that is totally unrelated to either gaming culture or misogyny in general. Damion, you should just disown even knowing about this guy, because he is COMPLETELY dragging you down and giving you a bad name! Oh noes!
…
Just go back to digging through DiGRA for your bullshit “gotcha” moment…
If he is laudable the moment he says something he says something you like then he is laudable. Selective fact using works fine everytime doesnt it?
NFL, in the words of Terry Crews, is “jail with money.” The irony is that Chris Kluwe talked himself out of a career.
Kluwe’s tweets implied he joined his teammates (who included Adrian Petersen, who isn’t smelling like a rose either) in telling rape jokes to a coach who was either a Penn State fan or used to work there. He also implied there was worse shenanigans going on, which contrasted with why they decided to fire him (that might include being a mediocre punter.)
That sounds shitty. Kluwe ought not have done that.
But, this is who he is. He’s too much of a mouthy nerd to have successfully managed a professional sports career.
Acknowledged. You don’t have to like Chris Kluwe either.
I have no idea whether he is laudable or not, but the article writer seemed to think so. They mentioned a bunch of other work that Kruwe had done and the tone of the article was “you’re better than this, I’m disappointed” – not the “you’re a hateful monster who nobody (that’s you, Damion!) should associate with” bullshit that you are trying to pull.
He did something pretty thoughtlessly demeaning, and (rightly) got called on it. He apparently doesn’t have a history of this kind of behaviour (unlike the public face of GG), else the article would have hammered that point home. Your transparent attempt to link Damion to some kind of Ted Bundy-like sociopath is boring and old. At least have the decency to *try* to serve up something new at Cafe GG?
“GamerGate started as harassment and about sex so we can dismiss it until the end of time based on past sins.”
“The recent past of this person is irrelevant deraiing – who cares about the past, what matters is the now!”
What’s it like to be such an ideological warrior that you can’t maintain even the slightest bit of logical coherence?
What’s it like to be a rando with no point to convey? Start a blog, already.
But, since you asked, read my above. What are you quoting, anyway?
What’s it like to be an asshole with nothing to contribute who lashes out at the world because his parents didn’t hug him enough?
Go away troll.
Also what’s it like to be not intelligent enough to understand how a threaded comment section works?
There are lines and indentation cues to let you know who is replying to who. It’s not rocket science.
You should stamp your feet with impotent rage less and read and understand more. Pro tip.
Now go whine to Damion about how I should be banned for being rude to you despite the fact that you’ve been rude to me a half dozen times. I’m sure that’s your next step!
Damion can do what he wants with his own blog. Just like you could, with your own. Trolls would want to provoke you to keep talking. I don’t.
Note that there’s a huge difference between those two entities. One of them is a hashtag, an event–the other is, ahem, a person.
Whatever Chris Kluwe’s sins, it’s absurd for anyone to say that it was a mistake to create him. Unless I am very wrong about how infant and child development works, Chris Kluwe did not start as a dude who made offensive jokes about Penn State. Just like every other human being, including those retweeting GG, he has made mistakes. But all human life is valuable, and its wrong to point at any person and say their existence is a mistake.
#Gamergate, as a piece of data on Twitter’s computers, was created in order to signal boost harassment and defamation. Creating GamerGate was a mistake. It doesn’t matter who else joins the campaign or what their new agenda is. Creating a hashtag to signal boost harassment and defamation is wrong. Supporting such a hashtag once it has already started is wrong. Trying to redefine the hashtag so that it’s about something else, making it harder for victims of the hashtag to defend themselves, is wrong. You cannot redeem a hashtag that was started for immoral reasons because trying to do that is itself an immoral act.
You really have no understanding of how critical thinking actually works, do you, Person?
You can always find one thing about someone that proves they aren’t a paragon of virtue. That one thing does not invalidate the history of good works they have done and continue to do.
Linking to a single article that calls out Kluwe’s bad behaviour, in which the article writer goes out of his way to highlight the overall good character of Kluwe and is sad that he can no longer trust him as blindly as he once could, and the linking of which is meant to imply that Damion is somehow tainted for approving of Kluwe’s writing, is the very essence of cherrypicking.
GG as a movement has a history of harassment, of vile behaviour, and of generally being repulsive. Recent attempts to overcome that history are optimistic, but you will never be able to establish trust with that identity, particularly when the harassment and vile behaviour continues to this day.
“What’s it like to be such an ideological warrior that you can’t maintain even the slightest bit of logical coherence?”
Please, enlighten us! It’d be useful to better understand what we are dealing with.
The Chris Kluwe essay is fantastic. So much problems in GG people stem from their teen complexes, a lot of them still believe that the nerd-jock war continues and here we have a football player calling them neckbeards. Not everyone is going to survive that PTSD!
A jock nerd-bashing GG is a refutation of anti-GG as nerd-bashing? Or are GG just supposed to be so terrified of jocks that a football player joining in against them means they will run away?
–Dave
The jock in question is most definitely a nerd of the first order.
He’s a “Gamer” by my definition, but his definition seems to be somewhere between “nerd” and “neckbeard”.
–Dave
There is no meaningful definition of “gamer” that doesn’t include Chris Kluwe, and I’m not sure how you could read that article and think he didn’t consider himself a gamer.
You are correct. Looking at it, he’s arguing for an expansion of the word “gamer”, not declaring it dead and over. I wonder if anyone told him that puts him with most of GamerGate.
–Dave
You think so? I’ve seen an awful lot of gatekeeping in #GamerGate, including some very explicit “people like you were mean to us in High School, so you can’t join us now that we’re getting popular” statements.
And I’ve seen an explicit statement that pasty nerds that didn’t know how to dress and how to act should be excluded from the tribe.
Some people reacted poorly to that, and not just because they were sun-deprived autistics with no fashion sense. You open your argument for inclusiveness in gaming with a declaration that the first step is identifying who to exclude, the rest of the argument tends to get lost.
Bring in the jocks, the dorks, the melanin-challenged and the sunscreen abjuring. Those with one X chromosome, two, or even three. The “gamer” label started at tables covered with dice, character sheets, maps and miniatures, and everyone was welcome. Why would we ever want to lose that?
–Dave
We should give that up because making “gamer” an identity requires people to give up their other identities. GG is okay with women as long as they realize “There are No Girls on the Internet”.
An identity is a kind of person. If “gamer” is an identity, that means only certain kinds of people can play games. That identity should die. All kinds of people should be able to play games.
I think you misunderstand “There are no girls on the internet.” It’s partly a subversion through overstatement of the idea that the internet in general and online games in particular are the realm of male nerds, and in large part an appeal to the egalitarian ideal: Don’t expect to be treated better because you’re female.
Of course, it being a 4chan meme, they immediately took it over the top into “Fits or GTFO”, if you want to be treated differently because you’re a girl, prove it. I’ve said it before, ‘asshole’ is their thing, I think they tattoo it on their forehead.
Do you have to give up your identity to be a “gamer”? No. You have to give up your *privilege*.
–Dave
Unfortunately, that’s pretty much what I thought it meant.
“Don’t expect to be treated better because you’re female.”
To call this “egalitarian” presumes that women are generally better treated because they are female, which is a very strange perspective.
“Do you have to give up your identity to be a “gamer”? No. You have to give up your *privilege*.”
GamerGate does not get to set requirements on who is a gamer and what they do or do not have to give up. Expressing your identity is not a privilege. Disagreeing with Gamergate on feminism is not a privilege. Telling Gamergate to fuck off is not a privilege. The only people who owe Gamergate anything are the trolls and right-wingers who tricked Gamergate into doing their bidding.
Does GG have a misogynist problem? Yes, there are definitely misogynists operating under that banner. But GG is much larger than has been acknowledged, a conservative estimate based on IP uniques at /r/KiA and 8chan puts it north of 50k. The actual misogynists are no more than one thousand, and becoming more and more marginalized every day.
The only simple description of GG that actually fits (as opposed to making a neat narrative) is that it’s anti-nerdbashing, and reacting to the constant current of nerdshaming in coverage of GG. There are lots of factions with lots of agendas, but that is the common current for most.
You don’t need to convince me that harassment and threats to women is a real problem. But, assuming the forces of goodness and light succeed in pinning it on GG and drive it out to the wilderness: Will anything actually have been fixed?
–Dave
I’m extremely socially awkward, I’m clumsy, I have a nasal voice, I have a narrow circle of friends, I like math and gaming, I have at times had hair growing on my neck, and I’m posting a blog comment on Friday night. GamerGate does not get to make me their shield. I’m not saying those jokes are unproblematic–I’m not those guys’ shield either. But joining a campaign started by misogynists because you’re offended by “nerd-shaming” is wrong. My fellow nerds should know better. I think most of us do.
Nerd-shaming as a primary force in GG doesn’t explain much of GG at all. Doesn’t explain their obsession with targeting females, “SJWs” or the origins of the movement. It doesn’t even explain the “ethics in journalism” angle. Or demanding “objective reviews”.
If you’re trying to tell me that misogyny is marginalized on 8Chan and KiA… um, no. Misogyny cannot be marginalized in GamerGate, because given the origins of the hashtag, that’s the first thing they would have to marginalize.
Fighting GamerGate isn’t so much a matter of fixing things as preventing GG from breaking everything. As Brianna Wu said recently “this is a fight about losing an entire generation of women in the games industry.” You know what? That’s a real fucking possibility. That the limited progress that has been made thus far could be unwound by this freak show.
He was a kicker.
One more for the road: Dan Olson’s Folding Ideas did an episode about Gamergate, featuring a paper sock puppet named Foldy, who examines base assumptions about the argument that show what we knew all along: The feelings of threat and invasion by “others” (SJWs and women) were real, but the rhetoric and tactics were not. Gamergate was never about debate; but it may as well have been about individuals subsuming or abandoning all pretext of self for the benefit of the mob.
http://blip.tv/foldablehuman/s4e7-gamergate-7071206
This is actually a fantastic watch, although very long.
Since he started with some blatant postmodernist fallacies (some truth can be shown to be socially constructed, therefore all truth is socially constructed), I never got far enough into it to see what he had to say about GG.
If the first thing you want to do is discuss “base assumptions” by setting forth fallacy as logic, I’m pretty confident you’re not going anywhere useful after that.
–Dave
I’m not gonna rewatch the puppet to find out for sure, but I don’t think he claimed that “all truth is socially constructed”. He is claiming that all human beliefs depend on “base assumptions” (not necessarily that the *truth* of the belief depends on the assumptions) and that all human activity, including the creation of art, takes place in a political context.
The first claim is basically undeniable–what, you think you “clearly and distinctly perceive” the truth, Descartes-style? The second might be more contentious, but a non-puppet version of it was argued here: http://midnightresistance.co.uk/articles/game-design-always-political-im-not-even-exaggerating-here
Both that post and the video cited that same Žižek doc, but I haven’t bothered to watch it because that guy is a CIA plant (j/k).
“all human activity, including the creation of art, takes place in a political context.”
This is false unless your definition of “political” is so vague as to be meaningless.
If everything a human does is political then “political” as a word has no meaning beyond “any thing a human does.” It’s tautological.
This is a common rhetorical trick these days, but that’s all it is – a rhetorical trick. It’s making an argument via unstated semantic finagling.
Everything is political. Ok. Everything is religious. Everything is about California local politics. Some guy in the Ukraine who doesn’t care about California politics is still supporting the status quo through inaction – I guess they support the current system of propositions, even if they don’t know what that eve means!
Everything is about penguins. No matter what you do penguins exist, everything is in the context of penguins existing. If you have no opinion on them and take no penguin-specific actions you are endorsing the penguin status quo.
This is an argument that can be made about everything. Everything is political, everything is about sandwiches, everything is about whether or not you like Harry Potter. These all work!
The idea that everything is political is idiotic. It’s a bon mot, nothing more.
The great thing is that you posted that comment, but anyone who clicks to read that essay I linked–or for that matter, watches that entire puppet video–will understand why you’re wrong.
“Man is by nature a political animal.”
–Aristotle.
Fairly famous fellow.
You…you seriously just said, “Everything is done in a political context” = “Everything is political”.
And then you went downhill from there.
/golfclap
look at how dumb you are.
Piling on like this is really distasteful, we shouldn’t do that.
But Joel’s mention of Aristotle brings to mind two links. Some evolutionary psychologists claim that social reasoning, i.e. politics, is the primary reason that human consciousness evolved: http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/david-barash-evolution-consciousness/
Perhaps even more radically, some philosophers, comparing the performance of rapid instinct vs. conscious reason, claim that reason only makes sense in a social context–that reason is essentially argument, and an argument without anyone to argue against just becomes rationalization.
Oh, sorry, forgot the second link: http://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/MercierSperberWhydohumansreason.pdf
“I think Gamergate is primarily about anger at progressive people who care about feminism and transgender rights and mental health and whatever else is getting involved in gaming, and by what gamergaters see as overly solicitous coverage of said individuals and their games.”
There’s absolutely nothing progressive about moral scolds, especially when their scolding is often rooted in the same sort of thought you’d get from the religious right: shaming of women’s bodies and such. The criticisms these people have of sexual content is almost exactly the same as the criticisms you’d get from social conservatives.
These people are “progressive” in the same way as the guy who thought Robin’s crotch bulge would make kids gay – not at all. Ideologically they are well-aligned with Tipper Gore, the Comics Code, Cleanflix and other social conservatives.
anti-GGers routinely bash people who are socially awkward, people with autism, etc, so calling them “progressive” when it comes to mental health is outright laughable. There’s also a definite strain of classism on display, with low-income workers repeatedly mocked.
Feminism? These “feminist” activists attack routinely call women gender traitors and say that women aren’t smart enough to make their own decisions in life and need to clam up and listen to their male superiors who know better.
How any of that is “progressive” is beyond me.
The idea that the good guys are progressive and pro-diversity doesn’t hold up to scrutiny at all. Neither side has any sort of big tent philosophy, they have competing small tents.
I really wish you’d up your game, Person. You’d make a much better foil if you did.
Critizing the depiction of female sexuality in gaming for being myopic and juvenile is not the same as criticizing women for having a sex drive. Your position is analogous to the conservatives who claim that liberals are the REAL anti-woman party, because they want to reduce women to just a pile of reproductive organs by giving them birth control.
Perhaps you’d like proof of this. No problem. Even within the exceedingly narrow role of “Sex object” how many fat chicks do you see? How many butch lesbians? How many genderqueer women? I’m not talking about PC characters or even *party* members — how many video games actually depict women who depart from the idealized norm in *any* kind of positive light?
When Borderlands 2 unveiled Ellie, the developers took heat from people who objected to her being depicted as fat and hideous and from those who were pissed at the inclusion of a fat chick — but the fact that simply including a fat NPC sparked such rancorous debate from both sides is itself *indicative* of how rarely these concepts are even peripherally addressed.
http://ontologicalgeek.com/down-to-size-borderlands-2s-ellie-and-body-image/
This is an issue of nuance, of scope, of pervasive portrayal. Ivy is notorious in Soul Calibur from transforming from a stereotypical female fighter (immodest) into what I’ve memorably seen described as a “Fighting Fuck Toy” in SC4. Then in SC5, she moved back towards something that might be described as “Armor-ish by fighting game standards” as opposed to “String.”
http://lmc.gatech.edu/~cpearce3/lcc4725/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Progression.jpg
The fact that I find her SC4 depiction distasteful has nothing to do with a dislike of breasts, bodies, or women, and more to do with an art style and direction that relentlessly hyperinflates her chest at the expense of pretty much anything else.
It is profoundly intellectually dishonest to take a criticism of Ivy that reflects on the fact that video game women are primarily valued for the tits and say: “Oh, you people are just against depictions of female sexuality.” I’m not. I just happen to think female sexuality has a great many more valid expressions than “XXX-sized cup and thigh-high boots.”
“I really wish you’d up your game, Person. You’d make a much better foil if you did. ”
I really wish you’re respond with logic instead of insults but that’s asking to much of a moral scold I suppose.
I find it fascinating that I’m constantly insulted in these comments threads apropos of nothing. It’s like people like you don’t even understand the difference between reason and insults.
The rest of your post was garbage but I assume that if I refute it you’ll just resort to more childish insults. The short version is that what you are talking about can be true in the abstract but doesn’t apply to actual moral scolds who very much do shame women for their bodies and sexuality. (Let’s not forget these are the people who accuse attractive women at GDC parties of being paid models since attractive women simply can’t be game developers)
Lose the attitude next time brat. Thanks.
“It’s like people like you don’t even understand the difference between reason and insults.”
“The rest of your post was garbage but I assume that if I refute it you’ll just resort to more childish insults.”
You know, I made these two separate quotes, but you actually typed one of them right after you typed the other. That’s impressive.
Joel made a serious response and you blew him off and called him names. It’s a bit rich seeing you lecture anyone on the difference between insults and reason after that. (Not that I would claim to be an angel on that front.)
“doesn’t apply to actual moral scolds who very much do shame women for their bodies and sexuality.”
Let’s talk specifics, then. Prime targets of GG, as near as I can tell, include:
1). Feminists and feminism, targeted with varying degrees of precision and/or understanding. Very few people decrying feminism that fly the GG banner appear to understand that 1). The sex-negative viewpoints typified by the work of radical likes Dworkin were one of the reasons why Third Wave Feminism exists and why TWF is typically much more sex-positive, trans-inclusive, and intersectional.
Even so-called “sex negative” second wave feminists would never decry the female body *as such* but rather the pervasive distortion of the male gaze that teaches women to view themselves as sexual objects. This is a nuanced but critical point of distinction.
Journalist ethics: I have yet to see a journalist or major publication write an article claiming that pretty women can’t be game developers. That doesn’t mean some drunken idiot didn’t say so on Twitter, of course, but the world is full of idiots and most of them have jobs.
If you are going to rally against a viewpoint and claim it’s something to organize *against*, you need to be able to provide concrete and distinct examples of a behavior. Again, critiquing a game’s depiction of women or its hypermammiforous qualities is not the same as critiquing female sexuality or female bodies.
“(Let’s not forget these are the people)”
I agree. Let’s not forget. Let’s name these people. Who are the people shaming women at parties?
Ben Kuchera? Ben was a co-worker of mine for several years. I never saw him shame anyone in a public gathering. Do you have evidence he did?
Arthur Gies, the Bayonetta 2 reviewer at Polygon?
Who, precisely, are “these people?” What have they done? And how do you know that those actions (whatever they might’ve been) were sufficiently pervasive and descriptive enough to justify your claim that “these people” have created an entire culture of sex negativity inside gaming and game development?
I would find your claim that progressives want to stymie the expression of female sexuality if female sexuality was ever depicted as anything but a prop for the juvenile straight male. Show me where the modern gaming industry and GG is arguing for trangressive demonstrations of female sexuality that appeal to butch lesbians, genderqueer individuals, and something approaching actual intimacy between lesbians. (The Last of Us’ DLC is again unusual for touching on this topic).
Show me that GG’s claims of protecting sex positivity from progressives actually protect the expressions of sex that don’t involve straight men. Show me where GG has stood up for the inclusion of transgender romance, or expression of non-binary gender.
For the record, I would never actually argue that modern gaming of the type GGers loathe actually does ANYTHING like a good job of protecting these values. In fact, it’s laughably terrible at even acknowledging they exist. That’s why I’m so curious to see what evidence you’ve got — if GG is the bastion of sexual positivity the industry is missing, I’d love to see the proof.
“anti-GGers routinely bash people who are socially awkward, people with autism, etc”
You got that one backwards. See: the “hugbox” videos by Internet Aristocrat, who is many things but is not “anti-GG”. https://www.youtube.com/user/InternetAristocrat
Not to mention that the ‘autism bashing’ came from a twitter account that was spoofing a legitimate Brianna Wu account.
Oddly, despite all their efforts in investigating anti-GG’ers, it appears GamerGaters have overlooked investigating who the spoofer could have been: almost as if it was already known…
It’s almost like Gamergate is all about chaos and noise and being all up in each other’s business.
How many articles calling GG names is it going to take before anti-GG realize it won’t work. I don’t care what Chris kluwe thinks, any more than some asshole at gawker or verge.
At some point either engage us or deal with the fact that this is the new normal. People will call your shit out.
Who is “us,” again?