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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2362 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 28, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I'm not sure if this is going to get any eyeballs here, but I don't think a short post asking a question is appropriate for the CW thread.

Is there an overview of Gamergate anywhere, from the pro-Gamergate side? The anti-Gamergate view is readily available on Wikipedia. (I hope I'm using pro- and anti- right.)

In particular:

  • What concerns were there about "ethics in gaming journalism"?
  • What is the response to "Grayson never actually reviewed any of Quinn's games, and his only Kotaku article mentioning them was published before their relationship began"?
  • Was the claim of a conflict of interest really based on a typo in "The Zoe Post"? What is the response to this revelation?
  • How did Sarkeesian and Wu get involved? What is their relation to "ethics in gaming journalism"?
  • Was there really pre-existing seething from gamers about Depression Quest that motivated Gamergate? What was that about?
  • What is the response to the harassment Quinn, Sarkeesian and Wu received?

I wrote a four-part post here about exactly this a while ago, with a focus on the Grayson/Quinn conflict of interest, and some of my responses in the thread address the pro-GG response to harassment. For bonus points, I have also summarised cases of unethical conduct among the anti-GG side here, for example an instance where they rallied around a known pedophile in their ranks.

God fucking damnit, I got so much shit for writing these. Who's laughing now?

Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for. There was a conflict of interest after all!

Those IRC logs don't really exonerate Gamergaters, though. The people there are openly talking about sharing Quinn's nudes. I thought these were supposed to be the non-harassers? Gjoni himself condemns it, but the rest of the server seems fine with it. Sharing her nudes is clearly harassment, and if they're doing this, how do we know they aren't engaging in all the other forms of harassment she received?

And another question, if you don't mind: what is the timeline on the Grayson/Quinn conflict of interest? Did people first believe she traded sex for positive coverage, and only when this turned out to be false did they find out about their prior (non-sexual) relationship, by going through their Twitters? When did each of these events occur?

Also, do you know how Sarkeesian and Wu got involved? Wikipedia places them right next to Quinn as victims of Gamergate, but as far as I can tell, there were no allegations of unethical behaviour on their part. According to Wikipedia, Wu was targeted "as retaliation for mocking Gamergate", while Sarkeesian was targeted because people didn't like Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. Would proponents of Gamergate consider these harassment campaigns unrelated to Gamergate?

Edit: I'm going through the /r/kotakuinaction stuff, it might have the answers to my questions, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

I wrote a long response, then I accidentally erased all of my progress. Now I'm writing it again.

Those IRC logs don't really exonerate Gamergaters, though. The people there are openly talking about sharing Quinn's nudes. I thought these were supposed to be the non-harassers? Gjoni himself condemns it, but the rest of the server seems fine with it.

The user discussing sharing Quinn's nudes in that IRC chat log is mainly SweetJBro, and you can see many other participants in the server objecting to the idea. Such as this entire block of text from the chat logs:

Aug 18 17.42.01 SaladCream Posting the nudes wouldn't be productive

Aug 18 17.42.11 VidyaBro saladcream is right

Aug 18 17.42.14 Geno_ Yeah but we need to put her as the villain

Aug 18 17.42.16 Geno_ not the victim

Aug 18 17.42.19 cuteGamrgrll doin' it indiscriminately might be a little reckless though.

Aug 18 17.42.22 Geno_ Otherwise it won't work

Aug 18 17.42.25 cuteGamrgrll GET THIS HOT HEAD OUTTA HERE

Aug 18 17.42.34 BurgerKing Don't forget

Aug 18 17.42.41 BurgerKing You post those nudes she can go to that pax panel

Aug 18 17.42.44 VidyaBro we can always save the nudes for an encyclopediadramatica page

Aug 18 17.42.48 BurgerKing and make us look like the bad guys

This certainly isn't a case of "coordinated harassment through IRC", as anti-GGs tend to describe it.

Sharing her nudes is clearly harassment, and if they're doing this, how do we know they aren't engaging in all the other forms of harassment she received?

Given the size of GamerGate, and given how prominent and hot-button GamerGate was at the time, there are almost certainly a non-zero amount of GamerGaters who would've harassed Quinn in some capacity. The question is whether or not GamerGate tried to police itself, and there are multiple instances of them making attempts to do so. I'm not saying they were all Literally Angels, I'm saying that the description of them as a "harassment campaign" is inaccurate.

And another question, if you don't mind: what is the timeline on the Grayson/Quinn conflict of interest? Did people first believe she traded sex for positive coverage, and only when this turned out to be false did they find out about their prior (non-sexual) relationship, by going through their Twitters? When did each of these events occur?

I believe initially the typo in Gjoni's post making it seem like they were on break between March and June, instead of May and June, led people to believe that Grayson and Quinn were having sex while he was giving her positive coverage, outlined by this Internet Aristocrat video called "Quinnspiracy Theory". I don't believe the idea of sex for positive coverage has actually been conclusively refuted with this new timeline though. Putting the sex a few days after the coverage doesn't necessarily make it any less transactional.

Regardless of whether they were wrong or right about that initial detail, they uncovered a conflict of interest - in fact many, across the industry. They might not have been right about every detail (4chan/8chan shitposters aren't the most rigorous people), but they were right enough, and right about a lot of things that people would really have wanted to deny.

Also, do you know how Sarkeesian and Wu got involved? Wikipedia places them right next to Quinn as victims of Gamergate, but as far as I can tell, there were no allegations of unethical behaviour on their part. According to Wikipedia, Wu was targeted "as retaliation for mocking Gamergate", while Sarkeesian was targeted because people didn't like Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. Would proponents of Gamergate consider these harassment campaigns unrelated to Gamergate?

Off the top of my head I can't tell you about Wu, but I can about Sarkeesian. GamerGate partially originated because of the reaction to the uncovering of these conflicts of interest, specifically the infamous "Gamers are dead" articles that appeared en masse after Quinn started getting flack. One of the most famous ones was written by Leigh Alexander, a journalist who likely knew Quinn in some capacity beforehand (given the twitter logs). As a result GamerGate ended up not just being about conflicts of interest; at least part of GamerGate was about the idea of gaming being gatekept by progressive cliques who were completely contemptuous of your average game consumer, and who would dishonestly use accusations of racism and sexism and other such tactics as a method of both deflecting from their own failures and enforcing their preferred sets of norms upon an unwilling consumer base. Sarkeesian's grifting was sufficiently egregious and also sufficiently related to this phenomenon for it to become a hot topic among GamerGaters. I also recall that it was claimed that threats that Sarkeesian got even before GamerGate was even really a thing was "GamerGate harassment", even though this was effectively evidence-less, with Anita herself trying to retroactively contextualise her harassers as being GGers, and this shaming tactic also helped pull her into GG's ambit.

Sarkeesian wasn't even a fan of video games. She claimed to be a gigantic consumer of games since she was young, several times. Then people discovered a lecture where she was caught explicitly saying that she didn't really like them. The pro-Sarkeesian crowd tried to spin this as her being a "casual" fan who didn't base a significant portion of her personality on being a fan of videogames. But that was absolutely and demonstrably not the way she advertised herself before.

People in gaming don't tend to take very kindly to moral scolds who attempt to force their own sensibilities upon a community they're not part of. What Anita Sarkeesian experienced here is... fairly normal, and the main unique thing was her insistence that she had been uniquely victimised because of her sex. Look at the case of Jack Thompson, a fervent critic of video games and their supposed ability to cause violence, as another example. The main difference is that Thompson was derided by pretty much everyone with articles in Ars Technica and Engadget advocating you make a Thompson lookalike in Mortal Kombat and beat him (his avatar) up, whereas Sarkeesian ended up overshooting her funding goals by several orders of magnitude because of the sympathy drummed up for her.

And to risk sounding like a broken record, there was certainly harassment against Sarkeesian, but the harassment against her mostly didn't come from GamerGate, and in fact there were instances where GamerGaters attempted to oust people who were sending threats to Sarkeesian, something which even Kotaku admitted to. GamerGate certainly didn't like her and gave her a lot of shit for her actions, but saying negative or even unpleasant things about her isn't automatically harassment.

EDIT: added more

Is there an overview of Gamergate anywhere, from the pro-Gamergate side?

The sidebar and wiki of /r/kotakuinaction appear to contain links to several summaries.

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