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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Gamergate always seemed like a lot of the two sides talking past each other

Sure, I think we would disagree on which side is doing most of the "talking past".

The counter to "there's lot of ethics problems in videogame journalism" was never "no there aren't", it was "duh, everyone knows that; no one takes videogame journalism seriously. Why are you harassing women about it?".

This sane-washes the anti-GamerGate stance. The general anti-GamerGate stance, exemplified by Danskin, was not "well, there are ethics problems, but harassing people is a step too far", it was the stronger claim that "You people are misogynists who are just using ethics as a cover for your misogyny". Often, it does in fact veer very close to claiming that there was nothing to complain about ethically, as evidenced by Danskin's dismissal of the idea that there was an ethical conflict of interest in the Quinn/Grayson case.

As to why people got harassed, it's because it's the internet, and everybody who's even remotely controversial gets harassment. The mistake of anti-GamerGaters is to characterise basically the entirety of the harassment as being ascribable to GamerGate, when there were a large number of third parties that existed to stir shit. It, furthermore, also ignores that GamerGaters also received harassment and threats during that whole kerfuffle, and ignores their actual attempts to stop harassment. Cathy Young expounds on that argument here:

There was certainly some appalling harassment toward Quinn, Sarkeesian (who canceled a university lecture in October 2014 due to an email threatening a massacre), feminist game developer Brianna Wu (who received a death threat mentioning her home address after she mocked and trolled GamerGate), and some other people, not all of them women. Web developer and GamerGate opponent Israel Galvez was targeted by a fake 911 call that resulted in a visit from a SWAT team, a scary tactic known as “swatting.” But several caveats are in order:

(1) None of the criminal or severe harassment was ever tied to anyone known to be involved in GamerGate.

The FBI spent months investigating GamerGate-related harassment; as documents show, it ended up only issuing warnings to one man who admitted sending an email threat as a “joke” and to another who had made harassing phone calls to a woman with whom he had argued in a chat room. Neither was a known GamerGater. And, while the FBI found evidence that some of the harassment around GamerGate originated on 8chan, a site known as a GamerGate hub, some of it was linked to the forums on Something Awful, frequented by anti-GamerGate, anti-8chan posters.

When GamerGaters blamed the harassment on outside trolls, it looked like an excuse or a far-fetched conspiracy theory. But Kerzner, a neutral GamerGate observer, agrees that “there was a sizable number of third-party trolls that caused the vast majority of the really bad stuff.” There was at least one fairly well-documented instance in which the swatting of a GamerGate critic was traced — according to The Verge, hardly a GamerGate-friendly publication — to a troll from an 8chan board dedicated to “general anti-social mayhem,” where “users joked about Gamergate supporters ‘taking the fall’ for the attack.” A November 2015 post by a notorious troll known as “Wild Goose” also appears to confirm the existence of a troll nest that went after “SJWs” and “gaters” alike.

(2) While the harassment related to GamerGate was quite real, there was also a drastic failure of journalistic skepticism in reporting it.

Of course, questioning people’s reports of being victimized by harassment and threats is something that should never be done lightly. But honoring that principle shouldn’t preclude basic fact-checking.

For instance, in late 2014 and early 2015, there were scary reports of a GamerGate “psychopath” named Jace Connors who had made a series of videos threatening Wu; one of them featured knives, another a man in a skull mask. The most bizarre one showed Connors ranting dementedly against Wu after crashing his car, supposedly on his way to her house.

In February 2015, the videos were revealed to be a satirical prank; “Jace Connors” was actually sketch comedian Jan Rankowski while the man in the skull mask was one of his sidekicks, and the purpose of the videos was to troll and mock GamerGate. Yet more than two months after this disclosure, the skull mask video was still described as an instance of horrific GamerGate harassment in a Boston Magazine article.

More oddly still, Wu’s own New York Times op-ed last month asserts that GamerGaters “shot videos wearing skull masks” and displaying knives they threatened to use against her. When I reached out to Wu for comment, she initially replied that she received “many” such videos and that only GamerGaters themselves had ever claimed they were satirical — even though Wu herself was quoted commenting on the hoax in a February 2015 article in Verge. In a subsequent email, Wu reiterated that she was sent other videos matching the description during that time; however, none are mentioned on her Twitter timeline. (The closest is a screenshot of a tweet with a photo of what looks like a boy wearing a skull mask and holding a toy gun, and with a threat to kill Quinn, Sarkeesian, and Wu.) It seems likely that the reference in the op-ed is to the debunked “Jace Connors” incident.

(3) At least some of the portrayal of GamerGate as a harassment campaign had to do with speech that, while arguably unpleasant, was not threatening.

This speech ranged from polite but persistent unwanted attempts at debate (nicknamed “sea-lioning,” from a 2014 web comic) to video blogs criticizing someone’s work.

(4) GamerGaters themselves were targets of serious harassment, a fact hardly ever acknowledged in the mainstream media (with a few exceptions such as David Auerbach, then at Slate.)

A number of GamerGate supporters were doxxed (i.e., had home addresses and other private information posted online) and reported threats. In 2015, two offline GamerGate events I attended — a meetup in Washington, DC and a panel examining the pro-GamerGate side of the controversy at a Society of Professional Journalists conference in Miami — were disrupted by bomb threats that forced evacuation of the building. This received virtually no coverage.

Given that GamerGaters were defined as the “bad guys” in social justice discourse, many supposedly right-thinking people felt free to engage in startlingly hateful invective toward anyone involved. In November 2014, Geordie Tait, a Bay-area writer for the gaming website Star City Games, posted a series of tweets literally calling for a Holocaust of GamerGaters; when criticized for trivializing the Holocaust, he responded by saying that the Holocaust was “not as bad as what women have suffered.”

Even people who were not GamerGaters but were seen as too GamerGate-friendly (or even too neutral) were sometimes targeted. YouTuber John Bain, a popular video game critic known under the nickname “Total Biscuit,” who strongly condemned harassment but also took the view that GamerGaters had some valid concerns, said that he was inundated with abusive messages while undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer, including messages wishing for his painful death. (Some GamerGate critics also vilified Bain after he succumbed to cancer last year.) Kerzner was a victim of false rumors intended to undermine her career — rumors that chat transcripts disclosed in 2016 seemed to confirm came from anti-GamerGate activists.

(5) Many GamerGaters not only denounced harassment toward their opponents but actively tried to curb it.

Early on, some members launched a “#GamerGate harassment patrol.” In October 2014, Kotaku reporter Jason Schreier, a strong GamerGate critic, acknowledged on Twitter that GamerGaters were rallying to report a troll who was doxxing journalists. In a Kotaku article a month later, Schreier credited GamerGaters with tracking down a man responsible for a string of threats to Sarkeesian (though he still suggested that the climate created by GamerGate had probably egged the perpetrator on).

https://archive.is/W9YFk

I was mostly trying to avoid speaking for the pro-GamerGate side as I don't think I can represent them well. But from my perspective it looks like it's basically "we're just talking about ethics in videogame journalism; we have nothing to do with those other people harassing women, why are you grouping us together?".

... and the response I always saw was along the lines of "there's plenty of ethics problems in video game journalism; somehow all the ones you come up with involve women and totally not organizing internet mobs against them on purpose".

With any self-organized group, there's always the question of who the True Scotsmen are. The pro-GamerGate side wants to focus as narrowly as possible while the anti-GamerGate side wants to cast a wide net and talk about all of the fallout.

You have to take anything that the media was reporting on with a huge dump truck pile of salt, if they're not outright lying that is.

The biggest issue with GamerGate was that the people reporting on GamerGate, the media and journalists, especially the videogame related media, was itself the subject of the criticism. The media obviously has a huge, self-interested reason not to accurately report criticism levelled against themselves.

Who watches the watchmen, basically.

... and the response I always saw was along the lines of "there's plenty of ethics problems in video game journalism; somehow all the ones you come up with involve women and totally not organizing internet mobs against them on purpose".

This is just repeating the previous claim, with the focus now moved from "harassment" to "not necessarily doing the harassment yourself but purposefully inciting harassment by drawing undue attention", a claim that's much more difficult to falsify because it requires information into one's intention and other relevant details that often don't exist.

As to the "somehow all the ones you come up with involve women", that ignores the centrality of Nathan Grayson to the whole "Quinnspiracy" drama, and furthermore there were plenty of ethical breaches identified by GamerGate with a female reporter/male dev, or those which did not involve women at all.

A few examples from the Deepfreeze site (a source which takes a pro-GamerGate perspective):

"Perhaps, though, Grayson’s most blantant impropriety is the overwhelming coverage given to his friend, sound designer Robin Arnott. Author of Oculus Rift game Soundself, Arnott received an abnormal amount of coverage from Grayson. Grayson plugged him six times in three months, with the bulk of the coverage for Soundself coming from Kotaku."

"Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Philippa Warr, who wrote three articles about Sunset without disclosing her friendship with Alexander, has also written three disclosure-less articles about her friend, indie developer Terry Cavanagh — the same Cavanagh that also received coverage from Jenn Frank, who didn't disclose she provided the game's voice acting."

https://deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=unfair

The Quinn story blew up because it was the spark that lit the powder keg, and because there was a salacious story (The Zoe Post) behind it, which meant it had legs.

With any self-organized group, there's always the question of who the True Scotsmen are. The pro-GamerGate side wants to focus as narrowly as possible while the anti-GamerGate side wants to cast a wide net and talk about all of the fallout.

Sure. But No True Scotsman only applies if and when the people doing the thing you want to exclude actually identify as being part of your group. If there is no proof that the severe, criminal harassment was in fact done by people involved in GamerGate, it's much harder to pin these things on them. Furthermore, only focusing on the harassment and blatantly ignoring the members of GamerGate who actively policed and discouraged harassment is indeed its own form of No True Scotsman.

EDIT: a word

I appreciate your usually well-supported MRA-ish arguments, but isn't this below your pay grade? Endlessly litigating who said what about whether he posted his own stuff on fourchan, going through all the rationalwiki sources and so on, does it really matter all that much?

I think far too much ink has already be spilled on that subject for something so trivial. Best case, it's about ethics in game journalism, and I don't even care about that.

Was gamergate your first time, is that why? For me, elevatorgate holds that special place in my heart. I'll always remember it fondly, but I know I have to let it go.

I appreciate your usually well-supported MRA-ish arguments, but isn't this below your pay grade? Endlessly litigating who said what about whether he posted his own stuff on fourchan, going through all the rationalwiki sources and so on, does it really matter all that much?

What?

Recently, someone sent me a video about GamerGate made by BreadTuber Ian Danskin in 2021.

Yeah, so some guy said the other guy posted his rant on 4chan , and op meticulously went to work debunking that conclusion. Don't get me wrong, one side is more wrong than the other, but both are wasting their breath. If he did post his zoe relationship retrospective on 4chan at the time, would it make the smallest difference to any of the participants? This is meta-commentary of refutations of disagreement about things that don't matter in the slightest. But whatever, we can't all be interested in the same things, carry on if it makes you happy.

If he did post his zoe relationship retrospective on 4chan at the time, would it make the smallest difference to any of the participants?

This objection could be made to refuting anything, whether current or not. If you refute something, it's probably not going to make any difference to the person whose post you've refuted. And the people on your side already know the truth, so it won't make any difference to them either.

I don't think so. If rationalwiki released a video of gjoni beating quinn, that would matter quite a bit. Or I don't know, clear proof of video game journalists selling articles for sexual or monetary favours. Whether gjoni posted his tale to 4chan otoh, is not central in any way.

I agree that whether Gjoni posted to 4chan or not isn't particularly central. However, the 4chan thing is a very small portion of what I wrote - the post of mine is broken up into 4 parts. Part 1 is an introductory section which exists mostly just to demonstrate the sheer carnival of trivial-but-damning errors that Danskin makes, errors that shouldn't exist when you're speaking authoritatively on the subject for a university. The meat (and the primary point of making this post) is part 3 and 4, which demonstrates that Grayson and Quinn had a glaring conflict of interest that went completely undisclosed when he was reporting about her.

With regards to your other question about whether GamerGate was my first time, yes, it was my introduction to the culture war, and admittedly it has a special place for that reason alone. I still think, however, that it's important not to let your culture war opponents define the historical narrative in the way they want, even on seemingly small things like GamerGate. Ceding ground to them like this gives them the ability to smear you later on and justify increasingly censorious behaviour towards those who oppose them, and at this point I'm adopting an approach of not giving an inch where I don't think it's warranted.

Finally, GamerGate is not in any way my main focus and it is also not something I'm going to be writing about often. This thread is probably the last top-level thing I'm going to be writing on it for quite a while.

Called it lol. OK, that's largely fair.

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