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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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... 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