What is #gamergate?
I just ran into a youtube video about Angryjoe not being able to deliver a game review of Shadow of Mordor, then i read in the discussion something about #gamergate and there are just so many bashing about that topic and then it went on to Zoe Quin, Young Capitalists, Misogyny, Male Gamers being dead, etc.
So what exactly is #gamergate and how does it affect the gamers/consumers like us? and who are the actual persons who are pro and anti? i'm so confused which ones of them are pro or anti. here are some of them. if you can add on this list, please feel free to do so and classify them if they are pro or anti
- Zoe Quin
- Adam Baldwin
- Popular Youtube Gamers who make reviews (like Angryjoe, Watchmojo, Gametheorist)
- Big Company Reviewers (like IGN, Gamespot, etc.)
- The Young Capitalists
- Cis white males
- minority gamers
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I've been following this a bit. As far as I can tell, Zoe Quinn is an indie game developer who allegedly had an affair with a number of people involved in game journalism. Some people saw this as a violation of ethics and breach of journalistic integrity in gaming since Zoe's intimate relationship with those people may have potentially caused her games to receive more promotion and favoritism than they otherwise would have. This led to some very nasty individuals harassing Zoe online with a lot of threatening and misogynistic vitriol, which some have attributed to what they see as the rampant sexism in gaming culture. The hashtag "#gamergate" is used to refer to the controversy surrounding Zoe Quinn and the apparent corruption in video game journalism, but is also associated with the online harassment of Zoe Quinn and other women such as Anita Sarkeesian by gamers.
In what I believe to be a separate issue, The Fine Young Capitalists, an organization that seeks to help female game developers find footing in the game industry, accused Zoe Quinn of trying to impede their business operations. Then /v/, the gaming board of the website 4chan, decided to pitch in to help The Fine Young Capitalists out with their business venture, primarily as a sort of middle finger to Zoe Quinn. They ended up raising a bunch of money and as a thank you for their efforts, The Fine Young Capitalists let /v/ create a character to be featured in the game that they helped fund. This character, called "Vivian James," portrayed as a misanthropic female gamer, has since become a sort of mouthpiece for /v/ to use to criticize what they see as a Social Justice Warrior movement against gamers.
How does this issue affect you? Well it doesn't, really. There's lots of arguing on both sides about what this means and how important it is, but really, there are pretty much only 3 takeaways from all of this:
1) You should be skeptical of video game journalism and reviews, since there is probably a lot of corruption going on
2) There are a lot of people in the gaming culture who are misogynistic douchebags
3) Dumb internet arguments taking place on a massive scale are still just dumb internet arguments
Nothing new here.
Funny I don't know either, all I know is that I don't really care and everyone seems to think it's important, I don't know about that, where I live there's been a ton of really awful stuff happening so I'm too worried about our political issues to care about whatever silly video-game politics bullshit that's pissing everyone off right now.
NNOOOO! RUN AWAY! SAVE YOURSELF!
I mentioned Sarkeesian on another thread and I might as well as thrown a steak in with a bunch of starving pitbulls. I'm not really much of a gamer, so that's probably why I don't care, but it seems incredibly innane to me. Both sides just seem incredibly petty too.
Waaiiiitaminute.
The Fine Young Capitalists originated in and in fact stand for 4chan. Same thing, really. 4chan, THE activist board that tried to ridicule and slander feminism wherever they could during the last decade (don't research: "freebleeding"). Coming from this forum, Quinn naturally hasn't had much love lost for the project. And sure enough, once gg got traction, the activist hatemobs formed directly in 4chan again, so much in fact that even their usually braindead moderators actually took action.
The issue is pretty much the same and has been for years. A critique of video games is always seen as a critique from outside, and even plainly evolutionary changes in the medium are always seen as damaging. Voices which point out an imbalance in the portrayal of the sexes ("Tropes vs Women") or voices which describe the factual 'gamer' label genesis in video game marketing are interpreted as a huge danger to the entire structural integrity of the industry. So people are 'fighting for video games' by attacking completely random people. That's gamergate, a conglomerate of mindless consumers scared shitless about having their video games taken from them. They explicitly and exclusively attack the powerless - the journalists, the indies; and almost never the actual culprits, AAA devs and publishers. An absurd conflation of publisher monopoly and the VG press can happen right under their nose (Steam Curator), they don't notice, it's not their topic, it's not their field of interest.
I've tried to discuss "journalist ethics" several times in gamergate related threads and can attest to the fact that the fervent gamergate supporters talk least about journalist ethics. Among them, it's not a book with many pages. Instead, you'll find hate fests about this woman who supposedly personally insulted 'them' or that woman who supposedly wants to 'censor' games or this guy who supported this woman with his tweets and...
It's a non-issue. It'll kill a few indies and a few sites of VG journalists, primarily those who actually take their job seriously. Which of course strenghtens publishers and AAA developers, which leads to more corruption. As it turns out, gamergate may actually make sure that there's considerably MORE corruption in the video game industry.
I've never heard anything about TFYC having originated in 4chan. I know that they became allied with 4chan after the message board helped to dig them out of the financial hole they found themselves in after their encounter with Zoe Quinn, but I found nothing to suggest that they were connected prior to that. And as far as I'm aware, Zoe's criticism of TFYC was initially unrelated to 4chan. Can you direct me to a source that says differently?
Well, quite a bit of the criticism that video games have received over the years were from entities that were not only outside the industry, but willfully ignorant of the material that they were criticizing. Pop-science articles talking about "the damaging effects of violence in video games," finger-pointing from news reports following a school shooting or other tragedy, political figures and activists exaggerating or sometimes even downright fabricating details to make the games they're criticizing seem more lurid and immoral. These entities were trying to damage the industry.
So now there's a sort of autoimmune reaction from gamers to any person or group that they see to be outside the gaming community, whether or not that's the case. AAA devs, while also seen as highly corrupt and criticized for the practices by gamers, are at the end of the day considered part of the core of the industry, integral to its functioning. Journalists and indie developers aren't, and so it's easier to categorize them as foreign bodies that pose threats to what the gaming community has come to know and enjoy as "video games."
To be sure, a lot of the emotional drive behind gamergate stems from petty, immature, bigoted, and hateful vendettas against certain individuals, mostly women. And any campaign that serves as a vehicle to attack people, regardless of its original or core intents, should not be supported. But labels and campaigns aside, there is valid criticism to be had of video game journalism and the lack of transparency and accountability in regards to how journalists and developers interact. You even see this with Telltale, whose close relationship with IGN undermines the legitimacy of their games' positive reviews. These are important things to take note of as consumers. But again, it's hardly as groundbreaking and monumental a revelation as people are making it out to be.