#Gamergate goes off the deep end

[CountDeMoney]

"I am a professional developer," Wu told Kotaku. "The quickest way I could think of to end my career and destroy my credibility would be making something like this up and getting arrested for filing a false police report."

But it's OK because you're on LinkedIn.

[Valmy]

Wow, that's quite some nastiness being shown there; no person deserves that, irrespective of their views.

Angry mobs are not really about fair and just punishments.  You are either one of the righteous are you will be destroyed.  I read a lot about the French Revolution so believe my I know

[Malthus]

Sounds like "gamergate" is a 'about' group of particularly nasty and vile trolls who have found the absolute perfect victims (from their perspective): feminist computer game theorists. 

Eh there are people who have better motives who do think "gaming journalists" (aka: bloggers) should be held to an ethical standard.  Of course that is impossible.  Even so, their solution is possibly the worst one imaginable.  People are being convicted of ethics violations without the ability to fairly defend themselves and mobs of idiots are trying to punish them...and choosing the ones who most upset them emotionally.  It is kind of sad and funny to see them trying to defend this predictable train wreck.  It is not so funny to see mob justice at work though.

Some kerfuffle about gamer journalists may be how this started, but by now it seems to me it is mostly continuing because some pretty nasty trolls are getting a kick out of it.

Mind you, that was probably true for most forms of vigilantism ... 

[Jacob]

Sounds like "gamergate" is a 'about' group of particularly nasty and vile trolls who have found the absolute perfect victims (from their perspective): feminist computer game theorists. 

Eh there are people who have better motives who do think "gaming journalists" (aka: bloggers) should be held to an ethical standard.  Of course that is impossible.  Even so, their solution is possibly the worst one imaginable.  People are being convicted of ethics violations without the ability to fairly defend themselves and mobs of idiots are trying to punish them...and choosing the ones who most upset them emotionally.  It is kind of sad and funny to see them trying to defend this predictable train wreck.  It is not so funny to see mob justice at work though.

Some kerfuffle about gamer journalists may be how this started, but by now it seems to me it is mostly continuing because some pretty nasty trolls are getting a kick out of it.

Mind you, that was probably true for most forms of vigilantism ... 

I believe how it started was that one dude got dumped by a girl who is also an indie game developer. He responded like a whiny little bitch by posting allegations that she'd been sleeping with all these other guys, and that it was to get good reviews for her game. Neither of those allegations have been proven true, and the allegations of sex-for-positive-reviews were in fact shown to be untrue (the guy had never actually written a review for her game).

So while in theory there is some sort of "journalism ethics" banner being waved about (though, curiously, nothing about the thoroughly corrupt journalism surrounding AAA games, only stuff related to people who don't agree with the trolls), this whole thing started squarely with misogynistic trolling as far as I can see.

[Barrister]

I believe how it started was that one dude got dumped by a girl who is also an indie game developer. He responded like a whiny little bitch by posting allegations that she'd been sleeping with all these other guys, and that it was to get good reviews for her game. Neither of those allegations have been proven true, and the allegations of sex-for-positive-reviews were in fact shown to be untrue (the guy had never actually written a review for her game).

So while in theory there is some sort of "journalism ethics" banner being waved about (though, curiously, nothing about the thoroughly corrupt journalism surrounding AAA games, only stuff related to people who don't agree with the trolls), this whole thing started squarely with misogynistic trolling as far as I can see.

I believe Quinn admitted to having a relationship with a game reviewer from Kotaku (but, of course, so what - consenting adults and all that), but agree that the sex-for-reviews thing is proven untrue since the fellow never wrote a review of her game.

[Valmy]

Some kerfuffle about gamer journalists may be how this started

It is funny how anecdotal that was to.  Just one woman who had her games reviewed by some people who knew her boyfriend or something.  Even if there was some kind of conflict of interest going on, that is just one unproven anecdotal allegation.  Hardly evidence of systemic problems.  Yet they claim there is this big conspiracy going on...because they are becoming radicalized because that is what happens when you do vigilante mob justice.

[derspiess]

I'm having to get caught up on all this.  I had no idea what gamergate is or was.  Anyway man, that Quinn girl is homely.  Who would sacrifice their professional integrity to sleep with her??

[CountDeMoney]

I thought all this was over one of her online pieces on how video games positive female characters, and have game development and narrative were all directed at a single market of consumer, the adolescent male.  Or is that a different female that was threatened?

[Agelastus]

Forbes article summarising the history of this internecine spat. http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/09/04/gamergate-a-closer-look-at-the-controversy-sweeping-video-games/

It boils down to a lot of people who should have (taken a deep breath, counted to 10, etc.) before acting. With a thin veneer of something to be genuinely concerned about (the cosy relationship between game reviewers and developers) but that has been a pretty well known fact for 20 plus years.

I stopped reading video game reviews back in the days of the magazine and the Spectrum 128 when it became rather obvious that page count, and the amount of text was directly related to the size of the score. No "proper" review ever gave a bad rating; it was nothing more than semi-covert advertising.

GamerGate: A Closer Look At The Controversy Sweeping Video Games

It all started with a blog post.

Jilted ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni wrote a long treatise on the alleged infidelity of his ex-girlfriend, video game developer Zoe Quinn. Members of the video game industry and press were implicated.

This led to an initial outcry over corruption in the video game press. Sex for positive coverage was the spark that fueled what has now become a huge gamer backlash against the video game press under the hashtag #GamerGate. While the initial concerns were quickly proven to be all smoke and no fire, the revelations led to further questions by many gamers, and so the #GamerGate movement was born.

The Streisand Effect

Gjoni posted his treatise on August 16th. Within days it had taken the internet by storm, though few video game publications felt comfortable writing about the deeply personal affairs of the people implicated in the piece. This perceived radio silence on the part of the press led to early grumblings of 'censorship' among gamers crying foul play.

Radio silence wasn't the only thing encouraging cries of censorship. Moderators on forums at reddit and 4chan deleted posts and comments related to the Quinn controversy. One YouTube commentator, Mundane Matt, had a video on the subject removed after receiving a DMCA takedown notice, apparently issued by Quinn herself. (I have reached out to Quinn and asked her about this and other questions and will update if and when she replies.)

The DMCA takedown caused well-known YouTuber TotalBiscuit (John Bain) to comment on the matter on Twitter. And while he maintained a fairly neutral stance, noting clearly that the facts were not all in, he was quickly lashed out against by members of the indie game scene such as Fez developer Phil Fish and others. Fish called TotalBiscuit a "gross nerd" setting the tenor for what snowballed into a much bigger debate.

Battle lines were drawn. Silence from the gaming press and apparent censorship at major forums only stoked the flames. The DMCA takedown notice fanned them higher. And as Bain warned in his initial comments on the matter, the Streisand Effect began to take place.

The Fine Young Capitalists

During all of this gamers began to dig, with much of the organized effort stemming from 4chan. Zoe Quinn isn't a new face to disgruntled gamers. She'd been in a dust-up with Wizardchan already, a forum for male virgins, who she claimed in 2013 harassed her over her game Depression Quest.

Then, in February of 2014 Quinn and PR rep Maya Kramer spoke out publicly on Twitter against a new game jam/charity known as The Fine Young Capitalists, or TFYC for short.

TFYC is a charity competition designed to get women with no experience in the industry involved in making a video game, with proceeds of the money raised going to the contest, the contestants, and a charity.

Disagreements over the nature of the project led Quinn and Kramer to lash out at TFYC on Twitter, ultimately leading to TFYC's website crashing in what was, essentially, an accidental DDOS attack, something Quinn joked about on Twitter at the time.

The disagreement between Quinn and TFYC is a little difficult to parse. Quinn claimed on Twitter that she disliked TFYC's stance on transgender people; others allege she saw TFYC as competition for her own game jam. Quinn also seemed to take offense at the idea that the women involved would be working without being paid; TFYC claims that the women were only doing conceptual work to begin with since contestants weren't actually game developers rather than spending months actually developing a game. TFYC's game designers would be doing the bulk of actual work.

Either way, bad blood between TFYC and Quinn grew out of the mess months ago.

This is where things get even more difficult to track. As Quinn came under fire, developers like Phil Fish came to her defense. When one developer, Wolf Wozniak, stated that he had been sexually harassed by Quinn on Twitter, Fish and others lashed out at him, and he quickly retracted his statement.

The battle heated up, and soon Fish claimed that his website and Twitter accounts had been hacked and personal information stolen and revealed to the public, presumably by people angry with him over his defense of Quinn. Fish is now selling the rights to Fez as well as his studio, Polytron, after the hacking.

Not long after this, the TFYC IndieGoGo website was hacked as well, apparently as a counter(counter?)-retaliation for the Fish hack and online harassment of Quinn.

The hacking took the guise of an official IndieGoGo takedown, with a message directed to /v/, the video game forum at 4chan:

    Dear /V/,

    We think it is abhorrent what you are doing to Zoe Quinn and other indie devs. Indiegogo does not support hacking or any other illegal activity that comes from your message board. We are shutting this fundraiser down before things get more out of hand.

    Sincerely,

    The Indiegogo Team

The hack wasn't an official IndieGoGo takedown, however, and ended up wiping the entire campaign and all its donations.

But why would anyone hack the TFYC crowdfunding effort in retaliation for Fish and Quinn and then address a message to /v/?

Because, dear reader, this rabbit hole is insanely deep. /v/ is widely seen as a hostile place for women, gay people, and basically anyone who isn't a part of the /v/ gaming culture. 4chan in general is widely viewed as a nasty sort of place for anyone not straight and male.

So it was strange when /v/ rallied behind TFYC, raising $17,000 for the game jam partly in order to spite Quinn and partly in order to mess with everyone's preconceptions of the forum. TFYC even agreed to use a /v/ designed female mascot for the winning game, the now infamous Vivian James. An "every-girl" of sorts, and maybe not what you'd expect from 4chan:

So we have TFYC, a self-described "radical feminist" group aligned with 4chan. Strange bedfellows indeed, though my conversations with the organizers of TFYC reveal deep dividing lines between many mainstream feminists and the concepts of this particular group.

Suffice to say, at this point trenches had been dug. (Though TFYC and Quinn have since made peace, at least officially.)

Accusations of harassment and hacking began flying from both sides. Both Quinn and YouTuber Anita Sarkeesian reported death threats forcing them to leave their homes. One game developer went so far as to pen an open letter against harassment of women in the industry, garnering hundreds of signatures. (Though petitions against harassment sound about as effective as wars against terrorism. Abstract ideas and random actions can't be stopped via wars or wishes. Update: I should note here that much of the online harassment we see against women is very troubling. I'm just not sure anyone, including myself, knows how to put an end to it.)

But I digress. Let's simply note that at this point, gamers were up in arms, actively trying to connect dots that may or may not exist to prove corruption in the industry between media and developers, and many in the media and development community were silent on the issue or lashing back at the mob.

Gamers are Over

It was during this rising crescendo of malcontent that a sudden chorus of articles were published from numerous gaming outlets claiming, more or less, that the age of the "gamer" was over. Gamers as we knew and stereotyped them—white, male nerds with deep-seeded fears of both reality and women—were going extinct, and all this backlash over the Quinn scandal was a reaction to this fact. Foremost among these was a piece by Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander.

Game writers claimed that all cries of corruption in media were merely thin veils to give cover to what was, essentially, a misogynistic movement. In less than two days more than ten such articles appeared around the internet, on the one hand preaching to the choir, and on the other leading many already-upset gamers to cry foul even louder. This many articles at once all saying the same thing seemed fishy to many, though I would argue it had nothing to do with coordination and everything to do with like minds feeding off of one another.

I wrote a piece on the notion as well, criticizing both sides of the controversy: Game journalists for condescending their audiences and gamers themselves for their lack of diligence in how they critique the press and their insistence on focusing on Social Justice Warriors.

Interlude – Definitions

1. Social Justice Warriors

It's here that we should pause and take a look at this term: Social Justice Warrior. So much of the debate in #GamerGate hinges upon definitions. Terms like "misogynerd" and "SJW" help label opponents on either side of the aisle, but often do more harm than good in how we think about and view each other, muddying the debate rather than elucidating it.

So what is a Social Justice Warrior? There are two definitions. First, the definition as it's applied by those who use it and second the definition as it's received by those who it's used against.

First: Someone who uses social justice issues like sexism, homophobia, etc. to push a political agenda and personally benefit (i.e. from pageviews, ad dollars, etc.)

Second: What you're called whenever you talk about social justice issues when writing about games, even if you don't mean to push an agenda or personally benefit.

Language, it turns out, is quite the double-edged sword. And the fact is, both definitions can be true at once.

What it boils down to is many people feeling upset that the video game space has been so heavily politicized with a left-leaning, feminist-driven slant. I've heard from many readers claiming they have no problem with more women and gay people represented in games; they simply don't want every game to be critiqued based on these factors. I've heard from others who readily admit that they miss the days when games were more male-centric. One reader emailed to say that he has no problem with women, but video games were a nice boys club of sorts, a refuge from women where the boys could play for a while undisturbed.

Meanwhile, I suspect that many so-called SJWs simply do care about how girls are treated in the video game world. Especially Japanese-developed games can be seen as deeply sexist by many writers in the West, thanks to a fairly deep and wide cultural divide. So we have many left-leaning members of the press writing about issues that matter to them—maybe sometimes doing it to bait readers, but often likely doing it because these are issues they actually care about—and a strong reader backlash because many readers don't want to be told what's good or bad about a game's social politics, they just want to hear about the game itself.

All of these things are true, mainly because they are all about perception. And all of these things are lies for the same reason.

2. Misogynerds

The Social Justice Warriors aren't the only side given an unfairly broad label. The same forces behind the "Gamers are Over" campaign have batted about plenty of labels to describe their opponents in recent days and weeks. "Gross nerd" evolved quickly into "Misogynerd" which is a super convenient way to label a large and diverse group of people as both icky nerds and misogynists.

Once again, while there are plenty of true-blue misogynists polluting video games, it's a ridiculous term to describe everyone involved in this debate. Ridiculous mainly because members of the press should be above such name-calling and mud-slinging.

But here, at least, we have a glimpse at just how much each side of the equation loathes the other, how each side has labeled the other in order to dehumanize them. Whatever truth belongs to each label, simply utilizing these sorts of terms in any debate is more about propaganda than it is about digging for answers.

/End Interlude

#GamerGate is Born

With definitinos and labels out of the way, we can move on to the hashtag itself: #GamerGate.

As all the ugliness between gamers and the press grew, various theories about media corruption blossomed. Writers at various gaming websites had been donating money to game developers via the website Patreon and this was seen as a conflict of interest. Some sites, like Kotaku, decided to put an end to the practice. Others, like Polygon, made a rule that full disclosure of any donations would be mandatory going forward.

Other apparent breaches of trust were uncovered, such as writers giving positive coverage to friends or roommates in the industry.

Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totillo wrote:

    We've long been wary of the potential undue influence of corporate gaming on games reporting, and we've taken many actions to guard against it. The last week has been, if nothing else, a good warning to all of us about the pitfalls of cliquishness in the indie dev scene and among the reporters who cover it. We've absorbed those lessons and assure you that, moving ahead, we'll err on the side of consistent transparency on that front, too.

    We appreciate healthy skepticism from critics and have looked into—and discussed internally—concerns. We agree on the need to ensure that, on the occasion where there is a personal connection between a writer and a developer, it's mentioned. We've also agreed that funding any developers through services such as Patreon introduce needless potential conflicts of interest and are therefore nixing any such contributions by our writers

Relationships between various indie developers, the press, and PR representatives led to more questions and theories on everything from the validity of the IGF awards, to the overall nature of the relationship between the press and the industry it covers, which many see as far too cozy. Lots of YouTube videos have been made about this. Lots of screenshots of tweets and various websites with lines drawn between various members of the press and the industry have also been created. It's a maze of allegations and connections without a solid destination.

Whether any of these theories hold water is an open question and one that, in my mind, is secondary to one very big fact: Readers have grown deeply distrustful of the gaming press.

That's why the uproar here, over something so nebulous in so many ways, is so uproarious.

This is not really a story about Zoe Quinn and it's not really a story about corruption either. It's about mistrust and the way both sides are feeding into that mistrust, whether through over-the-top reactions to the Quinn affair, or a bevy of articles proclaiming that an entire group of people is now irrelevant. Trust is the casualty here.

And where trust no longer exists, politics rules the day.

The #GamerGate hashtag took off when conservative actor and Firefly veteran Adam Baldwin began tweeting about the controversy. Suddenly an entirely new audience cast its eyes on what was going on in the otherwise obscure video game world.

Quickly the gamer vs. journalist/developer conflict grew into something much bigger: #GamerGate is now a political controversy more than anything.

#GamerGate Is Being Co-Opted By Politics

Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart London entered the fray with the most inflammatory piece yet, proclaiming in his headline that "Feminist Bullies" are "Tearing The Video Game Industry Apart."

As you can imagine with such a headline, whatever kernels of truth Yiannopoulos may have included in his article were glazed over heavily by a deeply conservative, anti-feminist bias.

I'm not against bias or opinion, per se, but far too many gamers who felt under-represented by the gaming press latched on to the piece as an example of "real journalism." Just because you agree with something, or just because a piece gives more of "your side" of the argument, doesn't make it unbiased or objective. It certainly doesn't make it "journalism."

Just like my own Op/Ed pieces are not straight-up reporting, neither is the Breitbart piece. This is opinion writing and should be treated as such.

Yiannopoulos begins his piece by admitting that he's mocked gamers as "dorky loners in yellowing underpants" in the past, and then goes on to speak at great length about how feminists and Social Justice Warriors are destroying the industry and culture. (His description of gamers is oddly similar to the description offered by so many of the "gamers are over" pieces.)

It's obvious from the get-go that Yiannopoulos cares more about undermining and vilifying his political opponents than he does about video games or the video game industry. So he takes on the sacred cows with glee.

Speaking of prominent female critics in the industry he writes:

    There is a platoon of irritants in the media whose talents are vanishingly slight, but who generate column inches by the thousand for victimising innocents and manipulating their way around an over-sensitive industry. Some of them, such as Anita Sarkeesian, have no discernible higher purpose in life, except to bother innocent games developers.

    These women purposefully court – and then exploit – boisterous, unpleasant reactions from astonished male gamers and use them to attract attention to themselves. What's remarkable is how deeply unpleasant the skeletons lurking in their own closets often are, how completely those skeletons give the lie to their public image, and how uncritically their claims are repackaged by credulous games journalists.

If there is truth to these claims, it is drowned in the rhetoric—rhetoric every bit as over the top as any used by the "other side" and designed precisely to inflame and bait.

(On a side note: "Innocent game developers" is an atrocious thing to say, as though anyone creating art is too "innocent" to face criticism. Everyone should face criticism. It's how you respond that matters. There is not some great, horrible bogey-critic eating your firstborn children if you ignore their critique.)

Whether or not some people are capitalizing on a culture of victimhood is a matter largely of opinion, and not something that can simply be stated as fact any more than alleged, unverified death threats against anyone ought to be reported as fact. So much of this is mired in speculation and partisanship at this point that it's almost impossible to see the forest for the trees. Anyone selling you simple answers is likely ripping you off.

Yiannopolous claims that the enduring effect of #GamerGate will be a gaming media that "has destroyed its reputation and its relationship with readers, who will never again trust it on any issue beyond which power-up is most likely to get you past level 17."

I disagree. In many ways this was already the issue before #GamerGate came into existence, and is more complicated than some "feminist bullies" and their dreaded agenda.

Rather, the enduring effect of #GamerGate will be the further politicization of video games. With rightwing activists like Baldwin, Yiannopoulos and even political blogger Ed Morrissey dipping into the fight, we now have entirely new lines being drawn.

These newcomers to the video game scene are being hailed as heroes by many gamers, but gamers should be just as distrustful of them—if not more so—than the Social Justice Warriors they decry.

If a Social Justice Warrior is using video games to push an agenda, you can rest assured that these rightwing non-gamers suddenly swooping into the scene with inflammatory anti-feminist headlines are doing the same thing, only from the other side of the political spectrum. If you care more about your political viewpoint than you do about video games, by all means welcome them as heroes. But if you truly care about video games, I can only suggest that these are not the droids you're looking for. At least the dreaded SJWs have been writing about games day in and day out for years, not merely at this opportune moment.

These are not people who want to talk about video games, let alone play them. This is the co-opting of video games to push political agendas—the exact same thing gamers are accusing SJWs of doing. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

All that being said, if gamers want more conservative commentary on video games, they should push for that. My most frequent encounters with conservatives speaking on video games has been talk of censorship due to sex and violence, so I'm not sure this is a great idea.

But some mainstream libertarian voices like Penn Jillette and John Stossel have been reasonable on video games.

In Sum

I haven't touched on all the strands. Readers will undoubtedly be disappointed that I haven't taken a harder stance on one side or the other. They will point out details that I left out, either consciously or because there are simply too many at this point to include in one article or because I personally find them too flimsy to include. Readers will link to heavily subjective and slanted YouTube videos that make claims far too bold for mainstream journalism. We will define the word "fact" differently. Miniature rhetorical wars will be fought.

What I come away with here is not "feminist bullies" destroying the industry or "misogynistic neckbeards" out to scare away all the women.

What I come up with is three-fold:

First, we have a young industry that began, like so many others, as a male-driven industry on both the producer and consumer side now experiencing growth pains. The media is even younger than the industry itself and it's experiencing growth pains, too. These growth pains have resulted in some raw, open wounds that fester whenever controversy erupts, and risk being infected further by politicized forces that care less about video games and more about political agendas. (All of this is a distraction from the real business of reporting on the video game industry and critiquing video games, though I think there is plenty of room for cultural commentary with political slants here as well, just like in TV, film, etc.)

Second, we have deep mistrust between consumers and the video game industry thanks to years of bad DRM and other poor business practices. That mistrust is now being cast on the press that's supposed to be covering the industry to protect the consumer. Consumers (gamers) have increasingly viewed the press as "in bed" with the industry rather than working for consumers. This is enforced by stories of chummy developers and journalists, lavish AAA publisher-thrown parties, high-scoring games that aren't particularly good, and so forth.

Finally, we have a video game press with a largely left-leaning political bias in some ways alienating itself from much of its readership. This seeps into the first two problems and complicates the matter, but isn't in and of itself an invalid complaint. If the video game press were deeply conservative, you'd have a lot of left-leaning voices decrying it as well. The tenor of the discussion has become so "us vs. them" at this point, that many gamers simply feel unrepresented and condescended.

Add all three pieces together and you have a recipe for disaster.

Ultimately #GamerGate is the third in a trilogy of video game related scandals.

Act I was all about Mass Effect 3 when gamers were largely derided as "entitled" for wanting a better ending. The same derision was cast on gamers (though without as much fanfare) when the Devil May Cry reboot was released. DmC was not a very good game, but gamers were again labeled as "entitled" when they complained about it. (There was also #DoritoGate, come to think of it, so maybe this is less a trilogy and more an ongoing mini-series?)

Now we have the Zoe Quinn scandal, which has become much bigger than any one person, which focuses on the indie scene rather than AAA games, and which is as much a symbol of mistrust as it is anything else.

Readers may claim that I'm white-washing the entire thing, that scandal and conspiracy really do lurk beneath all of this. And maybe they do. I continue to follow all the details and revelations. But what I've seen so far points more to rotting sea of mistrust embedded in yet another culture war battle than a smoking gun.

Of course, these problems are faced in other areas of journalism as well, whether covering politics or smartphones. Video games are unique partly because video game journalism invariably focuses so much on narrative. Because games have stories with political messages and because smart critics want to discuss all elements of a video game, it's pretty much impossible to just avoid ever talking about these issues. And why should we?

Controlling Your Own Destiny

The answer isn't to turn to conservative outsiders to provide "fair and balanced" coverage, though maybe conservative gamers can find their own voice.

It isn't to turn to YouTubers who have even fewer ethical restraints than members of the press (many YouTubers engage in financial deals with the industry while still attending the same events and parties as online games press, while having absolutely no oversight from an actual publication.)

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the proverbial wind.

#GamerGate doesn't have an end goal. Some are crying for more ethical journalism while embracing completely biased and one-sided coverage of the event so long as it conforms to their own biases. Others simply don't want to be talked down to by the press, which I think is a reasonable request without a clear solution.

Ultimately, I think it's a matter of everyone involved creating their own future. It's time to stop complaining that the game press is biased and corrupt, or at least to stop thinking that complaining is the final step. If you don't like what you're reading, go start your own game publication.

I don't mean this in the "if you don't like this video game why don't you make your own" sort of way. I think starting your own publication is a perfectly reasonable and attainable goal. I bet you could Kickstart the whole thing. Likewise, if you don't care about the social justice issues but only want more ethical journalism, start a site with very clear ethical guidelines and don't participate in the sorts of things that compromise that.

Cheaper still, read only the sites you believe in and trust. If you don't like a site because it writes about social justice issues, don't read it. If someone writes a post about social justice issues or records a feminist YouTube video, you can simply ignore it—the way I ignore the Men's Rights movement.

The market is at the heart of all of this. But the invisible hand only works if people are willing to take risks and invest time and money into something and/or vote with their wallet. Of course that's only one part of the equation. The other part is being open to discussion and never, ever engaging in censorship or harassment.

What irks me most about both sides of the debate is their unwillingness to simply accept that the other side might have valid, or at least sincere, points. As human.

As I said in my last note on the subject: "Bring me a chorus of voices, of opinions. I want them all. I want a loud cacophony of differing viewpoints. Agreement is the death of creativity."

It's up to all of us to make this happen.

#GamerGate isn't about conspiracies. It isn't about scandal and corruption. It isn't about feminists or misogynists. It isn't about any of these things, and it's about all of them all at once.

In the end, it's about gamers upset with the status quo and demanding something better. It's about a group of consumers and enthusiasts not simply feeling that their identity is threatened, but believing that they're being poorly represented by an industry and press that grow more and more cliquish and remote every year. And it's about the ad hoc, messy series of uncoordinated events that got us here.

Perhaps none of this is the answer. Perhaps the only answer is to encourage honest debate between people who truly care about video games. A conversation is a powerful thing.

[Valmy]

I'm having to get caught up on all this.  I had no idea what gamergate is or was.  Anyway man, that Quinn girl is homely.  Who would sacrifice their professional integrity to sleep with her??

Just stay ignorant it is a giant waste of everybody's time.

Maybe Quinn is good conversation.

[Norgy]

Jeez, Spicy, where did you leave your empathy?

Oh, wait, with your party membership.

[Valmy]

I thought all this was over one of her online pieces on how video games positive female characters, and have game development and narrative were all directed at a single market of consumer, the adolescent male.  Or is that a different female that was threatened?

Different.  That is Anita Sarkeesian.  That is a hilarious clusterfuck as well.  Anita is a prudish sex-neg type that I find particularly annoying but damn it is sad how self-righteous in their rage these people get over simply posting some Youtube videos.  As an activist this is probably great for Anita, even if probably shit personally.  Here is the evidence of evil male oppression and a toxic male culture of video games is right out there and she exposed it.  Feminist hero and martyr forever and I suspect an inspiration to young activists around the world.  Way to go trolls.

[Valmy]

I stopped reading video game reviews back in the days of the magazine and the Spectrum 128 when it became rather obvious that page count, and the amount of text was directly related to the size of the score. No "proper" review ever gave a bad rating; it was nothing more than semi-covert advertising.

The last straw for me was when Black and White got a perfect score way back in the 90s.  That was a WTF?  Moment.

[grumbler]

I'm having to get caught up on all this.  I had no idea what gamergate is or was.

Same here.  I don't follow the right twitter feeds or facebook pages or something.  To me, gamergate is a badly-run Paradox Entertainment game-sales site.

Anyway man, that Quinn girl is homely.  Who would sacrifice their professional integrity to sleep with her??

These are "journalists."  There is no integrity to sacrifice.

[CountDeMoney]

The last straw for me was when Black and White got a perfect score way back in the 90s.  That was a WTF?  Moment.

But it was brilliant! Revolutionary!  An achievement in game design!  Not Tekken!