Is it safe here? or How I Caged My Very Own Nicolas

[Commiebot]

Straight up talking to those dug in, like Kuchera, McIntosh and the like isn't going to change their minds. They've too much at stake to actually admit that there are legitimate concerns and that they were implicit in incredibly shoddy journalism at best, widespread collusion, fraud, and libel at worst.

The further they dig in and facilitate hatchet pieces like the MSNBC's piece that vilify 'gamers' as a whole, the more companies like Intel follow suit and pull ads. They're to the point where they cannot even tell half the story and have it make sense. With holiday season approaching and the controversy not dying down, advertisers are going to have to make some choices.

If you care, keep informed, write emails to advertisers. The more Kotaku, Polygon, Gamasutra and their ilk drive a wedge between themselves and gamers as a whole, the more advertisers will be willing to listen to your concerns.. Ad revenue and clicks are the only things that keep these glorified bloggers shoveling the shit, and it's what keeps them insulated from the consequences of their actions.

 

[Master_Craig]

Thanks C_nate for the article, might check it out soon or later, but I appreciate your "tl;dr version".

 

[Master_Craig]

Read the article, C_nate.

wtf did i just read

 

[C_nate]

Craig, You read proof that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Oh, and that the internet makes some people crazy and social media allows that craziness to coalesce and gain sentience.

Commie, the reason I don't agree with emailing advertisers is because it is basically trying to censor the sites who censored pro GG people. I'm a big believer in free speech, even if it is speech that pisses me off.

I live by a simple principle. If I'm watching or reading something that I don't like or agree with, I turn it off. I don't write angry letters that demand those things stop existing or that they change their content to align with my values.

So a couple of sites can say they hate gamers, I just won't visit them. Problem solved. One site gives Bayonetta 2 a lower score (still on the 7 to 10 scale btw) because it offended the writers morals? Who cares, it is one site out of dozens giving it near perfect scores while femfreq complained in vain about it. It proves that their agenda pushing has a relatively small sphere of influence that the triple AAAs are pretty much immune to.

If anything, they only have an effect of the small indies trying to get noticed and as youtubers and streamers continue to grow in prominence, I see more indies going straight to them and cutting out those sites that won't cover them unless they adopt their worldview.

My thing is, why and what are they (GG) still fighting for? They got those couple of sites to update and make more transparent their ethics policies. They kind of won already in that sense. Are they not going to be happy until every gaming and review site sound exactly like one another? I can't get behind that kind of thinking. As much as some of those sites and their thinking annoy me, I still think there is enough room in gaming for them.

tl;dr If a few snobby, pseudo-intellectuals want to sit around and dissect every little thing about games, all the way down to whether or not we should actually be "controlling" them, (and I'm not even making that up) it does next to nothing to slowing down or changing the gaming industry cash cow.

 

[Commiebot]

I've never agreed with the notion that emailing advertisers=censorship, although I understand why you come to that conclusion. In this case, I advocate writing emails to let advertisers specifically know that I'll no longer be going to Destructoid or Polygon, because they've broken their trust with me as a consumer.

I've disagreed with the conclusions or Ryan's and Blake's on GR, but they haven't broken my trust with outright lies and censoring. They have the right to their opinions and they're not infringing on the rights of others to disagree in the comments. Furthermore, they're not the EIC or the public face of the site.

Gamergate is a consumer revolt over ethics. There are a number of factors that have built to this event, as far back to the Gerstmann firing, to DoritoPope, people like Adam Orth, Anita, Kotick, and any number of minor scandals of the last several years I can/will enumerate. Quinn was just a catalyst, insofar as virtually every single major site decided to hamfistedly kill that story, and in doing so draw the battle lines.

I don't think simple transparency is enough to placate the pro-GG side anymore. Careers will be lost, and deservedly so. A number of new sites and personalities are finding an audience, and a number of old ones will fall into the obscurity they've earned. Apologies will have to be made before people are satisfied. None of this will happen if we just conduct business as usual.

You summarize it as "a few snobby pseudo-intellectuals', except that it isn't just a few loners, they run PR firms and make allies to profit on manufactured outrage:
-Gawker media, who owns Kotaku, Jezebel, The Mary Jane and others has been in full attack mode to paint GG as a hate movement.
-Vox media has been doing the same through Polygon and The Verge
-Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and Wired all put out articles misrepresenting the movement
-MSNBC, Cracked, HuffPo, The Guardian, Vice, NeoGAF, Rock Paper Shotgun, Destructoid, Gamasutra all also went into full-court press to paint this in the worst light they could conjure.

Consider that all of the above have censored dissent, closed comments, banned dissenters, and share a twitter block list of over 8000 accounts and growing. I'd say if you truly believe in free speech, why would you not message advertisers?

 

[madster111]

Remember when cracked used to be good, you guys?

 

[Master_Craig]

Found this video on Kotaku.com.au which is a small snippet of the upcoming "Game Loading: Rise of the Indies" internet documentary. The video features Zoe Quinn as well as a few other women in the indie games industry discussing issues in the industry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9x9uwbKDWo

Your thoughts on this video?

I threw it into this thread 'cuz I thought it seems relevant due to all the issues and controversies going on at the moment.

 

[madster111]

I think if ratings weren't disabled it would be the only video on youtube with a 1:1 view to downvote ratio.

 

[C_nate]

I've never agreed with the notion that emailing advertisers=censorship, although I understand why you come to that conclusion. In this case, I advocate writing emails to let advertisers specifically know that I'll no longer be going to Destructoid or Polygon, because they've broken their trust with me as a consumer.

I've disagreed with the conclusions or Ryan's and Blake's on GR, but they haven't broken my trust with outright lies and censoring. They have the right to their opinions and they're not infringing on the rights of others to disagree in the comments. Furthermore, they're not the EIC or the public face of the site.

Gamergate is a consumer revolt over ethics. There are a number of factors that have built to this event, as far back to the Gerstmann firing, to DoritoPope, people like Adam Orth, Anita, Kotick, and any number of minor scandals of the last several years I can/will enumerate. Quinn was just a catalyst, insofar as virtually every single major site decided to hamfistedly kill that story, and in doing so draw the battle lines.

I don't think simple transparency is enough to placate the pro-GG side anymore. Careers will be lost, and deservedly so. A number of new sites and personalities are finding an audience, and a number of old ones will fall into the obscurity they've earned. Apologies will have to be made before people are satisfied. None of this will happen if we just conduct business as usual.

You summarize it as "a few snobby pseudo-intellectuals', except that it isn't just a few loners, they run PR firms and make allies to profit on manufactured outrage:
-Gawker media, who owns Kotaku, Jezebel, The Mary Jane and others has been in full attack mode to paint GG as a hate movement.
-Vox media has been doing the same through Polygon and The Verge
-Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and Wired all put out articles misrepresenting the movement
-MSNBC, Cracked, HuffPo, The Guardian, Vice, NeoGAF, Rock Paper Shotgun, Destructoid, Gamasutra all also went into full-court press to paint this in the worst light they could conjure.

Consider that all of the above have censored dissent, closed comments, banned dissenters, and share a twitter block list of over 8000 accounts and growing. I'd say if you truly believe in free speech, why would you not message advertisers?

My way of thinking is, that if a place has broken my trust and I stop visiting that site, and enough like minded people like me do the same, that the advertisers will notice the hit in traffic even without the email campaign.

It's true that those sites are shutting down speech (I even got banned from one for trying to go to bat for gamers, not even mentioning GG at all) that doesn't fit their narrative and because GG started emailed advertisers, those sites went all out with total hit pieces trying to discredit the tag because now you're messing with their money and they don't like that.

As far as seeing apologies or people getting fired, I don't think it will ever happen because to them that's tantamount to "letting the terrorists win"

All they have to do is keep slinging mud on the front pages of their sites, because that is all the average reader in going to bother to look at.

As for manufactured outrages, I mean, Fox turned that into a business model now. Everyone uses stuff like that for clickbait. And it's proven to work time and time again. Personally, I hate it but that's how I see a lot of social media now, just groups of people gathering together to bitch about inane things because reasons.

The reason, to me, this whole GG thing was doomed to failure is that it could not escape its ugly origin (some of those names in the IRC way back at the beginning of this thing, "jokingly" suggesting trying to hack into a certain someones email are still some of the most vocal GG supporters) and they had completely unrealistic goals of trying to bring sites and writers down instead of just trying to get them to acknowledge they went to far with their rhetoric.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't like crusades. I don't like people on the one far end trying to be like a morality police for gaming, and on the other end I don't like the people with the pitchforks and torches trying to shut those people down.

And they may have PR firms and have a group of allies, but like I said in the other post, their sphere of influence doesn't really extend beyond the indie scene which I pointed out with my Bayonettea example. AS went on and on complaining about the character but that did absolutely nothing to keep the game from sitting on a comfy 90 over at Metacritic.

Though if they are keeping indies down that don't buy their brand, that needs to stop.

Edit: omg, almost forgot...

 

[UrbanMasque]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/1 ... 90310.html

-Watch it.. its a good discussion, but sounds a little scripted.

 

[C_nate]

Well, this thing made it all the way to the front page of the New York Times and it didn't end well. Just about every major publication that has covered this story is coming out against it.

I think the people still carrying this on don't realize how much damage they are doing. More harm than good. They are scaring everyone in the industry into silence because none of them want to be targeted next. They've become the thing they were supposed to be fighting against.

The infuriating thing is, these sites are finally trying to do damage control with editor letters long after it could have done any good and they are still not addressing the convergence of events that turned a powder keg into nuclear fallout.

They let things get out of control and now everything they say and do is more fuel. They can't win, and yet, they can't let the angry mob win either for the message that it would send. It's hopeless.

Regardless of how this ends, the image of a gamer in the mainstream has been set back a decade or so.

Sad.

 

[Master_Craig]

Absolutely right, C_nate.

Funnily enough, the local news paper where I live wrote a story about "Gamer Gate", opening the story with "Welcome to the ugly side of gaming".

 

[UrbanMasque]

Maybe late to this but another Video to add:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAzo34c4eEE

Games are inclusive... but if you only play Candy Crush You are not a gamer.

 

[C_nate]

You know, it might sound snobby or elitist to say, but I have to agree. Anyone who is even slightly serious about whatever hobby it is that they might enjoy, devotes time and money to their hobby. So my opinion also is that playing f2p junk on your smartphone while you are on the bus doesn't make you a gamer. It dilutes the word to have no meaning whatsoever.

It's like saying anyone who buys a book of stamps is now a stamp collector. Anyone who drives a car is now a gearhead. Anyone who looks out their window and sees a bird is now a ornithologist, anyone who plants a tomato plant in their yard is now a farmer, anyone who picks up a nickle off the street is a coin collector, and on and on and on....

Having said that though, I still think at this point, GG is doing more harm than good. A lot of unsavory people have become involved because they see it as an opportunity to lash out at common enemies. I've been following the tag for a while now and I see way more talk about fighting feminism and going after and trying to shut people and sites down for insults rather than anything to do with cleaning up the gaming industry, gaming journalism, ethics, or corruption.

My advice is if you really care about games and the people who make and you are still championing this cause is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DHIqUkmj-o

 

[UrbanMasque]

My advice is if you really care about games and the people who make and you are still championing this cause is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DHIqUkmj-o

Oh for sure... but its still interesting as hell to watch evolve.

 

[C_nate]

Ok, I know I should leave this alone already and let it fade away, but this was an interesting twist I did not see coming:

If kids these days only knew about the power of selective apathy...

 

[UrbanMasque]

^

..i dont have cable, but i'll catch it tomorrow.

 

[Longo_2_guns]

Euuugh.

 

[Sourdeez]

*sigh*
That episode was sickening.
The colbert report will be over soon. He is leaving for the Late Show.

 

[C_nate]

I watched it and it really wasn't that bad at all. He nailed the absurdity of the whole thing and played Devil's advocate well enough. (as he usually does)

I'm just amazed this has made it all the way into the mainstream media like it has. As for AS making it all the way to Colbert, it reminds me a lot of the scene from that Howard Stern movie where they are discussing how the people who hated him listened to his show twice as long as the people who liked him

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G6xu-J_Dmc

All those people hating on AS gave her far more exposure than she would have ever gotten otherwise and extended her visibility from thousands to millions.