This is not your usual NYMG post.
I’ve been talking about the Good Game Autoblocker a lot lately. Everyone has; it’s a hot point right now, with talk of blocks as censorship, as people shutting off lines of discourse. I talk about it, I defend it, but I don’t use it. I’m not much harassed, and I will block or mute people who can’t treat me as a human on an individual basis, but I know that’s a privilege; for some, the wall of noise is too much. I get it. But there’s been so much pushback that I decided I would raise a question on Twitter: I tagged GamerGate and said someone had told me, not long ago, that GamerGate would have been over quickly if gamers got more respect. I asked for open discussion. I indicated I would not tolerate condescension or attack, and I only had to block one person, a person who wanted to smirk and preen, and I simply wasn’t interested.
I learned a lot, but not as much as I wanted. For all the noise about the autoblocker cutting off discussion, not many took up my offer (until later, when I asked about Zoe Quinn, and my mentions were hit like a hammer with explanations), but the people I talked to had some interesting things to say, and I hope we can keep talking. I have my thoughts about gaming media, and certainly about issues of representation and treatment (or I wouldn’t be here). I expected some good answers, and some bad. What I didn’t expect is how I would feel afterward, how emotional and conflicted. How I would feel somehow that we were all doing something wrong, and how lost I was in finding a way to do things better, and in that attempt, I have written the following, a fragmented essay tracking my reactions and work in the wake of this conversation, and other conversations I was having with friends.
I am sitting at my computer with too many tabs open. In one, a friend is telling me a story of a man he knew who lost his way, his only solace, when gaming conventions went too mainstream, when the only haven he knew turned into a reflection of the rest of his life: a place where a “freak” like him was no longer accepted, but instead subjected to the stares and whispers of “mean girls.” He talked about fake geek girls, my friend tells me, and for the first time, I understand, a little, where these accusations come from. I’m able to see the source of bitterness and anger.
My friend tells me he thinks this man is dead; he hasn’t heard from him in a long time, and at first I want to say, but you don’t know. I can’t say it, though. I can’t, because what did this man, the one my friend describes, have left? What would you do, if you felt there was no place for you at all? To what extremes would you be pushed? I suddenly overwhelmed with such a sense of horror and sadness that I have to look away.
In another tab, I am reading a dissection of Zoe Quinn’s body, a discussion of nude photos discovered, or hacked; I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. I don’t even know if they are really her; I do not look. What matters is that these people are dismantling her, piece by piece. This is a person and they are talking about her as though she is just a body, and one they own, as though she is the sum of parts, simply meat on a table for them to analyze. Is she attractive enough? Is she fuckable? Is she Hitler incarnate? Is she even a person, in this discussion? Each day, I assume, she wakes up. She gets dressed. She yawns. She eats. She has feelings, reactions, thoughts, opinions. As I write this, perhaps she is brushing her hair. Maybe she is thinking about cats.
In another tab, I am searching Twitter archives, though I’ve done this before, for all-time mentions of Nathan Grayson and “rape” versus Zoe Quinn and “rape.” I search them both for “kill.” I search for “stupid.” I search for “ethics.” Every time, Quinn wins the war of mentions. In another tab, I’m told she’s responsible for mass censorship. In the other tab, they are still discussing her body, will always be discussing her body. I will close my eyes and I will see the words. I will remember we are all just bodies.
Somewhere else, though I am not looking, a person is explaining that the harassment is made up, or less than we imagine; that it’s just a few people banding together under alts. That it’s just the Internet. That it’s fair because anti-GG has done it too. That there are reasons.
There are no reasons. No one should be treated this way. I am not looking at these explanations, not now, but I have seen them, and will see them again. It’s just the Internet. It’s not real. But it feels as real as a wound, and it’s not even my pain.
In another tab I am re-reading a conversation I had with a man (I assume, from his statements) about games, and GamerGate. He started out a little confrontational, to my eye, calling Anita Sarkeesian a con artist out of nowhere, dropping the “SJW” moniker, and referring to “Gestapos” calling for changes in games. I am remembering that I almost pulled out of this conversation several times, as his “spare mes” and hyperbole were skating close to a line I’d drawn with the discourse I was willing to tolerate. But I didn’t. I stayed, and we talked, and by the end we were discussing Dontnod and Quantic Dream and when he had to go, he thanked me cordially for the chat and we were just gamers again, talking about what we liked and what we didn’t.
I am back listening to my friend, who is telling me there’s no fix. That we can’t fix this. That we will always find someone to marginalize, someone to hate. I open a new tab and search #gamergate and everyone is fighting, yelling, mocking. All sides. Back with my friend, I am crying a little, because I want so badly to do something good and real in this world and because I want to help him not feel bad, not feel marginalized and also ignored because he happens to be a white dude because there are so many levels of privilege, but all I have are words and in this tab, they are failing me. In this tab, they are useless. Words are nothing.
In another tab, words are everything. I’m reading someone telling Anita Sarkeesian “you’re so influential you deserve to be put into a gas chamber.” Someone else is warning against killing her because she will attain martyr status. She’s anti-Semitic. She’s a Jew. She’s ruining video games and possibly the world. She’s a hateful bigot, a scammer, a con artist. A few people wish someone would bomb her.
This is all in the last four hours of a Twitter search of Feminist Frequency mentions (though some are retweets of older posts).
In another tab, there it is: someone is explaining again that the threats and harassment are only a few people. The threats are this group, or that, or certain individuals. I’m looking at the Twitter accounts of some of the people I’ve spoken with about GamerGate, and it’s all high-fives and one-ups and people joining the movement. It’s all celebration, and anger, and fuck SJWs. One is saying he can’t play with the public “shitposters” because there are too many people he actually knows who follow his account. He’ll have to make a new account. For another, it’s all about SJWs, how ugly they are, how useless. In another tab, I open Kotaku In Action on reddit. I read about suggestions for the gaming media. Some are reasoned; I begin to nod, and then there’s something, there’s always something about politics. About agendas. I just want them to leave their fucking biased and PC SJW political agendas OUT OF THEIR FUCKING REVIEWS. FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! FUCK! one comment reads. But how can you write a review without an opinion? Without a feeling? How can we, as TotalBiscuit suggested, divorce ourselves from politics? We are politics. Fiction is political, even when it’s not overt. We are not robots. Why can’t we find reviewers we like and just listen to them? Why can’t anyone that miserable with the status quo Kickstart a new solution? As I said on Twitter, I simply choose not to read Breitbart. I do not watch Fox News. Sometimes, they make me angry, but I never demand they change. There’s room. The world is vast.
I can’t reconcile this with the conversations I’ve had, and also, I can.
In another tab, I am reading about Dr. Robin DiAngelo and her ideas on white fragility, and I am thinking that there’s a lot of what she’s saying that could be equated to defensive statements about the status quo in the gaming industry. When she talks about observing “very predictable patterns,” in white behavior in conversations about race, she says, “And one of those patterns is this inability to tolerate any kind of challenge to our racial reality. We shut down or lash out or in whatever way possible block any reflection from taking place…a lot of the time, the person simply cannot function. They regress into an emotional state that prevents anybody from moving forward,” I begin mentally replacing words. I think of all the times I have questioned something online and been bombarded immediately not with discussion or discourse, but “articles that explain everything.” With “facts” and “studies” that aren’t. With statements, uttered without a shred of irony, that of course young white men are the target audience for games so of course developers cater to them. It doesn’t matter that studies indicate more women are playing games than ever, and are in some ways a majority; it doesn’t matter that all such studies are somewhat flawed because it’s hard to tell not only who’s buying what, who’s borrowing what, or sharing what, but also what people would play if they had access to a larger variety of games. It’s just a defensive barrage of “get over it,” “accept it,” “read this for everything you need to know,” and “fuck, stop whining about games; I like my women sexy in games, okay?”
DiAngelo says, “White fragility also comes from a deep sense of entitlement. Think about it like this: from the time I opened my eyes, I have been told that as a white person, I am superior to people of color. There’s never been a space in which I have not been receiving that message.” I think of Dying Light, which I’ve been playing; I am a white male savior with a group of people also led by a white man; most of the other characters, the ones I am saving, helping, aiding, and fighting, are not white. I think, too, of Shepard in Mass Effect, how it didn’t matter that everyone loved FemShep, that BroShep is still the face of the game. I think of the research I did earlier this year (that I have not yet shared, as it is not complete) that revealed only some 13% of top-selling Xbox 360 games featured a playable female protagonist option. Not even a character designed as the lead, just an option—games like Skyrim, I mean. Sure, more women were available as options in DLC or multiplayer modes, relegated once again to the sidelines. DiAngelo speaks, and I hear a male voice: “From the first time I picked up a controller, I have been told that as a white man, I am superior to everyone else in games,” and it helps me understand their outrage. It isn’t my outrage, but we’re all mad about something. On that, at least, we can agree.
Another, smaller voice whispers that maybe when I joke about being a “misandrist harpy, ha ha ha” and when other feminists talk about white male tears, maybe this is our own version of defense. Our own point at which we cannot engage, born not from privilege but from something else—from doubt, from harassment, from feeling, always, like we are in places where we are not welcome, like we are maybe not really welcome anywhere because we are not named John, because we bleed, because we are supposed to be taking care of the children, because we dare to move into spaces of shadow. That some of us, too, have reached a point at which we can no longer engage, and it’s a point I don’t know how to move past.
In another room, I am taking a break, I am moving, because I must, because the weight has moved beyond what I can bear. I am making coffee, and I am thinking about all the times I’ve had to explain that I’m a gamer, yes, really. There’s a certain look around the eyes people get, particularly men, when I say this, and I know the next question will be, “What do you play?” There’s an edge to it, a challenge. There’s a test I have to pass, and no matter what I say, or how, I might fail.
In five months I am starting a PhD program in which I will study games, and gaming.
I play the shit out of some games.
But I’m also thinking about everyone else who’s looked at me funny, like I’m less than human, maybe, because I’m still playing video games at my age, when I have children. When I should be doing something “important.” Most of these people have a game or two on their phones, but wouldn’t call themselves gamers; even in the short span of years before GamerGate when all geek things were pretty cool, there was something off about the label. Rejected, always, by normal people with better things to do with their time (like kill hours in Farmville or Candy Crush Saga).
For days I’ve been discussing the #ggautoblocker, saying again and again that I don’t use it, but I support it, that everyone has the right to close a door if they want to. That it’s not censorship. That it isn’t stopping anyone from speaking. That the internet still exists. I try to talk to “gators,” asking how they can divorce a media and press so entwined with every level of the thing it reports on. After all, fans become writers, reviewers, and columnists, and then many writers move on to work for devs. Outside of that, everyone goes to the same events. Everyone reports on the same body of news. It is a finite amount of news. Games are developed, released, and played. I try not to insult. I read the #gamergate tag and I see as many people harassing and mocking back as are getting harassed and mocked. I am not neutral; I do not support GamerGate, for reasons I’ve explained, but I try not to harass. Sometimes (often?), I fail. Sometimes, I am an asshole, I am angry; sometimes I mock and rage. I am often flabbergasted at opinions presented as fact, as though no one could possibly disagree, as though criticism is somehow censorship. As though blocking is censorship. As though there is no nuance left in this world of gamers, no complexity; it is them and us, we and they, and everyone paints in bright, bold strokes of rage.
It’s not always this way, but as I write this, that’s all I can see.
I am watching this video and I’m crying now, not a little but a lot, because I feel like I can’t cry, or shouldn’t and that makes me cry harder, because if I give in to emotion then I’m hysterical, just a hysterical woman with too many feelings and a lack of logic. One tear and it doesn’t matter that I’ve tried to engage politely, to discuss. That I want to talk to people, to discover something deeper than repeated party lines and really talk about solutions and ideas. It doesn’t matter, because I’m a stupid feminist weeping over a video, because god do I know that feeling of pausing, of considering what you’re about to say oh-so-carefully, lest you have to explain yourself ten times because someone is waiting to leap on you with a link to some “fact” that is really a thinkpiece or worse, a Wikipedia page, like I have never been on the Internet, like I have not not been playing games longer than some of these folks have been alive. Nothing matters except that moment of hesitation, the deep breath, the reconsidering. The careful crafting of statements lest they be misconstrued.
I close the tabs. I stop reading. There’s nothing left to see, not now. It’s too much. I need to breathe again, and think, and I need to say these things:
I don’t want to destroy games. I want more games, better games. I’m critical when every other game I pick up features a grizzled white dude on the cover, just as I’m critical of yet another book by a dude that’s set in New York, or another movie in which a tough white dude trades barbs with a tough white or inconclusively “exotic” chick, and just like I’m critical when women are shoehorned in just for critics. I’m critical because I think games need stronger writing, because I think diversity brings that, because I’m tired of playing the same things over and over. It doesn’t mean I want to tell developers what they can and can’t make; it means I fucking love games. It means I think nuance makes better stories, and over-reliance on tropes makes shittier stories. It means sometimes I think white dudes are the default, and why? Why is it always a father figure, or an ex-military dude, etc., etc. Why are they bursting their T-shirts like they’ve just dropped in off a bodybuilding forum? Why are all the women trying to navigate the apocalypse in high heels? Where is the logic? I get to say this, because my opinion is my own. It’s mine. Stop telling me I’m too near-sighted to see “the truth” and then linking me “objective” pieces like this one (spoiler: it’s not objective). I can make up my own mind, and I am free to express myself.
You see that in a lot of GamerGate messages. Freedom. But when I exercise it, I am the voice that ruins games.
I’m not here to ruin games. Listen, I am a feminist, and I try to make my feminism inclusive. I want to be aware of the impact my voice can have and how it can silence others. I want to fight for everyone to have a voice. I want to talk about how names are read on job documents, and how perception of names, such a simple thing, helps maintain a class structure it’s impossible for some people to break out of. I want to talk about the very real dangers faced by trans folks, and the horrendous practice of outing and deadnaming, particularly in these internet fights, and how that can put someone’s life at risk. I want to listen to my friend reminding me when he feels like there is no place for him. I want to talk to people who feel that way, too, and I want to break open rooms until there is space for them. I want to talk to anyone who will engage, but I will set my limits because I must. I want to understand the feeling that something is being taken away or threatened. I want to welcome them in and tell everyone that my feminism is about making room. It’s about being what you want to be. It’s about choices, and community, and trying to make something better than what we have.
I want to remember that I am a gamer, too, and passionate about what I like and what I don’t. I want to talk about games with everyone and anyone, all the time, and all the ways we can make games even better, and how we can bring in those people who reject the label. I want to build a community again, but every piece I have is broken, and I don’t know how they can be fit together again, or even if they can. I don’t even know where to begin.
23 thoughts on “On Community, Fragments, and the Fringe: GamerGate, SJWs, and Everyone Between”
I wrote this really popular blocker app that is used by serious academics and powerful charities to shield them from ever having to read content produced by feminists.
I think it’s broken, though, because, I mean, you’re here.
Thank you for this heartfelt message. As a white, feminist gamer, I’ve waded into a number of Pro-GG and MRA forums to defend women, and I’ve tried my best to be polite and informative. Sometimes, I fail. Often, my message is ignored. But I have never faced the harassment that women have. The closest I get, is being called ‘gay’, which I can ignore simply because I don’t see it as an insult. I get called a SJW, and I wear that badge with pride.
But then again, I’m white, and male. There are other people who don’t have the kind of life I have – and who face much worse than I do.
So, thank you for this. Thank you for trying. I wish there was more I could do for you, beyond just giving you my gratitude.
Christopher, thanks for commenting. We welcome men as well as women to our community. We have to work together to make change. All of our struggles are different, but that doesn’t make one less valid than another. We hope you stick around and engage.
Christopher is a fake, for starters. Pro-GG forums are all inclusive, and they do not want women out of gaming. They want The mostly MALE JOURNALIST and IGF to stop giving backroom deals to their talentless buddies like Phil Fish. They keep women out of games, not gamers.
and searching for quinn? No one talks about her. So, obviously your tabs were all open to your personal slash fiction sites before you decided to write this.
Real feminists are fucking mad as hell that corrupt game journos are basically using Feminism as a shield.
You people are why we real feminists cant get real work done.
“fake” “talentless” “personal slash fiction” “real feminists”
Tell me more about how inclusive qualities of your rhetoric. I don’t even have to go screencap forums for this; it’s right here in your selection of words.
Real talk, why are you here? It seems you are not attempting to read for nuance or detail, as when I talk about searching archives. You’re not interested in engaging. You seem most interested in being angry, and that’s fine. Be angry. It’s your internet. But let’s tell it like it is; this kind of response furthers nothing. No part of the community right now, no faction, no splinter group, is “all inclusive.” No “side.” There’s too much anger. It’s all devolving. So, I’m sorry; I call bullshit. We can talk about it if that interests you — I’m interested — but this was one your free RAGE RAGE RAGE SPEW post here in this thread. If that’s all you’re interested in, there are plenty of spaces for that. I’m here to talk.
Seems you went out to find what you wanted to find.
For instance the entire Zoe Quinn section, you do realize she was summarily dismissed within the first third of the famous InternetAristocrat video which effectively started gamergate, his statements on her game situation were factual, he didn’t say she slept with him for a review, yet, you see the media and the anti’s completely running a different narrative about it when the facts were laid out plain in the first video which was nearing a million views before it was taken down.
No one cared about Quinn other than the fact of the streisand effect.
Its like Anita’s supposed harassment, you can read every single one, because she posts them, but she fails to mention something very simple, that its less than 1% of her tweet volume.
And how come Zoe was a topic? http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/09/09/GamerGate-Why-Gaming-Journalists-Keep-Dragging-Zoe-Quinns-Sex-Life-into-the-Spotlight Because the media wouldn’t shutup about it. Don’t pretend that everything that is printed arises organically, shitstorm, the fuss over the scientist’s shirt was created by the verge, things like manspreading were pushed into the mainstream by the media, the idea that gamers pushed the media to write about Zoe is backwards, no different than with Anita, these people had an agenda, or they were trolling their readers deliberately for views.
And there is no way you can support the GG autoblocker if you are truly against harassment.
The Hidden Face of Hypocrisy: Randi Harper
http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/hidden-face-hypocrisy-randi-harper/
http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/the-hidden-face-of-hypocrisy-randi-harper-part-2/
http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/the-hidden-face-of-hypocrisy-randi-harper-part-3/
http://theralphretort.com/silenced-prominent-randi-harper-critic-censored-on-twitter-3017015/
http://theralphretort.com/randi-harper-tries-to-bully-neutral-writer-into-silence-0308015/
http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/the-underhanded-nature-of-the-online-abuse-prevention-initiative/
http://theralphretort.com/super-abuser-randi-harper-washed-up-punter-libel-mark-kern-3015015/
http://theralphretort.com/randi-harper-intentionally-leaks-address-0305015/
http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/blocked-silencing-public-opinion/
http://theralphretort.com/oapi-chief-harper-loses-it-bullies-innocent-lootcrate-employee-and-admits-to-censorship-3019015/
http://www.reaxxion.com/6446/how-randi-harper-uses-her-ties-to-twitter-executive-del-harvey-to-silence-other-women
NOW OPEN HOUSE DRUNK STREAM @Sushilulutwitch Banned for criticizing Randi Harper?
Dr. Layman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVhk-gzA3_c
No BS! #GamerGate stream with NEUTRAL Stephanie
Maguel83
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtxOmih7LtA
Harper and Twitter Sitting in a Tree
Vernaculis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k4C3kY3Hhg
Let’s Think Games – News Media and Nightline with Stephanie A.K.A. Sushilulu
Let’s Talk Games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyziSTTXJBU
http://s2b20blog.mukyou.com/truth-unsellable-commodity-journalism/
The record of toxic behavior by Randi Harper speaks for itself. Its a weapon wielded by a queen bee to control people, its her power trip, and to support it is to support something which is ethically cancerous. Her methods are beyond suspect, there is no trial no evidence to get smeared as a harasser on her list, you get on there for petty and arbitrary reasons set by herself alone. Its as if I made an anti feminist blocklist which would become adopted and endorsed by major industry organizations under the banner of anti harassment, but really it would target feminists and label them as child molesters or whatever pleased me at the time, it would be something unjustifiable.
Just yesterday we saw her underhanded behavior yet again, not wanting to put a prominent game dev on the list, she create a blocklist just for Mark Kern, but she would block him by proxy, blocking his followers.
http://i.imgur.com/9QbwwXI.jpg
https://archive.today/3GQhC
http://i.imgur.com/ttSSOfO.png
https://archive.today/bxoyZ
http://i.imgur.com/ukY9R9F.png
The malicious and shameless glee she exhibits in her posts just are revealing about her character.
And others, like Brianna Wu
http://imgur.com/kD1yciJ.jpg
https://imgur.com/a/oOiBf
http://theralphretort.com/did-deceitful-brianna-wu-pull-biggest-con/
http://theralphretort.com/infamous-nutter-brianna-wu-caught-spread-sarin-gas-lie-about-gamergate-2021015/
Lied about fleeing her home, tried to frame gamergate with a sarin gas threat and was caught red handed.
Zoe Quinn has a history with helldump, one of the most toxic cyberbullying boards to have existed
http://i.imgur.com/6nSEGEg.png
https://archive.today/Qb96g
Chris Kluwe
http://www.cbssports.com/general/writer/gregg-doyel/24628550/chris-kluwe-cant-be-moral-crusader-after-his-cruel-twitter-rant
So while you were digging up anonymous trolling for evidence of GG’s wrong doing, which is basically a way of selecting a biased sample, the prominent figures of anti GG are pretty shocking once you take a look at them. Ones like srh butts or laurelai are on encyclopaedia dramatica…
So while you are saying the “facts” in the links aren’t good enough, the thing is, gamergate does have the facts, while anti gamergate doesn’t have anything other than accusations.
As for Sarkeesian, people are tired of being told they are just “scared of change” when this is a selective defense based on her gender alone, its a defense based on benevolent sexism because she seems to be judged by an almost sub human standard, where there are no amount of lies she can be caught in before she loses any credibility at all. She can be caught literally saying she isn’t a gamer, her work can be debunked easily and the quality only reveals her ignorance on the subject, and countless cherry picked examples or outright lies are found, but it doesn’t matter, she gets a pass because she is a woman, she is immune from criticism.
Anita Sarkeesian Debunked in Under a Minute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW-69xXD734
One only need look at her “masters thesis” in which she even thanks her co writer Jonathan McIntosh for helping her even then…watching hours of tv to finish her thesis. The quality of work she produced only revealed how low the academic standards were for that institution, and the quality of her work has not improved since.
Anita choice feminism
http://i.imgur.com/iGA3Kec.png
Anita Sarkeesian Part 1: The College Graduate
Instig8iveJournalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6gLmcS3-NI
Anita Sarkeesian Part 2: Burqa Beach Party
Instig8iveJournalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpFk5F-S_hI
Re: What I Couldn’t Say – Anita Sarkeesian
Male Trope
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IewGFnf9Dc
TL;DR – Anita Sarkeesian Doesn’t Understand How to be a Feminist
TL;DR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqQ850-YiXE
Anita And The White Knights [mirror]
InternetAristocrat Archive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxSxeOvaor8
clone this paste RAW Paste Data
So much of this comes down to just the shaming language of “you are afraid”, no, quite literally most male gamers do not care, they do not care if women play games, they are just tired of being told what they apparently care about. They are tired of these feminists throwing out inflammatory content and then getting upset at the backlash. And they are tired of being told these intellectual lightweights like Sarkeesians are some kind of intellectuals of note that everyone must take seriously when its clear that person has no credibility on anything at all. Unable to even fulfill their promises to their backers on the promised content, 3 years late, only half way done. People are tired of these women being held to such incredibly low standards.
We are also tired of this false idea of diversity. Note all the damsels in anti GG are actually white, and connected to privilege. They aren’t even just white, they are a special class of white people, Anita’s McIntosh is a trust fund child, Brianna Wu is a child of millionaires who will drop 200k at a hat on her vanity projects, Zoe Quinns current boyfriend is also a trust fund child(alex lifschitz). For all the talk of diversity, how likely is that random?
And no, half of gamers aren’t women unless you are counting mobile games. Why the insistence anyways? Its no different than insisting that half of the modified street racing cars out there are the creations of women in garages. No one believes that, or that half the water cooled rigs for gaming are run by women, again, no one believes this or see’s it in any reality they experience. The genders clearly have differences in their preferences, and how is that a bad thing, unless actual diversity is a bad thing. If women can’t be bothered to make the WNBA successful because they aren’t interested, why this arbitrary assumption that women must make up half of gamers? Its never reflected in reality, its just an insistence that its true. With the proliferation of smartphones I”m sure everyone has angry birds by now, so technically near 100% of people are gamers at this point, but in this discussion everyone knows we’re talking about hardcore gaming, not mobile gaming.
And complaints about rhetoric? You have to remember who threw the first stone, it was the Anita’s of the world who painted gamers as misogynists, that was the charge they lead with, quite a vicious claim, and not one which was supported with evidence of any note, so when people wonder why people are angry? Well they’ve been attacked relentlessly by the media and these women for literally years now, based on frankly no substantive arguments or evidence. Recently Veeh and Sargon had a debate with femmesinfridges, and she basically admitted she got into arguments iwth 12 year old boys online in games, sometimes people find what they are looking for, instead of laughing off trashtalk they decide to pick and fight and basically create a self fulfilling prophecy. Anita does this as outlined in the male trope video above. Its clear from video taken from her pre-kickstarter days she already knew of 4chan, and knew how to deal with trolls, so her complaints later on, her feigning surprise were entirely non genuine. In fact in some debunking videos, I think it was thunderf00ts, one time she let the mask slip for a moment during an early cnn interview when she was asked if she was feeding the trolls, she smirked before she caught herself…..and that is why we don’t take these people seriously, and why we are tired of being insulted and smeared by these people. We are tired of being told we harass these people when we don’t.
https://medium.com/@cainejw/an-actual-statistical-analysis-of-gamergate-dfd809858f68
https://medium.com/@cainejw/a-narrative-of-gamergate-and-examination-of-claims-of-collusion-with-4chan-5cf6c1a52a60
http://chrisvoncsefalvay.com/2014/12/07/Gamergate.html
http://chrisvoncsefalvay.com/2014/12/16/Gamergate-2-retweets.html
http://chrisvoncsefalvay.com/2015/01/03/gamergate-3-trends.html
http://chrisvoncsefalvay.com/2015/01/11/gamergate-4-population.html
http://chrisvoncsefalvay.com/2015/01/16/a-footnote-on-gamergate.html
If one is going to apply notions of collective guilt and punishment, then apply that to other groups as well. Shouldn’t african american’s apologize if another african american person someone commits a crime? That is what this collective responsibility idea charged against gamer game is about really. Our notables are generally well behaved, and so the anti’s point at some randoms to try to assign guilt, when they could be anyone, including false flaggers. In fact with Brianna’s “drake harper” sock puppet and her sarin gas accusation, these come from even the notables. While GG points to real and notable abusers in anti GG such as Harper who are given legitimacy and support without question, without scrutiny. Just look at Sushi lulu’s articles on her, they are damning, she identifies her pattern of behavior to harass people, and this is the person anti GG supports and entrusts with the power to run an anti harassment initiative? If the tables were turned there would be no one on the anti side making excuses for any of this behavior, and that is the problem., there are incredible double standards going on here.
The anger is real, because people have been silenced, or threatened with silencing constantly for years now under the guise of things like “its harassment”, when its clearly just criticism.
It’s interesting to me that you think the author of this article went out of her way to reach these conclusions, KiA was talking about it’s eternal hatred of Quinn *just yesterday* in its top post for the day. It takes less than sixty seconds of reading the comments of almost ANY anti-GG writing and analysis to find corroborating evidence for all the claims it makes about how obnoxious and toxic GG is. Your post, for example.
In terms of “going out of your way to find something you wanted to find,” you’re the cake-taker. What did this take you to write, an hour? More?
Bonus question: how do you square Gators feeling so ‘slandered’ by the GG AutoBlocker when ya’ll go around posting entire *articles* of baseless, disproven character assassination bullshit?
“BEING INCLUDED ON THIS BLOCKLIST AUTOMATICALLY ACCORDING TO AN A CODED SCRIPT IS AN ACTIOANBLE OFFENSE, MEANWHILE PLEASE READ OVER 20,000 WORDS ABOUT HOW THE STRANGERS I’VE CHOSEN TO HATE ARE AWFUL.”
There is one post from two days ago I found on quinn with 1307 votes, “[PSA] I am tired of our opponents claiming the favorable coverage of Quinn was debunked time and time again. Don’t let them rewrite history. Whenever they try to polish that turd of a tale, drop this image on their heads. ”
Explain that as “external hatred”?
As for how long I spend, if I took an hour, it would be better written.
Btw the articles are based on Randi Harpers own tweets and behavior, she can’t help herself to a degree where she provides evidence of her abusive nature on a daily basis.
One more thing on Quinn, I skipped over because I didn’t want to talk about her, her record is not that of a victim. What she did to Eron was not trivial, and she did admit she violated his trust to put it lightly, as she had previously defined rape for herself, she raped him. Eron isn’t the neckbeard misogynerd painted or assumed in the media, he’s actually a “sjw” rad fem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvW-WCIpl8k Oliver Campbell speaks with him on that stream. The record of Zoe speaks for itself. Her record with the Fine Young Capitalists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d6Q3VpqXyk where she went out of her way to damage a competitor in an underhanded way, through false accusations. There was the entire wizardchan debacle of course, and then when mundane matt came out with his video? She false dmca’d his channel, which is one of the most damaging things one can do to a youtuber who is monetized, it cirpples your channel. Then she abused the court system to gag order her ex https://medium.com/@brokenomelette/understanding-the-zoe-affidavit-29d001415f23 and when Jordan Owen of the Sarkeesian Effect went to interview the photographer who had worked with her, she claimed that he was using one of her pictures without permission and false flagged him again on twitter to get him suspended. The photographer was even ready to grant him proof of permission, he has a video on his site on this situation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY46z-Aj4kA And finally, when she went on her vacation to france, she claimed she was fleeing due to gamergate harassment, but when people looked, she had planned this vacation before gamergate existed. http://i.imgur.com/TQF4tBb.png
This is the record with these types of people, its why people are angry when people assume these people are victims and that everyone is just out to get them.
Well, let’s unpack this. The first thing I have to say, out of the gate, is that you’re beating on a rather large strawman here. I’m not analyzing in this essay. I’m not not drawing connections. I’ve written my analysis before, my opinions on gaming press and harassment. This was an experiential piece, a simple rendering of my feeling after I stepped out of my “side” and asked for a conversation. The only time in this piece I offer anything approaching analysis is when I engage with DiAngelo’s ideas of white fragility and the image of the average white male gamer, but also the idea of defense mechanisms all around. Would you like to talk about that? I’d love to discuss it further; I find a lot of fascinating corollaries.
The rest of this is party line rhetoric. It’s the same links and ideas that get thrown around all the time. Why are we having that conversation? That conversation is happening in the same ways every day and has been for months. It only changes when a new challenger appears, if you will. You want to address my mention of Zoe Quinn? Let’s look at it:
I happened upon several discussions of nudes that were ostensibly Zoe Quinn and people discussing them. You could replace Quinn with any number of figures here; hell, we could talk about Jennifer Lawrence if you’d like, but she’s not relevant to this community, while Quinn certainly is, or I doubt you’d be armed with so many links.
I also mentioned searching Twitter archives — I did not specify that I was searching at the beginning of GamerGate, and perhaps I should have for clarity, but I’ve mentioned it in a previous piece. I wrote about these two instances to discuss how I felt when I saw these things, how I’ve felt over the past months writing about GamerGate, which I’ve done several times here.
I wrote, too, about how I see a breakdown of discourse on all sides. You say I cannot support the blocker because of Randi Harper, but let’s consider that logically: because… she argues back? Because… some people don’t like her? Because you think she’s a hypocrite and a harasser? Let’s say she is. Let’s hypothesize. It doesn’t affect my opinion if so, because I believe people have a right not to hear the same things over and over.
I’ve seen these videos before, these articles, the reedit threads, the Twitter fights. I’ve seen everyone talk about white girls and privilege and white dudes and neckbeards and white knights and gamers and misogynists and SJWs and who started what fight and what’s killing games.
Can we ever move past it and actually talk again?
Can you, right now, leave your links behind and talk about any one point? Let’s talk about that percentage of women in games and industry potential and how we can’t really count and what mobile games mean and what all of this means for the industry’s future.
Let’s not fight strawmen. Let’s not compare gaming to the WNBA, because we’re in apples vs oranges territory. Let’s not link a bunch of “debunking” videos that are really just someone yelling. Let’s talk about hardcore gaming and what it means and let’s talk about, hey, even ethics in journalism or whether or not gaming press is journalism at all.
Can we talk?
The problem is we’re dealing with facts. Its like bringing up “defense mechanisms” when talking about a debate between a creationist and an evolutionist, I’m sure there are some defense mechanisms at work, but the problem is there is also an objective truth. So if the creationist starts going off on psychology and defense mechanisms on why an evolutionist is arguing so stridently against creationists, they are talking around the problem because it doesn’t actually matter what the psychological motivations are for the evolutionist making their argument is, it only matters whether their argument is right.
And on issues like the blockbot, there is simply no defending Randi Harper and her organization. If one is against harassment, that person has proven themselves to be a malicious harasser whos abusive nature reflects the very mindset of the blockbot.
You happened upon nudes, because you looked for them. That is the problem of confirmation bias, if nudes exist, someone out there will discuss them. They are not notable for anything other than them existing, they were professionally shot, that was the deal she took, they were not jennifer laurence nudes. The fact they exist in the discussion at all is based on the fact that she inserted herself into this discussion with her behavior, which makes people look for what they are dealing with. You will note that Grayson(because he’s employed) has kept his head down, which is why he doesn’t make the news much these days, but if he had gone on an endless media campaign of “gamers are evil misoggyknees”, yes, he’d be a topic for the day.
But that’s the thing, how many times has Zoe been relevant to the hashtag in the last few months? I watch the tag every day, the top retweets are always about something else, I almost don’t remember the last time Zoe was mentioned, it was only during the GDC where she attached herself to the OPAI that she merited mention at all, otherwise she, like Brianna Wu don’t actually show up in the hashtag unless they do something incredibly stupid.
Harper can’t be supported because she is objectively abusive in her behavior, she enjoys instigating conflict. This is a person who lacks such maturity that they don’t know or don’t care that someone in charge of an anti abuse initiative should exhibit behavior which is above reproach, they should be the standard for behavior, yet, instead we see a vincdictive queen bee leading people to brigade others and a person who abuses her power and exploits connections and rules to damage other people. She isn’t a child, she’s a 30 something year old woman who behaves like a vindictive child online, she has no right heading any anti abuse initiative.
The percentage of women in video games being a problem is based on an assumption. There are many industries where women are a minority because they aren’t as interested, from car mechanics to construction. Even on their free time these men will spend their money and time on things like their cars in a disproportionate way compared to women. I have doubts many of your friends even know how to change their own oil, never mind modify their cars for performance, and you see this in gaming as well. There is disparity because there is difference. The reason there are more males in X esp when they succeed is because men fill both ends of the spectrum, from the worst to the best. To be a professional gamer(another area of complaint about gender equity), male professional gamers devote absurd amount of time to their hobby, we are talking 8 hour days of “practice”, all for a questionable and extremely unlikely payoff. So when feminists complain about the disparity while ignoring the price of failure, they are revealing that their arguments are not based on an honest assessment. Its not a surprise that all those asian gamers dying from playing marathon gaming sessions in pc cafe’s are male. I’m sure a fair few more just flunk out of school because of their addictions. Its unfair to look at the successes, without looking at the costs.
I question your assumption that we need more women in the industry. I question the assumption anyone needs to be pushed into gaming. Do you know what game production is like now? Its a sweat shop industry and no one in their right mind would choose development as a job unless they wanted to be a starving indie dev artist, the number of indi devs which make it big are tiny, and as the indie-fensible videos on the IGDA corruption show, unless the IGDA judging staff have money in your game, you probably aren’t going to be winning, and because the corrupt extends to the media, you won’t be promoted either. And yes the corrupt IGDA was also linked to Randi Harpers blockbot since its useful way to threaten people into silence while maintaining some deniability on the issue.
Games studios close all the time, the industry is litered with the carcases of dead studios because a duds is all it takes to sink the ship. Its a volatile job market, and based on the sweat shop conditions, the crunch dev cycle, there are probably too many people trying to work in gaming. Pushing more people in will only make it worse, let alone women who do not have the interest or the willingness to sacrifice for that profession.
And its notable the women being held up are about the worst examples possible. I think it says a lot about the state of feminism that they have no standards over who they defend and promote. Zoe Quinn basically wrote a word document using twine, an open source game design tool which is so easy to use its promoted as not requiring any coding knowledge to use, with this, you can write a choose your own adventure game. Even total biscuit wrote a short one for a laugh. Brianna Wu has a degree in “investigative journalism”, not in any technology field, and her “work” speaks for itself. She only exists because her parents are able to lose vast sums of money funding her vanity projects. Anita Sarkeesian has a masters degree in “political thought”, her game idea was a cliche’d mess and as I said, her degree isn’t worth the paper its written on, yet she’s held up as some kind of intellectual on women in gaming. These are all horrible examples to hold up, women who don’t have actual industry experience, and in the case of Anita, even experience playing the games she speaks about.
I’ll give you a counter example to illustrate the problem. Grace Hopper was one of the great computer scientists of this age. She invented both the computer compiler and the language COBOL, and she eventually rose to become a rear admiral of the navy, and she’s been dead for almost a quarter century at this point. Ask yourself why feminists don’t bring her up? She doesn’t fit the narrative of victimhood, os oppression, she doesn’t excuse those women of their own decisions and laziness to not have taken a stem degree themselves and actually try their own hands at making the games they claim they want to exist. Instead you have feminists claim that stem education is so hostile to women they are scared to take the courses, when Grace Hopper recieved her BA/MA, then PHD in mathematics and physics in the 1930s, in america no less. It doesn’t fit the narrative, so its not brought up, she is literally forgotten by feminists, and in her place? Charlatans, fraudsters, conartists who frankly make women look bad, spread a threat narrative and just really are effectively the equivalent of modern day female sambos. Its an insult to the female gender that these professional victims with no skills or achievements of note are the ones who are held up for attention, as examples of anything to care about at all. What modern feminism holds up these days are women like Melody Hensley, women so fragile, so weak they get ptsd from twitter, while women like Grace Hopper rose to the rank of rear admiral in the navy based on her strength, even gaining special approval from congress to extend her commission, she has the US Navy Missile destroyer USS Hopper named for her, and this again, is buried by the modern feminist because it doesn’t fit the narrative, and if you want to talk about the real problem, that is it.
You seem to make a lot of assumptions about me, about other commenters, and about the world, and sometimes think because someone else made similar assumptions, they are true.
I’m not sure things are quite so clear-cut. I’m also not sure why you’re here. What do you hope to accomplish? Will you cure me of my feminism because some women succeeded in some fields? Because you insult others?
I teach at a STEM-centric institution. I teach these students. My husband is in the sciences here, conducting research. A few examples isn’t going to change my actual experience, or his, to which I’m privy. I’m all for broadening the conversation, but attempting to do so in such a hostile, confrontational matter that cherrypicks some examples while insulting others or writing off entire experiences isn’t going to do it.
So again, why are you here? What is your aim? If you hate everything I put into this and everything you think I stand for and every assumption you made about me… what’s the gain? Are we accomplishing anything? Are we discovering anything?
This is one of my favorite pieces I’ve read about GamerGate in a long time because it really captures the frustration and powerlessness of the situation. I also occasionally get frustrated at Gators and poke fun– I’ve said plenty of snarky, belittling things in response to the snarky, belittling things people say to me/about me. But it doesn’t help anyone, and I’ve been perceiving, more and more, that people feeling like they’re being denied a level of respect they would expect to receive in a real-life in-person conversation is the gnarled root of a lot of people’s investment in GamerGate.
If GamerGate had to walk on the strength of its ideas alone, it wouldn’t and couldn’t– treating everyday work relationships like a criminal act, targeting writers and critics and demanding they stop producing content rather than ignoring or rebutting the ideas, acting like “objective” reviewing is possible, let alone a desirable outcome– it’s all pretty dumb, dumb in a way that most everyone can see.
Yet, it persists, buoyed on a river of self-righteous indignation.
I think a lot about Felicia Day’s post from a few months back– how she talks about the subtle but heartbreaking loss of trust in the essential amicability of the gaming community, something I had a lot of trust in up through last year as well. It’s not like there hasn’t always been an undercurrent of unpleasantlness– I do youtube reviews, and people say all sorts of shit to a person, but I actually kind of enjoy the more trivial parts of it. When someone tells me I must have literaly brain damage for enjoying Bioshock Infinite and saying so publicly, that’s kind of funny– the rage is so disproportionate to the subject, it has no teeth, the angry diatribe is like a wet fart: loud, obnoxious, sophmorically hilarious. We’re both still gamers– we wouldn’t even be having that interaction if we didn’t both care passionately about the game in the first place, from opposite ends of the like/dislike spectrum. That’s the kind of harassment I’ve always seen in the gaming community before GamerGate. GamerGate is a different kind of harassment altogether.
GamerGate is the first gaming movement that wants me to never play or talk about games again. I don’t make gender-related criticisms often, but when I see awful cliche`s take the place of writing that takes effort, I say so. The stakes of writing better women and LGBT characters are so low– games can be better, can try harder, can do things and include perspectives that have been uncontroversial in other mediums for decades, or alternatively they can not bother with any of that and I won’t like them as much. How this gets translated to “I hate games and want them all to change to suit an agenda”. Writing dynamic women and LGBT chracters isn’t forcing an ‘agenda’, it’s making games more reflective of real life and the stories of the people playing them. This seems so basic. It seems like something people who love games like I do, and presumably like Gators do as well, would support without breaking a sweat. Especially because it takes no effort as a consumer.
GamerGate quite literally demonizes writers they don’t like. I haven’t been hit with it, maybe because I’m a guy, maybe because my videos don’t attract an audience of Gators, but I see it happen constantly. And the reaction from “GG would never harass” is always the same– ‘Well, *I* didn’t do anything, and that’s not what we’re about, we’re about ethics in game journalism, but we can’t have ethics if someone doesn’t take down these evil (And KiA does use the word ‘evil’ frequently) SJWs. ‘
I’ve also had frustrations with the anti-GG community, such as there can be said to be one. I think it’s important to talk about why the GG tastemakers, like Ralph Retort and fairweather Gator TotalBiscuit, but I can’t stand the constant “calling out” of random people who just uncritically retweet. It’s like they’ve never had to have dinner with an arch-conservative family member– you know damn well they’re going to say something offensive, but you’re still going to have to pass them the potatoes at some point over the evening. I even got “called out”– someone on Ghazi, the subreddit that makes fun of GG, talked about gators ‘bitching’ and someone was like “shocked you used a gendered slur,” and it took me a minute to realize they were talking about the word ‘bitching’– I see where they’re coming from, but the word is almost never used in a gendered context. And women use this word as much or more than men. Bitching is an important colloquialism, and a super mild one at that. I said I thought the guy was being pretty silly and excessive “calling out” someone over using a word that’s so commonly used, and whose common usage is pan-gender. A moderator ruled it was a gendered insult, and its use is a bannable offense. Is that being inclusive? If that’s how the mod feels it is, that’s the way it’ll be, it’s not my subreddit, but I really have to wonder at whether doing things like banning folks for using words I have literally never seen cause offense doesn’t self-perpetuate the problem– a unifying emotion for GG seems to be the feeling that they’re being judged by folks looking down an awfully long slope of nose at them, and they’re not entirely mistaken on that front.
The difference is distinguishing the individual from the systemic dynamic– GamerGate is a bullshit perspective, and I have no respect for it. Gators, themselves– who even knows? These folks are total strangers. I am a total stranger to them. That was fine when it came to games, even beneficial– here are two people who have never met, but who share the experience of journeying through games. But when it comes to laying down moral imperatives and judgements, being strangers does no one any favors.
To the guy who thinks I’m a betrayer of feminism and a bad ally for defending use of the word ‘bitching’, I am a hypocrite. To the Gator who thinks I am a betrayer of games and a bad critic for defending feminist game criticism when all it wants is “to destroy games”, I am also a hypocrite. To me, I love games and respect women, and I don’t feel like I have a lot of trouble navigating those two things at once. These people don’t know me at all. And I don’t know them. So long as we’re all telling each other how short we’re coming up in each other’s eyes, there is no end to the conversation, and no end to GamerGate.
At this point, I feel like the first and most important goal of GamerGate is to keep talking about GamerGate. It’s fueled by outrage. So I’m trying to do two things to make it stop:
1) Talk about love of games, and nuance of games, in the ways I always wanted to, regardless of whether GG thinks I’m a game-Judas for it.
2) Try not to a jerk.
After all this awful half-year of bullshit, that’s all I’ve got left.
I’d tell you I understand, but you already know. Thank you for sharing. It’s a lot. It’s all so much, and we’re all flawed, but we are growing. We will grow from this.
I’m trying, but I couldn’t even make it off the comments page without getting suckered into being irritated by a Gator. C’est la vie.
Its quite the opposite, what “ideas” does anti GG have? Its only idea is censorship, accusing people of misogyny and trans-phobia, and promoting a blockbot. Quite literally on every other issue involving facts they lose which is why they have to insist on “harassment” existing regardless of evidence, its literally all they have.
Corruption in the industry to the extent where the IGDA is picking winners based on what the judges are going to personally profit from is not “everyday” relationships, its “everyday” corruption. The unethical relationships between the gatekeepers to the public and game devs is not “everyday”, you are getting very close to defending situations which are little different from that of a casting couch.
And of course shaming language, yes, gamergate are just losers right? Again, what anti GG resorts to when they do not have a legitimate argument.
Thinking about Felicia Day? Why? Because she’s young? I find many defenders of women…well lets just say they prioritize the young women, if you know what I mean. If we’re going to pull out the shaming language, I think its notable which types of women the white knights defend, old feminists rarely merit such attention from such men. Felicia Day doesn’t deserve a defense, she did something incredibly stupid. Imagine if she had said she would cross the street seeing any black man after ferguson…after all, Michael Brown did assault the store owner and rob the store.
There is quite literally nothing stopping you from fixing the “awful cliche’d writing” in games these days, if you want to see more of these, then go do it. Or ask why women like Anita don’t do it, after all, I’m sure you think her game idea where the princess saves herself was worth making right? Surely you should be pushing women with such prominence and a following to raise the funding for an indie game or two fulfilling their requirements for representation. With the availability of game engines and a thriving indi market, it takes very low investment these days to actually get a game done. I’m sure Anita could pull some strings and even get investment from prominent wealthy feminists like Cherly Samburg to invest in an underserved industry, after all, whats a few hundred k out of a billionaires wallet? And if the industry is worth billions, and under-served, you and Anita could be sitting on a gold mine.
Yet, nothing happens, Anita doesn’t even try, even as she’s raise almost half a million at this point. Brianna Wu’s game has lost money and Anita is even attacking games like Dying Light for having “damsels” when in fact the dev took great pains to make sure it was done right with female input into the story line.
Writing dyanmic women and LGBT characters IS forcing an agenda, because you won’t entertain the other side of the coin. Your side want 50% of the protagonists doing the killing to be women, yet doesn’t even consider that 50% of the mooks and henchmen we blow up, mutilate and decapitate endlessly be women, no, its just a very one sided concern over “positive” depictions only, which amounts to little more than a quota for propagandistic characters. If you don’t want to explore the totality of existence then you can’t say you are adding more depth to stories when you are only willing to tell one side. So no, the “stakes” aren’t low, they are incredibly high because there is almost nothing you can do with such characters without raising offense, their application is extremely restricted, which is why they are rarely written at all.
You haven’t been “hit” with anything because to be frank, no one knows who you are.
Your excuse of your use of the word “bitching” is the problem. You think you are making a rational defense, but as they say, that’s white male privilege talking, what your reasons are do not matter, their feelings matter more than your reasons. Apparently you have all the power as a white man, and yet they have the power to silence you, which is the entire problem.
“A bullshit perspective” and yet, you don’t actually make a coherent argument against it.
On the contrary, I think the sum of your comments make an extraordinarily coherent argument against GamerGate, so I’m gonna take a smoke break and let you continue to manufacture paragraph after paragraph of reactionary nonsense and do my legwork for me.
Here’s a question I actually would enjoy getting an answer to– do you actually think anything you’ve written is remotely persuasive in any context, and would you act this way in real life?
I do not care about soe quinn, really, but now about brianna wu, I wonder how she has free time, since her is always hunting something for call of the sexism, or say that something threatened her somehow.
I know that people make mistakes, but when you take a threat of gas sarin extremely seriously, but after finding out it was ANTI-GGers threatening of the GGers death, her have considered an irrelevant threat AND excludes twitters, does not apologize and still says who is bothered by the peoples that spoke to the false report, calling them of abusers
ah, excellent text, just had to vent a bit
Your article is very eye opening. Too often we think to disengage with the opposing side when there are mature people that will actually engage in real discussions. I find it fascinating the one person you spoke with that said he felt left out of something that was once part of his identity. I see this quite frequently at cons: many cosplayers are mocked by other attendees. Why go if you’re going to mock these people?
But, what’s frustrating is that I as a woman and gamer have also experienced this rejection and judgement, from both gamers and non-gamers. I stand my ground against GG, not by lashing out, but by focusing on the positive things that are being changed by those more mature to handle the situation. It is sad that we can’t all get along for the sake of being geeks.
Frankly, the hate needs to stop both ways. Furthermore, people need to stop getting offended about people trying to change the world for the better–how do you get offended by wanting to make things safe for others to enjoy their interests?
Peace~
I agree with you completely. I think communication is key, and the only way for everyone to get some aspect of what they want, but too often people in the larger “geek” community turn on one another, as you say, and for what? What does anyone gain?