#Gamergate moral panic resembles the 90s, which directly affects women's career choices

By now, if you haven't been living off-grid, you've heard of Gamergate. It's been mentioned in connection to recent school massacre email threat made to Utah State University, who were clear on that they "determined that there was no threat to students, staff or the speaker, so no alert was issued", prior to Anita Sarkeesian's scheduled lecture. Ms Sarkeesian decided to cancel anyway, and in the NYT profile on her she makes some points about Gun Control, since Utah is a concealed carry state. The NYT article also has no problems connecting the threats to #gamergate. Many other newsoutlets followed suit, similarly headline about the threats Brianna Wu recently received discuss the problem of "women in gaming" being threatened all the time. Meanwhile, three gamer-ladies who identify as pro-gamergate and neutral had a chat with Huffpost Live about what #gamergate is, and the tumblrfied gif-set with Jemma Morgan stating "the real issue is we have a terrible problem with nepotism and cronyism" is currently trending on Tumblr. Jemma also says "the word misogyny always comes up, why do you think it does?" Because it's an easy way of deflecting criticism, it's a “Trump Card” Argument, to stop all dialogue dead in its tracks. And this exactly why gaming minorities and ladies posted photos of themselves in #notyourshield. If you're interested in that see Tits or GTFO: An Editorial on #GamerGate and #NotYourShield (Googlecache) and KnowYourMeme's page. On the one hand you have publications stating that #gamergate is a hate group, other saying it's a consumer movement, and in the meantime we have Australian #gamergates "shitposting" (posting rubbish) all night long to keep certain peoples personal information from being top item on anonymous bulletin board, saving her from "being doxed". It seems doxing these days simply means posting someones address - already listed somewhere - to the wrong place, in which case Wikipedia has been doxing me for years. Now, everyone go hate on Jimmy Wales. Nononono, I'm kidding. It's a seriously disturbing scary feeling when people post your address in front of a lot of eyeballs, absolutely abusive and very effective in terrorizing victims. Speaking from experience. It should always be stopped.

Now, I already gave a quick rundown about the problem affecting us professionals in advertising in insulting consumers shrinks the market. Since then Intel pulled ads from Gamasutra and just today Gawker Media lost Mercedes as their advertiser. In a world where yellow journalism has respawned as clickbait journalism in an effort to draw the ad-dollar when our news outlets financial support relies on CPM, it seems we're now peddling outrage rather than a dedicated interested readership an advertiser would want to target. The discourse in 140 chars and microwave mentality only serves to amplify the ugly. Moral panic brings a lot of clicks. Won't somebody think of the (insert woman, child or minority here).

And suddenly, I'm having flashbacks to the 90s.

You see, when I was a teenager I didn't want to work in advertising at first. I had my heart set on becoming a comic book artist. I studied under Ken Landgraf at Parsons School of Art and Design and I have a degree in Illustration. I practiced inking, daydreaming of a steady job at DC or Marvel, while I was sending my own comics to adult comic publications and collecting rejection letters that helped me get better at my craft. I went to comic meetups, swapping photocopies of my work with other budding artists, and I was never the only young woman in the group. Not even once. One day I got the phonecall. Horst Schröder, the godfather of Swedish adult comic book scene and publisher of Epix and Pox wanted to publish my comic in Pox. It was the moment of my life where I thought I had a shot at a career in comics, and it was a Big Deal™ to me.

For a background of what happened to his publishing company you can google translate Sundblom's blog moralpanic the police and legal action - comics for adults are not welcome in Sweden. Be aware that the pictures in the blog have sexual content, and do not represent Epix and Pox publications multi-facetted output as a whole. A specific issue of Pox magazine (for adults!) was reported to the police by Bo Bertilsson, chairman of The People's Organisation against Pornography, a feminist organisation whose stated goal was to save children from sexual exploitation. This got a lot of attention in the press.

Comics by Gilbert Hernandez, Altan, Art Spiegelman, Rick Geary, Bill Griffith, Neil Gaiman and feminist underground comic queen Dori Seda were painted in the press as sexually deviant, morally abhorrent, misogynistic violence propaganda, which of course would only ruin our children. Comics were terrible for women too, and the industry itself was painted as awful since the small market of Sweden only had a handful of women working in the industry. This sounds familiar, doesn't it? So while the press rallied around the topic, because if it bleeds it leads in yellow journalism even back then, upstanding citizens including uniformed police officers took it upon themselves to go around shops and ask them to stop selling these comic books. An innocent man, also named Horst Schröder, lost clients to his riding school because people thought he was the bad pornography-peddling Epix-förlag owner. Konsum, the consumer cooperatives supermarket, were the first ones to remove the magazines from their stores which was announced in every newspaper. Please note that this was after Horst Schröder and Epix förlag was freed in court from all accusations made against the comics. The moral-panic machine didn't care, and nobody wanted to associate with the comics anymore.

I watched all of that in realtime, which was much slower then as it was not powered by twitter. I boycotted Konsum, I went to stores asking for the comic every day as a way to encourage them to stock it again but it was all too late. People didn't want to be associated with Epix&Pox anymore, comic book fans withdrew (all except the hardcore ones) and the market shrank. The last issue of Pox was printed in Hungary but never made it to market as the entire publication house collapsed under debt in 1993. My budding career as a comic book artist was stopped before it even began. Since I was still in college, I re-saddled and changed my aim so that I would now work in advertising instead of in the male-dominated awful world of comics where I previously felt so welcome. When the market vanished overnight, I couldn't join it. So I joined the sexist woman-hating industry known as advertising instead. You've heard of that, I'm sure.

Now, if you're sensing a pattern here, it's because there is one. By painting gaming and gamers, developers and fans as a large group of violent misogynistic creeps, you are shrinking the market, there's no doubt in my mind. And right at this very moment, there might be a young gamer-girl in College who is getting a phone call telling her that her internship won't happen because a dev is closing shop. By painting anything said about three women as threats and misogynistic violence and then attaching it to all gamers & the game-dev industry, the media may very well have poisoned the well for all other women.

The video game industry took in 25.1 billion in 2010 according to the ESA. That industry employs our help in the PR, advertising and marketing departments and spends top dollar for it, often buying award winning work like Halo3 and are known for being brave clients pushing the creative envelope, like Playstation. When formerly respected newspapers like the New York Times ask leading questions to the web at large like "Have You Experienced Sexism in the Gaming Industry?", you can see we have a problem. People who haven't, won't answer. People who did, will.... And on top of all of that thousands of random trolls might join in just because it's the shiniest toy right now.

Advertising is in symbiosis with both publications and clients. It's high time we step in, before the playground is ruined for all of us.


I'm Dabitch, I'm #notyourshield, and I'm going to a halloween-party dressed as Vivian James. Tack till Sundblom, for the scanned cover of Pox magazine
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Carlos's picture

Nicely done. Also, about this "And right at this very moment, there might be a young gamer-girl in College who is getting a phone call telling her that her internship won't happen because a dev is closing shop", something related may have happened already. This female dev here: http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2jk2rq/ama_im_a_female_game_developer_that_has_been_in/
talks about a lot of stuff, but one thing stood out for me: "Recently I was contacted by my favourite professor from college who told me he had a student in his Game Dev class that was worried about getting into the industry from allt he terrible things she reads online. This is a girl straight out of high school, in college to do what she loves, and these people are literally scaring the crap out of her and making her second guess her career choice.
I think that's absolutely reprehensible."

John's picture

Thank you for sharing your story with us as well as not buying whats being propagated about #gamergate or its many diverse individuals.

I'm very sorry to hear that you career as a comic artist was ruined by similar people with agendas that even as an full grown adult I cant understand. The fear tactics that are being used are really counter productive for what these people claim to be for. Thanks once again for sharing your story and perspective on this!

Cydramech's picture

I'm sharing this with everyone I see; it's an incredibly insightful and wonderful article. Thank you for your consideration towards #GamerGate.

Anon's picture

I have heard many comparisons of #GamerGate with the comic book industry, but I had no idea of what happened to comics. This has been eye-opening. Thank you so much.

When you see some people propagating lies like "female programmers only earn a fraction of what males make" (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/female-computer-scientists-make-same-salary-their-male-counterparts-180949965/?no-ist), what impact is that going to have on a young woman trying to choose her career? I don't care who the hell is making my games, I just want to play fun video games damn it! And the more people making games, the better.

Sadly I have seen many women frightened during #GamerGate. One of those is exceptionally talented artist/animator Mariel Cartwright, who works on Skullgirls. She recently tweeted "I am grateful to be leaving the country this week because there is nothing more I want than to get away from the terrifying shit lately" and "it's a pretty scary time to be a lady in games." The thing is, gamers love her! She's not a corrupt journalist, she's not a target of #GamerGate. It's all so damn frustrating.

Thanks again, so much.

Biggsy's picture

I 100% agree. I don't care who makes my games, as long as they're good.

GameArt Specialist.'s picture

Hi, Future game developer here. I'm in college after several years of being a welder, decided to take 3D art specialization at the age of 26. 3 years in, I'm about to graduate.

Our class sizes are small labs, usually 20 people in them or less, and the gender ratio was equal or in favor of female students. It was really cool, some of the males/females were old enough that I didn't feel creepy hanging out with them. I made a lot of nice friends. Unfortunately, those under 26 are still attached to their parent's aid to go to school. If your parents earned a middle income, you essentially got no aid.

~Here is where the trouble comes in~

A lot of my friends that I've made over the last 3 years are not registering for their level 3 courses. I'd say about 30% of the women I know in the program who depend upon their parents are being pushed to give up game design and find another field because their parents read the slanted main stream media reporting and they're fearful for their daughters.

This sensationalism is making parents think their daughters will not be safe, or they will be sexually exploited.

This is awful. It is really awful. One of my very best friends was an exchange student from Finland, and now she's been called home because Finland is very politically dense with sex-negative, transsexual-excluding, radical authoritarian feminists and as a result their newspapers and television news essentially painted a picture of hell, and her mother called her home immediately.

This is not how you get more women in game development, this slander is creating a very terrible chilling effect.

Maybe I'm just upset that the party of 10 I was going to the "Captivate Conference" with is now down to 8.

Richard Kern's picture

Very well done. I am extremely pleased that you mentioned Aussie 8channers teaming up with GamerGaters to stop YET ANOTHER doxxing of Zoe Quinn.

Yet, for some reason that never gets mentioned by the big gaming press websites.

I support diversity in gaming.
I condemn threats and harassment.
I expect better behavior from my journalists.
I support GamerGate.

And I refuse to let anyone tell me I'm a bigot or a troll for doing so.

Yonan's picture

I didn't think about this from the advertisers point of view, but what's happening is definitely corrosive for the entire industry. There have been multiple cases of journalists and developers having their careers damaged or ended by games journalists that work together to push a single narrative. There have been multiple examples of developers work being forced to change to avoid a negative politicised backlash from journalists working together to push a narrative. It has to stop and soon before too much damage is done. GamerGate is only getting louder, and with the holiday season coming up - and developers largest sales season - they should be *very* interested in helping us bring this to an end as soon as possible.

Jake's picture

Hey I just wanted to say that you're dead on in your analysis. The idea that our gaming press is so full of themselves that they aided and abetting a direct assault on gaming is still mind boggling to me. I saw one of the more infamous mental midgets blaming "GamerGate" for bringing this result around, all the while ignoring the fact that the only people writing negative articles about gaming, gamers and the games they enjoy are the press.

Simply put, the lack of self awareness here is just astounding.

They're driving away loyal customers from their media brands, driving consumers away from the industry en-mass and particularly driving away women and other minority demographics with their moral panic and slandering of gaming subculture. What parent like myself is going to buy a game for their daughter if he thinks that she's going to be abused? What parent is going to allow his son to participate in online games if he thinks it's going to turn them into a terrible person?

I have seriously never seen an industry so eager to slit it's own throat as I have video games.

Ian's picture

Talking of Sony pushing the creative envelope, there was a brilliant billboard for the original Resident Evil. It was a just a simple white background and a bath full of blood, with the line "DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE HORROR OF PLAYSTATION".

Couldn't find it on Google, but that was something which really stuck with me.

Captain's picture

Another great article. Very impressed by your work.

You know, I always thought people in PR would know wtf they are doing.
Clearly not all of them do. You have to be a special brand of moron to not understand why insulting consumers is a bad idea.

Captcha : glass ceiling - wow , relevant

Dabitch's picture

I'm so pleased other people are amused by what I put in my fallback (non-advertising) captcha.

Sim's picture

Thank you for this article. It's refreshing.

Weep's picture

Do you happen to have any contacts in a major media outlet, Dabitch? Brianna Wu is talking about using her platform at TheGuardian next week to push for legislation to mandate all websites in the U.S. track the IP address of every user on every content submission. I have pretty damning evidence she fabricated at least one threat against herself and reams of examples of her colleagues using very racist, sexist, and patently offensive behavior across a number of spectrums. One of them including Brianna Wu referring to a poor black person as a "hood rat". I have much more damning evidence that blackmail and threats are going on here as well, though it's much less clear on those who the one(s) behind it is.

M.'s picture

Thanks for your sensible take on this.

I can totally understand why the current discussion would deter women from entering the industry, in fact I can clearly see that my spouse (of 6 years, we are in our thirties) takes all this debacle way more seriously and personally than I do. I haven't pushed it because why would I do that, but I think that there is a suspicion in her mind that what if some of what is being claimed is actually true, even though she is really levelheaded and sensible person (and working in unrelated graphic design).

Och hälsingar från den andra sida av vatten (den Moominsida).

@Kamelguru's picture

Moral hysteria is amongst the most damaging things that can happen to any topic that holds a potential victim. As a child care and welfare worker, I wrote a thesis on how the 80/90s hysteria around pedophilia crippled attempts to build understanding for purposes of molestation prevention by muddying the waters and making it almost impossible to talk about a topic that was difficult to broach in the first place. Moral outrage peddlers do not care one whit about the issue they bleed for revenue.

Ausyarr's picture

That was great. A real fascinating look at moral policing affecting industries

eric's picture

Let me make sure I understand this: The way to prevent harassment and marginalization of women in the game industry is to ... not talk about harassment and marginalization of women in the game industry?

Because of course that usually works so well to prevent harassment and marginalization of women in other areas....

Dabitch's picture

Not sure where you are getting that idea. I'm not saying that in my post.

The media-frenzy in this case echoes the media-frenzy in the Pox pornography saga. I point out that there was similarities in how people who had nothing to do with it (riding school instructor) lost business over things that could be read in the newspaper on a near daily basis. The silent giants Ubisoft, Bungie, Activision, EA will likely continue on unharmed as they have deep pockets, but small indie devs aren't being helped by a press that's bordering on panic which is telling the world in essence "games are bad and so is everyone who plays them". By only giving attention to the negative and never the positive, you shrink the market. Casuals don't enter and or leave, while hardcore stays the same. This doesn't open up for more women in gaming at all, if the market shrinks there's less jobs to be had in total.

Dustin Geels's picture

Being a hardcore gamer who likes the big name games and for the most part hates the arty drivel that comes out of a lot of indi devs. I honestly have a hard time finding the market shrinking back down to where it didn't have abunch of whiny little babies trying to get into it and fuck things up as a bad thing.

I'd love nothing more then to get all the shovelware off steam this amount of crap games haven't been seen sense the late 70s early 80s and the market crash maybe we need another one to get some quality control back into the industry.

Dabitch's picture

I'll take your comment as an anecdata example of a market truth: you can not expand the market by diluting the core.
Expanding the market is done by offering complementary products, services, extensions and specifically targeted similar products. For an easy example, see every single variant of Coca Cola where the product range has just been joined by splenda-sweetened "Coca Cola Free" - but the one time they changed the original the market freaked out.

eric's picture
Dabitch's picture

@Eric - How sad. You'd think after 14 years they'd know me better.

...She's also failing to acknowledge that she's only talking about Sweden...

Sure, I only mention it it twice in my post and link to the entire background of the Pox-scandal, I guess I could have made that a lot clearer.

Anonymous Adgrunt's picture

People read what they want to.

lordaych's picture

Nobody is seriously getting a suggestion from the media that "video games are bad because the people who play them are bad and harass people." The message is that "gamers," as a hard-core group of people who wish to rally behind this specific identity, are inexplicably rallying behind a movement that started, well, as the MetaFilter comment linked by eric above that you dodged only to quote another one as if it reveals some site-wide cognitive flaw, reads:

No-one's being "painted" as a misogynist creep; the first action of the people who would rally under #gamergate was to attack a woman on the say-so of an ex-boyfriend and to pry into her sex life.

I fail to see what anything that happened in your personal story (which doesn't involve your career being destroyed or you being personally harassed by hordes of assholes) has to do with this movement, other than introducing us with an effective disclaimer "everything you read here is colored by my unrelated experience and because I was personally affected in the past I will now trot out some non-arguments to further illustrate my bias for sympathizing with this "movement."

This movement is absurd on its face and it's vexxing to see so many people align themselves with it -- "just because on any established reality-based-timeline, this thing of ours started with doxxing and misogyny and the usual 'Gamer Culture Stereotypes' of angry white boys threatening rape and murder, and just because we continue to rally around this stupid fucking hashtag that is entrenched in this litany of shit, doesn't mean we aren't really just mad because we don't think we're getting good enough VIDEO GAME REVIEWS! and also you keep portraying ALL OF US this way when most of us JUST IDENTIFY with the PEOPLE WHO DO THIS because GAMES FUN and we want them to stop and play more games with us instead of making us look bad!

The only honest to goodness moral panic I'm seeing here is yours, centered around the "closing the dev shop" story. And in that sense I mean the misplaced concern-trolling slippery slope that ends with: what if the big nice Game Dev Shop closes down because of all these mean people calling out all of this fake feminism with their big bullying attacks on "gamers?" That will affect women too! So people who dislike the misogyny and the fact that this whole movement is ridiculous and self-important and started out with pure misogyny and doxxing and is seeking to rally around the most disgusting stereotypical elements of "gaming culture" that should be gleefully ridiculed (and if you don't identify with it, no need to defend it) will suddenly suffer from the 4D awesomeness of this argument and realize that the True Feminism is here on this side!

That's comes across as the sort of cargo-cult nonsense that the MetaFilter thread discusses well -- CTRL+F for "cargo" if anyone is interested.

As a longtime MeFite I do know you better (not that you know me, but you were around for much of my lurking phase) but that really is weak, first of all to make the leap that gaming as a whole is under attack and that shops will close because the worst elements of "gaming culture" are being exposed for the disgusting unwelcome assholes they are, those "gaming culture" loser-fucks truly being jealous and upset that MORE people are playing than ever...the thing is, the number of people who play these games is going up, the "hard core" is feeling threatened, and somehow feels like they are entitled to a more "objective" and dispassionate "games journalism industry" (so go do that) after decades of Nintendo Power and GamePro Magazine and EGM and so on, all amounting to advertisements with some cheat codes and tricks? Oh wait, that's probably too hard core for the "hard core" to remember or have experienced, but seriously, you expect me to believe all of this disgusting behavior and defense of same revolves around integrity in games journalism?

So let's get this straight. If society were to actually make a moral decision that Gaming Shops must be shut down (or a series of judgments and purchasing decisions that over time shuts down gaming shops as a result, because that's what you meant, I don't wish to straw man it), the argument that "women will also be affected because they won't be able to work in game shops" is just as meaningless as saying that some women are professional assassins and some women wish to become professional assassins, and so many professional assassins will be unemployed if we legalize all hard drugs, reducing the global demand for professional assassins. OK, a more realistic example, if we stop producing XYZ thing that we decide is terrible as a whole, whether it be weapons outlawed by the Geneva conventions, electric chairs, death panel gavels, or whatever, women will have less opportunity therefore "argument made."

I almost feel like that will come off as trolling because the moral panic really is on your side as "gamers" desperately flood twitter with nonsense about every "ally lost" or "advertiser pulled"... it's really comical actually -- but a typical slackjawed stereotypical gamer will read what I wrote and think HA, YOU THINK MAKING COMPUTER GAMES IS LIKE ILLEGAL DRUGZZZ! No, I'm just pointing out the absurdity of that argument, it doesn't belong anywhere serious, it comes across as intellectually dishonest, but you wrap it up in a layer of extra absurdity (dev shops being closed down because hardcore nerds were being mocked) that buries it further in more absurdity. The reality is that perhaps some of the demand for Yet Another Ultrarealistic FPS might drop but as the number of people who play games increases, the diversity of gaming as a whole increases, and your "hard core" will do just fine, and doesn't need to "stay hard and in the center" of gaming to survive as its own entity.

Chris Edwards's picture

As a response to lordaych:

That is exactly what was suggested; First, that 'gamers' were all misogynistic white 'neckbeard' virgin losers who live in basements and troll women for being women, then that 'gamers' had been replaced by 'gamers' which were multicultural and multisexual and blah blah blah. I say it that way because 'gamers' had ALWAYS been multicultural and so on, and that it wasn't the efforts of 'right thinking modern feminists' that made it so, but gamers and their welcoming inclusiveness, of which you can find stories EVERYWHERE.

Gamers as a whole have always been a target; gaming has been seen, until fairly recently, as a child's or teenager's hobby by those not involved. That's changed over time with the concerted effort of gamers themselves, inviting their family members and friends in, and with the availability of 'softcore' games like mobile and web/facebooks games, and of course, the Wii (I personally think Wii bowling made many a gamer all on it's own). But that is the perception; the reality is that women and minorities have always played games. Maybe they grew out of it, maybe they didn't, but they played. And why wouldn't they?

The metafilter comment above is about bullshit. I checked it out, and Jen Allaway (who I'd never heard of before) puts up a completely unsupported opinion piece which you treat like research. Why is this meaningful, because you like what it says? There's plenty of research, based on data and not feelings and fears, that shows that #gamergate does NOT fit the model of a hate group, but rather a replacement for traditional news media. And what would you expect from a group that's been shown repeatedly it can't trust those entrusted by the public to report the news?

So no one's being painted as a misogynistic creep, except everyone that is, and you take a man's honest recounting (supported by evidence, mind you) of his abuse (and it was abusive), and the link that showed to a journalist having a sexual relationship with a subject (which makes Nathan Grayson the target, not Quinn) as him directing attacks? I imagine there were some people who did do that, though Eron repeatedly tried to stop it (and it shows in those IRC logs you evidently didn't bother to read yourself). I don't know the man, I've never spoken with him, and in fact up until #gamergate I was fully listening and believing her, but she's been shown to be a compulsive liar, and it keeps occurring over and over. Take some time and do the fact checking yourself; you'll find that things are just how I'm telling you. Don't believe me, verify it yourself. You can look at the logs yourself of what he said. You can find archives of the zoepost online (I think, I haven't checked) and see the chat logs where she admits everything (and he NEVER accuses her of sleeping with Grayson for positive press, that falls on others). And more, there were no doxx.

Here's the thing for those fact checking; Quinn's supposed Doxx were faked. As an example, her "father's phone number" was a motorcycle shop in Hawaii. If that's fake, why would you assume any of the rest is real? And if Quinn is a self-admitted compulsive lair (like her mother, evidently from what she says, though we've no idea if that's not another lie), why would you believe anything she says about how the 'doxx' were released? Seems likely she released fakes herself. She faked the 'wizardchan raid' to get enough sympathy to get Depression Quest greenlit (and having tried it myself, it's a horrible representation of depression and only likely to make things worse for someone using it to show others what depression is like). Do you not see a behavior pattern? Conclusion; all evidence suggests that the 'mysogyny and threats' are fabricated to garner sympathy, again.

But #gamergate didn't really come from that; it came from the Streisand effect due to censorship of the discussion. As an example, 28+ thousand reddit posts deleted concerning Quinn's use ofa false DMCA report to illegally take down a youtube video criticizing her and Grayson. That's what #gamergate came from, resistance to censorship and a suspicion (later proven true) of media collusion to censor the subject in support of their friend GRAYSON (and Quinn, no doubt).

Then come all the hanger-on sympathy-demanders, each with threats that come from throw-away accounts who give no indication of being affiliated with gamergate, or even gaming at all. This has been a problem for Sarkeesian for a long time; she seems to make enemies wherever she goes. She came from movies and music, giving the same sort of false-criticism there (I say false because she uses provably false statements to support her arguments, which makes the premise false, thus the conclusion of her argument is false). No evidence is ever provided, but the media is quick to blame gamers and demand they police the entire internet to stop trolls. How is that remotely reasonable? You can't even prove the threats came from gamers, let alone gamergate supporters, and the demand is that they prevent all trolling everywhere from anyone (because yes, that's what you're asking)? I tell you what, I'll do that just as soon as you prevent all cancer, for anyone, from anyone, for any reason, including in animals,plants, and at any time, including in the past. Yes, that's about as reasonable a demand.

I'm responsible for my behavior, and my behavior alone. I'm not guilty of something someone else in Gamergate does, and you can't even show that they did it. I'm not guilty of what another gamer does, and you can't even show that a gamer did it either. All you have to support your entire flimsy argument is the statement that it must be a gamer/gamergate because it is said so. All of the horrible things that happen on the internet cannot be laid at my feet, or the feet of anyone else not involved, just because you find it convenient to silence your critics this way.

And what's so galling is that people take you seriously; even me, right now, taking you seriously by wasting my precious time (and it is precious) to tell you how wrong you are and WHY you're wrong and WHY we can PROVE you're wrong with EVIDENCE rather than just ramblings and feelings. You are demonstrably full of shit, but here I am wasting time telling you that. And I have to keep doing that, rather than doing something more valuable with my time, because stupid people will believe what you say the way you stupidly believe what you're told without ever asking for evidence.

Recent data shows that just the #gamergate hashtag has had a steady use by over 150000 unique and consistent users, of which the average account life is approximately 1 year old. These aren't sockpuppet accounts; they aren't fake. If even half of those are supporters, and I'd wager real money that it's something closer to 75%, that means 75000 people hate women so much that they've devoted time for 5 months to attack them via the obtuse means of discovering ethical failures in journalism, pointing them out, and demanding change. So what sounds more absurd to you; 75k hate women for 5 months but attack them via not attacking them directly, or that 15 or 20 people coordinate coverage in an email list and a handful of women lie or exaggerate the threats and their origins in order to make up a lie to cover failed ethics and provide real monetary support (to the tune of some percentage of Intel's 300 million dollars, or 14k a month to Brianna Wu who almost certainly made her own threat; you can tell because she's prepared to screenshot the threat immediately, and it's not like that sort of thing doesn't already have precedent among other modern 'feminists')?

And if you can't find one instance of harassment from #gamergate with at least 75000 regular users, several million tweets, and 5 months of time, what does that say about your assertion that it's a hate movement? Not ONCE has this assertion been shown with any evidence.

I can tell you I've seen comments I viewed as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist etc. I've seen all of them from those who oppose #gamergate, and in much more frequency, which given that I'm blocked by most of you because of Randi Harper's censorship list means a GREAT DEAL. Hell, half the horrible things listed there you can find just looking at Arthur Chu's tweets. I've seen some harsh, and on rare occasions unfair, criticisms from #gamergate to journalists and women (and men, mostly men), yet not once has any of the opposition ever shown one example that was linked to a gamer, let alone a gamergate supporter.

And if in all that, you still can't show me ANY evidence supporting what you're arguing, why would I believe you about ANYTHING?

I don't. Your argument is PROVABLY false and has no evidence in support. Your opinion is WRONG.

Given ALL of that, why would I give a shit about your criticism of video games or anything else? If you have to lie to support your argument, then the argument has no value. What a surprise (I think my eyes rolled so hard it adjusted the tide slightly).

Take your trolling elsewhere. Gamers aren't buying the snake-oil you're selling. If you want to play games, play. If you want to make games, make them. I may not have liked Gone Home, but I haven't seen anyone say it shouldn't be made or available for sale. If you want to pump five rounds into my digital face or top my high-score, bring it. I welcome the challenge and the chance for camaraderie. If all you want is yet another place to make everything the way you want it, get the fuck out and don't come back until you are willing to accept everyone else. It's not only your opinion that's important. If you don't like Hatred, don't buy it. I won't be, because that doesn't appeal to me. I haven't bought any GTA games either, but I'm not going to sit here and say no one else should be able to because REASON #11. And until you can do the same, you don't have a place here.

The table is open to everyone, but leave your baggage in your room.

Zacban's picture

Geez. Already in the second sentence this "article" spews lies.

The threat in Utah mentioned feminism as the root cause of the threat. no mention was ever made of #Gamergate.

Seeing as that's how you choose to start, I didn't even bother reading the rest of this garbage.

Zacban's picture

Apologies.

I read through it afterall. Good article that describes the real problem. Wasn't until later down that I realized you were simply showing us what the narrative tells us.

Dabitch's picture

^ That jumping the gun demonstrated by Zacban is a huge part of the problem and the basis for the current microwave mentality I mentioned. Thanks Zacban, for reading to the end and taking your time to process the entire post.

kidsleepy's picture

Some people have left comments on here that are as long if not longer than your post.