The big Phil Fish, Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian discussion thread

DeVore wrote: »

In addition there is something else which will add to the problem. The latest trend of "ITS ABOUT ETHICS IN JOURNALISM" is damaging and counterproductive. It will lead the reasonable people who maybe don't understand how bad its gotten for women recently, to feel like they're points are being simply shouted down. When moderates begin to feel like that, its my experience that they quickly become less moderate

There's another interesting parallel on the ethics thing.

When the Ghomeshi stuff started happening, he released a piece claiming "IT'S ABOUT HOW THEY FIRED ME FOR LIKING BDSM!". This had the - very intentional - effect of legitimising his angle, by cloaking what had actually happened underneath a wider and quite legitimate debate.

At one stroke, the whole debate becomes an argument about whether or not that law should be changed, and whether or not the women consented to what he did, or could have legally done so to start with, and whether BDSM itself is even okay. Ghomeshi became a champion for people with genuine concerns on the subject of sexual freedoms, and even now you can find people posting about how CBC was wrong to fire him because "the state should stay out of people's bedrooms!".

What was - at least for a while - obscured by this was the fact that the complaint he was actually fired for wasn't "in a bedroom" at all. It was actually plain old groping in the office. Before we get anywhere near the question of the ethics of BDSM, which he neither cares nor speaks about with anything more than the most superficial buzzwordy fluency, or the other seven alleged victims, what he was actually fired for was groping a coworker and telling her how much he wanted to "hate f*ck" her.

In this way, an absolute crapball of a human being exploited a legitimate issue he had no actual stake in as a cover for his own gross behaviour. Sincere people, with a sincere issue, unaware they were being exploited as a smokescreen, by a creep who was using them to fight a battle of deflection on his behalf. These people, who actually have been trying to negotiate said issue for some time, leapt to his defence in absolutely good faith, only to find themselves looking across the lines at people they have no beefs with whatsoever, and utterly bewildered as to where the disconnect is coming from.

"Ethics in journalism" - just like "Ethics of consent" - is a legitimate issue. And sincere people who have joined the rally because they were called to that banner are now frustrated because it seems - as you say - that they're being shouted down by people with some other agenda. In actual fact, their perfectly sincere and respectable agenda is being exploited as a shell for an original kernel of something that was very very nasty indeed.

But Jian Ghomeshi's "movement" was never really about ethics of consent, any more than Gamergate was ever really about ethics in journalism. If it was, we'd have heard far more about Kane & Lynch than we did about Hitman. That doesn't mean the debate can't or shouldn't be had - but if so, it HAS to be decoupled from the terms it's bolted around right now.

And that means screaming, screaming denunciations of the guys who messed it up. No "But I'm sure I had an example of that happening a dude lying around here somewhere...". No "We're not all like that!". No "But both sides are the saaaaaaaaaaame!" or "But wasn't she wrong that one time?"

None of it. Nuke the site from orbit, wait for the dust to clear, and build fresh.

TB did an interview with Kotaku Editor in Chief.

It's actually about ethics in video games journalism.

BlitzKrieg wrote: »

Oh dear.

Anita Sarkeesian just did an interview on the colbert report

Wasnt a great interview either (she naturally tried to keep it as general as possible and avoided Colbert when he asked her to name games) so expect to see/hear/avoid a further outcry across the interwebs.

It was pretty much what you'd expect from a Colbert interview on the subject though. I got a chuckle from it at least.

I do love how some are already twisting a comment she made around the time #CancelColbert was doing the rounds into her supporting that particular campaign however. :rolleyes:

kunst nugget wrote: »

Tbf, that looks like pretty explicit support of the CancelColbert hashtag considering it's under the picture.

The CancelColbert hashtag was everything that is wrong with twitter activism.

Totally agree on the utterly ludicrous nature of CancelColbert but I think it's pretty obvious she's commenting on the "vile oppressive backlash" the aforementioned women suffered as a result of their respective incidents. Have a rummage online and you can see Park in particular received a barrage of pretty horrible abuse, from rape and death threats to good 'ol fashion racist remarks. The point being, condoning that abuse shouldn't be seen as tacit support for the hashtag campaign nor is that kind of abuse an acceptable rebuttle to such actions.

This, on the other hand, is.

Reekwind wrote: »

I'm sorry, what? You're suggesting that I deliberately misquoted someone when you then proceed to quote from an entirely different article? I really shouldn't be surprised. The article that I was referring to is here.

I repeat: explain to me what is so offensive about that article that GG decided to organiser a mail campaign to Polygon's advertisers.

I wasn't suggesting that you misquoted anything at all. You're right, I mixed up the Polygon article with the Alexander article, that's my bad and I'm sorry for not checking it first. However I do still think the point stands. You said "what was so offensive about this?" and then proceeded to quote something entirely innocuous, but the point I was trying to make was that that's misleading because that particular quote isn't what everyone was rallying around at all.

As for what might have upset people in the article in general, I'd imagine it's just leading back to the long-standing criticisms of sites like this for putting a disproportionate lense on people giving women a hard time (because like all other types of crime reporting, excessive reporting on something can make it seem more widespread than it is) and reporting on things like that particular Anita threat and Phil Fish's hacking as fact when many GG supporters at the time were disputing them. For the record the above opinions are not my own and I have typically been at odds with the same crowd who hold them, I'm just playing Devil's advocate because you asked me to.

Reekwind wrote: »

Wait, what? How was anything in Alexander's article "venomously and personally insulting"? Never mind comparable to racist stereotypes. Did she single you out for insult? Did she claim that all 'gamers' are morons? Or is any critique of 'gamer culture', even when it comes from within the milieu, just unacceptable?

(There is of course a deep irony in a 'movement' that's hostile to 'SJWs getting upset about things' themselves proving to have wafer-thin skin and lashing out at anyone deemed to have caused them offense.)

This is what journalists do. They discuss and critique culture, evaluating its merits and bemoaning where it falls short. They are not just there to dole out scores to games or breathlessly gush over previews. They have a role, amongst others, in curating culture.

Of course she didn't single me out, if she had singled out one stranger on the internet with really no importance or influence, nobody would have cared that much. In fact, the type of gamer she described really isn't even me, but it is a lot of people who I know and who aren't bad people and I don't at all like the fact that she's looking down on them from her intellectual ivory tower. I do completely agree that games are too commercialised and treated like products rather than works and I also agree that it's important for journalists to promote this. What I don't agree with is broadly tarring everyone who does buy into that stuff (pre-orders, the marketing, memes) with the same brush and saying "they don’t know how to dress or behave" and that they "know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online ‘wars’ about social justice" when most of the people who do that stuff are well-adjusted and don't really care about online social justice wars. They're just people who want to buy the newest Grand Theft Auto or Halo or Battlefield and talk about it with their friend. Based off her article, the subset of people who do go all crazy for stuff like that are "game culture" and "that’s what your community is known for".

I'm all for critiquing the culture and digging deeper into game analysis than just "9/10 go buy it" but there's a way to do things that's constructive and a way that's destructive and what I've seen in these past months and years, the way taken by a lot of outlets has been a way that's broadly destructive. There seems to be a fundamental disconnect between a certain group of gamers and many of the big gaming websites (Kotaku, Polygon et al) and neither is doing much to bridge it. The group of gamers are the kind who think the sexism in games is overblown, that Sarkeesian is a con artist, that games like Gone Home are nonsense, that GTA5 getting a 7/10 is a crime and that game reviews are regularly bought and sold. These are the ones I often find myself vehemently disagreeing when but when they're constantly dismissed and ignored they only get worse. They aren't going to disappear and you definitely don't make them come around to the other side by telling them they're misogynists and a bunch of basement-dwelling losers that nobody likes.

Reekwind wrote: »

So now it's impossible to comment on, say, the environment inside sports stadiums? The quality of a social scene in a university? The level of cultural education provided by a school? The degree to which people become personally invested in a brand of OS or phone? The impact of X Factor on popular culture?

I would expect journalists to do all these things. Not worry that X Factor viewers will take offence and declare themselves to be a persecuted group, vilified by the media and suffering discrimination akin to racism. Because in every other medium people are mature enough not to flying off the handle when someone ponders the state of their medium and its accompanying culture.

I never said it was impossible or even inadvisable, I just said you have to figure out what is and isn't okay, because I'm personally still trying to wrap my own head around it. A lot of people have complained about being bullied or harassed for being gamers in this recent business and they regularly get dismissed as though it's okay to call someone a fat, misogynist neckbeard because they like games because that's stereotyping based on a hobby rather than an inherited trait like nationality or gender and it just doesn't sit well with me. Lest you think I'm being hypocritical or self-serving, I have often felt the same way about gun lovers when people instantly brand them as idiotic rednecks or about anime fans when people brand them as overgrown children.

The Xfactor comparison is interesting. I could definitely imagine an op-ed article in the Guardian or the Times criticising the whole thing as a load of rubbish. Painting the people who tune in every week to watch the made up drama idiots? Not as sure but still maybe. I definitely wouldn't imagine it appearing in multiple "X Factor fan" magazines without doing so. Would it cause a huge backlash if the same thing (article from a paper) were done in isolation about gamers? I don't think so. I think a lot of the backlash had to do with the timing and the context. If some relatively unknown (at least to gamers) toff wrote some piece directly insulting gamers in some old media outlet, I can't imagine it causing much of a fuss. Even if one of the "gamers are dead" articles happened in isolation on the same site several months previously, I don't think it would cause such a big deal. It's the wall-to-wall nature of the coverage in the media right now that made it so big. Seemingly all mainstream game news the past few weeks has been "gamers hate women and pretend to care about their press to cover it".

Timmyctc wrote: »

Thats one thing about TB I never 'got'. On Reddit and that he is lauded as this genius but he's never really saying anything more incisive than what is an average sensible opinion. (Granted, online a lot of those sensible opinions are buried by the unthinking majority)

I wouldn't say he's a genius and I'm not a subscriber or follower but I do generally like the fact that he is good at staying fairly calm and moderate. Sure, it often seems like common sense but a lot of the time it feels like that isn't so common.

Reekwind wrote: »

(Do film critics append their reviews with notes like 'I occasionally have a drink with the grip who worked on this flick'? Or 'here's a list of acquaintance of mine who was involved in this project in any way'?)

Not that I have anything to support this and I'm willing to be proven wrong but I don't feel like many film critics are intimately involved with moviemakers that way. Big film industry players are kind of on a different social tier to the people who write about them which isn't so much the case with the video games industry. Most film reviews tend to come from magazines or newspapers and it's hard to imagine many of the people writing for them are buddies with Martin Scorsese or Matthew McConaughey or even whichever indie actors and directors made the film they're reviewing, much less the unknown lower crew members like the grip or whoever else. They also typically don't rely on advertising money specifically from the big studios since reviews often come from places not specifically about films so they don't have as much of an interest in making sure Disney likes their "Lone Ranger" review.

Nody wrote: »

I'm inclined towards the second; there is no Gamergate issue because the issue is not about games or gamers; it's about the general attitude to women everywhere at all times.

This does seem to be a broader problem right now. There's a growing friction between people on whether sexism is still a big issue and I feel like a lot of people with really no interest in gaming (such as the Breitbart guy) have jumped onto Gamergate because of that.

jill_valentine wrote: »

I know not all dude gamers are misogynists, and nobody's saying they are. But it's okay to acknowledge that there is serious and widespread misogyny in gaming. The problem is there whether the consensus admits it or not. Women gamers know it because they experience it. Guy gamers are never going to understand the full extent of it because they aren't the targets - they aren't tuned to see the low level stuff because they don't have to be, and they aren't going to see it in full bore action because it's not aimed at them. It's also true to say that Gamers aren't uniquely or inherently prone to misogyny, and I've spoken before about my sincere belief that it's a relatively recent import from "mainstream" pop culture.

Misogyny is a very strong word. It means way more than just sexist. If misogyny was widespread you would not be able to not see it.

You also say 'not all dude gamers are misogynists' wouldn't it be way more accurate to say its a very small percentage of even just dude gamers.

I don't think all of those subjects would get the same abuse. In online gaming as an Irishman, I've found that the better you are, the more likely the potato/terrorist/famine messages are to come along. If you are middle of the road at the game, you don't receive a message. I have a PS4 since May and I haven't received a single message or abusive voice comms yet. I'm not outstanding at any game.

By contrast, my mate uses a female character model in Destiny and his PSN id doesn't stand out as male or female. He is about the same skill level at the game as me and he has received a few creepy/abusive messages based on what they perceive to be his gender.

Basically, skill at an online game elicits the negative reactions toward males of most backgrounds, generally speaking. Simply being female can elicit this response toward women. It's not just abuse we're talking about here, but creepy messages and voice comms also.

Gbear wrote: »

Not to mention the huge problem with otherwise sane people turning into deranged assholes as soon as they're removed from face to face interaction and are given unlimited freedom to say whatever pops into their heads.

It's barely 20 years since the internet was invented. I'm sure it took humanity a while to get to grips with the telephone as well.

I honestly think it's more because of Twitter than anonymity. Whoever wants to say something gets 140 characters and that's all anyone reading knows about that person so people feel free to just fill in the blanks themselves along very stereotypical lines. It's much easier to be hateful that way because it dehumanises people.