#GamerGate

[bikiniarmorbattledamage]

This is truly stiff competition for the worst case of willful false equivalence we've ever seen.

So, for those not aware: Ongoing embarrassment to gamers and the gaming industry, Mark Kern (former lead on FireFall), has been desperately trying to get Gamergate 2 going on X/Twitter... well after others have given up. If you need to get caught up on Mark, I recommend this video by documentary maker and experienced game developer, Dead Domain:

One of the latest fiascos in this mix has been the comparison of responses to character designs from Hades 2 (Aphrodite, left) and Stellar Blade (protagonist Eve, right). The post isn't by Mark, but is part of the general harassment campaign he's trying to lead.

If you're somehow not familiar with Aphrodite, she's the Ancient Greek goddess of love, lust and hot girl shit. It is absolutely perfect characterization for her to show up to a battle (or anything else) nude but for her hair teasingly covering the intimate parts of her body. But the buried lede here is, you don't fight her in Hades and nothing about Hades 2 indicates she'll fight there either, she just likes the aesthetic and has no reason not to indulge.

Stellar Blade will release on 26 April 2024, so we can't really give an informed discussion of her character. But what we do know is the studio head is the illustrator from Blade & Soul, Eve is described as being a member of "the 7th Airborne Squad" engaged in an "operation to reclaim the planet from the Naytiba", and the promotion material promises "an enthralling narrative filled with mature themes, mystery and revelation. Embrace the relentless pace, with no time to pause between moments where critical, story-changing decisions are made."

It's to be compared to games like Nier: Automata, Devil May Cry 5, Jedi: Fallen Order and Sekiro. And the screenshots look like this:

And yeah, unlike Bayonetta she's not supposed to be an unstoppable force of nature (and fashion) who is immune to self-doubt, she's supposed to be the scrappy underdog last survivor of her team.

Weird they gave her a costume that conveys... the opposite of literally everything they're supposed to be trying to tell you about her.

-wincenworks

[madame-helen]

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Ironic that quantum-dragon is supposedly against "unreasonable" bigotry, but apparently a) blocked everyone who replied, and b) pre-blocked me.

Doesn't seem very reasonable.

The supportive notes are still there, of course.

[gamer2002]

Mark Waid has repeatedly abused his position within the industry to hurt businesses of indie comics authors he didn't agree with. Examples are Alison Tieman and Richard Meyer.

He can kindly leave.

[futurebird]

What is a gamergate?

Friendly reminder about the word #gamergate

A "gamergate" (pronounced like "gamete") is a mated worker ant with the potential to become a queen of the colony. This is believed to be how early ant colonies worked before the physical differences between queens and workers became more pronounced in the majority of ant species. Diacamma, Harpegnathos and Ophthalmopone genus ants still have this ability.

This is the *only* significant meaning the word "gamergate" has had and will ever have.

I'm sorry... but look at her. She's like a cartoon character. "harpos" are very popular among antkeepers and their ability to choose new queens makes for interesting colony dynamic. They duel each other with their long mandibles to decide who will be queen.

And they can jump!

[ktempestbradford]

Yet Another Thing Black women and BIPOC women in general have been warning you about since forever that you (general You; societal You; mostly WytFolk You) have ignored or dismissed, only for it to come back and bite you in the butt.

I'd hoped people would have learned their lesson with Trump and the Alt-Right (remember, Black women in particular warned y'all that attacks on us by brigading trolls was the test run for something bigger), but I guess not.

Any time you wanna get upset about how AI is ruining things for artists or writers or workers at this job or that, remember that BIPOC Women Warned You and then go listen extra hard to the BIPOC women in your orbit and tell other people to listen to BIPOC women and also give BIPOC women money.

I'm not gonna sugarcoat it.

Give them money via PayPal or Ko-fi or Venmo or Patreon or whatever. Hire them. Suggest them for that creative project/gig you can't take on--or you could take it on but how about you toss the ball to someone who isn't always asked?

Oh, and stop asking BIPOC women to save us all. Because, as you see, we tried that already. We gave you the roadmap on how to do it yourselves. Now? We're tired.

Of the trolls, the alt-right, the colonizers, the tech bros, the billionaires, the other scum... and also you. You who claim to be progressive, claim to be an ally, spend your time talking about what sucks without doing one dang thing to boost the signal, make a change in your community (online or offline), or take even the shortest turn standing on the front lines and challenging all that human garbage that keeps collecting in the corners of every space with more than 10 inhabitants.

We Told You. Octavia Butler Told You. Audre Lorde Told You. Sydette Harry Told You. Mikki Kendall Told You. Timnit Gebru Told You.

When are you gonna listen?

[handkinkbis]

Far right millionaires can pay to make posts trend. It's called social engineering.

What you see on your youtube or other social media front page isn't always organically there. Rich content creators can pay for more visibility. They can buy views. Google is complicit with this tactic, as is facebook, instagram and every other greedy social media platform.

Comments and takes that become 'popular' (have top upvotes or reinforcing comments) are not always organic either, but they're designed to socially engineer public opinion with their seeming popularity. That's what PR companies and government astroturfers do.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Kylie Cheung at Jezebel:

The day after Election Day, calls to the Trevor Project’s crisis services hotline for LGBTQ youth surged by 200%; online searches for abortion pills and emergency contraception skyrocketed, too. Queer youth, women, and girls were clearly concerned about what a second Trump presidency meant for their safety and their futures. But the country has been largely apathetic to their fears. Instead, we’re being called to consider young men’s suffering—real and imagined—and the insidious forces that seemed to shift this demographic to the right. A sampling of post-election headlines includes, “We Asked Young Men Why They Voted for Donald Trump—Here’s What They Said,” “The ‘Lost Boys’ of Gen Z: how Trump won the hearts of alienated young men,” “What’s the Matter with Young Male Voters?” and “Trump Offered Men Something That Democrats Never Could.” Of course, Jezebel is now adding to that list, but what’s missing from some of these stories is the manosphere as an increasingly powerful political arm.

Exit polls show Trump received a larger proportion of voters under 30 than any Republican presidential candidate since 2008. In 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump by 11 points among men under 30. Last week, Trump beat Kamala Harris by two points. (Among young white men without college degrees, he beat Harris 56% to 40%.) Some of this should be taken with a grain of salt: Youth turnout dropped sharply from 2020, so these stats offer an incomplete snapshot of an entire generation’s views. But, as journalists, organizers, and the Democratic Party scramble for answers, one concern that’s come to the forefront is the manosphere—a fast-growing, unrepentantly hateful community of men’s lifestyle influencers, podcasters, and media personalities who glorify and preach misogyny to a new generation of young men. Think: serially accused rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate, hate speech-platforming Twitch streamer Adin Ross, or misogynist streamer Sneako, who once slapped a woman on camera as a “prank.” There’s also TikTok star Bryce Hall, who joined Trump on the campaign trail about a year after collaborating with proud neo-Nazis, including Sneako. One video from December 2023 shows Sneako laughing as he’s approached by young fans who yell, “Fuck the women” and “All gays can die.” He half-jokingly asks the camera, “What have I done?”

On Election Night, Trump handed the mic to UFC President Dana White (who, like Sneako, also slapped a woman on camera) at his victory party, and White directly thanked Ross, as well as the Nelk Boys and Theo Von, more popular manosphere influencers and podcasters who also supported Trump’s campaign. Over the last several months, Trump made numerous appearances on their shows and streams and hosted them at his rallies. And, because this seems to have worked, those who didn’t see Trump’s victory coming are now trying to understand this chilling sphere of influence that’s seemingly been radicalizing young men right under our noses.

It may be annoying, even disturbing to have to take this increasingly mainstream underworld seriously, but Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America (MMFA), tells Jezebel that understanding the manosphere is important to understand “what future generations are going to look like.” Carusone says MMFA researchers tracked at least 20 times that Trump appeared on manosphere podcasts—including those of Von, Hall, the Nelk Boys, and Jake Paul—since May. In 2023, Ross and other popular manosphere creators including JiDion, Steve Deleonardis, Jorge Masvidal, and alleged rapist DJ Akademiks, appeared with Trump at a UFC event. The meet-and-greet was set up by right-wing video platform, Rumble.

MMFA has been closely following manosphere stars for years now, watching them and the social platforms that host them profit off of mocking rape survivors and trans people, or joking about and openly celebrating violence against women to their impressionable, mostly teen and tween boy audiences. Young people who might turn to them for apolitical interests—weightlifting, video games, MMA fighting, dating advice—are increasingly inundated with out-of-context stats and arguments about how much easier it is for women to get jobs, or minorities to get into college, or trans people to succeed at sports. These audiences are radicalized to believe a liberal, feminist world order is crushing them. Now, thanks to social media algorithms, content about weightlifting, video games, MMA fighting, and dating has become a pipeline to the right.

[...] Nicole Regalado, vice president of campaigns at Ultraviolet, told Jezebel her organization has been tracking online misogyny campaigns since Gamergate in 2014, which saw an outbreak of rabid sexism, racism, and queerphobia against perceived feminist progress in the video game industry. But she’s been alarmed by sharp rises in online harassment against women in recent years. It doesn’t help, Regalado said, that at a time when the manosphere is surging, with the help of anti-MeToo backlash and a golden age of media illiteracy, “social media platforms are gutting moderation, trust, and safety teams,” while “platforming and profiting off hate.” A lot of this came to a head with the outcome of the 2024 election, Regalado said, which “followed months of disinformation and racism-misogyny about Kamala Harris” from popular right-wing, manosphere-type influencers. Trump’s victory has only emboldened this toxic stew of misogyny, culminating in the viral “your body, my choice” slogan.

I understand the importance of Democrats and progressives figuring out how to “reach” young men—the electoral stakes are high, especially for the most marginalized among us. But in the last week, I’ve often found myself frustrated, even disgusted by the idea that young men are uniquely suffering because they’re young men, that they deserve outsized sympathy and attention at a time when women and other marginalized communities are on the brink of perhaps one of the severest rollbacks of our rights in modern times. Teen girls and young women suffer from endemic sexual violence and misogyny, and many still find it in their hearts to not elect a fascist. 

Carusone says he’s struggled with this, too. But he’s made sense of it by understanding the manosphere and its toxic, mass appeal as a youth issue. “The 30-year-old men who are upset, the Tucker Carlsons of the world, they need to get over it. They’re not who I’m talking about,” he said. But manosphere content is poisoning the minds of children, shaping them to become violent toward other children, to grow up and inflict violence on marginalized people. “We have to think about this as it relates to kids. If we don’t do something about this now, we’re messing up kids,” Carusone explained. “As these boys and young men grow, they’re going to build and organize political power, and even worse, as they move into maturity, they’re going to be more violent and abusive than previous generations.”

Jezebel does an excellent report on how the cadre of manosphere influencers such as the Nelk Boys, Sneako, and Adin Ross-- who helped push young men to the right and push Donald Trump over the finish line and how they’ll shape politics.

[philbatrax]

[justinsentertainmentcorner]

Taylor Lorenz at User Mag (12.23.2024):

Throughout the press tour for the movie It Ends With Us, star actress Blake Lively was villainized. Once seen as a wholesome and popular celebrity, the public turned on Lively. In a seemingly endless stream of articles, tweets, TikToks, and other online posts, Lively was painted as controversial. She was deemed rude, ungrateful, a high maintenance nightmare, and a generally terrible person. Years old unflattering clips of Lively were surfaced, anonymous gossip accounts villainized her, and she was savaged in headlines. Now, it turns out that the public cancellation Lively endured was seemingly the result of a well funded PR effort to smear and discredit her so that the concerns she raised about It Ends With Us film producers Justin Baldoni and Jamey Heath's alleged misconduct wouldn't be taken seriously. Lively is suing Baldoni and the team behind the movie for orchestrating the online smear campaign after she spoke out about sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior on set. According to the suit, Baldoni subjected Lively to unwanted kissing, discussed his sex life, including encounters where he said he might not have received consent. Heath allegedly showed Lively a video of his wife naked, watched Lively in her trailer when she was topless and repeatedly entered her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed along with Baldoni. You can read the full list of allegations here, they are disturbing. In response to her speaking out, Lively alleges that Baldoni orchestrated a "multi-tiered plan" using "social manipulation" to ultimately "destroy" her reputation. But since details of the smear campaign broke, initially in a big feature in The New York Times, then subsequently in dozens of articles on major news sites, not one outlet has used the word misogyny. Misogyny is almost always at the core of smear campaigns targeting women, yet media coverage of these coordinated attacks consistently avoids naming it. This erasure is part of a pattern. When high profile women challenge power structures, call out abuse, or loudly express progressive values, they are met with calculated, well funded campaigns to discredit and destroy their reputations. The legacy media, when it does cover these sorts of attacks— which is exceedingly rare because the burden of proof is 100% on the women and most targets do not have the resources someone like Lively does— almost never centers the misogyny. By refusing to explicitly name misogyny when covering these campaigns, the mainstream media minimizes the systemic hatred behind these smear efforts and enables the very type of harassment they purport to critique.

Lively's case, much like the vicious smear campaign against Amber Heard during her legal battle with Johnny Depp, reveals a well-worn playbook. Baldoni and Heath even worked with the same communications consultants who Depp hired to discredit Heard. Even these consultants acknowledged the misogynistic nature of the hate Lively endured. “Socials are really really ramping up in [Baldoni's] favour, she must be furious," one comms consultant wrote to another member of the team about Lively. "It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women.” Lively’s detractors leveraged social and news media to smear her professionalism, personal character, and even her unrelated business ventures, like her hair-care line. Terakeet, a marketing consultancy who produced a report on public sentiment for Lively following Baldoni's campaign, concluded that she was subject to a “targeted, multichannel online attack” similar to the one against Heard, and that it was destroying her reputation. After analyzing “the entirety of Google’s search index” for Lively’s name, Terakeet found that 35 percent of the results mentioned Baldoni, which was extremely unusual given the length of her career. The firm ultimately suggested that "the media environment was being manipulated," according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, Baldoni, amidst mounting allegations, co-hosted a podcast along with Heath called “Man Enough,” about toxic masculinity. He was framed as a champion for women in news articles. Earlier this month, Baldoni received an award by the nonprofit Vital Voices, for his supposed allyship to women. At the heart of every misogynistic smear campaign lies a readiness by both society and the media to vilify women. On Monday, one of the publicists involved in the campaign spoke out saying that they didn’t even have to enact a “social combat plan” because “the internet was doing the work for us." Powerful men can outmaneuver accusations with strategic retaliation, while women risk everything by speaking out. Men can lean into being perceived as "controversial," "difficult," "annoying," or "unstable," while the same labels are career-ending for women.

As I wrote in my book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, so many of these campaigns against high profile women utilize the Gamergate playbook. Gamergate was a coordinated, deeply misogynistic harassment campaign that relied on manufactured outrage cycles to terrorize women, frame them as controversial and difficult, and drive them out of the video game and media industry. Gamergate was a watershed moment in online culture because it provided a blueprint for the weaponization of social media platforms to spread hate, exploiting the legacy media’s ignorance of online culture and its tendency to take things on the internet at face value.

The Gamergate playbook relies on leveraging networked harassment to launder bad faith attacks and smear campaigns through the mainstream media, in order to drive women and marginalized people out of positions of power by framing them as controversial, untrustworthy, or difficult. Lively's lawsuit details how this playbook was run on her. And yet, despite the fact that misogyny is the central element of Gamergate-style attacks, news media refuses to call it what it is. This has led to a deep ignorance among the public on what fuels hate, and has made the majority of people unable to recognize these smear campaigns while they're happening.

The smear campaign against Blake Lively (and Amber Heard before that) reeks of Gamergate-esque misogyny, as Taylor Lorenz wrote in User Mag.

[oatmealaddiction]

But I'm a Nice Guy Originally by Scott Benson in 2013.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

I’ve also seen loads of people complain that political writing in modern media is a lot more hamfisted and “preachy”. Often within the same franchise that used to be better.

So they are explicitly complaining about bad political writing.

For some reason, smugsters like TOL up there seldom address those people. Even when they responded to TOL’s post, TOL and their fanclub just doubled down on the smug mockery and strawmanning.

Heck, you can find one of them smugging on Taf’s post;

Also, it’s kind of hilarious that TOL used Bioshock, when a bunch of leftists assumed Infinite would be about aiding the glorious proletariat revolution. Presumably because they were unfamiliar with the series.

Or they were ignoring contrary facts, as leftists often do.

Or the people these days who think the first game is about “capitalism bad!” when Ryan is a tyrannical head of state who restricts private trade and free speech because they don’t fit his beliefs.

[gamer2002]

Somehow, GamerGate has returned.

[silvermoon424]

How it feels to learn about the Sweet Baby Inc controversy against my will, making me realize that there really are mfs out there who want to start up gamergate again

[wolfnanaki]

In hindsight, I'm glad that weird bald man made a video where he screamed about pronouns in Starfield.

He has completely exposed the right-wing backlash to diversity in video games for what it is. And it's why GamerGate 2 (the backlash towards Sweet Baby Inc.) hasn't taken off within the general population like the first one did, because all the plausible deniability is out the window.

We know who's doing this, and we know why. They can say whatever nonsense they want, quote things out of context, or twirl together whatever conspiracy theory suits their message, but we know they just hate people of color and LGBT+ characters in video games, and want to send a message that they, and they people who make them, are unwelcome.

"They harassed someone just for making a list of games they worked on!" And then they don't mention why the list was made: to say that the games were "poisoned" by DEI and need to be avoided at all cost. And their definition of "harassment" is "one employee pointed out the list and said it was bad, probably". You can play the poor wounded gazelle all you like, but nobody believes it.

And you can tell how much this campaign has been a failure because if you check the trending tag for it, it's all the same people patting each other on the back and sharing the exact same images over and over again. It's another conspiracy that they have to constantly reinforce to each other, since if they bothered to learn the truth about anything they've been espousing, it'd all come crashing down.

The original GamerGate was kickstarted by a lie, and that's no different this time around. Part of me hopes that maybe this time, gamers will finally learn some sense and drop their rabid hate towards minorities and instead investigate the real reasons why the games industry is falling apart.

But I doubt it.

[gacha-incels]

My current theory is that ( Puts tinfoil hat )  The ongoing gender war stuff in both CN and KR have definitely shifted how some 'waifu-collectors' see the female player base and therefore male characters in gacha games. There's definitely an ongoing narrative that women are the root of toxicity and more devs should adopt the waifu-only policy to appeal to as few women as possible and gatekeep their safe havens. The irony is that most of these people advocating to exclude women are using the vocal minority for their examples as to why, which is exactly what they don't want done to themselves. Basically, women should only play Love and Deepspace and men can play GFL2/AL/Snowbreak/Nikke etc. As long as women 'stay in their lane' they are satisfied, even though it's been shown that both men and women will pull for characters of the opposite gender and vice versa. Mixed cast games are trying to err on the side of caution because if they don't appeal to this crowd enough (by skewing the gender ratio harder, or by making more fanservice designs) then they will be brigaded on social media for appealing too much towards women or radical feminists.

omg yeah I feel like “gamer” men say this outright around the world from east to west. “women are coming into our games and making the women less sexy and everything more toxic” etc. attitude has ramped up. though it was always bad if you remember, in the west at least, the absolute insane violent tantrum reaction to Anita Sarkeesian for making like I cannot stress this enough just pretty basic feminist videos about video games. It was like seeing grown adult men have the same type of screaming tantrum a toddler would have when you tell him he can’t have an expensive toy at the store. except instead of one kid sitting on the floor screaming it was an unbelievable amount of men worldwide sitting in their computer chairs screaming and writing graphic rape threats and making full video games where you violently beat her. For the crime of just one woman talking about fucking Mario or whatever. THIS is how these men react when you do something as benign as that. I posted some more about this here.

you have no idea the insane shit that gets blamed on female fans or female employees of mixed sex gachas. A lot of that has been already posted here obviously so I’ll post something new I saw just so we can archive some more examples. Recently one of my friends from the infrared blog I sometimes repost here showed me this strange phenomenon happening on the Genshin impact leaks subreddit where a good amount of guys were accusing the developers of the game of being fujoshis because they thought a new female water character was being nerfed so that a previously released male water character would be the strongest water character. I thought this was a joke (my mistake) but it spanned a LOT of comments and got extremely heated. Later I found these comments in another thread there

Like this is the thought process. This sucked -> ok so probably a woman wrote it -> well most writers graduated from liberal arts schools, and most liberal arts students are women, so it was definitely a female writer. This is how easy it is for this type of “gamer” male to blame anything they hate on women. They did this for one of the stories in HSR that was disliked as well. If you look up “有男不玩” there are videos on bilibili but also some on YouTube where you can get snippets of how these guys are thinking about female gacha players. They share some similarities with all gamer men who think women are more frivolous, unskilled and don’t like action games. there were particular comments that reminded me of how Korean incels wrote about women, in that games should stop pandering to us altogether because we don’t have enough money, or if we do have money it’s because it’s coming from a boyfriend or male relative, or we’re all just playing f2p. ironically a huge amount of merch sales, IRL events and fan-PR like fanart comes from female players and they are usually the ones to stick around the longest I believe, but these guys only understand the money aspect of these games.

There are a lot of ones that were interesting but I don’t want to use too many since I was working with MTL, and then looking up individual phrases, and then retranslating some, and then looking up context, etc. lol. so when I have a better grasp on this I can make a better post.

in regards to how they find it ok if the games are sex segregated yes exactly,I posted about this earlier and probably a couple months ago too but this was most recent so it’s easiest to just copy here