#GamerGate

[theboyonthehighcastle]

Hey Mark Waid. Go Fuck yourself, nobody needs you and you aren't special!

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.

[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.

[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?

[philbatrax]

[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

[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

[gamer2002]

Somehow, GamerGate has returned.

[jinglebellrockstars]

Hot Take:

[blazehedgehog]

Do you agree with Gaming Journalists and what do you think of gaming journalism in general?

What does this even mean, dude.

"Do you agree with gaming journalists"? On what?

Do I agree with Shacknews that Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a 10/10, and with Digital Spy that it's also a 7/10? Do I agree with Let's Clear Up Those Halo Battle Royale Rumors?

Like, I've gotten some bait on this blog before, but this is 2/10 stuff, man. This is some hot 2014 garbage. Like no matter what I say, you're gonna go all

"Very interesting. Then do you care to explain why..." No thanks.

My real answer: Something I learned during my time at TSSZ and being around a few people who were deeper into "the biz" than I is that everybody needs journalism more than they realize. Corporations are pushing for consumers to become their personal cheerleaders more than ever before, which makes criticism and the journalistic exposing of information seem villainous.

After all: Xbox is my friend now, so how dare you attack the Xbox. Behavior that used to be reserved for the most dedicated fanboys is now the expected room temperature. I've talked about "The Cult of Naughty Dog" before, and that's the same thing. If a corporation can get you to be parasocial with them, then they have won, and being parasocial with a corporation means shunning real investigative journalism that would otherwise undo them. Journalists and critics used to be marketing tools, but by undoing the press pipeline and talking directly to fans, journalists and critics are painted as untrustworthy for being wildcards that don't always toe the company line.

And there has been more than a decade of people with a "I choose to be stupid and ignorant on purpose" outlook, which just makes that more frustrating. We've all seen screencaps where some brainless rando tries to explain something to a person who is an expert in that field. The rando thinks they're flexing their brain, but in some cases they are arguing with the person who literally wrote the book on their topic of conversation. Some people don't want to know anything but still pretend like they know everything, when there are real people out there doing real work to uncover real truths.

Misinformation is the real problem. It should not surprise anyone that there are people out there deliberately eroding the foundation of journalistic integrity, because the less people trust journalism, the easier it is to get away with lying. The easier it is to lie, the easier it is to control the mainstream, the easier it is to scam people out of their money, so on and so forth.

And misinformation is more than just "this one news article is fake." There are long running campaigns to install people into news organizations themselves to publish false information for all manner of different goals, but it's all the same: nobody trusts anyone and it's making everyone dumber.

That's when we get crypto currency. And NFTs. And now people claiming that generative AI will save humanity. Grift after grift after grift where the people at the top of the snake oil food chain make off with billions of dollars while the rest of the world is left scratching their heads.

The law isn't going to catch them. If they do, it'll take years. Look at how long it took for Sam Bankman-Fried to get caught -- he operated for almost half an entire decade. The amount of damage somebody can get away with in five years is significant.

We need journalism. Real journalism. Good journalism. Watchdogs that keep an eye on things and blow the whistle when it goes bad. Somebody to enforce accountability that isn't a cop.

Where do you find that? That's the hardest question. I'm lucky enough that I know people I trust because they are long time friends, or friends of friends, and thus they've been properly vetted in my circle as The Real Deal. But there are a lot of outlets out there who claim to champion "truth" and "intelligence" in a way to prey upon insecurity. I mean, c'mon, Trump's social media platform is called "Truth Social" and is basically the furthest thing from the truth you will ever get from anyone, ever.

The more obsessively they try to convince you they're telling the truth, the less likely it is they actually are. Which in itself could be an attack meant to undo the foundations of trust in people who actually know what they're talking about. By casting doubt on the very concept of truth itself, they can lie with increasingly greater efficiency.

Any advice I give feels like it is incredibly circumstantial. Which is the point, and is why we're in the state we're in.

Here's a good pdf by The News Literacy Project that's probably a good place to start. The general gist is "you'll have to do a lot of fact checking for yourself" but that's unfortunately where we're at these days.

But by and large I would say life is a lot harder for real journalists right now than I think some of their critics have ever thought about. There are people out there trying to do actual good work and being a bubble-brained moron about it just makes everything harder for everyone.

[kaiju-kisser]

The xbox reviews for Thirsty Suitors tell me everything I need to know about how this is probably a great game and I can't wait to try it

(Shout out to the last reviewer!)

[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.

[rhaenin-time]

So I started sharing some of my more popular posts on Reddit because they were getting reposted there regardless and I decided I'd rather it at least be under my control. And as a result, I now know there's a not-insignificant amount of Tumblr Greens who ALSO spend all their time OBSESSIVELY lurking on the part of Reddit where people discuss the actual HotD/ASoIaF universe rather than that fan fiction. How did I find out? Against my will.

Is it unhinged? Of course.

Is it funny? Yes.

But is it a little sad and concerning? Also yes.

Gamergate happened around the time I first got reliable access to the internet, so I kind of think of it as my (sad) introduction to internet culture. And I'm telling you, I haven't seen this particular combination of certain specific behaviors at this intensity since that era. And what worries me is that Gamergate didn't happen in a vacuum. It was simply one of many reflections of certain sentiments simmering in society and a precursor to those sentiments being expressed in far more material ways than misogyny on the internet.

There's simply no way HBO doesn't know the kind of discourse they've been feeding in the interest of engagement — and fear of alienating a part of their potential audience that shares in those troubling underlying sentiments. I'm not saying they're responsible for whatever's happening here, but they're definitely fine with fanning the flames for profit.

[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.

[zeeph-containment-zone]

been seeing a lot of people defend Sweetbaby inc on twitter because "ooooo the anti-woke people don't like them so they must be good and they must just be angry that there's women and poc in video games" and I'm begging people to fucking ignore those clowns for 5 seconds and realize that what SBI doing really isn't a good thing. If you're not happy with how flat and stereotypical characters that are suppose to be "inclusive" are being written currently you should be against SBI. If you want better writing and better quality of diverse characters in video games you should be against SBI. If you want genuine storytelling in your video games you should be against SBI. Support indie creators and games made by actual diverse devteams, not corporations that are only being inclusive so you spend your money on them and for no other reason. You deserve the best representation possible, not shitty husks of characters or barebones storylines that only exist to fufill a marketing checkbox. You deserve better than SBI. Don't stand for it. You should want your games to be good and for the people making them to care about what they're making.