Out of Pod Experience

Whenever you have a situation where a woman sleeps with a man with connections or access and by doing so gains something, like to speculate at random; gaming awards, coverage for a video game, or a job. it is a likely possibility that there is a woman who refused to sleep with said man and therefore did not get a job, or an award for a game, or coverage.

I think the sad part his is that the entire narrative has been focusing on the harassment and doxxing as the main issue. Granted, this is because the people connected to the issue also have the best media connections. No Youtube channel is going to get the same kind of traction as 10 articles dehumanizing "gamers" as a whole instead of just the harassers. Biting the hand that feeds you is going to get outcry and that's what happened here.

Zoe Quinn harassment over this issue was practically non-existent when this first started up. No one cared about it until people started realizing the implications of her relationship with the journalist, and then to Independent Game Festival judges. Suddenly there was a slew of claims of harassment and screams of misogyny. The narrative has since been derailed to only be about the harassment. Anna Sarkessian was NEVER part of the whole scandal. She was roped in later as support for Quinn due to the harassment....and later to be revealed that Quinn's PR firm works with Sarkessian.

Think about that for a moment. A handful of harassers are suddenly representative for gamers as a whole. But no one bothered to look at the counter harassment going on either and not by just anonymous actors either but by some of the very people involved here. It gets even worse when real independent people like TotalBiscuit and Boogie who had been supporting independent game development are turned on when they began to question some of the blatant collusion between the media and game devs.

Now, we not only have real issues with IGF judge rigging and a REAL RACKETEERING issue. One of those devs affected would have to file a charge against the IGF and follow through to the end. Probably causing the entire thing to collapse and go away. I don't see many wanting that.


But the worst thing to take out of this? It's that these writers treat harassment as a gamers only thing. The fact that Robert Ebert got death threats for movies he reviewed ought to be enough to show that this kind of thing has happened for decades. That was back in the paper mail days too. Only today it's just easier to hide behind an anonymous identity. If you're going to be a public and/or controversial figure, then you can expect to get hate mail from a handful of fringe types out of the millions of normal people who watch you stuff. Video games critics are no different.

Yes, because this thread needed to stay active.

I am apathy embodied.

How is this even a thing? There is no real money involved, no real stakes at all. Nothing.

I would have thought that if gamers were to get up in arms about reviews, it would be how the mainstream part of an admittedly niche subset of the press churn out high ratings for the AAA title du jour with a surprising frequency. Not about the alleged misdeeds of gaming's working poor.

Well, it all started with a whiny rant of a loser and all the other failures found it to be a rally point for their own misery. Because it allowed them to blame someone else for being so pathetic. Also since such suckers aren't exactly appealing to women, they get rejected by them all the time, so that dumbass manifesto met the fertile ground of the "forever alone hate" of eternal virgins.

That's all what GamerGate is about: "I'm a loser and someone else is to blame for this."

There is all that, but if you want to go against this, you need to pick the right targets. It's the billion-dollar AAA publishers that are calling he shots, not some obscure indie-devs with hardly any money no one knows. Getting ubiquitous coverage about their new titles, hyping everyone into preorders and then it turns out to be a piece of **** that all the gaming press refuses to give negative reviews until it's too late, if ever... moneygrab schemes like DLCs, microtransactions becoming more and more widespread... this are the things that are actually ruining games. And they can do that because they have the millions of ad money, they are the ones giving game reviewers access and background info and everything and they are the ones blacklisting everyone that doesn't do as they say.

Sarkeesian critizising depiction of women in games? Maybe she is right, maybe she is not... it doesn't matter because nothing she does will have ever any consequences. She is just someone who made some youtube videos. That is absolutely unimportant and the only point is some intellectual interest about the topic. The only thing that really changes anything is the bottom line of the big publishers, nothing else.
Quinn dating a Game Journalist? Who cares? He did never write about her after they got together, and the only thing he ever has written about her before that was just a passing mention in an article with a topic that wan't about her. Hardly anything more than acknowledging her existence. The entire site Kotaku -that he is working for- has not reviewed her game. So there wasn't anything like trading sex for good reviews. The only thing she did was that she dumped her ex. But given his whiny rant that he pushed anywhere he could think of... he had it coming. If you are the kind of guy that is so pathetic and then harrasses his ex of course you get dumped. People like him only exist to make fun of.

Choosing them as the main representatives of the problems in gaming is so hilariously mistaken as you can get and this is the reason why Gamergaters are not taken seriously at best, or only synonymous with ****/murder-threats. You don't even mention the issues that are really there in gaming, you don't disassociate yourself with the dipshits making those threats (some say a sentence or two how they don't condone this behaviour, but you don't boot them out or get yourself a new banner where these freaks aren't allowed in or do anything of consequence, so it's just lipservice and regarded as such). You are haring off to pursue some harebrained scheme where some small fries are actually running the whole gaming world with some conspiracy that is powered solely by Zoe Quinns genitals.

So if you are serious about creating a movement that is making gaming better for everyone, create a new banner to rally to without the freaks, kick them out when they appear, do some research where the real issues are and then do your campaign to adress these issues. Then you can be taken seriously and get some respect.

A quick question for the Gamergate supporters: If this is all about ethics in journalism, why are you going after female developers and critics, and not the journalists?

The only logical answer I can come up with is that you really just don't want women talking about games.

Aside from being ******* tired of this ridiculous circus, gender is the last thing on my mind when developers and journalists lapse in ethics and clearly display a behavior that they have no professional integrity whatsoever.



Again, and echoing what I said about gender. I don't care as long as they can talk about games rather than a knee-jerk tunnel visioning on things that can be interpreted as sexual advances (as in the case of Lara Croft) or ridiculous portrayal of female characters or the lack of. I don't know about you but I have yet to see a single review by a female critic/reviewer that hasn't somehow been negatively influenced by the examples above rather than focusing on other flawed parts of the game which only tells me that portrayal of women in games is more important to women than game design, mechanics and story.

Which is a fair argument to make in the year 2014 where we like think of ourselves as a "progressive species". The damsel in distress trope has been along for centuries and have been the quick and dirty way to tell a story.

I do agree though that these days we need to look in different directions for ways to tell our stories than to build a story around a damsel in distress. Using a damsel in distress as a sub-plot (rescue Leia from the Deathstar) is fine though, in my book.



Professional ethics. And to my knowledge, Sarkeesian was not the one that allegedly slept around for reviews, it was Zoey Quinn. Which had nothing to with Gamergate or Sarkeesian' original video " Tropes vs Women", that is on Zoey Quinn alone and regardless if Zoey Quinn did, or did not, sleep around for reviews, is at this stage irrelevant when you have two sides so utterly hell-bent of shutting up the other that the original conversation about sexism in games and women in these two industries have largely been lost.

Look no further than twitter to witness the toxicity between the two.