[Grizzly]

it thinks sites like RPS, Kotaku, Gamasutra, etc are unwilling to change, it got that impression from the 'gamers are dead' articles.

RPS never even posted a gamers are dead article 0_o.

[Flipside]

It should be noted that there is also the experience gap to consider.

Getting advertisers to withdraw support for something a publication has said or done is not an unknown tactic, it's been used before and will be used again and can be an effective way to promote change in an advertising-led media format. This has been a technique used in the past by several groups, including Women's Rights' groups.

However, there is a lack of experience of how to approach these problems that is evident, and displays itself as a scattergun approach to the problem, coupled with an inability to have any influence over the worst aspects of the community (not that such a thing is possible) doesn't help.

I will say this, if these were paid-for publications, I think I'd be more annoyed, but this is a situation where 'voting with your feet' would probably have had more impact. Nobody is forced to read these publications or base their spending habits upon them. I'm assuming that every member of Gamergate uses these publications to get information etc, so if they cannot be trusted, go somewhere else, once those mainstream sites see their hit-count reducing and therefore affecting their advertising power, they will soon start looking for the cause.

A campaign to boycott Gawker Media products and to explain to the public why people are choosing to do so based on organizational policy, rather than people, would probably have been far more successful and made it much more difficult to demonize its members without looking like it was a matter of self-interest for the Media to do so.

[Bobboau]

RPS never even posted a gamers are dead article 0_o.

you have a real talent for missing the point.

[The E]

And your definition of "bringing down" needs to be revised.

Also, why do you think that bringing these sites down is the right answer? Even if that endeavour were to succeed (highly unlikely), all you'd end up with is a bunch of journalists looking (and, in short order) finding a new home somewhere else. It's not going to change anyone's opinion, and it will certainly not put an end to all those articles about gender issues in gaming that you people seem to dislike so much.

If your answer to supposed censorship is to impose actual censorship, I think you're kinda missing the point.

[Flipside]

I think there's more than 2 sides to this debate, this isn't a 'With us or against us' situation.

I, for example, do not agree with even the initial starting point of Gamergate, I don't think the actions of individuals is indicative of overall policy on either side, and I certainly don't consider this to be a 'gate' situation, but then I also don't think there would have been nearly the outcry if a male developer had slept with a female reviewer. That's not really about computer games, it's about the old 'Man = player, Woman = slut' debate at its heart.

Personally, I don't associate myself with Gamergate, but that doesn't mean I am not concerned about the concept that mainstream publications have close liaisons with developers, not sexual liaisons, but business ones. A certain amount of crossover is to be expected, but, as the Gerrstmann debacle showed, there are still issues to address on how much say the publications marketing practices have over their portrayal of information.

[AdmiralRalwood]

The reason why I am driven a bit angry at this is because I've seen this **** before in the Atheist circles

If by "this ****" you mean "actual misogyny", then yes, you have seen this **** in Atheist circles before. Of course, the rest of your post reveals that your actual problem is with people complaining about misogyny, so that whistling sound is probably the point flying over your head at high speed.

Since nobody's posted it publicly yet, the definition of "apologism".

Personally, I don't associate myself with Gamergate, but that doesn't mean I am not concerned about the concept that mainstream publications have close liaisons with developers, not sexual liaisons, but business ones. A certain amount of crossover is to be expected, but, as the Gerrstmann debacle showed, there are still issues to address on how much say the publications marketing practices have over their portrayal of information.

And yet GamerGate seems to be advocating for game reviews to be more like advertisements, not less. Consider the complaint about the earlier-mentioned Bayonetta 2 review. How dare you treat this game like a cultural artifact instead of a toy! If they were just saying they disagreed with the review, that would be fine; instead, they're saying that it is unethical. They don't want to see reviews like it, anywhere. They want, it seems, corporate press releases. Yes, how objective; what useful reviews. :|

[666maslo666]

And yet GamerGate seems to be advocating for game reviews to be more like advertisements, not less. Consider the complaint about the earlier-mentioned Bayonetta 2 review. How dare you treat this game like a cultural artifact instead of a toy! If they were just saying they disagreed with the review, that would be fine; instead, they're saying that it is unethical. They don't want to see reviews like it, anywhere. They want, it seems, corporate press releases. Yes, how objective; what useful reviews. :|

Oh, please. The Bayonetta review in question was chock full of nothing else than complaints about supposed gender issues from feminist perspectives. It was a political propaganda piece, and the complete antithesis to useful review. Cultural artifact? lol, that doesnt even mean anything.

You can give gender issues the treatment they deserve (see The Escapist Bayonetta review I posted for comparison which does mention them), or you can go all feminazi on your audience and then such reviews do deserve criticism and indeed, are borderline unethical because there comes a point where pushing politics into game reviews gets so over the top that it is not a good review anymore.

You are right, I dont want "reviews" like that in any self-respecting medium, it should be contained in some Gawker BS clickbait site and laughed at by the rest of the gaming community.

Gamergate is advocating for more objective reviews. Not press releases but neither radfem propaganda pieces.

[karajorma]

And yet GamerGate seems to be advocating for game reviews to be more like advertisements, not less. Consider the complaint about the earlier-mentioned Bayonetta 2 review. How dare you treat this game like a cultural artifact instead of a toy! If they were just saying they disagreed with the review, that would be fine; instead, they're saying that it is unethical. They don't want to see reviews like it, anywhere. They want, it seems, corporate press releases. Yes, how objective; what useful reviews. :|

You really don't do your cause any services by arguing about a strawman of what they want.

It's pretty obvious that what much of GamerGate want is for a game review to be about the game itself, how it plays, whether the graphics are good, whether it's enjoyable. And not about political issues about the game. If you feel that the review can be mostly about political issues, argue about that.

You can give gender issues the treatment they deserve (see The Escapist Bayonetta review I posted for comparison which does mention them), or you can go all feminazi on your audience and then such reviews do deserve criticism and indeed, are borderline unethical because there comes a point where pushing politics into game reviews gets so over the top that it is not a good review anymore.

You really don't do your cause any services by bandying stupid quasi-Godwin terms like feminazi around.

Since you are basically the only person in this discussion who hasn't distanced themselves from GameGate, you're going to be held up as an example of what a GamerGate member is like. If you make yourself sound like you are against women's rights by labelling any discussion of feminism in a game review as feminazim, you're only going to succeed in persuading anti-GG that they're absolutely right about what GG want.

[Luis Dias]

The reason why I am driven a bit angry at this is because I've seen this **** before in the Atheist circles

If by "this ****" you mean "actual misogyny", then yes, you have seen this **** in Atheist circles before. Of course, the rest of your post reveals that your actual problem is with people complaining about misogyny, so that whistling sound is probably the point flying over your head at high speed.

Except it very much was a non-problem until hacks of third level grade started trying to smear well established faces of atheism apologism for being either rapists, rape apologists, mysoginists or sexists or whatever the hell they could stick. PZ Myers comes to mind in all this brouhaha, peddling narcissistic wannabes that never wrote anything remotely interesting about anything, but never failed trying to police the atheist movement into their own progressive agendas. Atheism plus, the end result, was such a failure of such magnifying proportions that its only legacy is a funny as hell twitter parody account.

Since nobody's posted it publicly yet, the definition of "apologism".

I'm still waiting for you to respond where anything remotely like "rape apology" is found on Grimachu's blog post, rather than ellude the question then calling me obtuse or telling me to **** off. For someone so keen at trying to educate people on such difficult concepts as "apologism", you don't seem to get the hang of them at all.

And yet GamerGate seems to be advocating for game reviews to be more like advertisements, not less. Consider the complaint about the earlier-mentioned Bayonetta 2 review. How dare you treat this game like a cultural artifact instead of a toy! If they were just saying they disagreed with the review, that would be fine; instead, they're saying that it is unethical. They don't want to see reviews like it, anywhere. They want, it seems, corporate press releases. Yes, how objective; what useful reviews. :|

I'm at odds with Bay2. Is it empowering or so pernicious. Really, I have no clue if I am allowed to indulge in such a great feminist game or if I should be guilty in indulging a fighting **** toy mysoginistic game. Someone HELP me!

[The E]

Oh, please. The Bayonetta review in question was chock full of nothing else than complaints about supposed gender issues from feminist perspectives. It was a political propaganda piece, and the complete antithesis to useful review. Cultural artifact? lol, that doesnt even mean anything.

So I read that article. Did you know what I saw? There are 6 paragraphs in the opening that deal with the sexualization of that character, and how the reviewer felt that this was distracting from the otherwise high quality of the rest of the game. There are 6 further paragraphs describing the systems of the game, the difficulty curve, all the nuts and bolts of a game review stuff. The whole thing is then capped off with a wrap up, in which the reviewer once more reiterates that it's a really good action game, but that he found the sexualization to distract from that.

Now, I said that there were 6 paragraphs devoted to discussing the sexualization thing, right? But, did you know how the word count breaks down between discussing that, and discussing the rest of the game? 705 words are spent on actual gameplay, 433 on the other stuff you find so objectionable. In other words, 61% of the review's text are dedicated to addressing the gameplay.

Now we come to your issue here. You want even more space dedicated to the gameplay, which I can understand. But, as the reviewer for Polygon points out, he was kicked out of enjoying the game by the sexy. If a reviewer's job is to write an honest assessment of a game, then it must follow that he or she has to be able to voice those concerns. Whether or not you disagree with that assessment is up to you, of course; but what the **** makes this specific review such a bete noire? Why is it that a review which spends quite a few words on praising the game for its good gameplay is vilified, only because the reviewer was not able or willing to overlook aspects of the game which were problematic to him?

I implore you, maslo, to be honest with yourself. You are not fighting against censorship, you are fighting for it. There are voices in the games industry you wish to see silenced, for no other reason than you disagreeing with them. There is a grand battle for journalistic freedom here, and you are on the side that wants to reduce it.

[Mr. Vega]

I'm at odds with Bay2. Is it empowering or so pernicious. Really, I have no clue if I am allowed to indulge in such a great feminist game or if I should be guilty in indulging a fighting **** toy mysoginistic game. Someone HELP me!

Oh my god! Feminists disagree with each other sometimes! And yet somehow still manage to get along!

Never played either game, but after reading I'm leaning toward the empowering camp. I also gave money to Anita (and Zoe). And the universe hasn't collapsed from the contradiction! Incredible!

[Luis Dias]

I implore you, maslo, to be honest with yourself. You are not fighting against censorship, you are fighting for it. There are voices in the games industry you wish to see silenced, for no other reason than you disagreeing with them. There is a grand battle for journalistic freedom here, and you are on the side that wants to reduce it.

That is a good point. I don't think it's about suppressing voices, though, or at least that's the less generous interpretation of what is going on. What I think is that many many people are tired of this righteous semi-propaganda pieces. Perhaps what gamers in #gamergate are furious at is at the perception that their games are at the forefront of a massive ideological scrutiny over feminist concerns, when what they wanted was that "games" be this genuinely naive and "innocent" activity where politics was something of a taboo word, for politics ended where games started. It was this massive place where people came together despite their political differences, and the perspective of losing this amazing feature (not a bug!), people are really really angry.

One can already foresee people having different games according to their own political leanings, and games will become, as all other forms of culture, another "artifacts" that are used to distinguish and balkanize people into their own political backgrounds and ideas. I believe, and it's only an intuitive insight that might well be wrong here, that this reaction, this fervent desire to block this foresseable future of political divide in gaming itself is at the core of #gamergate. And that may well be a lost war by now. Lefties are already calling #gamergaters all sorts of names and insults, throwing "right wing" among them. Right wing people are caching in perhaps opportunistically because they smell the lefties have angered a lot of people with this take over attempt.

This might mean, just like the Polygon article mentioned the other day, that there's probably a need for right wing gaming media outlets:

If GamerGate simply wants a conservative counter to what they consider a left-leaning gaming press, I think that's great! That's healthy! You don't have to like the way we or any other outlet cover video games. If you truly believe there's an army of people who reject "progressive" voices and outlets like Polygon and Kotaku, or who would prefer coverage "just about the games," then I'd encourage you to start a new site for those readers. There's no easier or better time to do it.

And you know, even Milo had stated two months ago that he would be willing to help start some kind of project like that, so you know there's a demand for that kind of thing, and so on and so on. This is the End of Games as a Non-Political Landscape. This is it. And this is why there's so much emotion here. Perhaps it is "about time" that politics enters games, it's a sign that games are maturing, growing, becoming adult, etc., but is there no end to this "politicization" process? Are there any landscapes left wherein we can escape from these "real world" concerns at all?

[Mr. Vega]

There's no escape from politics when the "neutral" point of view is whatever the posters beliefs are. Best you can do is make it about the actual beliefs as opposed to factionalism for factionalism's sake, in everything in life including games.

What are you protesting against? The expansion of games' subject matter into potentially political areas? That's where you wanna dig the trench? Spare me the lamentations that serious games are being made and have critics to accompany them. There'll always be a market for the Serious Sams of the industry for you. You don't have to read or play **** you don't like.

We were never about censorship. We're about calling it like we see it. As long as noone gets hurt, or driven out of their house.

[Grizzly]

RPS never even posted a gamers are dead article 0_o.

you have a real talent for missing the point.

Then please explain to me the reason why these people are going after RPS. Corruption? What are they basing that on?

---

I feel that this video is relevant. It was made two years ago after people demanded a reviewer from gamespot got fired because she mentioned GTA V's troubling representation of women and gave it a 9 instead of the 10 people wanted it to have (not neccisarely for that reason) - It's suprisingly relevant today:

[SypheDMar]

karajorma: While I don't agree with how you framed everything in this thread, I want to applaud you for calling out maslo and this statement in particular:

Since you are basically the only person in this discussion who hasn't distanced themselves from GameGate, you're going to be held up as an example of what a GamerGate member is like. If you make yourself sound like you are against women's rights by labelling any discussion of feminism in a game review as feminazim, you're only going to succeed in persuading anti-GG that they're absolutely right about what GG want.

[AtomicClucker]

karajorma: While I don't agree with how you framed everything in this thread, I want to applaud you for calling out maslo and this statement in particular:

Since you are basically the only person in this discussion who hasn't distanced themselves from GameGate, you're going to be held up as an example of what a GamerGate member is like. If you make yourself sound like you are against women's rights by labelling any discussion of feminism in a game review as feminazim, you're only going to succeed in persuading anti-GG that they're absolutely right about what GG want.

I think a lot us chose to distance ourselves from either the vitriol, juvenile, or down right conspiratorial bent flying in GamerGate circles.

As for the jilted Polygon review? The guy is entitled to his Victorian-style leaning on how women should remain chaste, in the company of a male overseer, and need a male member of the family to go outside... (yeah, more sarcasm). In all reality, a prude is a prude. And I've spouted enough the radFem pro-sex shlock I adhere to, henceforth my enmity with folks like Anita, whom my definition of Feminism regards as a Prudish bore trying to repress female sexuality rather than take control of it.

He does cover in details why the game is great, even though he bemoans the "sexualization" like a Parisien debutante bemoaning fries with ketchup. The clear majority of sites have given the game higher ratings, and they certainly don't seem in collusion to bring a "Feminist" revolution to games. They're united in criticizing GamerGate and condemning harassment.

Feminazi? No. Prude, Yes.

[Mr. Vega]

Lol, you missed the favorable feminist reviews of Bayonetta mentioned on this page? Leigh Alexander praised both games.

Maddy Myers also spoke well of Bayonetta and actually had to explain to GGers that feminists are allowed to disagree with each other. Do I have to explain it to you too?

[AtomicClucker]

Lol, you missed the favorable feminist reviews of Bayonetta mentioned on this page? Leigh Alexander praised both games.

Hint: Sarcasm in noted post above. But yeah, Leigh Alexander liked it. Anita on the other hand began to ruffle feathers and cluck wildly while flapping her wings in astonishment that people like Bayonetta (and Anita tried to smear Bayonetta for its marketing, but succeeded in in editing a video so she didn't get caught up in a tirade).

It should be a pretty good sign that not everyone is a prudish Victorian hold out.

[Mr. Vega]

You've already been warned by Kara.

[AdmiralRalwood]

You really don't do your cause any services by arguing about a strawman of what they want.

It's pretty obvious that what much of GamerGate want is for a game review to be about the game itself, how it plays, whether the graphics are good, whether it's enjoyable. And not about political issues about the game. If you feel that the review can be mostly about political issues, argue about that.

The content of the game is not "the game itself"? Some people disagree with the reviewer; that's fine. To say that the reviewer shouldn't be allowed to reduce the rating of the game because of their opinion on its content is both an accurate description of what people who align themselves with GamerGate claim to want and completely moronic.