@icedquinn I just don't get what happened and why it was such a big deal. I was also very young when it happened, like maybe around 10. All I know is zoe Quinn sucked someone's dick or something ? Then men blamed feminism for everything. Idk the details
@teratology yeah the press decided they were going to just blame men for being sexist in a hope they could deflect criticism and it went to the spiders from there.
@teratology I think it was moreso like gross journalistic corruption and nepotism which was uncovered and when the "perpetrators" therein were called out for it they blamed things like "sexism" and "patriarchy" and started actively attacking and demonizing the entire customer base of the industry they were producing journalism for which was bandwagoned by other media entities and basically woke up a lot of people to the fact that the establishments hate you and view you as cattle and the house always wins. @icedquinn
@teratology@icedquinn The coordinated and continuous shutdown of anyone talking about the initial event (which was basically meaningless) and shutdown of people noticing the shutdown, infuriated people and made the backlash worse, like infinitely worse than if it was just ignored.
All the indie journalists and indie game developers were in the groups, they were often friends, and in many, many cases competition judges and journalists were investors in games that they critiqued.
@Moon@icedquinn@teratology is games journalism even relevant anymore? I feel like literally everyone knows the press is entirely corrupt pieces of shit now.
@icedquinn@Moon@teratology I feel the same way. Everybody says "gamergate lost" but what exactly was the win condition? Shut down the entire press and overthrow the government?
@icedquinn@Moon@teratology I think part of the novelty of gg at the time was how transparently corrupt the media was being. They were taking stories that were obviously, hilariously false on their face ("the 4chan trolls sent military snipers outside of my house"). This was at a time when the media still had a decent reputation so seeing them report stuff that was so patently false on its face was shocking.
If polling is to be believed (yes I'm aware of the irony) only something like 30% of Americans have any significant level of trust in the media now. Off the top of my head it was 11% of Republicans (how that number isn't 0 is beyond me), 25ish % of independents and 50% of democrats which has actually fallen greatly since 2018. And of those people who don't trust NOW, I'd think the distrust would be far more intense after the last decade of having the curtain pulled back.
Thankfully it seems like most people have just grown tired of them and ever since blackrock money started drying up they seem to be withering away.
@icedquinn@Moon@teratology actually glancing at this article I unironically think they're making shit up. That polling is wildly inconsistent with other data.
@icedquinn@Moon@teratology honestly I wasn't really "around" during gamergate and I really only learned about it after it had already picked up. Mostly from watching metokur archives. I honestly don't know what people were saying back then. Like were the gg'ers shocked when all the hit pieces rolled out? I remember there was some sense of shock and moral outrage that the media would just outright fabricate stuff.
The kickoff for whatever this 2.0 stuff seems to be "remember that the media is the attack dog of the government and they have no rock bottom."
@RustyCrab@icedquinn@Moon@teratology We were shocked that they would so blatanly close ranks and make a coordinated push. All spouting the same lies. Many of us had yet to be radicalized. We did not yet know the phrase, "You don't hate journalists enough. You think you do, but you don't." There was still some basic assumption of a high-trust society.
@RustyCrab@icedquinn@Moon@teratology They were shocked at the level of outlets that got involved. Like NBC News, BBC, Stephen Colbert, etc. didn't have anything else to report on? The UN got involved? It was just bizarre to see the levels at which establishment ran interference for some uggo that was banging people shilling her game. I think they expected the shitpieces from woke games journalists, but not the mainstream media.
Note that it wasn't sex-for-reviews, I honestly think it was a case of games journalists and indie devs literally being in bed with one another, like a polycule, and just them trying to elevate each others' content. Still very corrupt, but just favoritism rather than quid pro quo. Also, if Gamergate did lose, it was a pyrrhic victory, since the whole thing brainbroke journalists and they started covering Trump like they did Gamergate, which shattered the public's trust in them.
@icedquinn@RustyCrab@Moon@mrsaturday@teratology At this point, believing the press is the lizardman's constant, the baseline number of people who on any poll will express an opinion that's batshit insane.
@RustyCrab@icedquinn@Moon@teratology GG had some Ws in getting some ethics policies changed, but lost because the people they exposed are still continuing their grift 10 years later and more often at bigger companies.
@RustyCrab@icedquinn@teratology There's a lot of fucking idiots out there that still believe journalists. Like, a lot. They are dumb. Real fucking dumb.
@Moon@teratology@icedquinn > they were often friends, and in many, many cases competition judges and journalists were investors in games that they critiqued.
name one industry where this does not happen
@Moon@icedquinn@teratology maybe, just maybe that has to do with the absolutely terrible PR goobergrapes got by being pushed by breitbart and similar outlets
@Moon@icedquinn@teratology in the end you can't really deny that goobergrapes took off because sweaty teenage nerds thought a woman got an advantage through sex and they didn't even get sex and got incredibly buttmad about it
@Moon@icedquinn@ic3l9@teratology This is really making me feel old seeing people that didn't exist when 10+ news sites dropped variations of the "Gamers don't need to be your audience" article having weird takes about it on dark fedi.
@birdulon@Moon@ic3l9@teratology that's just how everything is now though. we've passed them playing 'the game' back around bush jr time. they went from getting their hands caught in the cookie jar and resigning somebody as a sacrifice to just running denial and counter-accusation game.
i know some of the tinfoils have said this happens pretty much always at the fall of empires. elites are held so unaccountable to anything that it gets to the point they are just beating people on the streets in front of juries and everyone is just so hypernormalized that they let it happen
@birdulon@Moon@ic3l9@teratology their authority finally ends when the catastrophic economic failure overtakes their control (as happened with several of those news orgs, as is happening slowly with the american imperium right now.)
you can get away with a lot if people think it keeps them fed/safe but when they learn they have neither you get guillotined. then we pretend the replacement will never again be this decadent and, rip, the wheel of samsara continues.
@Moon@icedquinn@teratology it was at least the combination. a supposed "sex for review" scandal between men would not have blown up the way goobergrapes did. i'm not saying that all the other stuff did not happen, just that people joining the outrage because they hate women was a key part of the dynamic.
This. This exact reaction was the key part of the dynamic, that caused gamergate to explode. It wasn't the initial corruption. It was that when it was pointed out, this enormous coordinated simultaneous response from numerous outlets with the exact same message, slightly reworded, dropped all on the same day. It was later discovered that they did coordinate with secret email lists. And if you point it out, your post gets deleted.
This gaslight of "criticism of our corruption is invalid because you hate women and minorities", which grew to "gamers hate women and minorities and gamers don't need to be your audience." "gamers are over".
How dare they say the emperor has no clothes.
Now keep pre-ordering your AAA slop, and don't complain no matter how bad it is. The videogame industry is stronger than ever. If you don't agree then you're a white supremacist misogynist.
i remember the cool baldwin was talking about it at one point. it would kind of make some sense because we already know news orgs are fake and coordinated due to the church commission, but i never looked in to it further.
@aven@Moon@ic3l9@teratology i know the front has fallen off that strategy in more recent years because congressional hearings with zuck exposed intercorporate slack chats for censorship and then places started publishing the exact playbook (one was called AM!TT and they since deleted the page https://iceworks.cc/z/cl1lu1j9f00003wuq7hwkkjm9.html )
@icedquinn@Moon@ic3l9@teratology I've never heard of most of that stuff, and I don't think there needs to be a government connection. I'd be somewhat surprised if there was one, other than something like it being a test to see how far people can be pushed.
>to just running denial and counter-accusation game
The culture and philosophy that they're coming from is similar though, and I've thought that the same dynamic that occurred in gamergate has repeated many times since then, without any explicit relation, in the Woke and ESG shit.
The very soviet "everything is perfect and we are perfect and never make any mistakes ever and you are the evil enemy and must be destroyed for even suggesting the notion that anything is wrong." It's like narcissistic abuser dynamic writ large. Any valid criticism, no matter how minor, is treated as "hate", especially shoehorned into an idpol "you just hate women and minorities" way.
And they take as many as will fall for it with them as they go over the cliff, like it's a giant ponzi scheme. FTX is a literal ponzi example of this, complete with "effective altruism".
The videogame industry is currently going over that cliff, and I'll be genuinely interested to see if Activision/Blizzard get bought by Tencent, because I do have a tinfoil hat theory that China is pushing woke in industry so that it can crash and be bought up cheaply by Tencent, who will then go anti-woke but pro-CCP-censorship with them, because Woke is the gift you give to an organization that you want to die.
@aven@Moon@ic3l9@teratology there are very high level players in the game this time around. larry fink is basically the sole driver of DIE because he runs a hedge fund larger than most nations rn.
sweet baby would have had no relevance at all otherwise
But I was rubbernecking this nonsense from the start, and it was obvious right from day one that #gamergate was a way for corrupt corporate shills to deflect from their own corruption by trying to shift the blame to someone/everyone else. Part of the reason I caught on so quick was that I'd seen the exact same pattern over and over again previously in the left-wing activist milieu (eg. Occupy movement).
My assessment now is that most of the folks involved in proclaiming the "gamers are racist/sexist/bigots" narrative, had/have all the classic signs of narcissistic personality disorder. Their ability to organise a lynch mob under false pretences has discredited everything they stand for in my eyes. Even when I agree with them, I won't make common cause with these people for that reason.
@aven@Moon@icedquinn@teratology interesting narrative but i don't think you even understand my criticism. i'm not saying that (games) journalists wouldn't rather lie and betray than publish anything that doesn't fit their view of the world, i'm saying that goobergrapes turned into a pr holocaust because "gamers" were also full of shit and behaved in socially inacceptable ways once triggered too hard by presstitude shenanigans. and ironically this was ultra predictable from the point where people discussed the zoe post and, and behaving that way made the biggest slander campaign target you could ever paint on your forehead. maybe personally/individually you're right about that dindu nuffin shit but overall that doesn't matter
@ic3l9@aven@icedquinn@teratology it is impossible to separate out troll behavior because anonmyous third parties for no reason other than fun were calling in bomb threats and SWATings on people.
@Moon@ic3l9@icedquinn@teratology and those people speak for themselves, not for "gamers". I'm trying to say that real people with real jobs at real companies making real money with their actions, lying about groups of people, is not comparable to anons going on the internet and telling lies.
The journos desperately need those two things (professionals lying and anons lying) to be equally valued, to create a "well both sides did bad things so it cancels out". If those things aren't equivalent, then they're assholes.
@aven@Moon@icedquinn@teratology >those people speak for themselves, not for "gamers"
you have to put some controls on group membership because the actions of whoever takes on the "brand" will shape its reputation. it's not a novel convept, e.g. trademark holders need to actively defend their trademarks to not risk losing them. so claiming that harassment was not part of goobergrapes would require a credible effort to exclude bad actors, which nobody undertook.
>I'm trying to say that real people with real jobs at real companies making real money with their actions, lying about groups of people, is not comparable to anons going on the internet and telling lies.
that's a technicality and doesn't actually matter to anyone except meme war vets who haven't gotten over their vietnam
>The journos desperately need those two things (professionals lying and anons lying) to be equally valued, to create a "well both sides did bad things so it cancels out". If those things aren't equivalent, then they're assholes.
the journos operate in a value system where you lost from the very beginning, to them death threats, misgendering, swatting etc is a billion times worse than being overly general in a hit piece meant to boost morale.
@ic3l9@Moon@icedquinn@teratology
lol just make sure no one does bad things on the internet while calling themselves a "gamer". It's not a novel concept. Nobody even tried.
If only those goobergrapes policed the entire internet and made sure every "gamer" behaved in a dignified manor. Why didn't they???
Why didn't "gamers" just trademark the term and sue anyone who abused it?
>is a billion times worse than
Yeah, I know they think "It's okay when we do it".
> in a hit piece meant to boost morale.
Really? Do you think the purpose of hit pieces is the "boost morale"? Tell me more.
You know you're being a disingenuous piece of shit.
That entire argument of ethics of games journalism was so fucking stupid. There was never anything remotely ethical about game’s journalism it was literally just commercials. No one called out the real issues like EA buying up indie dev groups and cannibalizing and gutting them into shells of their former selves for what basically amounted to pocket change or the danger of micro transactions and DLC
I don’t goobergate 2 would make much of a difference. Most of the male gamers are malding over what they deem as “politics” in their games. Politics to them is a vague repellent to them that could mean a lot of things but from what I noticed is any kind of reference to mainstream political happenstances which is retarded because most of kojima’s games are literally just that lmao
The borderlands series cashed in on diversity/“sjw” rhetoric and made tons of money despite the games not being that good but so many normies bought them and liked them a lot despite the additions of they/thems, and corny ass storylines about the evils of misogyny and racism
I like how people focus on overwatch 2 censoring the girls and not that activsion-blizzard-Microsoft scammed a lot of people out of $60 on a free to play game promising them a story mode campaign that got canned
EA canceled alice maddness 3 too, I'm still pissed.
@teratology@icedquinn@aven@ic3l9 people complained about all those things, the difference is that when you complain about broken promises everyone agrees but when you notice that nobody's covering a trend that DEI is injecting stupid content into games, people call you a conspiracy theorist until you're proven right, then they call you an asshole for caring.
@teratology@aven@ic3l9@icedquinn A small number of people highly placed across the entire gaming industry are fighting a culture war and it is acceptable to not like a war being waged on you.
@Moon@aven@ic3l9@teratology
> culture war
imo this is because al ot of people are bad at making the argument. there is a kind of sense that things are happening, like the war against cute girls. but without pinpointing the exact bad actors its hard to get people to care in a specific actionable way
@Moon@icedquinn@aven@ic3l9 what is considered DEI at this point because there are plenty of games that have lefty politics and nobody is complaining about the fact that the entire premise of MGS is anti-nuke. the only major thing i can think of recently is TLOU2 but that was also attributed to awful writing and the gore devs watched.
more specifically what DIE actually does is it sets race quotas. its literally affirmative action that was already tried and abolished brought back because larry fink has too much money and can basically decide single handedly who gets funding or not because of that.
its a subtle thing but it comes down to is the character black because it makes a good story, or the actor is damned good, vs what blizzard did where their internal documents show the overwatch cast was made because "we need Old Woman and Black Guy to satisfy the quota"
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