Moderator abuse of power alert!
First of all, no it’s not. Out of fifty games, Grayson handpicks 3, based on an unknown criteria, and the one he mentions first is not only the one chosen to be the article’s sole graphic, but the article’s own title is a play on it. You’ll forgive me if I start to have doubts when the graphic chosen to catch eyes in the site is from the only game out of fifty that doesn’t have graphics to speak of.
Second, that’s an extremely convenient definition of cronyism you’re using there. They were at the very least in come over for drinks terms before that, which should already be cause for disclosure if not recusion. At this point, this was still a minor infraction of course, but the reason this blew up was because of the massive censorship effort that followed. I urge you to read this piece. It maps out the buildup of this mess quite thoroughly.
This feels like a complete derail. The benefit of not answering to publishers does not make it okay to ignore them being held by the balls by the media. The fact that indies don’t have publisher support means that they that much more at the mercy of the press.
This would be “okay” in an industry where there are competing news outlets with differing ideological agendas, but in an industry where the editors-in-chief of nearly every major news outlet get together to talk about which employees they should or should not fire, there’s no such equivalence of platforms.
Are they really that busy with all their fucking watermelon butt articles to talk about videogames? Really? Kotaku, Gameranx, Ars Technica, The Escapist, etc; not ONE of these mainstream sites has had the time to even dedicate a mere blurb to a game developed by the guy who did the Mafia series?
Did you read the links I posted? How much more upfront can you get than being the only group that has effectively done fuck-all about it? And I mean literally: every single source of harassment thus far that has been found has been tracked down by that same patrol.
What kind of logic is that? “The media against which Gamergate assembled says that Gamergate is harassment, and the fact that the media doesn’t say otherwise means it’s legit?”
The first claim is really easy to make considering these mainstream sites are run by people who coordinate shit on a mailing list. When the guy who runs the list opens up by saying he has no intention of even considering any arguments besides what he’s already decided, the fact that they all seem to be toting the line isn’t that shocking. That’s the problem of getting your info from the people accused of corruption. Of fucking course they’re not talking about it.
As for the second one: this cannot be the first time you’ve heard mainstream media talk about games. For fucks sake, how many times has this happened, and when in the fucking hell has mainstream news outlets ever treated the topic with anything short of clickbaiting sensationalism? Geoff Keighley had to show up before FOX just to talk about the ridiculous Mass Effect sex “controversy”. You think they actually researched this thoroughly instead of just looking at what the same five or so gaming outlets run by editors in chief who say shit like this were saying and running with that? Women getting hounded by evil misogynist gamers is an easy topic to sell to an audience, as has been every other media scare coming from these same people. Journalists overreacting and failing at PR is not.
Yes, you’ve heard this story a lot. And what story have you heard? Quinn repeating the same story and Brianna Wu talking about getting these twits. This is the story you’ve heard over and over and over.
How much have you heard about literally ANY of this?
I’m serious. Go to that last link. Read through it. Do you believe that’s false? Then try to remember the last time you heard any of those sites say a single fucking word about it. Then remember every single outlet that publicized Wu’s case and look at what the basis for the case was. Then go find the people opposed to Gamergate who work on tracking down THOSE harassers. You won’t, because there’s none.
I’m not minimizing harassment. Any amount of threats, no matter how minute, is abhorrent. But you can’t fucking tell me the coverage has been “fair” under any goddamn definition. I’m asking to stop judging what’s happening by what story gets repeated over and over the most. This is your argument: that repeating a story enough times and ignoring another is what decides the truth.
Let me explain why I care about this: I live in Argentina. For the past eleven years, we’ve been under the thumb of a series of incompetent, corrupt fuckheads that have destroyed our economy. Our fucking Vice President is being processed for major cases of corruption, and he is still in his post. Our government lies through its teeth about our economy and the inflation, claiming we’re in better shape than Canada while our currency drops in value so fucking fast that my previously “comfy single living” salary has been devalued to being worth less than 500 fucking dollars a month. And I have spent the last decade being shown exactly what bullshit narrative spinning looks like.
The idea that you can make something false into truth by repeating it enough and that if you ignore inconvenient truths enough, they’ll go away, makes me sick to the stomach. This is how I compiled all these links I’m bombing you with. I saw something that looked very, very familiar and began digging. Because if there’s one thing I have swore not to do, it is to pass judgement on things I haven’t seen first hand.
Don’t take my word for any of this. Don’t take anybody’s word. If you care to make a pronouncement, go and look with your own eyes. Ask the actual people involved questions and judge their answers for yourself.
I didn’t mean to connect the RPGC community with raving lunatic gamers making rape and death threats against women. If I thought that were the case, I wouldn’t be coming back here after all these years. And it’s a big reason that i do NOT hang around communities like Something Awful anymore. Trolling and joking around is all in good fun…but SA has now become associated with literally trolling a user to commit literal suicide and other terrible things, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn users there are behind a lot of the hostile threats being made. But the fact is many of them are not really “trolling”, they actually feel this vitriolic hate towards women, and they mask their true feelings by calling it “trolling” and having a good laugh about it. It doesn’t mean I think they’d actually go shoot up an Anita Sarkeesian talk, but what they are doing is much deeper than just a prank as well.
But anyway, to my original point, I only brought up the RPGC community because I think most of us can at least connect with at some level the feeling of being a bit outside the mainstream, and so most of us realize it’s not so simple as “the gaming community is misogynist”. And we also recognize it’s not as simple as “social justice warrior feminazis from tumblrland”…if any such people actually exist, and I have my doubts…are trying to destroy our precious video games. And assuming this whole thing wasn’t whipped up by trolls on SA or 4chan or whatever…we can connect on some level with feeling the anger, frustration, loneliness…legitimate emotions I’m sure many gamers are feeling right now that their community, maybe one of the few spaces in society they feel safe or comfortable in, is under the spotlight and being attacked. And I’m sure the ladies among our community have had their fair share of harassment and uncomfortable situations with male gamers online or even in real life (And I’m talking more than just getting pile driven to the ground by StarStorm on a suburban LA street).
So like…it’s my long winded way of saying that I can at least trust this community to have a reasonable discussion about this topic, beyond the shouting above each other’s heads with their fingers in their ears style of “discussion” everywhere else that’s just encouraged by our media organization, video game corporations, political parties. Cause in that end, that’s who is profiting off of all this shit. More click throughs on NYTimes and IGN and Gawker, where EA gets to show more advertisements for their games, and sell more of their games. So much for the democritization of ideas on the internet! But there’s still at least isolated pockets of intelligent discussion here and there…when I’m not busy trolling about bitcoins anyway.
BTW, I’ve lost about $70,000…paper profits anyway, not cash. At $350 per coin, it’s still a good 10,000% return. It’s not easy to actually clear any significant amount of coins at the “stated” market price though without having to take a discount. I’ve been selling about 5 to 10 per month, when liquidity is sufficient to not have to take too big of a hit. Could be worse though…could have lost all of them at mtgox like a buddy of mine had happen.
Read. I’m willing to believe that there are at least a few people in the movement who are genuinely good-intentioned, so I’ll give you that.
Like Occupy? C’mon, you have to know how this works. Anybody who comes up with a similar argument in the next five years is going to get compared to GamerGate and that is going to be used to discredit them.
You have way too much faith in the public to not have the long-term memory of Dory. 
If the individuals of GG really want to convey the message that they aren’t the sexist shitheads everyone has made them out to be, they’re going to HAVE to lay low for a while, and completely re-brand themselves. And when they resurface, they’re going to have to do VERY highly visible good things, and really, really reach out to the female gaming community and make it crystal fucking clear that they wanted nothing to do with the harassment, threats, and doxxing. They’re also going to have to become way more organized than they are right now, because as in the case of Occupy, it was a massive failure for that very reason. (Well, that a total lack of political lobbying and funding, but I’m not waltzing into that shitstorm.)
And that’s all I’m saying about this. If you support GG…that’s your rodeo. I personally want nothing to do with someone else’s drama.
And to further underscore Zepp’s post above, I love all you geeks. [SUB]In a strictly platonic kinda way.[/SUB]
RPGC remains the only online community I’ve really felt at home with; it’s not huge and impersonal like some other gaming sites, and we’ve discussed everything from the latest JRPG to to DG’s pet [STRIKE]tarantulas[/STRIKE] rocks, to PRECISELY the reason why that car is off limits to all passengers. Considering how long some of us have been here, that speaks volumes for the community as a whole. :3
I won’t bother addressing most of your reply, Seph, mostly because it just seems like you’re going to keep shouting at me no matter what I say until I discover “the truth”. Especially when we’ve reached a comparison between rampant political corruption that ranks sky high on the corruption perceptions index, and a mass conspiracy between feminists and a bunch of video game bloggers, most of whom probably can’t afford to pay their heating bills, let alone control a multibillion dollar industry.
What I will say is this, if you haven’t been involved in journalism professionally: The mythical “closed” E-mail list of journalists where they gather to talk about what gets covered? That happens all the time. Journalists have “conspired” this way for centuries. When I was in college and part of the college newspaper, there was a private group for journalists in the general metro area, where we would meet over pizza discuss what may be newsworthy in a given month. Often, internal issues and conflicts would rise. There are clubs like this all over the world for different levels of journalism. When you have a lot of likeminded people in an industry whose jobs naturally force them to mingle, friendships happen. I won’t pretend that this can’t give rise to conflicts of interest, but there’s a lot of discussion over disclosure and ethics (which was common on the GameJournoPros board, apparently). The reality of any corruption, though, tends to be much less impressive than what we’re capable of imagining. I’m reminded of BioShock Infinite. “The mind of the subject will desperately struggle to create memories where none exist…”
Also, Trilly, I thought you loved me. We’ve been through so much together! :x
Platonic doesn’t mean we can’t have fun, querida 
[SUB]:P[/SUB]
Sexist woman hater.
This is also basically what every “controversy” boils down to.
Drawing lines in the sand?
…so THIS is how the skeleton war begins.
My “participation” started as a result of being sick as hell during my last week of summer holiday, having all the time in the world to spend on the internet. Quite nasty with all conversation being swept under the rug. If there’s something I partake in regarding the hashtag, it’s mostly signal boosting neutral/positive press, motivational quotes and reporting doxxes. Then there’s the negative press just pouring dirt on everyone in gaming involved, when you could just remember that there’s the veil of internet anonymity where anyone can post anything for giggles.
Like said, I don’t want anyone harmed. But there’s the problem: If it’s smeared in the past, the dirt doesn’t quite come off even if there’s plenty of shining examples of good done in the form of charities and getting third party trolls harassing both sides uncovered. ESPECIALLY if publications don’t report or even are willing to report said deeds due to earlier bias. Could be mistaken for a sign of weakness, actually admitting mistakes or a lack of research.
I don’t quite “get” the “I’m not a racist, but…”-part. It’s quite curious, seeing I try to avoid labels a lot. But in trying to avoid a certain label, you get the opposite plastered on you by others. Lots of examples of “If you’re not a feminist, you’re a dirty MRA” seen when there’s someone with egalitarian views involved. Complex.
When it comes to gaming, gender shouldn’t be an issue. Pass the controller, it won’t judge, condemn or prejudice. Play what you enjoy. I enjoyed Classic RPGs back then, and I do now, which is why ended here, enjoying the company of others with similar views.
The thing to get is you shouldn’t need to put a qualifier like “but” after something abhorrent you claim not to be or not to want.
Thanks Chuh, you still rock. 
“I don’t always drink beer. But when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.”
The thing about the "I’m not a , but…" statement is that whenever somebody says that, generally speaking they’re about to go on a tirade about '’. An example would be “I’m not a booger eater, but I find that boogers taste the best when mixed with a couple flakes of blood and a lot of green flem.”. #askmeabouteatingboogers (stealth edit: #efb)
Ain’t no hatin when I’m doing the love makin
I’m sorry, Trill
.
That’s what your mom said. 