Feminist Gamer Journalist Targeted For Terrorist Attack

[Unbeatable]

The point is that "We're going to flood you with anonymous rape threats to prove that we're not misogynist" is every bit as stupid as "Death to those who say Islam is not a religion of peace!"

It seems you misunderstand what sorts of goals people intend to achieve when they make threats. No wonder these behaviors seem stupid to you.

 

[Togo]

I think it's worth separating the two different points being made, about two different behaviours.

Yes, two groups making threats against each other means both groups are equally bad to each other. In that sense there is a broad equivalency between gamergaters and antigamergaters .

However, only one of these two groups have sent death and rape threats to female journalists and then failed to condemn that behaviour. Only one of the two groups has attacked a group that has not attacked them back. That is a difference between the two groups, and I feel it's quite a significant one.

 

[Playball40]

The entire premise.

I've watched her videos and I think she supports her points very well.

For the sake of argument, let's concede that she does. But so what? Why are these tropes a bad thing?

For example, she rightly points out most female characters are just props used to motivate the male characters. They have no purpose other than to be a damsel in distress, or a potential sexual conquest, or a possession of sorts that the villain has taken from the hero, which motivates him to seek revenge. Even strong characters like Kerrigan in StarCraft are sacrificed so the guys will get angry and the villains will face their righteous wrath. And the way their bodies are rendered - ye gods, who could stand up straight much less run around with that much fleshy mass protruding out in front? Those ladies are as skinny as sticks and they still can't see their toes.

"Ye gods" is right, but in quite a different way. Since gamers have traditionally been teenage boys and young men, is it any surprise that most video games cater to them and their tastes, including sexualized female form? Is that any different than movies where movies that target younger male audience will show plenty of T&A even when it doesn't strictly fit the plot? However, film is a more mature medium and many different genres have developed, including "chick flicks" - maybe we need "chick games". Yes, the solution is to broaden the gaming landscape, not restrict it to appease feminists. It's funny that liberals/progressives usually celebrate different sexual expressions - female, gay, lesbian, trans, the whole alpha bits thing - except of course for sexual expression of red-blooded straight young men. That is attacked at every turn.

How are these portrayals of women in games any worse than portrayals of men in chick lit? Are men like Mr. Grey or Edward/Jacob or Fabio any more realistic than female characters in video games?
Should a "masculinist literature journalist" be invited to OSU to talk about how horrible it is that teenage girls read the Twilight series or that their mothers read 50 Shades series?

What I see happening is a group of guys who like their gamer-porn

The same kind of feminist that idolizes women like Anita also tends to hate actual porn.

women who dare criticize their taste in dead girlfriend storylines.

Men die in fiction as well, probably in greater numbers than female characters. But they are all fictional characters. If a woman writes a story in which a man dies, should she also be open to attacks of sexism?

I understand why gamers would get upset at attacks by the likes of Anita. How would you feel if your choices in entertainment were attacked all the time and from both sides of the political spectrum?

Out of curiosity, how does Edward/Jacob compare to disproportionally large breasted eye candy in video games? I'm trying to understand your analogy. They are definitely unrealistic in that they are vampires/werewolves, but they aren't particulary unrealistic in body (heck Edward is pretty scrawny - albeit shiny).

Can't speak for Grey as I didn't read them (started to, but they were boring) and found him pretty dickish and uninteresting based on what I did read.

 

[repoman]

It might be the Gay Nigger Association of America that is doing the 3rd party trolling:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_America

 

[RavenSky]

It might be the Gay Nigger Association of America that is doing the 3rd party trolling:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_America

Why do people do shit like this?

 

[Starr]

Just thought I'd post this video, it's quite long, but is actually a dialogue between two prominent people on both sides of the debate. TotalBiscuit would be classified as largely pro-GamerGate, and Stephen Totilo would be classified as largely anti-GamerGate. Totilo sat down with TotalBiscuit for an interview, and I found it quite interesting. I don't agree with Totilo on several points (e.g. the nature of the anti-Gamer articles for instance), but he does make some points I agree with (e.g. in a medium with a large diversity of review sites, I don't think one reviewer taking a game's approach to gender issues into account when scoring it is necessarily bad).

Anyways, if you are at all interested in listening to a civil discussion of these matters between two big players in this controversy, it is well worth it IMO. (It is nearly 2 hours long, but it is a podcast, so you can just listen to it, you don't have to watch the video).

[youtube]MpmIrWqEUUU[/youtube]

 

[ksen]

It might be the Gay Nigger Association of America that is doing the 3rd party trolling:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_America

Why do people do shit like this?

Because it's actually about ethics in game journalism.

 

[Arctish]

Why do people do shit like this?

Because it's actually about ethics in game journalism.

Newsweek magazine looked into the question of whether GamerGate is about ethics in journalism or harassment of women. The results are pretty interesting:

In the following graphic, compare how often GamerGaters tweet at Zoe Quinn, a developer, and Nathan Grayson, a Kotaku games journalist. In August, GamerGaters accused Grayson of giving Quinn’s game Depression Quest favorable reviews because Grayson and Quinn had been in a relationship. The relationship was fact, those ‘favorable reviews’ were fiction. Grayson only wrote about Quinn once, for a story on a failed reality show, and that was before they were in a relationship, according to Stephen Totilo, the editor-in-chief of Kotaku and Grayson’s boss.

Twitter users have tweeted at Quinn using the #GamerGate hashtag 10,400 times since September 1. Grayson has received 732 tweets with the same hashtag during the same period. If GamerGate is about ethics among journalists, why is the female developer receiving 14 times as many outraged tweets as the male journalist?

Totilo has received 1,708 tweets since September 1—more than Grayson but fewer than Leigh Alexander. Alexander got 13,296 tweets, nearly eight times as many as Totilo. And Alexander’s only crime was writing an op-ed critical of so-called gaming culture—GamerGate hasn’t even accused her of any malfeasance.

The discrepancies there seem to suggest GamerGaters cares less about ethics and more about harassing women.

GamerGaters do tweet a lot at the official Kotaku account—more than any individual journalist or editor. That account has been pummeled with 23,500 tweets since September 1. But that number pales in comparison to the tweets received by Brianna Wu, another female game developer who has spoken out against GamerGate, and Anita Sarkeesian, who has been a vocal critic of sexism in gaming. Sarkeesian has been bombarded with 35,188 tweets since September 1, while Wu has gotten 38,952 in the same time period. Combined, these two women have gotten more tweets on the #GamerGate hashtag than all the games journalists Newsweek looked at combined. And, again, neither of them has committed any supposed “ethics” violations. They’re just women who disagree with #GamerGate.

The day Nathan Grayson gets as many angry tweets as Anita Sarkeesian is the day's I'll believe GamerGate is all about ethics in journalism. As things stand today, whatever legitimate criticism of games-related journalism there might be has been completely buried under the misogynist dog-pile on women developers, critics, and gamers. The folks sending the tweets care more about Sarkeeesian's criticism of sexism in the games than they do about Grayson's alleged ethics violations.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

I keep feeling the urge to say to the gamergaters

"We can see you! You do know that, right?"

 

[PJPSYCO]

They want you to see them. That is why they post it to twitter.

 

[Axulus]

Because it's actually about ethics in game journalism.

Newsweek magazine looked into the question of whether GamerGate is about ethics in journalism or harassment of women. The results are pretty interesting:

In the following graphic, compare how often GamerGaters tweet at Zoe Quinn, a developer, and Nathan Grayson, a Kotaku games journalist. In August, GamerGaters accused Grayson of giving Quinn’s game Depression Quest favorable reviews because Grayson and Quinn had been in a relationship. The relationship was fact, those ‘favorable reviews’ were fiction. Grayson only wrote about Quinn once, for a story on a failed reality show, and that was before they were in a relationship, according to Stephen Totilo, the editor-in-chief of Kotaku and Grayson’s boss.

Twitter users have tweeted at Quinn using the #GamerGate hashtag 10,400 times since September 1. Grayson has received 732 tweets with the same hashtag during the same period. If GamerGate is about ethics among journalists, why is the female developer receiving 14 times as many outraged tweets as the male journalist?

Totilo has received 1,708 tweets since September 1—more than Grayson but fewer than Leigh Alexander. Alexander got 13,296 tweets, nearly eight times as many as Totilo. And Alexander’s only crime was writing an op-ed critical of so-called gaming culture—GamerGate hasn’t even accused her of any malfeasance.

The discrepancies there seem to suggest GamerGaters cares less about ethics and more about harassing women.

GamerGaters do tweet a lot at the official Kotaku account—more than any individual journalist or editor. That account has been pummeled with 23,500 tweets since September 1. But that number pales in comparison to the tweets received by Brianna Wu, another female game developer who has spoken out against GamerGate, and Anita Sarkeesian, who has been a vocal critic of sexism in gaming. Sarkeesian has been bombarded with 35,188 tweets since September 1, while Wu has gotten 38,952 in the same time period. Combined, these two women have gotten more tweets on the #GamerGate hashtag than all the games journalists Newsweek looked at combined. And, again, neither of them has committed any supposed “ethics” violations. They’re just women who disagree with #GamerGate.

The day Nathan Grayson gets as many angry tweets as Anita Sarkeesian is the day's I'll believe GamerGate is all about ethics in journalism. As things stand today, whatever legitimate criticism of games-related journalism there might be has been completely buried under the misogynist dog-pile on women developers, critics, and gamers. The folks sending the tweets care more about Sarkeeesian's criticism of sexism in the games than they do about Grayson's alleged ethics violations.

This one comment on the article made some good points:

Having worked with social media and web analytics for several years, I'm a little underwhelmed with your data analysis. Hopefully the report you got from Brandwatch was much more detailed than the summary in this article.

Why is there no timeline to contextualize the relationship of gamergate tweets to media coverage of these people/brands? For example, I would expect discussions of Brianna Wu to spike following her press junket where she alleged her harassers were representative members of gamergate. Since those allegations portrayed the entire movement as hateful harassers, they led to intense discussion of Wu among the thousands of innocent gamers she implicated as a hate group. If analyzing social media mentions for a business client, I'm sure Brandwatch would correlate the data to media campaigns and press mentions in other channels to give some idea of what events triggered these conversations. Without context, it's much harder to understand or speculate why some people were discussed more than others.

People like Grayson and Totilo did not do mainstream press interviews accusing gamergate of being a terrorist/hate group attacking women in games. Maybe that's why they did not generate nearly as much discussion as some of the developers you had Brandwatch look for (we can't really speculate though because you have not presented enough data to make a reasonable claim either way).

Had you really been interested in measuring gamergate's mentions of games press, you might have filtered for Arthur Chu, Ben Kuchera, Sam Biddle, Polygon, Gawker, etc. than a relative unknown like Grayson.

Also you could have filtered for relevant male game developers, like Phil Fish, or filtered for mentions of more famous and influential women developers (Robin Hunicke, Kim Swift, Brenda Romero, Sheri Graner Ray, etc.) who have not publicly accused gamergate of misogyny, harassment, and death threats (which is not to suggest these other women in games don't also feel that gamergate is a hate group, but just that they have not engaged gamergate on Twitter the way Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, Anita Sarkeesian, and Leigh Alexander have). Instead you only filtered for women in the games industry who have been very vocal in their condemnations of gamergate. If gamergate was specifically mentioning women developers mainly because they are women, then we would surely see more famous and influential women developers receiving as much or more gamergate mentions than a relative unknown like Zoe Quinn.

According to Kathy Sierra's Koolaid Point theory, the more famous and influential a woman is, the more she will attract misogynistic harassment and hate so surely we could draw some conclusions about gamergate from analyzing how they often gamergate mentions a few industry-leading, award-winning women developers, some with decades in the business and dozens of published titles. It would at least help us speculate how much of gamergate mentioning women developers is based on a woman simply existing in the game industry, and how much might be related to women condemning and antagonizing gamergaters.

I also wonder if your data is accurate because the brevity of tweets encourages shortened names and gamergaters often use nicknames including cryptic acronyms like ZQ and LW (there are so many snarky terms referring to Zoe Quinn that her mentions may have been much higher than reported here). But from the data presented, who knows.

So yeah, you've got a couple of bar graphs, some aggregate mentions, uncontextualized sentiment analysis, and they're tied neatly together with foregone conclusions. Maybe consider contacting a social scientist instead of relying on a brand monitoring company to correctly analyze a consumer revolt.

 

[lpetrich]

How conveniently cherry-picked.

Though the Gamergaters claim to be attacking corruption in video-game journalism, they have devoted remarkably little attention to big-name journalists and news-media sites that have suspiciously close relationships to big game developers. Instead, they much prefer to attack developers like Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu, and critics like Anita Sarkeesian, and attack them in misogynist and sexualized ways. They don't threaten to rape their male targets in their rear ends with broom handles and then castrate them.

 

[Underseer]

How conveniently cherry-picked.

Though the Gamergaters claim to be attacking corruption in video-game journalism, they have devoted remarkably little attention to big-name journalists and news-media sites that have suspiciously close relationships to big game developers. Instead, they much prefer to attack developers like Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu, and critics like Anita Sarkeesian, and attack them in misogynist and sexualized ways. They don't threaten to rape their male targets in their rear ends with broom handles and then castrate them.

We need to make a placard:

Rape to those who say we are misogynist!

They can hoist it at protests or something.

 

[Joni-san]

How conveniently cherry-picked.

Though the Gamergaters claim to be attacking corruption in video-game journalism, they have devoted remarkably little attention to big-name journalists and news-media sites that have suspiciously close relationships to big game developers.

It seems you haven't heard about Operation Disrespectful Nod (read about it at the KnowYourMeme Gamergate page), which brings attention what journalists do. It has successfully removed advertisers from the likes of Gawker (who own Kotaku) and other sites, due to comments from Gawker employees like Sam Biddle.

 

[Joni-san]

And in regards of harassment? Why not take a look at this.

 

[Togo]

So if the gamergate crowd are this community-focused, and this well organised, then why can't they condemn mysognist attacks by gamergaters on woman?

This is all very nice, but it's not the point.

 

[PJPSYCO]

Look up gamergate harassment patrol. They have already caught multiple harassing accounts and reported them to the FBI.

 

[Togo]

Look up gamergate harassment patrol. They have already caught multiple harassing accounts and reported them to the FBI.

That's great, is there any sign that these attempts have been successful, and that such harassment has stopped?

I appreciate that my sentiments may be frustrating to people. I'm well aware that a lot of activists do a lot of good work, some of them doubtless do it under the gamergate banner. The Klu Klux Klan also did a lot of valuable community work, exposed corruption, and acted as a voice for some of the disenfranchised in the community. It's just that because they were also violent bigots, none of that matters.

 

[PJPSYCO]

I think that I would separate the general good deeds of an organization, and specific deeds related to the supposed problem with that organization. If KKK were to fight racism that would be something.

In this case, the gamergate community is policing harassment(i.e. the KKK is fighting racism). Harassment is the claimed problem with them. A number of the harassing accounts are gone thanks to their efforts. I'd say good job.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

How did the harassment get this far? In such a vast yet evidently well organized and well self-policed community, how did we get to the A section of the Washington Post and people leaving their homes to hide for their lives?