Alison Polk very good points, I guess since im #Gamergate i dont focus on Zoe Quinn at all anymore. We're trying to open Parlay with these sites but they dont want to talk.

September 25, 2014 09:33:15 · Reply

Ross Llewallyn I haven't read the "screed", but I heard that criticism of Quinn that she was an abuser. That was a significant knot in the whole situation. But I find it to be a knot on the side of the issues of harassment and doxxing and whatever other horrible shit was happening. A lot of the connections you're drawing vary significantly in believability. I don't want to dismiss them, but I also think some of it is only bad in the hypothetical mindset of Quinn, which you don't know. You don't know she was co-opting Williams' death. You don't know she was purposefully editing. You don't know how true the screed was (which I know is dangerous territory of disbelieving survivors, but this feels like an exceptional circumstance given the potential motivations of posting and subsequent outcome far beyond abuse awareness). You effectively saying she's playing the victim to whatever degree as well feels as unsubstantiated as when any old MRA says it about a feminist being harassed. I'm open to new information on this, of course, but a lot seems based on speculation from my vantage point right now.

September 25, 2014 20:13:06 · Reply

Kelly Rued Yes, my reaction is definitely speculative. I don't know Zoe Quinn. I don't know any of the public figures I criticize though, and I would agree it's debatable whether anyone has a right to a strong opinion on people they don't really know. But considering we don't even have perfect information about our closest family and friends, it seems all we can do is call things how we see them. The court of public opinion is a rough place to be judged. Everything else aside, I'm mainly annoyed that some people feel a woman is above criticism once they are the victim of internet sexism and harassment. We can talk about people's alleged behavior and their work without vilifying them or abusing them, but not when any negative comment is dismissed as misogyny. My understanding of gamergate is that nobody gives a big whoop about Quinn, but since Rebecca Watson characterized gamergate as starting with the Quinn scandal, I wanted to address how criticism of Quinn has been uniformly reduced to "sexism and harassment" even when it's not. I don't really fault Watson for conflating the Quinn scandal with gamergate because there is so much misinformation out there explaining it exactly how Watson describes it. Gamergate is a movement to defend the gamer identity from what many see as unwarranted stereotyping and blanket condemnation for the actions of a small subset of gamers who behave badly online. Particularly, it seems to demand that game journalists treat their audience with greater esteem and stop with the abusive generalizations that reinforce an outdated idea that gaming is a sexist cis-het-white boy's club pushing hard to keep a small group of brave progressive heroes out of games. Gamers have been cast as villains, seemingly to promote a small group of developers and players as this bold new guard reforming a socially regressive industry. It's a narrative that rings false to a lot of people. As a sex game designer, I'm more interested in the sexual consent/social justice issues around Quinn's scandal than the Gamergate issue, but I also am not comfortable with how people, including Watson here, are conflating the two. It feels like the paternal protective cloak cast over Quinn because she suffered sexist harassment has been extended to protect game journalists who are being called out in gamergate. Related, but not exactly the same issue.

September 25, 2014 23:30:07 · Reply

Ross Llewallyn There could be a lot to unpack here, but I'll leave it at the fact that in all of these situations, I believe miscommunication or misinformation is really common. Subtleties are also frequently lost. I don't condemn all of GamerGate, but a lot of the focus and rhetoric I see is not of the caliber I'd hope to expect when I peer in. I have respectful conversations, but I'm not convinced it's a very good cause when Watson's criticisms don't appear to be strong data points in their minds. However, with all of this I must acknowledge that there is so much content and "required reading" to get the full picture on GG that I'm mostly apathetic (and ignorant). Also, one more thing. It's understandable to be annoyed that a point is being lost in favor of another. But I've learned to accept at least in the short term the benefit of solidarity. If two evolutionists vehemently disagree on punctuated equilibrium versus a linear progression, it's still in their interest to team up against creationists temporarily. I'm only talking practicality right now, and I think it's a shame we often can't handle two or three topics or conflicting data points at once, but when Quinn is getting harassed for no good reason, objecting to her for being potentially abusive seems like very bad timing. It makes you indistinguishable or perceived as supportive of a hurtful cause. But again, these are more tactics and diplomacy than about accuracy.

September 26, 2014 04:39:11 · Reply

Eron Gjoni If you read the "screed" you will find that the author goes orders of magnitude above and beyond providing the level of evidence of most public callouts, precisely because he felt no one would believe him in light of Zoe's status, and his lack thereof.

October 3, 2014 21:52:44 · Reply

Jasper Harris I'm afraid the downfall's been going on since about 2006 when the video games industry became Hollywood 2.0. You get several billions of terrible reskins of the same content (call of duty, to compare with every dumb action film to come out in the last decade), you get overblown budgets for no discernable positive result (Again, call of duty and it's weird boner for skin details), and a general dearth of new ideas because of the industry not wanting to take chances on new creators, leaving few established creators with good ideas. (Compare hideo kojima, etc to the likes of Kubrick, etc.) It's generally become a sham since about the next-gen era when consoles graduated past 64-bit. I'm not writing off all the good games that have come since then, it's just become more of a commercial exploit than it has in the past.

February 12, 2015 04:25:08 · Reply