The Gaming Den

Orion wrote:

it hit mainstream news, like CNN. And their coverage of GamerGate was "here's Anita Sarkeesian. She is a woman. She talks about videogames. She gets death threats. GamerGate is a thing. Make of this what you will."

Anita Sarkeesian was a story in her right, though. Some of the same people were harassing her, but as far as I know there were never any allegations that she had anything to do with zoe quinn or with game reviewers. The Quinnspiracy isn't somehow necessary context to understand the Sarkeesian story. A bomb threat on a university event with a controversial speaker is national news. Favor-trading in gaming magazines isn't.

And yet, this was the New York Times article on the subject:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/techn ... .html?_r=0

or the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morn ... -at-event/

So I checked it turns out that the video got taken down on Aug 17th, reuploaded with the video changed 18th and did not appear to have been taken down at any point, Totalbiscuit put up his post on Aug 19th, and the original video got restored on Aug 21st. Note that the audio was the actually meaningful portion. So it wasn't much in the way of censorship, which provides a good reason for why Forbes, The Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, IGN, Gamespy, et. al. opted not to mention it when they covered GamerGate.

Also, while using a screengrab from a game as your background while talking about allegations towards the developer of the game is probably fair use, it is not sufficiently definitely fair use to call it a fake DMCA claim.

Gods fucking damn it . . there was some weeks of quiet time and now this whole bullshit debacle is, once again, the topic of discussion for basically no other reason than "i don't understand what's going on" *hurrr, you are an imbecile because of my e-peen!"

name_here wrote:Also, while using a screengrab from a game as your background while talking about allegations towards the developer of the game is probably fair use, it is not sufficiently definitely fair use to call it a fake DMCA claim.

oh my god please shut the fuck up

You are seriously suggesting that it might not be fair use to a promotional image of the Transformers movies in news coverage of allegations that Michael Bay sacrifices orphans to his dark gods in order to secure the rights necessary to ruin our childhoods. It's fucking stupid and if you were actually bothering to think about what you were saying at all you would immediately see it for the steaming pile of shit that it is. The fact that you can't means that there isn't the faintest fucking inkling of impartiality here and you are just saying whatever the fuck you think will get you from point A to point B, where point A is saying something stupid and point B is anything but admit you said something stupid.

That video should not have been taken down with a DMCA claim. There is no wiggle room for you here, and the only thing that looking for wiggle room will do is establish that you aren't really into that whole "free speech" thing.

@DSM,

You're right of course that false copyright claims are illegal; also, extremely scummy. If I inadvertently implied otherwise, I fucked up. My bad. I was trying to talk about actionable goals for the movement. Responding to one crime is one thing, but I figured that if you wanted to make a difference for the future the best goal would be getting Youtube to change the way they process the DMCA's. I could be wrong about that.

@Kaelik, I don't see the problem. If the story is "Anita is getting all these threats" then "who is sending them?" and "who else is getting them?" are logical follow-up questions. In this case the answers are "people on #gamergate" and "Brianna and Zoe." That's pretty much all you need. It would be nice if you had space to go a level deeper and look at "where did these assholes come from?", but if the answer is "some guys were mad at a person who is not Anita over an issue Anita was not involved in and which you, dear viewer, do not care about," I don't blame them for cutting it. Or to put it another way, I count 5 pieces of information.

1: GamerGate was kicked off by Gjoni v Quinn
2: A handful of "gamergaters" are worried about the incestuous culture of game journalism
3: a bunch of assholes calling themselves GamerGaters are threatening to rape everybody
4: Sarkeesian is a target
5: There are other targets, such as Brianna and Quinn

Which of the 5 would you consider essential for a natoinal news story? Which points have I missed that you would include? Personally, I think 3+4 and 3+4+5 are valid stories in their own right.

EDIT: @DSM again,

I just worked out what bugs me about your OWS analogy. OWS was inherently a national concern. No matter which side of OWS they reported, they'd be reporting on something people needed to know about. You heard different agendas from different protesters, but they all *had* agendas that would affect the viewer if implemented. Therefore, fair national coverage needed to address the wide ranged of viewpoints.

GamerGate isn't like that. Anti-GG folks are tapped in to an issue that effects everyone -- the threats and harassment aimed at female public figures. The reasonable GamerGater just doesn't have an issue that works as a national platform.

Orion wrote:@Kaelik, I don't see the problem. If the story is "Anita is getting all these threats" then "who is sending them?" and "who else is getting them?" are logical follow-up questions. In this case the answers are "people on #gamergate" and "Brianna and Zoe." That's pretty much all you need. It would be nice if you had space to go a level deeper and look at "where did these assholes come from?", but if the answer is "some guys were mad at a person who is not Anita over an issue Anita was not involved in and which you, dear viewer, do not care about," I don't blame them for cutting it. Or to put it another way, I count 5 pieces of information.

1: GamerGate was kicked off by Gjoni v Quinn
2: A handful of "gamergaters" are worried about the incestuous culture of game journalism
3: a bunch of assholes calling themselves GamerGaters are threatening to rape everybody
4: Sarkeesian is a target
5: There are other targets, such as Brianna and Quinn

Which of the 5 would you consider essential for a natoinal news story? Which points have I missed that you would include? Personally, I think 3+4 and 3+4+5 are valid stories in their own right.

So you are now backtracking from the one actually sane thing you have said, that people who make threats against women are not just by that fact alone, related to gamersgate, and you are now telling me that a college student makes an email threat about a speech at his college, in which he never at any point mentions gamergate or journalism, and the person being threatened never at any point mentions gamersgate or journalism, and your conclusion is that this person is obviously representative of gamersgate? So much so that articles about this event with absolutely no relation to gamersgate are titled "Gamersgate: Threat that has no connection to GamersGate."

How is that not literally the dumbest thing you could possibly say to those articles?

I mean fuck, do you think the New York Times should title articles "The Left: World Trade Centers Destroyed in Terrorist Attack."

EDIT: You know what, Fuck you. You are just a lying shitfuck anyway. You are saying things like:

1) A handful of protesters are talking about taxes on the wealthy.
2) A bunch of assholes are murdering people for money and calling themselves OWS.


and 4 and 5 are you just lying your fucking ass off, since the threats against Sarkeesian are completely fucking unrelated in any way at all to the threats against Brianna Wu, and in fact, started years before gamersgate even existed by people who were very obviously not related to gamersgate.

Orion wrote:You're right of course that false copyright claims are illegal; also, extremely scummy. If I inadvertently implied otherwise, I fucked up. My bad. I was trying to talk about actionable goals for the movement. Responding to one crime is one thing, but I figured that if you wanted to make a difference for the future the best goal would be getting Youtube to change the way they process the DMCA's. I could be wrong about that.

When TotalBiscuit had his Day One: Garry's Incident review DMCA'd off the face of the internet, that particular battle got fought in the court of public opinion. TotalBiscuit won, and you can go watch his original review right now. The fact is that our laws are rigged in favor of whoever makes the claim, and until you can buy some senators to listen to you about how we need to reform them and bust up the RIAA and MPAA and co. you can't do shit except shout about it on the internet. And thankfully, TotalBiscuit has something like a million subscribers, so just throwing up a youtube video on his channel (which is what he did) gives him access to a fairly substantial amount of internet to shout on. Bullshit nobodies on youtube don't have that luxury, but here's the thing - they have the same rights, and deserve the exact same access to our collective outrage. Because that's literally the only protection they've got. We actually do live in a world where the free speech of the little people basically hinges on yelling at abusers when they cross the line. That's fucked up. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. And telling us we shouldn't call bullshit when we see it and instead talk about reform is just a weird incarnation of the nirvana fallacy. Not to mention you can and should just do both; call out bullshit abuses and call for reform.

Orion wrote:Anita stuff

Again, I love my civil rights examples. Everybody knows who the good guys and the bad guys are in those examples.

Black supremacists were a real thing during the African-American Civil Rights Movement. They wore a lot of the same labels and supported a lot of the same causes as everyone else that was a part of the movement, but in addition to that some of them just straight up murdered white people because. So tell me how you'd feel about someone covering those murders as though they reflected negatively on the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. I'm pretty sure you're going to say "that'd be bullshit," which is good, because that is the only correct answer.

But also, that stuff Kaelik is saying. Sarkeesian has been getting threats (yes, even directed at speaking/award/whatever events in which she is participating) her entire career. A bunch of angry misogynists telling her to get raped and die is basically what made her famous. Nothing about the speech she was given nor the threat she received were linked to GamerGate in anyway except that "they were two things that happened contemporarily." And given the regularity with which Sarkeesian receives death threats it's pretty fucking difficult to even derive meaning from that. But news coverage treated them as one and the same. Funny that.

Orion wrote:I just worked out what bugs me about your OWS analogy. OWS was inherently a national concern. No matter which side of OWS they reported, they'd be reporting on something people needed to know about. You heard different agendas from different protesters, but they all *had* agendas that would affect the viewer if implemented. Therefore, fair national coverage needed to address the wide ranged of viewpoints.

GamerGate isn't like that. Anti-GG folks are tapped in to an issue that effects everyone -- the threats and harassment aimed at female public figures. The reasonable GamerGater just doesn't have an issue that works as a national platform.

That is... gibberish. I don't know what you're trying to establish. Back to civil rights examples; if more people in the United States give a fuck about the Jewish than Palestinians (they do), does that mean any and all news coverage of anti-Israeli protests should highlight antisemitic elements (they do)? No, no it fucking doesn't. You don't actually get to sleight-of-hand slander movements by shining the spotlight on the worst examples. What Israel is doing is terrible, and the fact that more people are interested in making sure god's chosen are prepared to bomb those heathens than holding them accountable is the problem, not the justification.

DSMatticus wrote: You are seriously suggesting that it might not be fair use to a promotional image of the Transformers movies in news coverage of allegations that Michael Bay sacrifices orphans to his dark gods in order to secure the rights necessary to ruin our childhoods. It's fucking stupid and if you were actually bothering to think about what you were saying at all you would immediately see it for the steaming pile of shit that it is. The fact that you can't means that there isn't the faintest fucking inkling of impartiality here and you are just saying whatever the fuck you think will get you from point A to point B, where point A is saying something stupid and point B is anything but admit you said something stupid..

Oh fuck you. If you had bothered to spend five fucking minutes looking into fair use before not merely saying that the video is fair use but that it is impossible for any reasonable person to honestly believe it is not, you might possibly understand why "a video that uses a promotional image under copyright" and "a video that consists entirely of an audio track over an image under copyright" are not the same thing and would not necessarily be treated the same in terms of fair use.

Hey, dumbass; in both cases, the amount and value of the original work incorporated into the new work is exactly the fucking same (almost nothing), and the extent to which the value of the new work derives from attempts to serve as a replacement for the original work is exactly the fucking same (not at all). Whether you use the still for five seconds or five minutes, it remains completely true that A) that still is not a large or important portion of the original work, and B) the value of the new work is derived entirely from the commentary. And it didn't take five minutes to research that, because I already knew that the quantity of the original work you use (and the relative importance of the portions you use) and the extent to which your new work is intended to (or able to) serve as a replacement for the original work are both incredibly pertinent to fair use claims. Because unlike you, I actually give enough fucks about these things to know what they mean before talking about them.

Your consistent stupidity on this topic does not give you any grounds to act indignant when I heap piles of scorn you. I have never seen anyone so enthusiastically attempt to weaponize their own ignorance. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about and that means you shouldn't be talking. It is really that simple. There's no secret insight you're stumbling on; you're just fumbling in the dark shitting on free speech because you don't know any better and don't want to have been wrong on the internet.

name here, in a text review that includes a still image from a movie or video game, how many minutes does the page have to be open to the reader before it retroactively stops being fair use in your world? If there is no amount of time when that happens, will you admit that the thing you just said is extremely retarded?

-Username17

DSMatticus, there have been so many corruption scandals in game journalism before and after Zoe Quinn on both sides of the Zoe Quinn fence that didn't get a thousandth of the publicity Gamergate did. If you think the misogynists are a minority and everyone else is just reeeeeally concerned about Ethics In Game Journalism, your head is so deep in your ass that it's in your mouth again, somehow. Here's some bullshit trotted out as Gamer Bill of Rights. Note that Gamergate is presented by its supporters as a conflict between AAA games such as God of War and "SJW games" such as Gone Home, while obviously corruption exists in both indie and AAA markets. Furthermore, they propose that

retards wrote:We suggest fans of Gone Home review Gone Home —and fans of God of War Review God of War.

which is literally the opposite of ethical journalism. Gamergate has been a pile of misogynist bullshit which uses "bawww Zoe Quinn did something unethical that one time" as a shield from its very beginning. Because if the masses were truly super ethical, maligned by a small number of asshats, you'd have heard a comparable volume of protest in response to every other instance of things you claim Gamergate opposes happening.

Oh, god, Starmaker, everything you just said was stupid. Every single thing.

Starmaker wrote:DSMatticus, there have been so many corruption scandals in game journalism before and after Zoe Quinn on both sides of the Zoe Quinn fence that didn't get a thousandth of the publicity Gamergate did.

The media's handling of the Mass Effect 3 scandal, Doritogate, and even all the way back to the Kane and Lynch firings are considered precursors to Gamergate by its supporters on 8chan and Reddit. Haven't really checked the Escapist for a while, but I'm guessing they think the same over there, too. These scandals happened, people got angry, they raged about it, and after a few weeks they forgot about it, why? Because no one was stupid enough to try and censor things. Once censorship got rolling in a big way, and once that censorship demonstrated a reach no one had previously thought possible, people got scared rather than just angry and started banding together to find a way to fight back. No one cares about Zoe Quinn anymore. For a longass time her nickname was Literally Who because they repeated the meme that she's not important over and over and over again until it finally sunk in. On the frontpage of /r/KotakuInAction, gamergate's Reddit headquarters, there are exactly zero posts about Zoe Quinn on the front page right now. Even Anita Sarkeesian, the only one of those people who actually receives any significant amount of attention, is universally jointly condemned along with Jonathan McIntosh as one of two equally repulsive partners, or often as the pawn of McIntosh's agenda.

Here's some bullshit trotted out as Gamer Bill of Rights.

The Gamer Bill of Rights was almost universally condemned when it was released because Gamergate had an extremely strong opposition to having any specific list of demands or particular set of leaders. The explanation for why these were bad were part of the default OP copy/paste on 4chan and later 8chan for over a month. The Gamer Bill of Rights is not only not representative of all of Gamergate, it is specifically condemned by large sections of it. It is difficult to say if those large sections are a majority, however considering how few people I have seen defending it (specifically, none) it seems likely.

Note that Gamergate is presented by its supporters as a conflict between AAA games such as God of War and "SJW games" such as Gone Home,

What? No it isn't. When asked why corruption in AAA markets isn't being attacked, the answer has typically been either that people are hoping that the momentum from bringing down indie corruption will spiral into a campaign against the AAA industry or else that we're focusing on indie corruption because the AAA industry is, unfortunately, far beyond our capability to meaningfully oppose.

Furthermore, they propose that

retards wrote:We suggest fans of Gone Home review Gone Home —and fans of God of War Review God of War.

which is literally the opposite of ethical journalism.

And while the Gamer Bill of Rights is still not something that speaks for all of Gamergate nor, so far as any evidence I have seen suggests, even a particularly large fraction of it, this specific demand isn't even unreasonable. Fans of God of War are not the same as people who've been paid off by God of War, or people who blindly support God of War. Fans of Star Wars criticize the Hell out of the prequels all the time, fans of Devil May Cry hated the reboot, fans of Mass Effect 3 savaged the ending, but they attacked these games for failing to be what it is rather than failing to be what it isn't.

Note that they also declare that Gone Home should exist and be reviewed, it's just something that should be shilled towards its own target audience. Many people felt like they'd been duped because lots of perfect reviews refused to explain what Gone Home was about, saying that would spoil it, and instead just described it as super deep and moving. It wasn't, it was just some 90s nostalgia wrapped up in a decent-but-not-great forbidden love story whose big happy ending is a new recruit going AWOL to run away to Mexico with her high school girlfriend, and apparently we're supposed to be super happy that our younger sister just set herself up for disaster.

Because if the masses were truly super ethical, maligned by a small number of asshats, you'd have heard a comparable volume of protest in response to every other instance of things you claim Gamergate opposes happening.

It's amazing how consistently people insist that if Gamergate were really about ethics it would oppose X, completely unaware that Gamergate does in fact totally oppose X. The latest big scandal that everyone in Gamergate circles is talking about? Target and KMart removing GTA V from their shelves in Australia, another censorship issue (with a side dish of digging through GJP site archives for hypocritical condemnations of Jack Thompson's attempts to make this happen in ages past, and declarations that a new Jack Thompson has arisen and this time he (or she, exactly who the new Jack Thompson is varies from person to person) has infiltrated the industry to destroy it from within). Well, that and how Poole looks like he's about ready to completely nuke /pol/ from the face of 4chan, which means 8chan is about to get a whole lot of unsavory refugees.

Starmaker wrote:DSMatticus, there have been so many corruption scandals in game journalism before and after Zoe Quinn on both sides of the Zoe Quinn fence that didn't get a thousandth of the publicity Gamergate did.

Starmaker wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:I've often wondered why the anti-sex arm of feminism gets upset about one thing and not at another. I'm pretty sure it's "for no reason". The books, movies, video games, and table top games that get mini crusades shaking their fist about their objectification of women appears on first, second, and third look to be wholly random. And I think that's the actual answer: it is random.

It *is* random, because there's every reason for mini-crusades to work like every other internet meme under the sun. Some get popular enough for you to hear about them. Others don't. A campaign is made up of many individual, randomly interconnected expressions of outrage, and sometimes the flame of righteous anger just doesn't ignite.

Personally, I think the Starmaker of August 2013 has a much better point than the Starmaker of December 2014 - such a better point that I actually remembered you were the one to post that even though it is a year and four months old. I also think the Starmaker of December 2014 should read this.

Starmaker wrote:Here's some bullshit trotted out as Gamer Bill of Rights.

Here's Camille Paglia. I'm sure you totally agree with her on everything ever and don't think she is a shitbag. After all, you're both wearing the feminist label. Probably different adjectives, but it's all just one big camp, you know?

And of course, the fact that the Gamers' Bill of Rights is a little-known document made by who-gives-a-fuck and spread by a subset of the movement that has only existed for one month (maybe two? Not actually positive on that one) of this four month clusterfuck really couldn't possibly mean that it isn't actually representative of the movement as a whole. Not at all.

FrankTrollman wrote:name here, in a text review that includes a still image from a movie or video game, how many minutes does the page have to be open to the reader before it retroactively stops being fair use in your world? If there is no amount of time when that happens, will you admit that the thing you just said is extremely retarded?

-Username17

That's a review, so it is definitely fair use.

Also, see, I haven't actually been arguing that this wasn't fair use. DSMatticus has said that Zoe Quinn illegally used IP law, which requires that she not have been acting in good faith. Not just that the video was fair use, but that Zoe Quinn in fact believed it was definitely fair use when making the claim. Since, in point of fact, MundaneMatt publically said that it was a debatable point when the claim was filed, it seems there is at least one person who held a good-faith belief that it might be in question.

But I suppose the question of whether Zoe Quinn was one of them will be decided by the court case. Since Gamergate is a rather large movement and it's primarily about that DMCA claim, there totally is one, right? Sure, there's the broader issue of censorship, but winning the case would help get notice.

="Chamomile"What? No it isn't. When asked why corruption in AAA markets isn't being attacked, the answer has typically been either that people are hoping that the momentum from bringing down indie corruption will spiral into a campaign against the AAA industry or else that we're focusing on indie corruption because the AAA industry is, unfortunately, far beyond our capability to meaningfully oppose.

People are actually that stupid? Anyone who thinks they can hurt the powers that be by or after stomping the little guy is a tool of the powers that be.

EDIT: Since name_here and I are arguing *against* the same people I should probably explicitly say that I'm not interested in this derail into copyright minutiae.

name_here wrote:That's a review, so it is definitely fair use.

Once again, you have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. If your review contains substantive portions of the property it's reviewing, it's entirely possible that it will not be considered fair use. If a review gets a pass, it is specifically because the value of the review is in the commentary and the portion of the original work within the review is not enough to serve as a replacement for the work itself. Exactly like I described, you fucking moron, because the standards are almost exactly the same.

name_here wrote:Also, see, I haven't actually been arguing that this wasn't fair use. DSMatticus has said that Zoe Quinn illegally used IP law, which requires that she not have been acting in good faith. Not just that the video was fair use, but that Zoe Quinn in fact believed it was definitely fair use when making the claim. Since, in point of fact, MundaneMatt publically said that it was a debatable point when the claim was filed, it seems there is at least one person who held a good-faith belief that it might be in question.

You don't know what good faith means. "I don't understand what fair use is, didn't google it, didn't contact a lawyer, and filed a DMCA claim" is not good faith any more than "I blindfolded myself and got in a car, but I didn't mean to run over all those children" is not not negligent. And I really don't give a fuck what MundaneMatt thinks the law is and I don't know why you do. You do understand that there are women who have been raped and will claim that they weren't raped because they were too drunk to resist which is in fact the thing that made it rape? Unsurprisingly, being a victim does not magically give you special insight into what constitutes victimization or even mean your opinions aren't dumb or terrible. It means a bad thing happened to you; end of story.

name here wrote:But I suppose the question of whether Zoe Quinn was one of them will be decided by the court case. Since Gamergate is a rather large movement and it's primarily about that DMCA claim, there totally is one, right? Sure, there's the broader issue of censorship, but winning the case would help get notice.

I'm just going to say it; you are an incredibly shitty person. By your reasoning, TotalBiscuit should have resolved his experience with a malicious DMCA claim by spending years and hundreds of thousands of dollars soldiering through unfavorable courts only to maybe finally be vindicated long after the public's attention span wore out, and because he didn't do that we shouldn't take his whining about it seriously. Fuck you. No, really, fuck you. You're terrible. You're awful. You are literally taunting people about the fact that defending their fair use right of free speech in a court of law is so expensive and difficult it simply isn't an option for them. You're a scumbag. Just shut the fuck up and let Orion and Starmaker handle it; they're smarter than you and their opinions aren't as disgustingly abhorrent.

You're done. Stop talking.

Orion wrote:

="Chamomile"What? No it isn't. When asked why corruption in AAA markets isn't being attacked, the answer has typically been either that people are hoping that the momentum from bringing down indie corruption will spiral into a campaign against the AAA industry or else that we're focusing on indie corruption because the AAA industry is, unfortunately, far beyond our capability to meaningfully oppose.

People are actually that stupid? Anyone who thinks they can hurt the powers that be by or after stomping the little guy is a tool of the powers that be.

EDIT: Since name_here and I are arguing *against* the same people I should probably explicitly say that I'm not interested in this derail into copyright minutiae.

Works for the pro-censorship side. Slap down some minor indies noone gives a shit about with malicious DMCA notices and pretty soon you have a precedent you can use on large sites.

-Username17

DSM,

Here's my problem with your Paglia analogy: not all labels are equally valuable. It's worth fighting harder for control of labels that mean more. Feminism is a social movement that is decades old and has notable legal and social accomplishments. Camille is disingenuously trying to mooch off the credibility built up by decades of activism. It's worth trying to shut her down, worth defending the integrity of the label, and *possible* to prove she doesn't belong by contrasting her beliefs with the actual feminist achievements. The GamerGate label is less than 6 months old, has no notable accomplishments, and the label was created by someonin whose face you believe it should be legal to spit. What do you lose by cutting your losses and starting over with a new label?

Frank,

FrankTrollman wrote:Works for the pro-censorship side. Slap down some minor indies noone gives a shit about with malicious DMCA notices and pretty soon you have a precedent you can use on large sites.
-Username17

That's not how precedent works. Big corps don't play by the same rules as small corps. The only precedent for slapping down one big corp is slapping down another big corp. Fights against small corps don't mean shit.

Orion wrote:

="Chamomile"What? No it isn't. When asked why corruption in AAA markets isn't being attacked, the answer has typically been either that people are hoping that the momentum from bringing down indie corruption will spiral into a campaign against the AAA industry or else that we're focusing on indie corruption because the AAA industry is, unfortunately, far beyond our capability to meaningfully oppose.

People are actually that stupid? Anyone who thinks they can hurt the powers that be by or after stomping the little guy is a tool of the powers that be.

You will note the second portion. But, honestly, I think the people informed enough to give a fuck about GamerGate one way or the other stopped giving a fuck about the integrity of the AAA scene long ago. No one familiar with the state of the industry trusts or cares about what IGN or GameSpot have to say. I think everyone hopes that the indie scene and youtubers will be the future of games journalism, and from that angle trying to hammer integrity into the system now makes perfect sense.

Orion wrote:EDIT: Since name_here and I are arguing *against* the same people I should probably explicitly say that I'm not interested in this derail into copyright minutiae.

Look; I don't have the contempt for you that I do for name_here, but calling it copyright minutiae will get you there pretty quickly. Name_here isn't arguing copyright minutiae with us, he is adopting positions which are offensively disenfranchising to anyone who doesn't have access to their own legal department and he is supporting those positions with a willful ignorance about the elementary fundamentals of copyright. It deserves piles of scorn and public shaming from all sides, because if there's one thing every decent person should be able to agree on it's that fair use is awesome and the people who shit on it aren't. And his stubborn determination to find an excuse that will stick (there isn't one) just makes him look really, really bad.

Orion wrote:Here's my problem with your Paglia analogy: not all labels are equally valuable. It's worth fighting harder for control of labels that mean more. Feminism is a social movement that is decades old and has notable legal and social accomplishments. Camille is disingenuously trying to mooch off the credibility built up by decades of activism. It's worth trying to shut her down, worth defending the integrity of the label, and *possible* to prove she doesn't belong by contrasting her beliefs with the actual feminist achievements. The GamerGate label is less than 6 months old, has no notable accomplishments, and the label was created by someonin whose face you believe it should be legal to spit. What do you lose by cutting your losses and starting over with a new label?

Orion, you very clearly get your talking points from the exact websites trying to make GamerGate disappear because it was criticizing them. The call to "move the ethics to a new label" came from the same detractors who said "nothing about GamerGate has to do with ethics." It's completely fucking contradictory. "There is nothing good about X. Also, if you move all the good stuff in X to Y we'll start listening."

It was very specifically an attempt to convince the movement to kneecap itself by unilaterally demanding that if it wanted to be taken seriously it should sacrifice all the momentum and public attention it had earned behind one label and splinter into impotence attempting to rebrand itself. It was not a good faith request; it was a request to self-destruct. Well, no, let me rephrase; no one ever thought the movement would relabel. It was an attempt to give people like you talking points you could drag into arguments like this, by claiming that because GamerGate didn't self-destruct they clearly didn't want to be taken seriously and it's all their fault anyway so fuck 'em. Everything about that request was disingenuous and you absolutely should not take it seriously.

Even if GamerGate had successfully rebranded, literally nothing would have changed. The assholes would have tagged along for the opportunity to continue being assholes and the people who weren't assholes would have kept making the same points and the media would have kept shining the spotlight on the assholes and ignoring everyone else. Nothing would have changed. It was an ultimatum to be ignored or give up a bunch of ground and continue being ignored. For fuck's sake, "ethics in video game journalism" is now a derogatory meme for GamerGaters! And you are suggesting that by rebranding themself to something "less tainted with misogyny" people would have taken them more seriously? Hahaha no. Obviously not.

Sorry, let me be clearer: I don't support Name-Here's attempt to derail the conversation by disingenuously quibbling about the wording of copyright laws in order to deflect attention from censorship.

Meanwhile, my stance of gamergate isn't condradictory, it's arguing in the alternative. I don't believe any significant number of posters on #gamergate actually care about ethics, but I also believe that if they do exist they should stop posting on #gamergate.

EDIT: I don't get my talking points from the gaming sites targeted by gaters. I get them from the internet SJW mafia. I'm trying to be even-handed, but those are the first sources I read on this.

People are actually that stupid? Anyone who thinks they can hurt the powers that be by or after stomping the little guy is a tool of the powers that be.

See, I agree that they're wrong, but the ultimate conclusion you're taking away is absurd. If corruption is stamped out of the indie scene and indie journalism becomes transparent, honest, and pro-consumer, how does that help the AAA industry's corrupt elements at all? It doesn't, it just carves out a safe haven where some small portion of the industry can survive free from corruption. And no, that isn't likely to spin itself off into something that can take down juggernauts, but it's a noble goal unto itself and in no way harmful to indie devs who want their works to stand on their own merits and not on that of their connections. Those people aren't pawns of the AAA scene because the AAA scene does not meaningfully win if Gamergate wins, and the fact that you think this is an indie vs. AAA fight rather than a struggle for the soul of indie gaming fought entirely between different indies is another sign that you're taking your information about Gamergate purely from Gamergate's opposition.

The GamerGate label is less than 6 months old, has no notable accomplishments,

The Escapist, as well as all the rest of Defy Media, have updated ethics policies in response to GamerGate. The Fine Young Capitalists were able to fund a feminist game jam (which Zoe Quinn previously tried to kill because she misunderstood their trans policy and then doubled down when the misunderstanding was pointed out to her) thanks in large part to Gamergate's donations and spreading of awareness, and Gamergate has donated over $100,000 to various charitable causes since the hashtag began. The FTC is releasing new guidelines about native advertising, something which coincidentally Gamergate had been targeting Gawker Media for in the weeks immediately before the FTC made the announcement. The list of advertisers who've pulled out from advertising for Gawker and Gamasutra due to Gamergate emailing campaigns is too long to be named off the top of my head. These aren't sweeping victories that promise the end of corruption forever, but to say they aren't notable at all is blatantly disingenuous, particularly for a movement that is 4 months old.

Orion wrote:I don't believe any significant number of posters on #gamergate actually care about ethics, but I also believe that if they do exist they should stop posting on #gamergate.

And the second part of that is exactly that terrible bullshit ultimatum I described.

As for the primary constituency of GG, well... I'm going to state the obvious. Your sources about what GG "is" are the journalists GG criticized. Your sources are the people who were vocally and publicly pissed off that TotalBiscuit took a stance against censorship. You admitted walking into this conversation that I managed to tell you a bunch of things you did not previously know (presumably concerning the DMCA bullshit) because your sources did not tell you that. Your sources are the same people who demanded that if GG wanted to be taken seriously it had to stop talking about Zoe Quinn entirely - even though she was clearly in the wrong and the community of journalists and developers were clearly in the wrong for defending her as they had. And as someone who actually paid attention to those threads back when the only real place to talk about GG was 4chan, I can tell you the community overwhelmingly honored those requests by shouting down everyone who mentioned her, which is something you also aren't even aware of because your sources are the ones who made those demands and refused to acknowledge that they were being honored. Instead, they published articles of screenshots containing posts obvious trollposts which were deleted within minutes for containing threats. And hilariously, if you were to have checked the actual thread you would have seen a dozen responses boiling down to "STFU and GTFO." Which, of course, isn't something they chose to include in their screenshots.

The entire fucking point is that the media coverage of GG was supremely fucking dishonest. That is basically the only thing the entire movement agrees on, and they are absolutely right on that count.

Chamomile wrote:See, I agree that they're wrong, but the ultimate conclusion you're taking away is absurd. If corruption is stamped out of the indie scene and indie journalism becomes transparent, honest, and pro-consumer, how does that help the AAA industry's corrupt elements at all?...you think this is an indie vs. AAA fight rather than a struggle for the soul of indie gaming fought entirely between different indies

First: If the FTC actually does something about gamergateEDIT: about native advertising, that is legitimately awesome. That's very heartening news. I'm going to have to take some time to process that.

Second: I'm not convinced that this is "fought entirely between indies." I've seen gamergate folks listing off indie games they hate, but I haven't seen them listing indie games they hate. Just as right-wing assholes who aren't gamers at all are now trying to climb on board, I assume that asshole gamers who don't play indies at all have been in this from the beginning.

Third: GamerGate people are going after bother news sites and developers. You're right to say that what happens with kotaku or the escapist doesn't matter to AAA's, but they're also throwing around fraud allegations and other shit about Patreon campaigns and indie fundraising. If they succeed in making fundraising harder (which they might, because crowdfunding sites hate bad press), then there are fewer indie games.

EDIT: I'm having trouble finding a source on FTC action. Can you link me?

DSM,

In addition to SJW sources, my understanding of what gamergate is "about" are also informed by the gamegate yahoos who pop up on my Facebook.

DSMatticus wrote:Your sources are the same people who demanded that if GG wanted to be taken seriously it had to stop talking about Zoe Quinn entirely - even though she was clearly in the wrong and the community of journalists and developers were clearly in the wrong for defending her as they had.

This still seems reasonable to me. Look, creators are notoriously touchy people and make stupid attempts to control coverage about them all the time. People who are being personally slandered by ex-lovers are liable to flip out and do stuff they shouldn't. This is not an institutional problem, it's a part of human nature that can't be solved. What can be solved is the way our institutions handle these situations. The scandal isn't the fact that Zoe filed a fake DMCA, it's that YouTube went with it. It's not that she asked websites to pull articles, it's that the websites did pull those articles. Maybe Zoe Quinn is a shitty person, but she's still not a journalist and talking shit about her is a distraction from talking about ethics in journalism.

The plural of anecdote is not data. We are probably never going to have any sort of reliable analysis of what GG looks like, and the only thing I can tell you is that it sure as fuck wasn't the things those articles said it was.

But a really important aside; this shit doesn't look like it did two months ago. Unsurprisingly, when the media overwhelming equates X with misogyny, X has a fuckton harder time recruiting and retaining members who aren't misogynists. You really can just poison the well and shame people into abandoning ship until the lies you've been telling all along become truths. I really have no doubt that with every passing day the average GamerGater is a little more misogynistic than the day before, because they lost the media battle as hard as it is possible to lose a media battle and they have essentially been locked out of appealing to egalitarians even on the censorship issue. Because "everyone knows" it is and always has been just a bunch of misogynists.

But similarly important aside; I also have no doubt that some nontrivial number of egalitarians who signed up on the censorship issue are now card-carrying conservative shitstains. Because get this; if you take the podium as a feminist and tell people standing up against censorship makes them a misogynist, they will question the integrity of the label and the cause. The best case scenario is you get someone like Dean, who (AFAIK) is on the right side of all the important egalitarian issues but is uncomfortable calling himself a feminist. The worst case scenario is you get someone far less informed and far more reactionary who declares "sexism is over; stop whining."

The best outcome for feminism here really was "a bunch of heads metaphorically roll." It is absolutely not a good thing that feminist cred got burned protecting Zoe Quinn from criticism and it is absolutely not a good thing that feminist cred got expended protecting the jobs of those who rushed to her defense. Tribalism is fucking harmful.

EDIT: I think you edited in a bit I missed but want to respond to.

Orion wrote:This still seems reasonable to me. Look, creators are notoriously touchy people and make stupid attempts to control coverage about them all the time. People who are being personally slandered by ex-lovers are liable to flip out and do stuff they shouldn't. This is not an institutional problem, it's a part of human nature that can't be solved. What can be solved is the way our institutions handle these situations. The scandal isn't the fact that Zoe filed a fake DMCA, it's that YouTube went with it. It's not that she asked websites to pull articles, it's that the websites did pull those articles. Maybe Zoe Quinn is a shitty person, but she's still not a journalist and talking shit about her is a distraction from talking about ethics in journalism.

1) If you murder your cheating lover in a fit of jealous rage, that's not okay because it was a poor decision made under emotional stress. You still did, in fact, fuck up. You didn't fuck up as much as someone who's been planning their revenge for months, but you still did fuck up. Zoe Quinn isn't off the hook because she made a poor decision in the heat of the moment; she bare minimum has to fucking acknowledge and apologize for her poor decision. Which she very specifically did not do.

2) If you defend someone who murdered their cheating lover in a fit of jealous rage by suggesting that anyone who is upset with them for doing so is a misogynist/misandrist, you're a disgusting asshole. Murdering your cheating lover is not okay, and calling foul when someone murders their cheating lover is not an act of prejudice in anyway. Similarly, when the community rushed to defend Zoe Quinn from any and all criticism by painting her detractors with the broad brush of misogyny, that made them a bunch of disgusting assholes who are completely worthy of criticism.

3) You're still running with the Nirvana fallacy. Yes, it would be better if it were harder to abuse IP laws. If I ever have enough money to buy my own senator, I'll work on that. But hey, I'm still going to fucking yell at people who abuse IP laws. For example; I think it's fucking appalling that we didn't throw a bunch of bankers in prison for the last economic crisis, and I also believe in reforming our laws and systems to make what they did harder. Those aren't in anyway exclusive.

Orion wrote: Second: I'm not convinced that this is "fought entirely between indies." I've seen gamergate folks listing off indie games they hate, but I haven't seen them listing indie games they hate.

Relevant 8chan thread. There's a lot of praise for the Stanley Parable and a fair number of people actually say that Gone Home is overpriced or that the narration was too hamhanded (besides me, I mean, though I do have a few posts in that thread) and would give it a solid 7 or 8/10. While there are undoubtedly some indie haters jumping on this bandwagon, it is demonstrably true that there are a lot of GamerGate supporters who like indie games and are in this to fight for indie devs' right to go on making them how they like, without having to kowtow to the political ideology and/or personal whims of a clique who controls the indie scene.

Third: GamerGate people are going after bother news sites and developers.

Which developers? With the exception of Phil Fish and Tim Schafer, who are condemned mostly for 1) being involved in the clique and therefore succeeding not off their own merits but off their connections and 2) failing to actually produce any good games since their one-hit wonders (Fez and Psychonauts, respectively), I can't think of any devs who've fallen under fire. I might be missing a few, but unless significant portions of GamerGate are attacking devs for reasons that don't include screwing other devs out of a fair shake at gaining an audience, there's nothing really there.

Spite for Patreon and Kickstarter is a thing and it is somewhat worrisome, but it is far from a universal complaint. Most of the time when someone condemns Kickstarter or Patreon as a whole people will speak up to defend the idea of crowdfunding in principle, including Total Biscuit, who supported Jim Sterling's move to Patreon even while condemning "welfare for hipsters."

EDIT for FTC stuff:

These are the links. It's nothing you can verify yourself, but an awful lot of people would have to be duped or lying, since this has been verified by multiple people all of whom have incentive to quash false rumors. In any case, we'll know for sure in a few months ("early next year") when they actually announce the clarifications they're making towards native advertising. Or if we get to May-ish and that still hasn't happened.

EDIT 2 for DSMatticus: It's true we're probably never going to have an accurate picture of what GG really looks like, but my impressions on a few things you've said:

But a really important aside; this shit doesn't look like it did two months ago. Unsurprisingly, when the media overwhelming equates X with misogyny, X has a fuckton harder time recruiting and retaining members who aren't misogynists. You really can just poison the well and shame people into abandoning ship until the lies you've been telling all along become truths. I really have no doubt that with every passing day the average GamerGater is a little more misogynistic than the day before, because they lost the media battle as hard as it is possible to lose a media battle and they have essentially been locked out of appealing to egalitarians even on the censorship issue. Because "everyone knows" it is and always has been just a bunch of misogynists.

All of this is certainly true, but I think you over-exaggerate its effects. Whenever feminism is brought up in /r/KotakuInAction it is generally well received and a lot of people will declare themselves to be feminists. The reception towards feminism on 8chan is a lot more hostile, but you'll still get a lot of people who shout down anyone who tries to turn this into a left vs. right issue as a shill trying to split the movement (which may or may not be true, but a genuine rightwing hijacker is basically the same pragmatically speaking). People talk about horseshoe theory, where the extremes of both ideologies end up in the same place. They have political compasses that show a liberal/conservative x-axis and a libertarian/authoritarian y-axis and say that this is an up vs. down fight, not left vs. right. The dominant narrative is still "we're not left-wing or right-wing, we're the whole damn bird."

While I have certainly witnessed a growing hostility towards all leftism on 8chan in particular, which can only grow worse now that 4/pol/ is going to start hemorrhaging refugees in a big way, it's far from the point where misogyny is the dominant narrative. Anything blatant still gets shouted down. My main motivation for remaining heavily involved is because it would absolutely be the wrong move to make to abandon ship now, when the cooling effect is becoming a serious threat. As GamerGate goes on the anti-censorship perspective is slowly worming its way further out into the world - the fight for Wikipedia shows promise, more and more news outlets outside the mainstream are picking up on things, and word of mouth is slowly making its way around and underneath the mainstream narrative. I don't know if that'll be enough to actually win, but I'm certainly going to do what I can to try and keep the mainstream narrative from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for as long as there's any hope left.

On the flip side:

But similarly important aside; I also have no doubt that some nontrivial number of egalitarians who signed up on the censorship issue are now card-carrying conservative shitstains. Because get this; if you take the podium as a feminist and tell people standing up against censorship makes them a misogynist, they will question the integrity of the label and the cause. The best case scenario is you get someone like Dean, who (AFAIK) is on the right side of all the important egalitarian issues but is uncomfortable calling himself a feminist. The worst case scenario is you get someone far less informed and far more reactionary who declares "sexism is over; stop whining."

There was an entire thread back in November dedicated to nothing but people talking about how they'd been converted from Democrat to Republican by the events of GamerGate. So yes, this is absolutely happening, and will continue to happen until (if) Gamergate gains enough ground that people on the left can support it without immediately being excommunicated for it.