gamergate 2k15

It’s funny how GG is trying to spin it as “different political opinions are banned!” or “Leftists kick girl gamers out! Misogyny!”

If you go to a convention with the express purpose of disrupting panels, expect to be asked to leave.

While panelists can choose to not answer a question, the problem here is (as the GGers even admitted) their goal wasn’t to have a back and forth with the panel, but rather to disrupt it with a line of derailing questions. So choosing to not answer questions would’ve been used as fuel against the panel just as much as any answer. Because if they’re not answering questions “what are they hiding”?

That is the problem with GG in general. They use people ignoring them as implicit agreement, and will frequently target more vocal opposition for direct harassment in hopes of silencing them so they can again claim implicit agreement/approval.

*sign*

It’s about the ethics in gaming journalism.

You may laugh, you may think I’m joking, or that I simply quote the meme, but that’s actually what most GGs are concerned about. Some asholes took up the GG flag and waved it in a missguided attempt to attack women, which is why most GGs don’t use the term anymore, but the goal remains the same.

Don’t push feminism on your reader (push equality!). Don’t ignore other issues that may disagree with your feminist leaders, and don’t exchange favours with anybody that isn’t a journalist.

It’s that simple.

Aaaaand, I’m going offline for the rest of the day.

If GamerGate were actually about ethics in journalism, they would not be actively trying to destroy Kotaku — a site that refuses press junkets, regularly pisses off game publishers through aggressive journalism, and is just about as transparent as any gaming site can be — they’d be going after Metacritic and exclusive AAA game reveals and pre-order shilling and all the other noxious bullshit you can find in gaming just about every day.

They’d also realize that ethical questions are never black and white but are instead always delivered in varying shades of grey, to the point where they’re best dealt with on a case by case basis, not through some Game Journalism Bible full of strict edicts and laws.

GamerGate’s actual goals are hard to define, but a look at their main home (the Kotaku In Action subreddit) on any given day makes it pretty clear that they’re more about conservative values and fighting SJWs than they ever are about ethics. That’s all fine, except that they regularly mobilize to make people’s lives miserable on social media, which is something we’re just going to have to live with from now on, sadly.

You’re right. We have fucked up. Every single one of us has fucked up at one point or another —myself included, as any Dragon’s Crown fan will happily tell you. Should we have done a better job disclosing certain things? Absolutely. As Stephen pointed out back when this whole thing first started, one of Kotaku’s priorities over the past few years has been separating ourselves from AAA publishers in ways both big and small, because we don’t want to be an outlet that relies upon publisher access in order to do our jobs. We’ve done a really good job there. But, for various reasons, we didn’t do a good enough job taking those same steps with indie developers, and some of us weren’t clear enough about our personal connections while writing about games or stories we found interesting. We fucked up there, and we’ll all learn from it and move on.

But if GamerGate were a movement that solely said “hey, you guys didn’t disclose this this and this” and called out journalists when they did shitty things, we’d be living in a different world entirely. The actual, more tangible GamerGate is in actuality an amalgamation of A) hardcore libertarian and conservative voices who want to fight progressive voices in whatever way possible; B) gamers who are afraid that feminist and progressive criticism will lead to censorship in games and game culture; and to some extent C) lonely people who use the hashtag and message boards to find belonging through a wider audience. Some of these people undoubtedly actually believe that they’re fighting for ethics in journalism, but that’s become a punchline at least partially because of the battles they’ve picked so far. Any real fight for ethics in game journalism would be less about improper disclosure — which is a minor fuck-up in the grand scheme of things — and more about, say, the way big publishers treat game outlets as their marketing arms. Or the way systemic issues including low pay and poor treatment have made games journalism a mostly unsustainable career that many people just see as a path to PR or game development.

I’m sure there are some people in there who legitimately believe that Kotaku is unethical or hates gamers or whatever, but I’d also guess that those people haven’t read Kotaku (other than the occasional context-free KIA excerpt) in years.

A group of women selling art, including GamerGate posters, were told to leave by the Calgary Expo.  The Calgary Expo officially banned women for not agreeing with people.
And of course, the Mary Sue spins it so its somehow these ladies’ fault.
We now have an official instance of somebody saying “Go home gamergirl” at an expo.  And it wasn’t Gamergate.  It was anti-GAmerGate and the expo itself.
So much for being inclusive, right?

It gets even better!

“Which rule did they break?”
“Uh, the rule.”
And here are the rules! Taste the fucking irony.



And here is the actual statement of their “fraud”, taken from the Mary Sue article:

In April of this year, the Honey Badgers plan to put on a booth at the Calgary Comics and Entertainment Expo! We plan to infiltrate nerd culture cunningly disguised as their own. Each of us has been carefully crafting a persona of nerdiness through decades of dedication to comics, science fiction, fantasy, comedy games and other geekery, waiting for this moment, our moment to slip among the unaware. Once there we will start distributing the totalitarian message that nerd and gamer culture is… perfectly wonderful just as it is and should be left alone to go it’s own way.

Canadian One, the HBB even BEING at Calgary Expo could be considered harassment under their open & vague rules. By their rules, you could be guilty of unwarranted accusations, criticizing &/or judging, discounting, trivializing, undermining, and the catch all of “Any other unwarranted verbal attack on any person(s) that may cause them inherent psychological harm” for daring to question other anon. Are you understanding part of the outrage?

If you want to hear an example of the “harassment” that led to their banning, feel free to check out HoneyBadgerRadio YouTube channel, and the video “Find the Harassment”. Someone makes an over-arching accusation about MRAs, and one of the Badgers step up to give their perspective. And of course, when HBB supporters get up in arms about it, they get to filter through posts like “No, I will not apologize for my belief that Gamer Gate supporters should be skinned alive and have their teeth pulled out by their roots.”
As for The Mary Sue, I don’t trust having any one group in an unquestionable position of power, which The Mary Sue gave ‘feminism’ at this con. They had their hooks in the con and it’s staff, even co-sponsoring the cosplay contest, in which they booted and banned an awesome cosplayer, Anna Cherry, for being a GG supporter who cosplayed Vivian James. And of course there are the rumors, though yet unproven, that The Mary Sue broke their ‘exclusive’ about the HBB being banned BEFORE it actually happened, leading to the presumption that it was engineered by The Mary Sue in an attempt to play ‘gotcha’. Their “evidence ” of a plan to disrupt, if you actually look beyond their accusations, is a tongue in cheek description on their fundraising page, designed to be humorous to HBB supporters. And just how would someone know, as The Mary Sue supporters claim, that they only went to “feminist panels”, unless they made a point of following them around?

And of course if I were more of a cynic, I’d think that the entire thing was a set-up so not only could the con keep their $10K+, and The Mary Sue would have more 'evidence’ to use against non & anti feminists.

Interesting, I didn’t know this. I don’t really follow the whole Gamergate scandal other than to make fun of stupid people on both sides, so I don’t have a lot of context for all this happening. Still, it’s not really fair to kick people out for that.
-The Canadian One

Early this morning, staff (See edit notice at bottom) banned Honey Badger Brigade (HBB) from the Calgary Comics and Entertainment Expo (CalEx). Security staff approached the HBB booth, ordered us to leave, and refused to state the reason why unless Alison Tieman agreed to speak to them away from the other members of the group, without recording. They informed Alison that they had received complaints on social media, including 25 allegations of harassment. No evidence was presented, no request was made for information from HBB, and no specific incident was cited until further questions were asked of security.

Upon further questioning, security mentioned the Women in Comics panel discussion from the previous day, where Alison was given permission to speak. Alison spoke briefly in relation to a topic brought up by the panelists. Accusers, however, claimed that Alison derailed the conversation. Alison and myself were in attendance, and you can listen to Alison’s statement in the panel here on YouTube. You can hear Alison, myself and indeed the entire panel in the full discussion record.

As you will hear, there was no harrassment. Expo staff and mob rule, in their crusade for ending harassment against women, harassed the Honey Badgers despite having no evidence of any policy violation. To those unfamiliar, HBB was founded by three women and has a highly diverse staff of volunteers, creators and lovers of free expression. Alison Tieman, a woman who spent 7 years writing graphic novels and fighting censorship, was censored by other women for speaking her mind, and advocating equal compassion for men, and true strength in character for women.

We ask all involved to question what it means to provide an open forum, and to examine how CalEx treats it’s patrons and exhibitors. Do they provide a safe space from harassment, or a safe space for the people who want to define what harassment means?

Despite the insistence otherwise, it seems that even the Honey Badgers had no idea that they’d taken part in disrupting panels and harassment. In fact, they didn’t even know why they were being kicked out when they were kicked out.

As far as we can tell, people treated them like they were some sort of GamerGate terrorist squad that planned on ruining the convention. They didn’t do shit, but people saw “ethics” and “GG” in purple and green and assumed they were there to ruin everyone’s good time.. so instead of having a good time, a bunch of people flipped their shit, got all pissy about it, and bothered the expo staff until they were kicked out.

The only people disrupting the expo and making people feel unsafe were the idiots spreading rumors that evil GamerGaters had broken into the convention and planned to stage some massive incident.

Now there’s another component of this that I’m interested in hearing more about. I’ve attended numerous conventions and expos over the years and even volunteered for a handful of them. As some of you may be well aware, volunteer positions that grant authority and power are rife with SJWs and power hungry assholes who want to worm their way up the ladder until they can claim some sort of executive of head-staffer type position. It’s part of the reason why PAX has been going down the shitter over the past few years.

The Enforcers, PAX’s personal Staffers, are overrun with people constantly whining about trigger warnings, safe spaces, diversity, LGBT+ issues, Feminism, Cosplay and Consent, and so much other shit. They are the ones turning gatherings and celebrations of nerdy hobbies and geekdom into weird 1984-style reeducation camps, through an overwhelming focus on SJW shit.

So over in Calgary, the fact that they had a feminism panel, and several “women in ______” panels at all is a big fucking red flag. There’s a chance that several of the staffers outright lied to their higher-ups about the complaints and potential incidents, and forced them into action. We saw it at the most recent PAXs, where someone flips their shit because of a Vivian James cosplayer, or because someone said something vaguely pro-GamerGate.

What’s especially interesting about this whole idea that they were ruining the expo or making people feel unsafe is that the hysteria they’ve created around GamerGate has made it so anyone showing even the vaguest allegiance to it is made to feel unsafe and unwelcomed at these events that openly declare how they are supposed to be for everyone and create a warm and welcoming environment.

That’s incredibly fucked up. I know that can be taken to sound really whiny and like I’m parroting their usual rhetoric, but we’re at the point where overtly showing support of GamerGate will get you kicked out, your money wasted, and your weekend, if not your reputation and your career, absolutely ruined… and still, people believe the spin that GamerGate is the bad guy in this clusterfuck.

Fuck me. This is going to get a lot uglier before it gets better.

AMERICA WINS AGAIN wrote:I don't understand what they did wrong besides "supporting muh gaymergate" which isn't really an offense to begin with

viųbladanit appaloosa wrote:HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH KOTAKU IN CHARGE OF FUCKING FABRICATION



FULL PANEL THAT WAS "DISRUPTED," EXCEPT IT WASN'T AT ALL

• Kotaku's Stephen Totilo interviews Johannes Breuer and Rachel Kowert, two of the authors of Sexist Games=Sexist Gamers? A Longitudinal Study on the Relationship Between Video Game Use and Sexist Attitudes, because he:
  
  

[...] saw claims from the usual Gamergate quarters that this disproved anything gaming’s feminist critics have said about games. And I saw claims that this research surely had to be flawed or didn’t apply because of the age and nationality of the people studied or because it was too general. And so on. (What to Make of a Study About Gaming and Sexism [AT])

oaky wrote:explain someone who isnt op

Magician wrote:For when you get bored of old men trying to defame each-other and want to see young people do it instead.

viųbladanit appaloosa wrote:

Magician wrote:For when you get bored of old men trying to defame each-other and want to see young people do it instead.

**and women

now that hillary is probably going to win US pres election 2k16 we can expect plenty of hilarious shit from the woman crowd

Magician wrote:

viųbladanit appaloosa wrote:

Magician wrote:For when you get bored of old men trying to defame each-other and want to see young people do it instead.

**and women

now that hillary is probably going to win US pres election 2k16 we can expect plenty of hilarious shit from the woman crowd

Who is the Republican candidate?

oaky wrote:rtcity is fucking stupid

no, the power is split equally among the three branches of the federal government per our constitution and the legislative branch is no more powerful than the judicial or executive branch

viųbladanit appaloosa wrote:

oaky wrote:rtcity is fucking stupid

no, the power is split equally among the three branches of the federal government per our constitution and the legislative branch is no more powerful than the judicial or executive branch

that is literally what i just said faggot

in practice, yes most of it is in the legislative branch