Tag: #GamerGate

Bomb threat at Airplay

How dare they! Threatening to destroy Milo’s hair is just like the Taliban!

masterninja ‏@masterninja
They called in 10 fucking bomb threats on #SPJairplay…10! The fucking desperation to uphold the narrative about #gamergate

Daddy Warpig ‏@Daddy_Warpig
They are EVACUATING THE NEIGHBORHOOD.
Police not treating it like a hoax.
#SPJAirplay #GamerGate

UPDATE: Milo provides the comments he intended to give before the bomb threat:

I just came off stage at the Society of Professional Journalists’ Airplay conference in Miami, Florida where we were discussing the failure of the press to report on #GamerGate fairly. Multiple bomb threats were called in to stop this event about ethics in journalism from proceeding.

Here are my prepared remarks, only some of which I managed to get to on stage….  Gamers have no social capital. In fact it’s worse than that: everyone hates them. The Right hates gamers because it blames games for real-world violence. The Left now hates them because progressives have come to accuse video games, bizarrely, of somehow being able to make people sexist.

What makes this scandal on the one hand a great story but on the other genuinely tragic and upsetting is that it represents not a culture clash but a kind of geek civil war. The people on either side of this debate are remarkably similar, and closer to one another than either group is to the rest of us.

That’s why it hurt GamerGate and anti-GamerGate to see their favourite celebrities start to pick sides. This was a family argument that became public and then escalated out of control.

But it was a family argument created by bad journalism. Bad journalism didn’t just report on GamerGate in all the shoddy and unacceptable ways you’ve already heard about. Gaming journalism started the whole schism in the first place, by insulting and ridiculing readers and handing its moral compass over to highly questionable people with axes to grind and wacky activist politics designed to divide.

Then it drove a wedge down the middle of its own base of readers by cruelly, and in the absence of fact or justification, calling one side the most appalling names, while credulously, assiduously and reflexively supporting some of the most obviously and ostentatiously unreliable people in the history of journalistic sourcing.

Even worse, the war was precipitated by people who don’t even play, or much care about, video games. Anita Sarkeesian admits, in footage you can find online but she’ll never acknowledge, that she’s not a gamer and doesn’t particularly like video games. That story changed dramatically when she was given space in the New York Times. She suddenly remembered a whole childhood she’d previously forgotten about in which not only was she a GameBoy addict but she was also, implausibly, very much aware of how Tetris was, like, really male-oriented. Or something, who knows.

The people GamerGate calls “social justice warriors” – the feminist activists, bloggers and so on – annoy gamers in part because so few of them really give a damn about gaming. Some call themselves “developers” without having ever released anything of substance. The press doesn’t know, and doesn’t bother to find out, how credible these claims are.

John Scalzi on #GamerGate

Because McRapey is due to start claiming that he’s always been a gamer – in fact, he’s a game developer who has written games – and claiming that he and #GamerGate were just joshing each other a little like him and John Ringo, that they’re really good pals just like him and Larry Correia, any day now, I figured this particular Twitter rant should go on the record as the one-year anniversary of #GamerGate approaches.

    Astounding the number of dudes who think a woman game developer being harassed has nothing to do with a movement founded to harass women.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    And yes, GamerGate was founded to harass women. We’ve all seen the IRC logs. Part of the plan: recruit others to be their useful idiots.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    And there sure have been a lot of useful idiots letting offering up their services to those who want to harass women! Well done, you.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    Face it, dudes: “GamerGate” is a toxic thing. You can’t say you support WITHOUT explicitly standing with those who hate and harass women.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    Excellent post about GamerGate. “If you don’t step away… then you *are* part of a hate movement.” http://t.co/IOB0nSiFJE
    — N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) October 11, 2014

    So stop standing with people who WANT you to be their useful idiots while they threaten women. You can’t pretend you don’t know anymore.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    You know. We know you know. EVERYONE knows you know. No one else buys into your denial. Just stop. AND repudiate. Stop being used. Simple.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    And if you refuse to stop being a useful idiot for those who harass and hate women, we’ll know that too. And remember.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

#GamerGate is going to remember too, Johnny. Of course, it’s hardly surprising that one SJW fame whore who has virtually no connection to the game industry would rush to take the side of corrupt SJW journalists and other SJW fame whores who have virtually no connections to the game industry.

It’s no secret how actual devs feel about McRapey. But speaking of devs and game development, here is a screenshot from one of our games that will be released this fall. I expect seriously old school gamers will have no trouble identifying the original inspiration, as well as one of the new elements added.

It may interest you to know that while this particular project is a small one, it is a 100 percent Dread Ilk production. And to continue on to a second tangent, I should mention that another member of the Ilk is looking for a web developer.

I had an idea for a web business and I’ve had an acquaintance designing the program over the past year – he’s become unreliable so I need to find someone.  It’s a start-up and I’d like to find someone who’s willing to design the software for an equity share in the company. The system was developed in .net framework (I think with ASP).  There may be a better way and I’m not committed to that platform.  If you know someone that may be interested in such an arrangement, please forward my email to them.

If you’re interested in learning more about it, shoot me an email with WEB DEVELOP and I’ll pass your email onto him.

John Scalzi, Game Dev

This is hilarious. Scalzi is trying to impress his fellow SJWs with his game dev credentials, which are so much better than those belonging to the many devs of #GamerGate.

“I write video games. I think it’s pretty obvious GamerGaters don’t speak for anyone but their own pathetic selves.”
– John Scalzi, 6 August 2015

Needless to say, #GamerGate was unimpressed with Scalzi’s credentials. Beginning with Mark Kern, who worked on Starcraft, Diablo II, and Warcraft III before becoming team lead on the original World of Warcraft.

Mark Kern ‏@Grummz
I had no idea you could just write video games into existence. Guess we won’t be needing these designers, profs, artists, devs.

Dal Gren ‏@DalGren
Researching, I can only find one video game he’s written (Midnight Star). So…he’s lying about the amount.

The Deuce ‏@ibbibby
Scalzi lying about his involvement in gamedev like he does about his blog traffic? Say it ain’t so!

Mark Kern ‏@Grummz
He lies about his blog traffic?

The Deuce ‏@ibbibby
Yeah. He’s a shamelessly dishonest self-promoter.

The Deuce ‏@ibbibby
@voxday is the one who noticed and pinned him down on it. See these articles http://voxday.blogspot.com/search?q=scalzi+traffic …

Mark Kern ‏@Grummz
Oh wow, Scalzi really inflated those numbers.

No Fun Allowed ‏@nochafaa
Damn, Scalzi is turning out to be a bigger tool than I thought.

It was a bit amusing for me to see this, as on August 6th I was on my way back from GDCE. I currently have two games in development, one game in temporarily suspended development, and three more of my game designs will be in development shortly. (Hence my request for questions from experts in various games; I’d like to have at least 2,000 questions and answers before development starts.) Guests at my SAE-sponsored game development course that begins next month will include studio heads, lead game designers, veteran programmers, university professors, magazine editors, and other industry professionals who will share their perspectives on designing and developing games.

To have one writing credit on one failed mobile game doesn’t make you a dev. It means you’ve dipped your toe in the industry. (And to the real devs: if you had asked me, I would have told you a mobile rail shooter was very unlikely to work. Not all past mechanics are worth mining.) If John Scalzi genuinely wants to learn how the industry really works, he should take my course because he obviously knows very little about it. As Grummz wryly observed, one does not “write video games”. The insiders can always spot the fakers and the wannabes.

As for Scalzi’s frequent claims that I envy his career, I remind you of the Third Law of SJW: SJWs always project. And speaking of my career, here is a piece of concept art from one of our current projects in development.

Yes, that’s exactly what it looks like. Think of Joust, only with modern graphics, powerups, and the addition of a vertical element that involves goblins with catapults and orcs with scorpios. The hawk-riding elf is also armed with various magic spells for air-to-ground combat and he can ride other flying beasts with various abilities. I always wondered why there weren’t scads of Joustalikes, but I figured it out when I played the little-known Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest. John Newcomer transformed the core game from horizontal with vertical elements to a vertical game, which considerably changed the gameplay and made it very difficult while subtracting from the fun. That failure made Joust look like a dead end from a game development perspective; if the producers can’t make an effective sequel, who else can expect to do so.

So, I thought, what if we gradually brought in additional vertical elements to the horizontal game, plus provided powerups to prevent the difficulty from overwhelming the player too quickly? That turned into an arcade spinoff of my Elven Raider design that was signed by Elephant in 2008, but never made it into development. Although set in Selenoth, Elven Raider preceded A Throne of Bones. And as it happens, The Wardog’s Coin is what resulted when I turned one of the scenarios from Elven Raider into a short story.

This isn’t the only game we’re developing at the moment. Another one will be out in September, and I’ll post some screenshots in the next two weeks. The thing is, it is very clear that the big fish in science fiction don’t realize how small and insignificant their little pond is compared to the Vast Sea of Dev.

ASaltMineNamedZilla ‏@gameragodzilla
What games did he make again?

Bizz McTavish ‏@Bizz408
he’s not a Dev, he’s some B-list Sci-Fi writer

ASaltMineNamedZilla ‏@gameragodzilla
I know. Did he write any games worth talking about?

Bizz McTavish ‏@Bizz408
nope. he’s a nobody.

Silvertongue ‏@SilvertongueDvl
He’s writing for an ios game. He’s bragging about writing for a _mobile game_.

Drew ‏@omgMyCat
Miyamoto, Kojima, Romero, Scalzi… lmao

Midnight Star was released in February 2015. It has an average 68 review score from 8 critics on Metacritic. It does not have enough any user ratings. One can only conclude that John Scalzi should have written it better.

“Midnight Star sure looks promising, but comes up short in execution with
extremely watered down gameplay that is too bland, and repetitive to
recommend.”

Bland and repetitive gameplay in a mobile rail shooter? Who could possibly have foreseen that? In the meantime, KiA appears to have discovered ethics in SF journalism.

If they’re upset now….

This is interesting. Apparently the SJWs are more than a little worried about my upcoming book, SJWS ALWAYS LIE: Taking Down the Thought Police.

KIA mods censor major threads and happenings including Julian Assange and Vox Day. (self.KotakuInAction)

submitted 8 days ago * by endomorphosis
Vox Day
Before https://archive.is/zLVKT
After https://archive.is/gS76X
Julian Assange
https://archive.is/UkfNu
Sargon’s kickstarter controversy
https://archive.is/zQHvp

Just wait until August 27th, the one-year anniversary of #GamerGate, which I plan to celebrate by publishing the book. It is a pulls-no-punches, gives-no-fucks book in the tradition of The Irrational Atheist; some of it you’ll be familiar with since it involves concepts I’ve worked out here on the blog, but now usefully clarified, codified, and weaponized.

As for the concern trolls at KiA, I have a direct message for you.

You’ve done good work, but you’re not the leaders of #GamerGate. You’re not the GG police either. You don’t speak for #GamerGate anymore than I do. That’s the beauty and the power of a decentralized organization; no one is in charge, no one is in control, and no one is able to decide who can or cannot support it.
 
Now stop acting like SJWs, shut the fuck up, and send emails. We can turn on each other and fight it out once Gawker and Vox Media are dead, the Vampire Sarkeesian moves onto her next industrial victim, John Flynt is committed, and the Advocacy Track at GDC is history.

#GamerGate is far from over

When I think about how much I used to love going to CGDC in Santa Clara, this news just infuriates me.

UBM Tech Game Network, the organizers of the Game Developers Conference 2016, are now accepting submissions to present lectures, roundtables, panels, posters and tutorials through Thursday, August 27th.

Now entering its landmark 30th edition, GDC is expanding its Advisory Board, which reviews and refines submissions for the event, by welcoming pioneering developer Amy Hennig to help guide the content of the show….

GDC is the world’s largest and longest-running event serving professionals dedicated to the art and science of making games, hosting thousands of game developers from around the world for a week of learning, networking and inspiration. GDC 2016 will take place March 14th-18th at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California.

For the main conference, the GDC Advisory Board is considering session submissions for seven tracks: Audio, Design, Production, Programming, Visual Arts, and the Business, Marketing & Management track,  as well as a track on Advocacy, which covers social issues from diversity to quality of life.

Amy Hennig isn’t the problem. She’s no Social Justice Cabbage Patch Kid like Sarkeesian or Alexander, she’s a longtime dev and she knows what she’s doing, having been responsible for the Legacy of Kain and Uncharted series. What is infuriating is the fact that the conference organizers added a track on “Advocacy, which covers social issues from diversity to quality of life.” Which, you’ll note, is something that directly interferes with “the art and science of making games”.

Both GDC and GDCE already have the huge problem of having largely been taken over by the shills and the marketeers. I’ve actually heard of talks that have been rejected because the technology isn’t implemented in a game yet. Back in the day, learning about new technology and techniques is exactly what we went to CGDC for! No wonder fewer and fewer senior designers and developers are attending, what is the point if you can’t learn about new tech ahead of time and you’re going to get lectured by clueless non-developers about putting their politics in your games?

I’ve designed six games this year, have three development, and will ship two. And I have less than zero professional interest in anything even remotely related to social issues.

I hope the baleful eye of #GamerGate will turn on the UBM Tech Game Network and make it clear that the game industry is no place for Advocacy.

I said good day, sir!

I had to post it because it makes me laugh every single time I see it. Sad Puppies has its spokesmanatee, and no one would deny the masterful eloquence of Wendell, but you have to love the otters of #GamerGate.

The missed opportunity

An influential GamerGater, The Ralph Retort, supports Milo’s point about the conservative media completely missing the opportunity presented by #GamerGate:

At the beginning of GamerGate, I was still a card-carrying liberal.
Even though I had become disillusioned with my party, I had yet to
switch my official affiliation. It’s not that I’ve changed all my
positions or radically departed from my past. I just feel like my own
party’s thought leaders have left me behind in a very real way. I was
being called right-wing by people who had never done any real activism
or volunteering at all. They sat on Twitter and spammed #killallmen
constantly, so that made them good leftists. Fuck that shit and fuck
anyone who subscribes to it. I don’t have to toe their line, and I
won’t.

Don’t get me wrong: rank-and-file Democrats still disagree with these
people on radical feminism. I was just personally tired of being called
out over PC concerns and feminist bullshit. Plus, both parties are so
fucking corrupt that I don’t see a point in giving either one my vote
automatically. So, that’s why I personally switched. Even from the
start, though, I was willing to put any kind of political affiliation to
the side in order to fight SJWs. I saw Milo’s very first thread
on 4chan. Some people were up in arms that we were going to be
identified as a conservative movement. What these dopes failed to
realize was, we were always going to be labeled as right-wing by the
media. I already knew it simply because I had been experiencing it for
years, like I just told you.

This whole time, I kept waiting for the conservative media to jump
in, en masse. It never really happened. I guess some of them were too
cowardly to go up against the feminists. Maybe they were afraid to be
falsely labeled as harassers. I don’t know what the problem was, but I
know we were waiting for their support and it never materialized. Where
was Fox News, for fuck’s sake? Talk radio? They left us out on the
battlefield by ourselves with Milo, Based Mom, Cathy Young, R.S. McCain (great column by him here) and a couple others. Mike Cernovich
stepped up as well, although I wouldn’t really call him establishment.
He’s been taking great glee at shitting on those guys all week. While I
like Ms. Young, I can certainly understand his frustration over some
things. I have it too.

There’s still time for them to jump in, but it does feel like they missed the boat last fall.

I really thought that once anti-GamerGate managed to get Anita Sarkeesian in TIME and have GG pilloried in televised dramas as well as in the Washington Post, Fox News was going to recognize it as a story and jump in. But for some reason, they never did. Nor, as Ralph observes, did any of the major talkers or columnists, not even any of the younger ones that you would expect to be at least somewhat conversant with games.

I suspect that there were multiple reasons for this, generational, political, and tonal.

I’m about as old as a gamer in the media gets. There is a very clear divide between people who are only one or two years older than I am and everyone younger. The conservative media is pretty old, and many of the younger media figures are female. So, I strongly suspect that most of the conservative media figures who were peripherally aware of #GamerGate simply couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on. And, as we’ve seen with “cuckservative”, they are really uncomfortable with the vulgar way that gamers, especially channers, communicate.

On the political side, conservatives are almost as afraid of being accused of being sexist as racist. So, the fact that the media so readily swallowed and pushed the “gamers are harassing poor defenseless women” pretty much guaranteed that the conservative media would be about as likely to get on board with GamerGate as with ISIS. And, as we’ve seen with “cuckservative”, about all that is needed to keep the conservative media away is to cry raciss.

And then there is the tonal aspect. The conservative media, for all its pretensions, is moderate at heart. They spend as much time tone-policing and denouncing the “extremists” on the right as they do attacking the left. Since the GamerGate tone is cheerfully extremist, the conservative media was always more likely to take shots at it than support it.

Granted, the success that both GamerGate and the Puppies have had is causing some in the conservative media to come around a little. That, and the fact that the mainstream organizations they follow, such as NPR and the Wall Street Journal, are paying attention, albeit negative, to GG and the Puppies, has caused them to take another look. But given their reaction to “cuckservative” and Trump, I expect most of them to continue to largely ignore GamerGate until the next big success or two.

At that point, no doubt we’ll see books like The GamerGate Manifesto and The New Puppy Order being written by people who have never had anything to do with either GamerGate or the Puppies and published by Regnery. It’s not until the coopters and self-seekers and parade-leaders show up that one knows a movement has truly broken through to the mainstream.

And I think the shills will be very surprised to learn what sort of reception they’ll get. GG ain’t no tea party and Rabid Puppies won’t hesitate to tear off the hand that tries to put the leash on.

Failing Sun Tzu

Anti-GamerGate clearly doesn’t bother with opposition research.

As Milo said, “We need a better class of adversary, you guys.”

Speaking of opposition research, I’m wondering if I should apply for this job. After all, I’ve probably generated more publicity for Tor and its authors than anyone they actually pay to do it.

Post Date7/20/2015
TitlePublicist
OrganizationTor Books

Requirements         Tor/Forge Books seeks a highly-motivated and creative Publicist to join its publicity team. The ideal candidate will have three to five years publicity experience, possess excellent writing and organizational skills, be familiar with key print, broadcast and electronic media, and have a successful track record in publicizing a variety of genres. Reporting to Director of Publicity at Tor, this individual will work closely with marketing and sales efforts to implement successful campaigns while developing and strengthening media and author relationships.

If you’re an unemployed member of the Dread Ilk, I’d encourage you to apply for jobs like this. Invade the entryists. Just remember to be a minority and talk SJW.

GG tactics work

It appears #PPGate is off to a good start:

Representatives from Coca-Cola, Ford Motor Co. and Xerox say they’ve asked Planned Parenthood to remove their names as corporate donors to the embattled organization.

The move follows a Daily Signal report revealing the names of 41 companies that Planned Parenthood listed as donors. That list, which was featured on Planned Parenthood’s website, has since been removed.

This latest development comes in the wake of two undercover videos that showed Planned Parenthood executives talking about the sale of fetal body parts. Planned Parenthood is facing both federal and state investigations—and the possibility of losing taxpayer funding.

Notice the language used by The Daily Signal.

We Asked Companies About Their Donations to Planned Parenthood. Here’s How They Responded.

Notice that all they did was ask about their donations in light of the new revelations of Planned Parenthood being ghouls profiting off the corpses of murdered infants. And those corporations that weren’t advertisers or donors were very quick to point out they weren’t.

Now, it’s fair to ask why these tactics have been more immediately effective than the Tor boycott, and there are two reasons.

  1. Coke, Ford, and Xerox do NOT want to be associated with human organ trafficking. Tor Books doesn’t care if it happens to denigrate a few thousand of its customers.
  2. Targeting the advertisers always works better than targeting the company responsible. It’s the “Amenable Authority” problem. The Daily Signal and #PPGate would have gotten nowhere if they’d gone after Planned Parenthood directly.

The problem is that Tor Books doesn’t really have any advertisers. And the only individual at Tor who gives a damn about the customers and is theoretically in a position to do something about Gallo is Tom Doherty, but he’s got far less juice there than his title would indicate and he wasn’t willing to let PNH storm out in a huff, which is what he would have had to do to hold Gallo accountable.

So we can’t hit from outside, but only from upstairs. Which is why the only real question is how seriously Macmillan takes its code of conduct and if they’re willing to call PNH’s bluff.

But regardless, the key is persistence and patience. Sam Biddle was, and is, GG’s top target and he’s still at Gawker. Does that make #GamerGate a failure? Of course not. So, relax, and be ready to go back into action next week.

Jeu vidéo et «suprémacisme»

Causeur responds to Le Monde’s coverage of #GGinPAris:

Video Games and “Supremacism”

#Gamergate might not ring a bell with readers, but Le Monde / Pixels recently covered its recent meet-up in Paris. Concerned vigilance sums up the tone of the article. The author ventured onsite ready to ferret out any signs of Evil on the prowl. This unwittingly comic posture does not prove we should all bless #GG, even if it does incline us to consider this affair from a benevolent perspective. If you’ve read Alban Agnoux’s paper in Causeur #26, #Gamergate will seem like familiar territory: it is an online movement engaged in a cultural war to protect freedom of speech in video games. Against whom? Mainly against those #GGers denounce using the term social justice warriors (SJWs). In a nutshell, if you like Lara Croft, you are not an SJW. Does this also make you an antifeminist? It doesn’t take much to become a suspect these days.

Ah, how the young generation sometimes leaves us scratching our heads in perplexity! The author of the Le Monde article did not evade the polychromatic aspect of the #GG phenomenon. In order to balance his depiction, as well as to avoid bewildering his readers more than was necessary, it is understandable that he also chose to take some harder lines. Did he do so in order to quiet any inner doubts about his own orthodoxy as well? I would not go so far. In any case, this is where Vox Day, one of the gamers behind #GGinParis, came in handy: not too young, easier to classify, especially if you put words in his mouth. Given the number of detractors the man has already accumulated, why not join the pack? The threat lying hidden in the shadows of #GG would thus appear to boil down to him. Him, and his ideology: supremacism.

Perhaps it is me, but as characterizations go, this one comes across as vague, if not outright flippant. It is an accusation made in bad faith, without force and without conviction. Check out the second photo of the article, in which the alleged supremacist Vox Day appears, but which also inexplicably features the beaming smile of the black owner of the bar: how is the reader not expected to start having doubts after seeing that? If, on top of that, the readers goes off exploring the chap’s blog, well, at least all is not lost. From what I understand, accusations of supremacism sadden the accused greatly, as he never misses a chance to assert his Native American and Mexican heritages. And does he not seem a little too satisfied with the attention bestowed upon on him by Le Monde?

Yes, why not reduce the enemy to a caricature — but one has got to put some heart into it, lest the effort prove counterproductive.  

It’s a strong and wryly jaundiced response to the Le Monde author’s apparent determination to stick to the Narrative, and to take the occasional cheap shot. Don’t get me wrong, I was impressed to see that the journalist not only made the hitherto unseen effort to show up at the event, but spent several hours there and talked to many people there. However, it was disappointing that he elected to run with the “supremacism” line even after acknowledging that my ancestry made the claims of being a white supremacist absurd and that a response to a single attacker cannot seriously be considered a reliable indicator of one’s perspective on a group consisting of hundreds of millions of people.

Then again, the journalist openly admitted that he did not know how to describe my actual ideology, libertarianism. And he did make an effort, as he even made reference to my attempt to put it in French terms: “Voltairean revolutionaries dedicated to liberte’ while rejecting egalite’“. But the Causeur author is correct to call him to account for taking, shall we say, liberties with the truth, as the fact that communicating a hard-to-translate perspective does not justify inventing your own version of it.