Tag: #GamerGate

 A GME autist explicates his suspicions of the sudden rise of an alternative stonks forum:

We know the GME saga is bigger than a subreddit drama surrounding an epic stock play. This situation only came about through decades of financial fraud: short interest more than 100{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} and retail owning more than the whole float are supposed to be impossible. The resulting recursive loop glitch in the market technically has the potential to send the price to any number. We know this can go high enough that it obliterates the financial establishment, and I think higher powers (whether they be financial institutions, regulatory bodies, or governments themselves) have known this as well since at least January. They are self-serving, pro-active, intelligence-gathering organisations. These institutions are beholden to people with a lot of power and influence, and they really want to keep it, so they won’t have been sitting around on their hands waiting to lose it all. They can, and will, have amassed teams of analysts and experts to work around the clock developing and carrying out plans to prevent or limit the squeeze – to make people sell, or at the very least, sell early.

Don’t you think it’s weird how it seems the best they could manage is price drops, straight-forward FUD spam, and a few fake news articles? Weren’t we expecting some greater scheme to be executed, that they’ve been planning something bigger all along? Didn’t the structure of events over the last few days seem incredibly coordinated to you?

Think about it

We’re in the run up to the share recall deadline, everything is panning out as expected. It’s Sunday night, April 4th, on [r/]GME. It’s been a fairly quiet few days except: a couple new mods are announced, alongside some chatter saying they’re sus; rensole (supposedly accidentally) sends a server-wide discord message eluding to the sub being compromised; wardenelite gets banned for having self-promotion in his post (again). Then, suddenly all this information about fairly mild moderator drama is revealed. Rensole and redchessqueen99, the ‘celebrity mods’, claim they have been pushed out, and although other mods are insisting they weren’t, a bunch of accounts start hyping up that ‘[r/]GME has fallen’. The story gets muddied, and now people are panicking. Rensole posts a vague summary of events full of what look like subtle exaggerations and half-truths, portraying him and red as benevolent, moderate, and humble, says nothing to calm the fears the sub is compromised, then finishes by saying they’re both moving to [r/]superstonk – a subreddit that has existed for less than two weeks and isn’t even GME focused (allows discussion of distraction stocks like AMC).

In times of crisis people tend to cling onto what they feel is most familiar to them, and I think this was exploited here.

So next the spamming begins. I’d never seen this community act with such frantic haste, and I find it very hard to believe that every account endlessly pushing [r/]superstonk and bashing the mods was genuine – I looked at a lot of them, and although some looked real, many were only a few weeks old, or had long breaks before recently starting to post generic GME related content. During one of the quietest periods of the week, everything is kicking off, people are confused, and information is conflicting. The subreddit is bombarded with a broad message of ‘you should be fearful, uncertain, doubtful of this sub; act quickly, you don’t need to think about it, just trust in the celebrities; flee, come to [r/]superstonk, the safe utopia where you can finally let your guard down!’ So of course, everyone does.

And now, when people arrive on Monday morning, one of the busiest periods, it appears ‘the great migration’ has already taken place – you’re just late to the party. [r/]GME is a bomb site, full of spam and shitposts throwing out the wildest claims to make it look terrible, and urging people to move to [r/]superstonk. When people do, they find a heaven with friendly apes, excellent memes, and all the well-known users (because they are human and followed along like everyone else). It presents as what [r/]GME felt like weeks ago before the endless FUD, bots and shills started piling in and confusing everything.

Nobody questions why there are no FUD bots there – it’s sweet release in knowing the community is finally safe under the new benevolent order. Nobody questions why Thornton McEnery, a Marketwatch journalist with (in my opinion) a consistent track record of releasing carefully crafted FUD articles, references [r/]superstonk on the first day of its relevance, while [r/]GME never got a single mention in the media ever. If [r/]superstonk was legit, why wouldn’t the higher powers be doing everything they can to destroy it just as they did for [r/]GME?

We know from mod testaments released shortly after these events that rensole had been dominating leadership (thr0wthis4ccount4way’s post has now been removed, but it was literally the first line), and that recent attitudes in the mod team had become much more ban-happy, which rensole denounced during the heat of the drama. Since he had a role of leadership in the mod team, if rensole really thought FUD was as simplistic and manageable as he makes it out to be publicly, how did the moderation team develop a culture of excessive paranoia and over-banning? He gave a strong impression that unification was important, and that he was self-aware of his leadership role, so why did he decide to change subs so unexpectedly during a period of drama and misinformation? You’d think he would’ve known a large portion of the community would follow, and a division was highly likely? Something doesn’t add up here.

Undercover operations are standard practice in law enforcement in most countries in the West, including the United States. With how big GME has gotten, I think it would be foolish to seriously believe there isn’t the possibility of this being an operation; it has every hallmark of a honeypot trap. Since everyone is effectively unknown on Reddit, everyone is on the ‘sus list’ by default. Before the January gamma squeeze, neither rensole nor redchessqueen99 existed in the GME community at all, yet now they are basically running things. I think that warrants an investigation at the very least.

There are various forms of undercover ops directed at every online community, no matter how innocuous they are. These can range from amateur infiltrations, such as the Big Bear haters who subscribe to SocialGalactic in order to see what’s going on there, to the national intelligence agencies that patrol every comment system on the Internet and attempt to steer the trends on the major social media sites.

This autist’s analysis is worth reading because he describes a number of tells that even the most professional operators can’t help but betray. What I find interesting is how much overlap there is between natural gamma behavior and professional shill behavior. In either case, it provides more than sufficient justification for the zero tolerance policy here.

Anyhow, it’s always wise to be suspicious of newcomers who become self-appointed leaders. In both the cases of the Tea Party and Comicsgate, for example, individuals who had nothing to do with the original organic movement leaped to the front of the parade and managed to successsfully redirect it. And before anyone tries to make this about me somehow, I will remind everyone that I was not a part of either the Tea Party or Comicsgate.

For me, the second-biggest indicator of an unreliable figure is their tendency to dissemble and avoid answering direct questions. The biggest indicator, of course, is favorable media coverage.

 As an original GGer, and, of course, the Leader of GamerGate, I find it interesting that literally no one I know or with whom I am acquainted through GG has any involvement whatsoever with this show that is nominally supposed to be about GamerGate.

It is reasonable to say that the producers of this movie are a lot more interested in sending a message than making a comedy about GamerGate.  Honestly, if they actually wanted to make a comedy, they should get our side’s input because that thing was one hell of a lot funnier from this side of the street.  Being Woke, they can’t go into what really happened, so they have to settle for making shit up.

Five Guys, A Girl and Lies

Gamer Gate didn’t really start with Zoe Quinn.

GamerGate got its start in the 1990s.  Gaming mags were taking off but had a major problem.  A typical review usually read something like, “This is a good game. I like it very much.”  There would follow two or three pages of technical prattle and that would be it. 

A lot of the editors weren’t really into gaming themselves; they were just journalists who had landed a gig with a market segment that was just taking off.  The problem they were presented with was that they could either teach gamers how to write or teach writers to play games.  They made the wrong call.

Writers could learn to play games no problem, but it would never be their passion.  Their lack of skill is so notorious that gamers frequently refer to the Easy setting as Journalist Mode.

Writers care about characters, plotting, and story structure.  They find game mechanics dull and tedious. They liked good graphics though.  They were super keen on those.

Oh and left-wing politics, so you had better have those too.

Consequently, they started reliably giving good reviews to games with a good storyline that leaned left and looked pretty.  Game devs noticed and adjusted accordingly. 

Steam’s massive success opened the door for the Indy Game Devs.  Some of those early trailblazers made out like bandits.  After the trailblazers, came the early adapters.  They were the “me too” crowd back when that phrase had a different meaning.

One of these was Zoe Quinn, who was really just a writer trying to make a few bucks with a crude text adventure called Depression Quest.  She was hardly the only one back then.  What made her notorious was a reddit post by an angry ex-boyfriend, who alleged that she had slept with several gaming journalists to get good reviews for Depression Quest.  And the post went viral.

Honestly, I can’t tell you if there was ever anything to his claims or not. What I can tell you is that everyone checked Depression Quest’s scores and discovered that it rated better than 9 out of 10 with gaming journalists and around 1 out of 10 with actual gamers.

This was taken as absolute proof of the corruption of the gaming press, by gamers.  The gaming journos themselves clearly flew into a panic because if there was one thing they did NOT want; it was outsiders taking a close look at how their industry really operates.  I rather suspect that a sex scandal with a rather unattractive women would have been the least of their troubles.

Of course it will be a disaster. The only surprise will be if it doesn’t turn out that the GamerGaters are Literally Nazis. This is the media’s attempt – again – to have the last word and rewrite history.

 The Donald and the Arizona Republican Party calls for Team Trump to pour it on the corrupt Maricopa County officials:

The Maricopa Board of Supervisors are pleading to make the phone calls stop. They have had to put more staff on the phones to keep the lines up and operating. Hopefully they figure out soon that an audit is all the voters want. Do that small thing, the phone calls will end quick!

Maricopa Board of Supervisors: 602-506-3415.

Shut up and email because the ride never ends.

 They’re going to get GamerGated good and hard. EA is signing up with the ADL:

The games industry is being pushed by Germany and Electronic Arts in a direction that, if successful, would mean the mass de-platforming of right-wingers and free speech in gaming. The Anti-Defamation League and the big names in Silicon Valley have already signed on to similar projects in the US. All of which, if successful, will mean the inevitable control of gaining by the woke.

It starts with Germany. Martin Lorber, Electronic Arts Public Relations Director for German-speaking countries, announced in April a dual project between itself, the German government, and two new organizations: Good Gaming – Well Played Democracy and Keinen Pixel den Faschisten (No Pixels for Fascists). Their stated goal is to make sure gamers do not become radicalized into neo-Nazis. However, even the smallest bit of digging reveals that this project is, in truth, nothing more than a full-throated attempt to force the games industry and social media platforms to bow down before social justice.

EA has been known throughout the industry to be legendarily stupid for years, but this is truly descending to new depths. The Ride Never Ends. 

Not even Razorfist has enough vulgarities to begin to address this abomination of Satanic wokeness.

This is what it looks like. The inversion is always recognizable. They call good evil and evil good.

The ride never ends.

Also, humans are bad. Those are the lessons we are supposed to learn from the latest SJW debacle in the making otherwise known as the sequel to The Last of Us. But first, a spoiler of the upcoming game and its ending, simply because I despise SJWs in game development and the idiot designer is upset that everyone now knows how the game ends.

To sum it all up, Everybody dies in TLOU II.  Dina, Ellie, Joel, Jesse. Don’t know how Neil Druckmann thought this ending is something everybody would like. I’m disappointed becuase I waited years to just find out everyone dies

There are two main issues that come from the story as it is now outlined on the ResetEra message board. The first is that it takes a lot of beats from The Walking Dead’s plot points, especially with the “humans are the real monsters” and “cycle of revenge” ideas. Even so, those messages aren’t new to the zombie genre, which The Last of Us as a franchise falls into. “There is nothing new under the sun” of course, but from what we’re seeing of the plot, there’s nothing interesting here, either. It also doesn’t help that the exceptionally talented writer Amy Hennig (who wrote much of The Legacy of Kain and Uncharted games) was let go from the company during development. It is speculated that Hennig may have had disagreements with the direction Naughty Dog wanted to go.

What doesn’t really help Naughty Dog’s case is how they’ve focused on identity politics over actual quality storytelling. There have been warning signs for a long time. Creative director Neil Druckmann cited Anita Sarkeesian as an influence in his creative direction. Anita Sarkeesian is the head of Feminist Frequency (a non-profit that criticizes creative works for not being feminist enough), and has zero experience in creating fiction. It is rumored that the female designs in the game were made less feminine so as not to offend trans women. The main enemies of the game are apparently going to be one of the safest kind you could pick: a fundamentalist Christian cult. Generally speaking, the safest bad guys in fiction are demons, Nazis, and fundamentalists. Nobody likes fundies except for other fundies. What’s even worse is that people apparently don’t like the new character Abbie much either.

All of this comes across as a major train wreck. When your creative lead’s main concern is being properly feminist or being a “proper ally,” the product suffers. Especially when you say your game will be “about hate.” The lesson of half of fiction is “hate is bad.” Star Wars created an entire philosophy in its universe where hate turns you monstrous. It’s not exciting. Everything about this project seems generic. The main enemies are the dullest thing imaginable without having them summon Satan and walk around in SS uniforms. The new protagonist is “trans safe” and exists to kill off the old ones, who people actually liked. This is turning into The Last Jedi of video games.

Naughty Dog’s assurances seem pretty hollow. You can’t really do anything to make a narrative-driven game tantalizing to gamers when the narrative looks so poor. The best way to summarize the plot is to compare it to a treehouse with the LGBTQ+ flag draped over it. Naughty Dog is trying its best to assure people that what’s under that flag is great, but when you finally get past them and pull the flag down, the treehouse is likely rotten and termite-infested. The fact of the matter is that Neil Druckman was too busy worrying about not offending Woke Twitter and the trigger-happy games press, and not worrying enough about telling a good story that will make people want to buy his game.

SJWs delenda est. It’s interesting that the author points to Star Wars, specifically, The Empire Strikes Back, as the source for so much of the SJW’s nonsensical narrative. All because, being wicked and despicable, they are desperate to avoid being the subject of the well-deserved righteous hatred of normal, functional people.

The ride never ends.

No, the SJWs not intending to police anything. They’re not intending to ban anything. They only seek to educate and critique:

I want to preemptively say that wokescolds like me are not coming for your favorite media or going to police your enjoyment. Banning anything is not on the table. I seek to educate and critique. To paraphrase Anita Sarkeesian, we can enjoy media while being critical of its problematic aspects. Orcs are here to stay. Nobody is going to take away your Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance novels.

But understand that colonialism and its tropes are the original sin of the modern age. You can’t divorce anything from it. Time marches on and so has fantasy literature. Fantasy literature and its derived role playing games have, like everything, been touched by colonialist narratives. It is important to recognize that. I love fantasy. I even love elves and orcs but to think that race science bullshit isn’t part of its DNA is ignorance.

The way Orcs are depicted in fantasy literature mirrors the racist tropes and narratives about indigenous and black people that was used to justify colonialism and slavery. At various times there were ideas like the Curse of Ham, to Mormon views that black people and native americans were once white but cursed by God, to later eugenic and race science views. All of this was in the zeitgeist when Orcs were imagined by the pioneers of the genre like Tolkien. Elves too are evocative of race science mythology about a lost hyperborean master race that Aryans are descended from.

Excuses about how Orcs are corrupted elves then, fall flat, because that to is also a trope of racist mythology. Ultimately Orcs aren’t real. They are made up. But they were not made up in a vacuum. When they were made up, they mirrored the white man’s burden narrative. And the passage above is alarmingly similar to things written about human beings in those times.

I would say Eberron, Warcraft 3, and Elder Scrolls all made strides in reimagining Orcs Elder Scrolls also does a good job not making orcs canon fodder villains that are fair game for anyone to kill. I feel that Eberron got this right. The designer didn’t make fantasy counterpart cultures and reimagined the monstrous races. None of them, except for literal demons, are presented as inherently evil and Orcs have a druidic order that protects the world from the plane of madness. But even that is going to be fruit of a poisoned tree to some degree but so is everything.

None of this is to say you can’t enjoy DnD or even include Orcs in your game or cosplay as Orcs, but understand that there is a history there and that history might make people uncomfortable.

Translation: #Orcgate has begun. There is literally nothing they will not seek to take away from you.

I have a simple, one-word response: WAAAGH!

This piece is absolutely true. The SJWs have entirely taken over game journalism as well as far too much of the game industry itself.

An influential figure from a leading gaming website says that a clique of like-minded media figures are colluding to prevent right-leaning journalists and developers from having a voice in the industry. “If you were openly a conservative and tried to apply to any of the mainstream outlets that are on the coasts, I don’t think you’d have a chance in hell of getting in,” says the senior source, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions. There’s a lot of us that probably think there’s a clique, well, that know there’s a clique.”

The “clique” is composed of journalists from well-known gaming and tech websites: among them Kotaku, Polygon, Vice, Ars Technica, GameDaily, Gamespot, Eurogamer and loads more.

“People won’t write something, or we won’t say anything on Twitter or whatever because you spew one wrong opinion and you’re asking for trouble,” says the source, who has admitted keeping their own opinions private to avoid sanction.

“Unless you don’t care about potential opportunities within the industry, a lot of people just don’t say what they’re actually thinking.”

The dominance has directly impacted the integrity of the journalism at the publications run by the clique members.

In one example, which was described to me in detail that I have obscured to protect my source, staff members were discussing coverage of a controversial figure who’d been wrongly punished by a gaming organization.

Several members of the site objected, saying that the figure did not deserve fair coverage because they are not a good person.

Their crime? Being openly right-wing.

This clique is constructed on the foundation of the old GameJournoPros mailing list that inadvertently inspired GamerGate. As a former CGWer, I find this absolutely appalling. So should this be our next project? If you’re a gamer, what would encourage you to subscribe to it?

Reality simply can’t be surpassed:

DC Comics announced that Zoe Quinn will team up with artist Tyler Kirkham to write a Batman and Superman spin-off titled The Infected: Deathbringer #1. Quinn’s story will focus on Donna Troy as she becomes infected by The Batman Who Laughs toxin and turns her into the worst version of herself.

Let me guess how the story will go. Donna Troy falsely accuses Batman of sexual assault, so he kills himself. Then Superman falls in love with her and she convinces him to give her his powers. Then he kills himself. The end.

Snicker-snack.

About her nonexistent victimization by the late Alec Holowka:

On August 28, 2019, game developer and activist Zoe Quinn issued a multi-post Twitter statement detailing abuse allegedly suffered at the hands of former partner and fellow indie developer Alec Holowka. On August 29, the Night in the Woods development team cut ties with Holowka, and within 48 hours, he had committed suicide. The same day as Holowka’s suicide, Zoe Quinn’s Twitter account was deleted, returning shortly thereafter under a protected lock which enabled only a few select people to access the tweets.

A source with access to Quinn’s locked Twitter account has provided The Post Millennial with important history which sheds light on the developer’s time with the now-deceased Alec Holowka.

While, in Quinn’s August 28th public statement, Quinn did not specify when the alleged abuses took place, it was stated it was while living in Winnipeg at Holowka’s apartment. A cursory scan of their Twitter reveals Quinn was preparing to leave for Winnipeg at the end of March 2012 for an unspecified period of time and had arrived at the end of March or beginning of April 2012. While those tweets appear to have been deleted and were inaccessible even by The Post Millennial’s source, they had already been screen-captured and archived in a YouTube video prior to the deletion of Quinn’s Twitter account.

In an August 28th statement, Quinn claims to have been “physically confined” to Holowka’s unit, as well as “isolated” from the outside world. Tweets reveal a different story, with Quinn tweeting regularly throughout the time period in Winnipeg with Holowka, sometimes dozens of times per day, communicating with many others and describing Quinn’s time in the city, and documenting many excursions.

Quinn and Holowka also arranged multiple indie game meetups appropriately named Windiepeg in mid-April and early May at Urban Forest where up to 38 other developers were present, many of which had been those Quinn had been interacting with through Twitter.

If you’re a journalist or a game developer or involved with the comics industry, stay very, very far away from this psychopath. Especially if you are a low-status man who is flattered by unexpected female attention. Zoe Quinn may be the closest thing to a human black widow that we have ever seen operating right in public.

GamerGate was right all along.