Tag: #GamerGate

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.

Neoclown Ekaterina Jung is more concerned with attempting to gatekeep conservatives and keep them away from those unsavory nationalists who might actually try to win rather than go down in graceful defeat than she is in actually addressing any of the actual history in an article that purports – mostly falsely – to explain GamerGate four years later:

Was GamerGate a precursor to the alt-right and did it prepare the ground for Trump’s election?

In a literal sense, the answer to the first part is a clear no: The alt-right as a white nationalist fringe existed at least since 2010, when Richard Spencer launched the Alternative Right website. However, it is true that the alt-right’s online presence skyrocketed in 2015 and that a major vehicle for its attempted mainstreaming was Breitbart, the right-wing site which also embraced GamerGate.

In his perceptive Vox article in 2014, Klein noted that despite the left-of-center politics of most GamerGaters, media treatment of the controversy had been sharply divided along left/right lines: Liberal opinion was “in lockstep against Gamergate,” while some conservatives and critics of the social justice left were sympathetic. Breitbart, in particular, made GamerGate its pet cause, starting with a September 1, 2014 article by the soon-to-be-infamous Milo Yiannopoulos titled “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart.” Yiannopoulos also championed GamerGate on Twitter; with his flashy bad-boy persona, he quickly became a hero to many in the movement, even those who otherwise had no affection for Breitbart’s politics.

It is also true that there were alt-right-type elements within GamerGate. As I cautioned in an early article on the movement, any backlash against extremist versions of feminism and “social justice” is likely to be a magnet for actual misogynists, bigots, and far-right extremists. (Ironically, one example I cited was pro-GamerGate lawyer Mike Cernovich, whose past misogynist tweets had been flagged by a GamerGate opponent — and who went on to become a prominent alt-right figure before eventually attempting to distance himself from the extremist fringe.) There were also the “edgy” teens who came in by way of “/pol/,” the 4chan “Politically Incorrect” board notorious for racist and anti-Semitic memes, and who thought it was good fun to post a cartoon of Sarkeesian as a greedy Jew.

“Since GamerGate didn’t have any sort of people controlling its population, and it was nominally against leftists, it attracted /pol/, obviously,” a Jewish GamerGater who wanted to be identified only as David, a politically centrist tech worker in his late twenties, told me in an email. Yet David also stressed that he saw “very little” anti-Semitism in GamerGate-related conversations and made many Jewish friends through the movement.

Far from setting the tone in GamerGate, its far-right members felt sufficiently embattled to start a separate 8chan forum, /ggrevolt/ (GamerGate Revolt); its denizens often disliked “regular” GamerGaters at least as much as they did “social justice warriors.” Video blogger June Lapine (“Shoe0nHead” on YouTube), a 28-year-old New Yorker who was involved with GamerGate from the start, says that /ggrevolt/ was her “first introduction to what [the] ‘alt-right’ was.”

There is strong evidence that as the alt-right began to gather steam in late 2015, Yiannopoulos tried to channel GamerGate — which he often tried to treat as his private army — in its direction. In January 2016, someone leaked chat logs in which pro-GamerGate blogger Ethan Ralph, who was close to Yiannopoulos, and several of his friends from /ggrevolt/ trashed GamerGate, agreed that the culture war needed to move on to the alt-right, and discussed plans to “reappropriate” GamerGate for the alt-right by purging liberals, who were mocked as “SJW-lite.” These revelations, which coincided with intensifying harassment of GamerGaters by /ggrevolt/ types, rocked what remained of GamerGate and got Ralph banned from the Kotaku In Action board (which did not stop The Daily Dot from calling Ralph a “GamerGate leader” when he was arrested several months later for assaulting a police officer).

In the end, the GamerGate-to-Alt-Right pipeline never materialized. However, a number of previously liberal GamerGaters did get on the “Trump Train” in 2016. At present, still-active GamerGaters to whom I have spoken estimate that about half of the posters on Kotaku In Action are pro-Trump. Some may have fallen for the Breitbart lure; others saw Trump as the answer to “political correctness” or shared his hostility to the mainstream media, which they (correctly) felt had been extremely shoddy and biased in its GamerGate coverage.

The slide toward Trumpism disappointed many GamerGate sympathizers; it also made some left-of-center GamerGaters such as Matt Jarbo — a.k.a. “Mundane Matt,” the YouTuber whose video on the Quinn cronyism allegations helped start the controversy — worry if they’ve helped elect Trump. “I definitely don’t want that on my conscience,” Jarbo joked uneasily in our recent interview. Others, such as fellow YouTuber Lapine, a self-described “proud social democrat,” dismiss the idea as “delusional.” As Lapine puts it, “everyone is always pointing fingers at who is to blame for Trump.”

Jung is just trying to work in a hit piece attacking the nationalist Right that she fears while ostensibly writing about GamerGate. It’s highly amusing that she takes shots at both Milo and Cerno, as well as the Alt Right, without ever mentioning the one individual who was, unlike either Mike or Milo, both a pre-Quinnspiracy OGGer and openly Alt-Right.

But mostly it’s bad journalism; she doesn’t bother to talk to any of the major GamerGate figures or follow-up on what has happened to them since, she has no idea why the backlash to GameJournoPros took place or even mention the exposure of the conspiracy and the mailing list, and she completely fails to make the connection between the tactics successfully utilized by GamerGate and the tactics that are now commonly used for everything from Sad Puppies to consumer lawfare against the SJWs and the social media giants.

Consider what Jung claims to be the moral of the GamerGate story for conservatives:

For critics of the left, the main moral of the story is that it’s important to repudiate unsavory allies.

In other words, please cuck. This is absolutely and entirely false. If you want to understand GamerGate, you’d do far better to simply read chapter 8 of SJWS ALWAYS LIE, Striking Back at the Thought Police, which explained the relationship between GamerGate and Donald Trump back in 2015 at the very start of the chapter.

The reason SJWs have been so successful since the 1990s is that for more than two decades, they simply did not meet with any serious or organized resistance. #GamerGate represented the first serious organized resistance to them, and in only one year, the intrepid warriors of the gamer community have inspired similar resistance movements to surface in science fiction, in comics, and in romance. Echoes of #GamerGate have begun to appear in the popular culture, as Donald Trump not only refused to kowtow before Fox News’s Megyn Kelly flashing of the SJWs’ Woman card during the U.S. presidential debate but afterwards declared political correctness to be a big problem in the U.S.A. Trump’s unexpected popularity in the polls is, to a large extent, a consequence of his willingness to confront the SJW Narrative and speak the truth as he sees it.

#GamerGate tactics are also beginning to be adopted by other groups for unrelated purposes, as there is a distinctly GG tone to the anti-Planned Parenthood memes that have been cropping up on Twitter ever since The Center for Medical Progress began releasing its sting-videos that showed Planned Parenthood employees openly discussing the sale of human organs taken from the infants it aborts. American immigration opponents have also successfully tarred some of the leading Republican candidates as well as their media supporters with the #cuckservative hashtag, much to the dismay of both the G.O.P. elite and the New York Times alike. It is therefore little wonder that SJWs are terrified of #GamerGate and see it as their most fearsome enemy.

An actual GamerGater commenting on Instapundit provides a much better summary.

I was in gamergate and it had several interesting aspects that I personally witnessed.

1. Gamergate was first time I learned that SJWs don’t really care who they demonize. We had many Lefty type gamers that were astonished that they too would be declared “bad people” for defending their hobby.

2. Organizations have more money then you could make a dent into with a boycott, but nobody ever has enough time. We learned that you can overwhelm an organization’s customer facing department and PR with email and phone call campaigns.

3. Never ever ever make someone a leader. The Media loves to find leaders and smear them to smear the movement by proxy. Lots of people got smeared, lots of people lost their jobs.

4. Mainstream conservatives are traitorous cunts and should never be trusted to guard an outhouse. We tried to get so called conservative journalists interested in what we were doing. Most ignored us as they thought we were just “a bunch of nerds playing games in mom’s basement”, and of course we had the shitheads that said we were misogynists and games cause violence. In the end one guy gave us a fair shake, Milo Yiannopoulos and started giving us coverage. As per their nature the conservatives tried to deep six his ass and sent him to the fringes of society and the MSM was just giddy with the results.

Professional attention-seeker Zoe Quinn now has a bodycount:

Alec Holowka is the Infinite Fall developer who died on August 31, a few days after he was accused of sexual assault by a fellow developer, Zoe Quinn. Holowka was known for his work in the world independent video game development, beginning in Winnipeg, where he grew up. Holowka was a graduate of River East Collegiate high school.

Holowka’s sister, Eileen Mary Holowka, announced the Canadian developer’s passing in a Twitter message. Eileen Holowka said in the message that her brother had taken his own life. In the statement, Eileen thanks game developer Adam Saltsman for “staying up late talking with us and reminding Alec that there was a future.”

In the wake of the allegations made by Quinn, Scott Benson, of the “Night in the Woods” team, announced that they had severed ties with Holowka. Quinn made her allegations on Twitter on August 27.

When SJWs talk about being bullied and threatened, remember the Third Law of Social Justice:

SJWs Always Project. 

The ride never ends.

As previously noted, there is no white male space that SJWs will not seek to destroy:

In the continuing explosion of tabletop board gaming, there are numerous World War II games in which players get to be Nazis. There are American Civil War games in which players take the role of the Confederacy. Some of these games confront the victims of the Holocaust and enslaved people head on; most don’t, though of course they’re right there if players choose to look.

But even poorly designed games with war themes often get the benefit of the doubt. They are generally created and played by people deeply interested in history. They prize accuracy over fun. Most games in this genre are accompanied by extensive reading lists and explanations; players often treat them as a way to learn that is more engaging than just reading a book.

Scramble for Africa was a new strategy game — what is called a “eurogame,” to contrast the genre with war games and more confrontational luck-based American board games. In it, the player would “take the role of one of six European powers with an eye toward exploring the unknown interior of Africa, discovering land and natural resources,” as the game’s description put it.

And with that, Scramble for Africa became board gaming’s entree into the very particular, sometimes confusing and very of-the-moment culture wars of 2019….

Gene Billingsley, the owner of GMT Games, the game’s publisher, responded to the criticism by pulling the game, two months after its announcement. “It’s clear to me that the game is out of step with what most eurogame players want from us, in terms of both topic and treatment,” he wrote in an email to GMT customers….

The board game hobby — especially in the United States — is overwhelmingly white and male, though, anecdotally, that seems to be changing. Mr. Wehrle and Mr. Reuss said they see more women and people of color playing games and attending board game conventions.

It’s as if they are writing these pieces by rote from a very simple script. The moderately amusing thing is that the author of the article clearly doesn’t realize that there have been no less than four Scramble for Africa games published since 1973, and that doesn’t count games

If you are a white male, it doesn’t matter what your hobby is. Diversity is coming to destroy it.

Does craft beer have a diversity problem? Of course it does….

Given that big beer makers for decades courted male consumers with sexist TV ads featuring women in bikinis, it perhaps surprises no one that the craft beer business has become a haven for white males — most of whom happen to be hipsters. Sadly, what counts as diversity in this industry is the clean-shaven minority mixing with the bearded majority….

While Boston Beer may be mum about what more could be done on diversity, the Brewers Association, the trade group for small and independent American brewers, is not. Since 2016, the association has been on a mission to figure out how the industry can be more welcoming to everyone, whether as a consumer or a brewer.

Measures include updating advertising standards to ban sexually explicit, lewd, and demeaning language, graphics, and images; forming a diversity committee; hiring a “diversity ambassador;” and giving out grants to encourage brewers to promote diversity and inclusion.

Unlike big beer companies, which rely on expensive TV ad campaigns, craft brewers depend on word-of-mouth and grass-roots marketing to build their brands. Through its diversity grants, the Brewers Association is supporting Fresh Fest 2019 in August in Pittsburgh — the nation’s first black brew fest, featuring 28 black-owned breweries, and Beers With(out Beards), an event series in Brooklyn, N.Y., that promotes women in the craft beer industry and women-owned breweries.

Whether you obediently cuck or whether you try to hide in your basement and brew your beer in solitude, Diversity will hunt you down and try to inclusivate you. So, you’d better learn how to stand up and fight for your interests before they are demolished through diversification.

Learn to code, baby. Just learn to code. The ride never ends.

Last Thursday, I received the news that the HuffPost Opinion section—where I’d been opining on a weekly basis for a few months—had been axed in its entirety. The same opinion column had had a home at The Village Voice for some 21 weeks before that entire publication shuttered as well. “This business sucks,” I tweeted, chagrined at the simple fact that I kept losing my column because of the cruel, ongoing shrinkage of independent journalism in the United States. Dozens of jobs were slashed at HuffPost that day, following a round of layoffs at Gannett Media; further jobs were about to be disappeared at BuzzFeed. It was a grim day for the media, and I just wanted to channel my tiny part of the prevailing gloom.

Then the responses started rolling in—some sympathy from fellow journalists and readers, then an irritating gush of near-identical responses: “Learn to code.” “Maybe learn to code?” “BETTER LEARN TO CODE THEN.” “Learn to code you useless bitch.” Alongside these tweets were others: “Stop writing fake news and crap.” “MAGA.” “Your opinions suck and no one wants to read them.” “Lmao journalists are evil wicked cretins. I wish you were all jail [sic] and afraid.”

I looked at the mentions of my editors, who had been laid off after years at HuffPost, and of other journalists who had lost their jobs. There they were, the swarm of commentators, with their same little carbuncular message: “Learn to code.”

On its own, telling a laid-off journalist to “learn to code” is a profoundly annoying bit of “advice,” a nugget of condescension and antipathy. It’s also a line many of us may have already heard from relatives who pretend to be well-meaning, and who question an idealistic, unstable, and impecunious career choice. But it was clear from the outset that this “advice” was larded through with real hostility—and the timing and ubiquity of the same phrase made me immediately suspect a brigade attack. My suspicions were confirmed when conservative figures like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. joined the pile-on, revealing the ways in which right-wing hordes have harnessed social media to discredit and harass their opponents.

Apparently Literally Who is uncontrollably attractive to niche journalists:

Last June, DC Comics announced that the company would be reviving their graphic and adult content imprint, Vertigo Comics. The relaunch was announced alongside several new titles which aimed to speak to current social issues, such as xenophobia in Eric Esquivel’s Border Town or sexual freedom in Tina Horn’s Safe Sex. One of the titles announced for this relaunch was Goddess Mode, a cyber punk adventure series written by Zoë Quinn with art provided by Robbi Rodriguez.

Recently, The Verge’s Laura Hudson conducted and  published an interview with Quinn. The published piece is a fairly standard promotional interview in which Quinn speaks at length on Goddess Mode in order to promote her book in the wake of the comic’s official release. Yet many readers were quick to point out that, while the piece itself was innocuous, there was a glowing omission: Hudson did not disclose her personal relationship with Quinn.

If there is anyone in the media who does not have a personal relationship with Zoe Quinn, please raise your hand. At least we can all look forward to the inevitable CSI-SVU episode about a crazed ComicsGater kidnapping the Zoe Quinn stand-in.

The ride never ends.