Tag: #GamerGate

GDC rescinds award to Nolan Bushnell

I’m glad I stopped going to GDC after it changed its name from CGDC. It looks as if we’re going to have to launch a new conference for game designers who actually value gamedev history one of these days. Corporatization and subsequent SJW infestation have completely ruined something that used to be the highlight of my year back in the day.

The Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) announced that it would be honoring Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari, with its Pioneer Award.

Brianna Wu took to Twitter to disagree.

What followed was the #NotNolan campaign and a quick article in The Verge that would result in the GDC rescinding the award the very next day, instead choosing to honor “the pioneering and unheard voices of the past.”

I conducted my own research into the situation. I talked to several women who worked with Nolan Bushnell back in the 1970s. I talked with a man who has researched Atari for decades and wrote an 800 page book on the history of the company. I talked with Allan Alcorn, the engineer who designed Pong. They all provide a story much different to the one currently reported on by the press.

Several hours after Brianna Wu’s tweets, Elizabeth Sampat, who bills herself as a game designer and activist, posted the first of the #NotNolan tweets. Two minutes later, Jennifer Scheurle, another game designer and activist, followed it up with her own tweet. The #NotNolan campaign had begun.

The early stage of the #NotNolan campaign consisted of a total of 26 tweets sent out by 18 accounts. Several of these accounts are listed as game developers, including a developer from Bungie, one from Blizzard, and one from id Software. These 26 tweets received a cumulative total of 221 retweets and 645 likes — and likely fewer than that when The Verge wrote about them, as I’m counting them several days later.

In the article, the writer cited the examples of sexist behavior that Brianna Wu claimed, as well as some of the 26 tweets that comprised the NotNolan twitter campaign. It concluded, “Although many industries, from Hollywood to media, have had their ‘me too’ moments highlighting the predatory or sexist behavior of prominent men, video games has not” [sic] — and here she cites as evidence a post on the Patreon account of Elizabeth Sampat lamenting the lack of a MeToo moment in the video game industry. The GDC is quoted at the end saying they had not known about Bushnell’s behavior, but “will look at these more closely.”

The Verge article was posted at 8:46pm that night. On the next day, at 11:20am, the GDC rescinded the Pioneer award from Nolan Bushnell.

Unbelieveable. Literally Wu (real name John Flynt) has really become a cancerous, self-promoting little wart on the backside of the game industry. A microscopic and insignificant freakshow, but an increasingly irritating one.

I’d like to see game developers and game designers start boycotting GDC over this. I would, except I already stopped attending because it had become too commercial and too crowded.

The Gay Wizards and the Magic Bear

Ian Miles Cheong busts Wizards of the Coast for trying to silence a whistleblower on Dangerous.

Magic: The Gathering is mired in a controversy surrounding allegations that some of its high-level tournament “judges” are pedophiles who were not given background checks by Wizards of the Coast, allowing them to mingle with children who play the game.

Jeremy Hambly, better known as the host of The Quartering and Unsleeved Media on YouTube outed several high-profile judges for their pasts, who are serving time for convictions on child pornography charges. Hambly is currently embroiled in what some refer to as the “next GamerGate” for taking the Hasbro-owned Wizards of the Coast and its surrounding entities to task for failing the gaming community…. Instead of refusing to publicly acknowledge Hambly’s investigations, the company chose instead to address it through one of its vice presidents on Twitter instead of releasing an official statement.

Elaine Chase, the VP of Global Brand Strategy & Marketing for Magic: The Gathering for the Hasbro-owned company, described the investigation as “misinformation circulated on social media regarding Wizards’ policies, event staffing, and Magic Judges.”

“Safety at Magic events is our top priority. We have a zero-tolerance policy for sex offenders. Our standard and long-standing practice is to suspend offenders from the DCI and/or remove stores from the WPN,” she wrote.

“Magic Judges, a fan-run community and separate from WotC, regularly posts anniversary blogs which sometimes include erroneous anniversaries for former judges not currently certified, either because of lapsing certification or active de-certification due to conduct,” she added. “Retailers and TOs are responsible for staffing events they run and are required to comply with all laws. We will continue to work with retailers and TOs to ensure safe and inclusive communities.”

Chase directed users who wished to report judge and retailer or player misconduct to official emails.

The company is now accused of being lax in its failure to conduct background checks on volunteer judges—even those in the United States—who participate in Wizards-sanctioned events.

Hambly, who outed the judges, tells DANGEROUS that he had his The Quartering channel flagged and removed by YouTube within 45 minutes of uploading a video condemning Chase’s statement and defending his investigation. 

Magic: The Convergence

James Delingpole observes convergence at work at Wizards of the Coast

This is the story of Magicgate. Yes, another scandal, but one that for a change doesn’t involve any actual rape or sexual harassment… only game players who like pretending to be witches and wizards.
Like Gamergate, it concerns ordinary people who just want to be left alone to enjoy their hobby.

Ranged against these ingenus is an orcish horde of bullying, preening, self-righteous Social Justice Warriors who believe that everything — even an innocent collectible card game like Magic: The Gathering — should be played and policed according to their viciously intolerant politically correct rulebook.

Even if, like me, you’re not among the 20 million people who play Magic: The Gathering, what I hope you’ll appreciate is that this is a story that should concern us all.

By the end, I hope, you’ll feel as angered as I am by this ugly, scary power grab by the regressive left. And I hope you’ll want to join me in making your voice heard by hitting the people responsible where it hurts most: in their bank balance.

That means the companies which own and profit by Magic: the Gathering. That means you, Hasbro toys. And you, Wizards of the Coast.

I want you to realize that playing games is not a left-wing thing or a right-wing thing but an everybody thing.

I want you to realize that it is not the business of games manufacturers to discriminate against or punish players for their political opinions.

I want you to realize that your miserable sordid scheme to bully everyone who plays your games into sharing your SJW values is not remotely liberal but authoritarian and fascistic.

I also want you to realize that we have got your number: you try to claim the moral high ground, yet your entire business model is based on the kind of predator capitalism I’m sure you’d be the first to condemn if you weren’t getting so rich off of it.

Great. Now we’re going to have to get into collectible card games…. Although, more seriously, if there are any hardcore – and I mean hardcore – Traveller fans who are interested in providing assistance to an RPG-related project that is not Alt★Hero-related, please email me with LBB in the subject.

Anyhow, to return to the subject, I’m pleased that the two books in The Laws of Social Justice series are helping people understand these actions by SJW-converged corporations and put them in the proper context. Because these actions are not mere happenstance and they are all connected by the same twisted vision of reality and civilization.

Really, it’s about that extremely creepy, insidious and dangerous phenomenon which Vox Day anatomizes in his latest book SJWs Always Double Down: the thing he calls “Convergence.”

Convergence, essentially, is the SJW equivalent of those parasitic wasps which lay their eggs inside other insects. The eggs then hatch and the hapless host body is devoured from within.

Obvious victims of this include organizations like Facebook, Apple, and Google, which increasingly put the values of “social justice” before more conventional free market goals like customer service and the bottom line. And, indeed, before more traditional values like freedom of speech or individual rights.

But almost no institution is immune.

Indeed, every institution and organization is vulnerable. Be sure to SJW-proof yours.

Supreme and superior

I wonder to whomever they might be referring?

The “User Reviews” sections of Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and The Internet Movie Database – all of which let users leave scored reviews regardless of credentials or official status on the web – are uniformly on the more mixed side as the film enters its second day of release, marking the widest disparity between critic and “audience” scores for a Star Wars movie in Tomatoes’ history in particular. Granted, the film has proven more divisive among many fans than the previous installment, with unexpected character turns and further cementing of the push for a younger, more diverse cast of new generation heroes – but this level of disparity has raised eyebrows.

Accusations of such activity are currently being leveled on social media by culture-commentators like activist Peter Coffin, who compared the proliferation of anonymous reviews name-checking the same set of points repeatedly (references to “forced diversity” and “SJWs” abound) to more explicitly politically-motivated “brigading” attacks from earlier in the year related to elections and social movements. The deeper recesses of Reddit and 4chan are indeed littered with threads in which enraged “ex”-fans organize campaigns in an attempt to control the narrative and create a situation wherein the idea of the new Star Wars Trilogy as “poorly received” can overtake the reality of its reception in the public discourse.

The term “Sad Puppies” has been raised, a reference to a collective of right-wing fiction writers who gained fame by manipulating the Hugo Awards several years back, along with the GamerGate and ComicsGate social-media movements. Some point to the aforementioned politically-tinged reviews as evidence of motive, while others allege that some of the brigading has been conducted by fans of Justice League seeking revenge on the critical press for its negative reviews. Also posited is that this comes from anti-corporate activists who see the recent acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney as the rise of a dangerous monopoly.

Let’s see: Sad Puppies. GamerGate. ComicsGate. Now, who do we know was involved in all of those things…. The sad thing is that I now officially make for a better Dark Lord than anything in the current Disney SJWStar Wars mythos.

Man, they are NOT going to know what hit them when Alt★Hero comes out.

All your hashtag are belong to us

The Guardian whines as GamerGate continues to resonate:

That was fast. In this #MeToo moment, feminism has been coopted by both people who don’t understand it and by people who oppose it. Worse: it’s now being used against people who are feminists and allies.

The most recent example comes from Mike Cernovich, the alt-right conspiracy theorist who led the way on the Pizzagate hoax that claimed senior Democrats were involved in a child abuse ring in the basement of a Washington DC restaurant. That whole ruckus should’ve given MSNBC pause when he went after one of their regulars.

Cernovich recently orchestrated a campaign to pressure MSNBC to fire contributor Sam Seder over a joke he made in a 2009 tweet. The network did fire him – only to then rehire him after a backlash against their decision.

If you have ever been exposed to jokes before, you’d know the tweet was sarcastic. It mocked people whose defense of Roman Polanski from child rape accusations rested on the fact that he was a ‘great artist’. It was an anti-rapist rape joke, like the kind that Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer and even Jay Leno later told about Bill Cosby.

We’re now at the point where people are being canned for jokes, by people who don’t get the jokes, don’t get feminism, don’t get that maybe there should be some proportion in this thing, and don’t get that right-wing men with a public record of misogyny might not be your best guides through all this.

Even if Seder’s joke was bad and made in the wrong spirit (which, just to be clear, it wasn’t), if we’re going to fire everyone who has made a non-feminist remark we’re pretty much going to clear all the offices everywhere of almost every man and quite a few women.

That’s why people who’ve been thinking about gender politics and women’s rights should be in charge of this moment. We need to be led through this by people who’ve experienced harassment and denigration and discrediting. People who’ve spent years listening to others and who have been thinking about the dynamics, ethics and consequences of these things before.

Yeah, so, about that… SJWs have never been able to learn that anything that cuts their opponents can, and will, be turned around and weaponized against them.

 

The ride never ends

#GamerGate never forgets:

Bob Chipman @the_moviebob
There’s like a 50/50 shot that I will live to see Marvel and DC “Universes” consolidated into a single publishing continuity.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
More like 2/98. You’re a fat bastard who is likely to die of apoplexy sometime during the reign of the God-Emperor Trump.

Even if you combine all the SJW convergence with Alt★Hero, I don’t think we’re going to be able to compete with Mr. Chipman’s relentless need to stuff his maw.

No crime too small

This is why SJWADD was hard to finish writing. There are new SJW-related outrages occurring literally every single day! SJW convergence has gotten so out of hand in the game industry conferences that even women are now losing their jobs for the crime of inadvertently bumping up against the Narrative.

One of the largest video game industry conferences currently taking place in Poland has become subject to a controversy after its social media manager—and game developer—made a gaffe on Twitter. Her crime? Using the word “pretty” to describe other women.

Announcing a dialog between female game developers, Eve Poznan wrote: “Women in games is about to start! Gamedev ladies, join us and meet the pretty side of #gamedev” with a link to the event.

Her innocuous tweet was met with immediate fury from transgender game developers like No Man’s Sky’s Innes McKendrick, who assumed Poznan’s gender, and demanded that she “shut the hell up and listens to them.”

Other feminists in game development soon piled on, stating that Poznan’s use of the word “pretty” diminished their professional accomplishments.

Following the outrage, the conference organizer Jakub Marszałkowski‏ apologized for the incident, stating that “actions were taken for it not to happen ever again. GIC cares for inclusiveness” along a much longer explanation, which revealed the company’s decision to fire Poznan for her tweet.

Dear All, 

As the head of the Game Industry Conference (GIC) I am humbly asking you to accept my deepest apologies for what we all agree was unacceptable, disrespectful and sexist tweet and replies by our Twitter trainee. Her opinions are her own and are not representative of GIV or those of female developers, who attended the conference. 

I feel responsible for the conduct of all members of our team and I will do my best to make sure that a similar incident never happens again. To start with, the person who posted the sexist tweet will no longer be a part of the GIC organizational team. 

Please let me assure you that GIC is a respectful environment and we have zero tolerance for such remarks. I am sure that our guests can confirm that is truly the case. The inclusiveness programs that we have already put in place are also a testament to this. You can read more about them on our website. We will continuously work on making GIC more inclusive. And not because of this incident, but rather because this has been our goal for many years. 

With best regards,
Jakub

This is one reason why I no longer bother attending game industry conferences. What is the point? They are no longer about games or game development anymore, they are primarily concerned with diversity, equality, and inclusivity.

They’ve learned nothing

They are still lying about GamerGate, Trump supporters, and the Alt-Right.

The use of humor, irony and the destabilization of the truth is important. For years, my friends and I dismissed assholes in video game chat rooms spouting hateful rhetoric as performance artists and comedians. They didn’t mean anything by it, we told ourselves, they were just trying to get a laugh or a reaction.

“It is an extremist movement built on destabilizing meanings, making people distrust their senses and doubt reality, and deny responsibility by pretending to be joking or just playing,” Cross said. “Gaming culture, which has long shielded its native abuses by cleaving to the idea that it’s all ‘just a game’ was an ideal seedbed for this classic fascist two-step.”

It’s a tactic we’ve seen Trump employ repeatedly both on the campaign trail and in his presidency. Aside from the violence, the nasty rhetoric and the death threats, this destruction of objective truth is the biggest threat Gamergate and the alt-right represent — they make us doubt our senses and our sensibilities.

Which is why we have to fight. I love video games and, for years, I’ve muted or ignored the vile communities festering there. Most of the people, and I believe most of the men, playing video games aren’t racist, sexist or mean. But for too long, gamers have allowed the worst of us to represent the entire community. For too long, we’ve muted the racists instead of challenging their ideas. For too long, we turned the other way when someone creeped on women on the Counter-Strike server.

We can’t afford to do that anymore. We had the opportunity to shut these bastards down for decades and we didn’t and now they’ve spread from the chat rooms, message boards and online shooters into the real world. They’ve shut down public speeches, tortured journalists and run politicians out of public life.

Fans of video games watched the birth of a new fascist movement and we didn’t even realize it. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we have to do our part to stop it. When you’re playing a game and someone’s acting like an ass, let them know. If someone threatens to gas the Jews or rape a female player, report them. If you’re brave enough, engage with them and try to dismantle their ideas.

If we don’t fight them online, and now, we may have to fight them in the streets.

It’s amusing that they are still pretending, nearly two years later, that they haven’t been fighting us online and in the media as viciously as they know how. It’s a little less amusing, though not at all surprising, that they are not honest about the way we are simply using their tactics against them.

Regardless, we know them. They do not know us. They simply refuse to acknowledge the truth about either us or themselves, which only works to our advantage.


If you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.
– Sun Tzu

To paraphrase something I wrote around the time I published SJWAL, both their history and their rhetoric is incoherent. They have to cling to the idea that their enemy is stupid – to do otherwise would risk harming their fragile self-esteem – but somehow this “abysmally stupid” opponent is a dangerous risk. This can only be explained by attributing the danger to evil that goes well beyond the pedestrian variety, and reaches the level of disturbing malignity.

So, they choose to believe in a very stupid, very malignant enemy rather than an intelligent and legitimate opposition. Needless to say, this violates the first principle mentioned above, which is to know your enemy. And they can’t afford to be sufficiently honest with themselves to do that.

Don’t get cocky, kid

A single engagement is not the war. And the campaign isn’t even over yet. That being said, James Delingpole explains why the Right is winning the #CNNBlackmail battle on Breitbart.

Why and how did we win? Partly by using the enemy’s tactics against them; partly by exploiting a few strengths of our own.

Here are some of them:


“Sorry. Not interested”

Being on the left is all about grievance, victimhood and — usually feigned — moral outrage. This was the card CNN tried playing in response to the original Trump wrestling gif. They invited us to believe that Trump’s tweet encouraged “violence against reporters.” We responded in the best way possible: by ignoring it. This may have been what infuriated CNN into making their massive tactical error of hunting down and trying to destroy the alleged creator of the gif. Had CNN shrugged its shoulders and ignored the wrestler gif, it would not be writhing in such abject humiliation now.

Jokes

The left has lots of comedians, but it can’t do jokes: look at John Oliver, who, despite his lucrative gift of being able to persuade liberal studio audiences to make laugh-type noises, has never said anything genuinely funny in his life. This is because progressives are ideologically incapable of humor. We discuss this in more detail on my Delingpole podcast next week on a Special Youth Edition featuring a clever 18-year-old kid who understands the internet and memes and stuff. The reason the right is winning the internet war, he explains, is because our memes are much wittier than their memes. And the reason for that is that the left can’t do humor because they’re afraid it might hurt someone’s feelings.

Point And Swarm; Isolate And Shriek

As Vox Day explains in his invaluable SJW Attack Survival Guide, these are classic techniques used by the regressive left. Now the tables have been turned, and we are learning to use their methods against them. CNN got so panicked after the backlash hit, it had to ban all its staff from using Twitter because whatever they did or said only seemed to make things worse. SJWs can dish it, but they really can’t take it.

Thar’s magic in them memes. But don’t rest on your laurels. Meme harder. Retweet more. CNN is only in retreat, it has not yet been finished off and dragged by its heels around the White House grounds by the God-Emperor.