Tag: #GamerGate

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.

The GamerGate playbook

I, for one, have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. GamerGate? What is this playbook of which you speak so highly?

The Anti-CNN Harassment Campaign Is Using the GamerGate Playbook

This time the target isn’t video game reviewers. It’s families of reporters. And many of the same characters from the first time are back for Round 2.

KATHERINE CROSS

For Twitter users, the #CNNBlackmail flap has been hard to miss. Angry Trump supporters, furious that the network “forced” the originator of the Trump-wrestling-CNN GIF to apologize even though it didn’t, fixated on a single line in the story posted to CNN’s KFILE: “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should [his remorsefulness] change.” Cue the angry mobs that targeted not just the reporter of the story with death threats, but his wife and parents.

But for me, this all looked depressingly familiar. A mostly far-right swarm of Twitter users caterwauling about free speech, memes, and ethics in journalism? We’ve been here before.
Many of the same tactics and major players that made names for themselves in GamerGate—from Mike Cernovich to Weev—are being used to push a wide-scale harassment campaign against CNN.

In August of 2014 Eron Gjoni, the ex-boyfriend of Zoë Quinn, a game developer, posted a lengthy screed in which he falsely accused her of illicitly securing favorable reviews for her game. This touched off a tidal wave of abuse directed at her. At first, it all seemed like so many of the seasonal storms of harassment that women in tech are subjected to. Critic Anita Sarkeesian, veteran game developer Jennifer Hepler, and tech evangelist Adria Richards all had their turns as the monster-of-the-week for reactionary internet trolls heaping rape/death threats and slander upon them.

But the abuse around Quinn rapidly metastasized into something larger that attacked several people at once, and brought old targets like Sarkeesian back to the fore (she was eventually forced to flee her own home after detailed, specific threats were made). Using the fig-leaf provided by the false accusation about reviews, the attackers conjured a scandal about gaming journalism to justify their fixation on the female game developers and feminist critics they so hated. They called it #GamerGate.

This movement lasted for months, and constituted a new form of both online harassment and right-wing activism. Though GamerGate putatively drew its adherents from across the political spectrum, they would constellate around hatred of “political correctness” and feminism, and ally themselves with conservative and extreme-right voices.

Terrible stuff indeed. I, for one, denounce this mob intimidation being directed at hard-working journalists who are guilty of nothing more than reporting the news to the American public. I mean, what sort of monster concocts dreadfully dank memes like the one below? (clears throat, adjusts bow tie) Truly reprehensible!

Sargon schools Scalzi

Scalzi, being an SJW, is always one to try to push the false SJW Narrative, in this case the one defending Anita Sarkeesian for harassing someone in the very way she has made a little career decrying. Sargon of Akkad, who was Literally Who 2’s target, sets the record straight.

Typical, though, of the SJW to act as if women who cry about criticism are being harassed, but men who do nothing more than point out that they are being attacked in the very same manner are crybabies.

Gamergate: the ride never ends

SJWs in the game industry are trying to enforce their goodthink again, this time on developers.

Hello Raw Fury fans and friends,

Today we revealed The Last Night during the Xbox Press conference and have been overwhelmed with the response we have received. Both good and bad, and we specifically want to draw attention to a few things the creative director has said in the past.

We at Raw Fury believe in equality, believe in feminism, and believe everyone has a right and chance at the equal pursuit of happiness. We would not be working with Tim Soret / Odd Tales at all if we believed they were against these principles in any aspect.

The comments Tim made in 2014 are certainly surprising and don’t fit the person we know, and we hope that everyone reading this who knows us at Raw Fury on a personal and professional level knows that we wouldn’t tolerate working with someone who portrays the caricature of Tim going around the internet right now.

The wording of his statements toward feminism in 2014 was poor, and his buying into GamerGate as a movement on the notion that it represented gamers against journalists was naive, but in the same year he also cheered the rise of women in gaming. In a similar situation as the one happening now, folks on the IdleThumbs forums found questionable tweets and Tim took it upon himself to address them. What came from that was a dialogue where different viewpoints were considered and debated in a purposeful way.

Here is a link to everything including his tweets, his response, and the response of the forum; we hope you’ll take the time to read through it:

Side note: Debating Anita Sarkeesian’s efforts toward highlighting sexism in the games industry is touchy, and though Tim’s post back then was naive we felt that he wasn’t being malicious like so many others have been to Anita in the past, so we share all of this with the hope people can see that first hand. We understand that no matter what there will be people who will not look at Tim the same again and we respect that, too.

A lot can change in three years, including viewpoints, and Tim has assured us that The Last Night does not spout a message steeped in regressive stances. We trust Tim and know that he is an advocate for progression both in and outside of our industry, and we hope that this will be apparent moving forward.

Here we go again….

It’s frustrating, but people encountering an SJW attack for the first time ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS make the same idiotic mistake.

Tim Soret @E3‏ @timsoret  15h15 hours ago
Controversy time. That’s fine. Let’s talk about it, because it’s important.
1 – I completely stand for equality & inclusiveness.

Tim Soret @E3‏ @timsoret  12h12 hours ago
2 – In no way is The Last Night a game against feminism or any form of equality. A lot of things changed for me these last years.

Tim Soret @E3‏ @timsoret
 3 – The fictional setting of the game does challenge techno-social progress as a whole but certainly not trying to promote regressive ideas.