Tag: #GamerGate

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.

We, the Dread, Academic Edition

Ultimately, Gamergate demonstrated the refinement of a variety of techniques of gamified public harassment—including doxing (publishing personal information online), revenge porn (spreading intimate photos beyond their intended recipi-ents), social shaming, and intimidation. It also provides insight into gender as a key rallying point for a range of online subcultures. Moreover, it set the conditions for the rise of the alt-right. Several of the most active promoters of Gamergate are now core alt-right figures, including Milo Yiannopolous, Vox Day (Theodore Beale), Matt Forney (of Men’s Rights blog Return of Kings), and Andrew “weev” Auern-heimer. Gamergate’s success at mobilizing gamers to push an ideological agenda indicates the fruitfulness of radicalizing interest-based communities.
– Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online (PDF)


I think the Far Cry 5 version is probably more accurate and relevant.

RIP Pepe

Pepe the Frog has been murdered by his creator:

The creator of Pepe the Frog has symbolically killed off the cartoon frog, effectively surrendering control of the character to the far right.

Matt Furie, an artist and children’s book author, created the now-infamous frog as part of his “Boy’s Club” series on MySpace in 2005. Pepe took on a life of its own online as a meme, before being eventually adopted as a symbol by the “alt-right” in the lead-up to last year’s US election.

In September, Hillary Clinton identified Pepe the Frog as a racist hate symbol, and Pepe was added to the Anti-Defamation League’s database of hate symbols.

Furie launched a campaign to “Save Pepe”, flooding the internet with “peaceful or nice” depictions of the character in a bid to shake its association with white supremacy and antisemitism.

But he now seems to have conceded defeat, killing the character off in a one-page strip for the independent publisher Fantagraphics’ Free Comic Book Day. It showed Pepe laid to rest in an open casket, being mourned by his fellow characters from Boy’s Club.

Furie had been attempting to wrench back his “peaceful frog-dude” – whom he has often said he imagined as an extension of his personality – for more than six months. Pepe’s passing has been interpreted of his ceding control of the character.

Yeah, so, about that….

I cannot believe he didn’t see that coming. The Left has even begun to admit, reluctantly, that all their memes are belong to us.

Angela Nagle, a writer and academic whose book on the culture of the alt-right will be published at the end of next month, told the Guardian Furie’s campaign to reclaim his creation, while understandable, had been misguided.

“I can see why he must be dismayed that his own creation is being used in this way, so I don’t blame him for trying. In general though, I think it’s a dead end, yes.”“Critics of the alt-right have a tendency to try to outdo them at their own game by ‘trolling the trolls’. This should be rejected in its entirety and not ‘reclaimed’ in any way … There are many wonderful ideals for us to reclaim like beauty, utopianism, internationalism. Let them have their tedious nihilistic juvenile symbols.”

GamerGate Round Two

This time, it’s not inclusion and diversity, it’s “resisting fascism”.

Resist Jam Info

It’s time to make games, resist fascism, and meet some friends along the way.

Resist Jam is an online game jam themed around resisting fascism in all its forms, organized by a group of experienced game developers. Our objective is to get as many people making games as possible, with online workshops before the jam and around-the-clock support from expert mentors in all fields of game development. Diverse and inclusive gamedev is the best gamedev.

Read the whole thing at DevGame. SJWs always double down.