So, how about that Gamer Gate, then?

"Can't you see we've moved on to Magic: The Gathering Gate?!"

Lars Flyger, who apparently put many hours in arguing with different GGs, wrote a good mega-twit (totally not made up word) on the matter: www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1saqk6b.

Well, maybe that's true for the opposite party as well. I know for sure that this made me think about things I didn't pay that much attention before.

As foretold by The Great Prophet Dan Golding in the ancient scriptures!

"This shift is precisely the root of such increasingly violent hostility. The hysterical fits of those inculcated at the heart of gamer culture might on the surface be claimed as crusades for journalistic integrity, or a defense against falsehoods, but—along with a mix of the hatred of women and an expansive bigotry thrown in for good measure—what is actually going on is an attempt to retain hegemony. Make no mistake: this is the exertion of power in the name of (male) gamer orthodoxy—an orthodoxy that has already begun to disappear."

I read a couple of interesting articles (here and here) about a guy named Miki Dezaki, who was an English teacher living in Japan. A year or two ago he made some very educational, and bilingual, videos that provided education about racism. In Japan, awareness about racism and other prejudices are pretty low, so these videos were seen by many over there as very informative. They were well thought out and they didn't try to paint the Japanese as some horrible country filled with racists.

But of course, this being the internet, guess what happened! If your answer was "The same shit that's going on now with GamerGate", then you're correct! Crazy right wing internet looneys from 2chan got wind of the videos and decided the best thing to do was harass him, send death threats, contact his workplace demanding his videos be removed, etc.

Some parallels that I saw to GamerGate were that Mr. Dezaki is an American (a foreigner to the Japanese, much like Anita Sarkeesian being a woman in gaming is foreign to the GamerGaters). Despite him being foreign, he is of Japanese descent and fluent in the Japanese language (much like how Anita is also a gamer and knows about gaming). As one blogger pointed out regarding the whole situation, those two facts are seriously infuriating to the people who harassed him, much like how GamerGaters have been infuriated just because women have spoken up to them about the issues they have about gaming and gaming culture.

Give the articles a read if you've got some spare time. You'll find that crazy right wing internet nutters exist throughout all nations and know no language barriers.

As mentioned before it goes both ways, I was on the gamergate side before gamergate happened and all this shit made me realize the amount of vitriolic hatred in that camp. I still consider myself a gamer i.e. a person who likes videogames a lot, but I don´t consider these people as representative of my position. The problem with the whole gamergate situation is that there are good and reasonable people in there who actually care about how the gaming press operates and just want more transparancy, but it´s simply impossible to seperate the whole affair from it´s ugly center, subhuman scum like the internet aristocrat or milo blablablub. 

Some people in there are so damn contradictory in what they want it´s incredible, they say games are art but then don´t want anyone to ever take them seriously if it means people will critize what they like. They want journalistic integrity and create a fucking storm out of nothing and don´t even bat an eye at other stuff. Zoe quinn gets all this shit for maybe having sex with a journalist to get good press and some stupid indie award that I have never even heard of (because those are so fucking important and respected that they will make your free game sell by the millions ) but completly fucking ignore how much influence big publishers have. Total biscuit said it best "if you wanna see real nepotism and cronyism go to an industry party" but that gets a free ride because the sjw bloggers are way worse because they have an agenda (if anyone is agenda free it´s probably ea) and wield to much power in the industry.

But hey I think this whole thing will have a positive effect I believe. People will realize the side theyr on once the full war breaks out and in that case noone wants to be stuck trenches with the party that considers body odor a sign of "alpha maleness".

Yeah, Jenni Goodchild has been amazing in all this. She keeps me from losing all hope!

By the way, I made a series of haiku about [HASH]GamerGate to poke fun and I thought I'd provide approximate translations here:


Lots of winter, you might notice.

Yup! Despite being double-byte characters. And you can type maybe twice as much on Twitter, too. Dunno why I don't write ALL my tweets in Japanese.

Oh, right, because no one will listen to me. T__T

Ideographic languages are certainly useful for that.

I dig it! But that's because I'm a student of the language I really feel like you can say at least 3 times as much in a tweet in Japanese as you can in English. Lots of sentences are less wordy in their language, and I'm unable to write out my thoughts in a succinct fashion. I wonder if there have been any Japanese articles written about GerberGoop, and how the normal non-2channer would react to it over there.

With regards to the Gamasutra/Intel thing, of course one of the first responses to tweets about it were from Gerbers saying "that's why you shouldn't piss off your consumer base". Totally oblivious to the fact that Gamasutra is a site for the game industry, not a site for their tiny farting brains.

It does seem like a poorly thought out decision by Intel based on the astroturfing that they did to the advertisers.

So Zoe Quinn is in the middle of mourning a friend who committed suicide today, and the GamerGaters decide it's a good time to call her up repeatedly in the middle of the night and shout "Five Burgers" at her. GamerGaters demand proof (of course), and she just so happens to have recorded the phone call on video and posted it on youtube. The call came from an unidentified number, so the GamerGaters tell her to doxx whoever called her to find out the number and who it was. She refuses to do so like a sane person so they accuse her of faking the whole thing. That she already videotaped. The day a friend killed herself. There's no ounce of sanity or empathy within these people.

Film Crit Hulk's thinking about leaving twitter now too. I've never seen anyone who tries to engage and reason with people with dissenting opinions as much as he has in the past, and even he's at a loss for what to do.

So ridiculous.

If it makes anyone feel better, I've been following to a degree the Japanese reaction and it's been kind of funny. One journalist wrote an article about GamerGate saying that it's about fighting harassment and exclusion of women and minorities. Some idiot on Twitter was contacting the journalist in Japanese to try to explain that the doxxing and whatever was fake, and "here's this Youtube video/blog post" that explains everything. You know, usual tactic. I had written with links to the BBC and New Yorker mainstream articles. The journalist said that as a professional journalist, only real news articles (like the BBC/New Yorker articles) are acceptable as data. HO HO HO.

Then when the idiot tried to say that Polygon and Kotaku are full of lies about this, the journalist explained that they are affiliates of the site he works for. WHOOPS.

Some other people tried to contact a Japanese game developer (from the Bayonetta team) to get his thoughts on GamerGate. He said he wasn't interested. They kept pestering him to the point where anyone who mentioned GG to him got blocked. He had such apathy. It was beautiful.

So I think it's safe to say that Japan doesn't give a shit about journalistic integrity in games. In the meantime, people are using Google Translate and saying "YES! Japan's on our "side" too!"

You know, on the one hand I can see why gaters would tout the Intel concession as a big win, but it seems like an ad campaign on an industry facing site does not rise to the level of “hitting them where it hurts.” I do have to wonder if Intel realizes that the complaints were effectively spammed, given all the screenshots I've seen of directions to “contact these addresses with multiple burner accounts and complain about this.”

@kav I think most folks are apathetic about GG.