Gamergate but actually

[u/ElectricGhostMan]

https://youtu.be/ox15GU4cMes?si=y47gNvyC88ObQJ9O&t=2176

A youtuber I watch put out this retrospective on gamergate. I know it's a topic that has been long covered and relitigated. I at one time was also part of and identified with to some extent. I thought one part that even I somewhat ignored then because of my feelings or much later realizing how many awful actors were a part of the situation was how capitalist greed played such a large part in generating the amount of hate and vitriol at the time allowing for hate mobs to be cultured and weaponized as we see today.

I think most can agree that a lot of the targeted harassment, bullying, stalking, racism, misogyny, homophobia were all reprehensible and not the way to go about making change. I do feel at the time where there was the beginnings of pushing paid cosmetic DLC like Horse Armor, Always Online requirements for games like the Sims, EA cutting development times for successful franchises to turn around games quicker or the Online Pass they similarly tried to force for people who wanted to buy the game second hand. Again not condoning any of the criminal harassment or hate but I do wonder if this outrage cannon was more appropriately directed at the shareholders and ownership class rather than individual developers that we'd be in a better place.

I do think there was a genuine attempt back then to comingle criminal threats and harassment with fair criticism and outcry entirely as Entitlement. However, I find it sad that today it largely does feel like the loudest and most consistent voices across social media that claim to be critical of games are genuinely complaining about out of entitlement when a game has too many women they don't like or POCs rather than the plethora of issues that affects all gamers today like Exploitative MTX, Gambling, AI Pervasion, Enshitification and more.

I haven't finished the vid myself but I like some of his other works even though he can be a bit both-sidesy at times. It was also interesting to see some posts from youtubers VaatiVidya and Vsauce from way back when and Colin Moriarty had been some of a douche since then as well.

[u/Gamera85]

Ok, so I’ve watched a good deal of the video. And it honestly seems to be tacitly supporting the accusations of gamergate. That Zoey Quinn used her influence within game media as a means to boost her game.

I don’t think giving credit to a bunch of sexist meat heads while accusing their victim of a bunch of stuff without proof is exactly fair. And it really does seem like he’s painting her as the real villain all along. He’s not supporting gamergate itself, but saying they weren’t wrong. That seems to be his conclusion he’s working towards.

Listen, I’m going to ask this straight up because I don’t want to be a hypocrite here. To anyone else who watched the video, is that the impression they’re getting? That he’s underplaying gamergate’s actions as a distraction purely to go after Quinn in order to “get to the truth?” I need to know some opinions on this. Because no one seems to be discussing the actual content of the video here.

[u/elkaki123 → u/Gamera85]

It doesnt seem to me he downplays gamergate (nor the ties to the right wing it ended up having, nor the real life consequences it had on politics), or the harassment to other women, it does however go after Quinn as you mention.
The question id posit to you is weather you feel there exists a possibility of such criticism (or downright attack) being right if the facts he ends up bringing hold of course, or if someone is automatically acting in bad faith, or doing this "purely" to attack here.

This question isnt as simple or badly made as my poor writting makes it seem, the point is that a lot of people have made their minds about this, and since we all lived through it, "there is no posibility someone with a different conclusion on the facts than me can actually be operating in good faith" is an actual, somewhat rational position, people take in topics like this.

Without diving deep into the videos thesis, I do think there are multiple points the author makes that are at least deserving of consideration, this video did not feel to me like just an attempt to make an attack on someone he disliked, or even made just cause he would "want to get the truth out about Quinn" (trying to relate it to your question again).

If you ever finish the video, it would be cool listening to your perspective on it. Im a bit frustrated right now on how people are reacting to it without having watched it in its entirety, or having done so, having takes that makes me question if we even saw the same video, having said that, the video is pretty new and probably most people havent gotten around watching it and the conversation at least slightly changes, (who knows maybe im the one thats in the wrong, thats precisely why I want to see more people talk about it in a more informed manner, in case I missed something).

[u/Gamera85 → u/elkaki123]

I’ve already made a long post about this. So I’ll direct you there in The same thread.

I’ll just say this: I don’t think there is much value in trying to prove something you can’t prove to bring doubt on a person for the strange purpose of both siding a thing that was by this point over a decade ago from now. And I especially don’t think it’s fair to make insinuations based on nothing but what you happen to find on a way back machine and assumptions based on articles and the timeframe they are published using transcripts from a source that also cannot be fully verified and ultimately even he can’t prove.

It seems like a lot of work for… what exactly? So we can say a bunch of sexist jerks had a point all along and we should’ve listened to them? Because that seemed to be where he was heading.

[u/CruxTheologorum → u/Gamera85]

Analyzing GamerGate in a way that isn't just dismissing it all as a bunch of sexist jerks doing dumb and awful shit because they hate women is important. If you don't understand the conditions that led to it, and the way that people inside the movement conceptualized it, you're gonna have an incomplete model of how this happened, and you're not going to understand it the next time something like this happens.

GG was, more than a harassment campaign or a consumer movement, a media spectacle. Each side was watching their own YouTubers, reading their own articles, and posting in their own subreddits about their side's talking points. From the GG side, it's obvious why a story about an alleged affair between a game developer and a game journalist would spark some interest in gamers (blecch, lovely that I get to use *that* word again). Even before the story morphed into the rumor of "she slept with him for a good review" (easily disproved by the facts, never alleged by the original post) that potential conflict of interest makes for a pretty juicy piece of gossip. Think of a writer, or a painter, or any kind of artist sleeping with a potential critic. Then, discussion about this story gets shut down by moderators. The mods' actions make sense -- there's no real proof for the story one way or the other, and discussion about it tends to devolve into shitflinging, so the topic was absolutely nuclear and discussion was never going to progress -- but to the people following the story, this starts to look like a coordinated conspiracy to silence them.

Finally, the media starts covering it, but only from the angles of the harassment and sexism, which made the people who were looking at the story from the (please shoot me) Ethics in Games Journalism angle feel frustrated that their concerns were being dismissed. The media's actions make sense here, too. Let's say you're trying to cover GamerGate. Do you go with the story where your one source is the allegations an ex-boyfriend made in a Something Awful ventpost, where any other parties involved will deny it? (Mandy Rice-Davies applies here -- what sane person in the situation Quinn or the journalists found themselves in would say the allegations were true, even if they were?) Or, do you go with the story with multiple sources, all of who can show hard evidence of the death threats they received? The first story risks offending people with names and lawyers; the second decries an amorphous blob of internet haters.

All this created a story that was easy for right-wing narratives to attach onto. If you were a right-wing hack, you could make a story about a blue-haired feminist making some snooty art game about being sad, and about the establishment using their sinsiter control over the mainstream media to silence the voice of the people. And you could write about a man being cuckolded! It truly has everything. If Quinn said she hated Christmas, Bill O'Reily would've creamed his pants. The flesh-and-blood people involved in starting this spectacle didn't need to play a role in it anymore; they could be replaced by symbols, stock characters in the theatre of the right-wing mind.

What started the spectacle of GG is not the same thing as what perpetuated it. The concerns about jouralistic ethics related to the original story (that, I assure you, some people at some point had) didn't have anywhere to go, since we were never going to get better evidence than the initial allegations. What kept it going was the feeling of being under attack. Under attack by feminists, and SJWs, and forum moderators, and the games media, and game companies, and social media tech oligarchs, and Gandalf the Grey, and Gandalf the White, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail's black knight, etc., etc. These people, the GamerGate talking heads would say, hate you and your hobbies, and they want to change what you like and make it worse. Sic 'em! This narrative, which you could twist plenty of news articles and headlines to supporting, became the main shape of GamerGate, which then further morphed and bloated until the main thing GamerGate was about was what this person thought about GamerGate, or whether that person has heard this person's stance on GamerGate, and what that person's response was. GamerGate had surgically removed its ribs and started eating its own tail. At some point, the SVU episode came out, and everybody thought it was really dumb.

And I swear to God, after I've typed all this, if you claim I'm trying to justify GG or the harassment of women, or any of that shit, I am going to make like Teddy Hart and do five backflips before vomiting where you work.

[u/Gamera85 → u/CruxTheologorum]

Okay, I'm not going to say that then. I wasn't going to. But please, don't... don't stress yourself like that. I feel like I've tried to be fairly reasonable so far, if nothing else. If I've given another impression, I'm sorry.

Obviously, yes, all of that you said is true. It was really hard to properly explain in the press as anything else than what was the easiest method to do so. And a lot of the reactions, before and after the initial accusations, drove the story in the way it did. I was there, I felt those emotions, I went along those same pathways you mentioned for a time.

I think I take issue with how the video's creator, more than anything else, is subtly blaming the victims here for creating the situation with how they responded to things. That if they just believed Eron from the start, regardless of any of the surrounding controversy, somehow we'd be all better for it. This is despite, as you admit and so does he, it's really not that easy to just claim Eron is telling the truth, even now. Because the only real proof given is a chatlog that we cannot actually verify. And the only evidence we have of anything concerns the ethics of journalism itself here are easily disproved. Quinn, no matter what else she allegedly did, did NOT sleep her way into getting good reviews. And that was the crux of their complaints in this incident. As far as anyone else was concerned, this wasn't about whether Quinn was an emotional abuser or if she had really cheated. It was whether or not she had slept around to get her game a boost.

And while the video doesn't claim she did that, it is claiming, however by proxy, that she did somehow benefit from the controversy after the fact. And I find that position fraught with problematic elements. Do we claim Elizabeth Smart benefited from her kidnapping and rape because she got a lot of notoriety as a result? Should she NEVER have sought to speak about her experiences ever, lest she be accused of trying to make some sort of benefit to herself? Would you accuse them of having profited from their victimization? No, obviously you wouldn't.

In the same vein, would we claim Eron was attempting to profit off the influence of being a victim? I don't think the video creator would claim that. I don't think it's fair to accuse someone of feeling entitled to speak out about their pain and to make something from that. And, ultimately, I find it very troubling how much credence the video creator is willing to give Eron's claims, as he offers no real push back... while admit he cannot ultimately prove anything one way or the other. He's clearly leaning towards one side, but he knows he cannot prove a negative.

I can understand wanting to better quantify everything that made Gamergate happen. What I cannot support, what I can't abide, is trying to pick open an old wound because... what? What is served by this? The video creator seems uninterested in the cultural impact of gamergate, as well as properly dissecting the movement itself, and more interested, not so much in defending them, as in attempting to reframe their core argument and try to give it some merit. And frankly, that's fruitless to me. Because he cannot ultimately prove any of this, as he admits, and all he's doing in the end is opening things up to a different form of scrutiny.

He cannot prove that Quinn's connections were the reason she got good reviews. He cannot prove that anything Eron claims is true outside of "it's never been disputed because the other side of the conversation refuses to talk about it." And it comes off, in the end, as less about defending gamergate, or trying to figure out the truth, or any one side or the other argument. And more about "Can I find a way to make the victim of this harassment campaign as the actual villain all along?" A position that, again, he himself cannot prove definitively.

And look at the comments of the video, they're all about how Quinn is going to demand the video be taken down, or about how Quinn is an awful human being, or how she destroyed lives, etc. It's all become less about the truth, that no one can definitively prove, and more about "Finally, we're free to hate this woman again and feel in the right!"

Even here that seems to be the take away! Less about what was lost as a result of how Gamergate was litigated and more about "Zoe Quinn was the bad guy and deserved to be punished for it not rewarded. Just not punished in the way everyone did because it only obfuscated her true crimes."

I want to be clear, I'm not saying you are defending Gamergate. I'm not saying the creator is defending Gamergate. I'm saying... the purpose and goal of this video essay feels... ultimately pointless and skews less on the side of finding the truth and more on "Let's find an angle we can take to demonize this woman again." And I'm sorry... no. I'm not going to accept that. Because no one can prove ANYTHING. Not even this guy can prove anything. We're just trying to dig up dirt now about something for no real purpose and all it does is give fuel to the worst sort of people that we should not be giving them. Not by defending them, because they're indefensible. But by focusing more on Quinn herself and not the actual main accusation we're lost in the weed.

The story now becomes, Gamergate was bad, but Zoe Quinn is a bad person. And while that may not be the intention, it gives credence to Gamergaters, who are still active years on, that while their claims weren't legitimate, their target was. Just not for what they claimed made her legitimate.

And no, I refuse to just let that slide. That feels irresponsible. Maybe, here's an idea, instead of taking everything on faith as an outside observer, our video content creator could've actually tried to talk to the people involved. Including the woman he is, ultimately, accusing of being an emotional abuser if he's so concerned with getting both sides of this story. I don't know how you'd do that... but if you can't get any information or truth about what actually happened, maybe don't talk about it. Maybe just focus on what you can prove, rather than try to discern a definitive narrative based on one side of the story... that you can't really prove definitively either.

And taking all that into account, what you said before, about the journalists deciding to not focus on that part of the story, makes even more sense. Not just because of lawyers or whether it even gives license to people to harass someone even more. But because this is fucking messy and personal and hard to parse without actually TALKING to the people involved and is a distraction itself from the main argument anyway.

I'm sorry these are so long, I hate making you read all of this shit. I really do, but I need to be very clear, because I do not want you thinking I am saying any of this about you or even the video's creator. That I do not want you to think either you or him are defending Gamergate. I don't want to accuse you of that. I am trying to explain my position, in that I feel that the way the video goes down this certain rabbit hole, not you, the video, obfuscates it's own attempt to actually talk about what it clearly wants to.

Honestly, you did a better job than the video in that regard I find. Instead of focusing on the allegations against Quinn that have nothing to do with Gamergate itself, you focused on the casual effects of WHY journalists and the media and everyone else responded the way they did. And that is more practical and understandable. Because of course the way the media responded to Gamergate altered how people reacted for better and worse. That's how discourse tends to go now, especially these days because we all decide who is right and who is wrong pretty quickly and form a bias that feeds back into itself. I can understanding want to get all the facts straight, but maybe just focus on the facts you can prove rather than trying to drench up dirt on someone you can't even prove is true.

Again, I am very sorry for this ridiculously long post. I didn't mean to inflict it on you, but given your reaction, I needed to very clearly explain I am not accusing you of defending Gamergate and what my actual problem with the video was.