Gamergate. Can anyone explain to an old bird?

[TheBogQueen]

wTF this is about?

[MrsBertMacklin]

The Wikipedia stub explains it very well. Brewing well before the summer though, Anita Sarkeesian has continually received death threats/had people publishing her home address and threatening to rape her, since she requested funding for a series of critiques on how women are depicted in videogames and most recently, had to cancel a lecture this week after someone phoned in a death threat to the university hosting..

[TheBogQueen]

Blimey

Just for suggesting critiquing female characters in video games?

Now I get it. I kept reading tweets about it and news stories about it which don't explain WTF it's all about.

But that's pretty shocking.

[TheBogQueen]

Actually have just read read a bit more about it on Gawker and have concluded:

a) I no longer understand young people and am officially now 'someone's mum.'

b) these people should perhaps get out a bit more, run about in the sunshine, have fun.

[PuffinsAreFicticious]

It started when a woman called Zoe Quinn and her partner split up. Ms Quinn was a game developer and her ex wrote a blog where he stated that she had slept with a gaming journalist, who's name escapes me, in order for him to write a favourable review of a game she was involved in. Slight problem, Ms Quinn admits she slept with the guy, however, he had had no input into any review of any of her games and the ex knew this, but wanted to discredit her, he admits this, but says that what he did was fine because.... Insert stupid reason here.

The problem is that this lead a bunch of men, who had already been harassing women game developers, to have a CRUSADE against evil women fucking journalists for reviews.

Anita Sarkeesian had run a crowd fund to do a series of Vlogs about how hideously sexist the gaming industry is, and the gamergate loons then went for her too. There are some major players, thunderfoot being one, who, while offering nothing to refute great swathes of AS's work, picks on tiny things she gets slightly out of whack and posts long rants about it on YouTube.

The more serious ones, and one of the big boys is ex US military who makes no bones about calling in Intel favours, have a chat channel associated with 8chan where they plan Twitter hate campaigns, share personal info (addresses, social security number, phone numbers etc, etc, etc) with each other so that they can better threaten these women.

They have not only threatened, they have destroyed Ms Quinn's career. They post bomb threats, rape threats, personal info on Twitter and Facebook. They pretend they aren't misogynistic, and attack anyone who says they are. They are closely linked with some really nasty people in the MRM as well.

The latest one I've heard of is AS having to cancel a talk in Utah, because a man posted online, sent emails etc that he was going to do a school shooting like no one had ever seen and the Utah police refused to stop people concealed carrying.....

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

Excellent summing up by Puffins.

There are so many threads to this story that it's a bit of a minefield. Not only did they ruin Quinn's career but they accused her of making up all the harassment stuff and organising the threats she received herself. Which was proved wrong when she did this

The important thing that the gaming community would like you to know is that this is not at all about Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, women in gaming, feminists, social justice warriors. It is a campaign about ethics in journalism.

[PuffinsAreFicticious]

Oh yes, remiss of me not to mention that it's all about the ethics in gaming journalism thing, silly of me.

AS regularly gets told she's made up all her death threats as well, in fact everyone who has received death threats on Twitter are making them up. Social justice warriors by the way is the title GGers give anyone who agrees that stalking women on the Internet and threatening to kill them in really horrific ways is a bad thing.

[TheBogQueen]

I was a journalist ( now in PR) but years ago at least you have power of your publication and/ or union to back you.

Journalists should be able to write what they damn well like within the law.
I'm sad that I even need to state that. I'm even sadder that young men seem to be regressing in their attitude to women.

[JCDenton]

The whole thing is a mess and I cringe every time I see it pop up on Eurogamer or RPS. I don't people to think of this horrible episode when a hobby I love is mentioned.

A lot of it is people saying that games should be treated as a proper entertainment medium like film or TV and then shitting themselves when someone (a woman, no less!) actually does it. Even Reddit can't take them seriously.

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

the-toast.net/2014/09/11/im-gamer/#idc-cover

This pretty much sums it up quite well. Especially the last line.