this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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Naive question - why do you feel shame? I wasn't too invested in the events back in 2014 when they happened, but after reading the leaked "GameJournoPros" chat thread it seemed like the "Gaters" were right in their criticisms of journalistic ethics in the video games industry.
Genetic fallacies about the motivations of GamerGaters aside, if you personally advocated for ethics in journalism with pure intentions and didn't doxx or harass anyone, why would you feel shame?
Okay, so, I'm old, and I was around when you'd ask your parents to buy Nintendo magazine so you could look for the cheat codes in the back. And here's the thing about industry journalism. Not just gaming journalism, but all industry journalism; It's propaganda. There's never been any "ethics in gaming journalism" because it's not journalism. It's a captive propaganda program.
It was the most obivous tell that GG was always reactionary misogyny. People were upset about something that didn't exist and never had, and they were brutalizing Zoe and Anita and countless others in a ruthless, misogynist, racist, reactionary mob attack.
If you're accepting free copies of games, free travel, free accomodations, free hardware, gifts, swag bags, perks, bennies, bribes, you have no integrity as a journalist. You're compromised. journalism is oppositional and antagonistic. Journalists are supposed to tear down the lies of the powerful and reveal the truth.
"games journalism" has always been industry boosting with no credibility. When that fucking asshole wrote a whole misogynist screed attacking his ex, when he set off this massive years long witch hunt, he wasn't critiquing journalism. He just gave a huge amount of violent reactionaries a paper-thin excuse for engaging in misogynistic mob violence.
I'm already prepared to end this conversation quickly depending on what you consider fallacies, but GamerGate started by targeting a specific woman rumored to have slept with a Kotaku journalist for positive reviews.
From the beginning, it was misogynistic, as more of these rumors circulated about other women as well. There was a minority subsection of people who only cared about things like journalists receiving gifts from devs, which did happen and deserves criticism, but it was used as a smokescreen to legitimize a movement against women and progressive elements in gaming, such as Anita Sarkeesian's videos analyzing gender and misogyny in games.
Much like the Yasuke situation, there are probably a few people who care overly much about historical authenticity, but they amplify the voices of people who only care about it to the extent that they can downplay the accomplishments of a black person and push against those same progressive elements. Even if you never personally harassed someone, if you were a GamerGater, you gave power to people who did.
The freak out about Anita was so something. She was offering the most milquetoast, inoffensive, basic feminism 101 critiques of some games and the fash and proto-fash lost their entire goddamn mines.
Anita: "Hey did you ever think about how you can murder sex workers in Hitman? Why did they set up the game to allow you to do that? What can we learn by analyzing this question?
Fash: "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
This
You shouldn't take what they said it was about at face value. Its the same with other right-wing movements like "Save the children" (really just anti-LGBTQ+), or anti-DEI (white supremacist movement).
Well sure. But if the broken clock happened to be right about the time in this case, my question was why anyone would be ashamed of believing it.
Pointing out an obvious problem and assigning blame incorrectly does not make them right. That's the problem being highlighted here. I don't think it's weird for someone to feel ashamed about getting caught up in Gamergate discourse because none of it was legitimate aside from what was being presented at the surface (the ethics of gaming journalism).
its a pretty common fascist tactic, idk why we're supposed to give points to idiots who acknowledge basic reality and then blame it on like random minorities
Thanks for the insights!
There were exactly zero people doing that in G*merGate.
I don't want to assume anything about OP that he didn't say himself...