Ahh yes, the whole thing was about ethics in gaming journalism. Even though the vast majority of gamergaters never focused on that.
I read the gamergate thread on sherdog when that was a thing. It was filled with various rants about women, minorities, and SJWs, with very little of it having to do with ethics in journalism. The same sherdoggers ranting about SJWs today are the same people who participated in the gamergate thing. Maybe at one time very early in its history it was about ethics in gaming, but the anti-SJW brigade quickly took it over and made that irrelevant. Blame them, not the media.
Anita Sarkeesian should've never been a target of the gamergate folks in the first place. She's not even a journalist, she was just a random feminist youtuber voicing her opinion. You gamergaters made her famous when she should've been a nobody.
That was the rage-fueled backlash to the fact that the feminists seized on the misbehavior of angry #GG lashing out to stigmatize gamers, perpetrate their agenda by dictating to the wider gaming community the nature and content of its games, and judge them based on what they already consume. That's how Anita Sarkeesian injected herself into the dialogue. I don't care about a lack of "evidence" about timelines. Zoe was sleeping with the people who were covering her games, and even if she hadn't exploited her feminine wiles yet, she was already in contact with Grayson of Kotaku, and in an inappropriate relationship-- possibly already his lover, almost certainly already sexual or flirtatious on some level, and undeniably already friends.
https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/
She tried playing, "This would look bad for women in gaming" to keep her boyfriend from exposing her infidelity. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, Nostradumbass.
Anita and the rest of them should have kept their noses out of it, but they white knighted Zoe because they couldn't tolerate the idea a woman, and a journalistic body favorably covering her, face some level of scrutiny on the likelihood of sexual misconduct. The same disingenuous SJW pieces of shit who howled and lurched and performed all other sort of victimization theater in the press didn't mind seeing TotalBiscuit libeled as a white supremacist and rape-enabler on the other side. Fuck them.
What's really infuriating is that the press today declares this misconduct was "
debunked" (most of its links are dead). Uh, no, it wasn't. It simply wasn't verified to a criminal level of satisfaction. The circumstantial evidence overwhelmingly favors it. This isn't a courtroom, and people aren't burdened with that standard of proof. Gamers in the real word are going to look at what has been presented, and use their brains. For example, the anti-#GG crowd struts about the fact Nathan didn't write the later reviews of her games. He was staff. Can they prove he didn't have any influence on the perception of this woman to the rest of the staff? Can they
prove he didn't favorably refer to her game earlier due to their relationship? This is all quite inappropriate.
This is how the gaming press responded to valid concerns made by gamers (notice our anti-#GG NeoGafer didn't want to link this while "debunking" #GG):
'Gamers' don't have to be your audience. 'Gamers' are over.
"Gamers" above is code for men...but not really. It's actually just a straighforward reference to the most lucrative non-casual gaming base who happen to be mostly men. Yet they wonder why the hardcore gaming community (read: male gamers) reacted with such hostility. They had no concern for the sexism they introduced in kind; from a chaotic, butterfly-effect unfurling that all traces back to a shitty woman who tried to manipulate her boyfriend into not holding to her account for her infidelity with an appeal to the potential impact to their shared SJW agenda for gaming culture. And TotalBiscuit aka John Bain becomes the bad guy in this. Fucking
wow.
Breslau also disputed this characterization of Bain as a kind of the Anita of the right, saying Bain “didn’t like the culture on the right, he didn’t like the culture of the left and he felt both sides were kind of ridiculous…[and] contributing to the same problem.”
Truth. Moving on, that NeoGaf "debunk" the Forbes author linked has convenient little apologies like this on behalf of gaming journalism:
That's because the editors were demonstrating an agenda, and #GG was smart enough to pick this out. It wasn't all trolls sending in bomb threats, but there was a coordinated effort between gaming journalists to advance that narrative.
I also love gems like this one:
3) The biggest victory to date of #GamerGate has been an attack on ethical journalism. One of the most important ideas when it comes to ethical journalism is that there’s a wall between advertising and editorial. #GamerGaters hate this rule of ethics, because, as opponents of ethical journalism, they wish to control what journalists say and censor any ideas or opinions that they don’t want to hear. And so they have been targeting advertisers, trying to get them to pull ads from gaming websites that publish ideas they wish to censor.
Convenient time for social liberals to selectively care about free speech that isn't protected by the First Amendment. Yeah, you're real
victims of that brand of pro-censorship mob politics.
People like Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu caught shit because they misconstrued #GG as being against female developers when that was never their main complaint, and unarguably not the root cause. Gamers were against being vilified by the gaming press, and having the future content and shape of the industry they prop up with their dollars
dictated to them. They simply began to hold liberals to the same ethical standards that liberals themselves espouse. For some reason liberals didn't like this. Seems to me that liberals don't like liberalism.
That Forbes writer,
Fruzsina Eordogh, is even trying to use this revisionist bullshit to argue that the firing of Jessica Price is "collateral" of #GG, and makes a point of mentioning "associated mob
harassment". This language is a strong invocation of today's MSM branding of Sarkeesian as the "woman who survived the
harassment of Gamergate". The implication is that Jessica Price is on some extended level a victim of the harassment of #GG. What a crock of shit.
Stay classy, cunt. Classy and unemployed. Good riddance, and I'm so glad BioWare got that right. You're not a victim, and I'm not gullible enough to fall for your SJW Forbes white knight who only
pretends to approach this history fairly and objectively:
Fruzsina Eordogh of Forbes said:
What
pulled Bain into the online controversy was an issue he had covered before, related to false copyright strikes issued by YouTube bullies and music corporations. Breslau maintained Bain didn’t care about nor had any interest in any female developer’s sexual history (what sparked the original mob). Claims that Bain shared a slut-shaming video referencing “Five Guys Burgers & Fries” or that Bain made his career off harassing women are both grossly erroneous. Bain had already been talking about ethics in the video game industry for years and had either led or supported online campaigns that impacted the video game industry for the better (like increased transparency, for starters). He was, for all intents and purposes, an expert on the “ethics in video games” topic and ultimately why Breslau is wrong. It was because of his area of expertise that when Bain entered the conversation he immediately legitimized the “ethics in video game journalism” narrative.
Unfortunately for Bain, his star power, white male privilege and massive fan base of more than a million could never change the narrative to the issue he wanted to discuss.
Bain was my guiding light in all of this because he was highlighting genuine issues, but he's made the villain, and yoked to all the terrorist incels who destroyed the virtuous heart of the protest he voiced due to "white male privilege".
So maybe that makes it easier to understand why a white, male, non-casual gamer like myself reviles these despicable "activists", and sees them exactly for the racist, sexist bigots they are. Keep your
The Last Jedi politics off my games, thanks. You don't have to destroy Rome in a day as much as you desire to try.