Granted it was during a bleak period of my life when I was so reactionary. But my god, to think these goobers are still around today, still doing racism and sexism, just moving from target to target to take out the impotent rage on.
Just reminded of it today with the “discourse” of Yasuke being in Ass Creed and G*mers changing any woman not white and waifish with AI.
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?
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.
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
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.
if you personally advocated for ethics in journalism with pure intentions
There were exactly zero people doing that in G*merGate.
