Renegade Cut makes a video on Gamergate (and Ready Player One) - General

It's a good game though.

Gone home is both overblown at how great it is and is getting too much bad rep. It's a walking sim and an ok one at most. It just happens to be the game game journos jerked off and the whole thing became a goddamn joke.

These things still happen today. Not exactly the same thing, but Undertale was another game that the entire journo's industry pushed really fucking hard. Only difference was that this time, it was a legitimately great game. But what that behavior shows to me, is that they like to view themselves as taste-makers, rather than reviewers. They imagine themselves as guides to some kind of socio-cultural zeitgeist and they coordinate the pushes for those games. Before the indie scene, they did it with AAA games based on advertising payouts among other things. It's essentially the exact same practice that Gerstman got fired for not participating in. The only difference is they've swapped their motivation from Money to pushing ideals. If it wasn't for how transparantly the games they push have to follow their neo-moralist red thread, i'd honstly be predisposed to call it a vast increase in integrity. But alas, their positive pushing of some games is only one side of the coin. You still find these assholes coordinating negative coverage of games that don't subscribe to their pseudo-psychological view of games as an influencing medium (a viewpoint these same hypocrites spent the 90's vehemently denying against the conservatives). The end results is that games that are hyper-violent for the sake of it or don't subscribe to neo-puritanistic sex-negative pseudo-psychology still get violently panned. Which is even more hypocritical as these people were over the moon about the GTA franchise from 1 to San Andreas and would hear none of it when the conservative media railed against Mass Effect for supposedly being cheap porn. The funny thing is that the similarities don't end there. It even goes as far as their new concern being equally biased, removed from reality and deeply based on deliberate misrepresentation, that it's essentially the EXACT SAME movement, just from the other end of the political spectrum. I guess i went off on a tangent here. But the gist of it is that Gaming media hasn't (at least as a wider whole) been transparant with gamers since the early 00's. 6th and 7th gen it was advertisers and 7th and 8th gen it was lazy california ideology.

Except aside from Fez all those games were insanely popular. You can't really criticize the journo industry for talking about them.

The thing that people don't seem to get about reviewers is there's one really really simple way to get their affection: do something different and do it well. The whole idea of being a game reviewer, just like being a film critic, is to consume as much of the media as possible, what most do for fun you do as a full time job. As a result of this most reviewers get bored with stagnant genres and trends much faster than everyone else. Games like Undertale, Fez, Gone Home, Doom, all get rave reviews not just because of the product's quality in a vacuum, but because they stand out in the context they were released in, games like the entire Triple-A industry or Kane and Lynch don't.

The reality of this situation is quite different than how you paint it. To get a job writing, you need a degree in writing(typically, 5 years ago this was doubly true). To get a job writing a decent outlet like, the New Yorker, you had to be good at what you did and what you covered, regardless of what that was. Many of the authors we're talking about here are, at best, mediocre writers. They couldn't land good jobs out of University, and were often coming from, and catering to the same kind of spaces they came from, hence why we get writers like Leigh. Mediocre writers stuck at a site, hating the very job they have and only focused on the most "interesting" niche markets they could find. It's been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, that clicks are what get authors on modern websites paid. Negative headlines and controversial topics draw more clicks. Combine that with hating the job, and the people who you're supposed to cater to, and you get articles like that. Blatant attack pieces on awkward people who likely fell into gaming through social ostracization. Some writers and authors abused that and relished it. Kane and Lynch was a mediocre game, but the review controversy around it was real. It was blatant, and it didn't really stop after that whole debacle exploded.

This is a load of horse shit reviewers spout to get out of having unpopular opinions. I play hundreds of games a years and try as much as I can, game reviewers are not significantly more knowledgeable about games than me. Sure doing something as your job can suck the fun out of it but that was their fucking decision. Praising something just for being different is one of the worst habits of reviewers. Being different isn't a positive if the thing they're reviewing isn't good and the whole "I'd rather play something bad and different than the same and mediocre" is a position of privilege as game reviewers don't have to spend their money on move of the games they play. Most consumers are looking for what's good. You never see food crtics saying "Oh well the tart tasted rancid and the cream was gone off but it was different so I think everyone should try it." Game critics (and film critics) need to stop trying to review EVERYTHING and instead focus on a niche they actually are interested in, because doing something that bores and annoys you is the fastest way to burn yourself out and becomeout of touch.

That's the fault of the publications more often than not. Game publishers decide which publications get review copies for which games, and then the publications decide which of their staff they assign to the job. They don't always make the right call because certain genres get more games than others and they don't want to hire people for specific niches because a writer who can only write one thing isn't any good in the majority of situations.

I couldn't agree more. The fact that the publications try to make it all branded and not individualised is a huge problem. It shouldn't be "IGN gives Call of Duty Shooty Man 4 a 9/10" it should be "Russle Reviewman gives Call of Duty Shooty Man 4 a 9/10 on IGN".

Of the games you mentioned, three of them (Super Meat Boy, Fez, and Braid) were popular indie darlings with highly publicized development times. There was even a movie about it. All three of them got the spotlight for the story behind their development as well as for doing something new and interesting in indie gaming at the time. Binding of Isaac came off the heels of SMB's development and was one of the forerunners in turning 'roguelites' into a big thing. Undertale was pushed hard, but that came after a reasonably successful kickstarter by a guy already known for his work composing Homestuck music, so it had a strong fandom behind it before it really even blew up. Even Gone Home got publicized for being an interesting gameplay experiment and telling a story centered around LGBT themes at a time where very few games focused on that. The quality of the experiment and story is up for you to decide, but these things didn't come out of a vacuum and certainly not by some kind of megalomaniacal taste-makers in the journalism scene. Most people who call out Gone Home seem like they're caught up in the controversy and forget about favorable coverage for similar titles like Dear Esther, The Path, and other niche narrative-based games that came out well before it to much less issue.

I didn't include them because they were negatively or positively received. I included those games because they were all, as you said youself, examples of the gaming press deciding in a coordinated fashion to cover them over other promising projects. People called out Gone Home over the others for the same reason they gave Phil Fish shit and unloaded on Johnathan Blow. Because these people got favourable coverage because the press liked them, instead of the value of what they made.

So your logic is "gaming press is bad because they cover X fantastic game and not Y other fantastic game" What is your evidence that the gaming press "coordinated" to cover games like Braid instead of multiple press covering it because it's a great game and Jon Blow is an interesting personality?

Then why do you even care about game reviews?

Oh no I was in it from day zero, which may be particularly why I feel so guilty and why I seem to have twisted and blurred the history in my head. I saw the first threads about Quinn's ex-boyfriend sharing their private texts. I remember it was like 3 or 4 in the morning (or maybe that's how late I stayed up talking about it). I was around when '>five guys burgers and lies' just started becoming a catch phrase and helped gather evidence of collusion on Kotaku, Polygon and RPS, scraping for any possible dirt. I then published what may have been the first summarized "article" about it on Tumblr (since I had nothing else) and then published that on N4G so people outside of 4chan would actually see it, because the main conflict at that point in time was that no one on an actual game news site would share this story for obvious reasons, and we needed to find a way to get the word out to the more general public. So I submitted the article, called 'Kotaku Staff Reported to Exchange Positive Game Coverage for Sex' and fought for hours and hours to actually get it approved. It ultimately did with 18/10 votes but had the article flagged/put back into queue several times, and each time tweaked the submission and resubmitted it (including changing the actual linked article and making cached/screenshotted backups) until it eventually got enough comments and views to stay on the front page for an hour or so, and at that point the damage was sufficiently done. I was constantly in conflict with people saying this was slander, that this news story was about private matters that had no relevance, and that this was a form of harassment on people that were undeserving targets, but I saw all of that as desperate attempts to cover up the real story, the story of corruption and collusion that the community had been waiting for, finally with solid evidence to back it up. I was genuinely in that party of people, I was one of the "true" ethics-in-journalism activists and tried to do a lot to separate that movement from the trolls and people sending death threats. But I was also a /v/irgin, surrounded by /v/irgins, so I was still in the threads that passed around the nudes and the memes and the stupid mspaint drawings, I still found most of them funny and I still found 'Five Guys Burgers and Lies' funny because I still for some reason thought there was something wrong with an indie developer sleeping with some bloggers, because that's what everyone else around me thought and that was the corruption story we were all riding on the backs of. When 4chan was well into it's full-on spam implosion and people started talking about this weird new site called 8chan I was thrilled because finally we'd have a place to go for civilized discussion and free speech, a place where we could talk about GG and FG and collect evidence (the vast majority of which, to this day, is still woefully unsubstantiated) while discouraging and censoring spam and trolling, and we could finally live in our little integrity bubble where we believed we were doing the right thing. I watched the livestream of Hotwheels debating Brianna Wu and cheered him on as he gotcha'd the fuck out of her and used his disability to make her look like an assclown, and then in a display of intense irony helped make logos and artwork for the #NotYourShield movement, which was without a doubt a virtue signalling move that was ironically meant to decry virtue signalling. So what I'm saying is that I don't feel guilty because I was part of the troll squad because I really wasn't, I always hated and wanted to distance myself from those people and actively did. And even though I feel complicit in sharing the memes and laughing at the crude jokes, I acknowledge that that sort of thing is just the order of the day when it comes to 2014-era internet debacles. What really really makes me thing was the Five Guys thing (and even if the actual GamerGate started months later, I'm pretty confident that it wouldn't have happened if not for Five Guys and the floodgates it opened). When I stand back and look at it with some perspective, Quinn sleeping with some bloggers was a non-story, the consequences of her actions were so insignificantly small (all she got out of it were two brief mentions in some blog posts almost nobody read for a free text adventure game) that I believe the insane response to it could have only come from a deep place of reactionary sexism, that despite many proven stories of corruption showing up before this, Quinn was was set people off because her and her friends were the perfect targets for the Gamer community and represented everything we hated at the time, pink hair, hipster glasses and all. All the other truths about GG fall by the wayside at that point, yes I and many others sincerely believed we were fighting against corruption, but we were in a community with sexism and all sorts of prejudices ingrained so deeply in the culture that it was undetectable from the inside. Ethics in journalism may have been the engine driving us but misogyny is what turned the key. But that's just my view.

Five Guys didn't "open the floodgates", it's something that everyone would have stopped talking about in months if not weeks if the "Gamers are dead" articles hadn't happened. Collusion between supposedly separate media companies is a much bigger story than some girl cheating on some guy.

I don't know why you guys keep insisting that the two incidents are unrelated. The 'Gamers are Dead' articles were made because of the Five Guys incident, you yourself said that it was an attempt at spinning a narrative. Would those articles have been made in that day in a coordinated media blitz had the Five Guys scandal not happened?

"oops they think we're biased, better prove it by pouring kerosene on the controversy" Nobody would know about gamergate if the latter didn't happen.

Am I just misunderstanding what GamerGate was? I feel like I'm being told two different things. Was it a social movement against press corruption or was it Gamers reacting to being defamed by the 'Gamers are Dead' articles? I thought it was both?

Actually, it's about ethics in video game journalism

I know that, I'm not talking about who should be blamed more, I'm saying the events of Five Guys led to Gamer Gate, is that not true? I don't care if the journalists were justified or not in posting the 'Gamers are Dead' articles, in fact I agree that the impetus for it was to spin the narrative against the proto-GGers of the time, but did they not post those articles as a result of the Five Guys controversy?

While I do agree that them struggling to keep their cover stories straight is quite entertaining, let's keep in mind the articles in question were a completely unrelated thing that just happened at a very bad time. Quinn and the controversy around her had nothing to do with them being written, they just resulted in a certain subset of the gaming community being out for blood at the time they were released, an extremely unfortunate coincidence.

See that's the really distressing thing about GG as a whole, I completely believe you and I would like to think that at its core, #GamerGate itself was founded around that central principle, but that's just our opinions of what GamerGate was, and what it should have been. If we can all acknowledge that there were false flagging trolls and just regular trolls who used the #GG banner, then how are we to divide GamerGate between the "true" GamerGaters and the "troll" GamerGaters? Since everyone is anonymous, no one has any authority whatsoever on what #GamerGate was about, therefore none of us can trust a single word that the other says on the "actual" purpose of GG was. There is no "official GamerGate rulebook" and there's no union of leaders on high that decide what the group does, in fact that's one of the thing GamerGate advertises about itself. So the only way to accurately judge what GamerGate actually was is to look at the output of the movement, and understand its cultural context. That's all I'm trying to do here, I'm not trying to point fingers here or definitively find out who "the enemy" is, I'm just trying to figure out the cultural context that led to GamerGate's output.

The events of Five Guys led to Gamergate, because of the actions of Gaming Journalists, therefore Gamergaters is an unforgivably anti-feminist movement because otherwise the actions of Five Guys could not have led to Gamergate, due to the actions of Gaming Journalists. ???

You need to apply that same lens to both groups though, and you're not. Randi Harper doxxed several people. She openly wished harm upon her detractors. She was a vocal figure head of the AGG movement. People like ASparkle here won't even admit that they 1) were in fact a figure head or 2) that they doxxed or harmed anyone. They did. Both sides had dipshits who failed to express anything in a coherent manner and resulted in what we saw. The problem was the only media groups that would cover this were aligned with AGG from the start and had no desire to out anyone doxxing people on their side of the "fight". Whoever wields the narrative is in control. They wielded the narrative and swept every instance of bad actors under the rug while signal boosting every single cretin from Twitter who had a mean thing to say in a hyperbolic tone. It creates a false narrative of what's happening. It creates the need for a "No true scotsman" situation which is all around bad for everyone. Only one side had the ability to publish articles on widely read websites. Only one side presented a case to the UN about this.

Again, five guys was tiny and not worth what Gamergate was. Those articles were a direct attack by journalists against the very people they're supposed to be giving news to, and were absolute undeniable proof that game journalism completely lacked ethics and a large swathe of jouralists were working to push a narrarative to save their little group of friends from being rightfully fired. Gamergate came from the gamers are dead articles, and those articles came from journalists trying to hide a small controversy in the dumbest way possible.

I'm not arguing against any of those doxxings, I'm perfectly aware of what many aGGers have done and that these journalists were obviously doing everything in their power to silence GGers and proto-GGers, I'm just trying to find out the causes behind the causes here. I'm arguing not that GamerGate was made with the intent of wrongdoing, or "made" in the sense that it was even founded as a centralized group, but that GamerGate is the product of cultural context, the excess cloud of civil unrest reaching its boiling point, and is impossible to look at in a vacuum. What I'm investigating, and ultimately feel remorse for, is that cultural context that we were all a part of. It's important to remember that GGers and aGGers are first and foremost people, who exist in a social sphere outside of just gaming, and everything in that greater social sphere is interrelated.

You're right And I still get called a fascist or a nazi if I so much as reject the common narrative of GG. That's an issue and it's one sided. If this is the argument you're taking up, my earlier argument still stands. you need to apply this lens to both sides. You are not.

You keep chanting this mantra but you never provide any evidence. If she doxxed anyone, say who, say when, prove it.

This was provided to you, idk, maybe 20 times in the GG threads over the years. You ignore it every time, and you ask for it this time. Do you think my memory of you is so pathetic that I don't remember your motus operandi when you do this kind of shit? This is just one instance of it, I expect you to ignore it like you always do. http://archive.is/UWLWG

I just want people that read this post without prior context of both the events or this particular user, who might even consider the post informative or unbiased (when in fact it is carefully worded to tell half-truths intended to make this topic as unclear and chaotic as possible, per standard MO) that the gamers are dead articles was spearheaded by an organization whose senior gaming editor, weeks before, called for journalists (on a google group inspired after JournoList, ironically) to "signal boost" Zoe Quinn and use what happened as "an excuse to give her coverage" and ignoring the corruption issues people were raising up, while recognizing that they didn't want to bring Zoe into this themselves. The gamers are dead articles surely aren't an attempt of doing just that, no! I personally find it very incredible people even try to say these two events are separate when so many people of interest are present in both events. There's such a thing as a coincidence too many, saying the opposite is an insult to everyone's intelligence.