Jimmy Wales on the 'Gate

[PhoneLobster]

Jim Sterling looks pretty cool ... Has he said anything positive about gamergate? Have gamertgaters been saying anything positive about him?

Pretty sure Jim Sterling and gamers gate fuckwits have a distinctly hostile relationship from what I recall.

[Kaelik]

Jim Sterling looks pretty cool. Thank you for pointing him out.

EDIT: Has he said anything positive about gamergate? Have gamertgaters been saying anything positive about him? How ell known is he? Is it typical or unusual that I'm hearing of him for the first time now, despite several threads of gamergate talk gere and elsewhere?

Jim Sterling was formerly the chief editor of the Escapist briefly. He has also been making videos for a long time about primarily corporate bullshit, in particular as it relates to how they interact with journalists.

As a general rule, I expect that most gamersgate people are pretty pro Jim Sterling, and Jim Sterling is not really in a position to spear head anything gamersgate for a lot of reasons, but he basically says the same things as DSMatticus, including for example, unlike ignorant idiots like PL, he acknowledges the complexity of dealing with an issue when assholes exist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfDMHF2N7jI

His video addressing gamersgate, from back in September.

[PhoneLobster]

As a general rule, I expect that most gamersgate people are pretty pro Jim Sterling

Except he was critical of Gamersgate and so Gamersgate neanderthals put his face on a stupid little hit list of of "Social Justice Warriors" that they wanted everyone to boycott.

Pretty sure that happened.

Not that long ago either.

[Kaelik]

As a general rule, I expect that most gamersgate people are pretty pro Jim Sterling

Except he was critical of Gamersgate and so Gamersgate neanderthals put his face on a stupid little hit list of of "Social Justice Warriors" that they wanted everyone to boycott.

Pretty sure that happened.

Not that long ago either.

Except that he wasn't critical of gamersgate, and that gamersgate doesn't have a hit list of SJW, and you are full of shit.

But yes, aside from you vaguely recalling things that are absolutely false, people from Gamersgate are probably mostly pro Jim Sterling.

Hey PL, remember when you vaguely recalled that anyone who disagreed with you about anything was a rape supporter in the mysterious rape the thread that fbmf deleted to protect us from being rightly accused as rape supporters? Yeah. I don't trust your memory.

[PhoneLobster]

Oh for fuck sake Kaelik it was like the next fucking video along.

[Kaelik]

Oh for fuck sake Kaelik it was like the next fucking video along.

#istandwithgandorf is about someone using the word retarded, and not about journalism

[Mistborn]

To be honest the moral of this story is that internet outrage isn't and an effective tool to advocate for anything. Which is a lesson everyone involved in this fuck-up should learn, but especially the social justice blogosphere. Since the big worry I have after as a fan of social justice is what happens if the social justice side loses on of these twitter war, the last thing I want to do is turn on the news and hear that someone inoffensive got death threats from social justice advocates. (which could have already happened during the Laci Green fiasco, thank Madoka it didn't)

But anyway if you think that Gamergate is exclusively about misogyny you clearly have not been paying attention. We already have a pretty good idea of the size and power of the gamer misogyny brigade from the Sarkeesian incident. They don't have nearly the sort of power than the anti-GG people claim they do.

Regardless of where you stand on the issue you should at least try to understand what the grievances of the GG people are. Even if it's for no other reason that the internet misogyny brigade is using it as a weapon against feminism (and if you believe GG is just a misogynist conspiracy it's clearly working).

[Orion]

the last thing I want to do is turn on the news and hear that someone inoffensive got death threats from social justice advocates. (which could have already happened during the Laci Green fiasco, thank Madoka it didn't)

I think this happened at some point during #dickwolfgate, sadly.

[PhoneLobster]

OK let me just quote Jim Sterling, and I'm sure I could find others but this is just one I stumbled across while looking for other things...

"FYI I won't be very interactive on Twitter for a while. GG showed it's hand when I unequivocally wouldn't side with it so it's a shit show now." - Jim Sterling

So just remember kids. When Gamersgate apologists go on about how much they love Jim Sterling, that they also targeted him as an enemy for an extended period of their never ending mysogynistic shit storm.

In the mean time all people who aren't apologists for misogynistic shit storms can rest easy knowing that Gamersgate is irrevocably correctly identified by the entire world as a misogynistic shit storm and will never be identified as anything else no matter how much deeper of a hole the tiny number of bizarrely fixated apologists keep on trying to dig.

[Orion]

Meanwhile, Koumei spouts bullshit. She seems to be "on my side" in this thread, so I feel obligated to comment.

Oh goody, public discourse! We can all talk about how shit things are while we eat our shoes! That was definitely worth the tear gas and concussions, everyone!

Well yeah, it could very easily be worth all the tear gas and concussions.

Also to be fair to the Democratic party, you'll notice they basically can't actually get anything passed what with the Republicans being as they are.

That's not being remotely fair to the Democratic party, it's being slavishly sympathetic. Literally earlier in this month, the Democratic senate passed unlimited bailouts for Wall Street. They didn't have to do that, but they did. They had the Senate for years. They could at the very least have passed dozens of welfare bills, social justice bills, and forced the republicans to veto or pile Boehner's desk high with popular populist legislation. They also changed the rules to let themselves push through Obama nominees and then didn't bother to do more than a handful of them.

[Kaelik]

So just remember kids. When Gamersgate apologists go on about how much they love Jim Sterling, that they also targeted him as an enemy for an extended period of their never ending mysogynistic shit storm.

In the mean time all people who aren't apologists for misogynistic shit storms can rest easy knowing that Gamersgate is irrevocably correctly identified by the entire world as a misogynistic shit storm and will never be identified as anything else no matter how much deeper of a hole the tiny number of bizarrely fixated apologists keep on trying to dig.

Yes, I'm sure that that has everything to do with a total survey of all of gamergate, and not a particular reaction to a few dickholes. And I definitely can't find a quote from Jim Sterling explicitly saying that, and saying that he has nothing against people who choose to continue using the hashtag.

Seeing this thing with Jim is frustrating. Jim has always been very pro consumer and pro gaming. he's also been someone who takes social issues into consideration at all turns. He too has tried to be a voice of moderation and people on both sides, albeit mostly on the GG side, have not stood for it.

I wrote him tonight and reached out to him and even though our views differ on gamergate, I hope that we'll always be friends. I adore him even more to see him standing up for what he believes in. Awesome dude.

And since it will be implied otherwise, no I do not condone the actions of the few who harass Jim for his opinions.... Nor do I wish to entirely abandon a hashtag because of them.

Boogie, you and I are friends. I wish you wouldn't give credit to a movement that has, in my personal experience, achieved nothing except the distress of my respected peers, and caused me to hate what I do for a living, but I know you're a good dude and I know you don't condone the bullshit, so for all my wishes, I don't hold it against you.

Hell, I still don't hold anything against those who, for all their decisions, really did just care about a better standard of games media. But there are too many assholes for me to be nice about this anymore. I tried being reasonable and polite, and from Friday onwards, prominent GGers decided I needed to pay a price for it.

At any rate, I still wish you all the best. You know that.

http://67.227.255.239/forum/printthread ... 0&page=107

[PhoneLobster]

So, shorter Kaelik...

"Jim Sterling is much loved by Gamersgate community and is a perfect figurehead for their pure journalistic ethics agenda!

"Gamersgate has never targeted and harassed Jim Sterling and Jim Sterling has never criticized Gamersgate, I'll link videos about those things happening as proof that they didn't".

"OK OK, so MAYBE Gamersgate as a movement targeted and harassed Jim Sterling until he hated his life and he said some very critical things about Gamersgate. BUT He didn't condemn every single individual personally and there was totes this one guy who was sorry about the mass campaign. THUS PROVING... ??? (Underpants gnomes?) ???"


Yeah. A spiraling back pedal of apologia and denial and downright lies. And completely bizarre in it's fixation. Why the fuck does this shit need to be repeatedly lied about in public to defend the honor of the Gamersgate misogynistic shit storm? You want to talk about ethics in game journalism? It has nothing to do with Gamersgate, you can just go talk about it. Like people like Jim Sterling did and do, despite actively being attacked by Gamersgate, a community which every bit of evidence suggests is actively AGAINST there being ethics in games journalism considering the targets on their hit lists time and again are actually the biggest proponents of ethics in games journalism.

[Chamomile]

Gamergate has mixed feelings about Jim Sterling. He released a video which was (according to 8chan/KiA) critical and placed himself fairly firmly in the anti camp according to the hotbeds of the movement, but then a few days later was back to hating on companies for their blatant anti-consumerism. The general attitude is that Sterling is very pro-consumer unless it's a choice between consumers and his journalist friends, in which case consumers can eat a dick. I really dislike Jim Sterling's show for purely stylistic reasons, so I never bothered watching to find out how fair or not this assessment was.

[Mistborn]

I don't think think anyone doubts that terrible people are involved with GG at this point. Plenty of bad actors joined the hashtag in order to smear feminism by associating it with games journalism.

To be honest I stand with David Auerbach on this trainwreck. If you're going to play the guilt by association game then everyone who's ever weighed in on GG is a terrible person who shouldn't be listened to. Because it happening on twitter and that place breeds toxicity. The movement needs to stop sure, but trying to shame it out of existence has only poured gasoline on the blaze.

Which sort of makes me wonder what the hell the "Gamers are dead" people thought would happen. We're dealing with nerds for love of Madokami! Their central nerd cultural narrative is that people are going to beat them up and shame them for liking what they like. If I was trying to make the gamer community see the internet social justice movement as the enemy I'm not sure I could to better than Ms. Alexander and co.

[Orion]

In fairness to the "gamers are dead" folks, they had no way to predict that there was about to be a luridly sexual personal attack on a game developer by an ex who had put weeks of planning into making sure it blew up with maximum exposure and maximum harassment. The gamers are dead pieces probably wouldn't have caused this kind of mishigoss by themselves.

[PhoneLobster]

The movement needs to stop sure, but trying to shame it out of existence has only poured gasoline on the blaze.

I don't know if simply being accurate in the identification and criticism of a misogynistic shit storm is allowed to automatically be a bad thing just because it might further enrage the misogynistic shit storm.

And anyway gasoline on fires and what not? Nah, gamersgate is over. And the shitty misogynistic shit storm was accurately exposed to the eyes of the world very nicely and no amount of whiny demands for do-overs from Kaelik will ever change that no matter how angry or nerdragey anything makes him.

[GreatGreyShrike]

I think fundamental and inherent to Gamersgate that it inherently is sustained by the fact that it highlights a number of legitamately problematic behaviours in games journalism, and simultaneously has such a major sexist element. Fundamentally, earlier issues got nowhere near the screen time and attention and pervasiveness that Gamersgate got, because those cases were much more straightforward - for example, earlier reactions to the Kane and Lynch Gerstmann firing were lackluster because pretty much everyone could see it was inherently wrong and it drew no major streams of supporters for an entire side, so the entire thing didn't flare up nearly as bad. Slate Star Codex's Toxoplasma of Rage suggests mechanics which seem to me to be really obviously true about how our modern society and media perpetuates and sustains and reinforces discussion of controversy, and chooses which critical incidents will become major controversies and which will not. If the most reasonable elements of Gamersgate managed to rebrand and seperate themselves sufficiently to divorce completely the doxxers and trolls and sexists and other elements that are most objectionable, that part of it would draw no attention because it wouldn't say anything flamebaity that would incite rebuttals and arguments and so forth.

One critical reason this thing got so big was because of the sexists in the movement fueling the fires on the other side to create massive flamewars. If they had never existed, noone would have heard of the movement in the first place. If the movement completely divorced itself from them and they all shut up and never participated, the absence of controversy and talking points would cause the whole debate to collapse even faster than it already is. Reframing part of the movement to be entirely controversy-free and talk only about the actually very obviously wrong things about gaming journalism is, therefore, likely to not produce nearly as much overall attention as the rest of it.

[Kaelik]

So, shorter Kaelik...

"Jim Sterling is much loved by Gamersgate community and is a perfect figurehead for their pure journalistic ethics agenda!

"Gamersgate has never targeted and harassed Jim Sterling and Jim Sterling has never criticized Gamersgate, I'll link videos about those things happening as proof that they didn't".

"OK OK, so MAYBE Gamersgate as a movement targeted and harassed Jim Sterling until he hated his life and he said some very critical things about Gamersgate. BUT He didn't condemn every single individual personally and there was totes this one guy who was sorry about the mass campaign. THUS PROVING... ??? (Underpants gnomes?) ???"


Yeah. A spiraling back pedal of apologia and denial and downright lies. And completely bizarre in it's fixation. Why the fuck does this shit need to be repeatedly lied about in public to defend the honor of the Gamersgate misogynistic shit storm? You want to talk about ethics in game journalism? It has nothing to do with Gamersgate, you can just go talk about it. Like people like Jim Sterling did and do, despite actively being attacked by Gamersgate, a community which every bit of evidence suggests is actively AGAINST there being ethics in games journalism considering the targets on their hit lists time and again are actually the biggest proponents of ethics in games journalism.

Or you know, you could read literally my first post about him, which features:

1) Mention of the fact that most Gamergate people are pro Sterling which obviously means that some people aren't.

2) Highlighting his obvious conflict of interests as a reason he is not particularly pro Gamergate.

3) He acknowledges that there the existence of an indeterminate number of assholes is not the sole quality of a movement, and that it is actually pretty complex.

Your accusation that I am backpedaling would hold more weight if I didn't include literally all that in my first post about him. Here, since you have such difficulty reading it the first time, I will reproduce if below for you to struggle over:

Jim Sterling looks pretty cool. Thank you for pointing him out.

EDIT: Has he said anything positive about gamergate? Have gamertgaters been saying anything positive about him? How ell known is he? Is it typical or unusual that I'm hearing of him for the first time now, despite several threads of gamergate talk gere and elsewhere?

Jim Sterling was formerly the chief editor of the Escapist briefly. He has also been making videos for a long time about primarily corporate bullshit, in particular as it relates to how they interact with journalists.

As a general rule, I expect that most gamersgate people are pretty pro Jim Sterling, and Jim Sterling is not really in a position to spear head anything gamersgate for a lot of reasons, but he basically says the same things as DSMatticus, including for example, unlike ignorant idiots like PL, he acknowledges the complexity of dealing with an issue when assholes exist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfDMHF2N7jI

His video addressing gamersgate, from back in September.

[Mistborn]

In fairness to the "gamers are dead" folks, they had no way to predict that there was about to be a luridly sexual personal attack on a game developer by an ex who had put weeks of planning into making sure it blew up with maximum exposure and maximum harassment. The gamers are dead pieces probably wouldn't have caused this kind of mishigoss by themselves.

When those articles hit Gjoni's post was already out there and some of the people involved in what would become GG were already homing in on games journalism as a target. That one of the reason that the alarm bells got sounded, the solution to most of the "problems" the proto-GG was about is to talk about them on the internet. So people saw those articles as an attempt to preemptively silence dissent. (which I don't think they were, but sufficiently advanced stupidity is often indistinguishable from malice)

Proto-GG aka "the Quinnspiracy" is somehow even more stupid. Gjoni felt like Quinn was abusing him and decided that "calling her out" would be a good idea, and had the mistaken impression that internet outrage was the appropriate tool for that. (spoiler: it wasn't) 4chan immediately latched on because Quinn was on their enemies list already.

Of course the allegations that came out of that were dumb and misogynistic and turned out to be complete bullshit. A lot of the people involved realized this, but they had signed up to ruin someone and by golly they were going to ruin someone. So they started to look into corruption in games journalism.

[DSMatticus]

I think fundamental and inherent to Gamersgate that it inherently is sustained by the fact that it highlights a number of legitamately problematic behaviours in games journalism, and simultaneously has such a major sexist element. Fundamentally, earlier issues got nowhere near the screen time and attention and pervasiveness that Gamersgate got, because those cases were much more straightforward - for example, earlier reactions to the Kane and Lynch Gerstmann firing were lackluster because pretty much everyone could see it was inherently wrong and it drew no major streams of supporters for an entire side, so the entire thing didn't flare up nearly as bad. Slate Star Codex's Toxoplasma of Rage suggests mechanics which seem to me to be really obviously true about how our modern society and media perpetuates and sustains and reinforces discussion of controversy, and chooses which critical incidents will become major controversies and which will not. If the most reasonable elements of Gamersgate managed to rebrand and seperate themselves sufficiently to divorce completely the doxxers and trolls and sexists and other elements that are most objectionable, that part of it would draw no attention because it wouldn't say anything flamebaity that would incite rebuttals and arguments and so forth.

One critical reason this thing got so big was because of the sexists in the movement fueling the fires on the other side to create massive flamewars. If they had never existed, noone would have heard of the movement in the first place. If the movement completely divorced itself from them and they all shut up and never participated, the absence of controversy and talking points would cause the whole debate to collapse even faster than it already is. Reframing part of the movement to be entirely controversy-free and talk only about the actually very obviously wrong things about gaming journalism is, therefore, likely to not produce nearly as much overall attention as the rest of it.

Two things, both of which I have said a billion times already.

1) You do not need to appeal to an underlying current of sexism to explain why this exploded. The Streisand effect is a thing. I'm pretty comfortable saying that the single largest publicity-generating event for this controversy was being purged from reddit. The odds are astronomical that had that not happened we wouldn't be talking about this in December and Jimmy Wales wouldn't have shit to say about GamerGate because GamerGate would clearly be too small to merit a wikipedia article.

2) You do not even need to appeal to an underlying current of sexism to explain why the journalists involved spend so much talking about sexism. John Bain John Bain TotalBiscuit John Bain. I am going to keep mentioning that man until the significance of what happened to him sinks in. He only ever talked about the DMCA claim, expressed explicit skepticism of 4chan 'bullshit', and he still got called a fucking misogynist.

The question of how toxic GamerGate is or isn't is actually surprisingly irrelevant to how this would have played it, because censorship is the thing that made everyone pay attention and in this case shouting about misogyny is entirely a petty tribalistic defense of colleagues. And both of those things are true whether or not GamerGate is 99% misogynists or 1% misogynists or anywhere inbetween. I'm not saying your "volatile flamewars attract attention" theory is wrong (in general I'd actually say it's spot on), but it isn't the least bit needed to explain what the fuck happened in this particular instance and actually does a great deal to mask the bad faith with which the journalist crowd has acted.

In fairness to the "gamers are dead" folks, they had no way to predict that there was about to be a luridly sexual personal attack on a game developer by an ex who had put weeks of planning into making sure it blew up with maximum exposure and maximum harassment. The gamers are dead pieces probably wouldn't have caused this kind of mishigoss by themselves.

Your timeline is way off. The "gamers are dead" articles happened in late August, shortly after it became obvious that the attempt to kill the conversation by nuking it off reddit had backfired and made it fucking huge and after public twitter rage at TotalBiscuit had people asking "what the fuck is up with these assholes?" They were an incredibly unsubtle attempt to set the narrative by which future discussions were going to take place, and that narrative involved them being feminist heroes standing valiantly against a horde of basement-dwelling, women-hating neckbeards. The "gamers are dead" articles are best-case scenario the voiced opinions of a community so corrupt and incestuous that it doesn't actually think members of their particular tribe (like Quinn) can ever be worthy of criticism and worst-case scenario a coordinated collection of shrewdly political smear pieces intended to protect their own asses once people started looking closer at them for the giant shitstains they were being on twitter. And the actual story is almost certainly a little bit of A, a little bit of B.

[GreatGreyShrike]

What I'm saying is that if there hadn't been the whole misogyny accusations thing or something similar to seize on, then what would have happened is probably a bunch of the censorship -> everyone condemns the censorship -> the side that argues against GG doesn't exist in nearly the numbers and size and fails to create a huge flamewar that engulfs the internet and spreads to actual mainstream media. The thing would have existed and been known about by people on the internet, but it would have been maybe the size of the Gerstmann firing instead and it would have died out to the background 'that was a thing that happened' that the Gerstmann firing reached a couple months after it happened by now. The reason the thing hasn't died out yet is because of the ongoing sexism thing giving ammunition to the other side to create attacks with to allow the volleys of attacks and responses that seem to characterize controversies online.

I think what happened to TB was a shame, as his writing and thoughts on the subject were exceptionally evenhanded especially early on in the shitstorm. I like the man, and have used his "WTF IS..." series to guide my videogame purchases for some time now - he's always struck me as honest and reasonable and clearheaded, and his videos on discussing e.g. review date embargos is probably the most productive pro-consumer videogame journalism stuff to come out recently (possibly more due to AC:U than gamergate).

Ultimately, people on *both sides* took actions that escalated and increased controversy that were in aggregate clearly extremely counterproductive for accomplishing any constructive/productive/useful goal out of gamergate, and a lot of good people on both sides got smeared because of actions of the relatively few bad apples in each.