GamerGate

[Terrie]

[quote="Maggie Mae"

No one here is saying that anything that Anita or Zoe did warrants threats and intimidation. However, the next logical part of this conversation (IMO) would be to examine what they are saying. Otherwise, we are just a bunch of people repeating each other and saying how horrible it is that that happened.

[Maggie Mae]

[quote="Maggie Mae"

No one here is saying that anything that Anita or Zoe did warrants threats and intimidation. However, the next logical part of this conversation (IMO) would be to examine what they are saying. Otherwise, we are just a bunch of people repeating each other and saying how horrible it is that that happened.

What about all the other women who have been threatened? :evil-eye:

Tell me, what about Brianna Wu's views? If Sarkeesian and Quinn's comments are worth discussing (instead of, oh, I don't know, why the fuck whiny little boys are given any sort of support from anyone for pulling this sort of shit), surely you can explain how Wu's views led to her being threatened out of her home.

[Terrie]

I don't know who that is, and if I wasn't clear before, no one deserves to be met with death threats, whatever their view.

Okay.

Why are people given support for doxxing?

I don't know. I wasn't aware that anyone really supported what happened to those women. Pretty much all I've read is that some women who don't like the portrayal of women in video games blogged about it and got doxxed. Which is wrong, incase the fact that I've said it's not right in every post I've posted here isn't sinking in. She got doxxed. It sucks.

Very valuable and interesting discussion.

So basically, you've been trying to direct a conversation about a topic you know nothing about, despite the fact that Brianna Wu is covered in the article in the very first post in this thread. :angry-banghead:

You can say you don't support the death threats until you are blue in the face, but by attempting to direct the conversation to the behavior of Sarkeesian and Quinn, your actions support the environment that results in death threats going unaddressed in favor of talking about the victims behavior. "He should have never hit you. That is never okay. Let's talk about what you did."

You want to talk about Sarkessian and Quinn? Okay, let's talk about them.

Sarkeesian was accused of purposely inciting trolls to attack her to get press for her Kickstarter. After she raised a truly impressive amount of money, she was accused of pocketing the money rather than actually funding the project, because where were the videos? Despite fact that she started to release videos some time ago, along with having made statments that they decided to expand the scope of the project, which created the inital delays, people are still repeating the same claims that she pocketed the money.

Quinn's ex-boyfriend accused her of sleeping with video game reviewers for good reviews for her game. Despite claims that the backlash is about journalistic ethics, the focus reamined largely on Quinn, and not the reviewers who supposedly gave her this quid pro quo exchange. This strikes many people as odd, given that there are no accusations that she put a gun to someone's head and said "Fuck me and give me a good review, or I'm going to blow your brains out" so it's not clear how attacking Quinn will have any effect on reviewers. Plenty of people who are familiar with her name and the accusations of her ex can not name the reviewer without Googling it, which I find pretty telling about what the real focus is.

Brianna Wu, who owns Giant Spacekat, an indie video game studio, posted a meme poking fun at misogyny in gaming culture, with statements like "Says start your own studio to woman who owns a studio" over the picture of a tantruming toddler and received threats of murder serious enough to drive her from her home.

These are only the women who are getting major coverage. Plenty of others have been harassed and threatened on a smaller scale or have been silenced or simply not received the same press.

[debrand]

I don't know if I am a gamer. At 48, I am past the demographic that most video game companies actively target. This past year, I got lost in Skyrim, Mass Effect, Fall Out New Vegas , and am right now enjoying Destiny. Sometimes my date nights with my husband involve playing various video games. We used to play WOW until the game dumbed itself down. So, I might not be a 'gamer' but I enjoy a lot of video games. I would love to have an intelligent discussion about the portrayal of women in video games.

There are no excuses for death threats. Period. There is a very horrible irony in the fact that certain people believe that they can deny that video games are sexist by making degrading and threatening comments to women.

What is sad is that I think that the video game industry needs to have a discussion about how women are depicted but that will get buried.

Video games are actually just interactive movies in which the gamer plays the main character. Movies often fail in the presentation of female characters. Writers tend to believe that having one or two 'strong' female characters is enough but women make up half the population and should be half the supporting characters. In some ways video games are better than movies because the player usually picks the gender of their character but that doesn't mean that video games couldn't do a much better job. We can't really discuss how video games depict women without also focusing in on how media and movies do too because it is part of the same problem.

[gilamomster]

I've been a gamer since the release of Everquest in 1999. Since then I've alpha'd, beta'd and played more games than I can remember.

I am 48 years old and female; very into the gaming community with boys and a husband that are also deeply entrenched in the community.

I have led guilds, and have made friends that cross-over games with me for years all of us in our 40-50s.

Gamergate pisses me off, because all the inroads females have made into the gaming world seem to have vanished. Now I sit in Mumble, TS and Raidcall chats and cringe. I am routinely reminding the "boys" and men that there are female gamers and some of them are moms and how would they feel if someone spoke of their mom or their sisters in that manner.

Sometimes it works, sometimes I put them on mute. It's discouraging that a generation of boys thinks its OK to name their toons

C-licker, Urmomsf-cker etc.

I've heard my sons call out their friends and guildmates for the way they refer to women because I've raised them to respect women.

I think what we are seeing now is the 1950's version of a woman entering a male-dominated workplace with the men screaming and kicking that women should play pong and not create games like candy crush and leave the dragons to the manly men. Which is BS of course.