It's really disturbing to see people downplay GamerGate in this thread. GamerGate got the President of the United States of America elected, and GamerGate is a few days from infecting the Supreme Court of the United States of America for generations. We will never get away from GamerGate. GamerGate's original claims are that Zoe Quinn slept around for coverage favors. This was debunked literally months ago. And yet it persists.
Kotaku shows that Nathan never wrote the articles he was accused of writing
On March 31, Nathan published the only Kotaku article he's written involving Zoe Quinn. It was about Game Jam, a failed reality show that Zoe and other developers were upset about being on. At the time, Nathan and Zoe were professional acquaintances. He quoted blog posts written by Zoe and others involved in the show. Shortly after that, in early April, Nathan and Zoe began a romantic relationship. He has not written about her since. Nathan never reviewed Zoe Quinn's game Depression Quest, let alone gave it a favorable review.
Rock Paper Shotgun: This is the only article Nathan ever wrote on Rock Paper Shotgun that mentioned Depression quest.
GamerGate has not provided any other evidence to back up this assertion
Even though Nathan Grayson is the journalist accused of this unethical behavior (and he never actually wrote the articles he was accused of writing), and GamerGate insisting this is about "ethics in journalism", they can't seem to stop talking about Zoe Quinn (not a journalist) and Anita Sarkeesian (also not a journalist)
Other bullshit about Zoe Quinn
Zoe Quinn was and still is today regularly accused of doxxing herself.
Zoe Quinn was and still is today accused of faking death, rape, and other threats.
Zoe Quinn doesn't actually sell the game she's accused of sleeping around to get coverage of. It's a free game about Depression, called Depression Quest, created to help others learn to live and deal with the disease. She does take donations, and was accused of lying about giving those donations to charity. However, the charity confirmed the donations were actually received
When accusations of those lies first arose, GamerGate started donating to that charity in her place. After the charity confirmed receiving the donations, GamerGate started harassing the charity and threatening it with legal action because they claim they "didn't disclose publicly" they had received donations from her (even though that is not actuall illegal). This is a charity is made up of volunteers and a part-time paid intern, helping people deal with depression
Zoe Quinn is frequently accused of winning an award (instead of Papers Please) for Depression Quest because she slept with someone. In actuality, her game didn't receive an award, but just an honorable mention. Papers Please did indeed win the award. No evidence backs up the claim she slept with someone to get the....honorable mention.
Zoe Quinn was accused to have "deliberately sabotaged, DDOSed, doxxed, and shut down" TFYC ("The Fine Young Capitalists") because they were "competition" for Rebel Game Jam. The reality is that it's yet another bunch of bullshit accusations against her.
Other bullshit about Anita Sarkeesian
Anita Sarkeesian was similarly accused of faking threats. Still happens regularly.
The FBI confirmed the threats were real, currently under investigation.
Anita Sarkeesian needed to cancel an appearance for a talk at a university because of extremely specific and violent threats against her and the students.
Reminder: Anita Sarkeesian is not a journalist. She makes videos about video games, and that's it. Any attack on Anita Sarkeesian masquerading as "a fight for ethics in journalism" is automatically and instantly misplaced.
Even more bullshit
There is a mailing list in which games writers talk to each other. Warning: Breitbart link. This fact was presented as inherently controversial, but not really explained why. Absolutely nothing worthy of discussion was ever found on this mailing list. Just people who happen to share the same job, joking with each other, and asking each other uncontroversial questions.
One frequent accusation of journalist collusion is that there was a collected and coordinated effort to write "gamers are dead" articles to attack gamers. In actuality:
The first article, written by Leigh Alexander, was targeted at developers (the audience of Gamasutra), explaining how the gamer stereotype no longer has to be their focus, since games are so much broader. She wasn't attacking gamers, she was attacking the outdated stereotype
The subsequent articles are all related to and reactions of the first, not indepedent takes at a coincidental time indicating collusion.
Rock Paper Shotgun is often accused to have written their own "Gamers are dead" article. They didn't. They quoted one in a weekly round-up.
Jenn Frank was accused of failing to disclose a conflict of interest. She actually did disclose this in her initial draft, but before publication this was "removed by editors because [it] did not fulfill the criteria for a “significant connection” in line with the Guardian’s editorial guidelines."
Maya Kramer was accused of colluding/sleeping with the IGF chairman to secure an award for The Stanley Parable, a game she'd done PR for. This award was actually the Audience Award, and is decided by a public vote on the website and consequently immune to this alleged impropriety.
Phil Fish, developer of the game Fez, is acused to have fixed the IGF 2012 awards. But while Fez's backers were part of the judges, they did not actually have a say in the vote since they weren't a part of the jury that makes the decision.
The Escapist ran a horribly misguided attempt at interviewing GamerGate supporters who are developers. Pretty much everything that could have gone wrong, did go wrong.
Titles of the articles are "game developers" and "female game developers". Um. What?
None of the female game developers felt safe to share their actual identities
The questions are ridiculously loaded
The male game developers were sourced straight from 4chan...you'll never guess what happened next
One of the male developers interviewed was directly involved in coordinated attacks against Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and others including baseless accusations like tax fraud.
So what is GamerGate, in actuality?
It's a carefully coordinated attack on women in gaming, orchestrated by the underbelly of 4chan, deliberately masquerading itself as a "concern about ethics in game journalism" because that's the only way it would gather mainstream support
It's an attack on ethical journalism, the exact thing they have claimed to fight for:
RubberJohnny said:
]1) The main target of #GamerGate is not a journalist. She’s a video game developer. Holding her accountable for “ethics in journalism” is like telling your accountant that it’s his job to negotiate peace treaties in the Middle East.
2) The second biggest target of #GamerGate is an exemplar of clean journalism. If what you don’t like about gaming journalism is that it’s too cozy with the industry and therefore the writers are afraid to be critical, then your fucking hero should be Anita Sarkeesian. She funded herself with Kickstarter and not industry money. She is harshly critical of video games, even as she is a fan. She is the ideal of what a critical gaming journalist should be: Knowledgeable, critical, fair, thorough and utterly non-corrupt.
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.
5) The most recent target of #GamerGate was selected because she engages in ethical journalism. If Brianna Wu had kept her mouth shut and just quietly developed video games, she probably would have been left alone. Instead, she dipped her toe into the art of writing ethical journalistic pieces. But, because they are opponents of ethical journalism, #GamerGaters attacked Wu like they do any other young woman that doesn’t just churn out mindless pro-sexist propaganda.
6) One of the main leaders of #GamerGate works for Breitbart. Milo Yiannopoulos has been up front, rallying the troops of #GamerGate and even helping them select the inevitably young, female targets for harassment. He also works for Breitbart, an organization whose hostility towards ethical journalism is legendary. No surprise there, because #GamerGate is also opposed to ethical journalism.
In other words, #GamerGate is about “ethics in journalism” in the same way Fox News is “fair and balanced”, which is to say “not in the slightest and, in fact, they are the opposite”. Fox News called itself “fair and balanced” to cover for a not-exactly-discreet intention to be unfair, unbalanced and frequently just straight up misleading. And so #GamerGate claims to be about ethics in journalism, when in fact it is about the opposite: Bullying gaming journalists until they get in line with a corporate-friendly agenda of uncritically marketing “games pitched at the intellectual and emotional level of a 16-year-old suburban masturbator“. Anyone who actually tries to talk about anything interesting or intellectually engaging, particularly if female, will be drilled out with harassment.
