Is #GamerGate misogyny posing as concern for ethics?

[AniThyng]

Slightly off topic, but this seems to reinforce that again that anyone with any agenda can manufacture a controversy about anything and rouse the mob. And perhaps the internet is even worse because everyone on it can pat themselves on the back and tell themselves they are cleverer than those sheeple...

[Flagg]

1: anyone who identifies themselves as a "gamer" needs psychological help.

Why?

Because what began as a harmless label has been stolen by misogynistic homophobic shitsuckers that don't think something is a "real" game unless you can shoot someone in the face or kill hookers and whine about why paradox games don't use swasticas in hearts of iron.

[K. A. Pital]

I think those who threaten women with rape deserve to quickly leave this world and die, and their grievances I do not care about at all. As for those that merely pick women as targets for their whining and hate e-mails, they deserve to be humiliated as the chauvinist motherfuckers they are.

[GuppyShark]

Eight pages and not a single mention of the incredibly successful write-in campaign that gamergate has launched? Or the "gamers are dead" articles? Of how Intel got called a bunch of misogynistic assholes (hilarious when they have a female CEO) for pulling their ads off Gamasutra? Of how Gawker continues to make itself look like a bunch of petulant children? No mention of GameJournoPros and the proven collusion that has happened within the industry? Hell not even a mention of the segment NPR did on it this morning?

I'm geniunely sorry that the huge number of people committing criminal offences while waving your flag is tarnishing the reputations of the tiny minority of self-identifying #GamerGate activists pursuing their petty albeit legal agenda.

If these upstanding advocates of journalistic integrity (in a field that has historically always been a fanboy press) actively separated themselves from the scum (instead of covering for them) they'd be able to tell the doxxing hordes that they're #NotYourShield. And maybe then we could be united in shutting them down instead of having to waste time debating with the #GamerGate apologists.

[K. A. Pital]

Who the hell even picks on women in gaming? Some retarded fat permavirgin losers?

[AniThyng]

Who the hell even picks on women in gaming? Some retarded fat permavirgin losers?

If my understanding of parts of this thread is correct, your very statement is part of the problem, because "retarded fat permavirgin loser" is a stereotype that masks the true problem that this macho culture is so ingrained, that it actually is regular people that are doing it.

But YMMV and I may be wrong.

[K. A. Pital]

Now, retarded fat loser is a stereotype. The loser may not be fat. He may not be all that losery either, getting a real wage.

However, when it comes to sex life usually... Well... I mean seriously, a lot of these people in N7 t-shirts probably haven't had any sex in months. I should know, I am sort of related to the whole thing.

And that is when the losers who spend like 5 hours every evening on typing worthless facebook shit or discussing games or something get a target: women. They see women are attacking the boobies in games that they masturbate to. Seriously, that's awful.

And 'macho' culture is IMHO a different thing. Machism is also a lifestyle, and generally the person should be physically fit (at least appearance-wise) and not deeply interested in stuff like gaming. Being interested in some form of gaming is like the most anti-macho thing one can do...

[AniThyng]

You should look back to the 1st page and read TheFenix's post, because I think it addresses precisely this, though I don't think I necessarily agree with his conclusions on who's complicit:

Let's just say that if gamers ever wanted to shed the stereotype of being 300-pound mouth-breathing permavirgins with bad hygiene and worse social skills -especially with girls, the abuse and threats aimed at Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn and others who committed the heinous crime of gaming without a penis pretty much guarantees that particular blemish will last longer than the Mark of Cain.

I always kind of laugh when people think post-2000 gamers are some kind of cohesive block of losers. Hell, I laugh when they think that of pre-2000 gamers. The media loves to trot out how expansive gaming has become, about how even women are playing video games these days. About how it's super-cool that were all crowded around our gaming systems, chugging Moutain Dew and cramming down Doritos, connecting all our electronics through social networking apps to stay in touch with everyone everywhere for no good reason.

Yet when people do/say incredibly racist and sexist things, we go right back to that mental image of a fat neck-beard loser that happens to be a giant in the domain of the Interwebs because it's just easier that way. Meantime, in the real world, the same losers are worthy only of pity because they can't get laid.

I've been gaming a long time. Back before you could tell someone who wasn't a gamer you played FPSs. There has always been a fair amount of general racism and sexism there. The worst of the worst was by far Counter-Strike and it's players. I dealt with CS pugs for way to long. That said, within 6-months of playing on XBox Live, I had been called and heard more slurs than I ever did in PC gaming total. I'm not joking. It is that terrible.

What gets me is that sexism has become worse over time in gaming. With it becoming more mainstream, why exactly is that? It's almost like an entirely new market opened up and that new market isn't any more understanding than the original crop, probably even worse. Yet we still like to blame it all on this ubiquitous "virgin loser."

Do the #GamerGate crowd really have legitimate issues, or are they just misogynist swine?

There are obviously legitimate grievances made by GamerGate. The issue is what is the group at it's core: mostly pigs with an axe to grind or an anonymous group of people looking to help the industry which is bringing the trolls out? I don't know. What I do know is that the industry has been pandering to fucking morons for over a decade and controversy sells like a mother-fucker. If you can get 10k hits by reviewing a game on it's merits, but 100,000 hits by saying the game doesn't portray X group how you would like: Well, that's math.

But more to my point, the "dudebro" label didn't come out of a vacuum. It came mostly out of Xbox live when fratboys and other mouthbreathers could now play Halo and CoD without knowing shit about anything. The juxtaposition from the gaming "media" is hilarious to me. Probably because "lonely losers" have already been marginalized, but to come up with the same line of bullshit like "maybe these frat-boys who already have a history of acting like pigs might be part of the problem" might cost them advertisers.

[K. A. Pital]

I think the expansion of casual gaming corrected the gender imbalance, but... Casual female gamers that enjoy the width of gaming products present on today's market are not 'core gamers' (non-stereotypical male gamers too). Usually this part of gamers does not even care about dedicated gaming media (magazines and such) or trolling or debates on the internet, as casual gamers usually have a life. Core gamer is a different person.

Losing half of you real life to an imaginary life is, with the exception of few professionals in the industry or cyber-sportsmen, a prerogative reserved mostly for the core gamers:
http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/19/gender-inequality/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/19/gender-inequality/2/

The HD shooter audience is 78 percent male.
The HD action game audience is 80 percent male.
The HD sports game audience is 85 percent male.
All of this data represents core gamers. Hardcore gamers are referred to as “heavy use” gamers according to Nielsen’s data. They are defined as the top 10 percent of the core audience in total hours played per week. Heavy gamers in the HD console audience are an average age of 24, or four years younger than the average age for the core audience, and the average playtime among this group is 19 hours per week.

This hardcore audience, the most dedicated slice of the core audience we can measure statistically through demographic data provided by Nielsen, is 82 percent male. In other words, the problem of gender diversity is bad among the core audience, and it’s even worse among the hardcore audience.

What I found, like the researchers above, is that this is an almost exclusively male category. These people do not make money from gaming and they are not professionals.

These are also the ones who have the time to start internet campaigns demonizing women in gaming, the industry and everywhere related.

So fuck them.

[AniThyng]

I think the expansion of casual gaming corrected the gender imbalance, but... Casual female gamers that enjoy the width of gaming products present on today's market are not 'core gamers'. Core gamer is a different person.

Losing half of you real life to an imaginary life is, with the exception of few professionals in the industry or cyber-sportsmen, a prerogative reserved mostly for the core gamers:
http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/19/gender-inequality/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/19/gender-inequality/2/

The HD shooter audience is 78 percent male.
The HD action game audience is 80 percent male.
The HD sports game audience is 85 percent male.
All of this data represents core gamers. Hardcore gamers are referred to as “heavy use” gamers according to Nielsen’s data. They are defined as the top 10 percent of the core audience in total hours played per week. Heavy gamers in the HD console audience are an average age of 24, or four years younger than the average age for the core audience, and the average playtime among this group is 19 hours per week.

This hardcore audience, the most dedicated slice of the core audience we can measure statistically through demographic data provided by Nielsen, is 82 percent male. In other words, the problem of gender diversity is bad among the core audience, and it’s even worse among the hardcore audience.

What I found, like the researchers above, is that this is an almost exclusively male category. These people do not make money from gaming and they are not professionals.

These are also the ones who have the time to start internet campaigns demonizing women in gaming, the industry and everywhere related.

So fuck them.

Well yes, but then the question becomes, how much of these males are in fact "retarded fat permavirgin losers?" and how much are casually misogynistic in a way consistent with the broader culture?

[K. A. Pital]

Broad culture is broad. As in, really broad. Moviegoing, as in cinema film viewing, generally has a 50-50 ratio for most countries or close to that.

Core gaming on the other hand is a very secluded and toxic cultural dump. You can sort of imagine the broad culture as a huge, even if polluted, river, but compared to that core gaming will look like a narrow shitpipe. And a shitpipe it is.

Core gamer demographic is best explained through the psychological concept of passive resentment, but I feel if ikeep typing that will take me a whole day to describe. *laughs*

[salm]

To me it looks like this whole affair is generic teenager infantility with a bunch of idiot adults in the mix who were too stupid to notice that it´s teenager crap because of the internets anonymity.
A bit like back in the days when we thought it would be good to shun/harm the singer of band X for becoming a "sell out" and having the audacity to "destroy" genre y by selling too many records.

[K. A. Pital]

Teenager maybe not (target demographic extends up to 28-30 for males), but infantile? Certainly. A lot of these guys don't know how to file a tax declaration by reaching the age of 30. Their concept of the world is unchanged since they were in high school, and by that I do not mean they are passionate, romantic and idealistic, no.

But the clock is ticking and passive resentment kicks in at some point. That is how worthless trash (I have no other descriptions for the majority of FPS and MMORPG games thrown on ther market for the last 10 years or more) becomes a cherished life achievement... Well, due to the absence of other real achievements that take time and hard work.

Resentment is a tricky thing because active resetment can make one active and efficient, while passive resentment channelizes the energy into worthless or mind-numbing activities and also ascribes some inner worth to these activities. From there on attacking the activity, subculture or anything related becomes a personal insult to the resentment-caught worthless fucktard who proudly spams bullshit hashtags on social media.

[Broomstick]

Who the hell even picks on women in gaming? Some retarded fat permavirgin losers?

My theory is that it's insecure men who are operating on the level of a chimpanzee - in a troop of chimpanzees the most submissive male is still dominant over the most dominant female and doesn't hesitate to enforce that with physical force. All female chimps must kowtow to all male chimps.

Which is one thing if you are an actual chimpanzee... but these guys are supposed to be human.

They can't stand women invading "their" territory, and no woman can be better than even the worst of them at anything. Failure to maintain this state of affairs means their dicks will shrivel up and drop off, or something. Gaming is not the only place you can meet these shitheads, of course.

They may or may not be fat, retarded, virgin, or living in mama's basement.

[Simon_Jester]

Core gamer demographic is best explained through the psychological concept of passive resentment, but I feel if ikeep typing that will take me a whole day to describe. *laughs*

I'd actually like to hear about that if you ever have time.

[K. A. Pital]

I actually elaborated a bit on it in the subsequent comment, but long story short, resentment was introduced by Nietzsche as the explanation of the slaves' moral system which is inherently antagonistic towards their masters: they hate the masters because they are oppressed or in other words feel they are having a low social status. Resentment can become a powerful active, creative force when the slaves rise up against their masters (this act can also occur on the individual scale!) and seek to actively improve their own lives and the society. It can also be channelized to another activity in society which the subject can find useful, and finally it can be internalized purely (in which case the resentment is there, but does not lead to any actual creative social activity, neither work or education nor revolution nor career advancement/change).

The last type of reaction caused by deep internal resentment is what most of the core gamer demographic suffers from. Their achievements in life, especially sex life, are often nonexistent. They create a fictional reality where they act (gaming), receive achivements (game achievements) and recognition (peer approval), including the raising of social status (mmo levels, shooter leaderboards or pvp results, general feeling of 'skilled gaming').

Gaming is essentially a worthless unproductive activity for the most part, akin to reading non-educating fiction, but unlike fiction or movie viewing, gaming is a better channel for resentment as there is a whole social reward and interaction system built in it which is generally separated, shielded from real wider society and thus provides an 'alternative moral system' to the common social ideas that dominate the wider society.

This is not only why the core gamers are who they are, but also why their values often seem so at odds with the mainstream social views: in general people consider chauvinism shameful but for gamers it might be a way to improve social status.

Similar resentment-fuelled microsocieties form within passive subcultures (lifestyle subcultures), troll boards and imageboards, on some popular social media communities.

Active resentment fuels political movements, violent rebellions, armies, medical volunteers, social journalism, active subcultures (punks) and most of society-impacting activity that humans do.

Finally, there is no way out of this (sorry core gamers!) as gaming will not be appreciated by the wider society as a productive status-raising activity until it actually becomes such. Core gamer is not going to receive the respect of a skilled professional or a social administrator (government official, capitalist, etc.), until some activity is gamified and the game becomes productive and recognized as something more than timekilling.

So core gamers will always, in the immediate future, feel their achivements are not appreciated and their social status is low. Which will form a resentment spiral and 'gamer culture' will continue to be a worthless sack of shit. Once again this does not apply to recognized top professionals who make aliving out of the whole phenomena: in fact these will be prime hate targets for gamers (and they are often, actually).

[Covenant]

I think it is also useful to remember that gaming is a culture kludge made up of very distinct components, each with their own vices and virtues. I deleted a big post because it was kinda junk, but I was trying to say that nerd culture still suffers from delusions of being a bastion of progressivism and female advancement, even though its first and last major victories were basically in the 70's and 80's. If you say "women are always sex objects in video games" they can counter that because they have not always been--the problem is right now and the way they are treated in this era, not in a heydey past. Science Fiction has had a similar transformation. It was never great at helping women, but it gave us a few iconic "good female protagonists" and people have ridden those coat-tails for a long time hence. Then when you criticize them for treating women like its still the 70's there's some cultural whiplash.

Where many places women are still treated as if its the 50's or 60's, it can be better in nerd culture. But nerds are now part of a mainstream discussion and can no longer point at Eowyn as a feminist banner-carrier of their culture. Nerds are not wrong about their past, but the outside commentators are not wrong about the present.

There's also the cultural paranoia created by years of misguided moral guardians trying to blame everything on gaming, as they did to comics and violent movies and rock music. That's basically an outer shell of victimization and nobility that gamers still point to. But not only has it been so long since games were ACTUALLY a place of social progress (the recent fights were, in fact, kicked off by people making it one again) but the nerd barricades are now staffed by the numberless horde of normal people that the walls were erected against.

It creates a truly disgusting combination of self-perceived victimhood and righteousness (essentially stolen from a foreign sub-culture) and the benefits of a regressive macho consumer culture.

It is also really, really important to stress the CONSUMER nature of that subculture. Money drives a lot of what happens, not surprisingly, and that's one of the major reasons why demographics have shifted so dramatically in such a short amount of time. And also why there is such a shitfest about reviews. People want to BUY and they want to know what is the BEST thing to buy. They consume products and move on. Most games are never finished, you know. Developers like me can check to see what percentage of our players have actually finished the game, and you can kinda too if there are "benchmark" achievements in the game. Like "beaten the game on easy" is an achievement which, while it may seem stupid, allows developers to easily track how many people finish their game. It is not many.

And yet the money flows, in great part simply because of online multiplayer content, which are the troll carnival that really have created this problem.

Gamers are one of the most unabashed agents of mindless consumption, and the idea of consumption is core to their identity, such as it is. They get sick of being tricked by game media telling them something is good when it sucks, sure, that's legitimate. But this is the culture of pre-orders and early-access because they cannot even wait for a product to be done before starting to consume it and put their name on it. The name of the game is half-finished shovelware and people rage but they just keep buying. There is absolutely no impulse control. It's really disgusting, and I say that from the development side. Those people are certainly not my demographic, but they have most of the money.

It is also not surprising that there's a lot of very far-right elements working within the GamerGate community to weaponize the mob for their benefit. There's a huge push to get FOX on their side and the disgusting idolization of the Breitbart goons is just idiotic. They are happy to be a bludgeon in the hands of the right, even the exemplars of bad journalism, because their only real objective is to get the voices of criticism silenced. There is no doubt at all that the nuggets of concern over "ethics in game journalism" are just flotsam in a wave of rage at the minority voices that want into gaming and want to talk about and criticize gaming. As individuals they may not hate minorities but as a community they effect the same result by trying to exclude topics and silence criticism.

The qualms about game-media corruption are well founded, if only because traditionally the game media was just a PR branch of developers and platforms like Nintendo Power. It has only become an independent "thing" recently. But while that whole argument is drowned out by hate there can be no progress. Too much rage is directed at a few sites and independent developers and too few at major publications and major AAA developers that actually produce the content that drives the market. It is impossible to take them seriously given how specifically they cherrypick targets.

[Guardsman Bass]

If they're pointing to nerd culture progressive triumphs in the 1970s and 1980s, then they're pointing to a different nerd culture. Video game culture changed after the big crash in the game business in the mid-1980s, as this article points out - Nintendo and the other surviving companies made a choice to go all-in on focusing on boys as a market, something that particularly picked up in the 1990s. You started seeing a lot more overtly sexist advertisements, for example.

It's been long enough since then that people playing video games as teenagers and kids in the 1980s and 1990s are now among those making games, effectively institutionalizing it. That's a big problem.

[K. A. Pital]

There is absolutely no impulse control. It's really disgusting, and I say that from the development side.

Same opinion here. It is quite unlike the book market. And way more like the film market, with the caveat that games take as much time as a good book while being impulsively consumed as if they were films.

Sometimes I just want to say wake the fuck up people, good games are like good books and do not come out every month (if one considers Call of Duty tripe 'good', then it is akin to reading some endless shit series of crappy technotrillers over and over again).

[Civil War Man]

Perhaps because they're gigantic titans that have proper PR departments that make sure their people don't spout off terrible comments on Twitter? It's much harder to convince advertisers they shouldn't associate with extremists when there's no real examples of it.

I'm not sure I have any idea what the Hell you are trying to say here. It sounds like you are saying it's fine to not do anything about corruption among the large developers because their PR people aren't assholes.

Because I did not see anywhere near this level of organized outrage when, a few years ago, Sony threatened to pull its advertising from Gamespot when it published a negative review of one of their games, ultimately resulting in the person responsible for the review losing his job. But I am seeing people trying to organize a campaign under GamerGate's banner to get Polygon blacklisted by Nintendo because a reviewer there gave Bayonetta 2 a slightly lower score than other reviewers because he felt that the sexualization of the title character was excessive. Note that he didn't give it a bad score. He even says himself that he considered it to be a very well-made game. He just thought the level of sexualization was over-the-top and juvenile. But since he did not give it a perfect score, people in GamerGate want the entire website he writes for to be blacklisted.

No, John. You are the demons.

[TheFeniX]

Broad culture is broad. As in, really broad. Moviegoing, as in cinema film viewing, generally has a 50-50 ratio for most countries or close to that.

Yea, as a whole. Then you look at the Action vs Romantic movie demographics. How is this different from video games that has a 52%/48% breakdown as a whole?

Core gaming on the other hand is a very secluded and toxic cultural dump. You can sort of imagine the broad culture as a huge, even if polluted, river, but compared to that core gaming will look like a narrow shitpipe. And a shitpipe it is.

Am I really to assume CoD:Ghosts made a billion bucks mostly on the funds from guys who can't get laid? When you talk about "core gaming," that shitpipe is just as big as the river. There's that much money involved. There's that many people involved. At some point, people need to realize that this problem extends past a group of assholes who were marginalized over a decade ago.

Why is it people can look at entertainment venues like Movies and TV and say "Yea, there's a pretty big issue with sexism and racism on a cultural level," but still treat video games like it's 1998 and not the monolith of money that it is now? As much as people like to claim these degenerates are the real problem (and in the sense of the bullshit with GamerGate, they could be) with gaming in general when those guys are too busy being pissed off their Anime games are being censored for the American releases?

[K. A. Pital]

Yes you are to assume, as life is full of worthless fucks. The fact that said fucks impulsively spend millions of $$$ on shit entertainment only tells you this: there are millions of idiots waiting to be culled by fine capitalists.

And yes the demographic watching action movies exclusively is probably the very same brainless worthless get-a-life fucktards. You don't think they lack a few bucks to go see yet another brain-killing piece of shit produced in Hollywood? Right. So why should they lack money to buy a shooter?

[Covenant]

Let us actually state, for the record, that just about any worthless fuck can get laid. Nor are women some faceless inhuman arbiters of the good. Nor is sex with a woman the transcendant moment where a boy becomes a man and thus a loser becomes worthy of respect. All of these thoughts do, in fact, contribute to the objectified status of women.

I just wanted to add that as a cultural footnote, especially after Fenix notes that the Videogame Industry makes more money than movies nowadays. The shitpipe these people infest is small compared to the overall volume of shit, but the pipe itself is massive when considered in raw numbers, and will include a ton of people from across class, race, religion, sexual orientation, sexual accomplishment, looks and so on. There are attractive, successful, sexually desired shitpipe dwellers as well. I think everyone here knows that a shitpipe goblin is a shitpipe goblin to matter what they look like or how much they make.

They live in that pipe because they have a variety of hateful thoughts. They don't have those thoughts because they don't have sex or because they're fat or unsuccessful or live in a basement or are male. Those facts are immaterial and really no longer define the problem demographic in gaming. The problem demographic is an average person, liberated from empathy by anonymity and competition, who has right-of-center politics, a small worldview, and reactionary sensibilities.

Pretty much the same problem as ever. Games didn't make this fuck. The venn diagram of gaming audience just got big enough to cross over into their neck of the woods.

[TheFeniX]

Yes you are to assume, as life is full of worthless fucks. The fact that said fucks impulsively spend millions of $$$ on shit entertainment only tells you this: there are millions of idiots waiting to be culled by fine capitalists.

And yes the demographic watching action movies exclusively is probably the very same brainless worthless get-a-life fucktards. You don't think they lack a few bucks to go see yet another brain-killing piece of shit produced in Hollywood? Right. So why should they lack money to buy a shooter?

That's not my point. My point is that there exists this mythical Internet boogeyman that the industry is required to pander to to keep profits up. It's this small group of "poopsocking" losers that view gaming as life and are so pissed, they ruthlessly attack any women who speak up.

While I do believe that loser base probably has a lot to do with the GamerGate harassment, I find they are also a scapegoat for the actual problems in the industry. Those Core games (Sports games especially) do not pander to them at all because said group is too busy hating everything and pirating the shit out of games because they can. And honestly, from what I've seen, they hate "core gaming" more than anything.

To use them as the reason why female representation is so bad in video games makes no sense to me. But actually coming out and saying "maybe women would get better representation in video games if morons quit buying CoD and Madden every fucking year, making publishers billions of dollars while doing so" would cost the reviewers and publishers way too much money. It's easier to blame a group of degenerates who are already marginalized, so that "normal" people can continue to cough up money to yell slurs at people online.

[K. A. Pital]

But the core of my argument wasn't about their appearance; it was that their moral system is different due to the resentment. They can get laid, and they do it (the frequency and quality can be disputed, but still). That's not the point.

What is the point, however, is that the 'achievements' of these people are not considered achievements at all by the society - this leads to resentment. And they are locked in it, because for them being able to get X frags or rank somewhere on a leaderboard actually is an achievement, and be damned all those that try to somehow 'invade', 'belittle', 'spoil' or 'ruin' their games.

Core gamers often say they don't want anyone ruining their fun. Truth is, games are not their fun (otherwise they wouldn't give two shits, as I don't give any when something is merely entertainment). They are their life. So they really want to say don't ruin my life. But saying that sounds too bad from a social status point of view.

And no, they are not marginalized. Like I said before, many have a life. A job. Some income. Sex from time to time.

What separates them from others is their own feeling of irelevance and underappreciation, low social status as it is, and this in turn leads them to being "relevant" in the imaginary world of core gaming about which, let's be frank, nobody really cares. Not the millions of casual gamers who never finish a game and play it just for shits one hour a week. Not the people who make money on games professionally as they already know all their silly stereotypes and pander to them as best they can to milk the stupid cows.

But no group considers core gamers as life-achievers, as people of high social status except themselves in their enclosed fantasy world.