Poll: What Is #GamerGate About?

Well, for the Zoe Quinn scandal part, it takes some explaining, but the quinnspiracy as it was called at the time goes something like this. A couple months ago, her boyfriend Eron dumped her. About a month ago, he made a long tumblr post explaining why he dumped her with various screenshots of facebook chat logs and cellphone text messages as evidence for his allegations. The general gist being that she was a hypocritical liar and manipulator who amongst other things, cheated on him with 5 different guys over the course of their relationship. As such, you really shouldn't trust her.

It likely would have been likely ignored, except one of the people who she cheated on Eron with, was Nathan Grayson, a gaming journalist currently working for Kotaku, who'd previously highlighted her game in an article he wrote for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and who'd written an article about a game jam she'd ended, the second article being just prior to his romantic involvment with her.

When people wished to discuss this bit of nepotism, they were met with widespread deleting of posts pretty much everywhere. Only 4chan managed to discuss it, despite threads being deleted there as well. Then someone did a youtube video about Eron's post, which received a DMCA take down, apparently from Zoe, for the use of an image of Depression Quest in the video. Which only fueled the growing outrage at discussion being surpressed, and a bunch of people asked TotalBiscuit, a popular youtube reviewer who has spoken strongly against using the DMCA as a tool of censoring criticism in the past, his opinion on the video removal. You can read his pretty neutral response here: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1s4nmr1/

That got some posts on reddit's r/gaming that weren't deleted for once, but were heavily moderated. As in the r/gaming post on the subject featured someone turning on the automoderater, and over 24,000 comments were deleted, regardless of content. Most of their justifications for that rang fairly hollow in the face of the ensuring outrage, and widespead refusal to let people discuss the issue on reddit, or other popular gaming sites with message boards.

The upshot of the outrage being that people did even more investigating in Zoe which turned up a couple other questionable things.

The first being that back when her game Despression Quest got greenlit for steam, it received support from people being sympathetic to her alleging harassment from a board named Wizardchan. Upon scrutiny however, her allegations which were reported as fact in several places, and reportedly resulted in some harassment of Wizardchan, were rather short on real evidence and no one bothered to do any investigating or get any confirmation. This prompted escapistmagazine.com to update their article on the subject to reflect that these were allegations from Zoe, not confirmed facts.

The second being that she'd allegedly screwed over The Fine Young Capitalists, who were reported on by Gamepolitics back in March, and practically no one else because Zoe misunderstood their policies, bashed them on twitter as exploitative and transphobic, resulting in many of her followers doing the same. After which, people were unwilling to report on them as their investigations ended at seeing a bunch of accusations of them being exploitative and transphobic. This prompted 4chan's /v/ board to throw a bunch of support to TFYC, and the general discussion helped them get sufficient press coverage to get things off the ground. You can read an interview that includes TFYC's discussion of the issue here: http://apgnation.com/archives/2014/09/09/6977/truth-gaming-interview-fin... (They've since met their funding goal.)

Zoe for her part refused to address the initial allegations, and claimed this was just an attempt to get people to harass her and has maintained that stance since then.

There's more to the story, but those are the main points you're likely to see brought up. Most of the rest is either trolling or wild allegations.

Kotaku confirmed that Nathan Grayson had indeed been involved with Zoe in the timeframe that Eron specified, while rejecting the claim that it had affected the article he'd written that had included Zoe. Kotaku, Polygon, Destructoid, and The Escapist Magazine updated their disclosure/ethics policies in response to problems raised by scrutiny of Grayson, and things might have died there if some people hadn't managed to throw gasoline on the fire, but that's getting into the large #gamergate issue.

I more got the impression that she stopped sleeping with one specific guy and then he made up a bunch of stuff.

The problem here wasn't the "sex" it was the sudden rush to coverup and the rush to shutdown any discussion. With Gerstmann the Gamers could discuss and vent. But here? Yeah since we all know about the GamesJournosPro list go look at what Kuchera was seeking to do there. That's the scandal. What is it they say? The coverup is worse than the crime, and will call more attention. They followed up the censoring with the suicidal assault on their readers, their consumers. The people who's eyeballs they make their money from. And it just seems that wherever you turn it looks worse and worse. This is a site that was founded dealing with issues of law related to gaming. It grew out of the Jack Thompson fight. James Fudge was heroic in that. Yet why is asking to take a critical look at the practices of the games journalists so abhorrent? Yes it came out of a sex scandal. The sex scandal was we literally caught the games journalist in bed with an indy developer that he provided coverage on. Now Totilo says no violation occured. True or not (I kinda feel not) it is borderline enough that a conversation is warranted. Instead we got "Gamers are Dead" and "Gamers Don't Need to Be Your Audience". While Gamers get screamed at and accused of being Misogynistic Privileged White Male Trolls from every angle (something they are getting quite sick of BTW, that is the OTHER underlying cause of this. The third party crusade of outrage warriors that has seemingly replaced actually talking or writing about Games).

Customers of an industry see something a bit sordid a bit unseemly and that seems ethically not right. They ask a question "Is this normal" and immediately get branded as "Virtual Rapists". The Games Press demands that the gamers will not be spoken to, that they literally have no moral ground to question them until they quite frankly solve the entire problem of trolls on the internet all by themselves because it is all all of their faults. Oh and they are all "white male sexist misgynistic virtual rapist shitbags that need to die". (And yes these are all things that Gamers have been called by many of the leading lights of the gaming press over the past few weeks, typically in public, all why they point figures and shout how the gamers have harassed somebody with a nasty twitter tweet. Stay classy guys)

And the amazing thing is the ethics or rather what the ethics should be are pretty clear. See the wonderful Youtube Video of UGA Professor of Ethics in Journalism Greg Lisby talking about what the standards are. That's all the gamers are asking for. Disclosure. Recuse when applicable. Keep pants in upright position as relates to work. Treat actual consumers with respect, not as a punching bag for your personal crusade. Remove shitbag from your list of marketing terms.

And yet every rock we turn over seems to get worse. And it blows our mind how the gaming press just hand waves it away like "nothing to see here" no big deal. Money moving in strange circular paterns around Patreon between writers and developers, Writers and Editors operating personal PR and consulting firms offering services on how to game the review system (Hi Leigh!) A complete and utter disregard for even the most basic disclosure. A complete inability to keep a wall of seperation between Editorial, Opinion, Review and personal lives. They accuse the gamers of being the stereotypical teenage boy, failing to realize that most gamers are 30+ some are 50+ They have lives, carrers, long experience and they are familiar with real world business practices. They know, or enough of them most certainly know what is wrong with what we are seeing in the gaming press. How it fails virtually every test that could be run to determine integrity. Not that individual writers are corrupt, but there is no appropriate structure in place to prevent corruption. 

Take the Patreon accounts. Yeah it may just be friends helping starving artists. But honestly the way those things loop and twirl and spin around each other, it looks a lot like something else. To a casual or outside observer there is no way to determine if this is just friendly support, or some sort of pay to play extortion scam. And honestly there have been hints and reports that it could go either way.

And lets look at that GamesJournoPros list. According to Orland it was modelled on and inspired by "Journolist". They fashioned it after the original that stands as one of the most taught "Do Not Ever Do This" object lessons in every School of Journalism in the world. And they don't see how or why it could be a problem? Nono its just a normal business list of colleagues discussiong businessy things. And not say a group of major editors from numerous competing businesses functioning as a defacto shadow editorial board for all without there owners knowledge or approval? And even is it started out as one thing, as you can see from the exchange between Ben Kuchera and Greg Tito that with a simple turn of an e-mail thread it becomes the other, whether intended or not. This is why jounalists are not supposed to do this sort of thing.

somebody never taught the Gaming Press that like all Journalism they are a trust industry. They have broad powers and protections, but that is backed up by the need for ethical standards. The appearence of conflict or corruption is just as bad as actual conflict or corruption. And everything revealed since that simple "nothing to see here" sex scandal has been nothing but the appearence of conflict, corruption, bad practices and collusion for personal profit or purpose.

But you all are right, it's just because some girl had sex... Appalling