Hacker News Reader

Comment by igreulich | Hacker News Reader

Perception is reality. And it seems the perception is that Gahergate is a group of harrasors. You (not you personally) saying it is not will not change that perception.

It seems to me that if you want Gamegate to be taken seriously (though I think it is way to late for that) Gamergate needs to start cleaning out it ranks.

Which highlights the real issue. Gamergate has no central entity. So there are going to be people harrassing under the banner of Gamergate, and you can’t do anything about it. The name is tarnished, full stop. It will be almost impossible for Gamergate to do any good now, assuming it ever wanted to good!

View on HN

You (not you personally) saying it is not will not change that perception.

Perhaps, but correcting misinformation wherever its seen should be the goal of anyone connected with the movement. Perceptions can change.

Gamers have been a marginalized group for pretty much as long as the hobby has existed, so this is nothing new. People lying about them, their hobby, making fun of them as losers and shut-ins and immature and criminals in training, this is all de rigeur. One more insult on the pile doesn't change much.

>Gamergate needs to start cleaning out it ranks.

How so? Other than shouting down harassers, I'm not sure what action you expect a bunch of people centered around a hashtag and an idea to take.

>It will be almost impossible for Gamergate to do any good now

I'd say they've done quite a lot of good already. Disclosure policies at multiple journalism outfits enacted, FTC rules on paid endorsements being clarified due largely in part to an emailing campaign, hundreds of thousands of dollars raised for various charities...

>I'd say they've done quite a lot of good already.

Absolutely, and the saddest part about all this is that entities with painfully overt agendas (The Verge/Vox, Ars Technica, etc.) were more than happy to report on all the negatives, and will still continue to, while reporting none of the good that's come out of it.

Same with people on this site for the most part: they've completely made up their mind about what Gamergate stands for and will hear nothing else about it. Which is hilariously ironic given how much this site likes to tote itself as a well-educated bunch. Groupthink/hivemind tendencies are always the same for any community of humans.

Thing is, it's hard to not to get the wrong idea. All the people complaining the loudest about Gamergate have serious media connections.

Unchallenged falsehoods in multiple media outlets -> Sourced by Wikipedia per their usual secondary source rules -> Shows up on the front page of Google where most normal people will see it.

You actually have to have an interest in this stuff and actually dig to see that the narrative is false/misleading.

igreulich is correct - the name has been very successfully tarnished. Problem is, moving on to something else is a move that has zero benefit (because the same problems would just happen again under any new name), so the hivemind wisely decided to stay put.

Can you (or any pro-gamergaters) show me one site that you think counts as a pro gamergate site?

Here's a few:

http://deepfreeze.it (exhaustively sourced list of complaints against game journalists and information on the movement as a whole)

http://techraptor.com (games news site, spawned in the wake of gamergate)

http://escapistmagazine.com (games news site, updated ethics policies after initial complaints, allows open discussion on the forums)

DeepFreeze.it repeats the lies about Zoe Quinn.

http://www.deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=monster

> The overwhelming majority of their coverage consists solely of reprinting verbatim the anecdotal and often unverified accounts from controversial figures who directly profit from being considered targets of harassment — Zoe Quinn being a good example.

> Often described as an indie developer, Quinn has produced very little aside from the low-effort, unpolished free text adventure Depression Quest. More notable about Quinn was the disproportionate attention she got from the gaming press despite her limited accomplishments, from journalists such as her financial backer Ben Kuchera of Polygon and her friend Patricia Hernandez of Kotaku.

http://www.deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=unfair

> Hernandez has also promoted two Kickstarters by GaymerX while being on friendly terms with the organization's president Toni Rocca and some of the other GaymerX staff. She has also given positive press, without disclosure, to her friends David Gallant and Zoe Quinn.

http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson

> Positive coverage of Zoe Quinn in three articles, without disclosing their friendship and eventual affair. Later covered Quinn again, disclosing they "dated briefly", but not that he had previously financially supported her.

Techraptor does the same.

http://techraptor.net/content/zoe-quinn-lying-journalists

> One of the first things that seems quite possibly true about Zoe Quinn is the fact that she plays heavily into self-victimization. Now I will concede that I am not entirely knowledgeable about the psychology behind self-victimization, but what it is defined as makes it fairly easy to identify.

> The most high profile example of this was Zoe Quinn’s claim that Wizardchan raided and doxxed (acquired and revealed personal info) her. That whole affair is best summed up here. Basically, the takeaway from that is that her accusations hold little if any merit at all. What is consistently seen throughout that is how easily she puts herself forward as a victim and asks for consolation from a variety of personalities and sites. Even if you only read the text surrounding the images of her tweets and other communications, you can see this.

This is supposed to be an example of a site that doesn't promote and continue harassment? I can see why people think gamergate advocates are the worst kind of fucking scumbag.

Wait, what? Did you click through any of the links on those pages you cite? In the very fist example you mention, every bit of that is substantiated via an archive link. Quinn's game is unpolished garbage as revied, Kuchera did contribute financially to her, and Hernandez is friends with her and did write about her without disclosing that.

Those are not lies, or even misleading in the least. They are all trivially verifiable facts. All the sources are right there.

I'll go through the others if you wish, but I'd ask you to examine the evidence and point out problems with it before just dismissing it as lies. Heck, I might learn something here.

When I do it it's networking and growth hacking.

When she does it she's a dirty whore, cheating on her partner and exploiting and manipulating men. (and whether actually did this or not is irrelevant, we're going to keep saying she did and supporting that with total bullshit).

If your definition of "networking and growth hacking" means writing positive coverage for people you are friends with and/or financially contribute to while not telling people that, your definitions are broken.

It's not okay. It might even be against FTC rules. Full stop, end of story.

By the way, why are we talking about whether if you do it is okay or not when just one post ago you were calling the (sourced, verified) accusations outright lies?

As to who Zoe did or did not sleep with- kind of irrelevant in the long run, but if you're going to bring up any mention of it as perpetuating a lie, I'm obligated to address that.

Eron, her ex, posted a ton of chatlogs on the original post that started this whole thing (including that stupid "five guys burgers" meme).

It doesn't look like a lie to me. If is, it's the most exhaustively fabricated and backed plot I've seen this side of a crazy soap opera.

I'm not asking you to agree with me, here. I'm asking you to exercise the same dispassionate, critical analysis you'd use on any other topic.

This is an example of a gamergate supporter (you) continuing a pattern of harrassment (perpetuating the copiously debunked lies about Quinn). Repeating the libel is the harrassment.

I understand you don't see it that way.

If by "debunked" you mean "fully sourced and verified". Can you point to even one verifiably untrue thing on Deepfreeze?

Someone is lying in this conversation alright, and it isn't me.

By the way: HN Notify got to your snarky comment before you did.

The links you gave were interesting, so thanks for that, but I don't appreciate your implication that I was "lying" because you misunderstand a conversation's thread.

http://i.imgur.com/TLuTJRk.png

Are you going to reply to the other post or not?

> Are you going to reply to the other post

No. I'm not going to waste my time with people who lie.

> Quinn's game is unpolished garbage as revied

The fact some gamergaters don't like Quinn's game doesn't make it "garbage". It's not a traditional game. That doesn't mean that rating it highly is somehow a violation of ethics.

The idea that Quinn somehow used personal connections to get literally tens of thousands of people to highly rate her game violates Occam's razor.

Tens of thousands, involved in a scheme? No, of course not, and I have no doubt that a lot of people liked it. That was a subjective judgement on my part - I think it's low effort nonsense.

Here's the thing - would those tens of thousands of people have seen it in the first place if Hernandez hadn't talked up her friend on Kotaku? Would that niche of a title have wound up on the site at all if not for the personal connection between those two?

I suspect the answers to both those questions are "no".

> I think it's low effort nonsense.

Have you ever actually made a video game yourself, or written a piece of literature? Do you appreciate the effort this actually takes?

> Here's the thing - would those tens of thousands of people have seen it in the first place if Hernandez hadn't talked up her friend on Kotaku?

Sure. For one thing, Quinn had at least that many Twitter followers. It's a game, also, that covers mental illness, which isn't a frequent topic. On that novelty alone, it was likely to get some attention regardless of who Quinn's friends were.

> Would that niche of a title have wound up on the site at all if not for the personal connection between those two?

There's a good chance it would. Depression Quest was novel. Kotaku likes showcasing novel and interesting things.

\\Edit

I got DQ mixed up with another Twine game I had heard of at the time. This post can be more or less disregarded. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10254524

\\End Edit

>Have you ever actually made a video game yourself, or written a piece of literature? Do you appreciate the effort this actually takes?

Using the same tool ZQ used to make her game - it's literally 5-15 minutes online. The effort was next to nil.

http://twinery.org/

As someone who has actually worked on creating even a simplistic Zelda-clone, you're fooling yourself if you think it took any real amount of effort.

>written a piece of literature

The entirety of Depression Quest reads like simplistic hipster angst. Similar to "Will You Save Your Son", except at least WYSYS has some self awareness and was meant to mock this type of storytelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSm1Rn7Prcs

Maybe an hours' total of work for a low quality Twine game using a script written during a lunch break.

I think it's generous to even call it "low effort".

> Using the same tool ZQ used to make her game - it's literally 5-15 minutes online. The effort was next to nil.

Writing something the length of Depression Quest, creating graphics, mapping out the story, quality assurance testing, composing music... this does not take 5 to 15 minutes. It is not nil effort.

If you think it's so easy, please, go ahead and recreate Depression Quest from scratch in 15 minutes.

I'm going to have to apologize. I got DQ mixed up with a different hipster Twine game that I heard of at around the same timeframe. One that was no more than 10 or so panels and 3 lines of dialogue that also garnered a fair amount of attention. I confused the two (and no more than a brief Google search showed me that I had...)

At 40,000~ words + music/still graphics, DQ is a fair chunk of work.

Again, apologies. Definitely more than "next to nil" effort.

Eh, the quality of her game doesn't really matter anyways. It's interactive fiction with some graphics showing - it's hardly Call of Duty, but it does take a lot more than "15 minutes". Quinn is a game developer in the same sense that my gran playing Words With Friends on Facebook is a gamer - both terms still apply, even if casually.

Play around with something like Inform7 or even Twine with the interest of making a full story - it still takes a lot of thought.

Still, having played it, I'm not a fan (and that goes double since I've fought with depression and do not care for her treatment of the material!), and I think it comes off as amateur hour. I think Steam could do a lot better than IF-style "games" in general.

Good point WRT her Twitter following. I had not considered that.

That site seems to document all of this stuff. Which parts are lies?

> The name is tarnished, full stop.

You know what other names are tarnished? Liberals, Socialists, Democrats, Conservatives, Republicans, Christians, Muslims, ecologists, feminists, etc. Every sufficiently large movement has had its name dragged through the mud by its opposition. It's how things work. Gamergate is fine and continues to do good, whether the adversaries want to acknowledge it or not.

Gamergate doesn't actually have "ranks", it is a multi-homed, decentralized mob. That is the genius/horror of it. Welcome to the future of memetic warfare, it has already reached escape velocity from 4chan.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com