Fandom Is Broken

edit: frankly i see it as the legacy of the "anonymous" period. It gave people that would otherwise not act out a way to do so under the cover of seeming to belong to a group.

As that wound down, individuals started looking for something, anything, that allowed them to continue their antics. Gamergate is just such an excuse, but other controversial subjects are also being used in this manner.

Gamers wanted to discuss the zoepost because it was well, drama. Journalists,developers, the people running run awards and events, going to parties together, getting drunk together and gasp! even sleeping together. It revealed how cliquey and tightly knit the "artsy" indie gaming scene is.

The response of the media, the admins/mods of various forums was not good. They shutdown any discussion of the zoepost. DMCA claims were put to videos which discussed the zoepost (wrongful use of DMCA really pisses people off). The media responded with multiple articles about how "Gamers are dead". The thesis which of, was that "gamers" are childish basement dwelling adults who refuse to grow up.

Textbook case of the Streisand Effect. The coordinated media strike and the systemic censorship (right or wrong) also furthered that idea that the people running the show were heavily intertwined. When you attack a sub-culture like that they are going to get angry and try to break free.

I think fundamentally the gamergate, and much of what we are seeing across multiple fandoms represents a clash of systemizers vs empathizers. The "Gamers" care well, about gameplay, the rules, systems how they interact, the simulation of the setting. While a gamer will always like a good story, not if it comes as a sacrifice to the gameplay.

Empathizers care more about the social aspects of the game. How it makes the players feel, and the role of a game in our culture. The writing side of the gaming media seems to be largely composed of this segment, while the youtube side of the gaming media (total biscuit and such) seems to be largely systemizers.

This explains much of the tension that exists in gaming right now. Take a game like http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/gone-home. Great critical reviews. Terrible user reviews. Why? Because the critical reviewers place value on how the game makes the feel, and gone home is all about empathizing with the protagonist, while the majority of the users place value on gameplay. Hence the derision of this games as "walking simulators". Gamers want simulations. They want rules and systems and a game that is just a "walking" simulator is (to them) a poor game.

Or take the reaction to the trans-character in the new Baldur's gate expansion. The significant anger with that was because Baldur's gate is very much a systemizer's game. THACO and such. While it is a DnD game the room for role playing is limited. The draw of the was the system of the gameplay and the simulation of the world. The transcharacter was a violation of both aspects. Gameplay is agnostic of gender or sexuality, so pushing that was seen as valuing the wrong thing, and second of all, the character was a violation of the simulation of the world, as any trans person would just use the existing magic in the world to change their gender. It was a reflection that the people making the game did not care about what the people who wanted to play the game cared about. Hence the anger.

Or take statements like:

https://twitter.com/radicalbytes/status/737394198253428736?l... https://twitter.com/radicalbytes/status/737009100093980673?l...

Josh feels that games should be about emotion and social perspective and such, that games should be art.

So that is was gamergate is about. Gamers (mostly systemizers) thought that the gaming media (mostly empathizers) had their common interests. They don't. Hence the backlash. On the flipside, the empathetic media and developers are struggling to find an audience, hence all the condemnation of gamers. They want their audience to share their interests, but right now they don't.

Really the two cultures should disentangle and go their own ways, but instead all we have is both sides saying the other is doing it wrong.

1. People who are in fact concerned about the sorry ethical state of game journalism.

2. Trolls and jerks who have jumped in to cause trouble, mostly by attacking women in groups #3 and #4.

3. The game journalists whose ethics are being called into question.

4. Assorted "social justice" activists. They showed up because the original spark that set all this off was a lying, vindictive open letter from an ex-boyfriend of a female developer, accusing her and some journalists of unethical practices, and that caused the developer to receive some very inappropriate comments. The letter was fairly quickly discredited, but the incident did get many fired up to do something about long standing unethical game journalists, which had long been something people were annoyed about but never got organized enough to do anything about, which is what led to the formation of group #1.

5. Group #1 includes many female gamers. Many of them have been receiving death threats and rape threats. It's not clear if these are coming from people in group #4, or if there is a distinct group of trolls and jerks similar to #2 but who have decided to attack #1 instead of #3 and #4.

• group #1 is concentrating on fighting #3, and trying to keep #2 out.

• group #2 is attacking #3 and #4, and trying to make sure #1 gets blamed.

• group #3 is trying hard to make sure people don't consider the points of #1, by making sure to cover all the activities of #2, which they attribute to #1, and ignoring group #5's activities.

• group #4 is fighting group #2's actions, which they often attribute to group #1.

• group #5 is fighting the women in group #1.

There may be other groups. The women in group #1 maybe should be considered a separate group, because in addition to fighting #3, many of them are also fighting #4.

Which is bizarre as the only doxing/death threats/rape threats/threats against family/threats against woman/bomb threats I've seen occur in GamerGate either came from those who oppose it within their little media circle clique who have an utter distaste for their audience [0] or happens to women who support #GamerGate [1].

Not to mention they've tried to fake harassment against themselves several times and have been caught red handed doing so.

>Remember, it started as a campaign to put the fear of God in Zoë Quinn.

Since when is "#FiveGuysBurgersAndFries" equivalent to "#GamerGate"? The collusion that happened so quickly after 5 guys is what led to GamerGate as everyone realized the media was in the pits together. It was definitely a catalyst for but was never the focus of. The only time I heard mention of Zoe since at least Oct. 2014 is when the paid-for Twitter spambots spam whatever WashPo article was just written about her.

Most of the people I see against #GG have little to no understanding of what it is about other than what has been parroted by the media (lol) or the Wiki article (which was hounded so hard by the clique members against #GG that some had to be banned from editing the page for doing literally hundreds of edits to bias the page. It remains biased and even cites a Kotaku article - one of the companies being rammed against by #GG.

TL;DR - http://i.imgur.com/yYlbJHG.png

[0] http://i.imgur.com/LK3NieU.png

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2tbbkg/a_fi...

The article clearly falls on the side of the latter - protesting that it destroys many of the player-chosen threads in the story. But isn't there something in that? No matter what you choose, no matter what kind of person you are, there are inevitabilities that none of us can stop?

I find it an interesting thing to think about. I don't think this article does a fantastic job of it, but nor do I think there is much balance in the article you've linked to.