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To be honest, after I saw the fallout from GG, the online harassment seems like a much bigger problem than a bunch of corrupt game journalists.

Sure, but it's not a competition.

My understanding is that GG began due to undisclosed conflicts of interest among some journalists and game developers. This was later used to justify a crusade to abuse people on social media.

Although I think you're correct that the ethics in journalism issue was used as a smokescreen by bad faith actors.

Some gamers started harassing a developer because they didn't like her game. It intensified after her ex boyfriend accused her of cheating on him with a journalist and several other people. Some gamers imagined she had sex with that journalist and others for positive reviews. The ex boyfriend said even he didn't mean to accuse her of that.[1]

And those gamers connected the conflict of interest allegations to social issues right away. Gamergate's name was inspired by a video that said journalism's decline began with writing about things like sexual harassment and representation.[2]

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/everything-you-never-wanted-to-kn...

[2] 2:26 in https://archive.org/details/InternetAristocratQuinnspiracyTh...

I agree. The game developers who celebrated on twitter when John Peter Bain died to cancer was one of the worst behavior I have seen in the gaming industry.

The death threats to john and his family before that was also in rather bad taste.

According to Wikipedia (so YMMV) GamerGate started when a woman wrote a text-based game about depression and got rape and death threats over it, recorded said death threats and publicized them, got even more death threats, and an ex-boyfriend jumped in to contribute by straight up lying and claiming journalistic corruption... [0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy#History

Please don't just uncritically adopt their framing.

>GamerGate started as an expose on how dishonest and corrupt video game journalism

Not one word of this is true. Gamergate started by and has always been about harassing women.

That's patently false. Discourse still continues to this day on certain subreddits.

We talk about ethics in gaming journalism, and oppose censorship and the woke mob.

It's sad that some people decided to be harassers in the name of GG, but that is practically ancient history. If you think that's still true, you're part of the problem, because you believe everything the media and Twitter tells you.

This made me curious since I haven't heard much GG discourse recently so I went to /r/KotakuInAction since they bill themselves as "the main hub for GamerGate on Reddit". The third highest upvoted post over the last month is a mod that increases the butt size of a female character in a video game. Definitely seems to be a community focused on ethics with zero hint of sexism and misogyny.

EDIT: So apparently I was wrong that it was specifically about the size of the butt. The headline is "There's now a mod to fix Miranda's butt in the Mass Effect remaster, for anyone that cares" and the screenshot is a big butt. I took "fixed Miranda's butt" to mean they fixed the appearance of it. The issue was instead that gratuities shots of said butt were removed not that the butt itself was changed. I don't think that changes the fundamental issue, but I apologize for my lack of ethics in games journalism.

Can you elaborate on how people choose to enjoy content in the privacy of their home amounts to sexism and misogyny? Complaining about men enjoying content that caters to the male gaze seems as pointless as complaining about how romance novels cater to women's tastes. If people want to alter the remastered edition to more closely resemble the original 2010 release of Mass Effect 2, that doesn't strike me as sexist or misogynist at all.

This comment not only fails to demonstrate any sexism or misogyny, but makes me think that the sub has a valid point about inconsistent and unjust denigration of gaming.

>Can you elaborate on how people choose to enjoy content in the privacy of their home amounts to sexism and misogyny? Complaining about men enjoying content that caters to the male gaze seems as pointless as complaining about how romance novels cater to women's tastes.

People can do whatever they want in their own home. I'm not complaining about that. I am complaining about how their complaints are voiced in public, usually in an aggressive and derogatory manner. Have fun, enjoy the butt, but I am going to laugh at you if you whine in public that "the evil woke mob forced companies to remove the butt" and I will get angry if you start harassing people over it.

>If people want to alter the remastered edition to more closely resemble the original 2010 release of Mass Effect 2, that doesn't strike me as sexist or misogynist at all.

The more context you remove the less sexist and misogynistic it becomes. No one can argue with making a remake more closely resembles the original. It starts to get iffy when you add the context that the change is to add more gratuitous ass shots. It becomes clearly sexist and misogynistic when the addition of those shots is celebrated in a community that already has a reputation for sexism and misogyny.

As per one of the most top-voted posts in that thread [1], the same author released two mods: one that restores the shots of Miranda's behind to the 2010 release, and one removed them from the original release. I'm not sure how adding more context makes it any more misogynistic. This community is enabling people to enjoy the game however they want, both with more sexualization and even less sexualization. If your issue is specifically with "how their complaints are voiced in public, usually in an aggressive and derogatory manner" you would be much better served highlighting this particular kind of behavior rather than the community as a whole.

I think your last sentence is really demonstrative of what I'm saying: people harbor a highly prejudiced view of gaming as, "a community that already has a reputation for sexism and misogyny" and are making judgements based on this prejudice. I have no doubt that you earnestly believe this butt-mod is sexist, but the fact that you harbor this belief is precisely what leads me to feel that this group's complaints are valid.

1. https://imgur.com/a/NKZSoEw

The person who wrote the mod does not appear to be the one who linked it on KotakuInAction. Therefore that community can't take credit for the other mods and claim they balance each other out.

>I think your last sentence is really demonstrative of what I'm saying: people harbor a highly prejudiced view of gaming as, "a community that already has a reputation for sexism and misogyny" and are making very skewed judgements.

To be clear, I am not saying this about the general gaming community. I am saying this about the gamergate community. Surely not everyone in that community is sexists or misogynist, but I don't think you can legitimately argue that there is not some sizable portion of that community that is highly sexists and misogynist.

That context and context in general is important because it helps to establish the motivation behind their actions. It is just like how saying the exact same thing to your wife and a random women on the street could be loving in the former context and sexist in the latter.

> The person who wrote the mod does not appear to be the one who linked it on KotakuInAction. Therefore that community can't take credit for the other mods and claim they balance each other out.

Then by the same logic, the sexualized mod doesn't count either. They were authored by the same person. Otherwise, this is yet another double standard: the sexualized mod counts despite not being linked by the author, yet the de-sexualized mod doesn't count because it want linked by the author.

I don't think it's productive to drag this out any longer, but as an outsider to this situation you come off as highly prejudiced and it makes me sympathize more with the people you're calling sexist and misogynist over a mod.

>Then by the same logic, the sexualized mod doesn't count either. They were authored by the same person. Otherwise, this is yet another double standard: the sexualized mod counts despite not being linked by the author, yet the de-sexualized mod doesn't count because it want linked by the author.

The author doesn't matter. I am not criticizing the author as I don't know the author's intent.

I am criticizing the specific reaction of the KotakuInAction community to the work of the author the same way I might criticize how some people celebrate American History X for reasons that are not aligned with the filmmaker's intent.

You must be referring to the censorship of Miranda's butt in the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition remaster.

The mod was to remove that censorship.

But it is interesting what your initial assumptions about it were.

I don't see why you think this rebuts the previous comment. "We're mad that the company reduced the female's butt size" doesn't really refute "the community cares about female butt size [presumably to ogle large butts]"... in fact, it kind of reinforces that viewpoint.

For what it's worth, I looked through that subreddit's discussion of the article of this HN thread, and the dominant strain of opinions tended to be either "woke company is a bunch of hypocrites, ha ha ha" or "why are you believing what women say." I didn't see the other thread in question, but there definitely seems to be a very strong anti-woke-ism and misogynistic strain in general to the subreddit.

Yikes. One of the first articles I see on that subreddit is a long, curated list of "race and gender swaps" in movies, such as the "blackwashing" of casting Morgan Freeman as "Red" in The Shawshank Redemption, with several hundred examples, each lovingly attributed in a changelog. Ethics in gaming indeed!

How the heck is ass size of a fictional character something something journalistic integrity of video games?

It obviously impacts my freedom of uh, being able to look at big CGI butts?

Like I said, it's about censorship in this case. GG encompasses more than journalistic integrity.

Please learn to read. I already corrected the person who misunderstood that it's not a mod about increasing ass size.

> That's patently false.

Gamergate started because a dude spread lies about his ex-gf. Not a single one of his accusations regarding her behavior or the behavior of employees of gaming websites was true.

It was always, always about harassing women. It still is. The main places where Gamergate is still discussed are chock full of misogynist bullshit.

The gaming publishing industry does have conflict of interest issues, but Gamergate approached and approaches the problem from an entirely wrong-headed point of view. Criticism of the industry should be entirely detached from the clusterfuck that is Gamergate.

As someone who was on the original five guys /v/ threads the idea that GG wasn’t born out of harassing Zoe Quinn is absolutely ridiculous.

I don't deny that happened. I'm just talking about current-day GG.

So you essentially confirm that GG was born from harassing women, and that lots of people continued harassing women even while people said it was always about ethics in journalism.

No at some point the leftover people at some point had an about face, and said from now on we don't do harassment anymore and it's only about ethics in journalism.

Let's consider this is true, but why on earth would this new "only about ethics in journalism" movement continue to wear the same GG label, and somehow be surprised (and annoyed) that people still associate the movement with harassment and mysogyny?

The Venn diagram between gamer gate adherents and 4chan based alt-right trolls is a circle.

no, they aren't all based off 4chan (mostly because 4chan booted them). And not all are alt-right anyway

Its literally a conservative culture war for people under 60 lol. Any gamergate space is an alt-right space and any alt-right space is a gamergate space.