Our Properties: Gamasutra GameCareerGuide IndieGames GDC Vault GDC IGF App Dev Stories ADC GAO GAMASUTRA The Art & Business of Making Gones EVENTS Gamers' don't have to be your audience. Gamers' are over. auses August 28, 2014 1 By Leigh Alexander I often say I'm a video game culture wrker, but latelyI dont know exactly what that means, Game oulture as we know t is kind of embarrassing it's not even in-jokes repeatedly, and its getting mad on the August 28, 2014 It's backpacks and jutting promo poster rols, Queing passionately for hours, at events around the world, to see the things that marketers want them to see. To find out whether they should buy things or not. They dont know how to dress or behave. Television cameras pan across these Istless queues, and often catch the expressions of people who don't quite know why they themseves are st > Cryptic Studios Games cuture is a petn dish of people who know so ttle about how human social interaction and professional lfe works that they can concoct onlne wars about social justice or 'game journalsm ethics, straight-faced, and cause genuine human Because of video games. doing here. And I know I'm not abne. est Blogs Al of us shoukd be better than this. You should be deeply questioning your life choices if this and ths and this are the prominent publk face your business presents to the rest of the world This is what the rest of the world knows about your what does $100 buy in you decline to That's it. You should absolutelly be better than thes create or to curate a How to bring your game You dont want to "be divisive?' Who's being divided except for people who are okay with an infantiized cultural desert of s----- behavior and people who aren't? what re in your s spaces, you re responsible fo Spawns in the Our Games Right, let's say it's a vocal minorty that's not representative of most people. Most people, from indies to Industry leaders, are mortfied, furious, disheartened at the vacuum drection industry conversation has taken in the past few weeks. It's not like there are reputable outlets pub|shing rational articles in favor of the trols side: Don't give press to the harassers. Dont blame an entire industry for a few bad apples RSS August 28, 2014 Yet disdaiming liability is clearly no help. Game websites with huge communty hubs whose fans are often associated with blunt Twitter hate mobs sort of shrug, they say things lke 'we delete the realy bad stuff what else can we do' and 'those people don't represent our communty'but actualy, those people do represent your community, That's what your community is known for whether you lke it or not. Dive: Am nesie's Sanity When you decline to create or to curate a culture in your spaces, you're respons ble for what spaw ns in the vacuum. That's what's been happening to games That's not super surprising, actually. Whie video games themselves were discovered by strange, bright outcast pioneers they thought arcades would make pub games more fun, or that MUDs woud make for amazing cross-cultural meeting spaces- the commercial arm of the form sprung up from marketing high-end tech products to 'early adopters. You know, young whte dudes w th disposable income who like to Get Suddenly a generation of lonely basement kids had marketers whispering in their ears that they were the most important commercial demographic of al time. Suddenly they started wearing shiny blous es and pinning bikini babes onto everything they made, started making games that sold the promise of high-octane masculinty to kids just lke them. By the turn of the milennium those were games only main cultural signposts: Have money, Have women. Get a gun and then a bigger gun. Be an outcast. Celebrate that. Defeat anyone who threatens you. You dont need cultural references. You dont need anything but gaming. Public conversation was led by a games press whose role was primarity to tell peopke what to buy, to score products competitively against one another, to gleefully fuel the "team sports atmosphere around creators and companies It makes a strange sort of sense that video games of that time would become scapegoats for moral panic, for atrocities committed by young white teen boys in hypercapitalist Amenca not that the games themselves had anything to do with tragedies, but they had an anodiety in common, an amorphous cultural shape that was dark and loud on the outside, hollow on the Inside. Yet in 2014, the Industry has changed. We still think angry young men are the primary demographic for commercial radition r on year, with only a few stering brands enjoying predictable and economically, like the It's clear that most of the people who drove those carapace of a bug." revenues in the past have grown upether out of games, or into more fertile spaces, where small and diverse titles can flourish, where communties can quickly spring up around creativity, sef-expression and mutual support, rather than cons g Studio is audiences and new creators alke there. Traditional "gaming is sloughing off, cuturally and economicaly, ike the c This s hard for people who've drank the kool ald about how their identity depends on the aging cultural signposts of a rapidly-evolving, increasingly broad and complex medium. It's hard for them to hear they dont own anything, anymore, that they aren't the world's most special-est consumer demographic, that CREEDS UNITY We also have to scrutinze, dosely, the baffling, stubborn slence of many content creators amid these scandals, or the fact lots of stubbom, myopic intemet comments happen on business and industry stes. This hard for old-school developers who are being made redundant, both cuturaly and kerally, n their unwilingness to address new audiences or reference points outside of blockbuster movies and comic books as their traditional domain falls into the sea around them. Of course it's hard. It's probably intense, painful stuff for some young kids,some older men. he Fallen- World But t's unstoppable. A new generation of fans and creators is finally aiming to instate a healthy cultural vocabulary, a language of community that was missing in the days of gamer pride" and special interest groups led by a product-guide approach to conversation with a single presumed demographic This means that over just the last few years, wrting on games focuses on personal experiences and independent creators, not approval hungry obeisance to the demands of powerful corporations. Its not about being a reviewer anymore. It's not about teling people what to buy, t's about providing spaces for people to discuss what (and whom) they support. Blog Director These straw man game journalism ethics conversations people have been having are largely the domain of a prior age, when all we did was negotiate ad deas and review scores and scraped to be caled 'reporters, because we had the same powe had. Now part of a writer's job in a creative, human demographic inclusive cuture and a lack of commtment to that just people increasingly prefer not to Gamers are over. howling trolls who ve latched onto 'ethics' a as the latest flag Developers and writers alike want games about moreThat's why they're so abstract art. We wil get this, because we're creating culture now. We are refusing to let anyone Gamer Isnt just a dated demographic label that most people increasingy prefer not to use, Gamers are These obtuse shitsingers, these waiing hyper-consumers, these chidish internet-arguers they are not my audience. They don't have to be yours. There is no·side, to be on, there is no 'debate, to be had. There is what's past and there is what's now. There is the role you choose to play in what's ahead.

Share Pin Download More

Origin Entry: GamerGate

Notes:

I tried using the Nimbus screen capture for the original page to get a better quality image, but it wouldn't work at all, so I had to settle for a screenshot of the archived version.

File type: png

Resolution: (1268px x 3189px)

File size: 679 KB

NOTHING HAS F------ CHANGED 10

Gamergate (harassment campaign) Article Talk From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia For other uses, see Gamergate (disambiguation). Gamergate or GamerGate (GG)[¹] was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign and a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture. [2][³] It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015.[1][4][5][6] Beginning in August 2014, Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu, among others.[7][8][9][10][11] The harassment campaign included doxing, r--- threats, and death threats.[12][13][14] Gamergate proponents ("Gamergaters") stated that they were a social movement, but lacked well-defined goals, a coherent message, and leaders, making Gamergate difficult to define.[15][16][17] Gamergaters claimed to promote ethics in video games journalism, claimed to be protecting the "gamer" identity, and opposed what they asserted as "political correctness" in video games.[18][19][20][21][22] Read Date Target Gamergate, online harassment campaign in 2014-15 that targeted women in the video game industry. The attacks were attributed largely to white male right-wing gamers who railed against the rise and influence of women and feminism in the industry. Gamergate served as a recruiting tool for the growing alt-right movement and helped spur the online “Pizzagate" conspiracy theory, which soon spawned the wider QAnon conspiracy movement. …………………………....…..……….…..... Attack type Victims Motive View source Inquiry XA 28 languages ✓ Perpetrators Internet trolls, particularly from 4chan, Internet Relay Chat, and 8chan View history Tools ✓ Gamergate August 2014 - 2015 Women in the video game industry See all media Online harassment campaign Zoë Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and others Gamergaters created conspiracy theories falsely accusing Quinn of an unethical relationship with video game journalist Nathan Grayson.[23][24][25] More broadly, they alleged unethical collusion between the press and feminists, progressives, and social critics.[17][26] [27] These claims were widely dismissed as trivial, conspiracy theories, baseless, or unrelated to actual issues of ethics in gaming and journalism.[28] [29][30] Gamergate supporters frequently denied that the harassment took place, falsely claiming it to be manufactured by the victims.[31][32] Misogyny anti-feminism anti- progressivism FBI investigation Gamergate has been described as a culture war over cultural diversification, artistic recognition, feminism in video games, social criticism in video games, and the social identity of gamers.[28][33] [34] [35] Many supporters of Gamergate opposed the increasing influence of feminism and so-called "social justice warriors" on video game culture. [2][36] Gamergate led figures both inside and outside the gaming industry to focus on methods of addressing online harassment, ways to minimize harm, and prevent similar events. [37] [38] [39] [40] Gamergate has been viewed as a contributor to the alt-right and other right- wing movements.[21][41] Video game developer Brianna Wu

Jalen Hutchinson Studied Culinary Science at Culinary Institute of America (Graduated 2014). Author has 304 answers and 740.1K answer views. 5y Not that I care that much either way, but it did expose a lot of corrupt game developers and game journalists. X Journalists would make claims of people like Anita Sarkeesian "playing video games all her life" when she openly admitted many times she is not a gamer and only starter recently (when it wasn't for an interview). Various developers trading sex or money for good reviews got exposed, journalists who accepted got exposed. People became a bit more critical about supporting a game just because the developer has a victim complex stating tat their game could have only failed because of sexism, instead of their own poor developing skills. What really sealed the deal was opposition often faking their own harassment. Anita sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn have been caught multiple times screenshotting "harassment" while showing that the harrasser's account name in the login. Or when someone called the police to help Sarkeesian against a "very real threat" she was posting about, only for police to find the harasser's messages were coming from her IP address. I just want honesty from the community, and the lies were mostly exposed by the "dreaded" gamergate. 1.3K views • View upvotes 26

View All 4,079 Images

Load 4 Comments

More:

+5

GamerGate - The First "Death Of Gamers" Article By Leigh Alexander

PROTIP: Press the ← and → keys to navigate the gallery, 'g' to view the gallery, or 'r' to view a random image.

Our Properties: Gamasutra GameCareerGuide IndieGames GDC Vault GDC IGF App Dev Stories ADC GAO GAMASUTRA The Art & Business of Making Gones EVENTS Gamers' don't have to be your audience. Gamers' are over. auses August 28, 2014 1 By Leigh Alexander I often say I'm a video game culture wrker, but latelyI dont know exactly what that means, Game oulture as we know t is kind of embarrassing it's not even in-jokes repeatedly, and its getting mad on the August 28, 2014 It's backpacks and jutting promo poster rols, Queing passionately for hours, at events around the world, to see the things that marketers want them to see. To find out whether they should buy things or not. They dont know how to dress or behave. Television cameras pan across these Istless queues, and often catch the expressions of people who don't quite know why they themseves are st > Cryptic Studios Games cuture is a petn dish of people who know so ttle about how human social interaction and professional lfe works that they can concoct onlne wars about social justice or 'game journalsm ethics, straight-faced, and cause genuine human Because of video games. doing here. And I know I'm not abne. est Blogs Al of us shoukd be better than this. You should be deeply questioning your life choices if this and ths and this are the prominent publk face your business presents to the rest of the world This is what the rest of the world knows about your what does $100 buy in you decline to That's it. You should absolutelly be better than thes create or to curate a How to bring your game You dont want to "be divisive?' Who's being divided except for people who are okay with an infantiized cultural desert of s----- behavior and people who aren't? what re in your s spaces, you re responsible fo Spawns in the Our Games Right, let's say it's a vocal minorty that's not representative of most people. Most people, from indies to Industry leaders, are mortfied, furious, disheartened at the vacuum drection industry conversation has taken in the past few weeks. It's not like there are reputable outlets pub|shing rational articles in favor of the trols side: Don't give press to the harassers. Dont blame an entire industry for a few bad apples RSS August 28, 2014 Yet disdaiming liability is clearly no help. Game websites with huge communty hubs whose fans are often associated with blunt Twitter hate mobs sort of shrug, they say things lke 'we delete the realy bad stuff what else can we do' and 'those people don't represent our communty'but actualy, those people do represent your community, That's what your community is known for whether you lke it or not. Dive: Am nesie's Sanity When you decline to create or to curate a culture in your spaces, you're respons ble for what spaw ns in the vacuum. That's what's been happening to games That's not super surprising, actually. Whie video games themselves were discovered by strange, bright outcast pioneers they thought arcades would make pub games more fun, or that MUDs woud make for amazing cross-cultural meeting spaces- the commercial arm of the form sprung up from marketing high-end tech products to 'early adopters. You know, young whte dudes w th disposable income who like to Get Suddenly a generation of lonely basement kids had marketers whispering in their ears that they were the most important commercial demographic of al time. Suddenly they started wearing shiny blous es and pinning bikini babes onto everything they made, started making games that sold the promise of high-octane masculinty to kids just lke them. By the turn of the milennium those were games only main cultural signposts: Have money, Have women. Get a gun and then a bigger gun. Be an outcast. Celebrate that. Defeat anyone who threatens you. You dont need cultural references. You dont need anything but gaming. Public conversation was led by a games press whose role was primarity to tell peopke what to buy, to score products competitively against one another, to gleefully fuel the "team sports atmosphere around creators and companies It makes a strange sort of sense that video games of that time would become scapegoats for moral panic, for atrocities committed by young white teen boys in hypercapitalist Amenca not that the games themselves had anything to do with tragedies, but they had an anodiety in common, an amorphous cultural shape that was dark and loud on the outside, hollow on the Inside. Yet in 2014, the Industry has changed. We still think angry young men are the primary demographic for commercial radition r on year, with only a few stering brands enjoying predictable and economically, like the It's clear that most of the people who drove those carapace of a bug." revenues in the past have grown upether out of games, or into more fertile spaces, where small and diverse titles can flourish, where communties can quickly spring up around creativity, sef-expression and mutual support, rather than cons g Studio is audiences and new creators alke there. Traditional "gaming is sloughing off, cuturally and economicaly, ike the c This s hard for people who've drank the kool ald about how their identity depends on the aging cultural signposts of a rapidly-evolving, increasingly broad and complex medium. It's hard for them to hear they dont own anything, anymore, that they aren't the world's most special-est consumer demographic, that CREEDS UNITY We also have to scrutinze, dosely, the baffling, stubborn slence of many content creators amid these scandals, or the fact lots of stubbom, myopic intemet comments happen on business and industry stes. This hard for old-school developers who are being made redundant, both cuturaly and kerally, n their unwilingness to address new audiences or reference points outside of blockbuster movies and comic books as their traditional domain falls into the sea around them. Of course it's hard. It's probably intense, painful stuff for some young kids,some older men. he Fallen- World But t's unstoppable. A new generation of fans and creators is finally aiming to instate a healthy cultural vocabulary, a language of community that was missing in the days of gamer pride" and special interest groups led by a product-guide approach to conversation with a single presumed demographic This means that over just the last few years, wrting on games focuses on personal experiences and independent creators, not approval hungry obeisance to the demands of powerful corporations. Its not about being a reviewer anymore. It's not about teling people what to buy, t's about providing spaces for people to discuss what (and whom) they support. Blog Director These straw man game journalism ethics conversations people have been having are largely the domain of a prior age, when all we did was negotiate ad deas and review scores and scraped to be caled 'reporters, because we had the same powe had. Now part of a writer's job in a creative, human demographic inclusive cuture and a lack of commtment to that just people increasingly prefer not to Gamers are over. howling trolls who ve latched onto 'ethics' a as the latest flag Developers and writers alike want games about moreThat's why they're so abstract art. We wil get this, because we're creating culture now. We are refusing to let anyone Gamer Isnt just a dated demographic label that most people increasingy prefer not to use, Gamers are These obtuse shitsingers, these waiing hyper-consumers, these chidish internet-arguers they are not my audience. They don't have to be yours. There is no·side, to be on, there is no 'debate, to be had. There is what's past and there is what's now. There is the role you choose to play in what's ahead.

View Gallery Random Image

+ Add a Comment

Comments (4)

Display Comments

Image Details

606 views (4 from today)

Uploaded Oct 08, 2014 at 12:37AM EDT

Origin Entry

Notes

I tried using the Nimbus screen capture for the original page to get a better quality image, but it wouldn't work at all, so I had to settle for a screenshot of the archived version.

click to expand

Tags

Claim Authorship Edit History

About the Uploader

AlphaHeisenbadger

Scrapbooker & Conversationalist & Media Bus Boy

Textile Embed

!https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/844/011/53c.png!

Today's Top Image Galleries

Queen Never Cry meme.

Queen Never Cry

Wifejak meme format depicting a female wojak character with red hair and a grey shirt.

Wifejak

The Social Contract

The Social Contract

A photo of Furries at a furry convention.

Furries / Furry