What’s “fun”, I never heard of it.

Greetings Larry! I remember your dismissive, derisive sentiments about GamerGate from previous Disqus interactions.

I say bravo and keep it up! The refusal to hear a group’s concerns has, in fact, powered 9 months of advocacy, resulting in gaming outlets disclosing conflicts of interest they originally dismissed or laughed about. Furthermore, metaphorical lines have been drawn in the sand against censorship of art and free artistic expression. But then, what would one expect? In the interests of humanizing, consider how you yourself might behave when dismissed and ignored.

While I do respect your concern that this consumer revolt’s agitation has been noisy and (omitting obvious trolls) in some cases uncouth, using the SPJEthicsWeek tag to highlight perceived ethical violations in games media hardly seems a misuse. But then, this is social media, and redress is different now. The doors to the rabble have been flung wide open by technology, and while there are a great many who downright despise this reality, it isn’t going away.

Don’t you find it strange that a large number of gaming publications would post similar opinion pieces at the same time?

Imagine if 15 different automobile magazines all wrote opinion pieces saying Ford is shit and you should buy GM at the same time.

These so so called journalists were conspiring on a secret mailing list called GamersJounoPros.

I don’t have a problem with humor. I’ve seen GGers distort the concept of disclosure to the point that no specialized writer could write an article without the first 700 words consisting of disclosure. “Fred and I were in the Tech Model Railroad club together in 1965, after which we were both involved in a conference …”

Nonsense. I was cyberstalked and harassed for several months about ten years ago. The stalker set up ids under the name of my deceased wife, and followed me around from forum to forum. Since I can’t do my job without having an open presence, I could only report the ids to the sysadmins as they popped up, and file useless police reports. It’s the reason I began following gamergate to begin with. I had a great deal of empathy for what Zoe Quinn went through after August of last year.

That mailing list isn’t a conspiracy. You’re a dolt if you think it is. And no, it’s not strange that several sites that cover the same general thing talked about similar things over the course of a couple days. I follow several different Android news sites and when something new happens I see no less than a dozen different articles about it within hours. It’s how journalism works.

context is everything. Those articles came 10 as total, in a span of 24 hours, right after people started critisizing Nathan Grayson of Kotaku of being corrupt. It was not just some random statement, it was a direct response and an attack towards those who dared critisize them.

It was medias attempt to dehumanize their opponents. Nothing more. If you wouldve actually read those articles and realized what was going on, you wouldve known this.

But alas, you didnt, and you werent.

Hi Andrew. Thank you for making a statement on this. One of the most frequent juxtapositions I’ve used in posting about what I feel are ethical failings in journalism is the SPJ’s call to minimize harm and humanize the subjects of a story with blatantly abusive reporting. I am, frankly, utterly astonished at how socially acceptable among journalists it has become to completely disregard this concept if one feels the subjects in question are odious enough. Surprisingly, I see more investigation and humanization given to the thoughts and experiences of religious extremists than I do gamers!

It seems as if it has become widely acceptable, based on initial biased reporting, to demonize tens of thousands of people advocating for ethical reporting and resisting censorship in artistic expression. I struggle to understand why. My suspicion is that we are seeing a confluence of two powerful social forces, on the one hand the (very welcome) rising attention paid to the concerns of the traditionally marginalized mixing with a benevolent sexism that renders a “damsel in distress” narrative unquestionable. In the grand, the gross failures in reporting surrounding the Rolling Stone UVA story exemplify this phenomenon.

This confluence confers something of an “original sin” aspect to GamerGate. The thinking goes something like this: The concerns of this consumer revolt are invalid because they arose out of an alleged harassment campaign directed at a female game developer and her involvement with a games reporter. It does not seem to matter that not only does the individual in question seem to have been involved in a harassment campaign herself (drawing ire that, while not excusable, was pre-existing) or that GamerGate has moved beyond the origins of the scandal into wider journalistic concerns. As the one-sided Baltimore Magazine’s recent detailed piece shows, GamerGate’s “original sin” holds powerful sway in many minds, facts or alternative perspective be damned.

The culture of journalism, and its attendant ethical concerns, interests me greatly here. I can understand society rightly moving to condemn harm, especially what has been alleged to be sustained harm. But eliding facts and rejecting objectivity, as Kotaku’s Jason Schreier has championed, quickly slides into advocacy. Responding to the public with vitriol and contempt when they request a fair accounting of the facts and an utter disinterest in the perspectives of those affected seem to not be in the spirit of the SPJ.

Finally, unless it’s not completely clear, let me categorically condemn any abuse endured surrounding this issue. I had hoped that the #SPJEthicsWeek tag would raise awareness of little reported issues, but Twitter’s inability to respond to reports of abuse in a timely manner (of which I and others flagged frequently) spoiled that effort. You’ll not find it surprising that that was the aim of these trolls– to provoke a response and, like all bullies, control the behavior of others.

Nevertheless, I applaud your willingness to explore this issue.

That mailing list was started by the same people behind Journolist, which was so unethical journalists outside that group critisized it to oblivion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList

GJP was the exact same thing. To pretend it wasnt is to lie. Journalism definitely does NOT work that way.

As you know, I’m ridiculously easy to find.

Okay, so you’re very open about being an unethical person. How does it feel to totally invalidate anything you might write from this point forward because we know you have no scruples?

Reasons for that are quite simple:

A) The smear campaign that has already attempted to destroy people using their real names. Currently Joss Whedon was a victim of this and he was harassed out of Twitter. Not revealing your real identity mitigates the damage on that (which is why my account is my cat).
Gamergate as a hashtag and a group cannot be harassed or threatened away. I work in the gaming- and animation industry, and as Brad Wardells case has shown, gaming sites will stop at nothing to label you a terrorist or a rapist at every opportunity they get for easy clicks. Especially if you dare critisize them.

B) Gamergate is heavily international. I myself come from Scandinavia and most of us gaming enthusiasts here are pro-GG by default, because the journalistic standards here are way higher than in the US. We take ethical conduct for granted, so watching the US gaming media fumble so badly over these months has been rather surreal.

C) We want to represent ourselves as consumers on this issue, since the original media attack that created Gamergate in the first place was targeted against consumers. When Grek Kostikyan of Gamasutra threatened to fight to a duel every single dissenter of Leigh Alexanders article, when K.Thor Jensen of Escapist said my parents should die because I love video games, of course that can and should be perceived as an outright attack against their own readers.

Gamergate does not look for yes-men. It looks for people doing their jobs properly. What do you think happens to a restaurant where the cook spits on people’s steaks and then kicks out those who dare complain about it, without giving any refunds? Hate us all you will Larry, but if you give us a fair shake in an article you yourself have written, and actually follow the rules on SPJ’s own website: http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

Then you are okay by Gamergates book. Its not hard. We demand even less than what SPJ itself does. Why is it so hard to add disclosures to articles with conflict of interests in them?

Oh, but I was gonna say the same thing about you!

But, seriously, GamerGate is the original hashtag that *to this day* perpetuates the same disinformation as Quinnspiracy, so if there was ever an intention to distance itself, it was a an absolute failure.

It’s vacuous if she was being literal.

Actually, it is true. Look at the amount of traffic on the hashtag and 4chan around that time and Gamergate exploded right after those 10 articles. Baldwin was the father of Gamergate, but “Gamers are Dead”-articles were the mother. Once again, you would know this if you wouldve actually been there.

the -gate suffix is a reference to Watergate. Look it up. It also includes people being caught from something damning, and them trying their hardest to silence the opposition critisizing them by fabricating lies about them.

Also, Nathan did write favorably about Zoe Quinn, but not on Kotaku, that much Gamergate got wrong. He wrote about her game in Destructoid.

Disinformation? Really now? State this disinformation. Gamergate has grown far larger since those days, the original “rage” is pretty much gone now when everyone mostly responsible for those attack articles have either lost their jobs or relieved from game writing entirely.

But alas, its opponents keep it alive, the corrupt journalists kept making more and more mistakes and unethical practices in their job to further validate the existence of Gamergate as a necessary thing. Had all the perpetrators apologized and fixed their problems (like PC Gamer and Escapist both did and are outside all of that drama now), Gamergate would’ve ended in a week. But they didnt, and decided to continue their unethical practices even more. And here we are.

Its true that Gamergate isnt about its original dilemma anymore (since that was solved one way or another). But it has evolved into a consumer-driven watchdog group all thanks to everything that happened in-between its span of existence.

All the more reason to go pro-GG, help them fix the problem on gaming journalism ethics so all will be over and the 3rd party trolls dont have their playground anymore, yes?

Oh, I was there.

“-gate” does originate from Nixon’s scandal at the Watergate hotel, of course, but it’s been slapped onto just about every other scandal since, including several in the game industry; Gerstmanngate, which barely caused a ripple, Doritogate, which no one did anything about, and then…this.

Nathan Grayson doesn’t write for Destructoid. You might be thinking of rockpapershotgun, where he once wrote three words about Depression Quest in a list of 49 other games. Note that Eron Gjoni, *questionable* as his motives were, never actually accused her of sleeping around for reviews; early GG supporters made up that allegation and ran with it. For ethics. (Yes, that wasn’t *everyone’s* main focus, but it was a huge part of the early going; we all saw the IRC logs that prove that. And you should see the crazy fool in another forum who’s still going on about it now.)

As for the articles, journalists don’t operate the way you think they do. There isn’t some secret cabal out to manipulate the world’s opinion…on video games). Mailing lists exist, but that’s true of any profession. It’s a small industry. Everybody knows somebody who knows everybody, and people from various parts of the industry talk as friends all the time.

The way it works is more like: Something noteworthy happens, someone writes about it and gets a lot of attention, and then a bunch of other people weigh in. And, because it’s crucial in today’s media to be quick (or else your readers go somewhere else), you often see a barrage of articles around the net about the same thing, just like in politics or any other news topic.

Besides that, Alexander’s original article, in context, was all about how gaming has become so ubiquitous that it’s moved beyond all the negative stereotypes. Unfortunately, a lot of people’s reactions to that, after reading the article poorly, was to prove that those stereotypes can still be true.

Joss Whedon is a loud opponent of GamerGate. And yet you word your post to imply he got harassed off Twitter for supporting GamerGate. Ethics!

>SPJ code

Please reread the section “Minimize Harm.” The main chip on GG’s shoulder is actions taken to minimize harm to Zoe Quinn, by deleting threads spreading false rumors about her.

“Choice of sexual partner has no bearing in journalistic ethics.”

You have got to be kidding me? Great, journalists should sleep with their editors not just the people the report on.

It took Kotaku two years to update a story accusing Brad Wardell of something that a court proved him innocent of. They had no interest in correcting a wrong, because it fit their narrative.

He got harassed off Twitter by others against Gamergate. The smear campaign he was taking part with turned out to be his undoing.

Gamergate was born from the “gamers are dead”-articles. Are you trying to say those articles were GJP’s attempt at “minimizing harm” for Zoe Quinn?

I have no idea what your argument is. If it’s that we’re old, I apologize. One morning I woke up, and my hair had turned grey. I’ll admit that my generation, which grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, may be more susceptible to social justice issues than later generations. In my specific case it comes from my direct experience with Jim Crow here in the south. I have an enhanced old guy propensity to take claims of oppression seriously. But then again, I’m old, so I might be senile.