61–70 of 86 posts
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It is not a complicated situation, from the start its been clear that gamergate is solely a vehicle for organised harassment (primarily of women). There isnt any moral quandry or naunced position about it, its just harassment.
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If you're interested in interactive media -- and you've had an account on Hacker News for 8+ years, so let's assume so -- then you really should have at least a passing understanding of how video games work. Both technically and creatively. And as businesses. It's a fascinating topic -- and arguably we're going through a bit of a golden age! If you're just interested in making fun of nerds for liking video games... A…
Ha ha. I used to be a hard core gamer. Then I grew up, moved out of my parents' house, and got a life. There's nothing wrong with playing games as a hobby. The losers are the ones who actually care about games and take them seriously.
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Umm... That report does not say what you think it says. Whoever did that excerpt was either utterly useless at statistics (and reading comprehension), or was trying to twist the results to try to prove a point. The report was about harassment on Twitter in general, not GG. They were trying to get a very broad sample from all over Twitter, covering any abuse or harassment that was reported to them. Since the whole GG…
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Umm... That report does not say what you think it says. Whoever did that excerpt was either utterly useless at statistics (and reading comprehension), or was trying to twist the results to try to prove a point. The report was about harassment on Twitter in general, not GG. They were trying to get a very broad sample from all over Twitter, covering any abuse or harassment that was reported to them. Since the whole GG…
The Gamergate/Anti-Gamergate movement has to be a Sociology PhD Candidate's thesis topic. It's fascinating how utterly polarizing it is, I mean just look at the sort of comments we're seeing right here on HN, and we tend to be the levelheaded and civil ones! Both "sides" are victims of their own success. In spite of whatever potentially valid points they have, the moment someone figures out which "side" you are on yo…
> and we tend to be the levelheaded and civil ones! I've seen a lot of things discussed on HN. I think that may be wishful thinking. Just because HN isn't full of straight out cussing and insults doesn't mean we're level headed or civil.
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So there is an interesting question. In a polarized situation where there are two sides presenting themselves as victims of the other... how could show one side is ACTUALLY right and one is wrong (assuming reasonable evidence) without sounding partisan? Wouldn't anything that bolstered one side and defamed the other look very partisan? Wouldn't stronger evidence look MORE partisan? Would you have to slowly dish out t…
Um, okay. Here's a paper that did a study based on gendered behavior in Halo 3. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... (tl;dr: there is male hostility towards women in online video games) No one's stopping you from posting evidence and discussing it, of course. In a debate with sides this polarized, you will sound partisan whenever you use any kind of evidence. I try fairly hard to combat tha…
I meant my comment in the abstract, outside of this issue. I seem to remember On The Media (or something else) discussing something like this. I think there was a study that at a certain point any evidence tends to reinforce people in their position even if it's backwards (i.e. your proof I'm wrong convinces me I'm right).
It's not like we haven't seen a number of topics get wedged in this permanent 'stuck' state even when we have objective proof. They become politicized and truth no longer works on the discussion.
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I said I seriously doubt. No true Scotsman would be if someone clearly anti-GG was proven to send a death threat and I redefined them to not be anti-GG for some reason. We haven't reached that point yet in my argument. I'd have to be proven wrong first. Since the reason I'm anti-GG is the harassment and threats (don't agree with their ideas but I think they'd be ignorable without the problematic behavior), I wouldn't…
The unfortunate truth is that Gamergate has been harassed, you just likely haven't heard it. For example, there were bomb threats at several of their meetups, and a panel they had at a Society of Professional Journalism conference had to be evacuated because of several bomb threats.
I won't make any further comment about those threats. I have no info about them, all my thoughts on the possibility are heavy on bias (could be right, but clearly bias).
See: http://www.polygon.com/2015/5/3/8539733/gamergate-bomb-threa...
http://www.polygon.com/2015/8/16/9161311/bomb-threat-shuts-d...
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I've been following the #GamerGate trainwreck for a while. #SavePoint seems to maybe be about improving gamer culture? I don't know. I've not seen #SavePoint before today. For those who don't know, #GamerGate claimed to be about "journalistic ethics" when they were actually just harassing a women (and later other women) who said negative things about how women were treated in games. [1] The #SavePoint group seems to…
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Let's have a look at the first entry. I'll probably get bored after a few of these, but... whatever.
Charge 1 - Leigh Alexander stands accused of writing an article that GG disagree with, and that many of them inexplicably interpreted as some kind of threat, or something. I don't know. The article was basically about how video games have become mainstream, the concept of a "gamer" demographic is largely meaningless, and developers and publishers need not, and should not, solely target everything at this narrow demographic.
Charge 2 - She is accused of talking to her colleagues, possibly at other publications. She may have engaged in such crimes as discussing her work with others, and building a network of contacts. Y'know... journalism. Because apparently all journalism must be done in a vacuum.
Charge 3 - She is accused to also doing other work, and talking about that other work on her personal social media accounts. Even though there's no evidence that she's done anything wrong as a journalist, she totally could have if she wanted to, and therefore can't be trusted, or something?
At this point, I'm just bored. Most of the rest of the list is basically that Leigh is accused of having professional relationships with people in the games industry. Y'know, like every other games journalist - this whole professional networking thing is kind of how journalists get access to things. Same's true for journalists covering any other entertainment industry. Or politics. Or business. Or...
I mean, repeatedly accusing a journalist of doing her job just seems utterly ridiculous.
What else... There's an accusation of lying, which is included even though the accusation itself says that it was probably misinterpreted. A whole bunch of Twitter B.S. that nobody cares about. Some paranoid ramblings, and a whole bunch of other inconsequential crap that nobody cares about...
So... That's the smoking gun? Really?
> Even though most #GamerGate accounts were proven not to be harassers
Wrong. There was no "proven" anywhere - just that there was a lot of harassment on Twitter that wasn't associated with GG, and a wider study only picked up a small number of GG-associated accounts. Which is something entirely different, despite what GG like to pretend.
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Umm... That report does not say what you think it says. Whoever did that excerpt was either utterly useless at statistics (and reading comprehension), or was trying to twist the results to try to prove a point. The report was about harassment on Twitter in general, not GG. They were trying to get a very broad sample from all over Twitter, covering any abuse or harassment that was reported to them. Since the whole GG…
Sorry for the faulty logic. This is a difficult topic, and I'm glad you corrected me.
The basic tactic is to try to sound reasonable, to mask the seething rage and hostility that lies beneath.