Troy Maskell

Not really. I do this incredibly assholely thing tumblrs don't like. It's called thinking

You did a horrible, lousy fucking job at it then. And of course, I believe everything ever posted on Tumblr

Do you honestly think if we did that the misogynists would not follow to what ever statement or flag we put out there? This is one of the most pathetic excuses I have ever seen for anything, ever. You deserve the negative reactions you get, because you're too lazy, too scared or you don't care enough to actually try and get away from them. In your opinion. My question still stands, because we HAVE changed once before. From "The Quinnspiracy" to "Gamergate", we did that to specifically get away from the people harassing Zoe Quinn and to focus on our issue, the Grayson issue and the subsequent issues that followed. What happened? The Harrassers followed us to the Gamergate group. It's easy to say "Change the Flag" or "Why not try this?" but we already know that simply doesn't work. So tell me oh wise one, since you clearly have all the answers, what do we do when we switch tags and the narrative is either "Look at the misogynists trying to prove they're not misogynists but hiding behind another tag" or in three months when that tag gets spammed by trolls who have nothing to do with the group we're back at the same fucking spot?

Do you honestly think if we did that the misogynists would not follow to what ever statement or flag we put out there? Oh there's been problems with AAA games too. Shadow of Mordor was well known for hiring a PR company who offered early access to the game in return for favourable reviews

Do you actually read any of my posts or do you just randomly quotemine and move on? We go out there all the time and say "I Support Gamergate. I do NOT support Harrassment", we report people who use the tag to threaten those people and get their accounts banned, but do you know how easy it is to create a twitter account? If we change the tag do you really think the trolls aren't going to follow us? I like that I'm accused of not reading your drivel in a post that clearly shows you haven't read mine. I'll make one more attempt to spell this out for you: How about you go out there and no even fucking mention GamerGate? How about you go out there and just fucking say you're against bias in reviews or whatever stupid shit you'r e crusading on. Separate yourself completely, start a whole new movement, whatever. Instead you continue to preface everything with "I SUPPORT A GROUP THAT IS WIDELY KNOWN FOR HARASSMENT AND MISOGYNY...but I don't support that part of it!" And you wonder why people give you so much shit for it. GamerGate is a shitty "movement" filled with plenty of shitty people who do horrible things, maybe be fucking smart enough to no throw in with that lot if you don't want to be associated with all the shit they bring with them. Seems like common sense to me. Get it now? Or hey, its fucking video games, go whine about something that actually fucking matters. Who cares if someone gave a positive review to a fucking indie game you'll probably never play. You don't give a shit, really and it doesn't affect you in the least. If you're worried about buying a game that got a good, perhaps unethical review and it turning out to be shit, boo fucking hoo, grow up and learn how to make informed decisions before purchasing. The same shit happens in industries that are far more important than video games will ever be. Seriously Troy have you even played any of the games you keep mentioning? In answer to your question, yes. Gone Home was okay, not a revelation but okay, Depression Quest isn't a game. Soundshelf is pretty terrible and the Anna Anthropy games are a mixed bag, some good, some terrible

And for the record: Affleck was still da bomb in Phantoms

Have you ever heard of the chicken and the egg? Zoe Quinn and Grayson was merely the catalyst. When concerns were blown off people were inspired to dig deeper and found problems with a whole slew of articles and reviews, involving people like Patricia Hernandez (Who wrote glowing articles on Kotaku about games designed by Anna Anthropy, who was a close personal friend of hers, this was never disclosed) Nathan Grayson again (This time he gave a glowing review to the game Soundself, not disclosing he was close friends with Robin Arnott, a developer of the game) and Danielle Riendeau (Who reviewed the game Gone Home for Polygon, despite being close friends with the games composer, again never disclosed) There are others, Quinn was merely the tip of the iceberg, it was the reaction that caused people to dig deeper and when those we're brought up to the sites editors.....Three days later the "Gamers are Dead" articles came out.

Well, like Guy Fawkes and or anything, that date is...for lack of a better term, Genesis. That's where Gamergate began when the online media posted a huge ton of articles, all convieniently written to come out at the same time saying not only were they NOT going to investigate the concerns of some readers and consumers but also saying (Paraphrasing here) "Your kind is dead, you're all just misogynistic dudebros and we are leaving you behind. You don’t have to be the audience gaming or the industry caters to anymore."

Exactly this. If Grayson had just gone back and put that in or just said something on RPS as a quick amendum, Gamergate dies in two days. What we got instead was August 28.

OMG! You misogynist. You should die with the rest of the Gators you pig!

Truth be told Petey, Sarkeesian has very little if anything to do with Gamergate, besides being lumped in with those who posted all the hate to her and such because of the Zoe Post, As you say Sarkeesian happened before Gamergate even began. Do she make good points? Of course she does, the "Damsel in Distress" trope is cliché, is there a need for more women in the industry? Probably yes. The problem with Sarkeesian is she will not talk to anyone who has counter points to her arguments, which riles people. Ultimately though Sarkeesian has little to nothing to do with the core issues the moderate Gamergaters want discussed. As for Quinn the answer lies in the article I posted, there may not have been a REVIEW of the game by Nathan Greyson, but he did give it favourable coverage. That was the tipping point as you say, that and August 28 Actually, this was the only article Grayson ever wrote that mentioned Quinn, and it's simply a summarised version of an article written for Indie Statik about a dishonestly pitched game-related reality show that involved Quinn, among others. Quinn is only described as "Depression Quest creator Zoe Quinn", and at no point is any opinion expressed about the game itself. . Not true. He also mentioned on the site he worked for at the time RockPaperShotgun in an article about it getting greenlighted, not only mentioning it as a "Standout" game but including screenshots from it, the only game of 50 greenlighted games mentioned to have that privilege. Given the allegations and the fact he never disclosed the possible conflict of interest it's easy to come to the conclusion of favourable coverage Even if it wasn't meant to be, all Greyson had to say was "My bad" and make a disclaimer, he does that and Gamergate dies there and then, of course that didn't happen which turned into August 28.

Truth be told Petey, Sarkeesian has very little if anything to do with Gamergate, besides being lumped in with those who posted all the hate to her and such because of the Zoe Post, As you say Sarkeesian happened before Gamergate even began. Do she make good points? Of course she does, the "Damsel in Distress" trope is cliché, is there a need for more women in the industry? Probably yes. The problem with Sarkeesian is she will not talk to anyone who has counter points to her arguments, which riles people. Ultimately though Sarkeesian has little to nothing to do with the core issues the moderate Gamergaters want discussed. As for Quinn the answer lies in the article I posted, there may not have been a REVIEW of the game by Nathan Greyson, but he did give it favourable coverage. That was the tipping point as you say, that and August 28

https://medium.com/@meanmrpugface/the-3-events-that-made-gamergate-into-the-nearly-6-month-movement-it-is-today-8ad33f01c5fe I'm not here to argue or anything, like I said I'm done on that aspect. I simply mention this article which does a pretty good job of explaining in a neutral tone what caused Gamergate and why it's still going

I'm done. At this point I'm screaming at a wall and all I'm going to end up doing is getting myself banned. You clearly will not see any other reason but what you want to believe and nothing I say or do will change that I could post all examples of all the achievements we've had and it wouldn't matter because in your eyes "You're Gamergate, therefore you are a hate movement". Your biases will never allow you to have even the slightest hint of belief otherwise.

Kool-Aid has nothing to do with my views. It's called common sense, you might want to use it one day, I hear it helps There's no common sense in anything that you or any of the other GG people have been posting. There is a really fucking simple bottom line here and it has to do with wishing and hoping. No matter how much you wish and hope like Bret Hart was your genine in a bottle, you CANNOT say "I support GamerGate but I don't support what their leadership does" because then you DO NOT SUPPORT GAMERGATE because you instead support an idea that they are in all reality NOT about. What part of "we don't have a leader" do you not fucking understand? By your assumption, you're saying if ONE person does something wrong and uses Gamergate as a hashtag then the whole movement is tainted. Meanwhile people like Wu, Sarkeesian and co are whipping up all this hatred, to the point where people are threatening to show up at PAX East with Sarin gas to "Kill all the Gamergaters" or Wu actively promotes giving away tickets to people who "throw down with Gamergaters" But that's okay right? The hypocrisy of some people never ceases to amaze me

Don't bring up pesky things like "the facts" Sean. Brianna Wu has already deemed that as "Another example of Gamergate Harrassment" so naturally it MUST be true

Kool-Aid has nothing to do with my views. It's called common sense, you might want to use it one day, I hear it helps I trust that you're only repeating it as rumour on account of having never encountered it yourself. Well I certainly haven't encountered it from anyone talking to me in this thread if that's what you mean Edit: Except maybe Sean but I don't think he ever spoke to me directly

Kool-Aid has nothing to do with my views. It's called common sense, you might want to use it one day, I hear it helps

I love how "Less than 10 percent" somehow translates into "most of Gamergate" and how "Leaders of Gamergate are doing this' When Gamergate doesn't have a fucking leader. I swear talking to Anti Gamergaters sometimes feels like talking to children.

We die for the sins of our people

Do you actually read any of my posts or do you just randomly quotemine and move on? We go out there all the time and say "I Support Gamergate. I do NOT support Harrassment", we report people who use the tag to threaten those people and get their accounts banned, but do you know how easy it is to create a twitter account? If we change the tag do you really think the trolls aren't going to follow us? I don't understand. Gamergate IS harrassing females. They don't do anything else. Those two sentences are mutually exclusive. Any of the the subsequent times a gaming journalist - PARTICULARLY a male gaming journalist does something even slightly questionable, Gamergate is nowhere to be found. And that's the thing that they never seem to be able to answer. "If you're truly in support of ethics in games journalism, then where were you when *this* happened?" Does everyone see now why I said a couple of pages back that trying to provide my point was a pointless exercise? We can't win with you because you only see what you want to see. Confirmation Bias like I said As for your question. We have plenty of people calling out the stupidity of gaming journalists who try and attack Sarkeesian, Quinn and Wu. But saying "I think you're full of shit and here's why" ISN'T FUCKING HARRASSMENT! Despite them saying otherwise, they don't even debate the points, they just cry "harassment" and count their money.

Do you actually read any of my posts or do you just randomly quotemine and move on? We go out there all the time and say "I Support Gamergate. I do NOT support Harrassment", we report people who use the tag to threaten those people and get their accounts banned, but do you know how easy it is to create a twitter account? If we change the tag do you really think the trolls aren't going to follow us?

Off Topic: But I do find a touch of humor in my DP considering this discussion

The whole point of Gamergate, well the ones of us who are serious have this point and that is simply that we don't know who to trust any more. Which is what makes it different from things like Iraq, Fox News, etc. You ask a fair question in "What does it matter?" It matters this way, we don't know any more what review or what content is real and what content is paid. Is the reviewed giving the mixed review game an 8 because he genuinely feels that way or is he being told to say because the website is getting money from the developer. On the other hand, is the reviewer who gave the same game a 5 saying that because they genuinely didn't like or did they miss out on the deal? Ultimately though what this all boils down to is they won't admit they're wrong, they don't see the problem in having a reviewer who is a friend of the developer review the game, or someone who is still getting money from said developer doing the review, without a hint of disclosure. As much as people want to make it about Zoe Quinn she's not even in the argument any more to us, she was simply the catalyst for us to look deeper into things and what we found we didn't like. When we took those concerns to places like reddit and youtube because we got no response when we talked to them what was the response we got? We didn't want wholesale changes, we still don't. Just tell us there's a conflict of interest there and if you've ever taken money for reviews or not. But what we got was a whole string of articles with the same premise: Gamers are Dead. THAT'S what created the "monster" that is Gamergate, like I said if this was solely about Zoe Quinn we wouldn't have being dancing around this for over a year now. It would have died two days after it started. The thing that keeps Gamergate going right now is two things 1. The refusal of the majority of those implicated to admit they may have been wrong 2. They won't even come to the table and hear our concerns. Why? Because "You're Gamergate. You're a hate group. We won't give in to misogyny and hate" even when they see that the majority is not that way. It's easy to say it's not a right fight, or to say maybe you should back off, but at the same time when you've been marginalised like we have eventually you turn into Jean Lue Picard in First Contact "The line must be drawn HERE, this far no further and I will make them pay for what they've done". Does that mean we're going to go off on those we hate with murder and death threats? No. Does that mean we're going to go to people like Quinn and attack her? No. Are we going to back down? Of course not. Because in the end we know we are right. And no matter how much they try to marginalise us, eventually people will come to our argument, it's already happening. We fight because we're right, that doesn't mean Sarkeesian, Quinn and Wu are wrong, in the end they're not part of the argument, although we would like to debate Sarkeesian on her points, we're aware that ship's probably sailed. I think most Gamergaters would be happy if the big sites just came to us and said "Okay we're listening" and slowly but surely they are, Kotaku has changed their policy, the Escapist did. a few smaller sites have as well. In the end all we're asking for is a seat at the table, but right now we're not even getting table scraps.

Baldwin started GamerGate by adding a hashtag to two videos that mentioned Quinn and the alleged collusion, amongst other things, to say it was created specifically about Quinn is disingenuous, if it was solely about Quinn it would have died after a day or two, what kept it alive and continues to keep it alive was the evidence of Video Game Developers buying favourable reviews and op eds, not to mentions the infamous "Gamers are Dead" articles that popped up at the same time the Gamergate hashtag began. Quinn was a part of it, I don't deny that, the roots are in the Quinnspiracy, but to say it was specifically about her is deceptive at best, a bald faced lie at worst.