Re: On Gamer's culture and Gamergate @nichegamer

The article here: http://www.nichegamer.net/2014/10/on-gamers-culture-and-gamergate/
This is also a comment to the blogpost, can be found here: http://www.nichegamer.net/2014/10/on-gamers-culture-and-gamergate/#comment-1635054737

This is an amazing article. The account of #GamerGate being a postmodern movement, fighting against an imposed narrative from remnants of old modernity is indeed pretty good.

However, i invite the author to consider this.

It is entirely possible to have a "modern" mind that both maintains the core History narrative, but also embraces the totality of postmodern experiences, accumulates them inside a single picture, and empowers them towards a shared brilliant goal.

I know this may seem hard to imagine. After all, the core premise of postmodernity is that there is no such thing as a single unifying "objective" point of view. But i personally seem to be repeatedly successful at finding this point of view in all the increasingly "postmodern" scenarios my life has thrown at me so far. Find them without disrespecting individual experiences of "postmodern"-minded people, mind you.

In privacy of my own mind, i call this state of philosophical being "supermodern". I also well and truly feel that games as a medium offer the best opportunity to explore this "supermodern" approach, because the essence of a great game is to embrace the multitude of ways in which players are able to play it, while still guiding them along a core narrative.

Therefore, my frame for #GamerGate conflict is this.

There is a truly "postmodern" unity of gamers.
There is a "modern" side of game professionals, - their modernity defined largely by the current production needs of game industry. There is no such thing as "postmodern programming", after all :D
Some examples include:
- James Portnow and Daniel Floyd of Extra Credits
- Sid Meier, trucking along with Civilizations, his work proving to be an invincible testament to the sheer mechanical scale of game experiences
- Nintendo in general, and Miyamoto in particular, that managed to not only rise above the whole #GamerGate thing simply by communicating its values directly to its customers, but also preserved their core ethics and aesthetics against all financial pressures
Among game professionals, there are some that feel the untapped potential of "modern" transforming into "supermodern", but they are unable to articulate this transformation, being stuck in their invdividual narratives. Still, they feel this untapped potential and this drives them to demand more of games and gamers. Drives them to refuse the "no, i just want to play" answers.

The answer to the plight of this group of game professionals seems to lie in figuring out what is it exactly that all games share that seems to bind gamers together as an identity - and building a supermodern structure around it.

However, this group of professionals finds itself unable to properly function when faced with some of postmodernity's uglier sides such as harrassment and death threats. Having been forced to deal with innate "postmodern" state of gamers for decades, they have finally given up trying to understand us and codified this in "gamers are dead" articles. In which, they pretty much consigned themselves to slow professional demise.

All the while, the ones who prove most successful in terms of aggregated respect of the industry, are those who succeed in figuring out how to carry on their own core narratives not in opposition to postmodern state of gamer societies, but drawing upon it and empowering it.

- John "TotalBiscuit" Bain

These are just the biggest examples. There are plenty more.

The "surface only" state of postmodernity is its big strength against classic modernity. But it is also its biggest weakness, because "surface only" affords all sorts of ugly internal structures to flourish. It is because of postmodernity that we have such unhealthy climate in our industry and such frustrating lack of progress on games-as-an-artform front.

What will allow us to overcome this postmodernity, tame it and put it to good use, is a very special supermodern thinking. Not the Social Justice dictatorship of common modernity, but actual understanding of truth, beauty and justice inherent to games as a medium.

Re: Brianna Wu @ Polygon: Case studies on harassment

This is a reply to "No Skin Too Thick" article over at Polygon

http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/22/5926193/women-gaming-harassment

First off, i'd like to say that i feel extremely sad that yet another woman became the target of threats of her life in our industry. Whether the source of it was somethingawful.com or something else, this is unacceptable and has to stop.

It is also extremely sad that this woman's plight was immediately weaponized in the ongoing political struggle between some game journalists and what is collectively known as #GamerGate. Almost immediately, before any sort of investigation had a chance to happen, #GamerGate was named as a culprit and had to defend itself against allegations of harassment. True to its nature as a diffuse movement, #GamerGate responded with a range of replies, some of them went so far as accusing Brianna of sending death threats to herself.

The whole thing is ugly. It is very disheartening that it happened.

I personally try to avoid commenting on these issues until proper authorities come in and make proper investigations and i truly wish everyone did the same. Regardless of her role, I feel extremely bad that Brianna had to become the vehicle for this.

The fact that Brianna opted to take on a banner of fighting for safety of women in the industry is truly commendable and is something i deeply respect. I would hope to have as much fortitude as she did in the wake of anything even remotely similar to her tragedy.

However, when it comes to her recent Polygon article, there are some things i feel are worth pointing out.

Brianna paints an extremely grim picture of life of women in gaming industry, and it is obviously her right to do so, given the experience of past days. However, any changes she will be fighting for will affect a lot more people than just her and the few people she mentions in her article. So i am writing this in hopes of adding some useful context to the discussion.

Case Study 1:

Reality: "If you are a woman in the industry with a critical opinion, you will get a disproportional amount of criticism, hostility, and scrutiny compared to men."

Conclusion: " I’ve personally never heard of a man in the games industry getting rape threats for having an opinion."

The reality is undeniable. No matter how you slice it, women get too much threats in our industry just for having an opinion. Even just one instance of this is too much already, and we definitely have more than one instance on a seemingly routine basis.

Brianna offers an explanation for this sad state of affairs. She comments that males take criticism from females worse than criticism from males. This does seem plausible, i would love to see some research on this matter.

However, Brianna then continues the explanation by saying that some manner of “male privilege” causes males in the industry to “lash out”. While i do not doubt Brianna’s account of males that she encountered in the past behaving in a toxic way, i still think that her explanation is too one-sided and does not account for the full complexity of the situation.

I personally am yet to actually meet a single person, whose "male privilege" would make him "feel free to lash out". Most of what i see about me shows that males treat females as mostly equal coworkers, attempting to address all concerns objectively. Any deviations that i do see are actually examples of the opposite: men are getting cowed by women just because they are afraid to voice criticism.

This may have something to do with the fact that i work in Russia, which may be a different work environment from USA or Europe, but this is my actual experience so far.

In light of this, i feel Brianna’s explanation is inadequate. Worse, it is also a dangerous explanation, because it can be used by less scrupulous women as a shield against all criticism, giving them the necessary conceptual tool to attack any man daring to criticise her. Attack not on the merit of his criticism but on the fact that he is male and therefore - according to the provided explanation - unable to cope with her presence. This i have, in fact, seen happen in the workplace.

My personal counter to all of this is to insist, at the very least around myself, on fair treatment of all issues pertaining to games that we make. I will not stand for either male or female voices being silenced and make as best of an attempt as possible within production schedules to explore all avenues of criticism.

Still, if we refuse Brianna’s explanation of the issue, then we need an alternative one that would allow to tackle the issue. The alternative explanation i have to offer is this. Women being much more frequent target has to do with nature of bullies.

There is a well-understood concept that the easier it is for a bully to get what he wants from a victim, the more actively will a bully go after said victim - for obvious reasons, explained entirely by his nature as a bully. And the sad fact is: it has so far been extremely easy to get a reaction out of women in our industry. A bully going after a woman even has a real shot at the ultimate bully grail - press coverage of his action - as the harassed target tries to resort to publicity as being her only real protection.

It is an unacceptable state of affairs that the only protection the people in our industry have against bullies is going to the police and the press. In other areas of life, similar situations are resolved by having various hotlines, where a person being threatened can call to get immediate professional support. Said hotlines can both provide the victim with protection and care, and assist the authorities in quickly dealing with threat.

One the things proven by #GamerGate is that this twitter-hashtag framework can adequately and rapidly respond to threats of informational nature, as long as it has a sufficient number of people passionate about the cause following it. A similar arrangement, only the one what also prevents the bully from seeing the results of his actions upon the victim, could be effective in dealing with the issue of victim-bully positive feedback loop that women have suffered from.

Case study 2:

The Reality: Many men believe women have no worth in the games industry beyond appearance. This means that an incredible amount of conversation focuses on sexual attractiveness, or appearance in general.

Conclusion: The video game industry is particularly egregious at only representing women as sex objects. As such, many gamers are trained to only see women in that context.

I'll be frank here, this seems like a bit of a blanket statement regarding all males in the industry, based on the statistically insignificant amount of Youtube commenters. Also i'd like to point out that this situation is not unique to gaming, but it also definitely present with regards to other media. This thing seems like an endemic problem with Internet culture in general.

I really am not sure how to go about fixing it at this point, too.

The reason i personally don't participate in this sort of stupidity is ... well, plainly because my parents taught me it is wrong. So i tend to tie this situation with the problems that exist with nuclear families and general public morals. If you want that to go away, the society at large will need to solve issues with upbringing of children.

Once framed this way, the problem becomes more manageable. In fact, gaming industry could do a lot for handling it, by creating more games where the protagonist is not a teenager abandoned by his parents, but rather someone with a more healthy situation, with his family serving as both a vehicle of growth and a stronghold against the ills of the world.

In fact, i personally hope that one day i'll be able to put a convincing family experience inside a game. It certainly seems we are just a small innovation in narrative mechanics away from being able to handle this.

Case study 3:

The Reality: This kind of harassment leaves long-lasting damage. It affects our friendships, and can cause us to be distant from others.

Conclusion: Paste Games editor Maddy Myers once told me, "You don’t really recover from this kind of abuse. You just change." She’s right.

This is straight up true.

Suspicion and fear are extremely hard to deal with. Once they take root inside your brain, they never completely go away. Best case scenario - you learn to deal with them a la Kevin Nash in the movie "A Beatiful Mind". Worst case scenario … is more than a little sad.

Either way, imposing yourself upon the person's world like that is a form of violence that is truly new in our tech world, but is also as real as anything physical.

Bullies are doing true damage and need to be stopped.

My recommendations are the same as Case Study #1. If there was a place where a person could go for anonymous help regarding identifying the bully and neutralizing him, it would go a long way towards helping this issue.

There is one thing that puzzles me in this case study, though. Brianna comments on how the bullies lack the requisite experience to understand the harm they are inflicting and consider themselves a sort of a gift, the intrusion of which upon her life a woman should appreciate. However, she seems to apply this logic to all men, not to just bullies. I have to ask - why?

We men are not fans of bringing up episodes of our own encounters with bullies too often. However, it doesn't mean we didn't have them and are incapable of understanding the feelings of a person held under a disgusting threat against one's will. Both internet culture specifically and postmodern culture in general has given bullies a golden free pass, and they have proven to be equal-opportunity predators.

I would like to assure Brianna, that not all of us are bullies. Most of us are not nearly as much in love with our own words as she seems to have been led to believe. Those of us that trust themselves above others and require proof to change their mind do so in an equal-opportunity way, being hard on both men and women.

If the motto is “listen and believe”, then, if we are equal partners against bullies, it really should go both ways.

CASE STUDY #4: CAROLYN

The Reality: Women are here, we love games, and we’re not going anywhere.

"And I think the industry, and our place in it, is worth fighting for."

Conclusion: Damn right it is.

I am glad to see more women in our industry and I am truly glad to see women standing up for themselves.

Maybe, with women actively participating as equal partners, we will finally be able to drive the bullies out of our industry.

Re: First Person Scholar - Postmodern intellectual on #GamerGate

A reply to
http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/we-will-force-gaming-to-be-free/
This text is also in the comments there. It might even pass moderation :)
UPDATE: it didn't pass moderation. I'll just assume it was too long for comment section.

-------------------------

The author, as befits any Guin-quoting postmodern intellectual, is trying to spin a tale of oppression of select few by dumb populace. The populace is displayed as an actual coherent being that has some focused will and cannot be handled by fragile nature of postmodern intellectuals.

I do so much enjoy dissecting texts such as these :)
----

The fact that #GamerGate's own "corrupt journalist" Milo saw an opportunity to score some publicity and maybe settle some scores does not really mean anything. Milo can be the most corrupt journalist in the world, but as long as the unearthed exchanges of GameJournoPros are true, he actually did his job as a journalist for once. Which is more than i can say for a lot of other GameJournoPros members.

The fact that #NotYourShield is shielding #GamerGate from accusations of mysogyny ... Is true. Not sure how that is ironic, though. Just because they are #NotYourShield doesn't mean they can't choose to be #GamerGate's. The fact that they chose to be #GamerGate's over people who claim to represent their interests is actually pretty telling.

The boycotts are simply an honest and empathic agreement with earlier Gamers are Over articles, as well as bans on certain conversation topics in clear violation of the usual rules of engagement on platforms that handed out said bans. Gamers are Over articles had people say that they didn't want gamers to be their audience and would have no debate over it. The bans reinforced these words with action. The boycotts, therefore, merely honor that desire. Not sure how it is #GamerGate's fault that advertisers back out when they realise the sites no longer serve their target audiences.

Of everything said in intro section, only Zoe Quinn / Anita observation makes any sense at all. Because it is tied to #GamerGate's only weakness - that is inability to deal with the fact that games have been a convenient vehicle for all sorts of abusers.
Well, i own up to that weakness and admit that it is indeed a problem. Doesn't mean you get to write all gamers off over that, though.

In fact, why are you even placing responsibility for abuse on internet on solely on the shoulders of gamers to begin with? I am certainly doing my part to make sure nothing of the sort happens around me, but my personal efforts can only go so far. In actuality, this seems more like an endemic problem of postmodern culture, which holds sacred neither decency, nor dignity.

In closing of the intro, the author makes the hypothesis that #GamerGate will collapse under the weight of internal contradictions. This is not what we are observing though, isn't it? So maybe some of the core assumptions behind that hypothesis are wrong?

----

The second part largely revolves around the inherent contradiction that the author feels should cause #GamerGate to fail.
Specifically, this: "But above all there need never be a conflict between a journalist’s or critic’s duty to inform and a reader’s desire to be told only what they wanted to hear—a contradiction that would surely make Berlin cringe."

The statement that a reader desires to be told what he wants to hear is true, because it is tautological. However, this statement seems to imply that a reader is incapable of appreciating being told something that he doesn't want to hear.
The author doesn't bothering mentioning how this runs counter to actual history of art as a transformative experience. Well, i'm here to mention it for her :)

The contradiction does not exist as the author puts it. The contradiction exists between the journalist's / critic's desire to get his point across and his inability to connect with his audience. Journalists and critics who are lazy entitled offspring of a bad person choose to resolve this contradiction by saying that the audience is not worth taking into consideration because it is too dumb to appreciate their high insights.
In contrast to these worthless nobodies, journalists and critics (and tons of others) who actually made an impact on this world, however, all proved this assertion wrong by actually finding a way to connect with an audience small or large.

Some credence is given to the notion of "no use to connect" by a following conundrum. You see, in some cases, journalists and critics found ways to connect with small audiences by pandering to its collective lazy entitlement and saying that said small audience is inherently more worthwhile than the larger one.
True evil always finds a way to exist in the larger picture of good, i guess :)

Either way, it seems that the claim that the inherent contradiction of #GamerGate as presented by the author is unresolvable remains in need of proof.

-----

Subsequently, the second part deals with how #GamerGate is more about countering the bias of people they perceive as SJW's and less about dealing with harassment of women.

#GamerGate is condemned for how countering the bias of SJW's quickly leads to countering the bias of feminists, which is just a poor choice of words away from actual harrassment of women.

My only response to this is "well, duh". #GamerGate never claimed it'd protect women from harassment, didn't it? Much as i personally would like to see some of JournoPro-unearthing effort to go towards dealing with people sending death threats and the like, #GamerGate doesn't seem to be about that. Trying to make it fit into that mold is intellectually dishonest.

On another hand, maybe if feminism was not so closely associated with SJW-ing to begin with, this problem wouldn't even exist.

-----

Finally, the second part closes with saying that "a mob is not a proper jury to deal with corrupt journalism". Not sure what would be the proper jury, though. Do game journalists have to answer to any body that enforces journalist ethics? I don't think so. Even "true" journalists have major issues with that.

I'd still take a mob over a complete lack of oversight, though. Because complete lack of oversight lead to "Gamers are dead".

-----

The third part opens with oft-repeated misconception that what started #GamerGate was the sob story of Quinn's boyfriend.
I feel that's giving a bit too much credit to Quinn's boyfriend.
This sob story would be a mild internet curiosity, followed by a brief discussion of it on internet platforms where people are into that sort of thing. And would then be forgotten.

Only, for some reason, a lot of platforms that previously had no history of persecuting these kinds of discussions suddenly closed ranks in protecting Quinn. This didn't really help Quinn - far as i can tell she is still "couch-surfing" to avoid her particularily devoted fans. However, what this did is showed how little respect the owners of these web platforms had towards something all gamers had dear and close to their hearts - the right of free discussion. #GamerGate hashtag was started then.

However, at this point, the whole thing was still on the level of forum conspiracy. It would still have been over and done with the instant Quinn was proved in the public's eye to not have been complicit to anything interesting. However, the strange phenomenon of the industry closing ranks against Quinn was still escalating for reasons beyond my knowledge until it materialized in 14 gaming sites coming out and straight out denying the right of existence of everyone who ever participated in internet discussions.

One of exact quotes is:
"These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish 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"
And somehow, despite the fact that sites like 4chan are populated by far more than just gamers, this was made to be specifically about us.

This, and not anything that came before, was the defining moment of #GamerGate. As it often happens in history, identity that previously didn't really exist as anything but a bunch of presuppositions, coalesced in the presence of someone displaying clear and unabated hostility.

-----

What follows in chapter three is the core of the issue for the author herself.

Apparently, she feels that she had no part to play in making "Gamers are over" articles come to life. She was sitting in her own little corner of her ivory-tower home, doing her feminist research, never really even imagining herself being the target of any sort of scrutiny from outside of academia. And then suddenly, these "obtuse intenet-arguers" come along with out grubby filty hands all over her nice clean world. They dare to hold her field of research responsible for the fact that some "gamers are over" articles cited papers from it. They institute their "digging digras" and inquire as to where exactly does she specifically fall on the issue and why. And, on top of that, dare to claim that if her acadamic approaches are solid and up to ethical standards of academia then she has nothing to hide.

It is almost as if she feels that one can't judge a fallacious argument from a good argument if one doesn't have a PhD diploma. Just having, say, a Computer Science degree and over a decade of experience in building logical systems is apparently not enough. You also need to have a prearranged agreement on what is right and what is wrong.

(( In all fairness, yeah, just having a working brain is kinda not enough. You also need to be familiar with actual content of the papers and at least some of the citations. Which is why #OperationDiggingDiGRA is yet to start in any sort of force. But that's a different point entirely isn't it. The claim made here that noone at #GamerGate is fit to judge her work, period. No matter how familiar he becomes with the research or how good he is at making logical sense. All because he doesn't subscribe to a set of ethical statements ))

----

In the closing chapter, the author attempts to round the discussion off by pointing out that #GamerGate prefers to think of itself as an unideological "consumer" movement that is simply trying to get what it has already paid for. Apparently this is ethically unacceptable. I mean, God forbid that people whose very existence compels companies like Intel to form marketing budgets criticise any website that runs off said budgets. Intel might pull their advertising! Creative people will suffer at the hand of those worthless plebeans!

I am not sure what passes for "ethically acceptable" in the head of postmodern intellectuals, because i am not one. However, i find that if your livelyhood is objectively dependent on a certain demographic, then you do carry some degree of responsibility in your professional conduct towards said demographic.
Now, obviously, the author is already prepared to twist this into saying that this makes a journalist into a slave of the demographic. Which ties into earlier argument on how the author thinks that people can't appreciate being told what they don't like. I have made it clear that i don't agree with that stance. Therefore i don't accept the author's attempt to twist the notion of journalists being professionally beholden to serve the people who pay them. Service can take a great many forms. Getting significant group of people to hear what they don't necessarily want to is one of higher and nobler forms of service. Which many journalists throughout history have proven is entirely possible to do, regardless of where your money is coming from.

The author makes a half-hearted attempt to reduce the "consumer" ideology to "get paid what you owe". Apparently she isn't very much into the actual ethics that brought about the age of modernity. Well, she isn't a postmodern intellectual for nothing, i guess

However, the actual attack from our postmodern intellectual comes not from the angle of morals, but rather from a favourite angle of postmodern intellectuals - the angle of objectivity. Or of how it doesn't exist.

Apparently, in the mind of the author, "are controls good" is the only kind of question a truly objective review of games can ask. And how the only point of it all is to "slap a score on it and tell a consumer whether or not to buy". I find this to be utter bull and complete misrepresentation of importance of game mechanics to game experience.

I also find it extremely surprising why a self-styled student of games wouldn't understand it. However, answering this notion properly would require yet another full essay, and this particular wall of text has run long enough. I am, after all, writing this during a dinner break and have to get back to my subjective work, in order to subjectively earn my subjective living and put some subjective food on my subjective table

Regardless, I would still encourage the author to google up TotalBiscuit and partake in some of his truly exellent reviews. This is a guy who does objectivity in reviews almost exactly right and delivers some exellent insights into experience of games that he reviews, spanning far beyond the question of whether to buy it or not.

-----

In the closing parts, the author gets completely nonsensical.

Apparently we already live in hell and "consumer revolts" threaten to drown us all in it.

Apparently, saying that Bobby Kotick deserves his salary for doing an exellent job running one of largest gaming companies around is wrong. Which, i guess hints at how much problems the author has not just with gamers, but with actual capitalism.

Also she speaks of goodgamers.us as something of a phenomenon, whereas this is the first time i'm hearing of it. Thanks to her for getting that on my radar, but so far this website has achieved exactly nothing of note. Let's see how well it does!

Then she rants off about how #GamerGate is in the wrong for reclaiming the concept of "gamer" and insisting that there might be some good in it that everyone who would see gamers to be dead and over might have missed. Apparently, protecting what you love is a bad thing. No wonder she thinks this world is hell!

She then moves on to accusing us of not actually reading feminist writers. Which, i guess, makes her earlier stabs at #OperationDiggingDiGRA a bit of self-contradiction

And then we get straight up metaphysical - doorways to paradise with letters written on them and all.

Lady postmodern intellectual author, if i were to tell you you are getting a wee bit crazy here, would you consider this harassment of women?

RE: Moviebob, GameOverthinker RE: #GamerGate

In response to Game Overthinker episode Gamer's Gate: http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.ru/2014/10/episode-96-gamers-gate_7.html
Copy of this tweet - 11:36am · 8 Oct 2014

You (addressing to Bob Chipman, author of the Game Overthinker) are saying these things: 

1) Gamer as a label didn't exist until 2005 

2) The need for gamer identity was felt by the industry but was not really strong until J. Thompson put it into overdrive 

3) That #GamerGate amounts to backlash against Sarkeesian et al 

And then you make a stance that "gaming doesn't deserve to be saved". 

Context

I'm not an American. I am Russian. I by an large don't know or care about your US-political goings-on except as a curiousity. "The war" that you talk about was little more than a distant blip on my inforadar. 

Replies 

1) Back when i was in high school (which was in the late 90s) i have already played games for close to a decade. However, i didn't call myself "gamer" until somewhere around 1997 a then-new video game magazine "Navigator of the Game World" came out, which put a person who dressed really funny (even by my high school standards, which were not high let me tell you that :D) and called himself "Gamer" as a mascot. The magazine was mostly run-of-the-mill game-review fare, but it did some really fun weird stuff in op-ed sections and published text adventures that tested people's knowledge of games from 80s and early 90s. 

The magazine didn't survive for very long because the people who really appreciated it weren't many and had not much disposable income. When the magazine announced its final issue, i was quite genuinely sad. It was also a lesson of how one should remember that commerce is not necessarily a friend of gamers and cannot be relied upon to maintain gamer identity. 

However, by the time this final issue rolled out, the gamer identity itself has already been formulated and embraced by me and more than a few others. 

2) I can agree with that sentiment, with one caveat. In the event of external threat, you can only solidify and respond as anything more or less united if the prerequisites for this solidification already exist. If there was no shared love of games (materialized in shared financial interests of institutions serving people with love of games), there would be no backlash to begin with. 

J. Thompson didn't create gamer identity. He was a test of whether it actually exists. Gamers passed. 

3) Fast forward to more recent events... I see a lot of people likening what is going on now to Thompson. Someone is being on our case for ethics, we respond in the same way we did before yadda yadda.

Only this time, this part is just the first step. 

The second step was to condemn us for not having learned to deal with these issues in any other way, call us various disgusting names, say that "there will be no dialogue" and "gamers are over". 

Now, i cared about Sarkeesian about as much as i cared about Thompson. That is, not much at all. Some eyebrows were raised when she raised $150k on Kickstarter and got a GDC award, but when she ultimately failed to deliver (3 or 4 vids of very questionable quality and value over a year so far), everything about what Sarkeesian is became quite crystal clear. 

She is not a critic. And if she is an artist, then it is of a con variety. Because real critics and artists would do a lot more with $150k of goodwill that she got. 

I cared about how various people respond to Sarkeesian a bit more. I really hated the bomb threat she received, for example. The bomb threat was by some apparently american guy, whose grandfather did something in WW2 therefore he feels himself in the right to threaten women. 

Where i live, you don't get any special treatment for your grandfather being a WW2 hero, because practically everyone's grandfather or great-grandfather was a WW2 hero. With the understanding, that among the people this hero was protecting, were indeed our grandmothers, mothers and us. So using that as an excuse to bomb-threat a woman just goes to show how little the bomb-threating person knows about actual war heroes. 

However, this still caused little reaction out of me, because ultimately i share an understanding that people who make these threats have both little ability to deliver on these and little connection to actual gaming. And while i do my part to make sure ladies get treated properly around my person, i also get some lip from ladies who feel that me insisting on said proper treatment somehow objectifies them. So i don't exactly go all in on it. And also i understand that this is not a problem unique to gaming and that fixing that would require fixing the entire Internet culture. Maybe someday, but not now. And not by gamers alone. 

However, then was Leigh Alexander's article. In which she said the above mentioned things. 

That we as a gamers are somehow responsible for all the harassment on Internet, did little to fix this over time and should now be discarded as an identity as the world of games moves to things that we apparently can't love or comprehend. 

Now, i understand that she probably thought she was speaking about a very limited, small subsection of people that play games that her audience universally despises. And i understand that maybe she felt that she could gather more attention by using such provocative language. And if it was just she who did that, this also would have been fine. I mean, she is ultimately just another blogger and if she had any worth as a journalist - this article nuked it all to high heaven. 

However, she was joined in this by 13 other people, who all wrote on pretty much the same day. Some of them citing references to actual studies that apparently objectively prove how me and those like me are bad people. 

So tell me, how does a person that "knows how not to be at war", responds when told that he is no longer relevant and that there is no dialogue to be had and that he is just to fade away? 

Because this feels to me like a kind of thing that would make a person learn how to be at war again. 

Hence #GamerGate 

You said that "Gaming doesn't deserve to be saved". Two responses to that 

1) gaming is saving itself just fine on its own and by hands of those that value it 

2) I'm looking forward to next episode where you elaborate on your position that gaming doesn't deserve to be saved

Re: ExtraCredits Dan Fw: Leigh Alexander's greatest work

A copy of this TwitLonger: https://twitter.com/ec_maxi/status/517715504031858688

@EC_DanielFloyd @ExtraCreditz
This is a response to Dan retweeting what Leigh Alexander considers her "greatest work".

I am writing this because i feel that your show - Extra Credits - is effectively the best thing to happen to this industry since ... Mario 64? I feel that way because your show addresses the things that make games a true art form. Your show addresses this in a consistent and convincing form and has been an inspiration for me in my own game industry work.

I am not aware of any other show in the industry that does what you do on the level that you do. TotalBiscuit's shows occasionally come close, but even he lacks a certain aesthetic sense that you guys over at Extra Credits succeed to manifest regularly.

Extra Credits addresses things that made me a gamer and helped me figure out what my identity as a gamer means. I am a big fan of Extra Credits and i've been happily recommending this show to all my friends.

At this point, you might already have an incling of what all of this unreserved flattery i have been showering upon you has to to with Leigh Alexander. Let me explain either way.

I strongly feel that, in writing her "Gamers are over" article - http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224400/Gamers_dont_have_to_be_your_audience_Gamers_are_over.php - Leigh Alexander painted herself into an enemy of everything that makes me a gamer. And thus an enemy of everything that makes games true. I am using the word "enemy" deliberately here, exactly to highlight how deeply her written word has offended me.

I understand that there is a possibility that this might not have been her intention. There is a lot of verbal excrement being dumped on her right now - she is being accused of "pushing feminist agenda", " being a corrupt journalist" and all the other stuff by folks over at GamerGate. Their version paints her as some sort of enemy mastermind seeking to subvert all the good things in gaming.
Me? I'm unconvinced on the account of all of this being her deliberate intention.

However much "evidence" GamerGate unearths, it is still entirely possible that, in her mind, Leigh Alexander sincerely might have just been trying to get across the idea that "gamer" is some kind of limited minority of people enjoying a dying strand of game, the existence of which holds the industry back.

However, there are two problems.

First problem is that i am convinced that this is simply wrong.

Leigh's core assertion seems to be that gamer culture is about excluding people from the fun. I don't see that. Instead, to me, game culture has been the most connecting and inclusive of experiences. Of course, i have encountered my share of ... dinkheads, for the lack of better word ... in the gaming scene. However, in every single instance of me encountering said dinkheads, i found one simple thing.

The things that make a person act like a dinkhead have nothing at all to do with games. These things are insecurities - about oneself, people of other gender, one's place in the world and future. It is these things that drive a person to act in exclusive manner. And, ultimately, a person like that turns to games because - behind all the insecurities - he still wants to feel connected to someone. And in the glorious experience of fun in gaming, he actually can. And, if he is just a bit lucky, a person like that is then able to find the experiences that let him get over the insecurities, grow as a person and learn to include people in his life.

If games matter at all, this is how.

Leigh Alexander denies all that. She was quickly to brand all gamers "obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers", unable to appreciate her vision of games as "tragicomedy, vignette, musicals, dream worlds, family tales, ethnographies, abstract art". Apparently, for her, there is no such thing as a powerful unifying transformative experience that is unique to games and is uniquely powerful because of that. Instead, she laments the fact that gaming experience does not incorporate what she considers more worthy artforms to a degree she'd like.

This alone wouldn't be a problem. This disdain for human beings that enjoy games for what they are and not as a "tragicomedy" or "vignette" wouldn't make Leigh Alexander my enemy. I would simply dismiss her, having decided that she is simply a person projecting her feeling of superior exlusivity upon others.

However, she then takes it just one step further. She says
"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.".

I have read this passage multiple times. I gave all the benefit of the doubt i could. But the only conclusion i can come out of it is that this is a straight political challenge, rooted in ideological differences.

She wants to take the games in a different direction, away from the people that is not "her audience" that does not immediately appreciate her "musicals and abstract art". She is not willing to hear out the other side or work to make her ideas understandable, because there is "no 'debate' to be had". And she is openly challenging the reader to pick a role.

Well, here is my answer.
I feel that games have their own unique value as an art medium, that is entirely separate from "vignettes and musicals".
I feel the the very inclusivity that games afford is the result of this unique value of games as an art medium.
I feel that Leigh Alexander wants to exploit that inclusivity to propagate something that has nothing at all to do with games, but is rather a reduction of games to other art mediums.
She does not appreciate the extremely diverse group of people who have been both the fans and creators of the art medium of games up until now.
She is not giving proper respect to unique values of games that makes this inclusivity possible.
In wanting to exploit the inclusivity of games while defying its source, she will inevitably act as the source of self-contradiction that, if allowed to infiltrate games too deeply, will destroy them.

My role prior to Leigh Alexander's article was to simply study games as an art medium, explore the messages of game mechanics and make games.
Now i will make a point of being extra careful to make sure that any game i'm making won't become a "vignette" devoid of interactive agency of games, and to caution everyone else from falling into the same trap.

Which brings me back to Extra Credits.

Dan

I understand you think highly of Leigh Alexander. I have been following Extra Credits for long enough to know that she was your inspiration for more than one episode of the show. For that, i hold nothing but respect.

That being said, i implore you to ...

Do a single thought experiment. It shouldn't take much of your time or effort. But it may let you feel better where i'm coming from here.

Imagine for a second not Leigh Alexander's horrific vision of a group of boys that tells her she can't play, but rather a completely different vision of an otherwise isolated child (of any gender you like) finding friends to play with through games.

Imagine this child growing up to feel that it is important to not just be a passive "player" of games, but to be an involved and appreciative "gamer". Try to get in the mindset of this child as he walks through school, puberty, youth, all the way up to his 30s, always finding games as his spiritual home to return to for contemplation, recuperation, communion. Seeing more and more people embrace the medium that is game for the same things that he came to love in it. And, ultimately, always finding in games the energy and meaning that would propel him actually improve both his own life and life of others.

And, now that you are in the mindset of said child, please read the "Gamers are over" article of Leigh Alexander.

If the things i've been getting out of your Extra Credits show have anything to do with what you've been putting in it, you should feel some of what i've described above. That feeling of something truly sacred being touched with hands that hold no love for it.

Everything that comes after that i will leave to your discretion.
Including the possibility that what i've been getting out of Extra Credits was not what you put in it.

With best regards and utter respect
Maxim Preobrazhenskiy