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.

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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 :)
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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?

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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.

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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.

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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".

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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.

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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 ))

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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.

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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?