@Sceptenar These weren't cherry picked - I just grabbed the top articles from a Google news search. In case anyone else still wants to remain in hopeless denial about what gamergate is doing, I hope this helps.
@Sceptenar These weren't cherry picked - I just grabbed the top articles from a Google news search. In case anyone else still wants to remain in hopeless denial about what gamergate is doing, I hope this helps.
Note: Sorry for the separate posts, btw. I was working off of a low ram device that would've refreshed the comment tab before I could get all of the links into one post. Mic drop regardless.
For what little it may be worth, as someone who mostly agrees with GG...
Well as you seem fairly reasonable, can you please explain to me what gamergate stands for and why it's worth taking seriously? Because all I know about it is that it started off with an online bullying campaign against a female indie developer and her personal life and now there's this huge smear campaign over Mizhena and an offhand one liner from Minsc. Also, why is being a 'social justice warrior' bad? As far as I can remember it's been considered good to argue for social justice and to respect diverse viewpoints. Suddenly as of the last half year I can't say anything vaguely left wing online without being swamped by insults (and God help me the time I mentioned being a vegetarian on YouTube. Death threats into double digits.)
If there is any validity to this perspective, I've yet to see it displayed in any constructive way that doesn't just reek of a smokescreen for 'I'm an entitled whiner, stay away from my toy box,' but I'm more than willing to be educated.
I tend to stick to Kotakuinaction for all things GG, so everything I say is based on that.
1) It's worth taking just as seriously as anything political. And this is for games (for the most part), so you know there's not a whole lot of people that are gonna be signing up for it. How it started has been misrepresented, how it exists now is commonly misrepresented, and how it will be seen tomorrow... we'll see. There's no way I can set this all straight for you in a post -- it'd just take a long time! I'd say just browse that subreddit for a few weeks every now and then and see where you find yourself on the topics discussed there. Often times it's just nitpicking over small things in popculture, yes, but every now and then you see something substantial. The controversy over at the University of Missouri is the most recent thing to come up there that I recall.
2) SJW is a loaded term and I think discussions would be better off if it didn't exist but ...internet. It shouldn't really at all be interpreted to simply mean something like "people for improvement of social issues", at least not as it is typically used by GGers. Which is very unintuitive, right? So is most everything to do with this "culture war". It really is a first world problem, all of it.
For what little it may be worth, as someone who mostly agrees with GG...
I tend to stick to Kotakuinaction for all things GG, so everything I say is based on that.
1) It's worth taking just as seriously as anything political...
3) What's wrong with being a vegetarian? lol
Hope that helps at least a little.
Thanks for the constructive reply, that is helpful. I'll try and keep an open mind and keep an eye on this, but seeing as I run a weekly contemporary dance class for young teens with major depression/self harm issues, volunteer with the local police's restorative justice team and am currently researching violence and suppression of activists for a sociology paper and all the horrors detailed in the reading for that.... It's quite fuckin' hard to take a lot of this stuff seriously. I'll chalk it all down to 'it's the Internet' and it will take some convincing for me to believe it's anything beyond the usual otherkin activist tumblrites vs the 'Shepard is straight unless you play a lesbian/why do straight guys only have two romance options in DAI?' crowd, with everyone else just caught in between (including the poor devs, in this case, who are being made an example of in the wider struggle for...something. The wider ethical issues of censorship in gaming unless it's a viewpoint you want censored? Not sure.).
As for being a vegetarian....uh, next time you're at a barbecue make an offhand comment about being veggie and see how many people confront you about it. Or if you're brave find a way to mention it on YouTube. Like a social experiment! I've had no shit from anyone for being gay (in person, at least, the Internet is another story...which really says it all), but people get very confrontational if you just tell them you don't eat meat.
I know quite a few genuine activists - writers and otherwise - who spend a reasonable amount of time on tumblr. Just being on tumblr doesn't mean "otherkin activist." Although I don't really care if someone sees themselves as otherkin, and I suspect more than a few of them are pretty legit activists as well.
Comments
I tend to stick to Kotakuinaction for all things GG, so everything I say is based on that.
1) It's worth taking just as seriously as anything political. And this is for games (for the most part), so you know there's not a whole lot of people that are gonna be signing up for it. How it started has been misrepresented, how it exists now is commonly misrepresented, and how it will be seen tomorrow... we'll see. There's no way I can set this all straight for you in a post -- it'd just take a long time! I'd say just browse that subreddit for a few weeks every now and then and see where you find yourself on the topics discussed there. Often times it's just nitpicking over small things in popculture, yes, but every now and then you see something substantial. The controversy over at the University of Missouri is the most recent thing to come up there that I recall.
2) SJW is a loaded term and I think discussions would be better off if it didn't exist but ...internet. It shouldn't really at all be interpreted to simply mean something like "people for improvement of social issues", at least not as it is typically used by GGers. Which is very unintuitive, right? So is most everything to do with this "culture war". It really is a first world problem, all of it.
3) What's wrong with being a vegetarian? lol
Hope that helps at least a little.