Know Your Meme
patrick miller writes about videogames hit me up on twitter @pattheflip Don't be silent! Things you can do about GamerGate I have spoken to a lot of people in the games industry who are frustrated about GamerGate but shaky on the prospect of speaking out themselves, they're worried about receiving death threats, or drawing unwanted attention to their employer, or just overextending themselves getting involved in an exhausting All of these are valid concernsl The problem is that good people being silent on the matter is what enables this to continue; many of the folks who organize under the GamerGate banner ( and non-harassers) genuinely believe that they're speaking up for the silent majority wh beliefs but aren't brave enough to speak out. (Personally, I tend to assume that people a their good intentions until proven otherwise; IMO the hard part of being a good person is right thing, it's doing the right thing.) In other words, silence is interpreted as implicit permission to continue Never miss a pos pattheflip patrick mille So, here's the thing. Speaking out doesn't mean you have to wake up every morning and only get out of bed after reading the previous night's GamerGate stuff for twenty minutes and getting angry. (I will say it's pretty good at getting me out of bed, though.) There are a bunch of different ways that you can make your voice heard, depending on how your personal HP/MP are doing 1. Read up. The challenge with GamerGate is that it is a complex, multilayered, distributed organization that depends largely on people who are willing to take their statements at face value (We're just about corruption in games journalism, guys"). I think these two articles (here and here) are good starting points for approaching GamerGate with a critical eye and understanding how it works. If you have an opinion, make sure it's well-informed 2. Signal boost. Hitting that retweet button (or reblog, share, whatever) does two useful things. First off it allows the folks who are speaking out to gain extra visibility, which is important to allow their voices to extend past their immediate friends and friends-of-friends. Second, it allows your 1st/2nd-degree friends to see where you personally stand, even if you don't feel comfortable using your own words to do so. Both of these are useful for minimizing the silence-as-permission effect, and neither of them should get you personally targeted. (If you are personally targeted by your 1st/2nd-degree friends, then you might need new friends.) This is the lowest-cost, lowest-risk way of getting directly involved, but it's still super importantl 3. Speak yourself. I think that for most intelligent folks, seeing their immediate friends/family/colleagues making their opinions known is more powerful than seeing strangers or internet celebrities weigh in, so if you vocalize your support in your own words it sends a stronger message than retweeting someone else's. That said, this is a bit higher-risk, because you will be putting your own words there for critique (and if you use GamerGate in full, hashtag or no, you will attract attention from supporters who probably aren't in your immediate circles). Tweet, write blogs, whatever you can to add to the voices on the Internet. If you simply won't risk doing so your under your real name, find a way to publish anonymously (pastebin is good for this). Heck, if you have a story you want me to tell anonymously, let me know. 4. Indirectly engage. In addition to making your own voice heard, you can speak to the people and organizations that you want to hear from as well. If you want to see these issues covered on publications you read, tell that to their editors and writers. If you want to see it discussed at games events, speak to the event organizers. And so on for any channel you think has an obligation to cover and/or weigh in. This is useful because, fundamentally, channels that haven't been covering GamerGate are likely omitting it out of fear fear, specifically, that their readership includes a large body of GamerGate supporters - and addressing them specifically gives them yet one more counterexample. This can be a bit more costly, as it will expose you to GamerGate supporters looking to argue with you. 5. Directly engage. Basically, this is "talking to GamerGate supporters". I leave this at the end because I think this is the most taxing, as far as your time and emotional energy go-and I don't want you to assume that partaking in any of the above four methods mean you are committed to directly engaging. In an ideal Internet, everyone would be talking to each other with respect and good faith. This is obviously, not an ideal Internet. "Concern trolling"people pretending to want good-faith conversation and instead responding with pre-scripted talking points that require more time to assert than they do to debunk is a very real tactic adopted by GamerGate supporters, and it's impossible to know whether a stranger on the Internet is in fact engaging in good faith or not. So: Just because you say something on the Internet doesn't mean you are obligated to follow-up with every single person who disagrees with you, especially in this case. I know it feels bad, but it's simply not viable in the face of tactics like concern trolling. Personally, I mostly engage with people who I have a pre-existing connection with, because l'm willing to trust their intentions far more than a generic Twitter account with no name or professional history Frankly, I haven't seen many attempts to directly engage that I would call successful, so I can't recommend it myself. But if you'd like to learn that yourself, go right ahead. Just remember that no one is entitled to your time, and you can stop at any point you feel yourself running out of energy. If your Twitter feed is full of sea lions, it's totally okay to block them. What's the ideal outcome? GamerGate, like the Tea Party and Occupy, is fundamentally unwilling to articulate a specific agenda outside of individual campaigns Boycott X advertisers!") because it correctly realizes that to have an agenda means miring itself down in defining an actual position, with actual ideals something that would necessarily fragment its organizing efforts and open it up to criticism from people who are smarter than GamerGate. Basically, GamerGate's organizing tactics indicate that isn't really about getting stuff done so much as drawing blood wherever it can in order to feed its participants with the feeling of validation and power they normally get from video games. (This is what allows GamerGate to say it is about advertisers' corruption in journalism while simultaneously trying to silence critical jounalists by targeting their publications' advertisers.) Because of this, I doubt GamerGate will ever go away, at best, it can be widely criticized, and its methods exposed, to the point where one's association with GamerGate is considered a personal liability (again like the Tea Party and Occupy, though I'm sad about the latter). That, I think is the the best outcome we can home for. For better or worse, video games are politically polarized now, just like everything else, and the sooner you understand how to navigate this, the stronger your voice will be -patrick miller OCTOBER 11, 2014 (3:53 PM) 227 NOTES

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Anti-GamerGate Playbook


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NOTHING HAS F------ CHANGED 10
Gamergate (harassment campaign) Article Talk From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia For other uses, see Gamergate (disambiguation). Gamergate or GamerGate (GG)[¹] was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign and a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture. [2][³] It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015.[1][4][5][6] Beginning in August 2014, Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu, among others.[7][8][9][10][11] The harassment campaign included doxing, r--- threats, and death threats.[12][13][14] Gamergate proponents ("Gamergaters") stated that they were a social movement, but lacked well-defined goals, a coherent message, and leaders, making Gamergate difficult to define.[15][16][17] Gamergaters claimed to promote ethics in video games journalism, claimed to be protecting the "gamer" identity, and opposed what they asserted as "political correctness" in video games.[18][19][20][21][22] Read Date Target Gamergate, online harassment campaign in 2014-15 that targeted women in the video game industry. The attacks were attributed largely to white male right-wing gamers who railed against the rise and influence of women and feminism in the industry. Gamergate served as a recruiting tool for the growing alt-right movement and helped spur the online “Pizzagate" conspiracy theory, which soon spawned the wider QAnon conspiracy movement. …………………………....…..……….…..... Attack type Victims Motive View source Inquiry XA 28 languages ✓ Perpetrators Internet trolls, particularly from 4chan, Internet Relay Chat, and 8chan View history Tools ✓ Gamergate August 2014 - 2015 Women in the video game industry See all media Online harassment campaign Zoë Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and others Gamergaters created conspiracy theories falsely accusing Quinn of an unethical relationship with video game journalist Nathan Grayson.[23][24][25] More broadly, they alleged unethical collusion between the press and feminists, progressives, and social critics.[17][26] [27] These claims were widely dismissed as trivial, conspiracy theories, baseless, or unrelated to actual issues of ethics in gaming and journalism.[28] [29][30] Gamergate supporters frequently denied that the harassment took place, falsely claiming it to be manufactured by the victims.[31][32] Misogyny anti-feminism anti- progressivism FBI investigation Gamergate has been described as a culture war over cultural diversification, artistic recognition, feminism in video games, social criticism in video games, and the social identity of gamers.[28][33] [34] [35] Many supporters of Gamergate opposed the increasing influence of feminism and so-called "social justice warriors" on video game culture. [2][36] Gamergate led figures both inside and outside the gaming industry to focus on methods of addressing online harassment, ways to minimize harm, and prevent similar events. [37] [38] [39] [40] Gamergate has been viewed as a contributor to the alt-right and other right- wing movements.[21][41] Video game developer Brianna Wu
Jalen Hutchinson Studied Culinary Science at Culinary Institute of America (Graduated 2014). Author has 304 answers and 740.1K answer views. 5y Not that I care that much either way, but it did expose a lot of corrupt game developers and game journalists. X Journalists would make claims of people like Anita Sarkeesian "playing video games all her life" when she openly admitted many times she is not a gamer and only starter recently (when it wasn't for an interview). Various developers trading sex or money for good reviews got exposed, journalists who accepted got exposed. People became a bit more critical about supporting a game just because the developer has a victim complex stating tat their game could have only failed because of sexism, instead of their own poor developing skills. What really sealed the deal was opposition often faking their own harassment. Anita sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn have been caught multiple times screenshotting "harassment" while showing that the harrasser's account name in the login. Or when someone called the police to help Sarkeesian against a "very real threat" she was posting about, only for police to find the harasser's messages were coming from her IP address. I just want honesty from the community, and the lies were mostly exposed by the "dreaded" gamergate. 1.3K views • View upvotes 26
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