How dare she create a successful game?!

This is disgusting.

They call themselves "GamerGate" and they think they're fighting for "responsibility and ethics in the gaming media".

Adam Baldwin (That right-wing asshole who's actually scummier than the character he played on "Firefly&quot coined the term and has been stoking the fire for months now.

Supposedly, "GamerGate" has disavowed this, yet are also rooting out ways to harass anyone (especially women) who speak out against them.

This is (at least) the third woman involved in gaming these cretins have threatened.
See also: http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/22/5926193/women-gaming-harassment (Written by Brianna Wu, referenced in the article above)

And when Cracked.com has the best article on your "movement", you might want to disavow said movement.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-ways-gamergate-debate-has-made-world-worse/

The Verge has a good article on it, too:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/8/6919179/stop-supporting-gamergate

Too many even here on DU automatically defend games and gamers without even thinking when questions are raised and criticism given. Too many are unable to think rationally when someone points out that perhaps we need a wider variety of games, that gamers aren't only (white) men, and that we should work for and support people who develop games with women protagonists, as well as women game developers. They don't hear what we say, but instead hear "no games should have men protagonists, men are evil, and should be killed." They are irrational, like the Southern Confederates who, when listening to Northerners say 'Slavery should be contained in the states that has it now, and not expand' heard 'whaaa we will force your daughters to marry black men, just try and stop us!' Complete disconnect in their brains.

It's funny: I've seen every one of Anita Sarkeesian's "Tropes Vs. Women" videos about video games, and she's not once called for the banning or games or the "all men are evil" or anything.

She's just said it's prevalent in video games, and she's right. All of the "debunking" videos I've seen nitpick and falsify her stance, and it's absurd.

Heck, we even had a DUer say he was continuously petitioning YouTube to get her banned for "lying" in her videos. All because she criticized his favorite game, I assume.

I don't get angry at any of this. The term "gamer" needs to be retired, I think: most people play video games these days. On their phones, on their computers, on their consoles. And they've never called for a shutdown of the industry, but you wouldn't believe that from the reaction from 4chan and Reddit (and, most likely, a contingent from DU's offshoot site).

I see her videos and I think "Hrm, she's got some good points." And then I start to see the same thing she does when I take a critical look at games and even at my own writing; I've realized I fell into the same "damsel in distress" trope repeatedly in a book I'm working on. So I'm going to re-work the story a bit to not fall into the same patterns.

There seems to be a swarm of "defend the gamergate fort" trolls here, and a couple of them have even stalked me around different posts.

As always, they know how to exploit the rules system, and I think they have at least one pet Mod they can call, too.

trolls.

Why aren't they out there doing superior things?

The ones I tried to throw in, previously suppressed on DU for "irrelevance":

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224400/Gamers_dont_have_to_be_your_audience_Gamers_are_over.php

http://www.bustle.com/articles/38742-what-is-gamer-gate-its-misogyny-under-the-banner-of-journalistic-integrity

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

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/27/your-princess-is-in-another-castle-misogyny-entitlement-and-nerds.html

And the Men's Right's "Point of View":

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/01/Lying-Greedy-Promiscuous-Feminist-Bullies-are-Tearing-the-Video-Game-Industry-Apart

Summary: Women get ahead in the video game industry by whoring around, and any "threats" were manufactured by themselves for publicity.

And this awesome article spotted by SeaBeyond which lifts the whole issue beyond GamerGate to the 4Chan/Reddit Trolling-for-the-Lulz culture in general: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/the-unsafety-net-how-social-media-turned-against-women/381261/4/

I'm guessing no sane journalistic website relaizes there's really "two sides" to this.

for all the links.

Thanks for those. These are conversations we all need to have about this.

I like that article because it really hits all the highlights of the Men's Rights "position", though. You can see what the GamersGate articles are debating against.

And the *attitude* toward women...it burns...

Read the "Princess in Another Castle" article, though. I thought that one spoke to wider cultural problem - not just the irredeemable right-to-rape jackasses, which hopefully are a dying breed.

Wil Wheaton tweeted something about Anitia Sarkeesian and his feed got swarmed by people demanding he stand up for ethics in gaming media. I couldn't figure out what was going on, so I dug a little deeper and unearthed this nasty underbelly. It sickens me - as a geek and a gamer I don't want to be associated with these scum. They're the same people who harass cosplayers and girls in comic shops - their precious little boy's club is threatened and this is the only way they know to deal with it.
And Intel just bowed to the Gamergate people.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/10/04/353702104/intel-pulls-ads-from-gaming-site-amid-gamergate-debate

Thank goodness geek icons like Wheaton and John Scalzi are standing up against these testosterone filled rage-nerds.

Why weren't these people vocal when Jeff Gerstmann was fired from Gamespot for his low review score of Kane and Lynch?

We helped report the guy as well as the latest roll threatening Anita Sarkeesian. Sad thing on the latter is that he's like a hydra, manage to get twitter to delete one of his accounts and two more spring up, all by the same guy. I would admire his tenaciousness if he wasn't so much of an asshole.

Also not mentioned in that Polygon article was the fact that the doxxing on 8chan was quickly reported to the moderation team, and practically every person in that thread was telling the guy to fuck off.

You may disagree with me or not and you may discount my words immediately after I said that I'm part of GamerGate, but please bear with me. We are not a harassment group. What we are searching for is some basic journalistic standards in the gaming press. As for Zoe Quinn, the majority of us don't care about who she sleeps with unless it was such a conflict of interest as having such a close friendship with Nathan Grayson (who covered Quinn's involvement in a failed TV project as well as covering games Greenlit on Steam including and themed by Depression Quest, Ms. Quinn's game) that eventually became romantic in nature. He had covered her work before and may have been able to cover her work in the future and did not disclose his relationship with her when he could have done so.

We are not misogynistic, that is the narrative being spun by the very ones that we oppose. Gamergate counts many men, women, and transgendered people among the ranks. The NotYourShield hashtag was started by an African-American man who was tired of always being assumed to be white by opponents of GamerGate. Have a listen to the Girls of GamerGate streams if you wish to as well. We are not are also not a Conservative group, despite two prominent and visible members being Conservatives. A political test chart was compiled and a majority of the results fell into left-leaning areas.

Well, I think that covered a lot of the bases. I hope I carried the GamerGate message well. If there are any other questions, please reply.

Kotaku blew your whole beef with Quinn out of the water, as did Cracked.

No, I won't. Because this is about journalistic ethics. Because I've actually looked at the hashtag and posted in it myself rather than letting the opposition's narrative and their cherry picked tweets of trolls and outright agitators tell me all about it.

Hahahahhaha! Sure, keep telling yourself that. When you associate with this crowd, IN ANY WAY, you are endorsing their hatred of women.

I hate women. There, I said it. I absolutely hate women.

Yeah, a bit snarky, but that's what I'm feeling at the moment. So, how, if the movement hates women, did Not Your Shield get started? How are there so many women involved in the movement?

Hate can be internalized. The fact that women are involved is not evidence your organization doesn't hate women.

reading #GamerGate on twitter can quickly figure that out. They spend a lot of time talking about "cultural marxism" and "feminazis",their fearless leaders are one of the right wing Baldwin brothers and Brietbart and many are openly MRA. One doesn't have to cherry pick tweets to see that,that's who they are. To call it a movement about journalistic ethics is ridiculous.I would encourage DUers to check it out for themselves,it's pretty obvious what it is.

but not all of feminism.

Gamergate's vicious right-wing swell means there can be no neutral stance

Far more importantly, to affect neutrality is to do profound, immeasurable disservice to the victims of Gamergate. This revolt needs to be understood in the context of years of attacks on women in gaming, under various guises.
To cede to Gamergate’s manufactured counter-narrative, which foregrounds the fractious consumer-creator relationship, is to ignore its place in this wider trend, to airbrush out the periodic mobbing of individual women by both trolls and malcontents. This past weekend, the developer Brianna Wu was forced out of her home by death threats, the third case in two months after developer Zoe Quinn and cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian.

Gamergate proponents deny culpability even as some of them try to imply these women brought it on themselves; most are genuinely frustrated by these incidences, but largely because they know it hurts their image.

It’s incredibly telling that, when The Escapist tried to run a “balanced” piece acknowledging pro and anti-Gamergate reactions from male developers, it had to go to Gamergate itself for the pros, and those interviewees lost no time in revealing themselves to be gaming’s Rush Limbaughs and Richard Littlejohns, eager to provide and flesh out a mythology that rationalises hatred towards the feminist/progressive element in games. The female developers interviewed uniformly opted to remain anonymous.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/13/gamergate-right-wing-no-neutral-stance?CMP=twt_gu

meaning, as long as we stick with abortion and birth control, which makes sex more available to man, then it is a good feminism. but by gosh, of our brand dares to challenge patriarchy and the submissive role men try ot put women in, then that "brand" of feminazi is attacked.

Gamergate’s patriarchal sway has allowed charlatans like Milo Yiannopoulos to become one of its preeminent champions. Yiannopoulos, who routinely writes misogynistic, transphobic, and other bigoted rants for Breitbart, would never be exalted in any forum lacking an undercurrent of reactionary right-wing sympathies. Even the American Enterprise Institute has chimed in, arguing that the issue of sexism and misogyny in video games is a fake issue created by "feminist tech writers" and "concernocrats." AEI’s involvement has been led by Christina Hoff Summers, who cares very little about video games but an awful lot about the alleged War On Men, which ranks somewhere near the War On Christmas on the list of things adults ought to take seriously. Nevertheless, she’s been anointed by Gamergate fanatics as a truth-teller for her views on male persecution, ditto other reactionaries like YouTube personality "Thunderf00t" who has published videos such as "Do hot girls have all the advantages?" and "Why feminism poisons EVERYTHING."

The conspiracy theory at the core of Gamergate even has parallels to other attacks on liberal journalists. Brietbart wrote how the "secret mailing list of the gaming journalism elite" had been "exposed," the same way Andrew Brietbart tried years ago to nail an allegedly liberal journalism "cabal" including writers like Ezra Klein and Dave Weigel. There was no real scandal with Journolist, the same way there is no real scandal with the game journalist list — unless you believe that journalists merely speaking to one another constitutes some kind of shadowy media illuminati.

Manipulative identity politics, ripped straight from the handbook of conservative sophistry, are also at play. Under the #notyourshield banner, people who say they have vulnerable identities rallied around the Gamergate cause to counter the narrative that all gamers are angry white men (something nobody is saying, by the way) and prove that "gamers" in the movement are suitably diverse. But this hashtag campaign started as just another disingenuous 4chan astroturfing operation designed to make Gamergate critics look like hypocrites, essentially by saying "look at all these women and queer people and black people, they can’t be racist or misogynist!"

Gamergate supporters, like the reactionary right-wing in general, have attempted to co-opt the vulnerability of those they seek to marginalize, while simultaneously maintaining the illusion that they are the ones being harassed. It’s the same tone-deaf logic that bigots and racists use when the structural power enforcing their traditional values erodes, and is eventually conquered: "Stop saying mean things about us because we believe gay marriage should be prohibited by the state! Stop silencing us!"

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/8/6919179/stop-supporting-gamergate

lazy and cowardly way.

rw is so fuggin dishonest. though not surprised, it always makes me *gasp* at the audacity.

Baldwin brothers.

Palin, that 'republican tea party' and the RW trolls in general ruined twitter!

"Justice Warrior" is another cue term that lets you know you are dealing witb GamerGate jackasses.

How they managed to twist "justice" into a term of denigration is beyond me.

I suppose it involves the same faulty neural paths that derived a big "journalist ethics" issue out of the false premise women must sleep with reviewers to get good reviews, or to get games made at all.

*waits for the GamerGate swarm on DU to exploit the system to get this comment or whole posg suppressed*

said with derision. i hear ya, who would figure justice warrior is a sneer. i have heard it more often, since.

i wonder where it originated. limbaugh?

This is absolutely disgusting!

K and R for more exposure

"law-abiding citizen" has?

This is just too weird. I'm not into gaming except as an occasional pastime. I tried online gaming ONCE and I felt like I was surrounded by 20 12-year-olds. Is this normal behavior for gaming? I'm not talking about the death threats, I'm sure that's not normal but the hatred of feminists, of women. Do males somehow believe gaming is "theirs" and no girls allowed? I truly don't understand.

Unlike consoles which usually have children in high numbers along with adults, the costs to build gaming desktop computers tends to limit them to adults.

I'm a big PC gamer, though I prefer turn based RTS like Rome 2: Total War and Civ 5.

The gameplay is fairly similar though the maintenance/upgrading of cities is quite a bit different. It's not a bad game. I still think Shogun 2 was probably better. I still hold out hope for a Medieval 3.

My husband loves it.

And it just so happens it's my husband's birthday that day so absolutely, along with a marble chocolate/vanilla cake, special meal and a bunch of computer geek hardware stuff about which I know nothing.

We're old fucks so we have a tendency to stay with the same game/game line. I just like Borderlands because, besides the different levels, you can replay the game as a difference character and have a completely different experience.

That's my kind of birthday party, chocolate cake and a brand new BL game!

Just waiting for it to unlock.

Sid

SidDithers and Le Taz Hot agreed on something. (This may never happen again, folks.) LOL!

As perverse as it seems, it's kind of stress-busting to watch the nukes fly at the end.

Crap did I just foment a flame war war by taking your bait?

I couldn't resist. You brought up Civ. I loved Civ.

Did you see the Alpha Centauri remake that's about to release? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization:_Beyond_Earth

Haven't looked too much at the betas, 'cause I have a personal rule against that after getting burned a few times in the past. Played the beta of a good game, and felt "done" with the game very quickly after release.

I'm a huge fan since Civ I. Didn't like 5 - part of my enjoyment was the complexity, and 5 took away a lot of complexity. Though I should probably try 5 again now that I have young kids - a simpler game probably may fit better with the level of attention I can give it.

In Everquest there are lots of mature people who have professional lives and play EQ games for fun. Lots of trolls and kids too.

I also loved the Age of Empires series , started in the 'MS zone rated rooms' vs other players. Most of the best players in AOE were College students, Korean and Chinese.

Can't the police track down the person who wrote this?

Sid

I know, right?

And you don't want to give him an opportunity in case he is serious.

I hope the idiot is found and fully prosecuted and it sinks in to the other asshats doing this sort of thing.

Seriously, how can you not know that?

there who are taking gaming waaaayyyy too seriously. I hope they catch this asshole and any other who thinks he can make these kind of threats with no consequence.

Unfortunately, it sometimes seems that such disease differs only in degree, and not in kind, from the minds of the masses.

-- Mal

Like YouTube, Yahoo, Urban Dictionary.....probably plenty of others too. These are just the ones I know of, where commenting while female, (or posting a vid that dares to step out of stereotype ), is inviting a lot of insulting sewage.

Why the hate? Someone doesn't like her views on something so they threaten violence? How about they just not buy her games instead?

not so weak creating one of their rape snuff porn scenario to feel like a man. put that woman in her place.... to feel like a man. do what ever to a woman. .... to fuggin feel like a man. gotta feel like a man, in a world, where he is weak and cowardy.

I wish the world were not this way. And such depraved insecure individuals would get the counseling or mental health treatment they need.

so the woman can live her life, take care of her kids, walk in her home. WITHOUT FUCKIN FEAR!

personally. i like that answer

none of the stuff that you listed is indicative of a real man.
Actually more monster than anything. Being a man doesn't mean hurting someone or forcing anyone...

thrown you way?

how does it make you feel?

why was/is it allowed.

ik, r?

- Doesn't believe anyone should make games they do not like. Any effort on games they do not like is wasted effort that should have been spent entertaining them.

- Doesn't have any power in the other parts of their lives. Think of the stereotypical early high school kid - "No one understands me!!"

This kind of thing gives them power, and lets them put down "bad" games and "bad" developers.

The gender angle (presumably - we're assuming the asshole is male) adds to the power dynamic. Someone who feels they don't get enough attention from the opposite sex is "putting her in her place".

maybe it's just me...

at least we noticed each other.

Of course, the article was fairly long. But talk about your experts!

or are these terrorists too smart to get caught?
that is appalling. i think we need a whole new women's movement - worldwide.

goddamn pigs women are PEOPLE

Bigotry lives on still. Someday soon, it will all be a thing of the past.

And that makes me sad because I consider myself one. But this is just one more instance in a long line of journalists, PR folk, what-have-you that got on the wrong side of a faction of gamers. People have quit lucrative careers just so they wouldn't have to deal with this community anymore. Hell, a lot of people (myself included) disdain multiplayer games altogether just to avoid having our mothers slandered and our sexualities questioned by foul-mouthed twelve year olds. It's a real problem, and I don't think anyone's hit on a good solution yet.

I also got sick of the multiplayer world and tend to play singleplayer campaign games like Rome 2:total war. But the vile nasty world of the internet isn't just in gaming - Look at many newspaper message boards or Yahoo. It's all over the web.

and I met some pretty sick guys who just hate women. I don't know what their problem is, are they lonely? or whatever, but the way they treated women, were like we were all pieces of meat and didn't have any true feelings for them.. I have always been kind and nice to some people on line, but have gotten crap back, one..because I am a woman and 2ndly cause I am Asian.. and so If I don't cyber with them, I am ... well they use all kinds of names. The only thing to do is block them or report them, because some of them are just down right nasty. They can be that way cause they are anonymous on the internet.. but the website can block and ban them if necessary which is a good thing. I have been on Twitter a long while and never had this kind of hatred come back at me, but, I did do an on line game for a while, and some of the guys on there are ruthless bastards who will cut you up verbally just for the fun of it.

that throw out the foul-mouthed twelve-year-olds. I've found it much harder to find similar organizations in other multiplayer game formats. Shooters seem to live off the rage of young teens.

shields such speech (nor should it). Why hasn't the person making such threats already been identified and arrested?

I don't know anything about gaming, having last purchased a PlayStation for my stepdaughter over 15 years ago. I just haven't kept up with the technology, but I don't think there's any plausible 'gaming' exemption in American society for comments like these.

Police can and will track this guy down.

this goes way, way beyond the pale. (In addition to my ignorance about gaiming, I'm also somewhat ill-adept at Twitter and like technologies. But I have to assume comments made via the internet can be linked to the person making them, via subpoenas to the relevant ISPs, TelCos and what-not).

I'm sure twitter would have no problem complying with an IP request. After that it's to the ISP to identify the physical address.

Anonymization is a double-edged sword: for every dissident it protects from an evil government, it shields ten trolls like the one in the OP. If they ever find this asshole I will be unbelievably surprised.

I'm sure they will trace it back to a white male in his 20s who has had military service given the reference to a K-BAR knife.

Who may also play military games that feature a k-bar, whatever that is.

By the way - I don't know if Twitter has this kind of identifying feature - but isn't it possible this jackass is from somewhere in rural Lithuania or the Philippines who would get off trolling the Privileged American Woman even more than some American teenaged 4chan addict? If that's the case, we can't send the cops after them. Misogyny is In The Cloud these days.

Tracking down the source of the threat can be pretty time consuming, and cross a lot of jurisdictions. As a result, it has been very difficult to get law enforcement to go after the people making such threats.

the physical address) that I would think tracking them down would be a high priority. But I'm not a super techie, so I'll defer to your judgement on this.

It's the person making the threat that can be difficult to track down.

You have to subpoena Twitter to get what IP address logged in to that account. Then you have to subpoena those ISPs to find out who had that IP at the time in question. And those ISPs are probably not in the same jurisdiction as Twitter. Then you have to get a search warrant to find and seize that person's computers so you can prove they actually sent the Tweet. And that's probably in yet another jurisdiction.

And that's just if the person making the threat doesn't know enough to try and cover their tracks. Add in multiple countries and technologies like TOR, and it gets even harder.

So it's been difficult to get the local police to start the ball rolling, since they probably will not be able to do anything themselves.

To think that the cops have time to shoot unarmed black teens who AREN'T a threat, but chasing down an actual theta like this scum bag is too much trouble.

The local PD needs the help of a lot of different jurisdictions in a lot of different states in the best-case scenario.

If the person making the threats has the slightest bit of knowledge about how to cover their tracks, it gets really, really hard very quickly. That huge NSA budget isn't because it's hard to spy on us.

in that there'd only be one jurisdiction involved.

But if I was an asshole like the person in the OP, I can bounce my Tweets through another country pretty easily. Which now means the FBI would have to get the help of whatever country I chose to send the Tweets through. Russia would be a lovely choice right now, since they aren't feeling particularly interested in helping the US.

And that's assuming I don't use something like TOR, which would mean you now have to get cooperation from several different countries.

This isn't something we'll be able to easily get rid of through policing. We should have a federal law, and should aggressively prosecute people we can find. But there's going to be a lot of assholes we will not be able to find.

That is the truth. Anyone who claims that both sides are at fault, or think that both sides have some merit of truth, supports the guys doing this. You cannot try to distance yourself from the assholes who say these things, who come with these threats, and do the doxxing, and at the same time say that you think their demonstrably false claims have some grains of truth in them. Gamegate is a leaderless movement, and because of that, these guys can't be thrown out - they are part of the very fabric of Gamergate.

And dipshits who push false equivalence such Brad Wardell (@draginol), who retweeted "a small sample of the daily smearing" he gets...

"Hey look, one of the people “interviewed" for that article is Brad Wardell. He continues the lie that feminist critics don’t know games."
"Brad Wardell defines corruption as... victims complaining about sexual harassment. "
"If you're quoting Brad Wardell for your cause, you already done fucked up. He's a known misogynist."

while Brianna Wu, Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and other women who dared to talk about games get tweets like the ones posted by Brianna Wu, for weeks and months, and even years (Zoe Quinn still gets rape threats daily after two months since the initial accusations against her was proven to come from an ex-boyfriend she had just broken up with), well those dipshits are just as bad as the guys who post these threats. They enable these psychopaths, and they encourage them, and they refuse to support the women who experience this, making the gaming community extremely hostile to women. They are the ones that should be run out on a rail from the gaming community (the psychopaths should be arrested and tried for stalking, and threatening.)

To start pseudo-rational nitpicking your comment and asking for your evidence from specific games, for you to identify the specific malefactors, because it's certainly "not them", and it's "not gaming" (that would be generalizing...)...

I further confess I liked it that way.

Troll-swarmed and actively suppressed.

Or just sunk quickly because no one understood why it was pertinent to DU or larger society. I'm not the only one who posted on it.

I'm going to have a talk with my son about this tomorrow.

I hope you report back.

"There are prisons in China where prisoners must spend fourteen hours a day playing online video games to build up character experience points. The prison officials then sell these characters to teenagers in the West. Here we see, in extreme form, the disconnect between the physical and virtual worlds, the suffering and exploitation upon which our fantasies are built."

Guess I hadn't thought much about gaming before, but that fact and this post have opened my eyes. The death threats are, of course, reprehensible and sickening. Makes me shake my ol' gray head and say WTF is WRONG with some people??? At any rate, I'm bookmarking this thread for future reference. A conversation with my gaming grandsons may be in order.

As we used to say in the 60s...peace.

a YA novel about young people around the world who unite to fight against such exploitation: one group of characters are Chinese youths who create the "game gold" to be sold.

I've never gotten into on-line gaming myself. My spouse is involved in one on-line multi-player game with a group of people from various parts of the world: his own group seems to consist of a number of women and other mature people who seem to be able to separate reality from fantasy. I still find it boring, but to each their own.

Very timely and certainly informative. I have two teen-age gamers (although one just turned 20) who'll be getting copies from their ol' granny, who, so I'm finding, learns something new every day, thanks to DU and posters like you!

Glad to know your spouse has found a group of well-grounded folks who can separate reality from fantasy, but I'm with you--the online gaming seems pretty boring.

Cheers!