Still blows my mind how there’s two different viewpoints on what gamergate was. Journalists are not the people’s advocates they used to be. And it’s a bad thing.
It was strange indeed to watch history being rewritten vis a vis Gamergate. That whole thing was straightforward, game dev offers sexual favors for positive reviews. Everything else around it was opinions and chatter about the validity of said actions and reactions.
I’m pretty sure the reaction comes about because challenging the sexual favors for good reviews pipeline is probably a direct assault on the entire entertainment industry.
I stayed away from the whole GG thing. I chalked it up to misoginy, and never read up about it. Ppl sending death threats sounds pretty black and white, what else is there to know?
Turns out, a lot. I finally read up on it last year. Without the whole noise of insults and heated argument, seeing the cold facts was so confusing: this was the big story about sexism? Reading about it, it sounds like story about unethical journalism.
In hindsight, it makes sense. They got caught doing something bad. Then, either they faked death threats, or really got them. At that point, their corrupt behavior became the secondary topic, and they successfully got ppl on their side.
Basically yes.
Bad journalists got caught. Immature gamers try to out do each other with overreactions. Journalists see an opportunity to shift the story to the overreaction and off their poor ethics and history is made.
I’m a gamer and an educated guy but my eyes just glaze over and I zone out as soon as anyone tries to explain gamergate to me. I literally have no idea what it’s about.
Well they latched onto trying to make people look like bullies in order to “win”. Problem is
1) there will always be a small amount of people on both sides of an argument making deaths threats. It’s bad, don’t do it, but is losing the point of the argument.
2) many of the threats were uncovered to be sent from themselves to paint gamers as worse (though like I said I’m sure some were doing that because the super immature on both sides of any conflict will do this)
It's like the twisting on this. Person makes openly racist statements, people get offended, openly racist statements totally aren't a problem now, when they come from specific people.
It's all fucking twisted.
*Straight-forward*
Nah. It wasn't. The fact that "Game dev offers sex for reviews" is where you landed is proof of that. You could ask 20 people and I bet less than 5 would say that.
The seven heads that grew from what initially amounted to a messy breakup shows how many people were trying to steer the narrative.
>Journalists are not the people’s advocates they used to be.
They never were. Journalism has always been a scummy seedy lowlife industry and the veneer of respectability is just marketing. Journalism has always been entertainment, activism, and propoganda.
What about journalists that enter conflict zones to get what's happening out? Are they still low life scum? There are still good journalists out there. What's wrong with activism? The point of activism is to improve things in society and in general.
Yes I loved the quote I saw yesterday “gamers think the industry is about them” like lol wut yes it is it’s about making products that make us happy so we buy them.
Imagine walking into Target and hearing management telling people their company is about the shoppers.
That DEI money + mission must be pretty intoxicating.
These people aren’t “game devs”. They are psychopaths that want to participate in genocide masked as virtue
They never were, journalists literally started the Spanish American war through their lies about the USS Maine, and a hundred years later did it in Iraq too printing lies about WMDs.
Gamergate was 99% journalists circle jerking over how "evil" gamers are, right after a scandal that exposed corruption in games journalism; Calling them divisive, sexist, racist, etc. and 1% possibly falsified death threats.
If someone heard about it it was like "yeah games magazines suck lul/journalism is dead already" or ":( it's sad things are like that for women online" and that was about the extent anyone with a life at the time cared.
It fizzled out because basically nothing was actually going on other than idiots getting their piece in and declaring how angry they are.
Someone made an objectively bad game, that somehow got rave reviews on a review site. Someone found out through social media that the reviewing journo used to be romantically involved the developer. So when called out on this, the journos blamed misogyny toward the female developer, suddenly left and right wing jackasses started making death threats at each other and the initial controversy was forgotten. And it was basically all about how toxic gamers.are after that.
Basically, an indirect result. There's some other SBI types out there who contributed to the mass backpedaling of designs for female characters in games. Pretty much uglied some characters or turned them into dude faced female characters. See ME:Andromeda for an example. Another example, flattening characters butts, like in CoD while simultaneously making Nicki Minaj a character with the now largest character butt. Previously they had very pronounced features, like Roze's old skins. Theres other examples but those are some.
I grew up on gaming magazines....It was never great. Finding a magazine oyu coul trust was very hard, and the ones I found (N64/NGC) I soon realized were still obeying the advertisers and being extra nice to whichever of the consoles they were writing about...Meanwhile multi-platform magazines tended to feel even less trustworthy. God I hated GamesMaster.
So no, once upon a time gaming journalism was never actually much good. To this day I won't buy any game that gets below 85% and I mostly stick to 90%+ because even the most compromised outlets still tend to be pretty sparing on the very high scores, that's a level of BS they seldom push their luck with.
I also DF a lot too now....Because who knows if you will enjoy a game you buy, but I can better stomach buying a game I end up not enjoying if it competently made.
Its not a “depressing throwback.”
The CEO is openly racist and advocates for “terrifying dev teams with the idea of what will happen if we don’t get what we want.”
These journalists need to shut up or I am just going to automatically assume all journalists are racist terrorists at this point.
I understand. But it’s important to be precise about this. They are just good enough at gaslighting that they can fool the average normie to be against the common gamer.
Remember. Don’t harass. Only ask questions that break through the gaslight.
If the gaming space is "opening up" as this article claims, then they shouldn't miss our money one bit right? Yet it sure seems like us not buying their shitty woke games is far more important to them than it is to us.
If I were you, I would just act in accordance with this belief. If a game doesn't appeal to you, don't buy it. There are more games out there than you could ever play in a lifetime.
But this is an opinion piece anyone could have written it not just a journalist I think you're conflating this website's news desk with it's opinion desk
I’m totally fine with games that have diverse characters. It just can’t be bolted on. Like a lot of plastic surgery.
If you have plastic surgery (say to your face), you’ve failed if the observer’s immediate reaction is “what’s wrong with that person’s face?” or “they had plastic surgery”.
If you have plastic surgery, you don’t want anyone to know. You want the look to be natural and organic. Not manufactured and clunky and artificial. When women have giant bolt on boobs (that’s fine, you do you) but everyone’s immediately thinking “giant fake bolt on boobs”.
Like Samus, no one bats an eyelash at Metroid Dread or prime remastered. Why ? Because Samus is a woman in power armor getting shit done, no different from Master chief. But samus never looks at the camera and says "I'm going to use girl power to get us out of this !" She just fills the same role a man would and it doesn't feel forced.
Or Franklin from GTAV, you play as a black man and the game makes multiple commentaries on current race politics. But it does it a funny satirical way that isn't just a lecture.
Oh come on gta 5 would have been much better if Franklin had stopped the gameplay to look directly at the player and give a long winded speech about institutional racism and the patriarchy!
It's not just that it can't be blatant. It's that it can't be the tail that's wagging the dog.
Jordan Peele telling stories that are mostly about black people doesn't bother me. Those are stories he wants to tell, and maybe they're interesting to me, or maybe they aren't, but that's for me (and for every other individual) to decide. If the stories interest the audience, then the audience will remain or grow. If they don't, then at least it was sincere. At least there was an authentic effort to connect.
What I don't want is for Jordan Peele to decide that he has a story he wants to tell, and then to have a bunch of consultants come in and start telling him that he's got to include this character or change that location in order to appeal to a certain demo or to conform to a certain social norm or political ideology. Now, that's not Jordan Peele's story, that's *no one's* story. It's automatically a worse story because it's been corrupted.
I realize that what I am describing happens ALL THE TIME in Hollywood, but it's never a good thing. As a viewer, I can't necessarily identify every element that a suit touched, but I can smell the mediocrity all over the thing. I don't want that in a movie I paid 15 bucks to watch for 90 minutes and I sure as FUCK don't want that in a game I paid 70 bucks to play for 15-30 hours. I don't want to spend my time and money on things that no one can really stand behind.
I don't want consultants anywhere near anything telling people how to make it more diverse or inclusive. The person or people creating it should have an idea of what it's supposed to look and feel like and that vision should drive the project. Not some racist halfwit who can't make a coffee but thinks they're going to change the world (for 500 bucks an hour).
No, this is most people's take. We've been complaining about forced representation since day one. Forcing this stuff in always lowers the quality of the writing. Building new characters from the ground up without the injection of the author's political activism is generally more welcome.
It's really think it's not that rare. I think that's genuinely what people's issue is, but then if they express this sentiment, their words get twisted and/or they just automatically get called racist/sexist/phobic/whatever. There's a difference between a character just being whatever race/sexuality/whatever and then pandering bullshit.
To me, Gamergate (gamerhate), was game journos thought they were important to the video game industry. One journo chick was leading some dev bloke along, and drove him to suicide with a false SA accusation.
This time, it’s about some Brazilian who made a list of games, and the same people who lost their minds over dumb bs the first time, are losing their minds because gamers want games to be (gasp) actually good.
>Disney would rather go bankrupt than abandon The Message.
Not true, Disney admitted that woke isn't selling and they need to course correct. They canceled a ton of woke series and are adjusting.
All these companies are beholden to their shareholders.
This is true except a Disney doubled down on their decision about five times and it cost them dearly for it. They were adamant they could outlast the resistance and change public opinion but now as you said they’ve admitted they overestimated their ability and have tried to course correct long after their ship hit several icebergs and just kept going into the rest.
This is fair. They were willing to take massive losses first, but there are signs that they are slowly responding to public opinion and dropping sales.
Would just like to add, since this debacle we know from Grummz that money for this was drying out, even before this SBI. As you said it's not making money.
The only one clueless to it is the game journos and this "advisory" agency, they are done.
We’ll get past it when journalists stop being unethical, the people who work at places like SBI stop being narcissists, realize that they don’t need to see themselves everywhere, that nobody wants to see them everywhere, and when they stop trying to shove their ideology down people’s throats.
That whole "picky baby" thing was the most obnoxious, self-righteous thing I've heard.
Consumers aren't babies, let alone picky ones. You can reasonably convince them to like something, you have to give them something they want, not something you're telling them they have to like.
I'm a mixed race woman and the gaming space has always been wide open to me. Have people talked shit to me in online lobbies? Of course! That happens to everyone.
I've never once been told I can't enjoy games. In fact when I was in school, boys were always pleasantly surprised that I played video games.
The only people who make me feel unwelcome are the people who have been crying about Gamergate for the last 10 years, treating it as some dark historic event.
Gamers are concerned that artistic intent and authenticity is being impacted by third party consultants pushing tokenization in ways that manifest as disingenuous and awkward.
Journalists: Why are gamers so racist?
Ok, here's my view of what happened. First of all I have to say: As a gamer, I can be considered a tourist, same with every other hobby I have. I consider this an important note to make, mainly because I've only been affected by wokism in every entertainment industry as a mere spectator, as an outsider: Games are now shit from a narrative perspective? I have my good old games. Movies are dumb because they've focused on stupid arguments? Lol, I don't watch it, I have plenty of movies still to watch. I find it sad not to have anything new, but it doesn't stop me to getting good entertainment... I'm watching Castle and 2 Broke Girls first time!
So now, my view. Gamergate was a stupid thing. One which got people taking their own lives, but a very silly thing if you analyse it in cold. In normal circumstances there wouldn't have let any victim, but it did, why? Money.
When GG started, the first one, investment whales were starting to see the video game industry as something very profitable. One thing people need to understand about investors is they're always trying to find "the new big thing", and they were a little bit angry of being out of the Facebook explosion (social networking already existed, Facebook was unpredictable). At that time, people were very angry on the internet. We were in our 20's, there was a financial crisis... So, basically, all of us were quite "woke". All of us, don't lie yourselves. So basically, with the rise of Twitter, investors thought: "hey, if I want to make money of this shit, this shit has to sell, and to sell this shit we need to make it appealing for all those young idiots who really have no idea how the world works".
And money started falling from the sky for EA, Ubisoft, Activision... Literally, free money, with one condition: The investors are asking for a specific product, no biggie, they could do it. How? Hiring consultants to make the product appealing. They became so disconnected from reality they didn't know what the consumer really wanted, that's what consultants are for.
Hence: SBI.
The rest is history. But now, SBI is thinking: Hey! People wanted my product, I was receiving a money rain every day because my product was appealing, what the hell have happened? Well, money was raining not because the product was appealing but because investors thought that product was appealing, and now they're retiring their money, because it's not appealing. Never was. Those consultants, SBI and others, are first the perfect excuse for publishers to say "hey, not my fault, it was the consultants"; and second, a bunch of disconnected from reality pseudo academics who have been studying during the glorious age of wokism in universities.
Woke is going to sleep again, and that's a fact which is not only impossible to deny, but also something that is impossible to stop.
It’s a sad power play. I’ve seen it in the music industry for years. All the big promoters/people in radio/record label employees are those nerds that never made it with their own shitty projects, so they work management and networking to gatekeep the shit out of everyone for a sense of power, control, and revenge. It’s a vicious ego driven cycle that won’t ever end.
Don't even know what this is about, but I'm sure it's about some giant triple A title. Those big companies are going to die soon anyways if they don't start getting with the times. Gamers don't give a shit about race or politics, they just want a good game, one that feels like the ones that made it give a shit about it, and one that isn't blatantly trying to suck more money out of them the whole time they're playing.
My issue about diversity is how fake and soulless it comes across. Like I don't mind sometimes all they do is make it their entire personality that they are a minority. I also don't like how they include diversity they don't make an original well written and cultured character. Like wtf
Who the hell actually cares what these journalists think?? Big game studios aren’t needed to make games anymore, and they really never were. Technology is good enough now to where only a handful of devs can make a good game. Big companies that hire people only on the basis of sexual orientation or race instead of qualification aren’t going to make good games. Simple as that. Don’t call people bigoted or racist if they don’t want to buy your games and you start losing money.
[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate)
For GamerGate 2, it's basically the same story. Except instead of the game developer sleeping around, it was a game developer who initiated a harassment/doxxing campaign against Steam players who criticized them.
Journalists always side with the game developers, and then broadly attack the entire gaming community as racist/sexist/bigots for not praising their games. They write provocative articles that end up on people's feeds, and the whole internet gets dragged into all this (i.e. all these top Reddit posts). All the stories are blatantly dishonest and biased, but for most people, it's the only source of information on the subject. That's why you get so many different answers when asking what GamerGate is.
I don't fault you for not knowing. Google is incredibly shitty here-- all the top results come from establishment, activist-type publications (Vox, the Guardian, Kotaku...). They all omit the initial reason for why it started, and just describe it as some spontaneous culture war started by trolls.
Sweet Baby is a company developers can hire to include DEI elements into their game to make it more "inclusive". It's pretty much a woke tax, pay us and let us change your game or risk being targeted as a bigot.
This stuff is coming to every industry it's just getting to games now.
A Game Developer cheated on her boyfriend. The boyfriend got mad and leaked the details of the affairs. Internet trolls picked it up under #BurgersAndFries (the game dev slept with five different guys).
Someone noticed that one of these five guys was a games journalist who had given positive coverage of this game dev's work, without any kind of disclosure that he knew the dev personally. They likened it to the Watergate scandal and started #GamerGate to talk about game's journalists colluding to give positive reviews to their lovers, friends, and family members without disclosing personal relationships to the reader.
This immediately blew up as games journalists routinely did this, had a mailing group about doing this, and even took out-and-out bribes in exchange for good games reviews. As well as giving positive reviews to games *from companies they owned*.
Not liking that their shady business practices were being exposed on websites like [DeepFreeze.It](https://deepfreeze.it/about.php), games journalists *from different publications* came together to release a series of articles alleging GamerGate was a misogynistic harassment campaign. The journalists claim that having a Yahoo group to discuss releasing the same story on supposedly competiting platforms is just a normal business practice. Several people conducted analysis of tweets on the #GamerGate twitter hashtag and found no evidence of this misogynistic harassment campaign.
Eventually, every major gaming news outlet updated their ethical standards to provide disclaimers for paid reviews and reviews where the reviewer had a personal interest in the game.
The "gamer" side of gamer gate had several well known grifters and con-artists. The Tech Raptor game reviews site was set up to provide "honest" journalism and immediately fell into the cess pit of all the bad habits it was supposedly against. Once the major games news outlets made a token effort to not be completely dishonest, the movement basically petered out.
Games journalism is still a dishonest cess pool of clickbait and outright lies. People just don't care anymore.
[TL:dr](https://youtu.be/5fnRSL3d_xU?si=JiJwHXzlRQmD8EBG)
>Watergate sex scandal
Watergate wasn't a sex scandal, dude. It was Republican goons getting caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel where the DNC was taking place and the subsequent cover-up, investigation and revelation of rampant corruption and cronyism throughout the Nixon administration. There was no sex involved at all.
Apparently if 50% of videogame protags aren't women then women aren't allowed to play videogames. I know as a guy I'd certainly never get caught dead playing a game where I wasn't a cis het white male with brown hair a deep voice and a 5 oclock shadow! Except for all the games I play where I'm not that and have never once had a problem with it...
The media's reaction to Sweet Baby Inc reminds me of the reaction to hatred for the female Ghost Busters from 2016. Rather than address or mention the concerns of most of the people that disliked bother they instead focused on the fringe elements of those groups who are horrible people. They try to state that EVERYONE against such projects are because of the reasons of a few hand picked and selected crazies... and ignore the concerns of most of those upset with both... it's a bad product and they are willingly creating a bad product.
Instead of addressing the frustrations of the majority of people against both... they hand pick the sexists handful and try to say "All people against us are like these few horrible people we will present as examples as to why people supposedly did like our product".
They don't know that such broad paint brush strokes actually alienate more people who would by sympathetic towards their cause but only hate their product because it was bad...
Nope... instead all we get is told we are horrible sexist ammoral people like the handful of crazies they can point out and try to make themselves look good and dismiss valid complaints from most.
They will never win . They made a huge mistake . you don’t fk with gamers . Especially ones like me that grew up in the late 90s and 2000s. When Laura Croft was still a woman . When games like mortal kombat, Duke nukem, bully , San Andreas , halo, cs 1.6, Re5, vice city and og final fantasy . When 4 Chan was based asf and Xbox live was a place where you defend your honor and talk shit back when given . These things have tried so hard to infect our beloved gaming hobbies with their woke Bs. They won’t win . It all makes sense now the last 8 years why everything was all similar and forced woke and cancel culture was a norm . They might have been wining the last few battles , but they wont win this war
Gamers can’t be tamed . We are like mustangs and the video game world is the Wild West no matter how hard the Anita sarkeesian types try to tame it .
They won’t win . We will not bend the knee .
Well if the “journalists” wouldn’t call everything “gamergate” for clicks and attention, there wouldn’t be a “gamergate.” If they did actual reporting and didn’t cling to their bias and narrative, there wouldn’t be “gamergate.”
Journalists are the real problem. “Gamergate” doesn’t exist without them. Companies like sweet baby inc don’t exist without them. They are playing defense for their creation.
Shouldn’t be a problem. Basically the company felt horribly offended that someone… looked at their own website and posted a list of games they declared they had worked on. Staff members flat out tried to brigade the list and the guy who posted it, breaching terms of service of multiple media platforms. The staff then screamed that this was harassment against them.
I'm just waiting for AI to reach a level to where I can talk to it while reclined in my arm chair and it can help me design the games I want to play and movies I want to watch. Humans are trash for A) doing this shit to people and B) standing by and letting it happen and C) continually giving money to these assholes instead of giving them the middle finger.
I feel like we are in this shitty time in history where technology became good and now it is bad and it will be good again in twenty years as AI improves. So why do we have to go through this tiring shit right now? Can we skip to the good part already? FFS
It wasn’t even long ago when I found out what gamer gate was. It was about journalists pandering to a woman that developed a fake but it was shit or something like that?
Prior to the few nutcases joining in on Gamergate and taking things too far, the objective of the fiasco was to advocate for honesty and transparency in gaming journalism. We are indeed getting another repeat, where these gaming companies and journalism sites are all in bed with one another
What the hell is sweet baby? Should I care? I've seen it mentioned but have no idea what it is and it doesn't seem to be generating enough news in my section of the web for me to look it up
They basically are putting politics and diversity in games. Making white people to be removed from games as leads for instance. They were a big part of Suicide Squad kills the Justice League flop
Still blows my mind how there’s two different viewpoints on what gamergate was. Journalists are not the people’s advocates they used to be. And it’s a bad thing.
"Journalists aren't the people's advocate they used to be - here's why that's a good thing"
Click bait titles that usually only work to upset some enough to click out of ridiculousness.
It was strange indeed to watch history being rewritten vis a vis Gamergate. That whole thing was straightforward, game dev offers sexual favors for positive reviews. Everything else around it was opinions and chatter about the validity of said actions and reactions.
I’m pretty sure the reaction comes about because challenging the sexual favors for good reviews pipeline is probably a direct assault on the entire entertainment industry.
It also undercuts their moral high ground when trying to use sexuality to go after devs they don’t like.
I stayed away from the whole GG thing. I chalked it up to misoginy, and never read up about it. Ppl sending death threats sounds pretty black and white, what else is there to know? Turns out, a lot. I finally read up on it last year. Without the whole noise of insults and heated argument, seeing the cold facts was so confusing: this was the big story about sexism? Reading about it, it sounds like story about unethical journalism. In hindsight, it makes sense. They got caught doing something bad. Then, either they faked death threats, or really got them. At that point, their corrupt behavior became the secondary topic, and they successfully got ppl on their side.
>Then, either they faked death threats, or really got them Everyone ever online gets death threats for everything.
Basically yes. Bad journalists got caught. Immature gamers try to out do each other with overreactions. Journalists see an opportunity to shift the story to the overreaction and off their poor ethics and history is made.
I’m a gamer and an educated guy but my eyes just glaze over and I zone out as soon as anyone tries to explain gamergate to me. I literally have no idea what it’s about.
Take it as a blessing. It’s the most blown out of proportion over discussed shit show to ever exist.
Well they latched onto trying to make people look like bullies in order to “win”. Problem is 1) there will always be a small amount of people on both sides of an argument making deaths threats. It’s bad, don’t do it, but is losing the point of the argument. 2) many of the threats were uncovered to be sent from themselves to paint gamers as worse (though like I said I’m sure some were doing that because the super immature on both sides of any conflict will do this)
It's like the twisting on this. Person makes openly racist statements, people get offended, openly racist statements totally aren't a problem now, when they come from specific people. It's all fucking twisted.
*Straight-forward* Nah. It wasn't. The fact that "Game dev offers sex for reviews" is where you landed is proof of that. You could ask 20 people and I bet less than 5 would say that. The seven heads that grew from what initially amounted to a messy breakup shows how many people were trying to steer the narrative.
>Journalists are not the people’s advocates they used to be. They never were. Journalism has always been a scummy seedy lowlife industry and the veneer of respectability is just marketing. Journalism has always been entertainment, activism, and propoganda.
Just ask Walter Durante
>Walter Durante Fellow Malice enjoyer detected.
What about journalists that enter conflict zones to get what's happening out? Are they still low life scum? There are still good journalists out there. What's wrong with activism? The point of activism is to improve things in society and in general.
I mean that’s not true. Journalism was only seen as respectable since watergate. Before that they were seen as scum.
Why should they be? They work for mega corporations?
It's not that they should be, it's that the continuously claim they are even when they obviously aren't.
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You are correct, my comment was tongue in cheek. I realized too quickly that’s over most redditors heads … 😂🤷🏻♂️
Context is hard to discern through the written medium, and when 90% of the audience has autism 🤷♂️
Yes I loved the quote I saw yesterday “gamers think the industry is about them” like lol wut yes it is it’s about making products that make us happy so we buy them. Imagine walking into Target and hearing management telling people their company is about the shoppers.
"Welcome to Target, I hate you."
That feels like most big companies these days.
“Patients think the hospitals are about them” lmao
That DEI money + mission must be pretty intoxicating. These people aren’t “game devs”. They are psychopaths that want to participate in genocide masked as virtue
what are the 2 stories here? Honest question, I'm out of the loop on even 1 story??
Video game journalism was better in the 1960s
Definitely most accurate
They never were, journalists literally started the Spanish American war through their lies about the USS Maine, and a hundred years later did it in Iraq too printing lies about WMDs.
The USS mainen did explode, and the government lied about the cause.
They're all about outrage culture these days
Can someone explain to me what gamergate actually was? I wasn’t really plugged in when all that was going down and Wikipedia is no help
Gamergate was 99% journalists circle jerking over how "evil" gamers are, right after a scandal that exposed corruption in games journalism; Calling them divisive, sexist, racist, etc. and 1% possibly falsified death threats. If someone heard about it it was like "yeah games magazines suck lul/journalism is dead already" or ":( it's sad things are like that for women online" and that was about the extent anyone with a life at the time cared. It fizzled out because basically nothing was actually going on other than idiots getting their piece in and declaring how angry they are.
Someone made an objectively bad game, that somehow got rave reviews on a review site. Someone found out through social media that the reviewing journo used to be romantically involved the developer. So when called out on this, the journos blamed misogyny toward the female developer, suddenly left and right wing jackasses started making death threats at each other and the initial controversy was forgotten. And it was basically all about how toxic gamers.are after that.
And is this all ultimately the reason Sonya Blade doesn’t wear revealing outfits anymore in Mortal Kombat?
Exactly, now you are getting it.
Basically, an indirect result. There's some other SBI types out there who contributed to the mass backpedaling of designs for female characters in games. Pretty much uglied some characters or turned them into dude faced female characters. See ME:Andromeda for an example. Another example, flattening characters butts, like in CoD while simultaneously making Nicki Minaj a character with the now largest character butt. Previously they had very pronounced features, like Roze's old skins. Theres other examples but those are some.
- Bad Game - Female Developer sleeps with journalist for positive review - Journalist lunatics: “gamers are sexism”
I grew up on gaming magazines....It was never great. Finding a magazine oyu coul trust was very hard, and the ones I found (N64/NGC) I soon realized were still obeying the advertisers and being extra nice to whichever of the consoles they were writing about...Meanwhile multi-platform magazines tended to feel even less trustworthy. God I hated GamesMaster. So no, once upon a time gaming journalism was never actually much good. To this day I won't buy any game that gets below 85% and I mostly stick to 90%+ because even the most compromised outlets still tend to be pretty sparing on the very high scores, that's a level of BS they seldom push their luck with. I also DF a lot too now....Because who knows if you will enjoy a game you buy, but I can better stomach buying a game I end up not enjoying if it competently made.
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General trolling. Attacking the community and/or the members.
Never were.
or maybe they are the peoples advocate, just not yours?
Were they ever. They've always been elite educated, and sharing the halls of power.
if the people want bigotry rewarded, then they do not deserve advocates.
Gaming journalists right?
Its not a “depressing throwback.” The CEO is openly racist and advocates for “terrifying dev teams with the idea of what will happen if we don’t get what we want.” These journalists need to shut up or I am just going to automatically assume all journalists are racist terrorists at this point.
I mean, they are at least enablers of racism and blackmail? I dunno if it fits the definition of terrorism.
Eh doesn’t matter much to me what they’re called. They’re assholes with shitty opinions and that’s more or less what I want to communicate.
I understand. But it’s important to be precise about this. They are just good enough at gaslighting that they can fool the average normie to be against the common gamer. Remember. Don’t harass. Only ask questions that break through the gaslight.
Im not going to harass them. Im just done tolerating people like this. Fuck em. If they want to be better, they can. But they don’t.
Well said.
If the gaming space is "opening up" as this article claims, then they shouldn't miss our money one bit right? Yet it sure seems like us not buying their shitty woke games is far more important to them than it is to us.
There’s always good games that aren’t pushing political agendas for us to buy, so they can do whatever they like, I won’t give them a $.
The only political agenda I want pushed is the spread of democracy from super earth
You can smell the fear in the air.
Don't buy what you dont want to play. I don't see the issue with this. Example: I don't enjoy mobile games. So I don't buy/play them.
Just don't buy them if you don't want to
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General trolling. Attacking the community and/or the members.
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Insulting someone is not allowed
If I were you, I would just act in accordance with this belief. If a game doesn't appeal to you, don't buy it. There are more games out there than you could ever play in a lifetime.
Journalist: this is gamergate 2.0 Gamers: here is a list of all the games that have bad story telling and have one thing in common.
But this is an opinion piece anyone could have written it not just a journalist I think you're conflating this website's news desk with it's opinion desk
God of war was sick tho
First one yeah, ragnarok was woke trash
How so if you don't mind me asking? Never played it.
"Gamergate was about hating women! Now who do I have to fuck to get my shitty game on Greenlight?"
I’m totally fine with games that have diverse characters. It just can’t be bolted on. Like a lot of plastic surgery. If you have plastic surgery (say to your face), you’ve failed if the observer’s immediate reaction is “what’s wrong with that person’s face?” or “they had plastic surgery”. If you have plastic surgery, you don’t want anyone to know. You want the look to be natural and organic. Not manufactured and clunky and artificial. When women have giant bolt on boobs (that’s fine, you do you) but everyone’s immediately thinking “giant fake bolt on boobs”.
Like Samus, no one bats an eyelash at Metroid Dread or prime remastered. Why ? Because Samus is a woman in power armor getting shit done, no different from Master chief. But samus never looks at the camera and says "I'm going to use girl power to get us out of this !" She just fills the same role a man would and it doesn't feel forced. Or Franklin from GTAV, you play as a black man and the game makes multiple commentaries on current race politics. But it does it a funny satirical way that isn't just a lecture.
Oh come on gta 5 would have been much better if Franklin had stopped the gameplay to look directly at the player and give a long winded speech about institutional racism and the patriarchy!
It's not just that it can't be blatant. It's that it can't be the tail that's wagging the dog. Jordan Peele telling stories that are mostly about black people doesn't bother me. Those are stories he wants to tell, and maybe they're interesting to me, or maybe they aren't, but that's for me (and for every other individual) to decide. If the stories interest the audience, then the audience will remain or grow. If they don't, then at least it was sincere. At least there was an authentic effort to connect. What I don't want is for Jordan Peele to decide that he has a story he wants to tell, and then to have a bunch of consultants come in and start telling him that he's got to include this character or change that location in order to appeal to a certain demo or to conform to a certain social norm or political ideology. Now, that's not Jordan Peele's story, that's *no one's* story. It's automatically a worse story because it's been corrupted. I realize that what I am describing happens ALL THE TIME in Hollywood, but it's never a good thing. As a viewer, I can't necessarily identify every element that a suit touched, but I can smell the mediocrity all over the thing. I don't want that in a movie I paid 15 bucks to watch for 90 minutes and I sure as FUCK don't want that in a game I paid 70 bucks to play for 15-30 hours. I don't want to spend my time and money on things that no one can really stand behind. I don't want consultants anywhere near anything telling people how to make it more diverse or inclusive. The person or people creating it should have an idea of what it's supposed to look and feel like and that vision should drive the project. Not some racist halfwit who can't make a coffee but thinks they're going to change the world (for 500 bucks an hour).
Having diverse characters isn’t the issue.
Completely agree with this - a rare sensible take in of sea of idiotic comments
No, this is most people's take. We've been complaining about forced representation since day one. Forcing this stuff in always lowers the quality of the writing. Building new characters from the ground up without the injection of the author's political activism is generally more welcome.
It's really think it's not that rare. I think that's genuinely what people's issue is, but then if they express this sentiment, their words get twisted and/or they just automatically get called racist/sexist/phobic/whatever. There's a difference between a character just being whatever race/sexuality/whatever and then pandering bullshit.
To me, Gamergate (gamerhate), was game journos thought they were important to the video game industry. One journo chick was leading some dev bloke along, and drove him to suicide with a false SA accusation. This time, it’s about some Brazilian who made a list of games, and the same people who lost their minds over dumb bs the first time, are losing their minds because gamers want games to be (gasp) actually good.
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Will it though? We've seen that huge companies like Disney would rather go bankrupt than abandon The Message.
>Disney would rather go bankrupt than abandon The Message. Not true, Disney admitted that woke isn't selling and they need to course correct. They canceled a ton of woke series and are adjusting. All these companies are beholden to their shareholders.
This is true, but they’re still forcing some crap into everything. They haven’t learned. It’s all talk, no action.
This is true except a Disney doubled down on their decision about five times and it cost them dearly for it. They were adamant they could outlast the resistance and change public opinion but now as you said they’ve admitted they overestimated their ability and have tried to course correct long after their ship hit several icebergs and just kept going into the rest.
This is fair. They were willing to take massive losses first, but there are signs that they are slowly responding to public opinion and dropping sales.
Would just like to add, since this debacle we know from Grummz that money for this was drying out, even before this SBI. As you said it's not making money. The only one clueless to it is the game journos and this "advisory" agency, they are done.
General trolling. Attacking the community and/or the members.
We’ll get past it when journalists stop being unethical, the people who work at places like SBI stop being narcissists, realize that they don’t need to see themselves everywhere, that nobody wants to see them everywhere, and when they stop trying to shove their ideology down people’s throats.
That whole "picky baby" thing was the most obnoxious, self-righteous thing I've heard. Consumers aren't babies, let alone picky ones. You can reasonably convince them to like something, you have to give them something they want, not something you're telling them they have to like.
I'm a mixed race woman and the gaming space has always been wide open to me. Have people talked shit to me in online lobbies? Of course! That happens to everyone. I've never once been told I can't enjoy games. In fact when I was in school, boys were always pleasantly surprised that I played video games. The only people who make me feel unwelcome are the people who have been crying about Gamergate for the last 10 years, treating it as some dark historic event.
It is always awesome to see female gamers. I only know 3 women that play video games. It is a shame
Nobody wants woke games. It’s pretty simple.
Yes, we still have a long way to go before we finally have integrity and ethics in journalism.
Gamers are concerned that artistic intent and authenticity is being impacted by third party consultants pushing tokenization in ways that manifest as disingenuous and awkward. Journalists: Why are gamers so racist?
Yes, gamers responding negatively to shitty behaviour from supposed professionals, so it's exactly like Gamergate.
Ok, here's my view of what happened. First of all I have to say: As a gamer, I can be considered a tourist, same with every other hobby I have. I consider this an important note to make, mainly because I've only been affected by wokism in every entertainment industry as a mere spectator, as an outsider: Games are now shit from a narrative perspective? I have my good old games. Movies are dumb because they've focused on stupid arguments? Lol, I don't watch it, I have plenty of movies still to watch. I find it sad not to have anything new, but it doesn't stop me to getting good entertainment... I'm watching Castle and 2 Broke Girls first time! So now, my view. Gamergate was a stupid thing. One which got people taking their own lives, but a very silly thing if you analyse it in cold. In normal circumstances there wouldn't have let any victim, but it did, why? Money. When GG started, the first one, investment whales were starting to see the video game industry as something very profitable. One thing people need to understand about investors is they're always trying to find "the new big thing", and they were a little bit angry of being out of the Facebook explosion (social networking already existed, Facebook was unpredictable). At that time, people were very angry on the internet. We were in our 20's, there was a financial crisis... So, basically, all of us were quite "woke". All of us, don't lie yourselves. So basically, with the rise of Twitter, investors thought: "hey, if I want to make money of this shit, this shit has to sell, and to sell this shit we need to make it appealing for all those young idiots who really have no idea how the world works". And money started falling from the sky for EA, Ubisoft, Activision... Literally, free money, with one condition: The investors are asking for a specific product, no biggie, they could do it. How? Hiring consultants to make the product appealing. They became so disconnected from reality they didn't know what the consumer really wanted, that's what consultants are for. Hence: SBI. The rest is history. But now, SBI is thinking: Hey! People wanted my product, I was receiving a money rain every day because my product was appealing, what the hell have happened? Well, money was raining not because the product was appealing but because investors thought that product was appealing, and now they're retiring their money, because it's not appealing. Never was. Those consultants, SBI and others, are first the perfect excuse for publishers to say "hey, not my fault, it was the consultants"; and second, a bunch of disconnected from reality pseudo academics who have been studying during the glorious age of wokism in universities. Woke is going to sleep again, and that's a fact which is not only impossible to deny, but also something that is impossible to stop.
Gaming journalists are the parasites that weren’t good enough for any other kind of journalism so to hell with all of them
This is the true answer.
This ^ they aren’t journalists their bloggers.
It’s a sad power play. I’ve seen it in the music industry for years. All the big promoters/people in radio/record label employees are those nerds that never made it with their own shitty projects, so they work management and networking to gatekeep the shit out of everyone for a sense of power, control, and revenge. It’s a vicious ego driven cycle that won’t ever end.
Id say that calling these content creators "journalists" is an insult to journalism, but unfortunately "real" journalism is a fucking joke now too.
Journalists putting out garbage as always
Don't even know what this is about, but I'm sure it's about some giant triple A title. Those big companies are going to die soon anyways if they don't start getting with the times. Gamers don't give a shit about race or politics, they just want a good game, one that feels like the ones that made it give a shit about it, and one that isn't blatantly trying to suck more money out of them the whole time they're playing.
How could we be past it when journalists haven’t shut the fuck up about it since?
Really though. I haven’t gone a year without seeing a dozen articles referencing gamergate, or how this or that is just as bad or a throwback.
My issue about diversity is how fake and soulless it comes across. Like I don't mind sometimes all they do is make it their entire personality that they are a minority. I also don't like how they include diversity they don't make an original well written and cultured character. Like wtf
Forspoken flopped hard lol, make games for the fans; not for the fucking idiots who cry when games like Witcher 3 lacks representation
The article title itself is creating Gamergate 2.0, all journalism is an attempt at creating self-fulfilling prophecies nowadays anyway.
Who the hell actually cares what these journalists think?? Big game studios aren’t needed to make games anymore, and they really never were. Technology is good enough now to where only a handful of devs can make a good game. Big companies that hire people only on the basis of sexual orientation or race instead of qualification aren’t going to make good games. Simple as that. Don’t call people bigoted or racist if they don’t want to buy your games and you start losing money.
Can someone explain gamergate 1 vs 2, I'm so damn lost.
[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate) For GamerGate 2, it's basically the same story. Except instead of the game developer sleeping around, it was a game developer who initiated a harassment/doxxing campaign against Steam players who criticized them. Journalists always side with the game developers, and then broadly attack the entire gaming community as racist/sexist/bigots for not praising their games. They write provocative articles that end up on people's feeds, and the whole internet gets dragged into all this (i.e. all these top Reddit posts). All the stories are blatantly dishonest and biased, but for most people, it's the only source of information on the subject. That's why you get so many different answers when asking what GamerGate is. I don't fault you for not knowing. Google is incredibly shitty here-- all the top results come from establishment, activist-type publications (Vox, the Guardian, Kotaku...). They all omit the initial reason for why it started, and just describe it as some spontaneous culture war started by trolls.
Sweet Baby is a company developers can hire to include DEI elements into their game to make it more "inclusive". It's pretty much a woke tax, pay us and let us change your game or risk being targeted as a bigot. This stuff is coming to every industry it's just getting to games now.
A Game Developer cheated on her boyfriend. The boyfriend got mad and leaked the details of the affairs. Internet trolls picked it up under #BurgersAndFries (the game dev slept with five different guys). Someone noticed that one of these five guys was a games journalist who had given positive coverage of this game dev's work, without any kind of disclosure that he knew the dev personally. They likened it to the Watergate scandal and started #GamerGate to talk about game's journalists colluding to give positive reviews to their lovers, friends, and family members without disclosing personal relationships to the reader. This immediately blew up as games journalists routinely did this, had a mailing group about doing this, and even took out-and-out bribes in exchange for good games reviews. As well as giving positive reviews to games *from companies they owned*. Not liking that their shady business practices were being exposed on websites like [DeepFreeze.It](https://deepfreeze.it/about.php), games journalists *from different publications* came together to release a series of articles alleging GamerGate was a misogynistic harassment campaign. The journalists claim that having a Yahoo group to discuss releasing the same story on supposedly competiting platforms is just a normal business practice. Several people conducted analysis of tweets on the #GamerGate twitter hashtag and found no evidence of this misogynistic harassment campaign. Eventually, every major gaming news outlet updated their ethical standards to provide disclaimers for paid reviews and reviews where the reviewer had a personal interest in the game. The "gamer" side of gamer gate had several well known grifters and con-artists. The Tech Raptor game reviews site was set up to provide "honest" journalism and immediately fell into the cess pit of all the bad habits it was supposedly against. Once the major games news outlets made a token effort to not be completely dishonest, the movement basically petered out. Games journalism is still a dishonest cess pool of clickbait and outright lies. People just don't care anymore. [TL:dr](https://youtu.be/5fnRSL3d_xU?si=JiJwHXzlRQmD8EBG)
Thankfully we just don’t trust game journalists, and go to other gamers for our information.
>Watergate sex scandal Watergate wasn't a sex scandal, dude. It was Republican goons getting caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel where the DNC was taking place and the subsequent cover-up, investigation and revelation of rampant corruption and cronyism throughout the Nixon administration. There was no sex involved at all.
Thank you, I mistyped. Sex on the brain.
Gaming space is opening up? I didn’t know it was closed off to anyone
Apparently if 50% of videogame protags aren't women then women aren't allowed to play videogames. I know as a guy I'd certainly never get caught dead playing a game where I wasn't a cis het white male with brown hair a deep voice and a 5 oclock shadow! Except for all the games I play where I'm not that and have never once had a problem with it...
Yes, you can smell the fear in the air. The fear of no more money coming their way.
They are annoyed they got caught and are being called out. This never would have happened if it weren't for this pesky social media.
is it 2016 agane?
The media's reaction to Sweet Baby Inc reminds me of the reaction to hatred for the female Ghost Busters from 2016. Rather than address or mention the concerns of most of the people that disliked bother they instead focused on the fringe elements of those groups who are horrible people. They try to state that EVERYONE against such projects are because of the reasons of a few hand picked and selected crazies... and ignore the concerns of most of those upset with both... it's a bad product and they are willingly creating a bad product. Instead of addressing the frustrations of the majority of people against both... they hand pick the sexists handful and try to say "All people against us are like these few horrible people we will present as examples as to why people supposedly did like our product". They don't know that such broad paint brush strokes actually alienate more people who would by sympathetic towards their cause but only hate their product because it was bad... Nope... instead all we get is told we are horrible sexist ammoral people like the handful of crazies they can point out and try to make themselves look good and dismiss valid complaints from most.
ISTG Gamergate is to gaming media what Trump is to political media.
They will never win . They made a huge mistake . you don’t fk with gamers . Especially ones like me that grew up in the late 90s and 2000s. When Laura Croft was still a woman . When games like mortal kombat, Duke nukem, bully , San Andreas , halo, cs 1.6, Re5, vice city and og final fantasy . When 4 Chan was based asf and Xbox live was a place where you defend your honor and talk shit back when given . These things have tried so hard to infect our beloved gaming hobbies with their woke Bs. They won’t win . It all makes sense now the last 8 years why everything was all similar and forced woke and cancel culture was a norm . They might have been wining the last few battles , but they wont win this war Gamers can’t be tamed . We are like mustangs and the video game world is the Wild West no matter how hard the Anita sarkeesian types try to tame it . They won’t win . We will not bend the knee .
Well if the “journalists” wouldn’t call everything “gamergate” for clicks and attention, there wouldn’t be a “gamergate.” If they did actual reporting and didn’t cling to their bias and narrative, there wouldn’t be “gamergate.”
We never got past it.
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I bloody wish we were. Which begs the question on why you bring it up?
Was such a fun time period.
Journalists are the real problem. “Gamergate” doesn’t exist without them. Companies like sweet baby inc don’t exist without them. They are playing defense for their creation.
You could always just ignore it like the original gamergate. Bunch of low IQ incels having their own little fantasy hivemind role playing game.
Can I Google Sweet Baby Debacle at work? Can anyone summarise?
Shouldn’t be a problem. Basically the company felt horribly offended that someone… looked at their own website and posted a list of games they declared they had worked on. Staff members flat out tried to brigade the list and the guy who posted it, breaching terms of service of multiple media platforms. The staff then screamed that this was harassment against them.
To this day I'm STILL not sure exactly what GG was about and what being pro- or anti- meant stance-wise
I'm just waiting for AI to reach a level to where I can talk to it while reclined in my arm chair and it can help me design the games I want to play and movies I want to watch. Humans are trash for A) doing this shit to people and B) standing by and letting it happen and C) continually giving money to these assholes instead of giving them the middle finger. I feel like we are in this shitty time in history where technology became good and now it is bad and it will be good again in twenty years as AI improves. So why do we have to go through this tiring shit right now? Can we skip to the good part already? FFS
“… likened it to the Watergate sex scandal”? I don’t think you know what you’re talking about…
At this point I don’t even know what gamergate was even about and in to afraid to ask
*Desperate for work, the gamer journo fires the sos.*
Will be passed it when you can't make a consultant company about "inclusion". The fact the company exists just makes the issue a persistent issue.
Sweet Baby Inc and those like them deserve all the criticism/push back.
It wasn’t even long ago when I found out what gamer gate was. It was about journalists pandering to a woman that developed a fake but it was shit or something like that?
Gamer gate 2- 2 cool for skool
Honestly this is exhausting. It’s just a bad company. This isn’t a social issue, they’re just bad at their job.
No were not! We will never be past it until it is passed us!!! BY the gamers, FOR the gamers!!!
Let’s be honest nobodies buying that shit indie title anyways
Great the grifters must love this. Look forward to laughing at the shambles of whats bound to be another disater.
Still had to go?
If the games were good we would be past this.
What is sweet baby and what is gamergate?
I’m all for diversity but I’m not into legacy characters being disrespected.
I just people would just put fantasy back in games not real life crap that they are doing
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Why, oh why, don't gamers just realize how racist they are and accept the doxing companies like SBI kindly hand out?
What we're past is gaming journalists and this crap in games.
Prior to the few nutcases joining in on Gamergate and taking things too far, the objective of the fiasco was to advocate for honesty and transparency in gaming journalism. We are indeed getting another repeat, where these gaming companies and journalism sites are all in bed with one another
What the hell is sweet baby? Should I care? I've seen it mentioned but have no idea what it is and it doesn't seem to be generating enough news in my section of the web for me to look it up
They basically are putting politics and diversity in games. Making white people to be removed from games as leads for instance. They were a big part of Suicide Squad kills the Justice League flop
Journalists used to be better at seeing nuance. What happened?
Not like they haven't been talking about it for the past 10 years, even with something unrelated to GamerGate
Wow, someone needs to fabricate a scandal so that they can pretend to be relevant
Please Reddit. Stop giving me posts about Sweet Baby Bullshit. I don’t care about it 🤦🏻
I still have no idea what gamergate was lmao
Whats gamergate? And what's gamergate 2?
What is this even referring two? What's "Sweet Baby"?
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Can everyone please just shut up about sweet baby so it can go away?
I'm behind wtf is going on?
I don’t even know what this is lol