OMM, Gamergate, Bannon, Trump, and the End of Democracy

[_beastie]

So I also contribute more than a question, I should add that much of my response comes from viewing the issues around Gamergate as it being one subcultural expression of a much broader culture-conflict that is wide-spread in US society that I think of as being more foundational than anything that could be assigned to the term Gamergate.

I'm still not completely certain I have a clear picture of gamergate. It's an incredibly polarized issue.

But right now I think there are various ways gamergate expressed the larger culture. One example is how the "mainstream" - ie, the more powerful branch of any given movement - can react dismissively towards the upstarts, which can create anger and resentment in the upstarts.

Since there were several very powerful women involved in the "mainstream" of gaming at first, and the upstarts tended to be young men, some of that anger was expressed in sexualized and aggressive language.

Eventually it bloomed into full fledged harassment and seeming misogyny - if the accounts I've read are correct and fair. As all the recent news shows, that's probably reflective or our larger society as well.

I don't know, honor. I'm dead tired right now. Maybe I can think about it more this weekend. But I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

[_honorentheos]

Since there were several very powerful women involved in the "mainstream" of gaming at first, and the upstarts tended to be young men, some of that anger was expressed in sexualized and aggressive language.

Would you mind sharing where this idea came from?

[_honorentheos]

beastie -

I'm going to take a guess that when you looked into sourcing the statement you made above you found that one of the bigger complaints in the gaming industry has been it's domination by male game designers and producers thought the demographics are shifting. Games on phone platforms are popular with males and females, but even console and computer-based games seem to be shifting to a demographic closer to that of the population broadly.

The idea that "several powerful women involved in 'mainstreaming'...gaming" were targeted by upstart young men (assuming you mean in the industry trying make their way up to where these powerful women held positions) is not tied to reality. I hate to say it, but it's an idea that is fueled by a bias and not the facts.

See, I don't care if people are sincere or insincere when it comes to so-called fake news. It doesn't matter. What matters is that people are leading with their biases to find information that conforms a narrative they prefer and then run with in the full confidence that they are right because they have support and facts.

Gamergate really does have at it core a bunch of nihilistic loser dudes behaving absolutely despicably. They tend to be assholes to everyone. 4chan-ers are assholes. There is also a group of people whose main contribution to the gaming industry is to make it about how sexist and dominated by so-called toxic masculinity everything is. And they are assholes. They tend to be assholes towards anyone who doesn't see things the same way they do, either. At it's heart, gamergate was about those two groups who feed off of each other's worst inclinations just revving their outrageous behaviors higher and higher. But around those groups were largely people who don't think misogyny is excusable, that threatening to rape someone even for so-called lolz is criminal, and the industry is best off having a plurality of voices. The narrative gets taken over by the unreconcilable and frankly irrational behavior of the two extremes, though, and both sides suck people in over time as each can point to incidents that they jump at to say, "See! See! This in endemic to the industry!" be it toxic masculinity or social justice warrioring.

And that's just the way the exact same phenomena are being expressed throughout society rather than just in gamergate. Some of the language has made it to the mainstream, but the emotions and sides didn't originate there. I tend to think most Americans, Republicans and Democrats, aren't condoning racism or sexism or rape or whathaveyou. But the volume is turned so far up that Black Lives Matter v. Law Enforcement is a political and cultural issue, pussy grabber Trump is held up against sexually assault Bill Clinton to shout down people who don't share one's political views (and one can immediately hear the shouts of, "But I voted Sanders!" because that feels like the moral high ground here...)

My issue with your OP was it represents one of those two factions, as does Cams. And you're both contributing to the downfall of democracy. The cultural wars are a side show to the real political issues facing our nation. You both suck. A plague on both your houses.

And so we're screwed because bias works a certain way for a reason, the volume is only getting louder, and even disasters can't seem to hold the national attention long enough to encourage some form of bipartisan and I'd argue adult thinking.

[_beastie]

When I started reading about gamergate, I just wanted to figure out what had happened. One of my children, whose opinion I hold in high regard, was adamant that the gaming community is not inherently sexist and that they'd been unfairly portrayed in the media. So I started reading more about it. I wasn't leading from my own biases, other than a bias to view my child's opinion as usually having some merit to it.

So I read things like this (from an article I linked and quoted heavily in the OP):

In the ’80s and early ’90s, one of the best-known and best-loved game designers was Roberta Williams, creator of King's Quest. The undisputed top critic in gaming was a woman writing under the pseudonym Scorpia. In Britain, Anita Sinclair's company Magnetic Scrolls was a household name; in France, Muriel Tramis rewrote the book on what games could be.

Countless examples exist of women's enormous involvement during this period. Williams and Scorpia and others, many years later, said they’d never faced any kind of discrimination back then: jobs weren't denied to them. There were no pornographic comics about them in circulation. There was no equivalent to Old Man Murray or Gamergate. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better.

At that time, the biggest computer games weren't Call of Duty sequels and other first-person-shooters. They were flight simulators, adventures, strategy titles, roleplaying games and management games. Doritos-and-Dew misogynists — such a familiar sight for us — were unknown to the game industry. Even as violent shooters like Quake and Doom (1993) and their many transgressive offspring began to attract a new crowd, “edgy” titles were vastly outsold by games like Microsoft Flight Simulator and classic adventure puzzle game Myst. Four years after its release in 1993, Myst still beat Quake’s 1997 sales by more than three to one in the United States.

Old Man Murray hated this old order, and the site’s biggest target was (famously) Roberta Williams herself.
In a post that took just 70 words to cross the line from irony into abject cruelty, Wolpaw once called Williams a “pompous ____ bitch” and “the woman who invented human suffering.” He then speculated that she was mentally ill and openly hoped she'd commit suicide. The site gave voice and power to the Quake crowd, at the time labeled “casual gamers” by many in the old guard. Williams made a similar point in a 1999 interview, and it enraged OMM.

I remembered the games my sweetie played so much a decade or so ago, and how popular they were. So I was willing to believe that this article was portraying the situation accurately. In addition, I read similar statements in other articles as well.

I didn't even discover the link between gamers and Bannon/Trump until after I had begun reading to simply try and understand gamergate.

So I have no idea how the idea that women were involved in mainstream gaming and were then targeted by upstart young men was an idea fueled in some bias I have.

[_honorentheos]

The article you linked to from the MIC channels is a perspective. It's an interesting one presenting an interesting perspective. But it's also a pretty lonely article in terms of what it has to say. And it really seems to be an example of this that I mentioned in the post above - "The narrative gets taken over by the unreconcilable and frankly irrational behavior of the two extremes, though, and both sides suck people in over time as each can point to incidents that they jump at to say, "See! See! This in endemic to the industry!" be it toxic masculinity or social justice warrioring."

I'll ask you to go past it and find more support for the statement, "Since there were several very powerful women involved in the "mainstream" of gaming at first, and the upstarts tended to be young men, some of that anger was expressed in sexualized and aggressive language."

Remember this discussion on the board?

viewtopic.php?p=1056538

Any position a person cares to take is going to find support somewhere. How someone deals with that is a pretty good indicator of how they deal with their own biases. Perhaps I'm wrong and there is a broad spectrum of sources that support this example statement I selected from your explanation of the OP as it was the most explicit in demonstrating where I see the problem. I've never read them but maybe I'm the one extreme filtering here. Anyway, we'll see.

[_beastie]

The article you linked to from the MIC channels is a perspective. It's an interesting one presenting an interesting perspective. But it's also a pretty lonely article in terms of what it has to say. And it really seems to be an example of this that I mentioned in the post above - "The narrative gets taken over by the unreconcilable and frankly irrational behavior of the two extremes, though, and both sides suck people in over time as each can point to incidents that they jump at to say, "See! See! This in endemic to the industry!" be it toxic masculinity or social justice warrioring."

I'll ask you to go past it and find more support for the statement, "Since there were several very powerful women involved in the "mainstream" of gaming at first, and the upstarts tended to be young men, some of that anger was expressed in sexualized and aggressive language."

Remember this discussion on the board?

viewtopic.php?p=1056538

Any position a person cares to take is going to find support somewhere. How someone deals with that is a pretty good indicator of how they deal with their own biases. Perhaps I'm wrong and there is a broad spectrum of sources that support this example statement I selected from your explanation of the OP as it was the most explicit in demonstrating where I see the problem. I've never read them but maybe I'm the one extreme filtering here. Anyway, we'll see.

Heh. I feel like I'm being gaslighted here a bit.

I start my OP with this:

Off and on for the past six months or so I’ve been trying to figure out gamergate in general, and its influence on specific trends in the US. It’s been challenging, to say the least, because gamergate is so polarized that I’m never sure if I’m reading an unbiased reporting. So it’s possible I have some false ideas about it all. I’m posting this in the expectation that at least a few posters here have looked into this as well and can help me out.

At this point, I am leaning towards this article:

and end up being told by Honor that I'm the equivalent of cam and I suck.

The internet. lulz

So perhaps you can help me out by telling me which part of this statement is so wildly biased that it justified you telling me I suck and am the mirror image of cam.

A. Since there were several very powerful women involved in the "mainstream" of gaming at first

B. and the upstarts tended to be young men

C. some of that anger was expressed in sexualized and aggressive language.

A, B, C or all three? Cuz I'm at a loss here and the only reason I've gone this far with you is due to our posting history.

[_honorentheos]

Here, I'll do the work of finding another source that compliments the statement you made -

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2 ... with-jade/

It talks about the porn comic made of Jade Raymond mentioned in your OP. It's from well before gamergate and mostly isolated to the discussion within the game industry itself before it became a broader publicly discussed topic. In this case, the source is a blog with a focus on feminism, too.

The arguments it makes are regarding issues similar to ones seen in many industries. Successful women CEOs, athletes, politicians, professionals, etc., etc., are accused of not actually being competent but rather getting where they did by being attractive. They are treated differently, have their fashion critiqued, are subject to unfair expectations. Some douche turned it into porn in Jade's case, but that is not unique. Mainstream porn producing companies have "parodies" of successful famous women of all types from Sarah Palin to probably every female celebrity in recent history. People are sick "F"s.

That's not gamergate. That's America in the 21st century.

The so-called gamergate became a _____gate with the implications of suppressed scandal because of a flair-up around a very typical social media-driven outrage response to a false claim by her BF that a female game developer had slept with a game reviewer in an effort to get good reviews of one of her games. The supposed scandal giving it the ___gate moniker being the manipulation of game marketing to gamers. And yes, part of the masses who think that women in the industry use sex made that part of the debate.

But that narrative was quickly enveloped into a different and more metanarrative discussion than the original issue re: manipulation of gamers by marketing in a multi-billion dollar industry. The metanarratives took over because the two sides I described earlier entered into more and more broadly accusations that the actions the other side represents are evils needing to be stomped out so the discussions become each side throwing gas on the others' fires. The dickish chan-er types willing to expose real life information and threaten rape with basically zero regard, viewing any sign of having been offended or sensitivity as a weakness to be exploited; and the offended by the very nature of their identity political stance can't help but enter into the argumentative equivalent of a self-feeding firestorm because each feeds on and feels validated by the actions of the other side. It stopped being about the issue that pertained to the subculture of the gaming industry and became another manifestation of something operating much more broadly in the US. That being, as I noted above, the cultural warfare of identify politics that are locked in a battle to the death with one another because both sides see the other as embodying almost metaphysical concepts ran to the extreme of racism, toxic masculinity, social justice warrioring, feminism, political correctness, self-hate, etc., etc., etc.

So I'm not trying to gaslight you, beastie. I'm saying your source and conclusions are biased ones painting a picture that fits incredibly neatly into one of the two metanarrative forms that are both wrong in their simplistic attempts to demonize and destructive to democractic pluralistic society. Just like Cam's whole schtick does.

Jade Raymond is a powerful woman in the gaming industry still. She also was involved in the creation of non-violent as well as violent games including Assassins Creed and Watch Dogs which are the kinds of games suggested in your link as being driven by masculine stereotypes. And compared to the supposed kinder-gentler cerebral games that are strongly suggested as coming from a time when women were more dominant in the industry. That's poppycock. Men and women in gaming are making all kinds of games that sell. The industry has long complained of being skewed towards men as many other industries in the US have been, but signs are it's becoming more balanced both on the creation side and user side.

So, yeah, understanding gamergate requires seeing it in the bigger narrative of American politics. And to understand it mandates one see that it's a conflict between competing metanarrative arcs. Yours focused on one, and one that is consistent with your position on every other discussion on the board where the subtopic has overlaps these arcs in favoring the identity politics explains everything side.

And that's the result of bias. It was so bad it skipped talking about actual gamergate.

I see both metanarrative arcs as destructive. Yeah, I know that's my bias now and yes part of that comes from reading things like Haidt's The Righteous Mind. It also comes from reading sources across spectrums and seeing these metanarratives as well as their absence at times. When I read someone's post or their sources and it goes to an extreme, I'm biased against it. Guilty as charged.

And that results in you and Cam being equally crap in my opinion when it comes to this thread.

[_beastie]

And that's the result of bias. It was so bad it skipped talking about actual gamergate.

I see both metanarrative arcs as destructive. Yeah, I know that's my bias now and yes part of that comes from reading things like Haidt's The Righteous Mind. It also comes from reading sources across spectrums and seeing these metanarratives as well as their absence at times. When I read someone's post or their sources and it goes to an extreme, I'm biased against it. Guilty as charged.

And that results in you and Cam being equally ____ in my opinion when it comes to this thread.

Thanks so much for the education. Totally. I never realized that gamergate was about Zoe Quinn until you corrected me.

You know what's really screwed about this thread, honor? You ride in on your self-righteous horse like you're above the fray. You can rise above human bias, you can see what's really going on while the rest of us are stuck in the mud.

And let's say that's true. You really are righteous. You really are above the fray. You really rise above human bias.

But instead of somehow disagreeing in a constructive manner, you alienate. And it is far from the first time you've done it.

So yeah, we are screwed if even someone as righteous as you can't manage to share your opinion - when I made it clear I was simply asking for input on a topic, admitting right from the get go that I wasn't certain I had the facts or interpretation right - without being an ass.

So the lesson I've been learning quite a bit lately is that people on the internet act like assholes. Makes me more grateful the rest of my life does not mirror that.

[_honorentheos]

beastie,

I'm a self-professed dick, guilty as charged. And certainly with my fair share of biases. Part of why I post on the board is because I know people here will call me on my BS and are capable of it which becomes our best means of recognizing our biases and correcting them, in my opinion.

But being a self-professed dick, I get irritated when someone isn't actually engaging what was said, completely missing the point of it, and also acting like they have it all nicely tied up with a bow. And that's often my perception of your responses. They dismiss what I said while appearing to me to dig deeper into the particular area that I particularly find off. So, it's hard to apologize if I offend because I'm not going to be sincere in doing so. Honestly, one of my reasons for being so frustrated in this and similar discussions is that we've had discussions about the subject of bias, read much of the same literature including Haidt, and yet seem to have come to completely different conclusions regarding what it means for any one of us as individuals.

From your first response to my first post in this thread to the one above it seems to me like we don't even start to communicate because...what? I tried the approach of starting with asking if you had a different intent than my reading, then asked to zero in on a particular statement that seemed like it would be a good vehicle for discussion because it came from a source but would require other sources to validate it such that there could be some sort of exploratory discussion. But that didn't happen.

So yeah, I share your particular pessimism from this exchange as well as others. But this one in particular because I don't think it could have been better set up for discussion to have occurred. My impression is the result of each attempt was your becoming more entrenched in your position, asking to have something explained while also taking offense as the responses became more and more reductive...I don't know, beastie. I just don't know.

[_beastie]

You seriously have no idea why our communication was unsuccessful on this thread as it has been on a few others.

Ok.

It seems so obvious to me but I accept that you're blind to it.

You enter the thread and immediately begin to insinuate, and then flat out state, that I'm no better than cam and am destroying democracy.

I tried to not take the bait, but you insisted that I take it.

Then you wonder why you couldn't successfully communicate your ideas to me.

I haven't read Haidt's new book, but I suspect it echoes some things I've read elsewhere. If you really want to communicate with someone instead of just encouraging retrenchment, you have to create some sort of bond with that person in some way. They have to be able to see you as non-threatening, not just someone from the "other side" who wants to attack you. We are tribal in nature.

You've been doing a really bad job of that lately, to be frank. It feels to me like you really bought into Haidt, and instead of that creating the ability to internalize what he was saying and incorporate it into your own approach to discussions here, you use it as a stick to hit people with. It is quite unpleasant, because you combine that attack with a self-righteous demeanor.

Don't mistake this critique as me claiming I have some sort of moral high ground. I don't have the time, energy, or desire to turn my participation on this board into some sort of implementation of "what will fix the world". I post here when I have time to vent about something or to try to get ideas from posters here. But you really do seem like you view this board as an exercise in implementing "what will fix the world". Ok, that's your choice. But when you act like that in combination with acting like an asshole, it doesn't work.

It just stuns me that I started this whole thread admitting that I didn't have all the answers, I wasn't sure of the conclusions I'd drawn so far, and you still reacted towards me like I had everything tied up with a pretty little biased bow. That is your own bias.

Because I have respect for your ideas, and because of our posting history, I've tried really hard to let this slide. I just don't have the stomach for it anymore.