The GamerGate Mess--It's Philosophical

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

The GamerGate Mess--It's Philosophical

In another thread (the one on Bill Cosby), Darrell talked about GamerGate.

I didn't know what the hell that was, so I started looking into it.

My two posts grew so much, and this topic started turning out to be so important, I decided to split them off and start a new thread.

I know... I know...

Videogames? Philosophy? Really?

But yes, really.

An organized propaganda attack was made by Marxists and progressives to infiltrate, take over and indoctrinate kids through their video games.

It didn't get too far off the ground, though. The boneheads played their hand too fast and pissed off too many kids, many of whom are hackers on the side. And it got ugly--still is.

First, here is the post Darrell made:

You make some very astute observations, Michael. If these new (rehashed) memes are part of a concerted effort on the part of the left to minimize the effect of the election drubbing that Dems received in the mid terms, one might expect to find evidence of coordination.

Remember "JournoList"? That was the list hundreds of left-leaning news reporters and journalists subscribed to discuss what to talk about and to plot strategy. There's a Breitbart article here about an attack that was orchestrated against Sarah Palin after she was nominated to be VP on the Republican ticket in 2008. A recent Breitbart article contains hints that there might still be a JournoList in existence. Apparently, there is a once secret list called GameJournoPros that Breitbart just revealed in September of 2014. Here are some of the juicy tidbits from that article (emphasis added):

This new leak follows an earlier release of emails dated August, which showed games journalists
joking about having sex with public relations executives and game developers.

It was an unfortunate choice of topic given that the video game journalism industry had just been rocked by revelations that developer Zoe Quinn -- allegedly according to her ex-boyfriend -- had enjoyed five sexual relationships in quick succession with industry figures, including a journalist, while receiving lavish praise for her Depression Quest game and being in receipt of financial support from journalists who reported on her.

...

The #GamerGate hashtag, which has swept social media in recent weeks, has been used by gamers to express their disappointment in widespread ethical failures by video game journalists, who have allowed far-Left feminist campaigners to saturate the news agenda with allegations of "misogyny" and sexism directed not just at games studios but at ordinary gamers themselves.

But it's not just GamerGaters who are capable of ugly behaviour. Reporters sympathetic to the #GamerGate movement have had their home addresses and phone numbers published online and have been sent toilet rolls and unsheathed syringes containing unknown liquids via ordinary mail.

So, in support of your hypotheticals above, it appears that there really has been a coordinated attempt to brand game developers and players as misogynists and sexists. This could well be part of a larger coordinated effort to push the misogyny meme. In fact, there has been a not so secret public campaign against the "war on women" which is really just a campaign to make the left's political opponents appear to be misogynists. The campaign clearly has a public face and a secret agenda as well.

Darrell

Below is my response as it originally appeared on the other thread. Ditto for the post immediately following this one.

- - - - - - - - - -

Darrell,

I tried to read up on GamerGate and I still don't understand what all the hollering is about. Something to do with feminism and harassment, but it seems like everybody is harassing everybody.

. . .

OK... I just read a few things and saw a few videos.

It's clearer now. People outside have no notion of how big and intense the videogame universe is (me included most of the time).

Here's how I understand it without the sordid details--and there are a LOT of details for those with a LOT of time. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Some very popular video games portray sexy women in dubious and highly aggressive "damsel in distress" situations that can be called misogynist. I believe the popularity of these games is due more to the raging hormones of a young male demographic than to bigotry, but whatever. A Marxist progressive group of people saw this as an opportunity to make a stink and try to gain power and money.

They infiltrated game reviews, where a lot of standard "capitalist" payola-like corruption takes place--meaning good reviews result in more sales, and the financial rewards are massive right now, so they feel pay off the damn reviewers. Like yesterday. And keep it rolling.

It's easy to penetrate a corrupt structure like that, so that's what the Marxists did. Once they started pumping the "games are sexist" misogyny meme in reviews and articles at key sites (starting with an event involving some lady named Quinn), there was an incredible backlash of people who got offended. Aggressive progressive propaganda on one end saying gamers are sexist pigs, and "fuck you suck my cock bitch" kind of reaction from young immature gamers on the other, and money flying all over the place. What on earth could possibly go wrong?



Now it's coming out that the progressive journalists were organized (see your links) and the gamers feel... well... raped. They are pissed. They want games, not this shit. And with online places like 4chan and Reddit, plus hashtags on social media, crap started flying all over the place, including the personal addresses, phone numbers, etc., of people involved on all sides. Lots of death threats, too.

The part that tickled me was the way the "attack the sponsors" tactic of the progressives blew up in their faces like a trick cigar. They thought attacking the greedy corrupt capitalists would be easy pickings. Little did they realize the efficacy of enraged young gamers, many of whom are hackers on the side.

Suddenly Adobe, Mercedes Benz, and so on started pulling ads from sites like Gawker, which was fanning the flames on the progressive side. This was because of all the threats and noise the young gamers were causing. And the young hackers were making mincemeat out of Gawker's Adsense and Amazon ads, so even those income trickles were damaged.

The result?

Nick Denton just now had to step down as president of Gawker Media (see here). This idiot just about ran his website and entire company into the ground on a topic where everyone is making money hand over fist.

Dayaamm!



If this keeps up, the hard left is going to implode from sheer incompetence. It is getting its ass handed to it by young nerds. But it looks like GamerGate is going to be around for a long time. Too many people are involved. I expect to see a game about it soon.

I have a real regret with this. As one Mr. TotalBiscuit mentioned, there are lots of autistic kids playing videogames and they are both confused and hurt by this blowup. The gaming world was their refuge from the difficulties of normal reality and the irrational behavior of people manipulating others. Now it isn't anymore and they don't know what to do about it. My stepson is semi-autistic so I am going to have some heart-to-hearts with him as I now know what some of the stuff he has talked about means.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Earlier today, I started to post on the Gamergate thing again (right here in fact) because I came across a most interesting video about Anita Sarkeesian. This woman is interesting because she is right in the middle of the controversy. She used Kickstarter to make a series of videos about misogyny in video games and there is a hell of a lot of buzz about it on the Internet.

I almost posted that video I found, too, but then I thought, nah... better look into her first and see what she is talking about. That video bashed her pretty hard and I don't want to post anything without checking the other side first.

So I started reading (see the Wikipedia article I linked to in her name), looked at some news articles, etc., etc., etc., and saw, among other things, she talked an awful lot about a Damsel in Distress trope as a common plot device. I believe the controversy around her has even made this into commonplace jargon among gamers.

I'm into storytelling, so my ears perked up. Tropes? Archetypes? Cool. I can go for that. Let's see what the lady has to say. So here is the first of the series of videos she got funded through Kickstarter. I saw it and it's very interesting (discounting the ham-handed agenda, which is easy to discount if you want to look at just the facts):

Damsel in Distress: Part 1 - Tropes vs Women in Video Games

But right at the end, she said something where the warning bells went off in my head. At around 23:33, Sarkeesian said she grew up on videogames and has been a fan of the Mario and Zelda franchises most of her life... that she's always held a special place for them in her heart.

Well...

Oops...

It looks like Sarkeesian Grubered all over herself. (Gruber is the MIT professor of economics who, in classes and lectures, liked to wax poetic on the stupidity of the American voter and how he helped the government fool them into accepting Obamacare through guile and deception.)

So I guess I will put up the video I saw earlier after all. You don't need to watch the first video, but I definitely recommend you watch the second. It's only 49 seconds anyway.

Anita Sarkeesian Debunked in Under a Minute

Like one of the YouTube commenters (one "psychotic jackalope") said: "0:12 The fucking controller isn't even turned on."

Double oops...

Now... Sarkeesian has been making YouTube videos talking about misogyny in pop culture for a while, mostly about films and TV shows, so she didn't need to pose as a video game lover in order to make a study and present her results.

But she did and she has used this pose all over the place (like the debunk video said, "a scripted lie").

So what is she doing?

How about propaganda?

Indoctrination.

Wolf in sheep's clothing--pretending to be one of the gang.

No wonder the kids are pissed at her.

It's a shame, too, because Sarkeesian might have some interesting things to think about storytelling-wise. However, knowing she will lie right in your face without blinking makes me realize I have to double-and-triple check everything that comes out of her mouth before I can take it as more than something to look into when I have time.

It's obvious there's a lot more here than meets the eye, so I'm going to dig into this topic to see where it leads.

And maybe even look into a trope or archetype or two while I'm at it.

Ah... before I forget.

One of the deepest insights Ayn Rand presents with clarity--which is probably her most powerful draw to young people in the beginning--is how society tries try to make you feel guilty and ashamed over something that comes naturally to you, whether it is pride in achievement or sex. And she blasts this as the evil it is. Man does that feel good when you have suffered from it.

The Damsel in Distress trope has been in stories since the beginning of recorded history (look at all the fairytales!), so it obviously speaks to something deep and natural in the human psyche. It's clear to me that Sarkeesian is trying to make people feel guilty--to feel shame--for responding to this trope with pleasure. Thankfully this is falling on very hostile ears, especially young males who are full of raging hormones at this stage of growth. I don't expect it to succeed long-term since she has no organized religion to carry her agenda.

She didn't have to do it that way. She could have presented a good case to open up stories to more female heroes without all the victimization and manipulation of shame crap.

So I want to dig into her arguments as I think she might be on to something with an idea or other (and this might even suggest some story ideas to me), but I'm not all that enthusiastic. It feels like I would be looking for some gold coins that got dropped into a sewer.

Underneath all that intelligence and passion, all she shows is power-lust. Not the urge to create.

Michael

PS: Sarkeesian referenced the 1913 silent Keystone Cops film called "Barney Oldfield's Race for a Life." This has the first filmed version of a lady tied to railroad tracks with the villain twirling his mustache (as an example of a "Damsel in Distress").

I looked this movie up on YouTube and got charmed to death. It's only about 13 minutes, so if you want to see it, here goes:

Cool as all hell...

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here's a female game developer, a politically innocent one, who simply uses her mind in an 'identify correctly to judge correctly' manner. She talks more common sense about this whole issue than anyone I have seen so far.

She nailed it. The negative reaction the feminists are getting from gamers is not from the problem they point to. The archetype and trope stuff they mention is interesting. It's from the motivation they attribute to the people involved.

Rand made this mistake at times--she attributed hatred to people who did not hate what she claimed they did.

This is a very interesting psychological phenomenon. If you want to piss someone off instantly, choose a moment when they are having fun and/or feeling good about themselves, or pious, then tell them they are disgusting in their hatred of [fill in the blank] and shove a victim or caricature of something they like in their faces. Maybe dose it with a touch of smugness.

Arrrrrrrgggg!

(Apropos, this is the methodology Perigo used when he was still being taken seriously in O-Land. For those who interacted with him and got pissed, think about it.)

The lady in the video ("doll divine") also made another point that is extremely important. She talked about the indirect way Sarkeesian presented her message and how that increased the offensiveness of it.

In NLP (neuro linguistic programming) and conversational hypnosis, they talk a lot about the power of presuppositions. Indirect means using presuppositions. And example is "What is a better time for you to get together? Tuesday or Wednesday?" This is said to a person who has not agreed to meet. One uses these kinds of presuppositions to bypass the defenses of the target so one can sneak in suggestions and information under the radar.

In the case of Sarkeesian, she is using presuppositions to get people riled by offending them on purpose. The point is to make them mad without them understanding why they are mad. "Do you still beat your wife?" is the standard example of this way of using presuppositions. Lawyer use it to befuddle or trap a witness, but others use it to piss off the target.

Both of these examples of presuppositions are framed as questions because that makes seeing them easier. But here is one way to use them without using questions. You talk to someone as if they agree with you in general, but you treat something as disgusting, you slightly misrepresent it, and you know you are talking to a person who likes that thing. You presuppose they agree with you, or want to agree with you, and you know they can't because the disgust and hatred are simply not in them about that thing.

Rand did this and she did it a lot. (It pains me to say this, but this is not a side of Rand I admire.)

I don't think this is an innocent mistake or a question of style. I think it is intentional provocation through misdirection. Such indirect misrepresentation and attribution of wrong motives are a way to call people out for a fight, but make it look like they are the bully.

How? By insinuating (or even claiming outright) they are despicable precisely because they like something or other and dare to feel good about it.

People often respond aggressively to this insinuation--respond as if they were slapped hard across the face. And that makes it look like they were the ones who started the fight.

Michael

[dldelancey]

As a woman and a gamer and the mother of a young gamer, I'll wade in. My son and I are part of the gaming community, quite active in fact. We have friends there, and while I shelter him sufficiently (so far) to avoid him having any foes there, I certainly have a few. We read gaming reviews and blogs. We have paid subscriptions to online game communities. We are faithful YouTube followers of several vloggers, both the very popular and the not so popular. Heck, my son is even a Minecraft vlogger himself, at only age 10.

This is the first I've heard of GamerGate.

I haven't watched the videos yet, and I've only been halfway down the rabbit hole of links. So far, I'm seeing exactly what I would have expected to see as a woman and a gamer, but nothing that supports a grand left-wing conspiracy. If the argument is that girls want less Damsel in Distress and therefore there's a progressive agenda, I'm not buying it.

Here's what I see evidence of:

• A game developer who slept with a bunch of journalists probably in return for good reviews. A woman trading sex for professional favors. Nothing new under the sun there, but is that a progressive conspiracy?
• A gaming journalist who wrote about a game developer she knew without revealing that they knew each other. A journalist giving a boon to a friend without full disclosure to the readers. Also nothing new, but not surprising either considering that women in STEM is a small community. I would expect a lot of them to know each other. Is this a progressive conspiracy?
• Women in gaming demanding a better representation of women in the games that are being developed. The way they are going about it is not the way I go about it, but I want that, too, not just for myself but for my young son. I'm certainly not a part of a progressive conspiracy.
• Bad blood between professional journalists and amateurs. The world is a small place these days, and anybody can reach out to anyone about anything (almost). Anybody, including my 10-year-old son, is in on the gaming review business. Some people can even cross over from doing this stuff for fun and doing it for a living. Those who planned for it to be their living from the outset are, to borrow a phrase from Jules, butt-hurt about it. Again, this is not surprising. The exact same thing is going on between professional journalists who review beauty products and clothes and the fashionista teenage sensations of YouTube who are now doing their jobs with zero training.... and making a living at it. The exact same thing is going on between professional journalists who review books (and authors, too) and the amateurs of GoodReads.
• Gamers feel hoodwinked because journalists they trusted were talking about them behind their backs. I'm not one of them in feeling hoodwinked, but I don't blame them. You might {facepalm} or {ragequit} or swipe some loot you didn't need but someone else did, but for the most part there's trust among gamers. Historically, anyway. The larger the community gets, the less trust there is. Gamers are not happy to see that go.

I'll come back to the videos and I'll continue down the rabbit hole, but for now, I'm not seeing what you are, Michael. At least, I don't see a progressive nature to it.

[dldelancey]

Warning: slightly off topic post here

Michael, are you familiar with this site? I visit it every now and then just because it's interesting. It's a collection of tropes in fiction, and talk about a rabbit hole!

Enjoy!

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Warning: slightly off topic post here

Michael, are you familiar with this site? I visit it every now and then just because it's interesting. It's a collection of tropes in fiction, and talk about a rabbit hole!

Enjoy!

Deanna,

Right here on OL:

Best Damn Fiction Writing Waterhole I Know

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I'll come back to the videos and I'll continue down the rabbit hole, but for now, I'm not seeing what you are, Michael. At least, I don't see a progressive nature to it.

Deanna,

I've been going through the videos of Anita Sarkeesian on her Feminist Frequency YouTube site. I have to remember what videos she said it in, but she has clearly identified herself as left-wing and progressive. And she wants to spread the word in the gaming world. She's open about it.

I'm going through them because I like her special highlight on certain tropes and archetypes, but I really don't like her spin.

Probably (for her) because I'm a oppressor pig or something.

I like Ayn Rand's comment when asked why she despised feminists. She said, with emphasis, that it was because she was a male chauvinist.

(It was actually because of the left wing stuff, but what the hell. It's a great story the way she did it.)

Incidentally, Dagny Taggart is the exact opposite of everything Sarkeesian complains about. Rand's career itself was. And, if I remember correctly, Dagny is the only Randian hero to shoot someone dead.

Sarkeesian would probably call Dagny's presence among all male heroes an example of the Smurfette Principle. However, in a story told by Nathaniel Branden from somewhere (probably My Years With Ayn Rand), he asked Rand why the female heroes in her works had multiple male lovers, but not the contrary. I think he was talking about Dagny. (Well... there was Gail Wynand..., but he wasn't a true hero, he was a potential one.) She replied this was her fantasy, dahling, not his.

So if Rand Smurfetted Dagny, it was certainly not from making her a token women as an accessory to the stories of the males.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I'll come back to the videos and I'll continue down the rabbit hole, but for now, I'm not seeing what you are, Michael. At least, I don't see a progressive nature to it.

Deanna,

Journalist-wise, I think the kerfuffle is due to the journalists on the private Gaming Journalism Professionals (GameJournoPros) Google groups mailing list colluding to put pressure on the major sites devoted to gaming to make sure the narrative about certain events was the one they decided in advance should be told--or ignored.

Surprise surprise, the approach they talked about a lot was strikingly similar to what progressives would think and do. Must be a coincidence...

Especially galling to the gamers was the journalists' demands that this narrative not be contaminated by user comments questioning their journalistic ethics and whatever the hell they didn't want users to talk about. They actually demanded sites take down user comments. Things like that.

The Quinn affair was simply used as an example in the media reporting on this to showcase the activity of GameJournoPros since it was one of the topics of interest to the group.

Here's a simple article on GameJournoPros. I haven't read all the emails and messages from that group (nor do I intend to), but the article is quite clear that it was inspired by the original JournoList, which was about as progressive as they come.

The fate of both was identical. After the emails were leaked and the groups exposed, they closed. Some high-profile members lost their jobs. And most main members said the equivalent of, "Oh no. Precious be. We were not colluding. We would never do anything like that."

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

As a curiosity, I ran across a guy who has been extremely critical of Anita Sarkeesian. It looks like his name is Jordan Owen. And, no, you are not dreaming. That's a two and a half hour YouTube video of a guy talking about Atlas Shrugged.

Now get this. It was uploaded to YouTube on Mar 25, 2013 and currently has 32,608 views. From the gist of the comments, it seems like a lot of viewers actually watched the whole thing. Full disclosure--I have only viewed about the first 7 minutes so far--he was reading Anthem out loud when I stopped. But I will try to do the whole thing. Maybe...

To keep this on point, below is a short video by Owen on Sarkeesian where he goes into her early career as an online marketer selling a handwriting analysis course. (btw - I have studied some of Alex Mandossian's online marketing training--he's an old-timer who really knows his stuff.)

Owen has several videos on Sarkeesian and is going to produce a documentary called "The Sarkeesian Effect."

Interestingly enough, he claims her interest in feminism comes from her boyfriend, not her. That would make her very life an analogy to the role of females as adjuncts to the stories of males she decries in her videos. Supreme irony.

Also, he mentions Ayn Rand in passing (bashing Christians who ignore the fact that she was an atheist).

Er...

What the hell am I doing?

Help!!!

I've been sucked into a time-space vortex where vidoegames are ruling the earth in a fight between progressivist misogyny and Objectivism!

Help!!!

Help!!!

I want out!

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Incidentally, Dagny Taggart is the exact opposite of everything Sarkeesian complains about. Rand's career itself was. And, if I remember correctly, Dagny is the only Randian hero to shoot someone dead.

Francisco blew the heads off two men attacking Rearden in his mills.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Brant,

Thanks.

So I didn't remember correctly.

I'm going to have to reread AS before too long. Not just for the same reason people reread it. I'm doing a study of her literary methods.

Now get a load of this--kinda like look what I found. Rand is appreciated--much in the same manner as I am growing more and more to appreciate her--in the comics world. I had heard about some of this a while back, but I didn't pursue it. Just so I don't have to rewrite a bunch of stuff, here's part of an email I recently sent to a friend:

============================

In my storytelling excursions, I was delighted to trip over a passage about Rand in the following Google Hangout discussion on theme:

These are comic book creators. I have been studying storytelling from a bunch of different angles for a long time and I swear, these dudes navigate this world well. They know their classics down cold, all the storytelling gurus, some neuroscience and cutting edge psychology, the works. Here is the phrase that jumped out at me right as the guy said it. It comes at the 31:57 mark and his name is Jerzy Drozd:

[it's] like reading Ayn Rand without turning into an Objectivist. You can read her books as literature or you can read them as a manifesto for life. That's your choice, the reader's choice, and I already made my position: I actually enjoy her books as literature and I like the way she constructs her stories and constructs her characters and pits them against each other, but I don't agree with her politics.

Add this to the self-help stuff in Rand and I believe this is what entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban get from her.

I know Jerzy likes her self-help angle. Here is a devastating podcast he made about getting negative people away from you, especially if you are a creator (I think I like this guy, Jerzy):

Thunder Punch Daily 17 – Rotten Fruit

There is a picture of Rand on this podcast:

He talks about the scene where Rearden has given his wife a bracelet of Rearden metal and she makes fun of it at the party.

This is exactly the angle I want to take my knowledge of Rand into--storytelling and self-help.

So long as people talk about small government and overall freedom, that's about all the politics I want to involve myself with. I'm getting really disgusted inside by paying more attention to it than I should.

I'll keep doing the egghead stuff in Objectivism like epistemology (especially induction), and metaphysics (especially causality), but the part of Rand that appealed to me in my younger years was her storytelling and her way of blasting guilt for being good out of the way and saying you should feel pride for it.

. . .

Uplifting stories and earned wealth from honest capitalism.

What could be better than that?

. . .

Apparently Rand is huge in the comics world. She is taken very seriously as an artist (not a goddess) and studied as such. They even study The Romantic Manifesto. It's different than out here in the rest of the world. The cult part is gone in the comics world and she is not shit on by comics intellectuals--who, incidentally, are heavies in their own right. She is admired for her good stuff, not her manipulative stuff.

Ah hell... I've been too jaded for too long. These comics guys and their attitudes toward life, work, storytelling, Rand, etc., really turn me on (ahem... not sexually ).

============================

It's funny how I started out getting into Rand through her stories and this is where I am now interested in going back.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

And Ragnar never even mussed the hair of anyone with his "long range naval guns."

I think what Rand's pirate did might have been modeled on the German Raider Atlantis which plied the South Atlantic and Indian oceans early in WWII. The ship was a converted freighter and the MOA was to get close enough to an unsuspecting British ship to destroy its radio and compel its surrender. The crew would be taken prisoner and a prize crew put on board if it was still in good enough shape. If not, cargo (and documents) would be removed and the ship sunk. I read the titled book as a teenager. In over 600 days at sea it sank or seized--mostly sank--26 ships. It was sunk in turn by HMS Devonshire in November 1941.

As war it was as realistically gentle as you could get. U-boats would sink your ship and you would drown, freeze in the water or burn.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I just finished the entire series of Tropes vs Women in Video Games by Anita Sarkeesian.

Man, there is some sick shit in the video game world. Lots of explicit sadism. I felt like I visited a different planet. That is definitely not me, and I wrote a short story where I blew up a Taliban soldier and a young girl.

Before, when I played a lot of games (Duke Nukem, etc.), I would shoot a monster and it would fall over dead. Now there is realistic-looking blood and guts all over the place. And lots of women being murdered graphically like that.

Sarkeesian seems to be saying all this sadistic "darkness" is all hunky-dory if only we can remove the sexual and helpless components from the women. In other words, it's OK to squish the guts out of a woman in full graphic detail who is a guard or something, but not OK if she is half-naked and chained up.

How about not squishing the guts out of anyone?

I'm glad I saw this series, but, after trying to see it with an open mind, I still have little sympathy for Sarkeesian's feminist cause. She did a pretty good job explaining and giving examples of tropes, but not a good job of convincing anyone but her progressive feminist choir that the awfulness against women in games is more awful than the other awfulness present when things get awful.

Part of the thrill of violent games is going into the awful and coming out of it. I think Sarkeesian wants to use this awfulness as an covert indoctrination tool.

Now that would be awful: a policy of don't rape the body in play; instead rape the mind in reality.

Once again, how about not raping anything?

How? Hell, that's easy.

Make better games than the ones that use this kind of violence and let the market sort it out. All it takes is talent and hard work.

Michael

[dldelancey]

Michael,

I did eventually make a little time to venture down this rabbit hole. I don't have much to add, although I do still see multiple distinct topics.

There's "GamerGate" which the gamers seem to be sorting out themselves, as gamers are wont to do. It's an interesting sub-culture. Gamers don't just speak with their wallets. The really hardcore ones are not just going to stop buying the games that don't meet their needs. They're going to go develop their own and then become gabazillionaires with very little investment. Minecraft is a perfect example of that phenomenon.

As for the awfulness (as you so aptly put it) that exists in many video games, the market will eventually sort that out, too. There's been huge changes in the gaming industry in the last few years. There's always going to be the type of games you described, but more and more everyday the demand for them is getting outpaced by the demand for less awful.

Then there's Sarkeesian. I don't even know where to start with that one. Gamers love to talk to interested non-gamers about their play, but they don't want to be duped into thinking that person is one of them. That was her big mistake. Now the people who can actually do something about the problem she's trying to draw attention to are going to shun her entirely. Plus, she's doing the same thing that most feminists do - focusing only on what's going to make all the little girls grow up to be well-adjusted women. There has to be some balance. We ought to be addressing what's going to make all the little boys grow up to be well-adjusted men, as well. But that's another conversation.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I came across the following video on RoR.

 

It is a good explanation of a few of the root causes of Social Justice Warriors. And it's funny.

 

It deals with more than GamerGate, but since the image of Anita Sarkeesian is featured and GamerGate is mentioned, and it seems to come from the GamerGate world, this thread is probably the best place for it.

 

Some notes beforehand:

 

1. I don't believe all millennials are spoiled narcissists like author (InternetAristocrat) insinuates, but for those who are, his observations make a hell of a lot of sense.

 

2. Near the end, the author refers to something that happened "two weeks ago." This video was uploaded on September 14, 2014, so I don't know what he is referring to. Barring that, the message is universal enough that this is not important.

 

3. Lot's of cussing in the video.

 

4. I have dealt elsewhere with a publicity and persuasion technique called "Social Justice Warrior baiting." This is when you make a high-profile statement on social media (or other media outlet) designed to produce a stampede of outrage and grandstanding by Social Justice Warriors. But you make it vague enough to make the SJW's appear to possibly be unfair. In the flame wars and hot discussions that follow, the idea or product name you embedded in the message gets talked about a lot--mountains of free publicity and possibly free persuasion.

 

(Donald Trump is a master of this with regular media, and on a much wider canvas than normal, too. You know I had to plug him even here, didncha? )

 

For those who like such things, the video below explains in more depth the inner workings of the minds of the SJW's you want to bait--it makes it easier to bait them so to speak.

 

Enjoy:

 

 

Michael