Congratulations, assholes! You did it! Your threats and harassment have driven game journalist/designer Jenn Frank and game designer/media critic Mattie Brice to leave the gaming world.
Frank, an award-winning writer and sometime game designer, came to the attention of the misogynist mob after writing a brief opinion piece for The Guardian decrying the widespread and vicious harassment of women in gaming. In addition to writing about the harassment she’s gotten — including someone trying to hack into her email account — she (as you might expect) also highlighted the misogynistic rage directed at feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and indie game designer Zoe Quinn.
The new rule seems to be that any woman who writes about online harassment will herself be harassed, and in this case it didn’t take long.
The gamebro army, completely ignorant about how journalism works, decided that she had a “conflict of interest” — because, and I’m totally serious here, she had previously exchanged some tweets with Quinn and donated some money to her on Patreon. One critic, who put together a much-passed-around graphic outlining the charges against her, angrily denounced Frank for “vigorously defending [Quinn] while pretending to be impartial.”
There are a couple of giant problems with these accusations. First off, Frank never pretended to be impartial. She was not reporting on anything for the Guardian. She was writing an OPINION PIECE about a topic that obviously affected her. Editors don’t assign OPINION PIECES to writers who are, or who pretend to be, impartial. They assign these pieces to people WITH OPINIONS. You’re not going to get much of an OPINION PIECE from someone with no opinions.
Second of all, according to Frank (and I believe her), she had asked The Guardian to attach a brief statement to the end of her piece noting her — admittedly tenuous — connections with Quinn and Sarkeesian. The Guardian editors chose not to run it because they thought these connections were too trivial to merit a mention. They forgot that she was a woman writing about gaming, and that misogynistic assholes will seize on anything, literally anything, as an excuse for harassment.
After she started getting harassed for her alleged “conflict of interest,” Frank wrote a blog post dealing with the issue clearly and straightforwardly, and convinced the Guardian editors to append a version of her original disclosure statement to the piece:
Update: Jenn Frank has purchased and is a supporter of Zoë Quinn’s work, although this is the first article she has written on the developer. Frank has also briefly met Anita Sarkeesian.
As absurd as it is for a woman writer to have to publicly confess that she “has also briefly met Anita Sarkeesian,” as if this is some sort of crime, Frank thus answered her critics directly. And that should have been it. But of course the harassment — sorry, the perfectly legitimate criticism — continued, and on Wednesday night Frank announced that she’d had enough:
https://twitter.com/jennatar/status/507338379474649088
https://twitter.com/jennatar/status/507411937383022592
The only “conflict of interest” here was the “conflict of interest” that Frank wrote about originally in her Guardian piece. After describing her horror on discovering that someone had been trying to hack her email, she wrote:
My unabashed love for video games, my colleagues and my work have a conflict of interest with my own terror.
And, at least for now, the terror has won.
Meanwhile, game designer and media critic Mattie Brice was also extracting herself from an industry and a culture that has been grinding her down. I’ll let her tweets tell the story. (See her timeline for more.)
real talk is that people like me have been getting harassed and disregarded for a long time and patience's gone for things not being better
— @mattiebrice.bsky.social (@thotxcouture) September 3, 2014
it feels like everyone is taking their merry ol' time to wise up and take action in a way that actually helps. don't have time for that
— @mattiebrice.bsky.social (@thotxcouture) September 3, 2014
i need to get better and since that healing isn't coming from the outside i have to get it from the inside. shouldn't be how it is
— @mattiebrice.bsky.social (@thotxcouture) September 3, 2014
see ya video games pic.twitter.com/0nnU6oAl7N
— @mattiebrice.bsky.social (@thotxcouture) September 4, 2014
Congrats to all the people excising themselves from something horrible and looking to take care of yourself
— @mattiebrice.bsky.social (@thotxcouture) September 4, 2014
If industry cared you would be properly supported. It wasn't ready for or deserving of you. Go shine elsewhere
— @mattiebrice.bsky.social (@thotxcouture) September 4, 2014
It'll be nice not aspiring to be a part of an industry that makes me cry and hurt so often
— @mattiebrice.bsky.social (@thotxcouture) September 4, 2014
I'm glad you all love video games a lot, these guys are tough company.
— @mattiebrice.bsky.social (@thotxcouture) September 4, 2014
i decided i'm not spending time and energy on things that don't reciprocate. the games industry never budged to make room for me
— @mattiebrice.bsky.social (@thotxcouture) September 5, 2014
it asked for volunteer work, it asked me to take harassment, it asked me to live in poor conditions. i won't anymore
— @mattiebrice.bsky.social (@thotxcouture) September 5, 2014
until you figure out how to change that this industry will be a revolving door where people don't even get into the building
— @mattiebrice.bsky.social (@thotxcouture) September 5, 2014
i won't spend any energy making you feel like your consumer products are art and deserving of critical attention
— @mattiebrice.bsky.social (@thotxcouture) September 5, 2014
Elsewhere on Twitter, the bullies crowed over their victory:
https://twitter.com/AlrightAnon/status/507395891838590976
Another day, another couple of women ground down and spat out by the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine, Gaming Division.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the gamebros haven’t forgotten about Zoe Quinn either.
lemme just check my email and- oh. #GamerGate pic.twitter.com/YJ8cwzlM79
— zoë “Baddie Proctor” quinn (@UnburntWitch) September 3, 2014
Here’s the screenshot; click for a larger and more readable version — if you’re not triggered by violent threats, that is.
What the fuck is wrong with these people?
Seriously, if you know, tell me, because I am fresh out of explanations for this level of blind hatred.
NOTE: This thread is a NO SHITHEAD thread. If you say anything that in any way even slightly excuses or justifies the harassment of these women, you can fuck right off to any of the eight zillion places on the internet where you can badmouth these women to your heart’s content. I and the other mods will be banning and deleting as necessary.
I did not know that zoe’s ex was doing more than just that butthurt bucket of bitterness he posted on 4chan. I thought he slunk away after that but it turns out he is in the front lines of doxxing and harassing and coaching others to do it? My god he is grade A asshole. He must be MRA, it explains everything.
@Zolnier: there’s probably about the same amount of sexists as there are everywhere, but the games industry still has a complex from when it was the moral panic du jour back in the 90s. Any kind of external criticism is interpreted as an attempt to delegitimise the artform and stunt it in the way the Comics Code did; any kind of internal criticism of the grosser parts of it is seen as capitulating to the forces of censorship. It’s also an area where disaffected youth can regain some control over their existence, which leads to a bourgeois kind of mentality where all these companies are serving a very narrow definition of what games can do, defined by these ‘consumer-kings’. People like Zoe Quinn have always existed on the fringes – part of the anger is that there are people seeking out and writing about the fringes.
Obviously we’re talking about a minority here – games also attract some of the smartest people around, who see quickly that underneath the crass commercialism and the shitty parts of the fanbase there’s something incredibly interesting going on – but it’s a minority that’s loud, that feels entitled, and doesn’t really have the social niceties to explain how they feel in a way that’ll elicit empathy.
And that minority is catered to by a corporate infrastructure that feels it’s safer to just go along with them rather.
@Merus
The comic code was of the industry’s own design. They didn’t even bother to stop and reflect on the fact that shooting themselves in the leg right now is going to seriously hobble them in the long run, so that isn’t even worth clutching pearl over.
And as far as I can tell, these fellows are doing all the heavy lifting for everyone who ever remarked that maybe we should delegitimize the current brand of pseudo-anonymous internet use for good.
Alex M – hahahaha, that link to the “special jamming OP”
“classical minorities”? Seriously, do they seem to think that no one in the universe can read what they say or that someone who is disgusted with their shit won’t tell anyone?
Since they don’t want “real SJWs” hijacking that tag, if I had twitter, that’s EXACTLY what I would do. Because it’s not like they own that tag and that no one can mess with it, though they’re fond of messing with other people’s tags. I’m actually laughing right now.
@Kakanian Oh god, don’t get me started on faulty analogies from the world of video games. One of game journalism’s obsessions for a solid decade was the “Citizen Kane of games”, which was… well it was different for everyone but presumably it was going to be the thing game journalists could offer up to Roger Ebert which would allow them to be real critics.
It turned out that no amount of thoughtful criticism from people with cultural cachet like Tom Bissell and Charlie Brooker meant anywhere near as much as the industry making fuckloads of money. Turning your nose up at a $50B industry while still appearing to be in touch with modern trends is a tall order.
I don’t think pseudonymity is the problem here – after all, we know the names of the people writing at AVFM and it doesn’t stop them. It’s the lack of consequences, and the lack of defence. More than a few people noticed that Twitter didn’t lift a finger to stop the account that was posting child porn directed at Zoe Quinn’s account, while someone with no history and no trust is allowed to put whatever they want into Zoe’s mentions. Most of the social internet is designed to be radically inclusive, but that means that every gatecrasher who wants to turn up is given their very own invite and they never have to leave.
sunnysombrera,
Right? How are these jerks seeing him as a victim and Quinn as the villain? Can you imagine the response if the ex was a woman in this situation and Quinn was a man? Can you imagine the boiled bunny jokes?
I honestly can’t help but laugh at the IRC log thing.
They post the channel on 4chan repeatedly and expected that no one that was against this whole campaign would log their shit?
Remember when David first made a post about Zoe Quinn being harassed and a bunch of people came here to claim that her ex wasn’t involved and didn’t sic trolls on her? They claimed all he did was write about the “abuse” he suffered on a random WordPress blog and it just happened to go viral?
Right.
There were also a couple of people claiming to be feminists who were taking the side of the harassers. Of course, we all saw through that bullshit and after seeing that storify Bogdan shared (Thanks Bogdan!) it pretty much confirms that those “feminists” were misogynist trolls.
It gets better: 4chan are releasing their own logs to ‘prove’ Zoe was cherry-picking.
As any long-term readers of WHTM could anticipate, she wasn’t cherry-picking. Someone did a word count for selected words, and the results speak for themselves:
You can be very smart when it comes to computers and stupid in other ways apparently. I’m sure they’re just so arrogant and entitled they thought the “SJW” is some house of cards that can easily be destroyed with a harassment campaign and they don’t need to be careful. As if people who care about social justice have only existed on the internet the past few years. It’s not like progressive movements have been happening out in meatspace for a very long time or anything!
ej,
He didn’t think she wanted to see it. He knew she didn’t, because she had told him so. He was deliberately violating her boundaries and that’s what made it thrilling. It’s exactly like that link way back on page one or two about the guy who was putting his semen in a coworker’s coffee, and claimed he just wanted her to notice him. Guys don’t force women to look at/touch/consume fluids from their dicks for attention, or because they don’t know what women want. The ability to force women to engage with them in a sexualized way is the entire point.
Ikanreed,
Or Operation Rescue taking their protests from abortion clinics to churches that refuse to join them in front of the abortion clinics.
sunnysombrera:
Yep, that is EXACTLY what I mean…and thanks for the link. Seriously, hateful and nasty men HATE it when they are busted to their moms. It is a wonderful way to shame and humiliate them (which they richly deserve) and it has the added benefit of forcing them, even if only for a little while, to face themselves. Most of these guys want their mothers to think well of them, which is kinda hard when they have to explain to mom what they are doing and why.
That they are, grumpycat. Happily, their dad would never tolerate this behavior either. We are very happy with our three sons and one daughter. And it can be difficult when they come home from school behaving like jerks because that is what they see in the larger world.
But now for the real question: is Gamergate just a distraction about Benghazi?
I’m actually struck by the similarities: a trumped-up charge (albeit a more serious one in Benghazi) is transparently used as cover for people to hate on a minority who has managed to make it into what they see as rightfully their own territory.
But the gamers are amateurs compared to the political right wing, and so fail to come up with accusations that would be worth getting that upset about even if they were true (which, so far, they either aren’t or there is only the proof of an angry ex-boyfriend who likes to harass his ex… not the most reliable or witnesses).
That they are, grumpycat. Happily, their dad would never tolerate this behavior either. We are very happy with our three sons and one daughter. And it can be difficult when they come home from school behaving like jerks because that is what they see in the larger world.
*Mod hat on*
Friendly reminder that slurs will automatically put your comment into moderation. If you want to talk about someone else’s use of them, please use stars or something to disguise them. Thanks!
*Mod hat off*
Lazy cat fihjt:
And that will teach me not to check spelling even on a cat video comment.
Maybe I misunderstood the original “thonk” comment. Mea culpa!
In any case, I think the extremely limited dox of “sent this to your mum” is FUCKING PERFECT. Let her know how these assholes treat women who aren’t her…words will be had!
I appreciate you being in total panic mode because Zoe “Fraud” Quinn was exposed for the duplicitous hypocrite that she is, but hopefully your quest to get laid by pretending to be a feminist doesn’t continue humiliating you 🙂
And this video made Jade come over to investigate the sounds from the lightbox:
Is it really fair to his mom though? Does she really need to see her adult son’s penis too?
You know, it’s shit like this that has had me basically leave geek circles. Comics bullshit is pretty similar, though in my opinion breaking down (I’ll spare you the economics comics rant) but the specific brand of geek misogyny just grosses me out and pisses me off like no other. It’s the mix of vicious territorialism and victim complex.
RE: ikanreed
It’s like the KKK in the south attacking and sometimes killing people(of all races) who stood up for equal rights.
Oh come on. The KKK focused their attacks mostly on black folks. Saying “of all races” makes it sound like they attacked everyone equally. Don’t be a dickbutt.