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Ah, sweet schadenfreude! The gamebros at 4chan have been insisting publicly that the whole #GamerGate campaign — you know, the vicious attacks on game developer Zoe Quinn and other women in gaming — has been a spontaneous grassroots uprising against corruption in the world of game journalism, not a targeted campaign by misogynistic 4channers and their allies to ruin the lives of Quinn and everyone even vaguely connected with or even just aligned with her.
Well, it’s just become a lot harder to make that argument with a straight face. Last night, Quinn announced that she’s been lurking in the IRC where 4chaners have been diligently and often quite deviously planning this “spontaneous” uprising. And she’s started posting screenshots that seem to offer pretty incontrovertible evidence of just how duplicitously 4channers planned every element of #GamerGate.
You can find Quinn’s tweets of these screenshots laid out neatly on this Storify page; it’s essential reading for anyone who’s been following all this.
But I thought I’d highlight some of my favorite bits.
Here, 4channers talk about trying to hack her email:
definitely no raids ever happen because of 4chan and I definitely hacked myself mmhmmm pic.twitter.com/3309AiQk3u
— zoë “Baddie Proctor” quinn (@UnburntWitch) September 6, 2014
Here they spout bizarre conspiracy theory — while conspiring to hack another website.
this has pure insanity AND some illegal shit in it pic.twitter.com/rRo5KVFBhZ
— zoë “Baddie Proctor” quinn (@UnburntWitch) September 6, 2014
In this screenshot — you can find the whole thing here — 4channers talk candidly about how they hope to ruin her career:
More of the same:
because this is about integrity. not revenge. not harassment. not hurting people. pic.twitter.com/rSSm4ZJG4T
— zoë “Baddie Proctor” quinn (@UnburntWitch) September 6, 2014
Here some 4channers talk about #NotYourShield, a supposedly spontaneous bit of hashtag activism in which people of color — and white dudes pretending to be people of color — attack “social justice warriors” for supposedly using them as “shields” for their attack on gaming. Notice the dudes at the end talking about showing up on Twitter “as a Latino” and “in blackface” to support the campaign.
Given how damning a lot of these screenshots are, it’s hardly surprising that they freaked out when Quinn started posting her screenshots:
https://twitter.com/MsMinotaur/status/508177920687210496
Too late, dudes. Too late.
Hi! That’s factually incorrect!
:large A minority game developer got fed up with the white-washing “journalists” were doing in their coverage of #GamerGate, and so he created the subset for minorities around the world, and women, in support of the movement to get better journalistic integrity in gaming! It’s been great meeting so many of them, and you should probably check it out for yourself! This is why fact-checking and not just believing whatever one person says is EXTREMELY important!
CC,
Cool story bro.
Is there any sort of organized group of people that you can’t cherry-pick a few sentences out of tens of thousands of things they’ve publicly said to paint them in a bad light? Clearly a biased article.
I’m late to the party, but can I go by Social Justice Avenger? I fancy being a comic book superhero. It ties in nicely with my love of tight clothes and urban spaces. To the Justice Mobile!!
Zoey took the discussions out of context.
She even took a joke about baldwin and tried to pass it as “an attempt to rally up alec baldwin to their cause”
I mean, if you know anything about this whole story, you’d immediately see how BS it is.
Here is the full 2 weeks chat log from the IRC, which is where zoey took the snippets from, out of context.
You know what’s funny? She said she went to the police with some logs of the IRC. The people managing the IRC simply decided to upload the entire chat log file since the creation of the chatroom. They have nothing to hide
https://archive.today/Ler4O
@ cc…in that spirit, please check out the following link: bringvictory.com
Thanks, kittehserf and Misha! For anybody that I forgot or missed in that story, consider yourself part of another team (the ones who got separated from the other group in the battle or the ambush team, your pick) roaming the catacombs.
@kittehserf: Clerics may look like what you described there, your run-of-the-mill healers in robes, carrying holy items (the Holy Hand Grenade is probably an epic level artifact). I was thinking about the Dungeons and Dragons cleric, who, interestingly enough, is allowed to wear heavy armor. Sort of a holy warrior type, but more casting-oriented than the more combat-heavy paladin.
In actual games, video or tabletop, clerics may often be treated as mere healerbots, which may be why it’s not a highly sought-after position with competitive dudebros. After all, why be a defender who makes sure the whole group is working properly when you can be on the offense, going for gold, glory and experience points? Not saying there’s anything wrong with playing a super aggressive Conan the Barbarian type, but let’s just say that it occupies a special place in the hearts of violent, macho type men.
@CC: Umm… What’s factually incorrect? What are you referring to? Care to link to anything besides a screenshot of a random tweeter making an unsupported claim? The tweet doesn’t offer any links either. It’s really hard to “check it out” when there’s nothing to go by.
In any case, why would a minority come forward now, when the #GamerGate bunch has pretty much been outed as misogynistic assholes pretending to be supervillains? If you really had an issue with journalistic integrity, you would not associate with #GamerGate. There may be great discussions to be had about the issue, but why would you take the opportunity to join a campaign whose sole purpose so far has been to use a made-up cause in order to harass a woman? That makes you look like you think harassing women is a more worthy cause than discussing actual grievances.
I’m sorry, but I need something more to go by before believing some random person’s dubious claims, particularly since misogynists have a history of appropriating the struggle of minorities in order to attack women. As an aside, lying while pretending to speak for an oppressed group in order to justify harassment against a member of another oppressed group is grade A asshole behavior. I really hope you’re not doing that, because I can’t imagine how pathetic one would have to be to sink so low as to make up falsehoods. That’s the type of behavior one should be deeply embarrassed about, as it shows you know you’ve lost the argument, but are still desperately trying to pretend that you have not. That makes a person not only a bad person, but also a coward.
You could only be more pathetic if you linked to your own sock account. The rather free use of exclamation points and capital letters seems to suggest that, but surely you aren’t that ridiculously and hilariously stupid, right? You both just happen to be equally excited about discussing journalistic integrity, I’m sure.
@Anarchonist Great narration!
I am new here, and missed probably more than half of inside jokes and meta-references you’ve made, but I liked it nonetheless.
@ the Article itself: why the need for so much repetition when they announced the alert? There are at least 13 (I assume copypasted) cases of the ‘Abort the raid’ warning. In a single post.
What sort of mind does that? It’s even worse than using three exclamation marks at the end of a sentence.
Anybody have the full chatlogs? I don’t really buy screencapped portions. Kinda like taking a page of “mein kampf” and saying it’s a book about the quiet life of an austrian-born German man.
(Not to mention user “RogueStar” seems to be the only one mentioning anything about hacking)
Also, someone pointed out the guy spamming “ABORT THE RAID IRC’S” was a troll.
https://archive.moe/v/thread/261914337/#261917325
And so I wouldn’t think a public, anonymous, available-to-everyone IRC would be a good place to plan a raid…
Anyway, still don’t support gamergate since I don’t think posting their hashtag over and over is going to do anything. Ever.
@ silvarth…may be a heretofore unnoticed side effect of the consumption of large amounts of sugar, caffeine, and tartrazine all together.
…sometimes maybe they should Mountain Undo…
Just to be clear, Alex M and others, Eron Gjoni is not his real name. He’s on twitter under that name, and uses it in the posted chat logs – according to his twitter posts, he’s always been quite open about that being really him. He is claiming that he has done nothing wrong, and is daring people to post quotes proving otherwise. It’s true afaict that he hasn’t posted anything really obviously quotable and terrible, I mean specifically calling for people to harass Zoe or anything. But he’s pretty clear in the logs that this is a considered strategy to create doubt in people’s minds about who the real victim is. Lots of “We shouldn’t harass her, but she is a terrible person who’s ruined my life, so I’m not very sad if she’s getting harassed” type stuff. In the meanwhile, he is doing AMAs, seems to be loving the attention. I feel pretty unhappy having read some of it.
Oops, just after posting this, realised it’s probably wrong. Don’t know but that’s probably his real name after all. I had misunderstood something I read. That makes me feel slightly uncomfortable about the ‘do not hire him’ stuff, but I guess if you put this stuff out under your real name it’s not unreasonable for people to react to it.
TebTeb, I have the full chatlog, and honestly, it’s more damning than just the screenshots. It’s full of terrible stuff, people doxing, explicitly talking about sockpuppeting,hacking accounts, all sorts of misogynistic and racist shit. The screenshots are really just the tip of the iceberg.
The denizens of 4chan’s various boards count as grassroots by any of the standard definitions of the term. So unless you’ve got moot in that chatlog it doesn’t have any impact on the grassroots status of what is going on. Yes 4chan is full of horrible people but that was already widely known.
LOLOL. And to think, I got jumped by a shit ton of dudebros on twitter for speaking up about this how this WASN’T about sexism. At all. Uh huh. Didn’t believe them then, laughing my ass off at this now.
@Anarachonist – that is brilliant! I love that!
Yeah, can you imagine working with this guy? Somebody’ll accidentally use his coffee mug one day, and the next day their address will end up on 4chan. I’m saddened by the fact that his “Don’t harass my girlfriend who you’ll totally harass *wink wink nudge nudge*, I’m a nice guy” act is actually convincing people that he isn’t abusive scum. When it came out that the review he claimed she slept with someone to get didn’t exist, he apparently claimed that part of his tell-all was a typo. No really. Clearly he’s already convinced himself that he’s a perfect person who can do no wrong. I wouldn’t trust anything he says.
Even if all his claims were true, though, it wouldn’t actually make a difference. The #GamerGate teenagers have no clue how the industry functions. I have said it before. Most of the men who work in games got there through connections, not merit. This is not a secret. Entertainment critics often have personal relationships with entertainment makers. Again, not a secret. I’m assuming they are all too young to remember when a game journalist was fired for giving Assassins Creed a bad review because Ubisoft was sponsoring the website. Surely, if this isn’t about misogyny, sexism, racism, and entitled babyism, each and every #GamerGate teenager has been boycotting Ubisoft games for years, and certainly hasn’t ever played an Assassins Creed game.
Also, I call Social Justice Black Mage, PEW PEW.
I don’t really believe that this will have much effect on the gamergate stuff. Mainly because I don’t think anyone not related to 4chan or /v/ was supporting them in the first place.
I like their motto, though. “I am against harassment, I am for women in gaming.” That’s why I will not let anyone criticise games as not being accesible for women or portraying women in a sexist light. That seems to be the logical continuation of that sentence.
Also about notyourshield. I’ve seen some ridiculously obvious sockpuppets like “a logical black guy/logical minority” or “a feminist woman”, but I’ve also seen that there is some proof of astroturfing but I can’t find them again.
No way, we can call this a real grassroot movement. It’s more like: ‘grassholes’ by the look of it.
There has to be a distinct line between lobbying for something, even in a direct, more aggressive manner, and harrasing other people. The latter must not be allowed in any form.
@Shadow – What is the NotYourShield thing? I’ve had it thrown at me a few times since this started. I’ve told the guys in question I didn’t ask to be shielded and to go live their own damn lives.
@karalora: “You must be a Social Justice Druid/Ninja! Odd multiclass combination, but whatever works!”
I have played that! Ninja/spirit shaman (Complete Divine; basically a druid of different sort, uses druid spell lists) worked GREAT. There are lots of interesting tricks that benefit a ninja.
WAIT A MINUTE…
Do we have a Social Justice Monster in the Darkness? Because I really think we need one.
If that’s a grass-roots movement, all it says is that the whole community should just disappear forever, because they’re nothing but loathesome misogynists.
However since gamer is not synomymous with repugnant, violent loser who wants to rape, cripple or murder women, I would retain hope that no, it’s not a grass-roots movement at all. Subterranean, perhaps, as in troglodytes or things that have been buried and are rotting, but not grass-roots.
OMG, I am a RL Social Justice Healer!
Oddly enough, back in the day, when I was NOT going to be a nurse (and still had a D&D group), I always played healers. Shoulda known.