Categories
#gamergate 4chan 8chan a woman is always to blame advocacy of violence antifeminism boner rage creepy douchebaggery doxing empathy deficit entitled babies evil SJWs evil women gamebros harassment irony alert men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny no games for girls no girls allowed oppressed men rape culture threats twitter zoe quinn

In a series of brilliant, furious Tweets, Zoe Quinn tears apart the myth that #GamerGate has "moved beyond" harassment of women

Get over it, dudes.
Get over it, dudes.

Zoe Quinn has had it.

Yesterday, fed up with the equivocating bullshit that’s constantly being said in the media and within gaming circles about #GamerGate, and pissed off at all those who think of themselves as good people but still refuse to see the hatred and misogyny and harassment and doxxing that has been central to GG since the start, Quinn posted a series of (justifiably) angry tweets calling out the cowards in the profession who know that what’s going on is deeply evil but won’t say anything, and documenting the unending harassment she and her boyfriend, and her family, and his family are still getting.

Was that even a sentence? I don’t know. The point is she’s STILL getting harassed. She’s STILL getting “prank” calls. She’s STILL getting death threats. People are STILL digging around in her personal life and the personal life of everyone connected to her.

And she’s not the only one. The newest target of #GamerGate wrath? Indie game developer Brianna Wu, who, as I noted in my last post, got death threats … for posting memes on Twitter.

Meanwhile, two creepy obsessed assholes are still begging for money to make a documentary they hope will ruin Anita Sarkeesian.

Oh, but #GamerGate is about ethics.

I’m just going to paste in a bunch of Quinn’s Tweets here, because they pretty much speak for themselves.

I followed up on the IRC log here and here, but I wouldn’t have known about it if she hadn’t been there first collecting screenshots.

Take the time to enlarge the pics on these tweets:

And then there’s … this:

Also, she gets phone calls:

Oh, you don’t believe she gets phone calls? Ta da:

As the MRAs say: Always Be Recording. Except that Zoe Quinn actually has a good reason to do this.

It’s kind of amazing that Quinn manages to retain a sense of humor in the midst of all this.

Gamer inside joke!

Also, kitty:

 

 

164 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
strivingally
strivingally
10 years ago

jiggawutt: as a gamer, it’s embarassing to me to see so many other gamers treating people who disagree with them as just more enemies to be dispatched, using ever-escalating tactics. It’s not okay to disagree with someone anymore – that makes you The Other Side.

As someone who can remember people getting pretty heated over Sega vs Nintendo, Playstation vs XBox, etc. I still don’t think anybody claimed an existential struggle in those days.

jiggawutt
jiggawutt
10 years ago

strivingally: Ah, those were the days, weren’t they? The worst thing you could’ve been back then was a rabid fanboy for one company or the other. No more..

katz
katz
10 years ago

Misha: вы русский? I keep meaning to ask.

pallygirl
pallygirl
10 years ago

@strivingally: in relation to your earlier comment, this appears to open up the possibility of an accurate and good use of #notyourshield

strivingally
strivingally
10 years ago

pallygirl: Yeah, I guess I’m sick of hearing NotAllGamerGaters whenever the abuse and threats come up. 😛 I’m a gamer who gives a shit about feminism. Funnily enough only one side is telling me that’s some kind of conflict – the feminists aren’t saying that I’m the enemy for being a gamer. All the hate I’m feeling has been coming from the GamerHate side.

Kakanian
Kakanian
10 years ago

@Bina

Yes, it’s pretty obious that the movement in the german-speaking countries copypasted a lot of the talking points of their US brether, though most of those that want to be taken serious at least manage to not sound totally insane for the first half of their airtime.

vaiyt
vaiyt
10 years ago

The nail in the coffin was the note from the editor that talked about every story having “two sides” with the truth lying somewhere in between.

Raaaargghh! Not the golden mean! VAIYT SMASH!

M. the Social Justice Ranger
M. the Social Justice Ranger
10 years ago

Re: The Escapist.

I just got curious and read the “Publisher’s statement on #GG” linked in that diarrhoea pile of an article. Three and a half pages of “Casual gamers aren’t gamers because something about cars,” half a page on #GG that doesn’t mention women at all and one paragraph apologising for not blaming “An indie dev” (presumably Zoe Quinn) hard enough and making “A forum community (presumably 4Chan) look bad.

So… They’re trying to deflect an “Unofficial” article insulting half the population by linking to an “Official” article insulting 3/4 the population? What? Am I missing something here?

M. the Social Justice Ranger
M. the Social Justice Ranger
10 years ago

*”A forum community” – missed a quote mark. Argh, why no edit button. =P

Lea
Lea
10 years ago

I watched my daughter and her boyfriend laughing and gaming today.
She wants to go into tech.
She’d love to be a game designer.
This could be her getting these threats and having these conspiracy theories circulated about her one day. Either that or she’ll be driven away from her passion entirely by the men who are actively terrorizing women to push them away from gaming and game design. She won’t be the only one. This won’t stop until people stand up and stop it. They will do this to every new generation until it is stopped. This will escalate. It always does. It starts with making excuses to hate people and to hurt them. Threats are excused. We all know what comes next.

This will not die down on it’s own.

Dedicated misogynists like these will never stop being misogynists. As long as the (we are told) majority of men in the gaming community who are not misogynists do not stand up with feminists to stop this terrorism, it will continue. It will snowball. The next generation of boys will come up on these conspiracy theories. They will learn that this is how gamers treat women. They will learn that this is what men do and that it’s right and good. What do you think parents response to this will be? What do you think the word “gamer” will be associated with?

This shit is personal.

vaiyt
vaiyt
10 years ago

On the other hand, she might spend her whole career making games for the section of the public that doesn’t treat her like shit.

Alex M
Alex M
10 years ago

@vaiyt

The problem is that these assholes don’t give a shit who’s she’s making games for or why. To them, any woman making games period and any person making anything that doesn’t fit their narrow “triple-A hardcore” definitions are the enemy. It is not enough for them to get the games and the coverage they want; they also want to destroy any perspective that doesn’t line up with their own.

They are at war with the mere thought of diversity.

strivingally
strivingally
10 years ago

I’m with Lea. This shit is personal. These fuckers are trying to claim they’re sticking up for me, as a long-time gamer. Personally I’d rather see a hundred more articles about the growing diversification and adoption of games across different groups than see even one more site pull an article or advertiser pull their advertising because it makes a bunch of butthurt assholes uncomfortable to consider their friends might be acting like assholes.

grumpyoldnurse
grumpyoldnurse
10 years ago

If you are so concerned that these “journalists” (really just ad-men for the big gaming companies) are being shady, you would simply boycott the entire lot of them and be done with it like I did two decades ago.

Or, if this was really about journalistic ethics and integrity, and boycotting somehow wasn’t enough, maybe they would be targeting the journalists who are showing the bad ethics and lack of integrity? (Please note: I think that would still be a very bad thing, but at least the hypocrisy wouldn’t be quite so mind-numbingly thick). This is pretty obviously the old “no girls in the treehouse ’cause cooties” thing. Anyone who says otherwise is being wilfully obtuse.

Bernardo Soares
Bernardo Soares
10 years ago

@Bina
Thanks, and concerning info about the Mens’ Righters in Germany:
Like AVFM, there is one group – called MANNdat – that organizes much of the “activism”. There is also a blogger, Arne Hoffmann, and a forum and a few other websites (like the hilarious wiki they started). That’s basically it. However, anti-feminism has found a new home in a populist-right party that has gained some traction in the last elections. It’s called Alternative für Deutschland and it’s a strange smorgasbord of uber-neoliberal macroeconomists who claim the Euro is bad for Germany, actual remnants of the nobility of Easter Prussia who want “their” land restituted (Eastern Prussia belongs to Poland, a fact which Germany accepted in the treaties for the unification in 1990), antidemocratic libertarians (who actually want some kind of neoliberal monarchy), and radical Christian anti-abortionists (they call themselves Lebensschützer – life protectors) and homophobes (I think the French anti-gay-marriage protests were more prominent in international media; the German ones weren’t as big, but still big).

The political party most strongly connected with MANNdat, however is the Pirates’ Party. This party – which consists mainly of a platform emphasizing legal issues in the Internet – data protection, hacking, copyright – has a history with the Men’s Righters (it’s the only party in Germany that has a working group for “mens’ issues”), but has now all but disintegrated because they have a political culture on the level of gamergaters – personal insults, “uncovering” alleged moral failings of others, mobbing and harassing via twitter are rife in this party.

As you speak German, you can look for more information on these two websites:
http://rechtekerle.blogspot.com/
http://andreaskemper.wordpress.com/tag/mannerrechtler/

Concerning tactics: yeah, I’ve already decided to link here in case anyone posts more crap from the AVFM youtubers, so that it’s clear who they actually are. I probably will limit myself to posts explaining the background of these guys and mockery (At one point, one of them actually ranted about how, historically, men had sacrificed themselves “bis zur Vernichtung” – to the point of being exterminated.

@Policy of Madness
You’re right about the Gamergaters, and the Pirates’ Party I mentioned above shows the familiarity of these two groups – and their sense of entitlement. The Pirates can’t believe that people don’t vote for them, so it’s always due to someone who conspired against them. I’ll try to stay calm the next time; luckily, the blogger is persistent in posting Sarkeesian-related and feminist stuff.

@strivingally
I feel the same. I always played PC, so I stayed out of the fanboy arguments, but, having only recently returned to gaming (after my girlfriend introduced me to the wonderful world of steam and gog), I feel more than ever disconnected from these guys. However, reading Rock Paper Shotgun and some wonderful German indie blogs, I feel that I’m not the only gamer who doesn’t want anything to do with entitled assholes.

David Futrelle
Author
David Futrelle
10 years ago

Hey everyone, I’ve let through a bunch of comments from GGers (mostly in the Brianna Wu thread); email the mods if any of them start acting up.

Alex M
Alex M
10 years ago

@grumpyoldnurse

They already are doing that. It’s just that their definition of being “unethical” is saying that men aren’t the center of the universe, that gaming culture has problems, that women shouldn’t be driven away by the content and other players, or the greatest sin of all: simultaneously possessing a vagina and a spine. (Incidentally, I really hate the meme of associating testicles with bravado e.g. “grow some balls”.)

Misha
Misha
10 years ago

@katz, sadly no, I’m not Russian :), British, wot wot and by jove (I had to google translate your question so if I’ve fluffed it I’m sorr- ahem, embarrassed).

katz
katz
10 years ago

How did you end up with a Russian handle?

strivingally
strivingally
10 years ago

I think inurashii-chan nailed it:

https://twitter.com/inurashii/status/520951829430296578

Hyatt
Hyatt
10 years ago

Reading the Escapist article with the statements from female game devs, and I can’t look at the comments section because the first one in the FB section is “No, you’re wrong about us, you’re hurting us.” GG people talk about how anti-GG erases women who don’t fit “their narrative” and ignore their stories, but when presented with women who are telling them that GG scares them, they brush it off and make it all about how unfairly maligned GG is. The cognitive dissonance is really disturbing to me, and it just keeps getting worse. I shouldn’t have to remind a GGer to black out personal information of one of their supporters, and being met with yet another justification for not blacking it out is doubly worrying.

Shaenon
Shaenon
10 years ago

Oh yeah, and claiming people were killed because of Zoe Quinn? Seriously? The only person who might end up dead is she herself. These melodrama llamas really need to get a life, collectively.

The logic there is so amazing.

1) The harassment campaigns against women are making gamers look bad.
2) This is the women’s fault. After all, if they weren’t being harassed, gamers wouldn’t look bad for harassing them.
3) It’s making gamers look so bad, in fact, that employers may become reluctant to hire people who identify as gamers. Or they could fire gamer employees who use their work hours to harass women, which is so unfair!
4) Someday this hypothetical anti-gamer discrimination will get so bad that gamers will be unable to get jobs and will STARVE TO DEATH BY THE MILLIONS.
5) This imaginary discrimination is a much more serious problem than the actual discrimination, hate campaigns and death threats going on in the gaming world right now. After all, the imaginary discrimination affects men.

grumpyoldnurse
grumpyoldnurse
10 years ago

they could fire gamer employees who use their work hours to harass women, which is so unfair!

FFS!!! I have an coworker who got officially reprimanded for checking zer FaceBook on a company computer! Somebody, Call the WAAAAAAAAmbulace!

Dennis Jernberg (@dennis_jernberg)
Dennis Jernberg (@dennis_jernberg)
10 years ago

I’m still lying low on Twitter (I was already), but I’m keeping track of the situation as best I can and preparing for when the time comes to do battle (and I’m following too). I’ve had some skirmishes with the #tcot faction before, but nothing this big yet (I merely got blocked by Glenn Beck, Scott Baio, and a few others).

Re “two sides”: that strikes me as an all too familiar #msmfail conservative meme by which establishment media outlets declare themselves “centrist” (read: not Fox News) while still trying to force the “Overton window” as far right as they can, so I’m not surprised the GG reactionaries are latching onto it so hard.

@Bernardo: Speaking of reactionary trends originating in America, the Alternative für Deutschland party looks like a clone of the “TEA Party” faction of our Republican Party (that “TEA” is a pun on the Boston Tea Party and stands for “Taxed Enough Already”). And I’m somewhat familiar with its neoliberal-monarchist faction, since I’ve read some of their posts during my occasional sojourns onto the US libertarian sites (e.g. Hans-Hermann Hoppe on LewRockwell.com). No doubt they have links to the UK Independence Party too, being both Euroskeptic and reactionary.

lacerta viridis
lacerta viridis
10 years ago

@Shaenon Thanks for unravelling that particular piece of bizarre troll logic, because I couldn’t make sense of it at all. ZOE QUINN KILLED IMAGINARY GAMERS! SOMEHOW!

1 2 3 4 5 … 7