The latest brilliant plan by the GamerGaters to bring gaming industry corruption publications that say mean things about them to their knees?
OPERATION KRAMPUS, which is literally a plan to RUIN CHRISTMAS by … boycotting every game maker that continues to send review copies of games to the ever-growing list of game-related publications that the GamerGaters have decided aren’t sufficiently adoring towards the GamerGate Revolution.
No, really:
![OPERATION KRAMPUS The Leader of Gamergate 10/13/14 (Mon) 16:56:46 ID: 15d7f7 No.104068[Last 50 Posts][Watch Thread] OPERATION KRAMPUS Winter is coming, and with it the holiday sales rush. We are two months into #GamerGate, advertisers continue to withdraw, but the gaming websites have issued no apology and continue to survive. It's time to escalate. People have said from the beginning that if this drags out until winter, it will affect games sales and force the hand of developers. It is time to assure that. The operation is twofold: 1) A complete boycott of games made by companies who send review codes/copies to anti-gamer publications. Gamers are under attack by the gaming websites. The developers cannot support both, and anything done by developers that allows these websites to thrive is a show of support. Contact the PR departments of the game companies. Let them know that we are angry and offended. Tell them that we will not support companies who work with the websites that have attacked us. 2) Spread the word to holiday shoppers. Flood #BlackFriday and #CyberMonday with pro-#GamerGate messages. Let holiday shoppers know which companies advertise on anti-consumer gaming websites and that they should not buy from those companies. Provide alternative places for holiday shoppers to make their purchases. Continue contacting advertisers with OPERATION DISRESPECTFUL NOD as before, but spread the word to other customers as well. The message needs to be crystal clear: Support people who attack your customers and your customers will no longer support you. First step is to collect information. Compile a list of companies who send review codes/copies to Kotaku, Polygon, and the like and how to contact their PR departments. Then let the emails fly. This will be our winter campaign.](https://manboobz.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/krampus.png)
Happily, I suspect that the GamerGaters’ master plan is simply too ridiculous to succeed. Because, seriously? The ever-expanding list of publications and websites they want to destroy consists of a rather large portion of all gaming media, not to mention pretty much every other non-gaming publication that’s written about GamerGate.
Here’s an incomplete list of the websites and publications that the GamerGaters are trying to boycott:
Kotaku; Polygon; Destructoid; Rock, Paper, Shotgun; The Escapist; Motherboard; IGN; GameSpot; Gamasutra; Gameranx; PCGamer.com; Xbox 360: The Official Xbox Magazine; Total Xbox; Gameplanet; Gizmodo; TechCrunch; Ars Technica; VICE; The Daily Dot; Badass Digest; The Daily Beast; Raw Story; The Mary Sue; Salon; BuzzFeed; Uproxx; Paste Magazine; Wired; The New Yorker; Cracked; Mic; xoJane; The Verge; Gawker; Valleywag; Defamer; Lifehacker; Deadspin; Screamer; io9; Sploid; Jalopnik; Paging Dr. NerdLove; RationalWiki; TV Tropes.
Now, granted, Dr. NerdLove and The New Yorker don’t exactly publish a lot of video game reviews, but do GamerGaters really think they can stop game makers from sending review copies to IGN, Gamespot, PCGamer, the offical Xbox magazine, The Escapist, and Kotaku? That seems about as likely to happen as movie studion forbidding critics from the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly and the AV Club from seeing their films.
I guess the open question isn’t so much whether OPERATION KRAMPUS will bring the eeeevill game sites and/or companies to their knees — seems a tad unlikely — but whether the GamerGaters’ collective tantrum will throw a wrench in game sales this holiday season and basically ruin Christmas for everyone in the games biz anyway.
But hey, there’s no reason any of this has to ruin Christmas for me. See, for some reason I’m not on this GamerGate list of baddies yet, as far as I know, so I would like to encourage all game makers out there to send me all their extra review copies and codes. I won’t review any of the games in question, because that’s not what I do, and also I suck at most games, but at least it won’t get the GamerGaters mad at you.
Merry Christmas!
H/T — @EffNOVideoGames
Sheesh @ everybody who thinks it’s ridiculous to not have electronic gaming in my home…
It’s about the points to be made and conversations that stem from it. It’s also the right and responsibility of the adults to set the tone of the household. And, not less than anything, it’s about the inappropriate behavior, mood swings, limited hobby activities and horrible grades that were happening before we made this an extremely game-limited zone. Making it a total game-free zone is not that radical a change. Having a house without computer games and electronic gaming systems is really not that radical a thing. Honestly folks. It’s not. Neither is not having access to the Internet at home, although in our case, we just limit the teen’s use of it to school work and limited hours on non-school nights. That’s not radical, either. There remain other hobbies to be had and developed. Honest to god, there is life — fun life, fulfilling life, places to go, people to meet, things to see and do — outside electronic games and the internetz.
If our goal were to keep the teen in our house from ever being “justifiably” upset and angry, we’d place no restrictions on his behavior and activities at all, would we? We’d never serve spinach, we’d never withhold his allowance if he didn’t do his chores — we wouldn’t give him work to do around the house in the first place, for that matter — and we’d never have him suffer any negative consequences for any inappropriate behavior. Getting “justifiably” angry and upset over rules is something that teenagers are just going to do, and living through that is part of what helps them develop their frontal lobes and grow up. So is having conversations about why there’s never going to be a GTA in this house, and now why we’re shutting down the games completely.
When he moves out, he can game all he wants. However, because he has been living in a home in which any inclination to over-indulge in that activity has not been indulged, and in which seriously thinking about the nature and implications of gaming culture has been strongly encouraged, he’s less likely to not know what else to do with himself when he’s out on his own and to independently question and critique gaming content. And if he does decide to submerge himself into the game world bubble, and his grades in college start reflecting it, that’s the end of college funding from us. He will be fully empowered to make that choice, but because he’s been given full opportunity to develop rational thought, I doubt we’re going to be able to get out of tuition payments. There’s always a downside, what?
What I’m getting out of Mary’s teel deers’ is that GG is a good excuse to ban electronic gaming. Not sure why this fit in with the subject, since clearly the actual substance of GG isn’t an issue (other than being nasty) with the stepson.
Hahaha, I’m getting the sense Mary thinks video games are a ‘childish’ pursuit. (Some of you know why I’m laughing about this.)
Going off to find where my eyes rolled to.
@ Mary
Nobody in my household is a gamer, thus we don’t own any gaming equipment. I still think you’re being unreasonable (and also long-winded – editing, it’s a thing).
@ puddle, the stepson definitely has gamergate on his radar screen, and it’s been in his consciousness for longer that it’s been in ours. Lots of teenagers are fully aware of it and opining about it amongst each other, as well as opining about feminist critiques of games. Parents would be wise to not assume their kids know nothing about any of this and, therefore, feel like they needn’t have conversations about it with those kids. Making our home a game-free zone is in part, a response to that situation (as well as all those other problems the gaming habit was causing). It’s not a radical response, it doesn’t seriously alter what already goes on in this house, and it opens the door for substantive conversations about GG in particular, and critiques of game content in general. Can one have a substantive conversation on those subjects without pulling the plug on the XBox? Sure, but that’s not what we’re doing around here.
Now nobody is a gamer in our household, either, cassandra, at least not while in this house. Seems to be working fine and gives us one less source of constant conflict. No temper tantrums, just lots of dinner table conversations and reading. Pretty cool, eh?
This reminded me to play Loved again. I find it perversely soothing and calming.
I do find it kinda weird to be putting limits like that on a seventeen-year-old’s behavior. I mean, that’s a year away from adulthood and voting.
@lbt, not “weird” at all. It’s perfectly reasonable parental discretion. It’s generally a good idea to provide some limits to 17 year olds, you know. This one provides balance and perspective; some household he associates with are into the gaming thing, some aren’t, and he knows why this one isn’t.
Not sure why anyone here would get worked up by that decision, particularly since it has fueled some really good discussions in our house with a young man who is in critically important years of sorting out gender issues. I’m sure we can all agree that’s a good thing and let individual households decide how they want to go about instigating such conversations.
Hey, if you want to treat your 17 year old like he’s 10 it’s not as if any of us can stop you. We’re not obliged to give you an approving pat on the back, though.
RE: Mary
It’s just weird to me because I was living independently when I was seventeen. (Well, in a dorm, and for just a summer. Still, my parents were over a thousand miles away, and I had absolutely no adult supervision. Good thing, too; it’s how I escaped an abusive situation.) So the thought of having someone trying to control my gaming or Internet access when I was living in an alien city not knowing a soul… it’s just strange to me.
@ LBT
I started doing that when I was 11 (at boarding school so there was some supervision, but certainly not on the level where people were trying to control what my hobbies were), so imagine how odd this sounds to me.
Puddleglum, I was rolling my eyes too.
Mary, if you think you have no gaming in your home simply because you have no video game platforms you are deceiving yourself. Sorry to disabuse you of your prideful notions of control, but there it is.
Also, if his grades aren’t high enough then there goes his parental college funding! Parent of the year, right here.
RE: cassandrakitty
I forgot that you did boarding school! (And am impressed you made it through; had we been sent to boarding school at eleven, I imagine it would’ve ended horrifically.)
Yeah, honestly, I’m kinda perplexed, because it’s like… dude’s going to be presumably living independently within a year or so. I mean, if the kid hasn’t learned self-control himself by now…
But what the fuck do I know, I ain’t a parent. And our younger brother at the age of seventeen was the sort where, when our parents wanted to get rid of some truly heinous liquor, simply told him over and over not to take it and DEFINITELY not to take it to his friends’ party.
Apart from anything else, yeah, it does seem a bit like locking the barn door after all the horses have already made it to the next state and the rest of the barn has mostly burned down.
Also, the idea of passing on awful booze to badly behaved teenagers may be the first thing I’ve ever heard about your parents that I don’t entirely disapprove of. Taking a gulp of siddiqui (Arab moonshine) from what I thought was a bottle of Perrier at a young age certainly put me off drinking for a while.
What I mainly got out of it is that Mary wants cookies and praise for her parenting skills. Your interpretation also works.
RE: cassandrakitty
Well, it kinda failed, since the entire bottle got emptied and our brother returned home drunk as a skunk. At least he didn’t drive; I have no idea how he got home.
(It was a bottle of Midori, if anyone’s curious.)
That was brilliant!
RE: grumpyoldnurse
I really like Loved, and can never play it through just once. I always want to get ALL THE ENDINGS. Part of me just finds it really cathartic to escape a creepy controlling entity that always misgenders you and tells you how worthless you are, while the environment becomes steadily more chaotic and colorful.
Plus it’s short and effective, which I’ve grown to appreciate more and more as I’ve aged. Just like Quing’s Quest VII!
I also recommend High-End Customizable Sauna Experience, a cyberpunk hacking adventure, with similar play and amusement as Quing’s Quest!
Finally, someone else who doesn’t like Midori. Mr pallygirl really likes it.
Dammit LBT, why didn’t I know you when you lived in the same general area as me?
Well, gang, welcome to a view of another approach. No cookies and congratulations necessary. Keep them for yourselves, please.
Yes, yes, bewilder. There are computers (time on which is pretty restricted) and smart phones (he doesn’t have one) and iPods engineered for maximum funness (his is only engineered for the lower quadrant of funness). Yep. Those things exist. It’s simply amazing that I know about them, but there you are.
And yes, cassandra, if we’re forking out thousands of dollars on tuition, and he looks like he’s opting for the eight year undergraduate plan with academic warnings and bouts of academic suspension because he spends more time playing on his XBox than going to and studying for his classes, we won’t pay for it. Throw me a parade.
The smug is strong with this one. Coincidentally, I just happened to remember that I should probably go tell my dad how much I appreciate him. Huh, wonder how that happened?
Be sure to write in 5 years when your relationship with him is in the toilet.
Midori is nasty. But still better than Mary’s parenting style.
Those sticky sweet drinks will give you the hangover from hell too.