Denial

"For us to serve you better, please connect your Steam and Twitter accounts." *Boop* "Your Steam account has been suspended." Just imagine.

In a sense, the only reason not to sell at that point is because you don't need to. Like, there were rumors of Microsoft buying Valve at various points, but there was never any reason why Gabe Newell - already sufficiently wealthy, first from Microsoft stock and then Valve stock, to be able to do pretty much what he wants for the rest of his life - would want to be an employee at Microsoft again... (Oh, man. What if Notch turns out to be this generation's Peter Molyneux? Maybe not the Molyneux we need, but the Molyneux we deserve...)

Nobody pronounces Leigh "lei". Like, nobody at all. Otherwise... this guy just seems to be reading website text. Does it get good? It doesn't get good, does it?

On the other hand, I can imagine how awful Twitter might be for a Polygon writer if nobody was blocked. I noticed a couple of names in the list of people who have been kicking around the dread hashtag. However, using somebody else's blocklist, using Blocktogether, does sound like a hostage to fortune. (There's blockbot, which has a list of known trolls, spammers, griefers etc, which works a bit differently.) OTOH, I can't fault someone for blocking people in general. And if you're the editor in chief of Polygon and relying on Twitter as a primary mode of contact with industry figures, you're probably in trouble anyway, so I don't know how big a deal that is.

Oh, yeah, logic and rhetorical terms get used a lot - I think that's the effect of Reddit. Lots of "genetic fallacy" and "ad hominem" going around, not least because proponents of the hashtag keep turning out to have... complicated pasts.

This by Tadgh Kelly (disclosure- whom I know) is actually not a bad summary as well as something of a call to action. It doesn't cover everything - the Silverstring-as-ACORN part, for example, is not there, and I think TFYC as a whole doesn't feature noticeably, but then that feels like a sideshow anyway...

Is a legitimately terrific comment.

It looks like the Duke is on preorder - is it new? Sounds pretty cool, but I'd like to take a look at it...

Oh, man. Are Twitch streams the new imgur pinboards? They take so long...

If I make you a chair with three functioning legs, that chair is not corrupt unless I was paid by your sworn enemy to endanger your coccyx. It is however indubitably a shoddy piece of work. Shoddy journalism may also be corrupt journalism. However, it need not be. Plenty of people are able to turn out substandard work without being illicitly encouraged to do so. So, you know, words mean things? That's basically what's happening here. Words are meaning things.

That isn't corruption; it's just shoddy journalism. The issue there being that the enthusiast press (which most, if not all, games-specific sites pretty much inevitably are) is usually run at razor-thin margins, usually with expenses needing to be near zero and ad revenues being very limited. Sites like Polygon (Vox Media), Kotaku (Gawker Media) and at a lower tier The Escapist (Defy Media) have the ability to cross-market and cut better per-view/click revenue deals, but if you look at the sites that the Gaters were holding up as shining examples of the kind of journalism they want to see - places like Cinemablend's gaming section - you're probably looking at people who are paid little or nothing for their labor. They may get freebies from PR, and that may be the bargain: they produce content that pulls in some ad views - mainly copying and pasting press releases, either with minor alteration or straight out - and in return can try to get free merch. One weird thing is that people without journalistic training are being lovebombed - despite one of the 'gate's multifarious demands being the frankly hilarious stipulation that you need a journalism degree before being able to be a journalist - and, in part due to that lack of journalistic training, they are responding to a level of attention and praise they have never previously received by moving further into the tank. (I guess, Goodgames.us could become a media giant and give them all paying gigs. But it feels like it will be another site with limited editorial oversight, a largely amateur staff and a stock in trade of reproducing press releases and pestering publishers for review copies.) Which way The Escapist jumps probably remains the most interesting element of this farrago from a business perspective.

That QA example is really good. On the other hand, that's two hours out of the life of someone with things to do, and the m.o. of trolls is to try to waste your time for as long as possible, so it could have gone a lot worse...

Also, wasn't Identity Crisis roundly criticized for depending on the illogical targeting of a widely beloved woman by an irrational stalker for its narrative impetus? Seems legit. (Edit of "universally", because somebody out there probably hates Sue Dibney.)

You're wrong, FWIW - which doesn't mean it's _sincere_, but doesn't mean it's sarcastic. I think Alexander Macris may be positioning the Escapist to try to scoop up the people who are insisting that they are done with sites like Kotaku, Destructoid, IGN, Giant Bomb etc. It'll be interesting to see how big that audience actually is... I have my suspicions. The Escapist is pretty well-positioned for that, since its flagship products are largely already video podcasts, so is a more native fit with the YouTuber culture. It's been a long time, in online publishing years, since Julianne Greer was running it as a weekly online magazine of longform pieces on video games...

It's interesting. I don't think you have to do much to get lovebombed; the Escapist guy has arguably overegged the pudding, there. All you really need to do is downplay the harassment angle (cf Totalbiscuit's retroactively hilarious assertion that all right-thinking people know that hating women is wrong, and there's no need to go on about it), and do a fist-to-forehead bit about what this is really about. You want to do enough to get the praise from Twitter (which is _tremendously_ validating, btw), but not be cut out from the mainstream of acceptable journalistic community or repulse the larger community of readers who are responding with what at this point must be well-worn horror at the harassment.

I think he's trying to make it clear that the change of policy at Kotaku doesn't justify or excuse the harassment of Jenn Frank or Felix Maya Kramer.

There's actually a precursor of this kind of brouhaha when a guy called Burch out on the grounds that Tiny Tina's dialog was racially offensive* To which he responded, "I don't think that's the case", but then asked Twitter, got some responses and said that he'd think more about it and might tweak her presentation in future. That still turned into kind of a shitstorm, but. *Didn't see it myself, but I could follow the argument.

Well, the tiny crack through which the harassers squeezed their body, Tooms-like, was that initially she mentioned her friendship with ZQ in the first draft, but it was cut, and the Guardian's lawyers told her not to worry, and that for an opinion piece not focussed on ZQ that wasn't a material disclosure. So, to be clear, the lawyers of one of the most respected newspapers in the world, which already has its own code of ethics, were considered not to be sufficiently expert on disclosure or journalistic ethics, and a woman was hounded out of writing Genius.

From the SPJ Code of Ethics: Like, literally the first things it says.

It's possible, but Occam's razor suggests probably otherwise.

Well, if you want the full story, the by now inevitable imgur is here. The takeout is: I know that spelling/grammar mockery is the lowest form of critique, but really. Dude manages to spell "Riendeau" a different way every time, despite it being right there in the Twitter screencaps. Some people just don't respect their art...

Zoya Street, whose geek credentials are hopefully established by having written a book about the Dreamcast, wrote a piece at the Border House that helped to capture an ill-defined discomfort that I had with Totalbiscuit's response, which has grown in clarity as he's doubled down. I think that if one thing has definitely come out of this, it's that this "Haven't you heard? Sexism is over" stance (a line from Kate Beaton's amazing Strong Female Characters, mentioned above) is clearly inadequate to the realities of being a visible woman in games (or indeed anywhere else, qv the nude photo theft). (Edit to fix HTML)

Well, finance is difficult. Like, Gamsutra is owned by UBM Techweb . UBM also runs GDC. Look! The same organisation is paying journalists to write about developers, _and_ putting on an event which depends for its success on the attendance of developers! If you wanted to build a conspiracy theory based on that, it would be childishly simple. But the people who are trying to build their brands on this stuff - the anonymous YouTubers and the basement-level bloggers - a) don't have the tools to put that together (which in this case basically means the focus to click on a few links) and b ) don't have any interest in doing so, and know that their audience has no interest in trying to follow that stuff.

"It's partially organic." Wait, like the nanosuit in Crysis? If I'd known those "Gaming's Feminist Illuminati" T-shirts gave you cloak and bullet resistance, I would probably have bought one. Even though pink isn't my color.

Specifically, it's usually supported by a video of a talk she gave at Santa Monica College in 2010, but it's selectively excerpted. She says she'd love to play [sc. more] video games, but she doesn't like ripping people's heads off. So, she doesn't play a particular type of video game for pleasure, in essence. The funny thing about that, it seems to me, is that the dudebros were trying to undermine her by saying she wasn't a real gamer, and a couple of years on a whole bunch of people are saying "actually, if this is what being a real gamer entails, we don't want to be real gamers".