Granted it was during a bleak period of my life when I was so reactionary. But my god, to think these goobers are still around today, still doing racism and sexism, just moving from target to target to take out the impotent rage on.
Just reminded of it today with the “discourse” of Yasuke being in Ass Creed and G*mers changing any woman not white and waifish with AI.
I’m already prepared to end this conversation quickly depending on what you consider fallacies, but GamerGate started by targeting a specific woman rumored to have slept with a Kotaku journalist for positive reviews.
From the beginning, it was misogynistic, as more of these rumors circulated about other women as well. There was a minority subsection of people who only cared about things like journalists receiving gifts from devs, which did happen and deserves criticism, but it was used as a smokescreen to legitimize a movement against women and progressive elements in gaming, such as Anita Sarkeesian’s videos analyzing gender and misogyny in games.
Much like the Yasuke situation, there are probably a few people who care overly much about historical authenticity, but they amplify the voices of people who only care about it to the extent that they can downplay the accomplishments of a black person and push against those same progressive elements. Even if you never personally harassed someone, if you were a GamerGater, you gave power to people who did.
The freak out about Anita was so something. She was offering the most milquetoast, inoffensive, basic feminism 101 critiques of some games and the fash and proto-fash lost their entire goddamn mines.
Anita: "Hey did you ever think about how you can murder sex workers in Hitman? Why did they set up the game to allow you to do that? What can we learn by analyzing this question?
Fash: "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
This
You shouldn’t take what they said it was about at face value. Its the same with other right-wing movements like “Save the children” (really just anti-LGBTQ+), or anti-DEI (white supremacist movement).
Well sure. But if the broken clock happened to be right about the time in this case, my question was why anyone would be ashamed of believing it.
Pointing out an obvious problem and assigning blame incorrectly does not make them right. That’s the problem being highlighted here. I don’t think it’s weird for someone to feel ashamed about getting caught up in Gamergate discourse because none of it was legitimate aside from what was being presented at the surface (the ethics of gaming journalism).
its a pretty common fascist tactic, idk why we’re supposed to give points to idiots who acknowledge basic reality and then blame it on like random minorities
Thanks for the insights!