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Old October 3rd, 2014 #9
Sam Emerson
Diversity = White Genocide
 
Join Date: Dec 2013
Location: Doom Fort II
Posts: 2,800
Default Gamergate and the End of Culture

http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/...end-of-culture

Miss Quinn has one game to her credit, a So This Is How It Ends entry in its own right called Depression Quest. You are a “human being” (so as to include all the people who can’t figure out what sex they are, though this still presumably excludes the otherkin) living with depression. And that’s it. The game–by which I mean a series of web pages–has the purpose of “spreading awareness,” and it accomplished that in my case. After five minutes of “play,” I certainly understood depression as I found myself calculating whether the ceiling fan could support a rope and my body weight.

How the hell is this a critically acclaimed project rather than an obscure website? Well, that brings us to the heart of Gamergate. Like the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Gamergate isn’t really about sex–but it is. In 2013, Zoe Quinn managed to get herself a boyfriend who shared her interest in social justice. It emerges that she was cheating on him with as many as five different men (hence the alternate name for the scandal–Five Guys). Her boyfriend responded by posting the entire sordid history of their relationship online. (As we’ve started with the jokes already, what does Zoe Quinn do after she’s been to Five Guys? Finally get something to eat.)

Why does this matter to anyone? Because these men included gaming journalists who were promoting and reporting on her projects. Like any self-respecting and strong independent woman, Quinn had essentially slept her way into a career. And just as if it would be considered a gross violation of ethics if a Politico reporter was having a House of Cards-style affair with a politician she is ostensibly covering, the inappropriate personal relationship between various industry figures and an “independent” game producer raised questions about the entire state of the industry.

What followed were a series of claims and counter-claims between Zoe Quinn and her detractors. These can be broadly separated into two camps. The anti-Zoe forces are mostly independent investigators and online commentators. They include commentators like Internet Aristocrat and the TheInvestigamer, posters on forums like Reddit and /pol, and some borderline Beltway Right figures like Christina Hoff Summers of the American Enterprise Institute. Even Breitbart has seized on the cause, notably revealing a “Journolist” style collective effort to shape the Narrative.

Their fire is directed not just on Quinn but on “Social Justice Warriors” (SJW’s) generally, who are seen as totalitarian, humorless, and engaged in a hostile takeover of the gaming subculture. More importantly, as the behavior of Quinn herself shows, “social justice” is more about money and control over resources than anything else. Quinn systematically took down an effort by a group called “Fine Young Capitalists” to promote female game developers, ostensibly for social justice reasons but also to secure her own market share. The result lead to the individuals at FYC being “doxed” and receiving death threats.

In contrast, Quinn’s defenders are precisely what you would expect and their case can be summarized easily. Shut up, they explained.