Totalbiscut was on the Packman show, his was the best interview of them all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaMccosnRMc

 

Quoth wiki: "New York is a weekly magazine concerned with life, culture, politics, and style broadly, and with a particular emphasis on New York City."

And people coming together from various strata of life and different parts of the country to celebrate - of all things - the birthday of a website might just be odd enough to warrant a piece in the 'culture' part. Add gamergate to that and it presumably became worthwhile enough?

 

Derp. My apologies for that. It is correctly spelled Gaider. I should know this. I think I wrote that half-asleep...

 

That's...interesting to hear.

 

Well, even if that's true the final product is what really matters. I'm sure Sarkeesian is very pleased with how they edited it.

 

They had two options for spin, and chose the one they could get the most laughs from. IIRC Colbert never pretends he is "fair and balanced".

 

The problem is that the public at large is not really aware of this debate going on. I've yet to see an article from CNN, fox, abc, etc on this issue. Colbert is probably the first widely watched medium that mentions Gamergate. And he glosses over/perpetuates one view to the viewers.

The public perception of these viewers is just a brief mention of a group of misogynists and they certainly won't feel the need to research such an "idiotic and bigoted movement."

 

Well, yeah, but feminists are sexy because they have vaginas, and of course we're misogynists no matter what.

(Arguing sexual politics has made me... pretty fucking bitter, at points.)

 

Question. Maybe I'm a bit behind the times, but wasn't GamerGate all started because this one douche wrote some hatefic about his ex or something? Maybe the movement has some decent points now, but when I last tuned in to see what was up with it, it was just a lot of fucked up shit.

I think there was actually a Cracked article about it recently, though I didn't stop to read it. But then, y'know, Cracked. Line up for salt shakers.

 

It was less "hatefic" and more "Vile and baseless accusations in a wide spread of gaming media that's completely disproportionate to anyone involved", but then it came out that Zoe Quinn was just a genuinely horrible fucking person with serious skeletons in her closet, and the whole of gaming press jumped to defend her while simultaneously shitting all over the gaming public via a string of "Gamers are dead!"/"Gamers are misogynist!" articles on the Kotaku/Gawker network. Now you have a serious case of people reacting negatively to their hand being bitten.

(And if anyone wants to argue about Zoe Quinn, I once more refer you to the bullcrap she pulled in regards to TFYC. I really wish she'd just sucked a few cocks because what she actually did was far more vile.)

 

That remains one of the oddest forms of hyperbole in the whole early debate. Had Alexander gone with something like 'gaming is growing up' in reference to the less-AAA-more-indie point that was made, I guess that half the wind would have been taken out of GG, even if the core point of gamers being over remained the same. C'est le ton qui fait la musique.

It is less clickbaity though, that I will grant. (Which in itself is a part of why it'd've been less of a rallying point for GG.)

From my -admittedly less pro-GG than many in this thread- perspective, I'd say Coyote's read is fairly spot-on, with the addendum that there probably (I don't know the exact timeline) were attacks on Quinn even before the whole TFYC thing came to prominence -- IIRC it was the fact that someone went digging for said skeletons that caused TFYC to get involved. That, plus the aforementioned gamers are dead articles have caused what boils down to people feeling attacked in their (dare I say cultural?) identity, which leads to a counter-movement aaaaaand suddenly it's November with both sides proclaiming minor victories here and there. (But really: from where I'm standing, it looks more like a reenactment of the trenches.)

Also, despite being an interview with Zoe Quinn (who is not liked around here, to put it mildly), there's a neat bit of info in a BBC article. The entire 'pure toxicity' part is probably worth it to read. Choice (read: most important IMO) quote:

 

I dunno if it works the same for these sites, but with football and its press, the titles of the articles aren't generally chosen by the writers.

 

I'm honestly not sure whether that'd apply to sites like these. I know newspapers often work like that, but I'm fairly certain it's not like that all the time. It also doesn't exactly matter - it'd merely shift the blame from Alexander to some unknown staffer, which means Alexander would take the blame anyway, because that's the name on there.

 

I already made this point earlier in the thread but the problem with Leigh Alexander's article wasn't just the title "gamer's are dead." It was what was in it. Alexander insulted and degraded Gamers and took a general 'holier than thou' attitude that is prevalent in other journalists like herself.

I would've been fine if it was merely an article about gaming going mainstream and needing to grow up as a result of it. The problem is that it wasn't.

 

Oh yeah, there is the whole issue of her faking harassment from fucking *Wizardchan* of all groups. Thanks, I'd forgotten about that in my writeup.

 

For most I'd say that the biggest problem with Leigh Alexander's post was that it was posted simultaneously with a dozen other articles with the same message because her website was part of a mailing list dictating which agenda to push and when.

For me it's because previously Leigh Alexander was damn a good journalist who researched potentially controversial subjects extremely well, and wrote about her own opinions regardless of any sort of narrative or agenda, like in her report on Katawa Shoujo where she even went into depth about an old 4chan story to give readers real context and insight into the culture surrounding a game about fucking crippled bitches.
Compare that post to her article on why gamers are awful.
I don't know what killed her passion for video games (or at least the people playing them), and I'm not going to concretely point something specific out as a 100% "that's it" moment but I think the biggest contributor was the readers focus on her gender, from both sides of the "argument", long before gamergate was a thing.
This article really paints a picture of a tired writer constantly needled at because of her gender, by people who see games as their no-girls-allowed free dick swinging club and people who fucking jizz over girls kind of liking games and want her opinion on anything even remotely related to tits and games in relation to one another. In the years since then, I've gotta say that it went from fatigue to outright anger, which is why she was okay with throwing the entire subculture under a bus.
I honestly can't blame her for that if this was the case. To me she's probably one of the most sympathetic public figures of the current debacle, even taking into account her tweeting that you should totally doxx people, actively being involved in corruption and generally being an all-round awful human being, if only because unlike the rest of the mob I can see why she'd turn into such a hateful person. There's basically a visual timeline in her writing showing her steadily becoming more apathetic, then pissed off about gaming culture, whereas Phil Fish for example was born a giant dick wrapped in a fucking asshole and the only development he ever had was growing sideburn shaped indicators for how much of a prick he was.
Which is all awful for her as a person and for us as an audience, since she had great taste in games and actually researched what she was writing instead of shitting all over a page, vaguely shaping the feces into something agenda shaped and advertising it by telling someone to kill themselves over twitter, like every other god forsaken journalist in gaming. Whenever someone asks me what I wish video game journalism was like, I point to that Leigh Alexander piece about how the morality of fetishising thalidomide babies is just like, your opinion man.

i've been drinking

 

So your problem is that Colbert isn't being a journalist? I don't really see how you can call him out on that, he isn't. He is an entertainer who engages in political satire, there is no reason why he should feel any obligation to show both sides of an issue.

 

Well, you know how the jester's the only one who can criticize the king and get away with it? It's kind of a shame when he doesn't take advantage of a good opportunity.