Two of the best commentaries I've seen about GamerGate

[40hz]

Two good posts regarding GamerGate that are actually worth reading IMO. Both from Popehat.

The first by "Clark" talking about how the whole idiotic thing got started - and how it evolved to even greater levels of idiocy from there:

Gamer Gate: Three Stages to Obit

Posted By Clark On October 21, 2014 @ 12:09 pm

A lot of things been written about Gamer Gate. Some of them wrong, some of them stupid, some of them both.

A lot of the confusion (both accidental and malicious) is because Gamer Gate is three separate things clustered together under one name. <more>

The second is by Ken White who provides 10 mini-rants which are very funny and enlightening - and apply equally to any major web kerfuffle. A must read!

Ten Short Rants About #GamerGate

by Ken White · October 26, 2014

If you know what #GamerGate is, I don't have to tell you. If you don't know what #GamerGate is, any description I give you will be attacked by hordes of partisans saying that I have described it unfairly and that the sources I have linked are biased. So I'm going to treat you, dear readers, as if you know what it is. Clark wrote a post about it last week. My take is different. I'm not going to offer you a timeline or an attempt at a definitive "what happened" or "who is right." Instead I'm going to rant about ten ways that this controversy illuminates how we're screwed up. <more>

[Renegade]

I liked the Clark post better. But, they were quite similar in many ways.

One (partial) comment from the first by Clark:

http://www.popehat.c...bit/#comment-1277710

It's a little more complicated than that. Gamergate started, not as a relationship spat, but as a competence matter. Zoe Quinn is no more a developer of video games than you or I. Last year, she, and two partners, made a text-based choose-your-own adventure on the subject of depression using free online tools from http://twinery.org/. No programming was involved whatsoever. (Think of a '90s web developer who just used FrontPage and couldn't code HTML, let alone js or Perl.)

Depression Quest's code was, needless to say, unoriginal, its theme decidedly uncommercial, its use of language trite (just read her description for grammatical errors). It was rejected by Steam, the Amazon Marketplace of downloadable video games, last December, and the subject of mockery in online forums. Quinn then began claiming rampant sexism was "holding her back."

The first 2 paragraphs of the comment are overly kind to the point of being obsequious regarding Depression Quest. The game is simply about the worst POS I've ever seen.

Has anyone actually tried to play it?

It's completely unplayable. It's mind-numbingly boring. It takes the 'un' in 'fun' and copies it to the front - 'unfun'. It will make you want to kill yourself rather than spend another second playing it. That it has received so much attention is just mind-boggling.

I can't imagine any kind of mockery of the game being anything less than kind given just how horrible it is.

[Deozaan]

Reasonably fair articles. I think I also liked the Clark one better, though there was a part or two where I wondered what the heck he was talking about.

I feel that Rant #8 misses the point of the #NotYourShield hashtag.

8. Women, Minorities, and LGBT People Are Not Magic.

The "#NotYourShield" hashtag is apparently intended to convey that #GamerGate can't be sexist or racist or anti-gay because there are women and minorities and LGBT people who support #GamerGate.

The hashtag wasn't meant to say that GG can't be *-ist because there are minorities who support it and said minorities are incapable of being *-ist. It was a response to anti-GG people saying, essentially:

"Literally the only people who support GG are straight white male misogynists!"

The #NotYourShield hashtag was a way to show that supporters of GG are a diverse group of people, and the opposition was whitewashing (is that the right term?) pro-GG folk and totally dehumanizing anyone who wasn't straight, white, male, or a misogynist. Which, by my estimation, was/is practically every single supporter of GG, since even if you are a straight, white, male supporter of GG, it's highly unlikely that you're also a misogynist.