Intel pulls ads from Gamasutra in response to #GamerGate
Gamasutra says Intel was "flooded with complaints over a recent opinion piece" concerning video game equality
In what seems to be the first actual corporate action in response to #GamerGate, computer chip firm Intel has pulled its advertising support from game development website Gamasutra. "Intel has pulled its advertising from website Gamasutra," Intel spokesperson Bill Calder confirmed to Re/code. "We take feedback from our customers very seriously especially as it relates to contextually relevant content and placements."
@BuckSexington Yes, our partners at @intel were flooded with complaints over a recent opinion piece, and they did pull an ad campaign.
— Gamasutra (@gamasutra) October 1, 2014
Intel was apparently "flooded" with complaints from #GamerGate supporters who did not like the tone of editor-at-large Leigh Alexander's article entitled "'Gamers' don't have to be your audience. 'Gamers' are over." In the op-ed Alexander pushes for equality in video games and protests the often sexist culture that has permeated the "gamer culture" for the last couple decades. She urges game developers to rebuff that culture and create a new one that's inclusive of players of all types, genders, races and sexual orientations. "We are refusing to let anyone feel prohibited from participating," Alexander wrote.
People who self-identify as "gamers" felt as though Alexander was writing about the death of gaming and rallied against her views, ultimately causing Intel to be concerned and remove its ads. The #GamerGate hashtag, started when actor Adam Baldwin was badgering independent developer Zoe Quinn, has unfortunately been closely associated with harassment of women online.
Some online have viewed the Intel decision as a victory and urged people via Reddit to continue sending emails and voicing displeasure with any sites that are "attacking gamers."
Edit: Why do you hate grammar?
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Jehferson Wohllerz Curupana da Rocha e Mello on 2nd October 2014 10:08pm
The article in question, Gamers are Over, is a very concise, very methodical argument as to why one should not use that term to self-describe. The opposing campaign is working with the politician's toolkit. I have seen this a millions times, it is your basic play if you want to manipulate people with text. Express your emotion, suggest to reader he should have the same emotion, reassure that there are reason why having this emotion is right, then point to walls of text nobody will read at this point. Throw it at enough people and you shall have your personal witch hunt consisting of people angry enough to do what you say, while still to lazy to ask the right questions. It is the 21st century in a nutshell so far, if you ask me.
If the public perception of gamers is dominated by people organizing into virtual witch hunts without offering any sort of reasonable arguments, then the term really will be forfeit, since it will no longer be attached to a positive culture. I rather use #Elene from now on, ELectronic ENtertainment Enthusiast.
But the fact that they still haven't publicly addressed this mistake or apologised is disgraceful. They need to defuse this soon before it becomes an even bigger PR disaster for them.
@Barrie Tingle: You understand "#notyourshield" is an astroturf campaign by the harrassers, yes? If you think there's any upside to vandals being able to disrupt the business of a legitimate industry resource, you need to have a bit of a think.
*facepalm*
#Notyourshield was literally started as an astroturfing effort by 4channers to make it appear that #gamergate had significantly more support outside of the privileged straight-white-male demographic than it actually has. Gaters were given detailed instructions and directions on creating fake Twitter accounts with stock photos to pose as women, members of ethnic minorities and LGBT individuals in order to, ironically, shield #gamergate from criticism. There are plenty of chatlogs and screenshots to prove this, it's not even just supposition.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Jessica Hyland on 3rd October 2014 5:20pm
What GamesIndustry.biz promotes is sensible, adult discussion about issues and anything offensive (including personal attacks) will be moderated.
Thanks for taking part in the conversation.
This is not about a social justice agenda (although why anyone would be against the systematic poor representation of minorities is beyond me). It is about a campaign that makes me ashamed to be a gamer.
If you really must get exercised about 'corruption in games media', there are plenty of actual ethical issues worth investigating. Zoe Quinn's sex life is categorically not one of those things.
That list you linked to is a list of ethical issues in games as a whole, and whilst it is a decent list for what it is the discussion here is about corruption in games media. If the alleged issues that have arisen recently (specifically those of cronyism collusion and nepotism) are not ethical issues in media (be it in games media, or any other kind of media) then what are they?
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Iain McNulty on 3rd October 2014 8:38pm
If we're still talking about Zoe Quinn's sex life, they're an incredibly transparent excuse to attack a moderately visible woman, her friends and supporters, and the social justice causes many people involved in games stand for.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Jessica Hyland on 3rd October 2014 8:45pm
I'll wait.
@Christian
'Damage control'? Leigh has been talking about those issues for years. Not her fault people didn't listen until she hurt the precious feelings of some people who cling a bit too closely to the carefully constructed hypercapitalist consumer identity her article criticised.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Jessica Hyland on 3rd October 2014 9:24pm
Damn right I'm 'salty'. I am sick to utter death of watching and occasionally being subjected to torrents of abuse from hypersensitive overgrown children because people in the games industry dared to make games not deemed 'real' enough, because people dared to speak up about harassment, because people dared criticise the unhealthy culture that encourages people to build their entire identity around buying and consuming videogames.
You don't know the meaning of 'hateful harassment speech'. Having to sit here and watch you and people like you whinging about your hurt feelings that somehow justify a months-long campaign of harassment, abuse and threats is blood-curdlingly insulting.
True, and yet the article lists:
Why target specifically YouTubers as a one of the "real ethical concerns"? Does that same concern not apply to gaming media as a whole?
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Iain McNulty on 3rd October 2014 10:27pm
Luckily, they are an incredibly tiny(if extremely vocal) minority. I don't need the custom of people who think that sort of behaviour is in any way justified.
Same goes for Leigh Alexander, her arguments are not contested with better arguments, but with desperation attacks and generalizations. Sorry, that is not discourse, that is trash. If intellectuals formed groups enforcing their law in the style of an Islamists religious police, there would be no end to the lashings in town squares as a result of this.
You may now cry yourself to sleep over there not being enough supermodels of low moral fiber creating, or reviewing games. Because that was the point in time the games industry went to hell: when people started having relationships. Help me, I want to facepalm but have no hands.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Klaus Preisinger on 4th October 2014 12:53am
I didn't actually moderate your original comment, merely explained our policy, but I can understand if you're not happy with the standard of discussion required at GamesIndustry.biz. I'll amend your account as requested.
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Rachel Weber on 3rd October 2014 11:22pm
A Slashdot style voting system on comments would do better, but thats only my opinion.
Edited 3 times. Last edit by Ben Borthwick on 4th October 2014 4:18am
Here is a somewhat detailed laying out of facts:
kotaku article: http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indie-game-reality-tv-show-that-went-to-hell-1555599284
Talks about a televised gamejam, during which ZQ spearheaded a walk-out and the production tanked, even after their demands were met.
Contains: praise of person, mention of game by name, link to article on Gamasutra, various quotes, her intentions to run a game jam of her own. Sources: ZQ, friend she stayed with, friend she slept with.
Article comes out on the 3/31, they start "dating" on 4/1 (next day).http://kotaku.com/in-recent-days-ive-been-asked-several-times-about-a-pos-1624707346 he didn't inform his boss until August.
A few months earlier an article called; Admission Quest: Valve Greenlights 50 More Games
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/08/admission-quest-valve-greenlights-50-more-games/#comments
A list of games is provided, 3 games are given praise and internal link to the site: "standouts: powerful Twine darling Depression Quest,".
indiestatik article: http://indiestatik.com/2014/03/31/most-expensive-game-jam/
Contains praise of ZQ, describes how she rallied the troops, she slept on the guys couch after the debacle. Sources: ZQ, friend she slept with.
Worth to note: a 400K show was tanked a man was attacked in public for doing what he was called in to do: spice up a game jam tv show, admittedly not in the best possible way, but the only obvious drama when you decide to film a room of people sitting on computers.
Shortly after the game jam mentioned in the articles is announced (rebeljam), a page is created, there is a donate button, but no other details. Paypal is personal.
Game says part of proceeds go to a charity she has no affiliation with, she had to contact them to make them aware of her presence over a year after the game went on sale. Wiki: In the United States, prevention of charitable fraud is mostly a function of state governments,[7] and laws vary widely from state to state. Approximately 45 states have laws regulating charities and require registration before soliciting donations.
Then in the mid August a blog appears detailing abuse and these affairs. There are pages and pages of chat logs, this is where the connection was made.
Weak or strong it doesn't matter, suddenly coverage for what some people considered a none game on sites that indie developers want to appear on make sense.
Some people focus on the behavior of the person described in the chat logs. They become pretty nasty with their comments. Her nude photos were paid for are downloaded from a site and distributed (not personal - commercially released pornographic photos).
Other start digging around to figure out what has happened, who the other people are and most importantly: DO OTHER PEOPLE DO THIS?
Amongst the 5 people she revealed she cheated with, 1 was the blogger above, the other being her married boss and a few others.
As it turns out things are pretty connected between some devs, indie organizations and journo-bloggers.
The main sentiment here being that indie wasn't tainted by all this crap AAA outfits have been accused of in the past. Suddenly a lot of hyped games get their hype questioned.
And then comes the ban hammer, the DMCAs and all sorts of mass deletions on various sites.
As this is unfolding a familiar face in gamer controversy decides to drop her latest video in the middle of all this. Each video she has posted has created controversy - basically because games in her videos are misrepresented to fit a narrative.
This fuels the fire. A twitter shit storm falls upon all involved. Some characters get involved, their publicity is questioned, some fishy connections in funding are exposed.
All the sites involved and similar outfits don't allow discussion on their forums, but also don't cover any of this. Suddenly a storm of 14-20 articles drop with titles like the above. This is just kerosene.
The thing really takes off. All the while accusations of misogyny and sexism are hurled left and right, trying to paint the mob as a hate group, yet it is a group as diverse as the human kind. A new hashtag appears. The origin of the hashtag is documented and clear: a black gamer (I'm European) came home and saw the what was happening and started it, gamers from around the world used it, use of the hashtag to people not on twitter was explained in order to boost the signal.
A mailing list of over 150 games journalists and tech bloggers was revealed. Discussion on how to handle the ZQ issue as well as the accusations of collusion was part of leaked emails. Apparently discussing how to cover subjects over a variety of sites is common practice and nothing to worry about.
The digging continued. The writer of the article that led to Intel removing ads has a history of posting racist remarks and attacking or as she boasts: terminating careers with a click.
Anyway there are a lot more details, but these are pertinent to what you have talked about so far.
- There was limited coverage of ZQ on sites someone she was later involved with was working for.
- The #notyourshield is not astro-turfing, limited astro-turfing might have occurred (twitter is rife with that), but there are just too many photos with the tag handwritten that it is simply nonsensical to discard it as astro-turfing.
- The articles on the gamer identity were instigated by a person with frequent racist outbursts.
Some information to note:
- the developer's current boyfriend is a vocal supporter of tearing gaming culture limb to limb (all 5 implicated in the infamous post were also straight white males),
- the boyfriend of the video creator is also her producer, also a vocal supporter attacker of games and gaming culture, Both are straight white males, as is the majority of the staff on all the sites involved (upwards of 80%).
Besides these three very vocal women, all other women implicated have relations (public on twitter) with developers they have covered.
Also worth noting:
- some sites changed their ethics policy,
- some sites went back to old articles and added notes on Conflict of interest - retroactively, although marked as updates.
There are a lot more details, I won't focus on the attacks and doxxing both sides have been a part of. There a lot of details on another feminist crowdfunding campaign that got derailed and then resurrected - an interesting story and catalyst.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Konstantinos Giatilis on 4th October 2014 1:51am
@Ben I might have stepped into a time machine upon reading your comment, but was there not an outcry over YouTubers being held to the same standards of disclosure only weeks ago? And in regards to that, from what I can gather part of the Gamergate campaign has been the wanting and need for such transparency from gaming media, be it on blogs, actual games journalism sites, or on video sites such as pre-recorded content on YouTube, or sponsored live streams on Twitch (to name but two examples).
The sad thing is that from an outside view it seems video content producers actually opened up about this at the time, weeks before Gamergate was even a thing (during the aforementioned outcry), even doing interviews with the BBC about the issue, yet the gaming blogs have seemingly done the opposite and close ranks, seeming to refuse to even acknowledge that the transparency issue was even legitimate until the issue started to spiral out of control. As such, it seems that a lot of people have been given the impression that YouTubers want to keep an open dialogue with their audience, but the blogs and website journalists are keeping a very much "us and them" attitude of disconnection towards their audience, seemingly only engaging with their audience only when it benefits them.
Case in point (and to tie this into recent events): John Bain wanted to chair a roundtable discussion about the recent controversies associated with Gamergate, and put out an open invite for YouTubers and "traditional games press" journalists to appear on said show. However although YouTubers were apparently willing to participate, "traditional games press" journalists and bloggers from online gaming websites were generally not so willing, and by that he can be quoted as saying he was met with "walls of silence".
http://theralphretort.com/gamergate-exposes-leigh-alexander-part-2/
Some of my favorite from this person you want Intel to support:
http://theralphretort.com/wp-content/uploads/EVIDENCE4.jpg
http://imgur.com/o0iWc79.jpg
@Konstantinos Frankly, I think all those show is a person who goes combing through someone's timeline for tweets that appear to fit the original person's narrative with no consideration or information of the actual context or nuance the poster had at the time of posting.
You have an article here about a game being about sex and the gamers of Steam didn't want it, so Valve took down the Greenlight submission, I don't think an overtly patronizing group of "ethics police" that can't even abide by it's own profession's ethical code, is required. Games are all inclusive by nature, no one knows how you really look and no one really cares, unless they are losing to you, but you aren't going to cure sore losers by attacking all your audience with sweeping generalizations.
A game isn't bad if it allows you to do bad things and that's as simple as it gets. (I've even heard that sandbox games allow for too much freedom, yes, what we developers have tried to do for years now is too much...I ...what do you say to that?)
You're right, the issue has not yet been completely solved, with video content producers NOR traditional media in fact, given the latter have been around as long as the games industry itself, it is somewhat lame that they have not cleaned up their act by now, yet are accusing video content producers of making the same mistakes, sounds like a classic case of projection if anything. However unlike the traditional media it seems that video content producers are actually addressing such concerns, and quickly too, making declarations where there is a conflict of interest and such, so in seeing that the consumers have been asking why traditional media journalists and bloggers are finding it so hard to make such declarations themselves. And that is a very good question to ask.
Using online video hosting sites as a means to disseminate gaming news and gaming media is only a very recent thing (something which has gone MASSIVE in the past two to three years, and is something which will continue to grow), so you would be hard pressed to find such a controversy from the YouTubers from 2007. To say that people have a short memory for YouTubers and then use an example from 2007 seems very much to be false equivalence. The real test of such things will be in about five years time, and whether recent controversies will be remembered, and how they are remembered.
And that's before we come to the whole argument as to what actually constitutes "corruption" and not. That's a whole other issue, and that's not going to be something solvable in one swoop. It's completely understandable why YouTubers aren't aware or as learned in these things as traditional media as they're a younger medium. But many of the audience seem to take for granted both are already held to the same standards when they're not. It's almost exactly like the whole debate about whether games "journalists" should be held to the same standards as "real" journalists when the majority of us don't even consider ourselves "real" journalists or have many, many, many different roles within our remit, we just have the title as there's no real other good way to categorise our roles as a catch-all term.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Ben Borthwick on 4th October 2014 6:42pm
I'll admit I'm slightly biased as I've been following Leigh and her work for a long time (and I'm sure some will take that statement to disregard anything I may say), but I don't always agree 100% with every single tweet she may or may not make - and I never expect to. I also don't expect everyone else to have the same prior knowledge of Leigh or context of stuff she's said in the past as I do either, but that's exactly why taking old tweets out of context is an inherently flawed method of proving almost literally anything.
It should also be noted that Intel have now (rather half-heartedly at 5:30pm on a Friday mind) apologised, insisting they didn't want to "take sides." So now it seems there's very little evidence to suggest that their actions have been much more than reacting to mob pressure.
I know a lot of people too. None of them have had the need to express such opinions, let alone in public. If she can't behave in public maybe she isn't cut out for the job. I know that a lot of the minimum job workers she also routinely makes fun of have probably never needed to resort to racial remarks and can probably critique games more objectively, since they aren't "traumatized" by gamer nerd bullies when they were twelve or at least they don't let that taint their whole lives.
What you are saying is basically that someone is a person, so they can make mistakes. OK, fair enough.
Do you know what else is true? People get fired over these mistakes. Leigh would know, she brags about ending careers all the time. They made the mistake of being in her path and looking at her wrong.
Look I understand you might have an appreciation for someone, because they have written something you like. I like Lovecraft, I know he had racist sentiments, I don't apologize for him and I understand why he had those views. That doesn't make them right, that doesn't make them defensible, that certainly doesn't give him/her the right to call others what she has done, with proof and stay beyond reproach. To be frank if I had a boss and I was such an idiot that not only I had offended black people, Irish people, the main demographic supporting the whole industry I am part of, lost a high profile advertizing client I would think he would at least have the decency to fire me on the spot, let alone defend my drunken rants.
This is not an attack on you, you might like LA, but I understand that you are not her and I certainly don't think you agree 100%.
I do expect you to condemn her actions and not act like there is nothing to see here or that Intel wasn't right to pull support from a site that tries to antagonize a whole demographic with inaccuracies.
I have an exercise for you. Flip the gender of the author and change games to clothes.
Also, are you twelve years old or did you somehow manage to mistype Anita Sarkeesian's name? You need to do some serious growing up, man.
The GamerGate hashtag was made to combat journalistic corruption.
'Gamers' sent those letters as a response to Leigh Alexander's hate articles which essentially marked a demographic with a big broad brush of evil.
People then used that to go ahead and doxx a 10 year old, several female and male youtubers, transgendered teenagers, and the rest.
So yea, I'd tell intel to back out. Why? It's hate. It's caused several people to lose their livelihoods. And it's also racist.
And frankly, I'm not just going on because Leigh's written something I like. Like I said, I've followed her career for a long time. Is she outspoken? Hell yes. Is she always perfect? Hell no. "If she can't behave in public maybe she isn't cut out for the job?" how the hell is how she acts in public in any way a reflection on how she does her job? If that were the case, maybe you should go down to a nightclub or similar and tell anyone walking past they shouldn't be doing their job. Has she bragged about ending careers? Sure - but Leigh has a very bullish personality. Should she therefore not be surprised when she receives an equally hot-tempered response? Maybe, but that's largely irrelevant to the conversation. (And frankly from the evidence I've seen no-one, no matter how bullish, deserves the response many similar folk in the industry get for daring to speak up.)
Part of Leigh's job IS to have opinions. You don't have to agree with them, but she can have them and isn't doing anything that's against her role by putting these opinions down in an opinion column. Her experiences inform those opinions, as do her reactions. So the article that this whole thing comes from isn't what I'm calling a mistake. But like I said the other tweets we have no idea the context of what they're from. Would you like to be fired (for example) for something you said five years ago in a thing that had nothing to do with anything you're doing now? Yes, things come back to haunt you, but again, there is no context to base these tweets in to relate them to anything. My point is not so much that they're mistakes rather that there could be any number of plausible explanations for them. Using them is just akin to confirmation bias.
As for what this whole article thing is, it's pretty irking that - for the most part - it stems from a complete misunderstanding and misinterpretation of what Leigh's article was about - it was not "insulting a whole demographic" - it was about how the typical idea of a gamer as a primary audience to make a game for is dead, because the label is these days too broad to have a separate meaning. And the real kicker is - Gamasutra's "audience" - unlike what many people attacking that article seem to believe - isn't "gamers" but developers. So it was an indication that many developers are no longer making their games to the concept of gamers as a niche, because now everyone is - to varying degrees - a gamer. To put it another way, Activision doesn't make a game for "gamers" - they make a game for "shooter fans". And thinking that just the act of playing games should mean you're more important to a studio than other members of the audience just isn't true, because there are no true "other members of the audience." Everyone plays games now, and game development is by and large reflecting that.
Could it have been worded better? (Heck, I'm certain my explanation I just tried to make can be too) Maybe, maybe not - I think it's kinda too early to say and that's more her decision than anyone else's after all is said and done, but people attempting to go over her head to petitioning to have advertising removed from a piece that was always meant to be an opinion - which, let's be honest - is essentially an effort to silence her, and reeks more of censorship than anything else!
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Ben Borthwick on 5th October 2014 12:22am
The problems with games media aren't Leigh Alexander penning an angry critique of the concept of the 'gamer' on a developer site, they're not the existence of indie developers like Zoe Quinn, they're big PR departments and huge amounts of money being spent on parties, swag, hotels and 'exclusive previews'. They're Metacritic scores being used to determine developer bonuses and they're websites running enormous advertising campaigns for the very games they're supposed to be reviewing for their audiences.
Until the #gamergate group starts actually taking an interest in real issues in the games media rather than chasing women and feminists and screaming at tiny indie developers, their objective is clearly nothing but harassment and formless, pointless rage. Until then, nobody outside of their angry little pity-party will take them seriously.
Don't mistake Intel's kneejerk response(and half-hearted 'apology' for the implications of said response) to being spammed by these people as 'taking them seriously'. Huge corporations are stupid and reactionary and that's exactly what this kind of mailbombing campaign relies on.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Jessica Hyland on 5th October 2014 10:25am
As I said before, if anyone was waiting for one "side" (for want of a better phrase anyway, the "us versus them" mentality does no-one any favours) to be completely clean before they're allowed to criticise the other group, we'd be waiting an incredibly long time. If there's one thing both camps agree on is that yes, there is work to be done. The argument comes from the aspects being ill-prioritised by various angry mobs claiming to represent both sides and the ill-advised reactionary responses from corporations.
Edited 3 times. Last edit by Ben Borthwick on 5th October 2014 1:22pm
You keep saying how these "YouTubers" do not know what ethics are, except it is abundantly clear that in recent times they seem to have been showing more awareness of ethical issues (and been better at adapting to the consumers want and need for more transparency) than the traditional games media. I guess traditional games media just feels threatened by YouTubers and other video content producers taking their market share, and rightly so, since video content producers (be them on YouTube, Twitch, or elsewhere) will continue to grow their share of the market, and will do as long as traditional games media continues to treat it's consumers the way they have done with an "us and them" attitude. But that is nothing new, gaming media holding such an attitude towards their consumers, it was like that back in the early 1990's too, and has not changed since.
Whether trad-media sees YouTube as a threat, I don't want to speak for anyone on that - I personally think it's better if they're working together - but the way again all of these debates are seen by many as "us versus them" between trad-media and YouTube - just the same as seeing the "audience versus trad-media" thing are all perception problems. I'd like to think people from all sides don't intend to do that consciously, but yeah - I'll agree it's a tough one.
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Ben Borthwick on 5th October 2014 7:32pm
How can someone seriously defend someone calling people hoodrats or calling people ghetto something and calling that mild in the same sentence.
Other people - usually men - don't get such: well maybe context. I will repeat: just a few weeks ago someone was crucified for what they said in private and you have the gal to defend this person who doesn't think before she writes?
OK... would you please tell him that on twitter, I would love to hear his reply.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Jessica Hyland on 5th October 2014 10:36pm
You say none of the "journos" got fired (whether they should be outright fired is another debate entirely frankly) but to use an example I'm more familiar with, let's go back a couple of years to the Rob Florence/Doritosgate scandal from a few years ago. Can you - without looking it up - name the game or company that the free PS3s given at the awards ceremony were for that kicked the whole scandal off? People call for the firing of writers, and make controlled campaigns like this one this original article this entire comment thread is about - which is essentially an attempt to get an opinion columnist fired for writing an opinion piece ie: her job - and yet (back to the Doritosgate example) barely a peep about anyone from the publisher/PR company who caused the whole mess.
To give a further example, Ubisoft recently tried to give journos at a Watch Dogs event a free tablet. Many gave them back without accepting them, many still then went on to write about this happening with a view of exposing the practice and how they were against it.
Yet still, most of these campaigns often target the outlet, not the publisher who offered it in the first place. My point is that YouTubers were mentioned specifically in that linked list of "actual" issues not because other media is necessarily clean, but because there's often attacks on trad media not getting the complicated stuff right, while some YouTubers aren't even doing the basics right yet - I'm not meaning to take anything away from what those YouTubers who have managed to do in terms of transparency, of course.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Ben Borthwick on 6th October 2014 1:18am
Rather than bashing the audience that exists, focus on growing the audience, but it's going to be a slow multi generational slog to get the audience levels for new types of games aimed at other audiences to get to the level that, when the next generation of console/processor/gfxcard is released that they'll be in the queue side by side with the "straight white male gamers" and "lonely basement kids"
This is a site for industry members, not conspiracy theorists. Please go away.
No it isn't. Documentary evidence of this has already been linked to.
Please feel free to argue in favour of a harrassment campaign on your own site. This is supposed to be an inclusive industry site.
I've lost count of the number of times I've seen it used as a rallying cry to call in reinforcements, to intensify harassment against women who never wanted anything to do with the hashtag but happened to be talking about their experiences of sexist harassment in games on Twitter. It's organised harassment, you cannot possibly give that behaviour any other name.
Again, the entire crux of what this article is about - a campaign to get Intel to pull their sponsorship for a website hosting an article with the eventual end goal that the website decides to drop the writer and furthermore so the writer they are unable to work again anywhere because advertisers are no longer willing to have their ads associated with the writer is for all intents and purposes a campaign to get that writer fired and blackballed, even if in an indirect fashion.
I don't follow Sterling's work so I can't really comment on that incident(quite frankly, up until recently I would have put him in the YouTuber category, that's how little I follow his work) - but sure, there will be examples of making mistakes, his views aren't necessarily those of the whole industry - we don't agree on many things ourselves at all more often than we do. The very same behaviour that's being held against the anti-GG lot: lumping a subset together under the actions of a small minority, is exactly what the pro-GG lot are doing back - assuming all gaming outlets speak for all other gaming outlets. It's rather tiring because many perceive highlighting areas that need work from one side means that side putting them out must think they're scott-free or absolved from things themselves.
(And to note: Asus quickly pulled the ad and apologised for it too: https://twitter.com/ASUSUK/status/519072382280294400 )
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Ben Borthwick on 6th October 2014 3:06pm