How did The Escapist's culture change so much?

[BloatedGuppy]

I don't recall people being offended by the articles which started GamerGate. Angry, yet, at being insulted, but not offended. There's a difference between anger and offence. They can overlap but they aren't the same thing.

Zontar, I'm sure you're a good guy, but this is the most hilarious case of hair splitting I've ever heard in my entire life.

GG got very evidently and actively offended at those articles. Many are, in fact, still extremely offended by them. Let's look up the definition of offended, shall we?

of·fend·ed: resentful or annoyed, typically as a result of a perceived insult.

Don't like that dictionary? Let's try another.

of·fend·ed: to cause (a person or group) to feel hurt, angry, or upset by something said or done

How about a third?

of fend: To cause displeasure, anger, resentment, or wounded feelings

Or a fourth?

of fed: to irritate, annoy, or anger; cause resentful displeasure

A fifth, perhaps?

of fend: Cause to feel upset, annoyed, or resentful:

Is that sufficient? I'm sure we can go on like this all day.

GG found those articles extremely offensive. And in the rigors of their offended sensibilities, sought to get the authors of them out of the industry. Indeed, the dismissal of people involved in the writing of those articles are often listed as "successes" on GG's mission pages, much as I'm sure getting GTA V pulled off Target Australia shelves is on someone else's success list.

 

[Zontar]

Snip

Alright, so it dues in fact fall under offence, I'd still say it's a false equivalence to say that a one line joke one needs to bend over backwards to find offence in or the removal of a game which one had no intention of buying is the same as explicit insults towards the core demographic of one's readership.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Alright, so it dues in fact fall under offence, I'd still say it's a false equivalence to say that a one line joke one needs to bend over backwards to find offence in or the removal of a game which one had no intention of buying is the same as explicit insults towards the core demographic of one's readership.

As offense is a highly personal state that is dictated by the emotional sensibilities of the person being offended, there is no "good offended" and "bad offended", there is only "offended".

Fry, for example, was talking about a proposed British law that would have made it possible to criminalize "incitements to religious hatred", such as, say, telling jokes about the Church on a television program. Do you think he might have viewed that as a false equivalence with getting mad because someone made a stroppy editorial? Stephen Fry is extremely sensitive to anti-semitic and homophobic statements, so he's clearly not above feeling offense himself.

Spoiler

Stephen Fry, the actor, writer and raconteur, has told of his disgust after a quest to trace his Jewish ancestry ended with the discovery that his great-grandfather's grave had been desecrated by robbers.

In a village in Slovakia, he found the cemetery had been targeted by anti-semitic vandals who dug up his great-grandfather's remains to steal gold from teeth and rings. He described the act as 'a desecration' and 'a kind of blasphemy', which had made him re-examine his views on whether the law should recognise blasphemy as a crime.

Fry was speaking at a debate with the journalist Christopher Hitchens at The Guardian Hay Festival last week. Among the issues raised was the government's proposed Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill, which has been criticised by civil liberties campaigners and comedians, including Fry's friend Rowan Atkinson, who warned that it could be used to ban jokes poking fun at Islam, Judaism or the Christian church.

Fry, whose films include Gosford Park and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, admitted: 'I'd never believed that there was any problem with blasphemy; it was an obvious nonsense to have a law suggesting that blasphemy be a crime. It's often an offence against good taste, it's often unkind, as so many things humans do are, but we don't necessarily have to make them outlawed.

'But I was doing a BBC programme a couple of weeks ago in a small village south of Bratislava. I was in search of my mother's grandparents and managed to track down a Jewish graveyard... surrounded by concrete walls and somewhere apparently my great-grandfather was buried there.

'All the graves were broken and destroyed, and it was a ruinous thing. The bodies had been disinterred. I discovered they'd been disinterred for two reasons: one was simple anti-semitism, the other simple greed, trying to get gold from teeth and rings. This had happened within the last five years: not a Nazi crime but a recent crime.

'A part of me then, eventually finding my great-grandfather's broken grave, did think: this is a desecration. If this happened in Britain this would be covered by laws of racial cruelty or so on. It's also a kind of blasphemy against something more than the Jewish faith though. It made me question whether I really was quite so sure that blasphemy was an old-time law for an old-time statute book.'

Fry went to Slovakia for a new series of the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are?, in which celebrities go in search of their roots. He wrote briefly about his Jewish heritage in his 1997 autobiography, Moab is My Washpot. His mother's great-grandfather, a Hungarian Jew named Neumann, lived for a time in Vienna 'and it was always said of him that he was the kind of man to give you the coat off his back'.

Fry wrote that his 'blood ran cold' when one day, reading about Hitler, he came upon this passage: 'He [Hitler] wore an ancient black overcoat, which had been given him by an old-clothes dealer in the hostel, a Hungarian Jew named Neumann, and which reached down to his knees... Neumann... who had befriended him, was offended by the violence of his anti-semitism.'

Fry added in his autobiography: 'I suppose there were many Hungarian Jews in Vienna in 1910, and I suppose many of them were called Neumann, but one can't help wondering if it really might be true that one's great-grandfather might have befriended and kept warm a man who would decimate a large part of his family and some six million of his people.'

This is one of the issues when someone takes a quote from a person completely out of context and flies it around in the internet like a flag because they're annoyed at "offense culture". Stephen Fry does not universally disagree with "being offended". Stephen Fry is actually a super sensitive and compassionate person, and like anyone with any modicum of intelligence takes things on a case by case basis, he doesn't throw a blanket over a commonplace human reaction/emotion and say 'that's unacceptable'.

See, the thing about GG taking offense to those articles isn't that they got mad. Of course some people got mad. I rather suspect the point of some of those articles was to get certain demographics angry and questioning themselves. It's A) the hypocrisy of "my anger is righteous, yours is ridiculous" and B) the subsequent action of trying to destroy the source of that anger. Just "getting angry" is not a problem in and of itself. Getting offended is not a problem in and of itself. Everyone is different, everyone has their sensitivities and their sore spots, everyone gets angry.

 

[FirstNameLastName]

Stephen Fry put it best, and this is definitely a case where this quote applies.

And yet, hilariously, when GG got offended at being called "dead", this quote didn't apply.

Funny that.

I don't recall people being offended by the articles which started GamerGate. Angry, yet, at being insulted, but not offended. There's a difference between anger and offence. They can overlap but they aren't the same thing.

... What?

Many have long been pointing out the hypocrisy of people who are constantly offended over other people taking offence, but this is the most bizarre way to handwave the cognitive dissonance I have ever seen. Redefining "offence" to conveniently exclude certain types of offence; seriously, what the fuck?

Perhaps the SJWs aren't actually offended over anything at all, they are simply angry.

Simple, in the case of GamerGate the companies in question explicitly attacked and insulted members of our community, and did so through a means which they directly made income from doing so.

Pillars of Eternity, on the other hand, had a joke that arguably didn't even reference a transgendered person that didn't paint anyone except a straight man who happened to be full of himself in any negative light, and for those playing the game could be easily ignored, assuming they ever found it at all (compared to the hard to miss articles that anyone frequenting the sites in question couldn't miss if they tried).

While I agree that the joke was perfectly fine and didn't even have anything to do with trans individuals (not that it needed to be removed even if it did), this is rather shaky reasoning.

Since the joke was part of a commercial game, if you did believe it to be making fun of trans folk, it would seem they are making money from making fun of people.

As for the article, just like the joke, it is easily ignored. In fact, even with all the controversy surrounding it, I have yet to do anything more than skim that "gamers are dead" article.

 

[Zontar]

Snip

Does that mean that if I write an article insulting Africans who eat only KFC, watermelon and deals drugs in an intercity, does that mean I get a free pass since the only ones who should feel insulted are the ones who meet that stereotype? Because that's permissible using that logic you just presented.

Though it's a moot point since the articles where explicit in it being all gamers being called those stereotypes, not insulting those who met them.

As for Pillars of Eternity, the person who started this all is infamous for their twitter account being used for the sole purpose of starting shit, which is why it's more likely they just took the joke and twisted it to make it offensive then actually feeling any real offence, since even disregarding the fact one needs spinal removal surgery to bend over backwards enough to see the joke as an insult to anyone, it's incredibly doubtful someone can make it that far into the game who has a problem with those types of jokes not being triggered by something long before that point.

 

[Zontar]

See, the thing about GG taking offense to those articles isn't that they got mad. Of course some people got mad. I rather suspect the point of some of those articles was to get certain demographics angry and questioning themselves. It's A) the hypocrisy of "my anger is righteous, yours is ridiculous" and B) the subsequent action of trying to destroy the source of that anger. Just "getting angry" is not a problem in and of itself. Getting offended is not a problem in and of itself. Everyone is different, everyone has their sensitivities and their sore spots, everyone gets angry.

I wouldn't really call it hypocritical, given how the "gamers are dead" articles explicitly insulted gamers (usually numerous times each) while the Pillars of Eternity joke does not even makes reference to the group which is supposedly insulted, nor was there any malice to it.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I wouldn't really call it hypocritical, given how the "gamers are dead" articles explicitly insulted gamers (usually numerous times each) while the Pillars of Eternity joke does not even makes reference to the group which is supposedly insulted, nor was there any malice to it.

Guy, I can't force you to acknowledge hypocrisy any more than I can invalidate your offended sensibilities by telling you that you were wrong to take offense at the thing that pissed you off. All I can do is point stuff out.

There's a lot of people in the world that put stock in intellectual honesty and rationality right up to the point where it becomes inconvenient or fails to fit the narrative we've become attached to, and then we start doing things like redefining what "offended" means or shifting poles around like there was some metric to determine what righteous offense looks like. I'll let you in on a secret: there isn't.

Being able to acknowledge fallibility is not a sign of weakness. I just posted an article for you in which Stephen Fry does it. Or is Fry only worth listening to when his out-of-context quotes appear to support our arguments?

 

[Zontar]

I wouldn't really call it hypocritical, given how the "gamers are dead" articles explicitly insulted gamers (usually numerous times each) while the Pillars of Eternity joke does not even makes reference to the group which is supposedly insulted, nor was there any malice to it.

Guy, I can't force you to acknowledge hypocrisy any more than I can invalidate your offended sensibilities by telling you that you were wrong to take offense at the thing that pissed you off. All I can do is point stuff out.

There's a lot of people in the world that put stock in intellectual honesty and rationality right up to the point where it becomes inconvenient or fails to fit the narrative we've become attached to, and then we start doing things like redefining what "offended" means or shifting poles around like there was some metric to determine what righteous offense looks like. I'll let you in on a secret: there isn't.

Being able to acknowledge fallibility is not a sign of weakness. I just posted an article for you in which Stephen Fry does it. Or is Fry only worth listening to when his out-of-context quotes appear to support our arguments?

And what about intent? With the Pillars of Eternity joke, there was no malicious intent (hell, the group it was supposedly insulting was never even referenced in the joke) while the gamers are dead articles, well, it's a little hard to argue that malice was not their sole purpose. Criticism was certainly not what they where, nor was discussion or argument the intent, which is probably why, while the reaction to Pillars of Eternity has been near universal disdain for Obsidian changing the joke, the reaction to the articles was a consumer revolt which saw every single major American gaming site adopt an ethics policy and disclosure policy, as well as Gawker loosing every single advertiser it had (though given how they came to the attention of those advertisers, it's likely all GG did was bring that attention, and it was more then just the "gamers are dead" articles which made them pull out. The site wasn't exactly known for painting its sponsors in a good light, or any demographic either once you take its subsidiaries into account)

 

[smartalec]

Hmm, I'm inclined to agree with IceForce here. What is the difference between GamerGaters feeling angry about articles calling 'gamers' dead, and, say, a transgendered person finding the Pillars of Eternity joke insulting?

This is asking the wrong question, I think.

Wade through the outrage and the noise a moment, put aside the angry froth. The thirteen Gamers are Dead articles are focussed on because they were a glaring example of the different games journalism websites and some independent bloggers working together to cover the backs of themselves and their friends, at a time when people were accusing them of that and it was denied (but was found later to be true). The issue isn't the articles, it's what's behind them.

If anyone can link the Pillars-of-Eternity joke to some kind of developer conspiracy against the transgendered, then I would agree that it is exactly the same.

 

[Zontar]

Considering the logic I just presented would result in an article saying "Africans (somehow I doubt we're talking about people in Africa) are more than just those that eat only KFC, watermelon and deals drugs in an intercity" I fail to see what the problem would be. Do you think black people would be offended by someone stating that they don't all act like their negative stereotype?

How about instead of taking one statement from the articles that was made for the sole purpose of covering their ass by saying what amounted to "oh, don't worry, you're in the 10% of people who are totally not like that", how about to address the fact that everyone who cared about the issue which led up to that was a fat, white, male virgin looser living in their mother's basement, this in direct defiance of the fact that the group being insulted was more diverse then the group writing those articles, as well as having a very Americentric view of a world wide subculture?

If the hypothetical article I mentioned where to be made, it would imply that those who don't meet the stereotype are the minority within their own group.

Sure they were. It's not like they made it very clear who they were talking about and that who they were talking about was not "all gamers" or anything. Nope, the thing that fuels the endless and righteous fury of the offended best is what actually happened.

I'm not going to pretend they where attacking all gamers, but let's also not pretend that they where not attacking the idea of being a "gamer" or that they did not imply that all the people who where part of the group they where insulting where straight white men in defiance of all the evidence both before and since which show that not to be the case, or that said diverse group did not make up a disproportionately large part of their reader base.

Tell me, why is it so difficult for people to even acknowledge that something is potentially offensive if they aren't personally offended by it? It's very easy to see why a joke about a man taking a woman to bed and freaking out when she "turned out a man" (pretty much transpanic in a nutshell) might be offensive, not least because it can be taken as calling a transwoman a man. Now I know lots of people love going on about that being based on the assumption that they were a transwoman, but considering all the alternatives (he was drunk! and they were an effeminate crossdresser!) are equally based on assumptions, that's not that convincing of a point.

Why is it so difficult? Because in this specific case the leaps in logic and the degree one must bend over backwards to take offence to the joke which doesn't even reference transpeople, and that the person who could be interpreted as being trans was insulted or the butt of the joke, one really has to wonder if most of the people insulted at the joke even looked at it due to the only person being made fun of was a guy who couldn't handle the idea of sleeping with a man.

It's a simple joke, it's an old joke, it's been around for quite some time, and yet this is the first time someone takes offence to it? And someone with a history of trying to start flamewars over nothing? Too many things seem to line up with this just being an artificial nontroversy.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

...while the reaction to Pillars of Eternity has been near universal disdain for Obsidian changing the joke...

Citation? "Universal" is a pretty bold claim. I'd expect someone to be able to substantiate that. Can you substantiate that?

And again, you're trying to establish "good offense" vs "bad offense". What metric are you using? Is it possible for someone to say or do things that might anger or annoy people without meaning to? Are the people getting angered in that circumstance "wrong"? What if I go to a foreign country, utterly ignorant of their customs, and blunder around insulting people left, right and center. Who is to blame? Am I an innocent? Are they contemptible for their anger?

Let me ask you a question. If I told you a group of people existed who were very offended by and annoyed by stuff they found on the internet, that over half a year later they were still angry and upset about it, if they wrote petitions and attacked the advertisers of the people who annoyed them in an attempt to get them fired/removed because they believed that the thing that annoyed them was an unbearable transgression, that seldom/never acknowledged any fault or flaw with their argumentation, made zero attempt to see things from the other side of the ledger, were riddled with disruptive/antagonistic elements that they either refused to acknowledge or expressly stated were "the exception", used generalizing terminology in order to demonize and diminish ideological opposition, and believed above all else that THEIR cause and THEIR anger and THEIR outrage was endlessly justifiable and righteous, who would you think I was talking about?

PS - Out of curiosity, why are we talking specifically about PoE all of a sudden? Is that the ONLY instance of people taking offense you've ever criticized? Or have you found some low hanging fruit that looks easy to pick for the purposes of this interaction?

 

[Zontar]

Citation? "Universal" is a pretty bold claim. I'd expect someone to be able to substantiate that. Can you substantiate that?

Obsidian's forum and the game's steam community hub are good places to start. The people there that took offence to the joke where few and far between.

Let me ask you a question. If I told you a group of people existed who were very offended by and annoyed by stuff they found on the internet, that over half a year later they were still angry and upset about it, if they wrote petitions and attacked the advertisers of the people who annoyed them in an attempt to get them fired/removed because they believed that the thing that annoyed them was an unbearable transgression, that seldom/never acknowledged any fault or flaw with their argumentation, made zero attempt to see things from the other side of the ledger, were riddled with disruptive/antagonistic elements that they either refused to acknowledge or expressly stated were "the exception", used generalizing terminology in order to demonize and diminish ideological opposition, and believed above all else that THEIR cause and THEIR anger and THEIR outrage was endlessly justifiable and righteous, who would you think I was talking about?

Well, if I took your comment at face value I'd say nothing, because I haven't seen such a group. But then I'd stop being hopelessly naive and remind myself that even though half of that is not true and the other half is intentionally forgetting the context then I'd admit that it's a pretty decent description of GG based on the narrative that those who hate it but at least admit it isn't a hate group are pushing.

PS - Out of curiosity, why are we talking specifically about PoE all of a sudden? Is that the ONLY instance of people taking offense you've ever criticized? Or have you found some low hanging fruit that looks easy to pick for the purposes of this interaction?

Because of the past year it's one of the three such controversies that happened, it's the latest one of the three, and one of the remaining two is not being defended by anyone on either side of this argument (and for good reason).

 

[Guerilla]

Everyone's just as passively hostile as 5 years ago.

Sure, some are mentally scar'd by big bad 4chan boogieman and seeing reptiles everywhere, but otherwise it's fine.

Also, everyones republican now.

Ew, I don't know if this is sarcasm or not but just to be on the safe side I want to say that I really doubt that even a small portion of the members of this forum are republicans.

 

[SomethingWorse]

There was a mass exodus on 4chan /v/ near the end of 2014, when moot decided to ban all gamergate discussion.

And those ended up in an other chan, channers hate regular forums with a passion.

Yeah, I was gonna say this doesn't seem like their scene.

You know, say what you will about Movie Bob-he was probably the most controversial producer the site has ever known-but he and some of his viewers had a different perspective. Escapist was one of the sites that actually had MONTHS of debate about Gamergate and feminism at large BEFORE it took over Twitter. We were ranting about this stuff before the hashtag even existed. This is why my post count is so low and I lurked, the escapist was an intellectual battleground. It was better than most, but it was certainly?passionate. I get scared of that stuff.

We only have critical miss in terms of hardcore opinion pieces, unless I'm missing something. ZP doesn't get on his soapbox about this stuff that often, though I know he hates SJWs. I think we're more one sided than before.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

Everyone's just as passively hostile as 5 years ago.

Sure, some are mentally scar'd by big bad 4chan boogieman and seeing reptiles everywhere, but otherwise it's fine.

Also, everyones republican now.

Ew, I don't know if this is sarcasm or not but just to be on the safe side I want to say that I really doubt that even a small portion of the members of this forum are republicans.

Honestly, Democrats and Republicans are essentially the same anymore. For the most part they do the exact same things in office as each other, they just use different platforms to get into office in the first place. Either way there are probably plenty of republicans on the forums. Just aligning with a party or it's platform does not make anyone the extreme side of that party. Also the "ew republicans" response is comically pitiful.

 

[StatusNil]

The above statements epitomize virtually everything that is wrong with Gamergate. GGers pruport to want "ethics in journalism" yet puts the focus/blame/responsibility squarely on Zoe Quinn for "shagging others for reviews" [she didn't] and not THE ACTUAL JOURNALIST in question [he didn't either, but that's beside the point]. GGers repeatedly claim that the movement isn't about Quinn and that the only people mentioning her are "aGG" but they can't help bringing her back into it all, repeating the same BS claims about sleeping with reporters for positive reviews/coverage again and again. They just can't help themselves, because they've invested so much in hating her over the lst 8-plus months, so they keep harping on what they believe was *abusive behavior* toward her ex-boyfriend [LOL give me a fucking break] or her supposed *history of online harassment* [ditto, what a fucking joke] and slam her efforts with Crash Override or her feminist views on gaming, all of which have FUCK ALL to do with ethics in journalism.

Meanwhile, Nathan Grayson sleeps in his own bed, gets a fraction of the criticism/harassment/abuse that Quinn gets, and takes a back seat to Quinn and other female "LWs" on the Gamergate enemies list, and GGers keep denying this movement has anything to do with gender/feminism/sexism with a straight face and stunning lack of self-awareness. It'd be hilarious if there weren't real people being hurt.

Oh, Exley. You didn't notice the whole "boycotting Kotaku" thing? That's the relevant "journalism" site. Do look it up some time.

I'm right with you in condemning sleazy hack Nathan Grayson. By rights, the SJW Brigade should also be all up in his business, if they were even minimally consistent in their outrages that is. After all, he's the kind of guy who tweeted a mentally ill female developer who he states he didn't really know AND her female PR Rep about the "game industry orgy" he wanted to have. (It's all in his archived tweets, unfortunately I don't have a link handy. But surely someone here does.) Hardly professionally appropriate. The thing is, there are fewer Internet slap fights involving him, because he at least has sense enough to lay low for the most part. Unlike the CON woman you mentioned, who is building a career (of sorts) on misrepresenting GG.

As for your profanity-laden rant in favor of abusive behavior as long as it's coming from approved sources, I disagree. Those things are not "cool", no matter what your peer group is telling you.

 

[Adeptus Aspartem]

This thread should actually answer everything to you OP. Write something about ANYTHING at it turns into a GG discussion.

The website is still gaming related, just with less quality content than before (imo) but the forums are now a GG-discussion forum.
It's boring and draining at the same time.