Bilious Green said:
Not just GG. She and people like Zoe Quinn tarred a lot of gamers who had nothing to do with GG with the whole unhelpful "gamers are abusive monsters" stereotype, when GG was really just a vanishingly small collection of idiots on reddit and not at all representative of gamers as a whole. I had nothing to do with the whole sorry saga, but I found myself having to justify my hobby to people who didn't understand what was going on and just saw the articles in the mainstream press. Suffice to say, that annoyed me a great deal. I doubt I'm the only person irked at being tarred with the same brush as GG merely by virtue of proximity.
You're far from the only person, because I've heard this quite a bit. However, most of the time, when I'm actually shown the examples in question, they're usually
not generalising everybody who takes part in the hobby, but rather identifying a specific behaviour or sub-set. Which is fair.
For example, when Jim Sterling was identifying specific (bad) behaviours that a number of No Man's Sky fans had been taking part in, the accusation thrown back was that he was tarring the whole playerbase of the game, which he never had. Similarly, when the infamous "Gamers are dead" article came out, I saw list after list counting other, perfectly moderate articles as equally culpable. To defend against what they saw as tarring everybody with the same brush, people were tarring everybody with the same brush.
TL;DR: I'm sceptical that this is actually the case.
Zhukov said:
Don't you have to buy a game on Steam to leave a user review on that game? Would people really hate-buy her stuff just to review bomb it? I know she pissed off some truly pathetic people, but that would be quite the show of dedication.
Let me tell ye a tale, Zhukov. I once acted on the crew of a play. In this play, the director had chosen to have the two romantic leads both be female. In this particular case and context, I rather think it worked. Of course, we had protesters turning up.
These protesters bought tickets from us, in order to get in, so that they could disrupt the performance. They let their plan be known after purchasing tickets, but before actually getting in, so they were (of course) barred entry. All they managed to do was support the show.
The moral of the story is that if people have the pettiest of axes to grind, then intelligence just flies out of the fucking window. I can believe wholeheartedly that people would buy this game just to review-bomb it.
