2014-10-26 14:26 GMT+02:00 John Young <jya@pipeline.com>:
I had not followed GamerGate until today's New York Times article about it. Nor followed games, so the controversy is new to me. But not the issues involved, which are prevalent online and off. Particularly in testosterone-rich enterprises like military, spies, armaments, sports, weapons, ideology, religion, education, society, civilization, humanity, existence itself. In all of these, the stronger violently dominate the weaker and do so with the psychotic belief that this is the way it should be, natural.
In war and peace, in human exploitation of animal and earthly domains, in climate degradation, in force-feeding "democracy," in cruel treatment of women's bodies and neglect of children, in just about every aspect of torturous "advancements in civilized peoples" in the course of inventing and applying ever greater and more vicious ways to kill, maim, starve and over-populate earthlings by male rape in all guises of wargames.
Games are a reflection of the this much greater conceit of male dominance in all institutions, all of them, even those which spout diversity and affirmative action and grant minimal access to privileged male sanctuaries -- no matter the skin color, ethnicity, faith, location on earth.
It is argued that male aggression inherent and can at best be somewhat controlled by law and social compact. That is a comfortable apologia by male supremacists in law and social compacts dominated by them with intellectual and economic arrogance. All institutions measure accomplishment by male-derived standards to tip the balance in favor of those rigged games.
GameGate is too limited in scope, so much that it should be seen as a male-dominated diversion, a game, to avoid addressing the origin and sustaining influence of male way of thinking, doing, making, competing, surviving, by lying, cheating, killing, ruling in all aspects of existence, simulated in games, trained for in games, monetized by games designers and producers, applauded and lauded in halls of power and control, in prizes and awards, in cemetaries and statues, in art and science, in accumulation concentration and monopolization of wealth.
No game this larger world, this wargame of "ballsy" potentates in military, policy, spying, media, sports, taxation, playing obsessively the "law of men enforced by lawmen."
At 12:10 PM 10/25/2014, you wrote:
Hello John, what do you think about GamerGate?
cheers, George.
It looks like you don't really understand GamerGate at all. Nothing you said is even remotely related to GamerGate. For me it looks like you're just slamming your own views on it without realizing it's not even related. I just read that New York Times article and you can clearly see it's written by anti-GamerGate like most mainstream media does so. This is actually exactly why GamerGate is such big movement and it's best described with this quote: The issue GamerGate is attempting to address is that the majority of games publications take an unbalanced view of the industry, injecting their political beliefs into stories they then report on as fact. It's like if Fox, MSNBC and CNN were all ultra right (or left) wing and that was the only news you were able to get.
I'm sure we all know that media/press is fourth power (Fourth Estate) and it's bad when it starts pushing it's own agenda. And it's actually happening not only with just gaming journalists but everywhere. It used to be just government which could influence us in bad ways, but now, media have such power that it can also influence our life. If you won't be careful, you can easily fall for this. For example there was published atleast *34* different articles with titles such as "Gamers are dead" within couple of day span. No, I'm not joking, you can see list of these articles here http://goo.gl/Uu2QxC And those articles were published from various gaming and review sites with more than just a few readers (well, now fewer :D) and in such short timespan that there's no much doubt it was coordinated and that they know each other somewhat and are trying to push same views. But this is not, how you should treat your audience. I'm a gamer, I enjoy gaming, but it's such a diverse group that you can't really tell anything about them individually. Only thing that's common is that they all love to play games and are interested in them. Anyway GamerGate is really complex issue and it's not only about journalism. My suggestion would be, look here http://www.historyofgamergate.com/volume-1.html for full story. And note, that, it's not only gamers who support GamerGate, but also game developers, including females (see #NotYourShield).