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[hermes]

I'm not going to link anything, just check out /v/, but I was referring to the ample evidence that members of the clique were writing op.ed. pieces and reviews for their games, openly criticizing games and developers that didn't conform to their agenda, and probably some other stuff I forgot.  All of this predates the scandal breaking.  It was not a reaction, its their modus operandi, and that's the root cause of the 'blackouts and corruption'.

Except this is nothing new or unique, this is how "game journalism" works. Big companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even millions, to control what is written about their products. Why should anyone about what a completely unimportant indie dev does in comparison to that? How is some people shilling her free game important when the whole business is built around taking bribes and selling an audience to the AAA companies?

I don't doubt that there is some aggression between the major publishers that plays out in the media circus, but it rarely if ever gets as personal, critical and agenda driven as this is.  Agenda is the key word here.  Gawker media has an agenda, which it pushes through its various outlets.  They're not about selling games, even cheap or free indie ones, they're selling a lifestyle and a way of thinking and advertising space/clicks.

This is important because they have co-opted an underrepresented section of the gaming community and beaten everyone else over the head with that agenda with a big, noisy stick for the past few years.  This isn't how big business works.  I'm not sure of advertising law in every country, but I know that in some places you're allowed to picture and criticize competitor's products - but companies don't, because it's a vicious cycle they don't want to start.  The big publishers generally avoid this.  The Gawker agenda feeds off of this negativity and has been actively promoting it.

I'm not exactly behind big business, I'm a Bay12 guy like you folks too!, but there are some benefits to it.  And seriously I'm missing the positive games-are-cool-lets-have-fun circlejerk we had going on in the media before.  I loved IGN in the 360 heyday, just good games and good vibes and lamenting RRoD...

*rocks in chair and smokes pipe*

[Reelya]

I've only just delved into this whole topic. It looks like the stuff relating to the Game Jam she attacked from "The Fine Young Capitalists" is a much bigger issue than any special relationship with a journalist. I don't really care what people do with their personal lives, but throwing muck on other people's productive efforts is really not on. Looking through the available information for the Game Jam thing, it looks like those involved attacked a for charity event then tried to funnel the understandable public interest into a similar for profit venture.

And that's a much bigger and nastier issue than who-shagged-who to get free publicity.

Hopefully, the Streissand Effect kicks in and makes the FYC Game Jam more well-known. These efforts usually backfire by making the target newsworthy.

I'm considering donating them some money, which is evidence of the Streissand Effect firmly at work

[(int) magicMissile]

I've only just delved into this whole topic. It looks like the stuff relating to the Game Jam she attacked from "The Fine Young Capitalists" is a much bigger issue than any special relationship with a journalist. I don't really care what people do with their personal lives, but throwing muck on other people's productive efforts is really not on. Looking through the available information for the Game Jam thing, it looks like those involved attacked a for charity event then tried to funnel the understandable public interest into a similar for profit venture.

And that's a much bigger and nastier issue than who-shagged-who to get free publicity.

Hopefully, the Streissand Effect kicks in and makes the FYC Game Jam more well-known. These efforts usually backfire by making the target newsworthy.

I'm considering donating them some money, which is evidence of the Streissand Effect firmly at work

Especially when you consider she outright lied about how she acted towards TYFC.

More evidence.

[Reelya]

Many of Zoe's attacks on FYC Game Jam seem to be because they had some rules about whether transgender people were eligible to be treated as women under the contest rules. Of course, ANYTHING targeted at women must by necessity have such rules of eligibility, and if you've already decided you're against the contest then naturally, there are no possible sets of rules that are going to make you happy.

Hell, not even all feminists can all agree on the status of transgender people within feminism, so I don't think picking on a detail like that is very productive. It's also implied to be insensitive to transgendered people themselves, a cis person using trans people as an issue, to score points on twitter.

The broader question that Zoe raises is then, is it possible to have anything on the internet that for, or by, or about women? After all, we can never be 100% sure they're really women. Personally, I think the Game Jam raises publicity for the lack of female game designers, whilst also ensuring some people's games which would never get made otherwise get a chance to be created. Not everyone with a cool game idea has the background or skills to create games, and this is where Zoe's "get them a job in the industry" line falls apart. These people have good ideas, but they're not game developers. But more games out there which are noted to be designed by women open the doors for more to enter the industry and be taken seriously.

[penguinofhonor]

There are, however, some minor issues with it.

Why do you keep posting these? They're terrible.

Someone who actually believed in being scrutinous would not be so completely confident with the vague, circumstantial evidence presented here. As long as you keep bringing in anti-feminist 4chan crap, this thread's days are numbered.

[Graknorke]

There are, however, some minor issues with it.

Why do you keep posting these? They're terrible.

Someone who actually believed in being scrutinous would not be so completely confident with the vague, circumstantial evidence presented here. As long as you keep bringing in anti-feminist 4chan crap, this thread's days are numbered.

I wouldn't say that's complete crap. The twitter account is almost definitely fake, regardless of who it was created by. And it probably wasn't anyone called Kevin Dobson.
Who actually created it is up in the air though.

[(int) magicMissile]

There are, however, some minor issues with it.

Why do you keep posting these? They're terrible.

Someone who actually believed in being scrutinous would not be so completely confident with the vague, circumstantial evidence presented here. As long as you keep bringing in anti-feminist 4chan crap, this thread's days are numbered.

What is anti-feminist about evidence and scrutiny of that evidence?

If Anita or one of her Twitter followers is capable of responding to a Twitter made 3 minutes before and screenshotting the vile things it said, without being logged in and without doing a search, I am more than a little impressed.

The point is that it's unrealistic. There's inconsistencies. You have to point out those inconsistencies in order to find out what, exactly, happened in a given situation.

I wouldn't say that's complete crap. The twitter account is almost definitely fake, regardless of who it was created by. And it probably wasn't anyone called Kevin Dobson.
Who actually created it is up in the air though.

The part that I am finding funny is that I'm having to bring evidence of harassment in order to disprove it. I want people who state that people are being harassed to provide evidence of it, otherwise we end up with another Wizardchan situation.

[penguinofhonor]

If Anita or one of her Twitter followers is capable of responding to a Twitter made 3 minutes before and screenshotting the vile things it said, without being logged in and without doing a search, I am more than a little impressed.

The point is that it's unrealistic. There's inconsistencies. You have to point out those inconsistencies in order to find out what, exactly, happened in a given situation.

There is no evidence that there was no search. The image you posted is just wrong there. If you search something on Twitter then go to someone's profile, it clears the search out of the bar. I just tried it and it looked exactly like it does in the screenshot Anita posted.

The person who made this didn't even check their own claims, and I guess nobody else bothered to question them either. Stay skeptical, 4chan!

[Reelya]

Maybe she got the tweets on her phone, while she was in her home/office etc, and then looked him up via his handle on her PC by typing "twitter.com/kdobbsz" directly into the URL bar, so she could do a screen capture. Plenty of people use their phone as their primary tweeting platform, but a PC is much better for screen grabs, any day.

Typing the address in one go would be faster and easier than using twitter's "search" feature (you'd need to type twice then, once for the page, and once to "search"), or logging in.

That would explain how she was on it so fast, and not logged into the account on her PC, and didn't need to used the "search" facility, because she could see the user's tag right on her phone. 3 minutes would be about right.

The guy who posted the insults was expecting a "drive by" attack and his account to get nuked, so perhaps he prepared the shit first. I find it hard to believe that Anita gets no harassment at all and needs to make this up, that's just paranoid.

[GreatJustice]

To give my opinion, I'd more or less agree with Reelya in that I wasn't initially so annoyed about this because of the Five Guys thing (though that's the icing on the cake), it's that she:

-Slammed a perfectly reasonable indie game jam for no other reason than because it was competing with her own game jam, creating a twitter shitstorm about them in the process

-Had her friends in the industry pretend aforementioned game jam didn't exist, instead pressuring them to amalgamate into her game jam, which basically just had a name and her bank account attached to it

-When people began getting wind of this (and many other problems coming to the public eye), they attempted to spread it, only to find that their Youtube videos were being DMCA'd, their posts/comments were being deleted, and the gaming press refusing to say a thing. Keep in mind, this is the same gaming press that ran inflammatory articles about Max Temkin being falsely accused of rape, so they can hardly claim to simply be ignoring "personal issues". At the same time, aforementioned indie game jam found it's indiegogo page being hacked by people trying to frame /v/ and so on.

Oh, and we're aware that EA and the like regularly do fishy things with the press for good reviews too, but there are a lot of differences here. First, we already know EA does shitty things, but they get called out on it by pretty much everyone including (most of) the gaming press when they do so, whereas ZQ is apparently being protected by someone fairly high up. Second, as a large, faceless corporation, EA doesn't engage in the really petty shit, like smear campaigns or smacking down tiny indie competitors. Hell, to my knowledge they don't even do cover ups or use DMCAs on negative videos, since SEGA tried that once and was resoundingly called out for it. This is a completely different issue, and it deserves some exposure, even if certain people are basically trying to poison the well and get the threads about this locked.

[(int) magicMissile]

If Anita or one of her Twitter followers is capable of responding to a Twitter made 3 minutes before and screenshotting the vile things it said, without being logged in and without doing a search, I am more than a little impressed.

The point is that it's unrealistic. There's inconsistencies. You have to point out those inconsistencies in order to find out what, exactly, happened in a given situation.

There is no evidence that there was no search. The image you posted is just wrong there. If you search something on Twitter then go to someone's profile, it clears the search out of the bar. I just tried it and it looked exactly like it does in the screenshot Anita posted.

The person who made this didn't even check their own claims, and I guess nobody else bothered to question them either. Stay skeptical, 4chan!

Regardless, that's no refutation of the rest of it.

[penguinofhonor]

The rest of it has no substance.

The most suspicious thing is that the person who took the screenshot was logged out of Twitter, and there are many possible reasons for that.

The fact that it's a throwaway account is irrelevant. Trolls make those too. The fact that it happened slightly before the person took a screenshot is irrelevant. If I look up people harassing @femfreq on Twitter, the most recent stuff is going to come up first and I'm going to be most likely to notice it. That's how Twitter works.

I have no idea what point the guy is making when he says the tweets are "planned out to never go over the character limit". That just means the person who wrote them was aware that Twitter had a character limit.

This is all ridiculously flimsy and shows why these "evidence" gatherers are terrible, whether on 4chan or Reddit or anywhere else. If something reinforces the mob's preconceptions, they accept it without scrutiny.

[(int) magicMissile]

The rest of it has no substance.

The most suspicious thing is that the person who took the screenshot was logged out of Twitter, and there are many possible reasons for that.

The fact that it's a throwaway account is irrelevant. Trolls make those too. The fact that it happened slightly before the person took a screenshot is irrelevant. If I look up people harassing @femfreq on Twitter, the most recent stuff is going to come up first and I'm going to be most likely to notice it. That's how Twitter works.

I have no idea what point the guy is making when he says the tweets are "planned out to never go over the character limit". That just means the person who wrote them was aware that Twitter had a character limit.

This is all ridiculously flimsy and shows why these "evidence" gatherers are terrible, whether on 4chan or Reddit or anywhere else. If something reinforces the mob's preconceptions, they accept it without scrutiny.

I would like you to apply Occam's Razor to this situation.

What is the simplest explanation that explains all evidence presented?

You can attack the character of the people trying to bring these things to light all you like, but it doesn't change the fact that you are complicating something by inventing explanations for it.

[Neonivek]

What is the simplest explanation that explains all evidence presented?

Let me see... the simplest explanation of everything presented...

Some article makers, reviewers, and what have you either had relationships with people or patreoned and really didn't think much of it.

Some people found out and threw a ruckus and they became so unruly so inflammatory that the sites had to shut down the discussions because they were just being used as troll platforms.

Then a bunch of idiots jumped on the bandwagon and made what was simply "opps" into one giant mess.

But that is just me a partial misanthrope

[GreatJustice]

What is the simplest explanation that explains all evidence presented?

Let me see... the simplest explanation of everything presented...

Some article makers, reviewers, and what have you either had relationships with people or patreoned and really didn't think much of it.

Some people found out and threw a ruckus and they became so unruly so inflammatory that the sites had to shut down the discussions because they were just being used as troll platforms.

Then a bunch of idiots jumped on the bandwagon and made what was simply "opps" into one giant mess.

But that is just me a partial misanthrope

That's ignoring what started the whole mess, specifically the suppression of TFYC by nearly everyone involved, as well as suppression of any information on the scandals following. It seems a bit more complicated, actually.