9 years ago
3
Almost No One Sided with #GamerGate: A Research Paper on the Internet's Reaction to Last Year's Mob
Lately I’ve been troubled by the fact that GamerGate’s supporters and I seem to have completely opposite perceptions about what most people think of their movement. I’ve had GamerGaters tell me that most people don’t equate GamerGate with online harassment and that most people (or at least, most gamers) are actually on GamerGate’s side. How is it that our perceptions of “what most people think” are so different? Could it be that we all live inside some social-media echo chamber that makes...
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Yeah, the methodology for this study was to analyze the slant of articles about GG published on popular media platforms (mostly things like news sites, it looks like). This indicates what most journalists for popular news sites think about GG, but it just assumes that most people in general would have actually read those articles (I think I barely skimmed a couple, personally) and then agreed with them.
Personally, I just don't care enough about the kerfuffle to have ever thoroughly looked into it. But I remember when this was first starting it just seemed like a bunch of annoying adolescent gamers (the kind you tend to encounter on xbox live COD games) got really riled up over some feminist critiques of video games and decided to troll the feminists. Meanwhile, some other gamers also got riled up and decided to point out that the feminist critiques were factually incorrect. These latter gamers just couldn't accept that no one was paying much attention to them, and have tried to hold to the fact that GG was really about them this whole time, when it has actually been about a bunch of adolescents who can't handle having their favorite hobby criticized (it's my favorite hobby too, of course, but I don't really care if someone says that a lot of games are sexist; most things are sexist). I suspect that most people on this planet know nothing about this, and that even most people who regularly read these websites know very little, because they (like me) decided that this story was just kind of ridiculous.
I am a little late to this party which is typical for me (but I always bring edibles to make up for it!).
Any time light is shined into the dark the results are usually positive. Many of the journalists, magazines and web sites reviewing games were operating without any written journalistic ethical guidelines to govern their actions. These guidelines ensure some level of objectivity and would require the disclosure of the relationships that existed between the game developer and the game reviewer. Even though the reality is that most of us rely on the reviews of other gamers, we should expect a minimum level of journalistic integrity.
Also, many were insulted by the descriptions of gamers as being puerile, misogynistic, racist and homophobic. I don't disagree that these types of users exist, but no more than in wider society. That's why when I play COD I stick to FFA (oh, yeah, I don't like taking orders from 12-year-olds, either). While superficially the response by some gamers might have been immature and inflammatory, the end result might be positive.
Politics seems to infuse every facet of our lives right now. I just want to be left alone to play my games.
"He who fusses over anything spoils it".
And I would guess, no one side against GamerGate either. I still have very little idea of what all that drama was (is?) about. In my days, internet wars had clear sides, targets and goals.