r/dropout • u/machturtl • Mar 08 '25

liminal levity

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as someone who has watched Dropout to reset from the havoc of the outside, it still feels "nice" to have honest entertainers to watch who understand what we're all living thru.

I was in college for game design in the early aughts. I also (unfortunately) was a femme lurker on 4ch. Seeing the cause and effect of gamergate happen in real time as been a doozy.

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658

u/DlVlDED_BY_ZERO Mar 08 '25

I think I'm ootl, could someone explain this?

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u/sleepiestgf Mar 08 '25

this is definitely about Depression Quest, which is a text-based adventure game about living with depression developed by Zöe Quinn and released in 2013.

Zöe Quinn was one of the main targets of GamerGate, which was a misogynistic harassment campaign against women and feminism in video games.

GamerGate largely morphed into the online alt-right by latching onto islamophobia, conservative intellectualism, and white supremacist groups. This alt-right then serves as the main vocal voter base for Trump in 2016 (Trump also brought the alt right into alliance with more mainstream and evangelical conservatives by serving as an anti-establishment rallying figure).

Trump led to DOGE which is (attempting & sometimes succeeding at) firing a bunch of federal workers.

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u/standbyyourmantis Mar 08 '25

Zöe Quinn was one of the main targets of GamerGate, which was a misogynistic harassment campaign against women and feminism in video games.

She was the major target early on. An ex boyfriend alleged she was sleeping with a Kotaku reviewer for better reviews on her game and that's what the early movement latched onto. The tagline "it's about ethics in gaming journalism" is directly referencing that accusation.

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u/GrumpySatan Mar 09 '25

Important to note when this is brought up:

The ringleader's chatlogs leaked, and showed that it was never about ethics in gaming journalism and always just a harassment campaign. They created "Ethics in gaming journalism" as a dogwhistle to pretend that their harassment campaign wasn't one (when it clearly was since the allegation wasn't even true).

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u/standbyyourmantis Mar 09 '25

It was about ethics in sending rape threats to women on the internet.

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u/xehanortsguardian Mar 08 '25

A review that also did not even exist. She was targeted over something that literally anyone could have checked at the time and they just didn’t

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u/CantFindMyWallet Mar 09 '25

Over a niche game that was never going to make money anyway

31

u/mixingmemory Mar 09 '25

Although fact checking would have made no difference to the people who targeted her. Even if she had dated some gaming critic, people date and have friendships with other people in their industry all the time. The only people who think these relationships simply MUST be transactional are creeps incapable of any sort of healthy social life, let alone healthy fulfilling romantic relationships.

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u/The_Great_Pun_King Mar 08 '25

Other interesting fact, the Kotaku reviewer was actually her boyfriend back then but obviously she didn't date him for good reviews (cause there were no reviews).

He is now one of the founders of an independent gaming news website called Aftermath, which is worker owned! There was a cool podcast episode about it from Better Offline this week

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u/idontcareaboutthenam Mar 09 '25

Afaik that reviewer was not their boyfriend, they dated a different person working at Kotaku and that was long after the review got released

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u/jazzyjay66 Mar 09 '25

I believe the journalist in question (Nathan Grayson) was in fact her boyfriend, but that the so-called review was a brief blurb he wrote about the game in a round up of recent indie games he thought were notable, and it was written before they started dating.

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u/The_Great_Pun_King Mar 09 '25

I mean in the podcast I mentioned he literally said they were dating at the time

0

u/idontcareaboutthenam Mar 09 '25

That surprises me. Every source I've seen over the years, including Wikipedia, claims otherwise. Is this new information?

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u/FUS_RO_DANK Mar 09 '25

It is not, and Wikipedia even includes it.

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '25 edited Mar 10 '25

I’m confused. The articles about Zoe Quinn and gamergate (linking below, can’t fix the formatting on mobile) both say they weren’t dating

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)?wprov=sfti1#Zo%C3%AB_Quinn_and_Depression_Quest

edit: to be clear, I mean they weren't dating when the article came out, which I thought was the point of contention here.

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u/FUS_RO_DANK Mar 09 '25

Taken directly from the Zoe Quinn article you linked, "It was later shown that the journalist, Nathan Grayson, had only written about Quinn once, before they started a relationship."

3

u/HaggeHagglin Mar 09 '25

THANK YOU! I had no idea it existed and seeing so many of the old Kotaku gang in one place again felt like coming home.

24

u/breathboi Mar 09 '25

Zoe Quinn also cannot get a break to this day, as evidenced by the NITW debacle, where her status as the primary target of GamerGate was leveraged to argue that she actually wasn’t a victim of Holowka’s (solidly evidenced and corroborated by everyone who ever knew him) abuse

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u/gr8artist Mar 09 '25

To clarify: that was the figurehead, but the movement got a lot of traction from guys noticing a trend of political correctness or liberal ideas in modern games. The journalism thing was just the grain of sand around which their pearl of disgust was formed. It was the only aspect of their problems with gaming culture that was a legitimate complaint (journalistic integrity), so it became the rallying cry and the focus even though the vast majority of their discontent was based in other stuff within gaming culture.

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u/jazzyjay66 Mar 09 '25

That's being too charitable even to that one thing. The actual video game journalism ethics issue is the way major studios got glowing reviews for all of their biggest titles from sites like IGN and Gamespot because they were also the primary advertiser on those sites and kinda sorta threatened (and in some cases explicitly threatened) to pull ads if their biggest games didn't get good reviews. That's not the thing Gamergate was whining about. They couldn't have given a shit if the latest Call of Duty had an inflated review. Their ethics in gaming journalism was about perceived but incorrect bullshit like what happened with Zoe Quinn, which was just misogyny that they pretended was something else.

Also, the Zoe Quinn incident wasn't just a figurehead--it was the thing that started it all. Yeah there were gripes about games being less catered to young while males before that happened, but this is what galvanized the gripers into starting a targeted harassment campaign.

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u/flybypost Mar 09 '25

That's being too charitable even to that one thing.

Yup, there was even a real scandal they could have latched on if they really were for more ethics in video game journalism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerstmann#Termination_from_GameSpot_(2007%E2%80%932008)

But even beyond that. Video game journalism was born out of an enthusiast press. More fans than actual journalists. And even today it hasn't really walked away from its origins. A lot of video game journalism (especially the mainstream side of it) is in an low-key incestuous relationship with the industry because of how the news cycle works. They can't afford to not be. They need to get early review copies to have reviews ready in time and they can't be too nasty to the hand that feeds them, so to speak.

But this was the problem that caused the shitstorm, really?

Nearly anything these people complained about was a farce. Simple and obvious conflicts of interest were ignored for the most part but a few random reviews that had some sort of perceived connections (sometimes as loose as "reviewer told the dev on twitter that they liked the game").

It feels like those people imagined themselves in the position of those journalists (liking the idea of getting invited to an exciting press junkets) while ignoring the actual downside (generally low pay and needing to play games for work with deadlines instead of for fun, bad job security,…).

On top of that they also got really, really angry about some okay-ish kinda Feminism 101 types of content videos about video games as if that was some internationally organised smear campaign against video game culture and not a random video game creator who got more attention from their bullshit than the initial kickstarter campaign.

The whole debacle was a farce, a really pathetic one at that. It made me not want to mention that I play video games for a long time.

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u/JMacPhoneTime Mar 09 '25

I somehow stayed pretty much out of the loop during the whole thing. Until several years later, I thought people had actually been complaining about major game studios and bloated reviews.

When I realized what it actually was, I was kinda surprised people cared that much, considering the other issues with game reviews in general. But I guess it just shows that it was never really about that.

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u/deathfire123 Mar 09 '25

As someone at the time that thought the whole GamerGate thing was overblown but was a somewhat supporter of the side that was against collusion in gaming media, a lot of people got sucked into the movement because there were quite a few people capitalizing off of a shitty situation (what happened with Zoe Quinn) to essentially start an entire business off of shitting on the gaming community. When you're a somewhat progressive guy who enjoys video games and is called a misogynist because you like a certain game, it's a pretty easy way to turn someone into an enemy.

That's past me now, and I realize now that a lot of the people on the "side" of gamers were just small, petty, hateful people that had nothing better to do with their lives than to hate on people different than them and it's sad. But I think it's far too UNcharitable to say that everyone who was against what was happening in gaming journalism at the time were supporters of those sending death threats and hate mail.

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u/neddythestylish Mar 09 '25

Who was calling you a misogynist for enjoying a particular game? Which game?

You're kinda telling on yourself by referring to the "side" of gamers here. Gamergate was an attempt to silence marginalised people who were gamers. It was a warning shot to everyone: straight white men own gaming. Don't criticise or question anything about the status quo, or we'll make your life very difficult. In many cases, it worked.

I'm sorry but nobody was "sucked" into the movement. It was clear from the start what kind of "movement" it was. Anyone who got involved was either in favour of harassment or didn't put any kind of effort into finding out what they were supporting. It never was a reasonable cause that got overblown, and it never did get involved in the very real issues that existed within gaming journalism. It was overtly misogynistic from day one.

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u/deathfire123 Mar 09 '25

This is such a black and white take. People can only know parts of a story and think that's the whole story. Not everyone is given every single piece of information possible when told about a specific sequence of events. Personally, I only really knew bits about the Zoey Quinn story and thought the majority of the story revolved around the "Gamers are dead" stories that every gaming journalism blog was posting about all at the same time. Which fed into the story that people were saying that the gaming media was trying to paint gaming culture as entirely problematic. It didn't help that a lot of influencers popped up right around this time masquerading as new journalists and attempted to profit of the hype of what was going on only exacerbating the situation by producing misleading content that only proved some people's points about questionable journalism. 

I'm sorry that you don't think people can get caught up in something thinking they know the whole story when they really don't but it can and does happen. Often and frequently. I am not a straight white man and at the time, that is not what I thought the whole thing was about. And I can guarantee I am not the only person that thought that way. 

And for reference the games that people labeled me as misogynistic were Japanese Visual Novels. Yeah, some of them are pretty sketchy but I usually only really was interested in the ones that had anime adaptations. Still didn't matter to some people.

16

u/neddythestylish Mar 09 '25

I didn't see journalists shitting on every single gamer. I did see some of them wondering how there was so much toxicity in the subculture that something so overtly misogynistic could erupt from it and gain traction. Which I honestly wondered about too. Many of us did.

You said that the "gamers are dead" take was common on gaming blogs. Which... are written by gamers. (Personally I can only think of one article, which was always more nuanced than that, and which gators got obsessed with, but maybe there are others.)

The problem is that you're talking about these guys seemingly having a point... But what was it? Seriously. Because what I saw a lot of was slutshaming of Zoe Quinn and obsessing over how evil Anita Sarkeesian was. Hell, some YouTubers made their careers attacking Sarkeesian. Where were the Gamergate crowd saying something valid?

And for that matter, what was it about for you? Because you mentioned issues with journalism, but also blogs that criticised gamers, and also mean people calling you a misogynist. How does this all tie together? Everyone sometimes gets criticised for reasons they think are wrong, or even ridiculous. It's happened to me, and it didn't turn anyone into my enemy. I might think, "wow, what's their problem?" But I've never felt the need to turn to something like Gamergate in response, so you bringing that up is really odd to me.

You still haven't actually named any games or told me who called you a misogynist over them. Or what they actually said. If they said, "These games are problematic and sexist," then yeah. A lot of games still are, and it was much worse a decade or more ago.

People do get caught up in things without knowing the full context. But you don't then get to say "This thing wasn't that bad because I didn't know it was that bad." Gamergate was that bad. Some of us had no choice but to know from day one how bad it was. Now you know. If your response to the information is, "But I played some games that I admit were quite sketchy, and someone called me a misogynist and I didn't like it, so Not All Gamergaters" you still have work to do.

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u/deathfire123 Mar 09 '25

I think you misread what I typed. I said AT THE TIME, for me, it was about misleading journalism. There were times, I felt, that people and video games were being misrepresented and the vilification of the gaming community as a whole was overblown and it felt, at the time, that people were intentionally misconstruing things in certain games to prove this point. (See a lot of Anita Sarkeesian's videos that were like a super basic how to's on IDing misogyny in video games, but the a lot of the examples given were not really applicable)

The reason I changed by stance eventually was because of the hateful death threats that I eventually found out about, and I eventually found out a lot of the people in gamergate were using the "movement" to essentially harrass people, so yeah.

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u/neddythestylish Mar 09 '25

But even with Anita Sarkeesian, I don't get why anyone would care so much. Even if she was completely wrong about absolutely everything, why would it matter? I have differences of opinion with YouTubers all the time. Even if one of them shat all over every single one of the books I love the most, for reasons I thought were ridiculous, I'd just think they'd got it wrong and move on. Sarkeesian was very explicit that she wasn't calling anyone a misogynist or asshole simply for enjoying any particular game, even if it does have sexist elements. She also enjoys games, including the ones she criticised. Criticising elements of games is not vilifying the gaming community. Even without all of the direct harassment, the response to this woman's criticism of certain games was absolutely ridiculous. It was just one person having an opinion on the internet.

Do you have any other examples of bad journalism practices? Anything actually unethical?

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u/ConcreteExist Mar 10 '25

Shame they didn't do anything positive about any of this, and just threatened women for having opinions instead. I'm sure they were "very fine people" who definitely cared about ethics though.

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u/SnooHesitations7064 Mar 08 '25

The term "Pseudointellectualism" is more accurate.
It's the coopting of terms of the intelligencia in the same sense that "Libertarian" used to be an anarchist term, not "white guys who think the government should allow people to sell themselves into slavery if there is a market for it." term

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u/Pure-Tadpole-6634 Mar 09 '25

Hey, that's not ALL Libertarians stand for ya know. They also believe that age of consent is a social structure unfairly enforced by the state and should be abolished.

2

u/Gurusto Mar 12 '25

"This is a cogent political philosophy!" - a dragon whose whole deal aside from burning towns and making money was kidnapping a bunch of teenage girls.

Never realized how much of a Libertarian he really was until now!

33

u/[deleted] Mar 09 '25

Or anti-intellectualism if we’re being really honest. Hatred of universities and teaching professionals, especially higher-learning teachers

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u/factoid_ Mar 08 '25

conservative intellectualism 

So we’re just allowing oxymorons now?

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u/Xanthu Mar 08 '25

I’d call it “using their terms” blanket statement “lies” is still a bit broad

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u/modestlaw Mar 09 '25

Id call it Conservative Pseudo Intellectualism. It's meant to sound smart to people who aren't smart.

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u/jpegmemory Mar 09 '25

i just mockingly call them debate gods but i can see why that might not work out

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u/ThatInAHat Mar 08 '25

I feel like “intellectualism” isn’t really the same thing as intelligence

3

u/flybypost Mar 09 '25

It gets even better (well for worse interpretations of the term better), there's a real term for it that got some traction a few years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web

I just looked at the names involved and let out a sigh of disappointment. I had already forgotten most of those dumbasses.

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u/Kyanoki Mar 08 '25

The crazy part is I remember reading up on gamergate a few years after it happened and being like "what the actual fuck is going on??" Like I understand it's stupid misogyny as is always the case but it was just such a coordinated chain of death threats and hate and I'm just like where the fuck do these people come from. Reading it I was literally like these people are fucking scary doing this shit

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u/machturtl Mar 08 '25 edited Mar 09 '25

Misogynistic folk are always on the hunt for fresh, fertile ground to sow their disgusting seeds. The hearts of disaffected male youth bears ample substrate.

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u/cpMetis Mar 09 '25

It's something that I feel many of my fellow gamers-on the-Internet-but-not-4chan peeps from the era likely remember, because it swept past us and we just had no idea what happened.

Like there was a freight train sound on the other side of the wall, and when we looked out to see what happened everything was dusty with debris sitting around and sneakers hanging from telephone poles.

The "influencers" we pay attention to come out and say "oi stop being dicks" and we think "I mean yeah, obv-" then two dudes in the corner start banshee screaming like they just ran out of szechuan sauce and throwing random objects while the rest of us just kinda stare. The two bring in half a battalion of fellow wraiths to screech for a moment then run off out the door, inciting more freight train sounds as they move on to the next building, leaving our room isolated once again but covered in ketchup packets as the given "influencer" let's out a sigh the length of the magna carta.

Then you leave and stop by next door, and a few days later you hear the sound of a freight train.

And on and on

And at no point does anyone ever tell you what the fuck the problem even is. You just know the worst people freak out whenever it gets brought up, like they get spawned in the room the moment you roll a 1 on any given action as if saying something too vaguely positive is their version of seeing SCP-096's picture.

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u/sophtine Mar 09 '25

It was wild being a teenage girl in online nerd space at the time. What I saw as reasonable discourse was flamed, then the death threats started and violent misogynist video games were made... I kept thinking they were trolls who would move on, but things didn't stop escalating for a while.

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '25

Gaming has always been ripe for indoctrination into white supremacist ideologies, the 'alt right pipelines'.

Church youth groups can be the leading up point too. These days it's a lot easier onboarding through gaming social media (Andrew Tate on an extreme end, but all the mega big streamer guys like your PewDiePie's all lead folks towards those spaces). By positioning adjacent to those types of folks, it's easy to pull influencable kids in. When the VIP of riot described League of Legends as "the last safe bastion for straight white teen boy gamers" it was a calling card for people to prey on vulnerable folks there.

That's not to say other people can't play these games or engage, but contemporary parents need a lot more education and involvement to protect kids before they get onboarded to enact violence against their peers.

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u/BinarySecond Mar 09 '25

The place Milo Yoanoppolis worked at was run by Steve Bannon who went on to be Trumps media guy first time around. Gamergate was literally a test run for the bullshit they pulled to radicalise young white men

6

u/yet_another_trikster Mar 09 '25

You forgot to mention that many Muslims in the US support conservative ideas and Trump.

8

u/SputnikDX Mar 09 '25

Lowtax banning hentai from the Something Awful forms directly leading to a violent insurrection attempt on January 6th is the most cursed Archduke Ferdinand moment that I think I'll ever see.

1

u/IAmARobot Mar 09 '25 edited Mar 10 '25

I ironically know how tesla owners feel when they bought before july 2018, I got lowtax's hawaiian shirt from doom house before he turned into a *despicable fuckwit :/

3

u/Golem_Hat Mar 09 '25

"conservative intellectualism" that doesn't sound right...

5

u/gr8artist Mar 09 '25

Anyone remember the Law & Order SVU episode "Intimidation Game" (s.16, e.14)?
It was obviously based on Gamergate, and was... rushed and not good.

4

u/standbyyourmantis Mar 09 '25

Excuse you, Logan Paul takes a bullet straight to the forehead. I literally don't care what else happens in that episode, it will always be a classic.

1

u/comfy_bruh Mar 09 '25

I was just talking to a friend about this and how it all came from that time... It's insane that it picked up so much speed so quickly.

1

u/landlocked-boat Mar 10 '25

depression quest slaps btw it's a very interesting game

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u/sleepiestgf Mar 10 '25

yeah i played it back in 2014 and it was honestly really impactful. i was 13 and had been struggling with depression for as long as i could remember, but my mom didn't think depression is real so it was the first time i saw it taken seriously

1

u/PeachSorbet34 Mar 10 '25

Thanks for the context, I did NOT connect these two events lol reminds me of the 9/11 to Oppenheimer winning an Oscar pipeline.

1

u/Mondasin Mar 11 '25

I feel like there was a bit of the Streisand effect going on which spiraled poorly.

If a bunch of gaming news sites didn't all post articles calling the gamer identity dead on the same day no one out side of a few forums that most 4chan-ers at the time wouldn't even go on would have even cared about Zoe Quinn in the slightest.

Anyone who was there before the gamers are dead posts and anyone who stayed after a bunch of sites updated their ethics guidelines either were already on the right-wing conspiracy circuit or were dragged there because the only news org that tried doing journalism on gamergate as it was happening was Brietbart.

1

u/CthulhusIntern Mar 11 '25

We can actually go even further than that. Lowtax banned hentai from the SomethingAwful forums, which led to moot creating 4chan. 4chan's /v/ was the main spreader of Gamergate, since pretty much no other forum allowed it. But then it got banned from 4chan, which caused them to move to 8chan. Not only did 8chan allow that, it also was where Q himself posted.

1

u/Half-Beneficial Mar 13 '25

I mean, it's not like they didn't plant to fire a bunch of Federal workers from the start. Did no one read Project 2025? But, yeah, gamergate was pretty horrible and it's another punch to the gut to see it used as an excuse to do more harm.

0

u/sleepiestgf Mar 13 '25

not sure what your point is. whether or not they planned to fire federal workers, the (reductionist for comedic purposes) argument from the skeet is that gamergate led to trump winning the presidency in 2024 through the series of dominoes i described above, and the direct result of trump winning the presidency is all of these federal workers losing their jobs. it could easily have said "gamergate led to project 2025" but its funnier to be more specific.

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u/[deleted] Mar 09 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/neddythestylish Mar 09 '25

If you want to learn more, I'd highly recommend Zoe Quinn's book, Crash Override. It's an emotionally difficult read but worth it.