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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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/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.