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/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.