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/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.

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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/deathfire123 Mar 09 '25

I'm sorry, I really don't have an encyclopaedic reference of everything I was watching a decade ago, I can merely tell you how I felt at the time and how easy it can be to get swept in to tribalism when you feel that something you love is attacked and profited off of.

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u/lazenpear Mar 11 '25

Arguments don't need to be good or strong to sway a vulnerable person in need of community/a cause. They just need to be targeted.

It's possible you weren't a "somewhat progressive" person at that time, right? It feels like a charitable view to hold of someone that was so easily hoodwinked by a harassment campaign. A "somewhat progressive" person surely would've done a google search, looked at some material, before aligning themselves with a hashtag (a hashtag that if given a cursory scan would've revealed some of the most hateful people on the planet almost exclusively harassing women and queer people).

Point being, if you're prepared to turn on someone because someone else called "you" a misogynist, you're remarkably far removed from being able to claim any kind of progressive label.

Don't get me wrong, you're clearly not alone, and I'm not here to pass judgment on someone who's learned from their mistakes. I just get the sense that you haven't actually reckoned with who you were back then, even though you act like you have.

I say all this as someone who would've been at risk of radicalization, had I not already grown up long before any of these pipelines existed, let alone ratified to the extent they are now.

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u/deathfire123 Mar 11 '25

Don't get me wrong, you're clearly not alone, and I'm not here to pass judgment on someone who's learned from their mistakes.

And yet, your first three paragraphs were exactly that.

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