gamergate

Wouldn't the line come down to the intent of the game? Like I can see Disco Elysium or Grim Fandango or something as art. That makes sense they have something to express and there's a relationship between the creators and the audience. There are stories, themes, messages, etc. But then there are games like Killing Floor or Counter-Strike, where the intent is entirely about an exhilarating multiplayer experience. One thing that always stuck with me that Roger Ebert said is we wouldn't consider a game of basketball to be art. Is a game of chess art? Or are the individual pieces artistic?

That's where I get hung up.

You forget that the actual catalyst was her ex-boyfriend venting about her on 4chan after their break-up and making those allegations. Chan types had hated the dev in question before GG too for some other crimes against gamerdom, and they were fucking ecstatic to blow the shit out of the post and turn it into a campaign

She was sleeping with someone else at that company, but that's pretty banal. Tightly knit industries filled with young people usually involve a ton of fucking. Some of it looks like a potential conflict of interest, until you realize it's just horny young people with similar interests getting pushed into having a lot of social interaction with eachother. No way she's close to the only game developer to sleep with a games journalist.

lmao not even, it got a mention on Kotaku due to DepressionQuest being, well, a means to convey a rough equivalent to being depressed. no reviews at all, literally just a little bit of coverage. Though tbh I'm thinking about it and I think Sarkeesian slamming predated gamergate, actually.

I don’t understand what all the outrage was about.

I genuinely believe gamergate was and is an online movement that continues to beg for more serious analysis. It wasn't a harbinger of Trump politics like some pundits think, actually it was a culmination of half a decade of continuous culture war waged by Rush Limbaugh types during the Obama years, and eventually evolved into a the more coherent belief of "politics is downstream from culture" by Andrew Breitbart. I said this before but this "culture war" was waged on several fronts, from movies, to sci-fi books to fucking MtG. Breitbart the magazine under Bannon was just waiting for the right movement to latch itself onto and the most explosive one was GG.

"Gamers" are mindless consumers who are completely subjected to the whims of corporations. Even the category of 'Gamer' is made up and not coherent (no an activity you do does not constitute an identity).

It is embarassing how much of a pant shitting outrage gamers threw over some pretty innocuous videos.

Right up to YouTube removing the dislike button, videos uploaded to the femenist freq channel still had at best 50:50 ratios of likes to dislikes. So wild to me gamers really spent the last decade continuing to go to her channel to downvote anything even tangentially related to her.