Quote:
Originally Posted by Gizmo
The problem is that while it may be a small subset of people from 4 chan/reddit, they're still absolutely terrible and unequivocally in the wrong for their behavior. Be upset that they're making the rest of gamers look bad, be ashamed that their harassment has caused at least two women in the industry to quit their jobs (and I'm not talking ZQ or AS).
Because that's what the story is: Anita makes videos critiquing the way women are depicted in video games, and she gets harassed. Zoe Quinn's boyfriend publicizes their and her sex life, and she gets harassed. A few different men and women, including jenn frank and Mattie Brice get harassed (and they quit their jobs) for defending AS and ZQ. This small group of sad men are doing this, and the people who aren't outraged about that behavior are questionable indeed.
Thanks for a reasonable post Gizmo! Responding to the bolded, I think it's silly for large game news websites to give any attention to this handful of forum dwellers looking to stir up trouble and piss people off like ZQ and AS by trying to scare them with threats and doxxing. That just gives them validation that they're making an impact when they can so easily hijack the attention of the entire gaming media, and gives them incentive to do it again in the future - you're not going to shame people like that in to changing their behavior.
And most of the people that want to talk about something other than how these women have been treated still preface their forum posts with comments on how ridiculous their treatment has been. Go look over the NeoGAF forum threads about this, or the comment sections on articles from Eurogamer/Polygon etc. dealing with this. No one is supporting that behavior that I've seen. At worst you get a few people saying they either made up some of the threats to get attention, or are using those threats strategically for some advantage. That seems to be where most of the threat/abuse controversy is coming from, but even the people making those claims are relying on the principle that those kinds of threats are ****ed up.
So I don't agree that the online abuse from a few trolls is the whole story. Part of it is about how insular and chummy the press are with both AAA and indie developers, part of it is a response to how the press are treating their viewers by attempting to shame them by lumping everyone together with the handful of trolls causing this mess, part of it is just people sick of how much attention this issue is getting out of proportion to the actual contributions of people like ZQ and AS to the industry, and part of it is people wanting a legitimate discussion on what barriers women face in either developing or reporting on games.
If you've been around the internet for more than a handful of years, you're going to have run in to some awful **** without having been a prominent person, we all have. Some of the streamers lately that have been swatted have faced a far more serious threat to their life than AS just did. Where was the call to action in those cases and why aren't they part of the current discussion if we're looking at online threats and abuse? I suppose another part of this story is that most online gamers have faced at least some small part of the harassment these girls are getting, and some people (maybe a lot) are unconsciously resentful that they aren't just shrugging it off. I'm a bit guilty of that, even though it's obvious that actually being actively targeted by a group of people willing to crack in to online accounts and call their homes is far worse than having someone say they're going to skull-**** your dead corpse in a game of Halo. But again, the few people that aren't disgusted with this kind of behavior are only going to get worse from any press attention given to them, not decide to change in to less hateful people.