Wednesday 28 October 2015

The Guardian and Gamergate


I'm honestly puzzled as to why the Guardian publishes this nonsense. It's supposed to be a paper that promotes free thinking, not slavishly following dogma. #gamergate was a response to corruption in the gaming industry. There was real corruption - journalists not revealing if they did or did not have associations with game writers. This created understandable anger. The result was there was a campaign associated with a hashtag #gamergate. It's not an organised group. Some of the anger went too far. Some anger always goes to far when you are dealing with an online group of tens of thousands. It's deeply dishonest to then insist that gamergate was 'really' about hatred of women, and continually cherry pick to make that case. There are plenty of women gamers who have supported the gamergate campaign, and some of those women have been subjected to harassment and and threats too. These don't get reported as they don't fit the 'gamergate hates women' narrative.

What the Guardian is doing is supporting this dishonesty, and this kind of dishonesty is becoming an increasing problem: diverting the message of a movement to fit an agenda by cherry-picking. We had this with the awful atheism+, now just about everything online is about misogyny. There is real misogyny in our cultures, but it's rarely specific to individual movements. It has to be addressed as what it is, and not supposedly part of 'gaming', or 'secularism' or whatever.

'Gamergate' has not gone - it has won. It's now standard practice in the gaming interest to list any connections that have that might prejudice what they write.

I want to see journalists have to work harder to discuss real issues in constructive ways. The Guardian should do better.