The claim was "positive coverage" by Nathan Grayson.

There's a very annoying tactic, that the media (including wiki, sadly) use, where they change the original claims a little bit. They still sound KINDA like the GamerGaters' objections, but thanks to the change they are now technically false and can be "debunked". Here's the claim as made by GGers:

To put incredibly simply: Yes.

It was brought up about gaming journalism just getting worse over time and finally came to a boiling point. People started speaking up more. Suddenly we have people off to one side screaming that we're sexist, bigot homophobes that want everyone out of an all white male gaming space.

That was the 'lolwut' moment as it was boiling over and that is what was screamed repeatedly over everything said. They went further to call us rapists and murderers for playing some games that are violent and treat women terribly. We were called 'sock puppets', and claimed that it was all just a few angry men making tons of accounts to agree with themselves.

Not Your Shield : Came about not too long after that starting up. Many people of different sexualities, skin colors, sexes, and walks of life came forward. People, including me and where I jumped in after seeing a video of this from Boogie2988, posted a picture holding a sign for the hashtag. Proving we weren't sock puppets but individuals of all walks of life that were disagreeing with their claims and were against them using us as a shield from criticism. They found after that that there was a bunch of people they claimed to champion and know what's best for... disagreeing with them and wanted to keep tossing shit at us.. even going so far to say we were all being pushed or threatened to be in the group to hide the fact that it was all a small group of angry white men.

Then everything as you have mentioned.. did happen.. kept going and still is today though for a great deal of people, the GG movement itself born from a hashtag is finished. It keeps being brought up as an internet boogieman.

We've found other ways after GG to keep on being aware of shit happening in the gaming space and to be more vocal instead of trying to turn a blind eye.



I hope this wasn't too much but to try to easily explain it without all the small things that led up to others that got even bigger wouldn't make sense with some context.

This happened a year before Gamergate. And idiots like you still blame Gamergate on the made up premise that "some of the people may have later joined it". Maybe the reason she got angry Tweets was that people felt she was trying to take advantage of them. She was a game developer. She used her position as a game dev to crowd fund her elective surgery. She used her power and position as a game developer to play on the emotions of her fans and steal from them. And when the truth of the deception was revealed, she received some angry responses and rightfully so. Of course people were going to complain after she tried to take advantage, but that certainly doesn't make them "Gamergaters" especially when there was no such thing as Gamergate.

And you don't commit fraud by lying about a crowd-funding campaign! He felt he had to out her because many people were getting defrauded. She was committing a crime. Absolutely amazing how some people think that being trans somehow makes it okay for someone to steal from others.

Tell me what he is "supposed to do"? Say nothing and let a whole bunch of people have money taken from them over a lie? Alison Rapp is the one who was wrong here. She tried to steal money from people by promoting a dishonest cause and she received negative messages as a direct result of her unethical actions. She created her own problem. Sorry, it's sad, but it's her own damn fault. He saw a crime in progress. He did the right thing by letting IndieGogo know that the funding campaign was fraudulent. He followed the law and she was a thief.

And the funny thing is that people like YOU continuing to push the false narrative that Gamergate is responsible and keeping her story "in the news" probably are just as responsible for her later successful suicide. Because you couldn't leave her alone long enough to atone for her own mistake.

You are the perfect example of someone making shit up to blame it on Gamergate...you are making a fool out of yourself.

Gamergate didn't cause her to commit suicide. Gamergate didn't get Trump elected. And Gamergate is not causing global warming.

This so much. There's no reason at all for any company (as an entity) to take any side in controversial issues or social media activist drama - all it does is antagonize potential or already existing customers. The funny thing is that GOG had a very good track record with avoiding this landmine - in the past.

The PR person messed up badly btw - he did, admittedly, indicate those were mostly his personal views but he also all but stated that's what he thinks is the official position too.

Yes. And let us clarify: Nathan Grayson's article was from before any sexual contacts. They had relations they just weren't in a relationship...And covering a game of someone you know and not disclosing this fact I find to be inherently dishonest. If I was a journalist and were to write about a game that an old class mate was working on then even though we haven't spoken since childhood I would definitely still disclose that fact because the viewers need to know where my biases are.

And to reiterate: To me the entire blame goes on Nathan Grayson for not disclosing. Zoe Quinn doesn't have anyone but her boyfriend at the time to answer to. A games developer does not have an ethical duty to either be objective or to disclose one's biases. A games journalist does.

Wikipedia is dreadful for anything controversial. It is specifically set up to use secondary sources, and for anything current and controversial that means journalistic articles, which makes any subject criticising journalism extraordinarily biased as journalists don't tend to criticise themselves. The gamergate article is also absolutely infamous for being... deeply problematic in terms of edit wars and the like and being camped by tame admins etc.

(The usual illustration of the weakness of wikipedia is that a writer saying that, for example, gravity doesn't exist cannot be countered by the empirical fact that it does- it can only be countered by enough writers saying it does, and if no one says that then gravity doesn't exist according to wikipedia. The other weakness of wikipedia if, of course, that you can have a 12 year old edit an article on black holes that has been written by Stephen Hawking, and so long as he gets his citations right the 12 year olds version would stand.)

I disagree, removing tweet while wanting to stay out of this would be ok.
CDPR got enough pr credit to pull out from taking sides and not suffer.. if they kept their neutrality strong they wouldn't suffer any meaningful backlash or attacks.

Problem is while they did it they attacked gg, picked side and called some their customers abusive..

This is pretty much gist of the problem, guessing a lot of people felt betrayed.

Don't forget that he is also listed as a playtester in the game docs. And this relationship they "were not in yet"...
The Polaris Game Jam article came out the same week he and Zoe went to Vegas to "start their relationship". An article that went out of it's way to blame the Game Jam for it's own collapse and not Zoe. The article came out on Monday. That next weekend their relationship supposedly started, just ask Nathan and Zoe, why would they lie about it?

The problem is that the journalist, the editor and the developer were all friends. We'll never get the actual truth, but the fact they all have this cozy relationship creates severe doubts about the objectiveness of the journalism.

The same thing in the Alison Rapp case. Destructoid was made aware that this game developer was fraudulently asking for money in this crowd funding campaign and decided to ignore it. They didn't warn IndieGogo. They didn't contact authorities. They just demanded that the reporter cover it up. It's this sort of cozy relationship between journalists and developers, that is the problem. Game rags are covering up for their friends and associates, even to the point of covering up crimes.

Or, they could have let the tweet stay making it clear it was an ad for a highly controversial videogame, while at the same time staying out of it by not answering to highly biased gaming media. And, no, they didn't just call some of their customers abusive, they basically accused their customer base at large, gamers, of belonging to an abusive movement, theory that has bee disproven by the FBI itself btw. GamerGate didn't reach the size it has merely because the regressive left gaming media decided to take a dump on a few gamers here and there.

Nah... any way you slice it, GG is a controversy, and Postal did directly refer to it. GOG had every right to stay neutral. I don't think that's very accurate. Just from the posts here you can see there are gamers that are anti-GG, and gamers who just don't give a damn.

I have my reservations about wikipedia and the general fashionable wikilogic of knowledge being a matter of beliefs polularity (knowledge is actually not "democratic" at all - its construction and propagation raises many problems but they cannot be solved by populism). However, in this specific case, it's hard to find sources less creepy than wikipedia. Because the reality is, gamergate is mostly a blob of noisy outrage about "cultural marxism", "feminazis", "political correctness", "gay agenda", "SWJs" and other "alt-right" buzzwords, that pretty much disqualifies the journalistic issues at its core. It makes curiosity about this original element a bit difficult to satisfy. It's a bit like wondering about "unidentified flying objects", when 99,9999% of writings about it come from the flying saucers enthousiasts, conspiracists, mystics, occultists and gurus who are the majority of people sufficiently motivated to write about it.

The additional footnotes provided there are valuable (as raw sources), but I'd skip the gamergaters' own narrative, given how transparently embedded it is in a broader, ideologically dubious one.

We all attribute legitimacy to very different sources and markers, with keywords (and concepts, or general discourses) acting as signs of validity, invalidity and deafening alarm bells. The reality is that, whatever its origin, this "journalism ethics" movement has drawned itself in a very specific, unrelated current, with very strong and polarizing identity markers. Hence the irredeemable shift of signification. If there is something interesting about it way way upstream, it was to be found where these markers don't flourish as much as, say, in this thread. So, yeah, wiki wouldn't be the worst starting point.

Zoe's game jam involvement was easily the most condemning of her character by far because it proves that her actions were completely premeditative. She probably would've gotten away with it had she not been an idiot and DCMAed Matt. She misused the DCMA, and Matt retailiated. This was the catalyst that caused gamergate.

fuck it, I'm done with this stupid tempest in a teacup, and from now on I'm just downvoting anyone who uses the term "SJW".