He was surely talking about LeonardoCornejo using the 'r' word wasn't he? unless 'LeonardoCornejo' is YOUR 'alt' :-p

Let me ask you this then...
Here's the title of the petition...
"Target: Withdraw Grand Theft Auto 5 – this sickening game encourages players to commit sexual violence and kill women"
First paragraph...
"It's a game that encourages players to murder women for entertainment. The incentive is to commit sexual violence against women, then abuse or kill them to proceed or get 'health' points – and now Target are stocking it and promoting it for your Xmas stocking."
Further on...
"This misogynistic GTA 5 literally makes a game of bashing, killing and horrific violence against women. It also links sexual arousal and violence."
And later...
"Games like this are grooming yet another generation of boys to tolerate violence against women. It is fuelling the epidemic of violence experienced by so many girls and women in Australia - and globally."

Do you think it was okay for them to misconstrue these "facts" about the game? Because to me, the biggest thing were these lies. Target and K-Mart were subjected to a great deal of media attention over this deceptive petition. The "choice" of freely carrying GTA V was taken away from them. It was remove it or continue to be barraged and harassed over carrying it. To me that is wrong!

I already proved that the 'hooker trick' is a thing by referencing GAMEFaqs a while ago
the petition DOES give the impression that 'The Hooker Trick' is more fundamental to the game and plot than the, almost 'Easter Egg' that it is but I can't help feel that it would have been better if Rockstar had quietly dropped it with the 4th one - the GTA series is a great series and it does it a great dis-service that so many 'civilians' know it 'as that game where you use and then kill prostitutes' - and I believe that they do, I've heard that from people in real life for years and I knew it would get the series in trouble eventually...

It's a pain when you're defending it and you have to start 'Well yeah, you CAN, but it's optional and a pain to pull off and, look, the game's not really ABOUT that...'

Also "Games like this are grooming yet another generation of boys to tolerate violence against women. It is fuelling the epidemic of violence experienced by so many girls and women in Australia - and globally"

That's the real impetus - 'Think of the children - won't someone think of the children?"

Not " GTA V needs to be removed from Targets and K-Marts in Australia because feminists might be "triggered" by it, as if now adults need to be protected for their sensibilities and as if these feminists were actually really going to buy GTA V anyway."

As you said before...

I read the encylopedia dramatica article. I thought everyone knew gaming "journalists" worked for the company currently buying the ads since the nintendo power days. In all my years of reading that magazine, I can only remember them panning one game.

Actually one of the retailers cited the petition in their response when they pulled it from the shelves. So yes, it was the petition.

Fever, I left out the parts of the petition where they claimed one of them was a former prostitute and it creates great grief to the abused. So how the heck are you contradicting me? And how is an adult game "about the children". Get real.

The "Hooker Trick" doesn't make those statements more true and less deceptive, and as I pointed out before, most of the mentions of that "trick" talk about gaining health. Some actually discourage you from killing them, some say its only an option. So, this hooker trick you speak of, is paying money to have sex with them for health....it doesn't involve killing.

And YOU chose to interpret that as trying to sell the game to children...
There are only 3 items in the picture and 1 of them is an adult game or 33% of what is shown....
And it is interesting how that picture of the ad, cuts off the whole bottom half of the page. Wonder why?

The censor is the one responsible for the censorship. In the case of a boycott, the potential censor is the target of the boycott. It is their action that determines if censoring occurs.

There was another reply to me about authority and the state. Sometimes the authority is give by the state, but in self censorship the authority is given by the entity that created the work.

Yes, the boycotters forced the censorship thus they are the censors. Just like with movies, the MPAA are considered the censors even though they just "suggest" a scene be removed lest it receive a higher rating. You are just trying to play word games justifying being a busybody who goes out of their way to demand actions of others...

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And for the record, the K-Mart/Target removal is a total of about 500 physical store locations.

Yes, a lot of people know about games reviews being influenced by the marketing budget of the company selling the game. That frustration has been growing for years. Then the some of the games press started in a new direction. They started promoting games of people they liked (usually indie) and they also started attacking their audience for largely being male and liking things that males like. That frustration started to grow.

Then the Zoe Quinn thing broke. Some of games press decided to respond to it by deleting threads discussing the drama, by encouraging other gaming press or sites to stop discussion on their message boards, and then they wrote the gamers are dead articles. They basically said that the only reason for the backlash is misogyny. It was the response by the games press that really caused this thing to grow as large as it has.

No, I am defending a valid political expression in a free society. The group calling for the boycott has no force at their disposal. They can't control how many people will and won't view or purchase a product. If someone truly believes that the integrity of their work is more important than income, they have the option to not censor. Unfortunately, most games start as financial endeavors. The thing about a boycott is you as an individual are free to say: "Boycotting this game because asexuals are under-represented is idiotic" and buy the game. Everyone involved has a choice to make.

This isn't even getting into censorship not always being a bad thing, or that demanding actions of others is necessary in a functioning society. An individual's choices ripple far and wide through society. Hate on Jack Thompson as much as you want, He is right about violence and children.

Does anyone have pre-gamergate article examples? I'd be interested in reading them. Someone should write a book about the tumblrs meeting the real world when they go outside.

They should. They really should.

If the player chooses to use a prostitute, the player gets charged $1 / sec for the service, which gains them health
This is quite a hefty charge, especially early in the game
However, if the player chooses to kill the prostitute afterwards she drops not just the normal pedestrian prostitute amount but the full amount charged

Therefore the player is financially incentived to kill the prostitute, the only reason not to is moral - some of the GameFAQs walkthroughs discouraged killing the prostitute on moral grounds even though there is no in-game advantage to this and its 'only a game'. Others presented killing the prostitute as the natural, 'spike', game theory 'optimal / correct play'

GTA isn't designed for optimal play; but there will always be some fanboy who does everything to gain mechanical perfection in his playthrough just to gloat, and think he achieved something. Even if killing prostitutes was mechanically more sound than not killing them, GTA is not a mechanics-only focused game like RTSs are. In an RTS deleting a worker to make population room for a soldier is encouraged, but doing the similar here is not encouraged to anywhere near the same degree. It can even be said that people are outraged because its killing females and nothing else.
And at the end of the day, games mechanically incentivizing someone to kill people of a particular type isn't gonna cause any problems unless the player has a serious lack of grip on normalcy and reality, and stuides have proven games don't cause violence, sexism or any other of the buzzwords.

Some Games reviews were influenced by advertiser money, the most notable example being the Kane and lynch 2 review from Gamespot and Jeff Gertman's firing, and guess why reported on that being bullshit at the time? Other games sites. It's like they've known and been complaining about this for ages.

Game sites promoting indie games because they like them, proves what exactly?

Do you have any proof that they were attacking their audience for being largely male? I mean actually attacking their entire audience indiscriminately, because they're the wrong gender, not attacking the "boys club, eww girls have cooties" of some segments of the gaming population hold (the biggest example being the dude bro douche bags that plagued xbl back in the day)

The Zoe Quinn thing "broke" you mean Zoe's X posted a thing and the internet shitbags that already had an axe to grind with her (Which I still don't understand, I mean I don't expect everyone to like everyone but why the internet picks certain targets for concentrated harassment/trolling confuses me) started posting their hateful bullshit and certain sites weren't having it.

The Gamers are dead articles, have you actually read them? They don't claim misogyny as the cause.

but I'll agree with you on one point, the Games media did handle this poorly, you don't feed the trolls, and you check your sources, if they'd done that Gamergate could've dead back in August and we could be living in a better world.