Tag: gamergate

Geeks chase women out of game conference

Posted on February 25, 2015 by - News

frankenstein-villagersLeading women game designers have been chased away from the PAX East convention in Boston with threats of rape and death.

Brianna Wu, cofounder of the Boston video game studio Giant Spacekat, has pulled her company off the exhibition floor at next month’s event because of safety concerns for the five other women who work with her.

Last week, Wu said in a blog post that PAX organisers had refused her repeated attempts over several weeks to discuss security measures.

Wu said that she had not backed down in the face of threats but “if something happened to my team, God forbid, that would be on me”.

Other developers have said that gaming culture is male and they want a frat-house environment where women appear only as pixellated sex objects. PAX East is a celebration of this culture and it was silly for women to want to be there in the first place.

However executives at Penny Arcade, the group that stages the expo have been behaving oddly.  Instead of issuing a general statement stressing that “the safety of our attendees, panelists, and exhibitors is the number one priority for PAX” which is normal in such cases it has clammed up completely.  This has given the impression that it refused to protect women developers who showed up at its event.

Nina Huntemann, a professor of media studies at Suffolk University and cofounder of Women in Games Boston told the Boston Globe that the organises needed to make a stronger statement.  Its current stance is that there are not taking seriously the concerns of women while preserving a male-dominated culture that they’ve allowed to fester.

On message boards and at meetings of women gamers, some continued to question whether Penny Arcade founders Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik are serious about gender equality after they posted a comic on their website in 2010 that appeared to make light of rape.

The comic featured monsters that were serial rapists, and Holkins and Krahulik later began selling T-shirts based on the cartoon. They ultimately axed the shirts, but Krahulik said at a PAX event in Seattle in 2013 that pulling the merchandise “was a mistake.”

 

FBI investigates Gamergate

Posted on December 19, 2014 by - News

untouchablesThe FBI has confirmed that it has opened an investigation related to the #Gamergate campaign, which had rapidly turned from a debate about “journalistic ethics in the gaming software world” to a hate campaign against women.

The bureau stated that, while they have documents related to the loose coalition of Gamergate those files are part of an ongoing investigation, and release “would interfere with law enforcement proceedings.” Who or what is being investigated remains is unknown.

A number of individuals, including Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu, have reported death threats after being targeted by Gamergate.

This will be bad news for the hackers and script kiddies who thought that they would be allowed to cyber stalk women and threaten to kill them without any reaction from the police. It is also a bit embarrassing for those who thought that #Gamergate was not illegal and the negative response was just the ranting of a few women who were trying to stop them playing games and go outside.

Although how it could justify DDOSing a disabled charity  is anyone’s guess.

 

American gamers tell Aussie women to get back to the kitchen

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

aussie minersCorrection: Sarkeesian cancelled a planned speech at Utah State University (USU), which is in Logan, Utah and is a different university than the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Apologies.

Women video game developers and critics in Australia are being threatened with rape and murder by American and Canadian gamers as the dispute that has gripped the global gaming community  goes global.

Sydney-based independent video game developer and critic ‘Sarah’ said she had received threats as a part of the movement after she voiced her opinion on an online gaming forum.  They were pretty blunt about what they were going to do to her for daring to make games that did not depict women as whores or sex objects.

“They were saying that they were going to rape me, they were going to kill me… They ran to friends of theirs, got them together … and started tweeting threats at me,” he said.

Sarah believed the perpetrators had set up a system that sent multiple threats to her account automatically.

Fortunately, they were not that clever. One posted a picture that allowed Sarah to figure out their name because they would screen capped it with their Facebook account in the background so I was able to find out the attackers name, and get a sense of who the other guys were.

They are all young, and they are all from the US and Canada and are all keen to spread their backward brand of misogyny to countries where women are treated a little more equally.

“That was almost a bit more terrifying – that they were this loose group of people that one of them could call up the others and they would attack.”

Unfortunately, because they were not Aussie misogynists they could not be arrested and charged with threatening behaviour.

The movement originated from a debate about whether video game journalists were too close to the industry, but then took a more threatening turn.

Earlier this month American feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian was attacked by people claiming to be from the gamergate movement shortly after posting an online video about the portrayal of women in games.

She was forced to cancel a speech at the University of Utah, after an anonymous threat from somebody who said they were planning to carry out a mass shooting at the event.

Gamergate geeks shocked as their heroes snub them

Posted on October 20, 2014 by - News

amazonGamers who have been waging a war on women have been surprised and shocked to discover that their heroes think that they are  socially retarded.

For a while now “Gamergate” has been waged against those who think that games should be more inclusive and less sexist.  A hard core of male gamers has taken it upon themselves to threaten anyone, particularly women, with violence, threats and general abuse.

For a while they have genuinely believe that sort of misogynistic behaviour was “cool” and that somehow becoming a gamer Taliban made them something special.  However over the weekend a number of tweets has put them in their place.

The tweets have come from nerd heroes such as Patton Oswalt who said that the “The misogyny of “GamerGate” sickened me.” Seth Rogen called for people to stop supporting this “stupid cause.”   Joss Whedonm responding to an article about the GamerGate tactics, said that it was not terrorism blowing things up, but it is using a fear of violence to “cow us and control our actions.”

Felicia Day dubbed the gamers a “cliched bloodthirsty roaming gang from post-apocalyptic fiction” while Tim Schafer (LucasArts) called on everyone to watch the video on sexism in games that set everything off. Mariel Cartwright the illustrator of Skullgirls said she found the whole thing depressing.

The gamers were initially shocked that the people they idolised considered them the backward scum of the earth and the only famous person who backed them was Alec Baldwin.

One person, without a trace of irony, or intelligence actually wrote on 4Chan: “Even misinformed people can put out their opinion on whatever they want, and they’ve got a large platform to do it with via the internet.”