Wow, blast from the past. May as well jump in on the last page where I left off a year later.
@Gabriel LaVedier:
What is a gamer. That's an interesting question. It's definitely not based on genre, and it's not based on any hard limit as to the minimum number of hours spent a week, maybe its the breadth of your knowledge of gaming geekery, maybe its some combination of things. I've seen it described as a way of saying 'you will not need to explain the essentials to me in order to talk to me about video games' though so maybe that's it, in which case you probably count. I would say Anita Sarkeesian isn't cause in the stand up lecture where she's being human and honest and says she isn't one, isn't interested in games and doesn't play much that that's anita sarkeesian not being a gamer. It's only in the highly scripted feminist frequency videos she claims to be highly invested in the culture.
Also her audience by and large aren't gamers because when she endorses a game that doesn't make anyone start playing it, and while she curates a list on steam hardly anyone follows it.
and yes, the racist, sexist etc threats she stirred up against herself are part of her strategy.
1. announce a project to create a video series criticizing video games on 4chan, 4chan being terrible people oblige and troll the shit out of it.
2. point at trolling, stir up pity dollars from well meaning rubes to fund project well over the goals.
3. start putting out the project, accuracy and research are not important and in fact being inaccurate and poorly researched is a bonus as any criticism can be put as more harassment to stir up more pity dollars.
It's a testament to the average competencies of your average geek that they actually fell for this strategy. Anita Sarkeesian played this particular social game well and leveraged the gamer community's dislike of condescending posers to go from an inconsequential vlogger to a rich, well known speaker who got to show up and talk to the united nations.
Without the hate no one would know her name, and no one would care.
I'm starting to reconsider the notion she's not a gamer though on the basis of what i've just written. It's like, when it comes to this particular social media game she's the equivalent of those japanese kids who show up in videos playing dance dance revolution on expert difficulty.
As for gamer gate in general. While there was a core good idea. That there was genuinely an ethics problem in video game journalism. It quickly got swamped with assholes. I think this is what happens when your movement is based on a hashtag, you can't organize it effectively to keep the message from getting corrupted (and assholes are INEVITABLE online). But gamer gate DID get ethics policies revised on quite a few game review sites, so in that sense gamer gate A. won and B. is over. anything that's left afterwards is the assholes who congregated under the banner but didn't really care about the corruption in games journalism issue.
As for the need to make video games that represent 'gamer gate ideals' or whatever nagato is talking about...eh, I think honestly there was an over-reaction. The video game industry is too vast and diverse for those who want to sanitize it and control it to make any serious headway, and honestly back on the subject of game journalism the last time i read a professional reviewer as to whether I should play a game was years back. I go by the steam community review averages instead. So whether social authoritarians with an agenda have taken over the media or not doesn't matter anymore than if they'd taken over the BETAMAX format.
So in short, nothing to worry about, nothing needs changing, video games are safe.
