Great rebuttal. I'm totally convinced.

There was nothing to rebutt.

How would people keep brushing you off if you, as an individual, moved on to something else and stopped telling everyone you support GG?

I think the problem is that you don't like what I am saying, so you can just brush me off because "I'm comparing them to racists", which is completely not my point. You know as well as I do that there are many ideologies and movements that are based on false premises and have no credibility whatsoever.

Or those who think it's nonsense.

It's not like the gaming media is under such scrutiny for the first time. People have been talking in public about integrity in gaming journalism for ages, and sometimes it has lead to outings and changes. Yet this has never led to a "coordinated smear campaign" by the gaming media. In fact, gaming news outlets have been merrily reporting when other websites have been under attack for their integrity. And now all of a sudden they have all formed some sort of brotherhood of game journalists watching each other's backs?

The feeling I have been getting (and this thread has reinforced it) that the real heart of the issue is not "ethics" in the gaming media. It's about a group of gamers who want to claim ownership to gaming and being a gamer, suddenly being told that they can't, and it pisses them off.

Those articles got such an emotional response because they hit too close to home. There are gamers who have formed their entire identities around being a "gamer", and they have very inclusive ideas of what the word should mean. Any criticism towards that definition of a gamer feels like a personal attack towards one's identity.

Anita Sarkeesian...is that you?

Finland's economic issues if i recall correctly. That's right. All about Finland, it is.

Look, your lame tactics here have been rehashed by the media a hundred times by now, I suggest you take a screenshot of your efforts, maybe Polygon is hiring and you can get a job there. Good day.

You speak of ownership as if it was exclusive ownership (excluding others from participation). Replace ownership with belonging, having a voice and you're much closer to the truth.

The articles got such a response because they were the proverbial pin in the camel's back. The climate of criticism aimed only at non progressive views is much older than the recent articles. This had been slowly boiling for a long time. Even in here we've seen many people saying to keep politics off their lawn.

Of course, that you are focused on the emotional responses does not mean there are zero valid rational or ethical arguments. If you don't want to address them though is your choice, just don't pretend the emotional is the whole story.

Ps: I think you meant exclusive instead of inclusive.

I'll reply with the word "delusional".

For starters, the debate about what is a gamer has been going on for decades. Is a guy who only plays COD with his mate a gamer? Is a girl that plays Bejeweled on Facebook a gamer? A lot of people define a gamer as someone who considers gaming to be his or her (main) hobby. This is not about ownership - I've seen the games industry atrophy for over a decade now, with more and more games being tailored to fit the mass market and for as many casual players. THAT is my main worry, not whether the games will have less revealing armour or more female protagonists. And I can tell you a lot of people join this sentiment - we want proper games, more niche games instead of the same game being copied over and over.

And in this whole debate, journalism has been no help at all, most of them consisting exactly of people who are on the fringes of gaming, who aren't truly invested, who don't give a crap about their audience. There's a reason so few journalists critique the industry: because they care more about the hand-outs than about gamers getting the games they want. Kickstarter may have circumvented this problem for a while, but journalism did nothing to help publishers see that there's still a market for these games, that it shouldn't be up to consumers to open their wallets to get a game funded. No, instead they focused on gender issues, listening to people who make a living out of playing victims, when the bigger fight is ignored. And ironically, this bigger fight ENCOMPASSES these gender issues because these don't fit in the idea of "mass market appeal" for the publisher.

So when you say it's about gamers feeling threatened about what gamer means, you're so out of your depth it's painful. We just are sick of journalism not having our backs and even attacking us.

Well I was using that term semi "tongue in cheek".

To me, Gertsmann has been somewhat of a beacon since 2007 when he had a falling out with gamespot over giving undesirable reviews to games that were sponsoring his website and he lost his job over it. The subsequent walk out of other gamespot people who went on to form Giant Bomb was something that at the time I thought was really positive, notwithstanding that at that time I was taking a break from gaming. This was at a time when the distinction between reviews and advertising was often blurred (although nothing like it was in the 80s and 90s). If you are interested, you can read about it on wikipedia.

For me, your post does make a good point of what many people have been saying about #gg. Its not so much about journalistic integrity as it is about viewpoints you disagree with. You like Kain, that's great, I like him too, but I don't know why you would suggest he is more ethical than Gertsmann, other than because you agree with his viewpoint.

Gertsmann make be wrong about #gg, and its a shame you didn't read past that paragraph, but I think that he presents his honestly held opinion. To me, when someone rights an opinion piece, that's all I ask for.

Friend, gaming is still going to be around, even with progressive voices. There is still going to be a place for you, even if there's going to be a place for someone who is not like you. You still have a voice, even if someone else does too. Nobody is going to take anything away from you.

I agree, that's all true. And this can't be helped. This what this video talks about at the beginning: http://blip.tv/foldablehuman/s4e7-gamergate-7071206

To me, there is more evidence of it being about people not liking what people (be they journalists, critics, SJWs, whatever) are writing. Comments like this:

"To summarize both points - we need to weed out propaganda pieces."

"We just are sick of journalism not having our backs and even attacking us."

I like the idea of an independent media, within reason, independent of both their subjects and their audience. I don't want the media to just report on what the masses want, to say what the masses want to hear and to agree with the masses. I don't want the media to report on what the game makers want to them to report on, say what the game makers want them to say, etc. If they are SJWs, that's fine by me. If they are not, that is also fine by me. I want the media to give their own opinions, write what they genuinely believe and disclose any genuine conflicts of interest.

The problem with your sentiment is your sense of entitlement. You're used to being catered to, and it upsets you that other people are being catered to as well. The fact of the matter is that the industry is free to choose whom they are catering to. You really don't need to be their audience, no matter how loudly you demand it.

Not that I think there's ever going to be a situation where you'll run out of games you want to play. I don't know about you, but I know I have a backlog of games I want to play (and some I want to re-play). There is an insane amount of games being published nowadays, it's impossible to keep up. Yes, there are games that are made for other people, but there are also lots of them made for hardcore, niche audiences as well. The situation is completely different from what it was ten or 20 years ago. In the mid-late nineties it was painful to be an RPG/adventure/strategy game fan. The revival we have been seeing in the past few years has been amazing! So many old genres have made a comeback, such a great variety of games and genres and styles we have never seen, and I for one welcome the diversity. I think this is a great time to be a hardcore/niche game fan. There are great games to play for everyone.

It's not entitlement - you confuse entitlement with being angry because game journalists are complete jokes when they should have our backs. Is DRM entitlement? Is having a game copy die after a few years because the copyprotection no longer works entitlement? Is seeing games being chopped to bits so they can be sold as DLC entitlement? It's anger at what the industry has become and seeing the journalists not giving a fuck because they're too busy with their circle wank while gladly going to industry parties and all-expenses-paid trips. Games journalism is ROTTEN.

And yes I have a ton of games to still play but that's a poor excuse to use. There's no reason the industry shouldn't have more morals. In other industries at least there's *some* proper journalism to stop it from getting out of hand but this is obviously not the case here. When you see all these sites write about GamerGate when they never bothered to write a single negative word about how copyprotection and DRM are killing the games, it's terrible. And you wonder why there's a shit storm going on now?

EDIT: also, for years I was vocally against Steam while the press ignored all the shady things Valve did across these years. The past few years, Steam has improved itself but that doesn't excuse all the crap they pulled and yet the press never ever wrote a negative article. Steam is now the "only" choice for digital games with most online digital stores selling Steam keys. It's practically a monopoly and why? Because the press has always backed Steam even when they fucked up. Just to give another example of how terrible the gaming press is.