We Hunted The Mammoth
Activision Blizzard, the game giant best known for its blockbuster Call of Duty and World of Warcraft games, is in turmoil amid accusations of a “frat boy” company culture rife with sexism and sexual harassment. More than 1500 workers at the company walked out earlier this week, angered by company management’s belligerent response to the accusations, detailed in a lawsuit filed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing.
We’ve been treated, over the years, to endless misogynist manifestos declaring that nerdy hobbies like comic books and video games should be kept free from pesky females, for all sorts of ridiculous reasons that usually come back to some allegedly innate characteristics of males and females that show that only men can appreciate said hobbies and that all of the women who claim to like them are only pretending, because really what they want is endless attention from nerdy dudes.
A specter is haunting Davis Aurini, the specter of thousands of Americans exercising their First Amendment rights by taking to the streets to protest the incoming Trump administration.
Say what you will about the meme-makers at the Going GHOST – MGTOW Facebook page, but you have to give them credit for one thing: their laser-like focus on the issues that truly matter to men.
And I don’t mean silly frivolous fluff like prison rape or workplace safety or prostate cancer. No, I mean the issues that REALLY matter. Like ladies night. And hot chicks playing video games in their underwear.
So the #GamerGaters are mad about a new study that suggests that some of the most dickishly misogynistic male gamers are quite literally losers. That is, men playing video games like Halo and Call of Duty online tend to lash out at women players when they’re doing their worst.
Looking at the behavior of a number of men and women over the course of 163 games of Halo 3, researchers Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff from the University of New South Wales and Miami University found that
Over on Roosh’s Return of Kings site, the lovely individual known as Redpiller1985 has totally figured out what has ruined video games, which sadly “have declined since their great rise in the 70′s-00′s.” He’s looking at you, ladies!
Ok, well, that’s not exactly a new sentiment to hear from a #GamerGater. But Redpiller1985 has managed to precisely identify just which kinds of ladies — sorry, “chicks” — are ruining gaming the most: the pretty ones who actually play video games. Or at least pretend to!
Leave it to Vox Day, the proudly reactionary sci-fi author and game developer, to say what most of his #GamerGate comrades spend so much energy denying: that their little movement is at least in part a backlash against women in gaming. At least against real women, with their own opinions.
As Vox writes in a post on his Alpha Game blog,
Worlds are colliding: Roosh Valizadeh, the reactionary, woman-hating pick-up guru, is starting a #GamerGate inspired game site, just as #GamerGate itself is descending into a morass of mutual recriminations and generalized douchebaggery.
Reaxxion – the title presumably a reference to Roosh’s neo-reactionary political views – doesn’t seem to have officially launched yet, but it is up, and looking a bit threadbare at the moment, with only a handful of articles posted yet. Billed as “a safe space for gamers who support #gamergate,” the site is an obvious attempt to cash in on #GamerGate anger. Roosh’s timing is a little less than perfect; he’s jumping aboard this money train as it seems to be derailing.
Men’s Rights activists are the only ones asking these tough questions about the recent threats against Anita Sarkeesian and other outspoken women in gaming.
Zoe Quinn has had it.
Yesterday, fed up with the equivocating bullshit that’s constantly being said in the media and within gaming circles about #GamerGate, and pissed off at all those who think of themselves as good people but still refuse to see the hatred and misogyny and harassment and doxxing that has been central to GG since the start, Quinn posted a series of (justifiably) angry tweets calling out the cowards in the profession who know that what’s going on is deeply evil but won’t say anything, and documenting the unending harassment she and her boyfriend, and her family, and his family are still getting.
Was that even a sentence? I don’t know. The point is she’s STILL getting harassed. She’s STILL getting “prank” calls. She’s STILL getting death threats. People are STILL digging around in her personal life and the personal life of everyone connected to her.
And she’s not the only one. The newest target of #GamerGate wrath? Indie game developer Brianna Wu, who, as I noted in my last post, got death threats … for posting memes on Twitter.
Meanwhile, two creepy obsessed assholes are still begging for money to make a documentary they hope will ruin Anita Sarkeesian.
Oh, but #GamerGate is about ethics.
I’m just going to paste in a bunch of Quinn’s Tweets here, because they pretty much speak for themselves.
