Those are some great articles in the OP.
I said I was going to avoid this as it was messing with my head, but here I am again.
All this blew up for a few reasons but to me there is one big one. Gamer's for a long time has been talked down to by the gaming "press" and big devs and publishers. Whether it be the ME3 ending, DLC abuse or what have you, most gamers feel that most of the press have been in the back pocket of the game maker's for a while now and have told gamers to stop being whiny entitled children. In other words, animosity has been brewing within our hobby for a while now. When the same gaming "press" blame the "gamers" for the industries problems and then shout down to the same gamers that they are irrelevant it reached critical mass and blew up.
Pretty much. Then when you look at
twitter stat research:
Journalism is the only category where women received more abuse than men, with female journalists and TV news presenters receiving roughly three times as much abuse as their male counterparts.
For clarity if you follow the link and download the spread sheet you see this.
- Overall Tweets (male)45792 (female)60048
-
- Abusive Tweets (male)898 (1.96%) (female)3136 (5.22%)
About 60% abusive tweets from male and around 40% from female
This tells you that for whatever reason female persons in the press get a lot of hate. The reason for this, I honestly dont know, but because of this, guess who is going to get most of the mob hate when the hate is focused on the media?
This means whenever a mob gets created in the game industry, and it is about the journalists, they will suffer and female celebrity media will suffer the most(since we have no politicians or celebrities really, outside of a small handful of youtube celebs).
So, when the mob goes on the attack you have to expect that the mob will attack by around 4x the women in media (this is me assuming that the 1% from celebrities transfer over to the journalist), more then the male journalists. This can very easily look like gamers have more of a sexist problem then other industries, by journalists.
You are not sexist or misogynists, however the mob WILL have them, and statistically since we have no celebrities or politicians the mob will near
exclusively go after the media and the women will experience the hate by a factor of 4... That is a noticeable difference when you compare yourself among your peers.
So ya, it is never good to join in on a mob, specially when that mob is on twitter(and looting). If people cant figure out, from this, that people will assume you are a misogynist because some of the mob(regardless of the accuracy of the accusation), I would hope people can see why the perception is there. 4x the amount of abusive from twitter responses is a hard thing to deal with, specially if you are getting attacked more then the male counter part.
So to me, because the way the media and the industry as a whole is setup I think the game industry has to be more careful then most, because the perception is very easy to be construed as a large % of "gamers". I also think this means the male journalists have to be more careful to not fan the flames, because by doing so you are actually keeping the pressure on the women, I think.
The moderation team has been asked for a thread dedicated specifically to the #gamergate phenomena currently exploding on a Twitter near you.
2. Don't drop a link and say, "That's how I feel!" If you can't be bothered to put your opinions into your own words, don't post.
Haha, at 1st I was worried this wasnt going to get followed.
