I feel like I start understanding why I feel so much discussion in this thread seems unproductive and circular.
There are essentially three topics here:
- Ethics in games journalism
- Harassment of game developers and journalists
- Meta-discussion about what GamerGate is and is not
The first two topics are important, and it is possible to have an interesting discussion about them. However, they are lumped into this thread (which is titled "GamerGate"), where they inevitably end up in a circular meta-discussion of what gamergate is, what its position is, sides involved, etc. The thing is, people usually end up violently agreeing on issues which actually matter; they disagree on what GamerGate is, but as Deadspin article points out, "by design, Gamergate is nearly impossible to define", and the answer to the question mostly matters only to the people who for some reason decided bringing themselves under that banner would be a good idea.
We need a discussion ground where we can discuss both issues of ethics in games journalism and issues of what we can do against the harassment, without derailing into "what #gamergate is all about" question. When we say "now is not the time to discuss those issues", we essentially allow Twitter hate mob to dictate us their agenda.
The issue of journalist ethics needs to be decoupled from gamergate, because gamergate was never about it. The issue of harassment would benefit from such decoupling too. The problem existed before the entire kerfuffle, and I suspect that many people who did horrible things during GamerGate were ready to do them before (remember, GDC with bomb threats happened back in March).
Seriously, there is only so many times I can read someone post "GamerGate is about ethics #NotAllGamergate" with subsequent rebuttals, and we are almost at 12,000 posts in this thread.