Fox News is an entertainment show not a news show, despite the name.
The Zoe Quinn sex-for-reviews scandal
- Thread starter GasBandit
- Start date
Necronic
Staff member
Is this an example of the high quality journalism you feel is missing from the games industry?
GasBandit
Staff member
Hey, if storify is sourceworthy in this discussion, so is this.
Necronic
Staff member
I just have such a hard time taking that away from this. There were few, if any, ethical breaches in journalistic integrity in this story, especially when compared to the far more common practices of giving journalists huge gifts before they review a game. Those stories never get any real traction.
Yet this one did. Why?
My guess is that it's because Zoe Quinn is generally unlikable (her twitter feed is just....not good), and because it allowed a backdoor excuse to backhandedly attack women in the name of "integrity".
I still don't see it.
Yet this one did. Why?
My guess is that it's because Zoe Quinn is generally unlikable (her twitter feed is just....not good), and because it allowed a backdoor excuse to backhandedly attack women in the name of "integrity".
I still don't see it.
GasBandit
Staff member
Because her network of friends deleted 25,000+ reddit posts about it, squelched any discussion of it on prominent gaming websites, and closed ranks and worked in lockstep to declare "gamers over" because of it. Streisand effect. Almost immediately, the story started becoming "WHY ARE YOU CENSORING DISCUSSION OF THIS PREVIOUSLY MINOR ANECDOTE?!" As I said, if that didn't happen, I'd be willing to bet the story would have died out and gone away within a couple days.
I certainly didn't hear about it until the mass reddit deletions, which is how this very thread got started here on halforums.
Umm... you mean like the Geoff Keighley stuff, where he did a review surrounded by Doritos and Mountain Dew Code Red? The Doritos Pope has been crucified ever since and he's the laughing stock of the industry now.
Or how Jessica Chobit got to be in ME3 entirely because she worked for a review site (I wanna say IGN) and was... kinda of attractive? She is ALSO a laughing stock now.
Or how Jeff Gerstmann was literally fired by Gamespot for shitting on Kane and Lynch in the review during a site wide promotion with the developer? He went on to make Giant Bomb which... well, it's legit, but kind of crap.
To put it simply, the gaming community has risen up enmass before, but those situations didn't escalate because they weren't challenged. That doesn't mean it's forgotten.
Or how Jessica Chobit got to be in ME3 entirely because she worked for a review site (I wanna say IGN) and was... kinda of attractive? She is ALSO a laughing stock now.
Or how Jeff Gerstmann was literally fired by Gamespot for shitting on Kane and Lynch in the review during a site wide promotion with the developer? He went on to make Giant Bomb which... well, it's legit, but kind of crap.
To put it simply, the gaming community has risen up enmass before, but those situations didn't escalate because they weren't challenged. That doesn't mean it's forgotten.
*looks up Jessica Chobot*
Oh, that's who that was? I kept wondering who the fuck this was supposed to be, and why won't she get off my damn ship, she's terrible.
She seemed nice enough on the Nerdist podcast and is enjoyable enough on Nerdist News on Youtube.
Gaming is serious business, I guess.
Not to poo poo on your party, but none of those incidents had nearly the insane amount of backlash as gamergate.
I think the issue is that her character, for the most part, felt rather shoe-horned in. Most don't mind cameos, but her model was designed to look exactly like her (no other character got facial mapping with the voice actor to the degree she did), be a journalist, and take up a huge part of the ship for the entire play-through. It felt like they were doing it as a promotion of IGN rather then just a cameo, which I don't think anyone would have cared about. She basically became the character version of the Nike symbol appearing on all your armors, she was seen more as a promotion then a character.
None of those incidents the gaming journalist community attempted to squelch.
GasBandit
Staff member
That's because it wasn't squelched. It was allowed to burn itself out in due course.
If the issue was money she could have just done the voice work for a reporter character and no one would likely have cared. It was the fact they worked so hard to make her "JESSICA CHOBOT FROM IGN IN MASS EFFECT" is where the issue came up.
Either way, yes, gamers do take things more serious then they need to, that is a given, because gamers are often engulfed in geekdom, and geekdom can take anything way to seriously, from Captain Kirks hairdo in one episode to "Han Shot First, Dammit!", all the way to writing twenty page essays on why a certain character sucks on Game of Thrones.
Gamers like to think that 'their' media is pure and unviolated by business. When that curtain gets ripped away and they find it is not only just as bad as the other entertainment venues, but in many ways worse and even more incestuous, that cognitive dissonance kicks in and it's a reverse Ogre, instead of jocks yelling "NERRRDS" it's nerds yelling "BUSINESSSSSSSSS"
Basically this. It didn't get suppressed so it ran it's course.
I'd wager that that had something to do with it being pretty much pure harrassment of a woman because of (as necronic said) few, if any, ethical breaches in journalistic integrity and more for her sex life. Can't blame people for not wanting to be a part of that, and for those running sites and the like to not want that stuff going on under their watch.
GasBandit
Staff member
Like I said - Somehow these reddit mods, site admins, and game journalists all forgot how the Streisand Effect works... and instead of simply excising/censoring actual sensitive data (like alleged addresses/pictures/doxxing) they simply started pruning everything even remotely related with a chainsaw, legitimate or reprehensible alike.
That's not how you calm a situation down.
Given how much blowback there was, it's a lot easier to blanket ban a volatile subject than try to sort through large amounts of comments/posts for which ones are legtimate and which are abusive. And if it really was a minor thing, as you've agreed, than a blanket ban of the topic isn't that big a deal.
GasBandit
Staff member
Internet people being told they can't discuss something very quickly becomes a big deal. It didn't blow up until the deletions started. You can bet most of those 25k+ posts were "WHY WAS MY POST DELETED" or repeats of things already posted, which then got deleted again, which led to more WHY WAS MY POST DELETED. Then someone else comes along and reposts the same info again, crosslinked from another site, and suddenly you've got mickey mouse trying to chop up magic brooms.
Anyone who's ever had to manage any kind of online "community" could have told you how that was going to work out.
Actually, this time, it was "ETHIIIIIIIIICS"
So it's not about journalistic intergity then, but people on the internet overreacting to strong moderation because of the harrasment involved in a specific incident.
Well, frankly (teehee), there is a lot of confusion between ethics and business amongst the nerdcore. A mailing list of writers is apparently an 'ethical' issue?
GasBandit
Staff member
That's what really started the massive reaction, and then it moved on to the journalism thing when the large, angry mob was then suddenly attacked simultaneously by all the big gaming media sites as being "over."
Again.....they weren't. There was a blog and one article about how gamers were over. Then a lot of articles written ABOUT those articles.
There were many times as many Are Gamers Over? articles than there were Gamers Are Over articles.
Probably because he's only big in Canada. However, I know a lot of people are going after him hard.
GasBandit
Staff member
But you know darn well that's splitting hairs. Even asking the question in a headline is to imply it is the case (otherwise people wouldn't have so many gripes about news headlines like "Is Obama secretly helping jihadists smuggle in ebola?" where the actual text of the article can be accurately summarized as "no"). To give it the coverage it got was tantamount to support.
Wasn't the reason the thread kept getting deleted was that it was written by an angry, jilted ex? Airing out dirty laundry - which, given the source, half of it might not even be true - is not gaming journalism. It's an ex trying to get back at his cheating girlfriend. It was related in some ways to gaming, yes, but only tangentially. I still don't trust the original source because the guy clearly wrote it out of revenge.
It wasn't deleted because of VIDYA GAEMS. It was deleted because it was an attack on an ex, airing personal details an unnecessary dirty laundry.
It wasn't deleted because of VIDYA GAEMS. It was deleted because it was an attack on an ex, airing personal details an unnecessary dirty laundry.
Those were deleted without incident until the guy made his own blog to post the info, because no one really cared about her sex life at that point. In the end that was just the first catalyst, because it noted the relationships Zoe had with various journalists who at one point or another reported on her favorably. Once people latched on that it started to gain trending status on a few sites.
Also, just to be clear, the journalists didn't favor her in a "OMG DEPRESSION QUEST IS THE BEST BUY IT" type of way, but more nuanced, like more references in various articles about the failed GameJam she took part in, and direct linking to her own GameJam which has no foreseeable released date, all the money going directly to her personal PayPal. THESE were the things we were questioning.
A few people were questioning these things on Reddit and NeoGAF and such till all the posts started vanishing, as Zoe had a friend in the Reddit moderation team who she was speaking with about the deletions on Twitter. Other sites soon followed due to connections they had with either Zoe or the various journalists involved in the whole thing, and it spiraled out of control from there into what people now know as GamerGate.