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Jan. 15, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
24:42
Good @Nightline, Sweet #GamerGate
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Violent depictions of women being beaten.
Oh my.
Raped.
Good lord.
And run over by cars.
Well, I am certainly offended that there is art out there that offends me.
I think we should ban this sick filth right now.
It's not the movies, it's video games.
I fail to see how that's a relevant distinction.
Ban it all.
Ban everything.
I don't want my art to be controversial or to push the boundaries of societal norms.
That'd be despicable.
And now the women calling for change in this multi-billion dollar virtual industry are facing a very real backlash, including death threats.
It goes without saying that nobody's in favor of death threats.
In fact, we're all so against death threats that it doesn't matter which individual sent the death threats, everyone should be held accountable as if they had themselves sent those death threats.
Here's my Nightline co-anchor, Juju Cheng.
For Anita Sarkeesian, this is the new normal.
Armed escorts at public events, tracking her every move.
I'm constantly aware of the fact that there's an enormous amount of hate directed towards me.
Hate in the form of bomb threats, rape threats, even death threats.
Okay, so what you're saying is that you want me to believe that whenever Anita Sarkeesian has some kind of public speaking engagement, she is always taken there, under armed guard by the police.
Because if I've got to be honest, and I'm going to be, I have a really hard time believing that.
The terror threats you're talking about was when she was due to speak at the University of Utah.
Everyone agrees that threats are awful and deplorable.
Now that we've made that clear, let's actually critically analyse what the threat was.
To start with, it's very unusual for someone who's going to commit a massacre to warn about it in advance.
As far as I know, this is unprecedented.
Not only that, nothing to do with gaming was mentioned in this threat.
It was entirely focused around the concept of feminism.
I repeat, neither gaming nor gamergate are mentioned in this threat.
And the police themselves found this threat to be not credible.
Quote, throughout the day, USU police and administrators worked with state and federal law enforcement agencies to assess the threat to our USU community and Miss Sarkeesian.
Together we determined there was no credible threat to students, staff or the speaker, and that the letter was intended to frighten the university into cancelling the event.
So why do I bring that up?
Well, I bring that up because Anita doesn't seem very scared.
And I don't think she's very scared because I think she knows she has no reason to be scared.
For example, she tweets this.
It appears some of our angry gamer friends can't contain their excitement about my interview with Nightline Tonight.
Or pictured here with Joss Whedon where they make light of how Anita has a career of being offended.
And that's all she does.
She has a career of being offended about portrayals of women, and it's a joke to her.
I'm all for having a sense of humor about yourself.
But there's nothing about Anita that makes me think that she thinks she's under any kind of threat.
Which is why I think we should then talk about something called the liar's smile.
How to spot a liar.
Let's have a look at that footage of her walking to the car with the police officers.
I'll play this at slow motion because I want you to really look at her face, look at her expression.
She looks like the cat that got the cream.
So going back to this article, the team from the University of British Columbia concluded that liars were betrayed by tiny movements that caused them to raise their eyebrows in surprised expressions and smile slightly.
Innocent people, meanwhile, tended to furrow their brow in genuine expressions of distress they found.
Well, she doesn't look like she's distressed to me.
Hell, she's full-on smirking here.
Again, you might be thinking, well, so what?
Well, the reason is that Anita Sarkeesian has actually worked with some very suspicious characters in the past.
For example, here we can see her posing for a photo on the website of someone called Bart Baggett, who has multiple allegations of fraud to his name.
And then she worked with a guy called Alex Mandozian.
I just want to let you all know how amazing Alex's teleseminar secrets was.
It really motivated me to get my own business started.
In my current day job, I saw how teleseminars could change the face of your business and make a lot of money, but I didn't really understand how it worked.
Who teaches people how to do teleseminars where he says that he will increase people's earnings and help them earn six, seven figures?
And surprise, surprise, Alex Mandozian has allegations of fraud against his name as well.
Now, I know these are just allegations.
This is not proof.
But there is a preponderance of evidence to suggest that she is indeed consorting with nefarious characters.
Especially when she ends up making six figures doing teleseminars.
She appears to have been dishonest.
She has consulted with people who are probably fraudsters and she is probably a fraudster herself.
And then we come to Gamergate, finally, which is a subject with which she has nothing to do.
She is not a journalist.
She is not implicated in any scandals.
She isn't even implicated in any of the corruption or nepotism or cronyism that's going on in the gaming journalism community.
There is nothing to do with Anit Sarkeesian here.
And yet, she is still on TV pimping her professional victimhood to get attention and money.
So when I see her walking along with these smirks, looking like the queen bee, like the cat that got the cream, I really, really have a hard time believing any of this.
On this morning, high alert at Loyola University in Chicago.
It's Anita's first speaking engagement since threats of a shooting massacre forced her to cancel her last appearance.
That's incorrect.
She wasn't forced to cancel anything.
She elected to cancel the talk.
As already shown, the police have stated that this is not a credible threat.
All because this media critic dared to criticize something millions of us play every day.
Who plays video games?
You're either stupid or you're lying.
Which one is it?
You have either not bothered to look into this at all, or you are willfully misleading people.
The quote-unquote terror threat made against Anit Sarkeesian was because she was a feminist.
It states as much in the threat.
It does not mention gaming or Gamergate.
It appears that what you are doing right now is willfully misleading people.
Video games.
The threats making splashy headlines around the world.
It's very strange how everyone is prepared to give her a platform.
I mean, she's nothing to do with Gamergate.
And yet, when people want to talk about Gamergate, for some reason, they go to Anit Sarkeesian.
I have absolutely no explanation for this.
It's almost like the media, which is the target of criticism from Gamergate, because tens of thousands of consumers are sick of media corruption.
It's like they're hiding behind these women.
It's like whenever they're called to account, they trot out these women to use as their shield.
And these women make thousands and thousands of dollars for doing so.
But we'll get to that.
On shows like Melissa Harris Perry, the threat of violence, all too real.
No, they're not.
Unless Melissa Perry has information that the police don't have.
In which case, Melissa, I'd like to know why you're not volunteering that information to the police.
There is apparently a woman's life at stake.
And webcasts like Democracy Now and HuffPost Live.
Violent threats for pointing out sexism in video games.
Things got heated, to say the least.
The harassment became part of what's now known as Gamergate.
What started as an online spat about the ethics of gaming journalism quickly escalated into a full-blown culture war.
You know what?
It is a culture war, but it wasn't declared by the gamers.
Let me show you a few clips to show you exactly why gamers have such a problem with the culture that's trying to invade their space.
Anita fakes the threats and harassment she receives on a regular basis, either by sending these threats to herself via sock puppet account or by enlisting an army of feminists to do it for her.
Where is that army?
And of course, I'm far from the only person doing progressive writing these days, which is awesome.
I'm part of a community as well.
I'm part of a, I feel I'm part of a movement.
I'm definitely not in charge of this cultural shift.
No one person is.
In addition to regularly writing and speaking about feminism, I reject as much as possible conventional models for video games writing.
You know, you can't be a female columnist or like a woman who writes her opinions without people making referendums on your personality or speculating about your motives or even your mental health.
So I just double down on doing personal work.
Whether I'm doing interviews, criticism, anything, no pretense of being unbiased.
I write about the things I'm interested in, the creators I care about, and the trends that I want to see succeed.
Sorry, that's the conspiracy.
The tide is turning in gaming, and that larger numbers of developers and fans are challenging the sexist status quo and embracing the ideas and critiques expressed in my work and the work of many other women doing the same cultural criticism.
I'm absolutely proud, you know, to advance amazing creators and conversations that I think matter to games.
Yeah, I have an agenda.
Sorry.
I've been playing games since I was five years old.
It's a soundtrack of one song, except I'm doing video games.
So it's not exactly a fandom.
I'm not a fan of video games.
I actually had to learn a lot about video games in the process of making this.
In general, my approach often puts me at extreme odds with the typical gamer fan type of reader for various reasons.
I'm a polarizing figure, but I'm thriving even still, despite the fact I've deliberately alienated the traditional audience.
Somehow I still have a career.
One of the most radical things you can do is to actually believe women when they tell you about their experiences.
So just to clarify, from those clips there, there is a movement of feminists doing progressive writing.
They reject traditional objective journalistic methods in favor of bias to promote their agendas.
They are not gamers.
They have gone out of their way to deliberately alienate the gamer audience and they want people to uncritically hear what they have to say because as I have already shown, it is very likely that at least one, if not more, of these people are flagrant con artists.
And this is from their own words.
So why, Nightline?
I am begging you, why are you letting them go on your program and slander the gamers that they despise so much?
Gamergate has a problem with them and their culture because their culture is fundamentally corrupt.
They know it.
We know it.
Everyone who comes into contact with them should know it.
And so now they are going to mainstream media outlets to slander us, to say that we somehow have a hand in death threats that they cannot in any way prove are connected to gamers who participate in the GameGate hashtag.
I personally am being slandered in this way.
Women shouldn't be mere disposable objects or symbolic pawns in stories about men.
And a small but hardcore group of gamers resisted to change.
God ordained that it is one man, one joystick.
But Gamergate doesn't just affect boys playing in a basement.
No, it affects all the women and minorities who are part of Gamergate as well, who make themselves visible using the hashtag NotYourShield.
The stakes are much higher than you might think.
We're now spending more money on games than movies and music combined.
Now, video games are kind of a big deal these days.
Gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry with an enormous impact on our larger cultural landscape.
In my current day job, I saw how teleseminars could change the face of your business and make a lot of money, but I didn't really understand how it worked.
And there we have it.
It's about money.
And to be fair, that's not entirely surprising given that we are dealing with a con artist.
To the tune of $21 billion.
And what might surprise you, there are now more adult women playing video games than there are teenage boys.
But what are they playing?
That's the question.
We are looking at two separate markets.
One market, which is dominated by casual and puzzle games, which is the mobile market.
And for console games, we can see that action games, shooter games, strategy and sports games are the most popular.
And so if we look at the demographic breakdown of these categories, for example, mobile games such as Bejeweled Blitz or Farmville are dominated by women players.
Whereas strategy and action games such as Castle Age or Call of Duty are dominated unsurprisingly by male players.
We know that on average, men and women are not playing the same games.
It is not the women who are playing male-dominated games that are complaining about those games, and it is not the men playing female-dominated games that are complaining about those games.
What we are looking at are two very distinct markets.
And it is not right to dictate for one market based on another market.
To lump all games together in the same category is a fallacy of composition.
It is to say that because women are playing certain kinds of games, they must be playing all kinds of games.
This is not true.
It is demonstrably incorrect.
We're talking about fantastical scenarios like the ones in Bioshock and epic adventures in games like Mirror's Edge.
What is it exactly that's so disturbing in some video games that's making women like Anita willing to face death threats?
Well, I have covered this already, but the fact that the death threats were not credible and the fact that she's getting stacks of cash and attention.
She gets to go on various news outlets and television programs and be treated like a goddamn celebrity, all at no risk to herself.
Just when you think you hit the worst example or the most misogynist example, you find another one.
Yeah, she really doesn't sound all that bothered about it to me.
Maybe I'm just a cynic.
Escapism is big business.
More than half of us are already playing games like this one, Grand Theft Auto 5.
But critics say in these virtual worlds, things often take a turn toward the dark side.
So what?
Art is quite often controversial.
It quite often contains representations of violence or sex or graphic depictions of acts you would never consider doing in real life.
There's absolutely nothing unusual about this and I don't even know why you'd raise it as an issue.
As a player, you can solicit a prostitute, kill her, and if that's not enough, you have the option to run her over.
The sense of violence against women being used as almost background decoration, right?
As texture to make an environment gritty, more real.
There are plenty of games that aren't violent or sexualized, but some of the best-selling games are especially egregious.
How is this a surprise?
There is a video game ratings guide for the same reason that there is a film ratings guide.
And unsurprisingly, adults enjoy titillating or salacious media.
Oh my goodness, someone called the Puritans.
On her website, Anita dissects these games.
Developers regularly utilize the brutalization of women's bodies, and especially the bodies of female prostitutes.
Her goal?
To bring attention to what she calls the inherent misogyny in the gaming world.
I'll teach you.
In Watch Dogs, she points out how women are murdered to give the hero a reason to chase down a bad guy.
It gets worse and worse.
Reinforces this idea of women as sexual objects, right?
Wrong.
Absolutely, categorically, provably wrong.
With every metric that we have, violence against anyone, male or female, is on the decline, steeply on the decline, as well as sexual assaults against men and women.
This coincides with the rise of the sale of video games.
I'm not saying that correlation implies causation, but as video game sales have risen, crimes of any kind have declined.
And honestly, it doesn't take a genius to work out why this is.
If you have people sat at home committing make-believe crimes, that's time they otherwise would have been spending outside committing real crimes.
It reinforces this idea of women as playthings for their amusement.
No, it doesn't.
You've got absolutely no evidence to suggest it does.
Crime rates have been drastically on the decline since the 1990s and the rise of the video game.
Again, I'm not saying that they're directly tied, but video games are certainly not causing any kind of violence against women or anyone else.
It honestly seems that Anita is just projecting her own insecurities and personal fears onto the industry when they're not warranted, they're not required, and they're just not valid.
Either that or she's trying to scam people out of money.
You tell me.
And it's this kind of talk that makes her a target.
And that's when the cyber mob, right, the hate mob descended, bombarding her with mostly anonymous tweets and messages.
I will rape you when I get the chance.
Hiding behind usernames and claims of free speech.
I'm sitting outside your apartment with a loaded gun.
Your neighbors won't hear you screaming in pain.
Someone even created a grotesque game where players can beat and punch a picture of her face.
Wow, but the virtual harassment turned very real when her online attackers published her social security number, her home address.
I have left a link to the FBI's cyber crime division.
Please contact them.
Please find the people responsible.
I don't want any Sarkeesian getting death or rape threats either.
Contact them so the individuals can be caught, they can be brought to justice and we can all get on with our lives.
And she's not the only one.
Oh, Brianna Wu, brilliant.
Again, another person who is not a journalist is not in any way connected to Gamergate other than the fact that they keep criticizing Gamergate in the most harsh and strident terms to get a reaction from people who are in Gamergate so they can go off and play the professional victim.
But never mind, let's have a look and see what you have to say.
They told me they were coming to kill me.
They told me specifically they were going to castrate my husband.
They, they, they?
Who are they?
Certainly wasn't Gamergate.
In none of the threats made towards Brianna has Gamergate been even mentioned or even alluded to.
Again, it seems to be concentrating on the fact that they are feminists.
Women like Brianna Wu, an independent game developer, was even driven out of her home, all for simply tweeting her opinion.
Which is why you showed her at her home, which is where she has been in every interview she has done about Gamergate.
There has literally been no proof whatsoever that Brianna Wu has been forced to leave her home.
I find the fact that you're doing the interview at her home baffling.
Why would you even say that if that's what you're doing?
When someone posts your address online and they tell you they're going to murder your whole family, you don't really feel safe staying at that location.
Then why did you, Brianna?
Same monitors, same room, same chair, same window in the background.
You haven't left your home.
I have no idea why all the news organizations are complicit in doing this.
I really have not.
Maybe it's just laziness.
So far, the Gamergate harassment against Brianna and other women like her has remained online.
But the FBI is taking it seriously enough that it started a file.
Prove it.
Prove any of this has come from people who support Gamergate.
Gamergate is a consumer revolt about unethical journalistic practices in the video game industry.
You are not even talking to any journalists.
You are talking to a critic and a developer, both of whom have a vested financial interest in making people think that they are the victims of harassment.
If they are, find those people.
Drag them into the light of day so they can be tried.
It is not incompatible with the desires of the people who support Gamergate for this to occur.
In fact, we would like it to happen with extreme expediency so we can stop talking about Anit Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu.
I'm so hesitant to use the phrase terror because I think it's such a politically loaded word, but this is it's terrorism on women in this industry.
Honestly, I'm genuinely starting to worry about the state of Brianna Wu's mental health.
I mean, she literally thinks there is a war on women going on in the video game industry.
There's a literal war in this industry on women.
It's scaring every single one of us.
Maybe.
I mean, I don't even know what kind of expression that is, but I'm certainly terrified seeing it.
But let's talk about Brianna Wu deliberately provoking people in an attempt so that she indeed can play the professional victim.
I posted this meme.
It was just six.
Six shots.
It was a simple tweet.
I didn't think anything about it.
And later that evening, I tuned, turned back on my Twitter.
And I saw that A-Chan, these people had flooded this meme with thousands of alter memes kind of attacking me.
Wu made up some memes specifically about gamers in Gamergate, said, I love it, I think it's a great meme, posted it to mock them, and then got upset when they made a meme about her and mocked her back.
Talk about a professional victim.
Did it pay off?
Well, after spending enough time advertising her Patreon to all of her followers, yes indeed, it paid off to the tune of $13,000 a month.
$156,000 a year.
Because apparently being a professional victim is profitable.
She even had press outlets promoting her Patreon campaign.
But was that enough for Brianna?
Was it hell?
She then went on to make false allegations towards pro-Gamergate supporters to try and get their Patreon funding pulled.
An act which Patreon themselves publicly apologized for.
This is the kind of person you are dealing with when you talk to Brianna Wu.
She has no scruples, she has no decency, and she appears to have no common sense.
But she is able to make a buck.
Why such hate?
Why such anger?
I can't help but wonder why you didn't ask someone involved in Gamergate.
I know that later on you do talk to someone who is a gamer, and that gentleman does accurately point out that these women are definitely overblowing and exaggerating what's happening, which I have gone on to prove for him.
How do you respond to critics who say, well, this is fantasy, this is not reality.
You have to lighten up.
Yeah, that's a fun argument.
I can answer this for you.
She doesn't.
Her and Jonathan McIntosh, the writer of Feminist Frequency, do not take criticism.
If someone criticizes them, gives them legitimate criticism, they are simply ignored or blocked.
which is why Anita will give the response that she now gives.
Games have a huge impact on our society, so it's not just fantasy.
It actually works to potentially reinforce some pretty harmful messages about women.
As I will prove for the final time, that is complete and utter hogwash.
Anita is either saying it because she is personally incapable of dealing with the fact that this is her insecurity and reflects not at all on the real world, or she is doing it for the tens of thousands of dollars she is making out of it.
I will stress again that Gamergate is a consumer revolt against corrupt journalism.
And these corrupt journalists, who are part of some movement or culture that is at war with gamers, their very audience, is hiding behind these women because they have been found out.
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