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May 12, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
03:51:26
#GamerGate Community Stream About the SPJ (#SPJEthicsWeek)
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Hello everyone, we're going to do a Gamergate stream to discuss the Society of Professional Journalists and their interest in Gamergate.
And I suppose we'll probably end up going through a few GameGate issues that anyone wants to bring up.
This is a community stream, so what you'll need to do is contact Gilgamesh320 on Twitter.
And if you follow him, he will send you a link to come on if you ask him.
And then we can have a chat.
And it seems that we have someone in, so Unfit, are you there?
Yeah, I'm there.
What's up?
How are you doing, man?
I'm alright.
How are you?
Yeah, really good, man.
What's up?
What do you want to talk about?
Not much.
What?
What would you like to discuss?
I don't know.
Okay.
Why did you join the stream?
Hello?
Oh, sorry.
The other video was playing in the background of this thing.
The SJP thing seems pretty interesting.
I haven't really been looking much into it because I had finals.
The last one's going to be on Thursday.
I don't know.
What's your opinion of the SPJ?
I think they're pretty cool.
They have a pretty decent.
What's funny is all these journalists that call that they those journalists that were in question because of Gamergate, like they, if they honestly followed those codes of ethics, like do no harm and all that like stuff, this wouldn't have been a problem.
Like if they just apologized to their audience, like Gawker wouldn't be burning right now, you know what I mean?
Yeah, totally.
None of this would have occurred if they had stuck to some kind of ethical standards.
But that's the issue, though, isn't it?
I mean, everyone knows that gaming media is just corrupt as shit.
And so this was a long time coming.
Yeah.
That's true.
Okay, so have you got an opinion on the committee that's been chosen specifically?
Shit, I haven't really followed it that much.
Hold on.
I'm just going to tweet a link that people can have a look at in the meantime.
Alright, hold on.
Okay.
I've just tweeted that.
So, yeah, is there anything else you wanted to say?
No, not really.
Also, all these hangouts that have been coming out recently seems pretty interesting.
Like, because of what happened in DC, like, it spread to more hangouts in New York, Houston.
Yeah, the meetups, yeah.
What am I saying?
Hangouts, meetups, same shit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, it's really, really cool.
I'd love to go to one.
Is there not if anyone knows of one going on in the UK?
Let me know.
Oh, actually, I found earlier, I sent a link somewhere to this guy I know on Steam.
He's I have it.
Oh, fuck.
Just check my phone really quick.
This will take some time.
Yeah, like there was this whole I found a link on 8chan earlier that I sent to him and It's basically a whole schedule of all these hangouts.
I mean, fuck meetups.
That's going up.
Hey.
What's up, John?
Hang on, hang on.
One more time, man.
One more time.
Okay, sorry, sorry, sorry.
Yeah.
So there's one in Australia, a whole hell of a lot in the US, a couple in Canada.
Should if I could find it somewhere.
Should have kept this in my favorites.
Okay, well, I tell you, tweet it to me and I'll check it out later, okay?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem.
Well, thanks a lot for coming on.
All right, no problem.
Take care, man.
See ya.
Right, John, you were next to him, weren't you?
Yeah, I have a question.
Does this have a push to talk?
You're talking right now, so.
I know.
But what's up?
Hmm.
Well, I'm in a computer repair shop, just trying to figure out what this is.
Right.
You just talk and everyone can hear you.
So what are your thoughts on Gamergate and the SPJ?
Well, I'm a game developer, so I obviously support Gamergate.
I don't think I've met one that doesn't.
And I'm not sure what the SPJ is.
The Society of Professional Journalists.
Is that linked to the Game Journal Pros list, or is that something else?
No, no, no, no.
It's an authentic organization of journalists who have a code of ethics.
If anyone's curious, I'm going to tweet it.
Because basically, I think the issue for me, I think, would be to explain to them what Gamergate's concerns are, because really I don't think they understand just why this is important to people.
Why journalistic ethics in the gaming industry is important, because I don't think they know anything about the gaming industry.
So, yeah, it just strikes me that if we can get them to say, yes, ethics in gaming journalism is just as important as anywhere else, then it's probably going to put a big stick up the ass of Kotaku and Polygon and all the other corrupt ones, isn't it?
Yeah, I think that's a good thing to have.
In here.
Okay, so what did you want to come on to talk about since you didn't know about that?
Well, I've actually been wanting to talk to you for a while about things, but no, I didn't think I'd be doing it in front of a whole ton of people.
300 cheap people.
I actually want to actually know what you're currently working on, like, you know, what programming kind of thing you're currently working on.
Oh, well, I'm using Unity script for Necromancer, but we can talk about that another time, man.
Okay.
There are people who are waiting to talk about this SPJ thing.
Yeah, which I'm reading right now.
Okay, well, if you don't mind, we'll call it there and I'll talk to someone else about it then.
Thanks a lot for coming on, man.
Take it easy.
Yeah, you too.
Sorry, I can interrupted the whole thing.
That's alright, man.
That's all right.
Right.
Aldershot.
Are you there?
Hello?
Hello.
How are you doing?
All right, great, good.
How are you doing, Sargon?
Yeah, really well, thanks, man.
Excellent.
Excellent.
What were your thoughts on the SPJ?
I'm really excited about it because I kind of see this as Gamergate's kind of its way to go legit, if that makes any sense.
It does.
That's basically what I'm thinking about it.
Yeah.
I was actually kind of browsing through IKEA earlier, and an anti-Gamergate actually started talking to me in a discussion thread.
And this person was actually fairly cooperative.
Like, I was trying to be nice to him, obviously, right?
And I managed to ask him a couple questions about how AGG or Anti-Gamergate feels about this whole SPJ thing.
I'm just wondering if you're interested in seeing what they had to say.
Yeah, well, I mean, is it relevant?
Well, I asked him a couple of questions, right?
I asked them, it's just one person.
He's not speaking for all of Anti-Gamergate, obviously.
But I asked him a couple questions.
I asked him, like, what did he think of this whole SPJ thing?
And if they don't like it, what would be some conditions that they would like to see met in order for them to participate?
I also asked them who would be good choices for them and who would be good choices for us, kind of like their perspective into this thing, right?
So they gave a couple of interesting answers.
They actually mentioned you would be a good speaker on our behalf, believe it or not.
I'm surprised they're gone.
But yeah, I can share the link with you if you like.
Yeah, tweet me a link and I will check it out on the screen.
Sure.
But go ahead.
No, no, I was just going to say, was there anything else?
No, that's pretty much it.
I just kind of want to say that I hope this SPJ thing goes according to plan.
I mean, I listened to all the committee discussions.
Like, I don't know how many hours was that, but it was like a whole day's worth.
Yeah, I listened to all of Olive Campbell's ones with the gentleman.
I can't remember his name now.
Very interesting, wasn't it?
It was really, really interesting.
I liked how they compared it to WrestleMania.
I thought that was really funny.
Yeah.
Okay.
Right.
Okay.
Well, if there's nothing else, I'll say thanks for coming on.
Great.
Thanks, Sargon.
Take it easy, man.
You too.
Right.
Mythios?
Is there someone called Mythios here?
I'm guessing Xavier is going to be next then.
Oh, mate.
Hello.
How's it going, man?
You know, the usual.
What were your thoughts on the SPJ?
I'm good, thanks.
I've been keeping up with the SPJ for a while now, just in a Gamergate professional kind of context.
I'm one of the people that thinks that, you know, ethical journalism, et cetera, it's one of the things to strive for.
And I mean, my thoughts on it is that their efforts in trying to bring better work to journalism is great and all.
I'm not entirely sure what their views on gaming journalism is.
Sorry, Harry in a second.
I was trying to mute people.
Sorry about that.
Sorry, Carolyn.
Nowadays, I write for TechRaptor.
I don't consider myself a journalist or anything like that, just a writer.
But I want to emulate the views of journalists, the things that the SPJ holds up their code of ethics.
And I'm not I know how to do that, but I don't know how that really translates into gaming journalism.
Like, how do I do this sort of thing?
So, you know, one of the reasons I came on was to try and figure out how I might better go about doing that.
What your views are, what people may want to see from that.
Well, I would think I personally think the ethics policy of the Society of Professional Journalists is just pretty easy.
I don't see how you could go wrong if you were to follow it.
I mean, I've got it here.
It says you should take responsibility for the accuracy of your work.
Verify information before releasing it.
Use original sources wherever possible.
Remember that neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy.
Provide context.
Gather, update, and correct information throughout the life of a story.
Be cautious when making promises, but keep the promises you make.
Identify sources clearly.
Consider sources' motives before promising anonymity.
Diligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism and validations or wrongdoing.
Avoid undercover or surreptitious methods of gathering information, unless traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public.
Be vigilant and courageous when holding with those in power accountable.
Give voice to the voiceless.
Support the open and civil exchange of views, even the views that you find repugnant, which I think that we all can understand that the gaming media has failed on.
Recognize a special obligation to serve as watchdogs over public affairs and government.
Well, in this case, gaming.
Provide access to source material when relevant and appropriate.
Boldly tell the story of diversity and magnitude of the human experience.
Avoid stereotyping.
Label advocacy and commentary.
Don't really know what that means.
Never deliberately distort facts or context and never plagiarize attributes.
And minimize harm, act independently, be accountable and transparent.
I mean, not all of those are strictly applicable to gaming journalism, but how could you go wrong if you just followed those to the best of your ability?
Yeah, I know that.
I mean, it's hard to follow these things.
Sometimes you just want to write something that, I don't know.
Like, if I want to write something about a fighting game, you know, I don't want to have to bring up Street Fighter 2 and all the different fighting games that came before that influenced it, which, you know, that's not providing context, but, you know, fuck it.
I'll do it anyway, because I assume people know what fighting games are.
But beyond that, it's that the code of ethics wasn't made with gaming journalism in mind.
And beyond what's on that page, I feel like there's other things that people want out of gaming journalists or people that are trying to become gaming journalists, people who think that they are one.
But they're not getting anywhere else.
What do you think is missing?
I don't know.
Whenever I read a review or something, I always just think they're being too light on it.
I like games that just beat me into the dirt, and I have to really overcome it.
But a lot of gaming reviewers, they seem to like an easy experience that they can get through for five minutes and then review and go for someone else.
And I always just think, you know, they're being way too easy, too forgiving.
But I don't know what people want.
That's why I'm not here on what it is.
I suppose it depends on your audience, doesn't it?
I mean, I imagine that Leigh Alexander's audience of non-gamers probably don't want difficult games.
Yeah, that's not who I'm trying to appeal to.
Well, that's I guess that's what you've got to speak to your editor about.
I don't know.
Yeah, that's basically it.
Okay.
Thanks for coming on.
Anytime, man.
Take care, man.
Right.
Who is next?
Let me just check.
It's probably Daniel.
Hello.
Hello, how's it going?
Pretty well.
I just have a pretty straightforward question here.
And basically, along the lines of how will the SPJ have influence outside merely the people that subscribe to it?
We've run into a situation with GG that the majority of the communication is just within the group.
And there's definitely communication that goes outside of it, but it can be definitely not as refined as the communication you get within GG, with yourself to some other member.
So how can the SPJ have a more coherent outward message instead of just being a badge that somebody like us can go to and say, oh, this person subscribes to said F?
Well, I think that the Society of Professional Journalists has probably had to explain their position regarding ethical practices and journalism to various non-journalist sources, you know, politicians or whoever, you know, whoever they've had to explain it.
So I imagine they're pretty good at explaining the ethical quandaries you run into without following said code of ethics.
But I'm not sure.
I mean, what do you think?
The concern that I have is, in short, that it'll grow to the point where there's a number of journalists that do subscribe to it, that either agree with the ideology or consider themselves, I'm not exactly sure how the system works, but basically are within the Society for Professional Journalism.
But you'll get to that position and nothing else outside of it.
You'll have a group of which you can find a journalism, you could say, oh, they subscribe to this code of ethics, and then there'll be the journalists outside of it that don't.
And then they'll argue about whether or not you should be within or not within this group.
I would think that within the circles that journalists travel, being wantonly outside of the group that uses ethics or holds to a code of ethics is probably going to do you damage professionally in the long run.
I imagine it probably limits the number of people who want to deal with you.
I would hope so.
I would hope so.
I don't know.
In gaming journalism, that didn't exactly happen.
No, but all of gaming journalism is really corrupt.
We know it.
That is true.
That is true.
It was until Gaming Gay, anyway.
Yeah, now it's well, a dent was made.
That's something to celebrate.
Okay.
Was there anything else you wanted to go over?
I believe that's all.
Thank you.
Thanks for coming on.
Right.
I think it's Fiv next.
Fivule?
Hello.
Can you hear me?
If you're talking, we can't hear you.
Thivio, you've unmuted yourself, but you're not talking.
Hmm.
Hello.
OK.
Right, we'll go for the next person.
Sam, you seem to be fairly responsive there.
You there, Sam?
I'm kind of here.
How's it going?
That's going well.
What can I do for?
I don't know.
Good question.
Have you got any thoughts on the SPJ?
I like ethics.
Ethics are good.
Good start.
That's about all I have to say.
Okay.
Sorry about that.
That's all right, man.
Yeah.
Thanks for coming on.
No problem, man.
Okay.
Calbeck, are you there?
Howdy, can you hear me?
I can hear you very well.
How's it going?
Okay, coming to you from the grand state of Arizona and the lousy town of Mesa.
I guess it balances out.
Anyway, yeah, I wanted to comment that the important things that we're going to be covering with SPJ are twofold.
First of all, the ethics, of course, the big thing, pointing out this is what we're about.
This is why the whole movement started.
And especially the horrific reactions that journalists had to actual concerns of ethics.
The way they laughed it off, mocked it, attacked people, banned people, censored people, and even got to the point of redefining what censorship is to be, you know, anything as long as it's not the government doing it.
Yeah, then it's okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
That's the first big thing.
The second one is we're going to have to address the elephant in the room, which is the harassment claims, because this always derails the ethics conversation.
It is the shield that our opposition hides behind.
So I think that at some point we are going to have to address the known situations, not the suggested ones or the alleged ones, but the known situations where there have been misleading statements or outright fabrications from these people about these claims of harassment.
We're simply going to have to debunk them.
Well, I'm actually wondering, why don't we just demand that they prove them?
Well, that's going to be part of that discussion.
But the discussion itself has to be held.
We can't just say, you know what, you prove it.
It's better to actually be proactive and instead of saying, you prove it, point to a situation, for example, with Anita Sarkeesian at USU, where she had one known threat.
We know of exactly one threat from her, or that was allegedly sent to her.
And we have seen the entire text of that threat, and it is generically anti-feminist.
There is absolutely nothing in it related to Gamergate in any way.
And we shouldn't even bring up that point.
We should point out that the guy's actual, what's the term I'm looking for?
His inspiration was an anti-feminist mass murderer from Canada.
What does that have to do with Gamergate?
Well, Anita Sarkeesian says so, that's all.
Yeah, honestly, I think that that threat was sent by a feminist.
No one outside of feminism knows who the fuck that guy is.
Right, but let's stick with what we know to be true rather than what we believe.
Just point out the hard facts and then point out that despite any connection to Gamergate whatsoever, that Anita then went on a nationally televised show to declare this is from Gamergate.
We know for a fact that she's falsifying claims.
Absolutely.
And not only did it not have any connection to Gamergate, but the police absolutely categorically said it was not a genuine threat.
Specifically, the FBI.
There was no, yeah, exactly.
The FBI specifically.
And we can always compare that.
We can contrast that to the FBI tipping off about the bomb threat to the Gamergate meeting and meet up in DC.
It's easy to show that, I mean, we can easily bog them down in a conversation of, well, it happens to everyone.
It's the internet.
These things happen.
Well, it also comes back around.
This dovetails back into the ethics issue because we can then point out, hey, look, she's made these claims.
They're unfounded.
Threats were made against Gamergate that were considered by the FBI to be serious, and in both cases the press simply took a stance that was not based on factuality, but appeared to be based on selling ad space.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I think a very interesting I mean, Twitter has recently announced a crackdown on abuse with new filter and title rules.
I should tweet out this Guardian article for everyone.
Just to say that it's not like things haven't been done.
And I think that in Gamergate, people from Gamergate.
I think if we are very supportive of the fact that people are doing it, I think that's great.
I don't particularly want people sending Anit Sarkeesian or Zoe Quinn or whoever any nasty messages on Twitter.
I don't really care if they do or don't, but it just doesn't personally help me or any causes that I believe in.
And so I'd personally just rather if they didn't.
I mean, I'm not going to fucking cry over it, but you know what I mean.
Well, yeah, I have the same attitude towards anybody, say, sending.
Yeah, I'm just trying to think of a male radio personality.
Let's say Rush Lindbaugh.
Rush Lindbaugh doesn't deserve it anymore.
Yeah, he gets it all the time.
But does he go and run for the hills?
Does he actually treat it as serious?
Does he report every single thing to the FBI?
Does he try to raise money off of it?
No, because it is part of being a celebrity.
Yeah, exactly.
It's part of being a public figure.
I mean, I've had them from feminists.
It's not nonsense.
It's words on a computer that they wrote because they were pissy.
Yeah, it's not acceptable, but at the same time, there is literally nothing you can do to stop it.
And to sit there and say, you know what, we're just going to go ahead and have the press try and turn this into a moral shaming routine is not only not the right thing to do, it's not helpful to anyone.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, well, thanks a lot for coming on.
And is there anything else you want to go over quickly?
No, those were pretty much it, and you have a great afternoon.
Thanks a lot for coming on.
I think a really useful thing to add to the conversation.
Take care.
Thanks much.
Bye.
Right, okay.
Fivy, are you there?
Tiv, yeah, I'm here.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you.
How's it going?
Okay, first of all, I would like to say one very special thing.
I'm sorry for saying this, but fuck you, Sargon, because I'm Polish, and quite a few times you said fuck you, Polish people.
So, you know, I'm returning the respect.
Well, the thing is, right, you guys, you've got words that can't be pronounced by anyone outside of Poland.
Yeah, I know.
So I will just say in Polish, ocz wiscm oče movis.
That means I know what you're talking about.
Have you got any thoughts on the SPJ or Gamergate?
By the way, I'm the guy who contacted you about Polish military units.
Oh, oh, yeah.
Okay, great, yeah.
Yeah, I called you on Twitter, so you know who you're talking to.
And one thing I would like to really say about Gamergate, not really SPJs, but mostly about Gamergate.
That's one really important thing.
Yeah, go ahead.
According to a recent study about Polish income, 80% of Polish people earn less than $900 per month.
Bloody hell.
Games cost still $60, $70.
So this is really why we need Gamergate.
Because, you know, we can't afford to buy shitty games.
It's really hard to buy games in Poland because we really can't afford them.
So Also, we have high piracy levels because of our low income compared to all of you guys.
See, this is something that I try to emphasize to people.
It's not just that there's collusion, corruption, and all that.
It's more that they are advising people on how to spend their money.
And people in America, people who live in San Francisco, might not have a problem for money, especially if they're professional victims.
But like yourself, people in Poland might well.
Yeah.
And currently, I have a pretty good job.
It's not the best job, but it's a pretty good job, stable job.
I earn about $600 per month.
Each game I buy, it's about 10% of my monthly income, and I have to pay the rent, pay the bills, and so on.
And really, I really need Gamergate because I don't want to steal games.
I don't want pirate games.
But seriously, I can't afford to buy shitty games for $60.
Yeah, no, I totally feel you, man.
When I was unemployed, it was very much the same sort of thing.
It was rare that I bought a new game, and so I didn't want to be buying a game that I wasn't fully informed on.
And by the way, I'm not some kind of physical worker who does a junk job.
For my work in Great Britain, they pay at least one and a half thousand pounds per month.
So, you know, this is the gap.
This is the pay gap.
Let's talk about the pay gap.
Yeah, according to the feminists, the pay gap, if you use the numbers that feminists use, Polish women earn about minus $1,000 per month.
So who works for that minus $1,000?
Probably Polish men.
They're full of shit, aren't they?
The statistics just don't match the real life.
Yeah, they piss me off.
Was there anything else?
No, I'm not going to take any more of your time.
So take care.
And I really like your stream.
Thanks for coming on, man.
And thanks for the kind words.
Right.
I think next is Christ.
I'm not even sure who's next.
Probably Video Cult.
Video Culture, can you hear me?
Cool, how's it going?
Pretty good.
I'm on a cell phone.
This actually works.
Bloody hell, that's good for a cell phone.
It's how I record all my videos.
So, hey, so you can call me a martyr for short.
That's what everyone does.
I'm on a quick break at work, and I just wanted to kind of talk a little about the SPJ thing and kind of Gamergate in general.
Just for Gamergax.
So essentially, with the whole SPJ thing, what I've seen is really two camps in regards to this is the best opportunity ever and this is a trap.
And while I enjoy the skepticism and I completely understand the skepticism, I've seen way too many people who are just like, well, we're Gamergate and everyone's out to get it, so we can't do anything.
And I think that's really unfortunate mind frame because when we have devs like Mark Kern who reach out to us, you know, obviously he was very gung-ho for ethics and lack of censorship and stuff like that.
But when we basically kind of turn a side eye and go, well, we don't know if we can trust you.
I understand that verify, trust, but verify.
But sometimes I think we need to be a little bit less healthy.
We don't need to be paranoid.
Exactly.
I don't see there's any reason that we should be distrustful of the society of professional journalists.
Absolutely not, especially because one of the things that I remember at the very beginning of Gamergate was the SPJ code of ethics was brought up.
And one of the big hardline things that people were saying were websites like Kotaku, Rock Paper, Shotgun, Ars Technica really need to take the SPJ code of ethics and apply that to their own.
Yeah, I totally agree.
And I mean, this is in direct contradiction to what Movie Bob says, where he doesn't think that they do.
No, sorry, Bob.
They absolutely fucking should.
This is part of the industry growing up.
This is part of the medium maturing.
You know, professional codes of ethics.
And that's the thing is they talk about wanting the media to mature.
And the thing is, when you say, well, the media needs to mature, but it needs to do it in this specific way, or else you're a misogynist, you're a terrorist, or you're some sort of issue, then it's just a crock of bullshit.
Like, I'm 24.
I've been gaming since I was five.
I think the one time I had some asshole go, you're a girl, you can't be here, the rest of them just turned to him and went, fucking seriously?
Exactly.
This is your idea that Gamergate is harassing women.
It's a crock of shit.
And even when I go to my parents, of all people, and explain what Gamergate is, my mom, who barely touches video games, lost her shit.
Because she's like, this is absolutely ridiculous.
What are they even talking about?
And I mean, like, I have gaming tattoos.
I'm like, yeah, your guess is just as good as mine, mom.
And my mom has a degree in journalism.
So when she hears about this, mind equals balloon.
Well, I'm afraid you're going to have to leave gaming.
You were born in the wrong gender.
I'm sorry.
Well, I've been told I'm limiting wrong fucking constantly.
So whatever.
Really quick.
Really quick.
In regards to Gamergate, one thing I heard you talking about earlier was having to address harassment.
And I think one thing that we don't use enough as of our ammo are the statistical analyses done on the tweets towards Anita Sarkeesian and other literally who's, so to speak, that really show, look, the only people who are using the quote-unquote Gamergate tag to try and attack these people are using the tag specifically to attack these people.
That's a really great point, actually.
Can anyone send me that information?
Because I think what I might do is compile it all into a video with the sources.
So we've basically, you know, as many different angles of attack on this argument as we can get compiled into one area so people can just grab it.
Because, yeah, that's a really great point.
And I just don't have the link to the statistical analysis around.
I don't either, Cell phone.
But yeah, no, of course, of course.
But I'm sure that someone somewhere will be able to send me a link.
Yeah, no, there's archives of archives of archives.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, thanks very much for coming on.
Really, really useful.
And I'm a big fan.
Thanks very much.
Take it easy.
You two, take care.
Right.
I think it's probably the Black Knight.
Hello, Sargon.
Hey, man, how's it going?
Bag of Nerves have got a university examination tomorrow.
Although I usually keep it all together, I'm not collapsing right now.
Well, what are you wasting your time studying on this call for then?
Because I want to talk about the SJW's attitudes.
Specifically about opinions.
I've noticed recently that You usually say that your opinion is wrong and you have to change it.
Case in point, this is kind of anecdotal.
I have a U I'm not chilling, but I have a YouTube channel and I've not been trying to show it to my mates recently because of my views towards feminism and stuff like that.
Most of them don't care, but you get a few crazy people.
And someone, by cosmic coincidence, had found a video that I did about the Pillars of Eternity problem that you know when they had to took off the poem that's not really offensive in any way.
And she said, I give your video zero out of ten and your opinion is wrong and you need to change it.
And I was like, why should I have to change it?
She didn't give me a reason, so I assumed I had to change it because they didn't agree she didn't agree with it.
So if you can't give you a good reason to change it, then why should you?
I know.
They all say that, don't they?
Every single one of them, it's like, your opinion is wrong because I don't like it.
Change it.
Educate yourself.
And I saw this.
I know.
And this happened to me Rational Wiki as well.
I wasn't necessarily an atheist and kind of naïve.
So I assume, oh, rational wiki.
I didn't agree with most of it.
I was just reading it because it was a bit like Encyclopedia Jamatica.
It's the world's biggest con, isn't it?
Rational.
It is, yeah.
I joined the YouTube, I mean, not YouTube, I joined the Facebook page, which is closed, and for good reason.
We were funnily enough talking about games.
I think it was pre-Game of Gate, and they started calling me shitlord and asshart, and I'm just like, and throwing memes at me.
I was like, I've got to get out of here.
They can be really unpleasant, can't they?
Yeah, it's all because of an opinion.
Like, you could be whatever you want, but if your opinion's not right, or to them, not right, get out.
You're evil, you're horrible.
I just don't get it.
It's just what they do.
I mean, it's basically bullying.
Yeah.
I think it effectively allows them to dominate any of the conversations going on.
But have you got any opinion on the SPJ and the code of ethics and the meeting?
Oh, I didn't really follow it.
I didn't know when they're going to do it, actually.
But I looked at some of the links and I think a dialogue needs to be had.
And I think that the more opposition people that come out, the better, because it's about time they stop avoiding us and blocking us and actually try and challenge what we have to say.
Because we want to win this debate, after all, don't we?
Absolutely.
And I really think that ethics is the way to win it.
It's hard to argue against imposing ethical standards onto gaming journalism.
The only people who are going to argue against that are the people who are already corrupt.
That's my opinion, anyway.
Is there anything else before you go?
I can't think of anything.
Thank you for having me on.
Thanks for coming on.
Thank you.
Cheers, man.
Right.
I think it's probably Vortex.
I'm not doing this.
Hey, man, how's it going?
Sorry, man.
So I just want to talk about Koreski.
He seems like a really nice guy, honestly.
The gentleman who's taken the interest.
Yeah, just like even giving them a chance, you know?
It's just like a very neutral stance on it.
And I think it's something we've been waiting for for a long time, honestly.
I totally agree.
I totally agree.
Like proper journalists.
Yeah, proper society.
Professional journalists who know what an ethical standard is when they see it.
Isn't that strange that there's like people that exist like this in the real world, you know?
Outside of the industry, it's kind of normal.
Inside gaming, it's impossible.
And everyone's all the journalists are like, you know, fuck yourselves.
That's great.
It's such like a sad state of affairs, you know, when you get to that point where you actually have to think of that as weird, you know?
Yeah, it's the way the world is and it fucking back to front.
Yeah, it's a bit of a drink.
What else did you want to say about it?
So I wanted to give you the scenario.
So you own a betting shop right now.
I don't know.
Sargon's betting shop.
And I wanted to know your best odds on an AGG attendee and your worst odds on an AGG attendee.
Who would you give the best odds for attendant and who would you give the worst odds for attendant?
Well, that's a good question.
I think they were, oh, God.
I mean, I don't think that they would send Brianna Wu or Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkeesian because to put these people in a room with representatives of Gamergate is to watch their narrative crumble completely.
Because I think almost anyone who knows anything about Gamergate and supports Gamergate would be able to just dismantle what they would say.
The little victim spiel.
I think anyone would be able to tear it apart.
So I don't think that would happen.
I can't see any of the journalists turning up.
I think they're too cowardly.
So no, I think the odds of an aggro turning up is pretty low.
Do you think it's going to be like man fodder?
Do you think it's going to be a male AGG to kind of keep the narrative flowing?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think if they were going to send anyone, it would be.
I think the best, but it would probably be Totillo, to be honest.
He's kind of spineless, but he's got experience.
He's the most likely.
Yeah, exactly.
He's been in that degree in journalism, you know.
So he's the most likely.
But if he does, I mean, he's going to get castigated.
He knows better than what he's doing at Kotaku.
He knows what recusiness is.
He knows what a conflict of interest is.
And he knows that he has broken all of these things.
So I would be surprised if any of them turned up.
I really would.
Yeah, I mean, either way, it seems a bit like a win-win, but I was just wondering, like, what do you think your best...
So, imagine you could have, like, two results.
What do you think would be the best result from it?
And what do you think would be the worst result?
Well, I personally would like to see these people be given Gamergate's ethical concerns regarding the journalists in the gaming industry.
And I think we could lay out quite a concise and convincing set of ethical violations that journalists from almost every single website have committed.
And I can't see why the SPJ would turn around and go, well, you know what?
I don't care.
We don't care.
These aren't something we're going to give a damn about.
You guys are on your own.
And so, I mean, I think they're more than likely to turn around and go, well, yeah, these are all breaches of journalistic ethics.
All of these sites have done wrong.
What was their response when you confronted them?
Their response was obviously fuck off.
So I can't see them siding with Kotaku.
I would be surprised.
It would be really, really surprising if they did these things.
And so basically, I would like to see them.
I think if we gave the examples of sites like TechRaptor and Good Gamers, where they came out strong with their ethics policy, saying, look, this is what we do and how we do it.
It would be nice to have them not endorsed, but kind of like an example, maybe.
Exactly, yeah.
Held up as more of an example of how to do gaming journalism than Kotaku and Polygon.
Alright, then I was going to ask what do you think about other cultures getting involved here?
So we had like was it sad puppies?
Other cultures getting involved on the same front.
I think there was also the was it the heavy metal music where there was quite a lot of bullcrap of this culture coming around as well.
Do you think other cultures get involved with GG in that sense?
I think that they're natural brothers in arms, but I think each culture has its own issue with this.
It is a problem culture that's invading the spaces.
That's the thing.
There isn't any way of dressing it up.
Ultimately, it is a problem culture.
It's coming in.
So there's no getting around it, but you can't really fight it as a problem culture because what's your argument?
It's like, well, I don't like the way they do things.
Well, that's just your opinion.
Whereas if we say, well, they're doing things that are clearly definitely unethical, then that's not just your opinion.
Have I got time for one more question, Dick?
Yeah, go on.
Yeah, I was just going to wonder.
I was just wondering, so it's not kind of like SPJ, but it's kind of in a way.
So what do you think will eventually kill off this kind of SJW ideology kind of thing?
Or do you think it will always exist?
Well, I don't know, frankly.
Because we've seen communism absolutely get wrecks in history, but people are still kind of pride in it.
Communism failed everywhere except in the American university.
That's basically the problem we're having now.
I think we're having it a lot in Britain as well.
No, no, we absolutely are.
It's been an extra.
Ridiculous.
It's recently that this has been imported.
But the thing is, I think a lot of people don't seem to understand that Marxists are alive and well in higher education.
I don't really want to understand that.
But it's a different conversation for a different time.
Exactly, yeah.
Okay.
Thanks a lot for coming on, man.
Cheers, man.
Thanks for having me.
That's all right.
Right.
Wesley M. How's it going, man?
Hello.
How are you?
I'm good.
I've actually gave a little SPJ code of ethics thing a little read.
And I certainly agree with many of these gaming sites should adopt something similar to this.
You know, just to avoid all the collusion and all of the scummy con artistry and buddy-buddy stuff.
You know, things like people getting in because of nepotism instead of merit.
No, I totally agree.
I mean, at the very least, what's the harm of having it?
Yeah.
What would be the harm of having an ethics policy universally across gaming websites?
There would be no damage done from it.
And at worst, it's, oh, you're being ethical.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you know how you said that not many people listen to the, you know, this is something I want to talk about.
It's, you know, basically you realize in America there's things like Fox News and MSNBC.
To be perfectly honest, I think they're all guilty of doing certain things like supporting one side over the other and they're both, you know, don't they?
Yeah.
Yeah.
They, you know, and it's basically just marketing fear and paranoia to a bunch of scared people just so that they can sell you crap you don't need.
It really is to a lot of a lot of the times.
I mean, It's a different kind of fear for each side, but it's the fear for each side, isn't it?
Whichever one they prefer, they can choose.
Yeah.
So you think that the SPJ meetings are a very positive thing for Gamergate then?
Yes.
Yes, I think it should.
And, you know, maybe there could be a representative from Gamergate as well as anti-Gamergate just to tear apart their silly narrative of, ooh, all gamers are rapists and they're objectifying women and stuff.
And I'm like, my God, this is just like the same crap that Jack Thompson said that video games cause violence and they're murder simulators.
Yep.
Yeah.
It is incredibly similar.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Different taglines, same bullshit.
Yep.
Yeah, it's just it's it's it's one moral authority, you know, one authoritarian moralist or the other, you know, whichever it's coming from both sides, isn't it?
Yeah.
And the thing that really, you know, gets to me is that, you know, Anita Sarkeeson is getting like national attention and media spots and stuff.
And I'm just like, my God, you people are listening to essentially a con artist, and you don't do any research to know about that.
Basically, it's the thing is, I wonder if there's a lot of social pressure within the industry, the media, that they feel that if they don't support this narrative, then they're going to get castigated in some way.
Yeah, like they'll either lose their job or lose their media shows.
Yeah.
I mean, it's almost like every single night I watch the O'Reilly factor because my dad likes to watch it at dinner time.
And I listen to his things and I'm just like, oh my God, he is just using this as a platform to sell his crap.
Yeah.
I have a feeling most of those emails he gets are pretty much made up.
I've got no doubt.
I've got no doubt.
Yeah, right.
Was there anything else you wanted to end on?
Yeah, basically, you know, I'm a very live and let-live kind of guy.
You know, I believe that there shouldn't be any limits on what a creator can or can't create.
If someone doesn't like what you're creating, that's no reason to completely change it or toss it out the window or something like that.
I'm just like, eh, if they don't like it, they don't like it.
Whatever.
That's their problem, isn't it?
Yeah.
Their problem, not mine.
Exactly.
That's the thing.
My objection is when they make it other people's problems.
Yeah.
That's completely what I do.
But anyway, thanks for coming on, man.
No problem, sorry.
I'm a big fan of you.
You.
Thanks, man.
Take it easy.
See ya.
Bye.
Right.
Ross, are you there?
Can you hear me?
I can hear you very well.
How's it going?
It's fine currently.
Thanks for having me on.
I was going to say that.
My pleasure, man.
What's going on?
Well, I'll be honest.
I haven't kept up too much for the SPJ thing, but I've been reading it as the cause went on.
And I agree that we agree with most of the things that I've seen on the CEFIX policy.
The thing I'm wondering is it's just how many websites are going to actually adopt it if they decide to.
It's confusing and how much sites actually have bias within the higher-ups, if you understand what I'm saying.
Well, that's an interesting question, actually.
But I think that we can say that a lot of the higher-ups for these sites are at least aware of these sort of things.
I mean, I find it very interesting that Leigh Alexander was removed from Karma Sutra and has been reduced to obscurity on, I don't know, I can't even remember where she's gone.
But nobody hears from her anymore.
You know what I mean?
And I think that the fact that Polygon and whatnot have all put disclosures on and stuff like that, I think that there has been a definitive push to make sure that there are at least some ethical standards in place.
And I think that getting that sort of push legitimized by the SPJ would be a really good thing.
So I don't think it falls on deaf ears.
Yeah, well, I agree with you.
I think that it's a bigger push to kind of make the whole ethics policy sort of watertight, if you know what I mean.
Because I think I'm in the same ballpark as you and Milo Yelenopolis.
I think that's how you pronounce the name.
I think that Gamergate has won.
I think we've won, but all we need to do now is defend that win of some sort, if you understand what I mean.
Consolidate.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's it.
And I personally do think a definitive ethics policy, maybe one that is created by a third party that's kind of put in place, kind of like, I'll use an example.
It's pretty loose because it's different.
For example, the ESRB sort of rating.
Maybe if we had something that was kind of along the lines of that for ethics, policies, of course, not with actual age ratings, but with ethics.
Yeah, just basic ethical standards that game journalists are expected to adhere to.
I mean, there's no reason why this couldn't be enshrined in the gaming industry.
Or at least I don't see a problem why that would be a problem.
Yeah, well, I've been, along with other people, of course, been debating with people for the past, I don't know, it's been quite long about gaming ethics and journalism.
And it's honestly disheartening to see people trying to, for example, this is a different medium, but I'm sure it can go.
But for example, with SJWs trying to censor things, because that used to be a right-wing thing.
That's surprising.
It used to be a right-wing thing in which people used, you know what I mean?
People used to always accuse the right-wing of wanting to censor things.
Oh, no, it's really going around.
They're two sides of the same coin, essentially.
They very much are.
I think it's just the horseshoe effect, isn't it?
The further you get from the center, the more likely you are to endorse censorship for whatever reason.
Oh, yeah.
And I'll tell you what.
With the point that was made by one of the previous speakers about schools and universities essentially becoming sort of Marxists and things like that, I can actually back that up because I'm in Sixth Form currently.
And two of my tutors are socialist.
And one of them is a die-hard liberal.
And with this, I've come across a lot of kind of iffy things that are said.
And I've kind of been alienated to some extent in some of my classes because I've talked about these sort of things.
For example, yeah, there's a SJ, I'll call her an SJW in my English set.
We have a sort of tutorial thing afterwards, which is basically sort of like, do you remember PSC or something like that, where they just talk about life and jobs and all these sort of things to do with life?
Well, we had that end up with Stubov Equalities, I think it was.
And there was a racism thing in which basically flipped the tables and showed people being racist towards whites.
And this SGW, after this stopped, we were asked their opinions on it.
And they basically said, because I'd never heard someone like kind of IRL be sort of that.
Yeah, yeah, go on.
And they basically said that, no, it's not racist.
I'd call it xenophobic because whites aren't oppressed enough.
Oh, well, that's fine then.
You go ahead and be as hateful as you want to white people.
Yeah, no, I instantly just responded saying, oh, come on.
You can't change a bloody definition.
You know, I'd love to be in a room with it.
I'd be like, why are you trying to make it okay to be hateful to anyone?
You know, you're coming up with rationalizations to enable you to feel okay about being hateful to people based on the way they were born.
I mean, you know, even if you were right, I would tend to say, you know, it's inherently wrong to want to do that.
You know, even if you've got a rationalization that means that you're not a bad person.
Yeah, this was closer.
This was to the end of the lesson at the start of the lesson.
It was the sort of time when Joss Whedon got kind of berated off of Twitter.
Oh, he claimed that that wasn't the case, though.
Well, he did.
Well, you know, people claim a lot of things.
Well, he's a feminist himself.
Of course, he probably wants to be kind of defendant of the sound, but I don't know.
That's word from his mouth.
I'll take it as a whatever.
But this was at the start of the lesson in which this SJW actually started slandering Joss Whedon as well.
And basically said, basically, they said stuff like, she had said to us that I'm not going to watch The Avengers because the Maximal twins, because the Maximon twins are not true to the comics because in the comics they were Jewish Roma and in this they're white.
And my response to that was you do understand that if you wanted to stay true to the comics, you do understand that Nick Fury was originally white in the comics.
No response to that.
That's oppressive.
You can't do that.
Honestly, it's just I think the main thing I've came on is that I really want to rant about the English lessons and the sort of education system that we have is that there is a lot of bias.
We've done English lessons where we've mostly English lessons consist of reading Guardian articles, which come on, really.
Yeah.
Well, we have comparing Guardian articles to the Sun a lot.
We've had that in the past.
Jesus.
Sounds like indoctrination.
I don't want to rummage for my bag, but we had a gender sort of text, and basically it was a woman talking about cat calling.
And yeah, it was what I was saying.
That doesn't sound good.
It sounds like we're getting a bit off topic, but that does not sound good.
And I mean, tweet me anything interesting you get because I'll probably use it in a different video, a non-gamergate video.
But yeah, no, that's what can you do?
argue with them and get alienated by the rest of the class yep well on the plus side remember that every person they alienate is eventually going to find us in I don't even know what to call the sort of the intellectual sphere of the people who can still think They're going to eventually find us.
So we're just going to keep growing because they're going to keep pissing people off.
Yeah.
No, yeah.
Yeah.
And I just want to say thanks for all the stuff that you've been doing with Gamergate.
I've been watching you for quite a long time now.
And this week in Stupid is probably one of my favorite series I watch and you do.
Thanks very much, man.
I appreciate that.
All right.
Sorry if we're going off topic.
That's all right.
Don't worry about it.
Take it easy.
All right.
See ya.
See ya, man.
Matt.
What's up?
How's it going, man?
It's going pretty good.
How about yourself?
How's Oregon?
See, now we get to have some e-celeb chat and everyone hates us.
Oh, yes.
Watch everyone leave right now.
That's what's going to happen.
No.
Oregon's good, man.
Oregon is great.
It's raining right now, which is something I'm completely not used to living in Southern California.
Yeah, I can imagine that Californians would pay for rain, wouldn't they?
At this point, I think William Shatner is like, let's make a $30 billion water pipeline.
That's just Captain Kirk logic right there.
You'll probably end up having to do that.
But anyway, what's your thoughts on the SPJ?
I think it's a grand idea.
I think it's something that is definitely going to be beneficial to bringing, I think, the ideas behind Gamergate to the mainstream that aren't completely marred by gender and identity politics.
Yep.
Sorry.
I've just been informed by Gilgamesh that he can't send out the link anymore because he's been spamming its people.
Give me two seconds.
Sorry.
Sure.
I'm just going to send a link to Oliver Campbell, and hopefully he can send it to people.
Or I've been told.
In fact, feel free to tell everyone what you were thinking while I do this.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Dead air is still dead air.
No, I think that the SPJ meetup is a good idea.
The fact that we're finally being able to be given the opportunity to have a platform to discuss the issues openly and not have it just kind of broil down to snarky tweets fired back and forth, which, let's face it, that benefits no one, is something that is good because, like I said earlier, it definitely will open the door to more people kind of looking at it from maybe a different perspective and not one that's like Brianna Wu writing an article.
It's time for the FBI to investigate Gamergate.
And we're sitting here going, well, yeah, no shit.
Fucking do it.
You know, like vindicate this, please.
Thank you.
Exactly.
Bring it on.
For fuck's sake, bring it the fuck on.
I can't.
They don't understand that.
They don't get that.
Not once.
Do they understand that this is what we want?
It's like you're playing into our hands.
Someone, I retweeted the statistical analysis of Gamergate.
I mean, just on this, out of thousands of tweets, harassment from a gamer is 72 out of thousands and thousands of tweets.
I mean, harassment from anti-gamers is 257 on this chart.
So, you know, it's that sort of thing.
The statistical analysis, it's in our favor.
There's no getting around it.
So I can't wait for them to investigate all this stuff.
It's going to look fucking embarrassing for the anti-Gamergate people.
Well, remember, they say that there is no anti-Gamergate people at all.
It's just us versus everybody else, which is ridiculous.
And that is definitely what they would like to believe.
But I think...
Oh, sorry, go ahead.
No, no, go on.
Go on.
Oh, well, you know, one of the things in talking about who should attend from possibly the other side of this, because we've been spending the entire week discussing who from our camp should be invited to go, right?
Well, the only person I could see from the other side, well, two people.
You mentioned Attila earlier, but there's also Brian Crescente.
Because Crescente agreeing definitely is he definitely would represent the other side, but he would do so probably in the most neutral way.
Because he could look at Tottillo and just go, yes, Kotaku investigated Kotaku and found that Kotaku was not guilty of any wrongdoings.
Whereas Crescente at least attempts in his own writing to adhere to the SBJ code, which he posted out a tweet last year sometime talking about that, or 2013, maybe last year, where he was like, oh, we at Polygon, we adhere to this code.
And he linked to it.
And I did a video looking through the whole thing and going like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
Because they don't.
But even here, if you go back to his article from April 15th, when Zoe Quinn spoke at that congressional hearing, he actually says that Gamergate is a movement that's difficult to define because what it is has come to represent no central leadership or agreed upon manifesto.
So he's trying to at least be objective and live by the code of the SPJ.
That's why he got chewed out by the other SJWs for a bit, didn't he?
Oh, absolutely.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And here's Anita Sarkeesian tweeting out her snarky stuff, going, I didn't do nothing.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think Crescente is actually, I would like to have him on a stream to talk to him, just generally, have a chat.
Because I think he understands that there are probably issues that need to be corrected.
That's the thing.
Absolutely.
And I think he would be a good person to have those discussions with.
But will he step out of that echo chamber and actually, I don't know, discuss it is an entirely different thing altogether.
Well, this is the problem, isn't it?
The problem that people on the other side have is ostracism.
Look at Aaron Joni, the poor fucking guy, man.
Has he got any friends left?
You know what I mean?
He gets castigated.
I see them sending him fucking awful messages constantly.
There was some guy who was like, you know, you're lucky.
There was some guy tweeting, fucking you're lucky.
If I meet you, you're going to be lucky if I don't beat you over the head with a tire iron or something like that.
And it's like, Jesus fucking Christ.
This guy has been emotionally abused by Zoe Quinn.
He's been cheated on by Zoe Quinn.
And then all he does is tell the truth.
And then suddenly everyone hates him and he's getting death threats.
And he gets them a lot.
I asked him directly, how many do you get?
He's got loads.
And it's just fucking guy.
It's like when Zoe Quinn spoke at that congressional hearing, she said, oh, I dated an abuser.
And it's like, I'm sorry.
Is this opposite day?
We have evidence from screenshots of you having abused him and manipulated him, which is what prompted him to speak out about his abuse.
But I mean, not to bring her into it.
But the point is, it's going back to the concept of this particular event.
It doesn't necessarily matter who on our side goes.
Because people who go are going to have the same ideas.
They're going to speak from the same experiences and a lot of the same mindset.
But the other side, to have it be an actual win, you have to have someone from the other team show up.
And that's the only way.
So my fear is that people are going to, when it comes time to put out the invites and whoever gets invited, no one's going to want to step up and do it.
And those who do, from the aggro side, are probably going to be people who might only want to further their career, who are provocateurs.
If Leigh Alexander got invited, she, in my opinion, would actually go.
I would love to spend some time having to interrogate Leigh Alexander about this.
Yeah, I mean, got the opportunity.
I'd probably pay money for it.
I would definitely want to be there.
I keep hoping she's going to come back to the XOXO Fest this fall so I can go check it out.
But at least from an outsider perspective.
But the point is, people on the other side that talk about this sort of thing, they're rarely ever discussing ethics.
And so now it's an opportunity for them to put up or shut up.
And I'm a feeling a lot of them are just going to shut up.
I don't think they're going to turn up.
I think that they know they've got no ground to stand on when it comes to the discussion of journalistic ethics.
They know they've got nothing.
They know it.
That's why they talk about harassment and women and misogyny all the time, because that's the only weapon they've got.
Yeah, it's a weapon that's quickly running out of ammunition because people are just fucking tired of hearing about it.
Exactly.
They've cried wolf too many times.
Right.
Do you want to do me a favor?
Sit here, man.
I think the next speaker is John.
I need to go grab another drink.
Do you mind interviewing him while I grab a drink?
Sure.
Just say you need tea.
It's okay.
We know you're British.
Actually, I'm getting it a bit.
Oh, well then.
Well then.
Colour me.
Colour me embarrassed.
Yeah, going crazy.
But yeah, go ahead.
I'll be back.
Funny, I just got myself a sweet tea, southern style, you know, just full of fucking sugar, because that's how we do it down here.
But hello, everyone.
I'm John.
I'm part of the committee.
Yes, committee, not council.
Let's make sure there's a clear definition of that.
So, John, I've been curious to ask you, how did you get involved in the SPJ airplay event?
Because I'm curious to know about that.
So the question of how I got involved was, coincidentally, I found out about the article first from your video and then Sargon's.
But I went through the article.
I looked through it.
I searched up Michael Koretzki as a person, and I found his info on the SPJ thing.
And I noticed that all of this is taking place in Miami.
So as somebody from Tampa, I'm thinking, wow, that's only a four-hour drive.
This is really exciting.
I want to get in on this.
So I call him, and we had a conversation, and literally, and there was a stream I did with Oliver, who's here now, where this story was also explained.
He put me on, and his reason for putting me on is because it makes me feel like a used condom, but he wanted to experiment by throwing on somebody like me.
And now I'm just trying to make sure I'm doing as best a job as I can.
No, it seems like you guys have been organized and pretty well put together.
I was listening to a lot of the recorded dialogue from the other day, and it was very interesting to kind of listen to everyone get together and discuss these issues.
So what is it in my ⁇ I'm curious to know.
What is it that you hope to see happen from this event taking place in August?
For me, my biggest hope is that it helps shatter this narrative that all gamers are terrorists and we're all horrible people.
The kind of thing that came out with the Law and Order episode, go home, gamer girl.
I don't want to wake up every day and then go play video games and have a good time.
But then I turn around and I see all these people telling me that just because I enjoy this hobby or this is something I do, that I'm a horrible person.
I understand that.
It's one of the things I think a lot of us are in this for.
I know people have their varied reasons, but ultimately it breaks down to we want to enjoy our hobby.
I think that one of the things that this SPJ event will do is I think it's going to help bridge the gap, at least from a public perspective.
Hopefully, though, the other people will be willing to talk about it.
Have you guys actually been able to get any feedback from people on the other side of this?
So the answer is yes.
A few of the committee members do have connections and they're having off-the-records talks with a few of the antees.
The situation is, and Michael will be releasing an article on it officially Thursday, or at least that's what he has posted.
And there's an email chain going on about this now.
I've been posting some of the emails as we speak.
The talks with the anties and the way they're going to organize themselves and the committee they form.
If you've noticed, our committee has been very transparent.
We've been very careful to make sure that we are considering the voices of as many people as possible.
We want to get this much feedback.
We want to make sure that nobody thinks we're a cabal.
We're looking to take over Gamergate or whatever.
Now, with the Antes, you have to make sure that you can make this as safe for them as possible.
They have to be able to think that they can come.
Michael put it like this.
If they're not going to do it here on neutral ground at a journalism event, they're not going to do it at all or ever.
No, no, precisely not, because they're enthusiastic press.
They're bloggers.
They're not journalists.
They just masquerade as such.
Of course, yes.
Well, that's not if you ask Jason Pryor and Stephen Totello.
They're convinced, absolutely convinced that Kotaku is stuffed by journalists.
I don't know.
Alexander is games journalism.
I would say, though, that Kotaku, it's like, you know, we make fun of the watermelon butts and the other shit like that, but they do occasionally put out some decent articles, the in-depth stuff.
And it's like, where is this?
Like, why aren't you doing more of this?
You know, and it's unfortunate that they hide behind the shit in order to put out the smaller good things every once in a while.
Well, they're very clickbaity, aren't they?
A lot of people.
Exactly.
They operate purely on clicks.
One of the things that Gawker does is it tends to cross-link a number of articles from different sites to each other.
So I'll look through their RSS feeds and I'll find different Kotaku articles in Lifehack, right?
And little things like that where they just keep crossing over to generate more traffic.
It's part of their business model.
They are extremely.
They're extremely lazy as well.
I noticed that Leia Alexander was the perfect example of this on wherever she is now.
Someone had sent me a link to an article she'd written, and she'd basically taken someone else's article, a giant three paragraphs out of it, written like two paragraphs of her own, basically saying, I agree with this or I hate this.
I can't remember which one it was.
And that was the entire thing.
And it's like, you lazy motherfucker.
Is that literally all you're going to do for your day job?
Is just link someone else's article and go, I disagree.
Oh, yeah.
That was the Game Informer article from Michael Futter, and that was about the Witcher 3, and it was from VG247.
Yeah, she basically copy-pasted, added one or two lines of dialogue and did that.
Exactly.
And it was just like, that is just fucking cheap.
But that's what they all do.
That's what every single one of them does.
And it's out there in the open.
I'm glad somebody on the inside finally called them out.
Yeah, I agree.
So whilst there anything else that you'd like to say, John?
I just wanted to make sure everybody knows, and now that David's here, we're both representatives of the committee that was selected.
I'm here to answer any questions if anybody has any about what we're doing, our pics, any of the stuff that's online.
Sargon, if you want to, when this is all over, put some important links in there.
I'm communicating in as many fronts as possible.
I'm on the A chan V thread.
You'd be John Smith and Dave Rickey.
Yes, we're John Smith and Dave Rickey, yes.
Right, okay.
Well, if you guys want to hang around, in fact, if you guys want to hang around, we can talk after the stream, at the end of the stream.
I'd like to let everyone have their say, and then we can get into a bit of a conversation if you want.
Yeah, that's fine.
Okay.
Well, do you guys want to mute yourselves for now, and I'll get back to you when everyone else is finished.
Yeah, yeah, I've got stuff to do.
Great, okay.
I'll speak to you in a bit then.
Right, so I think it's Scott's next.
Oh, he's AFK, actually.
I'm going to get going out of this call, so I will talk to you guys later.
Thanks for having me on, Sargon.
Not a problem, man.
Take care.
See ya.
Bye.
Okay, Travis, are you there?
Travis, are you there?
Okay, Travis isn't there.
Oliver.
Yo.
How's it going, man?
Well, this has been an interesting week, hasn't it?
We've been filled up with happenings.
Haven't we, John?
Old school hacks.
Yes.
Very exciting happenings as well, actually.
I'm quite interested to see where all this goes.
Reminds me of the summer of 2014.
That's the level of happiness I think going on.
I just got some stats from Bone Golem about Deepree's about 11 hours back, but I just came to like eight hours later, and he showed them to me so people can actually hear what those stats are as far as the traffic and everything just for me.
And these are the stats based on from the day that it properly launched to the public and then up until 11 hours ago.
Can you hear me?
Hang on a second.
Who is that?
Sorry.
Hello.
Can you hear me?
Travis?
Do you mind hanging on?
I'm all right.
How are you?
Yeah, I'm good, man.
What were your thoughts on the SPJ?
Hello.
Can you hear me, Travis?
I don't think he can hear you.
Travis, can you hear me?
So...
Okay, go ahead, Will.
Go ahead.
What happened with the, like, today I wasn't here?
What do you mean, what happened?
Like, I saw a lot of tweets out on Twitter today about different stuff.
I already know about what happened with his face.
Let me bring it up.
Shit.
Well, we're talking about the SPJ committee that is going to be electing representatives or choosing representatives for Gamergates to talk to the Society of Professional Journalists about the problem that GamerGate has been having with, or just the problem of journalistic ethics within the gaming industry.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
No, not really.
Okay, well, thanks for coming on the stream.
Do you want to say anything before you go?
Hill Hitler.
9-11 was a joke.
It was all planned out by the Jews.
It probably was.
They get around, don't they?
Yeah.
All right.
Take it easy, man.
I'd rather not.
Okay, there we go.
9-11.
Caused by the Jews.
Travis, can you hear me?
Are you having technical difficulty still?
Okay, Scott, can you hear me?
Are you there?
See, this is the problem with people who don't usually use Google Hangouts.
Okay, Oliver, are you there?
Oh, no, Lion.
Yeah, go ahead and let Ryan go.
Yeah.
Lion, are you there?
Yes.
Ah, right, okay.
Sorry, I'm just I've I apparently I have muted Scott, so I will unmute Scott.
Only he can unmute himself.
No, I can do it.
I've got the power.
Hi.
How's it going?
Sorry about that.
No, it's fine.
What are your thoughts on the SPJ?
Yeah, I feel like I'm in agreeance with you and Milo that Gamergate's won, essentially.
And I feel like this is just sort of like I don't know, like a victory lap where we're just finally getting acknowledged for the victory, not to really talk about what's left to do.
Yeah, I agree.
I think that it's important to be kind of ratified almost in a way.
But yeah, sorry, go on.
No, I just want to say on Monday Matt was talking about how Leah Alexander would love to progress her career with the SPJ.
I mean, let's face it, Matt was going for it.
He wanted to, you know, he put himself forward as a candidate even though that poll didn't look great.
And I like Matt, but you know, he's all about them shekels, right?
Well, it's not really relevant to the discussion.
Yeah, no, no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
I was just sitting here listening to the conversation for a while.
I don't know he's that bad.
But yeah, I feel like I mean who ended up winning the poll?
Because I know you were like a ahead the last time I checked.
I think that William Usher actually won it, which is it's someone I would definitely like to see go because goddamn he's been all over this.
And he had been before Gamergate as well.
So I think he's definitely eminently qualified.
But I believe let me just check the committee.
I think he's actually on the choosing committee, yes.
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
So if you know, I can he's not a I think he's he tends to he's very much a writer, isn't he?
So I can understand if he doesn't want to go and do a public debate.
There are definitely other people who support Gamergate who can do that.
Yeah, yeah.
Gosh, it's difficult to think of something to say now.
Yeah, I was just gonna mind.
You know what?
It can wait for another time.
Thanks for having me on.
Not a problem, man.
Take care.
All right, thanks.
Bye.
Right, Travis, have you solved your technical difficulties?
Or have I muted you?
Let me see if I can unmute you.
Travis, can you hear me?
I'll take that silence as a no.
Lion, are you there?
Yeah.
Yep.
How's it going, man?
Pretty good.
Good.
What are your thoughts on the SPJ?
You know, the thing about the SPJ, again, everyone has already been saying that it's pretty much a win state for Gamergate as a whole.
Or or I should say everyone who was involved in Gamergate, everyone who identifies as pro-Gamergate or even neutral Gamergate.
And it is, but there is also this Perception that this is a debate.
And I think it's important for everyone to remember this technically not meant to be a debate.
It's not framed as a debate.
This is a roundtable discussion.
Now, of course, antis even going, or the state of antis is pretty much a Schroeder's cat.
We don't know who's going, and we don't even know if they're going to go.
But whoever goes, if they go, it will pretty much be a debate just by nature of who's there.
The whole opposition and just the kind of, I guess you could say, incendiary nature of the argument as a whole.
I think it could definitely turn that way.
I think you're right, yeah.
Oh, also, I did kind of want to say something about Gamergate itself, too.
I actually made a video about this a couple of days ago.
It was more so about the words escape me right now.
The drama.
I don't know why I couldn't say that.
Just the general drama and fight infighting and everything.
While that is going to happen, hello, we're gamers.
Just go play some freaking games every once in a while.
I can't believe that we don't have some sort of fucking trial by combat and video games worked out.
I mean, there's Quake Live, isn't there?
Can't we fucking all hash it out in that?
It would be fantastic.
I would love to have a Street Fighter fight or Minecraft Counter-Strike something.
Whatever, you know, people can choose what they like.
But I think that's how we should solve things.
But, yeah, that's overall what I wanted to say.
Just try to keep things into perspective to everyone.
Yep, totally agree.
I think it's important to remember that you're right.
It's not going to be a formal debate.
Can I actually clarify a point on that?
Sure, absolutely.
So the listed format for the day is going to involve a few hours for a first panel.
And this panel is going to be broad strokes.
What is Gamergate?
Why is it important?
And that kind of thing.
The second half of the day is going to be an actual, much more formal debate with questions, sort of getting into the nitty-gritty.
And the third half of the day is going to be a very informal, almost open-mic, chaotic discussion with the back and forth of whoever's going to be there.
Great.
I think that's a fantastic thing.
Frankly, I think a lot of people would prefer it to be like that than not.
The format is still subject to change, but that's the tentative format we are working with at the moment.
Okay, well, I've not heard any objections to the idea.
And I've heard someone told me it was going to be like that the other day.
I can't remember who it was, though.
But yeah, I'm fine with that anyway, personally.
Yeah, I'm just hoping that it all turns out really well in the end.
Me too.
Does that clear anything up, Lion?
Yeah.
There was one other thing I wanted to touch on, just really briefly.
I don't want to get it derailed or anything.
There's also been a lot of talk of the whole is this just about ethics and games journalism or should we go after SJWs and stuff like that.
And of course, there's arguments of, well, no, it is about SJWs or maybe not.
So it's about SJWs, but we should go after them and get rid of them.
And while they the whole ethics and games journalism and other related things is very important, but it is a symptom to the actual cause, which is SJWs.
With that being said, though, you do want to focus on the games journalism and other related things.
Because once they have to be ethical, once they have to do any work whatsoever, being ethical is work.
Actually writing articles and thinking about other people outside of themselves and their best friends.
It's all work.
In the very moment that they have to do work, they are going to want to quit.
They aren't going to want to do it anymore.
That's why they do it in the first place because they think it's easy.
That is some fucking truth right there.
That is exactly how it is.
Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but seriously.
No, no, that is exactly what they're like.
But that's the point.
You've got to fight this on issues rather than on people.
You know, you can't really just attack them as people.
You've got to attack what they do.
And as they're supposed to be journalists, and they're currently in violation of a lot of ethical standards that other journalists would say you probably shouldn't be in violation of.
I mean, why wouldn't we fight on that?
Yeah, that's exactly why they're so adamantly fighting against ethics and games journalism.
I mean, even to the point where they say, oh, I'm supposed to list every single relationship I have with everybody.
It's like, well, no, you have to keep it in context.
We don't care about who your father or who your mother is or anything like that.
Every single article.
It has to be relevant.
But they don't want to do that.
Unless you're covering them, for fuck's sake.
But yeah, okay.
Yeah.
Great.
Thanks a lot, man.
But yeah, that's all.
I'll hop off in a minute.
If I can show my last project, if you don't mind.
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, just came out with the gamers album.
It's all called the legendary closed fist technique.
You can find it on my band camp.
It's just lion.bandcamp.com.
Cool.
Okay.
Well, if you want to tweet me a link, I'll retweet it for you.
I believe I had someone send you a link to it directly.
I have to ask them to make sure he sent it to you.
Tweet it to me and I'll retweet it.
I don't know what it's going on.
All right.
Take it easy, man.
All right.
See you, everyone.
Right.
Let me just, who the hell's next?
Right, Travis, are you there, mate?
Travis.
Come on, you can do this.
I have faith.
Maybe you can't do this.
Okay, let's go for Jaden.
Hi there, can you hear me?
I can hear you.
How's it going?
All right.
I was worried about that.
Me and Google Hangouts are mortal enemies.
I'm doing good.
This is giving me an excuse to not sit here and do my massive pile of dishes.
So, whoa.
I actually had a bit of a different related topic to the SBJ thing I wanted to bring up to you.
I was wondering if you've been paying attention to the Twitter response to it today.
I haven't today, actually.
What have I missed?
Well, there's a lot of people that are supportive of Gamergate that don't seem to be particularly happy about it.
Well, do you want to take me through it?
What's going on?
Well, I'm not entirely certain I get it myself, but because I'm sort of neutrally involved with Gamergate, I support it and all, but I'm not throwing myself out there.
I have no reach.
I'm a welder, for fuck's sake.
I know nobody.
I'm going to a trade school to learn to melt metal together to hold fucking planes together.
I don't know people in the gaming industry.
I don't have any reach.
I just do my own thing.
So what I've been watching is I follow a whole fuckload of people on Twitter just because it's kind of how I keep informed about what's going on.
And the general consensus seems to be people are pissed off that it's becoming more tribalistic, I guess, was probably the most extreme thing.
Okay.
I think Travis partially fixed his shit over there.
Travis, are you with us, mate?
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.
Don't go anywhere.
Don't change anything.
Don't mess with these sentences.
Don't sit there.
Touching quiet.
I will be there in a second.
So go on, Jayden.
Also, Provost Tree, you're the first person who's pronounced my name first upon seeing it, like ever.
And no, I'm not named after Will Smith's son at almost fucking 30.
God damn it.
That's a wipe on off of me.
I get jarred in a lot because somehow there's an R in there that I can't see.
Right.
Okay.
Anyways, so, like, there's a lot of people that are literally, it's funny because people are saying it as a joke in the chat right now, the GG is dead thing, but there's seriously people kind of going out and pushing that right now because they think that Gamergate's going to become reputable and then just become another group like Feminism Dick.
There's a serious backlash just today on that right now.
Okay.
Well, I mean, I don't know what to tell them.
I know.
I was wondering if you were aware of that.
Because I actually went and engaged one of them.
I don't ask me to pronounce their marragate, gel, IEC, or whatever.
I wouldn't ask them a question.
I was like, so are you trying to tear Gamergate down now because of this?
Because I didn't understand.
And they're posting things like how it's over and when Gamergate ends, it's just going to be a whole nother bullshit ism and all that.
And I'm like, so what happened?
And I got, of course, I got my shit kicked in on Twitter for that because apparently I stepped on some social landmine that I'm not aware of because, again, welder.
The fuck do I know?
Yeah, no, no, no.
Right, okay.
I don't know anything about that, I'm afraid.
This is news to me.
Yeah, I was wondering.
Oh, go ahead.
If you don't mind that I chime in, there's actually a bit of a backlash.
I'm not sure if it's a third-party group or some antis with just bad intentions.
But there has been a group that's been trying to poison the well for Michael Koretzky, as well as put out a few messages.
They're currently attacking GGHQ on 8N, and I know they're flooding a few other places.
They're trying to make sure that the SVJ thing seems as illegitimate as possible.
And that's something we've been addressing in our public emails.
Okay.
Well, I personally am a fan of the phrase, when in doubt, ignore your opponent.
And so I don't really know what to do about them.
So I would just ignore them and carry on doing what you're doing.
David, had that been your reply or William Williams?
My general position on it is just you never want to be reacting to the trolls.
As soon as you start reacting, they are in control.
You're doing what they want, even when you think you're being an independent agent.
Yeah, I agree.
Okay, and now, okay, that was the one part of the thing I wanted to bring in.
Also, I've been looking at the SBG, SPJ, SBGJ, whatever the hell that, what was I trying to say?
And I had another question that I thought was a good concern.
So I want to make sure I fully understand this first before I mention my question, otherwise I'm just going to fucking ask.
So this is essentially, you're setting up a neutral ground to try and discuss this with reputable journalists, right?
That's Michael Koretsky from the Society of Professional Journalists, yes.
Okay, so he's essentially going to be your moderator, is how I understand this.
Yes.
He's essentially the organizer of this, and his viewpoint on it is simply he's a board member of the Society for Professional Journalism, and a large group of people have come to him saying, hey, we have some issues with ethics and journalism.
Will you listen to what we have to say?
And this is him setting up an opportunity for that community to go out and speak directly to the journalists.
We are not what you have been told we are.
This is who we think we are.
Excellent.
Okay, so I do understand this as well as I hoped I did.
So here's my question for you.
So we're sending members ⁇ you were talking earlier about getting members of the opposition to come speak about this.
What are you going to do about the fact that every single member of your opposition either has been, well, to not put too fine a term, shit canned from their jobs where they were first speaking about it, or that all of their actual employers have in fact adopted ethics policies?
I mean, isn't that going to be a bit of an uphill battle for you there?
Because you've already won.
So where's your point of stance?
Now, again, I understand, because I'm not an idiot, that there's still corruption in journalism.
But where is your, I guess, empirical proof since, well, Kotaku got an ethics policy, the Escapes got an ethics policy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Look, you're getting what you want.
Where is your leg to stand on?
You know they're going to ask you this.
So do you guys have something ready for that?
Well, that's not even our role.
I mean, our role in this is simply to facilitate the conversation.
I'm just saying that the first question is out of their mouth at you.
Would you want me to answer that?
Anyone.
I will take anyone's answer on this.
I'm curious.
Yeah, I'll go ahead and I'll attempt to answer that question.
Look, anyone can write anything down, and just because you write down a thing doesn't mean that you're adhering to it.
You know, many of these outlets had plenty of policies, and they broke them frequently and often.
In fact, that's one of the reasons why we're here.
It's one thing to sit down and say, oh, we've adopted an ethics policy in order to attempt to quell the masses.
But the fact of the matter is that if these outlets actually had ethics policies, disclosures, so on and so forth, and they were adhering to them, well, we would see actual articles regarding Gamergate and the things that Gamergate has done come out and be evenly reported on and addressed correctly.
The fact of the matter is that they're doing the bare minimum possible to try and scoot by.
Even then, the panel in and of itself is not about the immediate current event.
It's not like we're only going to be talking about what has happened that day when we're down there.
No, we have to cover eight months of stuff in an eight-hour window.
There's going to be a lot to talk about in that time.
So to say that Gamergate has won is not, I would say, a genuine statement.
It hasn't necessarily won.
It's made progress.
Yeah, those simplifications are really, really dangerous to use where you say if the argument is over ethics, well, everybody thinks ethics are good, argument over, or if the argument is about harassment, well, everybody thinks harassment is bad, argument over, and pretending that these incredibly complex, nuanced issues are simply something you can address with a simple litmus test of up or down, that's been the problem all along.
There needs to be an action.
That's the fact that why I'm bringing it up is because you have this softball to them of you want to bring the discussion of ethics and journalism to this little round table of yours.
And that's a good thing to want to have a discussion about, but you know, the first thing that the opposition is going to toss out is, hey, look, all of your detractors have ethics policies now.
So, you know, you're going to have to.
Well, that's just admission that they were in the wrong.
I mean, you know, they've got everything that we're saying.
Well, I don't care whether they're smart or not.
I mean, the fact that they've done that just completely validates everything Gamergate has ever stood for.
And then we come to the issue of minimize harm.
Now, you cannot tell me that 10 articles in a day decrying their audience is them attempting to minimize harm.
I mean, there are so many things these people are guilty of.
It's just there is simply, they can't just say, oh, well, now we have ethics policy.
I'm fucking sorry, but we're going to go through this step by step, point by bloody point, until they realize just what fucking terrible people they are.
Alright, now, part two of that question, since you guys already have a plan involved in that.
What is going to be, I'd like to have, I don't want you to show your hand here, because it's like, you know, we're in super sick, there's plotting mood.
Don't think it's public stream that 1,500 people watching us.
I know.
Do you guys already have an idea of how to, I mean, are you, I don't, I really hate to think that you guys would be asking for some kind of grand journalistic oversight because that just sounds like it's just ripe for abuse in and of itself.
I mean, at that point, how can you guarantee who's going to be overseeing journalistic ethics?
Is these themselves ethical?
Who watches the watchers?
Apply your own fucking bullshit tri-comment here.
I personally want them to come out and put themselves in opposition to the Society of Professional Journalists because if they disagree with what GamingGate wants, then they will be in opposition to the Society of Professional Journalists because GamingGate basically wants their ethics policy applied to gaming journalism.
Now, I think that that's going to make all of the gaming journalists look remarkably silly in the eyes of other journalists.
And I think that that would just be a tremendously amusing situation to see them trying to squirm them out of.
You're talking about the lines of Leia Alexander as her ethics policy is she does what she wants.
Exactly, exactly.
Russell points, he said that sounds a lot like the Mafia's ethics policy.
And I think it is the Mafia's ethics policy.
That is literally it.
So what you're basically wanting to do is, you know, it's like you and I are very different political beliefs.
And in addition to, you know, we live in different countries.
I live in Texas in America, and I'm fairly center-conservatist.
And you're in Britain.
That already changed the game plan entirely.
But you basically want them to do what's an old conservative say in America.
Liberals, no offense to you.
It's our perception of liberals.
No offense to you.
Liberals want conservatives to shut up.
Conservatives want liberals to keep talking.
That's what you want them to do.
You want them to change with their own words.
The thing is, your conception of liberal is progressive.
That's the thing.
That's what you guys talk about when you're talking about liberals.
It's interesting when you're talking about liberals, what we're talking about is 19th-century French Enlightenment thinkers.
That's what we're thinking of.
This is the difference, I think.
But yeah, no, I tell you progressives talk.
They win us more converts than we can ever win ourselves.
Well, yeah, you had a perfect example on This Week in Stupid yesterday.
You had one guy talking about bedtime stories.
The more he talked, I'm sitting here thinking I'm listening to someone do a dramatic reading of 1984.
It's insane, isn't it?
But that's what you're trying to do here.
Yeah.
Was there anything else you wanted to add?
Sorry, we've got people waiting.
Oh, no, I'm done.
I was going to just say, you know, I'm a big fan of yours.
And this should be something.
Again, we're opposite sides of the political spectrum on those things.
But, you know, even I'm religious and you're not.
It's like, we're both rational.
So from the other side of the aisle, I'd like to shake your hand.
And Travis, are you still there?
I hope he is.
Thanks a lot for coming on, man.
And you guys have a good one?
I think Travis should have the floor now since he has wrestled his computer demons.
I definitely agree.
Thanks a lot, man.
Take care.
No problem.
How's it going, Travis?
I'm all right.
Great.
So, like, this is slightly off topic, but two or three weeks ago, this was in the mainstream news.
There was a chess grandmaster named Nigel Short.
Yeah.
And he was talking about how men are better than women in chess.
Right, I did see that.
Yeah, it was all over BBC and everything.
So you know the ELO rating.
Do you know how ELO works?
I don't.
Well, pretty much the more you win, the more points you get, and you want a high number of ELO points, the higher rated you are.
So there's this big gap between women and men in chess.
Like if you take the number five-rated men player compared to the number five-rated women player, there's a 250 ELO difference.
So it's a pretty big gap.
I have no idea, but do you have any thoughts on the SPJ?
Not really, no.
I just thought maybe you wanted to look into that.
It's an interesting thing, isn't it?
I probably will, but this isn't the time or place.
All right, see you.
Thanks a lot, man.
Sorry for keeping you waiting.
Right, let me see.
I think Lucas is next.
He's Lucas.
How's it going, man?
Good.
How are you?
Really well.
Just so people know, Lucas has got a YouTube channel and he makes fun videos.
I like his videos.
Thank you.
That's all right.
Well, yeah, to lay some context, I'm a comedian, so I got into it because of the censorship aspect.
It wasn't so much Zoe Quinn is fucking people for publicity.
It was more for the suppression of information.
But that's another thing.
I think that's an ethical issue in itself.
I think it's censorship is unethical.
Yeah.
So I want to say the SPJ, it's a very good thing because the mainstream media still sees video game players as overgrown children.
They're still seeing us as basement-dwelling, knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers.
Yeah, but that's probably because they've met Bob Chipman.
That's true.
You're not wrong.
I mean, Bob there aren't Bob Chipmans in the world, and that's kind of my next point, is the people that are those the basement dwelling mouth breathers, those are the people that are the anti-gamergators because they never like, you know, learned to socialize.
And that's how this SJWs infiltrated gaming so well is because, you know, the mainstream media doesn't give a shit.
So they were able to come in and just kind of have their way with these people that just kind of have no social skills.
And then you have the mainstream media that's like, oh, something's happening.
Gamergate, let Kotaku or Polygon handle it.
Like, we got real shit to talk about.
Fucking Bruce Jenner's a girl now.
We got to talk about the real shit.
So these people, these, you know, the anti-gamergators, you know, Gamasutra, Polygon, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, they have carte blanche to say whatever the fuck they want.
So now we have the SPJ gets to come in and just kind of go, all right, you've had your fun.
Now you need to start talking about the fucking things that are happening.
You need to report on facts.
Has anyone brought up the Chris Clue Mercedes-Carrera thing?
No, not yet.
What were your thoughts on it?
Okay, well, this is my thing.
As Mercedes-Carrera came off, like, she, you know, read the statistics and, you know, got her hands dirty and got in there.
And Chris Clue came off, like, everything he learned about Gamergate, he learned from that fucking Law and Order episode.
And then, like, all these anti-gamergators, to me, they come off like all the fucking juggalos that listen to that insane clown posse song.
They're like, yeah, it's science.
Don't tell me how fucking magnets work.
You're ruining the mystique.
So these people are like, oh, don't give me your facts and your reason.
It's all about misogyny.
Well, it's amazing.
No, he is.
We're going to do a stream sometime, Lucas, because I've been busy.
That's the only reason we haven't.
I know.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt.
I know, I know.
No, he is good.
But yeah, I think in that, I watched it, and Chris Clue just came off as someone who said no respect for Mercedes at all.
I mean, even if it was someone I don't like, I would try to have a basic level of respect for that person.
And he seemed to lack that entirely.
And for someone who is a feminist, Chris, I would think that you would probably have more respect for a woman than you appear to show.
I mean, didn't he?
Well, you know what?
The fucking crazy thing about them, it's just that all these SJWs, they don't believe in the shit that they're saying.
Like their idea of the GDC, when you have Tim Schaefer making fun of the fucking Not Your Shield people, and then Panda the crowd, like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, oh, Tim Schaefer, you're so funny.
They're all fucking white.
They're all fucking white dudes.
And then who is sitting down fucking pissed?
It's like the six women in the front that are like, what the fuck are you doing?
Are you fucking crazy?
Dude, tell us more about Little Legends.
Oh, my God.
Tim Schaefer, what the fuck happened?
I remember I used to like his games, too.
Oh, man, he sold the fuck out.
That was a good idea.
Oh, Jesus.
But the thing that it's so fucking crazy is all these people that talk about diversity, it's like the most undiverse people you'll ever see.
They all fucking look the same.
Just all of them.
They're all hipsters.
They're white, privileged hipsters with fucking funny-colored hair and goony beards.
No, it's crazy.
But their idea of diversity is you just have to think like what we do.
You know, we say we're diverse.
You just have to say you're diverse.
And it's like what happened with Joss Whedon.
Joss Whedon was the fucking king, man.
And then, you know, one thing, they do one thing that doesn't fall in line with their bullshit agenda.
You're out of the club, and we make sure we do whatever we can to that you just never recover.
I mean, it's Joss Whedon.
He made a movie that made a billion domestic.
They're not going to fucking do anything.
All these people do is talk.
Yeah.
Twitter is their biggest weapon, isn't it?
But, right, okay.
Is there anything else quickly before?
Actually, you know, I kind of wanted to vindicate myself real quick because I said something using the Gamergate hashtag that I drew some ire from, and I'm sure nobody here rather remembers it.
But I said, you know, back when it was picking up steam that someone linked me to Zoe Quinn's Patreon, and I said she must suck the best dick in the world to get $4,000 a month.
It had nothing to do with her promiscuity.
It's just that nobody that's done that little deserves that much.
So I just wanted to get that off my chest.
Well, I'm not one to tell the social justice warriors how to spend their money.
If they want to give it to Zoe Quinn for being promiscuous, that's entirely their choice.
Oh, no.
You know what?
I agree.
If these people, you know what?
Stupid people got to spend their money.
And I guess it's just easier to give it to someone who says they're oppressed.
You know, if we can somehow make it so that Zoe Quinn stops talking and just rides off to, you know, sells off to a desert island and spends her Patreon money, great.
That would be brilliant.
She's going to Europe.
She's going to Europe for three months.
Yeah, no, she was doing a nice tour of Europe.
So, you know, that's good.
That's good for Zoe.
I hope she loses her internet connection there.
But I don't know why people think that she's relevant.
She was relevant for a week, and then it was all about the game Journos Pro.
It was about all these people being in bed with each other.
It has nothing to do with this one person, but the fact is that's just the narrative they're pushing because they got caught with their fucking pants down.
Exactly.
If they talk about Zoe Quinn, they don't have to talk about ethical violations.
And then it's just easier for them to deflect because all the mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers, they're going to jump on it because they're just so starved for pussy.
And it's so fucking obvious.
It is.
But okay, man, well, thanks a lot for coming on.
And we'll have a stream at some point in the future.
Yeah, yeah, no problem.
Thanks for letting me come by.
Not a problem, man.
Take care.
All right.
Right, let me just try to figure out who the hell's next.
I think probably Gwen is next.
You know, Gwen?
Yes, I'm here.
Hello, how's it going?
Could be better.
Why?
What's wrong?
Oh, run out of one of my new medications, and so my body is just being a bit of an ass, you know.
That sounds bad.
Have you got any thoughts on the SPJ?
Actually, quite a few.
That's why I'm here.
I feel that we're focusing too much on the really well-known folk instead of finding ways to scout out the absolute best folk to be discussing the issues at the SPJ.
And I feel that's not very fair to the overall to the overall thing that is Gamergate, because there are probably a lot of people out there that would be great at discussing these, but they've been kind of not in the limelight.
And I really think we should have made some way to find them.
That should have been the first time.
Can I feel the response to that?
Well, just quickly, that's actually why I do these streams.
I know I haven't done one for a while, but that's why I do these streams, because I do think it's important to give a platform to people in Gamergate who otherwise wouldn't have one.
But please go ahead.
Gwen, to give you a little insight of who I am, literally I was an internet nobody until Monday when the committee went public.
And the reason why I'm on this committee is because I called Mike and I convinced him that I would make a good pick for this.
And now what I'm doing as part of the committee is I'm being sort of the feet on the ground.
I'm in Kotaku in action.
I'm on Twitter and I'm on the 8chan boards.
I'm trying to get as many people as possible to give me as much advice or input, and then I'm presenting that to the committee.
I have notes sitting in front of me on a pad and paper, all of that, and I'm trying to make sure I can best represent as many of the little guys as possible.
So when you voice your concerns on that, I'm more than happy to say that I'm trying to cover that field.
Mind if I talk to you more about this at some point at some point?
My Twitter is at 38chan at gmail.com.
Yeah, there we go.
Sorry, go ahead.
My Twitter is at 38chan at gmail.com.
If you troll any of the not troll, but if you follow any of the places I just mentioned, you should easily be able to find me.
I would love to get in contact you if the get in contact with you if you have anything you want to voice.
Go ahead.
Do you have a Twitter or was just that email?
The Twitter was at oh, I had accidentally said my email.
My Twitter is at 38CH underscore John Smith.
I'll type it out in the chat for you and then you can go me there or whatever you like.
Cool, because it's been like ever since this started, I've been really concerned that everyone focuses as a whole on the celebrity and not on searching.
And that's just always something I see happen in things like this.
I've been an activist on and off for a long time, and the same thing happens there where someone gets popular and then no one else matters.
Even though everyone wants to accomplish the same goal, the person with the personality almost always ends up sort of overshadowing everyone.
I think Dave has some kind of leak.
Yeah, one of the things that comes up in relation to that is, I mean, the biggest question that the committee has faced up till now is who the hell is John Smith and Dave Rickey?
Because we weren't public figures in this.
We weren't people that everyone knew.
And because we have a fairly compressed timeframe, I mean, we're supposed to have settled on who's being invited by the 1st of June.
There isn't a great deal of time for the community to become familiar with complete unknowns.
Plus, there's an expectation of an awareness of all of the events and people and social phenomena that have been related to Gamergate that's expected of anyone who participates in this panel, that it's just really hard for someone who hasn't been part of it in a visible way for a long time to demonstrate.
I guess.
Wish we had more time then.
Well, this is the sort of thing that we can discuss in the future.
So it's it's not like we can't discuss this in the different stream at another time.
All right.
Thank you very much for uh having me on.
Not a problem, Glenn.
Um am I following you on Twitter, Stamin?
Yeah, you follow me on Twitter, but you never respond to anything.
I I send you on DM.
Then I ah shit.
Sorry man.
Okay, well I will message you.
Oh yeah, so I don't.
Sorry.
I'll message you now and we will talk and we'll have a stream and talk about these things.
That sounds great.
Cool.
All right.
Thanks a lot for coming on.
Can I show something on the way out?
Go ahead.
I'm making a video game with some great people I met in Gigi.
You can learn all about that at the Twitter at Harvester Game.
And there's a great website if you're looking for good news, Super Nerdland.
And I think more folks should go look at that site.
That's it.
Thanks a lot for coming on.
Thank you for having me.
This was it was really good to be able to come make my piece.
Not a problem, honestly.
Right.
I think we're probably Max.
Are you there, Max?
Yeah, hey.
Hey, how's it going?
Wonderful.
Oh, I don't even know what name is showing for me.
Well, it says Max.
That's fine.
Oh, I hate Google Plus.
Well, yeah, I wanted to raise some point about the SPJ discussion.
And it's about who anti Gamergate will send, if anyone at all.
Because the dot I see is that they have pretty much nothing to gain from it.
I think they can only lose from engaging in such discussion.
I agree.
I really don't see what they're going to get out of it if they do turn up.
So I think they will not.
Yeah, well I watched a stream with Oliva, I guess, yesterday, or the day before yesterday, I'm not sure.
And there were quite some optimistic views about who could come, but as far as I see, they pretty much can only benefit from not engaging in discussion.
And I wanted to ask you guys, like, all around, how you feel about that.
Well, I personally don't I agree with you.
I don't really see what they've got to gain from it.
I'm happy for anyone else to answer that if they want to.
Which I guess nobody has.
I had missed a question, David.
Did you hear it?
Yeah, I did catch the question.
I mean, it's obviously a difficult problem.
And it's one that the committee's wrestling with, how to get figures that are involved on the anti-GG side of this to actually stand up and explain what their motivations were, what their logic, train of logic was, because yes, the easiest thing for them to do is simply not engage.
But then what they've done is they've left a platform where Gigi is going to have representatives there explaining to a room full of journalists from all over the southeast and possibly the country exactly what their beef is with absolutely no rebuttal.
So there's an opportunity cost for them there.
They lose the chance to control their side of the story.
They do.
I think that they're probably going to put their heads in the sand and pretend this isn't happening.
But I mean, what do you make of that, Max?
Yeah, I pretty much feel it's the same.
So far, they make quite a lot of money from being victims instead of engaging in discussion.
And it would probably be even the smartest thing for them to just keep that up.
Well, I've got a point there, actually.
I don't think that the journalists themselves actually do make any money from being victims.
I think the people who make money from being victims aren't journalists.
So I don't see why they would be invited to this discussion, really.
You know, Brenna Wu and Isaki Zinzo Quinn, they're not journalists.
They're nothing to do with what we're concerned with.
They can't commit violations of journalistic ethics.
Yeah, that's actually true.
The journalists already lost a lot of money, I guess, from losing advertisers.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, no, they absolutely have.
So it's one of those things.
I can't imagine Nathan Grayson or any of them turning up.
Yeah, I would actually love to see that Nathan Grayson or Le Alexander.
It would be a lot of fun to watch, but I do not expect it.
The idea is laughable, isn't it?
They're never going to turn up.
Right, was there anything else you wanted to add?
No, that was pretty much the whole point.
I hoped someone would be more enthusiastic about getting someone on, but I guess it's pretty much the same view everywhere.
Yeah, I'm sure they'd be absolutely welcome.
I mean, maybe someone should try approaching them.
We're very hopeful that we're going to get some of these figures in.
It's just that we have to be very, very careful in talking about it because, I mean, it's going to be a delicate subject for them.
And we have to not present this as do it or else, as if there were some kind of threat being invoked.
Right.
If I could add to that, we also have a list working of neutrals who might be able to stand in their place.
Yeah, I think anyone who could accurately represent the opposing view would be acceptable.
Or at least in my opinion, it would be.
Yes, having any kind of discussion that is just honest about the issues at hand would be wonderful.
I agree.
Well, thanks for coming on.
Thanks a lot for having me.
Not a problem.
Right, I think next is Oscar.
Hey, everybody.
It's Oscar from Original Gamer Podcast.
I'm the one who did the interview with Michael Koretzky last week.
Oh, hey, how's it going?
It's going good.
I'm glad a lot of people like the interview.
A lot of details came out.
I was surprised on how everything went.
And sure enough, over the weekend, all this happened.
Where it's really picking up.
Great.
I mean, I think it's something that people are very glad for.
I listened to the podcast.
I only got about three quarters of the way through, but I think I got enough out of it to know what was going on.
Good job, by the way.
No, thanks.
Yeah, I saw his post and I said, you know what?
I need to get in touch with this guy because I'm part of the SPJ as well.
And when I hear someone of his ranking in the group, because I mean, every region has a director and a director, they're in charge of a lot.
I'll put it that way.
And when I hear someone that he's a director, I decided to talk with him.
And we went through quite a bit and we talked a little bit afterwards.
And it was, I'm still working on my degree, but it was great to hear sort of an old school journalist like him.
Yeah.
Because he was very sort of, you know, what?
You could threaten to kill me.
Maryland Matchet fans have done that.
And there's nothing that surprises him.
And that's the old school journalist.
Those are the journalists back when that would say that.
Yeah, no, it's refreshing to have old school journalists who understand why these things are important looking at the situation.
So honestly, I'm quite excited about it for this.
It's really nice to see.
Yeah, and it's something that I mentioned in the podcast that part of me hopes that this is kind of where this kind of sort of makes everything.
I won't say end it, but I mean, because it is kind of exhausting for nine months and almost a year to just be arguing for a year.
It's just really, after a while, it does get tiring.
It kind of puts a little exhaustion on the soul.
So I'm hoping with this here, this can sort of finally get everything to where we're sort of back on track and just being talking back about video games.
Yeah, I mean, I personally would prefer it if people could just stop insulting us and claiming all sorts of nasty things about us.
I mean, for Christ's sake, it's just old.
I'm just tired of it.
And that's the same way I feel.
Where I wake up in the morning and it's like, all right, who do I have to fight with today?
Yeah, you know, I understand.
I would rather just, I'm glad that we're getting to a point where there are people who are prepared to listen to us in a reasonable discussion.
So I've just got, I've been commanded by Russ to say there's a gentleman called at L-A-W-L-F-A-K-E-R-S-I-R.
There's a Twitter handle, and he's doing little Gamergate, hand-drawn Gamergate avatars for people.
I've retweeted his total visceral one, so contact him if you would like a hand-drawn Gaming Gate avatar.
It's a bit shilling for him.
Could you put that in the chat here?
I can.
Thank you.
So yeah, was there anything else you wanted to say, by the way, Oscar?
No, I'm good.
I want to say thanks for everybody that did listen to the podcast.
I was excited when he came on, and it had me revved up.
And I see a lot of people that get that little glimpse in their eyes, a little second breath, if you will, to where they're kind of saying, hey, we're not totally crazy here.
We actually have a point, and here's someone that's listening to us.
I'm glad that it had an effect on people that people are getting energized, and people are just saying, you know, the fight's not over, and there is more to be done.
So I'm glad that happened.
Glad everybody liked it.
Keep checking the website, originalgamer.com because we have been sort of very fighting the social justice warrior journalists since 2010.
I fed better with them.
But yeah, thanks a lot, guys.
Hope you guys enjoyed it.
Again, check out my website.
Follow me on Twitter, Reggie GamerOne.
Great work, everybody.
Great.
Thanks a lot for coming on.
All right.
See you guys.
Take care, man.
Right, Monsieur.
Are you there?
Hello?
Am I audible?
Hello.
Bonjour.
Okay, hello.
Yes, Bonjour.
I just wanted to add something, something that on hello, can you hear me?
I can hear you very well.
Okay, something something that Travis already touched on.
And that's when you hear people right now claiming that they're Gamergate and that they suddenly have opinions that absolutely don't make sense, like they're against the SPJ thing, you have to be very critical, very skeptical in terms of whether they really are Gamergate, because the short version of the shilling is real.
They are, for some reason, the ante's are absolutely horrified of this whole SPJ thing.
And they were on Poll, they're on Gamergate HQ, they're on other boards.
It's by far not as bad as when they had an actual board just for shilling in the boards.
But it's already getting bad, and they're doing the same thing in Kotaku in Action.
There's a lot of people pretending to be Gamergaters on the subreddit, on the boards, trying to rile people up and drive a wedge.
Drive a wedge right now mostly around the topic of are we about ethics or about fighting SJWs, which is of course by fighting one, you're fighting the other.
And so fighting for ethics radically degrades the SJWs.
Totally agree.
Totally agree.
That's all I want to add, really.
I think that's a very fine point.
And I'm not surprised, actually.
I believe the term is astroturfing.
Yes.
So anyone who is about to get too riled up or who is wondering why people are suddenly talking too much about social justice warriors, that is why.
It's not really an occurrence.
It's just Garzi's weird Twitter, maybe SRS, getting it into different places.
That's all it is.
Okay, that was all of it.
Okay.
Well, thanks for coming on and letting everyone know.
I didn't know that.
Thanks for having me on.
See ya.
Great.
Someone right.
Let me see who's next.
Hang on, next.
What are you still doing here?
Right.
Cluster Ed.
Hello, Ra, can you hear me?
I can hear you.
How's it going?
Hello, everyone.
I'm sorry if my speech gets incoherent.
Firstly, I'm very nervous because there are a lot of people watching it right now.
And second, I'm Russian.
I'm not a native speaker.
And I've haven't been speaking to an English person for like two years.
So I try to speak again about my points because I talk about the SPJ only in a little.
And my point is I've been following Gamergate since August since the articles in Gamma Sutra and other outlets popped out.
I felt that gamers were betrayed by the attitude of game journals because as for me, I've been a huge fan of game video game magazines.
I love the editorials, reviews, and so and I believe that game journals have been or had been An important source of information and sort of connection between the gamer and the developer.
But as for now, there are a lot of people just pushing the agenda.
And when Lee Alexander said that gamers are dead, she betrayed gamers, she not target audience, but she betrayed people who really believed in game journalism like myself, because I treat game journalism as something more than just reporting and reviewing stuff, etc.
I really liked editorials and investigating journalism about, for example, cancel projects and so on.
And I think that GamerGate is very important for me not only because of the ethics, but also because a lot of people are anti-censorship.
And as a beginning artist myself, I'm really interested in this question with censorship and other things.
And about myself, actually, speaking about the narrative that agros push, I'm actually a part of a small community of male-only gamers, but I really like this community.
I value it a lot because this community helped me to get through a difficult situation in life.
I lost family members.
And it's really interesting for me to because this narrative they push is very interesting for me because in some points I know why they are pushing it and what their points are based on.
That's why I believe that this narrative will be really hard to destroy.
But Gamergate, I'm really happy that this SPG meeting that will be held, I believe, I don't know, in August.
It's very important.
It's like imagine yourself a main bus battle in an RPG game.
And everyone in a game should treat it like a major winning point if the code of ethics that is introduced will be applied by games journalists.
So that's mainly my point.
No, I think that's a very fine point.
I think it is a momentous occasion.
I agree with you.
I think it's something important.
Well, that's the only thing I would like to add.
Thank you for.
I'm very happy to join because you, you, Sargon, Oliver, you are very inspiring because I really like your videos, Thunderfoot is a really great YouTuber.
And it's very interesting to watch, especially for me, a foreigner, because in this country I only whine a bit.
The basic human rights are often violated.
And there are a lot of liberal magazines or hipster folks to push that SJW agenda, even in this country where basic human rights are often violated.
And for me, because I'm more involved in music, it's really a pain for me to watch all these articles where people discuss whether there are too little, not enough female electronic artists and so on.
That's why GamerGate actually influences a lot of things, not only gaming, not only gaming journalism.
So keep up the good work, everyone.
Thanks for the kind words, and it's interesting to know that.
Thank you.
Okay.
Yes.
Thank you very much.
No, I appreciate hearing that and knowing that we're helping make a difference.
Yeah, it really is heartwarming, man.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you, Orilana.
Take care.
Having a good time.
Thank you.
Cheers, dude.
Right.
We've got a John.
But not the John who was already here.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes.
I just wanted to come in to address a few points that were mentioned on the stream.
When Oliver did the first stream on this, I was one of the people who said that Gamergate is not justified ethics and journalism, although I may have not used those exact words.
That's not to say I'm backpedaling.
I still maintain that position.
But I think it's important to clarify this.
Many people think that by saying that, I'm trying to shift the conversation to SJWs.
That's not the case.
It's not about SJWs either.
They're very annoying.
They're very loud.
But the most harm they do is acting as like they act in mobs and they just go against people.
But that's another story.
But when I said that, what I mean to say is it's about ethics, period.
And I say this not based on just personal opinion, but my own observations for the course of the past nine months.
Because a lot of the issues we talk about don't specifically relate to journalism necessarily.
A lot of them relate to con games, schemes.
There's also censorship issues, which are not necessarily journalistic issues, such as Reddit censorship, 4chan censorship.
There's industry corruption.
And then, of course, there's the astroturfing, which is done by corporations who own some of these publications as well.
Many of these things tie into each other, but I think it is important to state that Gamergate is not just about ethics and games journalism.
That being said, as I stressed on Oliver's stream the last time I was there, this particular debate is about ethics and journalism, though.
But I do think that the point does need to be made clear so that the other corporate corrupt players involved in this are held accountable.
What's the difference between corporate and corrupt, I suppose?
No, that's a very interesting point because I think a lot of people misconstrue that statement to mean it's not about gaming journalism rather than it's not about ethics.
Or the other way around, sorry.
I think people assume that that means that what we want to do is attack the SJWs for who they are, what they are, or something like that.
And I think you've articulated it very, very well there.
I do think that there are definitely greater ethical concerns surrounding Gamergate, you know, that Gamergate people are definitely concerned about.
But I'm glad that we can agree that it's ethics that we're concerned about.
I think it's very important that that distinction was made.
I think you articulated it very well.
There's a couple points, other things I just wanted to say.
Just two more points really quickly.
This is something that was touched by Gwen previously about recruitment.
I also agree with her that we need the best, most qualified people there.
I'm not going to say too much about this because you already said you're going to do another stream on this.
But I've also been thinking about this and I've been working out some plans for this to have some debate streams on my channel and trying to them out that way through the course of debate.
Basically, the person who's most basically people can come in.
It would be like sort of open house, but I want to limit the number of people at a time and allow them to go against each other, arguing pro or con the positions.
We would need advocates for this, but there is also.
Yeah, have you got a link to your channel that I can tweet?
Sharp thing.
Let me send it to you in a DM after this after I get off.
Yeah, that's fine.
Okay.
And also, one last thing about this, about getting representatives from the anti-portion of Gamergate to get those people, there's a subreddit called Reddit.com/slash R slash anti-Gamergate.
They're a different sort of faction of anti-Gamergate where they're not Ghazi, but they legitimately believe that Gamergate is wrong and they will argue against our positions.
And I think those are What are their main contentions then?
Mainly, as far to surmise, I think that they accuse Gamergate of extreme hypocrisy and enabling an environment where harassment becomes more and more acceptable.
There are counter-arguments to that, but that would take up too much time if I was going to.
I've just had a look at that subreddit, and it's private, so I can't see it.
Interesting.
I didn't realize it was private.
It's just Gamergate all one word, isn't it?
I believe so.
Yeah, it appears to be private for me, so I can't.
But I mean, that's fine because I don't know anyone in Gamergate who doesn't support anti-harassment measures.
So that's fine.
That's a battle we can also win.
Right.
And if I can chill for a moment, tomorrow at 11 a.m. Eastern, that would be around, I believe, 4 p.m. GMT in case you're in England.
You can figure out the rest of the time since from there.
I'll be interviewing Bone Golem, who is responsible for deepfreeze.it.
And I'll be asking him a lot of questions and addressing a lot of concerns that have been brought up by all parties who have brought things up.
So I'd recommend checking out.
Send me your channel and I'll tweet it so people can find you and subscribe and then they can catch up with your stream whenever they want.
I appreciate it.
All right.
Have a good one.
There's been some great discussion here, and I'll keep on listening after I get off.
Bye.
Great.
Thanks a lot for coming on.
Right.
I think, Remy, are you next?
I'm not sure.
I think so.
I'll go next if you guys are ready for me.
I was just going to real quick.
Hi, how are you doing?
I wanted to really fast address some of the stuff that I heard coming in with Gwen that looking for the most appropriate voices, I brought this up on Ali's stream, is that absolutely we need the most qualified voices there and not the person that's our best buddy or the person that we're most familiar with.
That doesn't automatically discredit people like yourself who have time and time again proven to be well-spoken, to be comfortable on a public platform, and to be knowledgeable of the history up until this point.
So while I think right out of the gate, I said that it's important that we look at all of the potential people that we have to go to not automatically discredit The people that we've come to to be our strong voices at the same time, that we should kind of fight back against being knee-jerk with that.
I understand it, but you guys have proven time and time again to be loud, well, not loud in a bad way, but vocal and trustworthy.
So sometimes sticking with the voices you know is not necessarily a bad thing.
I think one of the reasons that a lot of the time we kind of default to the loud voices is because these people know the, they know what the you know, they know the situation and they, you know, for whatever reason they, they're good at putting their voice out there.
You know they've, they've obviously got some sort of innate talent for it or something, I suppose, and so it's, it's.
You know, I don't want to and i'm really not trying to blow my own horn or anything, but I can see why you kind of, I can see why in general and it's not just with gaming gate, it's it's with all of these things like people were saying with like um, various other communities I can see why there is a trend towards the sort of personality uh, I don't want to say cult, but you know that that sort of thing you know.
But sorry, I was just interrupting.
Oh no, you're totally fine, and that's and I guess that's the thing is that there are some people who have been suggested and i'm not going to say who my dream team or anything is for that, because it's it's actually been very fluid through all of this, but I I think that there's some people that have been suggested because we like them and we're like oh, this is somebody I really like.
But be aware that anybody who is going um up in front of of this group, they're going to be dug into.
Their history is going to be dug into.
So when you're suggesting your friends as well, realize that that's putting a spotlight on their ethics and their background.
And so some of the names that i've seen sort of put out there, realize their career is going to be in scrutiny now too.
Um, and then to piggyback off of something that that John was saying, um, some people now and I always have to preface this everybody knows i'm an MRA.
Well, and if you didn't, now you know, and everybody knows that social justice warriors and I did air quotes drive me bonkers.
You can look at me fighting with people all the time on Twitter.
But we need to win this battle so that we can then move on to the greater war.
And so when we say with SPJ to focus on ethics, it's not ignoring the greater, the greater war at hand and I'm stealing words from you Sargon, please forgive me, but I loved it.
It's important.
If we win this battle, this is a big platform for us, and if we go in and we do well and we stick to the task at hand, which is journalistic ethics, because that's what SPJ is about, then that's a huge victory for us to hold up in the greater war to say look, we lost ground in comic books, we lost ground here, we lost ground there, but here we grain, we gained ground on the battlefield.
So everybody who wants to fight social justice, don't think that's getting ignored, it's absolutely not.
We're just trying to be tactical about it.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that people have got to remember is, why are you against social justice warriors?
Now, I mean, I think the answer for most people is they are unethical people.
They don't act in their personal lives, in nor in real life, in an ethical way like most people do.
I think I genuinely think that most people do hold themselves to some kind of ethical standard, even if they don't think about it, and that's what's so repugnant about the social justice warriors that I really think that's why people oppose them.
So you know just, you know, that's the thing.
It's the ethics that is the concern, I think.
But that's my opinion exactly and I just wanted to.
Sorry, I just wanted to pop on real quick.
I know it's.
I'm bleeding.
I'm sorry.
I'm going to be here again.
Poor Dave.
I know that people are trying to filter through real quick, so I'm going to go ahead and pop off so that there's room for other folks.
But I just wanted to put those two things out there.
Just be aware when you're putting new folks up there or promoting somebody, think about their ethical background too, just because we like them.
And there's lots of folks I like that are questionably ethically as journalists.
Just know that they're going to be looked at just as hard as the other side in this situation, and don't discount our big voices.
And thank you for having me on, Sargon.
You have a good day.
My pleasure.
Thanks for coming on.
Right.
Okay, Zan, are you there?
I am.
Long time no see Gamergate, I guess, and a long time no see Sargon.
How have you been, man?
Good, man.
How are you?
I'm pretty good.
I just wanted to offer a couple of words and then some thoughts on a larger thing.
So I think it wasn't John Smith.
I was talking in the side chat.
It was actually one of the SPJ committee people offered some thoughts on their blog recently where they said that they thought that the SPJ ethics thing might be a chance for Gamergate to, quote, go legit.
I semi-disagree with that because I think it's already been legitimized.
The collapse of the social justice narrative all around basically kind of legitimizes it.
But one thing I will say to that note is I think that this SPJ ethics thing, I think this is going to be potentially a good conclusion of sorts because it is a chance to have a large organization with far-reaching connections potentially really write a truly critical and unbiased report of this whole affair.
And moreover, potentially to write a scathing report of the absolute ridiculous behavior by the games media and by the MSM that's backed them up.
So I think it's a really great opportunity here for a good conclusion of sorts.
And I really think that people need to get behind it.
One of the problems that there is right now is, as Victor pointed out, there are actual shills.
But moreover, there's another group of people who I think kind of wants to cling to Gamergate the way that it was back in September.
And the reality is that Gamergate is about way more than ethics and journalism at this point.
It has started a much larger pushback against social justice in every medium.
The sheer number of people who, I guess you could say, are waking up, or as Paul will say, the normies who are becoming informed is insane.
There's a ton of people now who are pushing back against Marxist-centric ideologies and authoritarian ideologies across the board, particularly in Europe, but also very, very much in the West.
People have just had enough with the sort of Marxist academic media brigade because it's just so many lies.
Like the Baltimore thing really showed me that.
Just the amount of outrage over that at the way the media was handling it pretty well proved to me that this is true.
So I think that the thing that Gamergate really needs to do is to focus on this SPJ ethics thing as sort of a, not necessarily a finale, but a chance to finalize the legitimacy of the ethics argument.
And then what would be nice to see is if they start focusing on the bigger issues, like, you know, maybe into like people like Ezra Klein, who paid for and funded Catherine Cross and directly contributed to Diggra and things like that.
He created Journalist as well, didn't he?
Exactly.
He created journalists as well, and he was also an active contributor to Digra.
So these are the kinds of things that it would be nice to see people focus on, because these are bigger issues.
Everybody wants to say, oh, it's just ethics, or we should just focus on the corrupt journalists in gaming.
But the reality is that the corruption goes all the way up to the top of the media.
Whenever you start to dig on this stuff, you find out the same interests, the sort of super PAC, AI PAC type people who back up the corrupt journalists in the mainstream media were also paying all of the same people in the gaming media.
Like, you know, your Catherine Crosses or Leigh Alexander's or whatever.
They were all on the take from these people.
So it would be good to see after the SPJ ethics thing, it would be good to see sort of a long-term focus on that.
Well, I was actually thinking about this.
So, Jumping, one thing I think is important.
I love my military history.
I absolutely adore it.
And I spent a lot of time.
I could reel you off campaign after campaign of various ancient generals and what they did right and wrong.
And I think one thing that we've definitely got to be aware of is mission creep.
The reason I think that we should keep Gamergate tight and focused on ethics and journalism is because it is a very clear victory condition.
You just can't say that you fail if you know what you're aiming for.
Whereas if we start using Gamergate to go after other things, then it becomes a bit more nebulous and a bit more stretched.
I was actually thinking there has to be some way to get a coalition of the willing who are concerned with the and it is a Marxist ideology.
I'm actually at the point where I'm not even broaching discussion on people who think it's not.
It absolutely is.
And if you think it's not, you don't know what you're talking about.
You know, that's frankly the case at the moment.
But I think that a greater coalition of the willing can be put together after Gamergates has won its battle for ethics in gaming journalism because I think that that's what the case is.
It's the war against social justice, but it is a battle for ethics and gaming journalism, I think is what Gamergate is.
And I think it's most powerful when it's focusing on that.
Fair point.
Yeah, I'll definitely agree with you on that.
And I guess I'll say, I guess I'm thinking more in the sense of after SPJ ethics and after.
Because I really do feel like if the SPJ ethics panel, if this is successful, that kind of because their entire committee, their entire society, right, its entire legitimacy of brand is based on ethical critiques of the media.
So if they mess this up, it will be, they'll ruin themselves, and I think it'll also set off a larger strike significant.
So they have a lot of motivation not to mess this up.
So I kind of feel like that this might be, if it's successful, this might be the conclusion.
But I could be wrong.
I am definitely thinking, though, along the same lines, sort of post-Gamergate, what do we do next with all of the people who are angry and still want to do something?
I guess I'll offer a couple of final thoughts.
So one, I watched your newest This Week in Stupid, where you covered the SJWs not wanting parents to raise their own kids.
Yeah, that really lost my mind over that one.
And I have to say, like, that illustrates sort of exactly why people are pushing back against this.
It seems to me that a lot of social justice people and people on the Marxist left, they don't understand sometimes where the pushback's coming from.
So they default in their minds to, oh, it just must be that much misogyny or that much racism.
That's not what it is.
Well, right with stuff like this, so it's so ridiculous now.
It's so insanely authoritarian.
I mean, advocating that, that's literally one of the things that Lennon used to advocate.
Parents should not raise their own children.
The state should raise them.
Mal is even more intense.
I mean, you know, you couldn't make it up.
No, you couldn't make it up.
I guess the last thing I'll say is: you know, I wish you guys good luck.
I leave in five days.
I'm not sure where I'm going.
Some people have pointed out Middle East, I think the Middle East, I don't know, has to do with my job.
No, I'm not in the military.
Yes, I am a defense contractor.
No, I won't talk about what I do.
So, anybody wondering about that, I will be gone until September.
So, I hope that when I come back in September, I come back to sort of a larger battle because time is kind of running out.
And what I mean by that is next year in the United States is a general election, but it's not just any general election.
You have very obvious social justice-style candidates on both sides, and they both want the same thing.
They want to use social justice as an excuse to push over more authoritarian-style laws.
And in the lead-up to this, I believe that Gamergate is going to get used as a political football.
But moreover, I believe the issues raised by Gamergate are going to become that much more important because the media is not going to tell the truth at all in this election.
Whatever truth they may have told in previous elections, throw it out.
They're not going to tell the truth at all in this election.
They're going to show for whoever pays them the most money.
That's very clear.
So, time is running out in the sense that people need to recognize what's about to happen and prepare for it and prepare to, you know, for lack of a better word, prepare to red pill the masses, prepare to show them all of the information when this stuff starts happening.
We've got just about 12 months now, just a little bit over 12 months until this takes place.
And I think we have a real opportunity to push this stuff back, not just in the media, but in the highest sense, of potentially getting candidates elected in this country who are not just sort of corporate goons or not just pack goons.
I think we're going a bit off topic there.
Yeah, that is kind of off topic, but it's my final thought.
I'm not even sure I'd be optimistic about that, but it would be nice.
But I'm not in the US, so I can't really, you know, it's not the amoeba, is it?
But yeah, good luck.
Yeah, I know the Tories just won in Britain.
Yeah, it's a fucking I am about halfway through doing a video of just all of the terrible things the Tories have done, and they have done terrible things.
But anyway, we're getting off topic, so thanks a lot for coming on, man.
Yeah, I will head out.
I guess the last thing I'll say is the weld, the weld bro raiders don't know who's doing that, but it's hilarious.
So I guess keep welding it.
What's with the welding?
I don't know.
They called you welder of a cod.
So I guess.
I have no idea.
I thought it was someone else who was welding.
I don't know.
Somebody said it was like a social justice blog or something was raiding.
I don't think so.
I think maybe that's how it started, but it got co-opted.
So it's just really funny now at this point.
I have no idea, but I do love watching the chat anyway.
Thanks, Kyon, man.
Take it easy.
Appreciate it, man.
Take it easy.
All right.
Dave, I think you'll probably be our last drop-in.
Oh, no, no, no, no, Dave.
Yeah, right, okay.
No, sorry, Dave.
Right, okay, guys.
Let's discuss things since you're the last people.
Okay, I'm sorry if I was I don't know the proper protocol for participating in these streams.
I haven't done any of them.
I didn't mean to step on your screen.
No, no, don't worry about that.
Although, I'm have you got any headphones or anything?
Is there any bit of echo for you all?
Let me try something.
I have had more technical problems with trying to do these streams than you would believe, but I do have a pair of headphones I can try to use.
Yeah.
He was mostly mute through our original two streams.
I can understand why.
Okay.
Right.
So, Oliver, then, since you've been so patiently waiting.
Yes, sir.
I just wanted to get in there and touch base on some stuff.
Actually, I like going last to generally, you know, because people have a lot of different opinions that they want to share and stuff that they want to get out there.
And it also gives me stuff to think about and think about as talking points.
But when I first started speaking some time back, I just wanted to give people the stats on Deep Freeze.
I'm looking at those right now.
The stats I'm looking at are about 12 hours old.
They're current up as to the beginning of this day from Bone Golem.
I already tweeted that out, so if you haven't seen it, you can go just check the hashtag and you'll see the stat sheet.
But as it stands right now for the month of May, since Deep Freeze launched proper, we're at just under 3 million hits to Deep Freeze and unique visits.
Now, there's a difference.
Hits and visits or unique IPs are not the same thing, just in case people aren't sure.
But according to the stat sheet, it's 2,940,550 hits, and then visits are 60,098.
And those visits are unique, which means there's been 60,000 people have gone to that site to look over it and see what's going on.
And that's pretty damn amazing, if you ask me, no matter how you slice it.
So, you know, for those who were there when we first started, when we first all sat down and conceptualized Deep Freeze, yeah, we knocked that one right out of the park.
It's definitely got people's attention, and that's fantastic.
Those stats I got directly from Bone Golem himself, so it's not just like pulled out of the air.
No, like I said, I went and checked with him.
I was like, is it okay to share this?
And he's like, yeah.
So now that you know how those stats are going.
The second thing, just regarding SPJ Ethics Week and airplay and all this, I believe that Sargon has been really on point this entire time.
You know, he popped over to Reddit and had some words about understanding how this works and how it benefits all of us and so on and so forth.
And of course, everyone knows that I'm making air quotes when I say everyone.
I'm just speaking in general terms.
Almost everyone knows that there are many facets to Gamergate just besides ethics.
Of course, ethics is the core.
And I would say from there, you've got tentacles, basically.
I know someone's going to make jokes based on that, but that really is it.
It's like tentacles or branches of a tree that go into other things.
And those things are just as important depending on the context of the discussion.
However, for people to sit down and say, well, Gamergate isn't just about ethics.
Oh, it's also about dealing with social justice warriors.
I would counter with, no, it's still about ethics.
What we're really looking at here is just a series of different ethical issues in different categories.
I'm actually going to pause here for a minute and read something off so people understand what ethics are.
And the definition for that would be ethics, also moral philosophy, is the branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct.
The term ethics derives from the ancient Greek word ethikos, which is derived from the word ethos, habit or custom.
The branch of philosophy, axiology, comprises the sub-branches of ethics and aesthetics, each concerned with concepts of value.
As a branch of philosophy, ethics investigates the questions which is the best way for people to live and what actions are right or wrong in particular circumstances.
In practice, ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, vice and virtue, justice and crime.
As a field of intellectual inquiry, moral philosophy also is related to the fields of moral psychology, descriptive ethics, and value theory.
So really what we've been talking about here is that when you look at the question of, well, what are the ethics here?
And many of us are here because of a distinct ethical issue happening within our hobbyist space, that being, you know, video games and game journalism and the game industry in and of itself.
But where our opponents are people that we can comfortably say, I think, that are ethically and morally bankrupt in that sense, where they don't have bad tactics.
They just have bad targets to use a phrase that we're pretty familiar with at this point.
Thanks, Bob.
And that's really what it does come down to.
You are having a fight of ethics.
You are having a fight of what's right and what's wrong.
And what many people in Gamergate, whether they're primarily here for the ethical concerns or they're primarily here for the social justice warrior concern, it always comes back to there is an ethical problem.
If you don't believe that there's an issue with someone's ethics as far as their profession goes, you are saying that you are having an ethical issue with their behavior and how they go about accomplishing certain things.
For example, to really boil all that down, since it may be kind of complicated, the easiest way to describe it is to sit down and say, well, using a bomb threat in DC is not an ethically sound way to voice your concerns and to accomplish a thing.
It is morally wrong to go that far to that extent.
That's what people say.
So we're always having a conversation about ethics.
It's just a question of having that conversation about ethics in what particular context.
Yeah, no, I think you're right.
I absolutely do think you're right.
I think one of the things, though, is that people, you know, the social justice warriors, they're provocators.
A lot of them are deliberate provocators.
A lot of them study critical theory, which is almost entirely designed to rile up your opponent and make them lose the debate by losing their head.
And I think a lot of people aren't prepared for that.
And they have not got themselves mixed up, but they're letting their hatred of certain social justice warriors come ahead of why they hate them.
Maybe I'm not elucidating that well.
No, you're absolutely right.
It's important.
No, go ahead.
Okay.
First of all, I wanted to let Sargon know it's actually been stuck on my avatar in YouTube because you muted me, which I understand why you had to do that.
Yeah, yeah, sorry.
I don't know why it's stuck on that.
Well, because you selected me so you could mute me.
Ah, right.
Oh, yeah.
I didn't even realize I could select people.
Shit.
How do I unselect people?
Just click on me again, I think.
Oh, good shout.
Thanks for telling me.
I had no idea.
I'm such an amateur.
But beyond that, I mean, the scope of what we're trying to do, I mean, what the panel is intended to do is, yes, the core focus is ethics, but the core ethical question at hand is, has the positions of Gamergate been fairly presented in the role of the journalists to make the case in an honest, intellectually charitable way,
where you don't present a straw man version of the argument, and you don't pick out the absolute worst person that can make that argument, but you make an honest case of who is saying what and what their intentions are.
So you're going to have the opportunity in that setting to say, yes, we are about more than women in game development or more than railing against social justice warriors.
We have this entire range of opinions that we have not been allowed to say to you because this other group decided that there was no discussion to be had.
Yeah, and that is fundamentally what people have been having a problem with.
You know, it's interesting, you mentioned the women in gaming.
It's just not something that ever comes up when you're not dealing directly with the opposition to Gamergate.
It's only them that bring that up.
It's fear-mongering, frankly.
Well, yes.
I mean, I'm not a partisan in Gamergate, okay?
I've been an extremely interested observer.
And the disconnect between what was said outside of Gamergate about Gamergate and what Gamergate actually does when they're talking to each other is just huge.
But yet, nobody wants to go and actually look at Gamergate.
They think that if they go to Gamergazi or someplace like that and just see these cherry-picked bits of people saying or doing stupid things, that they're informed.
And they're not.
And it was the role of journalists to inform people.
And I think it's hard to say that they did not fail at that.
And that really needs to be addressed.
I'm very heartened to hear that, to be honest.
I mean, it's one of those things that, I mean, when we've been doing this for months, you know, we've suffered the slings and arrows.
And there have been times where, I mean, Oliver, I'm sure you felt this way, where it feels like literally no one is going to listen to you.
You know you have sensible, rational points that you are trying to make, but nobody is interested in listening because the problem we're having is with the media.
And they will talk to The Guardian, for example.
There was a leaked email from Le Alexander that was going around The Guardian, where they were just basically telling each other, don't talk about Gamergate until Le Alexander, one of the principal antagonists of Gamergate, contacts them about it.
I mean, I don't want to say they're colluding, but that seems like they are colluding, you know.
Like setting the money.
I think colluding may be a strong word to use.
Journalists are by nature, they tend to follow the herd.
They look for the story where the other journalists are going for the story.
And because they're in the business of stringing words together, they are particularly open to being sold a narrative.
And I think it was just a matter of once they established in their own minds that they were defending women in the industry against these misogynist hordes, they just kind of stopped paying attention to any evidence that didn't prove that.
And I think that's the worst case that you have.
Not a conspiracy so much as simply a case of groupthink gone wrong.
Well, no, I didn't want to use the term conspiracy.
And I use collusion in the loosest sense, but I mean, we know that they have colluded.
I mean, there is the Game Jeno Pros list where, I mean, it's the it's direct, where they're trying to organize or almost like organize policy, like they're an organization.
Like, all of these disparates or what should be disparate sites have are all on the same team or something, you know?
You know what I'm talking about, don't you, Oliver?
Yes, really what Sargon is trying to describe here is the concept of people not so much as reporting the news as they are trying to affect the news.
You know, that was one of the main issues that came out of Game Journal Pros, where you have reporters pressuring other reporters who are their competition, and they're trying to say, you don't need to write about this thing.
It's like, well, wait a minute, you're not my boss.
You don't tell me what I can and can't write.
My boss tells me what I can and can't write.
It's just based on that thought pattern alone, it raises eyebrows.
It sets off alarms for people.
And just as Sargon is trying to describe what happened with The Guardian, they're saying, well, we're not going to talk about this until Lee Alexander, which just as Sargon said, is one of the prime instigators of all of this stuff.
You're not speaking on this until the very corrupted person and the questionable person that we've all been discussing, you're not going to speak on this until you talk to that person.
The biggest issue here is just looking at this as a whole and going, wow, we say there's some major issues going on with the media.
We're pointing to all these examples, definitive examples, their own words, not taking the things that they're saying out of context.
We're just boom, laying it out right there.
And then people are actually trusting that very corrupt media to give them the story in question, rather than looking at the charges and going, okay, well, these people are making these claims here.
Let's examine their actual evidence that they're putting forth here and see if those things are factually correct.
They're just going, no, I'm not going to believe that because I'm not going to believe that because I'm not going to believe that.
Rather than exactly, that case needs to be made.
And the point is that I'm trying to reach is it's not our place as the committee to make that case.
It's to understand what's happening well enough to know who can make that case well and invite them to participate in this process and make their case.
We need to respect the scope of our remit.
We're acting as agents for Michael Koretzky in this, and it's not, even if we have positions or opinions, our scope is simply to look at the range of opinion that is represented in Gamergate and try to get people into this panel that can represent that range and do it well.
And there's something I wanted to say about that panel, or I'm sorry, about that committee.
I've been looking over the list of the short list that you have on all sides over the positives and the negatives.
And particularly in regards to Annie Gamergate, if anyone from Annie Gamergate is listening, based on that short list, which there are more speakers on that side from what I saw than there are for Pro Gamergate, you've got a pretty wide range of people who can speak on this topic.
I mean, the people on that list are the exact same people that you've used to lead your charge, and they are the same people who you've all rallied behind.
So, you know, I think that if there's people to be picked, that is the list of people to be picked who are either incredibly vocal or they've spoken in the media as well, or many people are standing behind those individual people.
And it's just, you know, looking at it as it is, you know, I'm actually impressed with this committee for making the choices that they did to represent the ante point of view and even some of the neutrals as well.
I mean, it's like, huh, you've actually haven't seen who is on the short list.
Has anyone got a link I can have a look at?
Yeah, John, can you pull that up for him?
Yeah, I have the paste bin right here.
And just a note on the short list, it's not a tentative.
The committee needs to meet again, and we're going to add more names and discuss who's on there and maybe take a few off.
You know, and it's the usuals.
No, it's the usuals of which you would expect, you know.
There's even...
There's journalists even on that side, not just ideologues.
Just off top of head, I believe I saw Totillo, Brian Crescente, Brianna Wu.
I think I saw Leigh Alexander on there.
I can quickly read it off if you want.
Yes, please.
Kyle Orland, Ben Katera, Leigh Alexander, Catherine Clark is a congresswoman, James Fudge, Brianna Wu, Bob Chipman, Chris Grant, Christopher Plante, Brian Crescente, Mark Bernstein, Jim Sterling, Danny O'Dwyer, Dale North, Pixie Jenny, who I'd like on there, Catherine Cross, Kathleen Dewey, Arthur Chu, and Chris Cluey.
That's the ante.
And the neutrals would be Alistair Pinsoff, Derek Smart, Alexander Makris, and Eric Kane, who I think are all excellent choices as well.
I think they could accurately represent either side, to be honest.
Right, which is what really impressed me because it's a widespread of the loudest of voices, I suppose I would say, on their side who have their own points and they keep continually trying to stress those points.
And as Korecky said, this is the most neutral of grounds that you're going to end up speaking on.
And if they don't even want to meet on that ground with only key individuals who represent a certain set of things, a certain set of personalities, then where are you going to have this discussion?
This is not about having a discussion for these people.
They don't want to have a discussion.
They may say they want to have a discussion, but any time they're invited to a discussion, they do everything possible and they basically tuck tail and run at every single opportunity.
I'm sure people saw what happened with Jason Schreier and I like a week and a half back, where I just had commentary about articles being written, as I usually do, and then he just suddenly pops up and tries to jump in my shit.
And he had another thing coming.
I don't care who I'm having a conversation with.
If you come at me straight, proper, and not acting crazy, I'm going to give you the same kind of conversation.
I'm only going to escalate as far as you do.
If you come at me talking fucking crazy, I'm going to come right back at you talking crazy, and then we can de-escalate when you calm the hell down.
But I'm just not going to let somebody come get in my face and get nonsensical with me and trying to treat me like they know who the hell I am.
It's like, you don't know.
I missed that.
Oh, basically, he ended up showing up and just out of nowhere.
I was like, okay.
And he's like, who are you?
And I'm like, who are you?
And I was like, yeah, I'm not your shield.
I'm the person that you have specifically made it a point to avoid for eight months straight.
And, you know, people sat back and they were just watching this go back and forth.
I was like, you know, you want to talk about this stuff.
Let's go ahead and talk about it.
You know, I'd love to have you on a stream or whatever.
You know, DM me.
He's like, well, you're spamming my mentions.
I'm like, motherfucker, you came and jumped and started talking to me first.
Don't come over here, start a conversation, and then accuse me of shit.
Just in case anyone's wondering, Jason Schrei is a Kotaku journalist who declared that Kotaku was not staffed by bloggers.
It was staffed by journalists, but then proceeded to say something along the lines of objectivity is a silly thing to strive for.
Nobody at Kotaku will ever claim to attempt to be objective.
And this gained a lot of traction, as you can imagine.
And so he then went on to write an article saying that he wasn't objective again.
I don't really see how that was helping his point.
But yeah, so that's the level of journalism you'll expect from Kotaku.
You know, and this is the big thing.
Like, when we sit down and we look at this potential platform, it's really important to realize that value that we've all been talking about.
For eight months, people have been saying, you're not giving me an opportunity to speak.
You're not letting our concerns be heard.
You're not letting them be addressed.
You know, to even think about what Mark Kern went through.
And he's like, you know, you're not even giving right of reply, which is very unethical in and of itself.
And now Mark Kern just will not have anything to do with the media as far as speaking regarding his own works.
He's just like, no, I'm not doing it because it is that bad.
It is that bad of a situation where people are now declining speaking to the media.
They would rather not reach their audience and customers because of, well, the circus that this has become.
For us in Gamergate, looking at this situation and realizing what a huge get it is, it's about looking at the long game and things like that.
I've told people in the past, I said, this is not a sprint.
It's always been a marathon of who can outlast who.
Every now and again we see anties dropping out and so on and so forth.
They can't continue to fight against us and the concerns about their unethical behaviors and the things that they do.
And this is that opportunity to sit down in front of journalists, real journalists, not hobbyist reporters, no, people who have done this for potentially decades in some cases.
And these are the things that they want to know about.
The whole reason, the whole reason this has even come about was because of Gamergate.
There's someone of a smaller, much smaller voice, I would say, in Gamergate who showed up in the SPJ ethics chat.
And it was because of their commentary and them being involved in that chat that is making this happen in the first place.
And I don't think that those people are being recognized.
It was the Ivy Clover and Zetta Zeta Zeta.
It was their commentary.
Yeah, it was their commentary that got Koretsky's attention.
And so we need to make sure that we're looking at those things and realizing that this is the discussion that people always said they wanted to be had.
And we've got journalists taking us seriously.
Koretsky's going, hey, these guys are ethically legit.
I'm not paraphrasing that.
He wrote that himself.
How I know Gamergate is ethically legit.
The things that we are talking about and discussing are valid points.
He said that himself.
Now, there may be things that he doesn't agree with, and he's been very, you know, upfront and clear about that.
He's like, well, I don't agree with this.
And, you know, I'm sure he's going to elaborate on those things in the future and in additional casts and posts and so on and so forth.
But the fact remains that this is the place that, or this is the type of event that people wanted.
They wanted Gamergate to be heard.
And for people to not want to take advantage of that opportunity after we waited eight months for that, I think would be a grave mistake.
I think that there's several things involved there.
I mean, one is that, I mean, as the committee and Michael Koretzky in particular, we are concerned, we've talked to each other, and those emails and everything will come out about how we need to make sure that it's not just the loudest voices that are heard, that there is a channel by which some of the less prominent people can get their input into it without it all degenerating into chaos.
And we're tossing around various ideas for how to do that, and we're open to hearing others.
But another factor is, I mean, I especially, my fascination with Gamergate as a social event came about because I was watching what the trolls were doing.
And I have been digging through some of the worst sewers on the internet.
I have seen things I never, ever wanted to see.
Bathomet broke me.
I can't go back there.
It just gives me nightmares just thinking about it.
But the fact is, we cannot ignore that trolls have been active, and a lot of times they've been driving the bus.
And trying to keep their influence to a minimum and keep them from poisoning this is a big challenge that we are going to be wrestling with clear up until it happens.
I think this is the major crutch of Gamergate is that it's a hashtag.
So, you know, it's an internet movement.
Anyone can do, well, anything really regarding it.
And so you're going to get trolls.
There's no getting around it.
Yeah, we're taking that as a given.
I mean, we're not saying there's some magic bullet that will get rid of the trolls.
We're just accepting.
We're just, I want to acknowledge that we know the trolls are out there.
We're trying to allow for compensating for their influence and trying to extract the meaningful sense of the community out of all of the noise that the trolls generate to try to get their version of things to be what everybody sees.
And it is a big problem.
Gamergate members have long known it, though.
I mean, you've got like Margaret Pless, who almost right from the start was running what they call the Gamergate Harassment Patrol.
If they see harassment and it looks like it's coming from anyone who might be attributed to Gamergate, they get on it and report it to Twitter.
That's the best they can do.
And that's what they've done.
And they've done it bloody consistently.
I've seen that.
I mean, like I said, I've been watching all this very closely over the last eight, nine months.
I mean, I've seen the efforts, and I've seen how the trolls reacted to that, where they started attacking, for example, Mike Cernovich.
I mean, I don't have an opinion about who Mike Cinerovich is as a person, but I'm pretty sure that the reason that Mike Cernovich became the focus of so much scrutiny was because he was leading the charge on the Gamergate Harassment Patrol and trying to make that an ongoing viable thing, and they wanted to shut him down.
I've got no doubt.
I mean, he's not afraid of the opposition at all either.
So he's bold.
And he's a lawyer, so he knows the legality of what he does as well.
But yeah, I mean, it's been an interesting eight months.
There's no denying it.
Right, okay.
Is there anything else we wanted to go over?
Sure, sure.
Just like, again, just a couple of quick points, things like that.
Just following up on the idea of airplay in and of itself and what it's going to do.
On my previous stream, I talked about this is a huge opportunity to basically drag people out into the sunlight, so to speak.
This is why we're currently watching, like I can't remember who it was earlier.
And he said, you know, he saw some people who were disagreeing with just the concept of airplay happening in the first place.
But also something I've seen happen today was many of the social justice types and Gamergazi and so on and so forth, they're frothing at the mouth over this even happening to begin with.
And there's been talk back and forth of not even thinking that any of them will show to airplay.
Many of us have said as such, we don't think they would show up for this.
We just don't think that they would.
And of course, Correzio is like, well, why?
And it's like, well, they don't want to talk to us.
These are the people who utilize blockbots when you say, hey, could you expand on an idea or expand on a thought, just to give some examples of tweets that I've seen, and this just ends up being blocked.
These are people who don't want to have a discussion in the first place.
They're the people who quite literally put their fingers in their ears and do the la la la, I can't hear you thing.
So when we look at airplay as a situation, it always comes back to it, you know, all the paths lead to win conditions as far as this is about ethics and behaviors of people and how that has a type of reach and so on and so forth.
It always comes back to a win condition for us just based on that alone.
Like win condition one, they don't even bother to show up.
Okay, so we get to go and sit in a room and talk to these journalists about what's happened over the past eight months and why it's here in the first place and the concerns that we have regarding the entire industry caused by it.
Okay, great.
That's a fantastic win condition, too.
They show up.
We're still sitting in a room talking to a bunch of journalists about ethics and the things that we've seen for the past eight months.
And then they argue about, well, no, it's about harassment.
Okay, and none of these journalists who have actually covered very major stories, including business, just general life stories, some of them will have actually been to damn war zones in their lives.
And they're just going to sit there, look at this stuff, the stuff that they're presenting.
And I have no doubt that some of them are just going to laugh and go, are you serious?
So again, it turns into a win condition.
In my opinion, the only fail is when no one shows up.
And for me, I'm more interested in seeing Gamergate get the vindication that it deserves.
I've watched and had conversations with many of you over the past eight months, and many of you have become a part of my life.
And seeing what this is all about and seeing what has happened, what has transpired, and seeing, I guess, various levels of despair from people.
And it hasn't changed over those eight months.
It still comes down to why is this happening to me?
Why am I being treated this way?
I didn't do anything.
Just as John was saying, I don't want to be called a misogynist because I didn't do anything.
People were just hanging out.
And then suddenly there's this huge attack on you, huge attack on your hobby.
There's an attack on your industry.
All of these things happened unprovoked.
They quite literally came out of left field.
And now you are having disturbing ideologues coming down and dictating how this industry is going to go when they have absolutely no interest in this industry to begin with.
But it was an opportunity for them to strike.
And it was an opportunity for them to step out and hit what they saw and perceived as low-hanging fruit, not realizing that they walked into the house of people who will quite literally throw themselves at a problem over and over and over again or at a wall until they bust through it.
It's like, well, you picked the wrong people to mess with.
Like, we're trained for this.
This is what we do.
We do it for fun.
I have seen a lot of steely resolve coming out of people from Gamergate, I have to say.
But yeah, no, no, I'm very, I mean, I'll tweet this link to a Game of Gazi post, and And the title is, Can You Think of Anything Worse for Gamergate than having four Gators in a Room with an audience packed full of actual journalists?
It's like, why would we be begging for it if it would be so bad for us?
They've constructed this narrative in their head where every person who supports Gamergate is some terrible woman-hating harasser on the internet that sends death threats and bomb threats and all this sort of stuff.
And I wonder how much of it is projection.
I really do.
I think part of it is simply, I mean, with social movements that involve extremists, you usually see as they age and lose attention that eventually you're left with just a core of the most extreme.
So there's this assumption that since they say Gamergate was an extremist movement, therefore, obviously now that it's fading into the past, it must be boiling down to ever more extreme, ever more unpleasant people.
And again, that's just not fitting.
I'm not a Gamergator.
I would disagree with the Gamergate consensus on so many things, but yet I want to have that conversation with them.
I want them to be at the table.
And I watch them having their discussions.
And these are not, yeah, there's some assholes in there.
There's some hateful people in there.
There's always that guy.
And people just try to talk around him and try to avoid him and generally are trying to have constructive discussions about what they see as important stuff.
And even if I don't agree with them, I want those people at the table.
I want to talk to them.
I want that guy to get marginalized and not have so much cover for his being a jerk and have the actual normal, reasonable people with points to make that I might not agree with coming forward to have that conversation.
I think one of the things that they this I always find baffling.
The only winning move against trolls is not to play.
It's to give them no attention.
Don't feed them.
And feeding them just encourages other people who think, oh, I might troll them to think, well, I'll get a response and I will do it.
And so to give them all of this response, I mean, they publicize when they're getting threats.
And that is the absolute opposite of what the FBI will advise you to do if you receive what you think is a genuine threat.
They will say, don't publicize it, just report it.
And they do the opposite.
They don't report it, but they spread it all over the internet.
And so I mean, that leads me to conclude they don't think that they are serious threats.
Well, there's a maximum of game design.
There's a maximum of, well, it's from management, but we use it in game design of you get the behavior you reward.
And simply recognizing a behavior is rewarding it when it comes to the trolls.
If they do something outrageous and you pay attention, they win.
Yeah.
And exactly.
It's going to incentivize other people who think it'd be a laugh and they're going to do it.
And it's a self-feeding mechanism that creates more problems than it's worth, and you could have just ignored them at the start.
So that's what I would advocate for anyway.
All right, is there anything else we need to cover?
Just off top of head, I guess some of the stuff that's going to be coming down the line to give people kind of a heads up on this stuff, because we've been at this long enough to know how these things go.
And we know patterns, we know behaviors, we know how to predict things.
There's predictive responses to everything, just like many people were like, oh, yeah, antes aren't going to go for this.
They're going to flip their lids.
Turn around within a day and a half, two days, they start flipping their lids.
But we're also very keenly aware of antagonists and bad actors and so on and so forth that have shown up.
Just like this is what happened with the SPJ Ethics Week chat where people came in there and started flooding it with porn.
And Koretsky himself just sat down and he was just like, oh, well, people are posting horrible things.
And then that was it for him.
Like, he was like, yeah, this is in fact not anything close to the kinds of behaviors I've seen out of people in the past doing reporting and things like that.
So I hope that people would realize that people like Koretsky, who handle real journalism, the people who go out and cover a police beat where they see people shot up bloody in the street and all kinds of crazy stuff, they're not going to be phased by that.
I think that there are people who don't even realize that this is the kind of people that we're going to be dealing with.
And obviously, anytime someone sees an opportunity where they can rile people up and cause a mess, and so on and so forth, it's no different than someone just taking advantage of any other situation to, well, I guess, you know, generate lulls and that kind of stuff.
And you're going to see that kind of stuff with this.
And people need to stop letting themselves getting affected by that and just keep going on and going forward.
And just remember, we already knew that there were bad actors and there were third-party trolls and so on and so forth who were just doing certain things to get rises out of people.
And then obviously now antis are even starting to realize, okay, yeah, there are third-party trolls doing stuff and so on and so forth.
Well, it's going to continue happening.
It was happening then, it's happening now.
It will probably happen in the foreseeable future.
Why?
Because, well, some people don't have anything better to do and they figured that's how get the jollies off for that day.
So just remember that we're going to see these things go on.
And these guys have a very difficult job of trying to put together this thing to make sure that we have the conversation that many of us were asking for in the first place.
And so I just hope that people wouldn't get disheartened by those things.
And I also don't believe that the overall way of doing things, I don't think that's going to change in any way, shape, or form prior to airplay, nor do I think it's going to happen after airplay.
Just as we said before, looking at this, the best course of action, I believe, is finding the people who can best express this information and put these things out there and talk about the past eight months.
Well, it'll be a year at that point.
Whoever can sit down and consolidate the key stuff that's happened over the past year in an eight-hour window of time.
And they're going to be dealing with various circumstances.
There is going to be things like rebuttals and points of view, and someone is going to say things that you don't want other people saying.
And all you have to do is just be able to sit down, be quiet, use your manners like you were taught growing up, and basically get the info out there.
Whether you agree with Gamergate or not is basically going to end up being irrelevant.
You don't have to agree with Gamergate to believe in ethics, ethics, or ethics, regardless of whether or not Gamergate believes in ethics or not and thinks that they're important.
So at the end of the day, we are going to have an ethics discussion, whether they like it or not.
That's just kind of how that's going to go.
Cool.
Okay.
Was there anything else?
Dave, do you just want to introduce yourself and then I could briefly, just so that we could make sure everybody here still listening knows as much about us as possible?
Yeah, I kind of jumped into the middle of things without ever actually saying who I am.
I'm Dave Rickey.
I've been a game developer, mostly design for mostly online games for the last 15 years.
Before that, I did really boring business apps that nobody cared about.
In my spare time, I've played internet gaming journalist.
That all you had to say?
That's, I mean, yeah, the rest of it I pretty much put in there.
I mean, I right now I'm going to school, I'm getting a degree because I kind of hit a wall career-wise.
I've had a lot of people that I'm friendly with in the industry tell me that getting anywhere near this is a mistake, and they're probably right.
But it seemed like the most important discussion in game culture possibly ever, and nobody wanted to be part of it, and there was just something wrong with that.
Um, so my name is John Smith.
I'm a 19-year-old in high school, but more importantly, and I'll find the poll quote here.
I'm a concerned consumer who's working to spread and disseminate as much information between as many people as possible and present everything I can to the committee.
Now, I personally just want to wake up in the morning and not be branded as a terrorist or part of a hate group.
And I'm here to do my part or to right any wrongs towards that goal.
So I'm posting in as many communities as possible.
I'm on Kautaku in Action.
I'm on Twitter.
I'm in the Achan threads.
And I'm just trying to make sure that everybody else in the committee, William Usher, Alumbakari, Dave Rickey, and myself, know as much of what you guys are talking about as possible, and that you guys know as much of what we're doing as possible.
All of our emails are public.
All of our Google Hangout conversations are hosted on my YouTube channel.
The central hub for all of our information is boards.38chan.net forward slash AP.
If you have any questions for the committee, get in contact with me or go there.
My contact information is there.
And I just want to make sure that this event goes as best as it possibly can.
I need to put in one caveat about the everything public because this will become known and I want it out in the open.
There are times we're talking with someone directly, either as individuals or as a committee, and we've offered them anonymity as a condition for them having that discussion with us.
And in those cases, when we're talking to and about those people, then that goes off the record and won't be referred to in the publicly released emails.
But if it comes rises to the level of actually discussing their inclusion or exclusion from the panels, that will be publicly discussed.
Thank you for clarifying.
I think they're fairly acceptable terms for everyone, I would imagine.
Was there anything else before I call them into this, I suppose?
Just final thoughts.
You know, look at the people who are trying to be voices of reason and make sure that things are heard.
Oh, there was one thing that someone asked me to see if that could get addressed.
I thought it was just an interesting point of view, and I wanted to share that just a quick aside.
Someone from Australia was saying that I hope that people make sure to take the time and talk about how this isn't just a North America problem, that it is an international problem.
And I just did think that was a really good point to bring up.
I know that Sargon is on that short list of people, and obviously, he's British.
So people do need to make sure that they realize that there are people from other countries who are a part of that list, even Milo as well.
They're not Americans.
And I don't think that there's going to be any doubt that the international issues and things that have come up over the past months and things that we've seen happen, such as GTA 5 getting pulled from store shelves in Australia because of the type of astroturfing that social justice warriors like to get up to and do.
So I think that it would be without a doubt a certainty that people who aren't just in North America or not just in the United States, I think that they're going to talk about those issues and things that have come up.
Because no matter how you slice it, it is something that is affecting this industry.
The same people that we're talking about are the people who basically sit down and try to do assassination of, for example, Japanese games and those titles.
And I know for many people, those are titles that matter to them.
And, you know, hell, it was just a whatchamacallit, like, they're all up in arms freaking out over an action figure for Quiet from Metal Gear Solid V.
Yeah, I would kind of consider that to be an international issue.
And that would be a thing that people talk about and discuss.
So don't think that, you know, for whatever reason, even if someone from your country isn't there, that people aren't going to talk about those things.
Those are very relevant talking points and things that are a concern.
They're issues that aren't tied directly into location.
Everyone's got these different problems, especially based on their own country and the different political landscape that's going on in those places now.
But they're all branching off based on a certain set of behaviors.
It's no different than we're seeing absolute idiocy happening in the American press, but we're seeing that same kind of idiocy happen even in the European and British press and so on and so forth.
Just looking at The Guardian and that article about, and suddenly Gamergate knobs on Mars, it's like, what the hell is wrong with you, man?
You're talking crazy.
That's amazing.
That was just amazing.
We're like, where did this come from?
Why wouldn't we get something talked about?
Like, apparently we're going to fucking Mars now.
Like, sure.
It's the only place where we can go to play video games without people calling us terrorists, then I'll go to Mars.
Yeah.
It's like, it's such a silly stretch, and it's such a silly thing that came out of their mouths, but it was just somebody trying to score points.
The closest I'm getting to Mars is a Mars bar.
Come on now.
Exactly.
Honestly, that was just amazing.
And I love that that paints Gamergate is the people who are eventually going to build a rocket and go to Mars.
I mean, we're a smart group, but we've got our limits.
Right.
Fucking Mars, honestly.
What the fuck are they thinking?
Sorry.
But I just wanted to make sure that that was something that someone brought up, and it was a really good point in things that are over how this is going to go.
And I just want to make sure that that got addressed.
And at least something people are thinking about.
You know, on my last stream about this yesterday, I just talked about how make sure that you guys are having conversations.
That's the number one thing that people in Gamergate do best.
Surprisingly enough, anyone else will say they can't have conversations?
No, they're really, really good at having conversations.
We all are good at having conversations and testing ideas and seeing how they work and finding the holes in our own strategies and things like that.
And I think that that's super important.
You should continue to do that, just as we always been.
And this, I don't see this situation.
I don't see airplay as any different than any other thing that's been done in the past.
Really, I think what you're looking at is just who are the bodies that are going to go and stand there and talk about the same stuff we've all been talking about and making sure that those points are covered, addressed adequately.
Well, one of the things that's come up in relation to this is eventually we're going to have our list and we're probably going to have it set up where it's a range of the most desired and then moving on down.
And the matter of funding the people actually going, getting on planes and flying there is going to be ticked over to the community.
And we're going to try to crowdsource the funding for that.
And it's going to be a matter of, well, if you come up with this much money, then this many people can go.
And if you come up with that plus this much, then these many more people can go.
And an issue that's going to come up in that, I mean, for example, some can self-fund.
Milo has already said that he'll self-fund if he's selected.
Other cases, I mean, it's really expensive to fly somebody from Australia to Florida.
So that's going to be a concern.
But it's maybe one we just leave up to the community.
Where do you want to spend money to get somebody from Australia to come to Florida?
If it's the right person, I'd put money into it.
Yeah, I think many people would.
Yeah, you got 10 bucks from me sort of thing.
You know what I mean?
I think that we could raise the funds to transport whoever needs to be there to where it needs to be.
An interesting fact on that, Mark had mentioned being not Mark, Michael.
Michael Koretzky had mentioned that he was working with the SPJ that they might try and crowdsource some of this.
And he said the SPJ might be willing to raise $1 for every crowdsourced dollar up to a certain point.
So if that does end up happening and that works out, just know that that might be something that is happening.
Keep in mind, that's speculation.
That's not a promise from the SPJ.
I don't want people running off and getting angry because the SPJ decides they can't do that.
Right.
That's the current plan.
That's what he's hoping to do, but it's not set in stone.
It's not confirmed yet.
So just keep that in mind.
Okay.
I'm pretty sure that has been made clear.
I'm actually just waiting for one last person to join who says they're doing a documentary about Gamergates, but they haven't turned up.
And I don't know where they are.
I would be interested to hear what they have to say.
So I suppose, I mean, is there anything else you guys want to cover while you're here?
We've got some free time.
No, sir.
Unless there's any questions or anything that you had for me.
If there's any questions in the chat for us as the committee that we can clarify now while people are listening, it makes my job a lot easier.
Go ahead, please.
Have you got links to the chat, guys?
Yeah, I have the YouTube stream pulled up in another window.
Yeah, yeah.
Go ahead.
If there's any questions, please be like.
I'm actually just going to pop the bathroom.
So, yeah, go ahead.
All right.
Keep in mind, they're running about 30 seconds to a minute behind us, so they're just barely hearing this about the questions.
Right.
I'm seeing a lot of questions about welding.
Yeah, that seems to have been something they went off on.
Yeah, something about the A team.
It doesn't seem like we're going to get any decent questions from the chat here now that I'm looking at it.
Yeah, it's being spammed pretty badly.
I'm pretty sure most of the genuine participants have kind of given up on it.
Not that there isn't anybody there.
They just lost in all of this.
Yeah, kind of sad.
You know, here's something I saw people bring up, John, multiple times.
They said, you know, like, he's got kind of a generic name.
Sounds sketchy.
John Smith.
That was my action when I first saw it.
Well, I mean, obviously, not my birth name or anything, but you've got to have some online moniker.
We know who John Smith actually is, okay?
He's not a mystery to the committee or to Koretsky.
He's just for obvious reasons, he doesn't want to drag this home and drop it on his parents' doorstep.
Though they have been asking me quite frequently what the hell I've been doing, and it's been pretty fun trying to describe it to them.
Well, there's the answer for that: John Welder Welder Smith Shoe on Head in chat, bring in stream.
I wouldn't mind talking to Shoe on Head.
They're actually on the short list, so if they had any questions or concerns, I'd love to hear any points they have to bring up.
I don't see any harm in that.
Did someone say that Shoe on Head is in the chat, is she?
Yeah, they said bring her on, and if she's willing, then we'll have her on and answer any questions she has.
Or listen to anything she has to say.
I have a question for John Smith.
Paint with all the colors of the wind.
Yes, I can.
Yes, I can.
Sure.
I painted them all on Plymouth fucking rock when I landed there.
Oh, dear God.
Even Shoe on Head is giving us for the rise tonight.
Oh, and for the guys in the chat that just asked, my gay porn name is Rock Hardman.
That's a great name.
You know, I prefer blast hard cheese.
Uh, oh well.
Um, yeah, it doesn't seem like uh I mean, I can start uh looking through any of the other uh like Twitter and stuff and see if I'm getting any questions there.
Um, Zan is back in here.
Yeah, randomly pop back in, actually, because um I guess the chat in the YouTube chat didn't notice this.
They're too concerned with welding.
William Usher is live on A-chan right now and is asking about whether or not we should send Milo Yiannopoulos to the SPJ airplay thing.
He already had a sort of a poll thread regarding this on Kotaku in Action.
He now has a similar thread on A-Chan.
So if you want to see At Nero Milo Yiannopoulos sent to the SPJ airplay thing regarding the panel, I guess go to that thread and ask.
And that brings up a question for you guys.
Would you guys want to see him on that panel?
Yeah, that's getting beyond the scope of what we really ought to be talking about in public.
We need to any discussions we have about who goes or who doesn't go, we want to keep in committee.
I've actually made public statements about who I want and who I don't want to go.
And I believe Alum has also in the Kotaku in Action thread.
Dave.
I know.
It just has a tendency of getting a little out of control if we start picking our favorites.
I'm not going to be saying anything about who I want.
I'm not going to speak for John.
Right, right.
And I can respect that.
For anybody who wants to hear Dave's opinion on anything he has mentioned yet, the recorded calls of our committee speaks are up on my YouTube channel.
The consensus seems to be, and I don't know if this was Dave's opinion or not.
One moment.
One moment.
Sorry about that.
Was that me, Usher, and Alum had definitely wanted Milo to come.
Now, in my honest opinion, I think it's sort of inevitable.
The man is too big of a name.
He's paying his own airfare.
If we didn't invite him, I bet he would show up anyway.
And it's kind of like leaving the elephant in the room.
So I've actually been in my second stream when we did discuss Milo, I had brought up some criticisms I had read, even though I didn't agree with them, from the A-chan boards and any other places I could find them.
And they were addressed.
And I'm not a walking encyclopedia, so I couldn't recite what the exact retort to that was by the other two members of the committee who had voiced their opinions on it.
But the committee's general consensus was that we want Milo on, yes.
Personally, I would like to see Milo on that.
Speaking in general terms, I mean, the position I've taken on Milo is just basically, yeah, he's got a lot of baggage.
He's a polarizing figure.
People either love him or hate him.
But the people who love him are a big enough chunk of the community that if we don't invite Milo, we need one hell of a good reason why not.
Or a lot of people are just going to say this is all nonsense and nobody should pay any attention at all.
Yeah, I think Milo has a good understanding of the issues.
I think he's a very good debater as well.
In fact, Milo is probably the best debater Gamergate has.
Honestly, he's amazing.
He's really good at what he does.
And like I said, he's got a very comprehensive knowledge of the issues surrounding Gamergate, and he is a journalist.
He's a professional journalist.
So he knows exactly the ethical breaches that the gaming media has been making, which is, I think, in addition to the concern about the larger culture surrounding it, it's probably another thing that professionally has piqued his interest, you know?
You know, the one thing that I saw people in chat just pointing out regarding Milo, and I think is a very good point.
They said, you know, he's writing a book on Gamergate, which I don't see anyone else doing.
So it does seem kind of a given that at the very least, the bare minimum, he has a very complex understanding of Gamergate and what has happened and what has transpired over that period of time.
And there's obviously a ton of research that goes into writing a book about a factual series of events.
And it just, you know, by the time that comes around, he'll have, well, close to a year's worth of material to research on.
So in that sense, yeah, this is just someone who has a lot of knowledge.
And for him to do something unrelated to airplay, the very thing that he's trying to do requires having an extensive and in-depth knowledge of the subjects at hand and even Gamergate's opponents in the sense of, well, he's not just got to understand Gamergate in and of itself, but he also has to understand who we've been dealing with, specifically with game journalists and those supporting game journalists.
And he's obviously going to have an in-depth knowledge and understanding of social justice warriors and who they are and what outlets they represent and so on and so forth.
And that's something that's pretty difficult to overlook.
Well, yeah, I mean, even beyond all of that, if we don't invite him, the odds are he'll come on his own.
And then what are we going to do?
Tell everybody on the panel that they can't point to Milo and ask him to come up?
That yeah, it can get pretty stupid for us pretty quick.
Okay, well, I think that's probably everything we needed to cover.
Johnny, are you the gentleman doing the Gamergate documentary?
Yes, I am.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, I can.
Would you like to give us a brief overview of what you've got?
Okay, I'll just introduce myself.
My name's not Johnny, surprisingly.
That's just Matt.
He's called Johnny Tommy Wise on the room.
If anyone gets that, then, oh, hi.
So, yeah, that's out of the way.
So basically, I'm just literally some random 17-year-old on the internet.
Hello?
If it makes you feel any better, Johnny, I'm a random 19-year-old on the internet and I'm on the committee.
And you cut out there, so keep going.
Right, so you're like two plus me.
You're like a bonus addition of me.
I like that.
That's cool.
So I've been commissioned, quote unquote, by my college, not university, God know, to make a documentary.
And I decided, hmm, well, what's important to me and I think has an unfair representation in the media as a whole.
Well, it's Gamergate, obviously.
So I've decided to do my documentary.
The aim is well the target audience will be gamergaters, non-gamer gators, people who are neutral, people who are even completely removed from the gaming world and don't know what the hell GTA stands for.
So I'd like to bring up both sides of the argument, you know, try and get some pro-gamer gated devs, some anti-devs, whoever, get them to talk on my documentary.
It's basically going to be a little timeline of what's happened, key points and events, where we are now, where we can go from this, what's everyone's opinions.
Hopefully I can create a dialogue between everyone and anyone and hopefully bring this to a happy ending, this situation.
Yeah.
Any questions?
Well, I mean, there are quite a few, but probably too many for the remaining time we've got on this hangout.
Okay.
I guess, I mean, what is how long have you been following Gamergate exactly?
Sorry?
Well, I knew of it back when, eight months ago, and I thought, hmm, that's interesting.
I don't really, when I buy a game, yeah, not really for me.
These social justice types, they're fucking idiots.
I used to watch Internet Australia.
I was like, I know who these types of people are.
Just poor bastards who's involved in arguing with these people.
And then a couple months later, I'm like, oh, wait a minute.
These people are calling gamers dead.
It's like why are they doing this?
So I was like, fuck, fuck these people.
I don't like these people.
Why are they allowed to have a say in what my money goes into?
It's not acceptable.
Since it's me rebelling against those people.
So yeah.
Okay, well, I think maybe the best thing to do would be to post using the hashtag saying that I'm creating a hashtag Gamergate documentary.
And I'm sure that people who are interested in talking about it with you will reply to you.
Yeah, I badly need some people who I can interview.
It'll only take like maybe five, ten minutes.
I'll take a small clip of that, use it in my documentary.
I'm also going to have a little questionnaire survey type thing set up somehow.
I'd love love for that to do something.
I'm just really passionate about this now.
It's time consuming.
Okay, well I've got no doubt that you'll be able to find literally thousands of people to interview in the hashtag.
So I've got you know I think that's probably the best way.
Yeah, it's just I'm struggling with anti-gamergators because surprise, surprise, none of them seem to want to talk with any of us.
So if anyone knows of any any friendlies I can contact I greatly appreciate that.
I think we're probably all blocked at this point, so your guess is as good as anyone else's.
So am I.
I don't know.
Me and David are so fresh.
You might not be blocked yet, but who knows?
Yeah, it's only a matter of time.
Exactly.
Sorry, I got dropped there for a second, Sargon.
I just had a browser crash.
But I'm going to go ahead and step out and just thanks for having me on.
And I'm just really glad that you take the time to hold these streams for everyone because it's really important to get everyone's kind of input and the things that they're looking at and observing, even things that many of us may not agree with.
But nevertheless, you get a really good feel for what people are thinking about and what they're talking about.
And getting that breadth of ideas and opinions is what helps fix situations like this and helps make things continue to move forward.
And so especially, this was just, wow, an amazingly huge stream that you had at least 1,500 people showed up to hear this stuff and have this discussion.
And I just wanted to let you know keep doing this kind of stuff because it's pretty amazing.
So thank you.
It's my pleasure, man.
No, no, my pleasure.
I'm really glad everyone could come on, and I'm really glad so many people tuned in to listen.
I always enjoy these.
I like talking to people.
So, you know, this has been, I think, very productive as well.
So, yeah, no, it's my pleasure.
I mean, I'll probably do another one in a week or so to talk with Gwen about a few things.
And I'm sure that it won't be a call-in stream, but it'll be to deal with specific issues.
But I mean, I can do another call-in stream at some point in the future.
But yeah, well, I'll put an end to the stream there then, because it's getting quite late here.
So could I just show myself real quick?
Yeah, go ahead.
It's only fair.
You can stalk me at WingIt Productions.
That's on the Twitters.
I'm also on the IRCs.
That's service called Freenode, and it's hashtag Gamergate.
You can stalk me there.
Thanks.
Okay, great.
And big thanks to John and Dave for coming on and talking to everyone.
I'm sure that everyone really appreciates it.
It's been a pleasure.
Great.
And yeah, okay.
Well, I'm sure I will speak to you guys in the future.
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