Innuendo Studios
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2015–2022
9:36 · 1.1M views · Jul 13, 2015
The first part of Innuendo Studios' six-part video essay series on the online hostility around Anita Sarkeesian and GamerGate. It lays out the history and the motivations of the people involved.
HN recommends the series as a nuanced analysis of online harassment, defensiveness, and gaming culture conflict.
7 comments from Hacker News
GamerGate was orchestrated by misogynistic racists on 4chan's /pol/ board. They used "ethics in journalism" as a deliberate excuse to rile people up, and tricked a large crowd of gamers into buying that excuse and thus providing them with cover and additional power. Ultimately it was a disgusting and successful attack against women and people of color. By repeating the excuse (that it was about a game review, when in fact it was an orchestrated attack, and the supposed review does not exist ), you're perpetuating a mistake (providing cover to a small group of misogynistic racists) that caused a lot of harm. I doubt you did this intentionally, so I suggest you do some more research. There is a fantastic YouTube series that goes into detail, including investigating the public record of the people behind GamerGate, here: this video If you can't watch the whole thing (although it's worth it), this part goes into the origins of GamerGate: [LINK] .
Invariably such refutations fixate on the specific examples chosen by Sarkeesian and go on to make flawed arguments like e.g. (paraphrasing): > Violence against women in XYZ is not problem because XYZ also features violence against men! Which is completely besides the point and ignores the societal context into which these games are released. Other common "critiques" leveled against Sarkeesian, that I've seen anyway, are straight up strawmen. These include gems like she's in favour of censorship or that she argues games have the ability to directly manipulate people into violence or sexism. Innuendo Studios recently posted a great analysis of this phenomenon in their "Why Are You So Angry?" video series. It's really well done and worth checking out: this video The OP reads just like an Angry Jack.
This video series does a pretty amazing job in describing those two groups and their motivations (the harassers, and those caught up with them): this video
Before continuing the conversation, can I ask you to take a moment to step back and ask yourself with honesty whether you think that these statements imply that I am saying that you are not a good person because you also behave this way. Because if so, there is a - perfectly reasonable - misunderstanding of my intent here. Read what I wrote again, more closely: all it is describing is a societal norm that I would like to get rid of. If you think you don't act that way, great! This is not an accusation, it would be a perfectly understandable response (I get defensive all the time when my GF points things out to me). At no point am I talking about you, nor saying that you are "not a real man". At no point am I saying that you are a bad person if you do or do not act this way. I'm sorry that you feel defensive, but there really is no need to. I'm not accusing you, nor would I blame you or any man for having toxic masculine behaviours. It's not your fault to be raised in a society with those norms, after all. If you have the time, please watch Why Are You So Angry? by Innuendo Studios[0]. It also goes into how societal norms about good and evil train us to think things are about us and personal attacks when they aren't (the video highlights gamergate, but the process is not gender specific). But the short version is: people tend to get very defensive about topics like sustainability, feminism, racism, animal rights, etcetera, because it makes them question whether they are good p
It doesn't matter what you do, if it experiences some success, no matter how fleeting someone somewhere will get really upset about it. I believe that part of this is connected to the inversion of small-scale private conversations into large-scale text-driven public ones without us really being fully aware of the difference. Without the context of non-verbal communication or the closeness towards people we've never met we react differently online to offline. I think it's important not to lose sight of the idea that people can blow up online, call you every name under the sun and still be perfectly good people. I found Innuendo Studios' Why Are You So Angry[1] and SSC's varieties of Argumentative Experience[2] really helpful in coming to terms with my own online behaviour. There's also a pg essay[3] that's fairly relevant. I particularly enjoyed Rationality.org's double-cruxing approach[4]. Right now I'm focusing on avoiding continuing discussions at the point they stop adding overall. Nobody's perfect but it's definitely keeping my internal Angry Jack at bay. [1] - this video [2] - [LINK] [3] - [LINK] [4] - [LINK]