On Ethics and Free Speech

I'd like to say a few quick words in regards to the biggest concern regarding GamerGate: ethics and free speech.

Ethics is the philosophy of right and wrong. It is the study of ideas that define what behaviors and actions can be seen as righteous or condemn able. There are several schools of moral philosophy, including Ayn Rand's Objectivism, Immanuel Kant's Intentionalism, and John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, to name but a select few. To learn more, here's Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics

Free Speech is a bit trickier to define, but let's give it a shot. Ideally, Free Speech means that we can say whatever we want without consequence. This, however, is impossible, because every action must have a reaction. I know that sounds vague, so allow me to present an example. Say someone were to yell "FIRE!!!" in a crowded theater, thus causing a panic. Is that person excising free speech? In a way, yes, but what their action caused a panic, so the person must be punished. How about we give an example closer to our interests? Say someone uses their Twitter to harass, say, Anita Sarkeesian. Is she (let's make her a female to be fair. Not everyone who hates Sarkeesian, after all, is male) using her right to Free Speech? Well, technically, yes. But she's also committing an unethical act. Harassment means the continued and unwanted actions towards one party by another. This is illegal, and continuous harassment can get you in trouble.

A Tale of Two Feminists

To you, my readers, I present a tale of fiction. The characters, though based on real people, are entirely fictional.

There once were two very different feminists, hereby referred to as Alice and Betty. Both girls believed in Girl Power, both girls wanted careers that were traditionally thought of as "boy's only" jobs. And both girls wanted to be involved with video games.

However, that was where the two were very different. Alice loved video games, you see, for she grew up with them. She played many, many games on her Playstation 1, her Nintendo DS, and her Playstation 2. She saved up for a Playstation 3 and bought the system herself, with her own money! Alice loved gaming above all things, and wanted to make her own game, work for a big gaming company. When she was younger, Alice read all about Rieko Kodama, and said "I wanna be like her."

Open Letters to Zoe Quinn, Phil Fish, Adam Sessler, Devin Faraci, Samantha Allen, and Kotaku

Dear Adam Sessler:

  Your words are those of a comfortable man, a man who has never in his life had to confront the horrors of war save from the safe distance provided by a couch and a television set, or in this new day and age, a chair and a computer. Let me show you some pictures, Mr Sessler:
(CAUTION TO READERS: THE FOLLOWING IMAGES MAY BE UPSETTING FOR YOUNGER AUDIENCES)

Gamergate

It's hard to believe that the biggest controversy to hit the gaming community since Jack Thompson's anti gaming crusade started when a jilted ex boyfriend made a blog post revealing that his ex-lover, Zoe Quinn, cheated on him with several prolific members of the gaming press. It's even harder to believe that the gaming press has reacted to this controversy with censorship and attacks on their consumer base, calling gamers "irrelevant". 

Or rather, maybe what should have surprised us was that it took this long for this controversy to start, because the warning signs were all there from the get go. Consider how long gaming "journalism" has been assuming a holier-than-thou attitude towards gamers, especially in regards towards gender politics. Consider as proof Ian Miles Cheong's article "Be Respectful and Considerate", an article about the Mighty Number 9 Kickstater and the controversy surrounding Dina Abou Karam, which does little more than paint the entire controversy as being about anti feminism when it was really about anti cronyism. A link that that article here. Zoe Quinn didn't "start" this, she was just the spark that lit the fire. The fire itself was a long time coming.

Maybe this controversy should have started earlier, but right now, that doesn't matter. What DOES matter is that the movement has started, and it seems to be gaining ground. Although we gamers are disadvantaged in terms of voice power (after all, we're not the ones with big traffic websites) we do have powers that gaming "journalists" just don't match.

We have the power of consuming. We are the ones that made this industry, with our hard earned money (or in the case of our younger gamers that do not rely on an independent source of income, our parent's or guardian's hard earned money). WE are the ones that made GTA5 the entertainment juggernaut it is today. WE are the ones that made World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Halo, etc into household names. And the publishers? They know it. They know we are the ones who made their careers, that the consumer is the job creator of the market, that without us they have no jobs. When the time comes, will publishers side with the gamers that made their careers, or with the "journalists" that insult their own consumer base?

Right now as of this writing, Gamergate continues, and I predict a victory for the gaming community. But what I think should come out of this is the following:

Shit like this needs to end. We want gaming journalism to be impartial to all audiences, to be dedicated to truth based on evidence. We want a gaming journalism that reports based on facts, not on what would earn the website revenue based on how many people read their articles. We want gaming news to be titled based on what the subject is, not on what would lure more people to click the article.

We want "journalists" to face consequences for their actions. When a "journalist" compares us gamers to ISIS (the Islamic State, currently one of the most infamous terrorist groups in the world) we want that person to be disciplined, hopefully even fired. We want gaming journalists to owe up to their sources, we want them to cite, we want them to tell the truth.

We want journalists to be impartial when they report the news. We're tired of journalists that defend Anita Sarkeesian and use her word as gospel; we want journalists to question her. We want journalists to ask her what she did with the 150K dollars we donated to her for a 12 part video series that was promised to be delivered by December 2012, of which she has, as of this writing, released only 5 videos, and which has been accused of NOT reflecting a dime of the money she had been given. We want answers to these accusations: that she stole Let's Play footage, that she stole artwork, that her some of her harassment has been staged. We want journalists willing to confront the wrath of any special interests groups in order to find the truth.

What else can I say? There have been hundreds of words spoken about Gamergate, and all of these voices have said whatever needed to be said better than I could. I guess I leave you what I can only call required reading and viewing:

http://themalesofgames.blogspot.com/2014/09/gamergate-and-notyourshield.html

http://themalesofgames.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-zoe-quinn-story.html
http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp