This tawdry scandal boils down to a young woman who was trying to get attention for a "social justice" game she developed, who then decides to shop her product. The problem is she can't, or won't, keep her legs closed as she is doing it.
When she was called on it, some gaming media decide to declare the era of the white misogynistic gamer to be over. And gamers responded.
Gaming media should congratulate themselves. They have arrived: a legitimate paid media, espousing lefitst values while denigrating those who oppose those values.
You really don't get a sense of the scandal in the linked article, but that is only because it is so weird, it defies description.
From TFA:
It was during this rising crescendo of malcontent that a sudden chorus of articles were published from numerous gaming outlets claiming, more or less, that the age of the “gamer” was over. Gamers as we knew and stereotyped them��"white, male nerds with deep-seeded fears of both reality and women��"were going extinct, and all this backlash over the Quinn scandal was a reaction to this fact. Foremost among these was a piece by Gamasutra���tm�s Leigh Alexander.
Game writers claimed that all cries of corruption in media were merely thin veils to give cover to what was, essentially, a misogynistic movement. In less than two days more than ten such articles appeared around the internet, on the one hand preaching to the choir, and on the other leading many already-upset gamers to cry foul even louder. This many articles at once all saying the same thing seemed fishy to many, though I would argue it had nothing to do with coordination and everything to do with like minds feeding off of one another.
I wrote a piece on the notion as well, criticizing both sides of the controversy: Game journalists for condescending their audiences and gamers themselves for their lack of diligence in how they critique the press and their insistence on focusing on Social Justice Warriors. …
Relationships between various indie developers, the press, and PR representatives led to more questions and theories on everything from the validity of the IGF awards, to the overall nature of the relationship between the press and the industry it covers, which many see as far too cozy. Lots of YouTube videos have been made about this. Lots of screenshots of tweets and various websites with lines drawn between various members of the press and the industry have also been created. It���tm�s a maze of allegations and connections without a solid destination.
Whether any of these theories hold water is an open question and one that, in my mind, is secondary to one very big fact: Readers have grown deeply distrustful of the gaming press. |