Playboy’s gaming editor, Mike Rougeau, literally aggregated Klepek’s piece and then escalated it. While Klepek later went back in and amended his piece to include Nintendo’s statement, Rougeau went in guns-a-blazin’, originally stating…
“Nintendo fired Alison Rapp, a former product marketing specialist for the video game company. Rapp in recent months found herself the target of GamerGate, a hate group that’s been harassing and threatening women and other targets online since 2014.
“GamerGate’s harassment of Rapp was triggered by the hate group’s objections over changes made in certain Japanese-developed Nintendo games, including the recent Fire Emblem: Fates, as the games underwent a process called “localization.” Localization is a process by which cultural differences between Japan and the (in some ways) more conservative West are taken into consideration”
Rougeau frames the narrative that #GamerGate harassed and bullied Rapp and Nintendo until the Big ‘N’ caved and fired Rapp. No mention of the Wayne Foundation and no mention that there was a big debate in many #GamerGate containment threads about not wanting to get Rapp fired because some felt it would make #GamerGate “as bad as SJWs”.
Interestingly enough,
Always Nintendo did actually include the information about the Wayne Foundation in their report, a report that is generally told through tweets with the added update from Nintendo. For the most part, they keep it neutral.
But what’s worse is that Rougeau’s article was spread around quite a bit before he later was informed of Nintendo’s comment and updated the piece.
Now the good part is that both sites updated their pieces. The bad part is that misreporting that this was all an anti-feminist, anti-woman, pro-Nazi ploy to pressure Nintendo to drive women out of gaming actually spread just enough to nearly get the
citogenesis effect into play.
