- Joined
- Apr 25, 2019
Gamergate is the Simpsons of online movements
Infected GamerGate - Autistic MRA manchildren and the twitter feminists who love them
-
🐕 I am attempting to get the site runnning as fast as possible. If you are experiencing slow page load times, please report it.
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2018
Oh boy oh boy oh boy! They're going to change the U.S. Constitution to make Sargon President for Life after this is finished
Stay tuned:
twitter.com
Article linked in tweet:
www.nytimes.com
archive.is
Stay tuned:
Hamza Shaban on Twitter
“The NYT is out with an urgently needed project to better understand Gamergate, and its ever-present impact on individual lives, our culture and politics. Everything is Gamergate via @cwarzel, @BriannaWu, @BostonJoan and @sarahjeong https://t.co/uu4Rc8hoZI”
twitter.com
Article linked in tweet:
Opinion | How an Online Mob Created a Playbook for a Culture War
The powerful lesson of a 5-year-old harassment campaign: How to wage a post-truth information war.
Opinion | How an Online Mob Created a Playbook for a Culture War - Th…
archived 16 Aug 2019 11:47:51 UTC
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
Everything is GamerGate sounds more autistic and terrible than everything is political.Oh boy oh boy oh boy! They're going to change the U.S. Constitution to make Sargon President for Life after this is finished
Stay tuned:
View attachment 893690Hamza Shaban on Twitter
“The NYT is out with an urgently needed project to better understand Gamergate, and its ever-present impact on individual lives, our culture and politics. Everything is Gamergate via @cwarzel, @BriannaWu, @BostonJoan and @sarahjeong https://t.co/uu4Rc8hoZI”
View attachment 893691View attachment 893692View attachment 893693View attachment 893694
Article linked in tweet:
Opinion | How an Online Mob Created a Playbook for a Culture War
The powerful lesson of a 5-year-old harassment campaign: How to wage a post-truth information war.
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2019
We all know about Wu.
Hey remember when /pol/ declared war on Joan for trying to deplatform Metokur? Remember when Jeong called for literal White genocide?
Hey remember when /pol/ declared war on Joan for trying to deplatform Metokur? Remember when Jeong called for literal White genocide?
- Joined
- Jan 17, 2018
Funny how everything is tied back to the only thing that makes these women seem relevant. The closest people like Wu and Jeong have to possessing any influence at all is that people on the internet pointed out how big of an asshole they are.
Jmz_33
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Feb 18, 2019
There’s a game journalist who’s making an ass of themselves on Twitter because they’re trying to cancel the lead dev of ‘Night in the Woods.’ As it turns out, It’s not even the right guy.
Right now he’s just replying to critics saying he was only pretending to be retarded to prove some kind of point.
Edit: UPDATE
Right now he’s just replying to critics saying he was only pretending to be retarded to prove some kind of point.
Edit: UPDATE
Last edited:
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
While not focused on GamerGate, I may as well bring up NicheGamer since it got known thanks to GamerGate:
The journalist and kiwi known as @sophnar0747 tweets about Brandon Orselli, the owner of Niche Gamer, not paying his staff for two years.
twitter.com
While it ain't any sort of sperging related to GamerGate, it's pretty much something that ends up being unethical since it means workers were not paid for whatever work they put in. INB4 some people sperg about Sophia Narwitz just being some cuck trying to go against gamers or someone that wants to destroy a guy because he ran a pro-GG gaming website despite trying to be more transparent and ethical as a journalist.
The journalist and kiwi known as @sophnar0747 tweets about Brandon Orselli, the owner of Niche Gamer, not paying his staff for two years.
Sophia Narwitz on Twitter
“Proof that Niche Gamer wasn’t paying all its staff, which goes against everything Brandon has ever said.”
twitter.com
While it ain't any sort of sperging related to GamerGate, it's pretty much something that ends up being unethical since it means workers were not paid for whatever work they put in. INB4 some people sperg about Sophia Narwitz just being some cuck trying to go against gamers or someone that wants to destroy a guy because he ran a pro-GG gaming website despite trying to be more transparent and ethical as a journalist.
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2019
While not focused on GamerGate, I may as well bring up NicheGamer since it got known thanks to GamerGate:
The journalist and kiwi known as @sophnar0747 tweets about Brandon Orselli, the owner of Niche Gamer, not paying his staff for two years.
Sophia Narwitz on Twitter
“Proof that Niche Gamer wasn’t paying all its staff, which goes against everything Brandon has ever said.”
While it ain't any sort of sperging related to GamerGate, it's pretty much something that ends up being unethical since it means workers were not paid for whatever work they put in. INB4 some people sperg about Sophia Narwitz just being some cuck trying to go against gamers or someone that wants to destroy a guy because he ran a pro-GG gaming website despite trying to be more transparent and ethical as a journalist.
To me, the most unethical thing is that he was telling twitter that the entirety of his staff was getting paid. He lied to the public. And that's where I took the most issue, more so as there's been developments behind the scenes that haven't painted him in a good light. It is worth adding though that an agreement has been met, and two of the employees will be getting compensated in some form. So hopefully the drama is over.
It's just a shame as without Niche I wouldnt have the audience I have now, they gave me a platform when few others would, but there's problems there, and I think it'll be mismanaged into the ground in the coming year or two. I hope I'm wrong though.
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2019
It’s pretty funny that smugruko can’t even hold onto an account without getting suspended.
- Joined
- Dec 31, 2018
The fight against toxic gamer culture has moved to the classroom
Students used to be blank slates — now they arrive with agendas
Gamergate comes to the classroom
Students used to be blank slates — now they arrive with agendas
By Megan Farokhmanesh@Megan_Nicolett Aug 21, 2019, 1:36pm EDT
It was the phones that tipped off Bo Ruberg.
Ruberg, a UC Irvine assistant professor in the department of informatics, was teaching “Games & Society.” It was November 2017, and the course was a required class taught to 260 students, the majority of which are typically male freshmen. Ruberg kept a strict no-screens policy in their classes — an easy enough ask to keep students from texting or scrolling through Instagram when they should be paying attention. But this was different: a dozen or so people holding up their phones, recording their lecture on gender without even the effort of hiding it. The class felt strangely fuller. Ruberg paused, reminded students of the policy, and assumed they would put them away. They kept their cameras trained on Ruberg.
On a hunch, Ruberg asked their TAs for a head count. The final number? Eleven extra bodies. The intruders had made that part easy, at least. They took the day’s pop quiz under fake names along with everyone else. Ruberg’s experience was unnerving for many reasons, but above all, one thing was clear: this was a coordinated effort.
In the five years following Gamergate, sites like YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter shifted the power dynamics between student and teacher. The harassment-campaign-turned-online-culture-war paved the way for how abusers coordinate and systematically target victims. Online harassment has moved from the web and into real life. Marginalized figures have always known harassment existed in digital spaces, but Gamergate honed these tactics and pushed them into mainstream awareness. New York Times writer Charlie Warzel sums it up succinctly: “Gamergate’s DNA is everywhere on the internet … its most powerful legacy is as proof of concept of how to wage a post-truth information war.”
Now educators face new challenges: teaching responsibly, while also safeguarding themselves from the very kids they hope to help. “You develop this self-preservation intuition,” Ruberg tells The Verge. “You have to know what’s happening so that you know how to protect yourself.” As misinformation and hate continues to radicalize young people online, teachers are also grappling with helping their students unlearn incorrect, dangerous information. “It has made a lot of us teachers more cautious,” they say. “We want to challenge our students to explore new ways of thinking, to see the cultural meaning and power of video games, but we’re understandably anxious and even scared about the possible results.”
Ruberg’s teaching focuses largely on the intersection of technology and society with an eye on games. Part of the pushback, Ruberg believes, is because game dev students are resistant to the idea that cultural issues should have an impact on what some consider a very technical job. For some of the most problematic kids, however, the root cause is far worse. “These students have been radicalized,” they say.
After the gender lecture, Ruberg and their three TAs spent the next few days patrolling local campus Reddit communities for the material. To Ruberg and their TAs’ collective relief, nothing ever appeared — in their opinion, because there was nothing salacious: women in games have a hard time, and masculinity is constructed through gaming. But the experience left a mark on Ruberg, who says they’ve become more hesitant to include material about gender, sexuality, and race on their syllabuses. They’ve become wary, in some ways, of their students.
“I’m watching out for potential problems,” Ruberg says. “It makes me sad to say that, because I truly love teaching undergraduates, but it’s [hard] to tell when you’re teaching a student who is open to new perspectives and when you’re teaching someone who has the potential to do harm.”
The internet as a whole opens up impressionable kids to toxic beliefs, whether it’s forum culture or online multiplayer. Radicalization is an ongoing problem on platforms like YouTube, where viewers can easily tumble down rabbit holes of far-right content thanks to the platform’s algorithm. If there were any lessons to be learned from Gamergate — from how to recognize bad faith actors or steps on how to protect yourself, to failings in law enforcement or therapy focused on the internet — the education system doesn’t seem to have fully grasped these concepts.
Steve Wilcox teaches game design and development at Wilfrid Laurier University. Several months ago, he spoke to the president of his union about how they were preparing to tackle topics like ideological radicalization and misinformation. His takeaway? “I do not think that we are really prepared.”
How we talk about these issues now, he adds, is often in the context of freedom of speech and expression. “The argument is that conservatives are being discriminated against, and people with these otherwise odious views about society and race and gender,” he says. “That fails to recognize that society is already kind of deplatforming people — women, people of color, and trans speakers, or people marginalized in society — despite the fact that our society is already predisposed to being prejudiced toward them in the first place.”
It’s a problem that goes beyond just topics specific to the gaming industry, extending to topics like feminism, politics, or philosophy. “Suddenly everyone who watches Jordan Peterson videos thinks they know what postmodernism is,” says Emma Vossen, a post doctoral fellow with a PhD in gender and games. These problems with students are not about disagreements or debates. It’s not even about kids acting out, but rather harassers in the classroom who have tapped into social media as a powerful weapon. Many educators can’t grasp that, says Vossen.
“This is about students who could potentially access this hate movement that’s circling around you and use it against you,” she says. “This is about being afraid to give bad marks to students because they might go to their favorite YouTuber with a little bit of personal information about you that could be used to dox you.” Every word you say can be taken out of context, twisted, and used against you.
“Education has no idea how to deal with this problem,” Vossen says. “And I think it’s only going to get worse.
The issue is not only with teacher safety, but points to a greater crisis in how the education system must fundamentally rethink how to instruct students. “How much of our classroom time do we dedicate to, rather teaching and learning, but unlearning?” Wilcox says. “Helping people unlearn the biases and prejudices that essentially that they’ve learned from the internet, all the way up to the age of 18, or whenever they enroll in university.”
The conventional model has always been to treat students as a sort of blank slate, using education and information to inform them and teach from point zero. The combination of Gamergate hubs like subreddit KotakuInAction and unchecked alt-right personalities preaching harmful ideologies have changed that. An educator’s job is no longer just about teaching, but helping students unlearn false or even harmful information they’ve picked up from the internet.
Deradicalization is the common question on educators’ minds, but some say steps need to be taken preemptively. It’s easier to circumvent poisonous thinking rather than scramble to find an antidote after the fact. “The issue is that they have a preconceived way of interpreting information, which then shapes how they interpret that data,” says Wilcox. You can’t just combat bigotry with stats or hard facts; you have to address the larger social and cultural factors that make them an issue in the first place. “If we started teaching students the basics of feminism at a very young age,” Wilcox says, “they would have a far better appreciation for how different perspectives will lead to different outcomes, and how the distribution of power and privilege in society can influence who gets to speak in the first place.”
Even at its worst, the educators The Verge spoke to believe change is possible. These are still young people they’re teaching, who deserve the chance to learn and grow. “The behavior and games culture is this sort of microcosm of behavioral and larger culture,” Vossen says. “Gamers are not inherently sexist. Gamers are not inherently racist.” But much of the issue as an educator comes from the battle with what she calls living in an anti-intellectual time. “People will say [education is] brainwashing,” she says. Figures like Peterson or Lindsay Sheperd will pose human rights discussions as one with two sides, rather than accepting that all people deserve basic rights. To combat this, Vossen will play leftist videos in her class from channels like Innuendo Studios. “I think that sadly, at the end of the day, we can’t actually change anyone’s mind,” Vossen says. “But we can present alternative options.”
Wilcox says that the overwhelmingly masculine, anti-political, anti-education tone common to some spaces in games already dissuades marginalized groups from entering the profession in the first place. It’s a vicious cycle, in which the same hostile ideologies that make it difficult for other voices to enter the field continue to feed into each other and gatekeep. The problem ahead is a fickle one that requires a larger look at bias in culture and, more broadly, society.
“[That culture] is kind of already there, regardless of whether someone uses the talking points in my classroom,” Wilcox says.
Students used to be blank slates — now they arrive with agendas
By Megan Farokhmanesh@Megan_Nicolett Aug 21, 2019, 1:36pm EDT
It was the phones that tipped off Bo Ruberg.
Ruberg, a UC Irvine assistant professor in the department of informatics, was teaching “Games & Society.” It was November 2017, and the course was a required class taught to 260 students, the majority of which are typically male freshmen. Ruberg kept a strict no-screens policy in their classes — an easy enough ask to keep students from texting or scrolling through Instagram when they should be paying attention. But this was different: a dozen or so people holding up their phones, recording their lecture on gender without even the effort of hiding it. The class felt strangely fuller. Ruberg paused, reminded students of the policy, and assumed they would put them away. They kept their cameras trained on Ruberg.
On a hunch, Ruberg asked their TAs for a head count. The final number? Eleven extra bodies. The intruders had made that part easy, at least. They took the day’s pop quiz under fake names along with everyone else. Ruberg’s experience was unnerving for many reasons, but above all, one thing was clear: this was a coordinated effort.
In the five years following Gamergate, sites like YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter shifted the power dynamics between student and teacher. The harassment-campaign-turned-online-culture-war paved the way for how abusers coordinate and systematically target victims. Online harassment has moved from the web and into real life. Marginalized figures have always known harassment existed in digital spaces, but Gamergate honed these tactics and pushed them into mainstream awareness. New York Times writer Charlie Warzel sums it up succinctly: “Gamergate’s DNA is everywhere on the internet … its most powerful legacy is as proof of concept of how to wage a post-truth information war.”
Now educators face new challenges: teaching responsibly, while also safeguarding themselves from the very kids they hope to help. “You develop this self-preservation intuition,” Ruberg tells The Verge. “You have to know what’s happening so that you know how to protect yourself.” As misinformation and hate continues to radicalize young people online, teachers are also grappling with helping their students unlearn incorrect, dangerous information. “It has made a lot of us teachers more cautious,” they say. “We want to challenge our students to explore new ways of thinking, to see the cultural meaning and power of video games, but we’re understandably anxious and even scared about the possible results.”
Ruberg’s teaching focuses largely on the intersection of technology and society with an eye on games. Part of the pushback, Ruberg believes, is because game dev students are resistant to the idea that cultural issues should have an impact on what some consider a very technical job. For some of the most problematic kids, however, the root cause is far worse. “These students have been radicalized,” they say.
After the gender lecture, Ruberg and their three TAs spent the next few days patrolling local campus Reddit communities for the material. To Ruberg and their TAs’ collective relief, nothing ever appeared — in their opinion, because there was nothing salacious: women in games have a hard time, and masculinity is constructed through gaming. But the experience left a mark on Ruberg, who says they’ve become more hesitant to include material about gender, sexuality, and race on their syllabuses. They’ve become wary, in some ways, of their students.
“I’m watching out for potential problems,” Ruberg says. “It makes me sad to say that, because I truly love teaching undergraduates, but it’s [hard] to tell when you’re teaching a student who is open to new perspectives and when you’re teaching someone who has the potential to do harm.”
The internet as a whole opens up impressionable kids to toxic beliefs, whether it’s forum culture or online multiplayer. Radicalization is an ongoing problem on platforms like YouTube, where viewers can easily tumble down rabbit holes of far-right content thanks to the platform’s algorithm. If there were any lessons to be learned from Gamergate — from how to recognize bad faith actors or steps on how to protect yourself, to failings in law enforcement or therapy focused on the internet — the education system doesn’t seem to have fully grasped these concepts.
Steve Wilcox teaches game design and development at Wilfrid Laurier University. Several months ago, he spoke to the president of his union about how they were preparing to tackle topics like ideological radicalization and misinformation. His takeaway? “I do not think that we are really prepared.”
How we talk about these issues now, he adds, is often in the context of freedom of speech and expression. “The argument is that conservatives are being discriminated against, and people with these otherwise odious views about society and race and gender,” he says. “That fails to recognize that society is already kind of deplatforming people — women, people of color, and trans speakers, or people marginalized in society — despite the fact that our society is already predisposed to being prejudiced toward them in the first place.”
It’s a problem that goes beyond just topics specific to the gaming industry, extending to topics like feminism, politics, or philosophy. “Suddenly everyone who watches Jordan Peterson videos thinks they know what postmodernism is,” says Emma Vossen, a post doctoral fellow with a PhD in gender and games. These problems with students are not about disagreements or debates. It’s not even about kids acting out, but rather harassers in the classroom who have tapped into social media as a powerful weapon. Many educators can’t grasp that, says Vossen.
“This is about students who could potentially access this hate movement that’s circling around you and use it against you,” she says. “This is about being afraid to give bad marks to students because they might go to their favorite YouTuber with a little bit of personal information about you that could be used to dox you.” Every word you say can be taken out of context, twisted, and used against you.
“Education has no idea how to deal with this problem,” Vossen says. “And I think it’s only going to get worse.
The issue is not only with teacher safety, but points to a greater crisis in how the education system must fundamentally rethink how to instruct students. “How much of our classroom time do we dedicate to, rather teaching and learning, but unlearning?” Wilcox says. “Helping people unlearn the biases and prejudices that essentially that they’ve learned from the internet, all the way up to the age of 18, or whenever they enroll in university.”
The conventional model has always been to treat students as a sort of blank slate, using education and information to inform them and teach from point zero. The combination of Gamergate hubs like subreddit KotakuInAction and unchecked alt-right personalities preaching harmful ideologies have changed that. An educator’s job is no longer just about teaching, but helping students unlearn false or even harmful information they’ve picked up from the internet.
Deradicalization is the common question on educators’ minds, but some say steps need to be taken preemptively. It’s easier to circumvent poisonous thinking rather than scramble to find an antidote after the fact. “The issue is that they have a preconceived way of interpreting information, which then shapes how they interpret that data,” says Wilcox. You can’t just combat bigotry with stats or hard facts; you have to address the larger social and cultural factors that make them an issue in the first place. “If we started teaching students the basics of feminism at a very young age,” Wilcox says, “they would have a far better appreciation for how different perspectives will lead to different outcomes, and how the distribution of power and privilege in society can influence who gets to speak in the first place.”
Even at its worst, the educators The Verge spoke to believe change is possible. These are still young people they’re teaching, who deserve the chance to learn and grow. “The behavior and games culture is this sort of microcosm of behavioral and larger culture,” Vossen says. “Gamers are not inherently sexist. Gamers are not inherently racist.” But much of the issue as an educator comes from the battle with what she calls living in an anti-intellectual time. “People will say [education is] brainwashing,” she says. Figures like Peterson or Lindsay Sheperd will pose human rights discussions as one with two sides, rather than accepting that all people deserve basic rights. To combat this, Vossen will play leftist videos in her class from channels like Innuendo Studios. “I think that sadly, at the end of the day, we can’t actually change anyone’s mind,” Vossen says. “But we can present alternative options.”
Wilcox says that the overwhelmingly masculine, anti-political, anti-education tone common to some spaces in games already dissuades marginalized groups from entering the profession in the first place. It’s a vicious cycle, in which the same hostile ideologies that make it difficult for other voices to enter the field continue to feed into each other and gatekeep. The problem ahead is a fickle one that requires a larger look at bias in culture and, more broadly, society.
“[That culture] is kind of already there, regardless of whether someone uses the talking points in my classroom,” Wilcox says.
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
Freaking goobergate leaving its DNA everywhere, making it hard for everyone that that still wants to beat that dead horse. The only true lesson from GamerGate wouldn't be any bad faith actors or some group like the FBI not labelling a bunch of vidya playing tards as terrorist. It's that no one will really let go of GamerGate without wanting to milk whatever is left of a dead hashtag. And does KiA even do anything bad beyond just flipping its shit out over spergy things?The fight against toxic gamer culture has moved to the classroom
Students used to be blank slates — now they arrive with agendaswww.theverge.com
Gamergate comes to the classroom
Students used to be blank slates — now they arrive with agendas
By Megan Farokhmanesh@Megan_Nicolett Aug 21, 2019, 1:36pm EDT
It was the phones that tipped off Bo Ruberg.
Ruberg, a UC Irvine assistant professor in the department of informatics, was teaching “Games & Society.” It was November 2017, and the course was a required class taught to 260 students, the majority of which are typically male freshmen. Ruberg kept a strict no-screens policy in their classes — an easy enough ask to keep students from texting or scrolling through Instagram when they should be paying attention. But this was different: a dozen or so people holding up their phones, recording their lecture on gender without even the effort of hiding it. The class felt strangely fuller. Ruberg paused, reminded students of the policy, and assumed they would put them away. They kept their cameras trained on Ruberg.
On a hunch, Ruberg asked their TAs for a head count. The final number? Eleven extra bodies. The intruders had made that part easy, at least. They took the day’s pop quiz under fake names along with everyone else. Ruberg’s experience was unnerving for many reasons, but above all, one thing was clear: this was a coordinated effort.
In the five years following Gamergate, sites like YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter shifted the power dynamics between student and teacher. The harassment-campaign-turned-online-culture-war paved the way for how abusers coordinate and systematically target victims. Online harassment has moved from the web and into real life. Marginalized figures have always known harassment existed in digital spaces, but Gamergate honed these tactics and pushed them into mainstream awareness. New York Times writer Charlie Warzel sums it up succinctly: “Gamergate’s DNA is everywhere on the internet … its most powerful legacy is as proof of concept of how to wage a post-truth information war.”
Now educators face new challenges: teaching responsibly, while also safeguarding themselves from the very kids they hope to help. “You develop this self-preservation intuition,” Ruberg tells The Verge. “You have to know what’s happening so that you know how to protect yourself.” As misinformation and hate continues to radicalize young people online, teachers are also grappling with helping their students unlearn incorrect, dangerous information. “It has made a lot of us teachers more cautious,” they say. “We want to challenge our students to explore new ways of thinking, to see the cultural meaning and power of video games, but we’re understandably anxious and even scared about the possible results.”
Ruberg’s teaching focuses largely on the intersection of technology and society with an eye on games. Part of the pushback, Ruberg believes, is because game dev students are resistant to the idea that cultural issues should have an impact on what some consider a very technical job. For some of the most problematic kids, however, the root cause is far worse. “These students have been radicalized,” they say.
After the gender lecture, Ruberg and their three TAs spent the next few days patrolling local campus Reddit communities for the material. To Ruberg and their TAs’ collective relief, nothing ever appeared — in their opinion, because there was nothing salacious: women in games have a hard time, and masculinity is constructed through gaming. But the experience left a mark on Ruberg, who says they’ve become more hesitant to include material about gender, sexuality, and race on their syllabuses. They’ve become wary, in some ways, of their students.
“I’m watching out for potential problems,” Ruberg says. “It makes me sad to say that, because I truly love teaching undergraduates, but it’s [hard] to tell when you’re teaching a student who is open to new perspectives and when you’re teaching someone who has the potential to do harm.”
The internet as a whole opens up impressionable kids to toxic beliefs, whether it’s forum culture or online multiplayer. Radicalization is an ongoing problem on platforms like YouTube, where viewers can easily tumble down rabbit holes of far-right content thanks to the platform’s algorithm. If there were any lessons to be learned from Gamergate — from how to recognize bad faith actors or steps on how to protect yourself, to failings in law enforcement or therapy focused on the internet — the education system doesn’t seem to have fully grasped these concepts.
Steve Wilcox teaches game design and development at Wilfrid Laurier University. Several months ago, he spoke to the president of his union about how they were preparing to tackle topics like ideological radicalization and misinformation. His takeaway? “I do not think that we are really prepared.”
How we talk about these issues now, he adds, is often in the context of freedom of speech and expression. “The argument is that conservatives are being discriminated against, and people with these otherwise odious views about society and race and gender,” he says. “That fails to recognize that society is already kind of deplatforming people — women, people of color, and trans speakers, or people marginalized in society — despite the fact that our society is already predisposed to being prejudiced toward them in the first place.”
It’s a problem that goes beyond just topics specific to the gaming industry, extending to topics like feminism, politics, or philosophy. “Suddenly everyone who watches Jordan Peterson videos thinks they know what postmodernism is,” says Emma Vossen, a post doctoral fellow with a PhD in gender and games. These problems with students are not about disagreements or debates. It’s not even about kids acting out, but rather harassers in the classroom who have tapped into social media as a powerful weapon. Many educators can’t grasp that, says Vossen.
“This is about students who could potentially access this hate movement that’s circling around you and use it against you,” she says. “This is about being afraid to give bad marks to students because they might go to their favorite YouTuber with a little bit of personal information about you that could be used to dox you.” Every word you say can be taken out of context, twisted, and used against you.
“Education has no idea how to deal with this problem,” Vossen says. “And I think it’s only going to get worse.
The issue is not only with teacher safety, but points to a greater crisis in how the education system must fundamentally rethink how to instruct students. “How much of our classroom time do we dedicate to, rather teaching and learning, but unlearning?” Wilcox says. “Helping people unlearn the biases and prejudices that essentially that they’ve learned from the internet, all the way up to the age of 18, or whenever they enroll in university.”
The conventional model has always been to treat students as a sort of blank slate, using education and information to inform them and teach from point zero. The combination of Gamergate hubs like subreddit KotakuInAction and unchecked alt-right personalities preaching harmful ideologies have changed that. An educator’s job is no longer just about teaching, but helping students unlearn false or even harmful information they’ve picked up from the internet.
Deradicalization is the common question on educators’ minds, but some say steps need to be taken preemptively. It’s easier to circumvent poisonous thinking rather than scramble to find an antidote after the fact. “The issue is that they have a preconceived way of interpreting information, which then shapes how they interpret that data,” says Wilcox. You can’t just combat bigotry with stats or hard facts; you have to address the larger social and cultural factors that make them an issue in the first place. “If we started teaching students the basics of feminism at a very young age,” Wilcox says, “they would have a far better appreciation for how different perspectives will lead to different outcomes, and how the distribution of power and privilege in society can influence who gets to speak in the first place.”
Even at its worst, the educators The Verge spoke to believe change is possible. These are still young people they’re teaching, who deserve the chance to learn and grow. “The behavior and games culture is this sort of microcosm of behavioral and larger culture,” Vossen says. “Gamers are not inherently sexist. Gamers are not inherently racist.” But much of the issue as an educator comes from the battle with what she calls living in an anti-intellectual time. “People will say [education is] brainwashing,” she says. Figures like Peterson or Lindsay Sheperd will pose human rights discussions as one with two sides, rather than accepting that all people deserve basic rights. To combat this, Vossen will play leftist videos in her class from channels like Innuendo Studios. “I think that sadly, at the end of the day, we can’t actually change anyone’s mind,” Vossen says. “But we can present alternative options.”
Wilcox says that the overwhelmingly masculine, anti-political, anti-education tone common to some spaces in games already dissuades marginalized groups from entering the profession in the first place. It’s a vicious cycle, in which the same hostile ideologies that make it difficult for other voices to enter the field continue to feed into each other and gatekeep. The problem ahead is a fickle one that requires a larger look at bias in culture and, more broadly, society.
“[That culture] is kind of already there, regardless of whether someone uses the talking points in my classroom,” Wilcox says.
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2016
Didn’t know where else to put this but this faggot was anti-gg and in one of those pathetic “media/gaming PhD programs”.
It’s extremely cringe, “if you don’t report on these unfounded rumors and accusations I won’t read your garbage anymore!!!”
F
FH 721
Guest
kiwifarms.net
I'm starting to fear that Sargon's wish will come true and GaymerGate 2.0 will happen.
The amount of smug chuckling will be unprecedented and unstoppable if it ever does.
The amount of smug chuckling will be unprecedented and unstoppable if it ever does.
Last edited by a moderator:
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2018
If Gamergate 2.0 happens we will see an bigger influx of idiots saying they are japanese housewives and an even higher number of idiots believin' them.
Worked for Mombot
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FH 721
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kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2018
I mean, yeah it is funny seeing people fall for such obvious fake shit honestly.
Can't wait for the shitty sequel
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2018
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2018
It'd be a candidate if Smugruko was relevant besides her own twitter circle, seriously, before she popped up in IMC's thread anybody cared about her?
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2017
What's the government supposed to do about anonymous people harassing the poor WoYmAn gayMrZ? Why bring up Gamergate to them at all?
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2018
True, but I thought the wording and lack of self awareness qualified it.