GamerGate’s Misconceptions Thus Far

Here’s a list of misconceptions I still see being held up as fact in the #GamerGate tag – you can fact-check them yourselves, please do email corrections/additions to pixiegamergate@gmail.com. Some of this is sourced from this post.

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• Spacekatgal did not call someone a “gross fucking aspie”. It was a fake account. See here and here and here
• GamerGate DID NOT start after the “‘gamers’ are over” article wave. It began with Adam Baldwin’s tweet, which when looked at on central time is the 27th August – the articles are all the 28th. In addition, the articles came after harassment of Anita and Zoe (more here). Whilst people may have joined over those articles, they were NOT the cause.
• Leigh Alexander does not run a PR agency, but a consultancy agency. She has also – as far as I can research – never written about a game she’s consulted for without disclosing it.
• Nathan Grayson DID NOT review Depression Quest – he mentioned it in a list of 50 indie games on Rock, Paper, Shotgun and mentioned her in an article on Kotaku about Game Jam.
• The GameJournoPros list didn’t co-ordinate the ‘gamers are over’ articles on list since many of the authors are NOT on it. In addition, not all the journalists being claimed to be part of this collusion can be found on it either.
• The ‘Gamers are Dead’ article wave isn’t as clear-cut as it seems – analysis here.
• Zoe Quinn DID donate to IFred – source
• The Fine Young Capitalists ARE NOT a charity. The money raised on IndieGogo goes into making the game, and 74% of any profits go to charity.
• Zoe Quinn DID NOT win an award for Depression Quest at IGF. It was not even a finalist. Papers, Please won. In addition, people keep linking this to IndieCade + Robin Arnott and Maya Kramer. IndieCade is separate and both Robin and Maya work on Night Games – which is this thing, not the awards.
• Maya Kramer DID NOT collude with the IGF chairman to get The Stanley Parable an award. The award it won was the Audience Award – ie, voted by the public
• Some people still claim Phil Fish hacked himself. Others claim the information from the hack proves something [more below]. If he hacked himself, this information would (presumably) not be out there. This is inconsistent.
• The IGF 2012 awards WERE NOT weighted by the financial backers of Fez. There were hundreds of judges, which they were part of. They were not, however, part of the jury – which makes the ultimate decisions.
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun DID NOT write a ‘gamers are dead’ article. They quoted one in a weekly round-up.
• Jenn Frank DID NOT refuse to disclose in her Guardian article. She had it in her draft, the Guardian themselves removed it.
• Anita Sarkeesian DID NOT lie about the police – instead, it was filed with the FBI, hence the records not appearing to exist.
• [edited thanks to comment]. Anita DID receive threats. The context of the “no threats” comment is here – “USU police, in conjunction with several teams of state and federal law enforcement experts, determined that there was no threat to students, staff or the speaker, so no alert was issued.” – This does not mean the threat was false, only that it was not considered to be severe enough to cancel the talk – though clearly, it was considered serious enough that “University police were prepared and had a plan in place to provide extra security measures at the presentation.”
• Darpa/DiGRA ARE NOT linked. This claim comes from the fact they advertised a job role available at UC Santa Cruz that was funded by Darpa.
• Digra’s criticisms of peer review ARE NOT unusual. Full explanation here and a sample of some other (different) criticism from other sources.
• Digra is NOT about predominately gender studies. Great graph here.
• Adrienne Shaw’s paper DID NOT say all gamers were a certain type of person. It talks about the constructed gamer – as in, a model created and how people relate to that model. I recommend reading the full paper but here’s a quote:
  

  “Whether or not individuals identify as gamers is done in the context of certain social constructions of gamer…Certainly “gamers” in the popular imagination are presented as particularly gendered and raced bodies who engage in certain types of play and for a pathologized amount of time…The narrow construction of gamer as an identity has been heavily critiqued for some time…What I am arguing for here, however, is that rather than try to disprove these assertions and articulate a new definition of gamer identity, I will demonstrate how players understand their relationship to video games as a medium through this construction of “gamer.” In particular I look at the way interviewees do or do not perform the consumption of games in relation to what they think of as gamer subcultural capital”