🎭 Dramacow Gamergate / Depression Quest Shitstorm

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These people and their fucking collections of made up labels, Jesus.

It's probably just my straight white male privilege talking, but I can't fucking imagine being so self absorbed and hateful that I'd just create myself some bizarre fantasy identity and completely loathe and demonize literally anyone who didn't cater to it.
 
Right now I just want to make some half-assed sort of "neutrality manifesto" and sperg out/explain why I hate all of this bullshit.
It pains me to see how many libs like me (I guess, I dont even know what to call my political views) are just jumping on the bandwagon of anti-GG just because "it's misogyny!", even usually logical ones. I guess not everyone is immunit to fallacies.
 

I'm starting to think that this may be a pretty person / NYC problem. *yawn*

Anyway! Ever since TotalBiscuit got Stephen Totilo to the table, I've been wondering what it is going to take to appease the angry gamers. Some parties want nothing short of a complete surrender of the video game media, but I personally find that an unrealistic goal. Most of these journos are not going to get fired and most of these sites are not going to be run down, so what's it going to take for people to say "good enough" and go back to their vidya?

Terrorists make demands, and since GGamers are not terrorists, I'm just going to list some "offenses" committed by the people involved and maybe speculate what they can do to fix things.

KOTAKU

Stephen Totilo wrote a public announcement about Nathan Grayson's relationship with LW, but never about Particia Hernandez's ties to Anna Anthropy or Christine Love. The disclosure was later edited into Hernandez's articles, but her failure to include it before was not publicly acknowledged by Kotaku before the podcast with TB.

AFAIK, Grayson's relationship with Robin Arnott has not been addressed.

Stephen Totilo released a statement on their stance towards Patreon donations from writers to Developers, which Kotaku now regards as a conflict of interest. (green text is for "at least they changed SOMETHING")

Smutley's corrections here.

POLYGON

Polygon released a statement saying they have asked all staff to disclose any Patreon contribution they have made to developers. Polygon did not state that it found such donations constituted a conflict of interest.

Danielle Riendeau's relationship with Chris Remo has not been addressed.

GAMASUTRA

Alexander's conflict of interest (gaming journalist promoting the clients of her game dev consulting agency) has not been addressed.

GAMEJOURNOSPROS

A secret mailing list on which several prominent gaming "journalists" "discuss what to cover, what to ignore, and what approach their coverage should take to breaking news".

Ben Kuchera repeatedly pressures other journalists and editors to take down material on their websites [...] and to close down debate [...] by removing comments and forum posts.

GameJournosPro and Destructoid colluded to fire and blacklist Allistar Pinsof.

The mailing list has since been abandoned, which I hope will be the end of the collusion.

"GAMERS ARE DEAD" AND OTHER ARTICLES

The sites that published the Aug 28th articles and any negative pieces they have since done:

6 Vox Media (Vox, Polygon, Verge)
5 Gawker Media (Kotaku, Kinja, Jezebel)
2 Ars Technica
2 Buzzfeed
2 Gamasutra
2 The Daily Beast
2 The Mary Sue
1 BetaBeat
1 Rock Paper Shotgun
1 The Stranger

Evidence that the "death of gamers" had already been in planning for over a year among games journalism and social justice cliques.

Internal email of The Guardian leaked, shows how they were biased against GamerGate from the beginning.

IGF / INDIECADE

It is revealed that Quinn's game Depression Quest received an IndieCade Award, awarded by a panel which included Robin Arnott, one of the people Eron alleges Quinn had an affair with.

[Judges at the Independent Game Festival] directly say, ‘this game is better than this other game BUT, this game needs some help. Let’s make them win.’

Indie dev who entered IGF says staffer told him, "Don't be disappointed WHEN you don't win, games weren't being judged on merit."

Regular submissions is $ 80 USD and late submissions $ 110 USD.

Misc IGF, Indie Fund, Fez

SILVERSTRING SHENANIGANS

Pastebin of a deleted google doc detailing how Silverstring Media is trying to push a "feminist" agenda in the gaming industry -

Very detailed pastebin showing how the Gamer+ clique (Silverstring, DiGRA, Gamasutra, among others) is connected to one another.

There's more of these of course. Feel free to add your own.

Regarding Kotaku, Gamasutra, Polygon and any other outlet that is involved: I think they should openly recognize that their readers are upset by their writers' failure to disclose their ties, instead of addressing each relationship as they pop up. Right now it seems like they only act when they are caught doing something shouldn't be doing. I wouldn't push anyone to apologize, because I believe that an insincere or forced apology is worse than no apology at all.

As for IGF and IndieCade... I feel really strongly about these issues because developers are losing money, but like Silverstring, these problems are on a whole other level and aren't directly linked to journalism.
 
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Totally a pretty person problem.
 
Varis said:
Anyway! Ever since TotalBiscuit got Stephen Totilo to the table, I've been wondering what it is going to take to appease the angry gamers. Some parties want nothing short of a complete surrender of the video game media, but I personally find that an unrealistic goal. Most of these journos are not going to get fired and most of these sites are not going to be run down, so what's it going to take for people to say "good enough" and go back to their vidya?
Click to expand...
It has gone past the point of no return. They've permanently lost a lot of viewers, but some gamers are SJWs, so they haven't lost everyone. If they made any concessions to gamergate, SJWs would go thermonuclear, and that's the majority of the audience they have left.

This is going to end in a schism. Strictly gaming oriented sites will have their audience, and SJW sites will have theirs.
 
I think one major thing people on #GamerGate want is for the other side to stop being so insulting and arrogant. Of course this means that their apologies should be respected and the people who tell them off [if so happens] should be told to shut up, but let's face it...

Every time a Literally Who declares #GamerGate to be worse than ISIS, every time someone claims for bullying to come back, every time people act like it's okay to say horrible shit because 'gamer' no longer means 'fan/player of games' but 'misogynist', that's an unnecessary aggression. Attack the person for what they say, not for gaming.
 
I think David Pakman is being converted over to our side by the the behavior of the SJW's. C'mon guys he is asking you to to give your side of the story, this is a chance to set the record straight. Sending him threats and accusing him of misogyny for his neutrality will only make him see you as unreasonable.
 
SCRuler said:
I'm just sick of the whole "This is about games being a boys club" and "This is about MRA misogyny zomg stop threatening to rape and kill all women". No matter who I come across, it's always that.
Is there a single easy link that has a huge stockpile of evidence that this isn't about "gaems bein' fulla sexy plot devices" and instead about a cadre of people doing less than savoury stuff whilst hiding behind that pretend reason?
Click to expand...
There's no single link - not because people don't want there to be, but because there's so fucking much to cover. Gamergate's wiki, KotakuInAction, and so on are good start points - especially the former - since it has links to almost every scandal, bit of collusion, and rote corruption that's popped up so far. However, for the sake of those involved, here's my own annotated list. I'm doubtlessly missing some, so bear this in mind. I'm also going to skip over the earliest one (specifically, Quinn and the FiveGuys) because it's been covered to death. Of critical importance - Quinn herself keeps coming up because she's tied to so much within Gamergate - so whilst she isn't relevant by and large to what we've learned so far, she's been critical in that Gamergate's dug up as much as it has by following her actions. Read on:

1. Zoe Quinn Accidentally Sabotages The Fine Young Capitalists
Easy Sources: KnowYourMeme, TheMarySue, Reddit
Zoe Quinn, for reasons unclear, had some kind of falling out with The Fine Young Capitalists, a charity group that supports women developers entering the world of gaming. Though it appears now to have not been Quinn's direct doing, and TFYC have made peace with Quinn, Quinn's followers, including Maya Kramer (remember this name; it'll be relevant later) were responsible for getting TFYC DDoS'd and taken down. Most analysis shows that the most likely scenario was that after the falling-out between TFYC and Quinn, supporters of the latter were responsible for overwhelming TFYC's with traffic. Unfortunately, being this is the internet and a lot of anonymity is up in the air, not a lot is provable. Still, this one bears note because of who was revealed in it - so hold onto this one - you'll see why later.

2. IGF and Indiecade Shown to be Openly Corrupt; IndieFund and Phil Fish Exposed
Easy Sources: N4G, Gamesnosh, Reddit
This one was big enough that it was partly covered in the mainstream press, to a degree, and involved potential racketeering charges. Essentially, it was proven comprehensibly, by several participants of both IGF and Indiecade, that the fix was in on games that got through and won the contest (note, this is a big event, and one you have to pay to enter). In many cases - Phil Fish being the most obvious - judges were openly in the tank for games that they stood to profit from when the games swept the Independent Games Festival or Indiecade (and is why a game like Depression Quest won out over games such as Papers, Please!, for instance). Maya "LegoButts" Kramer, who you may remember from #1 on this list, a long-time friend and possible lover of Quinn, works for SilverString Media and was involved with all three of these scandals. Silverstring, a major PR firm, also happens to employ some other notorious individuals of note: Anita Sarkeesian, Jonathan McIntosh, and Devin Faraci. That's three more names to rmeember.

3. GameJournosPros Exposed; Evidence that Zoe Quinn and Friends Have Deep Ties
Easy Sources: Breitbart, Milo's Personal Dump Site, One Angry Gamer, Gamezone
This was the first "smoking gun" discovered in Gamergate - that the fix was in to quash the Quinn story well in advance because of many involved having an agenda. We would later learn that an inordinate number of people on this list financially supported and/or directly helped out Quinn and her ilk and were pretty fucking open about it. Of special note were Ben Kuchera's attempts to urge other people on the list to silence Gamergate supporters by locking down forums, and a certain user, who shall remain nameless, suggesting to buy Quinn a nice present for all the hardship she'd been enduring. Analysis by internet detectives quickly revealed that most - if not all - of the GamesJournosPros list that were Anti-GG were either directly or indirectly involved with the previous suspects from issues #1 and #2.

4. Sargon of Akkad Exposes DiGRA, Evidence of Political Extremism
Easy Sources: Sargon of Akkad, HoneyBadger
A lot of the ongoing Gamergate debacle has developed around the idea of a relatively deeply-connected cadre of people who have an incredibly obvious conflict-of-interest-laden relationship between one another - a subject of more economic corruption, rather than political and pushing a bias. What if this weren't the case, however? Sargon of Akkad, an amazingly skilled Youtuber known for is in-depth analysis and anti-extremist (from both sides!) slant, quickly, with the help of other Internet Detectives found a common political thread - an academic group called DiGra - and the bombshell that the 12+ "Gamer is Dead" articles that dropped on the same day all had one unifying source - a woman named Adrienne Shaw - and this is a proven fact. Shaw's article was either linked directly or indirectly in every single article. The article itself essentially covered how Shaw felt that since "Gamers" were essentially all white straight males, and since she hated said white straight males, she felt the term was not conducive to the broader objective of pushing the agenda of aggressive feminism in video gaming, and henceforth was an obstacle to be destroyed. It gets scarier from here, if you can believe it. The article itself was peer reviewed by exactly one person, something identifying itself as "The Fembot Collective" - which Adrienne Shaw is naturally a member of. The group itself has centered around anti-free market ideas and heavily espouses changing the entire landscape of gaming as we know it by trying actively to influence developers and publishers. Naturally, this group has a lot of ties to those involved in other items on this list, to the point where it is now eminently provable that DiGRA has an open hand in a lot of what's happened amongst our usual suspects so far: Dan Golding a member of DiGRA Australia, penned a post borrowing from Adrienne Shaw's template on behalf of a friend of his: One Zoe Quinn. In the "Gamer is Dead" barrage to follow, Kotaku links to Golding's post. RockPaperShotgun links to Golding's post. ArsTechnica links to Dan's Tumblr post. Even fucking Buzzfeed links to Dan Golding's Tumblr post. These posts were the direct cause of Gamergate. Even if you don't believe at all in the concept of DiGRA and a team of close-knit extremists working their damnedest to push a toxic agenda, this is way too big to be a fucking coincidence. All information dug up hence has only solidified the links between the likes of the Literally Whos, DiGRA, and Games Journos Pro. Seriously, check out Sargon's videos on the subject. He provides links and documentation for absolutely fucking everything, and it paints a chilling picture of where all this toxicity is ultimately flowing from. At every single turn, you will find a connection to DiGRA in this scandal. They are involved with Feminist Frequency (and thus Anita Sarkeesian and friends). They are involved with Silverstring Media (and thus Maya Kramer, and the IndieCade/IGF/Indiefund scandals). They are involved with Dan Golding (who is a personal friend of Zoe Quinn and was one of the premiere sources of "Gamer is Dead").

5. The Guardian is on the Take
Easy Source: Ralph Retort
We learn that the Guardian's decision to not cover Gamergate's side of an issue was decided well in advance.
Links to responsible parties and the Guardian's staff slowly are beginning to emerge, and there'll doubtlessly be more showed before this is over.

6. More Articles Espousing DiGRA Talking Points
Easy Source: Kotaku and company itself, but instead I'll give Archive Links
Kotaku and the other affiliates responding in the "Gamer is Dead" barrage have been increasingly shrill in pushing an extremist agenda. With such great articles like "white straight male is easy mode," and the infamous Kuchera/Jaffe Confrontation, it's been increasingly apparent that those responsible have officially stopped giving a fuck about subtlety. Like the whole Starcoon thing. The bulk of Gawker's been becoming increasingly clickbait in the last few years, but it's only recently that they've gone full throw your underwear out and go home early in regards to the Agenda-push. At this point we can no longer consider Sargon's information to be mere coincidence.

7. The Blacklist Exposed
Easy Source: One Angry Gamer
This is the quintessential smoking gun in Gamergate so far - honest-to-god evidence of attempts to blacklist anyone who spoke up about Gamergate and attempts to permanently stifle a journalist's attempt to get the word out about ongoing corruption. The story begins with one Allistar Pinsof, which may be one of the coolest names I've heard in quite some time, but I digress. Pinsof was investigating an IndieGogo corruption scandal with a transgendered individual. Though Pinsof got all the necessary go-aheads from the higher-ups, a huge group of people - so-called SJWs, mostly - began to attack Pinsof en masse for having the gall to expose that someone was exploiting the crowdfunding site. The flak got so heated that Allistar was suspended, and, when absolutely nobody at Destructoid would talk to him about the incident for fricking weeks, nor give him an update - essentially keeping him locked down in the Shroedinger's Cat-esque scenario of fired and not-fired (and not being paid), Allistar eventually broke the story. Allistair was ultimately fired after the head of Destructoid contacted Games Journos Pro. All the while, said head was telling Allistar he still had his job (you know, despite essentially making him persona non grata in everything but title). Soonafter, Allistar was fired proper, and he was noted along with the Games Journos Pro list to keep Allistar from ever working in the industry again if he tried to talk about it. Soonafter this came to light of public scrutiny, Destructoid's head saw the writing on the wall and quit. We know from the exposure that someone else knew all about what happened with Allistar Pinsof - Jim Sterling, of the Escapist.

8. Further Blacklisting
Easy Source: Boogie
The blacklisting we learned of in #7 takes on a frightening new light when we remember that Boogie, not a week previous, had brought to light that, in a fucking hard to watch and emotional piece, explained that for the crime of remaining neutral in the Gamergate issue, he had been openly threatened by games Journalists with blacklisting if he either supported Gamergate or remained a neutral party. If your immediate response to this isn't along the lines of "this is going to be tied to the same people as #7, isn't it," then you haven't been reading this peice nearly hard enough. Those involved in trying to quash these scandals are taking increasingly broad steps to stop Gamergate - and they're going to only get worse as time goes on.

There's 8 big ones - believe me, there's three fucktons more, and you can find a huge amount of them at the GamerGate Wiki.

This has rapidly blossomed into one of the biggest incidents to happen in the media in the past 15 years.
 
Varis said:
Terrorists make demands, and since GGamers are not terrorists, I'm just going to list some "offenses" committed by the people involved and maybe speculate what they can do to fix things.

KOTAKU

Stephen Totilo wrote a public announcement about Nathan Grayson's relationship with LW, but never about Particia Hernandez's ties to Anna Anthropy or Christine Love. The disclosure was later edited into Hernandez's articles, but her failure to include it before was not publicly acknowledged by Kotaku before the podcast with TB.

AFAIK, Grayson's relationship with Robin Arnott has not been addressed.

Stephen Totilo released a statement on their stance towards Patreon donations from writers to Developers, which Kotaku now regards as a conflict of interest. (green text is for "at least they changed SOMETHING")

POLYGON

Polygon released a statement saying they have asked all staff to disclose any Patreon contribution they have made to developers. Polygon did not state that it found such donations constituted a conflict of interest.

Danielle Riendeau's relationship with Chris Remo has not been addressed.

GAMASUTRA

Alexander's conflict of interest (gaming journalist promoting the clients of her game dev consulting agency) has not been addressed.

GAMEJOURNOSPROS

A secret mailing list on which several prominent gaming "journalists" "discuss what to cover, what to ignore, and what approach their coverage should take to breaking news".

Ben Kuchera repeatedly pressures other journalists and editors to take down material on their websites [...] and to close down debate [...] by removing comments and forum posts.

GameJournosPro and Destructoid colluded to fire and blacklist Allistar Pinsof.

The mailing list has since been abandoned, which I hope will be the end of the collusion.

"GAMERS ARE DEAD" AND OTHER ARTICLES

The sites that published the Aug 28th articles and any negative pieces they have since done:

6 Vox Media (Vox, Polygon, Verge)
5 Gawker Media (Kotaku, Kinja, Jezebel)
2 Ars Technica
2 Buzzfeed
2 Gamasutra
2 The Daily Beast
2 The Mary Sue
1 BetaBeat
1 Rock Paper Shotgun
1 The Stranger

Evidence that the "death of gamers" had already been in planning for over a year among games journalism and social justice cliques.

Internal email of The Guardian leaked, shows how they were biased against GamerGate from the beginning.

IGF / INDIECADE

It is revealed that Quinn's game Depression Quest received an IndieCade Award, awarded by a panel which included Robin Arnott, one of the people Eron alleges Quinn had an affair with.

[Judges at the Independent Game Festival] directly say, ‘this game is better than this other game BUT, this game needs some help. Let’s make them win.’

Indie dev who entered IGF says staffer told him, "Don't be disappointed WHEN you don't win, games weren't being judged on merit."

Regular submissions is $ 80 USD and late submissions $ 110 USD.

Misc IGF, Indie Fund, Fez

SILVERSTRING SHENANIGANS

Pastebin of a deleted google doc detailing how Silverstring Media is trying to push a "feminist" agenda in the gaming industry -

Very detailed pastebin showing how the Gamer+ clique (Silverstring, DiGRA, Gamasutra, among others) is connected to one another.

There's more of these of course. Feel free to add your own.
Click to expand...

I agree with nearly everything you wrote, with the exception of Kotaku. As part of the Gawker media empire, Kotaku behaves how Nick Denton wants it to. That means articles are updated without being given a front-page bump, so they can claim "updated" without actually drawing attention to the additional, generally unflattering, information. Gawker also is obsessed with their system of commenting failure known as Kinja - things that are written on Kinja carry as much, if not more, weight than the article itself.

Totilo DID discuss Patricia Hernandez... in the comments, buried way way way in them. Comments are displayed based on how many "likes" they get, so people with snarky one-liners about "Ethics, in MY journalism!?" get top bumped while responses like Totilos are buried at the bottom.

upload_2014-11-1_13-11-40.png


"We acknowledge that Patricia lived with a developer and that developers sexual partner for at least a two month period while she covered this source. We don't think this is a violation of any ethical standards but we have quietly updated the articles she has written, some of them from a year or more ago, with that information."

He also discusses how their new ethics policy will function - spoiler: it won't. He can't possibly track all his writers and what they are doing and asking them to disclose this information might hurt their feels so just trust him, okay?

upload_2014-11-1_13-15-27.png


Seriously. He could have updated the post this discussion was on to address Patricia personally, and talked about how they won't be tracking their writers on anything they do. But he didn't. He did all of this in barely-read comments. Seriously, look at that - that little star says 24, the second says 7, that's the number of likes he got, which means no one will ever see this post. Here's the top rated comment from one of their frequent commentators - none of them voted up his answers, because THAT MIGHT LEAD TO A GODDAMNED DISCUSSION.

upload_2014-11-1_13-14-45.png


Also, Kotaku has backed out on their patreon policy after getting people whining about it - including loudmouthed beta blogger John Walker of Rock Paper Shotgun.

upload_2014-11-1_13-21-4.png


"They can even expense it"

Motherfucker, that's what KICKSTARTER is for, but not really because all a journalist needs to say to a person running a kickstarter is "Give me a code and I'll review your game". But nah, all the people in comments said he was conceding, and John Walker whined at him on twitter, so a week later Totilo revises the policy to say "Our writers can not pay devs salaries, unless they want to. Then they can expense it."

tl;dr - Kotaku hasn't done anything except trip over their own feet covering up for themselves and Totilo is a lying shit.
 
KidKitty said:
WHAT THE FUCK IS A SONIC!!?
Click to expand...
Late... But funny enough to get a chuckle since it stole my bit. You get a like.

More on topic. Smutley, do you think that Totilo's backing off was solely due to Walker, or do you think it may have been something more endemic? As someone who's followed along with this a while and generally capable of delivering commentary far funnier than mine, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter. Everyone else's too, really.
 
Exactly, what I was looking for was a link that contained links to everything, like an archive.
Thanks.
 
Smutley said:
I agree with nearly everything you wrote, with the exception of Kotaku. As part of the Gawker media empire, Kotaku behaves how Nick Denton wants it to. That means articles are updated without being given a front-page bump, so they can claim "updated" without actually drawing attention to the additional, generally unflattering, information. Gawker also is obsessed with their system of commenting failure known as Kinja - things that are written on Kinja carry as much, if not more, weight than the article itself.

Totilo DID discuss Patricia Hernandez... in the comments, buried way way way in them. Comments are displayed based on how many "likes" they get, so people with snarky one-liners about "Ethics, in MY journalism!?" get top bumped while responses like Totilos are buried at the bottom.

View attachment 8364

"We acknowledge that Patricia lived with a developer and that developers sexual partner for at least a two month period while she covered this source. We don't think this is a violation of any ethical standards but we have quietly updated the articles she has written, some of them from a year or more ago, with that information."

He also discusses how their new ethics policy will function - spoiler: it won't. He can't possibly track all his writers and what they are doing and asking them to disclose this information might hurt their feels so just trust him, okay?

View attachment 8366

Seriously. He could have updated the post this discussion was on to address Patricia personally, and talked about how they won't be tracking their writers on anything they do. But he didn't. He did all of this in barely-read comments. Seriously, look at that - that little star says 24, the second says 7, that's the number of likes he got, which means no one will ever see this post. Here's the top rated comment from one of their frequent commentators - none of them voted up his answers, because THAT MIGHT LEAD TO A GODDAMNED DISCUSSION.

View attachment 8365

Also, Kotaku has backed out on their patreon policy after getting people whining about it - including loudmouthed beta blogger John Walker of Rock Paper Shotgun.

View attachment 8367

"They can even expense it"

Motherfucker, that's what KICKSTARTER is for, but not really because all a journalist needs to say to a person running a kickstarter is "Give me a code and I'll review your game". But nah, all the people in comments said he was conceding, and John Walker whined at him on twitter, so a week later Totilo revises the policy to say "Our writers can not pay devs salaries, unless they want to. Then they can expense it."

tl;dr - Kotaku hasn't done anything except trip over their own feet covering up for themselves and Totilo is a lying shit.
Click to expand...
Well motherfucker.

Corrected my post.
 
Jaimas said:
Late... But funny enough to get a chuckle since it stole my bit. You get a like.

More on topic. Smutley, do you think that Totilo's backing off was solely due to Walker, or do you think it may have been something more endemic? As someone who's followed along with this a while and generally capable of delivering commentary far funnier than mine, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter. Everyone else's too, really.
Click to expand...

I've had to think on this a while. That's a really tough question. The problem for me is that I'm obviously biased, and I try to set it aside when information comes out that disputes things. But it's difficult to do with the distaste I have for Kotaku/John Walker.

I talk about about Walker a lot because he strikes me as a personification of everything wrong with Gaming Journalism which is made worse by his site running some wonderfully in depth interviews and generally thought provoking essays. I still send people links to their three part series on Pathologic because it's that damn good. But Walker, the straight white man with his own busuiness, is a trend jumper who is obsessed with championing social issues - specifically third wave femismism. He's brash and short tempered, insulting readers on twitter and on his blog, and uses his position to try and bully others into accepting his views that any depiction of women negatively is worse than hitler and that stupid pre-order bonuses are morally repugnant. He even uses his site to bully readers, telling them to just leave because they aren't welcome if they dare challenge his viewpoints. He is so confident of himself that he locked comments on the article.

John Walker was SOOO mad at the Penny Arcade guys that he made Nathan Grayson thunderously declared that HIS website would no longer cover ANY PAX event EVER because of how shitty and awful the comic artists and their often-wrong views are. The same Nathan Grayson, I might add, that jumped sites to Kotaku. I don't fully pin the blame on Grayson for that article because, while he does share many of the same viewpoints, the article has the John Walker feel to it. If you compare it to any other editorial/opinion pieces discussion issues, the entire format, the entire content, the smug righteousness of being a warrior of light, it reeks of Walker's stink.

Grayson, RockPaperShotgun, and specifically John Walker were so mocked by their own users they were forced to issue an update/notupdate about "being wrong/notwrong" the next day. And the result was literally nothing. No one cared. The only thing that happened is Penny Arcade quietly stopped linking to them in their front page news blurbs from Tycho. RPS still covers PAX (even though they don't send their people there because they "just don't want to go, not because we're boycotting"), Penny-Arcade is still one of the biggest voices in gaming, and the whole shitty little stunt fell flat.

This is my really long, roundabout way of saying I don't think it was 100% John Walker. I think that Jason Schreirer and the GameJournoPros probably helped make that decision too at the height of their hubris. But Kotaku employees a few ex-RPS writers, they regularly share articles by current RPS writers, and Patricia Hernandez regularly works hand-in-hand with Cara Ellison, a contributor and vocal RPS SJW and super-best friend to Anna Anthropy because this is one big incestuous pit of ethics violations. RPS is one of the only gaming sites that Kotaku regularly gives credit - actual credit like, acknowledgements and sources - and not just stealing the material wholesale and posting a single small link to the source in [brackets] at the very end of the post.

So... in short, I think John Walker played a very big role in Kotaku's backtracking decision. I don't think he was the main reason, and my absolute distaste for him as a person biases my commentary, but I personally believe he has the clout and mouth to convince Totilo in the error of his ways.
 
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