Well we are here. It seems like the internet has fucking lost it. I have no other description of the events ever since the “Quinspiracy” broke and brought to question the integrity of “gaming journalism” even more then it ever was previously.
But I think we have officially hit a new low and when the internet heard how Anita Sarkeesian fled her house afraid of “gamers” who twittered her threatening to attack her. I do not pretend to know what was said or even if any of it was real. After all, we are talking about a woman who has been caught in everything from stealing artwork and video from gaming speedruns to buying her way into TedX and then claiming Ted Talks invited her to speak (while they are not the same thing). With this kind of “honesty” on display, I am actively reserving judgment on what actually happened that night. However, I only bring it up right now due to the aftermath.
Right now, as I write to you, a group of morons on the internet have decided that it is a good idea to punish all the gamers they can for the potential actions of a few possible asshats and turn off one of the major gaming platforms for an hour. Offhand, this appalls me. After all, why the fuck is it ok to punish everyone for a few? And this is exactly what they are doing as noted with the quote below:
“If the games community as a whole refuses to police itself, we feel that games distributors and the industry as a whole should make some gesture strongly condeming this kind of intimidation.
Closing Steam access for a one-hour period, or a comparable gesture, would be an extremely effective way (along the lines of the SOPA blackout protests) to communicate that the games community needs to police itself, to hold itself to a basic standard of decency, in order for that community to continue to exist.”
The first part of this statement is doing exactly as I’m saying, basically punishing everyone over the acts of the few, but the second part just gets disgusting as it then tries to compare punishment of a community to making everyone you can who uses the internet alert to bullshit laws that could be passed and effect us all BEFORE anything happened and it was too late to do anything. Seriously, what the fuck. There is a HUGE difference between a punishment and a protest. And based on what I’ve seen on the twitter of honest supporters of this, they know the difference, too.
But the insanity doesn’t stop there. I actually explained (ok, ranted) on a rather well known supporter of this on their blog for supporting something this fucked up DESPITE trying to be a voice in the community and how stupid it is… because even if it happens, it will accomplish nothing. Allow me to share with you my predictions:
- Due to the fact that almost nothing running on steam actually needs steam services up and running to work, most people already in a game will likely never even realize what is happening, defeating the point entirely (however wrong headed).
- Due to the fact that Steam has a working offline mode, most who want to play a game at that time will notice that they need to wait a little longer and then click “Offline Mode” before they get to play their game. 30 more seconds and one mouse click.
- This would inconvenience people looking to install a new game on Steam, but with the size of hard drives today, that would be a fairly small minority to actually be effected.
- News would get around, humiliating the supporters for wanting something so ineffective as well as pissing off the Steam audience for trying to punish everyone because someone may have said something mean on twitter. Frankly, I would be happy to point out the supporter I was talking to at this point, but that would require an article all it’s own to go into right now, and I don’t really want to buy him clicks.
So with all this in mind, what have we learned here today? Basically that in the current fight the gaming community finds itself in, the ones who believe in social justice are now starting to try (and be ineffective in multiple ways) to bully the community at large into submission, and with more then the twitter assault Jontron faced when he dared call PSN Now “Retarded.” (And incidentally, I had to block one of those people trying to turn that into a race thing on my twitter…. a few days ago… when that went down a month ago… yeah, rabid they are.)
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