The industry is lobbying against Stop Killing Games!

What happened to taking a step back from the initiative to focus more on games dungeon?

The last two weeks of unprecedented windfall happened, probably.

Hey Ross, I didn’t think this rose to the level of  of an email, but I’ve noticed a trend that you might want to get ahead of. Recently at a Ubisoft shareholder meeting, the CEO was first asked about “woke” games and then the SKG campaign by the same person. I’m not going to get into the content of the answer, but I have seen a lot of people supporting SKG who could broadly be thought of as representing the alt-right/Manosphere kind of gamer. Another example I saw was the SKG Twitter retweeting a message of support From Bounding into Comics, which was strongly connected to an alt-right harassment campaign against comic creators and is very right leaning according to every bias checker.
 

I am not trying to make a political argument here but I this sort of association could be problematic for the campaign. Obviously it is important to have as broad a base of support for SKG as possible and I don’t think the campaign should try to push away people who I find unsavory, but it would be very easy for the industry to try to frame SKG as another Gamergate if they can make these links. They haven’t done so yet but I can imagine them taking any step they can think of to discredit SKG the closer it gets to achieving its goals. The original idea of Gamergate wasn’t even bad—gaming journalists are too close to their sources—but the possibility of pushing back against those bad practices was lost when the goals got mixed up with politics. 

Obviously, you can control something like the shareholder meeting, but it might at least be a good idea if the person running the SKG Twitter tried to be a bit more careful with retweets.

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The original idea of Gamergate wasn’t even bad—gaming journalists are too close to their sources

The original idea of Gamergate was a lie that an abuser made up on 4chan to direct harassment toward his ex. It wasn't a well-meaning movement subverted by reactionary conservatives, it was their movement, and "ethics in games journalism" was the mask. I am concerned about a lot of the treatment of Pirate Software, it verged into bullying for things that don't matter. Like, he was a furry? Who cares? Furries are probably more reliable for movements like this. But it's important to remember SKG is for consumer groups and governments with a set goal, where harassment campaigns are meant to make their targets miserable forever. Even if a community had its well poisoned with Grummz shit or whatever, it wouldn't last because there's not much drama to farm. That's probably why Thor was targeted, there's nobody else to make an enemy of but corpos with no faces to offend.

Ross considers SKG a populist, single-issue movement (his words not mine). He's done interviews with people that have awful politics, but secured broad support from left figures anyway. Now, I don't love that, I didn't like it years ago when he was doing a live interview with racist crackhead child abuser Nick Rekieta (<-- not an exaggeration, I believe he's currently serving time for the latter two) but at a certain point you have to accept that Ross is taking what he can get. And not for nothing, while we characterize shithead gamers as "conservative", those beliefs don't necessarily flow into the logical extension of economic conservatism, because they're not thinking with 100% logic. So a lot of them would be more willing to support government regulation than something they think is "woke", even when the industry pushes for diversity are capitalist in motive.

With the UK petition filled and and the ECI past 140%, it seems Ross threaded that line well-enough, and what's left is in the hands of the professionals, who won't be bothering with random racists on twitter. For the rest, I'd say the community moderation we have had did an okay job keeping a reactionary base from sprouting up. Basic Discord and Reddit rules filter a lot of the worst shit. Twitter sucks and isn't getting better, but I have not seen people being particularly shitty to each other in spaces that aren't deliberately catered to the far-right to begin with. And all that being said, I don't expect the industry to frame us as racist or whatever to dismiss us, because they already don't do a good job getting rid of actual racists, misogynists and queerphobes.

I haven’t looked that closely into the history of Gamergate, and that may be true. Still, even if the impetus came from chuds, there were some people at the beginning who thought there was some merit to it at first. I think the guy who who first made the KotakuinAction subreddit tried to shut it down because he saw it was nothing but bigots.

Anyway, I think you may have an overly optimistic view of this process. This isn’t something people who support SKG can just turn over to EU legislators and hope for the best. The industry certainly isn’t going to approach it that way—their resistance is only going to get stronger the closer change gets to happening. Grassroots pressure if anything needs to get bigger to match that. I can absolutely imagine the industry using this as a point of attack, especially in the EU, which is more progressive in general. So any official SKG outlet like a Twitter account needs to be very careful about keeping its nose clean; or at least Ross and the other leaders should do a cost-benefit analysis to inform how they should respond to unsavory supporters.