@decaped said:@snickersnee: "Is there really a targeted effort on the part of the white male dominated gaming culture to exclude women and minorities from participating
I don't think the last 30 years of game culture has been a targeted effort to exclude women and minorities, it was simply that the white dudes doing it had no idea that other people might be into their thing that was already pretty exclusionary.
The last 3 months of game culture has absolutely been a targeted effort to exclude women and minorities, as /r/KIA promotes actively removing funding from sites whose writers discuss social issues in the context of games. What they call ethics is simply agenda-free writing. Or, to put it more accurately, writing that reflects their agenda - where social issues are never discussed, where a perspective outside their own is never considered. By actively attempting to defund these sites, the message is clear: this kind of content should not exist. It's not that GamerGaters don't want to read those perspectives, it's that those perspectives have no place in my video games - not "this content isn't for me and I should read something else," but "this content isn't for anyone and shouldn't be read at all." Promotion of any agenda is not ethics. This is not a campaign about ethics.
It's pretty easy to "boycott" Polygon and Kotaku, I've been doing it for years because I don't like the writing. I am not actively attempting to destroy Polygon or Kotaku, because I recognize that this content exists for someone who is not me. So I go somewhere else to get what I'm looking for.
There are plenty of places that remain "neutral," in that their reviews are not personal opinions shaped by the experience and perspective of the writers. That's IGN, Total Biscuit, GameInformer, and maybe (though certainly less in the past few years) GameSpot. It sure isn't Giant Bomb. A site may not be for you, and that's OK. If there are no sites for you, maybe you should start one.
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