I'm grateful that Jeff and the staff addressed the issue but I wish they'd gone further to actually deflate gamergate rather than (essentially) denouncing harassment.
My ideal reply from Giant Bomb, and I've thought about this for a long time, would be that letter followed up with a video. A video of the GB editors listening to audio questions from GamerGaters and discussing them. These questions would be either (a) answering what they see a good end goal for GG to be. (b) what particular thing about games media concerns them. This could be restricted to just people that have been members (free or premium) longer than four months, keeping it to just GB community members.
One issue I have with the letter is it doesn't address the fact that not all GG folk are harassers; but nor does it explain how moderate GG folk help create an atmosphere that enables harassers to do the thing they love. I think a video addressing the concerns of people that genuinely seem to believe there are ethical issues to discuss, would either convince them that they're wrong, dispel anger around being silenced or at worst convince them GB isn't somewhere they trust and they can leave. I'm ok with all of these results. There's also a fourth option where GG convinces GB that there is something to clean up, in which case they end up with a respectable face with which to talk to other outlets.
I had intended to tag the staff in on this post, but I recognise it's a stupid idea that only I think would work so instead I'm going to leave it here as a release for my frustration with the way things are.
A while ago, Guardian Games Editor Keith Stuart decided to inject the internet with a burst of sunshine with the #welovegamedevs hashtag. It was pretty great watching the stream of positivity coming through on there (at least until spammers and opportunists got in on it towards the end of the day). Anyway, I pulled together a list of the most mentioned accounts on there, to see which devs were getting the most love. I forgot about it until seeing the Notch/Mojang news today, which reminded me that multiple Mojang developers were high up on this list.
Account Name
number of all tweets
retweets
original tweets
1
@playstationeu
140
121
19
2
@bethblog
135
68
67
3
@notch
132
60
72
4
@ubisoft
119
61
58
5
@xboxuk
118
114
4
6
@square_enix_eu
76
60
16
7
@naughty_dog
75
18
57
8
@bungie
60
10
50
9
@jeb_
59
45
14
10
@sega
56
25
31
11
@mediamolecule
55
38
17
12
@capcom_uk
54
41
13
13
@assassinscreed
50
35
15
14
@dinnerbone
47
40
7
15
@ubisoftmtl
47
29
18
16
@rareltd
47
40
7
17
@codemasters
43
38
5
18
@simonhoneydew
41
40
1
19
@bioware
40
1
39
20
@playstationuk
32
28
4
I pulled in just under 2000 tweets altogether for the one day (August 22nd).
Other interesting things -
more people tweeted #saveshenmue than #shenmue, I'm not sure why I think that's interesting but I do.
#playstation, #xboxone and #wiiu all got exactly the same number of tweets, although not entirely fair because once you add in all the variations possible playstation comes out far ahead (although even that's helped by a big push from the @playstationeu account itself, which is also why it's at the top of the most mentioned list).
The constant reminders that my card details are out of date / membership is close to ending is getting really annoying. I'll re-up if I'm shown it's worth the money, quit nagging!
I'm approaching 30000 gamerscore on the Xbox and decided that the only decent way to go over the threshold was to finish Deadly Premonition. I played a few arcade games to get within 500 points of the target and am now ready to begin. I originally planned to watch the Brad and Ryan ER as I went along but quickly remembered that Vinny and Jeff had a much easier time of it so switched over.
The controls are as attrocious as it looks on video, i'm amazed anyone thought this was good?!
At the moment its a three way tie between Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead Redemption. It's been a fantastic year for games though, especially in the downloadable arena.
1) great games 2) it feels good to support charities and developers 3) it feels great to look philanthropic and generous when all you are doing is playing awesome games.
I'm not against the sponsored quest but I do think it sucks I can't finish it because my friends aren't GB users, I also don't like a quest linking you away from the site. Maybe I'd like it better if it opened in a new tab, but definitely not one that takes me off GB completely.
Log in to comment