Gamers

David Pakman:
It's the latest development in what has become known as Gamergate, an online culture war.

Stephen Totilo:
You know, after the bold part that you quoted, Luke writes, in terms of how they use the word gamer, and this is clearly his interpretation. He says, it's being used in these cases, this term gamer, it's being used in these cases as shorthand, a catch-all term for the type of reactionary holdouts that feel so threatened by gaming's widening horizons. If you call yourself a gamer and are a cool person, keep on being a cool person.

Tig:
Hello and welcome back to episode two of Neutral Good, a show exploring politics and gaming. I'm your host, Tig. This season of Neutral Good is about hashtag Gamergate. And if you haven't gone back and listened to episode one about Anita Sarkeesian, then I highly recommend you give it a chance. I'll leave a link in the description.

Internet Aristocrat:
And to be frank with you, the whole Gamergate thing is depressing. It was the opportunity to finally kick the teeth in of social justice warriors and tumblerettes and draw a fucking line in the sand and push back against all these hypersensitive cunts. And for a while, it was working really, really well.

Tig:
Meet the internet aristocrat, an alt-right shitposting YouTuber from the early 2010s who made videos about current internet and gaming culture from the lens of a young man who has been marinating for years in the internet's favorite cesspool, 4chan. Here he is sarcastically praising Anita Sarkeesian on an entirely unrelated video about Mighty No. 9.

Internet Aristocrat:
And let's not forget about Anita. why I have my box-set collection of her DVDs sitting right next to me. It's a place of honor. I want it within reach so I can watch it at any time. All 18 episodes, nine hours of content, and it was delivered so punctually. Three months after she got that money, she had all that done. That is such determination and hard work. That was $160,000 well spent. So I'm sure you can imagine the excitement people felt when a certain spiritual successor to a franchise that's been beloved for many years was announced on Kickstarter.

Tig:
What you're about to hear is from one of the first videos discussing Proto Gamergate. It doesn't really have a name yet. The energy isn't entirely focused yet, but you can hear the beats.

Internet Aristocrat:
Now, what started all of this off was a WordPress blog called The Zoe Post. This was put up by a man named Aaron, who is Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend. In the entirety of the blog post, which is extraordinarily long, he goes through a laundry list of complaints as to why their relationship failed and why he's upset.

Tig:
I had a hard time with how to introduce the actual Zoe post, the blog post that started this, but I figured we should learn about it in the same way that many folks at the time heard about it through the lens of Internet Aristocrat's video. I have trimmed this a bit for time, but he's not entirely wrong. It is written by Aaron Joni, Zoe's ex-boyfriend. It is very long. It is a laundry list of grievances from an unhealthy relationship that didn't pan out. Let's hear what else the video has to say.

Internet Aristocrat:
It started to have authors who are writing pieces condemning the gaming audience as being sexist and misogynistic, as being racist and bigoted, as being overly violent rapist. This has been seen on Kotaku, on Rock Paper Shotgun, on Destructoid, on The Escapist, on any website you can name. This has been transpiring for the last five years. It seems more and more these outlier pieces have become the standard and that the narrative put forward in them has become cohesive and refined, like a talking point targeted at us as the audience. And there's a reason for that. And Zoe Quinn and what's happened over the last three days helps to point that out. That is why this is important and it needs to be talked about. This has nothing to do with her as a person in a relationship. I don't care that Zoe Quinn fucked five guys. I don't care that Zoe Quinn cheats on people she's in a relationship with. That's on her. That's her own personal accountability. Her ethical and moral failures as an individual are for her and her partner to deal with. However, when the people she's having an affair with, when the people she's cheating on her boyfriend with happen to be able to help her career through their actions related to the industry that she's in, then it becomes a piece of public discourse and it becomes important because it helps to highlight a massive flaw in the fifth estate,

Tig:
 This almost sounds noble. It's misguided but you can understand that on the surface this guy wants to shine a light on an ethical failing in games journalism. He specifically says it's not about Zoe Quinn as a person it's about ethics.

Internet Aristocrat:
Now if you're like me you've grown up watching mainstream media television media die a death And it didn't just die this death because of the invention of the internet. It died because of its lack of ethical standards. I'd be surprising no one by telling them that Fox News and MSNBC and CNN and every other mainstream media source you can name is corrupt. We've seen this happen and we've seen the result of their reporting afterwards. backroom relationships, money changing hands, manipulation, illicit acts, have slanted old media to the point where it's unreliable and no one trusts it. So when the fifth estate emerged, when we had internet journalism, we felt like we had something we could believe in. We were going to report to each other. We were going to be the honest people. We weren't going to let other outside factors influence truth. But it has not happened that way. And what took a century to kill old media has taken mere years to undermine new media. So let's start at the beginning and see what the hell is going on here and why this keeps being pushed down and why nobody's talking about it.

Tig:
The idea that nobody's talking about this is a pretty overly used trope, even in 2014. In fact, you can easily find articles written 10 years ago about some pretty glaring issues in gaming and games journalism that Internet Aristocrat is conveniently oblivious to or willfully ignoring. Lee Alexander has been publishing articles about gaming culture and its problems in major magazines and websites for years and had been doing so for years prior to Internet Aristocrat's videos.

Internet Aristocrat:
And that is where our WordPress blog, the Zoe post comes into play. Because now we get to see from the perspective of somebody who knows her personally, namely Aaron and their relationship. Now, the interesting thing about the Zoe post blog is that it chronicles and has captures of interactions on social media. And we get to see what kind of person Zoe Quinn is, and we get to see how she's a liar and a manipulator and how the people at wizard Jan who put together that album that's linked in the description. weren't really bullshitting you when they said she's fucking making it up. Now at the heart of the Zoe post, aside from all the things that Aaron wrote down about her, aside from her white lies and her omissions of truth besides the deceitful behavior and manipulation, is the infidelity. And he names specifically three people in his post. He omits two names. Of course, due to technological wizardry of other people, those two names have been found. And so this is a list of five guys. And again, I'm not putting their names out there because I think it's wrong she cheated in a relationship. I'm putting those names out there to show you, or to start to show you, how corrupt gaming journalism and game development have become. The biggest fucking issue that we're looking at right now is the name in the middle. Nathan Grayson. Who is Nathan Grayson? And why is it important we talk about his and Zoe's relationship? Nathan Grayson is a video game journalist. Nathan Grayson is somebody who wrote for Rock Paper Shotgun and currently writes for Kotaku. Nathan Grayson is somebody who has published positive pieces about Zoe's game, who has given her publicity, and who has marketed her product while having sex with her and not disclosing it.

Tig:
Whoa, that's a pretty big allegation. What's the source on this again? Let me check my notes here. A WordPress blog post? Well, in 2014, we surely don't have any way to vet these claims, do we? I'm going to read you an article from Steven Totillo, the former editor in chief at Kotaku. In recent days, I've been asked several times about a possible breach of ethics involving one of our reporters. While I believe no such breach occurred, I feel it is important for Kotaku readers who have questions to get clear answers. The questions involve Nathan Grayson, who began writing for us part-time in March and joined us full-time in July. The allegations have been extreme. Nathan has been accused of in some way trading positive coverage of a developer for the opportunity to sleep with her, of failing to disclose that he was in a romantic relationship with a developer he had written about, and that he'd given said developer's game a favorable review. all of those troubling claims we take seriously. All would be violations of the standards that we maintain. Having spoken to Nathan several times, having looked closely at the numerous messages sent our way by concerned readers, and having compared published timelines, our leadership teams find no compelling evidence that any of that is true. On March 31st, Nathan published the only Kotaku article he's written involving Zoe Quinn. It was about Game Jam, a failed reality show that Zoe and other developers were upset about being on. At the time, Nathan and Zoe were professional acquaintances. He quoted blog posts written by Zoe and others involved in the show. Shortly after that, in early April, Nathan and Zoe began a romantic relationship. He has not written about her since. Nathan never reviewed Zoe Quinn's game Depression Quest, let alone gave it a favorable review. Given the information available to us, both from Nathan and all sources presented online, I have no reason to believe any further action need be taken. The situation is fraught for all involved, including our readers, whose trust is paramount. Inquiry is always welcome. The article I just read, again, written by Steven Totillo, the editor in chief of Kotaku at the time. I will link it in the description. It came out a day after the Five Guys video that we've been listening to. But if that was the end of it, I would not have recorded this series. So enter TotalBiscuit.

David Pakman:
I'm joined today by John Bain, known to many of you in the gaming community as TotalBiscuit. He is a gaming commentator and critic on YouTube, also known as a video game broadcaster.

Tig:
Now, by this point, TotalBiscuit is pretty well known amongst normie gamers. in the sense that his videos would get recommended to you on YouTube no matter what kind of games you played. You probably have heard content from him. You've probably read a review or seen a video or heard a podcast or something. On August 18th, somebody on Twitter named Jake Eldon reached out to TotalBiscuit saying, Hey, TV, I was wondering if in your next content patch you could address the Zoe Quinn scandal and the overarching ramifications. TotalBiscuit replied, I know of no scandal. Helping out friends in the industry is commonplace. That and her game is free, so nobody is getting ripped off. Jake Elden replies, I think the concern is that regardless of the price of her game, a journalist shouldn't give praise when there is a clear conflict of interest. I just thought it was interesting. It is your show after all. just hadn't seen a lot of discussion. The replies are folks glomming on saying, yeah, cover this. This is obviously a scandal. You know, she's sleeping with industry journos. How are you not covering this? There is multiple replies saying that TotalBiscuit himself must be trading sex for not talking about this so as to lump him in. So, on the same day that Internet Aristocrat's Five Guys video drops, TotalBiscuit posts a twitlonger saying this. The long and short of it is that Zoe Quinn, the developer of Depression Quest, is being accused of exploiting the nepotism that tends to plague this industry by getting a bunch of favorable coverage from people she has supposedly slept with. In addition to this, videos supposedly critical of these actions have been taken down from YouTube with copyright claims, including a video by a smaller channel called Mundane Matt. It's difficult to tell what is true and what is not. 4chan is all up in arms over it, which means that alongside any truth, there's always going to be ridiculous stories and trolling attempts. The kind of places posting information about this whole thing are also places I take with a pinch of a salt, or who have already clearly outlined agendas. Internet Aristocrat did the main video on this, a channel mostly dedicated to debunking SJW topics and complaining about how prevalent they are in today's media. What is clear, however, are two things using the DMCA to take down criticism of your product is a terrible idea and is unethical, if not, in many cases, flat out illegal. Don't ever fucking do this. Blah, blah, blah. And that she apparently took down his video because it used a picture from the game without permission. All of this comes from the bits of the internet aristocrat video that I've cut just because there's just too much to go into. All of this paragraph is from that part of the video, and that part of the video was debunked. The copyright claim on this other YouTuber was made by somebody who named themselves Zoe Quinn in the content ID system to do the copyright claim, but was not Zoe Quinn's copyright claim. He continues, however, it is entirely possible that she did not issue this claim and that someone impersonating her. It's easier than it should be to do this on YouTube because YouTube system is terrible. That's always worth bearing in mind, even though the evidence I've seen up to this point seems to indicate that she is responsible. Again, you can't see very far in a shitstorm. So he spends way too much time giving it credence. And then all of this stuff turns out to be debunked pretty quickly. The Kotaku article debunks a lot of the ethics issues. And yet TotalBiscuit, who is a name that many gamers trust, is already spreading just about all of the unfounded claims from the video to a much wider audience and generally just giving credence to the ethics angle versus the misogynist roots of where this really came from.

Lance (The Serfs):
There's just one problem. It didn't happen. Not the harassment and death threats. That all happened to barbaric proportions. We're talking about the manifesto. Zoe Quinn never traded sexual favors for positive reviews of their game. They never did it to try and boost sales or generate more money. Because the game is free. It always was.

Tig:
Here is David Pakman interviewing TotalBiscuit about quote unquote ethics in gaming journalism. I'll link the full interview in the description.

David Pakman:
if we want to address or have a real conversation about whether one side or the other has elements of sexism, for example, we can't even really have that conversation, I find, or I've been unable to, because very quickly the individual I'm speaking to will say, if you've seen what appears to be sexism from our side, those weren't really people that are on our side.

John Bain (TotalBiscuit):
It's the real problem with a leaderless hashtag movement that has zero entry requirements, doesn't it? And it's also a problem on the other side because those have claimed it is anti-Gamergate. But anti-Gamergate isn't really anything. Unless you are taking part in a hashtag like, say, StopGamergate2014, which didn't go anywhere, then all you're really saying at that point is that there's some organized other side. And there clearly isn't. And more to the point, I would say that even Gamergate itself is not a side. There is so much disagreement within it.

David Pakman:
No, and it seems that there are these two sides within Gamergate, right? The one that says the issue... I'd say there are more than that, frankly. Well, at least the two big narratives seem to be, and correct me if I'm wrong, Gamergate is about journalistic ethics or Gamergate is about misogyny and racism within games.

John Bain (TotalBiscuit):
I wouldn't say that those are the only facets of it. There are those that believe in the notion of social Marxism and the infiltration of progressive radical social justice ideas into gaming media and gaming journalism. And some people object to that. Some people do not object to it. There are people in it solely because they feel alienated by the games media that they trusted for so long. And that really boils down to the gamers are dead articles that were released. There are people in it solely for that reason. And yes, I do believe there are some people, a minority, but some people that are in it to cause trouble. Now, whether or not they are trolls, whether or not they are actual misogynists, that really believe that the presence of women in this industry is somehow a threat, it's very hard to quantify that. I think the only way to get past it is to focus on those that wish to discuss constructive issues and wish to make this industry better and freeze out those that do not. Yesterday, I interviewed the editor-in-chief of Kotaku, Stephen Tutillo. We had a two-hour conversation on various allegations that had been leveled towards his publication. I asked him to answer those questions. Now, he does not believe that they need an ethics policy, and he believes that instituting one would simply be an opportunity for people to say gotcha at particular moments and to rifle through his site's history, which is a valid concern. I don't have an ethics policy written either, but I'm also very clear when I create videos and especially advertorial content as to my level of disclosure and what I'm willing to do and what I'm not willing to do. The Escapist has an ethics policy and revised it recently. Polygon has an ethics policy and revised it recently. But Jenny was correct in saying that it's all well and good to do so and I think that's a very positive step forward and it also does a good job to prove that actually even early on this thing definitely was about ethics to some degree. but we need to see how they implement that and then there is a great deal of disagreement going forward from people as to what these sites should be doing. Some people believe that Polygon, which has self-identified as a progressive site now in a recent letter from their editor-in-chief, should not be injecting gender politics into reviews. Some people believe that that is OK. Some people believe that the the problem is merely the scoring system that they use and that the removal of the score and aggregation on Metacritic would allow them to espouse these perhaps more niche views without worrying too much about whether or not the score is going to impact things like developer bonuses or drag down attention online. Well, let's

David Pakman:
Let's pause there if we can, because I think this is an interesting thing. Would you agree, I see, from my point of view, I see two very different issues that you've presented there. On the one hand, there's this issue of disclosure in terms of what money has changed hands, what promises have been made, and what are the relationships between the reviewer and other interested parties. That's one issue. yes a very separate issue is the quote injection of gender politics which as i see it people can agree or disagree with that people can have a view that is sympathetic to those issues within gaming or not but really that's not an issue of ethics i believe because a publication not my program is an opinion program it is a progressive program and it is it is it is certainly my view someone can choose not to watch my show because they don't want to hear that point of view, but to say that ethically there's anything wrong with having a point of view, I totally disagree with.

John Bain (TotalBiscuit):
Yes, I disagree with that in principle as well. I think it's perhaps a little more complicated than merely saying we don't want gender politics or political injection of any description in games reviews because many do view that discussion as irrelevant. And they really just want to know, is the game any good? Because for the past 20 to 30 years, games reviews have strictly been buyers guides.

David Pakman:
And that's exactly my point, though, John, which is maybe then that would just not be the right publication for some gamers to get their information from. And there wouldn't be any ethical claim there as long as there's disclosure with regard to payment. Right.

Tig:
So two things I want to address here. One is that TotalBiscuit is still perpetuating the idea that Gamergate itself is not organized. In another episode, I will be able to drop a lot more information about the 4chan side of this and the fact that while he's recording these videos, there's an IRC channel dedicated to trying to get Zoe Quinn to unalive herself. So that's one piece. The other is that in the replies, he is still running interference for GamerGate as an ethics issue. And here is Aardvark88 calling out TotalBiscuit's arguments in this interview. Aardvark88 says, David is absolutely correct. on a publication's political agenda having absolutely nothing to do with ethics. TB is trying to imply that aggregate review sites somehow impact upon this because publishers slash developers idiotically have tied bonuses to scores. It doesn't. That's the nature of reviews. They're subjective to the publication and each reviewer has its own definition of what constitutes a good game, whether it's gameplay graphics, story, or whatever. The issue about journalists receiving monetary incentives to positively review and publicize video games is a legitimate issue. It's just a shame that TB and so many others feel the need to latch onto the Gamergate movement in order to have this discussion. because it's entirely separate to what Gamergate started as. A jilted ex-lover making false claims about his ex-girlfriend and trying to humiliate her online and it's actually harming the ability for their voices to be heard. TotalBiscuit replies, I've been speaking about the ethical issues regarding this since day one. If anyone is doing the latching, it's those that are trying to tack Gamergate is literally ISIS or Gamergate is a right-wing hate movement. I was here talking about ethics before this thing was even called Gamergate, and I'll be talking about them long after it disappears. I will agree with you on one thing. Focusing on someone's relationship is harming the ability for voices to be heard, which is why I'm using mine to steer the conversation in a more positive direction. I'd ask you join me. So while he says that in the interview that he just talked about with David, where he says that he interviewed Steven Totillo, he still brings up the relationship issues as the primary concern. I will link this interview in the description as well. It is about two hours and I highly recommend you check it out for yourself. Steven does a great job, I think, of explaining how much of a nothing burger most of this was and why Kotaku approached it the way they did, which to me seemed honest and in good faith.

John Bain (TotalBiscuit):
We're going to dive into some pretty heavy topics and we're going to be talking about allegations of conflict of interest specifically, and then we're going to be talking about a number of different things that are going to be more industry focused and perhaps less involved with Kotaku itself, but something that I would value and I'm sure the viewers also would value your perspective on. So let's dive right into this now. Allegations were raised that Nathan Grayson had a friendly and then romantic relationship with a game developer. Now, around this time, he penned an article, which was not a review. It was an article that focused on the failed Polaris game jam. And as for his sources, he referenced Zoe Quinn and he referenced Robin Arnott, I believe. And There was no disclosure of any description as to whether or not the writer of this article had any relationship with either of these people and it was later revealed that there was a relationship that occurred and that it was chronologically extremely close to the article and some people, including myself, have made the allegation that It is highly unlikely that Nathan Grayson was not friends with said source prior to them beginning this romantic relationship, because it doesn't really work that way. And as a result, this should have been a case where either this article was disclosed due to his relationship with the sources involved, or that he had recused himself entirely and that somebody else should have written the article. Now, I'd like to hear your response specifically to that particular incident.

Stephen Totilo:
Well, obviously, I think the work that we've done on the site and the statements and comments that I've made on the site show that I took it seriously from the get-go. When this thing wasn't even called Gamergate, it was really just about a post about Zoe Quinn and a very personal post about Zoe Quinn. that was leading to a lot of harassment of her. There was nevertheless questions, did Nathan Grayson, a Kotaku reporter, was he in a relationship? Was he dating Zoe Quinn at the time that he was writing about her? And did he not mention that? Wouldn't that be a problem? And I thought, yeah, that's certainly something we should look into and we should be able to answer that question. And I would be troubled if he was dating somebody and not telling the readers and yet going ahead and writing an article. At the time, it was clouded in other issues of did he review the game, which as you already pointed out, he didn't. Within days of me seeing this, frankly, while I was on vacation, I still said, this is important. I need to do something about this. I'm not going to wait until I come back from vacation. So I put up a post on Kotaku to address this head on and to let people know where things stood. And my priority was to make sure that there was no clear uh, impropriety that had occurred, uh, that the worst of what was being said either happened or didn't happen, and we'd come clean about it either way. Uh, and that was my priority to figure out, and that's what I addressed at the time. And I hope that that showed an act of, uh, good faith on my part in order to take this stuff seriously and to recognize the gravity of it. But what you're talking about, we begin to move into the more murky areas of, when are we friends enough that I should be disclosing in an article? And you have your read on the likelihood of whether people, how people, the degree to which somebody would be friends or close to somebody within days of them hooking up with them romantically. But really, you know, it can be different for every person. It can be different for any pair of people. And what I'm looking at from my perspective is, What do I expect reporters to be doing? What do I expect a reporter like Nathan Grayson to be doing as he's covering the San Francisco game development scene? I don't expect him to be staying home. I don't expect him to only be coming out of his house when it's time for a publisher preview event or when it's time that a game company or an indie developer said, it is now time to cover my game. I expect him, as he does, to go out and meet game developers, AAA developers, indie developers. I expect him to find sources, make connections, as I would, as I have done with sources of my own, get a drink with them, go to dinner with them. At some point in the process of reporting, and in my experience, I've been doing this for over a decade at this point, you find certain sources you prefer talking to, you find people that you recognize, you could be friends with them. If this was a different field, I would say, okay, maybe I will try to be friends with them. But I personally, I try to, draw that line. I don't want to consider myself to be the friend of anybody I might be writing about but it could be tricky because you know there's sometimes just nice people or whatever you like them and we wind up in these murky areas where at what point has a reporter crossed the line that they should be disclosing and the Nathan situation As far as I understand it, did he know Zoe Quinn? Sure, of course, he didn't try to hide that. Was he friendly with her? Or was he friends with her? Or was he professional acquaintances with her? We're in a realm of not really being able to classify that, I think, one way or the other. And so we have to look at the behavior of the reporter and we need to look at the body of work and what we assume. But we're in the realm of assumption. My read on it, my understanding from Nathan, my understanding from Zoe Quinn, my understanding from anything anybody's ever sent me about this, is that the timing of the article and proximity to the relationship certainly raises questions. My understanding, based on everything that I've been told, based on everything I've understood, and based on how I expect reporters to be reporting, is that the two of them knew each other. The two of them had some degree of reporter-source relationship. I am not convinced that they had crossed a line that they were of a level of friendship that compromised him to a point where he felt he needed to disclose. But this is not something we can ever draw a clear line on. If you and I do this, this podcast here, are we friends? Maybe not, yet, if we do another one a month from now. Now are we friends? What about the month after that? At what point, if I were writing about you, would I need to disclose, oh, I regularly do a podcast with TotalBiscuit? Okay, well, at what point would I disclose, I'm friends with TotalBiscuit? When would that friendship technically begin? If at some point, you and I get married, or we're dating, or something like that, or we discover that we're long-lost brothers, might have the same parents, at that point, clearly, we are on the other side of a line of necessary disclosure. But before that, the reporters, I find, will continue to confront this area of murkiness. And it is simpler when you have a reporter who's not at all in a scene. When you have a reporter in a scene, there is going to be murkiness. And that's why the second thing that I wrote about Gamergate was about, and it involved Patreon and involved some of the other things I know you want to talk about. But I said right at the top of that article that we are well aware that this has raised questions about what we are. I'll just read it to you, actually, just to just to help you out. Let me scroll up on my monitor here. I can get it for you. I said we've long been wary of the potential undue influence of corporate gaming on games reporting, and we've taken many actions to guard against it. The last week has been, if nothing else, a good warning to all of us about the pitfalls of cliquishness in the indie dev scene and among the reporters who cover it. We've absorbed these lessons and assure you that moving ahead will err on the side of consistent transparency on that front too." What's important to me there is, and I hope is important to our readers and even to the people listening and watching this, is that we get it. We get it that there is skepticism. We get it that to some, it just doesn't look good to be dating a person that you wrote about the week before. And I get that. I'd rather my reporters weren't dating developers, frankly. And thankfully, it's extremely uncommon. But once it happens, the best that we can do is say, please judge the overall body of work. Please judge how this reporter and all of us disclose and don't disclose going forward. I mean, I've written pieces about Nguy Krohl. Everybody knows, I think, who knows him and knows me, that we're good friends. And when I've written about him, I've certainly acknowledged that we know each other. I don't think there's any reason with Kotaku that we can't do that.

Tig:
Again, please check out this interview in its full format. I will link it in the description. Thank you for following along in this episode of Neutral Good. We have so much more to cover and there's just not enough time to do it. There's so much more coming up and stay tuned for episode three.