stephen_totilo 1 point 5 hours ago

Hey. I'm here because I saw a link to this thread, checked it out and figured I'd dive in for once! I'll probably regret ever mentioning this publicly, but I'm not someone who blocks people (or even mutes people) on Twitter. I listen to feedback, pro and con. I don't look at KiA that often these days, but I'll give it a glance from time to time. Usually I come away shaking my head, because the vibe here is so negative, I've never seen a single good Kotaku article posted about, and, well... this might amuse you... but my sense of a lot of what I see with KiA and Gamergate is that people involved traffic in outrage. At least, that's what seems to bubble up.

That's possibly why you and I would forever be at an impasse.

You're calling on me to "stop with the outrage bullshit" and you can probably cite some examples of what you mean by that on Kotaku, but I do not see our site as quick to outrage. You should see the extent to which WE talk about "outrage culture" in our own team chat. Or, you know, look at how my colleagues and I have actually written about Gamergate and dramas around it. I was calling for people to chill out in September and that's after I talked about ethics questions in August. When I wrote about harassment against Brianna Wu in October, I included a quote from a Gamergate supporter saying they denounced the harassment. I recently wrote about Anita Sarkeesian giving a talk at NYU and broke down points she made that I thought had merit, and noted issues with others. No moralizing, I don't think. Meanwhile, my Twitter feed is frequently full of folks presumably sympathetic to Gamergate yelling at me about this or that, perpetually outraged, it seems, and incapable, despite following me of ever having a good word to say about any of the good work we do. The amount of anger I got just on the Saturday morning after the DC Gamergate bomb threat alone was absurd, all this fuming on Twitter about how we surely weren't going to cover it, all the while we were doing our best to confirm with the police what happened. And then we published a story in about the same amount of time it took for us to report out the Wu incident in October. People were still pissed! I really don't get how some people can seem so angry all the time. I couldn't live my life that way.

So... outrage, moralizing. Let's pick some recent controversies. ACU's lack of female characters? I wrote about how questions about diversity were a no-win for devs to answer. Go further back to what Eric Kain says was one of the sparks of Gamergate, the Mass Effect 3 ending flap. I ran a piece supporting gamers' calls for the ending to be changed even though I liked the ending. I'm not saying we don't express opinions and say how we feel. Hell, I disagree with some of the opinions. But, come on. Your "activism" complaint is so loaded.

Lastly, I'm not going to fire good writers, reporters and critics because they made mistakes or because you perceived they made mistakes. Patricia and Nathan have done enough stellar writing and reporting--much of it celebrating the exploits of gamers--that they'd be a credit to any outlet that employed them. I like them where they are, and I actually think you'd love talking games with either of them.