GamerGate - #GamerGate - A War For Transparency lyrics

This will be presented in acts due to this being a very detailed controversy involving absolute MASSES of the gaming community. Act 1 - Closed Circles February 14th, 2013, developer and activist Zoe Quinn releases the text-adventure game entitled Depression Quest, a fictional work depicted to a**ert the player into the life of someone diagnosed with depression and their experiences in trying to manage. This was seen different than any other game due to its sole focus on dealing with a supposed mental illness and its attempt to accurately depict someone with those a**ortment of problems constantly hovering over them. The game is critically well-received by a number of critics for trying to tackle those mental issues but also separated by other's opinion of it counting as a "game" and not just a choose-your-own-adventure text. Zoe attempts to push this experience through Steam's Greenlight service for more independent games and reportedly backs out due to the hara**ment and negative criticism coming from her attempt. Later within 2013, Zoe's game is receiving more and more positive reviews from critical figures and eventually gets an invite into IndieCade 2013, a highly popular conference for independent developers to showcase their work. At this festival, her work manages to gain more attention within those creative circles and catches a notice as an IndieCade selection as well as votes for Best Narrative from Boston FIG, Category Winner from Ma**DiGi, and Honorable Mention from Mozilla GameOn. Sometime within this year or even previously a group of game developers, journalists, and overall individuals of highly influential positions form a private Google Group by the name of Gaming Journalist Professionals. The intentions of this group is to socialize and network among this crowd of people within the creative arts as well as discuss releases, ideas within the industry, and altogether discussion. Zoe Quinn is invited to this group for her merit within the gaming industry and is able to network with these individuals and an overall contact list of over a hundred people. Act 2 - The Quinnspiracy The people of Wizardchan are called into question due to the recent reaction of Zoe and her supposed hara**ment from the internet forum after her Tumblr was posted on the image boards with some spiteful comments along with a call to "raid" her. Accusations are tossed around causing the website to be condemned as a place for misogynistic white male virgins with Zoe presenting proof of a screenshot founding the call to arms, this is countered by the actual patrons of the website disclaiming any attempted raid or hateful phone calls she may have advertised with insufficient proof to back up her own accusations. Regardless of the argument, this sparks a new wave of support for both her and her game including numbers of websites and twitters advertising her movement including reaching the ears of Anita Sarkeesian herself. Zoe Quinn disregards her earlier doubts obtained from previous hara**ment from her project and decides to attempt to push Depression Quest through the Steam Greenlight service a second time, this time gaining some traction as it's accepted into the program as it was released in August 2014. The game is still looked upon with polarizing results from both critics and game enthusiasts alike before a cataclysmic blog post arises to change the views of her integrity as well as the entire gaming journalism community later that month. Eron Gjoni, Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend elaborates upon a lengthy number of posts about the entirety of their relationship together starting around the time of November 2013 through OKCupid services. The relationship elaborates as expected up until the point things take a turn for the worse. As the distance grew between the two, Eron had panic attacks about the reasons behind it until they broke up May 29th. Within this period of time the two keep contact with Zoe allegedly keeping Eron at a close distance while upholding a number of standards for the two to attempt to stay remotely faithful to each other and not sleep with other people. They give their relationship a second chance come June and things become a bit more quiet up until around July, where Eron confronts the doubts he raised numerous times before. This time his accusations are met with Zoe's confessional of cheating on Eron with Kotaku writer Nathan Grayson, her married boss Joshua Boggs, a**ociate of the two, game developer Robin Arnott as well as two others within that time, thus bringing their relationship to ruin and keeping to a standard break-up Zoe initiated. This leads to a ma**ive spiral of chat logs being exposed between the two and her attempts to continuously cover-up an already botched situation that automatically gets labelled as the "Quinnspiracy" due to the amount of controversy headed towards her way within the following days. Act 3 - Propaganda & Misinformation For the first 48 hours of Eron's posting, a bomb has been ignited that sends the indie gaming community into a violent upheaval with hoards of people hara**ing Zoe in any way possible as well as apparent dox and hacking attacks aimed directly at her image. Though these riots are ensued due to people questioning her moral standards another issue is talked about in the background: is it possible that Zoe Quinn gained more attention/positive review to her game Depression Quest in exchange for s**ual favor? The hashtag #GamerGate started by actor Adam Baldwin was the first to tackle this controversy with wildfire success in igniting the discussion of gaming journalism ethics. Due to the nature of vicious attacks on behalf of more radical groups, the issue turned from the ethics of these gaming sites into one of this overall attack just being fueled by a hatred of women, pulling figures like Anita Sarkeesian, Phil Fish, Tim Schafer, JonTron, Total Biscuit and others into the debacle. Fingers were pointed, more hara**ment on both sides of the fence was pulled into battle, and gaming journalism slowly seemed to turn on its target audiences by labeling gamers in general as white misogynistic males and declaring gaming dead due to its treatment of social justice, feminism, and Zoe Quinn. Out of these fires came the hashtag #NotYourShield to disclaim these attempts at labeling for minorities in both race and gender that attempted to bring the argument back onto point: where is the current transparency within gaming journalism? Around this same time while journalist articles were being tossed around claiming gaming as a dead culture arose leaked images from the Gaming Journalism Professionals private group, noting its ethics from influential figures and their coordination to tackle this controversy in their own way. This opened the floodgates to the GameJournoPros group's existence and only worked in opposition of their intentions of deswaying the people of their concerns of where the nepotism begins and ends, more people voicing their concern over the integrity of these figures by the minute. Surprisingly enough this has even lead to actions taken on account of 4chan's sole creator Christopher "Moot" Poole and banning all discussion within their video game forums of the issue as well. And while some people are automatically responding to this issue with the attention it deserves and are reviewing their ethical policies, this battle will wage on as long as others believe they don't have to answer for their own decisions. This is a war for transparency in an art people have already to believed to be in bed with publishers and otherwise with incidents like the Kane & Lynch scandal as well as EA's questionable methods, this is not the time to turn around and start throwing accusations towards your demographic. These leaked emails as well as 4chan's recent censorship are only some of the most recent developments in this story taking place within the last few days, where the next act leads, we'll see.