I haven’t written much on my blog about GamerGate on this blog. In general, I tend to think that what passes for games journalism somehow manages to set a lower bar than what passes for sports journalism. However, the leaderless nature of GamerGate means the movement tends to attract a lot of people who make games journalists look like level-headed exemplars of morality.
Take this story, for example, which someone had tweeted with the #GamerGate hashtag. The headline proclaims that a cruel injustice has been committed,
Media Outlets Lie About Survival Island 3; Game Gets Pulled From iTunes, Google
That’s awful. What sort of journalist would like about Survival Island 3–a game I hadn’t heard of before stumbling across this article? Those poor developers. How did this happen?
Well, according to the article, someone started a petition on Change.Org calling for the games removal. But that petition is filled with lies!
They’re parroting a story and advocating censorship based on a petition containing misinformation about a survival title that’s a sequel to Survival Island 2: Dinosaur Hunter.
Among other things, the Change.Org petition claims,
The game shamelessly promotes the fact that you will “have to fight with aboriginals” and uses warning messages like, “Beware of Aborigines!” when Indigenous people appear on screen. The game portrays Indigenous Australian’s as violent and aggressive. As well as trying to promote the Indigenous characters as authentic representations of a diverse culture through the description phrasing, “Meet real aboriginals”.
Don’t you hate it when you spend all your time making a game only to have people invent baseless lies about it? Where did the Change.Org liars come up with the fiction that the game says “Beware of Aborigines”? Again back to our intrepid journalist,
The “Beware of Aborigines!” line is from the app store page, along with the “New Weapon” line, both of which are used on the promotional screenshots but don’t actually appear in the game.
That’s right, these lies were copied directly from promotional material supplied by the game’s developers on its app store page. How insidious of the Social Justice Warriors at Change.Org to take the developer’s promotional materials at face value. Do these people have no sense of decency?