RIP TotalBiscuit

[The Extinguisher]

Beyond anything else, this is just so dishonest it warranted me saying something. Painting Gamergate as this big hit piece against women and female game developers and journalists is just...startlingly one sided and fatuous. Gamergate was a lot of things with a lot of people with a lot of agendas and it's certainly true that some people were what you're claiming the whole movement was. But to say it was just that. To paint it as this monolith of anti-female sentiment by a bunch of people isn't just a gross mis-characterization, it is well poisoning to the extreme. Especially because there was a not-insignificant female population within the Gamergate movement. You'd either have to deny that on its face (people have), claim that all the women were fake and were really just men (lots of people have) or were Uncle Toms (yet more people made this claim) to even scratch the surface of your assessment to be valid. Your identity politics is showing and it doesn't look good.

When GG started, it was an attempt to reign in some of the excesses of the game journalist clique, where they would promote the games of their friends without disclosure. IGN had been a joke for years, and Polygon and Kotaku had swung hard into that territory as well. Almost nobody who was super into gaming used game reviews from the big websites as anything except bias confirmation.

All that GG wanted was for the journalists to adhere to the SPJ Code of Ethics. This is especially important for hobbyist press, where there is an increased likelihood that the journalist has friends on the dev team or access they don't want to lose. Gamergate could've started and ended in 72 hours if they had come out and said "We will do that in the future, here is our updated ethics and disclosure policy." That is what TotalBiscuit fought for, and he followed that code in all of his review videos.

it really only takes the most basic of googling to figure this out. the 'movement' started out to harass a particular game developer, and then grew out toward gamers of all stripes that suspiciously weren't straight white men. Sure there was non straight white men in the movement, but a nonzero amount were fake (it pretty easy to spot usually) and its not like people are not capable of buying into their own oppression. There may have even been people there that came at it from a legitimate complaint about games journalism, but that was only ever a front for a harassment campaign that ended peoples careers, threatened people's life and livelihood, and in at least one case, caused a transgender game developer to kill herself

The block button exists for a reason. As does physically stepping away from the internet. If mean comments on the internet, even a lot of them all at once, can endanger your health, then you should probably not be on the internet.

I get death threats online on occasion. I usually laugh it off. Sometimes I'll block the person, other times I won't bother.

look, even if were putting aside the actual issue of cyber-bullying (which we shouldn't its an incredibly important issue and just saying 'get off the internet' is embarrassingly tone deaf), harassment mobs online lead very quickly to tangible danger. there are countless stories of people having to leave their homes for their own safety because their addresses get posted. bomb threats getting called in whenever a prominent feminist gamer speaks at an event. swat teams getting called on people who are statistically more likely to be killed by police.

John Bain, and men like him, have done actual tangible harm to the people around him and the video game industry as a whole is worse as a result of his actions. That cannot and doesn't get to be swept under the rug just because he died.