Evil Hat Games gets GamerGate card game pulled from OBS with boycott threat


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For those that haven't heard, James "Grim" Desborough published a GamerGate card game via his publishing company, Postmortem Studios, which went up on various OneBookShelf sites (e.g. RPGNow and DriveThruRPG) on December 4th. (Note that, while Postmortem has a Paizo outlet, the game has apparently not been uploaded here.)

Very shortly after it was uploaded, the guys at Evil Hat Games started threatening to pull their products from OBS unless the GamerGate card game was dropped.

Rather saddeningly, the game went down almost immediately. While Grim eventually put it up for sale elsewhere, it's still upsetting that this happened at all. Somewhat hopefully, the line from OBS is that internal discussion is still going on over this. They seem to be fairly open to input as well.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that I think that Grim courts controversy, often in a manner that could charitably described as lacking nuance. That said, I find it to be beyond disgusting that Evil Hat Games thinks that they can try to coerce a vendor into removing products that they personally don't like.

Apparently they're also fine that people can buy books such as F*&! for Satan, Choice and Blood (which can be summed up as "d20 Modern: Abortion"), and the infamous Carcosa, but a card game that leans in support of GamerGate? That's apparently a bridge too far.

A few caveats here:

I'm a supporter of GamerGate, having read more than a few articles about both the movement itself and what it means when viewed against a broader cultural context. Simply put, it doesn't live up to the "harassment campaign" that its detractors have labeled it as. I mention this because I'm guessing that some people will respond with something along the lines of "it's not wrong to take a stand against something that glorifies a hate group." That stance is based on a fundamentally incorrect premise; namely that GamerGate is a hate group to begin with.

Secondly, I'm anticipating that some people will respond with "Evil Hat has the right to determine where they sell their games." That's true, but questions of "rights" are questions of legality, not ethics. You have the legal right to ignore someone who's injured and needs help, but doing so is ethically corrupt.

While (what I call) a "personal boycott" is simply choosing whether or not you want to patronize a given business or outlet, that's different from what Evil Hat is doing, which is an "organized boycott" (again, my term). An organized boycott is a public pressure group that's designed to use the threat of economic harm in order to use coercion against a business or other entity in order to make them comply with your demands. As the ACLU states:

Quote:
In contrast, when private individuals or groups organize boycotts against stores that sell magazines of which they disapprove, their actions are protected by the First Amendment, although they can become dangerous in the extreme. Private pressure groups, not the government, promulgated and enforced the infamous Hollywood blacklists during the McCarthy period. But these private censorship campaigns are best countered by groups and individuals speaking out and organizing in defense of the threatened expression.

So I think that what Evil Hat is doing is founded not only on a fundamentally misdirected sense of outrage, but is ethically corrupt as well.

If the GamerGate card game had been hosted at Paizo, I wonder if they would have received the same threat (and I wonder how they would have responded).


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I very much doubt Paizo would ever put themselves in a position where they would be left open to that kind of threat. This isn't the sort of product they would host on their site to begin with.


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Alzrius wrote:
If the GamerGate card game had been hosted at Paizo, I wonder if they would have received the same threat (and I wonder how they would have responded).

My suspicion, based on knowing little more about the game than you wrote, is that they wouldn't have hosted it in the first place.


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Scott Betts wrote:
I very much doubt Paizo would ever put themselves in a position where they would be left open to that kind of threat. This isn't the sort of product they would host on their site to begin with.

It's exactly the sort of product that they would host on their site to begin with, right alongside the Hentacle card games (by the same designer), the aforementioned Carcosa and Choice and Blood, etc.

thejeff wrote:
My suspicion, based on knowing little more about the game than you wrote, is that they wouldn't have hosted it in the first place.

My suspicion is that your suspicion is wrong; see above.

That said, I'm not at all clear on how what I wrote would convince you that this was something Paizo wouldn't host, since I didn't talk about the actual content, mechanics, or artwork in the game itself. I included a link to where it's currently being sold - if you take a look at the examples, you'll see it's thoroughly benign.

Liberty's Edge

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You like to redefine words to make having an intelligent discussion with you difficult, don't you?

Liberty's Edge

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Ask Felicia Day how much of a hate group that the GamerGaters are.

Hint: 30 minutes from "I'm afraid of their actions" to them actually taking those actions is not a good sign.

Full disclosure: my twitter account is on their ban list.


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Krensky wrote:
You like to redefine words to make having an intelligent discussion with you difficult, don't you?

This post makes it clear that you have no idea what constitutes an "intelligent discussion."

Mephron wrote:

Ask Felicia Day how much of a hate group that the GamerGaters are.

Hint: 30 minutes from "I'm afraid of their actions" to them actually taking those actions is not a good sign.

Full disclosure: my twitter account is on their ban list.

Felicia's piece was about her being afraid of what *might* happen - telling trolls on the internet that you're afraid of them attacking you makes it unsurprising that they then turn around and do so. Tragic, to be sure, and in no way whatsoever Felicia's fault, but unsurprising.

Other than the fact that she conflates "GamerGate" with "misogynists," this has no ties to GamerGate at all - particularly since whomever doxxed her was anonymous about it, making the very idea that GamerGate did that to her an unsupported claim (particularly in light of anti-GamerGaters doxxing Gamergate supporters) - and that's likely due to her having mistaken them for being a harassment campaign to begin with (which is understandable, given that the video game journalists took over that message almost immediately and with great coordination, e.g. the "gamers are dead" stories).

Liberty's Edge

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Ad hominens, victim blaming, kooky conspiracy theories...

Could you use Social Justice Warrior and Victim Olympics in a sentence so I can fill out my bingo card?


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Krensky wrote:
Ad hominens, victim blaming, kooky conspiracy theories...

Ironically, both of your posts so far have been ad hominems, have ignored the fact that I explicitly said what happened to Felicia Day wasn't her fault, and the fact that the "conspiracy theories" are demonstrably true (or are you saying that gaming journalists mailing list doesn't exist, and that no "gamers are dead" stories were written?).

Quote:
Could you use Social Justice Warrior and Victim Olympics in a sentence so I can fill out my bingo card?

Once again, you complain that it's not an "intelligent discussion" while actively threadcrapping. So you're about at par for an anti-GamerGater.


Well, sure, if somebody or a company finds something offensive for whatever reason, they should...

Alzrius wrote:
Apparently they're also fine that people can buy books such as F&&+ for Satan, Choice and Blood (which can be summed up as "d20 Modern: Abortion"), and the infamous Carcosa, but a card game that leans in support of GamerGate? That's apparently a bridge too far.

...wait, what?


First, I don't think that is actually irony. Secondly, I think what krensky is doing is the fallacy fallacy, not ad hominem. Nothing to contribute really but it always irks me a little when the wrong fallacy is applied or someone says irony when no irony is there. Blame Alanis Morissette for that one.

Paizo Glitterati Robot

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Locking this one. We really aren't OK with facilitating threads where the sole purpose is seems to be inviting dog piling or drama from other parts of the web and other publishers, particularly when the thread surrounds an issue which is heated enough without these factors.

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