Not So Hot: GamerGate’s Deep Freeze and the “Facts” on Game Journos

Sometimes it really is about ethics—or is it? GamerGate members (ostensibly) launched a site this week called Deep Freeze, which, in their own words, aims to serve as “a journalism reference resource, conceived to supply a reader with easy-digestible[sic] information to determine the reliability of an individual writer or outlet.”

What’s the yardstick for reliability? DF offers seven categories, like “sensationalism,” “dishonesty,” and “collusion” as their measures, as shown in the in-line graphic here, but the text is more revealing: “Entries don‘t necessarily represent ethical improprieties — they might represent a strong appearance of impropriety, or even unprofessional actions that are not strictly breaches of journalistic ethics.”

So this site, reportedly a journalistic reference, may or may not be accurate, and may measure possible things that appear to be ethical improprieties to some person or persons. The creators? GamerGate? Objective audiences? There’s no telling from this wording, however; no specific set of criteria or frameworks are identified. Perhaps the category/offense pages have better measures.

Well, this starts off with a bang—who is the arbiter of what is deserving of coverage? Isn’t that the purview of the writer or editor? Offenders in this category include Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett, who wrote about Tentacle Bento and may have helped get the Kickstarter canceled. But really, Luke Plunkett just had an opinion. Another offender? Patrick Garratt of VG24/7, for writing about Mark Kern, Law and Order, and cycles in the gaming press.

Censorship, then, seems to be equated with “saying things we-the-compilers don’t like.” Also in that section are the main players in the GJPs list after the initial outcry against Zoe Quinn last August, but that’s been covered ad nauseam by everyone, ever; it’s likely everyone has their own opinion on that.

There are some people who think Deep Freeze should just be ignored as another ridiculous arm of GamerGate. Don’t write about it, people have said. Don’t link it. The latter is probably good practice—why link it?—but not talking about these wholesale creations goes against our primary core mission as rhetoricians. We observe, note, and critique; we follow lines of reason, broken or not, and analyze rhetorical situations. The creation of a website meant to track so-called “ethical violations” should be answered and analyzed in turn.

That said, let’s take a closer look then at some of the “ethical violations” tracked on Deep Freeze.

First and foremost, there’s no way to measure Gies’ intent in writing this review beyond the idea of any review: producing a reasoned review of one’s opinion of and experience with a game (which Gies did), and the “reference” (proof?) linked to here on the Deep Freeze site is a page about various types of troubling writing, including hasty reviews and reporting — nothing that specifically indicates any proof of Gies’ intent beyond base conjecture.

Second, Matthew O’Mara of the Financial Post awarded Bayonetta 2 the same score as Gies, and is not listed on the Deep Freeze site, perhaps because he focused his review more on a lackluster, repetitive game when compared to the original (also the angle Gies takes when discussing sexism). Nor is Wictor Sundell, who also called the game out for sexism in the Swedish Level 7 site.

Danielle Riendeau was also listed for similar reasons, having given Dragon’s Crown a 6.5 in her review (NOTE: this is a fixed link; the original was mislinked). However, DF’s “approved” site The Escapist gave the game a 6 in a review written by Mai’Dai Lashani (also not included in the DF lists).

Also graced with an entry: comedy writer Anthony Burch. Why? He was drawn as part of the People of GamerGate series, apparently. Nothing else. No “emblems.” Just that reference.

Another gem is the DF page on Collusion, which includes this: “Good examples are membership in GameJournoPros or participation in the “Gamers are dead” or similar media blitzes. This happens even when behind-the-scenes cooperation is strongly suspected and still unproven — and is only a matter of internal DeepFreeze classification, as articles involved would still be deserving of a Dishonesty or Sensationalism emblem individually.”

Membership—and only that—in GJPs is enough to get writers listed in DF, which, like Burch’s inclusion, is troubling for reasons we’ll expand on later. For now, let’s look at who’s not included. Missing from Deep Freeze: GG-friendlies such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari, both of whom write for Breitbart, among other outlets. Yiannopoulos and Bokhari have appeared on several “good” journalist lists (like this one), these alternatives seem like alternative agendas rather than journalists who pass the criteria from the Reuters handbook posted to #SPJEthicsWeek in regard to GamerGate interests (nor do they pass the SPJ criteria for ethics offered on their website). Also missing is William Usher of One Angry Gamer, another GG-approved writer, whose bio mocks the GameJournosPros list. Usher also drops in judgments about devs in game write-ups, another move not likely to pass muster with the Reuters handbook as his qualifiers on Tim Schafer are entirely unnecessary to the linked Broken Age round-up.

Here are those Reuters “absolutes”:

• Always hold accuracy sacrosanct
• Always correct an error openly
• Always strive for balance and freedom from bias
• Always reveal a conflict of interest to a manager
• Always respect privileged information
• Always protect their sources from the authorities
• Always guard against putting their opinion in a news story
• Never fabricate or plagiarise
• Never alter a still or moving image beyond the requirements of normal image enhancement
• Never pay for a story and never accept a bribe

I’ve made clear my opinion that games media, as an enthusiast press, tends to need its own set of standards, but as I saw these introduced repeatedly, let’s look at one of these writers specifically, first through just one of his articles, in line with those Reuters standards: in his “Avengers Director Joss Whedon is Feminism’s Battered Wife,” Yiannopoulos begins with an altered image of Whedon, writes from a very specific angle in no way free from bias, and never attempt to avoid injecting opinion into what seems to be, from the opening line, a news story. In a staggering demonstration of journalistic ethics, Yiannopoulos includes one partial quote Whedon gave to Buzzfeed and closes off the piece with more than a dozen tweets from his own feed.

That’s just one article; Yiannopoulos is guilty of the kind of hasty reporting and lack of correction (via KiA) outlined in the example linked to Gies’ page above, and while I can’t speak for any managers of his or what he tells them, participation in pro-GG events while reporting on GamerGate seems like as much a conflict of interest, if not more than, the kind listed on Jenn Frank’s Deep Freeze page (“conflicts” the Guardian didn’t deem worth noting per their policies).

Why these disparities? Because, again, there’s no solid measure of “ethics” GG is working from. There’s no single measurement of ethics outline on the DF site, and it seems they’re not working in terms of pure journalistic ethics or any single ethical framework at all. That lack of statement undermines the entire project; if you’re going to measure something, you must also establish standards, and stick with them. In conversation with GG supporters, we often hear about objectivity, which has been defined to me, again and again, as ensuring readers have the room to decide for themselves, to make up their own minds.

The American Press Institute has some interesting things to say on the idea of objectivity, in both historical and contemporary contexts. Per a piece on their official site, the idea of objectivity began to come to prominence in the early 20th century, particularly in the 1920s, and at that time, objectivity “called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information – a transparent approach to evidence – precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.”

There’s a lot on that page about untrained witnesses and objective methods over objective writers, all of which could apply in varying degrees to many parts of the gaming press; it’s a good read. But let’s not skew too far from the material at hand. The fact is, if GamerGate is indeed the “consumer revolt against corrupt journalism” it purports to be, according to criteria on Deep Freeze, these three examples above should all be included in the database while several others should be removed, if only to observe an objective method. Even if we were to grant any credibility to events on the GameJournoPros mailing list, for instance, that are often referenced as collusion, blacklisting, etc., flagging everyone who was simply a member in this database is akin to complaints GamerGaters often make when they say only a few trolls harass anyone under the auspices of GG. Don’t blame everyone for a few assholes, they say. How is flagging someone as a mere member of a list, who never spoke up in so-called questionable situations (and maybe never saw them; we don’t know) benefitting anyone? How is labeling people who have left the industry with tags of their old jobs as though they’re current a benefit? For instance:

Looks like a current position, yes? Dan Crabtree of GamerNode. Except Crabtree has reportedly left media and the date of his last post for GN was nearly a year ago, in late May 2014. Before then? October 2013. So unless Crabtree was writing for another site and the information on DF is inaccurate, Crabtree’s only known “violation” pre- and post-GamerGate was not dropping off the GJPs list. This is conjecture, but reasoned conjecture: it certainly looks like he wasn’t an active member of the press. And yet, on a site which lists “uses ggautoblocker” as an ethics violation, due, we suppose, to complaints that the innocent get blocked because they follow known GGers, he’s listed as a possibly unethical journalist.

This is the moving goalpost of GamerGate ethics in action. It’s a movement built on sand, ever-shifting, and the collective is so busy looking left that they cannot look to the right. Should the creators of DF be held, though, to some journalistic standards of ethics? No; they’re representing themselves as watchdogs, part of this aforementioned consumer revolt. But they are striving for some undefined level of objectivity, relying on that frequent GG language mentioned above. From their “about” page: “DeepFreeze strives, whenever possible, for maximum objectivity — supplying factual information so that readers can form an opinion on their own.”

Is this all factual information? Some things happened; certain people reviewed certain games and gave certain scores, for instance, but those facts are not being presented objectively. For example, is it fact that Luke Plunkett had a hand in getting Tentacle Bento suspended from Kickstarter? I don’t know; I haven’t seen any evidence. Kickstarter has its own rules about allowed content, and several other writers questioned this particular project (none of whom are mentioned by Deep Freeze; you can find a partial list here). Only Plunkett, perhaps because Kotaku is a favored GG target. Plunkett also never states flatly that the project should be pulled; he merely says it “reflects poorly on Kickstarter” and references Apple’s loose policies on what’s allowed in the App Store. In other words, he’s critiquing Kickstarter’s application and interpretation of rules, rather than censoring (after all, he cannot pull a project from Kickstarter) or even blatantly advocating. This is the writing equivalent, rather, of clucking one’s tongue.

Similarly using the Crabtree example as a benchmark, it is apparently a fact that he was a member of GJPs (though other former writers who’ve left the industry, like Dr. Gregory Gay, are listed as just that—former writers. Maybe this is an oversight. Maybe no one’s bothering to check on all the people who were “just” members of GJPs. But the thing about facts is that they rarely exist without context and context often yield connotation. The context of Deep Freeze is that it’s a site meant to collect and categorize possible moments of questionable ethics. For reference, of course. But note that outside of a few “approved” sites, there’s not much in the way of positivity here. What’s the result, then, or the connotation of being listed? If you’re listed, you’re tarred.

And that, we’re supposed to think, is ethics.