If Phil or someone at Polygon feels like I’m misrepresenting them here. They are invited to contact me here or on any of my social media accounts (on medium or on twitter @nuckable) to help me correct any possible mistakes. Pls no bully.
Preface
As some of you may have already seen yesterday, September the 28th an article dropped on Polygon with the clickbaity title
It’s an article written in the third person about an excerpt of the first chapter of Phil Owen’s book with the same title as the article. But interestingly the credits were initially given as Polygon Staff.
Here you also have Philip Kollar (Senior Editor @Polygon) confirming that Polygon was behind the article.
As an aside: The content of the article while not really relevant is basically the same thing Leigh Alexander (and others before her) wrote back in 2013 in a somewhat notorious piece about BioShock Infinite titled ‘Now Is The Best Time’: A Critique Of BioShock Infinite. He merely swapped BioShock Infinite for The Last of Us and presto!
After tweeting for roughly 2 hours he picked out a comment by Scrumpmonkey and called him a nerd
This is where it gets interesting, the very next comment he then attributes to GamerGate
So how does he know this is GamerGate?
So this was a deliberate decision from the beginning?
He generally received praise from the usual anti-GG buddies
Was called out by some industry veterans
But mostly he just kept on antagonizing GamerGate with choice tweets such as
(For reference see The dead gamers)
At some point TheQuQu wondered why the actual author wasn’t revealed since this was clearly an endorsement of a product and the nobody can check if there is in fact collusion at work if the author isn’t revealed.
So, in good old GamerGate fashion ArsVampyre did what needed to be done and invoked the FTC. To which Phil only had this to say
He actually finds this whole thing so hilarious that he’s since went on to ask people to actually contact the FTC…
Before we get to the most interesting part of this story though, I would like to take a minute to appreciate the hypocrisy that happened next.
To which he added
Yes, more narrative peddling that women are victims that need to be protected. Lots of people and women obviously had something to say about this.
Because while GG was definitely talking about it and to him, we weren’t the only people that took offense to his bullshit. I have already mentioned some of the developers, even more voices have joined since then
Nice dodge anyway, the second point of contention is obviously with the victimization of women. So as you may or may not know the NotYourShield-hashtag is used specifically by minorities and women to send the message that people should stop pretending like the speak for them. As you may infer from his behavior so far he only had ridicule and nasty comments for this
Four hours later he then apparently felt harassed (gee I wonder why people reply to bullshit in kind?).
So I actually went ahead and looked at all the tweets directed at him from the moment the article dropped to the moment he tweeted this out.
Here is the spreadsheet with the data https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kMTyKcujRwa6jC_JkVnjEyKFUpHRXf62hJXBrLS4F8Q/edit?usp=sharing
And here is the resulting graph
The 9 insults are listed here so you can get a feel for how generous I was when applying the insult-label
How is this harassment? Why does one write opinion into the world when they cannot deal with criticism? Is this real life?
Finally and sorry, but it needed to be said. Here’s the real kicker. Apparently someone over at Polygon did indeed take the FTC-mentions serious and has since changed the article.
You might be wondering if there was any attempt to correct this mistake then you’re out of luck, this is the only addition to the top of the article.
So what happened here? I would really like to know why there was no disclosure from the start. Is this really the behavior a professional should engage in?
