Gamergate: How the writers of Portal and Psychonauts (Old Man Murray's creators) helped it's inception

[Candescence]

Yeah, I'm gonna echo the folks saying the connections are somewhat tenuous. Edgy humor was rife back in the day and basically everywhere.

Interesting article, thankfully wasn't on the internet around this time but even by the mid to late 00s you could still see it. My first exposure to stuff like this were the early "comically vulgar" video game reviews that became really popular, the big ones being AVGN and Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, the latter especially revelled in "ironic" bigoted, sexist and "making fun of the politically correct" etc humour yet even to this day is still treated and respected highly in the industry, this f***er came up with the term "PC Master Race" (yay Nazi humour, what the gaming community needed more of /s) and before start trying to defend that like often happens:



Just a reminder you're defending a person thinks people NOT knowing history (because those who don''t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, screw that right!?!?!) and the meaning and the words they use IS A GOOD THING and unironically uses terms like Though Police... Yet people like him are STILL treat like gaming royalty....

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Yahtzee outright stated he regrets coming up with the "PC Master Race" joke because people started using it unironically.

 

[Dr. Mario]

The internet was a lot edgier and darker in the 90s and early 00s. This isn't news at all. It was also faaaar less serious.

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Yes, everyone who was on the internet in the mid to late nineties knows that it was edgelord anarchism. It was new, lawless and people were all trying to push boundaries to find the new normal. It was also pretty much all done in jest or for absurdist reasons.

 

[Gush]

1997 - 2002 was a completely different world when it came to the internet. OMM was closer to the norm than a outlier as far as edgy and provocative humour goes, and drawing parallels to gamergate only really works if you ignore the context of the rest of the internet from that era and for some reason misidentify OMM's tone as unique rather than pervasive.

I remember pictures of dead bodies being memetic back then, even as early as when I was in fourth or fifth grade. Shit was a wild west where shock jock commentary and absolute nihilism were indulged with regularity and a no holds barred approach was the expectation, especially when it came to humour.

OMM is more symptomatic of that greater context than GG is symptomatic of OMM. Correlation doesn't imply causation and whatnot.

 

[Eeyore]

Yahtzee outright stated he regrets coming up with the "PC Master Race" joke because people started using it unironically.

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I don't think you've read the rest of the post if you think you can respond that way when that very point was addressed.

 

[Pargon]

The internet was a lot edgier and darker in the 90s and early 00s. This isn't news at all. It was also faaaar less serious.

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You may not have taken it seriously, but a lot of the time it has come out that people behind the "we were only making jokes about being Nazis" type of internet 'humor' turn out to actually be that - or have, at the very least, emboldened people that really are.
Same thing applies to this type of vile sexist/racist 'humor' - only it was always far less plausibly done "for jokes" than the Nazi stuff, where back in the '90s you might have reasonably thought that no-one could possibly be serious about that sort of thing. Except we're now finding out that they are.

Being "common back then" does not excuse it. You were just being "ironically racist/sexist" because everyone else was?
The author reached out for comment and neither of them has apologized for it, or even tried to excuse it as much as people have done in this thread.

 

[Arkanim94]

The internet was a lot edgier and darker in the 90s and early 00s. This isn't news at all. It was also faaaar less serious.

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It all started like that.

 

[Siresly]

edit: Previously wrote a thing that ended up being quite stupid before having fully read the article.

"Weeks and weeks ago — just after the first photos of me hit the internet thanks to famous state and federal job retraining candidate Paul Steed — a concerned female reader wrote in and declared, 'I thought you'd be better looking.' Of course, my sympathies go out to her, her family, the men who pay her for sex and her smelly dried-up fucking abortion vent."
Erik Wolpaw , 2000-07-28

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Oh.

Should be noted that this was twenty years ago. Current Wolpaw could be a completely different person from the scumbag he was in 2000, and what a person said twenty years ago shouldn't be used to judge, disparage or attack their current character.

For the internet at the time, I don't know how large of a blip Old Man Murray made in regards to acting as a building block for shittiness. But it's fair enough to highlight that it was certainly part of the shittiness. And argue that they encouraged, influenced or normalized this kind of toxic, bigoted, misogynistic behavior among its community and beyond. Although assigning OMM as the "origins of Gamergate" is perhaps a bit spectacular.

 

[Candescence]

I don't think you've read the rest of the post if you think you can respond that way when that very point was addressed.

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Not really? It part about 'irony' is even barely addressed, and the fact that he completely disowned the term a couple of years ago (precisely because it came to symbolize the very gatekeeping and elitism he was satirizing, and he wishes he had used a much more insulting term instead) was completely ignored.

That, and he came up with the phrase in a time when Nazis were still considered a joke and nonexistent as a serious ideology.

 

[Thera]

I remember this old ass article when there was a thread about it back in 2017 on old place. My view then as it is now was that they have as much blame as a lot of internet and even video game culture from the 2000s. And the extent that that stuff caused Gamergate is really unprovable.

But to say these two guys caused Gamergate is such an absurdly longbow to draw. No one should put that on their shoulders.

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"Inspired", not caused.
It is important, thye doesn't say there is a casality. People didn't became shit head because of those two.
But by seeing that having this behavior is "cool" or whatever, it can shape a behavior, especially when they are followed by teenagers or even kids.
This is still a problem with streamers this day.

 

[Yossarian]

Interesting article. Not heard of the site before, but I was pretty late joining the online world.

Though I admit I've not seen the site and I'm lacking important context, I'm not convinced by the article's premise as written; that Wolpaw and Faliszek are personally (partially) responsible and/or an inspiration for Gamergate. It's a very heavy claim to lay on someone for some (admittedly) really shitty posts.

Just to be clear, my concerns about the article do not mean they should be absolved of the fact they wrote some disgusting shit, it's just things usually tend to turn out to be more complicated.

It's just... single people are very rarely the sole cause of big events. It almost always turns out to be a confluence of things; usually ones that are much less obvious.

While I appreciate that I'm saying this when I'm not as informed on this subject as the writer, I feel like there wasn't enough context around the kind of stuff on the site for the article convince.

With only two or three (admittedly) strong examples, I naturally wonder how much of the article's quotes are cherry picked? Might it be possible to find similar styles of humour at the time elsewhere, both on and off the Internet? Could I build a similar case from them? Was the kind of humour they tapped into something they invented/spearheaded or rather symptomatic of an ugly zeitgeist? If so, is not too simplistic to apportion significant blame on these two lugheads?

I'm certainly not claiming the writer did cherry pick stuff, by the way. I'm just saying I don't find the article convincing or thorough enough yet.

It's certainly an interesting read and I would like to see Part 2 to get more details/context and, hopefully, a more thorough look. Either that or I need to take a look at the place myself.

 

[astro]

Myself and my friends never used humour like this, we always new it was shitty. Not trying to posture, just saying the time it happened isn't an excuse because "everyone did it".

Not everyone did it, it was always shitty.

People can grow though, not going to judge anyone today for stupid shit they did in the past if they did grow beyond it. Just saying, it was never ok.

 

[mclem]

This stuff moves the Overton window in certain communities though.

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I wonder if it's perhaps more accurate to frame it as "The Overton window was already there, those early sites were a microcosm of the time and the relative immaturity of the subculture - but the audience has since matured and the window has moved leftward, and Gamergate is made up of those who have problems with that fact"

 

[Deleted member 17184]

There goes any interest in psychonauts 2. Shame.

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He worked on Half Life : Alyx too

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I think we should be very careful with this type of mindset. Yes, they wrote all that stuff in the 90s/early 2000s. Erik then wrote for the first Psychonauts, and the two of them alongside Jay wrote the Portal franchise (with the second one essentially being about two women removing a horrible man from power). Don't know much about Chet's work these days, but Erik then went to work on the first Half-Life game with a female protagonist, and also Psychonauts 2.

Whatever they did in the past isn't and shouldn't be a reflection of their current work.

I also wholeheartedly disagree that OMM took a part in how GamerGate was born. I don't support the content on that website at all, but GG was created to harass women and their supporters in real life. I know because I was attacked by them, too. When that happened, I certainly didn't think about OMM or its content; I thought about how those horrible people made one of their main targets sleep in an elevator shaft, afraid for their safety.

 

[nutaroundthecorner]

I, too, am going to ditch products by these amazing writers for a thing that they did about 20 years ago. /s

People change and grow, folks, and so does humor and culture. I'm sure they'd probably cringe if you showed them those excerpts today too.

 

[Dache]

I think a lot of the praise for OMM from back in the day comes from the interesting and original criticisms and flaws of games they frequently pointed out that many others missed at the time, rather than the acerbic way they presented those criticisms, because Chet and Erik were unarguably insightful about game design and had valid points to make about it back then. Back in those days, no one really considered the tone and insults for what they were because that's how the wild-west internet was at that point, but it's seriously rough reading them back in 2020. I don't think you can draw a straight line from soley OMM to Gamergate as there were so many other sites that were writing similar things at the time, more that OMM is a single part of a big jumble of horrible shit that lead to it instead.

 

[Deleted member 11214]

Why are we reposting sus articles from 2017?

 

[SteelBeast6Beets]

I, too, am going to ditch products by these amazing writers for a thing that they did about 20 years ago. /s

People change and grow, folks, and so does humor and culture. I'm sure they'd probably cringe if you showed them those excerpts today too.

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To me, people don't change. They just learn new ways to lie. Ergo, it's completely OK to judge a person based on their past mistakes.

 

[Deleted member 30077]

To me, people don't change. They just learn new ways to lie. Ergo, it's completely OK to judge a person based on their past mistakes.

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So you're telling that in the past 10-20 years you yourself haven't changed one bit? You haven't gained any new perspectives that made you grow as a person? You haven't evolved one bit personality wise over time? I'm sorry but I find that just incredibly sad. It's such a negative and lethargic way of seeing the world and people.

I hope one day you do gain a new perspective on this and you realize that people aren't unchangeable rocks and that they do in fact can grow, change and become bettter people as they move through their lives. The opposite is obviously also possible.

 

[Chairman Yang]

On Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek, have they ever been called out on their past behaviour or ever actually discussed regret for what they help fester because yes, their not guilty for creating gamergate, but are very guilty for encouraging it's early growth and giving that attitude a place where it could linger and grow, Something Awful is also very guilty of this as well.

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At least one of them (maybe both) is on Twitter. You can call them out if you wish.

 

[Hrodulf]

Will people stop using 'canceled' as a way to dismiss a damn discussion? It is so insincere and frustrating. The rest of your post is fine but my god, whining about cancel culture is so goddamn annoying.

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Especially considering "cancel culture" is largely horseshit and most everyone that has been "canceled" ends up bouncing back after a short time.

 

[Eeyore]

I wonder if it's perhaps more accurate to frame it as "The Overton window was already there, those early sites were a microcosm of the time and the relative immaturity of the subculture - but the audience has since matured and the window has moved leftward, and Gamergate is made up of those who have problems with that fact"

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I think you're more optimistic than I am but I can't say this is entirely inaccurate either.

 

[SteelBeast6Beets]

So you're telling that in the past 10-20 years you yourself haven't changed one bit? You haven't gained any new perspectives that made you grow as a person? You haven't evolved one bit personality wise over time? I'm sorry but I find that just incredibly sad. It's such a negative and lethargic way of seeing the world and people.

I hope one day you do gain a new perspective on this and you realize that people aren't unchangeable rocks and that they do in fact can grow, change and become bettter people as they move through their lives. The opposite is obviously also possible.

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I can't say I have. I've always been an extremely indolent person who thinks of everything as nuisances that I'm forced to put up with because of reasons.

 

[nutaroundthecorner]

I can't say I have. I've always been an extremely indolent person who thinks of everything as nuisances that I'm forced to put up with because of reasons.

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"I can't change therefore no one can"
ok

 

[Ruby-Eyed Witch]

I'm familiar with OMM, but having never really followed it, I don't think I realized how fucking heinous some of their shit actually was. But, while sites like this may have played a part in crystallizing general internet nastiness and that in turn probably fed into Gamergate, I don't know about blaming it for Gamergate directly. Gamergate is just the name attached to one arm of the alt-right (especially incel culture, I think), and the alt-right is way, way bigger than videogames. Right-wing extremists force their slimy fingers into every tiny social crevice looking for leverage to spread their disease, especially in spaces where they think they can find disaffected young men to radicalize. I'm sure they've been dug into videogame culture for longer than we know.

The catalyst for Gamergate was a raging shithead whipping up an incel mob to harrass his ex. Can we really blame OMM for that? It's not internet shock culture that's at the heart of Gamergate; it's raw misogyny, bigotry, and reactionary anger.

 

[MJForum Poster]

1997 - 2002 was a completely different world when it came to the internet. OMM was closer to the norm than a outlier as far as edgy and provocative humour goes, and drawing parallels to gamergate only really works if you ignore the context of the rest of the internet from that era and for some reason misidentify OMM's tone as unique rather than pervasive.

I remember pictures of dead bodies being memetic back then, even as early as when I was in fourth or fifth grade. Shit was a wild west where shock jock commentary and absolute nihilism were indulged with regularity and a no holds barred approach was the expectation, especially when it came to humour.

OMM is more symptomatic of that greater context than GG is symptomatic of OMM. Correlation doesn't imply causation and whatnot.

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Yeah, if you weren't on the Internet in the late 90s, it's probably hard to understand just how different it was. People weren't centralized on social media sites, so there were enthusiast websites and forums and IRC channels all over the place. There was a lot of edginess which is cringeworthy to look back on. I equate it to watching home movies of yourself from when you were a kid.

To me, people don't change. They just learn new ways to lie. Ergo, it's completely OK to judge a person based on their past mistakes.

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It must be terrible to go through life with this outlook. Looking back at my own journals and writings from 10-20 years ago, it feels like they are from a completely different person.

 

[Deleted member 37739]

To me, people don't change. They just learn new ways to lie. Ergo, it's completely OK to judge a person based on their past mistakes.

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Not that I'm defending any person in particular, but I can't see much reason for a person to change and grow if they'll still be judged solely on prior conduct... what's even the point of self improvement if you'll only be ever as good as your lowest moment?

 

[Dyle]

I remember this article and still don't agree with its premise. The connection is incredibly tenuous and it does itself a disservice by singling out one place as particularly responsible for what was clearly an entire culture of toxic discourse.

 

[L Thammy]

I'd generally agree with the "people grow up" position, if more because I hope people can grow up so then maybe I myself can have grown up. But some of the specific quotes in the article make me feel like there's too little introspection going on here.

Like, look at this.

"Weeks and weeks ago — just after the first photos of me hit the internet thanks to famous state and federal job retraining candidate Paul Steed — a concerned female reader wrote in and declared, 'I thought you'd be better looking.' Of course, my sympathies go out to her, her family, the men who pay her for sex and her smelly dried-up fucking abortion vent."

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Of it all, though, the "ironic" misogyny is perhaps most startling. Upon learning in 1999 that Stevie Case, the famous cyberathlete, would be doing a Playboy shoot, Wolpaw (around 32 years old at the time) offered this suggestion:

"Since Stevie's obviously aware that 'Playboy' is primarily a masturbation tool for men, I hope she won't feel any less empowered when I respectfully request she include a few shots of her ass. And if she could make sure that her ass is glistening with sweat or water from a hose, that would be great."

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After a string of paragraphs more obscene than this one, Wolpaw included a pornographic image with Case's face digitally edited onto it.

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Maybe I'm being too nice to myself here, but I feel like these aren't things that I would have laughed at on my worst day, because these are significantly different than the "ironic" jokes that I was convinced were actually about mocking bigotry. These aren't vague or without barbs. They're actually targeted aggressively at real, specific people.

Maybe I'm being too nice to myself, but I feel like if I had made jokes on that level when I was younger, I wouldn't respond with

"We don't really talk about it much anymore. It's a bit of history on its own at this point."

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because I'd want people to understand the issues with the sort of jokes that I was making so that they don't follow my mistakes.

 

[Deleted member 20471]

To me, people don't change. They just learn new ways to lie. Ergo, it's completely OK to judge a person based on their past mistakes.

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That's the most stupid think I've ever read in my entire life.

 

[L Thammy]

Found this article by the person who cofounded Portal of Evil with the Portal writer.

How I Paid My Rent by Publishing the Most Disgusting Things on the Internet

Between 1999 and 2011, I drove millions of page views to disgusting photographs, obscure fetishes, insane conspiracies, and things that beggared description.

nymag.com

Visitors' fascination with Portal of Evil exhibits always seemed to trade in equal parts on physical and moral disgust. There's a term that people use for trips to places like Auschwitz and the site of the World Trade Center towers: atrocity tourism. That phrase was adopted by the furry community — itself a frequent topic of Portal of Evil discussion — to describe what we did at our website. Visitors could climb out of their lives for a few minutes to gawp at the truly disturbing, then go back to normal with no harm done.

One former visitor thought that the power of the disgusting could be explained in two ways: "It really does make you feel better about your life. I remember there was that really weird-looking guy who wore diapers and just pissed all over his Looney Toons stuffed animals. That was how he got off, sexually — dressing like a little boy and peeing all over icons of his childhood. I felt way less gross about being something as boring as gay in comparison to that."

In a way, that was true for me. When I created the site, I was living in a five-by-nine room in a New York City apartment with a guy who cleaned every surface with ammonia twice a week like he was practicing for a crime scene. I hadn't kissed a girl since moving to the city and ate crullers on a daily basis alone in my bunk bed. My life was disastrous, but these peeks into something worse kept my head above water, both financially and emotionally.

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Of course, that's little comfort to the people who were angry to be featured as unreasonably weird or gross. Some bombarded us with irate emails and lawsuit threats (none of which ever made it to court). One woman, who wrote reams and reams of Secret of NIMH fanfiction, even encoded a Wiccan spell into the HTML of her web page to put us under some ill-defined curse.

But others embraced it. A significant part of our traffic, after all, wasn't from gawkers looking for somebody to cringe at. It was from other perverts and freaks who browsed the site unironically, connecting with people who were just like them. One of the best moments I can remember was when "Grandpa DeSade," a cheery bearded sadist who resembled Santa Claus with a bullwhip, showed up on the forums to talk about his lifestyle with the regulars.

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She wasn't wrong, even in my case. I was maybe less sensitive to the immediate sight of the disgusting, but I was getting more sensitive to the ramifications of what I was doing. In 2005, users of the site took a concept album written by "the DragonGuyver," a prematurely balding amateur philosopher in Maine, and put all of the lyrics to music, even getting some of the songs played on the radio; others Catfished an NYC slam poet into sending dick pics and showing up for a fake date. Stunts like this felt too far, and I started to move away from the site.

Chet was working at a video-game company and getting annoyed when former Portal of Evil exhibits would harass the receptionist, trying to get him fired. I was about to leave New York to live quietly on a small island in the Pacific Ocean. I'd been looking at the worst humanity had to offer for 12 years, but now I had other things in my life besides the disgusting.

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[Gabbo]

I wonder if it's perhaps more accurate to frame it as "The Overton window was already there, those early sites were a microcosm of the time and the relative immaturity of the subculture - but the audience has since matured and the window has moved leftward, and Gamergate is made up of those who have problems with that fact"

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This is a reasonable take, though I do really have a hard time drawing a correlation between OMM and Gamersgate given their intended goals respectively. People bring up Kieron Gillen and John Walker comments as if those two were taking notes on the edgy, low brow humour versus OMM's highly regarded takes on game design, which I think is clearly not the case and history plays that out.

 

[Border]

Seems like kind of a stretch to blame a site that shut down in 2002 for the Gamergate incidents that happened like a decade later.

It's important to note that a great deal of this stuff was posted before Twitter, before YouTube, before most blogs had Comments sections or Talkbacks. OMM felt funny and novel precisely because it was so over-the-top and that sort of content was relatively uncommon. You knew it was a joke because of its rarity. "Fuck you, you pompous bitch" amused people because they were used to seeing (predominantly) professionally published and sanitized content on the web and in print. The irony of it was obvious at the time.

To look at OMM nowadays though, it looks and sounds exactly like the completely sincere and hateful comments you see all over Twitter and in Youtube comments. Because the context has changed so wildly, it's impossible to read it as joke-y or ironic. We've pretty much come to expect that kind of indignant, vulgar vitriol throughout the web.

 

[Anatole]

There goes any interest in psychonauts 2. Shame.

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Double Fine mentioned bringing Wolpaw back in the backer video, but I don't think we have seen anything from him on that front since. As far as I know, he went to work on Alyx. Did he ever end up actually working on P2?

 

[hey it's that dog]

To me, people don't change. They just learn new ways to lie. Ergo, it's completely OK to judge a person based on their past mistakes.

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Whether or not people can/do change is actually an empirical matter and not one of personal opinion.

 

[NoWayOut]

To me, people don't change. They just learn new ways to lie. Ergo, it's completely OK to judge a person based on their past mistakes.

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That's a pretty shallow and sad way to look at life. I'm sure you never said or did anything you regretted in your life and today you are the same exact person you were 10+ years ago. It must be nice to always be on the righteous side of things. Congrats!

 

[catswaller]

Yeah these dudes have always been dicks. chets also a condescending bad take machine on twitter.

I do think theyve "reformed" some since this writing tho -- old man murray was 20 years ago, I dunno if they'd think anything so hateful was Ok to say now. People knew better back then too and they still deserve criticism, but culture was a lot more steeped in normalizing that kind of behavior than it is now. Hard to find successful "edgy" comedy brands that weren't like this back then.

 

[empo]

Yeah these dudes have always been dicks. chets also a condescending bad take machine on twitter.

I do think theyve "reformed" some since this writing tho -- old man murray was 20 years ago, I dunno if they'd think anything so hateful was Ok to say now. People knew better back then too and they still deserve criticism, but culture was a lot more steeped in normalizing that kind of behavior than it is now. Hard to find successful "edgy" comedy brands that weren't like this back then.

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First I thought they were just some edgelord teenagers but it's super embarassing that they were 30+ at that point. Yikes

 

[ChristianH94]

To me, people don't change. They just learn new ways to lie. Ergo, it's completely OK to judge a person based on their past mistakes.

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So like, when you watch a movie or play a story based game, do the hours of character development mean nothing to you then?

also that was a fascinating and well written article that I loved reading.... but I'm somehow not sold in the idea they're trying to present. I remember years ago when I was in school we watched some anti cybercrime videos and one of them stated "the internet is a lawless nation" which as T shirt worthy of a statement that is, that also really shows the problem with the internet at large at the time: people were terrified of it. OMM wasn't the root cause of people being assholes online, it was a symptom of the fact nobody treated the internet as if it was worth anything and when they did it would normally be a warning cry about how dangerous it is, so you'd naturally get a lot of psychopaths hanging out on it. By the time GG rolled around that was really just a bottled up scream from people who've been around that for awhile and managed to take full advantage of how accessible web 2.0 websites had become to launch a full scale harassment campaign.

 

[Lork]

I don't know why we're re-litigating this 3 year old article that was rightly dismissed at the time, but why don't we put our critical thinking caps on for a moment:

Regardless of whether Faliszek and Wolpaw said some problematic things, the central premise of the article, that the online gaming community was this progressive, egalitarian utopia all the way up until those dirty, Quake playing casuals came along and invented sexism is transparently elitist, history rewriting bullshit.

I don't know how you can read this stuff and not roll your eyes unless you were 1. Not there at the time and 2. Very credulous. To paraphrase a popular saying from the time, just because you read it on the internet doesn't mean it's true.

 

[Jegriva]

I heard GamerGate can be traced back to the primordial ooze. I think we should look into cancelling it.

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I think we are a couple of years far from somebody seriously proposing this.

So, the article says that racism, sexism and elitism were invented in the 90s' internet.
Ok, zoomer.

 

[We_care_a_lot]

so they literally had nothing to do with gamergate, then?

Gamergate is misogynistic edgelord tripe but not all misogynistic edgelord tripe is gamergate, if you see what I mean.

 

[Palette Swap]

I'd generally agree with the "people grow up" position, if more because I hope people can grow up so then maybe I myself can have grown up. But some of the specific quotes in the article make me feel like there's too little introspection going on here.

Like, look at this.





Maybe I'm being too nice to myself here, but I feel like these aren't things that I would have laughed at on my worst day, because these are significantly different than the "ironic" jokes that I was convinced were actually about mocking bigotry. These aren't vague or without barbs. They're actually targeted aggressively at real, specific people.

Maybe I'm being too nice to myself, but I feel like if I had made jokes on that level when I was younger, I wouldn't respond with



because I'd want people to understand the issues with the sort of jokes that I was making so that they don't follow my mistakes.

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I'm late to your post, but yeah, I'm one of the people saying "it was a different time and norms" to explain parts of it, but that doesn't mean people had zero standards and couldn't tell assholes. This being an obvious case of it.

Plus, honestly, when I think of that time, I intuitively project the bias "you can be dumb at 17 and laugh at some juvenile bullshit you wouldn't find funny 20 years later", but someone in their late thirties back then is a different story IMO. That doesn't mean you can't change between 40 and 60, just that adolescence can explain away some things.

 

[Nikus]

To me, people don't change. They just learn new ways to lie. Ergo, it's completely OK to judge a person based on their past mistakes.

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This is so stupid that after reading it my brain started to ooze out of my ears

 

[LinkSlayer64]

Interesting article, thankfully wasn't on the internet around this time but even by the mid to late 00s you could still see it. My first exposure to stuff like this were the early "comically vulgar" video game reviews that became really popular, the big ones being AVGN and Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, the latter especially revelled in "ironic" bigoted, sexist and "making fun of the politically correct" etc humour yet even to this day is still treated and respected highly in the industry, this f***er came up with the term "PC Master Race" (yay Nazi humour, what the gaming community needed more of /s) and before start trying to defend that like often happens:



Just a reminder you're defending a person thinks people NOT knowing history (because those who don''t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, screw that right!?!?!) and the meaning and the words they use IS A GOOD THING and unironically uses terms like Though Police... Yet people like him are STILL treat like gaming royalty....

On Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek, have they ever been called out on their past behaviour or ever actually discussed regret for what they help fester because yes, their not guilty for creating gamergate, but are very guilty for encouraging it's early growth and giving that attitude a place where it could linger and grow, Something Awful is also very guilty of this as well.

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Hey, just wanted for future reference, to have a source to this quote in case I need it, any chance you still have it?

 

[WadeIt0ut]

I've been big into gaming internet culture going back to the 90s and I don't remember OMM at all. In the slightest. To say it was the spawn of any of GG is silly. It was not that influential lol

 

[wwm0nkey]

There goes any interest in psychonauts 2. Shame.

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The sure they wrote this stuff on is 20 years old, not saying it wasn't shitty, but also a lot changes in that time frame

 

[Mahonay]

GamerGate was in 2014. It's highly unlikely an obscure website that shut down in 2002 was responsible.

 

[BlastProcessing]

GamerGate was in 2014. It's highly unlikely an obscure website that shut down in 2002 was responsible.

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I don't think I would call Old Man Murray obscure.

 

[TeenageFBI]

I don't think I would call Old Man Murray obscure.

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Yeah, I read it all the time. Chet and Erik were funny as hell even back then.

 

[Mahonay]

I don't think I would call Old Man Murray obscure.

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Many here have never heard of it. I was only 11 when it started and 16 when it ended.

Maybe it's a thing people in their late 30s/early 40s remember?

I would consider our forum here obscure, let alone a gaming commentary site from 18 years ago.