Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

The Next Gamergate Scandal is Here

The Next Gamergate Scandal is Here

I was so close. I was so dangerously close to getting sucked in to a black hole of hyperbole, flippant righteous anger, ad homonym attacks, and baseless accusations. My God, the war of words over that Gamergate nonsense is still being waged in full, and those who would skewer you with spears of fury for making level-headed, unbiased observations are legion. It’s a dangerous world out there for the stable-minded, and this latest “scandal” surrounding (or possibly brewed up by) Zoe Quinn is proof.

In case you’re unaware, let me fill you in on what went down. Wednesday afternoon Zoe tweeted out a pair of pictures (shown above) captured from the Paper Mario Color Splash stream during Nintendo’s “Treehouse: Live at E3” event. In this part of the game Mario is trying to win a key from a toad who runs a show starring the “Five Fun Guys,” shuffling toads who conceal the key by rapidly swapping places. At the end of the game Mario realizes that the toad running the show has been scamming them, which leads to what you see in that second picture there. The Toad exclaims, “Man, is this gonna ruin my career?! I can see the headline now: ‘Shufflegate: Exposed!'” Zoe Quinn assumes that this is Nintendo, or at least some translators working at Treehouse, taking a jab at her personally and referring to the Gamergate scandal. Her tweet reads, “What the f*ck did I ever do to you, Nintendo, that y’all had to make my suffering into a f*cking joke?” That post has already been retweeted almost 1,500 times at the time of writing. Thousands of furious sympathizers and critics have chimed in, and within a couple of hours a post addressing the tweet on NeoGAF had raged for 27 pages before getting shut down by a mod for the trouble it was causing. Good grief.

If you need filling in, Gamergate was sparked by Quinn’s ex-boyfriend publishing a scandalous blog post about her and how she supposedly used a relationship with a journalist to get a game she developed positive coverage. Everything snowballed and eventually Quinn was accused of sleeping with people in the gaming industry to advance her career. I never heard that she had been accused of sleeping with “five guys,” but that’s what everyone is saying now that this tweet has blown up. Quinn and her supporters repeatedly point to the words “five guys” and “shufflegate” as absolute, irrefutable proof that this is about her and everything she went through.

Of course, to the average human being, anything with the suffix -gate attached to it just signifies a scandal; a con found out. We associate it with the Watergate scandal immediately, because that’s the logical thing to do. If you really want to talk specifics, it’s worth pointing out that five guys were arrested for breaking into and burglarizing the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. Quinn, on the other hand, thinks it obscenely small-minded to suggest that this could possibly be a reference to an enormous, career-ending incident that changed the country and the way it views corruption in government. “It’s a watergate reference…?” she asks. “And after a ‘five fun guys’ line? How f*cking dense do you have to be to tell me this???”

The Next Gamergate Scandal is Here

I guess she doesn’t get the pun. Five fun guys – you know, fungi – it’s a mushroom thing. “Why are there five of them?” we’re asked. I don’t know, because five is a nice number? It’s the number of men who broke into Watergate? It’s a small stage, and five toads fit really well on that stage? Are we to believe the more likely explanation is that when Nintendo was developing and producing this game out of Japan that they had Zoe Quinn in mind, and based this whole skit and its dialogue on a scandal we were in danger of forgetting? Or perhaps the original Japanese dialogue is different and a malicious Treehouse translator was able to sneak this past everyone?

I don’t want to bash Zoe Quinn. I just want to make sure we all realize that not everything is a conspiracy. The dialogue represented in the two screen caps from Color Splash doesn’t even occur back to back like that. Those two lines are separated by an entire mini game and additional chat in between. This wasn’t a one-two punch below the belt from some scumbags at Nintendo trying to “get back” at Zoe Quinn for… I don’t even know what.

This, to me, is just attention seeking and self destructive. Why would you want to perpetuate an image of victimization? To be clear, I don’t want Zoe to stop standing up for women’s rights and equal representation in the games industry, but I am really disappointed and annoyed to see her latching on to something so petty and irrelevant and trying to drum it up as some great, injurious episode. Knowing that her voice is a strong one that resonates with so many, I would have expected her to at least view the video for herself before reacting so aggressively. If she had, I think she would have realized that someone purposefully spliced those images together to appear more damning than they actually are, and this could have been avoided entirely. That said, there’s a passionate group of people still arguing that the joke has no place in the game since it’s obviously capable of being miscontrued. What do you guys think?

To top