“Ethics in games journalism”: Bain 100% spearheaded the “All of old media is corrupt and lying to you because of sponsorships” and the gamergate crowd used him to legitimize them. Plenty of webcomics of the era did a “I am not a bad person and I don’t condone what all these angry people saying the exact same thing are doing but… maybe you should listen to us. Err, me” style joke with the mouthpiece looking a LOT like Bain
He would pretty regularly do “I am gonna get cancelled” level jokes on his podcast with Cox and Dodger and would go off on wild ass tangents about how it is “okay for women to look pretty” and so forth any time someone complained about oversexualized male gaze wank fantasies.
“Let’s look at the options menu”: On the surface this is really good. In practice it was yet another case of “Those evil devs are trying to fuck us” because he was active in an era where PC games were very much third class citizens for all of what we would now consider “third parties”. Like, we were genuinely lucky to even GET a Sands of Time PC release and much of the “lazy devs” rhetoric goes back to people like him
His legacy is a complex one. I’ll fully admit to loving his videos because he was speaking as a PC Gamer at a time when it felt like all the major publishers were abandoning us. That said, even as a young’n in the software development world (and a hobbyist gamedev) most of his rhetoric felt unnecessarily meanspirited and like it was focused on the people coding the games and not the people paying them and setting deliverables (one of the early hints that I leaned a hell of a lot more left than right…). And I mostly dropped his podcast because it increasingly felt like he was doing the same shit whichever dipshit at Penny Arcade was doing where the slightest pushback led to “I AM THE GREATEST VICTIM THIS WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN!!!”. And… he was very much a well to do British man when it came to his stances on LGBTQ and there was a LOT of transphobia that we’ll just pretend was ignorance.
But Bain wasn’t the only influencer I enjoyed content from. And as gamergate increasingly kicked off, it became painfully obvious that the guy who still insisted “ethics in games journalism” was the true divider was saying almost the exact same talking points as the people who literally put someone I semi-regularly chatted with on IRC into hiding. Not to mention some of the biggest targets of the hate movement were people he had “feuded with” for years. And when he finally DID address things, it was very much a “They have some good points but I don’t agree with how they are going about it”. Its unclear exactly when he knew about his cancer but many people (self included) suspect the reason he never really spoke out against gamergate is because he didn’t want to risk his money train and… I get it but also he was still profiting off the suffering of others to an obscene degree.
But yeah. I think the general take is that, at best, Bain was a useful idiot. At worst… he was the asmongold of his time right down to constantly framing things as people trying to steal your gu—err games. But there is very much a reason he is often considered the face of gamergate.
Bain’s schtick came down to three key points:
His legacy is a complex one. I’ll fully admit to loving his videos because he was speaking as a PC Gamer at a time when it felt like all the major publishers were abandoning us. That said, even as a young’n in the software development world (and a hobbyist gamedev) most of his rhetoric felt unnecessarily meanspirited and like it was focused on the people coding the games and not the people paying them and setting deliverables (one of the early hints that I leaned a hell of a lot more left than right…). And I mostly dropped his podcast because it increasingly felt like he was doing the same shit whichever dipshit at Penny Arcade was doing where the slightest pushback led to “I AM THE GREATEST VICTIM THIS WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN!!!”. And… he was very much a well to do British man when it came to his stances on LGBTQ and there was a LOT of transphobia that we’ll just pretend was ignorance.
But Bain wasn’t the only influencer I enjoyed content from. And as gamergate increasingly kicked off, it became painfully obvious that the guy who still insisted “ethics in games journalism” was the true divider was saying almost the exact same talking points as the people who literally put someone I semi-regularly chatted with on IRC into hiding. Not to mention some of the biggest targets of the hate movement were people he had “feuded with” for years. And when he finally DID address things, it was very much a “They have some good points but I don’t agree with how they are going about it”. Its unclear exactly when he knew about his cancer but many people (self included) suspect the reason he never really spoke out against gamergate is because he didn’t want to risk his money train and… I get it but also he was still profiting off the suffering of others to an obscene degree.
Skimming through it, https://www.forbes.com/sites/fruzsinaeordogh/2018/07/10/totalbiscuits-legacy-and-the-collateral-damage-of-gamergate/#5766dcb432ae is a pretty good summary of a lot of the controversies of Bain’s career written shortly after his death. And I vaguely recall Eordogh being a regular contributor during the good years of Vice/Motherboard for what that is worth.
But yeah. I think the general take is that, at best, Bain was a useful idiot. At worst… he was the asmongold of his time right down to constantly framing things as people trying to steal your gu—err games. But there is very much a reason he is often considered the face of gamergate.