Polygon is one of the biggest shitholes on the Internet. We established that the other day, if you’ll recall. There is almost no redeeming qualities about the place. Almost. There is one man among men that works there, though, and his name is Owen Good. He’s repeatedly been fair towards GamerGate, and for that, he’s been demonized by the SJW hate mob on Twitter again and again. The guy is a true warrior and he continues to stand tall. Anyone who can do that when surrounded by some true wackos gets my seal of approval.

Read this excerpt from Game Politics, where Good talks about the abuse he received as a result of trying to cover GamerGate in an unbiased fashion:

“Yes, that was directly my intention,” he agreed when I asked if it was a conscious decision to go with a straight news style…

Zoe Quinn, the game developer whose private relationship would become the impetus that would eventually become the GamerGate movement, also took to Twitter to object to Good’s article. “[P]olygon seriously just completely washed out [GamerGate’s] origins,” she said. She told Randi Harper: [T]his shit makes me want to quit tech more than the fucking death threats do.”

I reached out to both Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper to give them a chance to elaborate on their criticism but after a brief exchange with Harper I have not heard back from either…

What does he think of the criticism?

“I don’t think of it much beyond it being the emotional reaction of someone to something they don’t like. I’m not going to intellectualize what these people’s comments are,” he told me. “They plainly want me to advocate for them and I’m unwilling to do that; not on something of this scale.”

To those who might suggest that this event was not newsworthy or that covering a GamerGate-related issue legitimized the movement, he said, “This was a bomb threat called in to a public building at Miami Dade College. Public resources were used and the public was involved there. That is as straight up a news event as you can get and I’m not going to get into that as some sort of platform to speak against GamerGate. That would be victim blaming.”

He went on to offer his take on GamerGate in general.

“There’s no percentage in it for me personally or professionally to pick a side [in the controversy],” he said. “And yes, there are two sides to it. What I see a lot of is people brigading on Twitter asking me to say there is no legitimate criticism of the media. It might be an ulterior or secondary subtext to GamerGate, but it’s still there. And they have made legitimate criticism of games media’s professionalism, of their standards, and of their consistency, and I’ve said that before.”

At least there’s one decent guy left at Polygon. I actually remember reading Owen’s stuff when he was at Kotaku. Historically, I’m a big player of sports video games, and that happens to be his specialty. When he left Kotaku, I knew the place would sink even further into the abyss, and it did just that. Now he’s the only redeeming feature about Polygon.

Or maybe you guys can think of something else about the place that you like? I’m drawing a blank. Let me know what you come up with, and I’ll be back with a couple more posts later today before I head off to the GamerGate meetup. Also, Game Politics is the site Good did his interview with. I have to say, they’ve been pretty good with their coverage lately. They’re not perfect, but they’ve been pretty damn good. That’s worth a lot, especially when almost everyone else is complete shit.