Tag: Gaming

#GamerGate: RT @Griies ~ pic.twitter.com/WG0cdzFzqE

— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) October 21, 2014

Readers won’t let go of the debate:

As Arthur Chu artfully pointed out, the basic dynamic of #GamerGate is no different than that of the Tea Party: white dudes angry about Those People encroaching on their turf. What #GGers lambast as the “corruption” of gaming journalism isn’t part of the creeping menace of sponsored content; it’s the default mode of operation. Gaming publications have always been willing and enthusiastic adjuncts of the industry PR machine. The field’s evolution is no different than any other kind of entertainment journalism – critical film, music, and sports coverage didn’t emerge until the 1960s. To this day, no major entertainment media outlet meets the journalistic standard #GamerGate purports to demand (see: ESPN and the NFL). Really, where’s the scandal?

The difference now, of course, is the existence of social media and how it enables new ways of lashing out. No one has more skill with the Internet’s tools of harassment and abuse than the stereotypical gamer. Pretending that violent threats against outspoken women – whose collective influence in gaming, I should point out, is minuscule at best – have nothing to do with #GamerGate is absurd.

Freddie responds to these readers at length:

The video game media, generally speaking, is garbage. … But here’s the thing, you guys: if video game journalism is garbage, then #gamergate is garbage from an Egyptian restaurant that’s been baking in the sun in July in a heatwave on a New York corner, complete with extra dog poop and infested with cockroaches that have names like Misogyny and Threats Against Women. However well-intentioned some members of #gamergate may be, and however much I may agree with some criticisms of the video game media, the grimy sexism and hideous threats that have been made in the name of #gamergate renders the whole “movement” totally unpalatable to me.

Yes, it is unfortunate to define any group by the actions of its worst members, and there are times in life, particularly when it comes to political struggles, that you have to hold your nose and align with people you can’t stand. But this isn’t one of those times, and too many people who complain about how #gamergate is discussed in the media refuse to be frank about how rife with ugliness the phenomenon is.

I mean, there’s even legitimate criticism of Anita Sarkeesian, such as her unpaid appropriation of other women’s artwork, which my friend Alex Layne of the brilliant site Not Your Mama’s Gamer discussed. That behavior bothers me. But in a world where Sarkeesian is subject to such insane, violent threats, my instinct is not to criticize her about intellectual property but build a bunker to defend her from attack.

That’s the thing about surrounding your movement with threats and misogyny: people who might be inclined to listen to you feel compelled to reject you out of hand. Whether through refusal or inability, the principled people who consider themselves part of #gamergate have failed to eject the sexist, threatening core of the movement, and for someone like me, that makes it impossible to take the whole enterprise as anything but ugly.

Laura Hudson adds:

While there are legitimate ethical concerns about games journalism, it’s telling that the movement remains laser-focused not on the ethically shady behavior of the multimillion-dollar gaming studios making the mainstream games they enjoy, but small, often impoverished independent creators and critics—and even within that subset, the targets are nearly exclusively women.

Jesse Singal pens a Reddit letter to all the Gamergate people trying to convince him the press has it all wrong:

So what is Gamergate “really” about? I think this is the sort of question a philosopher of language would tear apart and scatter the remnants of to the wind, because it lacks any real referent. You guys refuse to appoint a leader or write up a platform or really do any of the things real-life, adult “movements” do. I’d argue that there isn’t really any such thing as Gamergate, because any given manifestation of it can be torn down as, again, No True Gamergate by anyone who disagrees with that manifestation or views it as an inconvenient blight from an optics standpoint. And who gets to decide what is and isn’t True Gamergate? You can’t say you want a decentralized, anonymous movement and then disown the ugly parts that inevitably pop up as a result of that structure. Either everything is in, or everything is out.

Faced with this complete lack of clarity, all I or other journalists can do, then, is journalism: We ask the people in the movement what they stand for and then try to tease out what is real and what is PR. And every, every, every substantive conversation/forum/encounter I’ve had with folks from your movement has led me to believe that a large part of the reason for its existence is discomfort with what you see as the burgeoning influence of so-called social-justice warriors in the gaming world.

Update from a reader:

In case you missed it, Clickhole has the ultimate encapsulation of GamerGate ( … unless anyone in GamerGate disagrees with it).

RT @Sargon_of_Akkad: @SabrinaLianne Here’s that montage of the ladies of #GamerGate and #NotYourShield pic.twitter.com/t1n2Nr2kwh

— NotYourShieldProject (@NotYourShield) October 16, 2014

A few readers provide key counterpoints to the controversy:

Your latest post presents only one side of a very complex, many-sided argument and unfortunately perpetuates the narrative that #GamerGate is mostly a reactionary, misogynistic movement. Please understand that the vast majority of GamerGate is not misogynist. The vast majority of GamerGate does not think death threats are trivial. GamerGate is a movement that has embraced women, gays, trans-gender people of all political stripes and nationalities, worldwide.

GamerGate is many things, but it is largely a reaction against the huge amount of abuse that gamers have suffered over the years, culminating in a coordinated campaign by a dozen or so articles that appeared on numerous gaming news sites nearly simultaneously on August 28-29, proclaiming that gamers were dead, spear-headed by a piece on Gamasutra by Leigh Alexander, who called gamers:

These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers – they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had.

Now is that any way to speak to a large number of your target audience? Most of the other articles weren’t quite as strident, but the mass coordinated nature of this campaign was not lost on many gamers. Understandably, being called “shitslingers” and “childish internet-arguer” upset many people. Hence GamerGate really took off.

It’s a horrible thing that Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu have received death threats. However, there is very little evidence that at least the threats against Sarkeesian and Wu have had anything to do with GamerGate. And yet, instead fingers were immediately pointed to GamerGate, in an appalling example of guilt-by-association. It is grossly unfair that a movement comprised of thousands of people worldwide is being tarred for the actions of the very few destructive people who just want to watch the world burn. That’s like blaming all Muslims for ISIS!

GamerGaters have been quite vigilant, often being the first and most vocal in calling out harassment as soon as they discover it online. This is a totally open movement. Anyone can do anything and claim that they did it on behalf of GamerGate. Even then, it’s abundantly clear to anyone who has actually talked to GamerGaters, that nearly all of us condemn harassment and welcome women into our movement. In order to counter this misrepresentation, the hashtag #NotYourShield was created in order to demonstrate just how diverse and inclusive the movement is.

Despite all this, GamerGate are being constantly insulted by others as “misogynerds,” “pissbabies,” “worse than ISIS” and god knows what else. Supporters of GamerGate have been given death threats, doxxed, lost their jobs and God knows what else. Yet none of that has gotten any exposure in the mainstream media.

The abuse received by people for the mere mention that they support GamerGate has been so bad that it has caused more than a few people who initially positioned themselves as anti-GG to realize that GamerGaters are on the whole good people who condemn harassment and just want to be able to enjoy video games without being constantly told by self-appointed social activists that their hobby is awful, degenerate, and they should be shamed. It’s part of a larger movement that has been touched upon by you in the past. Just listen to the voices of women here and here who received far more harassment from those opposed to GamerGate than from GamerGate itself.

There’s much much more that I can get into. But I’m just a nobody. GamerGate has been covered more fairly by conscientious, articulate people like these, both supporting and neutral to GG:

https://twitter.com/oliverbcampbell
https://twitter.com/erikkain
https://twitter.com/Totalbiscuit
https://twitter.com/Boogie2988
https://twitter.com/georgieonthego
https://twitter.com/mundanematt

There are many more. Please contact them and listen to their voices. Fairness is important.

Another reader details another major part of the story:

I was surprised to see that your take on #Gamergate ignored its central issue, chiefly because it’s one of your own pet issues – corruption in the media. And by “corruption,” I mean the press acting as a form of PR and not as a source for news. Gamers are upset because it seems, and has seemed for a while now, that the press is no longer interested in talking to them. Leigh Alexander’s piece declaring gamers to be “dead” (alongside a slew of other insults) was just the purest expression of that trend.

But make no mistake: these accusations of misogyny are deflections meant to shift focus (successfully, so far) from their own wrongdoing.

Take, for instance, Jeff Gerstmann, who was fired from GameSpot in 2007 after rating a game as “fair.” The game publisher, Eidos Interactive, pressured the GameSpot to fire Gerstmann, and GameSpot complied. Take also the review of Aliens: Colonial Marines, produced by Gearbox Software, which the press lavished with praise after being shown a “demo” that, in truth, represented nothing contained in the actual game. Or take the latest scandal, wherein WB Games offered review copies of Shadow of Mordor under the condition that the resultant review praise and advertise the product.

The gaming press is too busy begging for the developers’ scraps to care whether or not their readership gets taken for a ride. And in a $93 billion industry, that ride can be quite expensive.

Which leads us to #Gamergate, a scandal that sprang to life after evidence emerged that Zoe Quinn, an indie developer, had leveraged her inappropriate relationship with the press to boost her profile, including shutting down a rival feminist charity (one #Gamergate would later help get back on its feet). Rather than report on these relationships (as they had Brad Wardell and Max Temkin), the press went silent. This, naturally, prompted further digging, which revealed the gaming industry’s very own Journolist, wherein certain members of this press pushed predefined narratives.

Outraged at having been lied to, silenced and manipulated, gamers revolted. #Gamergate. This revolt won’t end by calling gamers misogynists. They’re not. No, this will only end when the press debrides itself of the notion that it reports to anyone other than its consumers. It’s time they stopped lecturing gamers, and started helping them find a fun game on which to spend their hard-earned money.

Another zooms out:

I think the actual point is completely missed by everyone there. It would not have been missed if people didn’t stereotype and objectify nerds as much as they accuse them of stereotyping and objectifying women.

The point is, nerds never wanted to “win”. The ascendancy of their subculture is a horrifying development for most of them. They grew up being marginalized by the in-crowd. They found interests and a common ground with the rest of the persecuted non-alpha class and they were relieved to never again have to be bullied around and to find a social subculture in which they could express themselves freely and, shockingly, even become admired by their peers. Like, really admired. Socially admired, not just admired by their parents and upstanding grown-ups in their community after receiving another scholarship or citizenship award.

And now here come the alphas to take this from them, as well as their eighth grade lunch money. They aren’t undermining themselves; they are sabotaging the movement. I see so many people throwing their hands up and wondering why these guys are behaving so beastly, and if you take five minutes and realize how they got where they are, then you could see where they’re going.

The nerds want the women to go away, because when the women go away, so will the alpha males. High school never ends, not really. Alpha males hate everything new or different, but they learn to feign interest in things that women are drawn to. And so now you have these massive audiences for comic book movies and video games, because women started liking these subjects and the alphas are following along. The producers of this content know that to keep those big audiences spending, they need to lower the sophistication to a level that the casual, obtuse consumer will like. The women will still prefer the alphas to the nerds, no matter what the nerds do, and the nerds know this. They don’t have the tools for the game the way that the alphas do.

Now here is the perfect storm. Everything they like is overrun by women who don’t really want to engage with them and want to see the subculture change to be more appealing to them (and this is where things like feminist critiques of video games drive them even more bonkers). The women are followed by alpha males, who the nerds revile and who will try to seize control everywhere they can, like alphas do. The quiet living room of the nerd has become the scene of a giant house party hosted by the cast of Jersey Shore. Oh, and that’s about to be the level of sophistication coming across in comic books and movies now that there’s billions of dollars to be made by appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Now I don’t sympathize with anyone who engages in death threats or who expresses anti-feminist ideals, or who essentially falls under the sway of their worst fears rather than their highest hopes. But I also gotta say, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

So I’m not saying you need to sympathize with these people or ally with them or approve of the obscene ends that some of them go to. But you will never, ever, understand nerd behavior if you think that they are exultant at the new attention on their subculture, and that all this misogyny and anti-social behavior is just exactly what your objectifying, stereotypical model of them says that it is. They are not struggling to express themselves and grappling with zero-IQ social intelligence. They aren’t fumbling their way through their moment in the spotlight because they don’t know how to behave. I know that’s what everyone has been raised to believe about them, and it sure looks like it’s what they’re doing. But the fact is, all this acting out and hostility isn’t awkwardness and it isn’t a dominance play. It’s a simple message to the newcomers: get. the. fuck. out.

Another touches on something we were suggesting with the choice of tweet-image above:

Wow. That third reader doesn’t so much zoom out as much as he spaces out. Apparently there are no female nerds, and the only defining characteristic of nerd-dom is being a social outcast. Really? I thought it was liking scifi and being socially inept was an unfortunate side effect of spending so much time reading as a kid (maybe that was just me?).

And the whole idea that the “sophistication” of some monolithic nerd culture is going to suffer is ridiculous. You know what is happening? They are making more geeky, nerdy things – from movies to comic books to novels. Sure, some will be less sophisticated. Some will be more. Some will not appeal to your tastes and so what, go read or watch something that does, there’s a ton of it. I personally find the idea of Depression Quest ridiculous; it seems more like a psych class than a game to me, but if enough people want to play it to make that kind of genre popular, it’s not like it’s hurting me.

I’m a female gamer, though I admit I haven’t been following the GamerGate nonsense closely. Mostly because yes, there is as much misogyny in gaming as in the rest of life, and yes, video-game review sites have been useless for a long time now. It would be nice if neither of these things were true, but you know what? I play video games to relax, and stressing about that shit isn’t relaxing at all. If sexism in a game bothers me, I stop playing it. If I’m looking for a new game to play, I’ll look at one or two blog reviews and then download it and try it (if the game doesn’t have a trial version, there are plenty of others that do, so, move on to the next one).

The whole death threats thing is ridiculous and people need to realize that’s not ok, but I feel like summing this all up as a message to “get the fuck out” is unhelpful. Not just from a putting the genie back in the bottle perspective, but the vast majority of nerds aren’t issuing death threats. Only a handful of whack-jobs are.

Another gets the last word:

Oh Jesus Christ, can we just let this thing peter out as it should? Honestly, I already have four kids and I have to listen enough of he said/she said young love acquired, denied, lost and how it is the end of and most important thing in the world teen angst babble around the family dinner table. Do I also have to suffer through this at my favorite blog as well?

Sure, there are game developers out there who have an agenda against woman because they weren’t with the cool crowd in high school and carry that resentment into their apparently adult adolescent years. And yes, there are woman out there who detest game developers who seemingly objectify and reduce woman to sexual byproducts. Please, can we just let them go sling it out in their own high-school sophomoric fashion by posting nasty comments to each other on their blogs and the rest of us just move on and focus on more important things? Thank you.