A constant refrain from GamerGate is that it’s a movement solely concerned with journalism ethics and that it can win on the strength of facts of corruption. This might be a more convincing claim if not for the following:
1) The nature of the catalyst
The primary driving force for GamerGate in its first stage was the belief that indie dev Zoe Quinn had entered a sexual relationship with a games journalist from whom she then received biased press coverage about her (free) game. This was given more traction by the perception that the gaming press was refusing to report on the issue because they were all in some sort of secret pact by which they abetted and hid each others’ venality. What seems to have never given GamerGate pause for thought about this is the following:
i) that the source of this allegation is a blog post by Zoe’s ex-boyfriend that betrays all the symptoms of bad faith that GamerGate has shown subsequently. The lofty, faux-detached and philosophic tone Eron uses throughout the post – of which there’s no starker example than the ludicrous title quoted from Wittgenstein: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ – is meant to lend credence to his avowed reason for publishing it: to present forensic evidence that exposes a dangerous, self-deluded and manipulative person about whom he needed to warn the gaming public, as a matter of duty. But what should’ve been utterly obvious to anyone with an ounce of emotional intelligence is that a serially jilted ex-boyfriend is the last person to be trusted to offer a detached and objective analysis of the person at the time that she cheated on him. And this not in spite of the attempts to rationally analyze the motives for her each and every action, and shine a critical, objective light on her personality, but because this is so obviously denotes a (unhealthy and quite ghastly) coping mechanism for dealing with the grief of losing a partner in such an upsetting manner. This post, from what I remember, is something like 8,000 words long: there was nothing detached and objective about it.
ii) It’s very difficult, given Zoe Quinn’s past record for receiving misogynist abuse from many gamers, to imagine there wasn’t an underlying motive of vindictiveness at the heart of Eron’s decision to go public with his story. He must have known the shit storm in which doing so would embroil Zoe Quinn; the levels of abuse that would be directed at her. And so isn’t it obvious why the gaming press held off from reporting on it, at least pending substantiation of the central allegation in which it was implicated? Given the culture of vindictive misogyny the blog post inevitably fed into? If GamerGate were really only concerned with facts, they could have shown some modesty and good faith by circumscribing their concern to the only part that (very tenuously and, it transpired, spuriously) pointed to an issue of journalistic ethics. Instead the ‘5 Guys’ meme was gleefully touted at every opportunity, perhaps most prominently in InternetAristocrat’s video – yeah, the same one in which he claimed this wasn’t about Zoe Quinn or misogyny, but about corruption in games journalism. Not to mention the campaign to mark down her game on Steam, the doxxing, death threats, etc. If GamerGate wanted to be taken seriously as a respectable movement against corruption in journalism, they ought to have distanced themselves from this pseudo-scandal from the outset.
2) Objectivity
This is a recurring theme in conversations with GamerGate folks on Twitter. The argument goes that if a review of a game pays some attention to the political subtext of the game’s narrative and/or depiction of gender, race, etc., then the reviewer has violated a basic ethical standard of objectivity. The assumption here is that what reviewing games is really about is assessing how much fun they are to play and how well their game play mechanics work. But this is only an assumption, and it really shouldn’t require much brain power to identify the root of it in subjective preference. It is fine if you exclusively have an interest in the ‘fun factor’ and playability of games. But for God’s sake, do not pretend this is anything more than what you happen to like. Bleating about how games reviewers are ‘unethical’ and ‘biased’ because they choose to represent other areas of interest in their reviews extraneous to the basic mechanics is incredibly petulant and self-important.
It is a different story, of course, if a reviewer gives unequal weight to game play mechanics vs., say, the political correctness of its characterization. If the former are barely mentioned, and the latter harped on about, that marks out a bad and unfair review. But the review is bad in virtue of not judging the game on all its merits; the nature of the ideology being pushed at the expense of doing so is irrelevant. There is nothing in principle that says these two aspects have to work against each other, and there is plenty of evidence to support this. Try John Walker’s Wot I Think about Shadow of Mordor, as a recent example.
A related complaint says that it’s not so much that games are critiqued through a progressive political lens, than that it’s the dominant perspective, and that other perspectives are being sidelined as a result. The first part of this is a fair complaint – if you don’t like left-wing politics or any for that matter being discussed in the context of video games, by all means get on whatever e-soap box is at your disposal and say so. What’s less clear is how this progressive trend sidelines other perspectives. If #GG really represents a core community of ‘true’ gamers, then it shouldn’t be hard to find or create alternative media outlets. Perhaps someone like Milo could help lead the way on this, assuming he’s not just a right-wing opportunist hack looking to jump on any popular anti-feminist bandwagon going. In any case this would be a much more respectable tactic than #GG’s current one by which they try to get ad campaigns pulled from websites whose political stance they dislike.
Of course, GamerGate will claim it’s not as simple as that, which brings me to the most laughable part of the movement:
The ‘Death of Gamers’ – the misunderstanding of meaning of ‘gamer’
Yes, what’s equal parts hilarious and irritating is the way GamerGate has tried to appropriate the language of the progressive left as regards intolerance and hatred and apply it to themselves as victims of such attitudes. Most of this is centered around an article by Leigh Alexander, which, it must be said, does contain paragraphs it’s hard not to see as deliberately inflammatory and antagonizing. At least, on the surface:
I often say I’m a video game culture writer, but lately I don’t know exactly what that means. ‘Game culture’ as we know it is kind of embarrassing — it’s not even culture. It’s buying things, spackling over memes and in-jokes repeatedly, and it’s getting mad on the internet.
It’s young men queuing with plush mushroom hats and backpacks and jutting promo poster rolls. Queuing passionately for hours, at events around the world, to see the things that marketers want them to see. To find out whether they should buy things or not. They don’t know how to dress or behave. Television cameras pan across these listless queues, and often catch the expressions of people who don’t quite know why they themselves are standing there.
‘Games culture’ is a petri dish of people who know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online ‘wars’ about social justice or ‘game journalism ethics,’ straight-faced, and cause genuine human consequences. Because of video games.
It should be emphasized that this is closest thing to merit accusations of hatred and ‘bigotry’ – yes, ‘bigotry’! – published in the gaming press about ‘gamers’, and I’ll concede it’s not hard to see why many felt offended by it. But on the other hand, I’m very skeptical of people claiming to feel that offended by it, and when Milo ‘gamers are frustrated beta males’ Yiannopoulos is taking to Twitter to accuse Leigh of ‘bullying’, my skepticism turns to suspicion.
Because who is she really talking about here? What is the identity of the group against whom she’s spouting these supposedly bigoted views? Some might be tempted to say white, cisgendered young men, as they are, or at least were, video game’s core consumer demographic. But I think this is an incredibly implausible interpretation of what she said. Rather, she is denigrating a parodic idea of what ‘gamers’ are, the out-dated stereotype of the reclusive, socially awkward nerd who finds in games the best form of escapism from a reality in which he feels ill at ease. The idea is out-dated because clearly gaming culture is changing as it enters the mainstream and games themselves become more diverse. What is arguably missing is a corresponding change in PR, in the popular perception of people who play games. The antagonistic tone, I think it’s clear from the articles she links to about the misogynistic campaign against Zoe Quinn, is aimed at a specific sub-set of regressive and aggressive gamers who resent the success of (particularly female) devs bucking the trend of games as pure fantasy escapism. If you identify with such a group, then by all means feel offended. But to attack misgonynists pissing their pants over the growing inclusiveness and maturity of gaming culture is not ‘bigotry’. Again I’ll admit the language Leigh uses is unfortunately broad and ambiguous so as to admit of the interpretation that it’s an attack on gamers qua ‘traditional gaming enthusiasts’ or something. But as she is no doubt a gaming enthusiast herself, I find this very unlikely. Again, to summarize: insofar as Leigh is attacking actual people, the people in question are a nasty minority bent on harassing and abusing female indie devs and left-wing pundits in the gaming press. Otherwise what she is decrying is abstract; that is, the popular negative stereotype of people who play video games, and saying that now more than ever, this notion is unfounded.
bretfrag 