Ive been watching the Gamergate brouhaha with sick fascination. We all know the Internets got ugly corners and suddenly the ugliness came out of the corner. I honor the courage of the women whove been standing up to the creeps. But I was kinda puzzled by who the creeps actually are and why theyre so upset; I know lots of heavy gamers and theyre by and large pleasant well-adjusted people. So I went looking for them.
[Disclosure: Im not 100% unbiased: I once spent a couple years in online games. Also, I like Android car-racing games. Also, Im an L11 Ingress agent; L12 soon!]
Where is it?
I looked at #gamergate on Twitter but its just a continuous ping-pong howl of rage. It certainly reinforced my lousy opinion of the GG folk; I screenshot one to dodge track-covering. But it didnt help me understand anything.
I also tried 8chan but I just couldnt find any signal among the noise. 8chan, Im pretty sure its not me, its you.
Then I spent a while reading /r/KotakuInAction, which you might not want to visit if youre not feeling thick-skinned and well-centered. But I will say there is a considerable amount of cohesive narrative happening there in among all the ragebombs. [Disclosure: Im not hip enough to discern the intended relationship to the Kotaku blog, a Gawker thing, reasonably sane on the face of it.]
Bullying
My first impressions of the KotakuInAction page were dominated by the word bullying , its all over the place. Good, I thought; theyre talking about all that bullying weve been hearing about.
Um, nope. Theyre being bullied, they say. They seem to think thats the big problem: gamers being bullied by non-gamers. There are other issues (the ones weve been hearing about) but all the emotional momentum comes straight out of this bullying thing, the feeling that theyre getting no respect and theyre mad as hell and theyre not gonna take it any more.
So, Ill grant that people who play a lot of videogames have a lousy image, and Ill go further: I think the image is largely unwarranted.
But shee-it, someone not liking your fave recreation isnt bullying. People disapproving of gender treatments on your home turf isnt bullying. Being unconvinced that games journalism is hopelessly corrupt isnt bullying. Get a fucking grip.
Opinions
Here are the ones that stuck out in my memory.
The media are all corrupt
I guess its easier to believe gaming coverage is crooked if you believe the whole ecosystem is. Also, it apparently removes the need to bring forward actual concrete evidence. Which I didnt see any of.
You know whats weird? Theres so much money in the gaming biz, and its so hard to make any in publishing, that I would have been unsurprised had it been a cesspit of bribery and intimidation, ripe for exposure. On the evidence, it isnt, which is sort of heart-warming.
They hate Ms Wu and Ms Quinn and Ms Sarkesesian
The contempt is visceral and apparently infinite in depth. They are scraping the bottom of the barrel on this one, looking for something anything to take down their critics. Jeepers, these women were niche sub-sub-subculture bloggers until GGs blunt-edged frontal assault made them profiles in courage. I hear and understand the mainstream feminist critique men thinking they should be above criticism from the Second Sex and I suppose it captures truth, but Im still baffled by the empty fury.
Were winning
Apparently, they think so. If they just stay the course (and here a few relatively-sane voices chime in saying ease off on the harshing, bros ) the massed ranks of the corrupt media and the loathed SJWs will undoubtedly crumble. Doesnt look like that from outside, boyos.
That SJW thing
(Stands for Social Justice Warrior and wow do they hate em.) Guys, I got news for you. You know who was an SJW? Abraham fucking Lincoln. Mahatma fucking Gandhi. And so on. Me, Im just a computer programmer but SJW is something to aspire to. The complete chuckleheadedenss of this targeting beggars belief.
The Politics
Well, theyre weird. Theres clearly a left-right thing trying to happen here: I got pushback to one of my WTF tweets pointing me at GamerGate: Part I: Sex, Lies, and Gender Games in Reason, pro-GG discourse in a pretty vanilla hard-right pub.
But I gotta tell you, the actual GG rank-and-file dont know Krugman from Erickson or Piketty from Le Pen. Theyre pretty sure that the people bullying them are in the grip of an ideology , and that must be super-bad. But near as I can tell they dont have one.
Good news?
Its not entirely absent. Erwin van der Koegh wrote So I read 1500 Twitter mentions that Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu got (20 hours worth) and yeah, theres loads of ignorant meanness, but apparently the actual rape/murder threats have died down to zero. Maybe Twitter getting its shit together?
Part of me suspects theres an upside to GamerGate: It dragged a part of the Internet that we always knew was there out into the open where its really hard to ignore. Its damaged some peoples lives, but you know what? That was happening all the time, anyhow. The difference is, now we cant not see it.