For the last three or four months I’ve been working on a webseries for The Escapist. Several years ago, the site had a tabletop show call I Hit It With My Axe, a reality-ish series wherein feminist alt-porn stars play Dungeons & Dragons. The show was pretty polarizing during its original run, having all of the following: A) female gamers in a male-dominated space, which riled up the “anti-SJW” crowd, B) professional porn stars, which riled up anti-porn feminists, and C) showrunner and DM Zak Sabbath.

(For my part, I had problems with none of these things - I want more women in gaming, I support ethical porn and sex-worker rights, and had no problems working with Zak.*)

After seeing my video about internet fame, Zak offered me a gig adding essay segments to the series in a bid to bring it back for another season. The Escapist was on board to fund a few new episodes, so I left my job and went full-time freelance.

Then GamerGate happened. Here’s why I don’t work for The Escapist anymore:

First off, in pure pragmatic terms, the reason I left is because the show ended up being a lot more work than expected, and since I was paid by the video, not by the hour, it shook out to twice as much work for about a third less money than I’d hoped. This was my own damn fault, and I’d been given the freedom to leave at any time if the gig wasn’t working out for me, so after a couple months I started thinking I would probably leave after getting our first small batch of episodes done.

But my feelings got complicated by The Escapist’s extremely problematic article about GamerGate, and the ensuing shitstorm people rightfully raised around it.

If you haven’t been paying attention to GamerGate, you can read this summary by A Man In Black. It’s a hate mob masquerading as an ethics movement, and masquerading convincingly, at least to people with enough misplaced anger that they want to be convinced. Its targets are almost exclusively women and a few male feminists. Their targets are harassed with public releases of their private information, public libeling, rape and death threats, stalking; multiple women have left their home after receiving highly specific death threats including their home addresses; there are at least 3 open FBI investigations into it. It is seriously ugly shit, and it’s been dragging on for 4 months now.

For a while, only a few sites in the gaming press covered GamerGate - mostly sites that had a higher-than-usual number of female contributors. As it’s continued, more sites have chimed in. Core to GamerGate’s operations is the insistence that they are concerned, primarily, with ethics in games journalism, which they insist has been routinely broken and that they are committed to addressing. Most have had the good sense to call it what it is: a cybermob of angry misogynists and the people they’ve managed to convince of their legitimacy.

The only gaming site to paint them at all sympathetically was The Escapist.

In the immediate aftermath of this article being published, I asked myself a lot of questions about where I wanted my work hosted and whether I wanted to be driving traffic and ad revenue to The Escapist. I talked to Zak, saying that if I was going to be on this site I wanted to be sure we were adding a dissenting voice to that conversation. It seemed I could be more valuable as a positive voice on the site than simply by walking.

I wrote to The Escapist’s Editor-in-Chief, Greg Tito. He had done a fair bit of backpedaling in response to the article, removing one of the most problematic interviews (with one of the most vocal proponents of hacking game developer Zoe Quinn’s data and sharing her private information) and publicly stating that The Escapist is against harassment. In my email, I suggested he back that statement up, asking him to let me write an article or even create a video talking directly about GamerGate.

Greg and I ended up speaking on the phone a few days later, and he explained a few things, chief among them that The Escapist’s parent company, Defy Media, had put the kibbosh on discussing GamerGate at all. Having seen that writing either critically or sympathetically about GamerGate met with an outcry from some part of the gaming world, they washed their hands of it entirely. And you’ll notice that The Escapist has not written anything about GamerGate since about two weeks after the article ran.

I don’t doubt that Greg Tito is a decent guy. (I got a strong sense that the reason he wanted to speak to me on the phone was so I wouldn’t think him indecent.) I also don’t think whether Greg Tito is a decent guy is at issue here. GamerGate is a hate mob driving women from their homes, and The Escapist interviewed several of its core instigators as though they were representative of game developers as a whole, having dug pretty deep down into the barrel of game developers to find so many sympathetic ones, and passing over the overwhelming number of higher profile developers who have criticized it. It’s like debating evolution with seventeen creationists and not even inviting Bill Nye. Decent people are capable of doing fucked up things, and publishing this article was supremely fucked up.

The reason this even happened, Greg explained to me, was that the interviews - attributed in the article to “Escapist Staff” - were conducted by Alex Macris, who is not actually on The Escapist’s staff. He works for Defy Media, overseeing several of their properties. He is technically Greg’s boss, and the article was pushed through editorial with less oversight than usual. Alex also notably interviewed Adam Baldwin, GamerGate’s celebrity champion, on Every Joe, one of the other sites he manages for Defy. He was also, notably, our point person for I Hit It With My Axe.

Greg also told me that he was skeptical about bringing back the show at all. It had been controversial with The Escapist’s audience, and after the backlash against their GamerGate article, he felt now was a bad time to start releasing videos that might rile up the same kind of people.

If you want to talk journalistic ethics, let’s talk about this: a news site is being forbidden by corporate from covering a major topic in gaming, and both site and parent company have come away thinking that all controversial content is bad. This is what happens when people can’t tell a just fight from an unjust one - they forbid both.

In regards to The Escapist’s responsibility regarding the article, Greg felt that the people harassing women were unlikely to change their behavior one way or the other based on how news sites covered them. But let’s be clear about something: GamerGate has invested significant effort since day zero in being taken seriously, from pressuring news sites to cover them sympathetically to the constant efforts to recruit people to the cause by convincing them that, really, it’s about ethics in games journalism, not to mention brutally targeting their critics. Say what you want about how they’d do the same no matter what we said, perception matters to them. People rise to the level of what they think is permissible - the more permissible harassment seems, the more it happens. Many of GamerGate’s instigators were harassing women months before GamerGate started, but ask any woman who’s been on the receiving end - it got worse when they found allies.

So the reason I don’t work with The Escapist anymore is because working on the show became viscerally unpleasant after this. The show’s future was uncertain - we were to make a batch of 12, at which point Defy would decide where to air them if they aired them at all, and would increase the order if they did well. No matter where the show went, we’d be working with Alex. I couldn’t address GamerGate using the show, but the show didn’t leave enough time to make a video about GamerGate on my own. I also worried that speaking critically of The Escapist’s actions might damage their relationship with Zak if I was still working on the show. The work itself was as good as ever, but the experience of working on it was terrible, and both the quality and pace of my work declined.

So that’s why I quit, and that’s why I launched my Kickstarter.

If you actually give any shits about real journalistic integrity, I recommend you write to Defy Media and tell them you want their sites to start talking about GamerGate, and start submitting articles about it. I’ve gotten the sense from a few oblique tweets that other gaming sites that have stayed mum on the topic are facing similar resistance from corporate, so you might want to dig up their parent company’s email as well.

And while you’re at it, support ethical journalists.

*edit: I have changed the phrasing on two lines of this post to remove my endorsement of Zak Sabbath.

