I’ve been struggling for weeks to come up with something to say about “GamerGate.” One can’t have a nuanced conversation about something so utterly without nuance. No one outside GamerGate buys the “it’s about ethics in game journalism” argument because ethics never get brought up in any context other than deflecting criticism. What gets their blood boiling is feminist/progressive critiques of games and “game culture,” regardless of source. Electronic Arts could be caught FedExing an envelope stuffed full of cash and gardenia-scented love notes to the IGN office and no one in GamerGate would give two shits about it until someone on 8chan claimed the envelope had once dated Zoe Quinn.

I’ve been refocusing on my fiction writing over the last year, and as fiction writers do, I suspect I’ve channeled frustrations into it. I recently finished a science fiction story, a prequel to the novel I’ve been working on, in which Gail—a space-going metahuman and the story’s heroine—gets confronted by, in her words, “people who scream that ‘fair treatment’ is code for 'totalitarian oppression.’” Those people form the core not only of GamerGate, but the larger culture war that bandies about terms like political correctness and social justice warrior.

When you learn to construct stories, you realize everyone is the hero of their own tale. No one sees themselves as the bad guy. Being confronted by someone saying this thing that you like is hurtful to others for reasons that you entirely missed is uncomfortable. We all know that racists and sexists are bad! If I like this thing that you say is sexist, aren’t you saying that I’m a sexist? Aren’t you saying I’m the bad guy? It’s all too easy to say no, you’re the bad guy, and to fashion a narrative that justifies going to war, literally or figuratively.

But what’s fascinating—and depressing—about this particular incarnation of the culture war is how thoroughly self-identified gamers are gutting the argument that games can be capital-A Art.

Every new form of expression must fight to be taken seriously. You’ll still find people arguing science fiction and fantasy aren’t real literature. The ugly kernel of truth, though, is that that argument persists because there’s a lot of embarrassing stuff in sci-fi. And comics. And, yes, games. (I write lots of stories with anthropomorphic animal characters, whether alien/fantasy races or modified humans like Gail, so they’re sci-fi and for kids and that weird furry stuff. Dismissiveness trifecta!) Art is aspirational. It’s making a statement we can argue about. It’s tugging at us to examine unquestioned attitudes. It still entertains us, but it makes us think.

But works always say something, even if what they say is “here are my field’s stereotypes in all their best-selling glory.” A genre saturated with embarrassing tropes is going to take flak for it, and as attitudes change, the level and direction of flak changes. If you read 1950s science fiction today, it’s startling how much portrays manly men chain-smoking their way through alien action with women relegated to housewives making sure the food replicator has dinner ready on time.

Science fiction has grown not by clinging fiercely to those tropes but, at least in part, by understanding and critiquing them. The Forever War is both allegory about the Vietnam War and pushback against jingoistic military sci-fi; The Left Hand of Darkness (like much of Le Guin’s work) questions gender roles rather than tacitly reinforcing them. Comics have taken their pass at this, too, with Watchmen and The Dark Knight.

So what about games?

Back in the Long Ago—the 1980s—it was fascinating to watch Richard Garriott’s Ultima series become progressively more concerned with morality and ethics, to watch Infocom’s text adventures aspire to serious social commentary with Trinity and A Mind Forever Voyaging, to see Chris Crawford slowly go bananas. But in the intervening years a curious thing has happened: the market’s bifurcated. There are big name (“AAA”) games and there are “indie” games, and with few exceptions the interesting stuff happens with the indies.

That’s a bold statement for a guy who isn’t much of a gamer, I know. But I keep up with the industry, and I’ll stand by it: in terms of playing mechanics, AAA titles haven’t changed much in twenty years. Kill all the bad guys, collect plot tokens, stay alive long enough to see a story delivered to you in cut scenes. The need to fit into that mold is a significant constraint on what kinds of stories get told, and the need to recoup Hollywood-level budgets is a strong disincentive to avoid challenging proven formulas.

And that’s where we circle back to GamerGate. The feminist/progressive critics—along with indie developers—are in a position to challenge all these formulas. If you truly care about games you want all these people to keep making their critical videos and publishing their opinion pieces and, most importantly, making their boundary-pushing games.

GamerGate, though, would like you to stop asking why there aren’t more strong women characters in games, because they can name at least—at least—three. They would like you to stop harshing their mellow just because they like a game that happens to have “press a button to rape the hot chick” action. (Also, they would like to remind you that Anita Sarkeesian is a lying liar who lies because when she highlighted that in Tropes vs. Women she didn’t say “but the game doesn’t reward you for raping her, so no problem.”)

“But wait!” a GamerGater might cry. “I do want games to be taken seriously. I just don’t take Sarkeesian and Quinn and Wu and Alexander (and and and) seriously.”

Okay. But who are you going to take seriously? More importantly, what are you going to take seriously?

What kind of subjects can games tackle? Is it good for games to recognize their own tropes? Can they subvert them? Reject them? Invert them? Do all games have to follow the set, proven models? Do all games have to consciously appeal to self-identified gamers? If women can enjoy games that do have these criticized tropes, can’t men enjoy games that don’t?

These questions all sound rhetorical, but if you want games to be all that they can be, to grow, to challenge, to be art, they have correct answers.

GamerGate’s proponents believe they’re somehow saving video games, as if one too many positive mentions of Depression Quest will cause the next Call of Duty game to spontaneously transform itself into a My Little Pony MMO. This is roughly akin to believing that Michael Bay will start making Jane Austen adaptations instead of three-hour Dolby Atmos test reels if his Rotten Tomatoes average drops another five points.

The real risk to gaming isn’t that GamerGate will fail, but that it won’t fail. No matter what happens, the gaming world will stay safe for the next Grand Theft Auto installment, and it will be as thrilling and wild and morally questionable as ever. But it might not be so safe for the next Gone Home or Revolution 60. Maybe not even for the next Journey or Braid or Papers Please.

The bottom line is that gaming hasn’t had an Ursula K. Le Guin yet, a Kathryn Bigelow, a Neil Gaiman, a Wes Anderson. I don’t know what that will even look like—but I know it’ll be challenging, and I don’t mean in terms of game play. It’ll be controversial. It’ll make people uncomfortable. And it will piss off people fiercely attached to the status quo.

I’m not saying that Zoe Quinn or Brianna Wu—or Porpentine or Emily Short or Christine Love or anyone else—is destined to be gaming’s Le Guin. But if she isn’t one of them, she’s almost certainly out there by now. And she’s watching all this. And after the last couple of months, she may be seriously questioning a career in game development if it might mean getting harassed out of her house if she says something “too feminist.”

If GamerGate gets their way, they won’t make game journalism more ethical. Even though many of them may genuinely believe that’s the battle they’re fighting, it isn’t. Not with those tactics. Not with those targets. The only thing they can succeed at is making games objectively worse for a generation.

Just like I wasn’t sure how to start this, I’m not sure how to conclude it. Don’t be a dick. Don’t let yourself be used by dicks. Understand that someone who shames and terrifies others into silence is never on the side of free speech. And support people who want to make what you love better, even when those people piss you off.

Also, Gail could totally kick Jayne Cobb’s ass. Just saying.