Prohibition. The Satanic child abuse Scare. The ‘war’ on rock and roll. Given the right words out of the mouths of the right speakers these simple aspects of our modern life can be transformed into a great evil that must be eradicated. Of all of the previous panics which I have mentioned, all have one common thread — They were pushed down out throats and even made into legislation — and in one case a US constitutional amendment — by people who clam to act for the greater good. This cannot be any farther from the truth. I dare argue, dear reader, that these people were on power trips that far extend our usual extent of being outraged, and have used facts and other truths and twisted them beyond their intended meanings and into something completely different. All scenes have experienced this, and now it’s the gamer’s turn.

Let’s be real here, friends. ANY bastion of pop culture worth it’s salt is going to have critics. Most of the time those critics will be people on the inside of the community, guiding the masses when they seek the next hot thing, advising when some in the scene go too far, and supporting\defending the community and the scene against all attempts to mischaracterize the community as a whole by outsiders. Never in the history of pop culture has an outsider been supported by the very people whose job is to protect and defend, let alone declare the people that give them a living nonexistent. Of all geek culture, gamers are the most persecuted.

One has to examine the many cases in which the bulk of the community has come under attack — The two Senate hearings, the ramblings of Jack Thompson, and the podium-slamming sermons of Leland Yee. Yet those crusades have paid a price for wasting the peoples’ time on cracking down on gamers — the two senators who instigated the first hearing are no longer in the Senate. Jack Thompson has been disbarred and is miserable, and Yee is a guilty verdict away from roasting in a federal prison for supplying guns to Chinatown gangs. Gaming itself has the means to defend against frivolous claims any time a horrific tragedy breaks news and the media pins the finger. Through the ESA the industry works the Washington angle, while the community enters the areas of public discourse and persuades people that games — like ALL other forms of media — cannot make a person aggressive. It’s up to the gamer to know the line between fantasy and reality and also know when not to cross it.

But something happened. The gaming press have allowed themselves to be alienated by people who purport to be liberals but instead are as extreme left as they come. Both extremes of the horseshoe — as Sargon of Akkad brilliantly puts it here — are just as dangerous to a democracy. It’s the extreme right that will actually pick a gun and shoot at people who disagree — most of the time. The gaming press, armed with these radical views of feelz before realz made it all too easy for themselves to praise Anita Sarkeesian and Jon McIntosh as heroes of the gaming community. In reality however they are nothing more than snake oil salespeople looking for the next flock of sheep to fool. The evidence is here and is documented.

They also subscribe to sex-negative radical feminism — the kind you see on Tumblr at any given time. I am not getting into that in detail, but I would say that most writers of the Gamers Are Dead articles that came out on August 23 of last year subscribe to the same ideas which in a nutshell call for destruction of all men on Earth just because they have a penis and displaying their obsession for drinking endless amounts of semen in a mug (with plenty of cream and sugar!) These people are hardly the people that commend respect from the masses but for some reason they do.

This unholy alliance of radical ideas and powerful people in the gaming press is an ideal playground for corruption. The fact that most game writers choose to ignore simple rules of propriety is mind boggling to me. Given that games as a industry is bigger than most sports leagues and the box office, you’d expect that when members of the Fourth Estate are shown to be behaving badly, then the well-being of the audience would be put first. At almost four months now evidence is come to light showing that game writers are coming together to decide which is news and which is not. Think about this for a minute. If any person of the Big Three networks have someone going what the gaming press has done, they’d be fired by Thanksgiving.

Bottom line — like the moral panics of the past, gamers are feeling the heat of the moralists. Instead of being called creepy child molesters and Satan worshippers, they are called women haters. Now, I will admit, gamers have a language all of their own which could take some time to understand. But as another study has said what all of the gaming community has said for years, I feel compelled to ask citations for most of the things these outside critics say about gamers. I am sure that I’ll never see those citations, as somehow the truth hurts these people. Instead I will offer these people some advice:

Gaming, and gamers, are not your community to change. If you desire to have change in gaming, then make your own section of the community and produce ideas — that is what all democracies do.