Let me tell you a story. I live in Germany. Games here are under harsher restrictions. Protection of youth is constitutional. When I received the German Developer Award, a journalist I’ve never met before gave a heartwarming speech on how TRAUMA shows even to the most jaded skeptics that game can be art. On the same evening, Spec Ops also won. The head of the commission to decide age ratings also gave a speech how for the first time in history of the commission there was a lengthy debate among them if they were doing youth protection or actually censoring art. This is a big deal since by the German constitution, one is mandatory while the other is illegal.

It took us a long time to get there and it was a group effort. Decades of journalists, academics and game developers doing their best to demonstrate the value in games and challenging stereotypes and misconceptions. That evening it seemed like we were finally getting somewhere. Games were discussed in mainstream newspapers in a thoughtful and appreciative manner. Game museums were being established. I applied for tax benefits as an independent artist. I was personally involved in establishing a games studies course at a local university. It took us 5 years to pull it off since the university board was so hard to convince that this was a reasonable thing to spend money on. But we were finally getting somewhere. The tables were turning. The doors were opening. It seemed like games were not for some alleged low life nerds after all. They were for everybody. They were important and valuable. They had been all along. People were coming around.

Gamergate comes in and it is a stab in the back from the very crowd we were working so hard to defend all this time. It is an attack on exactly the same people that were sacrificing careers, families and years of work for. Here were gamers hell-bent at being exactly the thing we fought so hard to prove they never were. We haven’t fought against the Jack Thompsons of this world only to have gamers issue threats of mass shootings. We haven’t been laboriously moving games journalism away from being glorified PR-megaphones only to be accused of bias by our own readers. We haven’t established game studies courses and academic conferences for gamers to denounce them as “SJW Bootcamps”. We haven’t been pushing the boundaries of what games can express for gamers to scoff at or efforts and calling them “not even a game”.

The bright future we were constructing with so much effort and against such resistance is being pillaged by its own inhabitants. You may not care about what other think about games, but we did. We fought for you. We fought because we love games. We fought because we believed in games.

To all of us who have dedicated their lives and hearts to this medium this is a tragedy and a humiliation. But most of all, it is the most crushing betrayal.