AbleGamers is a charity that I have some familiarity with. I actually spoke on a panel for AbleGamers in 2012 at PAX, when I also accepted the award for Accessible Mainstream Game of the Year on behalf of the SWTOR team. Their mission has always been noble, and from my viewpoint does three things:

Help raise money so that kids with disabilities can buy peripherals allowing them to game. Help raise awareness among developers that design choices can limit their game’s reach among those with disabilities. Help the differently-abled identify games that can be played with people despite their disabilities.

Designing with disabilities in mind is often put off way too late in the development cycle of the game. It’s often easy to do if you include factors early in development, but hard when you factor it in late. Common examples of things that should always be included but aren’t include: colorblind-friendly UI design or alternate mode (8% of males are RG colorblind – this is significant!), ability to remap literally any command to allow for alternate control mechanisms, and including close captioning and not depending on audio cues for key playability. You know, all those things in the options menu that you never turn on.

Anyway, I think they’re good guys, so when I heard that they were the target charity for a porn stream with GamerGate, I was disappointed and surprised. Maybe not too surprised – charities can’t always be too picky where the checks come from – but still.

Anyway, it turns out the people setting up the charity drive forgot to tell AbleGamers that gamergate was involved.

On December 5 2014, we received an email requesting permission for a charity event from an associate of Mercedes Carrera. The email had very few details other than “Would you be okay if a porn star raised money for your cause and donated it to you?” As a sex positive organization, our immediate response was “Absolutely. We would be honored to be chosen….” In doing our due diligence we discovered the event organizer was putting together a GamerGate stream that would “for now” be “a charity stream” because they “cannot mention that it is a GG stream as it might shy away BZ (Brazzers) and others.” AbleGamers became concerned by the lack of transparency in the original emails having made no mention of GamerGate. We became further alarmed as the post continued adding “GamerGate [h]as just weaponized porn.”

AbleGamers backed out of their commitment once the #GamerGate link was made apparent. They made it clear that they consider themselves as not taking a stance in the battle.

AbleGamers is a group of diverse volunteers from many different backgrounds. All of our volunteers have their own personal feelings on GamerGate and what it stands for. However, as an organization, AbleGamers is 100% neutral.

This did not stop some loose cannons in #GamerGate from letting their displeasure for being rejected known. Shortly after the announcement, AbleGamers website was attacked or DDOSed. They attacked noted awesome person and Gamergate nemesis Randi Harper for offering her help with DDOS mitigation, and then claimed it was probably her that did it. Veiled threats that this could all be over if AbleGamers would play ball. And then GamerGate decided that AbleGamers was a stupid SJW charity that wanted to limit artistic freedom anyway. They accused devs who supported AbleGamer’s decision of ‘sabotaging a charity’. One talked about investigating AbleGamers for Tax Fraud. And then they accused AbleGamers of faking DDOSing themselves because after the attack, it reverted to a blank white page.

Yes, the website is back up. Yes, its blank. No, we don’t know what happened after the DDoS. We can only tell you what our host tells us. — AbleGamers Charity (@AbleGamers) December 7, 2014

And then, of course, is just the wall of fucking outrage, where Gamergate en masse sea lioned AbleGamers for their decision, and pretty much missed the entire point and, at times, made shit up wholesale about AbleGamers stance. Keep in mind, this is a charity that was utterly uninvolved with GamerGate until THEY attempted to reach out to AbleGamers to be a charity recipient. And keep in mind that AG didn’t speak out AGAINST GG, they just declared their desire to not be involved in the fight.

If you want to support AbleGamers, I encourage you to donate to them directly here.