From your ally, a plea to GamerGaters to drop the DiGRA connection, and some to Sargon and Jenni aqua Follow Sep 29, 2014 · 6 min read

Hi, I’m aquapendulum, one of the archivists who document this event at KnowYourMeme. This is mostly an update to a Pastebin post I made, now in Medium for easier linking. The purpose of this post is to clear up the origin of where the connection to DiGRA came from.

The connection to DiGRA as some sort of cultist scholar group that is manipulating Silverstring Media was… not very tangible. I mean you really have to grasp at straws in order to create this connection. It was mostly born out of paranoia when gamers were bombarded with the chain of Gamers Are Over articles on August 28th. Here goes:

During the confusion and paranoia of being overwhelmingly smeared, many of us started digging through the connections among all the people we kept our eyes on. And connections were found, we traced the PR woman Maya “legobutts” Kramer back to her place of employment — Silverstring Media, which is consulted by the 2 figures of Feminist Frequency: Anita Sarkeesian & Jonathan McIntosh.

Last snapshot with the whole team presented.

This reinforced our belief that this agenda to end gamers was being pushed by feminist ideology. A blog post on September 1st confirmed Silverstring’s agenda to us.

Up until this point, the connection still seems plausible. However, it started getting shaky from then on. This Pastebin post was made and spreaded around earlier on September 1st.

One disturbing paragraph reads:

This PR group Sarkeesian is tied to is fairly creepy. Heavily ideological, they hold retreat workshops for SJW concepts, with a sharply activist tone. Reminds us of Jesus Camp. They do workshops for game devs where they discuss “dismantling hegemonic masculinity in the gaming industry”, and do weird training activities like “State Torture Jenga”. “Hegemonic masculinity” — it’s like they’re quoting Gramsci’s prison notebooks. Creepy.

The source for this can be seen by scrolling down several blog posts on Silverstring site: one particular blog post caught our eyes.

Which led to the theory that Silverstring is part of DiGRA and that they are creating creepy games together, which led to the creation of this.

The paranoia was perpetuated among us fast, especially to the ones who just read that pic and didn’t doublecheck the full context. The fact is Silverstring has no official affiliation with DiGRA. Silverstring CCO Andrew Grant Wilson went to a DiGRA conference on August 5th for the first time, making this the first and only contact between Silverstring and DiGRA (if you can even count that as a contact). It was also Andrew’s first attendance since Silverstring’s establishment in 2010.

Through our Lenses of Paranoia at that moment, the DiGRA conference must have looked like Jesus Camp indeed, especially when Andrew created a game about torture. It’s unclear how it plays from 3 still images, but Andrew had bad taste, I can say that much. But that’s Andrew’s own creation, we must have imagined the entire DiGRA conference were full of people having similar creations, which is highly implausible. It’s a far cry from actual Jesus camp.

I still think this kind of game academia conferences are more like a huge circlejerk for liberal art hipsters to show off their power level than anything else. But that’s just me.

The above Pastebin also contains a link to a DiGRA shared document in which members had discussions together.

The document was closed off from public access soon after the Pastebin was posted. This, I think, was the moment DiGRA members started noticing outsider access to their document from GamerGaters and closed off access from this document out of annoyance. We inadvertently brought the fight to DiGRA’s door first without knowing it, basically.

Unfortunately, all this has done was fueling the paranoia even further by creating the illusion that DiGRA was covering the tracks of their dirty dealings. And with paranoia came conspiracies, the conspiracy theorists among us (especially the ones from /pol/) started creating this theory that went deeper and deeper into the implausibility that DiGRA was slowly indoctrinating the audiences of video games with the backing from DARPA, that their members were the one pulling the string behind Silverstring to push feminist agenda into video games and they were trying to bypass peer review system to publish their papers.

The reality? Going by Jenni’s confirmation: Peer review is a contested subject among DiGRA members, and among other scholars as well. DiGRA members disagree on many things. Many of their publications have nothing to do with feminism. DARPA’s funding goes into organizing conferences. DiGRA members probably barely made contact with Andrew Grant Wilson, the person that represented Silverstring at the August DiGRA conference. And finally, the feminism agenda being pushed into video games has more connection to a particular man named Zoya Street than any DiGRA members. After all, Zoya pretty much shared the whole adventure in Utah with Andrew during that conference, and check out how he disparaged TotalBiscuit too.

He has this to say about himself.

Did I see the name “Critical Proximity”? This Critical Proximity?

I’ll leave it to you to dig more on that from here on. But think about this whole deal for a moment. The whole connection to DiGRA had its origin from a blog post of a 1-time attendance of Andrew Grant Wilson to a DiGRA conference, which spawned a severely inaccurate, paranoia-inducing infographic, which got spreaded around and planted the seed of doubt about DiGRA among many GamerGaters. The lack of communication with DiGRA prior to Sargon’s stream did not help clearing up this misunderstanding either.

GamerGaters, I am not one of you, but I am your ally nonetheless. I have stuck with you guys and gals so far because you have the facts on your side. After all, facts were how you convinced an ex-fencesitter like me. But I have been cautious when it comes to the DiGRA. We got them involved as soon as September 1st through a fringe connection, and the way many GamerGaters jumped in this lead absolutely believing in DiGRA’s involvement and wanted it to be true so bad that they would cling on to fringe theories, not facts, is disheartening. The cost of that is you guys let an important lead slipped right past your radar: Zoya Street, organizer of Critical Proximity. You want a theory of some agenda-pushing going on? You got it right there. See what names you guys can recognize from this list. The DiGRA lead will lead you nowhere and will only lose you the support of the sensible feminists on GG side if you pursue. Check @MissAngerist and @Calvin_xc1, they aren’t contend with broad-brushing.

Sargon, this is also for you. I think you have had the seed of doubt planted too deep in you. I felt that you really wanted to prove that certain agenda is being injected into video games, but were looking at all the wrong places. The group that you want to look into is Critical Proximity/Critical Distance. You’ll find a lot more familiar and relevant names than DiGRA members when you look them up. To everybody else, Sargon has revealed his cards on the table that he has his own agenda to pursue. I think it’s safe to leave him to his own device.

Jenni, PixieJenni, this is for you as well. I must say I don’t feel particularly comfortable with how you debated with Sargon. But I give credit where credit is due: you also revealed your cards. I see nothing to gain for GamerGaters by fighting you and your colleagues. This fight didn’t have to involve you if GamerGaters didn’t knock on your door and peeked through your internal document in September 1st. Let’s both stand down and stop antagonizing each other for a moment, deal? I think you should own up to your own words that you aren’t a radfem and look down on radfems in general. You and your fellow feminist scholars have your own house to clean, now that toxic elements like Rebecca Watson have jumped in this fight (and I dread the day this reaches Chanty Binx). To be honest, if feminist scholars manage to clean their own house, point me to their Patreon and I’ll tip each of them $1. Yeah, call me a cheapstake.