Why I Side With GamerGate

furrious-hamster:

You are going to lose, anti-GG. You may have some fight left in you yet, but we both know how this is going to end. You know when you’ve driven people like myself – A transsexual female, and a feminist, someone you claim to represent – away from you that you’ve done something terribly, terribly wrong, or several things in your case. Maybe you could have gotten away with the false flag doxxing and the slanderous “misogynerd” articles, if you left it at that. Maybe, even, you could have gotten away with destroying the careers of those developers and journalist who heard about GamerGate and thought “you know, maybe we can do better. What if gaming journalism actually revolved around the quality of games, and considered games on their merits rather than who they were made by? What if game developers were free to make games according to their own desire and own authorial intent without being constrained by fear of stepping outside of the box?” And you certainly could have gotten away with just harassing a bunch of anonymous redditors and 8channers over the internet. It is, after all, hard to take on entrenched interests, especially when they wield the power to determine the media narrative of events. But your campaign of slander and lies has been so foul, so consistently awful, and so perverse, that anyone who looks deeper into this story than your articles can see through the veneer of social justice you show off to the world.

You claim to represent women in gaming, yet you have ignored, and continue to ignore, many wonderful, skilled female developers. The only time we ever hear about women in the industry from you, in fact, is when they’re being harassed or under attack. Rarely, if ever, do you talk about the positive contributions women have made to the gaming industry. You claim to represent diversity within games, pointing out, rightly, that game characters do indeed skew towards being white males. Yet you refuse to recognize the minority and female characters within games as anything but stand ins for a group, ironically refusing to see that these groups are made of individual people, too. Character traits and flaws that, in white male characters, would be seen as enriching and humanizing you view hyper-critically for failing to totally encapsulate in a perfect being what it means to represent a member of a minority group. Conversely, no one bats an eye at idealized white male characters designed primarily for escapism, while, again, you expect minority or female characters to represent their group. And you wonder why so many lead protagonists are still white men when any female or minority characters are criticized ad nauseam, and the developers shamed. And when someone brings up these points, you talk over us who hey, maybe feel like you aren’t doing a great job of representing us. “Just shut up, you don’t understand feminism”, you say, as you continue to continue to disregard that we are individuals first and foremost. That we are defined by our individual experiences far more than our collective experiences as part of any racial or ethnic group, gender, or sexuality

At some point in time, you had noble intentions. Trying to make gaming inclusive for all types and kinds of people is, of course, a righteous goal. But you let this cloud your judgement. “It’s okay to slander some anonymous people, to ruin one or two careers for the greater good. To twist some facts into a clickbait moral–outrage story. We’re working against oppression and tyranny” you think. This trend began long ago. Long even before GamerGate. Or Gawker Media, even. Many among the advocates for social justice went down this dangerous path and long ago forgot where you were going. In GamerGate, at least, it’s led to you spinning webs of lies and deceit. A thick web that serves no purpose anymore other than tearing down yourselves and everyone around you. I wonder, as you twist information, harass concerned gamers, and go on national TV to denounce as hate groups and terrorists those who legitimately want to make the world a better place, do you question what you’re doing? Do you ever wonder to yourself what you’re even fighting for anymore? Who you’re fighting against and why GamerGate is so stubborn? What do they even stand for, anyway? It can be hard to tell when so many disparate individuals who seem to have little in common beyond gaming are so angry at you. Gaming journalism seems almost small now, lost in a fiery sea of Twitter fights. It’s not that we’ve been distracted by your harassment. Ethics in gaming journalism remains our core goal, but we have grown into representing something larger.

Are there people involved in GamerGate who I vehemently disagree with? Absolutely. It’s bound to happen when so many people join together of their own accord that disagreements arise. Sometimes I find the opinions of fellow gamers reprehensible. GamerGate will never be perfect. Some shit will be thrown and feelings will get hurt. But in GamerGate, I don’t have to worry about being talked for. I don’t have to censor every odd thought. I am, and can simply be, a person standing up for a just cause on the internet. As you have taken up the mantle of self-righteous deceit and lies, of censorship and a climate of fear, of viewing characters and even people not as individuals, but as something to be categorized by a series of labels, GamerGate has evolved to represent the the willingness to consider perspectives different than your own and the willingness to take healthy risks, the recognition that boxes and labels don’t mean jackshit, and that you make you what you are. This is why you’re going to lose this fight. Anyone paying attention sees that you long turned yourselves into the villain of this story.

Reblogging this since I feel that it’s an important perspective, and one I can sympathize with on a lot of levels. Also, because the author is a twitter user making her first little baby steps into Tumblr, and this post isn’t going to get any readers otherwise.

I’d like to reiterate that when I make posts about GamerGate I’m not indoctrinated into some shadowy cult where I’m completely opposed to changing my beliefs. I don’t mind shifting who I side with - in fact, I’d like there to be multiple parties competing for my support, each trying to outperform the other in terms of supporting minority representation and standing against harassment/abuse. The problem is that there is really nobody trying to outperform GamerGate on that front. The only opponents are people insisting GamerGate and everyone associated with it is bad.

Like, just look at some recent events, and try to think about how they would look to you if you were an LGBT+ game developer trying to break into the industry:

On the 25th, some GamerGate opponent made tweets encouraging people not to support a game made by Jennifer Dawe, a developer who had sympathized with GamerGate in the past. GG’s backlash against his tweet was so strong that Dawe’s game passed the Greenlight process the next day, landing it just shy of setting a new record.

On the 28th, another GamerGate opponent, Clair Schumann, started a Reddit thread where GamerGate supporters could ask her questions about her position. She was very polite throughout the whole thing, causing some fellow GamerGate opponents to harass her and accuse her of “encouraging a sexist movement” until she eventually deleted her Twitter account and all her Reddit posts. Purportedly in tears.

Afterwards, the GG opponents involved claimed Schumann was probably just a GamerGate supporter pretending to be against it as a trick. I guess their theory was that she was a fake ally, and they would publicly bully her into silence before she could make them look like the badguys?

Or even just look at the person who wrote the post I reblogged up above. You can go to her Twitter account, and if you scroll back to its earlier tweets there are accusations that, because she supports GamerGate, she’s not actually a woman but a sockpuppet account made to make GG look more diverse. After she finally posts the above picture there’s no apology or anything; the conversation just ends. She doesn’t fit the story, so she doesn’t exist.

And like… just ask yourself, who am I supposed to want to side with here? On one side, I see a group that really makes an effort to support diversity and tries to engage with people who disagree with them - not to mention can stand together strongly enough to create their own market. On the other side, I see a group that will attack or slander anyone who disagrees with them, while simultaneously saying that all of their critics are “actually the harassers”.

Really, this is a plea: if you are someone who opposes GamerGate, please try to win over GamerGate’s supporters - especially the minorities. Police harassment, vitriol and bigotry coming from your own allies, stop erasing experiences that go against your narrative, and recognize that supporting diversity means coexisting with people who disagree with you and not trying to harm them. Be the better people, matching and exceeding GamerGate’s attempts to do the same. Offer me something besides fear and threats.

Like I’ve tried to stress before, I will give you my support as soon as you become the better deal. If you can show me that you’re really looking out for my interests and safety, that would be a huge selling point. But if the best GG opponents can offer me is safety from their own blacklists, stigmas and harassers, I’m going to stay where I am.