He advocates against Gamergate. His actions support it.

In yet another useless column on The Guardian, Matt Lees, a British game journalist, writes about the importance of understanding Gamergate (archive link) as a precursor to the alt-right and the election of Donald Trump. In this column Lees displays such an astounding lack of self-awareness that one must wonder if the Hosts in Westworld are currently walking among us. “[Gamergate] was the canary in the coalmine,” he writes, “and we ignored it.” The poor man does not have it within him to realize that he and journalists like him, bear a significant amount of responsibility for the hashtag campaign that has endured for nearly two and a half years now.

It’s not that Lees and his ultra-progressive columnist ilk ignored Gamergate; it’s that they are so entangled within their own politics that they had (and have) no hope of ever truly understanding Gamergate, even if they somehow wanted to. Worse, he is lying when he says that he ignored the movement. The truth is he was an active participant, and his poorly conceived actions only succeeded in further stoking the fires.

Adrian Chmielarz is a Polish game designer and the co-owner and creative director of The Astronauts. He was the creative force behind The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, a unique and atmospheric game of the sort that ultra-progressive columnists, ubiquitous within games journalism, salivate over. Except Adrian Chmielarz made the critical mistake, in their eyes, of not falling in line with the prevailing narrative that Gamergate is a hashtag filled with evil people trying to do evil things. He is not pro-Gamergate, but rather he took a neutral stance that did not rely on the demonization of the entire movement, and to the ultra-progressive columnists, that is the same thing as pro-Gamergate.

For this crime of thought, Matt Lees, the guy who claims to have ignored Gamergate, actually removed a glowing review of The Vanishing of Ethan carter and publicly called Chmielarz “a total dick” on Twitter, because Chmielarz tried to approach the difficult and massively complex Gamergate controversy reasonably.

Chmielarz is a surprisingly gifted columnist and mentioned the incident in what is among the most reasonable pieces ever written about the Gamergate controversy. In the Medium piece he mentions not only the Lees incident, but also speaks a little to the unprofessional mistreatment he received from other games journalists due to his refusal to demonize the gamers unhappy with their work.

“To be clear, it’s not that I was offended. Screw that. It’s just that these people [game journalists] live in a world where such behavior is acceptable.”

I have personally put in more than a year of research into Gamergate. When people ask me what it is, I respond with, “take your pick.” Is it a harassment campaign and a hate group, as so decisively defined by game, tech, and “culture journalists”? Sure, depending on your perspective. Many who support Gamergate will disagree, but clearly some took things too far. Unfortunately, too many of these journalists stop right there and tie a neat little ribbon around their carefully packaged column. That’s like defining Ronald Reagan as merely a Hollywood actor.

It’s not that easy. This is a complex political movement involving tens of thousands of gamers. Is it a harassment campaign? Sure. Did they give tens of thousands of dollars to charities? Yes. Is it about ethics in journalism? Yes. Is it alt-right? Yes. Is it libertarian? Yes. Do they support Donald Trump? Yes. Do they loathe Trump and Breitbart? Yes. It’s all of those things and much more, and journalists like Matt Lees did a great disservice, not only to the people who support Gamergate, who deserved to have their opinions heard without being specifically ignored as a tactic to deprive it of oxygen (I had a popular gaming site tell me explicitly that) and unquestioningly affixed with the “evil misogynist” label, but a disservice to a public that should be provided reliable information about the movement from reasonable people who aren’t trying to score political points from their echo chamber of friends.

Instead we have Matt Lees and columnists like him, who invariably add “ostensibly” before the “ethics in journalism” description of Gamergate, then prove the movement’s claims of journalistic incompetency through their sheer lack of professionalism. Even now the top post on the Kotaku in Action subreddit, the most concentrated home of Gamergate supporters, is discussing how Matt Lees did not disclose the fact that he is a business partner with the husband of Leigh Alexander, whose “Gamers Are Over” column was perhaps the tanker full of gasoline that ignited the Gamergate spark in the first place.

The problem isn’t that Lees ignored Gamergate. The problem is that Lees lacks the ability to do anything but ignore Gamergate. This is a man who just wrote nearly 2,300 words about the importance of understanding Gamergate in order to understand Trump, yet he has never held a full conversation with a Gamergate supporter.

For someone so insistent that the movement is “ostensibly” about ethics in journalism, he has sure as hell provided them with an endless supply of ammunition.