Privilege

It’s been a while since I wrote about GamerGate. Every once in a while someone will still email me about it, sometimes in response to my plea for both “sides” to defend themselves, though I admit a certain disappointment in many of the replies. It’s not that they are poorly written, but as a general trend they have shifted toward a new claim, “GamerGate is damaging the gaming industry”, which never comes with as much defense as I would like.

As forewarning, this post isn’t particularly thought-out or well-structured; it’s just me sharing some general thoughts.

I guess I should explain where I’m coming from here. Back when I was a teenager, I used to be one of those internet art critic people. Like, you know the type: assholes who went out of their way to provide honest (if often overly harsh) criticism of every art piece someone had the gall to request feedback on. We rebelled against this thing we called, at the time, the “DeviantArt mentality”, where artists would exclusively get their feedback from a small group of friends who would positively regard their work no matter what. Most of us on the more critical side of things knew, from personal experience, that this behavior hindered artistic development and sort of took it upon ourselves to stamp it out.

As I got older, of course, I grew out of it. I realized, as I think most people eventually do, that it’s perfectly okay for someone to do something in a way they personally enjoy. The real issue with what we called the “DeviantArt mentality” was that it was not economically viable. A person who has their work coddled and never learns to appeal to a diverse and discerning crowd will not be able to compete adequately in a professional setting, their audience limited to that small group of friends (who are often artists in the exact same situation). As a result, you have a professional art community of people who expect and value candid and varied feedback, and a “hobbyist” community of people who are primarily interested in working for themselves or a small group of friends. This, I feel, is a working model.

If you read through my stuff, it’s pretty clear that I am very audience-focused. I talk about audience statistics a lot, as well as directly interact with fans at every possible opportunity. I don’t spend a lot of time around other artists, even going so far as to avoid seriously participating in any “artist circles”, since I’ve learned many audience members hate the schism this drives between creators and their fans. My policy regarding these things is a simple one: I work for the chaotic and diverse mass of fans that consume my material, and generally stand against anything that discourages them from sharing their thoughts or feelings (since, you know, that’s what my model pivots on catering to).

I never really joined GamerGate, which is why it’s sort of weird when people lump me in with them. What I did was pretty much the same thing I always do: value audience members the same as content creators. When a whole bunch of people are upset about something and a creator says “nah, it’s fine”, my first instinct is to hear both sides out, because as far as I’m concerned neither one has more credibility. As I’ve stressed before, the people who attack me for my thoughts on GamerGate never actually address anything I say as being misinformation, they just attack me for “listening to 4chan/8chan/gamers/whatever”, which is incredibly unsettling because it conveys this idea that I should value certain people higher than others - not because they support their ideas better, but because they are inherently better.

Which I guess takes me back to this idea I mentioned at the beginning: GamerGate damaging the gaming industry. When people are defending this assertion, they point to the “angry mobs” with no coherent demands, the general level of vitriol flung at creators, and the privacy-crippling digging they do into their targets, etc. All through this, though, I’m just left thinking “Holy shit. This is my jam!”. This thing they’re complaining about is the exact environment I’m used to navigating - in fact, as far as I know, it’s the exact environment the gaming industry always had. When people point to all the horrible harassment developers “received from GamerGate”, it’s tamer than what I’ve gotten just by virtue of being a relatively popular creator. As someone who’s in this industry, the notion that GamerGate is ruining it makes no sense to me since nothing actually changed.

What seems more likely, to me, is that people stumbled outside their Artist Circles and hit a wild audience for the first time. They didn’t know how to handle a critical and diverse audience, they turned it antagonistic, and they don’t know how to deal with it. It would explain a lot of the behavior you see: demands to see some kind of GamerGate leader they can blame/complain to, assertions that abuse is okay when it’s against the “right” people, lamenting their own harassment when it’s pretty much the bog-standard someone gets from working with a mass audience, etc. From my perspective, it feels like these are fish-out-of-water, dealing directly with my industry for the first time.

I admit when I first started writing this, I considered whether I should be showing these people more sympathy. They are probably scared, I realized: flung headlong into a scary environment their more tightly-knit artist circle did not prepare them for. But, then I thought back to when I was a young artist, and the first time I encountered a harsh critic: I wasn’t a dick to him, I didn’t tell him his opinion was stupid, and I adapted to a critical environment pretty quickly. A lot of these people vehemently decrying GamerGate, however, are kind of accusatory dicks to these groups of individuals they label as “angry mobs”. I started to consider a different theory:

What if this is about privilege?

What if this is some group of well-connected, well-to-do people who are stepping into a hostile and critical environment for the first time and are completely ass-blasted that they are not inherently valued above others? What if these people are realizing, with horror, that this is an industry where their word is just as valuable as that of some random non-creator on an internet forum, and they’re trying to “fix” it by reinstating a hierarchy with them on top?

I mean, just speaking personally, there are a lot of things I like about GamerGate and its affect on the industry. I like that when a creator is accused of something, GG digs into it and tries to gather evidence. I like that they’re critical of reporting and have made their presence known as a massive, vaguely-united mob that will lash out and potentially gain dangerous credibility if faced with things that are verifiably false. They’ve been bringing a lot of ideologically diverse people together in an environment where they can typically discuss things without attempting to harm one another. They’ve been speaking out against the tendency to “speak for” minorities. Best of all, it makes it harder to prevail above your competitors with nothing but money and connections. These are all changes I wanted to see in the gaming industry. But, frankly, I can understand why a privileged dickwad would oppose every one of them.

This is just a theory, of course. I mean, all I know is that from my perspective, a bunch of kind of rude and dismissive people are coming in and attacking the group I consider to be my audience as being horrible monsters who don’t appreciate True Art or whatever. I’m not particularly worried, because as I’ve stated before this only facilitates the development of a niche, but I’m still kind of offended when people say GamerGate is damaging the industry or driving away minority developers. Like… I’m here; you can talk to me. I approve of the changes, and I just explained why. I know that some people will be driven away, but a lot of them are kind of assholes to their audience and I parse the hostility toward them the same way I’d parse a rude waiter getting fired by his boss.

I don’t know. Like I said, I’m an audience person; my primary concern is with the tastes and desires of the people who play my games. I wish people who talk about GamerGate damaging the industry would talk about how it damages it for people like me, because it feels like the focus is purely on making the industry comfortable for the exact type of people I oppose.