Disclaimer: The paper being scrutinized was written by two authors. Both are credited. However, for the sake of brevity, an editorial decision was made to only refer to the more well known author.

Chess, Shira and Adrianne Shaw. (March 2015). A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying About #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media.

Noted and notorious feminist game scholar Adrienne Shaw, in collaboration with professor of mass media Shira Chess, recently published an article titled “A Conspiracy of Fishes” where she attempts to “share a story about how […] two feminist gaming scholars became implicated in a conspiracy to destroy video games and the video game industry” (208.) This conspiracy which they refer to is #GamerGate, more specifically the attempt of the KotakuInAction community to find potential collusion between the members of academic research group DiGRA, video game public relations companies like Silverstring Media, and various video game journalism outlets such as Vox Media’s Polygon and Gawker Media’s Kotaku.

Shaw writes that “this is a story about how we — two feminist gaming scholars — became implicated in a conspiracy to destroy video games and the video game industry. We are sharing this story with the larger academic public, not because it is funny (although some aspects are), but as a case study of a cultural moment in which masculine gaming culture became aware of and began responding to feminist game scholars.” While framing what is at best an autoethnography as a “case study” is certainly clever, it is by no means rigorous nor academic. In this short analysis, I will summarize Shaw’s article and discuss its shortcomings from an academic perspective. Before delving into the substance of the article, however, it is worth discussing one statistic quoted by Shaw.

In her introduction, Shaw mentions that “Recent industry statistics suggest that women players now make up about half of the game playing market.” This is unquestionably true — according to recent estimates, women account for over 50% of individuals who play video games. Shaw follows this up, however, with the statement that “despite this increase, the number of women working in the video game industry has increased only marginally” (208.) However, not only does Shaw offer no support to her assertion, but the industry data shows that the increase of women in the gaming industry has been far more than marginal. In a recent industry report presented by the International Game Developers Association — an institution that has often been implicated in the same web of collusion as DiGRA, the number of female developers in the industry has doubled since 2009, going up from 11.5% to 22%. This, of course, is not a proportional representation to that of the base percentages of gamers, but whatever the reasons for this — and there are many hypotheses, some less credible than others — the fact is that doubling the number of female developers in the industry to almost a fourth of the industry is hardly what one would call “a marginal increment.”

The section titled “The Setup” is a selective review of literature regarding women participation and recruitment into STEM fields, including game design, and an overview of recent events related to #GamerGate. In her review, Shaw notes that there has been discussion regarding feminism and gaming for over fifteen years and sources her information to a 2008 paper by Jenson and de Castell published in Eludamos. While it would have been better to rely on Cassell and Jenkins’ 1998 book “From Barbie to Mortal Kombat”, which she proceeds to quote immediately after, Shaw’s comments are indeed factual: feminist scholars have been looking at the relationship between gender and play for over fifteen years. She then discusses how criticism regarding gender diversity has been levied at the gaming industry and industry response has been mixed. She specifically states that “there has been an increasing amount of hostility towards feminist game critics in recent years” (209.) To demonstrate this, rather than relying on statistics or studies, Shaw refers to an incident in which Penny Arcade made a rape joke in one of their comics and their audience advocated that the authors should have the right to create whatever art they see fit, a 2007 case in which game developer Kathy Sierra received death threats, and the harassment that Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian received recently. She then proceeds to pin the origins of #GamerGate on the Zoe Quinn scandal where she was accused of trading sex for favorable commentary about her game and Adam Baldwin’s now famous #GamerGate tweet of Internet Aristocrat’s video discussing what has since become “The Quinspiracy”. She finishes her summary with the following statement:

“Although it is difficult to characterize members of an anonymous group — particularly one that lacks structure or coherent leadership — we refer to those who post and partake in this movement as ‘‘gamergaters,’’ for lack of a better term. Although not all gamergaters hold the same perspectives regarding games journalism, DiGRA, or the video game industry, their own use of a singular hashtag as a point of identification forces us to refer to them cumulatively at times. We also use the term to reinforce that there are individuals behind this movement, it is not an amorphous technological artifact” (210.)

The lack of sophistication and nuance in attempting to understand the community that is supposedly being commented on here is beyond incomprehensible. In this statement, Shaw clearly states that #GamerGate is an anonymous movement that lacks any structure. She clearly states that members of this movement have divergent ideas on a number of topics including journalism and academia. Later in her piece, some members of the community are quoted as saying that the DiGRA conspiracies sound like the plot of a Metal Gear Solid game and that it makes the community seem crazy (218.) However, Shaw unabashedly admits to ignoring these facts and claims that she is “forced to refer to them cumulatively.” What Shaw is doing here is admitting that there is ideological diversity and complexity in the GamerGate movement while at the same time saying that said ideological diversity is irrelevant. This is nothing but dishonest and, from the outset, takes away credibility from any findings Shaw might have discovered in her so-called study.

The following sections, “The Fishbowl” and “The Conspiracy Documents”, are Shaw’s interpretation on the now famous DiGRA conversation logs that members of KotakuInAction and /GamerGate/ have dissected in order to link DiGRA to the current political landscape regarding gaming and identity politics. Shaw discusses that “what we thought we were doing” was creating a conversation with the initial goal of doing “something about feminism in games”, where “what we settled on was less about feminism, and more about making sense of how identity and diversity, particularly embracing intersectional approaches to both, matters to video game studies” (211.) This “fishbowl” discussion was logged in a Google document. Shaw then discusses how on September 1st, 2014, anonymous individuals began editing the document by replacing terms such as “identity and diversity in gaming culture” with “penis” and a discussion of 4 chan IRC “Burgers and Fries” chat logs and how said logs link Quinn and Sarkeesian to Maya Felix Kramer, a shared contact and part of the Silverstring Media team. She argues that Silverstring Media is not a public relations company, as #GamerGate claims, but that it is “a game development company” (212). The truth regarding Silverstring is a mixture of both Shaw’s and #GamerGate’s claims. According to Silverstring Media they are both a game studio and a consulting firm. As a consulting firm, they advertise their services as follows:

“Whether you want to inject your game with award-winning story writing, build a fully integrated, interactive experience from the ground up, develop a story-based digital marketing campaign, or just need a single piece of content designed, Silverstring Media does it.” (Silverstring Consultancy page, 2015.)

By their own admission, Silverstring Media offers services related to the creation of digital marketing campaigns. Whether their services include having game journalism outlets giving their clients preferential treatment is a question that cannot be answered, at least not with Silverstring Media’s stated goals and services, but it is an undeniable fact that they do offer marketing services.

Shaw then goes on to discuss the publication of 11 articles published within 24 hours of each other decrying the death of the gamer identity, and attempts to frame them as articles that “supposedly denounce the ‘death of gamers,” though mostly they suggest a particular type of bigoted gamer identity is no longer central to the industry’s audience” (2012). Although this is certainly an interesting way of framing the articles, each of the articles specifically referred to “gamers” in general, not to a specific subset of gamers. The first “Death of Gamers” article published, Dan Golding’s “The End of Gamers”, the author writes that “what we are seeing is the end of gamers, and the viciousness that accompanies the death of an identity.” Later, Leigh Alexander wrote in her article “Gamers don’t have to be your audience, Gamers are over”, that “gamers are over, that’s why they’re so mad.” She concluded her piece with “these obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers — they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had.” The Daily Beast wrote that “gamers are angry, and they’re attacking prominent figures, especially women, with slanderous claims and death threats serious enough to drive them from their homes”, and the Ars Technica piece suggesting that gamers can’t separate a developer’s personal life from her work. Although the Kotaku piece by Luke Plunkett tries to suggest that “they’re not talking about everyone who plays games, or who self-identifies as a gamer, as being the worst”, none of the other “Gamers are Dead” articles make the distinction between “gamers” and “a small subset of gamers who troll and harass people”. They paint gamers with a broad brush. As such, Shaw’s claim that the articles were decrying a specific type of gamer, with the exception of the Kotaku piece, is factually incorrect. Shaw concludes this section with a survey of Sargon of Akkad’s videos and how these videos spurred what Shaw calls conspiracy theories regarding DiGRA.

Shaw begins the section titled “Making Meaning” by suggesting that “many of the above theories appear outlandish” while providing no evidence to disprove said theories (214.) She then suggests that said discussion “generated a unique insight into popular perspectives on academe” (214). She mentions how the KotakuInAction and /GamerGate/ communities saw DiGRA as a think thank for political ideology and how said communities focused on DiGRA funding structures and game scholars’ involvement in government funded research. She then suggests that there is “a fundamental misunderstanding of what the goals of critical theories are” (214) and discusses Sargon’s analysis of Cultural Marxism, feminist theory, and Shaw’s research, as well as the commentaries of Christina Hoff Sommers, as if they were conspiracy theories. However, rather than engaging with or attempting to debunk the claims made by Sargon and Dr. Sommers, Shaw instead dismisses their arguments by using quotation marks around the word evidence and suggests that it’s just a problem of perception — “to non-academics, we seem inscrutable” (215.)

The problem with Shaw’s take on Sargon and Dr. Sommers’ arguments is that these arguments are thorough. Sargon relies on existing documents and statements made by individuals, industry trends, and affiliations of individuals, while Dr. Sommers’ arguments rely on statistical data. Shaw’s rebuttal to these comments are no rebuttals at all. Rather, she simply calls them conspiracy theories in an attempt to discredit them; an attempt that that, to a critical reader, is ultimately unsuccessful.

In the section titled “Making Sense,” Shaw says that it would be easy for her to dismiss the theories in question — something which she has already done — by attributing it to “paranoid style”, a term coined in 1952 to describe the mindset of conspiracy speech. However, Shaw instead relies on more modern framework to further dismiss the claims made by Sargon and Dr. Sommers without actually addressing them (215.) Shaw suggests that several members of the KotakuInAction and /GamerGate/ communities are simply trying to understand shifting trends by mapping academia into its evolution in order to cope with and understand “changes that may equate to larger cultural shifts” and that this is likely because even though, according to Shaw, members of the KotakuInAction and /GamerGate/ communities see themselves as oppressed but, in Shaw’s assessment, are “representations of the power structures that have been built into gaming culture for decades” (215). Curiously, shortly after suggesting that gamers are representations of power structures, she states that gamers have been persecuted. Although she frames this persecution as “perceived persecution” rather than “actual persecution” and continues to dismiss the claims made against her and DiGRA by the likes of Sargon and Dr. Sommers, she states that “we can look at gaming culture as a somewhat marginalized group: For years those who have participated in gaming culture have defended their interests in spite of claims by popular media and (some) academics blaming it for violence, racism, and sexism” (217.) She concludes this section by stating that “it is easy to negate and mark the claims of this group as inconsequential, but it is more powerful to consider the cultural realities that underline those claims” (217.) In other words, as unlikely as it seems, Shaw is forced to acknowledge that the gaming community has been persecuted and victimized. While her ideology will not allow her to admit this as real persecution due to her interpretation of male gamers as part of patriarchal power structures, thus her use of “perceived” versus “actual” persecution, she is forced to recognize the very real hostility that gamers have had to face during the last three decades.

Shaw’s conclusions are nothing more than a re-statement of her story — #GamerGate is a conspiracy, Sargon and Dr. Sommers don’t know what they’re talking about, Zoe Quinn and Anita are threatened with rape and death, the gaming industry is male dominated, and women are alienated from video games. This last point ignores recent surveys stating that more than half of people who play video games are women.

Ultimately, Shaw’s work is not only remarkably superficial and poor, but also misleading and factually incorrect. When looked at from the lens of the academe, its research is mediocre and its findings incorrect. Furthermore, the style in which it is written — the first person story — ensure that despite its claims to being a “case study,” the work will be relegated to the status of nothing more than a mediocre story that somehow passed through a peer review process. Given the quality of the work, it is likely that the reason why it was published was due to ideological agreement in part of the editors of the journal.

In the #GamerGate communities there is a perception that Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and others are simply trying to cash in on the media circus surrounding games and misogyny. It is suggested that they are simply using games and #GamerGate as a form of boogeyman to gain sympathy and recognition. Whether this is true or not, it is more than likely that something similar is true of this paper published by Shaw in the March 2015 volume of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media was published not because of its merits as an academic piece, but rather because it has the “right” opinion on a controversial issue.