After his article on Alison Rapp’s firing was published on Kotaku the evening of March 30, Patrick Klepek took to Twitter to share his thoughts on the subject. Once Nintendo officially commented to IGN that Rapp was fired “due to violation of an internal company policy involving holding a second job in conflict with Nintendo’s corporate culture,” Klepek updated the article and tweeted the following:

Klepek’s opinion appears to be that while it’s reasonable of Nintendo to fire Rapp for her variety of offenses, they’re still in the wrong because they never came to her aid while she was at the center of a harassment campaign. That’s an interesting opinion that I hadn’t really considered, and I’m not sure whether or not I agree. But I can at least appreciate the question it raises: did Nintendo have a moral obligation to defend Alison Rapp and denounce her critics?

The main reason it’s hard for me to decide the answer is that I have no real grasp on the scale, purpose, and sources of Rapp’s harassment. The current state of Rapp’s Twitter mentions no longer reflects a particularly negative timbre, so I’ll give Klepek the benefit of the doubt and assume the situation was downright ugly, with Rapp receiving an amount of vitriol beyond the pale. But I can’t make assumptions about the purpose and the sources, because these ultimately determine whether Nintendo had a responsibility to step in.

So why harass Alison Rapp? To start, she was a Nintendo Treehouse employee, ostensibly bringing her into conflict with Gamergate, whose Operation Torrential Downpour sought to illuminate poor localization work on Fire Emblem: Fates and other Nintendo products.

But a quick perusal of the Torrential Downpour threads on r/KotakuInAction and 8chan reveals that though unpopular for her outspoken views on intersectionality and social justice, and for her pointed dismissal of Torrential Downpour’s complaints, Rapp was known to be employed in public relations and marketing, rather than localization. To the greatest extent possible given its lack of organizational structure, Gamergate appears to have been opposed to targeting Alison Rapp, at least within the context of Torrential Downpour.

Still, there’s at least a sloppy motive for harassment in there, for anyone angered by the Fire Emblem: Fates localization but ignorant of who was and who wasn’t to blame. Of course, this motive applies equally to all the Nintendo Treehouse staff. Sure enough, it seems that Rapp was far from the only Treehouse employee to have a hard time on Twitter over the last few months.

Rapp’s aforementioned unpopularity among Gamergate and elsewhere appears to precede Fire Emblem: Fates by a significant margin. Tweets like the following (posted in November 2014) explain at least why she might be more well-known, and thus a more obvious lightning-rod for criticism, than her Treehouse peers:

Or more recently:

I’m not going to pass any judgement on Rapp’s views, but they’re the sort of opinions that leave you open to an awful lot of discussion, debate, disagreement, mocking, and vitriol. So when it comes to identifying a motive for the harassment of Alison Rapp, I think her outspoken political opinions also help explain, at the very least, why Rapp might be singled out above and beyond the Treehouse in general.

YouTuber Its Becky Boop, among others, have identified a seemingly separate source of the vitriol coming Rapp’s way. In her video on the subject, Boop shows how Neo-Nazi publication The Daily Stormer took aim at Alison Rapp after her controversial thesis on sexualized depictions of minors came to light, and its readers began a campaign to alert relevant parties at Nintendo and elsewhere of Rapp’s “pro-pedo” statements.

Of course, it’s unreasonable to assume that Neo-Nazis were the only ones angered by Rapp’s opinions. As mentioned in my previous article on the causes of Rapp’s firing (but not in the majority of articles released on the subject by the mainstream games press), one of Rapp’s staunchest and most vocal opponents was Jamie Walton, president of The Wayne Foundation, a nonprofit that works to fight against child sexual exploitation and trafficking and for its victims (and founded by herself and film director Kevin Smith).



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I don’t know what the answer is.

If Alison Rapp was singled out as the primary recipient of the vitriol against Nintendo for the Fire Emblem: Fates controversy, head and shoulders above her Treehouse coworkers, and said controversy could truly be identified as the reason for said vitriol, then yes — in that case, I believe Nintendo would be morally obligated to step in and defend Rapp, denounce any real harassment against her, and proactively take responsibility for the Fates localization, whether or not they choose to stand by it.

But in most other cases, I don’t believe Nintendo would have any such obligation. If the vitriol was evenly distributed across Treehouse employees, then Nintendo would have no obligation to defend Rapp in particular, its female employees in particular, or the staff in general; on the contrary, to denounce the public’s methods of critique without bothering to acknowledge the core of the critique itself would be a disaster. (It’s that sort of behavior, displayed by the games press, that led to Gamergate in the first place.)

If Rapp was primarily singled out for harassment because of her views on politics, social justice, and feminism, then I don’t believe Nintendo would have had any obligation to step in to defend her, because those stances are completely unrelated to Nintendo, their products, their public image, and the performance of Rapp’s duties under their employ. Likewise, if her controversial views on child porn and sexuality are to be seen as the primary cause, Nintendo is absolutely not obligated to denounce her critics on her behalf; if anything, these opinions seem to conflict with the corporate values Nintendo of America hopes to present as a family-oriented company.

I reckon the truth is some amalgamation of all these scenarios. Certainly, the Fire Emblem: Fates situation resulted in substantial vitriol aimed at Nintendo of America and the Nintendo Treehouse; but if Alison Rapp became the lightning-rod for this vitriol because of her own political outspokenness, and remained at the center because her own controversial beliefs came to light, does she not bear the responsibility for the discrepancy between her own experience of harassment and that of her coworkers?

I don’t know.

But what I can say is this: if the majority of the mainstream press held Klepek’s apparent opinion, that Rapp was legitimately fired but that Nintendo still neglected to defend her honor, and had accurately reported all the relevant facts before reaching that conclusion, I wouldn’t feel quite as disturbed right now at the state of the games media.

It’s one thing for a difference of opinion, perspective or philosophy to lead to a difference of conclusions; or even for the majority of the media to have a difference of perspective from a huge body of their readership, as became evident in the gaming world when Gamergate began. But it’s something else when nearly the entirety of the press fails to include such critical facts of a case as the involvement of Jamie Walton and the Wayne Foundation, or that Rapp shared sexually suggestive photographs of herself with Nintendo products on her public, professional Twitter feed.

The omission of these facts completely changes the meaning and the timbre of the story, and yet the press has seemingly decided, as a monolithic entity, to ignore both. (It’s easier to find mentions of Jamie Walton, but usually in a dismissive tone, painting her merely as a pawn of Gamergate or the alt-right; I haven’t yet seen Rapp’s photographs mentioned in an article from any publication that could be considered even remotely mainstream.) Telling the story without these facts can be called nothing less than a lie, pure and simple. And it’s a lie that the vast majority of the press has decided to report to the public.

As a fairly young person, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. I’ve never seen such a widespread acceptance of a falsehood by the press, the public institution whose job is to bring us the truth, in a case where the actual truth is so easy to see. It’s not that Patrick Klepek didn’t know these facts; he chose not to report them. And nearly everyone followed suit. It’s surreal. (To be honest, Klepek’s article, after the edits and taken in conjunction with his tweets, is probably one of the most legitimate I’ve seen on the subject; it still failed to report the fundamental facts.)

Since the beginning, I’ve been on the fence about Gamergate. It started for me when Leigh Alexander published her bizarre sociological hitpiece declaring the ‘gamer’ identity dead and buried. As I’d just finished Sociology 101, it struck me as pretty dumb, and I couldn’t help but agree with YouTuber boogie2988 in his video “I am NOT A bigot. Are You?” Boogie, aka Steven Williams, introduced his approximately two million subscribers to the hashtags #Gamergate and #NotYourShield, and encouraged all to tweet them to make a simple statement: I am a gamer, I am not a bigot, and anyone of any stripe is welcome to play games with us. (Boogie, it should be noted, has regularly proven himself to be one of the least hateful human beings out there.)

So when the mainstream media publicly denounced anyone using these hashtags as a bigot, a neckbeard, and a misogynist, I knew something was wrong. And despite being frustrated by the people out there who do dox and harass and threaten in the name of Gamergate, I felt that at its core, the movement was in the right.

Any doubt I had is absolutely gone now. Any ambiguity to be found in the original Gamergate controversies is absent from the media’s coverage of Rapp’s firing. The majority are lying by massive, critical, incontrovertible omission. This time, it’s black and white. Whether you like it or not, the media is proving that Gamergate was right all along.