kazerad:

If you didn’t pick up from the title, this is another post about GamerGate. The normal disclaimers apply: if you disagree with what I say, you are free to talk to me about it. My contact info is in the sidebar. Every time I make this offer, I get a bunch of emails and Skype messages agreeing with me and thanking me for what I said, and then like one or two people on Twitter talking about how wrong I am. I want them to know that I’ll still hear them out, and if it seems like I’m holding onto an opinions you disagree with it’s because literally nobody is countering it.

Anyway, this time I’m particularly interested in people’s thoughts, because I want to write about something a little different. A friend was talking with me about my last blog post, and she began to bring up parallels between it and GamerGate - including a few I didn’t actually think of. It made me think of it in a slightly different light, and I’d like to propose a potential alternate interpretation to why this thing called “GamerGate” exists.

Throughout its life, GamerGate has been claiming it is about ethics in gaming journalism - and, I think a lot of people associated with it do believe that. However, I have a theory that its core goals and actions are better described as a focus on something else: individual accountability.

Think back to the very beginning, when this whole thing started. You had a game developer who had sex with a games journalist. People discovered this, and (wrongly) thought that the journalist had written a positive review of her game because of it.

Right there, any creator with a lick of common sense could have ended this whole issue with the simple words “I had sex with people in the industry, but I made sure it was nobody who would review my work or otherwise help me get ahead”. Just like that, she would have taken accountability for the actions while emphasizing that they were harmless, and no one would care.

Instead, you saw something different: rather than addressing this as though it were an attack on the developer specifically, she (and the journalists she was apparently associated with) addressed it as an attack on female developers as a group. People who had legitimate concerns about favors in journalism were publicly dismissed as being against female developers. Gaming media pushed the narrative that the attack had nothing to do with the developer’s actions, and everything to do with the groups she identified as a part of. To proto-Gamergate, though, it wasn’t about the group - it was about the individual, and no one seemed to see that.

You see this pattern continue into GamerGate’s more recent behavior. In almost all of their actions, GamerGate tends to target individuals in the game industry. They’ll send in a whole bunch of complaints about a particular writer who said something discriminatory, or try to persuade advertisers to pull from the specific news publication that employs that writer. Rather than targeting a group, GamerGate tends to very, very specifically go after people they interpret as doing something wrong.

And honestly, most of the people GamerGate attacks are being pretty horrible. Like, I think the latest one is some writer who said that GamerGate was proof that nerds needed to be bullied into submission. GamerGate retaliated by getting some advertisers to pull from the website that employs him, as well as donating a bunch of money to anti-bullying charities to make a statement. It’s largely a targeted call-out campaign, which is something I actually think is pretty awesome if executed with the right amount of skepticism.

In response, though, you see GamerGate’s targets try to make it about groups. They’ll claim that GamerGate is attacking journalists, or attacking independent developers. They’ll push a narrative that the attacks are purely based off group membership - that nobody in these groups is safe - and thus everyone in them should stand against GamerGate. Even the opponents who try to engage GamerGate diplomatically do it in a very removed and group-oriented way, asking what specific changes GG would like to see to their policies, all while refusing to talk about individuals. Anyone who tries to draw attention to them is a harasser.

You see the same thing when GamerGate’s opponents characterize GamerGate. They’re an angry mob, or a bunch of straight white cisgender men who are upset that their industry has diversity. Any individual voices or diversity inside GamerGate gets erased in favor of characterizing them as a homogeneous group.

Portraying a group as homogeneous means you can characterize them by any single member. If someone who claims association with GamerGate sends a developer a death threat, it’s not from an individual, it’s from GamerGate. GamerGate’s members, for their part, usually make an effort to track these harassers down and hold them personally accountable for their wrongdoing, but meanwhile their opposition holds up the harassment as proof that GamerGate is an salvageable cause full of harassment and everyone involved should abandon it. Interestingly, TotalBiscuit wrote an excellent essay on how publicizing death threats only encourages copycats, logic by which GamerGate’s opposition is causing more death threats to happen with their response. You don’t see them taking any personal accountability for that - it’s just GamerGate’s fault for sending the death threats to begin with. Anything to avoid acknowledging individuals.

I’ve even noticed this trend of anti-individuality in my own experiences. I’ve written things about GamerGate before and had its opponents immediately dismiss me on the basis that I’ve “drank the kool-aid” and been manipulated into supporting a bad cause that harms game developers and minorities.

But like… that’s me! That’s me your defending, on both counts. Can we talk about how GamerGate really does benefit the sort of business tactics I use? Or how my emphasis on word-of-mouth popularity and positive audience regard means I’ll be even more powerful if the journalism scene utterly crumbles? Heck, can we talk about how consumer-focused tactics like mine actually remove entry barriers, and how increasing their comparative power would probably bolster the number of women and minorities in the industry? I don’t want to be dismissed as part of a group - want to be acknowledged as an individual who has actual experiences and motivations that drive my actions.

That’s actually another thing I really like about GamerGate, and which also plays into the theorized emphasis on individuality. GamerGate’s opposition is mostly straight, white, cisgender men who claim they are bravely protecting innocent minorities from, apparently, GamerGate’s straight, white, cisgender men. GamerGate, on the other hand, tends to actually push their minority voices to the forefront. Maybe it’s just a response to the accusations of homogeneity, but any time a woman or minority speaks out in GamerGate’s defense there is an effort to really get her side heard and draw attention to it. They want to actually get the minorities themselves in positions where they can visibly speak, rather than just consigning them to an offhand mention as “my gay friend”. I’ve met more female, non-white, and LGBTQIA gaming writers and Youtubers through GamerGate than I have through at least four years of seeing gaming news sites talk about the importance of diversity in the industry. There are enough minority voices in one place that erasure has become a joke, with things like TallBlackNerd changing his Twitter name to “Cis White Gamer”. It’s hard to express how oddly meaningful that is.

And this all seems to tie back to that one core idea: individual accountability. GamerGate tends to push for things to be viewed in terms of people, whereas their opponents tend to push for things to be viewed in terms of groups, stereotypes and labels. Maybe this is intentionally malicious and they’re trying to cover up active wrongdoing, or maybe they just naturally think in a very privelaged and discriminatory way. Whatever the case, just imagine how much smoother things would go if the industry at large shared GamerGate’s dedication to individual accountability:

I guess what I’m really getting at in all of this is that I’m not sure GamerGate is doing itself a service by saying that it’s about “ethics in journalism”. At its core, I think the central idea is really about people in the game industry being held individually accountable for wrongdoing. That’s not an issue of ethics - it’s an issue of letting people defend themselves without dragging a group into it. If an employee of yours did something so bad that people are able to present evidence that gets advertisers to stop supporting you, then you need to treat that employee as a liability. And beyond that, you need to thank the people who called him out for doing you a service.

Is the theory accurate? Would such an angle better summarize GamerGate’s motives and give it a stronger arguing point? I don’t know. I’m one person, and most of what I focus on is my own goals and ideals. I do think it is an interesting idea to consider, though - and puts a better emphasis on what I find generally agreeable about GamerGate as a whole.

I’m not following GamerGate as closely as I used to, but I am still interested. Analyzing its advocates and opposition is beginning to give me those same feelings I get when playing an Elder Scrolls game or reading a story. I like the ideas, but beneath it there is a brooding realization: I could do it better.