A Reflection On Online Culture And Technology Platforms

The scourge of the game industry known as GamerGate has been in full swing for about three months; a good time for some reflection on it. Note that GamerGate itself is only three months old, but the underlying motivations behind it have been a movement for much longer than that.

What started as a misogynist harassment campaign of revenge porn by Eron Gjoni enlisting game-playing MRA types from 4chan, grew into a mob of so much vitriol, harassment and threats that it hit the front page of the New York Times; several of the primary targets of this mob were interviewed in Rolling Stone, MSNBC, the BBC and elsewhere.

Ostensibly, this movement started as an effort to try and uncover supposed or alleged corruption in video games journalism, but from the onset both the targets of investigation as well as the behavior of the self-appointed investigators revealed such a deeply misogynist undercurrent that it was impossible to take these claims very seriously; certainly, it was impossible to ignore the vitriolic attacks and harassment they came wrapped in.

Once it became clear that GamerGate was gaining widespread notoriety as a misogynist harassment campaign, the rhetoric to focus things on ethics in games journalism intensified as a PR move to deflect from the criticism, along with other deflection efforts. According to many still today, a core demand of GG is “better ethical standards in gaming journalism” — but the demand has not come without many problems undermining its legitimacy.

First, GamerGate’s understanding of ethics is myopic at best, being expressed only in self-serving terms and not in favor of actual ethical practices, as seen by Gaters’ attempts to strip publishers of advertisers for saying or doing things they don’t agree with. Second, any movement filled with so much vitriol and harassment cannot be taken seriously as an ethical endeavor, so any of their claims of purportedly being about ethics are farcical. Third, each de facto leader of GamerGate has a riveting history of unethical behavior, further discrediting any legitimacy of GamerGate as a legitimate consumer movement. Fourth, the practices and behaviors of Gaters are entirely in line with those of hate groups, which researcher Jennifer Allaway was forced to observe after GamerGate tried to hijack her unrelated research on the importance of diversity of game content to game players. Given all that, it followed naturally that GamerGate was included in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Watch.

Leadership (Such As It Is)

Many of the earliest prominent names driving GamerGate, the original “leaders” in effect, are internet identities with strongly misogynist histories and bodies of work. Whether intentional or coincidental, these highly toxic, high profile people drove the toxicity in GamerGate from the onset, and kept it going for a long time. In turn, it attracted other, additional high profile toxic people with their own proclivities for spouting racist and misogynist propaganda and slander. The reason is perhaps less personally toxic desires, and more simply the fact that they can make a solid income pandering to people and selling their bigotry and abuse.

But every single de facto leader throughout the GamerGate timeline has had their ass handed to them in some way. Their cats are out of the bag, and the opportunism that brought them together is waning as the opportunity for personal gain diminishes. They’ve realized that GamerGate is not going to grow any bigger than it was about two months ago, and, having only ever attracted worse prominent figures than the ones it had, any effort to push it into new territory now leaves only two places to go:

Go completely disgraceful, and openly become a distinct Stormfront-meets-KKK-meets-MRA-meets-gaming? organization and own it; Go in the other direction and become more moderate, which comes with a high risk of leading to the collapse of GamerGate altogether.

What high profile people in GamerGate remain today are in it to milk this thing for as much as possible, because they don’t have anything more constructive to do with their time. They’ve built their careers and identities on the toxic, destructive propaganda that they’re selling, so, as long as they see something to gain from being involved in GamerGate — whether that’s money or widening their audience — they’ll be there. Note that many of them have faded into the background, for a number of additional reasons as well as this one.

The People of GamerGate:

The Duped, The Bad, And The Angry

Today, GamerGate is a far cry from the small core of (largely openly) misogynist YouTubers and twitterers it began with. It has grown and evolved and morphed a number of times, attracting new audiences while shedding others. Today’s GamerGate is held together largely by a jagged alliance between people sharing anti-feminist, “anti-Social Justice Warrior” views; Men’s Rights Activists; hardcore gamers with entitlement problems and myopic world views, and, well-meaning people who have been led astray by the deception and lies GamerGate keeps throwing around — regardless of the evidence disproving it.

All this results in a disorganized yet highly reactionary group, with predictably few sensibilities. One of its primary hubs has gradually dropped all pretense of being about games altogether; another was so amoral that 4chan kicked them out.

GamerGate is now sitting on a pile of rubble of its own making, all while clinging to a halo of “we’re a consumer boycott”-justification. They tried rallying for ethics, and it backfired. They tried emailing advertisers, and it resulted in effectively nothing. They tried to deflect and accuse their opponents of being the real abusers and harassers, and it led to widespread suspensions of their worst members as well as Twitter collaborating with an advocacy group to address harassment more actively. They wanted to take the politics out of video games (not realizing that everything is political), and it made feminist analysis of video games as mainstream as it gets.

For every rock they throw, an avalanche washes over them in response. Eventually they’ll learn this lesson, if not necessarily that they’re fighting on the wrong side of history.

GamerGaters see themselves as soldiers in a gigantic war because they have inadvertently diminished their understanding of the world by getting too wrapped up in a fable, in their fictional universes where there is rarely any nuance to morality beyond good & evil. In story-driven game worlds, not only are you the center of the universe (that, in and of itself, is not a healthy subtle message to immerse yourself in a lot) but you virtually always play on the side of the good guys, and the ones you fight are the bad guys. Anyone opposing you is against you; it’s a simplistic mindset that we of course don’t need games for to instill in us, but games reinforce this polarizing view stronger than, say, movies or books, by making you an active participant in the struggle. It requires much more self-awareness and self-reflection to counteract those subtle messages when they are thrown at you so frequently.

Gaters also frequently espouse fictional world views lifted directly from games: “you can’t kill us; we just respawn!” — referring to how game avatars are regenerated upon death, elsewhere in the battlefield, to allow the player to continue playing. It has kept the fire going amidst their ranks, where they continually try to convince each other they will keep fighting this fight until the last of us “Social Justice Warriors” have shut up and gone home. But it will lead to nothing, because despite how (many of) the members of GamerGate have been fighting against an increasingly progressive world, they are the ones living the privileged lives that keep things easy for them. Their opponents are the ones who’ve been in this ‘fight’ their entire lives, as actual victims of oppression, and so they are much, much more resilient. Gaters are just playing a real-world ‘game’; their opponents live it as a daily struggle.

However much the Gaters might be fighting in a culture war, their grasp of the armaments involved is so pitiful as to be downright embarrassing. They are working from deeply incorrect base assumptions, skewing their understanding of everything they use and encounter. They’ve attempted to co-opt the “Social Justice Warrior language” — academic terminology that has gotten mainstream enough for non-academics to discuss effectively — to use it against their opponents, but again and again, it has led only to further mockery of their egregious misunderstanding and incorrect use of it.

Video games can have tremendous cultural significance and value, but they need to be made with their capacity for lasting impact, both positive and negative, in mind. Being indifferent to, callous about, or ignorant of this potential impact as a developer leads to games inadvertently sending messages that can be — and often are — harmful to those who play them. When video games are so prevalent that almost any child growing up today spends significant time playing them, game writing becomes both culturally and individually important.

Unfortunately, most games developers do not dedicate significant resources to the writing from this perspective, which may help explain why the highly-devoted gamers among GamerGate have such narrow world views and egregiously flawed understandings of the very topics they proclaim to be activists about: ethics, freedom of speech, censorship, (social) justice. All of these topics are important, but are rarely examined properly in games, if at all. You won’t learn much about them by asking Gaters how they work, and that’s a shame, because games certainly have the potential to inspire and educate players about these concepts.

Shared Values

The main commonality lingering across the current crop of Gaters is a reluctance to be told to self-reflect, to be asked to think critically about the harmful, bigoted elements in our society and, specifically, in games and gaming culture. There is a fear of thinking about those things because of the implications inherent in that, regarding their own personal complicity in upholding or even creating those harmful elements. What Gaters perhaps don’t understand is that their ‘opponents’ — the Social Justice Warriors — don’t deny this about themselves. “SJWs” acknowledge that they, too, were complicit in these things, and that is why they are now fighting to combat the systems that made them complicit: to get rid of the tropes and undercurrents in our media and culture which reinforce those harmful beliefs that work to make us complicit.

But that veers into the territory that has the Gaters so upset. All this isn’t a reactionary movement against people telling them what to do — the “operations” that GamerGate continually engages in are literally people telling each other what to do — but it’s one against being told what to think. They see this as “thought-policing,” not realizing that our entire human civilization has been built, in no small part, on policing our peers both in action and in thought. 150 years ago, slavery was still widely acceptable to espouse publicly and openly. Our society made laws abolishing it to put an end to both the practice and the widespread belief in its acceptableness, thereby improving our collective moral compasses.

The culture in which the most dedicated gamers live is constantly instilling entitlements, primarily to affluent white men, but not exclusively so. It is reflected in the anger Gaters have about not being actually given what society told them they were entitled to, and blaming this on the people who are simply trying to fix the imbalances of those entitlements in the first place. GamerGate today is mostly a lot of these people uniting under one banner, but their views are nothing new, their reactionary behavior is nothing new, and their resistance to (societal) change is as old as human history.

Positive & Negative effects

While GamerGate has accomplished virtually nothing of great significance, the damage it has wreaked is enormous. Across entire segments of the industry it has terrorized women, people of color, minorities, and those who simply stand by them. For the industry itself, it has caused disruption and damage to industry professionals’ lives and careers.

It’s hard to engage with your audience as a game developer, critic or journalist, when you have the shadow of the colossus that is GamerGate loom over your platform of choice, chomping at the bit to attack you for whatever opinion you might express that they don’t like or agree with. It’s not simply stifling, it’s an impediment of people’s freedom of speech.

And while GamerGate has had a chilling effect on the free speech of disenfranchised groups within gaming, as well as on its developers, the long-term positive effects will eventually outweigh it.

If there is one thing that social justice activism spends most of its time on, it is raising awareness of serious but subtle problems. GamerGate has inadvertently put most of these issues into the spotlight, for many more people to become aware of and examine. That is has come at the cost of so many people — primarily women — having left the games industry behind, even if only for the time being, is nonetheless an unacceptable consequence of GamerGate’s actions.

Another thing that’s become more obvious to observers is that holding people accountable for their poor behavior and awful actions is a good way to combat it.

Brianna Wu offered up $11,000 to anyone who’d provide them with the lead to find the person or people responsible for the death threats against her and her family, and quickly thereafter the threats quieted down.

Twitter started suspending the accounts of people who were violating the Twitter Rules (Terms of Service + guidelines for good behavior you agree to adhere by when signing up), and the harassment campaigns have taken a noticeably different tone since, although they’ve not had a change in volume.

Any and all harassment is unacceptable; any and all threats of violence are criminal acts, however credible or not they seem, and however rare our legal system may process them as such. That, too, is changing, and unified harassment campaigns like GamerGate bring more urgency to such changes being enacted in law and online services. All things together, both the online platforms of community discourse as well as the legal systems protecting citizens from harm are starting to take more action to combat systematized inequality such as racial or gendered harassment, and that leads to more accountability everywhere.

Accountability holds us together, as a society and as a community, which is why it’s important to either mobilize law enforcement to start holding GamerGaters accountable for their actions, or to defuse and dismantle it faster than it would fall apart on its own, to minimize the harm they cause.

GamerGate is a symptom of the combination of power abuse and a lack of accountability in online communication systems. When you give everyone free reign to do whatever they please, sooner or later you have to deal with people’s worst desires and behaviors thriving openly on your platform. We’re not talking about ‘mean words’: we’re talking about harassment so vitriolic, pernicious, evil and sustained, that it can lead people to mental trauma or suicide. As the owner of a communications platform, you have a responsibility to prevent that sort of thing from being possible to occur in the first place.

It’s not that Gaters are inherently bad people; they’re simply people who’ve been allowed to thrive by wallowing in their worst behaviors unabated. Our online systems not holding these people accountable for that behavior has only encouraged them. These platforms didn’t just not hold them accountable for the behavior, they actively awarded them for it. They get praise and support and gleeful favorites and RTs and upvotes and “top kek”s for being awful people amongst each other in an echo chamber; the worse you are, the higher the praise you might get, and the more incentivized everyone else is to one-up each other in being terrible. Browsing GamerGate forums is like stepping through a portal to another dimension, to a broken age of anarchy running amok, where rational behavior is out the window and vitriolic is the default mode of communication.

Of course, gold stars and little arrows and numbers going up are a rather meaningless currency, but we don’t need to go into the effect of dopamine motivators here; we all know this stuff can be addictive and fun, and they’re designed to encourage us to continue and do more. It’s when it’s addictive and fun while you’re engaging in destructive, hateful and harmful behavior that the systems in place should curb that enthusiasm, should discourage you. But right now, they aren’t, really, and Twitter more actively suspending accounts is but one tiny step in the right direction.

Github, to its credit, has been very proactive and quick to respond to GamerGate activity on its service; their zero tolerance attitude towards this kind of group’s activities is exactly what is needed to foster and maintain a healthy community and online environment. We need to see a lot more like this, from Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, really any online discussion or commenting service or platform. They need to start living up to their responsibility in encouraging healthy discourse and discouraging vitriolic harassment of one another.

GamerGate is just a symptom of people’s existing bigoted and fearful attitudes, uniting under a banner coined fittingly through the sharing of misogynist slander about a woman who ‘threatened’ to make games more interesting and diverse as an art and entertainment form. Fundamentally, GamerGate hasn’t changed in what it spends most of its time doing, but its supporters have started thinning, with more and more of its members realizing that it’s a movement of double standards, hypocrisy, and little to no positive societal value. It long ago lost the media PR war, its opponents and victims are moving on with their lives and their work, and all that will eventually remain is a fictional female mascot, and a group of real people who will continue to fight the societal progress towards greater justice and equality for all. Whether they do that under the banner of GamerGate or not is irrelevant; they’ll forever encounter a force so much greater than they even realize:

People don’t want destruction, hate and oppression. People desire justice, liberty, and progress. And through a greater understanding of one another, we’ll eventually get there.

Together.