Last year, IGN took a stand against general intolerance and abuse within our own community. At the time, we didn’t feel it necessary to single out any particular group as being in need of special protection from insults or harassment. We feel now, as we did then, that a pervasive indifference of and hostility toward “the Other” is the foundation of our problems, at least when it comes to the disagreeable pattern of discourse on the internet. But lately, the unique symptom that is violent threats toward women deserves special mention, as it is massively undermining our medium’s growth.

Plenty of other sites have already written at length about the timeline of the recent uproar in the gaming community. If you’re not up to date, it’s enough to say a female developer was suspected of exploiting personal relationships to ensure positive coverage of her game. Though the suspicion proved false, concerns about a general lack of standards in the games press nevertheless grew into a Movement, which was soon co-opted by multiple groups for seemingly conflicting agendas. The Movement became front page news in the mainstream press, not due to its claims of corruption in games media, but due to the harassment of female critics and developers by radicals associated with the Movement.

Since this story began several weeks ago, IGN has chosen to remain silent, at least publicly. Internally, there have been frequent, fervent debates about every aspect of the story. While we’ve all agreed that intimidation and threats of violence are disgraceful and destructive, we haven’t agreed on whether or how to confront the issues raised by this trend.

The argument against covering harassment is that it plays into the hands of the aggressors, who measure their payoff by the disruptions they cause. It is the same reasoning that keeps IGN from covering bomb threats, or from mentioning the names of killers when the mainstream media attempts to link real world violence with video games. The intimidation and threats hardly need a signal boost from IGN at this point, having been reported by the New York Times, CNN, and Rolling Stone. Many at IGN feel additional visibility only encourages those who want to use the Movement as a means to stop rather than start discussions.

The argument for covering the harassment holds that video games deserve more thorough consideration as a social and cultural phenomenon that extends beyond the edges of our screens. As game players and game makers mature, the art and commerce of games requires the inclusion of more diverse points of view, some of which are being threatened into silence. IGN’s support could encourage those gamers and developers who want to ask challenging questions about games and games coverage. Proponents of covering the story have further worried that IGN’s silence could wrongly be attributed to our own indifference to the problems of harassment in the gaming community or a desire to hide some assumed complicity in the unethical practices many members of the Movement hope to address. Neither of those assumptions are correct.

In grappling with this story, we’ve reached beyond the content team at IGN, discussing it with other departments, those employed in other areas of the industry, some of whom have been personally affected by the events of the last few weeks. Not surprisingly, the issue has proven just as contentious outside of our walls as within. Some in the industry have praised our reluctance to devote editorial space to this issue; others at the opposite side have called us cowards and worse.

In the hopes that we can elevate the way we all talk about games and gamers, we want both to reiterate our commitment to our community guidelines and to strongly advocate for their extension into all our interactions with each other:

Don’t assume a motivation behind another person’s actions.

Don’t attack a person’s character just because they disagree with you.

Don’t intimidate a person just because their ideas are challenging.

Don’t threaten anyone with violence.

And finally, don’t use one person’s violation of any of these rules to justify your own.

The good news is, if you are breaking these rules, you can stop and find that games will still be just as amazing as ever.

Games are the dominant cultural expression of our age. They are vital and expansive enough to tolerate new and challenging perspectives; those challenges are, in fact, part of what gives games their strength. If you believe games are capital-A Art, you must also believe it’s profoundly inappropriate to say to anyone, even those you consider non-gamers, “You aren’t welcome here.” To say that is to deny the value of games altogether and undermine the entire idea that games are worth discussing seriously. We can’t argue that games matter, or that they deserve to be provocative, without engaging with and educating each other about the consequences of those provocations.

Gamers are not a homogenous hive mind and, through respectful discussion and consideration of multiple points of view, the value of games is strengthened, not weakened. Ending harassment doesn’t mean silencing dissent, or rejecting calls for greater transparency and trust between publishers, the press, and the vast, varied population of gamers. Those discussions are essential to the evolution and expansion of video games, and we should be willing to listen to those who have questions about our assumptions, our values, and our practices.

If we started doing that, it probably wouldn’t make front page of the New York Times, but that’s a trade-off we’re willing to make.

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Steve Butts, Editor-in-Chief