GamerGate: Fracture

I know, I know, there are still a few emails and reblogs about my GamerGate essays that I haven’t responded to yet. My commitment to discussing this with absolutely everyone who wanted to discuss it has been a lot more time-consuming than I anticipated, and has slowly reached the terrifying point where I actually find myself checking someone’s popularity and prioritizing my response based on that. It makes me feel dirty. I don’t like it.

At the same time, however, it has led to me seeing a whole lot of ideas and different viewpoints - which, even if I don’t always agree with them at the time, is an activity I hold a lot of respect for. One thing that is particularly telling is the sort of patterns that emerge. With GamerGate specifically, every disagreement seems to follow the same structure: one person will say “it’s about ethics in gaming journalism”, and the other person will respond “no, it’s about the harassment of women in the games industry”. Or, sometimes it’s the inverse. In either case, you have both sides of the conversation feel like the other is trying to shut the conversation down and talk about something else that draws attention away from their wrongdoing.

If you look at it one way, it’s reminiscent of the horrible “package deal” philosophies that drive modern politics. Someone who is fiscally conservative and socially liberal, for example, has one vote with which they must decide whether they care more about budgeting or gay marriage: an either-or choice that only makes sense in a fictional world where calculators are powered by unmarried homosexuals. If you look at it the other way, though, it’s closer to the manipulation tactics traditionally used to shut down conversations about feminism. By characterizing one side of an issue by their worst stereotypes, you instantly put them on the defensive and direct the conversation away from their actual point and instead focus on making them counter their accusations - which, in turn, effectively makes it about their accusations. If you want to keep a conversation stalemated indefinitely, this is an easy and effective way to do it.

What got me thinking about this was a message I received yesterday, in which someone proposed that there were essentially two separate conversations going on in GamerGate: one about harassment/misogyny, and another about journalistic ethics/collusion. The sender postulated that, if the two issues were debated separately, most of the people involved would probably agree on everything. If someone tries to bring up journalism in the harassment conversation, they can just be referred to the conversation going on next door. Instead, we are presented with this nonsensical zero-sum-game where we have to choose which of these unrelated issues we care about more, pitting people against eachother not because they disagree, but because they prioritize things differently. Which, honestly, they should! We should care more deeply about the things in which we have more experience.

This all brings up the interesting point regarding GamerGate: maybe a fracture is necessary. I mean, yeah, strictly speaking GamerGate has been trying to fracture for weeks now - repeatedly saying “we do not condone harassment” or making infographics trying to explain what is/isn’t their scope. Yet, since allegations seem to continually arise that GamerGate is actually about harassment, maybe it’s time to just fucking take control of that conversation and talk about harassment. I mean, at this point I think it’s clear that nobody else is going to talk about harassment; they’re just going to complain about how GamerGate is ignoring it. If they won’t take that initiative, then GG might as well try and outperform them at their own game.

The more I think about it, the more it seems like the best thing for GamerGate might be not to focus, but to compartmentalize. If people want to try to make it about women in the games industry getting harassed, then make part of it about women getting harassed - but lead the discussion. If someone tries to use misogyny to shut down a talk about journalism, then you can just say “hey, we’re discussing that over in the Misogyny Discussion Tent. This is the Journalism Reform Teepee,” and everyone can carry on what they were doing unhindered. Except the people who were intentionally trying to stop the discussion for some reason. They’re fucked.

From what I’ve seen in the correspondence and criticism levied at me, I think there are essentially five different discussions going on (or trying to go on) under this delightfully chaotic label of “GamerGate”. While everyone is in or against it for different reasons, I think these five issues fundamentally represent most of the things people want to address, and every one of you can probably look at this and identify a “favorite” topic.

My five theorized divisions are as follows:

Division 1: Accessibility of gaming to women

This is essentially the thing GamerGate’s critics say it’s about, and there honestly is a very important discussion to be had here. Simply saying “female gamers/devs face additional challenges” is not a discussion, it’s a statement - the more important things is to examine the ramifications of this. For instance, I never picked up on this until a female friend pointed it out to me, but nearly any time you see a female gamer using voice chat in a public server, she’s playing with friends or a gaming clan. I had seen this before - almost constantly, in fact - but had never really parsed it as a method of harassment abatement. Experiences like this are the sort of thing that need to be shared and understood, because they are going to slip under a lot of people’s radar who just construe it as a personal preference rather than a safety thing.

It’s not all as simple and happy as “be nice to women in games”, either. One of the points that keeps coming up among women in GamerGate is this idea that female developers won’t get press coverage unless they are being harassed or look a certain way. Assuming their testimony is accurate, the “damsel in distress” narrative described by Anita Sarkeesian is essentially playing out in the industry itself - treating female devs less like equals and more like trophies. Similarly, you also have that point The Fine Young Capitalists were fighting for, that many employers are going to be particularly dubious of employing female game designers, since they are so rare. Most programs to get women into game design focus on education while very few focus on proving female designers’ economic viability - or even superiority, depending on the game or audience.

This is a complex discussion, and rather than dividing people into “good” and “bad” so that we can sit and feel superior to problems while they continue to exist, it needs to focus on proactive strategies to combat the social constructs that lead to this inequality. I think hardly anyone would be opposed to, say, media encouraging men to nut up and ignore the social pressure to hit on women online. Speaking as a man, I can testify that a lot of that behavior is due to this heavy external pressure to reassert your heterosexuality in public - a pressure placed even upon those who don’t have a heterosexuality to reassert. That’s just one example, but it’s the kind of thinking and collaborative work this would ideally focus on.

Division 2: Journalism coverage logic

People in GamerGate keep saying that they want journalistic ethics or empirical reviews, though I still think that is a slight misinterpretation of what they’re actually looking for. The better way to put it would be that the consumers of gaming media want to understand the logic behind what content is covered and the way it is covered.

This is going to be the predominant point most people from 4chan are fighting for. The desire for this has been there a while - just look at this edited Mulan clip 4chan’s /v/ board made a full year before GamerGate, depicting the “untrained journalists” as having no idea how to give a game anything lower than 9/10. It criticizes them for writing reviews to appeal to external groups that can give social/monetary benefits rather than to the site’s core audience. And even if you don’t think that is actually going on, the fact that this perception exists demonstrates that people don’t understand the logic that reviewers are grading from.

As a movement, this really needs to be less about ethics and more of a demand for transparent rules behind what is/isn’t reviewed positively, or even covered in the first place. That’s not saying you can’t dock something like Bayonetta points for its lesbian camerawoman, but rather that your site needs to establish up-front that this is the sort of thing that their reviews will be based on. It also means transparency about blacklists, as well as why people are being blacklisted or denied press coverage. There is a definite demand for journalism to be less of a black box.

Division 3: Journalist qualifications/behavior

If I sound overly passionate/biased in this one, I apologize, since it’s probably where I personally fall in these divisions. Something needs to be done to address the fact that many journalists have not only been out-of-touch or hostile to their audience, but shown an utter ignorance toward how human behavior even works.

Let’s be honest: in competent hands, GamerGate would have never happened. A mob is just a democracy formed in a hurry: when faced with one, your first step is to identify its largest subset, appeal to them or assuage their concerns, and then you watch the mob dissipate shortly thereafter. What you don't do is generalize and attack them, refuse to address the topics that concern them, slander them publicly, and even go so far as to accuse your former advertisers of “buckling to an anti-feminist campaign” when they pull off of your site for outright threatening readers.

In a lot of ways, the problem with gaming journalism is secondary to the problem with gaming journalists. My only real involvement in GamerGate has been writing essays on my Tumblr that I link nowhere, and I have actually gotten harassed over this, as well as had people spread fabricated stories about my own sexual history. Interestingly, though, the people doing this weren’t anonymous trolls with new accounts - they were literally gaming journalists. This is seriously what we are dealing with here. Add onto this things like Leigh Alexander’s assertion that she has the power to make or break any prospective journalist’s career and it starts to paint these people as a group of clueless bullies who rely on their sites’ big names to make up for reprehensible behavior toward their actual audience. It’s an insult to those of us who make an effort to put our audience first.

This division probably encompasses nearly all of the bigger names in GamerGate. I think most of the people in it don’t want to fix gaming journalism so much as watch the bad parts burn. We want these people who have no idea how to do their job to lose their job, the sites that won’t reprimand them to lose money, and everyone to learn an important lesson in audience respect as the journalists who lose their jobs to make it as a Tumblr blogger with a Donate button in their sidebar.

Division 4: Not Your Shield/“Social Justice Warrior” pushback

I’ve been told that #NotYourShield is picking up enough steam that it might eventually break off from or outshine GamerGate on its own. Essentially, it’s a lot of women and minorities getting together to say that they’re tired of people acting like dicks and then claiming it was to done protect women/minorities.

Within the Not Your Shield hashtag you actually see a pretty significant amount of vitriol for people who identify as “social justice warriors” - essentially a pushback against people who declare themselves representatives of every minority group. Honestly, I think this is a pretty healthy and necessary development. I don’t talk about it much, my minority status is kind of an open secret and I can say from my own experience that the people who purport to defend me are some of the most bigoted I’ve ever met. I think it’s very important that we have a way to call them out and remind them that an ally’s job is to help minorities gain visibility, not to speak over them or only acknowledge their statements you agree with. The ability to stand alongside other people who feel the same way on this is significant and empowering, and this division carries weight just by existing and remaining a way to say “hey, you don’t speak for me unless I say you speak for me”.

Division 5: Entry barriers in the Indie sphere

I’ve written my feelings on the indie scene before. While it’s certainly possible for someone to make it there with niche marketing like I suggest, there is this perception of there being an increasingly toxic “in-crowd” that I think needs to be dispelled. In other words: if the “popular indie scene” is actually toxic, it needs to be fixed, and if it’s not, it needs to stop looking that way, since it risks making indie less accessible.

It’s frustrating that people always try to shut this discussion down by saying something like “there’s way more corruption in triple-A games!”. Some of us aren't in the triple-A scene - we’re indies and we want to address the problems that affect us directly. When I see someone in the indie scene come forward about being sexually harassed and then get attacked by Phil Fish until he apologizes, that scares me. When I hear that competitions might be rigged, I’m concerned - I and many other creators rely on stuff like that. The indie scene’s response to this should not be labeling people misogynists or telling them to do more research until they can see the claims are unfounded. If people are scared of them, it’s their job to help combat this.

Basically, I feel that there needs to be a push to break down this perception that the indie dev scene is dominated by cliques. When all the top names know eachother, that’s a problem - you need to push in additional voices and diversify. This would be easier, of course, if journalism was predictably navigable (see Division 2).

So what does this all mean?

More or less, what I’m thinking here is that if you want to keep people from changing the topic and trying to talk about something else, the best option might eventually just be to let them change the topic, but discuss it in tandem with other things.

The most important element, I think, is taking control of the harassment conversation. Defensive and response-oriented things like “GamerGate harassment patrol” aren’t doing anything to dispel allegations that GamerGate is founded around harassing female devs - people are always going to have anonymous trolls they can point to and say “look! GamerGate did that”. With the amount of effort put into countering these allegations, though, you could just as easily outperform all competition on that front. Everyone would win, except the people who are trying to shut down conversations. They’re fucked.

Though less important, I think differentiating the other elements could be beneficial as well. Not everyone in this has the exact same goal - one person might be primarily concerned with journalists being held accountable for wrongdoing while someone else might just want to see “I have a gay friend” used as a defense less often - but they still get along and recognize their causes as mutually beneficial. The shared title represents this - that we don’t have a problem with these different causes, even if we don’t passionately care about every one of them.

What I am proposing here is a defense tactic. A friend messaged me today and asked how to respond to topic-changing tactics, and this is my response to her. If your opposition tries to push you somewhere you don’t want, have someone there already who can handle it. Spread out and dominate the entire playing field. Your goal in any conflict is to be the first to act, keeping your opposition permanently on the defensive. If you can do this, the overall direction is yours to control.

I don’t have time to keep writing these essays and responding to responses. I really am sorry for this; I still plan to reply to the last couple emails I have, as well as that guy with the turtle avatar who has been talking to me via Tumblr reblogs, but sooner or later I’ll have to just accept that I no longer have the time to do things like this.

If you disagree with me and want a response, I don’t want you to feel like I am dismissing you. Rather, I’d implore you to take my writings as an extremely-detailed snapshot of one person’s interpretations and experiences. If you’re interested you can read my thoughts on GamerGate from the very beginning. You can see the things that made me hesitantly speak up to begin with, and the way the issues I cared about gradually shifted over its course. Bear in mind that I got into this shortly after the whole Skyler Page fiasco, where a creator got away with abusive behavior for years before someone came forward about it. You’re not arguing against bad people here, you’re arguing against people with valid concerns they feel are not being adequately addressed. Perhaps they are based off misinformation, or perhaps they carry a seed of truth. The important part is that, if you want to end this, you understand people’s concerns so that you can assuage them. Consider my writing a window into what you’re dealing with, so that you don’t end up one of those clueless writers who churns out a tear-filled article about how GamerGate is an angry mob with no discernible demands and you don’t know how to handle it.

If you know me as a creator and find yourself respecting me less because of the position I took on GamerGate, I’d ask you to bare in mind: I do shit like this all the time. I mean, I’m the guy who defends 4chan, or who will literally look at my referrers, find a fetish porn site discussing my comic, and drop in all like “hey guys, what’s up?”. I get a lot of very touching messages from the weirder parts of the internet, thanking me for not automatically hating them the way other creators do. That’s important to me, especially with the sort of themes I write about, and you’re not likely to ever see me speak out against someone due to coercion or external social benefits. If your respect for me pivots on me disrespecting someone else, then I apologize for the fact that I will not meet your demands.

I’d also request that you respect my agency in taking a side here. I’ve been told multiple times that I “drank the kool-aid” or have been “manipulated by 4chan”, and it’s all very dismissive of the idea that I have actual opinions and experiences. I threw in my support with GamerGate because I am an indie dev who is concerned about abusive behavior in my industry, and a writer who is appalled by the way journalists have been responding to an angered subset of their audience. From what I’ve experienced, most other people who claim to support GamerGate feel the same way. On top of that, I’ve met more female and minority developers within GamerGate than I have through years of reading gaming news sites and following the indie scene, and learned that a lot of the negative experiences or perceptions I’ve had were not unique to me alone. This is not “kool-aid”, this is outcompetition. The bulk of people opposing GamerGate have done nothing but call me names and dismiss my concerns, while claiming in the same breath that they support diversity, conversation and progress.

I really do have to step away from all of this though; I have my own work I need to dedicate time to (and also a Halloween party tomorrow where I’m pretty sure everyone has spoken out against GamerGate and I’ll have to silently hope none of them read my blog). To the people in GamerGate, I’d suggest you get tactical, divide and specialize where necessary, and pre-empt your opposition’s derailing tactics as suggested above. If a consumer revolt in one industry can reduce its entry barriers and bigotry, that’s something that might one day spread to others. To the people opposing GamerGate, I’d suggest you try to understand why people are upset and respond to it directly rather than derailing. I don’t “feel threatened because games are becoming more diverse”, I feel threatened because people have said they wanted me dead. There is a slight difference that is important to recognize.

And to everyone who just wants me to get back to making things: I promise, no more essays until I catch up on my own stuff. My friends all know I have an essaying addiction and want me to stop, and it’s high time I try. Maybe I’ll take up a healthier addiction, like cigarettes.