So as #GamerGate continues to fizzle on the internet, despite its disappearance from much of mainstream Twitter and news, it’s becoming increasingly clear that what GGers are attempting to do is not hold gaming journalism accountable for corruption or shoddy reporting, as they so often claim, but to attempt to restore a perceived status quo from the early 2000s.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a paper considering the toxic fandom of videogames for next week’s PCAS conference (more on that after I give the paper), and looking in particular at what’s been happening with Anita Sarkeesian, #GamerGate, and online harassment, and how all that relates to the history of videogames themselves.
I’ve been following developer Zoe Quinn on Twitter, and watching her expose of 4chan forums; following Feminist Frequency (Sarkeesian); and seeing multiple journalists (Jenn Frank, Samantha Allen, Mattie Brice) disappear from my feed or cease to speak about games. I’ve also been watching other journalists, academics, and developers (Rhianna Pratchett, Leigh Alexander, Maddy Myers, Todd Harper, Zoya Street) continue to talk about harassment, speak out against it, and continue to teach and preach tolerance, diversity, and accountability.
What has struck me – in particular after discovering that my lovely TLF editor has been on the receiving end of GGer tweets on my account – most recently is that GGers aren’t actually trying to reform journalism (which I never thought they honestly were, to be frank), they’re trying to reclaim their perceived identity as gaming “experts” from the 1990s and early 2000s when women were an invisible presence in gaming. When gaming wasn’t as widespread (when 59% of Americans weren’t gamers*), when it wasn’t as diverse, it was a lot easier for the “hardcore” fans to be experts, for their opinions to be reflected broadly across little-known gaming sites and in gaming magazines.
When GGers seek to “reform” journalism, they’re demanding a return to the days when the voices in the games industry on all levels – fans, development, journalism – were homogenous, reflecting a bias created by industry marketers in the 1990s.** In the same way that people (mostly white men) talk about the “golden era” of the 1950s, GGers are looking to reclaim a period in videogame history when they were the dominant demographic in gaming, and their opinions went unquestioned and even catered to.
This is a response – cultural lag – that is ubiquitous within any rapidly changing form of popular culture (I’ve said this before here, here, and here) in which the “original” (“hardcore”) audience feels that the medium to which they have become attached changes on them, and that any change must necessarily be for the worse.
Games journalism is changing, yes. It is changing because the world around it is changing, and because games are changing to reflect and respond to that world.
This new world is a place that GGers find disconcerting and uncomfortable because it is not the familiar place to which they have become accustomed which reflects back their already-held opinions and preferences. It is a world in which people don’t all look like them, don’t all think like them, and – especially – in which people question their right to remain dominant.
This is a problem not exclusive to GGers, or to gamers, but to the whole of Western society, which just happens to have a high concentration among 30-something straight white American (and European) males with access to the internet (aka. middle and upper class). This demographic suffers from privilege – a phrase which is not intended as sarcastic, but as realistic. Those with privilege have a natural inability to see that privilege, and when it is pointed out to them, it causes “suffering”: discovering privilege is uncomfortable, disconcerting, guilt-inducing. Learning about your own privilege is a demand that you then do something about that privilege, that you cease to take for granted that your views are “normal.” To realize that the identity which you have so long identified as “default” is in fact alien to many of the people you know.
It means learning that instead of the hero you’ve long imagined yourself to be, you’re an unwitting – and perhaps unwilling – villain.
And that experience is uncomfortable, disconcerting, even painful. So yes, I understand why GGers want to demand a restoration of their comfortable dominance. But this understanding is not acceptance.
This comfort comes at the price of oppression, of subjection, of dehumanization. As has been true throughout history, privilege is bought at the cost of other voices and viewpoints silenced in the name of “purity,” “conformity,” and the status quo.
If you want to demand accountability in journalism, by all means go ahead. But when you define “accountability,” be sure to also hold yourself accountable – ask yourself, “Whose voice am I silencing? Whose opinion am I erasing? Whose life am I making more difficult? Would my life/work stand up to the demands I make of others?” And if, in the pursuit of what you believe is the truth, you are taking away someone else’s privacy, freedom, security, or speech, you aren’t seeking accountability; you’re seeking comfort, at the expense of human dignity.
It’s time to get out of the comfort zone.
*ESA 2014 demographic report
**Tracy Lien, “No Girls Allowed,” Polygon