For some reason I have yet to figure out, the abomination that is GamerGate has persisted, even going so far as to spawn an ostensibly academic offshoot that is seeking to “fact-check and peer review” the work of qualified academics under the umbrella of “saving games.” GamerGate has managed not only to ruin the lives of journalists and developers (Anita Sarkeesian, Phil Fish, Zoe Quinn, Samantha Allen, Mattie Brice, Jenn Frank, among others), but it has now caused major companies to withdraw their advertising campaigns from journalism outlets that have done nothing more heinous than refuse to bend to GGers’ demands – I’m looking at you, Intel. Mercedes temporarily pulled their ads from Gawker (who run Kotaku), but have since reinstated the campaign.
The ad focus seems to be one of the more banal things that has come out of GG at this point – no death threats, no rape threats, no one’s personal information being made available on the web. But, as The Washington Post‘s Caitlin Dewey notes,
the incident still demonstrates a worrying new trend among the Gamergate crowd: curbing the speech of reporters they don’t like by threatening their advertisers. For a media empire, such as Gawker, of course, one advertiser won’t necessarily make or break operations. But for targeted sites like Gamasutra, a smaller, gaming industry news site, or Gameranx, a five-person operation, targeting advertisers isn’t just a form of protest: It’s a threat to their very existence.
In other words, the ad campaign can be a very real, very serious problem to the very voices who area already being threatened by the oppressive ideological apparatus that makes up patriarchal society. (And yes, I am a card-carrying feminist.) Put more simply, for those in a position of non-dominance – women, minorities, LGBTQ folk – campaigns like this one cause much more damage, which is precisely the point.
I’ve talked before on this blog about what all this GG business is coming to mean for non-straight-white-male gamers, as well as responding to Leigh Alexander’s thinkpiece on “the death of the gamer,” to turn a Foucauldian phrase. But one thing that I keep coming back to is the idea that it’s time for gaming to evolve beyond the 1980s and 1990s stereotype of the white teenage boy in the basement – which, by the way, GGers are not helping, despite the fact that most of them are probably not teenagers or in basements.
What’s really happening is that those who have hitherto held the dominant position in gamer culture are losing that dominant position, and are fighting with all they’re worth to keep it, no matter how many internet death threats or metaphoric flinging of mud that requires. To quote former NFL Quarterback Chris Kluwe:
The only danger to the things “gamers” enjoy doing (i.e. playing new games), is the threat YOU YOURSELF have created, because for some reason you think sharing your toys with others is going to make the world explode.
Kluwe’s post (which has a fabulous ending) recaps a lot of the ideas already stated by Kathy Sierra‘s idea of the Koolaid Point –
the most vocal trolling and “hate” for a brand kicks in HARD once a critical mass of brand fans/users are thought to have “drunk the Koolaid”. In other words, the hate wasn’t so much about the product/brand but that other people were falling for it.
Put as simply as I can manage, the whole point of movements like GG and its sub-affiliates is the idea that someone is paying attention to something other than you, in which the “you” is the heretofore dominant demographic.
That’s it. GG is a temper-tantrum being thrown by people with so much privilege that it never occurs to them that exploiting the opportunities they have (wealth, education, access to technology) might be inappropriate in certain situations. It never occurs to them that death threats or other threats of bodily harm might not be an appropriate reaction to a delay in a game release, to the “nerfing” of a gun in Call of Duty, to one developer supporting another, or to a feminist speaking about videogames. People who have convinced themselves that feminists are a bigger threat to the world than ISIS or poverty or human trafficking or ebola-and-cholera-and-HIV-combined or institutionalized racism (which they also don’t believe exists).
All because feminists and “social justice warriors” (people who fight for social equality, which is clearly a dangerous thing) have the audacity to suggest that a medium they also love might want to take a critical look at the way it represents women, minorities, and LGBTQ people, because those people also play and love games.
How dare we.