Making Things Official

5 Nov

So this is the week in which academic organizations are making their official statements about GamerGate. First, there was the ICA (International Communication Association), declaring its position on harassment and doxxing, along with some helpful tips on how to minimize one’s chances of being doxxed. It’s a little disturbing, quite frankly, that being an academic now carries with it the possibility of online harassment, death threats, and doxxing – if you aren’t Salman Rushdie. DiGRA (the Digital Games Research Association and target of OperationDiggingDiGRA) also released their public statement condemning “bullying.”

As a member of the DiGRA listserv, I got to see this when it was sent out, and also was able to see the responses to it. Some people applauded DiGRA’s willingness to make a statement, some warned about the impending GG-related fiasco now that DiGRA has engaged with the discussion openly, some questioned the intent of the statement coming so late in the game, some remarked that making such a statement would hurt DiGRA’s standing with the industry (how?), and still more expressed their concerns that DiGRA hasn’t been critical enough of the movement, citing the ICA’s more condemnatory stance.

While I do see the point of view that wants desperately to stay out of the line of fire, I (obviously) think there is more harm to be done by remaining silent out of a sense of self-preservation, particularly since DiGRA itself was dragged unwillingly into OperationDiggingDiGRA. In large part, I think the biggest threat of remaining silent is a loss of the very thing which so many of us in academia value above all else – academic freedom.

For many of us, academia represents a locus of intelligent and open conversation about the major issues and concerns of our day – filtered through the media of our disciplines, but relevant nevertheless. To have our voices functionally silenced is to threaten the very core of what it means to be an academic – something that is already happening elsewhere with the University of Kansas Board of Regents‘ policy on social media.

Proponents of ODD will argue that academics ought to celebrate the opportunity for wider discussion and embrace the “peer review” and “fact checking” coming out of ODD. As I’ve said before, “fact checking” is always welcome, but “peer review” comes out of academia itself. The purpose is not to silence a viewpoint or theoretical approach, but to make sure that the discussion itself has merit. Some of the best pieces in academia are controversial, and spur arguments and counter-articles; discussion, not finality, is the aim.

What ODD threatens to do is to functionally harass academics out of the discipline of game studies – or at least to harass feminist and queer theorists out of game studies. It aims to silence academic freedom when that freedom doesn’t agree with gamergaters’ conception of the status quo. And that is the key here – academia has long been a source of challenge to the status quo, whether socially, politically, religiously, or otherwise. Progress – scientific, social, political – comes out of challenging the status quo by demanding answers to unanswered questions, by asking questions that others are afraid to ask, and by innovating in the lab and in the classroom.

ODD threatens to stop that conversation by making the emotional and mental cost of producing academic work in game studies too high. It is vital that academics in all fields have the freedom and the ability to continue to challenge the status quo, irrespective of whether they are feminist, conservative, games scholars, queer theorists, historians, literary critics, political scientists, hard scientists, communications scholars, or anyone else laboring in academe. ODD – and the Kansas Board of Regents, although entirely unrelated – is employing coercion in order to maintain the status quo through silence, and that is anathema to everything academia represents.