It's hard to believe that 12 years ago, Liberalism had found a comfortable home in the gaming community in no small part due to Conservative movements seeking to censor games. Gaming web comics made fun of old men in suits having panic attacks at seeing gun violence and nudity in gaming. So, how is it that Conservatism is now finding a new home in gaming, while Liberalism is seemingly being rejected by gamers? How did neo-fascists like Richard Spencer find support among gamers? The answer is very difficult to hear, and harder to believe.
Sometime around the end of the previous decade, Third Wave Feminism was starting to gain a hold of Internet Culture. Several sites began to churn out content that spoke on the concept of Social Justice (the relation between individual and society and how fair and just it is). This wouldn't be a problem (and IMO, it shouldn't have ever been) if not for the fact that many of these sites got a little heavy handed with their promotion of Social Justice. Sites like Cracked.com, which billed themselves as Humor sites, began to focus more on preaching Social Justice in general and feminism in particular. Problem is people go to Cracked.com to LAUGH, not to get sermoned on feminism.
Now of course it's ALWAYS good to be informed on such difficult and perennial topics such as Social Justice. There are so many things we could all stand to learn about: racism, poverty, class struggle, the alienation of the modern worker from their labor, trans rights, gay rights, etc. And I for one believe that it's a GOOD thing for certain websites to promote these ideologies! But there was a problem; many in fact.
First off, as I mentioned before, people don't like being sermoned. Nobody wants to go to a website that promises them laughs but then delivers a six page essay on why you're a bad person for being white, male, and cisgender. For those not in the know, cisgender means that you identify as being your biological sex, or to put it simply, you call yourself a boy and ONLY a boy because you have male genitalia, and vice versa. Nobody wants to go to a columnist that focuses on giving dating advice and then get a 10 page sermon on why male gamers are so privileged over female gamers because of female character designs. Well, OK, maybe feminist gamers would enjoy that last one, but the point is that such a topic would be lacking in mass appeal.
Another major problem was precisely who was sermoning to the masses. I'm gonna give you a quick pop quiz; Which of these three is the most vocal, most visible, and most often quoted Feminist voice in gaming?
A- A decades long veteran of Geek culture who has hosted her own TV show, has uploaded pictures of herself doing cosplay, continues to produce well written pieces to this day, and who regularly uploads videos on Youtube, on good weeks uploading a new video daily.
B- A woman with more than three decades experience in Academia, author of a few books on the subject of Feminism.
C- A vlogger who uploads videos of herself in front of a green screen, with a documented history of misrepresenting content, quote mining, and whose followers tend to be vitriolic against anyone who disagrees or criticizes her.
If you answered A, you're wrong. Liana Kerzner, though her work is of considerable quality, only has around 20 thousand Youtube subscribers as of this writing. That number includes myself. If you answered B, you're wrong again. Christina Hoff Sommers, though she was/is popular among GamerGate supporters, is not at all focused on gaming. The correct answer, sadly, is C: Anita Sarkeesian. Sarkeesian is the most talked about, most quoted, and most visible Feminist voice in gaming, having 10 times the subscribers Liana Kerzner has. She also has a wide number of users who focus exclusively on her, either defending her work or debunking it.
The major problem with Anita's work is that it's polemic not by nature, but by design. The more people try to debunk her, the more people will learn of her name, which leads to more views to her work, which then leads to more anonymous harassment, which THEN leads to more views to her work. The harassment then becomes the subject of several dozen online think pieces, which then leads to more views for her works, which then leads to MORE debunkings, which THEN leads to...you get the idea.
Anita gained infamy not by virtue of her own work, but by the constant harassment she received. And yes, I am giving her the benefit of the doubt and giving her an estimate of around 85% of her harassment being legitimate. There IS evidence that SOME of the harassment she received MAY be false, but I'm not going to say that ALL harassment she receives is false. Back on topic, compare and contrast this with how Liana Kerzner and Alanah Pearce, another video game critic for IGN, have dealt with the harassment they received; both soldiered on, refusing to be defined by the harassment they received, preferring to focus on the quality of their content. Pearce herself gained some minor fame for how she responded to her own harassers, wherein she threatened to expose them to their parents.
It's this strong contrast that has helped taint the image of Feminist Voices in gaming; in spite of the number of professional voices available, the most visible one is the one with the LEAST credentials AND most often seen as a professional victim. This became cannon fodder for the rising Right in gaming.
This leads me to a much bigger point: very often, the voices espousing the virtues of Liberalism and Social Justice were little more than hypocrites of the highest order. These same people, who'd often take every opportunity to demean Conservatives, men, and women who were not feminists, rather often fell short of the virtues they championed. Perhaps one of the most infamous moments where this was most evident was in 2015, when famed adult actress Cytherea had her home broken into.
She was raped.
It was the GamerGate supporters who donated money to her, who signal boosted what happened, and who gave their sincerest sympathies to this woman. When Mercedes Carrera, a pro- GamerGate adult film actress, asked Anita Sarkeesian for a signal boost, Sarkeesian gave no response. The woman who wasted no time in blaming "toxic masculinity" for a school shooting, gave no response whatsoever to a rape victim asking for support.
It was events like this that truly painted online Liberals and so-called Leftists as hypocrites. And who wants to listen to a hypocrite? THIS is what gave Right Wingers and neo-fascists what they needed to recruit gamers onto their ranks.
We need to understand that Right Wingers and Liberals used two very different voices when speaking to gamers. Liberals were smug and condescending towards gamers, treating us all as if we were fat, unemployed virgins who had nothing better to do with our lives. Right Wingers in general, and neo-fascists in particular, did the opposite: they flattered gamers, calling them "REAL fighters for free speech."
You know what's absolutely ridiculous? This isn't restricted to gaming; a good chunk of people who voted for Trump, Brexit, or Le Pen, did so NOT because they agreed with what they espoused, but because they liked how these politicians/political movements made them feel appreciated. A good chunk of Brexit's supporters weren't racist, xenophobic Brits; they were British people who were sick and tired of being poor and unemployed, and were told that leaving the European Union would lift them up from their poverty. Trump made Rural America feel like they could return to the days when they had steady jobs, something 8 years of Obama made them feel was never coming back. And the fact that we still have a Liberal media that continues to ignore the legitimate grievances of these people, that fails to produce a deeper line of thought than "lol racism, sexism, xenophobia," is a demonstration of just how the Right is going to creep right back into politics, into daily life, even into gaming.
And there we have THE biggest problem with Liberalism right now: it's so attached to its own ideology it's become detached from the realities of the people. Gaming sites became horribly detached from how gamers truly thought when they began to produce and promote think pieces on feminism and Social Justice in gaming. And those who dared to give different points of view, different ideas, were marked as undesirable and deplorable. Beyond that, there's this infuriating smugness that emanates from how self-righteous these writers were; perhaps best exemplified by the absolute hubris of Leigh Alexander's piece Gamers don't have to be your audience anymore.
I'll be speaking more on this topic at around mid to late August, when I'll be looking back at GamerGate. But if I leave you with anything, please let it be this: Liberals lost their audience due to disconnecting from them, and the Right Wing swooped in and connected with them like vultures. If the Left wants to reconnect with gamers, it must reinvent itself and adapt to a new culture, a culture that is now hostile to the brands known as feminism and Social Justice due to piss poor representation in the past. The sooner we recognize that smug liberals were one of the biggest reasons for the alt-right to grow in popularity with gamers, the sooner we can do something to rectify this situation.
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