An Analysis of GamerGate

This is my FINAL piece on GamerGate. It is also a continuation of my previous piece, "Gaming Going Right?"

I had originally intended this to be a dispassionate, objective view on GamerGate, its history, and its influence. But as I put pen to paper, I couldn't help but notice a far more important topic creep up: how GamerGate served as a microcosm of the rise of the alt-right in real world politics. And let me not mince words: had people paid attention to GamerGate, they could have prevented Trump, Brexit, Marine Le Pen, and other calamities.

We've all heard the story: GamerGate started when Eron Gjoni, Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend, published a long call-out post detailing the many ways the latter abused the former. Included in that post were allegations that Zoe Quinn, a small name game developer, had previously cheated on Gjoni with five other people. These people included, shockingly enough, Nathan Grayson, a games journalist who not only previously praised Quinn's work, but whose name explicitly appears in Zoe's game's end credits as a "Special Thanks." This raised a LOT of eyebrows.

Many people posted on Reddit regarding these allegations. I cannot speak for the quality of the posts made, but I know this much to be true: most, if not ALL of these posts, were deleted off the site. It should be noted that it wasn't 10 or 20 posts that got deleted; it was HUNDREDS. Hundreds of posts, deleted. Several threads, deleted. This sounded many alarms for a lot of people, myself included. What was going on? Several alarmists were already claiming that Zoe Quinn was pulling strings to get the story off the Internet, but these allegations sounded crazy.

That is, until Youtuber MundaneMatt made a video addressing the controversy, only to get it DMCA'd by Zoe Quinn herself for "copyright violation." The reason: MundaneMatt showed a single frame of her game, Depression Quest, in his video. His video got deleted off of YouTube, but by then another, more popular Youtuber got wind of Quinn, and did a video exposing what she had done. That Youtuber was known as InternetAristocrat, and his channel was already popular with the "anti-SJW" crowd. 

Who are the anti-SJW's? To put it simply, they are the people who had grown tired of the "Social Justice Warriors" of the Internet, their talking points, and their shenanigans. A Social Justice Warrior is a person, stereotypically a in their teenage to young adult years, who dedicate their online presence to issues of Social Justice, but do so in a confrontational, often naive way.

Back on topic, InternetAristocrat did a video on Zoe Quinn, and this helped expand exposure of Quinn's dealings to non-gamers. Suddenly, people began asking REALLY uncomfortable questions: 

1. Why would she DMCA (Digital Media Copyright Act. To DMCA someone is to claim copyright of something online and have it yanked out) someone for using a picture that was readily available for use online and had ALREADY been used by online publications?
2. Why were so many Reddit posts about her deleted overnight?
3. This game's journalist that Quinn allegedly cheated on her boyfriend with had also written a glowing review of her game! Is this a coincidence?

And the more people asked questions, the more restless the online gaming community became. Gamers began demanding answers. Some overstepped their boundaries, and targeted Zoe Quinn directly.

I'd like to take a pause here to remind my readers that harassing people online isn't OK. Sending death threats, rape threats, and requests for self harm to other people is indefensible, inhuman, and if you ever do it, you're a jackass. 

There were some online publishers who took this harassment and ran with it, claiming that Zoe Quinn was just the latest in a long, LONG list of women who were targeted for harassment by gamers. These same publications likened Quinn to Anita Sarkeesian, a woman who had also been subject to a campaign of harassment from gamers. Allegedly.

As many online games journalism sites began to chide their audiences for what had been allegedly happening to Quinn and Sarkeesian, the voices of gamers demanding an explanation continued to grow. Their numbers utterly exploded on August 28th, 2014. This was the day where no less than 8 online publications uploaded articles on the "death of the gamer identity." As if to add insult to injury, these were not small publications; they were the most popular online news outlets for games journalism!

Never had there been a bigger blunder in game's journalism. This one little stunt helped fuel a far greater controversy than could ever be imagined before. Gamers were suddenly asking the most damning question games journalism could ever face: is there collusion in the gaming press? The gaming press' integrity had been called into question, and it'd never recover from this incident.

It is important to note, as I had written in my previous post, that online "geek" journalism had slowly evolved into a mouthpiece for Liberal thinking points. Sites like Cracked, which previously published humor-based articles on topics like Batman's love life, were suddenly publishing humorless articles on sexism in geek culture (comic books, TV shows, movies, sci-fi, and of course, gaming.) The absolute nadir of these articles, in my personal opinion, would be "6 Sexist Video Game Problems Even Bigger than the Breasts." This article, published on a humor site yet completely devoid of any humor (except MAYBE a pun in the title?) ended on what I can only call the most ironic way to conclude an essay on Social Justice:

Finally, you allow people to criticize games and gender in narratives and allow the discussion to continue within game spaces without derailing the conversation. This is the best way we can learn from each other and improve the future of gaming. If someone is trying to prevent a discussion of a problem, they are that problem.

The irony lays in the fact that the biggest reason for why people were so disatisfied with Social Justice wasn't JUST the fact that many of the bloggers that were called (and called themselves) Social Justice Warriors were often immature and misinformed, but rather, it was their nigh dogmatic take on their points of view. You just COULDN'T debate an SJW; they'd block you at best, delete your comments and send anonymous hate towards you at worst. Anita Sarkeesian, for example, would close off her comments section in all her videos, disabling as well the Like/Dislike system. And before you go on about "but her harassment!" notice that neither Alanah Pearce nor Liana Kerzner, who are ALSO known for talking about feminism in gaming, have locked their comments section OR disabled Likes. Curious, isn't it?

Sometime around September 17th, Breitbart reporter Milo Yiannopolous published his evidence of a secret mailing list consisting of all the big names in game's journalism. This was the solid proof GamerGate (which was at least already two weeks going on at the time) needed to justify its crusade against the games journalists.

This is also when everything went Right. See, old game's journalism was almost entirely Liberal. Not Left-leaning, but Liberal (pro-feminist, anti-racism at the absolute least). But suddenly gamers couldn't trust these people to get their news, because these old journalists had been PROVEN to collude with each other in regards to what topics to cover, what to ignore, and whose career to destroy. Old sites like Reddit, and even 4Chan, were closely monitoring all threads to do with GamerGate, deleting posts left and right. Even the Main Stream Media were giving Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and the Liberal games journalists positive coverage while either ignoring, or even outright lying about, the reason GamerGate was even happening!

You had a Liberal leaning media that was selectively reporting on the going ons of GamerGate, happily reporting on the harassment that some female game developers were receiving while blatantly ignoring the harassment female, as well as racial minority, GamerGaters were receiving from anti-GamerGaters. Meanwhile, you had an unabashedly Right leaning, and often opportunistic, "alternative" media that gave focus to that OTHER side of the narrative: of how many racial minorities and women were supporting GamerGate, on how many games journalists were behaving unethically, etc. It was this Right leaning "alternative" media that, for the time being, gained gamer's trust. Let me put it to you in pictures:

Of these two, who looks more professional? Which one would YOU trust to give you REAL news? The woman is named Leigh Alexander, and there was a time when she was the biggest name in games journalism. She used to work for Gamasutra, one of the most popular gaming websites of its era. The man is named Milo Yiannopolous, a reporter for Breitbart, a website that focuses on general news with a Conservative slant. She spearheaded the "Gamers are Dead" publications, and even published the most oft quoted of said publications. He published the "GameJournoPros" mailing list, providing incontrovertible proof that there was, in fact, an ethics problem in games journalism.

She is an unprofessional woman who has used her position to bully others in games journalism. Her transgressions are well documented, and they include: collusion, corruption, misinformation, incitement of bullying, deceit, among many others. In the website DeepFreeze.it, which chronicles instances of unethical journalist behavior, she has the second highest amount of documented acts of unethical behavior, and possesses the HIGHEST count among female journalists. He, on the other hand, is an alleged pedophile with a documented history of transphobia. He once outed a trans woman in one of his presentations, a woman who happened to be in the audience for said presentation. He became popular, and in fact REMAINS popular, because he opposes people like Leigh. Because of this, he is sometimes given a free pass for his transgressions, which only FINALLY ended when his pedophilia became exposed. 

At first, GamerGate was characterized by boycotting the old games journalism rags. An email campaign to get advertisers off these websites began, called Operation Disrespectful Nod. I participated; I must have sent two or three dozen emails in a few weeks! Meanwhile, where did gamers get their news from? As I said before, from "alternative" sites.

Breitbart was one of the big ones, beginning a new campaign to cater to the anti-SJW gamer community. There was also The Ralph Retort, a news blog ran by one Ethan Ralph that published the latest happenings almost daily. InfoWars, Rebel Media, all became more popular among young people, especially those who abandoned sites like Gawker and Kotaku. Alternatively, there were also sites like Tech Raptor, which were "non political" in a sense that they focused on games, not Social Justice. But the big one, or what SHOULD have been the big one, was BasedGamer, a site for gamers BY gamers.

As the year 2015 rolled by, the Right's handle on gamers only grew. As Mainstream Media began to ignore GamerGate, especially after the EMBARRASSMENT that was Law and Order's "Intimidation Game" episode (an episode so bad it was almost universally ridiculed), sites like Breitbart only grew in popularity. Although many gamers grew wise to the shortcomings of their "alternative" sources for news and commentary, particularly Ethan Ralph (whose violently confrontational rhetoric proved too much for more moderate gamers, ESPECIALLY the liberal leaning GamerGaters), others like MundaneMatt and Shoe0nHead grew exponentially more popular.

Let me put in another set of pictures: 

The woman on the left is famed/infamous online vlogger and feminist Media critic, Anita Sarkeesian. She has given several talks on misogyny, Patriarchy, and women's representation in media. She is also the most quoted, most talked about feminist critic in gaming. The woman on the right is Mercedes Carrera, an adult film actress. She has never been known to be a gamer. With just THIS information, who do you think male gamers would trust more to deliver a fair critique of gaming culture?

Alright, now let me give you the REST of the information. Anita Sarkeesian has a documented history of fraud (being involved with known fraudsters) and intellectual dishonesty (many well documented instances of cherry picking, misinformation, disinformation, quote mining, etc). Mercedes Carrera, on the other hand, has never done anything similar, and has in fact run quite a few charities for others, most famously spearheading a charity for fellow actress Cytherea, a then recent victim of home invasion and RAPE. An incident, it must be said, of which Anita Sarkeesian remained tellingly silent. The woman on the left vehemently opposed GamerGate; the woman on the right virulently supported it. Again, who would gamers trust more?

I like to think that GamerGate ended on August 22, 2016, although by then most GamerGaters had left (considering we managed to shut down a few publications, enforce some ethics reforms on sites like Polygon, and even got a few old games journalists off their jobs, this is understandable). That was the day Gawker, THE biggest example of "Liberal," cultural authoritarian, click bait "journalism," was shut down. Gawker was one of GamerGate's biggest opponents, and to see it go down, that was the day I knew, that we ALL knew, we had won. I can't give you an exact date for when GamerGate ended, but if I had to, it would be August 22, 2016.

But History never ends. In spite of GamerGate's victory, gaming culture had already changed. Gone were the days where gamers could joke about breasts in video games. Gone were the days we could make fun of how badly women characters were written. Nowadays, these subjects are treated much more seriously, but not in the way we would have wanted to. 

Feminism failed to gain a proper foothold in gaming culture, and the reason why is because the absolute WORST people were the ones promoting it. Here are but a few examples:

I've already written about what Leigh Alexander did. No need to repeat it.

This is Zoe Quinn. A game developer who has spent more time and energy decrying the "harassment" she has received from gamers than she has developing games. Her actions have irrevocably destroyed gamer's trust in games journalism, gaming awards, as well as contributed to our distrust towards independent game developers.

Jonathan McIntosh, whose infamously ridiculous tweets regarding gaming and geek culture have created the term "full McIntosh," which is when you say something so ridiculously STUPID that it brings to question your intellectual capabilities. This phrase has, for all intents and purposes, replaced the much more offensive phrase "full retard." A positive, in my opinion. THIS is the guy who looked down on gamers and geeks, and whom he feels he should "educate" on the truths of feminism and Liberalism.

Joss Whedon, a man who gained fame by writing what in the 90's was considered an ideal feminist super hero: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This fame seemed to have gotten to his head, because his OTHER works featuring female "badasses" have been accused of misogyny. Mainly, that although his female characters DO get action, they are typically defined by their gruffness and lack of femininity. His infamous Wonder Woman script turned the eponymous superhero, the single GREATEST superhero of all time, and one of only FOUR superheroes that normal people could name before the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a thing, into a cold hearted monster whose superhero nature was defined by her OUTFIT. That's right, according to Whedon, Wonder Woman was no superhero until she put on her costume. THIS is the guy who claimed that GamerGate disrespected women, that the name itself was akin to the Ku Klux Klan! This complete and utter HACK of a writer, who can't write a woman without making her a "man with tits" (a common criticism of modern female action heroes who are only aesthetically female) thinks he can school gamers on how to treat women with respect?

And that just goes back to my main point! GamerGate happened not because one woman had a few indiscretions and gamers wanted to see her punished, it was because there was a HUGE problem, but the only places to talk about it where places where toxic ideas would form and spread. The only people who were giving gamers a voice about the issue of ethics in games journalism were people who were eagerly waiting to turn gamers to the Far Right!

Are some gamers misogynists? Sure. Racist, too. Xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic as well. Most aren't even aware of their innate discriminations. But now we have people telling them that these prejudices are not only normal, they're OK! "It's OK to be racist, some people are just best left with their own kind! Most trans folk are just screwed in the head! These feminazis are just a bunch of Cultural Marxists!"

But why would they allow themselves to listen to that? Because the people who were supposed to take them away from that path PUSHED them into it instead. "Oh you're a sexist pig! You're all nothing but white cis trash! Stay the hell away from queer spaces, Betty Spag-hetty!" The more the Liberal Left tried shaming the gamer, the more the gamer moved towards the Far Right. Why? The Far Right was not the one telling the gamers that they were trash.

When women and minorities raised their voices in opposition to the Liberal media, said media called them sock puppets, uninformed, and all but called the minorities Race Traitors. The Far Right took advantage of that by NOT doing the same thing; and in all honesty, who are YOU going to listen to? The people who call you a sock puppet, or the people who listen to you and treat you like a human being?

And THIS is why Liberalism has completely and utterly LOST the gaming community! By treating gamers like they were ignorant trash, gamers abandoned Liberalism and Progressivism and instead went towards Conservatism. The Far Right managed to recruit an entire generation of angry young men and women who have felt abandoned, used, and abused by the Liberal and Progressive Movements.

If you want a generation that embraces and accepts individuals regardless of their skin color, sexual orientation, or gender, we must first treat said generation as HUMAN BEINGS. If you want to TEACH empathy, DEMONSTRATE it. People are not dumb; they know when they're being respected, and they will respond accordingly. Liberalism and Progressivism is quickly losing an entire generation, due to our failure to demonstrate genuine empathy towards others.