The Last Thing I'm Ever Going to Write About #GamerGate
Before I start, a few notes:
First, if you are one of my readers who don't know what GamerGate is, you are a lucky person. Keep your happiness. Stop reading this right now and do your best to never learn anything about GamerGate ever.
Second, this piece is going to borrow heavily from a Storify I made a few months ago, which in turn borrowed heavily from a Medium piece I wrote not long before that (under a different name because I was hiding from GamerGate at the time).
Third, a warning: this is going to be long. If you're a "TL;DR" type, there's a bolded sentence near the bottom.
Because of the subject matter of my blog and my personal interests, respectively, most of my Twitter follows are feminists and nerds/gamers, so I have been hearing all about GamerGate since before it was GamerGate. I watched it begin as a hate mob stirred up by one man against his ex-girlfriend and grow into a directionless, volatile mass of nerd resentment, misogyny, and right-wing politics. Through all of this twisted evolution, one thing has remained constant: the people (usually women) GamerGate chooses as its enemies have been deluged with threats, harassment, and abuse.
When I say I watched this happen, I'm not speaking figuratively. It all played out on Twitter for everyone to see. I saw it with my own eyes, as did everyone else. There are no secrets. The story most of GamerGate chooses to tell about itself has never fooled anyone who was paying attention at the beginning.
(If you weren't, here's a thorough and extensively-sourced timeline for you.)
For about two months, from late August to late October, I tried to reason with GamerGate. Surely they didn't really believe one small-time indie game developer could control the games press with her vagina. Surely they didn't really believe an independent feminist YouTube critic could ruin their games. Surely they didn't really believe that people blocking them on Twitter or banning them from privately-owned message boards was censorship.
As it turns out, most of the GamerGate people I talked to really did believe these things. They were beyond reasoning. The futility, along with a few unpleasant days during which GamerGate dogpiled me on Twitter and spammed my Facebook page, convinced me that it was time to stop engaging GamerGate. I continued to talk about them, but I gave up talking to them.
Now, frankly, I'm tired of even doing that much. GamerGate has taken up too much of my time. I feel a little selfish saying that, because GamerGate's chosen targets do not have the luxury I have of moving on. But I have other things to do. Even now, as I type this, my daughter is watching TV when I could be taking her out to play in the snow. I need to be done with GamerGate.
But before I am done, I want to leave something behind: something I can link to in the future rather than having conversations, something explaining why I think all of GamerGate -- not just the few people doing the worst of the dirty work -- is toxic and needs to be stopped.
And for that, I'd like to begin with the words of a much better writer than myself.
In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis makes some keen observations about Western (read: white Christian) nationalism and racism, both the condescending kind that was used to justify imperialism and the even more horrible kind that manifested in things like the Holocaust:
I am far from suggesting that the two attitudes are on the same level. But both are fatal. Both demand that the area in which they operate should grow "wider still and wider." And both have about them this sure mark of evil: only by being terrible do they avoid being comic. If there were no broken treaties with Redskins, no extermination of the Tasmanians, no gas-chambers and no Belsen, no Amritsar, Black and Tans or Apartheid, the pomposity of both would be roaring farce.
This is one of my favorite chunks of book to quote. Lewis's "sure mark of evil" is a great tool for identifying hate and for understanding how hate operates.
Take as an example the Westboro Baptist Church: one disgraced, disbarred lawyer and his family got together in rural Kansas and called themselves a "church", then started preaching to anyone who would listen that every tragedy to befall America is divine punishment for America's (marginal) tolerance of homosexuals. That's not scary, and it's not news. It's pathetic. It's a joke. It sounds like an article in The Onion.
Becoming a menace was the only way for such a group to become more than a punchline. We all listened to the Westboro Baptist Church, but not because we thought their message was worth listening to. They demanded our attention by being too horrible to ignore. And it worked: the press treated them as a real news story. By being terrible, they avoided being comic.
There is a parallel to be drawn here with GamerGate.
GamerGate managed to become the biggest story in the games world in 2014, a full-blown internet phenomenon that made its way into the mainstream media (The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, The Colbert Report, Nightline, and others). How did it do this?
Did GamerGate represent so many voices and so many wallets that it commanded the attention of the industry? As Ubisoft's creative director explains here, no. Not even remotely close.
Okay, then. Were the issues raised by GamerGate so important and so relevatory that they could not be ignored?
How many people, really, are outraged that a writer for a games website once briefly acknowledged in print the existence of a (free!) game made by a developer he allegedly had a relationship with? How many people really believe a feminist critic expressing her opinions about video games on YouTube is a crisis that will destroy video games if literally hundreds of "debunking" videos are not made and shared with everyone? How many people really believe that banning on 4chan and blocking on Twitter represent a threat to free speech? How many people really believe "gamers" are being oppressed?
Even if we were to accept at face value the story that GamerGate is "about ethics in games journalism", how many people really see ethics in games journalism as a major issue that affects their lives and is worthy of outrage?
I feel pretty confident in saying not many. Certainly no one at The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, The Colbert Report, or Nightline.
GamerGate, then, is a demographically and economically insignificant group raging on the internet about issues most people don't care about. Throw in the support of some very eccentric right-wing fringe personalities, and you have something that sounds kind of silly and definitely isn't news.
So how did GamerGate become such a big story? C. S. Lewis could have predicted it.
Since August, a nonstop flood of rape and murder threats, harassment, doxxing, hacking, and other abuse has been hurled at GamerGate's enemies (mostly women). This has chased people from their homes. It has gotten events at major universities cancelled. It has chased the developers of popular video games out of the industry.
This is why the mainstream media is reporting on GamerGate. This is why GamerGate is a story people care about. Not Zoe Quinn. Not GameJournoPros. Not Bayonetta reviews. Not Twitter block lists. Not token charity donations. Virtually all of GamerGate's notoriety comes from threats and harassment.
GamerGate has avoided being comic only by being terrible.
GamerGate likes to claim that it can't be held responsible for the actions of a few wackos who wave its flag. I believe that it can be and should be, because all of GamerGate is using the actions of those wackos to boost its signal.
I'll say it again: virtually all of GamerGate's notoriety comes from threats and harassment. If you choose to make use of that notoriety to send your own message, you tacitly endorse the methods by which that notoriety was achieved. Everyone who chooses to take part in GamerGate chooses to accept help from misogynistic harassers and abusers, because those harassers and abusers are the source of GamerGate's relevance and influence.
This is why I condemn all of GamerGate, the apologists and the "moderates" right along with the harassers and the abusers. This is why I block all GamerGate supporters on Twitter, not just the "bad ones". And this is why I blame all of GamerGate for the dark cloud that descended on gaming -- and especially on women in gaming -- in 2014. They have all decided to share in the rewards of hate, and so they all share in the blame.
There is a lot of 2015 left. This year can be better. GamerGate appears to be slowly (though far too slowly) destroying itself, and I hope good people with more patience than I have can speed that process along by helping GamerGate's targets protect themselves and tell their stories.
But me, I'm getting out of this game.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a toddler who is in dire need of a snow fort.
