Thoughts on GamerGate

I have a tendency to speak, or in this case, tweet my mind. This is the tweet that ultimately lead to me writing this:

Nothing is going to improve until we can all sit down and have a reasonable discussion void of bile and hate. #GamerGate
— Andre Landwer-Johan (@grumpytck) October 7, 2014

As the title of the post suggests, I'm talking about #GamerGate. Now, I'm not going to go into what GamerGate actually is, for a quick catch up, watch this:




Before I get to the meat of the post, I want to make something perfectly clear: I personally believe that Zoe Quinn, and the accusations against her have very little to do with the issue at hand. If she and sex with a Kotaku editor would that have caused a conflict of interest when they covered her game? Yes, certainly. Should they have disclosed it if it was true, or not written about the game at all? Also yes. However, beyond that, her life and supposed sexual habits are entirely irrelevant.

The articles mentioned in the video that were released by a bunch of websites (all at once interestingly enough) decried "gamer culture" by picking out the worst, stereotypical elements of the culture and slamming them. Everyone knows the stereotype of the antisocial, misogynistic, teenage basement dweller, gorging himself on doritos rarely seeing the light of day, or for that matter a shower. Do these people represent gaming as a whole? No, that'd be like saying all Americans are gun toting idiots who want to rule the world (please, lets not go further than that on the matter). So why were these articles published? From a glance, they're a response to the hate aimed at Quinn for being involved in the supposed conflict of interest. Misogyny in games, and the gaming community has been a hot topic for quite some time now, largely sparked by Anita Sarkeesian's "Feminist Frequency" videos. What I believe the "Gamers are Dead" articles are, is an overreaction to the vocal minority throwing hate and death threats at the likes of Quinn and Sarkeesian. The behaviour displayed by certain elements of the gaming community is disgusting and shouldn't be tolerated. However, reacting to these few, very vocal people with a slew of articles decrying gaming culture as a whole is a complete overreaction.

Many gamers are understandably rather upset by these websites slamming their entire culture. A lot of these gamers went on to make very reasonable complaints, and began boycotting these publications. But as usual, we have the trolls. The misogynistic, angry, noisy trolls. Did the media do the sensible thing and ignore the trolls, instead paying attention to the sensible discussion GamerGate could, and should have fostered? Of course not, the trolls are being used as an example of what gamers are like. That's assuming the media talks about it at all, which interestingly enough, they haven't been, which brings me to the video that got me interested in discussing GamerGate in the first place:



Due to the general silence on the matter of GamerGate, when I saw TotalBiscuit had been involved in a discussion regarding it, I decided I'd give it a listen. I respect TotalBiscuit and figured he'd have a good opinion, which yeah, I believe he did. It's a pretty long video, but the most important point I took from it, is how messed up it is that many websites are flat out refusing to cover the issue, or allow any discourse regarding it. Many subreddits on reddit have banned any discussion of it, 4chan have, in an extremely bizarre move, banned any discussion of it. This has lead to much of the discussion taking place on Twitter, which really, due to it's format of short posts, isn't the best place for an in depth discussion. This has lead to rather a lot of people voicing their opinion, but not necessarily discussing the issue itself.

So on one side, we have a slew of disparaging articles full of poor stereotypes, and then total silence. On the other side we have a group of very justifiably angry gamers, What I believe has happened (and this is obviously my personal opinion) is that game journalists saw an issue within gaming culture, a very real issue, and proceeded to blow it way out of proportion. In response, a lot of gamers have decried these articles, and done one of the few things they can in response: boycott, and inform advertisers of said boycott. I don't think there's anything wrong with that response at all, it's one of the few things that can actually be done. However, we still have the issue of the vocal minority the articles were decrying in the first place, which brings me to the reason I'm writing this. We need a reasonable discussion. Most people want a reasonable discussion (on the GamerGate side at least). The only way we are possibly going to get a reasonable discussion at this point is if reasonable comments and tweets drown out the unreasonable ones. Hopefully game journalists will start to notice, and rather than hiding under their respective rocks, actually come out and engage.

This brings up the question of what needs to be discussed, it's also a question that I honestly really didn't know the answer to. As I said, I'm quite new to the whole issue. Luckily, my tweet, while receiving a few not so helpful responses, did catch the attention of a person I'll refer to as Soul of a Gamer, or just Soul, 'cause I'm way too lazy to type the whole thing out every time. Soul is one of the many gamers wanting a good discussion regarding the whole issue, and we had a fairly lengthy one regarding topics that need to be talked about, and what the members of the GamerGate movement actually want.

So what do we want to discuss? I've rambled a lot, so I'm gonna do fairly short bullet points. After all, this post is meant to foster positive discussion.

• Gamers are a very diverse group of people. Is it really helpful to lump them into one homogeneous group that is horribly misogynistic and sexist?
• Diversity in games. We don't necessarily need to change the games we have, but we need to encourage the creation of games covering a diverse range of people and subjects. How do we do this?
• How do we get a more diverse group of people working in the game industry?
• How do we get media to pay attention to the reasonable side of the discussion, and ignore the vocal trolls?

Gamers aren't one person. Gamers aren't, as a group, horrible, racist misogynists. We don't want to be lumped into that category. The horrible, racists misogynists, believe it or not, aren't hugely welcome in the gamer community. We can never silence the trolls. That's just how the internet is. What we can do is try to bring attention to the sensible discussion that is taking place. Will it be hard to do? Of course, the trolls are so much more entertaining to talk about. But we can't give up. Gamer culture isn't going away any time soon, and what we do will affect it's evolution. So if you care, speak up. Encourage women to start making games too. Hell, Rhianna Pratchett has written some amazing games, look her up. We need more of this, diversity is always a good thing, and honestly, most gamers want it.

Most importantly, I think we need to foster a good perception of gamers as a culture. Gamers are people who are extremely into games, Soul put it very well "You aren't a gamer for playing games, just like you aren't a football fan for watching a game of football. You are a gamer when you say you love gaming as a part of your life. Much like being a football fan, if you stop being passionate, you stop being one." Gamers are a passionate group, we love games, our passion is largely responsible for this controversy. Gamers are angry at being stereotyped as some awful group. It needs to stop, and open discussion is the way to do this. Gaming culture is huge. There are so many gamers, from all sorts of different backgrounds, we need to remember this.

Oh, and as a foot note, think before you speak.

Passion

I've always wanted to find what I'm passionate about. For some people it seems so incredibly straight forward. They get wound up about sports, or music, or teaching young children, or human rights. I don't think that my problem is that I don't care about anything, so much as I find it hard to focus on one issue more than any of the others. One minute I'll be fired up and ranting about the healthcare system and its failings, the next I'll be enthusing about an interesting critique of a video game. It's probably a very stupid thing to be bothered by, but I do wish there was something specific I could focus on, become extremely knowledgeable about, and do something in that field. Perhaps it's just a part of being young.

I have recently however, managed to narrow certain interests down to the point where I feel I'd quite like to get into politics. I spend so much time complaining about the state of the country I live in (which, compared to others really isn't bad at all) that I may as well see if I can do something about it. But even then, I'm still confronted with the question of what issue I would focus on once I get into a position of power. Would it be education? Healthcare? Equality for women? I'm not an expert on any of these things by any means, so what right would I have to speak on them? I think these questions are very telling as to what the real problem I'm having is. I don't feel I'm particularly good at anything. I know I like to think I'm right all the time (a lot of people who know me will agree I have this attitude), but honestly, I'm often not that confident. I do honestly believe I know about a lot of topics, but I often feel like I don't know that much about any of them. Not any deep knowledge any way. This post has turned disturbingly honest, I suppose I should be thankful my grandmother is the main person who ever really reads it (sorry for not posting more Oma, I promise I'll try write more often).

I think I'm probably just scared. I'm nearly two thirds through my degree, and it's just about time that I actually start real life and live as an adult. Start a career, save up for future life, plan on having a family. The problem is, I don't really know how I'm going to do any of this. As a child you think adults know everything, but then you reach this supposed adulthood, and you know no more than you did before. It's so gradual that it feels like no progress is being made at all. Intellectually I know I know more than I did at 15, but often I really don't feel like I do.