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Why Conservatives Should Care About #GamerGate
Every once in a while, the progressivism’s destructive effects penetrate so deeply into a story that they change the way people view the world. To the under-35 gaming crowd, #GamerGate may be one of those events.
I suspect many readers have no idea what I am talking about, or caught a primer through this week’s Radio Free Delingpole. Milo Yiannapoulos has covered it over at Breitbart. In brief, the community of people who regularly play video games (“gamers”) has significantly grown and expanded, to the point today where the image of the lone white young man in his mother’s basement is no longer accurate. It’s a diverse and widely tolerant community of people, mostly still under the age of 40 (Mr. Delingpole aside, apparently). The industry has exploded in size, rivaling — if not surprising –Hollywood’s revenue.
Increasingly, the gaming press has taken a progressive bent by injecting specious feminist arguments into reviews and coverage of games. Instead of providing insight into the industry and delivering advice on the best up and coming games and development trends in an unbiased manner, they have been weaving in feminist theories of misogyny in video games and objectification of women in a manner that is meant to steer the industry towards the development of more progressive titles.
So for example, when Assassin’s Creed was released, the gaming press bombarded gamers with preaching about how the game does not offer playable female characters. Never mind that the game’s story line is about a 17th/18th century brotherhood and that the gaming community, men and women alike, were more interested in a storyline that works rather than any social justice. We want women, we want them now.
The primary proponent of this feminism in games has been Anita Sarkeesian who has produced a series of Youtube videos analyzing the (alleged) the sexist content of video games. Her videos are full of mistakes, over-simplifications, omissions and polemical arguments, all disguised as facts. She has an argument to make, but the gaming press has adopted it as fact and never really questioned its validity. In turn, Sarkeesian has raised a ton of money off of sympathetic supporters and used that money to influence game development and reporting. Internet trolls post threats, which she uses as evidence of misogyny, she then calls the police, retweets the threats, and raises more money. The gaming press then print articles about how Sarkeesian is being harassed, even though internet trolls are just a fact of life these days, as anyone who has published anything can attest. Cycle restarts.
Recently there were revelations that some in the gaming press had been getting favors — both pecuniary and carnal — to support this progressive viewpoint. Indeed, the whole scandal blew up because the sex life of one of the feminist Social Justice Warriors was exposed for sleeping with one (at least one) of the journalists who was part of the cabal that reported favorably on her work and the work of others with the progressive viewpoint. Other corruption was subsequently uncovered, including fixing the winners of indie game contests and blacklisting entrepreneurs who are trying to promote women in gaming who are not part of the in crowd. It’s a mess.
In August, it all blew up. The gamers had had enough, and with the help of Adam Baldwin — yes, that Adam Baldwin, of Firefly fame — they began taking to twitter, reddit, 4chan and other social media platforms to decry the corruption. They launched a twitter campaign called #GamerGate. The gaming press fought back and, inadvertently, proved the point of the #GamerGate crowd by publishing very similar articles all lambasting gamers as misogynist white males within a 24 hour period. Thousands of comments on reddit sympathetic to gamers were deleted in an apparent attempt by the journalists and developers, who know the moderators on these forums personally, to shut down discussion.
Since then, Social Justice Warriors have issued false intellectual property threats against one Youtuber and had his site shut down to block discussion. Members of the gaming press, well-known names, took to twitter to denounce gamers as racist, misogynist hatemongers. Journalists were clearly colluding to press their viewpoint and in doing so, they rather stupidly criticized their own customers. They even had a mailing list to coordinate their agenda, very much like the JournoList debacle. Their customers were rightly furious, and as a result of this gamers are now completely boycotting the gaming press. It’s not a small movement anymore.
The gaming press is going to be fundamentally reformed as a result of this movement. Some sites have had their editors and publishers step in with apologies and new ethics standards meant to address concerns. Most other gaming press sites have thrown up the barricades instead.
So why does this matter? The reaction on Youtube, reddit, 4chan, Twitter and other places has been fascinating. Young people — generally, millennials — have found themselves on the receiving end of a progressive hate campaign for the first time. They’ve seen the progressive press and progressive critics using their megaphones to delegitimize gamers and their opinions. Instead of arguing the issues, they have been making hateful statements with the intent of making the gamers who have objected into persona non-grata. Gamers are beginning to realize that these progressives are making considerable money by creating conflict and maybe their motivations are not exactly pure.
Gamers are young people who tend to be open to progressive ideas. But being treated so poorly has induced them into making some very conservative arguments. For the first time, they’re arguing that our universities have created a group of progressives that are hostile to open inquiry and discussion. For the first time, they’re seeing gaming journalists and corrupt developers for the corrupt, entitled special-little-snowflakes that conservatives have been talking about for years. For the first time, they’re seeing the Far Left as the remarkably intolerant group of people it is.
And they’re not staying quiet about it. Many of them have put together blog posts and Youtube videos that amount to strikingly conservative defenses of free market game development instead of progressively-driven themes. They provide eloquent defenses of the importance of a press that is either unbiased or that discloses its biases and conflicts. They’re angered when the progressives take to their soapboxes and publish articles, blog posts, and tweets that are meant to delegitimize their opinions. Many of them have begun to draw the connections between how they are being treated and how progressives act on the national stage.
All this is happening because many of these young people never imagined they’d be on the receiving end of the pernicious tactics that progressive use everyday and that the Right has been warning about. And they don’t like it.
For more on #GamerGate, watch this video (warning, contains non-CoC language):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5-51PfwI3M
Image Credit: “Assassin’s Creed cover” by Ubisoft – http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002WC80MY/. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.
Published in General, Politics
I third (is that even a word? 8^) the clarity of your explanation. I have read a number of #gamergate articles, but yours really got me to understand what’s going on.
Lots of great posts here! I was surprised to see “gamergate” mentioned at Hotair, Ace of Spades, Breitbart (and now Delingpole?). One lesson conservatives should learn is to not give up. The push back against the SJW was really a lively discussion in (4chan) /v/ way before August. And it continued every day as a thread by thread battle. The fact that a majority of /v/ never folded under pressure from the mods is what encouraged people to really press into the Zoe Quin/Depression Quest “scandal” and move the youtube vid through the net. NeoGaf shut that discussion down with a fury. The Quinn scandal itself had very little to do with the rise of the SJW in videogames.
But Quinn never would’ve been forced out if a small group of people hadn’t been making threads and remaking them every time it got shut down. Gamers will defend their craft, but I don’t think it is making them “conservative” in any way. But it does show the value of them not giving up. The pushback on /v/ against SJW is much more fierce than it is in /co/ and SJW hardly even show up on /a/. It would be interesting to see why that is.
Also, I agree with Aaron Miller: gaming “journalism” is largely terrible and has been for a long long time. The firing of Jeff Gertsmann over the Kayne and Lynch 2 review in 2007 being a convenient place to put the “end” of gaming journalism.
To be clear, I do not think that these events are turning them into conservatives. I do think that they are making conservative arguments and as a result, are now the target of a progressive backlash. They have seen first hand how controlling the media can produce a narrative that works against them and is largely false, and at the same time getting frustrated over the biased treatment. I have been impressed with how gamers have handled this and I believe that some of the more thoughtful gamers will begin to see the pattern.
Going through what conservatives have dealt with for decades is very likely to lead to more open minds and questioning assumptions about conservatives that are based, in large part, on these false narratives that have been ingrained in the minds of many by the same progressive tactics. Hopefully, seeing this first hand leads to some broader questions.
You are correct. It is not turning them into conservatives, and it won’t. I’ve been following this from the beginning, and I actually had a draft of a discussion not unlike yours, because I think this is a very significant flashpoint in the culture war in general.
The best part of this whole thing to my mind is that we have a very diverse cultural group rejecting the extreme left and their PC-cultural-overlord invasion of their hobby with sound argumentation, and exposing a plethora of corruption and cronyism to boot. Gamers are simply having none of it.
The social justice warriors always had a glass jaw, but the gamers seem to have been the first to actually take a swing back.
Yes…that fits the “Odd Number Release” corollary.
It’s the fact that discussion was shut down in the first place that this blew up. Without that, this would have ended at Five Guys Burgers and Fries, simply another instance of games’ journalism being corrupt as usual (the only interesting thing about it was that it was an indy instead of a big publisher). An SJW would have been exposed for her hypocrisy, but what else is new? (Quinn had previously made statements to the effect that cheating is a form of rape; this is what got Tumblr mad.)
But the immediate and harsh censorship on most every gaming forum is what really got this to get big. People wondered just why Neogaff and Reddit would clamp down so hard on this, and it got people digging. Since 4chan was the only place left, everyone congregated there. When the coordinated attacks by the gaming blogs began, and people then contacted advertisers, things got really heated. Apparently even Chris Poole, founder of 4chan, is getting a lot of flack, which has led to him replacing most of the mods with sjws. Things are a mess, but Twitter is already going crazy. I don’t know how this will end up, but I do have popcorn ready.
/co/ is made of comics fans. They tend to be more sympathetic to liberal views, and they were taken over before they knew what happened, and were to supline and few in numbers to fight back.
/a/ knows that SJW’s can’t actually affect their chinese cartoons like the SJW’s are doing to video games, because Japan doesn’t care. SJW’s can come in and complain, but /a/nons just ignore them (/v/ was always more easily baited, because there are a lot more kiddies there). There are occasional attempts to ban loli, but the mods always get tired. And then there’s always the specter of Accelspamer, the last time the mods got uppity.
Am I the only one on Ricochet who has no idea what that paragraph means?
To those who know, are a lot of people actually leaving 4chan for other places or is that a crazy rumor?
Allow me to translate.
SJW is shorthand for Social Justice Warrior.
/co/, /v/ and /a/ are shorthand references to channels on 4chan.org. 4chan is a discussion platform with various channels for topics. /v/ is dedicated to discussions about video games. /a/ is dedicated to discussions about Japanese style comics. /co/ are American style comics. These discussion boards are totally anonymous, and develop very lively discussions that feed into the gaming and comic communities. A lot of information about the industry gets leaked and discussed on these boards, and the participants are usually the most dedicated supporters of their chosen medium. To give you an example of how these work, when the SJWs got an outside group that was raising money for women in gaming blacklisted and deprived them of their funding, the people that post on /v/ stepped in and raised tens of thousands of dollars to fund their project instead. This, by the way, is how the younger set organizes generally.
Because it’s anonymous, it’s also filled with a fair amount of troll baiting and can be quite unsettling. The argument is that the SJWs enter these forums, make statements that are meant to get a reaction, and wait for someone to say something horrible. They them use that single, anonymous posting as evidence of misogyny and as fundraising. That works in the video game channel because there are kids who post in there and say dumb things, as kids tend to do.
Recently, the progressives have convinced the moderators of 4chan to simply ban all discussion about gamer gate entirely. More suppression of discussion.
I wouldn’t say it’s a lot, but the Xchans are a lot more hopping than usual: hundreds of users instead of dozens! 8chan is probably the biggest winner, since they are using the hysteria as a recruiting drive (and several of the other -chans apparently also have sjw infiltration).
Does “troll baiting” mean the same thing as “trolling?”
As I understood it “trolling” was originally a fishing metaphor: throw out some bait and troll for responses. As in “oh ignore him he’s just trolling.” People who trolled became known as trolls.
But then at some point the term shifted and the people who took the bait and responded became the trolls. I guess because “troll” is a good name for nasty antisocial types.
So now we have the term “troll baiting” which I presume means trolling for trolls…
But do they see it as a progressive backlash? Will they associate it with other progressive causes, with Obama, with the Democratic Party? Or see it as an isolated case of free speech vs. corporate corruption?
I don’t know if it makes them into conservatives, but it’s a must for people to have an outlet that taps into some testosterone.
IDK, I used to post on a comics board for years and the majority of the people would make Clinton look like a conservative.
However, I do think when,if I remember correctly, Peter Robinson started to make a half point about violence in video games, but he caught himself….. ok terrible sentence. But the point is, some conservatives play up video games as some loser sport and that’s a fool’s position.
Been playing long enough to remember when romances were first being included, at least in western games, and I remember even then there were questions from players asking that they include same sex relationships. I have no doubt that there is a cultural component – if Bioware was being run by a fundamentalist Christian I know they wouldn’t have put it in. But again the way it is handled often seems reasonable and even handed – no one is being forced to go through a gay relationship in most games, and again there often is an in-game “opt out”. Seems reasonable to me.
So I shouldn’t put that on a bumper sticker?
You have a good series of posts. I do agree with you: much of what happened with GamerGate was that mods and reviewers overplayed their hand.
But I think the other important issue is that /v/ didn’t have a class of institutional consultants who said “let this issue go, make peace, pull in some moderates.” /v/ did the opposite of what many people are telling the conservatives to do– they dug their heels in and began to fight back.
This is a separate, but close argument– I’ve always believed some people have confused “wearing people down” with “changing people’s minds.” I think the SJWs would’ve “won” had they slowly tried to wear people down. (This happens with a lot of “social issues.”) Raise the costs of fighting and even if you can’t win the argument, you’ll win the war. But they [SJWs] overstepped their bounds by issuing too many bans on the boards, and overestimating their esteem with gamers.
Point taken about the other boards on 4chan. Moot did come in and pull the switch on a lot of Gamergate threads, and that in and of itself is bizarre. 4chan is home to some very troubling things, but let’s draw the line at talking about corrupt game journalism.
The best thing about Gamergate is what many on Ricochet have suggested– a lot of people will come away with the realization that not everyone calling for “fairness” actually means that. “Fairness” and other watchwords and catch-phrases are really ways to conceal the change who controls the reigns of power.
I must admit: part of me is nervous that Gamergate has “gone public”– meaning, getting onto Breitbart and other (mainly center-right) news websites. I’m going to guess that not a lot of people on /v/ (if they are of voting age) would’ve voted for Romney. What you had before Gamergate was a crowd of people dedicated to fighting a terrible “politically correct at all costs” influence on video games. Now that Gamergate has been pushed into the center-right blogosphere, I think you may see some people decide that while they don’t want SJWs influencing their games, they want even less to have to make common cause with Breitbart or Hot Air or “the right” in general. The coalition may break up.
Additionally, now Gamergate will be judged not so much on its merits, but on “who supports who.” So the new narrative will be prefaced by liberal sneers: “Oh you read Fox News and Breitbart about videogames?” Can you hear the condescension? And then Jon Stewart will make fun of Gamergate via Fox News and suddenly it will become harder and harder to defend.
Was it better when it was a battle waged mainly by the committed at /v/ (with refugees coming in from NeoGaf and Reddit)? I don’t know why, but I’m suddenly feeling pessimistic, and my answer is “yes.” I think we’ve given these gaming “journalists” a rhetorical shield because now they can posture via politics: “oh so you’re agreeing with Breitbart now.” I don’t have anything against Breitbart and Fox. I’m just worried about what people will say. I hope I’m wrong.
All the comments I’ve seen about how “liberals have been doing this to us right-wingers for years” have been rebuffed by “this isn’t about politics it’s about ‘corruption'”. I don’t know how much impact Jon Stewart denouncing gamers will have. They’re being called misogynists and wife beaters already. Not that your scenario isn’t plausible.
Personally I don’t know if #gamergate is going anywhere. They’re not going to get all the SJWs removed from community manager/moderator positions at say reddit or mighty number 9. They’re not going to be able to keep people from donating to their friends. Nor are they going to get all these writers fired. At best the less obstinate offenders will keep their heads down for a few months. It’s not as though there isn’t schmoozing, editorial omission/suppression and bias in mainstream journalism either; it’s just not as defiantly flagrant.
I’m just immensely enjoying the fact that people are sticking it to the bien pensant, preening, PC police. As a general rule, I don’t read Kotaku or buy Steam Greenlight games. Problem solved.
I’m in broad agreement with you– especially with your last paragraph. It is darkly humorous to see these people being forced to play damage control after they were so aggressive. I’m just hoping that the push back against the “PC police” will do two things: give aid and comfort to developers who want to pursue their vision for game design and game characters (the “art for art’s sake” idea) and that we will stop calling people “sexist” to control them. I’m perfectly fine if a dev comes out and says “hey, we are trying to reach the female market so we are including more women and changing our art design to sell to them.” That’s fine. That’s what companies do. But that doesn’t make the dev a better, more moral person. That doesn’t mean necessarily that people who don’t do this are “sexist.” Too many people on Twitter and boards have been running around insulting good people calling them sexist for no real reason.
It’s not an either/or answer, rather both. Trolls both are nasty and are trying to provoke. Troll baiting is white-hat (as you suggest) trolling of the trolls.
That’s basically what kickstarter is all about isn’t it? The market can drive what gets produced. Though when my friend linked me the whole “5 guys” thing I also read about that one SJW who injected herself into the Mighty Number 9 project and started banning contributors for messages relating to gamergate so….
…. I don’t have much hope for that.