This is a marginally
more temperate companion piece to my previous blog post, “On #GamerGate: the
RAGE Chapter”.
The following is
solely the opinion of Vaulisel and is not intended to reflect the opinions of
No Excuses or VtW Productions as a whole.
In 2007, Jeff Gerstmann, editorial director for GameSpot,
was dismissed from his post in the wake of his rather critical review of Kayne & Lynch: Dead Men. This review
dropped while GameSpot was under a contract to provide publisher Eidos with
full site integration advertising for the game in question, and Gerstmann later
testified that GameSpot had caved in under pressure from Eidos, resulting in
his dismissal[1]. The tinfoil-hat-wearers who had been clamouring for years
that the video games media were on the take from publishers finally had a
clear-cut case of a writer being fired for giving a meal-ticket game too low a
review score for the taste of their outlet’s accountants. From the time of this
landmark controversy, the corruption of games journalism passed from fringe
conspiracy paranoia into broadly accepted fact. Fast-forward to 2014, and a
prominent subset of video games news outlets are at war with a loose affiliation
of former members of their core audience, gathering under the hashtag
#GamerGate. How did it come to this?
Being the fractious and mercurial collection of individuals
that they are, mass mobilisations of self-identifying gamers behind a common
cause aren’t an everyday occurrence, but they do happen. In recent years,
(disbarred) attorney Jack Thompson and (suspended) senator Leland Yee have both
launched attacks on the nation of gamers in accordance with their personal
agendas or ideologies, and received in return the sort of bollocking that a
diverse cadre of dedicated and passionate people with an intense drive to
secure victory can deliver, leaving their reputations and careers in tatters.
In light of this, it is startling to see that in the past couple of months, the
gaming press, already on shaky ground trust-wise with their audience due to
their chequered past, has turned on its conventional audience en masse[2] to slam them with a dozen
articles delivering broad-brush generalisations of gamer culture and
stereotyping gamers as an ultra-exclusive club of woman-hating manchildren
crusading to stamp out diversity in games and diversity in developers. This
uncanny synchrony smacks of a concerted attempt to achieve some specific aim,
some aim which these major press outlets considered sufficiently important as
to risk bringing the combined and focused wrath of their readership down on
their heads.
Possibly the most cynical explanation for this bizarrely
anti-consumer behaviour from what should theoretically be pro-consumer edifices
is deflection. As many have become aware, the controversy surrounding the
allegations of psychological and emotional abuse directed at one Ms. Zoe Quinn,
an aspiring indie developer, by her former partner Mr. Eron Gjoni, led to the
unravelling of a rich tapestry of close personal and/or financial associations
between members of the games development community and games press[3],
associations which led to neither disclosure nor recusal when it came to press
coverage of the developers involved. Many of these types of close associations
(e.g. romantic, close friendship, roommate, funding on Patreon etc.) represent
unacceptable breaches of ethics for any respectable journalist according to Dr.
Greg Lisby, a specialist in journalistic ethics from Georgia State
University[4]. When readers raised these ethical concerns, they were either
dismissed out of hand, or the discussions locked or deleted. As it often does,
censorship inspired people to dig deeper, under the assumption that there was
something to hide. This revealed further suggestions of inappropriate personal
and professional ties between journalists and developers. When these
allegations were running at fever pitch, Adam Baldwin coined the hashtag #GamerGate
as an umbrella for the controversy. Following this, the press struck back with
the Gamers Are Dead propaganda campaign.
In any war for public opinion, the one to engage and strike
hard first has the advantage. However spurious, dishonest or disingenuous the
content might be, the opponent will be forced onto the defensive, and any
counter-claims can easily be framed as the tit-for-tat of a disgruntled opposition.
In this case, while these dozen or so outlets transparently collaborating to
construct a synchronised smear campaign was reckless, going in with all guns
blazing paid off for them in spades; they were able to burn their narrative of
their detractors being embittered, behind-the-times bigots into the worldview
of many neutral onlookers. Leveraging the sheer power that words like
“misogynist” and “harassment” have gained as red flags to mark out the bad
guys, the press was able to shut out all discussion and inquiry about readers’
ethical concerns by reframing it all as a problem with gamers and their culture
which supposedly harasses women. Anyone commenting on the issues raised by
#GamerGate is immediately branded a misogynist, and all concerns are dismissed
as a cover for the “typical” gamer’s alleged compulsion to abuse women. In this
interpretation of the Gamers Are Dead campaign, the journalists and sites
accused of an unaddressed lack of ethics have deflected and neutralised the
allegations against them through pure weight of massed ad hominem assault, a strategy which many parts of the increasingly
relativist internet culture are tragically beginning to accept as a valid tool
of debate. As a whole, #GamerGate is grossly offended at being libelled and
silenced for raising concerns about the ethics in video games journalism, and
so long as neither factor is addressed, they will remain angry and unsatisfied.
A less cynical interpretation of this concerted assault on
the gamer identity is genuine and unalloyed zeal for the ideology they
champion, of “diversity” and “inclusivity” in gaming. It is hard to dissect
this interpretation, because it has a tendency to become very political very
quickly. Octale (a.k.a. Todd Wohling) is writing an excellent series of
articles called “Good morning, Orthodoxy!”,[5] analysing the pernicious and
anti-consumer nature of a lot of the rhetoric these journalists have used in
their attempt to displace the extant gamer culture and install a new
“orthodoxy”, as he likes to call it, in accordance with their ideals. In truth,
from certain point of view, the specifics are irrelevant; the take-home factor
from the Gamers Are Dead propaganda is that the writers harbour a deep and
abiding distaste for the individuals who identify as gamers: the very
individuals who form their audiences, who entrusted them with the task of
informing them and helping them to make purchase decisions. This sort of
wholesale disrespect and disdain for their readers/customers simply marks out
the writers and editors responsible as unsuitable to continue in this line of
work, irrespective of how you feel about their personal ideologies and
politics. The prevailing feeling in #GamerGate seems to be that a press which is
chiefly concerned with foisting politics and ideologies on the readers at the
expense of quality and balanced review writing is a press they do not want.
Another angle to interpret Gamers Are Dead from is that of
relevance. The large, highly commercial video games journalism sites are in
general gratuitously behind the times. It shows in how they wrote their Gamers
Are Dead propaganda; the articles are riddled with implications that current
gaming culture is an exclusive club for cis-het-white-males, desperately trying
to preserve their old-boys’-club by keeping out diversity of participants and
suppressing innovation. This is laughably out-of-date; modern gamer culture is
one of the most gender/creed/race/orientation/whatever-agnostic subcultures in
the word; while any sufficiently large group has its undesirables, bigotry is
not an intrinsic part of gamer culture and there is no scientific evidence that
it is. Likewise, there are games that might have sexist elements in them, but
there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that this encourages misogyny. What gamers
really care about is if you can watch their back while they take an objective,
or keep them healed through the boss’ enrage phase, or pull off that perfect
combo play to gank an opponent. Gamers are always looking to get excited about
the next big thing; sure, they did
buy the last CoD game or the last Halo, but who do you think is actually buying
all those bizarre new indie games out there? It’s not some oppressed underclass
of indie-game-playing pariahs, it’s core gamers looking for a new diversion.
The games press need to catch up with the times and realise that their rabble-rousing
over the gaming hobby supposedly trying to keep new folks out is completely
out-of-place; they are the ones who are in denial. And why? Because they need
to feel like they have a relevant message. The self-styled games critics and
academics writing hit pieces on gamer culture are desperately scratching in the
dust for some sort of professional credibility in a market sector bursting at
the seams with people trying to break in; what better way to leave a mark on
the industry than to spearhead a cultural paradigm shift within it? But
newsflash: it already happened; you’re all late to the party and all the good
hors d’oeuvres are gone. The ones who stand at the forefront now are the new
wave of ascended fans: the enthusiasts and critics posting their videos and
let’s plays on YouTube. These are the critics who haven’t become so utterly consumed with their personal quests to
legitimise their views and pseudointellectual pontification in the nascent
gaming academia that they have become completely disconnected from the world of
their audience. Gamers once trusted reviewers because while they might have
been “living the dream” of playing games for a living, they were still “one of
us” rather than wannabe academics sitting in their homemade ivory towers. What
gamers want to hear is whether a game is worth a purchase and a play, not
whether some holier-than-thou critic thinks that it will advance their vision
of a new game-playing culture founded on political correctness and misplaced
guilt. Gamers are first and foremost about PLAY. The most useful critics are
those who value play as much as they do. The video games press as it is now,
puffed up with pride, ideology and academia just isn’t useful to gamers
anymore; if it discards them in an attempt to re-forge an environment where it
returns to relevance, gamers will likely discard them in turn. Steam curation
stats state pretty clearly that there are more people who want TotalBiscuit’s
recommendation on a game than Kotaku’s, by a margin approaching an order of
magnitude[6]. Why? Because TB is a gamer. Kotaku is “just” the press.
Regardless of the true objective of the fusillade of
criticism launched by the video games press at gamer culture, whether it is
sincere or self-serving it is a blatant slap in the face. #GamerGate boils on
because these big sites have dug in their heels; they refuse to sincerely
confront the allegations against them, they refuse to permit discussion of them
within the boundaries of their influence and they refuse to acknowledge the libellous
nature of the propaganda they have been spreading. It is gamers who hold the
power however; gamers are the ones who click their links, gamers are the ones
who give AAA publishers confidence that the press outlets deserve their attention
and gamers are the ones who convince advertisers that it is worth using the
press outlets for marketing.
It is in the hands of gamers to choose if they will support
or strangle the publications and journalists who slander and dismiss them. Continue
the campaign of starving the offending sties of clicks. The Gamers Are Dead
rhetoric can be made just as dangerous to those that published it as it is to
the gaming culture it condemns. Advertisers can (and have) been informed of the
poor journalistic ethics of these sites. AAA publishers marketing to gamers in
conjunction with the offending sites can be told by their target demographic
“Oh, Gamers Are Dead, so we can’t buy your product”; the bigger dent gamers
make in their profits, the better. Make them recognise the gamer voice. The
actions that make an impact here are those that are in keeping with the
character of #GamerGate as a consumer revolt. Engaging in debate with ideologues
is seldom profitable; they are ideologues because they can’t be shaken from their
points of view. Engaging those who attack #GamerGate with nothing more than
blind slander is a waste of time; they have demonstrated a lack of will to
investigate the #GamerGate controversy before becoming a mouthpiece against it.
Do distribute the resources, information and viewpoints of #GamerGate[7] freely
so those neutrals so inclined can find the information they need to decide for
themselves where they stand. Do unequivocally condemn acts of genuine
harassment by anyone claiming to support #GamerGate. Do support those who have
fallen afoul of the tactics of #GamerGate’s detractors; those who lost their
jobs, those who have been threatened, those who have been doxed; make sure they
know that as a community, the nation of gamers has their back.
There’s no knowing how long this will drag on; it could be a
short-term consumer revolt which causes the iron fist of AAA publishing
marketing departments to intervene on #GamerGate’s behalf to save their holiday
season bottom-line, or it could be a protracted culture war which drags on for
months or years while neutrals prop up a corrupt press which has its head in
the sand. But don’t give up; gamers are consumers and money speaks, so make
sure it says words that count.
Remember, Gamers Aren’t Dead; they just respawn to fight
again.
[Disclosure: Todd
Wohling is a former co-owner of VtW Productions. I was also his raid leader for
a while in WoW, if that matters.]
![[3]](http://mediacrush.net/Xe7Z78F4T2RD.jpg){kind=link}
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