Table of Contents
Inside Gamergate
Chapter One: Introduction Biography
Inside Gamergate
Chapter Two: Inside Baseball The Chans
Trolling
Social Justice Warriors
Internet Culture
Memes
Doxxing and Anonymity
Gamers Vs 'People who Play Games'
Normies
Vivian James
Chapter Three: Context Moral Panics
Wertham & the Comics Code
The Satanic Panic & BADD
The PMRC
Jack Thompson
The Porn Panic
Youtube
The New Moral Panic A Quick Side Note About Censorship
Occupy Wall Street
Atheism Plus
Anita Sarkeesian Side Note: Synergistic Trolling
'Entitled' Gamers
#CancelColbert
Women in Tech
Online Bullying/Harassment
Existing Corruption Issues
The Indie Scene
Pseudo-Academia
Gamergate's Place in this Narrative
What's Different About Gamergate
Chapter Four: Franz Ferdinand Zoe Quinn & Depression Quest
My Previous Support
Zoe's Bad Actions Wizardchan
Helldump
The Fine Young Capitalists
Polaris Game Jam
The Zoe Post
Five Guys & Quinnspiracy
Censorship
Gamergate
Chapter Five: Gamergate Itself Culture & Politics The Baldwin Tweet
Anti-Censorship
Something Rotten in Games Media
Gamergate's Politics
Blockbots and Echo Chambers
Feminism & Men's Rights
Effective Protest Unity
Operation Disrespectful Nod
#NotYourShield
Tag-Flooding
Alternative Media
Distributed Organisation
Pseudoacademia
The United Fucking Nations!?
'Fake News'
Gamers are Dead
Gamejournopros Exposed
Silverstring Media
Bring Back Bullying
SPJ & Airplay
Reforms
Clickbait & Gawker
Media Stupidity
Gamergate Vs Revolt Vs Baphomet Vs Trolls
Chapter Six: Harassment, Violence & Censorship Was Gamergate a Harassment Campaign? Definitions
Evidence
Gamergate Harassment Patrol
Trolling
Sock Puppets
Paedophiles and Sex Criminals, Everywhere
Doxxing
Personal Censorship
The Battle for Wikipedia
Calgary Expo
RedditRevolt & Youtube Censorship
CON Leaks & ZachAttack
Cashing In: From Milo to Sarkeesian Milo & the New-Right
Brianna Wu
Randi Harper
Katherine Clark & Other Politicians
Women in Tech
Sarkeesian
The Sarkeesian Effect
Chapter Seven: Gamergate in Summation Who Won & Who Lost?
Charity & Fund-Raising
Reform
Cultural Shift
Gamedropping
Rewriting History
Legacy Other Battles
Internet Censorship
The Great Meme War
A Shift to the 'Not Left.'
New Vs Old Media
An Uncertain Future
Last Minute, Last Night
Parting Comments
References
Inside Gamergate
Written by: James 'Grim' Desborough
Layout by: James Desborough & Michael Garcia
Ebook Conversion by: Michael Garcia
'Inside Gamergate' © Postmortem Studios (James Desborough) 2017
Chapter One: Introduction
It's the night of the sixteenth of October 2014, and I am sitting in a bathtub with a razor blade – retrieved from a carefully smashed 'safety razor'. I'm cutting into my arm over and over, trying to build the courage up for those two, vertical death slices to my wrists.
Why am I doing this? Why is blood running down my arm from cuts to my shoulder, bicep and forearm? Why am I in such a state of despair?
Because of Gamergate.
No, I'm not a woman in tech, 'cruelly bullied' and 'marginalised' because of my ovaries.
I'm not a brave 'white knight' standing up for some cyberpunkish damsel in distress.
I'm not an 'entirely innocent' games' journalist under assault from legions of paranoid, anonymous, online trolls.
No. I'm not a victim of Gamergate - which is already being painted as an online misogynist hate mob.
I'm part of Gamergate.
I want to kill myself mostly because I suffer from severe clinical depression and bouts of suicidal ideation, but this particular incident has been triggered - not by Gamergate - but by its opposition. It has been set off by the crushing weight of disappointment that comes from a whole community of creative people letting me down; personally and professionally.
I want to kill myself because hobbies I consider myself a maker and fan of – games, fiction, comics, geek media in general - have betrayed their audience and their right to creative freedom.
I want to kill myself because people I once respected and trusted are uncritically buying into bullshit and letting corruption and censorship slide. They're ending friendships and blacklisting writers, artists and developers because they tacitly support censorship, corruption and debunked sob stories. Meanwhile, I stand for free expression, ethical media and scepticism.
I want to die because this community, one I saw come together in the 80s and 90s to fight The Satanic Panic and Jack Thompson's crusade, is now the one prosecuting a new moral panic. They're calling everything and everyone sexist, racist, misogynistic, bigoted and a host of other damaging buzzwords. They're trying to censor the very creativity that they once defended. The self-same creativity that I depend on to make a living, that they depend on to make a living. It's a masochistic act of self-destruction, and they're threatening to take a lot of other people down with them.
For someone whose life has been games since before their age reached double digits, who has made it their career, who has fought to defend games against this kind of nonsense for three decades. For me, this revelation and their capitulation is utterly soul destroying.
The people coming after me, the group that was already coming after me since before Gamergate, are not an anonymous mob of ignorable internet trolls. They're people with names and faces. They're 'social critics'. They're 'journalists'. They're fellow authors and game designers, they're writers with columns in papers I used to read. The hate they unleash, the nonsense they spout, the doxxing, harassment, lies and slander that they engage in is passing and will pass, largely, without the criticism or attention heaped on harmless, meaningless trolls.
It's the people in Gamergate who end up coming together to make sure that I'm alright. The same fans who are getting lied about and called monsters. It's Gamergate who contact my wife and the emergency services to ensure I don't succeed in killing myself. These people who, we're going to be told, are heartless abusers, even terrorists. They go out of their way to save my life.
Two weeks or so after my attempt, medicated up to the eyeballs and therapied within an inch of my life, I get a razor blade sent to me – anonymously – in the post. I don't know who sent it, but I'm reasonably sure it's not someone from Gamergate. I burn it, in the envelope, bury it and try to forget about i
t, but these events have bought Gamergate an ally for life and its opponents a steadfast enemy.
For over two years, the same people who came together to help preserve my existence and protect our hobbies are going to be monstered and have lies told about them. Lied about because they objected to corruption in games media. Monstered because they took a stand against censorship from a new moral panic. Their story goes largely ignored. The threats, the doxxing, the razor blades – and worse – sent to them, the bomb threats at their events and meetings, the disgusting behaviour of their opponents. It's all ignored.
Their story threatens, now, to be ignored forever as Gamergate slips into history. Ignored, or worse, lied about as the 'victims' of Gamergate put out their slanted narratives. The hopes of getting the mainstream media to examine the events honestly slips out of the realm of possibility as its no longer news. Gamergate is now just a bogeyman to invoke when talking about the Internet. In a peculiar twist of fate and a reversal of the standard state of affairs, it's not the victors who are going to write the history; it's the people who lost.
That's why this book exists, to record what happened from within Gamergate. It's here to set the record straight, to give my point of view. The perspective from Gamergate that is being systematically erased, rewritten and ignored.
I don't tell any of this to you for sympathy or to paint myself as a victim. I do it to show you that what you've been told about what happened wasn't accurate. That Gamergate wasn't a misogynistic hate movement or 'alt-right' and that there's plenty of bad behaviour to go around on the 'other side' of the argument.
You just never got to hear about it.
Biography
My name is James 'Grim' Desborough. The 'Grim' comes from a college nickname, due to a propensity for making sick, twisted jokes, and being a miserable goth (my parents were divorcing at the time, which didn't help). I took the name as my own to give the middle finger to the people picking on me, and it has stuck ever since. That probably tells you a lot about my attitude.
I'm an author and a game designer. Mostly I write genre fiction and work in tabletop games - role-playing games to be precise. I've done some work on card games and board games, as well as a couple of social media oriented games but mostly I work in analogue rather than digital. I'd like to work more in computer games, but if you can't code the opportunities are scarce.
The Munchkin phenomenon was half my fault. My writing partner and I wrote the comedy book that kicked off the whole franchise.
I've been working professionally as a game designer and writer since 1999, as an amateur since around 1992 and have been a gamer of one kind or another since I was eight or nine. I was part of Gamergate from before it was even named Gamergate and stayed engaged with it until it petered out in 2016, though it has flared up again while I've been working on this book.
To long; didn't read: I'm well placed to talk about Gamergate from a professional, historical, political and personal perspective. There are few people – even self-proclaimed experts – that have the perspective and historical understanding that I think I bring to this discussion. You don't have to believe me though, use this book as a prompt and do your own, independent investigation. I am certain you'll be surprised.
Inside Gamergate
This book exists to record, for posterity, the events of Gamergate from the perspective of someone within Gamergate.
There is a real danger that, what with the media bias against Gamergate and the biased accounts of people like Zoe Quinn being the ones to be archived, that the other side – the right side – will not get recorded. In the future, anyone looking back is likely to encounter an entirely one-sided version of events from people who have been acting very shadily indeed.
As a participant in Gamergate, that worries me.
As a historian, that worries me.
As someone who cares about truth, fairness and accuracy, that worries me.
At the time of writing, there are some other books on Gamergate that are planned to be written. Journalist Brad Glasgow is working on one that breaks down a lot of events and viewpoints on a statistical basis and a neutral standpoint. Others are working on their versions. You should read as many of them as possible, from both sides.
I think I'm uniquely positioned to give an interesting take on what happened. I know the history, I can properly contextualise it within a timeline of other moral panics and responses. I participated in Gamergate. I've seen the aftermath of it. I've seen how it influenced things and how it fits into the broader culture war that has characterised the twenty-teens. I've been targeted by its enemies, who like to portray themselves as good people, and are anything but.
Mostly I want a record from this side, from this point of view. A counter-narrative to the one against Gamergate. Opposition to the stories being told by those who, despite mainly losing the cultural conflict that was Gamergate, are getting to enter their version of events into the record unopposed.
That cannot be allowed to stand.
So here then, is my story, from Inside Gamergate.
Chapter Two: Inside Baseball
One of the most significant problems in discussing Gamergate, and the things it grew out of – such as internet and gaming culture – is that there are a lot of people that simply don't understand it. Any of it.
I'm creeping into my forties, but I was a relatively early adopter of the internet, frequenting dial-in Bulletin Board systems on an Atari ST before the Internet proper was even really a thing. Back in the days 14.4 dial-up I frequented Usenet, IRC and email mailing lists and was in at some of the formation of what would go on to become today's Internet culture. Despite all this, in a medium as fast-flowing and ever-changing as the Internet, I can't keep up with everything. There are people I went to school with who still don't even have Facebook accounts, so little wonder that many people, who grew up – at least in part – pre-Internet have no real hope of understanding it.
What is a 'Chan' board?
Why can't people control the content on the Internet?
Why is it stupid to expect anyone to be able to?
What is a troll?
Why is a 'Social Justice Warrior' a bad thing, rather than a good thing?
What's a meme?
What makes someone a Gamer?
What is doxxing/doxing?
Is it 'Jif' or 'Gif' and why does it matter?
Why were gamers so collectively upset, and what were they upset about?
Why did they, if they really did, harass all these women and minorities?
It goes on and on and on. If we're going to talk about these things, then we need a mutual understanding of some of these terms and concepts. They're going to come up time and time again through this book, so let's help with some of the basics.
The Chans
A 'Chan' board is a message board that anyone can use. The most infamous of these is '4Chan' which, mainly, gave birth to the Internet movement 'Anonymous' and, which is the origin point of a lot of the 'memes' we see spreading further around the Internet.
Even so, a 'Chan' isn't any one, single thing. There are multiple different boards, and each is made up of a huge number of separate and distinct sub-boards. 4Chan, for example, has /pol/ (politically incorrect), which is a political board marked by extreme political discussion and, you guessed it, political incorrectness. It also hosts /v/, which is about video games and a host of other boards devoted to other topics from the supernatural to pornographic manga. While there is crossover between the users of these various sub-boards, a 'Chan' is not a homogeneous or singular thing with a singular culture but rather a collection of things.
Think of it as a town or village board notice board. When you look at it, there might be notes from the church about upcoming meetings, a poster from the school about an open evening, perhaps adverts for yoga classes or a cleaning service. If the parish priest later gets arrested for molesting children, that doesn't reflect on the yoga class, the school or the cleaners. Hold
ing anyone else accountable just because they happened to use the same notice board is a special kind of stupid, yet this is exactly what people do with 'Chan' boards.
The Chan boards also tend to embody the wilder ends of Internet culture, the anti-censorship, 'information wants to be free' culture that values anonymity and even makes a virtue out of it. It is thought, and there's some evidence to support this, that the anonymous nature of the boards means that the best ideas are the ones that thrive (ideas on what constitutes 'best may vary). Stripped of biases about gender, race, etc. the boards are an uncompromising meritocracy where only the best – or at least strongest – ideas survive without all the baggage of physical identity.
One of the most important things to remember about these boards is that they often use sick humour, political incorrectness and 'forbidden language' to self-segregate from 'normal people'. Much of this, even most of it, is ironic and insincere, but if you're not in on the joke, being confronted with 'faggot', 'nigger' and cartoons of the 'happy merchant' are likely to seem shocking. It keeps a lot of people away – and that's the intention. It's like a filter to keep out people who can't handle the culture. Again, with the anonymity, none of these things mean anything – but they do keep the average, sensitive soul, out of the way.
Once the Chan boards were near absolute bastions of free expression, since before 2014 however, the creeping censorship and control we've seen in other parts of the Internet has been seeping into them. The infamous 4Chan even found Gamergate too spicy (perhaps because of sales negotiations) and banned its discussion on their board – leading to a mass exodus to a similar board, 8chan.
'Chan' culture informed a lot of the banter and language of Gamergate, and just like the 'Chans' themselves, if you weren't in on the joke, it was easy to get it wrong. This has been particularly true given the double-whammy of Internet culture self-gatekeeping and the sheer lack of effort on the part of the media.
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