Inside Gamergate

by James Desborough

  Currently, things seem to be swinging against online anonymity. Some of this comes from the new online culture that has emerged in the wake of social media. Some of it from companies wanting to track data. Some has come from the state – in various nations – wanting to crack down. Still, to many in Internet culture anonymity is key, even critical, and they're more than willing to pay the price in terms of blockable trolls, to retain it.

  Anonymity and alternative identities online have stood me in relatively good stead over the years. Sometimes for good and noble reasons, other times for weak reasons. Multiple accounts used to be a good way of exploiting discounts or special offers, assuming made up identities to get demos of software. It was also a good way of observing people who had a problem with you (and I've had many).

  Sometimes it's also fun to pretend to be someone or something other than you are. In this way, you can gain a limited exposure to the point-of-view of 'the other' by adopting their persona. It was certainly educational to assume a female identity and to examine the claims made about women online. I found people tended to be polite, helpful and generous and that I got less harassment, but that it was more sexual. This whole possibility is falling by the wayside, which is a shame, as it does seem to be one of the few ways to eliminate or explore social prejudice

  Gamers Vs 'People who Play Games'

  To many, this might seem like a distinction without a difference, but within gamer culture, it is an incredibly significant difference. Many statistics and studies claiming to be about 'gamers' aren't aimed at Gamers as they self-identify. They throw their net absurdly wide, to the point where anyone who has played Candy Crush or online Bingo is counted as a 'Gamer'. This skews the gender proportion studies of 'Gamers' out of whack in particular while presenting a contradictory message about needing change to encourage inclusion (if it's already mostly women, why change anything?). More accurate surveys based more around types of game, still show a gender difference – though the gap is slowly closing.

  This whole terminology issue is not especially aided by 'Gamer' not really having a definitive definition. Does it only include people who have built their gaming PC? Individuals who've been playing computer games since they were three? Those who know the ins and outs of imported games, play online or play professionally? No, it's wider than that but still does not include those 'filthy casuals' who only play things like Farmville and Angry Birds – no matter how much time or money they happen to throw at those games. It's a term that's hard to pin down, but very meaningful to a lot of people.

  To understand the distinction it is, perhaps, best to take a look at analogies from other pastimes with more 'respectability'. It's a little silly that even today, getting towards fifty years from the release of Pong and being an industry worth more than $100 billion, that computer games still aren't taken seriously. That they're still not understood in terms of being an artform.

  Consider films.

  There is most definitely a difference between someone who takes their nephew to see the newest blockbusters once per season and someone who can rattle off every straight-to-video 1980s horror-schlock classic.

  Consider books.

  There's a difference between someone with The Davinci Code on their nightstand and someone with shelves and shelves of contemporary and classical fantasy lining their house from top to bottom in every room.

  We recognise the difference between a film-goer and a movie aficionado, no matter what genre they're a fan of. We understand the difference between a casual reader and a member of the literati, no matter what type of literature they prefer. The difference between 'Gamer' and 'someone who plays games' is the same. A Gamer is an engaged, active, interested and knowledgeable member of the gaming community for whom gaming is a primary hobby.

  Gamers are a core, reliable audience but also a critical one. One that knows the ins and outs of games, one that's demanding, one that understands the form and helps drive it onwards. Without Gamers, the games industry in all its success and glory today could not exist.

  Games have been important to me, in one way or another, all my life. More analogue games (board games, card games and especially role-playing games) but games as a whole. My dad was a maths teacher before schools had IT classes and an early adopter of home computing. I cut my teeth on a variety of early home computers that he built, bought or borrowed and those of some of my better off friends. The ZZ Spectrum was a formative experience, from The Off White Knight and MOTOS to Game Over and Everyone's a Wally.

  The computer was always something aside from my main love – RPGs – until the advent of 16 bit made games. These were a bit longer and more involving. The technology produced games that could at least somewhat approximate those more satisfying RPG experiences – Bloodwych and Dungeon Master, Midwinter and Carrier Command.

  As I got older, it got harder and harder to get people together for tabletop gaming sessions, but computers with Internet access meant you could roleplay whenever you wanted. Multi-User Dungeons to start with, later Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs like Ryzom, Warcraft or Anarchy Online. Then voice-over-IP and online group chat hosting combined the two into one.

  I consider myself a gamer, just – perhaps – using that term a bit more broadly than many. After all, it used to refer to tabletop gamers!

  Normies

  If you don't know all this stuff that I'm describing to you already, then odds are, you're a 'normie'.

  Many subcultures have terms for those outside the subculture and whose who aren't 'in the know'. When I was a young goth we referred to those outside the subculture (or allied subcultures) as 'mundanes'. If you've read Harry Potter, then some lines of comparison can be drawn with 'muggles' and the pity or scorn they can attract, if not outright hatred.

  'Normies' don't understand Internet culture. They don't get irony or sarcasm. They are 'triggered' by dark humour and the intentionally offensive nature of many memes (when they don't just stare at them in blank incomprehension).

  When Internet culture bumps up against 'normies', there is often trouble due to the mutual misunderstanding and lack of shared values. The anonymous, pro-free-speech, rough-and-tumble nature of the Internet can clash intensely with people's fears, prejudices and politics.

  When the 'real world' encounters sections of the Internet, it's very easy for it to be misunderstood, monstered and blamed for things. A 'normie' will see what appears to be an anti-semitic cartoon and will conclude that whoever posted it is a Nazi. They will see a meme with 'Aw shit nigga' on it and assume the poster is racist (a cop was fired on this basis!) In context, these needn't be misunderstood, there's a failure to communicate between different cultures.

  Vivian James

  Vivian James (a play on 'Video Games') is a mascot character originating from polls and discussion on the 4Chan boards /v/ and /pol/. She is meant to embody the 'everyman' gamer, a grumpy, tired-looking obsessive who is fierce in defence of games but who is also a deliberate defiance of the fatwhitemalebasementdweller stereotype that hasn't really been true for some years.

  Vivian was created, specifically, to submit as a character – in exchange for sponsorship payments – to The Fine Young Capitalists. TFYC was a charity effort to help encourage young women into gaming, without the same ideologically feminist baggage many similar efforts brought along with them. TFYC had fallen afoul of Zoe Quinn and similar culture-warriors in gaming (more on this later), and were one of the first major charities and causes that the nascent Gamergate movement took up in support of.

  Vivian James has since become an important gaming symbol and looks poised to stay around for a long time in comics, games and other material (including Rule 34 – look it up, or don't). This despite people trying to claim she's a hate symbol or a veil for misogyny. As an open-source character, anyone is free to use her, which draws some interesting comparisons with Octobriana[13], another politicised but public domain character.

  The existence of Vivian, along with other embodimen
ts of websites and boards, gave Gamergate – and its successor movements – a definite head start in the 'meme wars'. Interestingly, no similar ideas have sprung up and attempts to subvert or devalue Vivian have only backfired, especially her blonde, SJW counterpart, Lillian Woods.

  With a basis of understanding, we can now move forwards in greater detail.

  Chapter Three: Context

  As well as understanding some of the terminology and culture, it's important to comprehend the historical background in which Gamergate existed and that to which it was reacting. It is, after all, a combination of culture and context that best explains why this blew up, and nothing exists in a vacuum.

  Gamergate exists as only one of the latest in a long run of cases of resistance to interference in hobbies and pastimes. It does, however, have some differences to many of these classic cases which also helps to explain why it became such a big cultural event even more, as well as existing in an era of ubiquitous social media.

  Moral Panics

  A moral panic is, according to the Dictionary of Sociology:

  “The process of arousing social concern over an issue – usually the work of moral entrepreneurs and the mass media.”

  A 'moral entrepreneur' being someone who wants to attempt to manipulate society and culture to create a new moral norm.

  Moral panics are often, however, spurious - and even counterproductive; they are a form of hysteria that grabs the public consciousness to a large enough degree that commercial and state actors often feel like they have to intervene or make changes, even when these are unwarranted.

  What might be loosely termed 'Geek Media' has a very long history of being demonised and hated. This occurs both through its incorporation of fringe material and its early adoption of disruptive technology. It also has a long tradition of resistance to moral busy-bodying, with limited success.

  I lived through The Satanic Panic, the PMRC's attempts to censor music, the Vampire Panic of the 90s and several other, smaller events. This has certainly coloured my views on the current 'Social Justice' moral panic and the dangers it represents, even – or especially – because people are so convinced they're doing the right thing.

  Wertham & the Comics Code

  In 1954 the psychiatrist Frederic Wertham published a book called 'Seduction of the Innocent'. In it, he claimed that comic books were corrupting the youth and that they were a significant, contributory cause of juvenile delinquency. The book was seized upon by parents, schools and government and the issue was whipped up into a frenzy of condemnation.

  Things rapidly got out of hand, even got to the point where Wertham's scientifically unevidenced ideas gained enough currency and traction to be heard before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954. Beyond this, there were problems outside the law as well. There were comics burnings and, more locally, city and state ordinances banned horror comics in particular.

  In a panicked response to this chain of events, and fearing truly draconian censorship legislation, the comics and magazine industry created their own voluntary code of self-censorship. This was the Comics Code, which was only, truly, abandoned in the 2,000s.

  The code was ludicrous and, to modern eyes, rather quaint – as were similar codes such as the Hays code for film. The Comics Code contained such gems as:

  Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.

  In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.

  No comic magazine shall use the words "horror" or "terror" in its title.

  All lurid, unsavoury, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated.

  Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.

  Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, or words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden.

  Suggestive and salacious illustration or suggestive posture is unacceptable.

  Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.

  One can surely, certainly, draw parallels between the comics code and many of the calls for censorship today. The UK government's list of 'banned acts' in pornography, or their earlier list of controlled material, is not so very different and equally out of touch. The appeals for 'safety' and control are now coming from 'social justice' rather than right-wing Christian moralising, but they're eerily similar.

  In a lesson for today's would-be censors, the Comics Code ushered in an age of rather staid and dull comics[14] - as compared to the wildly experimental and challenging comics that had existed before. The trouble with censorship being that it is a blunt instrument that tends to take the 'good' out of the marketplace, along with the 'bad'.

  Of course, an underground comics scene also blew up through the sixties and seventies, wilfully and deliberately setting out to scandalise and to break every single commercial taboo of the Comics Code – as though it were a hit list. This remained mostly underground, and an act of futile protest until the moral panic had passed – decades later. Still, there was resistance and a constant testing of the boundaries, even within commercial comics that signed up to the code.

  Britain didn't have the code but barely had a home comics industry until later than the United States' golden age. Even so, a similar moral panic ended up killing off the rebellious and 'dangerous' comic Action but leading to the more acceptable science fiction comic 2000AD, which still pushed boundaries and exists to this day.

  The Satanic Panic & BADD

  The Satanic Panic was another moral panic that took true root - primarily in America - in the 1980s, before spreading internationally. It had started, as many of these panics do, with the publication of a book by Mike Warnke. This was a fantastical, tall-tale about having been involved in satanic cults and rituals that was entirely fabricated. Nonetheless, he was accepted as an expert on 'Satanism' and gained a lot of exposure on television and radio, picked up by evangelical Christians and conservative politicians to further their own agendas.

  It didn't pick up steam, however, until the publication of another book 'Michelle Remembers' by Michelle Smith. This was another pack of horrible sounding lies, this time of ritual abuse that supposedly came out of repressed memories gathered by her psychiatrist – and later husband – Lawrence Pazder. As with Warke's book this was also given an enormous amount of credence by those who stood to benefit from it. This credence was completely out of step with the quality and amount of evidence for anything that was described in the book. There was no evidence. Whatsoever.

  Soon, empowered by the interest in and promulgation of the idea by the Christian Right, along with the moral atmosphere of Reagan's America, people saw the influence of Satanism and the occult everywhere. They assumed the existence of a worldwide satanic conspiracy and saw its influence in everything from Ouija boards and tarot cards to games of Dungeons & Dragons and Heavy Metal music, even bar codes. Meanwhile, a genuine global conspiracy of child molesters, the Catholic Church, was getting away with murder.

  The effect of this panic, for all the ideas behind it, were horseshit, was very real. As with the comic burnings under Wertham's influence, people burned books, games and albums. They destroyed their children's hobbies, ruined their childhoods and destroyed their friendships in the name of protecting them. Ironically, they also ended up making D&D and Heavy Metal much cooler and more attractive. All this fear gave them an 'edge' and got a lot of kids interested in the forbidden fruit that was 'the occult'.

  The reverberations of the Satanic Panic continue to this day, with each new fad being condemned as the work of the devil by some pastor or other trying to get some media currency and publicity. It no longer has the grip that it once did and has, br
oadly, become an object of scorn. Everything from Harry Potter to Pokemon has been called Satanic, and the song and dance is losing its allure. It may seem hard to believe now, but there was a time when this could genuinely cause problems.

  Of particular relevance to Gamergate is how The Satanic Panic played out in regards to role-playing games.

  Dungeons & Dragons had already been a cause of some concern to particular groups of parents. Children and adults playing 'let's pretend' in such an intensive and structured way seemed to cause a worry that some that the players would lose the ability to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. There were also concerns raised after some suicides were blamed on D&D, particularly by Pat Pulling whose son had killed himself. Desperate for something, anything, to blame she latched onto D&D and spent years smearing and slandering the game and its players. She founded BADD (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) to push her agenda, even producing materials for police forces relating to D&D and other role-playing games. In fact, studies showed that D&D players were better able to tell reality from fantasy and at a suicide rate of ~28 in ~3 million, were less likely to kill themselves than the average[15].

  Did any of this matter?

  TSR – who owned D&D at the time – engaged in some mild self-censorship (of nipples) and changed some of the terminology and world-building around their demon inspired monsters. The CARPGA (Committee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games) was set up as an advocacy and defence group. This didn't stop the book burnings and the bannings, the terrified parents doing the wrong thing. It made very little difference overall.