Inside Gamergate

by James Desborough

  Of course, immediately after the advent of the tag, it was attacked.

  It was claimed that this was an 'operation' by 4chan (it did originate on that site, but wasn't an orchestrated fake) and that most of the people posting on it were sockpuppets (fake accounts). In fact, the idea of the tag was coined by 'Polar Roller' on 4Chan's /v/ board, and tweeted by Ninouh90 not long after, before taking off by itself.

  NotYourShield was useful in demonstrating that Gamergate was more diverse, especially once people – controversially – felt forced to step away from their anonymity to prove that they were real[95]. This exposed people to increasing attacks, including attacks on their jobs and attempts to doxx and threaten them – not that this got anything like as much exposure as alleged attacks on anti-Gamergate did. The attacks on me certainly didn't get any exposure, at least not of the sympathetic kind.

  The substantial diversity, in all ways, of Gamergate stood in opposition to the politics of victimhood presented by their opposition. Minorities involved in Gamergate appeared to want to be treated equally, to be given an equal shot with everyone else. They seemed to value the equal standing that online anonymity gives people, and appeared to see a lot of what Gamergate opposed as being well-meaning idiots screwing things up that they enjoyed. At the very least they did not see or acknowledge the supposed racial or gender issues the activists were raising. Many described feeling patronised and talked down to by 'Social Justice' activists who were treating them in a manner more appropriate to patronising colonialism, rather than genuinely wanting to help.

  There were, of course, people who did fake, who did take advantage and who did troll using sockpuppets. This – as with most things – turned out to be much more widespread behaviour on the part of trolls and Anti-Gamergate, but it did happen the other way.

  'Alison Prime', a prominent lesbian member of Gamergate and NotYourShield for some time, was eventually outed as a scammer. This scammer Steven Polk used his fake identity to get close to women and to try and get money for a home situation that may or may not have been fake itself. He was outed by Gamergate and was proven to be about as real as prominent anti-Gamergater Peter Coffin's girlfriend[101]. Gamergate was always most critical, suspicious and careful about itself and policing its collective behaviour in a way anti-Gamergate never was.

  Tag-Flooding

  Being almost entirely cut off from mainstream and games media access, Gamergate had to continually seek out new ways to get themselves heard. This was especially important given the adoption of Block Bots by general users. Their spread was based on the lie that Gamergate was a gang of harassers and bigots, and the truth that they did swarm people who mentioned them to debunk and discuss.

  One of the ways Gamergate found to get around this was to 'hijack' trending hashtags or hashtags used by events on Twitter. Despite heavy usage the Gamergate tag – and related tags, even new ones that were adopted – was often de-listed by Twitter, under apparent social pressure, reducing its visibility. Hijacking tags allowed them to bypass this censorship – and probably made things worse than simply allowing the blog to continue to trend and auto-fill.

  To be heard Gamergate would adopt new tags – like rotating a phaser frequency to get past a Borg shield – or it would 'invade' these other tags. Games conventions, tech shows and popular tags were all hit in this way, flooding them with information, countering narratives or demanding that attention be drawn to the bad actors in the gaming community. Particular targets were conventions, tech-industry or gaming related tags, but anything could be hit.

  One especially effective example came when Gamergate brigaded the tag being used for a conference by the Society for Professional Journalism (the SPJ). The journalists were bewildered and taken aback at this happening, but the SPJ had long been held up as an example of what Gamergate wanted from games journalists regarding ethical standards[96].

  There was something of a battle over informing the SPJ of who and what Gamergate was with anti-Gamergate making some headway in turning them off to the movement and getting many to adopt the auto blocker. The tag-flood did, however, manage to pique the interest of maverick journalist Michael Koretzky who ended up setting up a conference meeting specifically to discuss Gamergate and ethics in journalism – AirPlay.

  Alternative Media

  People have tried, repeatedly, to tie Gamergate to Trump and the 'Post-Truth' political era. There is one arena in which they may have something of a point, and that is about people's relationship with the media. The events of Gamergate crushed a huge number of people's trust in the mainstream media, whether it be newspapers, national networks or the online offerings of large companies.

  This problem with the mainstream media began almost right from the start. The Guardian accidentally leaked an email[97] that demonstrated a bias from the get-go. Guardian journalists were prevented from talking with Gamergate and getting their point of view. Also Leigh Alexander[98], a games journalist increasingly involved in the ethical problems Gamergate was protesting, was invited in to give her spin and create a narrative. There was no chance for anyone else to present their opinion without that pre-existing bias.

  When it came to Gamergate, the actions and corruption of the media was a large-scale application of the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect[99]. Briefly stated, this is what happens when we read a news story about something we know and understand. It rapidly becomes apparent to us that the journalist knows little to nothing about what they're reporting on. We scoff and dismiss what they're saying, but then we turn the page and read the next section – international politics perhaps – and instantly start treating them like they know what they're talking about again.

  In this instance, however, perhaps due to the viciousness of the attacks and the new status of media as an increasingly partisan, pandering and click-baiting institution, gamers didn't forget when they 'turned the page'. In generations already turning to Youtube, social media and alternative outlets for their news and information this was a death blow to their trust.

  Gamergate managed to make good headway on alternative and minority news outlets, got its message out in this new way and found that it didn't – so much – need more traditional media. They also made fantastic use of 'meme warfare', applying humour, in-jokes and artful trolling to play their opposition for fools and to make them look absurd – repeatedly.

  It is true that the right-wing made up ground in recent years for many of the same reasons. Constant misrepresentations, hostility from and towards mainstream media, the polarisation and the loss of 'The News'. It's also true that conservatives have learned to use humour and memes (Pepe the frog for example[100]) to great effect and to successfully mock and satirise their enemies. They may well have learned some of this from Gamergate and the anti-Social Justice Warrior movement. They saw its effectiveness, perhaps via Breitbart and the self-promotional success of Milo Yiannopoulos' association with it.

  I've been a news junkie since I was very young and while it has been somewhat heartening to see outlets like the BBC lagging behind the pandering going on in privately owned news companies. They have begun to however and their 'youth' content and Internet offerings, in particular, have been terrible when it comes to Internet culture. There is no option left anymore, other than to try and consume as much alternative media from as many different points of view as possible. Then, from all that conflicting information you have to seek to determine for yourself what is true and accurate. That can be exhausting and for most people, who has the time? That's a dangerous situation to be in.

  Distributed Organisation

  The idea of a distributed organisation without any real leadership is not new; it's an organisational structure that has been used in all manner of resistance movements, dissident groups and even terrorist organisations for many years. In recent memory, it is yet another element of modern protest that can traced back to the Occupy Movement. Occupy was a decentralised, Anarchistic movement with no real leadership. It emerged from a co
mmonality of outrage and took off with the popularity of a cat meme before stumbling and falling apart from too many agendas. Gamergate drew on some of these ideas but was different in significant ways, some of which have already been discussed.

  One of the most important ways in which Gamergate was different was that it was not only non-hierarchical, but it was also an example of emergent complexity. Gamergate was a comprehensive alliance of people with two, chief, concerns that united everyone (censorship and ethics). When something got its attention, it would naturally surge towards that issue, like a murmuration of starlings, without the need for leadership. All it needed was quick communication, which was facilitated by social media (especially Twitter) and image boards. Where there was broad agreement on an issue, there was critical mass and, hence, action. Where there wasn't, little happened.

  There were no leaders, but different, popular spokesmen and women would rise and fall naturally as they gained or lost support – and Gamergate was very suspicious and wary of 'leaders' and 'cabals' trying to control it. This gave it a degree of resilience and plausible deniability that its opposition always lacked.

  This, in many ways, made it impossible for its enemies to fight. They couldn't discredit leaders because there weren't any. Gamergate didn't care about 'toxic views' as they were beyond the issues. It couldn't be forced to turn on its own, outside of its own, emergent decisions to do so – so much as such a thing could be possible. For its enemies, this was like trying to nail jelly to a wall, couple that with Gamergate's vast-scale anonymity and its enemies were always shadowboxing. The opposition was never sure who or what was real, and even when they got it right, attacks on individual 'leaders' were pointless.

  This did have its downsides, of course, anyone using the tag – troll or not – could be labelled 'Gamergate'. Without leaders or spokesmen, the media didn't know how to handle Gamergate. They had no idea who to talk to. Being an anonymous source, unwilling to break anonymity even for media sources (little wonder in a battle with the media) meant a lack of credibility. It wasn't impossible to talk to Gamergate, both Milo Yiannopoulos and Brad Glasgow managed to solve the problem. The games media had its agenda though, and the mainstream media was too lazy to put the work in that was necessary.

  Interestingly mainstream media understands the things about Gamergate that it didn't understand before when it talks about Black Lives Matter [102]. Gamergate was held accountable for every anonymous troll comment, every spurious, untraceable, non-credible threat made in its name (or not). BLM has been forgiven every racist Facebook update, every criminal spokesman, even murders seemingly conducted in its name and chanting about killing police at its protests.

  Whether this represents a political bias or having learned since Gamergate, remains to be seen.

  Pseudoacademia

  People look to the populist/right wing rise and assume that this means that society has become more right wing and regressive. In my opinion, we have seen a rise in extremity on the left-in-name-only and the alienation of liberals, libertarians and libertines. Nowhere has this alienation and horror directed at the pseudo-left been more apparent than about academia.

  For years now, much of it concurrent with Gamergate, we have seen a rise in cultural conflict in and around universities. Controversial issues like no-platforming, trigger warnings and safe spaces have risen. We have minority students demanding segregation be returned. This time, segregation is somehow supposed to protect those minority students. We have language being characterised as violence, and violence being portrayed as expression – at least when it is used to silence and bar speakers. Once the bastion of the free speech movement, Berkeley, in particular, has become a flashpoint for the new censorship movement.

  Those being attacked might be right-wing, and many of their views might be disgusting, regressive or simply uncomfortable, but they have a right to free expression just as much as anyone else does. This has long been a left/liberal principle, and it's one that seems to have been irreparably compromised.

  We see an enormous political bias on campuses and a lack of balance of representation of different views[104] and this mono-polar environment has caused a degree of extremism. This extremism is most evident and prevalent in the humanities and social sciences, down to the denial of biology, physics and the scientific method itself. It is from these extreme and unscientific departments (exposed by the Sokal and 'Conceptual Penis' affairs) that much of the current criticism of games comes.

  Disturbingly, this is the prevalent point of view in the emerging field of Games Studies. In groups like DiGRA we see this hostility writ large, not only towards games themselves but to the scientific method itself – via the rejection of peer review and proper methodology. They start from conclusions and select 'evidence' and interpretations to serve that end.

  This has completely turned off the game audience itself from what could, otherwise, be a useful field of study. I, and others tried to create a journal and an alternative. We wanted something more study focussed, with a proper organisational structure, to look into games. There was simply no interest. The primary reason? Nobody saw any value in academic study of games, primarily because of the hash DiGRA and similar groups had made of it and the poor standard of their scholarship.

  These are not scholars or academics; they're activists. They're not there to study but to try and force change. Sadly they're having some effect, especially since the games media, and then the games companies themselves, are buying into this.

  The current crop of hostile games journalists and critics are mostly from this kind of background. They're steeped in postmodernism and gender theory, seeing themselves as people trying to 'make a difference', hostile to the subject of their own 'study' with no objectivity, no distance and massive bias. We're now seeing these problems play out in the wider culture war, especially at universities. To people from the outside, looking in – and even to people within universities – it looks awful. This is what other people have known for years.

  As a game designer, I would love for there to be some useful, decent, accurate academic study into games. There's virtually nothing though. It might as well be book reports written by high-school students. It's about them and their thoughts and reactions, not the games themselves, not the structure. It's useless from a design point of view and from the position of free expression advocacy it's actively dangerous. They're providing fuel – on no scientific basis – for people to attack games and the Internet.

  The United Fucking Nations!?

  A massively important aspect of the power dynamic around Gamergate and the broader 'culture war' is the authority and importance of victimhood status. I first became aware of this – yet again – during the Occupy movement when 'The Progressive Stack'[105] was used to determine who got to speak and who didn't.

  This is a kind of prejudice, where people's identity is given a primacy of importance over their eloquence, skill or ideas. It is the absolute opposite of the philosophy behind image-board anonymity, which emphasises merit and a viciously cruel marketplace of ideas. Essentially, the more 'oppressed' and marginal you are, the more protected groups you fit into, the more right you have to speak and the more weight your words are given. It's also starkly against left-wing philosophy, which advocates treating people equally, not creating special treatment or new hierarchies.

  Claiming victimhood, claiming marginalisation is, perversely, an incredibly useful thing regarding both hard and soft power. The irony is that the whole concept rests upon the idea that you're powerless, and need compensation for that status. That you need to be granted advantage – rather than equality. That's an argument that can be had and many groups are, indeed making these arguments. It comes down to a battle between those who advocate that equality should mean equal treatment and those who advocate for compensatory inequality.

  Speaking for myself, I'm an egalitarian. I don't think you can get to equality by pumping more inequality into the system. Certainly, in today's world, t
here are powerful arguments to be made that aspects of discrimination now more adversely affects men – especially in education[106]. There are also arguments to be made that 'positive discrimination' worsens race relations and creates resentment and problems as compared with assistance given by need. This may have contributed to the populist-right backlash and a sense of entitlement and outrage amongst communities constantly being told they are owed something due to history. Blaming whites, men, and heterosexuals for the alleged actions of their ancestors is like a secular version of original sin.

  People resent it.

  It certainly doesn't help the pursuit of equality.

  If you happen to belong to any 'non-marginalised' group, you'll find your opinions being censored, ignored, and you'll find yourself being held responsible for perceived historical wrongs. Are you cisgender? Are you white? Are you male? Good luck getting heard or getting a fair shake, especially if you don't spend half an hour apologising for that first.

  This power-dynamic narrative also lays behind the Orwellian attempts to redefine terms like racism and sexism to 'prejudice plus power' rather than simply 'discrimination' on the basis – in these cases – of race or gender. This is, in fact, a specialised sub-definition of racism used to describe systemic or systematic racism, not racism itself. The facile and shallow nature of this analysis, especially when it characterises all white people as privileged or holding power, is rendered apparent when you consider that the most racist demographics are the ones with the least power[107].

  The whole idea of this 'Oppression Olympics' and the power dynamic in question goes from tragedy to farce when you consider how things around Gamergate played out.