Inside Gamergate

by James Desborough

  The second camp blames society as a whole and the 'male' nature of the work culture in STEM for the lack of women in technology roles. It frequently blames sexism and misogyny – loosely defined – for the fact that fewer women go into STEM, stay within STEM careers, or use the STEM degrees that they earn. This is the main narrative that dominates the media about this issue, that it is a climate of sexism and 'brogrammer' culture that excludes women[189].

  Gamergate was a godsend to people pushing this narrative; it appeared – due to pre-existing bias – to confirm that the worlds of games and technology were misogynistic. It fed into this existing story, which was already well established in the media and this is part of the reason that the 'harassment' spin took hold so effectively. It didn't matter that this wasn't what it was about, here were what appeared to be misogynistic attacks on women and minorities in a STEM field (games) that confirmed what had been asserted for some time.

  Gamergate, in the meantime, as exemplified by its support for TFYC, the existence of NotYourShield and the participation of female developers[190] was having none of it. Those female developers, gamers and others involved in Gamergate took a different view to the dominant narrative as well. They have found the attitudes prevalent in the media and from activists to be patronising and to have created an inaccurate culture of victimhood that was responsible for putting women off STEM careers.

  Attempted solutions to these issues don't seem to have produced any fruit, and there remains a general shortage of STEM graduates compared to demand. There is a need for graduates of both sexes. Sadly, fixating on women doesn't seem to be working. Further, the demand for companies to employ women in STEM fields is leading to positive discrimination, which breeds resentment. There simply aren't enough women with the right qualifications for every company to fulfil a quota, or to employ the best people for the job.

  I don't know what the solution is to these issues, but women – and men – should be free to pursue whatever career they want to, STEM or not. Diversity hires, quotas and positive discrimination only seem to breed resentment and hobble companies who aren't acting out of bias but simply reflecting the proportions of the available hiring pool. The victim narrative and portraying the tech industry as misogynistic and hateful certainly can't be helping. Exploiting and misrepresenting Gamergate to push that point is opportunistic, and an example of the very unethical journalism Gamergate formed to fight.

  For my part, I've experienced sexism and suspicion in the other direction. Originally I wanted to be a teacher's assistant, with a view to possibly becoming a primary school teacher later on if I liked the work. The sheer amount of suspicion directed at me – and so I was later to find out, other male applicants – ended up putting me off. The assumption seemed to be that the only reason any man might want to work with young kids must be because he was a paedophile. Having worked in a school for my work experience placement, I already knew that the young boys in these schools were crying out for male and role models. I just couldn't follow through with the implicit suspicion and judgement hanging over it.

  Sarkeesian

  Sarkeesian was not initially, really, related to Gamergate despite being responsible for much of the atmosphere that made Gamergate – or something like it – inevitable. Still, Sarkeesian and her – at the time - boyfriend and collaborator Jonathan McIntosh were quick to exploit the situation as it unfolded. As a pre-existing feminist voice and 'victim' on the radar of the media, Sarkeesian was a go-to person to talk to. Time and again she appeared in news and gaming outlets, name-dropping Gamergate as a source of abuse and reinforcing the harassment narrative. Companies and groups seeking to distance themselves from accusations of even tacitly supporting harassment sought to virtue signal by consulting with or donating to her organisation, Feminist Frequency. This also happened – to a lesser extent – with others exploiting the situation, such as Quinn and Harper.

  Sarkeesian did very well out of this, perhaps most especially from Intel throwing money into the 'women in tech' and 'online harassment' causes, including Feminist Frequency[191]. Sarkeesian and Feminist Frequency had a lot to gain by perpetuating the abuse narrative, financially and otherwise. Self-inserting into the controversy was a good way to do this (symbiotic trolling).

  There's no doubt that Sarkeesian was trolled, a lot. However, there are no known links to Gamergate in any of it. Sarkeesian was baited – and disagreed with – long before the advent of Gamergate. Little wonder with her public, fairly extreme feminism and repeated attacks on people's beloved hobby, both advertising a weakness for trolls to exploit and genuinely upsetting game fans. At one point Sarkeesian published a 'week of harassment', hundreds and hundreds of Tweets, etc. which were, at one point, claimed to be due to Gamergate[192].

  I combed through the first hundred abusive messages and found zero with any link to Gamergate. Many of them were from 'burner' accounts or low-post new accounts with various warning signs of being a troll account. Amongst what was claimed to be abusive was also a relatively high proportion of things that were simply a disagreement or expressed anger. The claims of abuse are, and there is no doubt of this, being vastly overstated for activist and political ends. It's hard to believe such misrepresentation of facts isn't deliberate. That's abuse of a kind and has negatively impacted hundreds, thousands, of people.

  In fact, when it came to severe abuse Sarkeesian and others benefitted from the intervention of Gamergate which was, however futilely, trying to counter the false narrative that it was a harassment group. Perhaps the best example of this, besides the Harassment Patrol, was when Sarkeesian came under-focussed abuse from a mysterious series of accounts consistently linking to a set of webpages and articles about Sarkeesian. It was Gamergate, not Twitter, that successfully investigated this and found the culprit. This was 'Celebrinando', a Brazilian click baiters and troll named Mateus[193]. Gamergate located, him, Gamergate exposed him, Gamergate reported him and kept getting his accounts shut down – but this was never acknowledged.

  He had nothing to do with Gamergate.

  Sarkeesian also gained a great deal of coverage, during Gamergate, for cancelling a talk at Utah State University under a cloud of threats of violence[194]. No law enforcement agency considered the threats credible; the FBI investigations would come to the same conclusion. The University did not find them credible either. The letter, making the threat, referenced the Montreal Massacre, not well known or referenced outside of Canada, save in feminist circles and text analysis of the threat suggested the writer was a woman. There was no link, again, to Gamergate but this didn't stop a spate of interviews and news articles implicating or attacking the movement and lingering, virtually erotic shots of Sarkeesian's police guards.

  Time and again this was the story. The truth and complexity of what was going on was ignored. Gamergate's role in counter-harassment and its actual concerns were ignored. The story – ironically – of a damsel in distress, was far more appealing and worth more to media outlets than the truth. This benefited people like Sarkeesian certainly and to an extent, you can't blame them for acting in their self-interest. The news media, however, is supposed to report 'the' news, not 'a' news, and the repeated attacks on and misrepresentations of Gamergate only proved their point about media ethics and perpetuated the anger. This continues, even to this day.

  Again, just while writing, there have been more developments around Sarkeesian. She had a panel at Vidcon where, from the stage, she abused one of her biggest critics. After another panel, she bullied and abused a Youtuber named Boogie2988 for what he's said during the discussion. It was also revealed that at a previous conference she'd admitted it was never about the games, that she didn't consider her critics to be abusers and it was always about cultural engineering. Despite her actions she was not disciplined for her harassment. Another example of an absurd double standard and the fear with which she is viewed[211].

  The Sarkeesian Effect

  Feminist activists and dishonest click baiter
s were not the only people to exploit the Gamergate situation. Gamergate's desperation to be heard and listened to made it vulnerable to exploitation by outlets like Breitbart. Its need for solidarity and unconventional voices also made it vulnerable to scammers and catfish like Alison Prime. That sense of solidarity and need for alternative outlets also drove it to donate to many people and causes without – necessarily – being sufficiently wary of who and what they were.

  A particularly upsetting example of this was the film project, The Sarkeesian Effect[195].

  The Sarkeesian Effect was a project put together by Jordan Owen – men's rights commentator and activist against censorship of pornography – and Davis Aurini, a right-wing commentator who flirts with white nationalism and race realism, though this was less overt at the time. The project was initially Owen's, but Owen does not have a particularly strong or robust personality, while Aurini is much more assertive and controlling. Aurini joined the project on the basis of his supposed film-making experience and to broaden the base of support the two could get.

  The two managed to garner a great deal of aid through Patreon for their film project and set about travelling to record the footage they needed. There were, almost immediately, problems and clashes between the two, who had rather different visions for the film. Owen appears to have wanted to create something of a more direct exploration and refutation of Sarkeesian's claims and an exploration around gaming culture and its criticism. Aurini seems to have wanted to create something more of a conspiracy theory documentary, something he did finally do with his cut of the film 'Immersed in Subversion'[196].

  In the end, in my opinion, Aurini exploited both Owen – who strikes me as a genuine and heartfelt man with a long history of standing up against censorship and Gamergate, for money and notoriety. This was, unfortunately, at the clear and obvious cost of an effective film or counter-narrative. While The Sarkeesian Effect isn't an entirely worthless effort, it is by no means as polished or effective as it should be and was compromised in its mission by Aurini's presence. This can easily be seen by comparing the two films, Owens being far more effective, focused and polished while Aurini's is much more amateurish and less powerful.

  The Sarkeesian Effect project ended up being a disaster and a source of much mirth-making by Gamergate's enemies and the ideological critics it sought to criticise. Worse, perhaps, it soured a large chunk of Gamergate on crowdfunding and donating to worthwhile projects. This book, for example, was crowdfunded and came in for a great deal of criticism and suspicion for doing so. Realistically, not every project is going to succeed, but with so much at stake and so much attention, the cost of failure is absurdly high. Independent media and games rely on this new, freeing, source of income and the more people that become soured on it, the less opportunity there is outside of regular convention.

  Chapter Seven: Gamergate in Summation

  Gamergate occasionally flares back into life when something particularly egregious happens, it is misrepresented (again) in the media or one of its enemies gets a significant amount of media attention on the back of the false victim narrative. As time goes on the reputation of Gamergate, wrongly, gets calcified into that of an 'online hate mob' and history gets revised, the truth about things vanishes into an Orwellian 'memory hole'. This is why I wrote this book, to offer the truth as I saw it, as I experienced it, my 'lived experience' as the Social Justice Warriors say.

  This book was intended to be a retrospective. I 'retired' from Gamergate in 2016 as it ceased to be as relevant and as the trolls and the insane fringe took it over. While I was writing this one of those 'flare-ups' happened around a game called 'Last Night'. Our old friend Zoe Quinn – apparently seeking publicity for her book, to which this is a counter – condemned the game creator on social media for his 2014 support of Gamergate in a handful of Tweets. This blacklisting, the forced apologies and a sudden spate of anti-Gamergate articles had me making videos and debating all over again, as it did many other Gamergate veterans.

  Even so, Gamergate is – to all intents and purposes – over. So it's worth looking back to see what it accomplished. What victories and failures did it have? What is its legacy? What can it teach us about protest, free expression and the media in an ever-more online world?

  Who Won & Who Lost?

  It is hard to disentangle exactly who won and lost. Gamergate's main concerns were media ethics and censorship, and while it may have won significant victories on the ethical issue, the censorship issue is ongoing, and not going as well.

  When it comes to ethics, policies have been changed, implemented or just enforced. This is a considerable victory on the part of Gamergate since it was the main thrust of their campaign. Merely having the policies isn't sufficient of course, but many of those involved in Gamergate are now the self-appointed watchdogs of the Games Media, and bad-faith actions tend – now – to be found out and publicised. While this should be the job of editors, that it happens now – at all – is an improvement. All of this is a world away from the state of things as they have existed since almost the dawn of gaming. Of course, savvy games media would have used the Gamergate outrage to disentangle themselves from companies and reassert their objectivity in the first place, but that never happened.

  Gamergate managed to subvert and use the tactics of their enemies – boycotts and advertiser pressure in particular – to great effect. This stole the tactic and made it clear that both sides could use it. Being more numerous than their opposition it was also more effective than when their enemies used it. Even though there have been climb-downs since and the restoration of advertising, it was a useful way to pressure companies in counter to the usual way it is abused by vocal minorities. Personally, I don't particularly approve of this tactic (boycotts, blacklisting and advertiser pressure) save where there is clear and definitive wrongdoing, but there's no denying its efficacy.

  Gamergate gave an enormous amount of money to charity and, unlike their opposition, genuinely aided women in gaming and technology, victims of bullying and much more. They rescued TFYC's effort to help women break into game design, supported suicide prevention and so much more – even sponsoring a sea lion. They were indefatigable in their defiance of the unfair image being promulgated about them and did a huge amount of good, even if it was 'just' as a middle finger to their opposition.

  Gamergate aided anti-censorship efforts, particularly with respect to the games Hatred and Huniepop. This set precedents on the Steam platform against censorship that had been creeping onto that platform and helped to secure a route for adult content to be distributed (then patched) on that platform.

  Gamergate also helped inspire similar push-backs against cultural conservatism and 'Social Justice Warrior' interference in comics, Heavy Metal and others. There has, it seems, been something of a cultural shift against this (small 'c') conservatism and at least some of that can be attributed to Gamergate – and it should be proud of defending liberal and libertarian values that way.

  Gamergate also helped underline problems in media, in a way that has since spread to mainstream culture. There are still no solutions to this, and the problem has, if anything, worsened. There is, however, now a greater awareness of the issue and the slow emergence of a new centre, based on genuine liberalism, which is a hopeful development.

  Gamergate helped show ways to overcome the problems around protest movements like Occupy. It successfully, for the most part, accomplished being a leaderless movement without being divided against itself. It demonstrated how online protest could be effective, even when the media – through maliciousness or incompetence – is dead-set against you. Some of these lessons seem to have been learned or copied by other movements and protests – Black Lives Matter has mostly made it work, so it seems. It may have presented a new, successful (for now) paradigm of protest. It also showed the value and power in alternative outlets, social media and the power of humour and memes, which other groups, ones I don't, perhaps, agree with so much, have taken up and
used successfully.

  Gamergate's biggest scalp was certainly helping to bring down Gawker. The kings of click bait and online tabloidism. Sadly, many of its sites live on, having been sold off, but they seem to be a bit less terrible than they once were. Yes, the Hulk Hogan lawsuit and Peter Thiel had more to do with it, but Gamergate cost them seven figures and didn't let them get away with anything unchallenged. That is still significant.

  Gamergate helped demonstrate that there is a market for fair, ethical, enthusiast reporting and gave a substantial boost to Youtubers as well as new, alternative gaming news outlets. It helped create a market for an honest, knowledgeable, enthusiast press without an agenda. How that will shake out over time and whether it can be a commercial success, remains to be seen.

  Anti-Gamergate were not without their victories. For all their setbacks the story that dominates about Gamergate is that it was a hate group, a harassment campaign targeting women and minorities in gaming. The truth, at least so far as the mainstream record and media are concerned, is utterly eclipsed by this narrative and is the one that will go into history, virtually unchallenged.

  Anti-Gamergate has earned lots of money for their causes by virtue of panicking companies and being, essentially, bribed so that those companies can virtue signal. That money might be unlikely to genuinely help anyone, but there's no denying it has been a good earner for groups like Feminist Frequency.

  Anti-Gamergate has managed to push into academia as well as the media and managed to exploit Gamergate to help do this. They have also managed to get many panels on the 'issues' they raise at conventions virtually unchallenged on those panels. They've blocked any opposition or dissent by characterising any challenge that does occur as misogyny, racism, harassment and so forth. They've also successfully managed to ban or remove counter-panels or Gamergate explanatory panels from many shows – all on the back of the harassment narrative.