I’m not going to link a whole bunch of other blog posts and imagurs and videos and stuff to prove that #Gamergate is a thing. That is all out there and you can find it all. Talk to me on Twitter (@TheAngryVGamer) and I’ll help you find it. The point of this is just to provide an entry point. To cut through the crap and explain (from my own perspective) why I’m here.
What is Gamergate?
Let’s start with this: a day ago, nearly a dozen major “games journalism” websites posted editorial pieces, all pretty much at the same time. These pieces all had similar content and tone. They all described “the death of the gamer.” Basically, they condemned gamers as immature, sexist, racist, homophobic, part of rape culture, and so forth. They suggested that the gamer is a white, male, heterosexual identity exclusivly. This isn’t something new. We’ve seen these pieces before. But for a dozen sites to all come out and post them at once and then to call on game developers and publishers to stop thinking of gamers as their demographic because the concept of gamer was dying.
Why would they do this? Why would video games journalists make such sweeping statements and all at once condemning their own audience? Good question. We have to go back in time to answer that.
I’m not going to go into all of the ugly details. Again, this is just a sort of primer. You have to do some of the legwork. Which is good practice, because that’s what this whole really comes down to.
It was revealed that a indie game developer may have had several affairs with other game developers, journalists, and other people in the gaming industry. These people may have sourced that developer in articles and may also have given her money through her own Patreon and possibly as donations for an indie game development event she is supposedly planning to run. Now, people will tell you there is a lot of evidence out there for all of this. And I agree. There is. But in the interest of being completely honest, all I’m saying is that these possibilities existed. You can even find out her name easily enough. Again, broad strokes. Because SHE’S not important. I’m willing to drop her from the rhetoric. Her personal choices and those of her partners? Not particularly important. Except that her career may have benefited from those choices and relationships.
Now, this is the part where journalists would normally step in. They would investigate what was going on and report. They would verify or debunk and present their findings and allow us to make informed choices. The problem, in this case, was that gaming journalism, in general, did not bother. And, in fact, when the matter was discussed in comment threads and message boards, many of said comments were deleted. YouTube videos describing the situation and the evidence were hit with copyright claims to remove them. They have since been restored or reposted. Again, you can find all of this. If you care. I’m only writing this for the people who DON’T know anything about why we’re mad.
People were forced to do their own investigations while the media remained silent. And people discovered just how intertwined much of the gaming media was with the people involved in these scandals and they also discovered troubling events that had gotten glossed over. The developer who started all of this won an Indie game development contest and she may have been involved in a sexual relationship with one or more of the people involved in the contest. She also appears to have been heavily involved with people behind a major PR firm that also was involved with the other winners of the contest. The same PR firm also provides PR services, apparently, to many major gaming news outlets.
More disturbingly, at least once, someone apparently came forward on Twitter to accuse the developer of sexual harrassment and was quickly cowed into silence. There are screencaps of the conversation out there. Even more disturbingly, there are signs that maybe this developer may have purposely shut down a charity gaming development event designed to help women designers with no resources to publish their first games. And this, if it’s true, went unreported.
Now, again, I’m keeping all of the names and all of the evidence and all of the certainty out of this. Even though I’ve looked through a lot of the evidence, screen caps, logs of conversations, and so on, and I’m convinced at least some of this stuff is at least partially true.
The problem is, again, games journalists do not think any of this is worth reporting. Why? Well, it might have something to do with how intertwined all of this crap is with the major game journlism outlets. But we don’t know because we’ve got no one looking out. Which is the job of journalism. To keep everybody honest.
And the way information keeps vanishing and comments keep getting deleted, it looks like the people in control of the information are trying to shut down the conversation.
So folks starting seeking their own truths and investigating and discussing. And that is when those dozen or so articles about how gamers are immature, misogynistic man children all went live on all those different websites pretty much all at once. Which, in itself, makes you ask if all of these outlets are interconnected.
Because, what it looks like, is that gaming media as a whole seems to want to tar all gamers that aren’t with them, that aren’t toeing the line, as unreliable monsters.
Gamergate is nothing more than the people who think there is something really ugly going on here demanding that games journalists be held to the same professional ethical standards as other media outlets and other industries in general. That is all it is. We want to know who is involved with who, who is giving money to who, who the players are, and what agendas they are trying to push. See, most professions, especially those that rely on trust, have ethical standards to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest OR at the very least to disclose to the people who rely on them where such conflicts may exist so that they can make their own judgements. So if a reviewer gives a favorable score to a game, and the reviewer and the game developer are married, that information gets disclosed so that people can seek out other opinions and approach the information with skepticism.
Now, there are a host of other issues and scandals that have been piled on. In general, games journalism has had a growing credability problem. There have been accusations of collusion between major publishers and games journalists to pump up reviews and provide hype, to push preorders, to conceal problems, and so on. There’s all the interconnected stuff I mentioned above that may or may not indicate massive collusion between a small group of cliquish indie game developers and games media, again, to provide hype and marketing and to silence questions and opposition. There are some folks who are increasingly concerned about those same developers using games journalism to push a certain political or social agenda. That may or may not be true. The problem is, the way everything looks like right now, there’s no telling whether or not it is true or how true it is.
And again, that’s why #GamerGate. We need to know who is involved with who, who is paying who, and who has what axes to grind.
What GamerGate is NOT
Now, here’s the ugly problem. Many of the players in the current series of scandals are activists for greater equality and inclusion in gaming. I’m not going to use the term “social justice warrior” because that connotes a level of extremism and it is insulting. I’m trying to stay as neutral as possible. But there are folks who think those people may be using their connections to push their personal social agenda on gaming. And they are mad.
Unfortunately, there are extremists on both sides of that issue. The extremists on the equality side are often dubbed SJWs for social justice warriors. The extremists on the other side are often called men’s rights activists, but they are also often simply accused of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other ugliness. And thus far, those two groups have been waging a sort of war. And it is a very ugly war. Neither side is, in my opinion, blameless. Both sides use tactics like exposing personal information, taking down websites, hacking websites, and, in the extreme cases, harrasing phone calls and threats of horrific violence.
If you haven’t actually seen these things happen, believe me when I tell you they are brutal. They are awful. It is the nastiest shit you will ever see human beings do to each other outside of warzones and prison camps.
Gamegate is not about that shit. Those are tactics gamergate absolutely vehemently opposes. Gamergate is disgusted by those tactics. In fact, those tactics are part of the reason so many of us are so angry. Because they make actual, rational discussion about the underlying issues impossible.
Unfortunately, those who want to oppose the gamergate movement, for whatever reason, would like to lump in the participants with those sorts of extremists. And THAT may be part of the reason why those articles all went live at once, to reframe the questions about journalistic integrity and ethical standards as a concerted effort by the hateful misogynist extremists.
Again, that is not gamergame. And anyone participating in gamergate in good faith will not stand for that shit.
Which brings us to the other problem. Gamergate is a hashtag. It’s an open community. And so, it can’t control who uses the hashtag. If you watch the hashtag on Twitter, you’ll generally see a lot of people simply retweeting information and evidence about what’s going on and Tweeting constant reminders that gamergate is about integrity and ethics and that it is not about harrassment, violence, or misogyny. Interspersed, you will see occasional tweets from people who stand on one of the extreme sides. First, you will find people arguing against the gamergate movement. Some are arguing in good faith and they are engaged in good faith and with reason and respect. Others are trolls, making fun of the movement and trying to reframe it as a bunch of misogynistic children trying to keep women and homosexuals and so on out of gaming. On the other side, you will occasionally see nasty bullies who are doing their best to support gamergate. And when that behavior happens, it is shouted down pretty quickly. There are a huge number of people who are simply trying to keep the movement clean, respectful, and reasonable.
Also, you will find a lot of funny captioned images making fun of the state of journalism. And occasionally an actual funny joke making fun of journalism. Those are pretty good.
Why Gamer Gate?
I’ve gone on a long time here already. But I want to explain why this is important. Because inevitably someone will point out that it is “just gaming” and there are “bigger problems in the world.”
This is my own personal view. Everything above, I’ve tried to be as factual as possible and to leave as much room for doubt as possible. Here, I’m on a soapbox. I’m explaining why I care.
I’m an accountant in real life. One of the functions of accounting is to investigate and report financial data. We report to companies so they can figure out how well they are doing, fix problems, and spot any criminal activity in their ranks they may not be aware of. We also report to banks and other lenders so they can decide who it is safe to loan money to and how much money they can lend and how much interest to charge. And we report to investors who finance the companies. That includes big, rich people like Warren Buffett and banks again, but it also includes normal everyday folks. People with retirement plans or insurance plans. That’s where the money for those plans comes from. Ultimately, our trade is in trust. Banks and investors and companies have to trust us that we’re doing the job right and we’re being honest. If not…
Well, ten years ago (give or take) in America, it was “if not…” A small number of very powerful accounting firms had some conflicts of interest and they concealed crimes and falsified data to line their pockets and the pockets of their cronies. And when it came it (the biggest being the Enron scandal), it was a disaster. Huge piles of money disappeared overnight. Thousands lost their jobs – normal people, like you and me. Retirement and pension savings evaporated – again, normal people like you and me lost everything. It got so bad the government had to step in and pass new laws. Accounting could no longer be trusted to police itself. And it got much harder to be an accountant and make people believe you.
Games journalism – like all journalism – also trades in trust. That is their product. If you don’t trust them, they might as well not exist. And games journalism is not just reviews of games. That’s a part of it. And we’ve seen how much money can be lost on deceptive advertising and review practices. For example, Aliens: Colonial Marines. Now, that was mostly publisher deception. But it’s a good example of how even simple reviews can ruin things.
But there’s more to games journalism than reviews. Now, with the advent of crowdfunding, journalists have a lot of power to funnel money to smaller developers simply by building hype and excitement and linking to crowdfunding sites. Alternatively, they can make sure nobody ever hears of a project. If they make a concerted effort to quiet a project, that project can die. And that may very well end a career. Simply by deciding what to report and what not to report, they control the flow of a substantial amount of money. And for major releases, they can build hype or bury it. They can, if they want to, act as gatekeepers. They can decide which games even have a chance to succeed and which ones don’t.
But there’s even more beyond that, as the current situation is showing us. The developer of a card game was, not too long ago, accused of rape. An accusation he maintained was baseless. The accusation got a lot of play. His defense got substantially less play. We don’t know – and we never will – whether or not a rape actually happened. But by skewing the reporting, by giving a voice to only one side, games journalism decided who was guilty and who was innocent. The reason that should be worrying is because people can say absolutely anything. If I want to ruin someone, I can accuse them of a horrible crime. By the time the internet hype machine gets done, whether I can actually prove my case or bring criminal charges, that person can be ruined. Their life can be destroyed. Because I decided to destroy it.
THAT is why this shit is important. That’s why it’s not just games. Games journalists have power. They can decide how money flows, they can decide what we hear and what we don’t, who gets to speak and who doesn’t. They can push a game or kill it. And they can execute a person’s character with a concerted effort.
And now, take a look again at what’s going on. Take a look at how easily a dozen different major journalism outlets can all decide to get the same message out on the same day. They are closely interrelated. Even if there is nothing going on with any of the scandals I’ve mentioned, there could easily be one tomorrow.
Disclosure standards, professional ethics, codes of conduct that are enforceable, and transparency – those are the tools that empower us, the consumers, the public, the people who RELY on journalists to be fair in how they use their substantial power. That way, at the very least, when things start to look bad or smell bad or seem weird, we have recourse. We can ask the editors and chiefs “what the hell?” And we can point to their own codes of conduct. In the case where lives or games are destroyed, lawsuits can be brought to provide some relief. Advertisers will know exactly where they stand with publications and those relationships will be enforceable too.
Is it perfect? Will it work 100% of the time? No. We will still all have to be vigilant. But it makes it much harder to hide things and much easier to fix things when they break.
That’s why Gamergate.
Getting Involved
So, come out to the Twitter hashtag. Make a Twitter account if you need to. Search the #gamergate hashtag and strike up a conversation. Add your voice. Or disagree with us. Ask questions. Ask for the evidence behind all of this stuff. If you engage us politely and in good faith, we’re happy to chat with you. And if you face any harrasment or threats from inside the hashtag, let us know. Share that in the hashtag because we will quash it. It hurts us to let that stuff go.
And if you don’t want to be involved and you don’t buy all of this shit and you think it’s much ado about nothing? That’s totally cool. We’re still working to make a better gaming community for you.
The Angry Video Gamer 