The Gamergate idiocy continues, with death threats aplenty amidst spectacularly dumb attempts to still claim some kind of “legitimacy”. It’s over — or at least any kind of actual honest person would have to realise it should be.
Yeah, I know, I wasn’t going to say anything more about Gamergate, because in many ways it just becomes oxygen for a group of unrepresentative immature idiots with more shouting capacity than brain cells.
But the reality here is that matters are getting worse, not better. In recent weeks there’s been a rash of death threats against gaming-centred academics such as Anita Sarkeesian, or similar threats against Briana Wu from Giant Spacekat.
There’s no shortage of articles out there decyring this as mere posturing, and that somehow “Gamergate” isn’t about this kind of thing, or that it’s not representative of the “movement” as a whole. That it’s about ethical honesty in journalism, or some such high sounding thing, although I’ve yet to see anything approaching actual legitimate criticism from the movement.
Just a lot of death threats, a whole heaping load of absolutely repulsive misogyny, and a threat to take the anti-female agenda wider than games. Colour me not-exactly-terrified, for the record.
Oh, for the record: Male. Caucasian. Been a gamer and games journalist since before many involved with #gamergate were more than a funny twitchy feeling inside somebody’s testicles.
I’m not the one being threatened here, but I’m damned if I won’t say anything. I’m also well aware, as Kevin Cheung so eloquently puts it, that talk is cheap. I’m merely venting here, and you can take that for whatever value you want to give it.
To be honest, I’ve been trying to avoid writing anything further about the whole issue because I don’t like giving it oxygen, or making those who think they’re “fighting” for #gamergate think that they’re in any way winning beyond their own limited circle jerk, but at the same time, there’s a few things that become easily apparent when you do any kind of digging.
Almost every instance I can find of a pro-gamergate opinion is either hiding behind anonymity, usually because they’re simply idiot cowards, or is pretty evidently an immature fool.
So I wanted to try a different tack. It’s pretty clear that I don’t support any kind of idea that leads to death threats, but what if I could think within the mindset of the pro-gamergate crowd as they’re presented? What would happen then?
So I tried to think that way.
In some respects, that should be easy, because there was a time when I was an immature fool, and a gamer to boot.
I like to call these my “teenage years”, because that’s when most of us are at our absolute worst as we shift from being children to adults.
As a teenage idiot, I did stupid things, and I said stupid things. From time to time, people had their feelings hurt as the direct result of things I said or did, and while I carry some adult regret as a result of those actions, that doesn’t change the fact that they happened. None of them were at the level where any kind of criminal result was at play, however.
Fun fact: As a nervous, doesn’t-understand-the-opposite-gender-well teenager, I asked out a grand total of two girls. Seven years (I crossed continents and school systems, don’t ask) of high school. Two dates. Yeah, I was that guy.
On the plus side, 100 per cent strike rate, because they both said yes.
On the minus side, one dumped me within a week (and looking back, I don’t blame her one bit) and the other was involved in the most disastrous date at a school dance in the history of time. Except I wasn’t exactly involved, because having mustered up the bravery to ask her out, I then spent most of the evening with other guys in my year.
I was young and stupid and she was angry (again, rightly so) with me about that. I doubt very much that she’s reading this, but… sorry?
(as an aside: Becoming an adult doesn’t mean giving up things that might be decried as childish. As a child I adored the works of Jim Henson, video games, Doctor Who and RPGs. As an adult, I adore the works of Jim Henson, video games, Doctor Who and RPGs, although I don’t get quite as much time for them as I might like.)
As a teenager, I was a social outcast — looking back, I can see some behaviour patterns in myself that made that somewhat inevitable — and not exactly a catch for those of the opposite gender.
In some ways, that might have made me an ideal candidate for the pro-gamergate crowd, because there’s a strong sense of shared identity amongst that group as far as I can see.
Except that, even as an idiotic teenager, I had enough common sense to realise that it’s important to stop and analyse the agenda of anything you’re involved with.
And in the case of #Gamergate, trying to drop myself into that mindset, I could find NO getting away from the absolutely horrific crap that it’s being associated with. None at all.
It’s over. Or it should be. You’re perfectly free to disagree with, say, the analysis of Sarkeesian. I know there are points she’s made that I’m not entirely in agreement with, but I’m also aware that communications can be imprecise and I’d be far more inclined to sit down with her, time permitting, to go over any differences of opinion or fact than to, say, threaten her, because that’s a constructive thing to do rather than a deadly show of force against another human being, a response that’s rather akin to throwing all the toys out of the pram if the toys happened to be live hand grenades.
Want to discuss ethics in journalism? Be my guest. There’s a rich buffet outside of gaming to focus on too, be it the concentration of media power in certain circles, the contentious relationship between advertising, PR, marketing and editors… I could go on for days. But that’s a discussion, not a threat to do actual physical harm to somebody. Probably best to use another term to describe it while you’re at it, too.
What you’re not free to do is to threaten other people. These things have consequences, and it’s no surprise at all that those making the threats are doing so under a veil of anonymity. It’s not anonymity to protect some noble cause, because there is no nobility here. It’s anonymity because that enables the actions of cowards, misogynists and those who figure that their worldview is the only worldview.
Even when I was a teenage idiot, at the height of my own self-centredness, I knew that. So I guess I failed. I can’t get inside that mindset, and I think I’m OK with that.
Images: Digital Game Museum and Loren Kerns