GamerGaters sometimes try to rebut charges of misogyny by pointing out that the targets of their wrath aren’t only women. And that’s true. They also target men … who stand up for women.
Mike Stuchbery, a writer and teacher in England, recently aroused the wrath of the Gaters by posting a brief essay titled “A Letter To The Gamerdudes In My Classes” on his blog. In the essay, he wrote “[d]on’t be part of the mob that attacks whichever target GamerGate is going after this week.”
So now he’s become “the target GamerGate is going after this week.” Or one of them, anyway.
The essay that so angered the Gaters is about as mild a criticism of their movement as you can imagine.
Stuchbery, after noting his own love of video games like Skyrim and Assassin’s Creed, simply suggested to his male students that they “stay away” from GamerGate.
He noted that the whole thing started with a blog post by Eron Gjoni,the angry ex-boyfriend of game developer Zoe Quinn – something Stuchbery said he thought was “a bit of a jerk move” on Gjoni ‘s part.
He then went on to describe the harassment and threats directed at Quinn and other women involved in the gaming world, threats that have forced many of the targeted women out of their homes. “Now, it might just be me, but don’t you think that there is something very, very wrong here?” he asked.
The movement that arose in the wake of these events, #GamerGate, claims that it’s not about sexism.They claim that their movement is about journalistic ethics, keeping games magazines about games and not preaching any particular message. …
However, every time a woman speaks up to say ‘Hey, maybe we could change things, make gaming more friendly for women!’, she gets threatened with murder and rape. …
[E]very time a woman speaks up about abuse or harassment she’s received within the gaming scene, she’s forced to leave her home for fear of attack.
There’s a word for the kinds of people who make the kinds of threats that Quinn, Wu and Sarkeesian have received: Creeps.
Hateful, misogynist creeps.
Uh oh. The c-word. If there’s one thing misogynistic assholes hate more than women, it’s being called creeps.
Actually, I think I’ve got that backwards. But trust me, they hate it.
Stuchbery went on to make these radical suggestions:
Guys, I urge you, if you see this stuff online, don’t join in. …
Don’t be a creep.
Embrace women in gaming.
Apparently, to the assembled masses over on 8chan, these were fighting words. And so the angry mob began to form, in the thread archived here.
The angry and not-very-well-infomed mob, that is. Though Stuchbery has an unequivocally male name, and identifies himself as Mr. Mike Stuchbery on Twitter, many of the angry mobsters assumed he was a she. (Each of these posts are taken from different parts of the thread; see the link above for full context. Also note that all commenters are automatically assigned the name “The Leader of Gamergate.”)
Oh, but GamerGate isn’t about women!
Here’s how one of the commenters responded to the news that Mr. Mike Stuchbery was in fact a Mr.
Even those who did manage to get Mr. Mike Stuchbery’s gender correct, and managed to avoid making grotesquely transphobic jokes about it, didn’t take their fact-checking much beyond that. The commenters simply assumed that Stuchbery had presented his essay to his class in an attempt to “indoctrinate” them, though there’s nothing on Stuchbery’s site that would suggest this.
Indeed, when I asked him directly, this is what he wrote to me:
I simply posted it on my blog in response to chatter I hear in the corridors. It was kind of an open letter. There was no reading it out in class
But apparently getting basic facts right doesn’t matter much to a GamerGate mob intent on exacting “justice” upon a man they described variously as a “dipshit,” a “cunt,” a “faggot,” and “a shill that cannot be redpilled.”
So this is how it works now.
If you’re a teacher, and you post an open letter on your blog in which you suggest to your male students that they not join up with an online mob that actively harasses and threatens women … that mob will harass you, and doxx you, and try to get you fired. Or at least, as one of the mob put it, “[r]emoved: transferred to another class or whatever, but he can’t keep teaching those kids, not after what he done.”
Or at least after what they think “he done.”
Another one of the mobsters added this ominous note: “as it says in the Book of Gamergate: ‘He who breaks the law goes back to the House of Pain.'”
Now, I should add that some people in the thread — more than a few — suggested that doxxing was bad, and that maybe trying to get a dude fired wasn’t the way to go. One commenter urged fellow Gaters to get back to targeting advertisers instead of, and I kid you not, “going off on sidequests that wont get us any xp.” (That is, “Experience Points.”)
Others thought it would make their side look bad.
STARTING this line of actions? GamerGate has been about harassment from the very start, even before it was called GamerGate.
Other commenters responded to the calls for “moderation” with open hostility:
I actually agree with that last bit. If you’re involved in GamerGate and this kind of witchhunt disturbs you, take the hint and get out.
At this point, after all the revelations about what this online mob has done and is doing to fuck up people’s lives, you should realize just what it is you are a part of. You are, as Stuchbery has pointed out, part of a hate group.
Even if you aren’t personally harassing anyone, you are part of an online mob that is. And if you’re on 8chan’s /gg/ board, you’re on a board that is proving to be one of the central organizing hubs of this harassment.
Don’t worry about LOOKING bad. You ARE BAD.
If you have a decent bone left in your body, you need to do everything in your power to shut down this angry mob, end the harassment and threats and witchhunts, and bring an end to GamerGate.
I can’t imagine him getting fired, though.
“Mr. Stuchbery, I called you into my office because it seems you posted a controversial essay online. You argued that your students shouldn’t harass women and threaten them over video games.
Good for you!”
@Anarchronist: yep, I agree, can we please watch the ableism and bigotry?
Also, not sure if this one got posted here, but here is a piece from somebody who tried to analyze gamergate from an honest-to-goodness objective point of view. The whole thing is good, but my favorite line: “I’d argue that there isn’t really any such thing as GamerGate, because any given manifestation of it can be torn down as, again, No True GamerGate by anyone who disagrees with it. And who gets to decide what is and isn’t True GamerGate? You can’t say you want a decentralized, anonymous movement and then disown the ugly parts that inevitably pop up. Either everything is in, or everything is out.”
http://np.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2h36ue/another_poorlyresearched_hitpiece_from_the_boston/cldrqeu
I”m afraid the comments on Valenti’s piece went down the rabbit-hole in no time flat. Do Not Read the comments.
By now there must be a GG version of Lewis’s Law – the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism. I can’t English well enough to come up with anything equally pithy but someone surely will if they haven’t already done so.
The other night they harassed somebody who was already severely depressed. She tweeted out that she was feeling suicidal and at least one of them was egging her on. Apparently she came close to actually doing it, too, before somebody from a crisis center got to her. Her friends were tweeting at the gamergate hashtag to call them out and they were mostly saying variations of “can you show us evidence of a gamergater who was harassing her and egging her on? All I saw was tweets disagreeing with her political views” and suchlike.
I don’t even want to hear any more about this “both sides” stuff anymore. Hopefully whatever they’ve got coming to them involves law enforcement, multiple perp walks, and at least one lawsuit.
Did I just see “f*g?” Really?
These guys keep making themselves look worse every time they start up.
@Owl Cake
Thank you, that made me smile 🙂
I don’t if you haven’t watch this, but here’s Folding Ideas take on the issue. It’s very good: http://chezapocalypse.com/episodes/s4e7-gamergate/
I am sort of amused thinking about the school receiving emails from these fools about Ms. Mike, long tirades about thought control and what not. Ms. Mike? Why are all these people so confused about this teacher? Then they click on over to the open letter after reading a 10 page diatribe about thought control and laugh themselves silly.
Then I think about the fact that fucking Intel took these people seriously and I go back to being angry.
@Sarah – Day made while reading the Boston Globe thread to which you linked. From commenters Pobeda_nad_Sointsem and happening fish, this inspired flight of fancy in response to the username ShillbertandSullivan:
“He is the very model of a modern gaming journalist
He’s written many articles and frequents an internal list
Imagine’s he’s progressive but he’s practically paternalist
He is the very model of a modern major journalist”
#Gamergate isn’t a movement. It’s a tantrum. It’s only cohesive sentiment is “I’m angry that people see me as the bad guy.” It’s full of people who hate being called out on their casual or ingrained bigotry, abusive asshole behaviours, or raging ignorance. It’s full of people who think being guilt by association is a worse crime than the above behaviours. It’s a bunch of consumer sheep who don’t like their favourite games criticized at all, ever.
It’s the dam breaking on the fetid pond of forums and game communities where abuse, ignorance, arrogance and cruelty are left to fester, for fear of alienating paying customers with too much time, too much audience, not enough morals, and easy access to DDoS attacks.
The online chatter I’m seeing suggests some people think that the “moderates” are actually leaving gamergate (it is just a hashtag after all, and all that is necessary to “leave” it is to stop using it). Zoe Quinn’s boyfriend tweeted out a week or two ago that what they’re afraid of now is that if the “moderates” leave, as more and more bad pr against gamergate builds in the mainstream press, the ones who will be left are the ones who are the most extreme, the most emotionally invested, and the ones who are most likely to do irreparable harm. The whole situation becomes a powder keg that could spark and explode with far-reaching consequences.
Personally, I was just thinking the other night that this situation makes me think of a modern-day version of The Crucible. And very much like that situation, this thing may go on until one or more people die and/or somebody who is really important gets targeted (recall that the original witch hunt in Salem didn’t start to calm down until the wife of the then-governor was targeted).
I would imagine that if Gamergaters somehow did manage to get him fired, it would actually do far more to convince his students how awful Gamergate really is.
“Guys, did you hear the news? They fired Mr. Stuchbery! No, really! That hate group he blogged about, telling us about all of the harassment and professional sabotage they engage in? Yeah, they totally did it to him, so I guess he was right. What an awful group of people!”
Fortunately it would never happen. Gamergate is doubtless much smaller than those who oppose it. I believe that if his school received 500 emails asking for his dismissal, then they’d receive 5000 asking for his reinstatement if he were dismissed. The most the school would do is ask him to remove his blog or something.
“Guys, I urge you, if you see this stuff online, don’t join in. …
Don’t be a creep.
Embrace women in gaming.
”
VILE PROPAGANDA BURN THE WITCH GET HIM FIRED
@idle
“I may have spoken to fifty people but I hear the same ten talking points; the same Viv James anime avatar.”
Prettty sure about at leaset half those people are sockpuppets. Just saying. The planners of gamergate specifically told people to make loads and loads of sockpuppets to turn up the volume on the tag.
Insisting on calling a man a woman because he disagrees with you: The legit way of proving your hate movement is not about hating a particular gender.
Never calling myself a gamer again. Ever.
@Sarah: I found that interesting. FFS, if you’re* nervous because the moderates (i.e. people who never bought into the entire pitch your movement was selling) are leaving, you’re scared that people find out what your movement actually stands for as its core “values”.
I think your analogy with The Crucible is a good one too. While one witchhunt may fade away, the underlying reasons why the witchhunt occurred are still there, and witchhunting is likely to recur. Hopefully the fourth estate will be much quicker to locate and disseminate the facts the next time this occurs, because it will recur. And hopefully next time there won’t be the same numbers of people jumping onto the bandwagon.
* the ex-BF and anyone closely allied to him.
I know, these people have done more to make the term toxic than the articles about the word “gamer” being dead ever did! It’s a real disappointment because I would have liked to think I tried to discredit the stereotype by being someone who played games and also being a… I hesitate to use the word “normal”, but at least functional human being – but after this tantrum the term is broken beyond repair.
Not to oversimplify…But GG had it’s 15 min of “look at us”..now comes a slow downward spiral of probably increasingly desperate actions…and it will slowly vanish with whimper…or the 1% chance that that some crazed gator crosses the line…I’ll hold my faith in basic human decency close..reason has no meaning with them if it ever did anymore ..its a carnival of the truly desperate and the sadists now..
I would love to see the head teacher’s reaction if they reported him.
“So you’re saying a teacher, outside of the classroom, said men should treat women as equal?
“HOLY SHIT THAT’S TERRIBLE… Oh no wait, that’s what we expect them to do both in and out of the classroom, in line with our equality and diversity policy. Please stop wasting my time, I have a school to run.”
There’s also a remarkable amount of self aggrandising going on here- I understand this is a big thing in the Twittersphere but there’s a really good chance, and I hate to break to the GGers, that the head teacher might not have even heard of GamerGate and may not play games and actually may not give a shit about ethics in gaming journalism. Mind you neither do GamerGaters so I guess that’s something they’ve got in common…
Wow, this is like listening to call-in radio shows during the Rwandan Genocide.
To be honest, I was thinking about dropping the “gamer” identity but there are 2 issues with that:
1: The gamergate movement is vanishingly small. There are a lot of sockpuppets and a lot of shills designed and planned to make the movement bigger than it actually is. Every measure of the movements on twitter show the same thing: #gamergate is a small number making a big noise. It’s literally less than 500 people spamming the same talking points, just like all the right-wing commenters in online articles (who are usually paid for it)
2: While there are some truly disgusting aspects to hardcore gamer culture, Leigh Alexander was right – that culture is dying and dying fast. Why concede the term to the crazies when there are plenty of sane, rational people to call themselves gamers.
And as an addendum, remember – these so called gamers *hate* video games.
I don’t know how to format on wordpress or I’d pour so much formatting on that sentence for emphasis.
. I’ve spent (wasted) a lot of time on /v/ over the years though I hardly go on nowadays. They hate anything that’s not “gritty” or “manly” or “dark”. Remember when the Wii came out? Those people HATE the Wii despite it being one of the most successful consoles ever (and they hate Nintendo for not making the kind of games that pander to their wounded masculinity despite that everything they make is wildly popular). They hate most indie games. They hate most JRPGs because they tend to be cutesy and colorful instead of dark and edgy. They hate platformers. They hate visual novels (Katawa Shoujo was MADE BY 4CHAN and that group still hates it, and while KS may have some issues with it, that’s not why they hate it,)To the demographic that might sympathize with Gamergate, if you’re not shooting or stabbing something, it isn’t a game. Never mind hating feminism in gaming, they hate anything that’s not, for lack of a better term, masculinism.
This is OT, but have you seen this brilliant Clickhole article about Gamergate? http://www.clickhole.com/article/summary-gamergate-movement-we-will-immediately-cha-1241
(Clickhole is a Buzzfeed spoof run by the Onion in case you don’t know).
Also, Zoe Quinn is currently retweeting all the gators who think that the article is pro-GG right now. It’s pretty amazing. As she said “a movement easily outfoxed by Onion articles is the one last bastion of investigation and real objective facts in the games industry.”
Can we please just stop with the ableism? Please?
You
may beare part of a hate group if you have the Southern Poverty Law Center eyeing your crowd’s shenanigans. Never mind how bad it might make you look if you take to going after school teachers… if the SPLC has you as a blip on their radar, you’re definitely in a bad place.Uh, slurfest, much? Dafuq is going on here?