GamerGaters claim they’re on the side of truth and righteousness, but they sure do love monologuing like cartoon villains.
They claim to be shocked by alleged evidence of journalistic collusion, yet they happily plot strategies and “operations” together both in secret and in broad daylight. They claim to be about ethics, but regularly employ not-so-subtle subterfuge to try to disguise their carefully coordinated propaganda campaigns as spontaneous uprisings.
This week, GamerGaters on 8chan launched a new “operation” to win over the hearts and minds of the masses on Tumblr. And it’s as ethically bankrupt as anything they’ve ever done.
Operation Firefly, as it’s officially known, is an attempt to take the GamerGate “fight” to a “new frontier.” Tumblr. As the originator of the initiative explains it in a somewhat less-than-stirring manifesto:
In recent weeks the revolt has been getting bogged down in a stalemate. Useless drama and e-celebrity happenings are sidetracking us and sapping our strength. We’ve become demoralized and are losing momentum. …
Time for a new frontier, a new fight, a new chance to spread the truth.
Apparently, the GamerGaters are beginning to realize that their current strategy of being dicks to people on Twitter isn’t paying off quite as well as they had hoped.
While Twitter can be considered an important part of the movement, it is one of the worst places to focus our efforts. Too much time, energy, and attention is currently being wasted there. … The only things twitter is good for are out-of-context quips and angry outbursts.
Twitter is wearing us down, and it’s becoming a red herring/albatross around our neck. It’s time to use our limited resources where they will be more effective.
So they’re Tumblr-bound.
As a group we’ve done a horrible job at reaching out to others and spreading our message. That’s a problem. Instead of waiting for people to come to us, we need to go to them. That’s why we need to go to Tumblr. Going forward, only 25% of the people who are currently on Twitter should continue to post and debate there. 25% should redeploy to fight on Youtube and defend our home turf while the other 50% should go to Tumblr.
But isn’t Tumblr full of, you know, girls? Well, yes, but even this obstacle can be surmounted with some calculated pandering.
Most users on Tumblr are teenagers between 12 and 20, and most of them are girls. They are very interested in fandoms, anime, and other memes. … A good idea would be to use popular anime characters and pokemon to get the #Gamergate message out. Another idea would be to create crossover fanart with Vivian James in it.
That’s right: use an imaginary girl to win over the real girls. Just try to avoid being too logical, because, as everyone knows, girls don’t logic.
Tumblr enjoys appeals to emotion. While rational debate is important, make sure you are making it personal.
And remember to use GamerGate’s “female and minority” members as your shield! Oh, sorry, as your totally not a shield.
A major effort will be spent on pushing our female and minority voices to the forefront via #notyourshield. the goal is to discredit and debunk the narrative and shut it off at the source.
Operation Firefly doesn’t have to limit itself to the GamerGate hashtag on Tumblr. Go ahead and flood all discussions of vidya games with your propaganda. Just don’t make it too obvious, guys!
In order to be effective, you must also talk about Gamergate in other relevant hashtags, such as popular video game titles like “Mario”.
And make a bit point of pretending to be a victim. Sorry, not pretending. Authentically being a victim.
Tumblr is a different place than what you’re used to, so take time to lurk if you must. You are the victim in order to gain sympathy and support.
Remember to support your comrades!
Any time you see a pro-gg post, you need to follow the poster and reblog it in order to signal boost. This increases solidarity and cohesion. Build numbers and stay in contact with each other.
Just don’t lay it on too thick with your propagandizing, lest the Tumblrites catch on to the fact that you’re part of an invading propaganda army. Maybe reblog some kitten pics too.
It’s important to be a real person and not some faceless nobody. This means you should round out your blog by reblogging interesting content you like from other, non gamer-gate related things.
And try to lay off the scary skull imagery.
[T]umblr enjoys relatable and homely things. Consider when conveying your opinions to produce approachable and likeable art pieces. Look at the “art motivation” comics, high reblogged and non sexual fan art, cute stories and the like. …
Don’t be afraid to turn Vivian James into Hello Kitty or a pony.
When cynically setting up a throwaway blog to spread GamerGate propaganda, try to avoid looking too much like a GamerGater cynically setting up a throwaway blog to spread GamerGate propaganda.
[H]aving a profile say why you love video games, why you’re a decent person and concluding with “I am a person and I support gamergate” will show you’re human. … If you are making a new account, don’t choose a name that has anything to do with video games or gg.
Yeah, the “Tumblrinas” will never be able to figure out what’s going on.
Oh, and do your best to not make it too obvious what a hateful dickweasel you really are.
[T]alking like a cunt can be really fucking hostile even if it sharply nails the point. I get some of you guys enjoy the shitslinging language and the fuckyouisms of the prominent youtuber, but it’s not inviting. That’s not to say you have to read like a Disney script, but the language you use will be one of the deciding factors in who you appeal to.
Sounds like a foolproof plan!
On 8chan, some of the regulars put forth suggestions of their own.
CUTE KITTENS ASSEMBLE!
Meanwhile, another 8chan anon tried to convince the GamerGate invaders to ix-nay the ane-Bay memes, at least on Tumblr.
So, y’know how Bane is basically the mascot of GamerGate in the chan community? He’s a good fit: A brutal revolutionary and since he’s a Christopher Nolan character, he’s automatically a man’s man, which for some reason appeals to a community defined by their love of a sedentary hobby. …
Bane will not work on tumblr. He’s a bad guy. He’s all big and beefy and while some subset of tumblr’s mostly female audience will like him, most prefer dexterous pretty boys (hence the neverending love for Benedict Cumberpatch and David Tennant).
So what can GamerGaters do to get around the Bane ban?
[O]ur tumblr mascot needs to be Katniss. She’s in an upcoming movie which means even tumblrites with extremely short attention spans know about her. She’s a revolutionary fighting against a corrupt government. She’s a teenage girl which makes her easier for the average tumblrite to associate with her. On tumblr, GG is Katniss.
Uh oh, nobody tell Vivian James she’s got some competition.
So how is the invasion going? Well, if you go to the GamerGate tag on Tumblr, you will indeed see a bunch of GamerGate spam in it.
So by GameGate standards, I guess they are WINNING.
Cyberwulf, what M. said, thanks.
They can’t win this fight because technically, it’s not a fight. In order for there to be a fight, you need two sides. If there’s only one person in the altercation throwing punches, there’s different names for that.
Assault
Bullying
I guess in their minds, it becomes a fight when the people they are harassing and threatening try to defend themselves. Because “anti-GG” is as much of a well-defined and organized movement as GG, you know…
“There’s been harassment on both sides! But mostly anti-GG because the GGers who are harassing people aren’t really GG because I don’t agree with it and I’m GG!”
I just saw a pro-GG pic on tumblr of their mascot Vivien saying “Shut the fuck up and play video games”. One have to wonder why the gators don’t take their own advice.
Anyway, being told to shut the fuck up won’t appeal to tumblr teens.
Alais:
omg, BANE IS A WHITE KNIGHT. Like a literal died-defending-a-woman-because-he-wanted-her-love-and-validation white knight. And it makes sense that his nemesis is, of course, The Dark Knight.
Reason #456 why #GamerGate is urgent need of a critical media analysis class.
“…make sure you are making it personal.”
If I were them, I wouldn’t worry about that part, because it looks like they’ve already got it handled.
Bane fits #Gamergate perfectly because his revolutionary rhetoric is a cover for his real agenda of destroying Gotham’s society, and because his discourse might sound like social justice for the same kind of people who believe in shit like “the politics of envy”.
*bwaha*
Lawd, yes.
Related: this comment—and its excerpted “signal boost” on Twitter have been bugging the hell out of me since I read it yesterday:
https://twitter.com/Waye_Farer/status/530787004209197056
Annoying in part because it implies that an anecdote about a feminist-leaning student in an undergrad theory class can be extrapolated to feminism on the whole, when a single contrary anecdote is all that’s necessary to prove the fallacy of that supposition.
Further annoying for the “on fucking point” retweets its gotten because I have to infer that none of those folks seem to understand that modern critical theory is all about conversation and tension between differences in interpretation, and that sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears to drown out other perspectives is a kindergarten tactic (and precisely what they seem to be accusing their opposition of doing).
Mostly annoying because I’d bet my last dollar that 99% of ‘gaters don’t know Derrida from DeLorean, and couldn’t possibly grok how the average Vivian James meme provides an easy object lesson in deconstruction.
Free Vivian James!
Harlan: I thought #readergate was satire of gamergate, and so that little piece on blinkered feminist criticism was meant to be mocking the kind of stuff GGers come out with…
Correct me if I’m wrong.
@tinyorc
God, no. Think of their poor professors. Seriously, I remember a guy at a party who told me he actually decided to do Gender Studies because he wanted to show those stupid feminists. He was really proud of spending his university education basically being obnoxious in courses instead of, you know, learning something.
@Harlan
I’m pretty sure the comment is fake. Lacan and Derrida are much more important for gender studies than Horkheimer or the Frankfurt School in general. Actually, few people read Horkheimer at all anymore (it’s usually Adorno), but the name is often used as a dogwhistle for neoconservatives, MRAs and people from the new right.
@Harlan
I’d consider it annoying because it seems like the guy’s main point of the story is that feminists are incapable of criticizing anything from a non-gender perspective. Needless to say, identifying as a feminist doesn’t mean you refuse to engage in any critical thinking beyond gender dynamics. Most feminists I know don’t spend 24/7 talking about gender dynamics, so I don’t really see his point.
His story doesn’t really convince me that criticizing games from a social perspective is a bad thing, either. It just tells me he has students who care a lot about feminist/marxist perspectives. Even if you can criticize games without the social perspective, why should we stop criticizing the underrepresentation of women and minorities in games? He hasn’t justified why we shouldn’t, he’s just said “it’s possible to do”, so I don’t even see why gators are supporting his rant.
On top of that, what’s wrong with people who criticize games purely from a feminist perspective, so long as their points are reasonable? It’s not an ideal approach for some college courses, but if his student wanted to go into that specific area in the future then I don’t see the problem.
@Harlan – yeah, that comment smells strongly of bullshit to me, mainly because of the scare quotes around “social critique, but also because who gives “tests” on deconstruction? I did my English Lit degree at a fairly prestigious university, and we didn’t have class tests, we wrote essays. And more essays. And yet more essays. Tests are a really rubbish way to assess critical thinking ability. I took my last exam ever in my second year on university.
Also, this feminist has a first class honours degree in a large part due to my final dissertation, which used Derrida’s theories to explore the uncanny in House of Leaves. I don’t think I mentioned gender once. One feminist in one class who keeps bringing things back to gender representation is not actually an indictment of all social critique ever.
#readergate is satire, yes, but the comment on the article doesn’t rad as satire to me. Whether or not it’s sincere, it’s been appropriated as such by those who’ve retweeted-—I checked out a few of the individual profiles that did so and they’re full of #gg & anti-SJW twaddle.
Yes to the predominance of essays, but I do know lit profs who use testing, particularly in first- and second-year coursework. Tests don’t get a ton of rubric weight, and the tests typically incorporate essay questions as well, but as a quick-and-dirty method to discover whether or not students have been paying *any* attention and can tell the difference between structuralism and reader-response theory, testing is not invalid.
The fact the the TA’s claims are about test grading actually lend it some credence…from my POV, anyway. Grading objective short answer/multiple choice/true-false stuff can be left to TAs, while the profs I know tend to take on essay grading themselves.
Oh, I would *love* to see them try to take over Mario. Social Justice Wario anyone? 😛
Oh, and I predict Katniss/Vivian James art. T-minus-way-too-soon.
@Macha “So is it really slowing down?”
Bookmark this page:
http://topsy.com/analytics?q1=notyourshield&q2=gamergate&q3=yolo&via=Topsy
NotYourShield is less generating less than 60 tweets a day, which includes anti-GGers.
GamerGate is more popular at 10,000 posts a day, but most days the number one post is anti-GGer
I included YOLO simply to mock GGers. If your tag can’t rise above a three-year old overplayed hashtag, then it isn’t a movement.
That actually makes me suspect that on some level (where they’ve presumably cordoned off their self-awareness) they must know that their “cause” is bullshit and nobody would support them if it was presented honestly. People working for actual causes don’t have to trick people into supporting them.
Only a group of dudes already convinced that women and girls are idiots could assume that the young women and girls on Tumblr don’t already know about gamergate and already have opinions about it. I think it’s that belief that women are simple creatures who have a Pavlovian response to pretty manga boys/Benedict Cumberbatch/kittens and no higher-level intellectual functioning that leads them to believe that they can pretend to be women and get away with it. It never works, though, and there’s no way they’re going to be able to keep their urge to be creepy and sexually inappropriate in check on a site as full of teenage girls as Tumblr. It’ll be 3 posts of reblogged kitten GIFS and then an entire page of violently misogynistic porn and rants about bitches not dating them.
Also, if they actually try to post crap using Katniss as a rallying point what’s going to happen is that they’ll get lectured about appropriation by the few people who don’t ignore them. The language of Tumblr, they don’t speak it, not even on the most basic phrasebook that you take on holiday for a week so you can ask where the bathroom is level.
This thread is atomic level schadenfreude.
So they’re still thinking in computer game terms. But how does each player know which 25% they’re in, without any kind of centralized list of participants? Are they going to sort themselves based on star signs?
Harlan:
I have literally never encountered this and it seems very odd to me, but fair enough!
@C.S.Strowbridge
Thank you! Wow, the top tweets in #gamergate aren’t even pro-gamergate.
Some further comparison can be had from two Thunderclap campaigns. Thunderclap is a service that lets people tweet pre-written messages and measures “reach” through it (presumably a combination of retweets, favorites, and subscriber counts of participants).
The first one on October 9 had 3715 participants “reaching” 1,779,484 people. A follow-up on November 6th had 713 participants “reaching” 231,773 people. I’m sure arguments could be made about novelty or whatever, but having under 20% of the participants and “reaching” only 13% of the people is a pretty clear sign of stagnation at best.
That said, I don’t think GamerGate will ever “end” in truly conclusive terms. Popular 4chan ops linger on forever like a chronic illness. (There are still people stalking BitingBeaver over seven years later under the exact same pretense of “liberating her kid” despite him being 20-21 now.) Instead, GamerGate will just become so small, powerless, and unpopular that outside of their forums, they’ll only live on as an occasional joke.
That scene was not very well done, but the blue flash was because the CyberBrigadier shot her.
Thinking about it afterwards, the whole episode feels a little like a pale imitation of The Sound of Drums. The basic premise is pretty similar (The Master tries to convert humanity into a universe-conquering army, mostly to hurt The Doctor), but I felt like the Toclafane were much more sinister than Missy’s dead Cybermen things. The story seemed more coherent overall too.
@C.S. Strowbridge
You left out the hashtags in your Topsy search. The numbers for #gamergate and #notyourshield are much higher with the hashtag, although there are more “yolo” than #yolo tweets.
http://topsy.com/analytics?q1=%23notyourshield&q2=%23gamergate&q3=%23StopGamerGate2014&via=Topsy
That link compares #notyourshield, #gamergate, and the #StopGamerGate2014 anti- hashtag. #GamerGate is not in any danger of dying, but AFAICT it’s mostly a bunch of old memes recycling themselves and anti-GG people mocking the worst of them.