Today, the most pretentious, and also probably the most ridiculous GamerGate video I’ve seen so far.
Over black-and-white footage of assorted video game shooters, the YouTuber who calls himself PowerIndustry tries to provide a bit of inspiration to his comrades in the virtual trenches who have chosen, as he puts it, to “stand and fight.”
For those who can’t make it through the whole nine minutes– and there may be more than a few of you – here’s Mr. PI’s basic argument.
Be warned: his sentences can get a little long and convoluted and at times he doesn’t seem to know what the words he’s using actually mean. Roll with it.
He starts off with a description of GamerGate that might strike you just as a teensy bit overwrought.
This is a war. A war of the dialectics. A battle not just for the culture of gaming, for ethics in journalism, but perhaps the final battle of logic and reason in the modern Western world. Gawker, Kotaku and all the other political hacks know that they will have to break us and this movement, for if they do, with the most powerful medium at their disposal, they will be able to broadcast and control all intellectual ideas and messages for their corrupt and vile ideology, and video games, along with all mediums and media, will sink into a dark age not since seen or heard of, made only perhaps more sinister by the pollution of the pseudo-intellectualism that may very well dominate all it touches for generations.
Yes, that second sentence there was 92 words long.
But if we hold strong upon this war, if we endure upon the hit pieces and lies and fight back, if we remain sovereign and strong and respond with a resonating and sustaining yell of “no, not one step further” then not only will they be driven back to the idiological darkness from which they came but a new dawn shall shine its light back upon reason, back upon truth and honor. And not only will ethics return to journalism but the cultural Marxists who seek only to control and oppress those they pretend to speak for will find themselves for the first time in ten years on the defensive and the war taken to their front.
He goes on in this vein for some time, before finishing up with what he intends to be a rousing pep talk.
To you weary, who wonder now as I drivel on as I always have, wonder whether you will have the strength to continue, or if our battle has been in vain, and that soon GamerGate may plunge into darkness I say to you this: Do not despair. The shield of deception and lies has never once stopped even the weakest parry of the sword of truth, for it is truth that has driven back the darkness from the primordial age, it has turned huts to nations and nations to civilizations, it has pumped electricity into your home and put the sun at the center of the solar system, it has brought the world closer to becoming the sons of gods we were meant to be, [?] apes that we but a few million years ago closely resembled. …
Truth will prevail, as long as there are men who are willing to carry the light.
In his mind, the evil enemies of truth and gaming have
made a fatal miscalculation.
They have forgotten that we are gamers. That we on a daily basis fight and die a thousand deaths in a humiliating and ego-shattering fashion for perhaps a single taste of glory.
Or perhaps just a taste of Mountain Dew.
We are a breed that will fight a thousand wars for a chance of a single victory. … We will not stop fighting until the final boss falls at our feet.
He continues on with more of this “never surrender” nonsense, but I think you’ve probably gotten the gist of it. And I find myself too annoyed to keep transcribing.
Why? Because, Mr. PowerIndustry, YOU ARE NOT FIGHTING BATTLES, You ARE NOT FIGHTING WARS. You’re NOT SWINGING A SWORD OF TRUTH.
You are SITTING ON YOUR ASS PLAYING VIDEO GAMES.
You’re not defending TRUTH and REASON from the evil cultural Marxist Gawkerites. You’re HAVING A COLLECTIVE TANTRUM BECAUSE SOME VIDEO GAME JOURNALISTS CALLED YOU A BUNCH OF BABIES.
Which, by the way, YOU ARE.
Look , I enjoy video games too, including Call of Duty and other first person shooters.
But fucking hell, dudes, VIDEO GAMES ARE NOT REAL LIFE. REAL LIFE IS NOT A VIDEO GAME.
There are no “millions of gaming dead.” They’re PIXELS ON A SCREEN.
Your “movement” for “Truth” and “Reason” started off as a harassment campaign aimed at a female game developer. And at its heart it remains a harassment campaign today, albeit one with a somewhat wider range of targets and some nobler-sounding rhetoric.
Which often ends up sounding as ridiculous as this risibly bombastic little video does.
But the REAL problem with this video isn’t just that it’s ridiculous; that’s pretty much the only thing that makes it watchable.
No, the real problem is that it’s fundamentally dishonest as well. Its vague and pompous rhetoric is designed to hide what GamerGaters are actually doing in this “war” of theirs – that is, trying to ruin the lives and livelihoods of game writers (and critics and developers) who’ve gotten bored with hackneyed sexist tropes and endless Call of Duty sequels and who’ve dared to say so publicly.
In his famous essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell tried to figure out just what made so much political writing so very bad. “As soon as certain topics are raised,” he noted,
the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.
That of course is a perfect description of the rhetoric in PowerIndustry’s little video.
Orwell realized that this kind of bad writing didn’t just stem from a lack of imagination. No, he argued, political language sinks into clichés and vague writing generally because, in so many cases, political writers are trying to obscure the ugly realities of politics with pretty rhetoric.
In our time [he was writing in 1946], political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. …Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. … Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
Obviously GamerGaters aren’t razing villages or throwing peasants off of their farms. But they are harassing and in some cases terrorising their chosen enemies in the name of “Truth” and “Reason” and “Ethics.
And while few pieces of GamerGate are quite as ridiculously bombastic and overblown as “For Those Who Stand and Fight,” much if not most of GamerGate rhetoric is as fundamentally dishonest in its attempts, as Orwell would put it, to defend the indefensible.
Most of us outside of GamerGate can see this propaganda for what it is. Which is perhaps why so much GamerGate propaganda – including this video – is intended primarily for internal consumption, as a way to shore up the flagging spirits of new activists and convince them what they are doing is a noble thing.
The best way for us to fight rhetoric like the rhetoric in this video isn’t with detailed rebuttals but with laughter.
So mock on, comrades, we have a culture war to win! With your help, and a little luck, we can defeat GamerGate and plunge western civilization into a new dark age just in time for Christmas.
Can any posters with a hard science background explain how the sword of truth pumps electricity into our homes? I was a humanities major and that wasn’t covered in any of the intro science courses I was required to take in college. Thanks in advance.
And I thought I was long-winded and had a tendency towards super-long sentences with a bunch of off-shooting clauses and connected thoughts, but I’m not nearly to monologuing super-villain level yet.
Well… that sounds terrifying. Hey, didn’t the dude who made the Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian game (also a prominent member of GG, no surprise) turn out to have a whole Deviant Art account full of pornographic Sonic the Hedgehog fan art? Maybe there’s a very strange underlying theme with these folks…
That was the funniest screed I’ve read in ages! The pomposity, the over-the-top self-righteousness, the seriousness . . . all in defending playing video games. FFS.
“We struck down evil with the mighty sword of teamwork and the hammer of not bickering!”
(Also, a “parry” is a defensive move, not an offensive move. I couldn’t make sense out of that sentence. Either the sword is attacking, in which case not a parry, or the shield is attacking, in which case lolwut?)
@davidgerard
That /r/bitcoin thread is hilarious. GG’s can’t help but reveal how desperate they are.
Also: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2lsauj/rbitcoin_and_rkotakuinaction_have_a_lot_more_in/clxxpk6 Apparently GG’s NOT about ethics in game journalism. lolwhut?
Oh god I actually saw a piece of writing similar to this when I searched gamergate on deviantArt the other day. It was really dramatic and completely nonsensical.
http://www.deviantart.com/art/The-Battle-of-Gamergate-480297783
Here’s the link if you need a good laugh. I almost thought they were mocking gamergate because of how grandiose and over the top it was.
In the description they compare the “Zoe slept with five guys” thing to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that started WWI. No, really.
Everyone noticed that this person is confused about how reality and video games are not at all the same as far as danger is concerned.
But on top of that, there’s a layer of thinking great fictional speeches have the right character for describing reality. They see that whole “vanguard against evil forces” thing as what’s actually going on here. The notion of a conflict not lawful evil versus chaotic good is too complex for them.
They would not be welcome at my RPG night, because that attitude, even in fantastic fiction, is too shallow.
Gentlemen… I lastet 2 point 16 minutes. Do they actually think this is a real war?! Have they ever seen, heard or even read about real war?! Are we absolutely sure this is not The Most Brilliant Satire of All Time?! *gobbsmacked*
@Lids:
And then they declare that the assassination was a “simple thing.” O_O
And holy moley is that story bad. I can barely read it… Whole worlds are being smooshed together in the most ham-fisted-way possible, with absurd names for their enemies, “Socialius Justicia” and the great beast “Medius.”
Such diverse. So acceptance. Wow. And I love that we SJWs get “hammers and other weapons” after a couple paragraphs detailing how the gamergators get various pokemon, final-fantasy weapons and airships, “dragons all the way from Skyrim,” and Plants Vs Zombies plants.
I’m trying to decide if this is better or worse fanfic than “My Immortal.” Or rather, more importantly, I’m trying to decide if this is more or less entertaining. It’s definitely harder to read, as my eyes keep rolling at every sentence.
I’m still AMAZED that someone hasn’t invented a “GamerGate” game. Seriously.
The earth is getting invaded by SJWs from the planet Tumbler. A band of WCHM Gamers is the world’s only hope. They must destroy Sarkeesian, the dictator of the SJWs. To get to her they must fight their way through a series of gates guarded by level bosses.
It couldn’t be that hard to whip up a little arcade scroller for this.
The SJWs are represented by little cutie avatars and the sound of them firing their weapons is a shrill female voice saying things like “Misogynist”, “Neckbeard”, “Go back to your basement”, etc. The level bosses are things like a large burger & fries, a McIntosh apple, etc.
@libarbarian – you’re after Zombie Bukkake. http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Zombie_Bukkake (NSFW!)
Oy, that was painful. PowerIndustry is himself a good example of “pollution of the pseudo-intellectualism.”
Actually, it’s about ethics in pickled beet journalism:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2lsauj/rbitcoin_and_rkotakuinaction_have_a_lot_more_in/cly6gp0
@libarbarian:
“I’m still AMAZED that someone hasn’t invented a “GamerGate” game.”
First, LOL — you have the gist of it nailed. Second, therein lies your grand multimillion $$ opportunity. 🙂
I must say, this is a wonderfully tasteful video given that 2014 is the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. Screaming epithets on Twitter while everyone laughs at you is very comparable to fighting in the trenches.
But surely they can chalk THIS up as a win for their side of the ‘culture war’:
http://mashable.com/2014/11/08/doritos-mountain-dew-dewitos/
@davidgerard
Hehehehe, this is awesome. I love this comment:
This one by the OP is also very interesting:
Man, there are so few games in which you can actually die and keep on playing – Soul Reaver, Planescape, Cosmology of Kyoto… but in the majority of games, being killed simply means that you’re being set back a few steps.
@M. the Social Justice Ranger
I’m betting that they’d identify more with the Stormcloaks. After all, they’re “fighting censorship” while being generally awful.
Not that I actually think players who choose the Stormcloaks are like this, but they *do* fit better…
😉
Self-awareness dawns?
Oops, spoke too soon.
This is both hilarious in it’s complete cheesiness and absolutely terrifying in that they are apparently being serious.
@Aunt Edna and libarbarian: Not only that, but seeing how they are against reading for deeper meanings in games one could easily make the whole game into a big satire and mockery of the whole thing and they wouldn’t even notice if done right (and probably deny it if someone from outside of their circle played it and figured it out). Could be pretty funny
“For the lulz” is just a nerdier version of ‘just kidding’. It’s meant to be used as a shield if someone calls you on your bullshit, even though it is blatantly obvious to anyone who spends two seconds thinking about it that using racism and misogyny as the crux of your ‘joke’ is still an inherently racist, misogynistic thing to do.
I sometimes see commentators with GamerGate sympathies attempt to argue that this isn’t a squabble between left and right wing ideologies but “left-authoritarian” feminists and “left-libertarian” gamers. It’s only the reactionary right that stoops to throwing “cultural Marxist” accusations.