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.
@liberbarbarian
My son would be one of those guys, 32, working 70 hours a week for now, human kind of person leaning left. But what I don’t think is the obvious response is “fuck them”. Its not all or nothing for him. I don’t think you have to be an activist either way to have empathy and that’s what pisses me off about GGs and MRAs, its all fuck you, all the time.
It’s cute that Christopher Allman can’t even spam well. There isn’t even a link to his blog. He just told us what it’s called.
@libarbarian:
The only reason that “regular old white-cis-hetero-guy” would be made to feel guilty about something is if the “normal shit” they do does in fact support the system. That “normal shit” is not always benign, yet one’s privilege is what blinds one to the harm that “normal shit” can cause.
In an oppressive system, “normal” can (but not always) be oppressive. That’s kinda the point.
The idea that one should simply feel guilt for being part of a privileged group is asinine propaganda spread by people who don’t actually want to examine how privilege works and just want to stay nice and safe in their little bubble. Guilt only comes into play once you become aware of how your actions contribute to culture and you still choose to support oppression because, to you, it’s “normal shit.”
@cassandrakitty:
“It’s all fun and games until I could possibly get hurt through some convoluted conspiracy.”
Um, no. We say that even if you don’t actively participate in oppression, if you are a member of a privileged you benefit from that system of oppression. Nobody says that means you should feel guilty for being born white or male or whatever. What it means is that you should be aware of what your privilege gets you and aware of how lack of privilege hurts others.
The “guilty” part is something that people who are defensive just make up. It’s a deflection meant to avoid having to acknowledge systems of oppression.
And these are the people totalbiscuit is courting, sigh… Wish I had never listened to the guy’s stuff.
But then I don’t count as a gamer anyway, I didn’t play real games, just finished Grimrock 2. But that doesn’t count, no muscly Space Marines, too much thinking involved.
@notallman
“Balance” and “not fueling the gender war” would involve not spewing vile, misogynistic propaganda.
Try it. It won’t make you explode.
@libarbarian
I certainly can’t speak for everyone, especially not those in the US, but from my experience in the radical left: no. Guilt is very different from responsibility. If your privilege depends on the discrimination of other groups and persons, you are not guilty, but you bear some responsibility, again not for the system as a whole, but at the very least to recognize that you are privileged. That is what activists acknowledge. Also, they would not demand that people become activists like them, and although there are factions who ask that people do not exercise their privilege (which I and others criticize), they don’t shame people into doing so. They ask for solidarity.
My grandfather went to both WW1 and WW2. Strangely enough, he claimed never to have been scared during WW1, despite three hospitalisations for bullet and/or shrapnel wounds. But when I think of fearing for your life, I think of him in his WW2 POW camp, He wasn’t one of those who tried to dig their way out or to listen to those prohibited BBC broadcasts. He was the one who stayed outside the doors of the rooms where such things were going on, eternally washing his already cleaner than clean socks, keeping watch for approaching guards. His legacy from war? Absolutely obsessed with food and mealtimes. He couldn’t bear being hungry. He couldn’t bear the thought of children being hungry. He got extremely agitated when babies were newborn and their crying indicated to him, every single time, that the baby was starving.
As for my dad and WW2. Every night of the 20+ years I spent in that household, anyone who woke would here him moaning through his nightmares.
Some who went to war gave up their lives. All who went gave up their youth.
Pffft. … hear him moaning
@Macha
you finished Grimrock 2? I’m pretty sure that’s much harder than shootyshootymachobangbang-of-Duty. I’ve started to play two weeks ago, together with my partner, but we’re stuck at the hamlet with all those trolls. Our party is too weak. I think we need to go back to the cemetery first, level up and get better gear.
If I may add to Futrelle drawing from political authors, I was reading Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony And Survival. Chomsky writes how when American politicians want to subdue a country they crank the fear up to eleven, portraying its leader as the most vile, Axis of Evil monster who ever lived.* The politicians then tout bombastic rhetoric about freedom, American values, and bringing democracy to the people… while they bomb them.
Like what Futrelle said, GGs aren’t greedy and deceitful politicians, but they sure use the same tactics as they do. Even more sadly they completely buy into their fear mongering and scapegoating.
*The Axis of Evil monster embodies and is in league with some vague horrible Lovecraftian monster that will steal your children and destroy everything you hold dear. Since WWII it was communism. Now it is terrorists. With GGers it is the evil cultural Marxist SJWs.
That bitcoin thread (threads, by now) is almost as much fun as here. The mook shows up, blathers, locals bat the chew toy around, he comes back for more.
Libarbarian – to echo previous responses, no. Just no. That is not how it works.
Christopher Trollman – you are cute. Come back so we can bat you around a little.
More threads of the bitcoin folks batting the gamergate chew toy around? Links please!
@Macha
Wait, Totalbiscuit supports GG? Last I checked he seemed to be on the fence, but I must admit I haven’t watched any of his stuff lately. I know he did mention that harassing Zoe Quinn wasn’t the way to solve ethical problems in journalism.
Then again, being on the fence between “a group that harasses women under the guise of ethics” and “a group that opposes those who harass women under the guise of ethics” isn’t exactly a positive. Not that everyone has to be anti-GG (I don’t really consider myself anti-anything, so there’s that), but it seems like most should be leaning far far away from the majority of their beliefs/actions at the very least. It’s not like being against corruption in journalism means you have to be pro-GG, either.
I’m actually wondering why TB would support gators at all when they’re using ethics as a cover for their horrible actions. He seems like the type who’d care about actual corruption in the industry. But again, I haven’t seen any of his recent videos, so I can’t speak on the matter.
Part of my brain remains baffled by these dudes, in that “this is the hill you’re going to die on?” way. But I guess that’s the curse of seeing, you know, reality.
Their language suggests they see the entire rest of the media landscape as already irretrievably corrupted by “diversity” and games are the only “pure” space left. They’re willfully ignoring that the actual levels of diversity in most (US) media are piss poor and generally some form of tokenism, and that there have been token attempts are diversifying video games already. So if that’s their position, they’ve already lost.
It’s no wonder these dudebros are finding common cause with white supremacists and Republicans (but I repeat myself).
Gamergate is obviously just the continuation of the culture war and the attack on (what is perceived as by the cultural left, anyways) as a haven for white, Western heteronormative males. They don’t call us reactionaries for nothing. The growing reaction to this “progress” is rejection.
Wow, just looked at the bitcoin thread. This comment by the op really takes the cake:
It’s about ethics in games journalism, where “ethics” is writing whatever the audience wants to hear. Tom Brokaw weeps. If there’s one thing we learned from the current political climate in the US, it’s that adding more money makes things more objective.
@Mezza:
I only heard offhand that TotalBiscuit threw his hat in the ring with GamerGate, but if The Battle of Gameraget is to be believed, then he’s a supporter.
You know, they could just do that, hire some hack to write reviews of their favorite games, and leave the rest of the gaming media to do its thing. Pretty sure nobody else would have an issue with this. Get thee to Kickstarter, angry gamebros!
@kirbywarp
I find it funny how they can argue that when they have such an overlap with the ‘I GOT BANNED FROM A WEBSITE, CENSORSHIP!’ crowd. Apparently it’s fine for them to bully journalists into only saying what they want to hear, but don’t you dare tell them harassing women on forums isn’t acceptable or you’re taking away their right to free speech.
Also, I think he means “Journalists write about what AAA game developers want them to write, or they risk going out of business.” No, wait, my bad, that would require him to actually know something about how video game journalism works and why it’s a bad system.
I’ve just registered angrygamebros.com, but I’ll let them have it for cheap
@kirbywarp (about the TB thing this time)
That’s a shame. I guess I’m not shocked, though I can’t explain why it doesn’t shock me.
I did notice he posted a link on Twitter to a video talking about women in video games – I think it was a different person talking about it, I’m not sure if it was on his channel – but now I’m scared to click it in case it’s half an hour of “there’s issues with women in games BUUUUUT it’s totally not that bad and feminists/women/minorities should stop talking about it so much” trite. I know I should be more open to debate, but I’ve heard enough of that line of thought with all the GG stuff going on.
I wouldn’t really classifying listening to someone read aloud their fanfiction about that time when they went to battle and fought feminist orcs with Vivian James as “debate”.
Mezza:
“Both sides do it” is a very effective tool for rationalizing your desire to rise above it all and “stay out of the muck.” The best part is, it doesn’t even have to be true!
@Mezza:
Apparently he also retweeted this image, which is basically just the whole “#gamergate is totally about ethics in games journalism, we don’t support harassment or misogyny at all, you guise!”
He also wrote this, which attempts to strike a tone of neutrality but every hypothetical is basically “if what gamergate says is true then…” He seems to be aware that of real problems in the actual industry, but seems to have been suckered in to thinking that gamergate was as well (despite being acutely aware of 4chan’s influence and reputation).
I’ve only really heard negative things in the past about him in connection with the Yogscast, but I have no idea what kind of person he is. From his written thingy, though, it seems like he’s basically apathetic to the situation yet just goes with the gamergate propaganda machine.