By David Futrelle
I recently appeared on the Australian radio show Stop Everything to talk about the poisonous legacy of Gamergate. (You can listen to the archived episode here.) So I thought I would expand a little on some of the notes I made for myself before doing the show, and get into a little more detail on some issues I wasn’t able to talk about during the show itself.
It’s been five years since the supposed movement for “ethics in gaming journalism” began in the form of a harassment campaign against game developer Zoe Quinn. The movement, such as it was, faded out some time ago. But its unfortunate legacies live on.
So how did Gamergate poison online discourse? Let me count (some of) the ways.
One: It turned political and cultural warfare into a game.
You may remember the infamous — and much mocked — copypasta that made its way around the internet in the days of Gamergate.
They targeted gamers.
Gamers.
We’re a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. …
These people … think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We’ve been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. …
Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature … this is just another boss fight.
Like most people who read this overblown rant at the time– and this is a drastically shortened version — I laughed. But it turns out that people who treat cultural warfare as a game to grind away at turn out to be remarkably … persistent adversaries. Something to (sadly) keep in mind the next time you’re swarmed by sockpuppets on Twitter.
Two: Gamergate weaponized lying and bad-faith arguments, helping prepare the way for our current, and seemingly endless, “post-truth information warfare,” to borrow a phrase from New Yotk Times writer Charlie Warzel.
As Warzel points out in his recent overview of Gamergate and its legacy, the movement began with a lie — with easily disproven allegations that Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist to get a good review for one of her games. (The guy in question never reviewed her game.) And it thrived by portraying itself, dishonestly, as some sort of campaign for “ethics in gaming journalism,” when in fact it was little more than a harassment campaign writ large, an online lynch mob with memes.
Three: it helped to further blur the line between politics and harassment.
While Gamergate, in theory, was a crusade to improve game journalism ethics and, more broadly, to rid the game world of the allegedly sinister influence of so-called Social Justice Warriors, in practice it was a harassment campaign aimed mostly at a small number of women who had offended self-described Gamers in various ways.
Obviously, Gamergate didn’t invent the online pileon, or smear campaigns in general, but it did make these strategies central to a certain kind of reactionary cultural politics. It’s a small step from attacking Zoe Quinn for her alleged Crimes Against Gaming to attacking Brie Larson for her cultural crime of portraying a comic book superhero while female.
And you can see the legacies of Gamergate clearly in the online, er, actvism of reactionary disinformation warriors like Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec who have launched sometimes remarkably successful smear campaigns against political foes ranging from Hillary Clinton to John Podesta. It’s hard to imagine Pizzagate and QAnon taking off as they have without Gamergate.
Four: It weaponized white male nostalgia for a past that never was.
Gamergaters regularly hearkened back to what they saw as a lost utopia – the days when gaming was allegedly a “safe space” for (mostly white) male geeks ostracized by the larger society. Never mind that girls and women (and people of color) have always been a large part of the gaming world. Never mind that putting playable female characters in some video games is hardly a threat to any male gamer (and one of the most pathetic things for grown men to become exercised over).
Five: It created a new and potentially lucrative career path for right-wing ideologues and grifters.
Who could have predicted that a weird, fringe movement as Gamergate could make so many media careers? Well, Milo Yiannopoulos, for one, and a whole host of rising YouTube stars like Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin. These new “harassment influencers” — to borrow the language of Syracuse researcher Whitney Phillips — lived lavishly on the Gamergate dole, and helped to inspire a new generation of right-wing grifters. Gamergate also helped to revitalize the flagging career of old-school ideological hacks like think-tanker Christina Hoff Sommers, who reinvented herself as the not-quite-hip-but-trying “Based Mom.”
Six: It opened the door for fascism.
In 1995, writer Umberto Eco sketched out what he saw as the essential characteristics of “Eternal Fascism.” Gamergate ticked off almost every box on Eco’s 14-point list. It was at the very least a fascist movement in embryo.
Like the original fascists, Gamergaters were driven by personal and social frustrations. They were obsessed with what Eco called “the cult of tradition” (in this case, white male nostalgia); with the “fear of difference” (in this case especially the feat of the female other); “with “the rejection of modernism (or in this case postmodernism); with the notion of “life as permanent warfare” (“they targeted gamers”).
Gamergaters worshiped “action for action’s sake.” They were forever in motion, constantly on the lookout for things to be ostentatiously offended by. They were obsessed with conspiracies, and in retrospect it seems all too obvious that they were primed to go from imagining games journalist plots to embracing outright antisemitism and the mythical notion of a Jewish scheme to lead the west into “degeneracy” through so-called “Cultural Marxism.”
I could keep going, but you get the point: Gamergate was, in its very essence, a deeply fascistic movement. It helped to bring about the revival of fascism in American and world politics today, and gave the new fascists many helpful techniques to use in promoting their brand of hate.
Gamergate takes Karl Marx’s famous pronouncement on history repeating itself and turns it on its head: It began as a farce, at least for those who were not its direct victims — but its legacy has been one of outright tragedy.
NOTE: I did a somewhat more extensive catalog of the ways Donald Trump matches up with Eco’s 14 points here. It’s a little outdated in terms of examples (I wrote it just after the 2016 election) but its general points still stand.
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@darkrage
I didn’t read TMZ, but the most vile GamerGate stuff I saw was on 4chan and Reddit rather than Twitter. Death and rape threats, doxxing, literal Nazis, and every other awful thing you can think of.
@Buttercup
One would wonder, if Jim is such a proud GamerGater why is he so annoyed when it comes up again? Shouldn’t he be happy to reap what he sews? To see the results of what he did?
People shouldn’t use words like “censorship” if they don’t know what they mean. You’re just embarrassing yourself, Jim.
@Batgirl
No Man’s Sky (which originally launched flawed but has become far far better in the intervening years thanks to Hello Games’s diligent corrections and updates) goes out of its way to make characters in it (including yourself) gender-reference free. Helps with inserting yourself in it, but also… hell, these are all aliens. You think they have the same bits as humans do, or even the same social structures? “They” is probably the safest pronoun to use in this game.
It’s not really that surprising that some people would misjudge what would be popular or work in the wider world. Not just about diversity, though that’s a fairly common subject of misjudgement.
I mean, when you have a small, relatively isolated subgroup whose main social frame of reference is themselves and people very much like them, and they’re used to being catered to exclusively in some respects (or pining for an earlier age when they were, regardless of whether it existed) of course they’re going to believe other people think and want much the same things. That they’re really part of a “silent majority”, or something similar, because their beliefs and desires are so common and self-evident that no one needs to openly express them. This isn’t just a toxic gamer thing or a manosphere thing; I’ve seen it in various religious, political, and cultural subgroups.
For unaware irony, they’re going to say that those people who create products or art or movements they don’t like are the ones who are disconnected from the wider culture (or whatever frame of reference). When they’re proven wrong, they start coming up with elaborate excuses or conspiracy theories, or style themselves as keepers of the one true way, or just flat-out call everyone else mindless sheep.
Remember when Gamergate supported Jack Thompson because he made anti-feminist statements? And most still support Dumpy Trumpy, even though the Annoying Orange just tried to cause another moral panic against violent games.
Just imagine if Trump had somehow succeeded – I don’t know if that would have been funny or sad.
Well, watching the gamer-fascists twist and turn their minds to blame this on the SJWs would have been funny.
@A. Noyd
Isn’t it a bit mean to compare nostalgia for things one watched/read/played as a child, teen or whatever with the fake nostalgia of white supremacists?
Granted, I mostly dislike WoW for certain reasons, and this nostalgia craze does bad things (all those pointless and bad reboots and remakes), but nevertheless, I think it depends on context and what one is nostalgic for.
I guess trolls are related to the topic at hand. At least, I’d say the way they act is as if they’re playing a game. They’re not discussing ideas and you can’t win them by proving them wrong or unmasking them. The objective of the game would be bringing their talking points to the fore and wreaking havoc among the “enemy”.
On an article I read some days ago, it was said that the bulk of the activity that the far right generates, that which helps the far right most, comes from outraged leftists expressing their scorn and indignation.
I had an acquaintance turned facebook friend, who started trolling on some of the pro-immigration posts I shared. On two occasions, I engaged in a dialectic war with him. He kept spouting “his” evil and inhuman common places, didn’t read the articles I spent a long time searching to disprove what he spouted, and if I got personal he just kept spouting some more. He was doing a very specific thing with a very specific aim that had nothing to do with me. The third time he attacked I just blocked him.
Then I also thought about that Richard some days ago, to whom I replied twice. I imagine him thinking: “Great, one of my comments has got through. Now to work!’ A calculatedly misogynistic / paternalistic / contradictory ideology, a pretence of sincerity as if he really was just discussing points of view and not trolling, and three or four pages of comments and replies. If he does that, why does he do it? Should we reply or not?
Should we reply to trolls or just ignore them and ban them when possible? What’s best for fighting against the far right, or at least not doing them a favour? I’m very ignorant and this is a genuine doubt I have.
Herbert West says:
That is absolutely not what I’m doing and I have no idea where you’re getting that from.
@Ucalegont
I’m not entirely sure, and this is an issue which I’ve thought about before as well. I think in general it depends whose turf it’s on. If it’s on their turf, not engaging seems to be best, as they’ll just use their numbers and sock puppets to overwhelm.
If it’s in our space (i.e. WHTM) then it seems to be more complicated. On the one hand, if you engage you can troll them back, which is fun for a bit, and they’re unlikely to cause harm here, as David does a good job limiting them and banning them if they cause too much trouble. On the other hand, if they’re ignored they may go away faster. So I guess it’s mostly a personal choice of whether you want to debate them here. I tend to, just because for me it’s a good exercise in debate skills.
@Jim
You made it about politics from the very beginning, chud.
*doesn’t read the article*
*asks a question that’s answered in the article*
Congrats on wasting everyone’s time, dude.
It’s making the lives of educators more difficult and annoying.
Why would we do that to ourselves?
It’s probably mostly the arrogance of someone who works as a software developer talking but my response to that copypasta (or other similar declarations) was– once I’d retrieved my rolled-out eyes– was, “sitting on your hole all day mashing buttons doesn’t make you a genius, it makes you a damn Skinner Box rodent”. I mean, lobbing stones from the glasshouse of an industry as infested with techbros as software development is is probably not very wise but something about the attitudes expressed in those pronouncements, this elevation of passive consumerism to that of some kind of real creative expression, makes me furious. It reminds me of the red-faced fan hurling abuse at an athlete at a sporting event. Yeah, why don’t you come down here, Bubba, and show us how it’s all don– oh, wait, he’s gone off for more beer and corndogs…
@A. Noyd: They probably won’t get their nostalgia fix, in any case: if recent revivals are anything to go by, the game will probably be infested with lootboxes and other modern excresences designed to suck money from your wallet.
Yes, I do watch Jim Sterling’s videos, why do you ask?
I don’t know that trolls go away faster if they’re ignored. Often I’ve seen them escalate in an attempt to get some sort of response.
Unpacking their trollishness seems to work, but we can’t all be Scildfreja, alas. Commenting on how boring and repetitive they are makes for a decent defense, though the denser trolls sometimes crow that we must be triggered! And in denial about how thoroughly the troll is pwning us! For surely they are victorious! (No, I’m Victorious. You’re a troll.)
@Victorious Parasol
Ah, Scildfreja. Whatever became of her? I do my best to break apart trolls’ arguments, but I’m nowhere near as eloquent.
We’ll probably never convince the person who is trolling by any arguments. Jim, for example, isn’t here to hear about how gamergate impacted its victims, the splash damage it had, or the legacy it caused. (He clearly also wasn’t there from the beginning, because if he was he would know it was always a harassment campaign they tried to dress up with ‘ethics in games journalism’.)
But, as i have said umpteen times on this site, what happens when people push back against the trolls? Demolish their talking points, point out their personal attacks, generally ridicule them?
It makes the blog a space where lurkers know that people won’t put up with TERF bullshit. Sexist crap. Racist shit. Abled nonsense. It lets people who wouldn’t feel safe talking actually talk. It gives them a space where the troll doesn’t drive away posters.
If their opinions aren’t set, it also shows lurkers that the Troll isn’t expressing some prevailing opinion that no one feels the need to argue against. It helps disrupt the silent majority bullshit. Maybe it gives them new terms to search to get more info. Maybe we convince someone we will never know we convinced.
Also, maybe, someone might convince a troll that they are being a jerk, and maybe their life would be better if they had a long hard look in the mirror (Jim) and read the original post that started everything (Jim) along with the publicly available IRC logs (Jim). Maybe they should think about *why* they love games, and why they only want certain people to be able to have that type of connection to the media they consume (Jim).
Maybe they’ll remember a time a videogame moved them to tears, and wish that people understood how powerful an experience gaming can be. (Jim)
Maybe they’d watch the Feminist Frequency videos, and see that it’s all pretty basic stuff (Jim), and that critique like that is the first actual step for games to be considered something more than an idle pass time, but a medium capable of being art. (Jim)
Maybe they’ll see that, by using their understanding of ‘censorship’ where it means ‘outside pressure mandating choices’, they will see that by putting pressure on developers to not have racially, sexually, gender, abled, etc diverse characters, they (Jim) are the ones promoting (their idea of) ‘censorship’?
This is not likely to happen, because it takes a big person to admit that something they thought they were right about was something obviously wrong, and that their actions contributed to harm.
Five years is a long time, maybe they (Jim) have matured to a point where they can reflect on how the people Gamergate targetted (and still targets) were people *trying to make things they loved, and wanted to share*. If Gamergate really was about ethics, they would have dropped the first accusation against Zoe Quinn since ‘ethics’ includes ‘basic fact checking’, like how that journalist never wrote a review of Depression Quest.
Maybe they’d (Jim) realise they were caught up in the hype and ‘fun’ of an online mob.
I doubt it. But putting this all out there like this means that people who weren’t involved/around/interested/impacted can learn the history of a hate movement, and that has some value.
It is hard, trying, and draining work to argue with trolls. Sometimes i have the energy, sometimes not. Now one says that everyone needs to push back against them.
But no one is saying you have to let the troll have the last word either.
Good luck with your life, Jim. Hope you grow up at some point. Hope you never sent any rape or death threats, because that is going to be a weight you will carry for the rest of your days.
I don’t know how i would deal with the fact that my actions contributed towards giving people PTSD, but i was never a gator, and i don’t have to grapple with that.
It will be interesting to see what actual ethics come out of this, how people make peace with their shitty (but somehow not illegal or something people will prosecute) actions. How they stop younger people from making their same mistakes online, since we are still grappling with this mess of instant communication and connectivity.
Or they might choose to believe that they were in the right. We’ll see which direction they (and here, specifically, i mean Jim) go!
Eta: jeeeez i need to stop yammering so much, haha.
TL;DR – Why should we make it a rule that trolls always get the last word?
@Batgirl – I’d say Borderlands might not be a best example, given Gearbox’s CEO antics. As much as I love Borderlands series, associating inclusiveness in gaming with Random Pitfall sounds like shooting the messenger a bit.
But can’t we really look a bit further? The Longest Journey, a game from 1999. It had a well-written female protagonist with lot of character, and literally one of the first character you meet (your landlord) is telling you about her girlfriend. How cool is that for game released twenty years ago?
@Naglfar, thanks for tbe response and also @Rhuu; it helped me understand things.
As in many other areas, it’s a matter of applying common sense to every situation.
This is always a good resource for future Jims:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_Gamergate_claims
@Naglfar
Scildfreja’s probably busy doing SCIENCE! Which means she’s probably still benefiting all of us here, just in a less blogcentric way.
When Gamergate and the pre-gamergate freak-outs (Anita, the Bioware writer, etc) took off, I was a woman working in games. I’m not in that industry any more, but at the time it was mostly just very depressing. In particular, a handful of men I knew in the industry, who I thought were decent enough, came out in favour of it. I quietly ended those friendships for my own safety. I’m not interested in interacting with people who, if I were to mildly criticize a video game, might decide my name, phone, and social numbers should be plastered all over chan boards. And I honestly have no patience for people who build their entire identities around the products they consume, so much so that they are willing to destroy innocent lives over video game-related thought crimes.
Still, if you had told me gamergate was going to be a big player in the introduction of modern American fascism, I would not have believed you. We are living in the stupidest time.
OK, I can’t resist, I gotta come back to laugh at y’all. I didn’t come here to troll, I came here to give my opinion.
@Rhuu – apparently an illiterati: The only bad thing to happen to Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian is that they’ve gotten ridiculously rich off of GamerGate. Most criticisms of these women are true, that they’re grifters and never really cared about the video game industry. Anita Sarkeesian has admitted several times to not care about gaming, and Zoe Quinn was given $85k to make a game she never ended up producing. So when GamerGate calls these women scam artists, it’s not innacurate.
On the accusations of sexism, racism etc, like I said, anyone that comes in and attacks gamers would get the same heat, and that includes Jack Thompson. He wasn’t as big a threat even because developers weren’t forced to listen to him.
Now, unless someone has something intelligent to respond to me with, apart from accusations of isms or wank gifs, then it’s probably better you don’t respond at all.
*marks off a few gator-bingo squares*
@Jim
Then maybe stop responding to it “over and over again.”
And so then why did you do it, if it made your opponents rich? Isn’t that just a self own?
I might add, both of these women still continue to receive threats. Zoë Quinn has to hide their home address and relocate regularly, plus has PTSD from the death threats received. Anita Sarkeesian needs an armed escort when publicly speaking because of the threats she has received.
Somehow I don’t recall her saying that. If she didn’t care about gaming, why did she happen to know so much about video games and spend so much time talking about them? Why, years later, does she still talk in her weekly podcast about which games she is currently playing? Can you maybe give me a citation for that statement?
You want to talk about scam artists? How about Davis Aurini? There are plenty of posts here talking about his scam, better known as The Sarkeesian Effect. I might also note, AFAIK nobody who actually contributed to Sarkeesian’s videos or Quinn’s games thinks they were scammed. The only people who say that are people who didn’t contribute and don’t have a horse in this race.
If I recall correctly, Jack Thompson never received misogynistic death and rape threats. He also was openly embraced by GamerGate after his appearance in The Sarkeesian Effect.