The hashtag #GamerGate went mainstream in the past week, with commentary and reporting at the Boston Globe, CBS, CNN, Entertainment Weekly, TIME, The Guardian, the Washington Post.
Simple summaries are hard to craft: #GamerGate is complicated hashtag that grew out of a discussion of game industry journalism and morphed into death threats against women. I’m not a gamer, and I’ve resisted writing about this mess; the first I recall it entering my consciousness was when Intel pulled its ads from Gamasutra after a concerted campaign.
Appending “gate” to a word implies political scandal (and a reminder that the source, Watergate, was itself a proper noun). But a hashtag is not a movement or group; it’s shorthand geared towards findability. However, movements and groups create and use hashtags which can then also serve as badge of affiliation. But here?
Anchor points in the #GamerGate timeline
August: From the MotherJones explainer:
The conflict first blew up in August after a programmer named Eron Gonji wrote a revenge post about his breakup with developer Zoe Quinn, the creator of Depression Quest, a critically acclaimed game whose purpose is to illustrate the challenges of coping with depression…
[N]asty attacks against Quinn—including the circulation of nude photos, death threats, and rape threats—quickly flooded sites like Reddit and 4chan … [Anita] Sarkeesian experienced similar threats just a few days later, after publishing a new video in her series on women and gaming.
Adam Baldwin, one-time star of Joss Wheadon’s FireFly, is credited with creating the hashtag:
#GamerGate:
pt. 1: https://t.co/VMIwtoFlhD
pt. 2: https://t.co/bLrgB8JGwQ
— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) August 28, 2014
#GamerGate:
"Social Justice" vs. Justice ~ http://t.co/08fOSOfiVq
"Social Justice is Code for Communism." – http://t.co/yXy6voAs9V
— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) August 28, 2014
#GamerGate:
"We must not be shamed into silence." ~ https://t.co/nogM3l2Ykf
— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) August 28, 2014
@AdamBaldwin Thank you for supporting open dialogue and ethics. Social Justice is societal cancer. #GamerGate pic.twitter.com/7qbjxnkH14
— Starbrand (@alexlionh) August 28, 2014
September: Five weeks ago, ArsTechnica reported:
A set of IRC logs released Saturday appear to show that a handful of 4chan users were ultimately behind #GamerGate, the supposedly grass-roots movement aimed at exposing ethical lapses in gaming journalism. The logs show a small group of users orchestrating a “hashtag campaign” to perpetuate misogynistic attacks by wrapping them in a debate about ethics in gaming journalism.
What’s 4chan? An online community that is “widely viewed as a nasty sort of place for anyone not straight and male.”
October:
Game developer Briana Wu got death threats after joking about #GamerGate on Twitter:
A mob telling you they will castrate your husband, make you choke to death on the parts, murder any children you might have and then rape your ass until it bleeds has a way of scaring the hell out of you.
Also this week, popular culture and media critic Anita Sarkeesian — who produces a web series “Tropes Vs. Women” — canceled an appearance at Utah State University on Wednesday. From the University:
A number of personnel at Utah State University received an email regarding the scheduled presentation by Anita Sarkeesian tomorrow, October 15, 2014, at USU’s Taggart Student Center. The email contained threats to Sarkeesian and those who attend her presentation…
Sarkeesian is a Canadian-American feminist, media critic and blogger. She is the author of the video blog “Feminist Frequency,” and she writes often about how women are portrayed in video games. In 2012, she was targeted by an online harassment campaign following her launch of a Kickstarter project to fund the Tropes vs. Women Video Games series. Extensive media coverage placed Sarkeesian at the center of discussions about misogyny in video game culture and online harassment.
The email mentions the École Polytechnique Massacre, also known as the Montreal Massacre. Twenty-five-year-old Marc Lépine shot 28 people while claiming that he was “fighting feminism.” He killed 14 women and injured 10 others.
Because Utah’s concealed weapons law meant that it was not possible to prohibit or check for guns at the event, Sarkeesian canceled her appearance. In 2006, Utah became the first state to legalize guns on campus.
Requested pat downs or metal detectors after mass shooting threat but because of Utah's open carry laws police wouldn’t do firearm searches.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 15, 2014
Multiple specific threats made stating intent to kill me & feminists at USU. For the record one threat did claim affiliation with #gamergate
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 15, 2014
I'm a feminist speaker & had a gun pulled on me at an event in my home state of TX, a concealed carry state. @femfreq did the right thing.
— Shelby Knox (@ShelbyKnox) October 15, 2014
And then, there’s this:
When the #GamerGate mob targeted Anil Dash for no reason https://t.co/kldFtT284i via @x_glitch
— Punny Halloween Name (@HeyHeyESJ) October 20, 2014
It’s not hard to see how any legitimate concerns about journalistic practices would get lost.
And Sunday, here’s Joss:
Many good people think #GamerGate is about journalism & artistic freedom. That's like working at #KlanDayKare. The name means hate, guys.
— Joss Whedon (@josswhedon) October 20, 2014
Silver linings and explainers
Tim Bray finds one upside:
It dragged a part of the Internet that we always knew was there out into the open where it’s really hard to ignore.
While Jesse Singal at NYMag finds another:
[T]hese [new] titles really are going to make the world a better, more tolerant, interesting place. We just need to get past the terrible adolescent tantrum some gamers are currently throwing.
September 4, Forbes: GamerGate: A Closer Look At The Controversy Sweeping Video Games
September 9, Medium: The Paranoid Style in Gaming Misogyny
October 10, Gawker: What Is Gamergate, and Why? An Explainer for Non-Geeks
October 13, Vox: #GamerGate: Here’s why everybody in the video game world is fighting
October 14, Washington Post: The only guide to Gamergate you will ever need to read
And the verdict is …
I’m not a gamer and at a core level I’m not concerned with what goes on in “gamer journalism.”
This sums up my attitude:
Part of the problem here is that the world of “gamers” simultaneously want to be treated as a monolith and as individuals. But you can’t have it both ways. If you see yourself as a bloc of people who call themselves “gamers,” to outsiders you are only as good as your worst representatives, and the past month have shown those representatives to be racist, homophobic, misogynist, and threatening.
I am deeply concerned when individuals — fringe though they may be — use this medium to viciously attack women. I applaud the thick skin and tenacity of critics like Sarkeesian. My optimism for the medium is on the wane, with my view much more along Bray’s pessimistic one than Singal’s optimism.
:: Cross-posted from WiredPen
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:: Header image created by me; based upon Flickr CC licensed image
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