What's happening in Gamergate?
Seriously, we want to know
1
Gamergate has been a huge topic of discussion at The Verge in the past few days. It's become clear during that period that Gamergate is really, really confusing. It's meant a lot of things over the past three (seriously! three!) months that it's been around for. We've largely stayed clear of it, but in light of our recent piece, I want to know what everyone actually thinks is going on. Right, now, that means you. Our readers.
I'm not trying to figure out whether people agree with it, or what they think should happen, or get two-word answers like "journalistic ethics" or "misogynist harassment." I'm really curious what events you think started Gamergate, what specific problems people who support it are upset about (again, not "corruption" — I mean like "Ian Bogost paid IGN $50 million to write a good review of Cow Clicker"), what people have actually done (i.e. "Intel pulled sponsorship" or "a journalist said she would stop writing because of harassment.") Oh, and if you have no idea what Gamergate is, or only a vague idea of what's going on? Please post that. It's one of the things I'm most interested in.
I'm opening a thread in the forums, and I'll be reading through it — I'm interested in explanations, but I want to keep argument and rhetoric there to a minimum. I know there's an "operation" against our parent company right now, and this is emphatically not the place to promote it. Comments on this piece are closed, because the forum thread is where it's at right now.
In turn, I've tried to gather my own thoughts on the questions above. If you've ever read me or met me or probably even looked at a picture of me, I have obvious biases. So I can't claim to be objective, especially because I'm incapable of giving a full, comprehensive look at absolutely everything that's going on (you can head to Vox for that.) There's a lot of behind-the-scenes discussion in 4chan, Reddit, and other forums that I'm not even getting into, and I'm likewise not going to be able to capture the breadth of harassment, threats, and other harm that's come to specific people on any side of the debate. I'm not evaluating the reasonableness of most arguments, and I'm working under the charitable notion that there are people operating in good faith under the Gamergate banner, not just trolls. If you have strong feelings on Gamergate, I'm sure you'll think I've left out something vital or come to at least one wrong conclusion. But I've spent weeks watching this and trying to keep up with what's happened and why people are angry.
So...
Gamergate: a subjective history
In August 2014, game designer Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni writes a long post that's mostly about their allegedly terrible relationship dynamics and her alleged personal hypocrisy and dishonesty. It includes the accusation that she cheated on him with multiple men, and one was a writer at Kotaku (Nathan Grayson, formerly of Rock Paper Shotgun.) Quinn's game Depression Quest is critically acclaimed but massively hated by a certain subset of gamers — it's a fairly simply produced choose-your-own-adventure-style game dealing with a very personal topic. Gjoni seems to imply that her relationship with the writer got her good coverage of the game. Long-running anger at Quinn turns this into an internet firestorm.
Around the same time, feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian releases the latest video in her Tropes v. Women series, criticizing games for using women as sexualized background decoration. Virtually everything Sarkeesian does turns into an internet firestorm.
People who are angry at Quinn seize on the Kotaku connection, and the "corruption in games journalism" part of Gamergate begins. Based on timelines that would be hashed out later, Grayson hadn't actually covered her game during the period in which they were dating (they knew each other beforehand, as do many devs and journalists), and he'd never reviewed it. Gjoni revises his post to say that there was no evidence she'd cheated on him for good coverage. As far as I know (and seriously, I've looked) there is absolutely no evidence of her "sleeping with journalists" plural.
4chan, which famously hates Sarkeesian, is heavily involved throughout this whole debate, as is Reddit. Sometimes this means donating to charities in protest, sometimes it means sending raid parties after people they hate. In early September, Quinn publishes a huge dump of chat and forum logs from Gamergate supporters, and there's an ongoing debate about how much of the movement is aimed at punishing her personally, something 'Gaters deny.
There have never been so many gates in six weeks
Publicly, though, the issue becomes more about (allegedly over) friendly relationships between game journalists and game developers. Compared to the countless previous conversations about journalistic ethics, there's relatively little protest against large publishers; critics mostly focus on (often female) indie developers. They point to frequent conversations on Twitter, in-person visits, or declared friendships; maybe most commonly, they say it's a conflict of interest for game journalists to contribute to Patreon campaigns, e.g., crowdfunding on a monthly basis rather than per product (as on Kickstarter.) As a result, Kotaku and Polygon update their ethics policies to limit or ban Patreon contributions.
At some point during this, Zoe Quinn or someone (maybe?) supporting her allegedly issues takedown requests for critical videos about her. My chronology gets weak here, but members of gaming-related subreddits say that comment threads are purged or they're being banned for talking about what is now called Gamergate, a term either coined or popularized, I believe, by Jayne-Cobb-in-real-life Adam Baldwin. Did I mention that Gamergate is in full swing during Celebgate, which throws Reddit and 4chan even more in the spotlight than usual?
Then, at the end of August, the "end of gamers" happens, and a battle becomes a war.
The context for this is that since the Sarkeesian video, many, many game journalists and some developers who supported either her or Quinn have been facing a major wave of harassment and (sometimes successful) hack attempts. You can argue about how much, but look, if you noticed some problems posting images lately? That's because somebody was using multiple accounts, which they'd set up way beforehand specifically for this purpose, to spam our entire site with violent porn for days.
But, in response, a lot of journalists lashed out with a theme that they'd been following for a while: that the idea of "gamer" as a specific identity and community is dying. You can go ahead and read the most controversial one (by prominent journalist Leigh Alexander) and one that was criticized from Polygon (by Chris Plante, now with us.)
The basic gist for people who like or don't mind these articles (myself admittedly included) is that too many people play games now for the word to be claimed by a relatively small group of people — "gamer" is a thing you are, but not a specific community, and everyone should feel free to call themselves one without being quizzed about whether they bought Call of Duty. The gist for people who hate them is that Alexander in particular insults a group of people who base a large part of their identities on being "gamers," are an audience for games journalism, and obviously aren't all terrible. This whole fight is pretty old hat and has been going on for literally years, but Gamergate sort of made it blow up.
The backlash to the backlash to the backlash
From this point forward, specific complaints about unethical actions become less important than an overall culture war between generally more left-leaning developers, activists, and journalists and generally more conservative or libertarian developers, pundits, and Redditors / channers. It's picked up as a cause célèbre by the very prominent right-wing American Enterprise Institute think-tank and supported in a tweet from WikiLeaks and a Reddit comment from Julian Assange. You wouldn't be amiss thinking of it as another case of conservatives / libertarians fighting a "liberal media" with a politically correct agenda and liberals fighting what they see as a sexist, exclusionary subculture.
If you look past Gamergate and back over the past year or two, regardless of who's right, both sides generally think that games media supports their enemies. Some of the people accused of being social justice warriors now were accused of being sexist bigots just months ago.
And it's still evolving.
All the previous things I've described keep percolating, but there's more and more of a sense that it's about a fight over representation and identity online. On one side, there are people who want to protect an existing idea of "gamer culture" — which tends to cater to young white men, though they're not the only demographic in it — from outside pressure by social justice advocates, who they believe are out of touch, misunderstand their desire for "fun" and escapism, and paint them all as misogynists.
On the other, there are people who believe "gamer culture" genuinely ignores or is hostile to many people outside its target demographic, that it violently overreacts to criticism, and that it needs more games that make women active agents (including enemies and player characters) instead of putting them in the role of victims and trophies.
At this point, a significant amount of Gamergate seems to be people fighting about things that have happened over the course of Gamergate. There are a bunch of different lists of Gamergate goals — this one is maybe the clearest I've found, regardless of whether I agree with it — in addition to the "disrespectful nod" campaign asking advertisers to drop Kotaku, Polygon, and so forth. Intel drops coverage from Gamasutra, then apologizes for doing so. There's still complaint about conflicts of interest, but a lot of the demands now involve asking sites to apologize for writing about the "end of gamers" and not give "political" opinions outside editorials, however that's interpreted. Some smaller sites have been created or publicized as apolitical alternatives. There's been harassment of people both for and against Gamergate, although the volume and vitriol directed at each side is very open to debate.
Also military brainwashing is involved somehow?
Oh, and there's some thing going on about Zoe Quinn allegedly sabotaging a game development project called The Fine Young Capitalists, or maybe not. You can go read this blog post or something, because at this point the group seems to be doing fine and the whole thing has become so purely a matter of political symbolism (TFYC support both Gamergate and women in games, so donating to them is a way of saying you can be a 'Gater and not a misogynist) that I can't even coherently explain what happened in the first place.
There's also a conspiracy theory about... DARPA funding the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) and Zoe Quinn to make games that brainwash people? I'm not quite sure. If you know why people hate Silverstring Media so much, outside it representing multiple semi-connected clients (which is the whole point of PR and design agencies), I could use a recap of that too. By the time I publish this, there's a good chance I'll have even more events to keep track of. Did I mention there's now an official hashtag campaign against our parent company, Vox Media?
Are you still reading this?
Cool. Like I said before, I'm going into this with heavy biases: I guess I'm a gamer, but I come down hard against 'Gaters. I personally know people whose lives have been made very unpleasant because they dared write about women in games. I'm baffled at what feels like a suggestion that writers should rely more on press releases and canned interviews than actual, cultivated sources. I think there's rarely such a thing as absolutely apolitical writing. But the past months have been a process of trying to pick worthwhile threads out of this whole, monstrously tangled tapestry. At this point, I just want to know what people think is actually, factually going on. Let's get Rashomon on this 'Gate.