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The Activision-Blizzard Scandal Exposes The Hollowness Of The Anti-GamerGate Movement Gamers were never the reason women struggled to find a place in the video game industry. In 2014 a thing happened called GamerGate. It was a weird time. I wish Adam Baldwin had never coined the term. Gamers were upset about "ethics in video game journalism" among many other things. I won't go into all the unpleasant details, but I'll offer up a very brief account of what happened. Gamers were enraged when discussion of Eron Gjoni's post about his ex Zoe Quinn was shut down on basically every online forum. The post-which included accusations of allegedly unethical dealings between Quinn (a game developer) and a game journalist Quinn was in a brief relationship with-was seen as an ethical red flag and people were eager to discuss it. Instead of letting that discussion take place so that the whole thing could fizzle out, the powers that be tried to stifle the conversation-on reddit, in comments at gaming sites, even at 4chan (which is why we have 8chan and whatever the new version of that is, and indirectly sort of why QAnon is a thing). As we all know, shutting down conversation usually has the opposite effect. Things got worse and worse from there. That's one of several reasons I'm not a fan of censorship. Gamers are dead. After this, the Op/Eds started dropping-because hey, if you can't shut down the discussion you may as well douse it in gasoline and light a match. Things kicked off with Leigh Alexander's infamous "gamers are dead" piece at Gamasutra. That piece was aped by a couple dozen other writers at various outlets, all slamming gamers as evil neckbeards (incel wasn't a term yet) who hate women and who were trying to drive women out of the video game industry with their rampant misogyny. This was, to put it mildly, a gross overreaction that broke the internet's first rule of thumb: Don't feed the trolls. Not only did it smear all the gamers who were actually concerned about ethics issues in the game industry (many of whom were the same people upset by the Mass Effect 3 ending, and video game publishers in general) it gave actual trolls plenty to work with. Flame wars ensued. We hear a lot about the online harassment that took place, but nobody every wants to talk about the degree to which this was provoked and invited by the very people denouncing it. The sheer amount of clickbait was staggering. I can't even recall how many "concerned" articles I read that were clearly just attempts at driving traffic via conflict. A lot a lot. Frankly, nobody looked good after the dust settled. I felt like I needed a month- long shower. It very nearly broke my brain (and then along came Trump, just two years later to finish off the job). To me, this exposed many things about many people, including the ideologically driven nature of the gaming press and the willingness of gamers-as a crowd-to follow whoever would speak up for them, even if it meant following Milo, a man who gave exactly two s---- about video games, gamers or the industry, who saw all of it merely as a jumping off point to a much more fabulous career championing his own weird brand of right-wing politics-aka, trolling the libs. Lost in all of this was the real story. And so we come to the Activision-Blizzard lawsuit which alleges both harassment and discrimination at the World Of Warcraft and Call Of Duty maker. The Real Enemy What the anti-GamerGate movement missed, obviously, was the real problem facing women in the video game industry: The industry itself. The institutional hurdles facing women in video games at video game companies. The bad people who worked at these publishers. Why waste precious time writing about how awful these incel gamers are when the real villains, the mustache-twirling m------------, are the ones in the high towers calling the shots, not holding their managers accountable, not paying their employees well enough, burdening their developers with crunch, turning a blind eye to rampant sexual harassment, laying off hundreds or thousands of employees while laughing all the way to the bank with their bonuses and stock options and massive profits? Sure, there are plenty of bad, racist, sexist annoying gamers also. The video game community can absolutely suck at times (anyone who plays competitive games knows this) but you can't change human nature. You can, on the other hand, hold companies' feet to the fire. Or you can try. That's why I think the anti-GG movement was so hollow, so pointless, so much about virtue signaling and having some fun fanning the culture war flames rather than making the video game industry better-the exact sort of movement that would inspire quite possibly the worst episode of Law & Order: SVU ever made. It's not hard. It's not hard to attack "teh gamerz" or any other amorphous group. The "basket of deplorables" or the "commies" or whatever "other" you want to attack. Frankly, many within GamerGate fell prey to the same b-------, often taking sides with game publishers against journalists, as though that's going to solve the problems with the game industry. Meanwhile, the real assholes keep getting away with it, whether these are businessmen or politicians, bankers or game publishers. Revelations about abuse at Ubisoft Singapore (and throughout that company) and at Activision-Blizzard should be viewed as the tip of the iceberg. The rot runs deep. If you think it's limited to just a couple publishers, think again. I'm sure there are some studios where this kind of thing isn't tolerated, but even "woke" developers like Naughty Dog have been exposed as altogether too willing to employ crunch to get a game like The Last Of Us Part II out. Here's my point: GamerGate was a deeply flawed movement, but it sprung up out of a sense that game journalists didn't represent consumer interests, that instead they were industry shills, bought and paid for by the big publishers. Game journalists kept taking the industry's side over and over again, as we saw during the Mass Effect 3 scandal (silly entitled gamers!) and plenty of others. Now, fast forward seven years and we see the that the true rot in the industry is clearly at the dark heart of these massive corporations; that people were rightfully concerned that journalists were too cozy with these entities, flown off to lavish preview events, wined and dined at conferences, showered with swag and so forth. Mistrust in the media is at all time highs for a reason. Whatever the case, something needs to change. I'm just not sure anything meaningful really will.

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_"*I guess i had to do it if only because people are expecting me to do it. I didn’t even remember this was a thing till yesterday XD*"_ Had to add this because I thought that ppl would actually click the source link and look at the description after all this time
Like...is there any solution to this? Should we start something?
Jalen Hutchinson Studied Culinary Science at Culinary Institute of America (Graduated 2014). Author has 304 answers and 740.1K answer views. 5y Not that I care that much either way, but it did expose a lot of corrupt game developers and game journalists. X Journalists would make claims of people like Anita Sarkeesian "playing video games all her life" when she openly admitted many times she is not a gamer and only starter recently (when it wasn't for an interview). Various developers trading sex or money for good reviews got exposed, journalists who accepted got exposed. People became a bit more critical about supporting a game just because the developer has a victim complex stating tat their game could have only failed because of sexism, instead of their own poor developing skills. What really sealed the deal was opposition often faking their own harassment. Anita sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn have been caught multiple times screenshotting "harassment" while showing that the harrasser's account name in the login. Or when someone called the police to help Sarkeesian against a "very real threat" she was posting about, only for police to find the harasser's messages were coming from her IP address. I just want honesty from the community, and the lies were mostly exposed by the "dreaded" gamergate. 1.3K views • View upvotes 26
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gremlinboi
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gremlinboi

in reply to Zeebor

Nah, nobody won. Everyone lost, and the real villains got away scot free, snickering all the while. Journalism in the games industry is irreparably damaged, and the people who still held on to gamergate spun out of control into "trolling the libs". The conflict was a dumpster fire that should have died out six years ago, and yet people can't let go of it and now it's nothing more than a tumor that leaves an awful taste in the mouth.

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Rogue Wisdom
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Rogue Wisdom

in reply to Zeebor

I honestly don't know. I feel like I have a good understanding of politics overall, and yet GamerGate makes absolutely zero sense to me when I delve into it.

All I see are both sides devolving into virtue signalling and counter-signalling. And considering the main faces of it, who knows how much of it is just gaslighting and projection?

I feel truly blessed to be ignorant of it all.

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Uploaded Aug 01, 2021 at 09:03AM EDT

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