Raising the Bar: Gamergate & CrashOverrideNetwork

If you’re here, odds are you know what Gamergate is. If not, you can find out more about it here and here (this one is good). In brief, Gamergate has been a strange movement to target/expose/doxx/threaten people who are seen as threatening the integrity of the gaming community and its attached journalistic circles. Funnily enough, those people seem to be primarily women and those who dare suggest that the portrayal of women/LGBTQ+/PoC is a relevant concern when discussing video gaming. It’s largely already been said, but the actions taken by Gamergaters or on behalf of Gamergate have had some pretty scary results. But, if you’ll bear with me for a little bit, I’ll tell you about how some of these targets are fighting back.

If you’ve been following along these past couple months, you’ll recall that Brianna Wu had to leave her home after someone told her that “I’ve got a K-bar and I’m coming to your house so I can shove it up your ugly feminist cunt.” (I assume that this is the Ka-Bar to which they are referring.) You’ll also recall that Zoe Quinn had to leave her home after a stream of insults, rape threats, and death threats. You’ll further recall that Anita Sarkeesian was forced to leave her home after threats were made against her and her completely relevant parents. Which is obviously conducive to getting people external to gaming culture and media to view gaming as a space worthy of consideration that is characterized by integrity. Yeah.

Quinn, via BBC.

I could detail here my myriad objections to the premise of Gamergate, but I’ve already done so. In a turn of events simultaneously troubling and predictable, Gamergaters have taken the rather large weight of media articles which decry their actions and question their motives as evidence of a “Quinnspiracy” against them, or something idiotic like that. What part of this occurred after October 14^th has been dubbed MediaGate by some. That is right around when reporting about Brianna Wu, her making fun of Gamergate, and the threats made against her hit its stride. It really is truly disgusting behavior, but these women aren’t taking this lying down.

The Chilling Familiarity of Gamergate

(Trigger warnings for the Holocaust and sexual violence)

I don’t usually get recruited to join hate groups.

Being a Jewish guy, I’m out of consideration for the most of them. And on the other side, my secularism and interfaith marriage means that the extremist elements within Judaism don’t want anything to do with me.

So I’ve got a special kind of agita from Gamergate today. Because these guys don’t care about my bar mitzvah, but they could have looked at the geeky thirteen-year-old boy reading from the Torah and seen a potential recruit.

On some broad, unsettling level, these are guys like me. They’re men. They’re straight. They’re white. They’re about my age. They’re middle-class, educated, Americans. They like fantasy novels, comics, sci-fi, and Game of Thrones. They claim to speak for me. The hatred, rage, and violence espoused by Gamergate emerged out of my same world. Why is it them and not me?

This is going to sound like hyperbole, but to really answer that question, you have to walk back through the history of the Third Reich. I’ve heard of Godwin’s law—Internet arguments may all turn to Nazis eventually, but it doesn’t mean that it’s never warranted.

I don’t intend the comparison to be literal. You don’t have to tell me that Gamergate has yet to commit any genocides. But there’s a lot more to Nazi Germany than just our shorthand characterization of “the worst people ever”. They were, yes. But they had to get that way—a sophisticated, modern nation collapsed into Hell in just a decade. It happened for thoroughly human reasons, and there has never been a guarantee that it would never happen again. Much of the same psychology that turned Germans into Nazis turned geeks to Gamergate.

Gamergate is now a part of geek culture, and of our cultural legacy. We need to know that it is not unique, that it is working through a playbook that’s been handed down many times before. When we can follow those plays, we can keep ourselves—and our friends—from being sucked in.

Why I Don’t Buy #Gamergate

For gaming, fandom, and nerd culture, it has been a fucked-up couple of months. This much is obvious by now. The events of #Gamergate not only leave me highly disappointed, they also confirm the notion that any scandal or event described with the suffix “-gate” will be idiotic. This is not the first time I’ve addressed this subject, but I had hoped that in the intervening two months, #Gamergate would have blown over and we could all go back to eating Cheetos, having learned our lesson. But we haven’t, and so this fiasco stretches forward into November.