In the last month, what began as yet another example of the bottom rung of Internet culture showing off its asshole credentials somehow blew up into a “thing.” Game journalists suddenly got caught in the crosshairs. Salacious rumors and unverified claims of infidelity became front page news, not in Wired or Ars Technica, but mainstream news in major daily publications. And the hits just keep on coming. Rumors of collusion between game journalists, sexual improprieties, death threats, DDoS attacks. There’s a part of me that knows when the Internet loses its collective shit, things are never the same afterward. Sometimes, it’s a good thing. Sometimes, it’s horrific. I've spent most of the past month or so thinking “fuck all, y’all!” whenever some fresh report of insanity with the hashtag of “GamerGate” heaves into view. It’s had me vaguely toying with the idea of basically walking away from the video game industry entirely. Why? Because everybody who’s got even a modicum of restraint is drowned out by partisans on both sides, and I get enough of that as it is watching the local news. The Internet, as a whole, does not do “calm.” But it damned well needs to try.
Let’s get this out of the way now: I'm not a fan of Anita Sarkeesian or her video series. I think her arguments are basically weak and poorly supported. I think that she’s more interested in preaching to the choir than seriously interested in trying to change minds and attitudes. In some respects, she is behaving like a troll, despite any claims of “critical analysis” she may offer up. But for all of that, I respect that she’s willing to put forth an unpopular opinion, I will defend to the death her right to put out her content, and I am deeply disturbed by the degree of hostility that has been aimed at her.
I have no desire for her to join the company of luminaries like Salman Rushdie or Alan Berg, and I cannot fathom why anybody would. Aside from the blazingly obvious legal and moral implications, any act of violence against her would be utterly counter-productive. Alive and unharmed, she’s annoying, but basically harmless. Dead or injured by some crazed “true gamer,” and she becomes a martyr, a point which seems to escape probably every single idiot who’s engaged in this insanity so far. If you make a shirt bloody, somebody is going to wave it around.
With regards to Zoe Quinn, Depression Quest is not something I'm interested in playing, not even now. Do I think there should be more games that delve into issues like mental health? Absolutely. What about other topics, such as suicide, domestic violence, or substance abuse? Sure! Are they ever going to capture significant market share? Probably not. They’re likely going to be the game equivalents of art house films: small followings, sometimes deeply moving, sometimes pedantic exercises in the developer’s “social awareness.” As far as the business with her ex, and the accusations of sexual assault and “sex for scores” being put forth, it reads really well but it probably bears about as much resemblance to reality as I do to Brad Pitt. Airing dirty laundry out in the open, on a goddamned blog instead of in a courtroom where criminal cases are supposed to be adjudicated, reeks of desperation and pettiness. If there was an actual crime, then file charges. Otherwise, stop trying to play the victim and garner undeserved sympathy. Her ex may be male, but he’s a long way from being anything resembling a man.
There’s a little kernel of scorn for Leigh Alexander over at Gamasutra that I just cannot get rid of no matter how hard I try. Her article declaring “gamers are dead” threw gasoline on a fire that did not need more fuel. Much like with Sarkeesian, I disagree with the opinion, but I will defend the right to say it.
What makes the Alexander article more troubling to me is that it was put forth on a site that is centered on the development side of games. In effect, Alexander told game developers that they shouldn’t care about their customers, that those customers weren't worth any sort of consideration even from a financial perspective. For a demographic that has a segment which feels marginalized and has already demonstrated their willingness to engage in socially deplorable behavior, this was gratuitously insulting. For the rest of the demographic, it was still gratuitously insulting because they were getting lumped in with the idiots. Would this whole nonsense have stopped if she hadn't said that? Maybe not, but it might not have gone as far as it has. Certainly not to the degree of making Intel yank its advertising.
It’s getting to the point where it seems like otherwise reasonable people are being unreasonably expected to apologize for their choice of hobbies because a small subset of jackasses are showing not a single iota of decorum, class, or civility. There’s a temptation just to chalk it up to the antics of 4chan and call it a day. But that’s the easy response, the cheap way out, and it’s more than likely wildly inaccurate. 4chan is not the Internet. Gamers are not the Internet. As a whole, individuals who identify as gamers are a small portion of the population of the Internet. We’re growing, obviously, but we’re nowhere near to domination.
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I am a gamer.
I make no apology for my hobby. But I am perfectly willing to explain how I got into it. I was turned on to computers at an early age. I learned BASIC and Logo on Apple IIe computers. Macintoshes were the first upgrades I saw in my school. My first home computer was an Epson PC clone, running at a great and glorious 7MHz with “turbo” turned on. I talked my parents into getting more RAM for the computer so it could handle a VGA video card. Between my younger brother and myself, we probably blew a hundred bucks a year on blank floppy disks making “slave” copies of software and boot disks with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files tuned in the right ways to get certain games to run. A 40MB “hard card” was damn near miraculous.
I was a smart kid, which of course meant that I got picked on a lot. The only place where it didn't seem to matter was the computer lab. It was equal opportunity. Everybody was welcome there. Anybody could have come in, but very few girls did. Since I wasn't exactly fending off girls with a stick, this didn't bother me in the slightest. If there was a girl in the lab, fine and well, didn't affect me. If there wasn't, also didn't affect me.
My first after-school activities were a very informal computer club. I went through old issues of computer magazines to try and recreate the programs inside, and usually couldn't get them debugged in time. My first teachers for computers were women, and I held them in high regard because they knew more than I did, and I wanted to learn.
My baby sister had as much access to the computer and to the various game consoles and the computer as her big brothers did, and she didn't show much interest in the games. Today, she’ll play through Candy Crush Saga or a game of solitaire, but she’s not like her brothers. She doesn't think of herself as a gamer, and that’s OK. Nobody told her she couldn't be one. Nobody told her she had to be one. If she ever wants to drop in on a game of Street Fighter over at my place, I’ll be the first to hand her the controller. If she wants to roll her eyes at the suggestion, perfectly fine. When it comes to me, she will always have a place on my couch or on whatever private server I happen to be running for whatever game I might be playing.
Recently, Anita Sarkeesian cancelled a speech she was to give at a university in Utah. She posted on Twitter: “To be clear, I didn't cancel my USU talk because of terrorist threats, I canceled because I didn't feel the security measures were adequate.” Yet, the Washington Post reported that she was concerned that the university couldn't exclude individuals with legal concealed carry permits from attending. So, in point of fact, she didn't cancel just because of the threats, she also cancelled because she didn't trust anybody in the audience to behave like a responsible adult. Were it me, operating under those same threats, I’d have been perfectly happy to go. Not because I'm a guy, but because I would have trusted the audience. I will admit that my own knowledge and familiarity with firearms might prejudice me just a little bit, but more importantly, Utah does still require a course in order to get a CCW. And the people who go through those courses are not going to do something stupid which would jeopardize their continued status as a permit holder. Sarkeesian took counsel from her fears, she did cancel because of the threats, she has managed to insult the integrity of the students who would have come (possibly armed, possibly not), and she has only emboldened the bastards hounding her in doing so.
There’s been a lot of hand wringing and brow mopping about how to deal with the vicious and undisciplined scum that keep pulling this shit. Not one single person so far has suggested that maybe, just maybe, there is nothing to any of this except a lot of vile emails and low grade harassment. That for all the vitriol and threats, the actual probability of a violent event actually happening is so close to zero that you might as well call it that.
Nobody has suggested that it be approached from the perspective of bullying. It’s shocking and offensive, but it’s still bullying. It’s low investment-high return bullying, the best kind from a bully’s perspective because it means that they don’t ever have to come within arm’s reach of you. And the best preventative I've ever found for bullying is to stand up and dare the bastards to take their best shot, and put their asses down when they try. Forget making friends with the bully, forget trying to understand the bully, forget all the happy touchy feely shit that has been pumped out for the last few years. All of that can be handled afterwards, assuming said bully actually appears and survives the experience. There may be a chance, albeit exceedingly slim, that somebody is going to actually turn up. If they do, respond appropriately. Until they do, to hell with them and go about your business.
* * *
I am a games journalist. Kinda. Sorta.
I currently fit into the niche of “hobbyist press,” which I find a little insulting. No, I don’t have a journalism degree. No, the site I write for does not get millions of hits on a daily basis. No, I am not a great media personality. No, I do not command the adulation of millions. All I have is a passion for gaming and a desire to let people know about what is good and not so good about new games. I enjoy sharing my knowledge about the games of the past. I enjoy sharing information about games that are coming out in the future. Yet I am acutely aware of the fact that a lot of that “forward looking” information comes on sufferance.
The bulk of any information that we get about a game comes from a PR office, either internal to the developer, internal to the publisher, or external to both. Only drooling idiots would think that the press releases that are handed out are the total sum of activity related to any given title, but this is all the information that we’re given. Yes, it’s incomplete. Yes, it’s supposed to be shining the best possible light on the title and the developer/publisher. Yes, it’s all cherry picked and polished and spin to a high gloss finish. And there’s days where knowing all of that does nothing but drive me nuts.
Part of what kicked off this tremendous shitstorm was the claim (later proven to be patently false) that Zoe Quinn traded sexual favors with a writer for the website Kotaku in exchange for a favorable review. From there, it devolved horribly. Accusations of favoritism, corruption, lack of objectivity and full disclosure, cronyism, unethical behavior, you name it, it’s there and every douchebag with a website and a YouTube channel has been accused of it. Adam Baldwin, an actor whose talents I've long enjoyed, coined the term “GamerGate” and everything became a thousand times worse. Everything that was vile, everything that was questionable, everything that didn't seem to pass an almost impossible test of purity fell into the maelstrom. And it’s still going on.
I've said it before (not that anybody listened before), but the gaming press as a whole covers a small area of interest, relatively speaking. We’re not The Washington Post or The New York Times. We’re not Time or Newsweek. If anything, those guys are muscling in on our turf, and nobody’s giving them any grief despite turning out content that I think isn't nearly as good as what I would find on a dedicated gaming news site. Previews are, if we’re lucky, based a few hours of hands on play, a personal and subjective impression which can be dampened once the full game comes out. If we’re not lucky, we’re having to rely on those infernal press releases. To the best of my knowledge, when it comes to The Armchair Empire, no PR firm has ever tried to pull the sort of shit that recently happened with YouTube channel personalities regarding what could or could not be said about Shadows of Mordor. If some unfortunate suit had proposed something like that to me directly, I’d have told them to pound sand, and then put the word out nigh on immediately. If my editor passed along similar instructions, I would have the same reaction, assuming he hadn’t told the suit the same thing earlier.
My pen is not for sale.
Nor have I ever tried to extort any sort of concessions out of a developer or publisher with the threat of giving their title a lower score. Nor have I ever seen or heard of anybody doing anything so utterly corrupt. For one thing, it wouldn't work. No games journalist has that sort of pull, and anybody thinking they did would likely get their ass kicked out of any developer’s or publisher’s office in short order. Which leads me to my second point: access to the developers and publishers would be cut off.
Does that mean that I have no appreciation of the money that is spent to bring members of the press out to an event? Hardly. I'm close to California (where a lot of developers and publishers are situated), but I'm not the only person that gets flown out, nor am I the only person who gets put up in a hotel for a night or two. I'm not the only person who gets a T-shirt, or a pen, or even a physical copy of the game to review. The amount of money spent for a press event is not cheap, but it is a business expense for the developer and/or publisher. It’s a line item on the marketing and promotions budget. It’s supposed to generate interest. But any PR rep worth their salt is just as aware as we are that they can only put forth the best presentation. Once the product gets out into the wild, they've got no control over the reaction. One of the reasons that the PR firm Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment hired to handle the YouTube reviewers and Shadows of Mordor is getting such flak is because they did try to control the outcome. They did try to dictate what the review would be like. Were there some reviewers who docilely went along with this? Almost certainly. I can understand their position, but I cannot agree with it. However new and exciting a game might be, an honest appraisal of that game is more important than the benefits of getting access to that game a few hours ahead of everybody else.
When it comes to what is considered “hard news,” the gaming press usually finds out from the players more often than the publishers, such as the SimCity hack that let you play offline. In situations where the presentation of facts is necessary and vital to the integrity of the piece, most reputable sites do a good job. But the opportunities for hard news are not nearly as myriad as they are for CNN or Conde Nast. Game reviews are generally subjective impressions of things like gameplay, how enjoyable a title is, the perceived value for the consumer’s money. There are objective facts strewn about them at times, but they are ultimately one person’s opinion, biased, fallible.
When it comes to stories like John Carmack's hiring by Oculus Rift or Richard Garriott getting forced out of NCSoft, bias can all too easily creep in, but for the most part, the delineation between facts and opinions are pretty well made. Moreover, particularly when those stories involve a legal dispute, neither side will say anything substantive. Problem is that opportunities for those stories are not nearly as available as the reviews and previews content. Developers and designers are not easily available for interviews, and for small press outlets like this one, it’s even harder. Ask too many questions about stuff they don’t want to talk about, and the interview’s over before you can blink. Even at trade events like E3, there’s an enormous amount of reluctance to talk about anything that isn’t part of the prepared selling points.
I’d love nothing more than to be able to sit down with the big boys and ask the sort of pointed questions that gamers might well have on their mind. Assuming that all they care about is how big the explosions are is on a par with the assumption that game journalists are nothing more than glorified PR sock puppets: it’s insulting as hell. There might be somebody out there who accepts that view and is happy with their lot in life. I'm not. I try to make my reviews useful and informative. I may not always hit the mark, but I always try. And never once will have it been bought and paid for by anyone or anything. I might have waxed rhapsodic about games that later turned out to be less than stellar on further reflection (MMOs are particularly susceptible to this phenomenon), but my enthusiasm has always been genuine.
* * *
What can we say we have learned from all of this bullshit? That the smallest groups often make the loudest noise? Hardly news there. That minority viewpoints are not homogeneous and unified? No great surprise. That the problem is not going to go away simply by making one little change? The hell you say.
We’re all in this together. Players, publishers, developers, journalists, all of us. Demand one of us change to suit somebody else and nobody’ll get nowhere. It’s going to have to be give and take, half improvise and half compromise, from everybody involved if any sort of meaningful change is going to occur. Players do need to rediscover their manners, but developers and journalists (and I use the term very loosely for the likes of Sarkessian) need to come up with more persuasive methods of getting their messages across. Publishers and developers need to stop looking at journalists with suspicion and contempt, and journalists need to stop looking at publishers and developers with either thinly veiled hatred or barely concealed fanboy adulation. Mutual respect can be attained, but it’s not a one-way street. Otherwise, we’re down to increasingly factionalized camps hunkering in ideological bunkers while they imagine the barbarians of “the other side” roaming the wilderness. And all that does is lead us to the same bad set of options which brought all of us to this pass in the first place.
- Axel Cushing
The Gender Games - Part I: The Last Girl Standing can be read here.
