It has been well over a year since the strange reactionary backlash that came to be known as Gamergate burst into mainstream consciousness. In addressing this unpleasant and revealing incident in contemporary gaming culture at such a remove, I wish I could say I was doing a post-mortem, but while the passionate intensity of the movement has died down somewhat, the whole matter is - to my mind - but a symptom of a larger problem that remains essentially unaddressed. It is just one battle in a larger culture war being waged in the wake of so-called post-feminist thought, a flaring up of hostilities which the post-modern, post-ideological rhetoric of the late nineties and early aughts sought to paper over. It is a struggle over the meaning and purpose of games, over the function of ‘gamer’ as an identity, and in turn begs larger questions about the bases of identity, a category that has become enormously important in media discourse and politics.‘Gamergate’ is the name of the campaign of harassment directed at women in the gaming industry, a semi-coordinated barrage of abuse and vitriol thinly disguised as a call for transparency and ethical conduct in game development and journalism. Its ostensible purpose was to push back against the putatively aggressive infringement of socially-conscious and frequently feminist critique of gaming, felt to be an invasion both open and covert, involving conspiracy on the part of progressive activists and gaming journalists. Its most visible practices were comprised chiefly of rape and death threats paired with ‘doxing’, a form of cyber-bullying in which a victim’s personal and private information is posted publicly on the Internet. This abuse was directed almost exclusively at women.The beginnings of Gamergate can be located in the reaction to the release of Depression Quest, a game made by independent developer Zoë Quinn, in February of 2013. Met with critical praise in gaming journalism - praise earned in great part due to its use of game tropes to illustrate realities about living with clinical depression - it also became a flashpoint for self-styled gamers who believed the game - less a test of skill than an interactive illustration of an experience - was receiving undue attention on the basis of its progressive credentials. In other words, they claimed it was only well-regarded because it was politically correct.Reacting to this perceived injustice, Quinn’s detractors began to send her hate mail, kicking off a stream of harassment that she endured quietly for eighteen months. Events were catalyzed, however, by a post written by Eron Gjoni, a lengthy rant which alleged that Quinn, his erstwhile girlfriend, used a sexual relationship with a gaming journalist to garner media exposure for Depression Quest. Suddenly, Quinn’s detractors had the perfect argument for their purposes: not only was the attention Quinn and her game received undue, it was the profit of her feminine wiles. Not only was gaming journalism unnecessarily politically correct, it was moreover hypocritical, corrupt, unethical, a seamy underbelly of sexual favors traded for the furthering of an ideological agenda that had no place in the presumably apolitical ‘fun’ space of gaming.Despite a quick and thorough debunking - the gaming journal in question never reviewed Quinn’s game, and the only article they had regarding her was published before the allegedly unethical relationship began - the controversy served as a rally-point for a variety of disgruntled would-be defenders of ‘ethics in gaming journalism’, a cadre of men evidently infuriated at the incursions of ‘social justice warriors’ on their pastime. Complaints of harassment from Quinn were chalked up as just another cry for attention, the very thing they claimed her work did not deserve in the first place. All attempts on the part of gaming journals to clear up the issue was only further evidence of a vast progressive conspiracy.By the end of August of the same year, the harassment campaign had begun to ramp up, including doxing and focused hacking of Quinn’s social media. The public face of the outrage had even taken on a name, ‘Gamergate’, a term coined by Adam Baldwin, an actor sympathetic to the anti-progressive crusaders. With the entrance of celebrity voices - most of whom stood up for Quinn - the controversy embroiled gaming culture at large, bringing to the fore both the bugbears of the reactionaries (the growing prevalence and application of progressive, critical thinking in and around gaming) and the complaints of the very feminists and activists who were seeking to make the medium more inclusive, more mature and more accountable. Yet this hubbub was still confined to the relatively closed world of gaming culture, an internal fight that - while it can be connected to gender troubles throughout our contemporary moment - did not touch a mainstream nerve.This changed when the harassment of the Gamergaters dovetailed with an issue that looms large in the American public consciousness: mass shootings. The mainstream news took note when prominent gaming critic and feminist activist Anita Sarkeesian was forced to cancel a speaking appearance at Utah State University after the university received violent threats, one of which made reference to the Montreal Massacre, a mass shooting in 1989 where the perpetrator’s explicit aim was to fight feminism. Sarkeesian has been a lightning rod for just this kind of misogyny at least since the crowdfunding campaign for her award-winning ‘Tropes vs. Women in Video Games’ Youtube series. Much as with the Gamergater, her detractors openly alleged unethical conduct, claiming the crowd-funding campaign was scam, a cash grab, all while privately bombarding her with rape and death threats.We can see a pattern forming: in presenting this mask of moral outrage, the reactionaries provide not only a cover for their harassment, but also distract from what truly upsets them: the critique of games and gamer cultural, explicit in feminist activism such as Sarkeesian’s, and implicit in progressive game development like that undertaken by Quinn.Because make no mistake: it is the critique which infuriates Sarkeesian and Quinn’s detractors. The gross hypocrisy of misogynist reactionaries is evident in this two-pronged attack, this overdetermination of why women like Sarkeesian and Quinn - that is, active, productive, opinionated women - ‘don’t belong’ in gaming culture. On the one hand their moral outrage is meant to undermine the standing necessary for these women to make a critique, a critique the reactionaries furthermore consider unnecessary. They argue that video games should not have to be politically correct, that they are pure entertainments that should cater to the tastes of men; tastes that, even if they are misogynist, are free to be so because games are meant to serve as male fantasy. On the other hand, their fierce campaign of sexist and sexually violent harassment is a perfect example of the great unlanced boil of misogyny that still hangs from gamer culture. Yet on the outward face, this misogyny transforms into victim-blaming: these women, they claim, are playing up the attacks, exaggerating their severity for more undue attention, even out and out lying about it so as to further their feminist agenda.For my own part, I find Sarkeesian’s analyses somewhat rudimentary (at least from the perspective of someone steeped in dense feminist literary theory), and see a limit to the usefulness of the negative critique unless paired with positive counter-examples. Such examples would be easy to find, especially with the contemporary proliferation of socially conscious, thought-provoking games (Quinn’s being but one example). But the truth is that many people are ignorant of even the most obviously problematic aspects of their cultural consumption and - despite the existence of numerous inspiring and progressive games - Sarkeesian is responding to a larger cultural attitude, a view of games and gaming which the Gamergaters themselves seem to agree with, and indeed use as justification: that games and gaming are arenas of specifically male pleasure.This attitude about culture - who owns it, who it is for, and what function it serves - is not limited to the realm of gaming alone. In the same year that Quinn became the target of consistent harassment, reactionaries were at work in the Hugo Awards. Forming a bloc known as the ‘Sad Puppies’ a cadre of male voters articulated and forwarded a vision of science fiction: what it was, what it is now, and what it ought to be. They claimed that science fiction’s past was that of ‘zap-gun’ fiction, stories in which a male protagonist engages in operatic adventure, defeats the bad guy and gets the girl. science fiction is properly, traditionally, the realm of juvenile male fantasy. In the present, however, they felt that ‘message’ fiction - socially conscious, progressive, thought-experimental stories - had begun to predominate thanks to the effects of liberal guilt, taking advantage of an atmosphere of political correctness to gain undue representation in the awards. The goal of their bloc was to use the awards to chart a return to this supposed golden age of male fantasy in fiction, a kind of regression that they felt better expressed the true spirit of the genre.Setting aside the fact that Hugo Gernsbeck would likely have subscribed to neither of these uses of science fiction - Gernsbeck preferred the term ‘scientifiction’ and was a proponent of ‘hard’ science fiction with an emphasis on the ‘science’, touting the genre’s usefulness in propelling technological development - this vision of science fiction’s juvenile male past is largely illusory, as is the case with most nostalgia. To claim science fiction as the province of mere pleasurable fantasy ignores the tradition of social and political critique that has been present since the genre’s inception in the work of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. To claim it is an exclusively male domain disregards not just the brilliance of late 20th century and contemporary women authors - Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood to name just a select few - but to ignore the deep roots found in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein or the utopian Herland of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.Yet when I ask a friend of mine what broader culture thinks of when they think of science fiction, without hesitation she replied: ‘Sci Fi is for dudes who can’t get laid’. And this view is, if nothing else, an unflattering mirror of the Sad Puppies’ own opinion: that science-fiction is primarily a space for juvenile male fantasy, a compensatory erotics for men who find no solace in the real world. The same attitude can just as if not more easily be applied to video games, an attitude reinforced by the massive visibility of ad campaigns for mainstream games like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, games whose marketing is indeed pointed squarely at men of a certain coveted demographic. To a non-gamer, video gaming must indeed seem like the practice of socially and sexually marginal men. To those who think of ‘gamer’ as an exclusively male identity, too, this belief serves as a kind of reassurance that, wherever else diversity and political correctness has invaded, games are a safe space for their pleasures and prejudices.When they encounter progressive rhetoric like Sarkeesian’s, however, they are informed that they are the recipients of Privilege, that they are consistently favored by a society built to advantage people like them. Yet where is this easy success in evidence in their own life? Where is the profit from this White Male Privilege they’ve been hearing so much about? They are still socially awkward, still sexually frustrated, still marginal to the mainstream, yet they are told they are complicit in patriarchy, that they ought to feel guilty for their structural advantages, ought to ‘check their privilege’. And when they see a woman - a member of what they are told is a disadvantaged power minority - gain critical acclaim for developing a game they likely do not even see as a game, not as they understand it, as apolitical ‘fun’, they cry foul. Progressivism is, to them, the scam to end all scams. To them (and I had a wealthy, white, highly educated male housemate who in all honesty held this opinion), white men are the most oppressed minority in a society ruled by liberal guilt.Locating a Gamergater manifesto is difficult; the campaign functions on the ability to deny any given participant’s association if it is singled out for viciousness or duplicity, making its diffuseness valuable. Many representative examples, however, can be found on /r/KotakuInAction, a reddit.com sub forum with the telling subtitle ‘Gaming - Ethics - Journalism - Censorship’: all touchstones of Gamergater discourse. While GamerGate is not explicitly mentioned, its mission statement includes inescapable inferences to the furor over Gjoni’s post - ‘We have taken notice of various incidents involving conflicts of interest and agenda-pushing within media which we feel are damaging to the credibility of the medium and harm the community at large’ - and what it views as the hostile and invasive discourse of feminism - ‘We believe the current media is complicit in the proliferation of an ideology that squashes individuality, divides along political lines, and is stifling to the freedom of creativity that is the foundation of human expression.’ The terms they use are lofty, in keeping with the claim that what they are really fighting for is a higher standard of ethics, against forces of censorship, and it explicitly disavows ‘exclusion, harassment, or abuse’, in spite of the widely recognized connection between those actions and the alleged call for ‘ethics in gaming journalism’.The postings on the subreddit itself are further illustrative, containing such polemical calls to battle and claims to gamer identity as the following (all sic):
They targeted gamers.Gamers.We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.We'll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it's fun.We'll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We're already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren't shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We've been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized totheir strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they've threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can't is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You're not special, you're not original, you're not the first; this is just another boss fight.
Beyond the narrative of persecuted yet willfully chosen victimhood, there is the insistence that gamers are, as a result of this shared trauma, a homogenous group, a shared identity exclusive to those who have been properly initiated; their persecution has made them who they are. And alongside the assurance that the battle will be won by this ‘hard core’ gamer community, to whom games properly belong, we find the language of the last stand, a sense they are struggling existentially again an enemy that aims to ‘take our media’ and ‘take our devs’, to ‘change us’ and ‘tell us we no longer matter’. The logic of the passage is that feminism, as a social force, has already assailed and conquered other fields (the comment responds to an allegation that feminists have already invaded science and athletics), ‘taking’ them from those to whom they rightfully belong. Gaming is just the next thing on their hit list.The corollary to this sense of existential threat in the face of critiques of games and gaming - or that perceived in the creation of games like Quinn’s, ones that convey an idea rather than presenting the competitive challenge the passage-writer values so highly - are a belief in the ‘good old days’ of gaming (or sports, or science) before feminists came to kill their joy, invading one of the last bastions of presumed masculine preference, the final sanctuary of what to them actually feels like a space of privilege. And while it cannot, should not, be denied that men still dominate video games as a sector of cultural production - indeed, the same can be said of television, cinema and sports - we also cannot permit ourselves the assumption that both this monosexuality of producers and consumers is the whole story, let alone that it should remain so.Because, just as with science fiction, the claim that games have always been, much less should always be, an exclusively male one is complete unfounded. Since the early days of PC gaming, when Myst was the ‘killer app’ for the CD-ROM, the most successful games have been gender-neutral in tone. One of the best-selling game franchise of all time - The Sims - could very reasonably be called a digital dollhouse. Recent studies suggest that the percentage of women who play games has equalled or even exceeded that of men (in the UK at least). And while there are Doom’s and Wolfenstein’s and Halo’s aplenty, their conspicuousness in the cultural imaginary serves both to overshadow the enormously important work done by women in gaming culture, and to fuel the justificatory delusions of misogynists like the Gamergaters and the Sad Puppies. We must, then, refute the reactionaries on both counts, saying both ‘yes, games are sexist, have been since the beginning’ and ’but not all, not always, nor must they be’. Nor should they, if the form is to keep evolving, keep maturing, for the beauty of a truly great game is that anyone might play.This is the power of games: to place the player, no matter who they may be, within a specific bounded perspective, to immerse them in a new world, necessitating a temporary alternative mode of being. Games provide a role defined by rules, a range of behaviors that inform the player’s identity in the instance of play. In so doing, games allow both a temporary escape from the ambiguities and ambivalences of social reality and public identity, while simultaneously providing a clearer sense of identity within the game itself. Much as to have novels since the development of formal realism, they enable an escape both from and to the self.Moreover, in generating shared experiences, games provide a basis for distinct communities. Even those that are not explicitly multiplayer can, with the help of internet message boards and other such forums, form grounds not just for discussion but for a sense of belonging. Games are invaluable for mediating interpersonal relationships, providing a structure for interaction and a basis for conversation which makes so much of mass media - television and sports included - socially valuable. This too helps shore up a feeling of identity, as identity is a communal thing, the individual taking shape only within a broader social framework of like-minded individuals, of others that - in calling themselves a community - make the self possible. That much is attested to in the ‘They Targeted Gamers’ post, where gamers are defined by a set of shared practices and values, and is reflected in the /r/KotakuInAction mission statement, which claims that the media, in conjunction with feminism, ‘has alienated the artists, developers, and creators who perpetuate the things we love, enjoy, and enthusiastically build communities around.’Hence the fight not just over who gets to speak about games, but who can describe themselves as a ‘gamer’, who can lay claim to that identity, and what that identity defines in turn. One of feminism’s most important contributions to the lives of men is its critique not just of feminine roles, but also of the construction of masculinity. While men are granted disproportionate political and economic power, there is a price to be paid for this empowerment, by way of a self-concept that is deleterious to both understanding and communicating one’s own emotions, expectations of competitive success that can foster feelings of depression and inferiority even while it makes admitting and discussing such feelings a role-failing. Far from initiating a war between the sexes, feminism is a call for solidarity. And while feminism, as per its name, emphasizes the plight of women - and justly so, considering the very material exploitation of women in every extant human society, and the fact that this imbalance in political and economic power makes bringing about change that much more difficult - its dedication to a just and equal society is a promise made to men as well. Systems of oppression, in reproducing themselves, harm everyone caught within them.Of course the work of feminism is far from over, and the demands of gender roles are still felt acutely, still propagated and imposed in innumerable ways. To the socially marginal male, who often already has a troubled relationship to the traditional masculine role, feminism’s challenge to this construction of masculinity can leave him with little sense recourse, few ways of establishing his identity as a man. Games - viewed as a male homosocial space, a boys-only digital clubhouse - provide one solution to this problem. If gaming can be defined as a masculine domain, then conversely those who play it can be understood as men. This is particularly true when gaming is figured as an exclusive hobby, with a clear line drawn between self-identified ‘gamers’ and people who play games more casually on their tablets and mobile devices. Indeed, this difference between ‘hardcore’ gaming and ‘casual’ gaming - eg. between the enormity of Grand Theft Auto and the simplicity of Candy Crush - is an implicitly gendered one. Common to the complaints about women invading the cultural space of gaming is the contestation that women are not ‘real’ gamers, that they are primarily users of mobile games that lack the complexity of ‘real’ games (a conclusion invalidated by the fact that, in the US, women now make up a majority of PC gamers)But ‘real’ games - if by this we mean complex, highly immersive ludic systems - are by no means an exclusive, let alone exclusively masculine, domain. Quite the opposite. Some of the most elaborate and successful games, projects of cinematic scope such as Skyrim or World of Warcraft, are designed to appeal to a far wider audience than the once-coveted 18-24 year old male demographic. Indeed, their financial success depends upon it, far more than on meeting expectations of masculine prerogative: the more players, the more profit. But it is not merely market forces driving this tendency towards open identity-play. The formal qualities of games lend them the power to address anyone, to induce all people to become players, while enabling those player to imagine and adopt diverse new identities through the process of play.Thus Quinn’s game was disquieting to the nascent Gamergaters not simply because a woman made it, but because the game itself is a demonstration of the flexibility and incredible potential of games as a medium, one which subverts the desire for exclusive rights to a particular kind of identity. At its most effective a game gives its player an opportunity to be someone or something else, to experience an alternative subjectivity or abstract system in an immersive fashion. Like ‘message fiction’ in sci-fi, Quinn’s game is a ‘message game’, and it communicates its message by using the versatile game-form to simulate key aspects of a depression-sufferer’s experience. Games such as Quinn’s are part of an endeavor to provide new, informative or even transformative perspectives, an endeavor championed by social progressives who recognize this remarkable aspect of the game form. Such shifts in perspectives may not always be comfortable, much as the feminist interrogation of gender can be upsetting to someone with a great deal invested in that particular cultural construction; the fact that such a shift is even possible challenges any security found in identities derived from games. This discomfort runs sharply against the the escapist quality of the empowerment fantasy that underwrites the most emphatically role-masculine games, and in turn denies the solace that many socially marginal men seek when they turn to gaming, when they define themselves as ‘gamers’. They just wanted to have ‘fun’ after all, not think about what and who they are or might be, but to effortlessly know, and to feel at home in that knowing.Yet this kind of encounter with novel perspectives is precisely what the medium should strive for as it develops, what games and gaming have to contribute to media culture. No that this is a new aspect of games, this power to reveal the flexibility of identity, its ability to dissolve and inaugurate anew. Gamergaters and Sad Puppies alike are engaged in a classically reactionary move to construct a nostalgic fantasy - a time when men where effortlessly, naturally men, and women safely, manageably women, a time of clarity before the waters of identity were muddied - and demand that culture as a whole return to it. But the social has always been a role-playing game of sorts, all people its players, and any sense that those roles are sovereign provinces of selfhood belonging to just one class of bodies an illusion, albeit one with hypnotic power and very real efficacy. The harm the cultural regressives can do is very real, their fantasy of what culture is and should be one reflected in popular attitudes, and until we can reject those assumptions, they will always have it to turn to justify their claims, and to conceal their actions.____Philip A. Lobo is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. His previous video game reviews for Open Letters can be found here.
