Shortly before GamerGate came about Leigh Alexander of Gamasutra published a very well written opinion piece regarding the idea of a gamer identity that included the phrase "gamers are over". To anyone with a modicum of reading comprehension it was clear that she was talking about the coming death of the male-dominated space involving scantily-dressed girls and big guns as the defining aspect of gaming when so many other diverse niches were opening up and thriving.
There are 1.2 billion gamers in the world right now. If gaming were a religion it would be the third most popular religion in the world. That's an awful lot of different people wondering why all the big money games tend to star violent American white male power fantasies.
Still, there's no argument that gaming has largely been about that for most of its artistic life thanks to the decision to market the Nintendo Entertainment System as a toy for boys when the industry rebranded in the '80s. The coming changes feel like an attack on a beloved institution to the dwindling percentage of gamers for whom that is all they know or want to know. A piece like Alexander's when coupled with the soap opera narrative of Zoe Quinn and the razor-sharp criticism of Sarkeesian regarding the dangers of misogynistic tropes made for great enlistment material.
Suddenly it became the fight to protect a culture, further reducing the seriousness with which the 1,199,780,000 gamers who don't post to /r/kotakuinaction could ascribe to GamerGate. Gaming didn't need protecting against The Man anymore than all the hair metal bands in the '80s needed to rally to protect rock and roll. The vast majority of gamers aren't just that or even primarily that. They're people playing a few rounds of Candy Crush on the bus or logging onto World of Warcraft after a hard day. Most of them game because they always have, no different than going to the movies or watching TV.
In other words they're generally grown-ups and grown-ups have a hard time believing that ethics in video game journalism is worth sending death threats to a feminist on Twitter. It's entertainment journalism. It might as well be E!, and the absolute worst thing that can happen is an undeserved game gets a good review or a great game gets trashed. Is that unethical if the opinion of the reviewer has a conflict of interest or has been compelled to do so by a game studio? Sure, of course it is, but that story will never, ever be more important than, say, Felicia Day saying she's afraid to comment publicly on GamerGate because she might get harassed and then immediately getting called a stupid cunt and having her home address posted.
One of those is a real news story demanding immediate attention, and the fact that so many people chose to double down that the journalistic ethics concerns were of equal weight made GamerGate look entitled, childish, and most of all mean.
Something Anita Sarkeesian summed up nicely on Colbert back in October.
GamerGate was started and planned in plain sight by a vengeful ex-boyfriend and bolstered by an online community ready to tear into a woman in gaming. It jumped the harassment train that was already chasing Sarkeesian, and before her Dragon Age writer Jennifer Hepler, and so on and sadly so on. It was supported by a collection of social regressive media personalities and attempted legitimacy on an issue gaming and people in general ranked very low on the totem pole. Certainly far less than the larger discussion regarding gender representation in gaming and the industry.
With no central voice or guiding activists to control or regulate the movement it devolved into actions like a bizarre, crowd-sourced book that actually used a cover inspired by Mein Kampf for a time. No one could ever nail down the "real" GamerGate we were all told was waiting somewhere to have his or her or its story told, and all that was left was to talk to the people who found themselves under a mountain of chilling tweets containing the hashtag #GamerGate. It never represented the growing gaming world, and its failure to understand that doomed it to irrelevancy.
Jef has a new story, a tale of mad robot nurses and a man of miracles called "Sleepers, Wake!" available now. You can also connect with him on Facebook.
