Gamergate: the Dark Precursor to a Violent Feminism
#Gamergate can be perceived through two opposing perspectives. From the perspective of the Gamergaters, it should be understood as presenting an ethical problem in video game journalism where intimate relationships influence the objectivity of video game reviews. From a feminist perspective, Gamergate should be viewed as the response of the default gamer being forced to accept the inclusion of women and increased diversity in game narratives. The latter interprets the movement as an expression of men’s anxieties over losing ground in a domain where the patriarchal norms are particularly stark. The Gamergaters would contend that their marginalized identity, one distinct from hegemonic masculinity, is not acknowledged and that the feminist criticism of the Gamerworld is part of broader campaign of harassment and demonization of their community. No matter which perspective you look from, the way the Gamergaters expressed, whatever it was they where trying to express, is unfortunate for all concerned. Much of it has been recanted and almost all of it undermined whatever real cause they may have had. Some of it, much of what I have seen, is just repulsive. Nevertheless, it is worth reminding ourselves of the online harassment and threats of real violence to gage where we are now a decade on.
Feminists were indignant towards the harassment and violent threats of Gamergaters, but this indignation would lead to a feminism that would follow through on threats that Gamergaters left idle. In my last article, I coined this type of feminism Gone Girl Feminism after the film from 2014 that inspired it. In this article I will compare Gone Girl Feminism with the disgusting misogynist behaviour which typified Gamergate 2014 and inspired a new turn in Feminism. Gamergate was a threshold moment for Gone Girl Feminism: “Gamergate serves as an example of how symbolic violence can transcend the boundaries of the games into “reality” and has the potential to become “real,” physical violence.” (Kishonna L. Gray, 2016).
#Gamergate
In August 2014 Zoё Quinn was accused of exchanging sexual favours for positive reviews of a game she released in 2013. Depression Quest is a text-based game which runs like a ‘choose your own adventure book’. The series of fictional scenarios available are designed to convey the experience of depression. The game was received favourably on many sides, but there was a backlash from people who fretted about the departure from the traditional gaming. The gaming community is dominated by boys who gravitate towards games with imaginary words involving violence and skill. Depression Quest was seen as an intrusion of politics, social justice activism and feminism, into the world of gaming.
The post that officially started Gamergate, became known as ‘the Zoe post’. It contained 10,000 words including emails and texts, with images interspersed. Eron Gjoni latter admitted that he had no proof that there was any conflict of interest on Zoё’s part. Indeed, the journalist in question never reviewed Depression Quest, although some of Zoё’s Games were mentioned in his articles. However, both claimed that these were written before they started a relationship. It is difficult to prove when a relationship has not started, but it is beside the point. Some women gain professional favours with men they sleep with, but this may be an indicator of sexism in the workplace. Although, there may well be many women who resent how other women take advantage of their sexuality when their professional merit is not enough. Of course, many more women will resent the stereotype, as a myth that detracts from the merit of successful women. More importantly, in no way does cheating on a boyfriend justify the abuse and threats that followed Zoe Quinn for months.
More generally, Gamergaters decried a culture of nepotism between journalists and left-wing gamers in which progressive games are promoted despite not being favoured by gamers. A series of other victims followed, most prominently Anita Sarkeesian who had already been a victim of harassment in 2012 after the release of her video series Tropes Vs Women in Video Games which analyses sexist portrayals of women. She received rape and death threats, and private information including her home address was leaked and she was forced to flee her home. Brianna Wuu, a game developer, was also forced to relocate following threats to her life after she had ridiculed Gamergate. Wuu offered a $11,000 reward to anyone who provided information that led to the arrest of any of her harassers. She sent everything to the FBI who published a 172 page report on Gamergate from the FBI. In response to claims that they did not care, an FBI official responded by saying, and I paraphrase here. ‘It was never a matter of not caring, there was just too much to get thorough, it felt like we were working triage, in a war zone, and we had to decide which patients to care for first.’
The scientific literature on the Gamergate phenomenon
The scientific literature generally frames Gamergate as an expression of the insecurities of heterosexual white males. Although, most scientific papers also criticize this stereotype as part of the problem. The stereotype, it is argued, causes the anxieties that define the Gamergater:
From this vantage point, we can also see “Gamergater” as a gendered identity, tied to the popular perception of a gamer as a socially inept young White male. This stereotype’s inaccuracy generates many of #Gamergate’s defining anxieties. (Andrea Braithwaite, 2016)
Other articles acknowledge that gamers undermine the dominant hegemonic masculinity and that they are anxious of their position as a marginalized community. However, rather than acknowledge their lived experience as a marginal community, they sound incredulous:
geek masculinity also disavows stereotypically masculine interests in favor of technology and gaming, meaning “those who identify with geek culture often feel marginal, as their interests are marked by the dominant culture as odd or weird” (Massanari, 2015, p. 4).
There seems a waisted opportunity here to counter the detrimental effects of hegemonic masculinity. Instead, it is the worst traits of hypermasculinity that are expressed in the anonymity of social media. A study from 2021 that collected data from 700 Gamergaters found that 303 were men, so 89.2 % were male. At the same time, less than half of them conformed to the stereotype of white heterosexual male. The quotes that Braithwaite presents are, I suspect, the culmination of a competition amongst the Gamergaters online to conceive of the most grotesque images, the most offensive and the most hurtful comments, isolated from reality of the victims. Gamergate was the canary in the coalmine for the negative effects of social media, but we did not know what is coming.
Various studies show that boys gravitate to videogames while, girls gravitate towards social media. Girls develop abilities to win status and influence social media, but are also more vulnerable to the detrimental effects on mental health. Girls of Gen Z soon learned that moral outrage and victimization gained them more social status in the form of retweets, and the likes. This incentive structure rewards inciting resentment, disgust and anger in others. Gamergate happens exactly at the point in which everyone had smartphones and the negative effects were spreading through girls in Gen Z. However, girls are socially more adept at manipulating social media at an earlier age and adapt quicker, while the Gamergaters put out a barrage of embarrassing and cringe worthy rants and terrifying threats that served none of their proclaimed or apparent interests. Gamergate operates as just one more reason for women to galvanise against the unwanted behaviours of men, behaviours grouped under the term ‘toxic masculinity’.
Braithwaite’s paper presents grounds for disregarding the lived experience of male gamers as a marginalized group: “For the gaming industry, however, this dedicated male audience has been lucrative and courted nearly exclusively during the industry’s early years (Cassell & Jenkins, 2000; Kline et al., 2003)”. Even if male gamers are courted by the industry, their performance as gamers is done in private. Their marginalized identity will not be acknowledged in their offline experiences, let alone accepted or affirmed. We need to acknowledge that the gamer community is dependent on online discourse in a unique way. It is formed and maintained almost exclusively online because they are a marginalized group. As the article points out, the language of Gamergate is sadly before its time, it is:
characteristic of online discourse, which “requir[es] a communicative subject to be ‘heard’ before they become able to communicate” (in Shepherd, Harvey, Jordan, Srauy, & Miltner, 2015, p. 3). Increasingly, being heard means being hateful, as our “technologies and cultures of social media interpellate particular subject-positions, normalizing behaviours that would seem inappropriate in other contexts” (Shepherd et al., 2015, p. 3).
Women like Anita Sar should be commended for trying to transform a hostile environment at a personal cost. We should support these feminists, but also call out the feminist who now practice real violence offline as a means of vengeance and discipline. Both movements have been encouraged by the incentive structures that shape online discourse. We should avoid entrenching “the popular perception of a gamer as a socially inept young white male [because] This stereotype’s inaccuracy generates many of #Gamergate’s defining anxieties.” The same can be said for the ongoing discourse on male toxicity. I argue that all of us can be drawn into the polarizing hate speech acts online, discourses that demand that people take a side in a war. This will lead to dehumanizing violence on bodies that are only viewed as symbolic sites of political violence. It seems the ‘scientific literature’ on Gamergate has done just that.
Not a methodology, but an agenda
Andrea Braithwaite does not really define the methodology of her research but says it:
most closely resembles the “snowball” approach—I followed the trails created by #Gamergate’s participants, who provide links to numerous sites, Twitter feeds, Tumblr accounts, and discussion boards as part of their own posts. …I was looking for how “dominance may be enacted and reproduced by subtle, routine, everyday forms of text and talk that appear ‘natural’ and quite ‘acceptable’” (van Dijk, 1993, p. 254).
In other words, her method was to trawl the internet for the most aggressive and hateful discourse that she could find relating to Gamergate. What kind of scientific results can be drawn from such a methodology? She quotes these horrible tirades at length without explaining how they relate to, or are significant for, her argument or her expected findings? I question the scientific value of picking the worst of online discourse and quoting at length. This is a rhetorical ploy and not science. She continues:
The presence and prevalence of misogynistic speech can be “viewed as a sign that a network is robust, and it is being used and used hard” (Nakamura, 2013a, para 2; see also Gray, 2014). Understanding how #Gamergate imagines “gamer” is part of a necessary interrogation of the intersections of identities, technologies, and power on social media.
There is no data on the prevalence of misogynistic speech, so there can be no argument regarding how robust, or even how it is used. I think the last sentence does seem like something that is worth pursuing, but I did not find it in the article.
The hypocrisy of Gone Girl Feminism in the aftermath of Gamergate
Gamergate is not the only echo chamber that has led to extremist views, violent vengeance, and the intimidation of people who have alternative views. What was chastised as another grotesque form of misogyny and male violence has now become normalized behaviour in the fight against toxic masculinity and ‘Terfdom’. Where feminists and social justice warriors were once outraged at the threats and intimidation of Gamergaters, they now employ intimidation and carry through with threats of violence in a way the Gamergaters never did. They have refined the strategic use of social media platforms to systematically destroy people’s life. I do not mean destroy their career and reputation by making false accusations about them.
Men are directed into flats, letting them believe they have been very lucky to get their own flat in Berlin, only so that they can be drugged and harassed there. They are housed in a flat where they are drugged, and where their harassers can access their flat whenever the man is absent. This happens after the victim has been sexually harassed and coerced and sometimes sexually assaulted. This happens in his workplace over a period of 1-2 years, or however long it takes. This will happen at his workplace everyday. This will happen at his German course everyday. This will happen at most bars until they gradually learn everywhere he goes to socialize. This will happen in his flat share situations right up to the point that he finally arrives in the flat where he will be drugged. This is achieved through a series of scripted scenes that have performed and refined by the same women on a series of British targets, over and over, for at least a decade. Every time, new feedback and new refinements are made.
Gamergate started with a long peevish post from a man who had been cheated by his girlfriend. Feminists a ridicule the reaction to a girlfriend cheating and lying about it. It seems so pathetic for a man to seek revenge, or perhaps it is that fact he seeks revenge while disguising it as noble quest for justice that makes it so pathetic to some. In podcasts like ‘Bad People’ on the BBC from September last year the feminists quip the stereotype of a woman scorned- ‘there is no wrath like a man scorned’. Yet, feminists will spend years stalking, harassing, coercing, entrapping, sexually assaulting a man to prove he cheats to justify housing him in a flat where he will be drugged, for however long it takes him to leave. Female victims who have had private information published after a series of threat report how they were forced to move house. Yet, the group in Berlin takes pride in the fact that having sexually assauted the man and drugged him in the flat and in bars he flees Berlin for a chance to start over in safety.
Sofia Hagan reports how her online harassers claimed to have knowledge of her house which, as it turned out, was only garnered from photos she had posted. However, feminist groups in Berlin and Glasgow take pride in the fact that they can access the apartment of the victim whenever they want and take images of the flat, move things and take things from the flat. Even spiking the food and water supply in the flat. This begins false reports that the man cheated on his girlfriend and leads to women who dedicate are to the abuse of men and do not care to substantiate if the reports are true. Each has their own history and their own reasons for dedicating much of their life to taking vengeance on men. It is their means to gain prestige and popularity among peers for being the women who executes a certain form of violence or humiliation on British men. They need not wait for a man they know has cheated, or who they know hates German women, or women in general, to pull their performance off. No must they wait for a real cheat, racist or sexist for others to believe what is said of him in the group chats.
Gamergate was described as an attempt terrorize people who have different viewpoints like those women who tried to introduce different perspectives to the Gamer world. Yet the Telegram group chat where the dehumanizing abuse of victim is posted intimidates anyone who might speak up against the harassment and violence of the group. Of course, we all now know that even feminists and moderates suffer this form of intimidation for holding to a different vision of feminism and social justice. Some men are fairing much worse. It seems the toxicity of Gamergate that provoked moral outrage, has become the preferred tactic of the morally progressive.