As far as I can tell, conspiracy theories. Every time one of the theories about collusion or conflicts of interest in the industry is shot down, another one rises up… and then there’s the hordes of people who haven’t realized yet that the old ones were shot down.
And since all of these theories center around individuals in the industry rather than problematic industry-wide practices, there’s no way any of it can actually do any long-term good.
It’s worse than the 9/11 conspiracy theories that multiplied like rabbits.
There are few things quite as stunningly derp as a group of (mostly) guys engaging in misogynistic behavior in response to people pointing out their sexism.
It’s probably a timing thing. When I was a kid in the 90s, everyone played computer games, either at school or at home, because what else were you going to do on them? And a lot of people had consoles. But in both cases it was kind of about being reliant on what your parents would buy you, what your friends were playing, and I suppose what ads you might see. Maybe there was one or two kids who’d get a magazine or whatever, but it was all really casual.
I think a lot of this whole protection of the gamer idea is such revisionism, in that respect. I mean, my guess is that it’s a lot like fandom or hell, the whole pop culture obsessives thing (you know, like the tv episode reviews and the communities that sprung up around them), where they existed before the internet became popular, but that they’ve only really become big and visible (and thus valuable territory to claim and make into an identity) in the last decade or so.
Here I go again. Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in…
The next phase of my project will be to test the hypothesis that Twitter is an unrepresentative example of gamergate talk and that if you examine other fora of discussion you will find that talk of journalistic corruption gets more attention than, say, Zoe Quinn.
My first search involves the comment section of Internet Aristocrat’s 6 YouTube videos on the subject. I was only able to get 8214 comments (12.97% of the total 63,329) before the “Show More” button stopped working so this is as good as it gets. The break down is as follows: 2648 comments (8.4% of the total 31,171) from the Shitaku Stream video, 1378 comments (12.5% of the total 11,022) from Quinnspiracy Theory: The Five Guys Saga, 1248 comments (22.4% of the total 5570) from Quinnspiracy Theory: In-N-Out Edition, 1236 comments (26.4% of the total 4677) from Quinnspiracy Theory: White Castles and Ivory Towers, 1253 comments (46.8% of the total 2675) from GamerGate Part 1: The Path We’ve Taken, and 451 comments (4% of the total 11,112) from Atheist+ Stream: How SJWs Pushed Their Way into Atheism.
I wrote a basic python script (which I can post if anyone is interested) to total up the number of various keywords and print the results. Here they are:
The LWs (excluding Alexander) get 1206 mentions.
Quinn gets 984 mentions.
Feminism and social justice get 707 mentions.
Sarkeesian gets 216 mentions.
The Hernandez-Anthropy allegations get 188 mentions.
Day gets 167 mentions.
Grayson gets 95 mentions.
The Sagal-Pinsof controversy gets 68 mentions.
DMCA abuse gets 39 mentions.
Australian games journalism gets 23 mentions.
The IGF/Indiecade allegatons get 11 mentions.
The gamejournopros mailing list gets 7 mentions.
Wu gets 6 mentions.
Shadow of Mordor gets 1 mention.
You’ll notice that Quinn gets 5 times as many mentions as the most popular corruption scandal, the Hernandez-Anthropy allegations. The comment section for Internet Aristocrat’s videos is even more tilted toward Quinn than Twitter traffic is. So far it doesn’t look good for this hypothesis.
I learned to type by entering code listings from magazines for Commodore computers; it helped me a lot with jobs in data entry later on. Checksums were a wonderful thing. It was like TCP in slow motion.
I also remember having a book (published by Usborne?) with lots of BASIC games in it to type in, they were all 1K or less so that you could run them if you were an unfortunate with a ZX81. IIRC they worked with BBC/Acorn, Sinclair, C64, Amstrad, Dragon/Tandy…
To understand you need to be aware it’s been brewing for some years now, first under the radar and in the shape of sexist jokes such as self-professed gamer girls not being real gamers, just doing it for attention (don’t hit on me silly boys, tee hee). Then a completely unknown girl called Anita Sarkeesian announced a kickstarter for a feminist critique of video games. That got their attention and she was harassed. This generated a lot of sympathy for Sarkeesian and she raised over a hundred thousand dollars. This only made them angrier, how dare they stand up to anonymous! When she released her first video they gleefully tore into her. But she refused to give up and every time she released a new video the harassment would flare up again. They also began calling Sarkeesian a social justice warrior, because nobody is supposed to like those special snow flakes with their talk of micro aggressions. So that SJW stuff clearly began as anti-feminist rhetoric. In this way people were primed to think in certain ways about feminists and to think SJW is the worst thing ever. Internet harassment also became a routine way to react to girls they didn’t like.
After two years of this the Quinnspiracy happened. It featured a supposed slut, who allegedly used sex to get ahead (sleeping for better reviews), on top of which she was a female gamer who had made a game about depression (SJW!!!). It pressed all the right buttons and the whole thing swelled to gigantic proportions. No doubt many were simply caught up in the moment, thinking it was just a bit of fun, but there was that core who saw an opportunity here and constructed a bridge between Quinn and Sarkeesian (games! girls!). This was made easier when people began to stand up for Quinn, labeling the harassment misogyny. The ethics thing was and is incidental to the cause and essentially a fig leaf to show uninformed outsiders. If Quinn had been accused of something other than sexual bribery, then that would have been the fig leaf they’d be holding up instead. Their real cause remains their anti-SJW crusade, it is what they are constantly talking about among themselves.
This thing grew so large that there was a core sufficiently big to keep it going, to make it seem as if harassment was acceptable behavior and anti-SJW a worthy fight. When moot banned GG for breaking all kinds of 4chan rules this core was shocked, no doubt they felt betrayed, and that can strengthen attitudes. I honestly think tribal identity, defending the tribe is increasingly why they are continuing this idiocy. All the other things, including the misogyny are still there (I’m not a misogynist, all my best friendzones are with girls!) but clearly they like wearing the martyr’s crown very much.
