It’s pretty hard to miss that Twitter handle, “Fuhrer_Dante_Chan”, with the swastikas. Maybe that’s meant ironically, maybe it’s not very serious, but it’s hard to be sure. My sense is that #Gamergate is driven by a relatively small number of people who are emphatically reactionary, who usually mask how extreme they are. They’re deliberately appealing to a larger audience of people who feel they “just want to be left alone” with their games, who don’t want to be challenged about their received sexism and racism.
Recently, for a number of reasons but mostly due to the cost of housing, I had to relocate from an urban area and rent a room in a house in an old suburb. I haven’t really lived in a suburb in my adult life, so it’s at once familiar and very alien. It’s astonishingly isolating, with scarcely any space for interaction with other people. And the only thing I see young adults in the suburbs doing with each other, is playing console games. As forms of entertainment go, gaming is actually pretty cheap.
Jacobin Magazine had a good issue recently on cities and urban planning and so on, including the impact of the demographic shift in which now the cities are for the rich and the suburbs for the poor, The Suburbanization of the US Working Class. Urban life means more social services and more ready transit across short distances; it means it’s easier to form community networks and coordinate mass actions.
So I think there’s some truth to the stereotype of young men, isolated in the suburbs, who spend all their time on the console. But the stereotype is wrong about one important thing: these aren’t the affluent. And it’s hard to see the benefits of solidarity when you’re socially isolated. And if you’re a young white man in the suburbs, you’ve got conflicting messages: you’re playing on the easy setting, but the game’s gotten much harder. There’s a reason why there’s such a hunger for a form of narrative about individual heroism, in which you are the most important person in the world. And people hungry for this may be vulnerable to claims that someone’s plotting to take their games away. The suggestion that this someone has a voice that sounds like your superego, with its criticisms of your failure to get a well-paying job and do something with your life, is particularly insidious.
One way to reach people like this, I think, is with better narratives, better content in games. I was going to say this is ironic, but that’s the wrong word. I think this is exactly what the reactionary minority is afraid of, why there’s a note of desperation. Games with women as protagonists can be popular. What happens when there are more games about reclaiming agency and dignity through forging solidarity among the oppressed? When some of them become popular? What happens when some game is modelled on history – but not standard Whig history or a triumphal imperialism, but on struggles of the oppressed – and becomes popular?
