Gamergate

Hey, let’s rustle some people’s feathers.

So, since we talked about women in animation and we’re currently talking about video games, let’s combine the two. More specifically, how women are treated in the video gaming world. If you’re a part of the video game culture, you probably know where I’m going with this. If you haven’t heard of #gamergate, I’ll let Chris Kluwe summarize. 

“#Gamergate, for those unaware, is what happened a bit over a month ago, where an angry neckbeard posted demonstrably false allegations about his ex-girlfriend, claiming she slept with video game site reviewers for better scores for her games (again, demonstrably false), and then a whole bunch of other angry neckbeards on the Internet went full Denis Dyack and spitfrothed themselves into national attention by making an array of threats on numerous female game developers, including ones about their death, tried to hide behind a shield of “it’s about journalistic ethics because they said gamers are dead,” and generally proved why the Internet needs to be burned to the ground and the ashes salted.”

His whole article is great. Give it a read here.

One of the female critics that has been the victim of the “gamergate” is Anita Sarkeesian, a well-known feminist critic that runs the feminist frequency website and gives talks on women in modern media. 

She was scheduled to give a talk at Utah State University a couple of weeks ago. Some of the lovely anonymous gentlemen who are part of the gamergate movement threatened her, one of whom threatened to shoot up the school if the talk was held. She cancelled the talk when her request for metal detectors at the doors was denied, a move she made to protect herself and the people who wanted to hear her talk. The Salt Lake Tribune has an article that has the full details, including specifics of some of the messages sent to her.

The sad thing? This is the norm for her. Ever since she started her youtube channel, she's faced backlash and threats from men in the gaming community. Someone actually made a game where you click on her face to beat her up. She's had her private information leaked online many times. And she's not the only one. 

Felicia Day wrote a well worded and quite eloquent blog post on why she was afraid to talk about this issue in the gaming community. (The post is here but it's on tumblr, which isn't available on ResNet.) Almost immediately after the post went up, she was doxxed and her personal address was posted online. Here's a kotaku article on what happened if you want to read up. 

The video game community has always been a little on edge about the topic of women, but I have to wonder what fuels this obsessive hatred towards female and feminist critics. What is it that goes through their minds when they threaten these women with rape and death? (Remember friends, rape threats tend to be used as a display of power)

There's also the issue of the hypocrisy in these types of gamers. They want video games to be taken seriously, to be viewed as art. As soon as we turn a critical eye on games, however, they start saying things like, "It's just a game, don't take it so seriously!" instead of realizing that art has a lot to say about the culture we live in and can even start to sway that culture. I could make an entire post just on that. 

Sorry, this went on longer than I anticipated. I have a passionate love of games and a passionate hatred of the vocal culture. Those things clash on occasion.