A GamerGate Story – A State of the Gate Address, Part 1

At the time of this writing, we are on the cusp of the sixth month of the GamerGate scandal, and I have but one thing to say to start this piece out with:

“This is 2015?  What a time to be alive.”

I’m going to tell you a story, dear reader!

A man is browsing the aisles at his local Wal-Mart, picking up some groceries.  The fellow is pushing a shopping cart laden with food, new socks, pet food, and some necessities for taking care of his motorcycle and for getting a pesky stain out of an old, timeworn recliner.  He’s a tall fellow with a muscular build, hair to his shoulders and a well-groomed beard.  A son of the Vikings.  He pushes his cart up to the magazine rack and spends a few minutes flipping through the pages of The Backwoodsman and Popular Science – a couple old favorites.  He starts to turn away from the racks to head for the checkout counter when he stops and lets out a sigh.  He turns back, reaches down, and picks up a videogame magazine.  Probably EGM, though any of the various gaming rags would do equally well.

Why did the sigh come first?  Because this man, once a hardcore gamer’s hardcore gamer with a collection of hundreds of classics and great titles was a fellow who had come to consider himself retired from the gaming hobby.  In the recent years of owning a home, working a meager-paying job with long hours, and tending to the host of life’s little troubles that go along with being a middle-aged person, he had rather resigned himself to not being able to call himself a gamer any more.  Being a gamer takes upkeep and dedication the same as any other hobby, and there just wasn’t the time or the money any more.  Beyond that, the gaming magazines of the day had, starting many years previously and much to his disappointment, become almost unrecognisable to a fellow who grew up with Official Dreamcast Magazine, the original Electronic Gaming Monthly, and Tips and Tricks.  Gone were the detailed plots of information and game reviews tailored to his interest, replaced instead with the glitz of full-page, full-color product ads that took half the pages in the magazine, a review score that practically scored games only between a 7 and a 10, and reviews and previews that read more like official marketing material from the game creators than the journalistic work of an informative media.  In short, the magazines were worthless crap.  He picked it up out of old habit, he knew it, and he sighed.

But picking that magazine up might have been one of the best decisions in my life. Perusing its pages and skipping over the tripe, I eventually skimmed through part of an article that, of all the absurdities I was accustomed to in these magazines, was trying to win some sort of prize.  A videogame magazine – ostensibly by gamers and for gamers, was decrying gamers as sexist.  After the mandatory double-take and complete readthrough, I remember briefly recalling the slanderous bologna that came at me in the 1990s, at the peak of my passion, that called me violent.  “Murderers in training” according to the late, great Jack Thompson.  Before we were dangerous killers we were worthless nerds and social outcasts, as many of my GamerGate colleagues are old enough to recall.  And now here was another lie being spat out at us, at me, from the pages of one of these supposedly “gamer” magazines, of whom a lower opinion I didn’t think I could have.  Laughable.

I’ve been on the Internet a long, long time.  Long enough to smell a sock puppet in a forum argument from a mile away.  Just what the hell was going on here?

I closed the page, tossed it back onto the rack, and walked on to the checkout counter in disgust.  That was the beginning of an adventure, though I scarcely knew it at the time.  That evening I plopped down in my office chair and took my irritation online, hoping to to discern the reason for what I read.  And what I discovered was this:  That annoying little bastard of an article wasn’t alone.  In addition to the printed piece I had read on the news stand, not one, not two, but TWELVE competing online “games media” publications, including some old familiar names like Kotaku and Gamasutra were pushing an attack on gamers by decrying all of us as sexist and misogynist in what would later be known colloquially to GamerGate supporters as “The ‘Gamers are Dead‘ Articles.”  And why?  What was the stated reason for this journalistic outburst at an audience of millions?  Because a total nobody of a female indie game developer was being harassed by trolls for sleeping around on her ex.  These outlets were tarring an entire demographic over the actions of some damned trolls on the Internet.  They were tarring me.

That got my hackles up from the start, but something even more disturbing was nibbling at my mind.  I took a look at the publishing dates of the pieces, and all of them had been published within a mere 48 hours of each other.  All with the same message, and even using much of the same language, tone, and terminology.  How on Earth were a bunch of competitor publications just coincidentally releasing a massive wall of simultaneous articles, that frankly sounded like they could have all been written by the same person?  I’ve been on the Internet a long, long time.  Long enough to smell a sock puppet in a forum argument from a mile away.  Just what the hell was going on here?

I went to several of these sites in turn intending to voice my displeasure in their comments sections and forums, only to be blocked, banned, and silenced at every turn.  My home forum on the net was forbidding discussion.  NeoGAF forbade it.  I found my way to Reddit and discovered something that looked like the aftermath of a World War I battlefield – deleted threads and comments as far as the eye could see, like casualties of a world-record artillery strike, and this wasn’t even the worst of it as I would later learn.  The same sentiment welled up in my chest until I was fit to burst:  Just what the hell was going on here?!

In some of the comments sections of the Gamers are Dead articles I very quickly noticed a pattern:  If you offered commentary in support of the article, you would be approved in a short time.  Any attempt to challenge the article, complain about the article, or even, as was my case, to offer a polite defence of gamers by cautioning the use of such a wide brush for such serious accusations was met with either a ban, or derisive mocking and then a ban.  There was no touch light enough to avoid backlash if you opposed it in any way.  There was no defence accepted – you either forswore gamers entirely and without exception and agreed with the article, or you were summarily executed.  I was thrown out, forcibly, of the various gaming media establishment that my patronage had once helped build.  Not only did they shun me, but they took a rather vocal and borderline sadistic satisfaction in doing so judging by some of the Twitter posts coming from the authors of those pieces.  All for the crime of saying “That isn’t me.  I’m not the bad guy.  Why are you doing this?”

It took a full day to wrap my head around what I was seeing, until I gradually came to a hypothesis:  The games media were, for some reason unknown, actively trying to kill the gamer identity.  And they were going to do it by pushing this ‘sexism’ narrative, using their clout and readership to spread the meme, and silencing dissent until their point of view was commonly accepted as the truth.  Being a former activist in other political causes I had seen this mechanic at work before – it is something called “bootstrapping a story.”  You can Google it.  It is a strategy usually only employed by well-to-do parties over hot-button political issues like anti-war movements or gun rights, in my experience.  I could not understand why the gaming media would be using it against their own audience, and the notion that it was being done to shield some game developer I had never heard of who was involved in her 15 minutes of Internet drama struck me as too far out of tune with reality to be believable.  There was something bigger going on, and I could smell it.  I wasn’t prepared to bet my life on the theory yet, but their behaviour was certainly treading some familiar waters.  I was bloody furious at being treated this way regardless of their excuses, and by God I was going to get to the bottom of it.

And they were going to do it by pushing this ‘sexism’ narrative, using their clout and readership to spread the meme, and silencing all dissent until their point of view was commonly accepted as the truth.  Being a former activist in other political causes I had seen this mechanic at work before – it is something called “bootstrapping a story.”

Out of exasperation I dropped by an old haunt I hadn’t visited in ages – the videogames board on 4chan.org.  4chan was a wretched hive of scum and villainy if there ever was one, but owing to its occasional bursts of brilliant content and off-kilter humor it had been an on-and-off home for my Internet activities over the years.  In a place where almost anything goes and no subject was taboo, I felt sure I would find people discussing this whole fiasco with the gaming press.  As soon as the front page loaded I was happy not to be disappointed.  There was a very large discussion thread, front and center of page 1, discussing something called “The Quinnspiracy.”  Recognizing the name Quinn as the alleged victim from the articles, I entered the thread and began to lurk and read what people were talking about.  This thread and the ones to follow it were moving at positively blistering speed.  Thousands of people were participating, and the maximum number of posts in the threads were being reached within minutes.  The storm was so fierce that the board moderators were having major problems keeping the threads contained.

A few things in the discussion became apparent very quickly:

First off the censorship surrounding the story and the Gamers are Dead articles was far more widespread than I had experienced – virtually zero sites on the net outside of 4chan were allowing discussion of it, much less disagreement with its premises.  A Reddit thread was linked in which fully twenty five thousand comments had been deleted and countless users banned, and held to be only the worst example.  With almost nowhere else on the Internet to turn to, people had flocked in droves to 4chan.

Secondly I learned that a series of Youtube videos, one by user MundaneMatt and two by the InternetAristocrat had been produced summarizing the events since the alleged “harassment” of this Quinn person had began.  I watched all of these and went back to retroactively read The Zoe Post – the blogpost in which the ex-boyfriend of this person, a man named Eron Gjoni, had outed Quinn as having slept around with numerous people and which I had learned about from the videos.

 the censorship surrounding the story and the Gamers are Dead articles was far more widespread than I had experienced

Third I learned why there was such a firestorm going on about the contents of the Zoe Post:  Zoe Quinn was a game developer, and the people she had slept with made up a list consisting of among others, her boss, a Public Relations agent for nearly ALL of the media outlets that had written a Gamers are Dead article, and a game reviewer and journalist for Kotaku named Nathan Grayson.  A developer had been caught red handed sleeping with industry people, and not just that, but it had happened at a time when her game, a positively pedantic looking “walking simulator” with gameplay consisting of clicking through html pages on static backgrounds, was being top-billed as a recommended game by a whole host of outlets.

A developer had been caught red handed sleeping with industry people, and not just that, but it had happened at a time when her game, a positively pedantic looking “walking simulator” with gameplay consisting of clicking through html pages on static backgrounds, was being top-billed as a recommended game by a whole host of outlets.

Far from being merely a bit of e-drama between a couple breaking up, we had at last been handed what looked like a smoking gun of just the kind of industry corruption many gamers had suspected for years.  The entire situation positively reeked of backscratching and favors, and gamers wanted answers.  When answers were demanded the censorship of the various gaming discussion sites began, and when gamers took to Twitter to make their concerns and complaints known to the world outside the reach of the games media, the Gamers are Dead articles had come out as the response.

Far from being merely a bit of e-drama between a couple breaking up, we had at last been handed what looked like a smoking gun of just the kind of industry corruption many gamers had suspected for years.

Lastly I learned that my suspicions were shared by those whom I would later come to call my brothers and sisters in arms:  Nobody was buying that so many articles with the same message could have come out from competing outlets at the same time.  There was widespread suspicion that what we were facing seemed to be some kind of unified front where the game journalists responsible were arranging these events behind the scenes and “bootstrapping” this narrative.  We were weeks away yet from the wonderful Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannoupolis and his uncovering of the GameJournoPros mailing list, but all of us were already certain that something akin to it must have existed somewhere.  The order of business in these discussion threads was investigation – of the professional and personal lives of every game journalist and website involved in the attack articles.  People were digging through corporate contacts and social media content with a fine-toothed comb and posting results and leads by the dozens, with other people breaking off into teams to follow up each lead and post back with results.  Regardless of all else, one conclusion seemed to be shared by nearly every one of these myriad people:  Betrayal.

The gaming media had betrayed gamers to the same sort of lies and spin they had once fought against in the form of Jack Thompson and Leland Yee.  We trusted them as the bulwark of the gaming culture, and they hadn’t just sat idly by as we came under attack by political outsiders, but were actively participating in our destruction in order to cover up their own shady dealings.  It was the ultimate betrayal, and the people were going to find out who was responsible, where they coordinated this at, and how the censorship campaign was being arranged.  And once they were within reach, the matter would become making their professional lives miserable.  Payback with interest was the only item on the menu, for daring to attack the entire gamer demographic to cover up their own cronyism and corruption that they had kept so well hidden for years.  Payback for throwing the old “outcast gamer geek” stereotype back in our faces, like we hadn’t moved beyond it a decade ago when gaming went mainstream.  Payback for stereotyping us all as “sexist white males” and spitting on millions of minority gamers.  Payback for breaking our trust after we had built their empire with our own money, our own effort, and for many of us, our own tears and years of social, emotional, and occasionally physical trauma in defense of our hobby.

The gamers of /v/ and their new allies from Reddit and Twitter were launching an operation, code name “Disrespectful Nod” to break the interconnected web of corrupt and colluding journalists by destroying their primary source of income – the ad revenue from their media sites. The journalists had given gamers an ultimatum:  “Submit to the sexist label and grovel, or watch your identity cursed like it was in decades past only with no media to help you.”  Gamers had responded with their own ultimatum:  “Give up your crooked practices and behind-the-scenes collusion, or watch your careers die and your websites burn to ashes once and for all.”  The gamers posting on 4chan were actually prepared to accept committing to a state of mutual assured destruction if that was what it took.  Paraphrasing from the Batman movie Rise of the Dark Knight, the people had already decided on a general course of action and posted it out loud as a rallying cry everywhere:  “Crashing this industry….with no survivors!” 

The journalists had given gamers an ultimatum:  “Submit to the sexist label and grovel, or watch your identity cursed like it was in decades past only with no media to help you.”  Gamers had responded with their own ultimatum:  “Give up your crooked practices and behind-the-scenes collusion, or watch your careers die and your websites burn to ashes once and for all. “

Journalistic ethics, an old and nearly forgotten medicine that purges cancers like agenda pushing and cronyism from the body of the media industry had been invoked by gamers like a battering ram.  The thought was simple and sweet:  Enforce ethics policies, and the back room deals, back scratching, agenda-pushing, and as we would later learn, collusion, blacklisting and narrative-crafting on secret mailing lists, either stop for good, or gamers would have the legal and professional leverage to have the participants humiliated, shunned, and removed from the industry like any other corrupt moguls.  And with gamers worldwide watching the industry like hawks and digging through every detail of the media’s activities 24 hours a day in the wake of the scandal, we would know who violated ethics.  “Refuse to adopt and enforce good ethics, and we’ll destroy you.  Adopt a good policy and then break it, we’ll remove you under your own policies.  Adopt a good policy and actually stick to it, and we’ll allow you to survive.”

Gamers were pissed off, more motivated than I have ever seen any crowd in my life, and fully committed to taking action regardless of the odds or the scale of the fight.  They were calling for death ground – two groups enter, one group leaves.  Just the way the games media had offered it when they threw down the gauntlet with the attack articles.  The kid gloves were off.

I had a choice, right then and there.  I could sit on the sidelines and watch the fire burn with detached interest as these people in front of me fought the battle for myself and other gamers across the world.  I could finally consider the book closed on the “gamer” chapter of my life and go back to my normal routine of existing.  Or I could light my old torch, sharpen my pitchfork, strap on my metaphorical Power Glove, and yell to the heavens that I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.  I actually hesitated and thought it over for a good half an hour.  Activism is a lot of work after all.  It eats up long hours, is stressful and often times frustrating, there is no guarantee of success, massive penalties for failure, and you do it for free.

Gamers were pissed off, more motivated than I have ever seen any crowd in my life, and fully committed to taking action regardless of the odds or the scale of the fight.

On August 30th, 2014, at right about 12:30am Central time, I typed a name into the name field of the New Reply box in the recently-rechristened “#GamerGate General” thread, named for the hashtag coined by Adam Baldwin and proudly adopted by this ragtag army of angry gamers, typed a few words of introduction, and pressed the Submit button.

That was the day I personally went to war.