Spez1alEd
3d ago
This is true but I don't think it's the whole story. This is anecdotal, but if you were online and involved in gaming discourse in the late 00s and early 10s you would probably remember that gamers and journos already had a kind of culture war going on at the time, but it wasn't yet political. It was over things like day-one/on-disc DLCs, microtransactions, always-online requirements, streamlining in search of a "broader audience," shoddy reboots, and who could forget the Mass Effect 3 ending fiasco? Gamers and neckbeards complained endlessly about these things on online fora, but curiously the gaming journalists always seemed to take the side of the industry, calling gamers entitled manchildren for caring about this stuff. It wasn't until a little later that the Great Awokening happened and hit gaming journalists early, so they started complaining about immoral content in gaming and calling for it to be censored or changed the way conservatives had a few years earlier, and that was just another rift that opened between the two sides. I think among some gamers, they actually felt a sense of betrayal that journalists would do this after dunking on Jack Thompson with them years earlier.
Anyway, I think Gamergate was really just the largest battle in this already-existing war between gamers and journos and the point it became political, and for a lot of participants on the gamer side it was as much about stuff like this as it was about Zoe Quinn or feminism. Even on the journo side, actually--that's what all the "gamers are dead" articles were about, journos had seen gamers quarrelling with them and the industry for years at that point, acting entitled in their view, and this Zoe Quinn thing was just the latest flareup.
I think that's part of where the ethics talk came from as well--because journalists had a track record of defending anti-consumer practices in the gaming industry, a lot of people may've suspected it wasn't just about one dodgy review, but that journalists were probably shills being paid off by the industry to dismiss legitimate criticism of their business practices. To my knowledge no evidence for that was ever uncovered, but it was a suspicion I'd wager a lot of people had.
Spez1alEd
3d ago
I didn't go through what you're describing, but I began browsing 4chan in 2013 at the age of 17, largely /v/, /vr/, /vg/, /tg/, /his/, /an/, /r9k/ and /lgbt/, which is what set me on the path of the chud. Initially I found a lot of the content quite shocking, but partly convincing, at least the notion of what here would be called HBD, and the equivalent for gender, and incorporated it into my worldview which at the time was mainly apolitical but leaning pre-woke liberal, if that makes sense. I'm less sure of it now... clearly innate racial and sexual differences exist to some extent, but I'm unsure how complete an explanation they are for inequality. It isn't something I ever rigorously investigated anyway, I just suspected it was probably true because the sociological explanations all sounded like total cope.
I recall following Gamergate on /v/ at the time, not directly participating, but I'm not sure I fully understood the stuff about Zoe Quinn even then. All I knew was I already didn't like the weird turn left-wing politics had taken into supporting minority idpol and wanting everything they considered problematic censored or changed, so movements which opposed that, I generally liked. I never really watched Skeptic YouTube but I certainly still agreed strongly with that whole ethos of being socially liberal, rabidly pro-free speech and anti-censorship, and anti-progressive idpol/DEI/special treatment/whatever you wanna call it.
At the time that seemed like the dominant strain of liberalism so I had no reason to call myself anything but liberal. As late as 2019 I can recall being out drinking at a gay bar and feeling completely comfortable there, it wasn't like enemy territory or something, I didn't feel like an infiltrator who had to hide his beliefs. Today I doubt I'd feel the same way, after the riots in 2020 made it clear that the fringe woke ideology everyone used to dunk on had just become what liberalism is now. Which is an issue for me, because I don't want to think of myself as conservative. I'm not some Red Tribe guy (doesn't really apply to my country anyway), not religious, I don't care about promiscuity or sexual degeneracy or abortion. To the extent I was ever anti-trans it was always on account of opposing compelled speech, not some moral pearl-clutching about guys acting like fags.
All the same I've been in effect a chud since like 2015--that's the earliest I can remember thinking importing massive amounts of third-worlders into Western nations was probably a bad idea, anyway. And I was a free speech maximalist and thought trenders were giving trans people a bad name and all the rest of it. I've been trying to hang on to that while reconciling it with liberalism, but it seems an impossible task. I've tried to moderate my views on things like trans or immigration, but I feel like it's just binary now, pro or anti, anything that isn't transwomen are women/open borders will just be seen as total opposition.
And emotionally seeing some smug Redditor advocate for hate speech laws or deplatforming or celebrating when it happens will always set me off. I can't really feel comfortable with modern liberalism if that's what it is now, to the point contrarian spaces like this are the only places I feel normal in. And even though intellectually I still think racism is bad and all that, I feel like I've lost the capability to be offended by it or any other form of bigotry.
This is just what polarisation feels like, I guess.
There were pro-consumer journalists at the time, of course, but I do think there was a perception among a lot of the people kicking up a stink about this stuff that their concerns were often not taken seriously by mainstream journalists. Admittedly though I was a teenager back then and not following it super closely, so it's hard to recall the sequence of events perfectly. I just remember that at the time Gamergate definitely didn't feel like an isolated event, but rather part of an ongoing series of consumer revolts or, less charitably, nerdrage episodes that were pretty common in the gaming space back then.
Regarding Mass Effect 3's ending in particular I definitely remember journalists being quite adamant that calls to change it were illegitimate and that it would be an affront to the game's artistic integrity to alter the ending to appease angry fans.
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