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You know what we didn't have in a good while? A proper gamer drama.
All the actors from the past decade are basically defunct: Sarkeesian largely ceased publishing after the parted ways with McIntosh (my long-standing belief is that he was the brains behind the operation, and she alone just couldn't make enough quality material to stay relevant), Zoe van Valkenburg's last claim to relevance was an accusation against another of her exes in 2019, resulting in his suicide soon after. Youtube continues to steal lunch money from written articles about games, so Polygon and Kotaku are shells of their former selves. Vice's Waypoint has come and gone, and the only thing of note they did was having to apologize after posting a 9S forcefem fanfiction on main.
There has been some occasional flareups here and there, but nothing that could possibly rise to the 2014's heights of in(s)anity. Dare I say... until now?
You probably haven't heard of Sweet Baby Inc.. It's a "narrative consulting" company that specializes in retooling the game's scripts to better represent historically underrepresented groups. Notable releases with which they worked in the past few years include God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2 and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. For those of you who don't play often, the former two were generally favorably received, while the latter was a critical and commercial bomb that was dead in the water for years before its launch and probably killed the development studio.
The broader public (by which I mean the narrow, extremely online subset of the fandom) learned about its existence some time last year. People have been coming up with some wild conjectures about what exactly SBI's involvement was with those games. Like for example many western AAA titles in recent years struggle with modeling female faces for some reason, and the in-game models look uncanny valley-ish and quite unlike the people they're modeled after, and the conspiracy-inclined are saying that the characters are deliberately made ugly to challenge the patriarchal standards, or something. I am of two minds - most of the examples usually provided seem to be deliberately taken in-between frames, but still it's a bit weird how Japanese devs like Capcom, Platinum or Kojima Studios don't have those issues.
But let's put aside speculation about technical issues and focus on what is SBI's department: writing. Well, thing are not looking so good there either:
Oh, and as you probably expect at this point, SBI's members have been occasionally seen on twitter gloating about how the hold white male gamers in contempt. I've given up twitter and tumblr for Lent, so I won't be providing specific examples here, sorry.
A few days ago, a steam curator was created listing all the games that have SBI's involvement as "not recommended". The situation is played out predictably: some employees claimed harassment, the steam group got Streisand Effect'd and grew to 200k over the last two days, it has been mass reported, people are trolling in the fora claiming to have insider info, the forum got wiped... Kotaku has written an article about it, the article's author claims that you can't be racist against white people. It's all 2012-2015 discourse frozen in amber, time is a flat circle. The only difference now is that because it's Musk's twitter, the statement gets stamped with a community note. Contrary to what I wrote at the beginning, it'll probably blow over in a few days, but I decided to do a writeup just in case.
Myself, I haven't bought a western AAA game since 2017, and I wish all of you the same.
It will blow over, because it is missing the primary ingredient that caused GG to explode: topic ban. GG got huge because there was a scandal (rightly or wrongly, not weighing the original spark) and people who wanted to talk about it were not allowed to - even on 4chan. This lent an air of "what else are they hiding" to the whole game journalism industry, and then it all snowballed. It always confuses me when people don't understand that part, or that phenomenon in general. This time, no dice. There's no undercurrent of hidden misdeeds, it's just a discussion about a disliked group doing disliked things in the (relatively) open.
Whereas I would say it's missing the primary ingredient that precedes and causes the bans: a specific victim.
If the community picks out one specific woman who works at SBI and decides to make a hate circle around her, publish her home address and start SWATing her residence, make hundreds of hour-long hate videos directed at her with lots of focus on her appearance and personal life, build a mythology around her supposed criminal activities and personal failings, send mountains of rape and death threats, etc., then we will start to get the ban waves you talk about, and then it will turn into a big war again.
If JK Rowling is too rich to count as a legitimate target ("punching up" and all that), consider all of the people targeted by Andrea James.
You'll have a hard time persuading me that J. Michael Bailey's prepubescent daughter deserved to have her photo circulated on the internet and labelled a "cock-starved exhibitionist" for the crime of having been fathered by someone who doesn't toe the line on gender ideology. On the progressive stack, where does a cisgender female child sit relative to a transgender male adult?
I must say, it sure is weird that when you started talking about women on the internet facing harassment, death and rape threats, doxxing etc., all of the recent examples that popped into my head were from transwomen attacking women, members of a group with whom they supposedly feel a profound spiritual kinship that transcends mere anatomy. Also pretty weird that these transwomen talk about said women in a manner indistinguishable from the way creepy men talk about women in the comments of PornHub videos. Also weird that I can't think of a single example of a trans man behaving in this way.
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But enough about JK Rowling!
To make myself clear: I was there, David. I was refreshing the threads on /r/TumblrInAction back in 2014, seeing the TFYC game jam fall apart months before the whole situation exploded after Eron's post, browsing and saving all the screenshot compilations. And much of what you allege is just that, allegiations. Strangely left little to no pixel trail. One specific extant thing I remember that could be treated as harassing was Rich Kyanka's review of Revolution 60. (Well, extant in the form of screenshots, the review itself has been removed from steam it seems).
There was probably a nonzero amount of threats, yes. Everyone gets those. I get anon death threats on tumblr once every few weeks, and I don't even post that much!
And if your argument to the latter is that it's bad and nobody should get those - don't. I very much prefer the internet in which I get an occasional hate mail to the one in which such a thing is infrastructurally impossible, because it would have to look much more like the Chinese internet. A site like the one we're on would be illegal/impossible/dangerous to host, for one.
(And if the argument to that is that my preferences aren't universal and we should have accommodations for people who want a controlled equilibrium rather than a free-for-all equilibrium, then of course we should! Facebooks and Linkedins for the normies on one end, SA, chans and niche subreddits on the other! The thing is, van Valkenburg herself spoke about frequenting Something Awful, so I find it wildly implausible that she was unprepared to handle some amount of heat. Or is that too mythology-building?)
But, arguendo, if the amount of insults that you're insinuating is true, this seems largely comparable to the 24/7 firehose of junk that's been directed at Rowling for the past five or so years. She has the courtesy to sometimes provide screenshots and quote tweets of those, even. I know that UK has some pretty strict laws about speech, so that probably reins in her domestic antifans a little. But other than that, nobody cares. There are no sympathetic articles, no wikipedia articles about the phenomenon. Why is it that some women are more equal than others?
I've noticed that the people who tend to emphasize how bad online abuse towards women is tend to carve out an exception for Rowling because she's someone who managed to convince lots of people to voluntarily hand over billions of pounds to her and as a result has substantial resources at her disposal. In a very real way, this is an honest and straightforward way of analyzing the situation based on the privilege framework that such people tend to subscribe to. The fact that such a thing is an exception rather than the rule would have been an interesting observation at some point in the past, but that seems banal now.
Rich people and major celebrities getting harassment and flack has always been the norm. Whether or not that's morally 'ok' is a complicated and long-argued question, but 'they can cry themselves to sleep on their piles of money' feels like it has been the general consensus going back at least to the 80s (probably earlier, I just wouldn't be aware of it before then).
GG offended sensibilities by applying the same level of catastrophic scrutiny to folks that most would consider 'normal people', names you've never heard of who don't own a vacation home and don't have much real-world influence.
Yes, like Eron Gjoni, who was an abuse victim, abused further by anti-GG.
When I say a person or group is bad, it doesn't mean I'm saying their opponents or political opposite is good. That is arguments-as-soldiers thinking.
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If someone is famous enough to be an obvious example, then they're privileged and so don't count.
If someone isn't famous enough to be an obvious example, than no one's ever heard of them or knows to use them as an example, so they are ignored.
Gina Carrano is famous enough to have been heard of, but doesn't have billions. If it could be demonstrated that she suffered serious online harassment and that this harassment has been ignored, would that advance the conversation, or would the answer be that she's still too privileged?
I think the claim of privilege would probably be thrown to see if it would stick, but I suspect most people would predict that it wouldn't stick due to the fact that she's not all that "privileged" even merely by Hollywood standards, to say nothing of the standards of Rowling. It doesn't help that her skin isn't super white, though I don't know if she has any actual heritage that would win her some oppression points.
I can only speculate about what the actual tactic would be. There are a couple common tactics that immediately come to mind. One is just minimizing the harassment she faced, saying that it's unfortunate, but why do you care about that when there are literally trans people getting genocided every day in America? The other is just retreating from the position that women deserve special protection because they're women and saying she fucked around and found out or played stupid games and won stupid prizes. This is actually the same basic position as the people who call out the Sarkeesian defenders of the world as catastrophizing what was standard part of online discourse that was already cliche 10 years ago. Of course, logical inconsistency has also been a cliche in discourse in general, and so this shouldn't be surprising; that said, when an ideology specifically denigrates things like logical or rational thinking as being something white oppressors imposed on the rest of us, my guess is that followers in that ideology are more susceptible to pushing logically inconsistent behavior and rhetoric.
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Yeah, that's not the reason. Posie Parker isn't rich as far as I can tell, and they're more than happy committing actual physical violence against her, and any detrans girl gets as much or more shit flung their way as Sarkeesian did.
Sorry, I miswrote my comment. The part that says
should have said
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What I'm getting from this is that you agree this pattern of abuse exists and that it plays the causal role I'm talking about, but would also like to criticize the left for attacking a person and then not banning people over that?
My response I guess would be that there's some ways in which the situations are different and some ways in which that's real hypocrisy, but bleh. That's a boring conversation, the same one we have every day about everything.
I'm just making a point about what it would take for this to explode the way past instances have.
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I do hope this is autocorrect pulling a fast one on you, rather than some veiled "I have your dox" threat.
I assumed it was some kind of reference that I just didn't get.
I would laugh my head off if it was an autocorrect of Isildur.
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Conflating "the community" as a whole with very particular (and dubious) accusations about a few specific people is doing a lot of work for you here. I would go so far as to say that the gamergate you are describing doesn't exist -- which makes it simple to predict it won't happen again. (Actually, maybe that makes it more likely: things that never happened are happening all the time.)
Some people have a political commitment to toe the party line on GG, regardless of the thin air it turned out to be.
I remember when the stock line was "Gamergate is driving women to suicide online". I don't recall any body counts materializing, or any posted receipts, but everybody moved on as if they hadn't proclaimed an utterly vacant falsehood. They memory holed that particular spike of hysteria, casually downgrading back to the ambiguous but exploitable terrain of 'harassment campaigns'.
If there is a single death I can even tangentially connect to the GG saga, it would have been the suicide of Zoe's ex-boyfriend after she marked him for a feeding frenzy. That there was a concerted effort to suppress the criminal, dead-fucking-obvious irony of this among journos and fellow indie developers showed me how strong the woke meme game is when it matters.
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You're saying it was stochastic terrorism, and can't be held against any group or movement?
That's cool with me, but keep in mind I'm going to say the same thing about BLM and the distinction between protestors and rioters/looters.
We're both smart enough to think of a dozen exceptions that make this apples-to-oranges: but sure. I'll take blame for all the death threats made by Gamergate (if you can find any that were more than rumor) if you take blame for all the deaths, arson, destruction and damage of Black Lives Matter. This is a fun comparison!
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