bottom text (this was probably posted before)
I ended up watching one of Anita’s videos. I thought some of them were well-made, and she clearly had an audience. I don’t understand what all the outrage was about. It was straight up McCarthyism. Her videos were relatively inoffensive and can easily be moved on from.
“Gamers” are mindless consumers who are completely subjected to the whims of corporations. Even the category of ‘Gamer’ is made up and not coherent (no an activity you do does not constitute an identity).
I don’t understand what all the outrage was about.
I genuinely believe gamergate was and is an online movement that continues to beg for more serious analysis. It wasn’t a harbinger of Trump politics like some pundits think, actually it was a culmination of half a decade of continuous culture war waged by Rush Limbaugh types during the Obama years, and eventually evolved into a the more coherent belief of “politics is downstream from culture” by Andrew Breitbart. I said this before but this “culture war” was waged on several fronts, from movies, to sci-fi books to fucking MtG. Breitbart the magazine under Bannon was just waiting for the right movement to latch itself onto and the most explosive one was GG.
The book “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency” goes into this pretty well, and echoes your exact sentiment. Bannon had been lurking around “gamer culture” since the early World of Warcraft days.
Kathleen Belew’s book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America is very very good and covers exactly this subject. It was one of the main sources Robert Evans used for his similar shorter work The War On Everyone (regardless of feelings of the author it’s a good concise history of the evolution of fascist movements in the US into what they are now.
It is embarassing how much of a pant shitting outrage gamers threw over some pretty innocuous videos.
Right up to YouTube removing the dislike button, videos uploaded to the femenist freq channel still had at best 50:50 ratios of likes to dislikes. So wild to me gamers really spent the last decade continuing to go to her channel to downvote anything even tangentially related to her.
To be fair they don’t really have anything better to do
Worth remembering that while Sarkeesian was one of the principal targets of Gamer Gate, it initially got started when an
womanNB made a text adventure that got good reviews and people freaked and assumed she slept with a reviewer for them.She was sleeping with someone else at that company, but that’s pretty banal. Tightly knit industries filled with young people usually involve a ton of fucking. Some of it looks like a potential conflict of interest, until you realize it’s just horny young people with similar interests getting pushed into having a lot of social interaction with eachother. No way she’s close to the only game developer to sleep with a games journalist.
You forget that the actual catalyst was her ex-boyfriend venting about her on 4chan after their break-up and making those allegations. Chan types had hated the dev in question before GG too for some other crimes against gamerdom, and they were fucking ecstatic to blow the shit out of the post and turn it into a campaign
lmao not even, it got a mention on Kotaku due to DepressionQuest being, well, a means to convey a rough equivalent to being depressed. no reviews at all, literally just a little bit of coverage. Though tbh I’m thinking about it and I think Sarkeesian slamming predated gamergate, actually.
Yeah people hated Sarkeesian way back in early 2013, firmly before gamergate which technically started I think in 2014 and was only in full swing around 2015-2016.
I took a couple game design classes when I was in college and they basically all made it clear that the line between vidya and other art forms was basically zilch. One of them may as well have been an art class about the Dadaist moment tbqh
Wouldn’t the line come down to the intent of the game? Like I can see Disco Elysium or Grim Fandango or something as art. That makes sense they have something to express and there’s a relationship between the creators and the audience. There are stories, themes, messages, etc. But then there are games like Killing Floor or Counter-Strike, where the intent is entirely about an exhilarating multiplayer experience. One thing that always stuck with me that Roger Ebert said is we wouldn’t consider a game of basketball to be art. Is a game of chess art? Or are the individual pieces artistic?
That’s where I get hung up.
