A Decade Into Gaming’s Biggest Nightmare
Writer’s note: Despite titling this to be a continuation of my original post from 9 years ago, gaming’s greatest nightmare right now is undoubtedly the bloodbath of layoffs, studio closures and cancelled titles that years of corporate greed and incompetence has caused. This is where everyone’s outrage should be focused.
It’s been a decade since what is largely regarded as the day the GamerGate controversy began. I’m writing this the day before, so I haven’t yet seen how insufferable the Internet will be, but I’m guessing very. That stupid name is still one most in the gaming community will instantly know, even after all this time. Many have put great effort into keeping in the public consciousness, even calling it the catalyst of everything from the alt-right, to the election of Donald Trump, to the radicalization of western males into ISIS. That’s all stupid and ridiculous of course, but the worst part is how many are determined to not let the community move on and heal because it benefits them.
I stand by everything I wrote in my original post so I do encourage you to read that if you haven’t (there is also an audio version on YouTube, though I won’t be making one of this), but on this unfortunate anniversary, I thought I would take a look back on the last decade and what impacts the movement had, how the mainstream gaming press has changed (or not) and where some of the major players from the movement ended up.
The Press
One of the points many in the GamerGate movement have continued to hang on is how the mainstream games press is dying. No longer able to maintain an audience without resorting to yellow journalism and clickbait, it was only a matter of time until they all slid into failure and obscurity as YouTubers and streamers took over. So, has that happened?
In a word: No. To say the mainstream games press is healthy would certainly be untrue. Some startup sites have shut down, many well known ones have changed ownership, there have been many layoffs, downsizing efforts and you’d be crazy to consider it as a career now. Magazines have also all but vanished entirely, but that was well underway a decade ago. That said, nearly all the big sites you’d recognize from 2014 are still alive and kicking and if you listened to GamerGate back then, they should all be long dead already. Will most of them be here in another decade? Frankly, I doubt it, but it won’t be because of GamerGate, despite how big an influence the movement has always falsely thought it had.
Even though they still limp along, there’s no denying the continued arrogance, hubris and dishonesty that the press largely continues to operate under. Clickbait and ragebait articles are as rampant as ever and it’s clear that for most gaming “journalists”, GamerGate didn’t cause them to have even a moment’s self-reflection. With exceptions of course, this is an industry that still collectively speaks from a place of hating and attacking the audience they exist to serve, shunning any diversity of thought and living firmly on the extreme political left, while also wondering why their traffic and ad revenue continue to dwindle.
I always put “journalist” in quotes when speaking about the games press because to me, journalism is a sacred word that brings with it deep connotation. It means you’re someone who is determined to find and document the truth, no matter how hard said truth is and what bridges you may burn in bringing it to light. That’s not copy-pasting press releases or articles from other outlets. It’s not writing self-projection opinion pieces and classifying them as “news”. It’s not lamenting about layoffs at a major publisher, while also offering no context around them, such as when a CEO talks about how “necessary” they were, while also not taking a reduction in compensation for their failures of leadership. And it’s definitely not decrying hate and harassment in the gaming community, when you handwave away or worse, enable those within your press cliques who do the same thing.
What is laughably considered “gaming journalism” now are investigative pieces by the likes of Jason Schreier or Rebekah Valentine, which are almost always filled with quotes from anonymous sources, wrapped in an assumption that we should just trust that they’re all being truthful. Don’t even think of calling them out on this or even asking for clarification as they’re both famous for blocking everyone who disagrees with them and anyone who engages with those people. Indeed, I’m blocked by both even though I’ve never directly interacted with either. Strangely, this doesn’t seem to apply to those well connected in the indsutry or who are famous content creators. Funny that. Anonymous sources are considered second-rate at best in real journalism and at the most reputable publications, are not allowed at all. Yet, this is the best the games press apparently has to offer. A sorry state indeed.
I still believe many who are left in the industry feel writing about games is beneath them and are only there until they can somehow land themselves a job at a “real publication” or get themselves the connections to find employment in the development or publishing world. There’s certainly myriad examples of this kind of nepotism going back decades at this point, yet they still wonder why many in the audience ask if perhaps they are too close to the industry they are supposed to cover critically. They have shielded themselves with the idea that any pushback is harassment and that “everything is GamerGate” when they are forced to leave their echo chambers. While they have survived doing this longer than I expected them to, it’s certainly not leading them in the right direction.
The Alternatives
As the traditional press has declined, YouTube and streaming have indeed taken over, filling the void and a lot more besides. This was already happening in 2014, but has accelerated rapidly. When I started doing YouTube back in 2013, it was already pretty easy to get into with just a little technical knowhow but today, virtually anyone with something to say can do so for as close to free as you can get. This has given rise to a wide array of new voices who previously would never have been heard and that’s a great thing that the traditional press finds threatening. YouTube is not only how I get most of my gaming news these days, but also where I watch fascinating long-form gaming documentaries that give troves of information I couldn’t have dreamed possible only a few years ago. Many of these are being created by very small teams or even individuals, with writing and production values you used to only see from bigger outlets, but that virtually none partake in now.
Of course, as many started to make a living from it, YouTube and streaming quickly got inundated with garbage quality creators who don’t care about truth and lifting up the good, but just spreading misinformation and stoking culture wars from both political ends for easy money, taking advantage of how algorithms boost and favour negativity. Just as the games press does, they purposefully inflate non-issues into world ending events, convincing their armies of simps that either the SJWs are coming for your games or that the alt-right is taking over the medium and wants anyone who isn’t a cisgendered white male out. It’s nonsense in both cases, but preaching to their radicalized choirs is very lucrative. Drama channels are the lowest form of life on YouTube, yet they’re some of the most popular ones out there, going to the same lengths the traditional press do to fire up their audiences with lies, in between shilling scummy sponsors and their Patreons. That’s to say nothing of the streaming world, where undisclosed sponsorships for favourable coverage are everywhere and many big streamers openly promote things like gambling to children, at least when they aren’t getting caught sexting them. These people don’t care about games, only about the outrage and money that can use them to create. They don’t exist for your benefit, only their own.
For all the great gaming channels out there full of excellent information, they all have to work exponentially harder to find audiences than the scum they have to trudge past. I’ve become very disillusioned with creating content because of this, but that’s another story for another time.
There have also been some alternative gaming outlets that have arisen from the shrinking mainstream industry, coming in the form of yet more YouTube and streaming channels, podcasts, web sites and even email newsletters, which are having a surprising renaissance. Unfortunately, many of these are run by who were some of the worst offenders in the mainstream press and seem to be eeking out a living by appealing to only their political echo chambers. Even those run by personalities I once liked I quickly bounced off of because it was clear it wasn’t something they were passionate about, but more that they’d been in games media for so long, they weren’t qualified to do anything else and were just going through the motions to pay their bills off their legacy audiences. Hell, there’s strong evidence that one of the latest entrants on the scene is already collapsing under the weight of its Editor-In-Chief’s ego. While it’s nice to see some of the most obnoxious people no longer writing for popular outlets, they still manage to have an outsized and unearned level of influence. I believe this will only diminish with time though.
If you spend the time to seek out the quality stuff, there are still great options out there. As someone who is more informed on the happenings in the game industry than most, I can tell you that I haven’t needed the mainstream games press to do that in over a decade now. These outlets are all that I follow closely and they’re more than I need:
- SkillUp
- Video Games Chronicle
- TechRaptor
- Time Extension
- Game Developer
- Friends Per Second Podcast
- NoClip Crewcast (skipping the parts where Frank talks)
The Games
GamerGate insisted up and down that they had to constantly fight the extreme leftists and social justice warriors because if they didn’t, all games would become unfun vectors for woke propaganda. I thought that was laughable in 2014 and it still is today. I largely can’t stand woke culture and the outsized influence it’s had in recent years. Not because I don’t believe in progressive ideas — I hold many of them myself — but because the extremes that I consider to make up wokeness in particular are based on the same type of misinformation and propaganda all extremes rely on, ultimately to the detriment of the causes they claim to espouse. Catering to the oversensitive regardless of politics is a losing proposition.
That said, games have most certainly not gone woke. If you look in the indie space, you can certainly find some games that are, but they have as much a right to exist as any other. If you want strong political ideologies in your games, you can find ones that will give you that. If you don’t want your games to preach to you, then you have all but a tiny handful of them to pick from, whether indie or AAA.
Games with gender pronouns that you only see in the character creation screen or the option to play as a female character with a male voice are not pushing an ideology on you. Those things are options and you can ignore them if you want. Choices being present doesn’t mean you have to choose them. If you’re genuinely triggered by having more options, then you’re the one with the problem. Art isn’t built to cater to you, it’s built to match the vision of the artist. If you have a problem with the art, you’re free to ignore it, not to demand it cater to you, regardless of your preferences. There are more games now than there have ever been and there is something for literally everyone.
No one forces you to play anything. Focus on what you like and ignore the things you don’t. You are owed nothing beyond getting what was promised to you for your money. If you don’t get that, then get mad. If more people took the energy they spent yelling on the Internet about something not being to their taste and spent it on finding things that were, we’d have a healthier industry and many more happy players.
The (Fallen) Figureheads
Looking back at the decade since the GamerGate nightmare, the one thing I’m happy to see is that while many new grifters have arisen in its wake, the three biggest ones who helped fuel the movement, made clear how corrupt much of the press were, and profited from it the most have largely fallen into obscurity and been shown to be the frauds I always knew they were.
Zoë Quinn is where it all started and she wasted no time in milking it for all it was worth to her. Despite announcing many projects since GamerGate like a game jam, an anti-harassment organization, multiple games and more, virtually none of these amounted to anything. Rebel Jam never happened (though she worked hard to cancel competing ones), Crash Override Network never helped anyone before quietly ceasing operations, her Kickstarter game never shipped with backers were left hanging, while she claimed to have run out of money despite simultaneously tweeting about her vacation to Japan, and her main claim to fame is still the awful Depression Quest. Pretty much the only thing she has managed to release is her GamerGate “memoir”, which was almost certainly ghost written and which no one cared about. In addition to her documented emotional abuse that spawned the famous Zoë Post, she also accused another former partner of abusing her. This person was one of the creators of Night In the Woods and suffered from significant mental illness. Her claims caused him to be ostracized by his fellow developers , friends and even family, leading to his tragic suicide. After the fact, proof came out that her claims were all but entirely ficticious, something her supporters in the press largely kept quiet about, though this was also accompanied by a near total elimination of coverage about her. Though she still has not been held accountable for her actions, she is no longer in the limelight.
Brianna Wu probably has more modern relevance than Quinn, but barely so. She has multiple times unsuccessfully run for political office, her terrible game bombed, and she’s gotten increasingly more unhinged and nonsensical. After she falsely accused Nolan Bushnell of sexual assault while running Atari and prevented him from getting a well earned lifetime achievement award, people seemed to clue in to what a loon she’s always been and also largely stopped talking about her. Again, too little too late, but better than nothing.
Anita Sarkeesian held on the longest, with her Feminist Frequency organization continuing to bring in donations and sponsorships for several years, while putting out a drip feed of easily disproven propaganda at a pace any self-respecting YouTuber found laughable. This quickly started to wane however, with it ultimately running out of money and shuttering last year. Since then, she seems to have largely disappeared from view, putting out no new content that I can find and not even posting to Twitter in nearly a year.
I think all three of these people are not only demonstrable frauds, but awful human beings in general. They had no business having any influence in this industry. Their continual promotion and reverence by the press laid bare just how unethical so many outlets and “journalists” were and just how much they hitched themselves to the wrong horses. That all these people have fallen into obscurity and irrelevance is solely a good thing and the only tragedy of it is that it didn’t happen much sooner. They never cared about gaming or improving it, they only cared about their own cons and it still baffles me that so many fell for it. I remember those that did and I will never trust them again.
Conclusion
Everyone on the extremes of both sides of the GamerGate movement were wrong. The press were wrong by circling their wagons around the most corrupt in their ranks, using “harassment” as a shield and the movement was wrong by letting extremists and con artists co-opt what yes, did start as a genuine call for improvements in ethical standards and turn it into just another way for crooks to profit.
What little is left of GamerGate will say that they’re still “fighting the good fight” and the ever slowly shrinking games press will still insist that the movement’s much larger and has more influence than it actually does. Both do so to feed the egos and wallets of people who don’t actually care about this art form or those that partake in it, and don’t want things to actually get better, despite claiming otherwise. Like many activists, making things seem worse than they are is how they make their living and they want to keep the illusion alive. Don’t let them. Games are amazing and there has never been a greater number, both old and new, to immerse yourself in and there are so many easy ways to do so. Play and enjoy the good stuff, shun the bad stuff and don’t rely on others to tell you what to think. Be informed by people you trust, but make up your own mind. Ignore the clickbait and the drama because that’s what will ultimately make it stop. Direct your outrage not at hack writers, but to the parts of the industry that are trying their damndest to rip us off and destroying the livelihoods of hard working developers as their executives get richer.
Let GamerGate fall into obscurity as it deserves to and get back to loving this medium again. It’s what I’ve been doing and I’m far happier for it. You can too.
