I was determined to keep
my nose out of the whole GamerGate mess when it was still more or less
limited to the gaming world. However, recent events involving the Hugo
Awards have convinced me that this is something I should be addressing.
It
all started when a female game developer named Zoe Quinn was accused by
an ex-boyfriend of sleeping with gaming journalists for good reviews
last year. Quinn was the subject of a vile online harassment campaign,
and the campaign was held up as an example of gaming culture being
hostile and sexist. A particularly nasty group of gamers took offense
and pushed back against this characterization, insisting that they were
the ones being persecuted while fanning the flames against Quinn. These
were the members of what came to be known as GamerGate.
Well
then again, it's probably more accurate to say that the whole thing
started a few years ago with Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist academic who
used Kickstarter to fund a web series about the portrayal of female
characters in video games. Proto-GamerGate members were outraged both
by Sarkeesian's critical examination of games they enjoyed and that she
received so much attention and financial support. Sarkeesian quickly
became a harassment target herself. Or maybe it was back when video
games started becoming more mainstream and female gamers started
arriving on the scene in significant numbers. That was when
we first started hearing about how how toxic and unfriendly the teen
male dominated online gaming culture was to outsiders.
In
short, GamerGate is the latest battle in a culture war between those
who want gaming culture to be an anarchic place where the typical
young male id is pandered to, where gamers never have to worry about
being sensitive or even civil to anybody, and those who want gaming
culture to become a more inclusive, mainstream place where sexism and
racism are actively called out. And boy has it gotten ugly. GamerGate
supporters are absolutely livid at what they perceive to be the invasion
of their turf by meddling "SJWs," short for "social justice warriors," a
derogatory term for anyone (but mostly women) who dares to advance
progressive causes in media. They're convinced that any and all
attempts to tone down objectionable content and make video games and the
gaming industry more female-friendly are part of some fiendish plot
designed to destroy gaming as they know it. The average GamerGate
supporter is young, male, socially alienated, hates feminists, and has a
massive persecution complex. Their campaigns against SJWs, the
mainstream gaming press, and anyone who disagrees with them has been
dragging on for months, despite almost universal condemnation. Some are
still going after Zoe Quinn, despite the claims against her having been
proven false. GamerGaters have found few allies - the men's rights
movement, vitriolic conservative publications, and a bunch of yahoos who
are actively trying to wreck the Hugos.
Oh yes.
This is where I come in. I've been a big science fiction fan all my
life, and I'm very familiar with the Hugo Awards, which are given out by
the Worldcon membership to celebrate excellence in science-fiction
writing. This year the awards were hijacked. A voting bloc was
organized by a couple of vocally right-wing authors who successfully
pushed a slate of nominees specifically to counter what they viewed as
"affirmative action" trends in recent years - too many women and
minorities. Many of the bloc's nominees came from a single tiny
publisher run by one of the authors, Vox Day, who has proudly declared
himself an anti-feminist and finagled two Best Editor nominations for
himself. There's no evidence that any of the GamerGate mob participated
in this, but it's the same story. You have a small group of fervent
media fans who think that their clubhouse is being taken over by grubby
outsiders who have changed the comfortable white male dominated status
quo. And now they're angry and lashing out using the destructive
tactics of the most puerile internet trolls.
The
irony is, of course, that these efforts by GamerGate and Vox Day's
minions have been entirely counterproductive. Their win-at-all-costs
behavior is so distasteful, their attemtps at discourse so tone
deaf, and their goals so retrograde, they've proven
As
for the Hugos, several of the suspect nominees have either voluntarily
bowed out or been disqualified, and steps are being taken to ensure the
voting can't be hijacked in a similar fashion again. Conservative
authors are probably going to find the deck stacked higher against them
in the future than if Vox Day and friends hadn't meddled with the voting
in the first place. Maybe that was the point - setting themselves up
as poor victims of the establishment to somehow prove they're being
marginalized and discriminated against. They can't be bigots
and misogynists if they're the real victims! I suppose they believe
it's preferable to having to share their chosen identity - as gamers or
science-fiction fans - with icky women or minorities or transgendered
people who insist on being recognized and respected as such.
Oh, fandom. We still have such a long way to go.
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