Note: This was my senior thesis, which I finished in May of 2016. As such, some of the references to more contemporary events may be outdated. I just never got around to posting this.
Introduction: Division
In early 2012, I joined an online community of gamers after playing a few rounds of an online game, Guns of Icarus with them. The group was made up of thirty to forty people, and, following my joining the group, many of us would hang out nearly every night using a voice chat program called TeamSpeak. For around an hour or two a day, we would log into TeamSpeak, play some games, talk about our lives, and generally just laugh, relax, and enjoy ourselves. The group started as a fairly casual coalition of online friends, none of whom knew each other outside of this space, but eventually grew into a tight-knit group of friends. As the hours I spent on TeamSpeak increased, I grew closer with more of the members of the server. Over the course of three and a half years, I friended many of the members on Facebook, swapped real phone numbers with them, and became closer to what might regularly be called “real friends”. The group became incredibly important to me. I met one of the members at an In-N-Out Burger in Los Angeles, since we both happened to be passing through at the time. One member was the best man in two of the other member’s weddings. We stopped using our ingame handles and started referring to each other by our first names. In short, this TeamSpeak became my core friend group.
As of today, April 2nd, I have not logged onto their server in four months. I occasionally talk to one of the members over Facebook, but our conversations rarely go beyond, “So what games are you playing these days?” As far as I know, most of the core members still spend time on the server, but I have all but left that community. The reason for that is complicated, but it began in late 2014 after the cultural event of GamerGate, a social media harassment campaign against women and minorities in games. This has been the single most divisive event in the history of the gaming medium, with a very clear line drawn between those who support and oppose GamerGate. GamerGators, as they call themselves, are not an organized group; they congregate on forums and message boards such as Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, and for about half a year, made it their goal to harass women and minorities with an overwhelming amount of highlyspecific death and rape threats. The movement forced multiple women to leave the industry as a result of the harassment, forced four women to leave their homes when their address and personal information was released, and has polarized the community to a degree never before seen in the medium’s history. GamerGators see themselves as fighting against the corrupting influence of social justice in games media. They believe that developers, journalists and gamers themselves are being forced into accepting progressive politics, when, in their minds, these issues are simply not a problem. GamerGate has made it very difficult for me to say to others that I love games. It has divided the community so thoroughly that any discussion I find online can quickly devolve into a virtual shouting match. And it found its way into my community, on TeamSpeak. I rarely discussed political issues with my TeamSpeak friends, but after GamerGate, the topic came up much more frequently, and the arguments became much more vicious. There were three women in my TeamSpeak community before GamerGate, already an alarmingly low number. All three of them have now left. There used to be a diversity of beliefs and political views in the community. Now, all of the members who opposed GamerGate, myself included, are gone. However, these discourses and fierce opinions did not come out of nowhere; they had been growing for years before GamerGate began. The GamerGate movement was a response to the growing cultural and social criticism of a medium that had, for most of its lifetime, faced almost none of either, and the mundane events that started it served as a scapegoat and a catalyst to allow the gaming community to release years of pent up anxieties about the changing world and market that games now face.
Section I: A Climate of Distrust
Long before the prime movers of GamerGate were even well-know, others were setting the stage for its arrival. Games writer Katherine Cross linked the origins of the movement to events that happened long before the foundation of the internet communities that would eventually start it, such as lawyers and politicians attempts to ban and censor games in the 1990s. Like with all new mediums, games were, at first, viewed as a corrupting influence, and many attempts at adult content were met with great hostility. The earliest major attempt to censor games came as a result of the controversy surrounding the 1992 game, Mortal Kombat, a fighting game which featured graphic violence through their now infamous use of fatality finishing moves, in which, in a particularly gruesome example, the winning character would rip off the head of the losing one, with his spinal cord dangling underneath. Such violence was pixelated and almost parody by today’s standards, but still made a large impact.
The controversial fatality in Mortal Kombat, 1992
Games were, and in many cases, still are, viewed as a child’s toy, something aimed at a younger demographic that should not be presenting such content. Graphic violence, nudity, drug use, and other traditionally adult themes were not seen as acceptable subjects by the general public. As a result, the game was banned in many countries, and lead to the creation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, a self-regulatory organization that issued rating similar to the MPAA, in order to prevent government censorship. Additional attempts at censorship followed in the early 2000s, as politicians and lawyers such as Jack Thompson attempted to legally censor and ban such games on the grounds of obscenity laws. Thompson’s major target was the often controversial Grand Theft Auto series, which, in its third installment, gave the player free reign over a city where they could, infamously, hire a sex worker, then kill her to steal their money back. Such activities were optional, player-selected actions allowed but not encouraged by the system, but its presence in a medium still struggling to shake off the label of child’s toy was enough to cause a stir. Though Thompson was never successful or even really taken seriously (he was subsequently disbarred for unrelated allegations of professional misconduct), the threat of him and the lawyers and politicians like him created a climate of fear among gamers. While no game has ever been banned in the United States, American gamers still felt that their medium was under siege, and they were not entirely mistaken in this regard. Video games never faced any true threat in a real court, they did face a great deal of scrutiny in the court of public opinion. Today, over 50% of American adults play video games (Remo, 2008), and the stigma against the medium has mostly subsided, but in the early 2000s, it was at its strongest. The medium was, in the public eye, thought to have no artistic merit, and the men, women, boys and girls who played video games are often viewed as immature, emotionally stunted, and wasting their time. Each of these factors resulted in a generation of gamers who grew up feeling that their medium of choice was under attack, and that they would constantly need to defend it. For many gamers, this was an opportunity to teach others about the greatness and potential of the medium, but for others, this lead to the belief that those outside the gaming subculture did not understand it, and that the only reaction towards games from non-gamers would be ones of condemnation, belittlement, and censorship.
As a result, gaming grew up with very little serious outside critique. While other mediums emerged with a great deal of serious cultural and social criticism, gaming ended up devoid of much of it. By the late 1990s, games were roughly sixty years old; by this point in the history of cinema, film had long since reached the mainstream, garnering cultural acceptance and criticism, and having produced many of what we now consider the medium’s masterpieces. But because of gaming’s evolution as a subculture, it did not receive much of the same criticism that film did, and, largely as a result, did not grow in these areas anywhere near as much as it could have. Rather than social or artistic critiques, the criticism games did receive was usually in the form of technical analysis. The game industry was born out of the software industry, and as a result, games were often viewed more as boxed products than works of art. Early games journalism discussed games in this manner as well, asking questions like, “Did the game run well?” “Do the gameplay systems work?” “Does it look alright?” rather than “What are the core themes brought up by the work?”. This is not to say that great games that embraced the artistry of the medium did not exist, however. The 1970s saw the creation of early text-based adventure games, such as Infocom’s Zork. These essentially functioned as playable novels, later earning them the moniker of “interactive fiction”. This later evolved into graphic adventure games, such as Roberta Williams’s famous King’s Quest series. These titles were popular and well-received, and the adventure game genre they created was very lucrative for much of gaming’s history. While most games focused on with system mastery, quick reflexes, and pattern memorization, adventure games focused on mood, themes, story, characters, and complex, if convoluted, puzzles. Gaming journalists of the time praised these works, but often missed the artistry and craftsmanship of the work.
This disconnect between the emerging potential of the medium and the planned, product review style of the journalism is largely a result of early games journalism not really being journalism. Hobbyist, enthusiast magazines were common enough on their own, but the majority of games content written before the explosion of online journalism was almost entirely the trifecta of product-based journalism: previews, reviews and interviews. Many of these outlets were owned by the publishers of the games they were reviewing, such as Nintendo Power, Official Xbox Magazine, and Official Playstation Magazine. This created an enormous conflict of interest for the magazine’s writers, mostly crippling the institution for decades. As games increased in popularity, much of this writing was able to shift towards independently owned outlets, but these publications still had very strong ties to the publishers and developers they were covering. The market for games content required exclusive content and preview issues, which would be much less plentiful for publications that were more critical of these games. As a result, independent games journalism was largely viewed as an extension of the marketing for a big budget release. Gamers wanted to read this content, and enough of them paid for it to sustain the system as it was, but this lead to many of them developing a hesitance towards the integrity of the publications they were reading from. Many gamers had at least a suspicion that there was too much corruption in journalism, even well into the late 2000s when the internet allowed independent publications to become more profitable. These suspicions were justified in 2007, when GameSpot editor Jeff Gerstmann was infamously fired from his position for giving a game, Kane & Lynch, a low score (Plunkett 2012). GameSpot had a marketing deal with the publishers of the game, Square Enix, and after Gerstmann’s low score, the company demanded that he be fired. This became the most visible example of corruption in the industry, one that is still referenced today. It is perhaps the biggest contributor to the belief among gamers that the games press was not acting within even the loosest journalistic standards, creating an air of distrust that undoubtedly set the stage for GamerGate.
Section II: Anita Sarkeesian & Feminist Frequency
Criticism, as a whole, was something that the gaming community was very skeptical of. Growing up in a climate where the rest of the world seemed to want to censor and ban games, and the gaming press was beholden to publishers, gamers held a strong distrust of criticism of their games both from outside and within the medium. So, the idea of serious social criticism of games was not something gamers were likely to react positively to. But it was into this climate that Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic with a focus on geek culture, entered to create her series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. The series began with a Kickstarter campaign on May 17, 2012, with a modest goal of $6,000 to create five videos critiquing the depiction of women in video games. While she had created feminist content in the past, Sarkeesian had largely gone unnoticed by the gaming community as a whole. She had attracted a modest following, but was by no means popular. Academics and advocacy groups had been making feminist critiques of games for years, such as Women Against Pornography’s criticisms of the 1982 game Custer’s Revenge, which allowed players to rape a captive Native American woman (Dworkin). But focused, and more importantly, popular, critiques, were almost nonexistent. The average gamer had most likely not heard much feminist criticism of games beyond an easily refutable claim of, “All video games are sexist and turn people into women-hating, basement-dwelling sociopaths.” So, as games critic Ian Danskin explains in his series on GamerGate, Sarkeesian’s points were not new, and, in the larger context of feminist thought, they were certainly not radical, they were new and radical to an average gamer who had never heard a feminist critique that they could not easily ignore. However, Sarkeesian was not a high-profile media critic who suddenly decided to turn her eye towards video games, she was a self-proclaimed geek who was critiquing a medium she loved but felt excluded from. She wasn’t writing in academic journals or on popular websites, she was posting videos to her small YouTube channel. By all accounts, she should have gone unnoticed; her campaign should have reached its goal, she would have made her videos, and not many people outside of her existing fan base would have seen them. But that is not what happened.
From a casual observer’s perspective, Sarkeesian’s campaign seemed to be going much better than expected. She reached her requested $6,000 by the end of the day, and twenty-two days in, was at $48,000, 600% of the original funding goal. However, with a few weeks remaining in the campaign and all of her funding and stretch goals far surpassed, Sarkeesian posted an update to the campaign website detailing a loosely organized harassment campaign against her as a result of her project. She linked to thousands of angry Tweets and YouTube comments, filled with hate speech and personal attacks, showed that her Wikipedia page had been vandalized with pornography and racial slurs, and posted traffic showing that her website had been taken down by a DDoS attack (Sarkeesian, 2012). This was overwhelming and unexpected, but it was nothing compared to the harassment that followed her post. Several news sites began picking up the story of the harassment against her and the campaign, leading to a huge influx of backers that saw the campaign close at $158,922 (Sarkeesian, 2012), over twenty-four times the campaign’s initial goal. However, it also brought in an even larger influx of harassment. This cycle has continued in the years since her campaign beginning, where Sarkeesian will post references to threats and attacks against her, news sites will pick up the story, and even greater harassment will follow. Her attacks are filled with angry, violent death and rape threats, include content that is unquestionably misogynistic, and are unrelenting.
Tweets directed towards Sarkeesian
To this day, Sarkeesian receives multiple threats daily. Her personal information has been hacked and posted on forums and other websites (a process referred to as “doxxing”), leading to highly-specific death threats that Sarkeesian now forwards to the FBI as part of an ongoing investigation (Crecente). Some of her harassers created a video game where players could beat up a picture of her face (Sterling). Others sent a bomb threat to the Game Developers Conference if they gave her an award, which the conference later did in spite of the threat (Totilo). The harassment against Sarkeesian is so broad and far reaching that it would be impossible to document all of it, but suffice it to say that this campaign was unlike anything seen in gaming before.
Perhaps the biggest question asked in the wake of this harassment was simply, “Why?” Sarkeesian was a largely unknown personality, and it was unlikely that her critiques would be heard by many outside her existing community of fans. She was not the first feminist to critique games, not the loudest and not the most radical. So, “why her, and why now” (Danskin)? In a vacuum, this question is nearly unanswerable, but in the context of the larger history of gaming, it starts to make a great deal more sense. With a history as problematic as that of gaming’s, this seems bound to happen at some point. Here was a medium with an almost nonexistent history of strong, literary criticism, one where women as a demographic were considered unwelcome, even as they remained present as both developers and players throughout its history. Here was a medium that had faced the stigma of being a toy for children, and, as a result, had largely been ignored by cultural critics, leaving it with the critical base of actual children’s toys. Gaming had not been thoroughly examined by brilliant media scholars the same way film had, and thus generations of gamers grew up without ever having to apply the skills of literary analysis and media literacy that they learned in high school and college to the games they spent so much time with. Games, in short, went unchallenged and uncriticized, evaluated as apolitical, boxed products. The only criticism the medium faced was from outside of its borders, by uninformed reactionaries whose critiques were so baseless that they could be ignored. Gamers learned about games in an environment with weak, ignorable criticism, so, in their minds, any criticism towards games would continue to fall under that banner.
But the gaming landscape was not going to stay that way. Improvements in technology and distribution, the enormous growth of markets, and the increasing age of the average gamer meant that gaming was, at some point, going to have to face criticism as a real art form. And it was wholly unprepared for this. Gamers reacted to cultural criticism that would have been considered healthy in other mediums with a ferocity rarely seen outside its own medium. Critiques of trends in their medium were seen as attacks on the medium as a whole. This is why so many of Anita Sarkeesian’s critics say, unironically that she “wants to destroy games” or “ban all games”; they refuse to understand the difference between criticizing and banning, because the only critiques they had experienced towards games in the past were calls for censorship and banning. Sarkeesian was not unaware of this predisposition, and it is why, in the description of the series itself, she states, that “that it is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of it’s more problematic or pernicious aspects” (Sarkeesian). Gaming was a powder keg, ready to explode at any moment due to the messy combination of a history devoid of criticism and the growing demands for that criticism to finally be recognized. However, Sarkeesian’s videos and the horrific response they received were not what finally set it off. If anything, it only helped to further prepare the industry for something bigger.
After the first few months of Sarkeesian’s videos and Kickstarter, lines began to be drawn. Sexism and representation of women were now talked about issues in the gaming space. Sarkeesian received an Ambassador Award at the Game Developer’s Choice award (Makuch, 2014). The gaming community was now actively discussing these issues, when before they had been mostly silent. But this only served to further intensify the divides in the culture. The worst parts of the gaming community now knew that their critics were inside of the community, as well as outside. This lead to further polarization of the community, with fierce debates breaking out wherever Sarkeesian, sexism or feminism were mentioned. In many ways, it set the stage. GamerGate most likely could not have happened the way it did without Sarkeesian bringing these issues to the forefront. If the gaming community had not already been discussing these issues, and if they had not already begun to polarize, those events might have played out very differently. But gaming culture was already deeply flawed before Sarkeesian’s work further divided it, and the next time the issue of social justice was brought to the forefront, the response was more organized, more focused, and much, much, worse.
Section III: A History of GamerGate
Like Anita Sarkeesian, game developer Zoe Quinn was not a particularly well-known figure in the game world. Her most famous work, a game called Depression Quest, was first released in February of 2013 with initially little fanfare. Depression Quest is a work of interactive fiction, meaning that players spend their time reading passages of text and making decisions about what the protagonist should do next. The narrative reacts to the player’s choices, though not always in the ways they might expect. The game puts the player in the shoes of an
A screenshot of Depression Quest
undefined man in his mid-20s who is struggling with depression and mental illness. As the game progresses, players are given choices based on how depressed their characters are, and are asked to roleplay as the character, making decisions they think he might make. The game has almost no discernable feminist content, and focuses almost entirely on the mental illness and how to deal with it. Regardless, Quinn was faced with a wave of harassment in response to the game when she entered it into Steam Greenlight, a program that allows lesser-known developers to publish their games on Steam, the world’s largest PC gaming distribution platform. The harassment centered around the idea that, as Quinn eloquently summarized, “women can’t be depressed what a cunt”. The harassment came primarily from a site called Wizardchan, which describes itself, quite seriously, as “an anonymous community for male virgins” (Wallace). Quinn publically talked about the harassment, the distress it caused her, and how she believed internet culture as a whole as, in part, responsible for this kind of behavior. Her comments and the story of her harassment appeared on a few news sites, but did not traffic very highly, leaving her with a bit of fame, but nothing significant. By and large, the internet should not have cared on August 16th, 2014 when Zoe Quinn’s ex-boyfriend posted a 9000-word attack against her, but, for some reason, it did.
By all accounts, Eron Gjoni’s blog, The Zoe Post, should have gone ignored. It was the self-indulgent ramblings of a heartbroken ex, littered posting of personal information, gross hyperbole, and an overwhelming sense of self-importance. In it, Gjoni goes into disturbingly personal detail about his allegations that Quinn had cheated on him with five different men at different parts of their relationship. He provides screenshots of personal text and facebook chat logs with Quinn, convoluted timelines, and personal pictures. The writing is dramatic, to say the least, which each section of the post carrying a title such as, “Whereof One Cannot Speak, Thereof One Must Be Silent” (Gjoni). Again, most of this seems forgettable; allegations of the unmarried infidelity of a small-time game developer. This certainly does not seem like something that could serve as the starting point for a huge subcultural movement. However, at one section in the post, Gjoni alleges that Quinn had an affair with Nathan Grayson, a contributor at gaming website Kotaku. With the timeline he provided, Gjoni also alleged that Grayson wrote a piece about Quinn’s game, Depression Quest, during this time. Long after the post blew up, Gjoni later called this “a typo” (Gjoni). Further investigation, mostly a series of quick google searches, revealed that Grayson did write about Quinn, but it had nothing to do with Depression Quest, and instead was him reporting on a game jam that Quinn and others had organized. This article was written before Quinn and Grayson’s affair and barely received any views. This is all that The Zoe Post, despite all of its flaws, claims; something that, again, should have gone unnoticed.
Initial reactions to The Zoe Post were fast, explosive, and chaotic. Reddit, Twitter, 4chan, and other social networking sites and message boards exploded with links to the post, usually with sensationalist titles along the lines of, “GAME DEV SLEEPS WITH JOURNALIST FOR POSITIVE COVERAGE!!!!!!!”. A handful of YouTubers created long, meandering videos, such as the now-removed video by Internetaristocrat, titled “Five Guys: The Quinnspiracy”. The reaction, obviously, was accompanied by a torrent of misogyny and hate speech, but before this solidified, many members of the gaming community saw only the headline, namely, “sex for positive coverage”, and were not immediately opposed to the concept. In the early days and hours following the post, the lack of information meant that many people outside of the explicitly misogynistic were angry at Quinn. The general low quality and expectation of corruption in games journalism meant that even reasonable onlookers could see just a headline and not underlying sexism that had created it. At the time, the backlash was chaotic and unorganized, but Quinn was hit with a wave of harassment that far exceeded that which she had received earlier for Depression Quest. In less than two weeks “[on] August 27, actor Adam Baldwin became the first person to use a hashtag for the movement (#GamerGate) when he linked to two videos attacking Quinn” (Chess & Shaw, 2015, p208), comparing it to the infamous Watergate scandal. For whatever reason, the community settled on its name. #GamerGate was, officially, created.
In the days following the post and the initial reaction, GamerGate quickly began to radicalize. As members of the games press began to examine the narratives of the posters, and fact-check the post itself, the holes in the story quickly emerged. As soon as it became obviously apparent that the worst of the allegations could not possibly be true, any rational foundation for the movement had collapsed, and the growing community surrounding GamerGate began to produce more and more ridiculous theories. After a few weeks of radicalizing and establishing, GamerGate mostly settled around a narrative that Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, all of the staff of Kotaku, Polygon, and other social justice-focused games sites, were engaged in “a conspiracy to destroy video games and the video game industry” (Chess & Shaw, 2015, p210). This conspiracy, so the narrative went, was designed to “infect” the industry and the medium with social justice, and any attempts to make the industry more inclusive were the actions of others trying to force their politics on others. That fact that the majority of their targets just happened to be women or people of color was purely a coincidence. “Targets” was not an accidental word, supporters of GamerGate deliberately used militaristic language, most apparently in their “CENTRAL OPERATIONS ARCHIVE”, which is linked in the references section. They named each effort with militaristic, revolutionary titles such as “#OperationVoxPopuli” and “Combined Arms”. A great deal of these operations were attacks of specific targets in the gaming community, almost exclusively women. Their primary targets were Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, though that list quickly expanded. After their personal information, including home addresses, were posted, Quinn and Sarkeesian fled their homes after highly-specific death threats and pictures of their houses were posted. Both of them still receive such threats at the time of writing. This continued to intensify, destroying any notions that the movement would eventually burn out, and was eventually picked up by mainstream news media, including the New York Times, who wrote an investigative piece on the issue that many hoped would serve as a nail in the coffin of GamerGate, but seemed to be nothing of the sort. As the general public became more aware of GamerGate, the movement radicalized further, insisting that any site that had written negatively about them was colluding with other Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), as they derogatorily referred to them. The message kept increasing in severity, but somehow they still had enough members to continue it.
GamerGate, the harassment group, has largely not gone away. But “GamerGate, the cultural event is over” (Danskin). It is difficult to find an exact end date, but the end began when late-night television host Stephen Colbert invited Anita Sarkeesian onto his show and publicly skewered GamerGate. That public mockery essentially meant the end of a larger involvement in GamerGate by more average gamers. They still held the same belief, but found participating in GamerGate itself to be too publically humiliating. And so, while the division in the gaming community is stronger than ever, the overwhelming, targeted harassment has died down significantly. This is not to say it has stopped; many of the women deal with harassment and threats daily, but the cultural event itself has slowed to a stop. It still regularly flares up, when a developer publishes a game with particularly egregious representation of women or people of color, many outlets will respond, and many former-GamerGators will respond more loudly. Gaming sites and communities are heavily defined by which “side” they are on, and neutrality has become an increasingly difficult position to take. GamerGate may be over, but its effects are stronger than ever, and the gaming community has become increasingly radicalized and divided as a result.
Section IV: Why and How?
While the context of gaming’s history and the world’s changing approach to social issues did provide a perfect setting for GamerGate to happen, it still does not explain the immediacy, ferocity, and focus with which the event started and continued. GamerGate, while its goals were scattered, did not feel like a purely random grouping of people, it seemed to have at least some direction. The core of this direction is, surprisingly, not very difficult to find. In the weeks after the harassment campaign against her began, Zoe Quinn investigated chat rooms and message boards run by the higher-ups in the GamerGate community, and what she found was more disturbing than even the ferocious public face of GamerGate would imply. While it is difficult to find an exact beginning to GamerGate, the earliest and most often pointed to source is this one from the website 4chan:
TLDR Zoe Quinn, a rabid feminist SJW GAMUR GIRL who made a shitty nongame called Depression Quest, just got outed for BRIBING THE MEDIA INTO LIKING HER SHITTY NONGAME WITH HER VAGINA BY cheating on her boyfriend with 5 other guys, including Kotaku staff members who defended her online and reviewed her game and HER MARRIED BOSS. She is a manipulative liar and a sociopath. (Archive.is)
This post demonstrates the clear misogyny and disregard for facts that became emblematic of the movement, but further investigation in private IRC chatrooms revealed more sinister motives. The chatlogs Quinn posted were filled with some of the following messages from higher-ups in the 4chan and GamerGate community:
Aug 18 20.10.06 i couldnt care less about vidya , i just want to see zoe receive her comeuppance
Aug 21 17.23.31 The problem is that making it about Zoe sleeping around amounts to a personal attack which, while funny and something she totally deserves, will hurt our chances of pushing the other point …
Aug 21 17.23.38 ./v should be focused on the implications of gaming journalism … Aug 21 17.23.47 Because SJWs will cherrypick the /b/ shit posting and say “See? It’s sexist MRAs!”
Aug 21 17.48.06 I’m debating whether or not we should just attack zoe …
Aug 21 17.48.29 push her… push her further….. further, until eventually she an heroes …
Aug 21 17.48.51 … What makes you think she has the balls to kill herself? Aug 21 17.48.57 I kind of want to just make her life irrepairably horrible …
Aug 21 17.49.45 The more you try to attack her directly, the more she gets to play the victim card and make a bunch of friends who will support her because, since she has a vagina, any attack is misgony
Aug 21 17.49.48 ./v should be in charge of the gaming journalism aspect of it. /pol should be in charge of the feminism aspect, and /b should be in charge of harassing her into killing herself (Futrelle)
While GamerGate reached far beyond these chatrooms and message boards, these were the ones who ran the movement, set the tone, and, from there, organized the events. There are not contained opinions, either. For example, 4chan’s /pol/, or politically incorrect board, is run by a self-identifying white supremacist, holocaust denier (Outlaw10), a move that makes even GamerGate’s most ardent supporters uncomfortable. This highlights an important distinction between two groups of GamerGate, namely, the extremists, and the more moderate members that they surrounded themselves. The extremists are the ones who actually want Quinn and her allies to commit suicide, who are white supremacists, and who actually could not care less about the state of games journalism, and only want to use it as an excuse to force women, minorities, LGBTQ people, etc. out of the medium. The average GamerGater, however, was not like this. They genuinely believed in the cause of “ethics in games journalism”, even if the leaders of the movement did not. The leaders played on fears that these average GamerGators had about the emerging presence of feminism, social justice advocacy, and progressive politics in the medium, and packaged it with an issue that actually is a problem in the industry to make it more palatable. “Ethics in games journalism” eventually became a joke for this very reason, as GamerGators would claim that their attacks and arguments were not about harassment, but ethics, with a justification so flimsy that GamerGate’s opponents mocked them for it. “No really guys, it’s not about excluding women, it’s about ethics in games journalism” is, to this day, a running joke in the anti-GamerGate community.
However GamerGate would not have reached the intensity that it did if “ethics in games journalism” was not an actual issue. The most recognizable ethical violation is the previously mentioned firing of Jeff Gerstmann from GameSpot for his low score of Kane & Lynch,but there are many, many others. Games critic Leigh Alexander helpfully documented a great deal of them in her piece, “List of ethical concerns in video games (partial)”, which serves as a searing and continually relevant critique of the games press. In spite of this, Alexander was one of GamerGate’s main targets after she wrote the piece, “’Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over.”, explaining that the traditional stereotype of a gamer is no longer the only audience in gaming. Ethical concerns in games journalism are massive, widespread, and completely valid, and it is precisely for this reason that “ethics in games journalism” worked so well as a frame narrative for GamerGate. While many of the average GamerGaters did honestly believe that they were fighting for ethics in games journalism, the narratives fed to them by the higher-ups was tinged with sexism, and the targets of GamerGate were almost exclusively women and people of color. This specific type of online phenomenon is distinctly new, but the group psychology behind it, however, is most certainly not.
The study of group formation, one of the core aspects of social psychology, asks questions about why people form groups the way they do, why different people join different groups, and how different groups function. The website Fractal Sauna explores these ideas and tries to categorize different reasons why people join groups and the different kinds of groups themselves. Many of the points provided are very relevant to GamerGate and the way its various groups formed. Fractal Sauna lists one of the reason people join groups as, “Cognitive: needs to understand the environment: The theory of social comparison says we clarify our minds by comparing our worldviews with others in similar situations” (Fractal Sauna, 2013). In this method of group formation, people join groups to help understand the world by finding like-minded people and comparing and contrasting ideas. However, the site warns of “groupthink”, where there is strong pressure towards unity of thinking inside the group” (Fractal Sauna, 2013). These ideas are very apparent in GamerGate’s formation. The gaming community as a whole had, by the time GamerGate happened, developed a mindset of a group under siege, worried about outside influences trying to tear them down. This lead to the creation of a worldview that was hostile towards outside criticism, or indeed criticism of any kind, and created a cognitive need for validation among the community, a need that was filled by members of GamerGate when the group began to form. The allure of a group that provided that validation, that helped members frame their insecurities towards the changing social climate as an attacking force, could allow them to look past the disdainful actions of other parts of the group. Many of the more moderate GamerGaters argued that there was nothing they could do about the group’s harassment and more radical ideas, and argued that those outside of GamerGate were refusing to listen to them because of the actions of these radicals. This belief created a tone of complacency towards harassment, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. in their community, where otherwise, these same people might not have tolerated it.
Fractal Sauna also offers a useful framework that could help in understanding GamerGate’s progression as a group. The site references psychological researcher Bruce Tuckman’s outline of these stages, namely:
Forming: People are confused, goals and leadership are unclear, if there is a leader there’s strong dependence on that leader
Storming: Conflicts arise, different opinions, rebellion, leaders and goals are challenged, unclear roles and norms
Norming: Conflicts are being handled, norms and roles are established, people start to support each others and learn how to work in openly manner
Performing: Beneficial structures of human relating are forming, division of work is optimized, roles are flexible.
Adjourning: Tasks are finished, goals are achieved (or not), people move on to new challenges, celebrations and remembrance. (Fractal Sauna, 2013).
Each stage traces fairly cleanly to GamerGate’s progression. The early days of the movement were filled with confusion and lack of central focus, allowing the acts of extreme harassment to go unchecked as the group was not centralized. The Storming phase did address these issues in some ways, such as some GamerGaters condemning harassment, setting new goals and trying to make their movement more socially acceptable, but the lack of organization and formal structure of the movement made this difficult, and many of these problems continued. By the time the Norming and Performing stages were reached, the movement was so divided, publically disliked, and fragmented, that it was hard to consolidate as a single movement, as they had only a hashtag and a loose set of beliefs to gather around. Finally, the Adjourning stage was reached, sometime around when Anita Sarkeesian was invited onto the Colbert report and GamerGaters were publically mocked. To a certain extent, this phase is ongoing, as the movement, while much smaller in size, is still planning and acting. For example, on March 30th of 2016, Nintendo employee Alison Rapp was fired after a months-long, GamerGate-related harassment campaign against her. While the majority of GamerGate members stopped participating in the movement and entered the Adjourning phase in in late 2014, many of the group’s more radical members are continuing their campaign as vocally as ever.
Section V: Conclusion
With the field of social psychology continually working to understand how group formation has changed with the ubiquity of the internet, GamerGate serves as fascinating case study. It touches on topics such as group formation and cultural conflict, that are essential to social psychology, but provides an understanding of how they are have both changed and stayed the same over the internet. However, what I find most important about GamerGate personally was its ability to massively shift the dynamics of an entire culture. The culture surrounding video games was always problematic, but GamerGate brought those problems so strongly into the forefront that these topics cannot be discussed in the gaming world without an explosion of controversy. And what makes this intensification of previously dormant beliefs so important to me is that it affected me personally; it caused me to leave a friend group. The world of video games is a difficult one to love, and I have had much more difficulty loving it since GamerGate began over a year and a half ago. It has made discussion that would be commonplace in other media become polarizing, uncomfortable, and difficult. It has forced groups to pick sides, and allows for very little mixing of worldviews and room for compromise. These phenomena have been documented before; it has happened to an untold number of groups throughout history, but GamerGate affected my group, my medium, and my friends, and that makes it all the more relevant to me. As I said before, the cultural event may be over, but the damage has been done.
GamerGate did a great deal to weaken my faith in the gaming community, but, despite the movement’s intentions, brought forward aspects of the community that I do value. The emergence of a fiercely anti-criticism group lead to other members of the community listening to voices with powerful forms of criticism. It forced those who care about games to focus more on issues of social justice, and to keep demanding that we look at games with more criticism. GamerGate’s actions amplified the voices of those on both sides of the issue, but that amplification of GamerGate’s opponents lead to many of them simply being heard in the first place. Much of the community now makes a great effort to listen to writers who are women, people of color, or LGBTQ. In short, by creating an environment where criticism as a concept was under vicious attack, GamerGate brought out defenders and advocates, thinkers and critics. In his video on Anita Sarkeesian, Ian Danskin says that, in what he thinks was accidental, Sarkeesian’s harassers would inadvertently create the next week’s Sarkeesian talking points, making harassment that had previously been ignored become the focus of discussion. In spite of all of the damage it did to the gaming community, GamerGate may have accidentally strengthened the critical community surrounding games. The group dynamics of GamerGate and the gaming community are complex, twisted, and often, deeply flawed. But their actions may have brought forward some of the very things they were trying to destroy.
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for a .dll file hidden inside the Hacknet directory and run a few commands on it. Until they do this, Hacknet.exe will not start; it will only re-open that command prompt. The player has to engage with the game as a piece of software with .txt, .dll and .exe files, and until they can do that, they cannot continue the game. This raises a myriad of metatextual questions about if the player is technically still “playing” Hacknet, as they are carrying out instructions that the game is giving to them, but the game itself is not running. But these feelings are taken even further by how the game contextualizes this hack.
victory. Good game designers are consistently using each element of their game to reinforce the magic circle, to avoid breaking the player’s belief in it, the same way writers and filmmakers try to avoid breaking the audience’s suspension of disbelief in other media. In Hacknet, I have no earthly idea where the magic circle ends and the real world begins, but I somehow still fully believe in it. Acknowledging that games are pieces of software should completely shatter the magic circle, and I can think of dozens of games where this happened due to graphical glitches, game crashes, or mis-firing quest triggers. Hacknet, by positioning itself so close to reality, preserves its magic circle, while simultaneously calling attention to it. I don’t know if the possibility space of acknowledging games as software is vast, yet unexplored, or small, and Hacknet is using one of its limited applications. Regardless, it is something unique that the medium is capable of, and I’ve found exploring it to be fascinating as both a player and critic.
that scattered throughout. Instead, the game wants to create a thick atmosphere that unsettles the player. When playing REmake, the player is rarely scared in the same way they might be when watching a haunted house horror film. This makes the totality of REmake’s experience much more consistent than RE7’s, and since the player isn’t expecting jump scares around every corner, they feel free to explore each new area.
which perform the increasingly common function of highlighting all hidden items in the environment like the Arkham series’ detective vision. Instead of feeling like a gimmick that ruined organic exploration, it created an engaging second pass through an already-explored area, making quick bursts of progress that would have taken minutes of searching earlier. Each area feels unique, and unlocking them brings a rush of excitement as you wonder what items, monsters, or areas could be waiting inside them. 
unsettling by comparison, and the dramatically-lit entrance feel more like crossing a threshold. The result is a game that uses realism in a way that enhances the experience thematically and ludically, instead of chasing photorealism for the sake of marketing alone.
presence of being in this haunted house is enhanced. In REmake, there wasn’t much of a sense of presence as the character, and the tank controls and fixed camera angles, while good for the time, weren’t entirely effective at accomplishing these goals. RE7 manages to use the first-person perspective to enhance immersion, while keeping the gunplay awkward enough to feel unpredictable and clunky. But perhaps the greatest success of RE7’s use of the first-person perspective is how it affects REmake’s emotional peaks: the safe rooms.
any sense of freedom the player would have had. They are not exploring an organic world, they are picking which way they want to increase the completion percentage. That has lead to a fatigue with open world games, where, despite examples that I’ve found personally compelling for a time (such as Dying Light or Ubisoft’s own Far Cry 3), they eventually reduce to that completion percentage. Even the newest Grand Theft Auto, with all the artistry and skill put into its world construction, eventually reduced to instanced, scripted missions executed with the same aggressive linearity that its predecessors were created to avoid. Open worlds promised a digital landscape in which the designer did not always feel present, where the player could have experiences not explicitly designed, delivered, and focus tested by the game’s creators, but Ubisoft and its contemporaries seem to create worlds where the designer feels just as present, only giving the player more tasks to complete and evaluating them as they complete them.
difference, but these quest objectives are not given to player from the beginning, they must be discovered by talking to NPCs or triggering scripted events. In, say, Far Cry 4, the player has barely left the tutorial when the game is slathering notifications all over their screen ordering them to collect twenty deer hides or complete all bomb disarm missions. This adds to the sense of discovery that the player feels before they’ve even left the city, as these objectives organically emerged from the setting, rather than being non-diegetic, game layer objectives. Additionally, when the player opens their map to look around the world, it begins as fairly empty, and is filled in gradually as the player either discovered them or is sent there directly. Contrast this with Ubisoft titles, which start the player with a map filled with objectives. This makes selecting the mission the player wants easier, but Skyrim’s approach makes the world feel more unexplored, and temps the player with large, empty spaces of the map. Skyrim does have a fast travel system that could allow the player to jump from point to point, just completing objectives, but a great deal of the time the player spends in Skyrim’s early game is hiking to their next objective. An NPC might give them a quest halfway across the map, and the player will have to spend half an hour hiking there. The frequency of these experiences decrease by the late game, when the player has explored most of the world, but this ups the pace for the game’s last few hours, so that by the time the player is tired of half-hour hikes between each objective, they can simply fast travel there. It’s worth noting that the game does offer an in-game travel system through its carriage system, a version of fast travel that only moves between major cities. I usually play with fast travel disabled, using only this system, and the simple inclusion of an internally consistent travel system helps the world maintain its sense of scale while still providing that convenience.
important factor in if I am going to enjoy an open world game or not is if the game makes moving from place to place enjoyable. This is why I can enjoy the completely Ubisoft-inspired Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, because movement through the world is the core mechanic set of the game. Skyrim does not have any interesting movement mechanics, but instead puts a great deal of effort into making the player feel like they’re on a relaxing hike, not just moving their character from point A to point B. The overworld’s sound design is nothing short of masterful, with a brilliant combination of ambient music with rustling trees, softly blowing wind, and idle insects and animals. That soundscape blends perfectly with the often gorgeous fantasy landscape the player is moving to, regularly creating moments where the player can stop and gawk at the environment. Skyrim is a screenshot factory for this very reason: the developers wanted to create a world that the player was okay just walking through. In many ways, these sections remind me of playing Campo Santo’s Firewatch, which took these simple hiking mechanics and made an entire game out of it. That kind of idle relaxation is a perfect method of mediating the pacing of Skyrim’s long dungeon crawls. But those dungeon crawls still blend beautifully into the hiking part of Skyrim’s experience. I thoroughly respect Skyrim’s commitment to avoid instanced activities, and the dungeons just barely skirt the line in this regard, mostly for technical reasons. For example, in Burnout Paradise (a brilliantly designed open world in other capacities), you drive around the game world until you reach a stoplight, then get teleported to an instanced race starting at that location. That race plays out just like it would in a traditional racing game, then ends, and returns the player backed to the overworld. While this has its advantages (many of which Burnout Paradise uses), it creates a very modal game experience, where there is a clear distinction between two stages of play: racing and exploration. Most open worlds treat their content this way, most famously, Grand Theft Auto with its complex open world but simplistic, removed missions. The tradeoff, however, is that it makes the game world feel separate from its activities, and makes the activities themselves feel artificially gamey by comparison. Skyrim, on the other hand, doesn’t distinguish between these modes at all. There are a few load screens in the way, but the player can start in a city, walk outside into the world (even removing a loading screen if they have the right mods), wander until they find a dungeon or cave, enter that, complete it, and find their way back without changing the state of play. Skyrim doesn’t distinguish between game activities and open world exploration, in blends the two in a way that creates surprising moments. While walking to a quest objective, the player can stumble onto a bandit camp or find a dungeon, explore them, then get back on the path to their objective.
nearby. In this regard, Skyrim feels like much more of a console or ARPG than a CRPG, for lack of better genre terminology. It doesn’t want the player to be figuring out written directions and hand-drawn maps like in Morrowind (though it does occasionally offer those as side objectives), it wants the player to be in a state of flow that also incorporates discovery to keep it interesting. Walking across large distances in digital space can often kill any sense of flow that other parts of the game had built up, but with the balancing act of making the game flow but not flow so much that it’s mindless, the designers create an experience where you never feel completely lost. The end result is a system that enables and encourages hours of exploration, and doesn’t create moments of frustration where the player might quit the game. And this experience is topped off with the game’s approach to dungeon design.
area, and, what do you know, there’s an entire system of caverns, traps, and skooma manufacturing machines being run by a cabal of vampires using the skooma den to harvest their victims (Redwater. Get it?). I fought my way through the facility and got a ton of loot, ending in a dramatic showdown with the master vampire. Apparently the area is used for a quest later, but I didn’t care, because I had found these layers on my own, and I hadn’t expected a single one. It was a ruined house on top of a skooma den on top of a vampire den, and the discovery of each layer lead to more excitement. I was directed through these layers not by an artificial game system, but by my own curiosity and some subtle design tricks.
demand, keeping the player from crushing their controller and rage quitting is a persistent task for any developer, and Hitbox Team helped address this in a few clever ways, many of which overlap with this design aesthetic of flow. The game’s restarts are incredibly quick, absent of any load times, and don’t linger on your character’s death in the same way a game like Dark Souls does. You’re right back in the action in a few seconds. The music itself doesn’t even stop or react in any way, with an indifference to the player’s performance that stands in stark contrast to Runner2, or really most games out there. The game wants to keep the player calm so they are okay with trying over and over to perfect their runs of a level without turning into a rage-consumed troglodyte. This doesn’t mean the music takes a secondary role in the player’s experience, however, it means that the music creates a rhythm where a slip up and retry isn’t a jarring experience like it is in most games. You still fail – the game certainly isn’t pulling any punches – but the music keeps going even when you do. In addition to making restarts less frustrating, it also makes successful runs feel even better, as the player feels like they are matching the tone and mood of the music with an effortless-looking run. The jumps the player is making may, in actuality, be pixel-perfect, but the music, animation and game feel make it look natural. The combination of all of these elements, from visuals, to music, to game feel, to level design, create an experience that encourages to player to enter a focused, zen-like state of calm persistence as they slowly perfect their runs of a level and increase their mastery of the mechanics. The game wants to keep the player’s focus in the specific moment of the moves they are trying to pull off, and uses the music to narrow the player’s focus more effectively. For example, the game’s scoring system is designed to distract the player as little as possible, with the player being graded on two, easily and quickly identifiably variables: completion and combo. Completion is obvious to the player without requiring much additional mental effort, they just need to see if they have cleared the entire map. The combo meter is also straightforward, and simply requires the player to move quickly between objectives. With how easy both of these variables are to keep track of, the player can focus on the one variable that really matters: time. As a result, the player is always focused on their immediate concerns of moving as quickly as possible, because they do not need to spend time thinking about how to max out their combo meter or how to juggle other abstract systems. Without a focus on complex systems, the game can tell the player to focus on the immediate flow of the level, making the music match the tone perfectly.
support three tones at a time. However, the game builds on this with multiple musical layers, at first with only a background instrument or two on top of the melody, but eventually growing in complexity as the player picks up four power ups in the level. Each one plays a sound effect, displays a colorful notification on the screen, and adds another layer to the music, making the final few seconds of a level feel like a busting musical landscape. In addition to these power-ups, the level is also filled with thirty to fifty gold bars for the player to collect, all of which play a note or two when collected, also in sync with the music. Avoiding obstacles in the environment plays a different sound as well, each one placed at a point in the music that it feels natural. This is iterated on further in the boss fight for World 4, which uses a call and response structure as the foundation for the level’s music. The boss readies obstacles to throw at the player while playing a series of notes to let them know what obstacles to prepare for, then the player jumps over/ducks under/destroys these obstacles as the response is played. All of these aspects lead to a final audio track for each run of a level that is unique to that player, based on what collectibles and power-ups the player grabbed, and if they hit them at the correct time. This results in an aural experience that is much more reactive than even most rhythm games, where the player is expected to perform the audio the game wants rather than dynamically create their own. The end result is a more reactive take on flow, that feels just as elegant as Dustforce, but while Dustforce wants you to feel a detachment between the music and the gameplay, Runner2 wants you to feel like you are helping create it. Both takes are incredibly effective for each game’s specific design goals, but when compared, I think they provide interesting examples on how music can be used creatively with regards to game feel.
were obviously scripted and mostly cheesy. The more common mechanics of FEAR, however, created quite the opposite feeling. In addition to being a horror game, FEAR is also a first-person shooter, and it doesn’t seek to innovate too dramatically in that department, but it does execute on those mechanics wonderfully. From a design doc level overview of the game, it doesn’t have much to offer: samey enemies with guns, normal first person shooting, and a slow-motion mechanic to spice things up. But the game does so well with all three of these features that it elevates the game to an incredibly well-polished version of an oversaturated genre. First, the enemies use an incredibly clever AI system that sees them flanking, falling back, and responding to player actions, in a way that makes every gunfight feel delightfully dynamic. The first-person shooting feels punchy and kinetic in a way even games today still have trouble getting right. And the slow-motion, despite how overused it is in shooters, elevates the entire experience to a tactical, visceral experience. FEAR’s combat is not its only strength though, it’s environment and atmosphere do a much better job of evoking discomfort than its scripted sequences do to evoke horror. After a tough gunfight, the incredibly reactive environments will be covered in rubble and broken glass, leaving the previously sterile environments a mess. As the player walks from objective to objective, or explores an area for additional supplies, the tone is uncomfortably quiet, occasionally broken up by quiet, low-quality radio conversations that further the player’s sense of isolation. FEAR’s environments post-combat feel tense, and even though that tension is usually broken by a cheap jump scare, that tension is one of my favorite parts of the game.
frantic and confusing, but often it comes across as clunky and unpolished. This is a completely acceptable aesthetic to shoot for, but it diminishes the feeling that the game will respond to a player’s low-level skill instead of their higher-level skill. For example, aiming a gun in an FPS is a low level skill, it’s directly about using the controls to perform an action and the game reacts based on how well you do that. Deciding to flank an enemy and shoot him first instead of charging him head-on would be a higher-level skill, making tactical decisions that, while dependent on your low-level interaction with the controls, aren’t as immediately involved with them. This makes combat in Condemned more fun to think about than to actually play, as action games tend to rely more on low-level skill and the satisfaction gained from mastering them. In an opposition to FEAR, what it lacks in its low-level mechanics are made up for at a higher level. Condemned completely nails the atmosphere that FEAR only gets right some of the time. The discomfort of FEAR’s environment is ratcheted up for Condemned, making the player go from uncomfortable to always on the edge of their seat. Levels feel labyrinthine, requiring backtracking into rooms that will often be filled with new enemies performing unscripted actions. The game is fond of the same unmotivated cuts to confusing, horrific images and scenes that FEAR is, but it does them with more subtlety and effectiveness. While FEAR’s art style is largely forgettable, Condemned takes place in Metro City, but is obviously a grimey version of 1980s/90s New York, taking visual influence from films like 
Any botched hack or unscanned system could lead to a game over, which the game wonderfully contextualizes as the player’s in-game account being deleted, making retries a canonical part of the story. The player types commands into a DOS-like terminal, going through a process that, while not actually resembling real-world hacking, makes enough sense in-world that it limits necessary suspension of disbelief, even for players who do know a decent amount about cybersecurity. Most of the in-game programs have real-world analogs, like the brute force and dictionary password crackers, which are real world methods of breaking passwords. These programs are necessarily abstracted, represented visually by the inaccurate movie cliche of a program solving a password one letter at a time. Nonetheless, this closeness to actual hacking grounds Uplink in reality, not by actually simulating the real world, but by simulating something that feels just plausible enough. Like many of the good conspiracy stories the game’s narrative draws influence from, it gets just close enough to reality to pique the player’s curiosity, then lets their imagination fill in the gaps.
games work, which function just like Guitar Hero, but with the player plugging an actual guitar into their PC or console. So, Guitar Hero isn’t really asking the player to abstract their low-level actions, they’re asking them to abstract the context in which those actions are taking place. The music is the most obvious change in context the game wants you to imagine, and it does a decent job of emphasizing this through minor interactions such as the whammy bar and star power that give the player at least some degree of personal expression. The tracks also respond to player failure in an interesting way. Guitar Hero stores their songs in multiple different music tracks, including an instrumental track that only plays audio from the guitar, which will cut out whenever the player misses a note. Guitar Hero’s modding community will occasionally port custom songs over without this guitar track, removing the aural response to failure. Songs played without this feature feel substantially less responsive, and break the game’s careful balance of contextual abstractions. The expertly evoked game feel that Guitar Hero relies on suffers greatly from this lack of responsiveness, breaking the illusion that your actions are producing the audio coming from your speakers. Many of games are greatly elevated by their audio – would Bioshock’s Rapture have felt anywhere near as atmospheric without the game’s incredible ambient sound design? – but Guitar Hero is almost completely defined by it. If you remove all sound from Bioshock, you still have the game’s immersive sim-inspired systems, its competent combat mechanics, and its mostly stellar writing. It is an undeniably lesser product, but it is still Bioshock in some sense. If you remove the audio from Guitar Hero, the entire experience falls apart. It exists for the sake of its audio. 
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