In light of recent news topics on campus regarding feminism and this weekend’s Building Bridges conference, I thought it would be good to cover a related topic in the world of video games.
While I’m not as active in the world of feminist rights as I truly should be, if there is one thing I know, it’s video games. Ever since I got my first Gameboy Advance with Pokémon Crystal Version back in 2003, I’ve been hooked on the idea of falling into a virtual world as a means of escape. Nowadays, I still play Pokémon, but I also play everything from Skyrim, to other Nintendo classics: League of Legends, Terraria, Minecraft, Halo, and pretty much anything else I can get my hands on.
I’m part of the gamer community in both online forums and Facebook, and I even go to conventions/tournaments whenever one pops up in my area. While I stay away from sights like 4chan because I don’t generally like arguments or “trolling,” I do love Reddit and some of the Facebook groups I’m a part of.
Needless to say, I really enjoy being a part of the communities I have and I’m really happy that I’ve met some of the people I’ve played games with in the past.
However, lately I’ve found myself ashamed to be a part of that community. The thing that makes me so ashamed at the moment is in part due to the increase in “flaming” and “trolling,” but mostly due to the viciousness and toxicity that has overcome our community and how it is directed in part towards guys, but mostly toward “girl gamers.”
The idea of “girl gamers” in itself baffles me, since I don’t understand why girls who play video games need to be labeled and separated into a category of their own.
While this in itself bothers me, I have become aware of a recent situation that shows how girls in the gaming industry are really treated.
Recently, a female game developer by the name of Zoe Quinn developed a free-to-play, interactive video game where you play as someone who suffers from depression. The game provides you with scenarios that teach you to manage your illness, a relationship, work, and possible treatment options that those who are depressed must manage in real life. The game is genius and has really hit home with critics, despite its simplicity.
Shortly after releasing the game, however, Quinn began to receive hate mail over the game and enough spam that she even had to change her phone number. After a nasty break-up with her boyfriend, Quinn hooked up with Eron Gjoni from Kotaku, which is a popular online gaming news source.
The problem started when Quinn’s ex-boyfriend, Nathan Grayson, accused Quinn of cheating on him with Gjoni, so that Gjoni, who wrote a review of the game before they started dating, would give the game a good review.
This sent male gamers on 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit into an uproar of hatred directed at Quinn that included doxing (broadcasting personal identification information on the internet), threats of rape, hacking of Quinn’s Tumblr, Dropbox, and Skype accounts, and death threats that have ruined her life.
Later, the whole incident was given the name “Gamergate” after actor Alex Baldwin coined the term in his critique of the media attacking Quinn.
Just from reading that, you should be able to see how horrible this situation is. First off, we have a successful woman accused of sleeping with a man to get where she is. Second, we have retaliation for something that isn’t even true. Finally, we have the ruining of a young woman’s life just because she started a relationship with someone that interviewed her for a magazine.
That’s pretty disgusting and I can’t help but be ashamed of belonging to a community that has no form of ethical or social judgment and accountability.
Rather than assault them back, I say that now, more than ever, we at Gustavus need to take a moment to think, and educate ourselves to see how wrong this is and how horrible situations like this can become if we let them.
There is a limit on speaking your mind, ladies and gentlemen, and this has been taken too far. While any man or woman can speak his peace whenever he wants, and can even say it anonymously, a smart person will hold his tongue and only speak when the moment is right, to further his cause in relation to society.
In relation to the Female Power Hour issue that is going on in Lund, consider Zoe Quinn and how that all relates to the topic at hand.
As you see the negative outcome of this situation, please learn to respect your peers and not see them through gender, but as equals beyond that so that we don’t follow the gaming community on their path to ruin. We cannot allow our community to fall apart like the gamer community is right now.
So please, respect your peers and move forward with the knowledge that threatening to ruin another’s life with violence or horrible words will only destroy everything that we have worked for on this campus.
I encourage you to attend the Building Bridges conference this Saturday, as well, and better arm yourself with the power to prevent this situation from arising again in the future. Hopefully, I will see you there.
-Cory Witt
Gamergate is about ethics in games journalism etc.
Please see notyourshield hashtag, very unfair and discriminatory to say there are only men.
Liar
You skimmed over the fact that the outrage only kicked off after Kotaku refuted the claims she had traded sex for positive reviews. Then people pointed out that a number of writers were funding her via Patreon.
At that point those comments and many other comments (literally thousands) on reddit (where she was friends with several moderators) were deleted and a number of videos critical of either her or her game were struck off youtube with spurious DMCA claims THEN people kicked off and ADam Baldwin coined the term gamergate.
Of course Quinn’s supporters have always tried to reviue history so she looks like a saint instead of the nasty piece of work she actually is. (like her slander of the fine young capitalists game drive for women in gaming so that her own attmpt would get more attention or her falsly accusing a message board for lonely men of harrassing her and saying they were trying to stop her game getting greenlit so her followers should attack them and upvote her game, or even her linking to the doxx of a transgender teen)
Don’t get me wrong, no one deserves death threats just for being a bit of an arsehole, however, just because they do get those threats doesn’t absoilve them of what they did.
As for gamergate: At this point it’s just an ugly civil war between extrem free speech advocates and extreme moral authoritarians and both sides look like fanatics (more so the anti-GG side from the way they hypocritically harrass and threaten women, LBGT people and ethnic minorities who support GG while claiming to be fighting for inclusivity anmd tolerance)
“no one deserves death threats just for being a bit of an arsehole, however…”
No. You don’t get to put “however” after a statement like that. Ever.
That you think you can invalidates any argument you think you might have made. You are why gamergate is rightly identified as an unapologetic hate-group.
Way to ignore the context of the rest of my post and to prove my point in it’s entirety. So I guess thanks?
The however was in regard to the way ZQ used the fact that she had received death threats as a shield against all the crap she had pulled. I was not justifying the death threats in anyway, which if you had half a brain you would realize. This is actually why gamergate is going on so long as you cretins who are on the her side continue to deliberately misunderstand people and quote them out of context in a pathetic attempt to make them look bad or try and portray them as saying something when they’re not.
Case in point your attempting to use an out of context quote trying to make it look like I was justifying death threats.
Like I said people like you are so desperate to portray her as a living saint who has never done a single thing wrong that it’s almost comical.
And that’s why people view you SJW’s as hypocritical, lying sanctimonious sociopaths who don’t care about things like the truth or what’s right, just about being on the winning side.
So keep on keeping on.
Just out of curiosity do you actually believe that if someone gets a death threat that automatically absolves them of any nasty stuff they’ve done?
Seriously I’m curious about how far you lot are willing to go in your fanatical support of this foul woman (just for clarity her gender isn’t why I consider her foul, it’s her actions that have given me that perception and who she slept with has no affect on that)
And all the losers who do nothing but search for gamergate articles that don’t parrot KIA or Breitbart come slithering out of the woodwork.
Go back to pedochan you clowns.