How Computer games led to a spike in online violence against women
From a shoot a few year’s back with an avid gamer.
It was about a decade ago that it broke.
In August of 2014, when computer game developer Zoë Quinn’s ex-boyfriend published a blog post, insinuating that they (note: Quinn identified as female at the time, but has since come out as non-binary) had received a favourable review of Depression Quest in exchange for having sexual relations with a games journalist. (The accusations, as it turned out, were false. While the two did have a relationship, the only time the journalist had ever written about Quinn was before the relationship began.)
Quinn, who moved to Canada at age 24 to begin their career in game development, became one of the key targets in a movement called “Gamergate”. It began on 4chan, and spread to 8chan and redit as well as other locations.
Instead of commenting on the game itself—which is, you know, a valid form of criticism when discussing works of art—people, mostly young men, began to harass Quinn, putting their personal information online (known as “doxing”) as well as rape threats, and death threats, sometimes online and sometimes on the phone.
Other female game developers, such as Brianna Wu, began defending Quinn, and quickly suffered the same fate. as well as media critic Anita Sarkeesian, who was born in Canada but moved to California at a young age. (Wu, alas, has no real Canadian connection.)
Sarkeesian had earlier run into similar online violence after making a series of videos that looked at how women were portrayed in video games (you can find Tropes vs. Women in Video Games on YouTube.)
Gamergate proponents claimed to be promoting ethics in video game journalism and protecting the "gamer" identity in opposition to "political correctness", and the perceived influence of feminism and so-called social justice warriors on video game culture.
Again, if they had written articulate, well considered articles and engaged in dialogue with critics like Sarkeesian, that would have been fine. Instead, they hid behind anonymous attacks, using the ethics in gaming concept as a fig leaf to cover their harassment of Quinn and other women, often going so far as to deny it had happened, or (wait for it) claiming it was manufactured by the victims, a la your big brother grabbing your arm and slapping you in the face with it. “Stop hitting yourself,” he would say, while hitting you in your face.
One attacker even created a brower-based video game called “Beat up Anita Sarkeesian”.
At the peak of the Gamergate crisis, Quinn wrote that "the Internet spent the last month spreading my personal information around, sending me threats, hacking anyone suspected of being friends with me, calling my dad and telling him I'm a whore, sending nude photos of me to colleagues, and basically giving me the 'burn the witch' treatment".
In October 2014, Sarkeesian was suppsed to speak at the Utah State University, but that was cancelled after someone called proposing that "a Montreal Massacre style attack will be carried out against the attendees, as well as the students and staff at the nearby Women's Center", alluding to the École Polytechnique massacre, a 1989 mass shooting motivated by antifeminism.
In October of 2014, Brianna Wu was looped into Gamergate after mocking Gamergate. Wu, like Quinn and Sarkeesian before her, became the target of rape and death threats. Wu was forced to leave her home, but set up a reward for information leading to a conviction for those involved in her harassment, and set up a legal fund to help other game developers who have been harassed online.
According to Wikipedia, as of April 2016, “Wu was still receiving threats in such volume that she employed full-time staff to document them.”
Wu has gone on record saying that she believes in forgiveness for those “who apologize and show they have grown,” but admits that insults and harassment outnumbers apologies ten to one.
Instead of learning as a culture and taking steps to proactively prevent such behavior, it’s been allowed to fester. Indeed, in 2017 Trump’s political advisor Steve Bannion told reporters that he could use these people. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”
Instead of finding a way to moderate and mediate, these attitudes have been allowed to fester. And many of the divisions that we are seeing in society find their roots in gamergate. I’m not bold enough to assert that everything that is happening these days is caused by gamergate, but a lot of the issues I’ve been talking about over the last few days are connected to what happened ten years ago.
CNN has an interesting piece from earlier this year on the topic.
I’d like to say it’s getting better, but, as the Guardian wrote about last year, it isn’t.
I’m looking for a nice out on this one, but as someone who spent far too many hours playing things like Halo and Tetris and Doom and Wing Commander and Baldur’s Gate and …. I feel like I am dating myself here (not really; if I were to say “Original Castle Wolfenstein”? That would be dating myself. And I still have a cheap pong knock-off that my parents bought me when I was a kid. That’s really dating myself) … where was I? Oh, right, as someone who grew up as a gamer, what has become of portions of the industry make me sad, but as a photographer in the north, I don’t really know what I can do to fix it, other than tell the story of what happened, because those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it. All I can say is that I am all for women in the gaming industry, and for women playing games. We as a society are better when we can hear different ideas and voices.