Aram Zucker-Scharff

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Of course there are two sides to the situation. (As Fred Zeleny pointed out, there are probably more like five.) And I’ve read Ralph Koster’s AMA (which gives key insight into the average GamerGater’s perspective). But one of those sides is sending death and rape threats to women in game dev, and that is flatly unacceptable.

To be clear: I don’t think every person calling themselves part of GamerGate is evil. I think a lot of you probably do care about games journalism, and while I think you’re misguided, that doesn’t mean you’re all monsters.

But as long as you use the term “I’m part of GamerGate” to mean “I want better ethics in video game journalism”, then you are choosing to stand under the same umbrella as the people who use the term “I’m part of GamerGate” to mean “I will harass female game devs into quitting the industry”.

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– The “good name” of GamerGate. 

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But what happens if the culture is not there? What happens if the enthusiast community becomes so culturally polarized that it essentially becomes anti-content-innovation? What happens if it demands that games only be escapist fantasies? As I see it that’s what the fight over gamergate is really about. Whether games are more, or less.

Gamergate may want mechanical purity free of the sullying of media, but personally I feel that that is the wrong answer. Any answer that starts or ends with demands for games only to be looked at as products is a demand for a smaller rather than a larger universe. It’s a demand to be pleased at the expense of everyone else who might like to play a game but not engaged with the Gamer nation. It’s a demand that flies in the face of where all the rest of our culture is going and will continue to go. Their answer is reversion, but it can’t work.

For game makers the question is whether to buy into that Little Gaming view, or whether to reject it. If gamers are determined to become a smaller and ideological tribe than they already are, at some point the economics of buying them simply won’t make sense. Indeed they may already not.

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– The Gamergate Answer.

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“First, as Young points out, women’s harassment is more likely to be gender-based and that has specific, discriminatory harms rooted in our history. The study pointed out that the harassment targeted at men is not because they are men, as is clearly more frequently the case with women. It’s defining because a lot of harassment is an effort to put women, because they are women, back in their “place.”

Second, online comparisons like this decontextualize the problem of harassment, as though a connection to what happens offline is trivial or inconsequential.

Third, the binary frame camouflages the degree to which harassment of people, often men, is frequently aimed at people who defy rigid gender and sexuality rules. LGBT youth experience online bullying at three times the rate of their straight peers.

For girls and women, harassment is not just about “un-pleasantries.” It’s often about men asserting dominance, silencing, and frequently, scaring and punishing them.”

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– There’s No Comparing Male and Female Harassment Online.