Aram Zucker-Scharff

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“No imagined future paradise is worth terror in the here and now. […]

“The furious, crowdsourced prosecution of perceived feminist “corruption” violently conflicts with any anti-harassment ethic. GamerGate, more than most such movements, is morally unmusical: they have rules with no moral framework, they call for ethics without finding ways of instilling a sense of ethics in their followers. It becomes hollow rhetoric that ultimately bows before the terrible logic of revolutionary thinking: ethics are for paradise, in the here and now we must fight til our final breath with everything we have, no matter the wreckage we may leave behind us.

If you sincerely believe that the cyber mob is the ideal jury to fight corruption, and you marshal a perilous stack of indictments against dozens of writers, organisations, websites, and developers that charges them all with a conspiracy to destroy gaming, then harassment-as-praxis is inevitable. […]

the demand that everybody display in public his innermost motivation… transforms all actors into hypocrites; the moment the display of motives begins, hypocrisy begins to poison all human relations […]

When I and others questioned the ethics and objectivity of an operation whose chief exponent promised that academics like myself would “fear us even in their sleep” and pledged to target only “feminists,” […] we were simply told by gentler voices in the movement that we had nothing to fear if we had done no wrong. They are unable to understand that their ability to discern right from wrong is what is at issue here. […]

They are now all but criminalising the very notion that writers should be paid for their work, suggesting this is a conflict of interest in its own right. […]

On the doorway to paradise appeared the words: Agendas Are Unethical.

Thus we were all made to walk through.”

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– Gamergate and the Licence to Inflict Suffering.

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I mentioned offhand to my sister, about two hours in, that “it was getting to be my turn anyways,” to nonchalantly minimize my hurt. That was the moment I broke down.

I realized just how much I’d internalized the presumed process: if you’re even asking about equality or diversity in games, being shouted down in a traumatizing manner is now a mandatory step that you have to sit back and endure.

But I don’t hate #Gamergate for what they’ve done to me. I’m a researcher; my goal is to analyze and to understand. And after two weeks of backtracking through the way they’ve carried out their operations, this is the conclusion I’ve reached:

#Gamergate, as we know it now, is a hate group.

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– Gamergate trolls aren’t ethics crusaders, they’re a hate group. 

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“From outside, people have the same prognosis for videogames that they have about, say, the Sudan.

This state of affairs ought to chasten us. It ought to revise our understanding of the scope of the work before us.

For example: if you want to fight for diversity in games, then absolutely you should fight to broaden representation among players, creators, and characters.

But there’s another kind of diversity: the diversity of our interests and our dispositions, of the company we keep and the influences that inspire us, the people and the groups and the industries and the materials that we contact. It has to do with having dealings enough with the world such that it is no longer possible to be seen as a parochial backwater not even worth opposing let alone supporting.

We have become too comfortable here in games.”

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– Why Anything But Games Matters.

“”All of us are terrified. […] There is a literal war in this industry on women.””

– Sexism and the battle of the gamers. On MSNBC.