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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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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Gamergaters demand to be seen simultaneously as a 70-million-strong market force, too big for the industry to ignore, and as a persecuted minority. They warn advertisers it’s “racist” and “sexist” when a gaming site dares to point out that most angry gamers are young, white, and male. At the same time, they argue that angry, young, white males are those sites’ “target audience,” and writers offend them at their own risk.

It’s ironic, then, that #Gamergate is also spamming advertisers with links to Leigh Alexander’s highly controversial piece arguing that the stereotypical gamer is no longer the only audience available to the industry.

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– What Is Gamergate, and Why? An Explainer for Non-Geeks.