Aram Zucker-Scharff

Bomb Threat Targeted Anita Sarkeesian, Gaming Awards Last March: An anonymous e-mailer threatened to blow up a bomb at the Game Developers Choice Awards this past March unless the hosts rescinded an award recognizing feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian, t…

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“You want to debate any of these things under the charge of improving the ethics of game development and game journalism, be my guest. But here’s the thing.

As long as women gamers and game developers are living under a cloud of virtual terrorism, I don’t give a shit about your cause.

As long as women in and around gaming, including I note some on my friends’ list, are getting doxed, getting slandered, getting their private lives and sexuality discussed at length, getting revenge porn and nudes (real or faked) published about them, having their suicide openly rooted for, and getting harassed in private mail and public tweets so vile that they feel the need to hide out at a friends house and call the authorities, your pet topic is so low in priority that I can’t be bothered to care.

As long as the IGDA feels the need to work with the FBI in order to give game developers resources so that they can feel safe from people who claim to love games, I really don’t give a shit about any of the cute little ‘scandals’ that have been manufactured solely to give cover to the continued harassment of a handful of outspoken voices in this industry. There’s really not much else that merits talking about.”

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– Reclaiming ‘Gamer’ and Defending Our Tribe.

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“The problem with winners self-identifying as losers: once you’ve cast yourself as a victim in your own mind, there’s no need to interrogate your own behavior.

There is an alternative: solidarity. […]

I fear too that we have come to so thoroughly associate fandom with grievance that the two are now inextricable. That, I suspect, is the long-term consequence of the rise of the geeks: that we no longer know how to enjoy art without enjoying it against others. “

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– A really fascinating debate unit over at the New York Times. All the articles are really interesting, but this one hit a chord. Some of the phrasing (that headline…) is more meant to incite, but the underlying point… has a point.

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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.