Aram Zucker-Scharff

“It’s a valuable question for gaming culture—and “nerd culture” more generally—to ask itself: Do we want to tell stories that make sense of the things we used to love, that help us remember the reasons we were so drawn to them, and create new works that inspire that level of devotion? Or do we simply want to hear the litany of our childhood repeated back to us like an endless lullaby for the rest of our lives?”

– Laura Hudson, review of Ernest Cline’s Armada, “Serious Bill-Paying Skillage”.

One Week of Harassment on Twitter:

femfreq:

Ever since I began my Tropes vs Women in Video Games project, two and a half years ago, I’ve been harassed on a daily basis by irate gamers angry at my critiques of sexism in video games. It can sometimes be difficult to effectively communicate just how bad this sustained intimidation campaign…

“

“We made MUD because the real world sucked. We weren’t supposed to be at university – Roy was from Wolverhampton, I was from Yorkshire and sounded like I should be working on a farm. It wasn’t a great atmosphere; we were looked down on because other people were at university for intellectual subjects not mind-numbing technology. We raged against that.”

“You shouldn’t have to be what the world defines you to be. You should be who you really are – you should get to become yourself. MUD was a political statement, we made a world where people could go and shed what was holding them back.”

”

– We invented multiplayer games as a political gesture. 

“The campaign grew and morphed and got a name, “gamergate.” Very few people came out looking good in the ensuing hashtag war—an example of social media at its worst, with childish insults, sarcasm, disingenuousness, and threats of rape and other violence. Quinn fled her home in Boston and hasn’t been back in months. She periodically gets reports that strangers are lurking outside. She’s working with criminal prosecutors and the FBI on some of the more serious threats, but she says that her life has been practically destroyed. “I talk to my therapist,” Quinn says, via Skype from London. “She says, ‘I don’t even know what to tell you, this is so f-‍-‍-ing far outside anything I’m aware of.’ ””

– The Gaming Industry’s Greatest Adversary Is Just Getting Started.