Thread by @sarahmei

After two days of dealing with them in my replies, my overwhelming impression is that there are significantly fewer gamergaters than there were a few years ago, but the things they say have not gotten any smarter.

A typical example - unusually colorful metaphors, stronger than average spelling & grammar for this set...but equivalent in content to “ur soooo dumb hurrr hurrrr”

Never any substance.

I suppose “never” isn’t quite true. Sometimes, one of them trots out a tired argument that is just as untrue and/or irrelevant now as it was 4 years ago when it was first proffered. Here are some examples:

One argument they often bring up is that the anti-gamergate crowd includes sexual predators. That’s what this reply is obliquely referring to.

Nobody has specified who, exactly, they are, and tbh it doesn’t matter.

My response - if I can be bothered, because this is so fucking obvious to anyone who took a basic population stats class - is something like:

“Statistically speaking, every population has sexual predators - the only difference is whether you know who they are or not.”

Another tired argument that pro-gamergate folks often trot out says there is “no evidence” that any gamergater had anything to do with doxxing, or threats, against any of the victims.

Lots of people like this one.🙄

This one is pretty much just a patently ridiculous lie, and disingenuous at every level.

First, re: actual proof - between the FBI & the victims themselves, there are irc logs, emails, text chains...not only is there evidence, it’s as hard as evidence gets in the digital age.

Secomd, the folks who are like “THEY ONLY GOT 2 CONFESSIONS SO THE REST OF US DID NOTHING”....don’t really know how “law enforcement” or “proof” works.🤣🤣🤣

Looking at the actual evidence, you’ll see that potentially thousands of different people participated in the violence.

This included everything from doxxing research to sending harassing text & social media messages, to making harassing phone calls.

Families were threatened. People received disgusting graphic death & rape threats. There was at least one in-person stalking event.

Given the volume, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was closer to ten thousand than one thousand participants.

The FBI found the easy-to-find people. Unsurprisingly, they were pawns - not ringleaders - so they knew very little about what else was happening.

The FBI also, at this point, was very unfamiliar with online harassment. That’s definitely one thing that has improved markedly in 5 years 😊

As a result the FBI sorta fucked it up. That doesn’t mean only 2 people did anything - it means that’s all they could get into the official record. The evidence shows that potentially thousands of people participated.

Finally, there’s the claim that aaaaaaaaall the doxxers & other harassers were “outsiders” - not gamergaters. And the related claim that gamergaters were pure of heart & deed! Polite! Even cooperative!

Both of these are bullshit.

Let’s say you were a polite, cooperative gamergater who had a grievance with a particular game developer.

You’re just discussing this politely with your gamer pals on 4chan or whatever when SUDDENLY, thousands of outsiders descend and start committing abhorrent acts of violence in your name, against the game developer you’re in conflict with.

WHAT DO YOU DO?

If you have any brains at all, you realize that this won’t look good for you, & you distance yourself from the movement IMMEDIATELY. The outsiders have the mic, and they’re what the outside world sees.

You can always find another way to resolve your conflict with the developer.

That’s option 1.

If you had a few _more_ brains, you might take option 2 instead: CIRCLE THE WAGONS. Protect the developer (she’s one of you, after all, not one of these outsiders who are doing the harm) WHILE you are firmly & publicly distancing yourself from the movement.

NOBODY in gamergate took option 1 OR option 2. And that’s because the outsiders weren’t outsiders at all.

I’ve been calling gamergaters largely things like “stupid,” “idiots,” & “dupes,” because they went along with (and now still defend) a movement that was clearly - WHILE IT WAS HAPPENING -committing serious violence against women.

But on further reflection I don’t think that’s the case. I think they’re smart, and very, very, VERY misogynistic.

They saw an opportunity to punish some women they thought were encroaching on their turf, and they held their nose (fascists are smelly) & went for it.

Decent humans saw that their movement was causing harm, and left it.

Who was left in gamergate after that? The trash humans who are still defending it today.

Tomorrow we’ll talk more about how and when the actual fascists abandoned gamergate, and what that did to the movement. Right now 😴

Ok! As promised, having surveyed the tired, irrelevant arguments that gamergaters trot out when they decide to offer something apart from insults - it’s time for the last part of the story. It’s my favorite part!

“How Gamergaters Lost Everything”

So it turns out - it’s kind of a bad idea to make a deal with the devil.

The devil always gets his due.

People always think they’re going to be the virtuoso fiddler who plays better than the devil and WINS.

But they never are. They’re always Faust, dragged off to hell when the time expires.

I’m not religious, so I look at Faust as a powerful metaphor for the dangers of compromising your values to get something you _think_ you want.

Fascists like Milo saw opportunity in gamergate, to practice organizing online mobs. Gamergaters were all too happy to go along with it, since their real goal was driving out progressive values.

What a team!

Gamergate’s goal of driving progressive values out of gaming, you may recall, was clothed in a wafer-thin “journalistic ethics” robe.

Just remember - any time someone says “ethics in game journalism,” just mentally substitute “exterminating progressive values from gaming.”

Ok! So gamergaters made a deal with the fascists - help us exterminate progressive values from gaming.

It’s not like there was a summit with a photo-op of the leaders signing an accord. It’s more like the fascists showed up, and gg saw opportunity - so didn’t repudiate them.

The fascists used their extremely effective hate-based organizing techniques to get thousands of gamergaters to wreak _actual_ violence on folks from marginalized groups who represented progressive values in games.

We covered, earlier in the thread, what form that violence took.

One important note here is that there were a fairly small number of actual targets for this violence. However, since it was conducted in public, on the internet, the violence had a hugely outsized effect - beyond the actual targets, and even beyond gaming.

I still meet women who have no public social media presence because they watched gamergate happen and it made them afraid.

To this day - five years later - they are afraid that what happened to women during gamergate might happen to them.

Five years later, having watched the gamergate monster target and destroy seemingly random women, these folks are STILL afraid that just being a woman on the internet, just existing there, might be putting their and their childrens’ safety at risk.

I have a friend, a very nice white man who exhibits lots of ally behaviors, who told me yesterday that he’d completely forgotten about gamergate and was surprised to see me talking about it.

I suspect that’s because he never would have been a target.

I, personally, have never forgotten. And neither has any other woman who watched it unfold, horrified, from the outside.

And that fear we all still have is why it’s SO important to understand gamergate’s fall.

So let’s proceed.

The fascists’ goals were really to drive progressive values out of the whole country. They didn’t give two shits about games, really. They just wanted a proving ground.

The fascists wanted to know - could it be done here in games, this little sandbox where progressive values were already having trouble taking root?

Basically: could it be done on easy mode? If yes, move on to politics, a.k.a. hard mode, where we actually care about the outcome.

So the fascist hordes laid waste to the people who represented progressive values in gaming. Satisfied, the fascists looked at the smoking wasted battlefield, declared victory,...and then quietly peaced out.

The gamergaters looked at the smoking wasted battlefield....and really thought they’d beat the devil.

The gamergaters STILL think they won!

They think it worked - that progressive values were exterminated in games, to the point new women feared to come in (exactly what they wanted), & then their “devil” left for bigger, greener, more impactful pastures.

TOTAL WIN, right?!?

See, they forgot about something.

They forgot about the game industry itself - the people who are paid to create games.

Some lowlevel nobodies were part of gamergate, but mostly, the people actually in charge of games watched this shitshow from the outside, just like we did.

For many game companies, gamergate was a “holy shit” moment. They hadn’t fully realized their community’s venality. Support folks knew, community folks knew, but execs? Not so much.

Then they ALL saw gg rise up & commit violence against women in an _extremely_ public way.

I’d love to think morality in seeing gamergate’s actions drove change in the industry, and I’m sure for some people that was part of it.

But mostly, they merely realized that the misogynistic excess of their existing community was limiting their revenue potential.

If your existing customers actively work to keep _entire classes_ of people away from purchasing your work...that’s bad. That’s real bad.

But game development cycles are long. So it was _years_ before the internal realignments of the game companies started manifesting in big titles.

Which is why you’ve stared to see grousing again, in the last year or so, about progressive politics making their way into games. Big games, large titles YEARS (🤔🤔🤔🤔) in the making.

That deal with the devil gamergate made? Turns out - they lost.

The very tactics that ensured such total short-term success - specifically, the way the very public violence warned women away - was what sowed the seeds of their _permanent_ destruction.

Because it wasn’t just women watching on the outside of the industry. The money folks were watching on the inside, too.

And gamergate scared the shit out of them the same way it scared the shit out of us.

So while gamergate continues to think they won, and just need to stamp out this new crop of progressive values taking root...they’re wrong. On both counts.

The devil always gets his due.

As a postscript - the Republicans would’ve done well to study gamergate, so they could understand what happens when you make a deal with the fascists.

It’s too late for them too.

Just like the gamergaters are now toothless anachronisms who can only lob insults as they fade into obscurity - so will go the grand old party.

Never make a deal with the devil - no matter how helpful they seem. [end]

As a post-post-script, if you look at my replies you’ll see that I very rarely engage seriously with any gamergater. That’s for two reasons:

1. They’re not important. They can’t do anything to me, or to anyone else.

2. They’re stupid. If they haven’t been able to figure it out by now...they’re not worth my energy. I don’t want them on my “side” tbh😅

The only reason I engage them at all is because I want them to start understanding that they lost.

That nobody believes them anymore.
That nobody’s scared of them anymore.
And that their precious gaming industry now actively makes games designed to repulse them - on purpose.

Yep, I’m vindictive. They inflicted enormous pain on women in tech. They deserve whatever pain is in my power to give them in return.

SUCK IT, GG.