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GamerGate: Gaming's Angry Summer part 4
With the war spiralling out of control quickly and there seemed to be no stopping it. Almost everyone who spoke out for or against the issue were being targeted with death threats sent to them over Twitter, 4chan and even their own blogs! But there may be hope at the end of the tunnel as the rest of the gaming community are stepping into the fray!
Over at 4chan, the founder, Christopher Poole, banned all discussions of GamerGate on 4chan forcing GamerGaters to move to 8chan. Poole withdrew from 4chan after this and the involvement of his site in the 2014 celebrity photo hack. Over on Twitter more than one million tweets had been sent with #GamerGate were sent by September 2014! In one month! A quarter of these were from GamerGate supporters and the rest were by both Anti-GamerGaters and those who had no idea what gamerGate was. Discussions of the topic had also moved onto Reddit which is where some attacks were also coordinated.
Finally, let's get to the social and cultural impacts, the part of this controversy that affects me and you and gaming as a whole. Four parts and only now we're getting to that! Geez! Anyway many observers of the whole event saw GamerGate as the quasi-climax of the the whole gender equality issue in the video games industry. But this goes further than just having more female protagonists in games, it's time to call the identity of the "gamer" into the question! From video games first real step into our homes video games have predominately been aimed at young males. This doesn't really count from the Pump Unit to the Pong Consoles as those were purely aimed at families but the point still stands, on consoles like the NES and SEGA Master System had violent games aimed at this market! It's been a noose around the industries neck since the (almost) very beginning but now that was to change. This is what Gamergaters and Feminists want, even Anti-GamerGaters wouldn't neccesarily be opposed to it.
However, as we near one light another grows much, much dimmer. Remember that E.T. review I started this whole thing with? Let's address that finally! Thinking back to Zoe Quinn everyone thought that her game Depression Quest was given a good review because she, let's say, persuaded a game reviewer to give it positive scores. False of course but it did begin to expose many reviewers and gaming journalists. Game companies, usually indie developers, paid reviewers and journalists to give the game good reviews, game then sells more and indie company make a huge profit. Simplicity itself! However, this is where the controversy really makes you, the average gamer a part of the ongoing internet war. You want a trustworthy source to tell you if a game is worth your time and money but you can't do that if that source is being bribed. On the flip side reviewers on platforms like YouTube are only legally required to put the fact that the review is paying paid for in the description. They're not breaking any laws and there's still their safety shield of freedom of speech. That is where, really, GamerGate has led us, to question the very people we thought we could trust.
The online war has since died down and indie developers, mainly women sadly, are no longer having their home addresses leaked online. Zoe Quinn got back on her feet and did similar things to Brianna Wu and finally the gaming industry has already started to make steps in the right direction. Take Rocksteady's final Batman title: Batman Arkham Knight where we see some influence of GamerGate, although here the Riddler just pokes fun at the whole issue with his #CrusaderGate. As we have finally wrapped this up how about we address the elephant in the room: what were the GamerGaters true ambitions? As I've said they wanted what's happening right now, gender equality in gaming although think back to that historical parallel we made last time. The Treaty of Versailles was signed by the Big Three at the end of World War One. France thought the Treaty was not harsh enough, in our case they were the Feminist groups but that's only relatively speaking. GamerGaters were like Britain (sadly), they thought the Treaty was a bit too harsh on Germany, the GamerGaters went after Anita Sarkeesian because they thought her video was too harsh! Anti-GamerGaters were like the US, they just wanted peace in Europe just like how they wanted to stop the internet war! In the end, the industry moved forward for the better but let's never forget the savage actions of the GamerGaters on indie developers and the Anti-Gamergaters to those such as YouTuber Boogie 2988.
