The games press was biased beyond belief. Kyle Orland, games editor of Ars Technica and the founder of the email list, was seen calling the concerns of gamers “bullshit,” and encouraging other editors not to cover the GamerGate controversy at all, and instead use social media to reproach gamers.
An editor at one publication, Polygon, was seen urging the editor of another publication, The Escapist, to censor discussion of GamerGate on The Escapist’s message boards. Orland was also seen encouraging other journalists to contribute to a fundraiser for Zoe Quinn. At this point, Kotaku journalist Jason Schreier wisely pointed out that a fundraising campaign for a game developer might not be the best idea at a time when games journalists were facing mass allegations of collusion and political bias.
For gamers, the fact that such a thing had even been suggested by a games editor at a major tech publication said it all.
There’s no better feeling for a journalist than breaking a big story that other publications are afraid to touch, and I was already having a great time. But I was having an even greater time because at last, I had discovered a corner of the internet to call my own. I had discovered web culture.
Anonymity or pseudonymity instantly clued me in on why gamers were proving to be such tough adversaries for the biased progressive media, and for the feminist architects of the new moral panic. The irreverence of 4chan was the product of an anonymous online environment, which minimized the usual social consequences associated with taboo-defying speech. Progressives and feminists, the modern-day guardians of social mores, naturally think this is terrible. Leftist actor Wil Wheaton has even suggested banning anonymity in online video games.197
Shortly after I began my reporting on GamerGate, I took a trip to the video games board of 4chan, known as v, then one of the hubs of the movement. I was met with what I would later discover were called memes and shitposting. Virtually everyone told at least one gay joke.
My face was photoshopped onto a picture of the interracial gay porn movie Poor Little White Guy. Another 4channer posted an image proclaiming that I was not simply a faggot, “but a cool faggot like Freddie Mercury.” Having spent my professional career in the stultifying, politically correct world of tech journalism, I was amazed—and overjoyed—to discover there was still one place of pure, unfiltered mirth in the world.
I had found my people.
If I were a disingenuous left-wing blogger, I could have painted my anonymous hosts on 4chan as the vilest of homophobes and bigots. But that wouldn’t have been true, would it? It was obvious on its face that the people talking to me were not bigots of any kind, just irreverent teenagers with a healthy disregard for language codes. This was their way of showing affection, not disdain.
Furthermore, the GamerGate supporters who came from v and its more politically incorrect sibling pol didn’t even meet the standard progressive definition of bigots. From the pages of The Guardian, Jessica Valenti—with no evidence whatsoever—denounced GamerGate as a “last grasp at cultural dominance by angry white men.” It was a glorious moment, watching leftists on social media accuse Twitter users of being white dudes, only to see them dumbfounded as the users responded with face pics clearly identifying themselves as women and/or minorities.198
As GamerGate gathered steam, thousands of female, gay, and ethnic minority gamers tweeted #NotYourShield to protest at having their identities used as “shields” to deflect the racially obsessed lies of rubes like Valenti.
The first reaction of the games media was disbelief. Rabid SJWs considered #NotYourShield to be full of “ill-informed women” with no purpose other than “shut[ting] down talk about racism.”199 A piece in Ars Technica, perhaps the most brazen report of the entire controversy, claimed that accounts posting #NotYourShield on Twitter were just “sockpuppets” and not genuine minorities.200 Other left-wing journalists made similarly disparaging comments, or, more commonly, ignored the tag entirely, pretending instead that GamerGate was an exclusively white male uprising.
If that sounds familiar, consider the apoplectic response from feminists and mainstream media journalists to Trump’s success with female voters. Lena Dunham went on The View in full schoolmarm mode to remind the feminist sisterhood of its duty to re-educate those poor, ungrateful, ill-educated female hillbillies who voted Republican. (Those weren’t her exact words, but we understood what she meant.)
Is there anything more revealing than leftists shutting out the voices of women and minorities because they’re telling them things they don’t want to hear?
This is the true story of GamerGate, not the “misogynist white dudes” narrative you’ve heard from the mainstream media. It was about issues that would become dividing lines in the emerging millennial culture wars, as well as in the 2016 general election: free speech, the future of the open internet, and a nightmarishly partisan press corps that demonized critics of fashionable progressive causes as hate-filled bigots, while holding up their spokespeople as saints who could do no wrong.
THE NEW MORAL PANIC
In the 2000s, Jack Thompson, a conservative lawyer, filed a lawsuit against Take Two Interactive, then publishers of the Grand Theft Auto series, on the grounds that it inspired murder. He was mercilessly ridiculed in the games press, which then appeared to be performing its function as the defenders of creative freedom against absurd political crusades.
Because of battles like this with the conservative Right in the 1990s and early 2000s, gamers developed a resistance to politicization of any kind. “I just wanted to play video games” was one of the slogans of GamerGate. Gamers took pride in their hobby’s resistance in the face of an increasingly politicized world. This is how video games managed to escape the first wave of the Left’s cultural takeover.
Researchers can find no evidence that games make anyone violent or sexist.201 The studies that leftists and moral crusaders frequently cite are those that show a link between violent video games and aggression—but similar links are also found with sports games.202 You play a high-adrenaline sport and you become more aggressive. Who knew?! But that’s nowhere near the same as video games turning people into killers.
A lack of evidence never gets in the way of a good storyline. You may remember Elliot Rodgers, the “killer virgin” who went on a shooting rampage in May 2014.203 Naturally, the fact that he played video games was invoked. No evidence that games had anything to do with his actions was ever presented, but no evidence was needed. The storyline that video games must be involved in bad behavior was simply too compelling to pass up for the media.204