For example: “Hey filthy fucking dickwaffle,” might be used as a friendly greeting. Some of the most common topics for casual jokes include rape, necrophilia, and Nazism. If someone thinks you’re behaving stupidly or disagrees with you, “go kill yourself” will be a common, almost automatic, offhand remark. The biggest mistake you can make is to take any of this language at face value. Sure, it may be jarring for someone who’s not used to the conventions of this speech community, but that is no excuse for condemning it as bigoted or misogynist, when it clearly is not.
And if you don’t like it, online games afford multiple opportunities to set up your own gaming servers with stricter rules.
Mainstream society finds it impossible to reconcile this language with the reality that most gamers are actually left-wing, not to mention completely comfortable with diverse, tolerant societies. To leftists, rejecting their language codes is the same as being racist, sexist, or homophobic. Gamers know it isn’t. And that made them the perfect enemies for an increasingly progressive movement hell-bent on shaming ordinary people for violations of their dreary, stultifying language codes.
SHAMERS
In the years preceding GamerGate, left-wing SJWs had turned social media into their personal playground. With the aid of outlets like BuzzFeed, Gawker and The Guardian, they engaged in relentless public shaming campaigns to socially ostracize individuals, businesses and organizations that failed to abide by their increasingly restrictive set of politically-correct norms. Justine Sacco, a communications executive whose life was upended by Gawker after she tweeted a joke about white people not being able to catch AIDS, is a well-known example. Ironically, Sacco’s tweet was an attempt to make a point about the injustices of white privilege. For that crime, she became the most hated woman in America, and lost her job. The point of public shaming isn’t merely to offend or annoy, but to cause total social ostracism—the ultimate punishment for violating society’s taboos.
Video games did not escape the rise of public shaming. In May 2014, a small-time video games developer, Russ Roegner, discovered his career was in jeopardy.
“Be careful with me,” warned Gamasutra’s Leigh Alexander. “I am a megaphone… I wouldn’t mind making an example out of you.”
“This has been an amazing look at someone just starting out burning every bridge possible,” remarked games journalist Ben Kuchera.
“Really. Just. Stop,” said Ian Miles Cheong, editor-in-chief of Gameranx. “You’re not helping your case.”
What had Roegner said to attract such warnings?
“There’s no issue with gender equality in the game industry. I wish people would stop saying there is.”
Expressing such a view was career endangering in the video game industry of 2014.
Another infamous case of media-led public shaming in the gaming industry was the campaign against Brad Wardell, CEO of software and games development company Stardock. In 2010, Wardell was falsely accused of sexual harassment by a former employee.
Ben Kuchera wrote an article initially claiming that the case against Wardell had “damning evidence,” and included some of the most disgusting accusations from Wardell’s accuser (including the claim that he asked her if she “enjoyed tasting semen.”) Wardell was not contacted for comment before the article ran.209
Kotaku ran the same story, covering the accuser’s allegations in similarly lurid detail. The article contained the full allegations of Wardell’s accuser, but, deplorably, no counter-arguments from Wardell or his legal representation. That was because Kotaku had only given Wardell an hour to respond with his side of the story.210
As a result of this sloppy, Rolling Stone-tier journalism, Wardell faced years of smears and attacks, and even told me that his kids were being shamed at school because the first Google result for his name was the Kotaku article. It is worth noting that Wardell is one of the few open political conservatives with a position of prominence in the gaming industry, which might explain why the campaign against him was so relentless.
The case was dismissed in 2013, and the former employee apologized for her claims.211 GamePolitics, one of the outlets that reported on the unsubstantiated allegations against him, apologized for its sloppy reporting. Others followed suit, but it was too little too late. There’s no way to unstab someone once your pitchfork has pierced their flesh.
Public shaming relies on isolating its victims, who are made to believe that they are alone against an overwhelming tide of majority opinion. It’s a feeling that was shared by Donald Trump supporters—until they started winning. In reality, the shamers are usually part of a vocal minority, allowed to dominate the conversation by terrifying others into silence.
But gamers are hard to frighten. During GamerGate, they came out in droves to show the world how small and hysterical the purveyors of social ostracism really were. KotakuInAction, the leading Reddit community for GamerGate supporters, has more than 70,000 subscribers. GamerGhazi, the hub for feminists and social justice warriors in gaming, has a mere 11,000.
Gawker, one of the worst public shaming organizations to ever exist, was even kowtowed by GamerGate. Editor Sam Biddle, who had been personally responsible for destroying Justine Sacco’s life, was forced to apologize for anti-GamerGate tweets he said were jokes. It was a rare apology from one of the most unscrupulous sites on the internet. Soon, Gawker’s disgusting lack of journalistic integrity would kill the site. If it weren’t for GamerGate, Gawker would still be here.
Through numbers and tenacity, gamers broke through their fear of social justice warriors. The months following the birth of GamerGate saw a full-scale backlash against SJWs. Sites like Kotaku and Polygon, bastions of SJWs, created new disclosure policies in response to GamerGate demands.212
Before GamerGate, victims of public shaming like Justine Sacco had virtually no allies in the press. Many disagreed, but did not want to get on the wrong side of the social justice mobs. After GamerGate, victims like Dr. Matt Taylor, the British astrophysicist who was driven to tears after he was attacked for wearing a shirt featuring allegedly “sexualized” drawings of sci-fi women, could rely on an increasingly confident community of moderate liberals and conservatives who loudly and sternly condemned their persecutors. The silence had been broken. And we had gamers to thank for it.
UNLIKELY HEROES
GamerGate was hugely significant. It was the first time consumers of a major entertainment medium staged a mass resistance to the influence of the political left. Gamers showed frightened, isolated dissidents that it was possible to fight the cultural left, and win.