Why GamerGate and others like it need to be a continuing conversation
I want to start off by sharing a story I think helps exemplify exactly how I feel about GamerGate and similar controversies, and why they’re so important. Bear with me for a minute.
In the spring of 2002, during my senior year of high school, we had an incident that nearly brought the school to riots. Three girls in the senior class decided to write and distribute a “slam book,” a piece of work where they listed out a number of the seniors by name and wrote the most malicious rumors they could come up with. For example, girls weren’t just called sluts or whores; those statements were accompanied by specifically who they were allegedly sleeping with and what specifically they were supposedly doing. Gay or questioning students were targeted and humiliated. Guys were accused of date rape. I’m talking ridiculously damaging stuff. Even in a world that was pre-Facebook or Twitter, somebody decided to make a bunch of photocopies and word spread like wildfire.
What is most memorable to me about the incident wasn’t the initial anger over the lists, or the fact that my name was one of the ones that showed up in them (we’ll come back to that in a minute). The reason I still think about this 12+ years on is because of how the community of students dealt with the issue. This wasn’t all holding-hands and giving hugs; the spectrum ran from the members of the class who threatened physical violence against the instigators to the ones who just wanted to hush the whole thing up in the hopes that it would go away. The majority of us fell somewhere in between, providing support where we could. In my English class that afternoon, our instructor gave us the entire period to debate the pros and cons of different courses of action in response to the controversy. They all knew what had been said, and their support meant a lot to me. The back-and-forth between my classmates as we collectively tried to figure out where we stood and why was an experience I’ll never forget.
This follows the same pattern as the responses to issues like GamerGate, the Duke rape case, reactions to the Ferguson shooting, the GTA V controversy, and countless others: you have small portions of the overall population on either extreme bickering back and forth, but most of us fall somewhere along the spectrum of the middle. Your personal beliefs, values, and experiences determine exactly where along that spectrum you fall at any given point. So for example, Sekani’s background is going to put him at a greatly different place on the opinion spectrum of the Ferguson case than where you’ll find Emperor. The Duke incident sparked an amazing conversation among our staff a few weeks ago where one person made the argument that enhanced media coverage of the situation sparked imitators that actually worsened the problem (valid point), while several others (myself included) argued that it’s not talking about the issues and forcing social taboos on the topic that makes things far worse for everyone involved.
When the guys asked my opinion, as a woman, on the whole GamerGate controversy, I had to be honest: my experiences on the Big Bad Internets didn’t mesh with what a lot of other women had experienced. Part of this is because of my personality, another because of my past – historically, I’ve always worked in predominantly male fields, but with guys who saw me as a person rather than a skirt. But on the flip side, that hasn’t been the case for all ladies, and I’m well aware of that. I’ve heard GamerGate expressed as everything from a statement on ethics in journalism to a war on women (see Sekani’s take on the issue here), but it goes a lot farther than that. GamerGate, and controversies like it, is more a war on human decency, where a very vocal minority once again stirs trouble to achieve their own ends whether the general populace agrees or not. In this particular case, the targets are women (and those who support them), but the same tactics have been used time and again.
Even so, the fact a controversy comes up at all is indicative of both the progress we’re trying to make as a society and troubleshooting what road blocks stand in our way to success – that’s what makes talking about these issues so vitally important. The GTA V issue highlights both our efforts to limit censorship while at the same time demonstrating a cultural push to stop glorifying the idea of domestic violence – where is the happy median? Arguments about violence in video games, especially first-person shooters, sparked conversation about mental health, PTSD, depression, the uptick in mass shootings over the years – all of which are becoming more and more prevalent in American culture, even though violent behavior in general is going down. GamerGate touches a lot of issues and has, more than anything else, sparked rather heated debates about gender equality, the lack thereof, and how far is too far, which brings me to another point: most people don’t seem to understand that “equality” does not mean trading privileges to one historically underrepresented group while undermining the value that members of another group bring. But I digress.
Years after my school’s SlamGate took place, I ran into one of the girls behind it while I was at work one day. After a few awkward attempts at small talk, she did something I didn’t expect but that for a moment gave me hope for the furthering of humanity: she actually apologized for what she did. As she explained it, the slam book started as an antithesis response to a blog post I had written a few weeks prior that chronicled some specific things I appreciated about certain classmates and how those actions had affected me. Though it wasn’t a secret – I put it in a damned blog post, after all – I hadn’t intended it to be read to my class. My English teacher felt otherwise, and apparently word spread (although not nearly as quickly as the negativity that followed a few weeks later). While she didn’t go into exactly what caused her change of heart, the girl said she was very sorry about any hurt she’d caused me, and seemed pretty sincere – could it be that even trolls could be human and have a change of heart?
So I want to issue a challenge: stop being silent on the issues that matter to you. Stop letting the products of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory be the dominant voices in the issues that shape where our society. We’re better than that. The connectivity of the 21st century allows for the stupidity and hate to be spread at an obscenely fast rate, but it also offers an unprecedented opportunity to finally overcome the injustices that have held us back, by giving us the ability to band together in ways that were never possible before. In spite of the vocal minority, the culture we’re creating is slowly but ever surely creeping forward to make equality truly equal. And to those out there who would still argue that not talking about the problem makes it go away and it’s classier to ignore them, I think Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby said it best: “I’m thirty. I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”
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