How #GamerGate Destroyed my Faith in the Media, Part I

A Google search of the term "GamerGate" yields pieces from outlets like Spiked, The Mary Sue,  and Slate, that label the movement with buzzwords such as "misogyny" and "harassment". Previously, respected news outlets such as The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and the L.A. Times, among others, have published stories and editorials, and conducted interviews centered around the "harassment" that enemies of the movement have received, framing the campaign as one driven by straight white men, frothing at the mouth with sexist hatred against women in gaming such as Brianna Wu, Anita Sarkeesian, and Zoe Quinn.

The major problem with the vast majority of this coverage is that it's sensationalist and, frankly, false--and even though it's "just video games", the scandal has completely destroyed my already-waning trust in what seems to me now to be a very left-leaning media machine.

Incidentally, the debacle surrounding Rolling Stone magazine and their seemingly unchecked publishing of an horrific story of a gang rape at the University of Virginia provides a perfect example of and context for how the media, in order to sell a narrative (and thus, remain relevant and profitable) will jump on certain stories with little concern for the truth.

Indeed, it seems the narratives become particularly obfuscated if the alleged victims in the story are women or non-whites--and I find that stories that set out to debunk theories set forth in histrionic journalism often get little to no traction, another phenomenon familiar to those that support the #GamerGate movement. Suffice it to say, once I saw (and more importantly experienced) how voices like my own were stifled in order to slander gamers, especially MALE gamers, who have always been scapegoats for society's ills, not only did I learn some stark truths about the media we consume, but my political views shifted dramatically; among my Facebook friends, I now feel like the "right wing crazy".

But more on that later--here's a little about myself.

AN OLD SCHOOL GAMER

I received a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for my sixth birthday in 1988 (before that I was obsessed with Pac-Man on the Commodore 64). I and my friends in Hampton Roads, Virginia enjoyed classic games such as The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, River City Ransom, Double Dragon II, Mega Man 2, Ninja Gaiden, among many, many others; we'd visit each other, play games, then get bored and go outside and play. On my own, I would try my hand at games such as Final Fantasy and that shitty Ninja Turtles game (I was a boss at the underwater level that has become one of the most infamously difficult levels in games history. And later I would become a master at Battletoads, often considered one of the hardest NES games ever made).

A few years later, I was gifted with a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), which in my opinion is one of the greatest consoles in the history of home gaming. Super Mario World, Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Mortal Kombat II, Super Metroid, Yoshi's Island, Star Fox, Contra III, Turtles in Time, Super Mario RPG, A Link to the Past--these are just SOME of the classic games in my SNES library; and I got a Sega Genesis soon after that, enjoying the Sonic the Hedgehog and Streets of Rage series.

Over the span of my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, I would own a Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS, Sony Playstation and Playstation 2, the Nintendo 64 and Nintendo Gamecube, and the original Xbox. I also enjoyed great computer games such as Maniac Mansion (and its sequel Day of the Tentacle), and the Monkey Island games, along with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, not to mention the Carmen Sandiego series. I'll probably purchase a 3DS when the new model debuts here next year, and thanks to emulators I've been able to revisit classics such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, one of most incredible games I've ever had the pleasure of playing.

Hell, I was even a little competitive in Tekken Tag Tournament and Tekken 5 for a short, short time, and poured countless hours into Tekken 3, and I'm learning the basics of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo right now.

Although I haven't owned any consoles since the PS2 era, I do stay connected to games culture thanks to YouTubers posting footage of fighting game tournaments, posting Let's Plays, and posting reviews and news.

In short, I still feel VERY connected to gaming, even though I don't play as much as I used to. Unlike Anita Sarkeesian, I can speak/write with passion and specificity about video games and I don't need to lie about playing them.

CULTURAL BATTLEGROUND

#GamerGate is confusing if you haven't been following it closely, so I highly recommend checking out this website, and/or at least watching the video that set the conflict in motion (it's a copy of the original, which had over 1 million views before it was taken down by the owner of the account). The video, in particular, was made right after the scandal broke, and provides great context for the conflict that would unfold over the next several months. The allegations levied in the video may not all be factual, however the central point of contention, an intimate and undisclosed relationship between an indie game developer and a journalist who subsequently covered her game, has been verified, and thus the ostensible goal of the movement was born: addressing ethical failures in games journalism.

The movement itself is essentially a wildfire accelerated by The Streisand Effect, as game journalists and a couple of key websites (such as Reddit and 4chan) first sought to ignore the issue, then to censor discussion of the issue (found out more about that by watching this), and then, inexplicably, to disparage and dismiss gamers, the very demographic that the video game journalists should be protecting and serving.

And yet the controversy extends beyond ethics in games journalism; it exists within a larger cultural war, mainly against those mockingly called Social Justice Warriors, or SJWs, for short.  So-called SJWs tend to have their hearts in the right place, fighting for equality across a broad spectrum that of course includes gender, sexuality, and race--but their online tactics, reliance on emotions over reality, and hyper-dogmatism have turned them into one of the scourges of the internet.

In fact, if you click on the previous link, which goes to the Urban Dictionary website, you'll find the conflict encapsulated perfectly: the so-called SJWs are referred to disparagingly and accused of lacking integrity, and the response is quite typical, with blanket accusations of bigotry and hatred (often while being bigots themselves). They'll even venture as far into absurdity as comparing their comrades to Rosa Parks and other progenitors of the Civil Rights Movement in America during the 1950's, likening their escapades on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to real movements of social change that endangered the lives of many involved, and, as one may recall, actually led to the assassinations of people such as Medgar Evers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

One last point to make is that so-called SJWs, from what I've seen, are typically left-leaning (many times VERY leftist), while one survey found that Pro-GGers cover a much broader political spectrum, and that will become relevant later. Of particular interest in the conflict is what I'm calling the Radical Feminist Wing of the SJW armada, which includes people like Ms. Sarkeesian and Ms. Quinn, and they are at the very core of the conflict.

In the next part of this blog I'll look at how these women have been portrayed in the mainstream media and how (and possibly why) only their side of the story has been presented to the public, and how the voices of gay, female, and minority gamers have been almost completely ignored in order to weave a false narrative that #GamerGate is fueled by white male "misogynerd" rage.

The Incarceration of Black Artists

The other night The Shakespeare Theatre Company (@shakespeareinDC) held a "Twitter Night", where they encouraged audience members to tweet before the show and during intermission, using the #STCnight hashtag. In a mix of curiosity, vanity, masochism and, above all and most likely, stupidity, I decided to search what people had written. And I found this tweet (the user's handle and page have been edited out):

This user, who, from what I could gather is a young Latino or Black American woman and an aspiring theatre artist, makes a cryptic tweet about the casting of a Black person as Ferdinand--neither expressing discomfort nor seeming to condone the choice. When she's urged to elaborate on her feelings, she replies with "It made me wonder more about what we're saying about race and power given two black men with speaking roles became slaves."

The Twitter exchange reminded me of an interview between Tavis Smiley, Octavia Spencer, and Viola Davis from a couple of years ago. Here's some excerpts from the transcript; the full interview can be found here. The emphasis below is mine:

TAVIS:  You both have done wonderful work and will do more wonderful work, but there’s something that sticks in my craw about celebrating Hattie McDaniel so many years ago for playing a maid. Here we are all these years later, and I want you to win, but I’m ambivalent about what you’re winning for.
...
DAVIS: ...I will say this – that very mind-set that you have and that a lot of African Americans have is absolutely destroying the Black artist. The Black artist cannot live in the place – in a revisionist place. The Black artist can only tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is messy. People are messy.
Caucasian actors know that. They understand that. They understand that when you bring a human being to life, what you want as an artist, to show all the flaws as well as the beauty.
We, as African American artists, are more concerned with image and message and not execution.
....
TAVIS: The point I’m making is that while I celebrate your accomplishment, there is, in fact, a lack of balance in this industry, and it makes me – that’s why I said ambivalent. I’m not upset with you. There’s an ambivalence here that when I see the audience just stand up and cheer and go wild when the characters that we’re celebrating here – they are real. My grandmother, Big Mama, God rest her soul, you’re playing Big Mama.
....
DAVIS: If you would come to me, if you were to come to me and say that you were ambivalence because that you felt the writing was not balanced, that you felt like with Aibileen and Minny and Mae and Constantine, that you didn’t feel that there were a lot of colors to the character, that their humanity was not explored, that you just saw just a blank, flat, unrealistic stereotype, then I would go with you...But if your criticism is that you just don’t want to see the maid or you just don’t want to see Denzel Washington in “Training Day” play the kind of rogue cop, then I have an issue with that. 
...
DAVIS: When I say “multifaceted roles,” they’re roles where I open up a script and the character goes on a journey. Where I see a balance. Where I’m not just always dignified, I know everything, I see everything. I’m just this straight-backed Black woman, friend, all-knowing, seeing, whatever.
I’m talking about a human being, multifaceted human being that actually lives, breathes, all of that, okay? ...Because my whole thing is, do I always have to be noble? 

Frankly I rarely feel fidelity, as a Black American artist, to any sort of "cause". I think that the "Burden of Representation" (where a non-white actor, or a gay actor, or a woman, or whatever, is anointed as a stand-in for that entire group) is completely unfair and ridiculous. I approach my life and my craft as a human being first, as an individual first, NOT as a Black person. I am not naive enough to believe that my blackness has no bearing whatsoever on, at the very least, the way that I'm perceived, but there comes a point when one becomes too busy being "black" and not busy enough living life.

The best I can do is create a fully-realized and compelling character, and let the work speak for itself.  THAT is how you honor the "Black Experience", THAT is how you honor Black people--you show them as multi-dimensional human beings, no matter what, and you KEEP doing it. I try to choose roles based on their complexity and story arc--and that's pretty much it. If anything traffics in negative stereotypes, I attribute that more to limitations of the writers than anything else.

If I sit here and worry about what it looks like if I'm playing a slave, or what it looks like for a black person to be kissing a white man's foot, or what it looks like for me to wear chains, then I'm dead in the water. It's unfair to me as an artist to be beholden to "What Black People Might Think". Can you imagine the cast of HBO's The Wire worrying about what black people would think of their roles and their work? It would have robbed viewers of one of the most complex and compelling television dramas ever produced.

This woman's tweets piss me of because in her zeal to preserve and uphold her highly subjective and racialized worldview, she ignores that Ferdinand is royalty and has a wonderful journey through the play; she ignores Caliban's complexity and poetry and soulfulness; she ignores the hard work that everyone is doing on stage and off (which she should be aware of, being a theatre artist herself), in fact ignores the whole sweep of Shakespeare's play. Rather than celebrate the triumph of having black artists employed at The Shakespeare Theatre Company, furthering their careers, building their resumes, and sharpening their skills, she complains.

Two of the top-rated shows on television feature Black women in the lead, and the producer of both of those hit shows is a black woman; men like Key and Peele, Idris Elba, Chiwetel Ejifor, Michael B. Jordan, and David Oyelowo, and women like Shonda Rhimes, Lupita N'yongo, Uzo Aduba, Octavia Spencer and of course Ms. Davis are breaking through and getting their work out there and are CRUSHING it. We are living in a time of abundance and of unprecedented exposure for Black artists in entertainment, and yet it's STILL not enough--people still complain because to them the representations aren't "perfect". The Cosby Show "wasn't an accurate portrayal of Black life" yet Good Times trafficked in stereotypes; some people feel that Black-ish is a "coon show".

People are protesting around the country about overzealous law enforcement and what they view as an oppressive and racist regime that targets Blacks unfairly. In the realm of the arts, or at least entertainment, it seems that at least some oppression comes from other black people.

And I'm tired of it.