Gamergate controversy

The Gamergate controversy concerns issues of sexism and progressivism in video game culture, stemming from a harassment campaign conducted primarily through the use of the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate. Gamergate is used as a blanket term for the controversy, the harassment campaign and actions of those participating in it, and the loosely organized movement that emerged from the hashtag. Beginning in August 2014, Gamergate targeted several women in the video game industry, including game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu and cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian. After a former boyfriend of Quinn wrote a lengthy disparaging blog post about her, others falsely accused her of entering a relationship with a journalist in exchange for positive coverage, and threatened her with assault and murder. Those endorsing the blog post and spreading such accusations against Quinn organized themselves under the Twitter hashtag #Gamergate, as well as on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels and websites such as Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan. Harassment campaigns against Quinn and others were coordinated through these forums and included doxing, threats of rape, and death threats. Many of those organizing under the Gamergate hashtag argue that they are campaigning against political correctness and poor journalistic ethics in the video game industry. Most commentators dismissed Gamergate's purported concerns with ethics and condemned its misogynistic behavior. Most Gamergate supporters are anonymous, and the Gamergate movement has no official leaders, spokespeople, or manifesto. Statements claiming to represent Gamergate have been inconsistent and contradictory, making it difficult for commentators to identify goals and motives. As a result, Gamergate has been defined by the harassment its supporters have committed. Some Gamergate supporters have attempted to dissociate themselves from misogyny and harassment, but their attempts have often been dismissed as insincere and self-serving. The controversy has been described as a manifestation of a culture war over cultural diversification, artistic recognition, and social criticism in video games, and over the social identity of gamers. Many supporters of Gamergate oppose what they view as the increasing influence of feminism on video game culture. As a result, Gamergate is often viewed as a right-wing backlash against progressivism. Gamergate supporters claim to perceive collusion between the press and feminists, progressives, and social critics. These concerns have been dismissed by commentators as trivial, conspiracy theories, groundless, or unrelated to actual issues of ethics. Such concerns led users of the hashtag to launch email campaigns targeting firms advertising in publications of which they disapproved, asking them to withdraw their advertisements. Industry responses to Gamergate have been predominantly negative. The Entertainment Software Association and Sony Computer Entertainment have condemned Gamergate harassment. Intel, which temporarily withdrew their advertisements from gaming news site Gamasutra as the result of a Gamergate email campaign, later pledged $300 million to support a "Diversity in Technology" program. Gamergate has led figures both inside and outside the industry to focus more on better methods of tackling online harassment. U.S. Representative Katherine Clark from Massachusetts has campaigned for a stronger government response to online harassment, gaining the support of Congress. Within the industry, organizations such as the Crash Override Network and the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative have been founded to provide support to those facing online harassment. History: In February 2013, Zoë Quinn, an independent game developer, released Depression Quest, an interactive fiction browser game. The game was met with positive reviews in the gaming media, but some backlash developed among those who believed that it had received undue attention. Quinn began to receive hate mail upon its release, leading her to change her phone number and screen her calls. By August 2014 Quinn had been the target of eighteen months of increasing harassment, which had created what The New Yorker characterized as "an ambient hum of menace in her life, albeit one that she had mostly been able to ignore". In August 2014, Eron Gjoni, Quinn's former boyfriend, published the "Zoe Post", a 9,425-word blog post that quoted from personal chat logs, emails, and text messages to describe their relationship. The post, described as "a rambling online essay" in The New York Times, complained, among other things, that Quinn entered a romantic relationship with Nathan Grayson, a journalist for the Gawker Media video game website Kotaku. According to Zachary Jason of Boston magazine, Gjoni deliberately crafted the post to resonate with members of the gaming community he "knew were passionately predisposed to attacking women in the industry". The post was linked on 4chan, where some erroneously claimed the relationship had induced Grayson to publish a favorable review of Depression Quest. Grayson had never reviewed Quinn's games and Grayson's only article for Kotaku mentioning her was published before their relationship began. After Gjoni's blog post, Quinn and her family were subjected to a virulent and often misogynistic harassment campaign. The people behind this campaign initially referred to it as the "quinnspiracy", but adopted the Twitter hashtag "Gamergate" after it was coined by actor Adam Baldwin near the end of August. Baldwin has described Gamergate as a backlash against political correctness, saying it has started a discussion "about culture, about ethics, and about freedom". Journalists who did not cover the examination into Quinn's private life were accused of conspiracy, and a blacklist circulated by Gamergate supporters. The accusations and harassment were coordinated by 4chan users over Internet Relay Chat (IRC), spreading rapidly over imageboards and forums like 4chan and Reddit. Commentators both inside and outside the video game industry condemned the attacks against Quinn. The attacks included doxing (researching and broadcasting personally identifiable information about an individual) and hacking of her Tumblr, Dropbox, and Skype accounts; she was also subjected to rape and death threats. The release of personal information forced Quinn to flee her home; she explained that "I can't go home because they have been posting around my home address, often with threats attached to it". At a conference Quinn said, "I used to go to game events and feel like I was going home Now it's just like... are any of the people I'm currently in the room with ones that said they wanted to beat me to death?". One such threat, reported in The New Yorker, proposed that: "Next time she shows up at a conference we... give her a crippling injury that's never going to fully heal... a good solid injury to the knees. I'd say a brain damage, but we don't want to make it so she ends up too retarded to fear us." Further harassment: Gamergate supporters subjected others to similar harassment, doxing, and death threats. Those who came to the victims' defense were ridiculed as "white knights", or "social justice warriors" (SJW); and this characterization was intended, according to Heron, Belford and Goker, to neutralize any opposition by questioning their motives. Shortly after the Gamergate hashtag was coined, video game developer Phil Fish had his personal information, including various accounts and passwords, hacked and publicly posted in retaliation for defending Quinn and attacking her detractors. The hacks and doxing also exposed documents relating to Fish's company, Polytron. As a result, Fish left the gaming industry and put Polytron up for sale, calling the situation "unacceptable" and saying, "it's not worth it". The campaign expanded to include renewed harassment of prominent cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, who had previously been a target of online harassment in part due to her YouTube video series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, which analyzes sexist stereotypes in video games. Sarkeesian's attackers took her critical commentary as unfair and unwarranted, and considered her an interloper. After a new episode of Tropes vs. Women was released on August 24, 2014, Sarkeesian received rape and death threats, and private information including her home address was leaked; she was compelled to flee her home. At the XOXO arts and technology conference in Portland, Oregon, she said, in regard to the accusations that high-profile women were making up the threats against them, that "one of the most radical things you can do is to actually believe women when they talk about their experiences". "The perpetrators", Sarkeesian went on to say, "do not see themselves as perpetrators at all.... They see themselves as noble warriors". Sarkeesian canceled an October 2014 speaking appearance at Utah State University (USU) after the school received three anonymous threats, the second of which claimed affiliation with Gamergate. The initial threat proposed that "a Montreal Massacre style attack will be carried out against the attendees, as well as the students and staff at the nearby Women's Center", alluding to the École Polytechnique massacre, a 1989 mass shooting motivated by antifeminism. USU's President and Provost released a joint statement saying that USU, in consultation with state and federal law enforcement agencies, had assessed that there was no credible threat to students, staff or the speaker. However, requests for additional security measures were declined because of Utah's open carry laws, leading to the cancellation. The threats drew the attention of mainstream media to the Gamergate situation. Wingfield of The New York Times referred to the threat as "the most noxious example of a weeks long campaign to discredit or intimidate outspoken critics of the male-dominated gaming industry and its culture". The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) actively investigated the threat to attack Sarkeesian. In mid-October Brianna Wu, another independent game developer and co-founder of video game studio Giant Spacekat, saw her home address and other identifying information posted on 8chan as retaliation for mocking Gamergate. Gamer identity: The Gamergate situation is often considered to be a reaction to the changing cultural identity of the "gamer". The notion of a gamer identity emerged in video game magazines catering to the interests of an audience that was predominantly young and male. These publications were seen by industry leaders as a means of promoting their products, and the close relationship between gaming journalists and major gaming companies drew criticism. Over the years, the growing popularity of games expanded their audience to include many who did not fit the traditional gamer demographic. Games with artistic and cultural themes grew in popularity, and independent video game development made these games more common, while mobile and casual games expanded the scope of the industry beyond the traditional gamer identity. A 2014 annual survey by the Entertainment Software Association showed that nearly as many women played video games (48%) as men, and this broader audience began to question some assumptions and tropes that had been common in games. Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw wrote that concern over these changes is integral to Gamergate, especially a fear that sexualized games aimed primarily at young men might eventually be replaced by less sexualized games marketed broader audiences. Critics became interested in issues of gender representation and identity in video games. One prominent feminist critic of the representation of women in gaming is Anita Sarkeesian, whose Tropes vs. Women in Video Games project is devoted to female stereotypes in games. Her fund-raising campaign and videos were met with hostility and harassment by some gamers. Further incidents raised concerns about sexism in video gaming. Prior to August 2014, escalating harassment prompted the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) to provide support groups for harassed developers and to begin discussions with the FBI to help investigate online harassment of game developers. In an interview on Comedy Central's program The Colbert Report, Sarkeesian said she believes women are targeted because they are "challenging the status quo of gaming as a male-dominated space". In late August 2014, shortly after the initial accusations against Grayson and harassment of Quinn, several gaming sites published op-eds on the controversy focused on the growing diversity of gaming and the mainstreaming of the medium, some of which included criticism of sexism within gamer culture. The timing and number of articles published on or around August 28 was seen by Gamergate supporters as evidence of a conspiracy to declare the death of the gamer identity, according to Chess and Shaw. Slate's David Auerbach and The Sentinel's David Elks criticized these articles for alienating their publications' audience by attacking the gamer identity. Writing for Paste, L. Rhodes said the antagonism in the Gamergate controversy was a result of the industry seeking to widen its customer demographic instead of focusing on core gamers, which Rhodes says "is precisely what videogames needed". Brendan Keogh of Overland stated that Gamergate "does not represent a marginalised, discriminated identity under attack so much as a hegemonic and normative mainstream being forced to redistribute some of its power". Misogyny and sexism: Gamergate has been associated with sexism, misogyny, and criticism of both feminism and those it labels as "social justice warriors". According to Sarah Kaplan of The Washington Post, "sexism in gaming is a long-documented, much-debated but seemingly intractable problem", and became the crux of the Gamergate controversy. Jaime Weinman writing in Maclean's said, "whether it was supposed to be or not, GamerGate is largely about women". Discussing Gamergate on her ESPN blog, Jane McManus compared the misogyny that women in the gaming industry experience to that faced by the first women entering sporting communities. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has described Gamergate as "something that we need to stand clearly against". Sexism and misogyny had been identified as problems in the video game industry and online community prior to the events of Gamergate. Sarkeesian considered that the Internet has a "boys'-locker-room feel" to it, with male users trying to show off to each other which causes escalating cases of harassment in situations like Gamergate. In March 2014, game designer Cliff Bleszinski wrote a blog post commenting on the "latent racism, homophobia and misogyny" that existed within the online gaming community. In a November 2014 interview with Develop, Wu said the game industry "has been a boys' club for 30 years", and that the common portrayal of women as "sex symbols and damsels in distress" in video games has led to the players taking the same attitudes. Brendan Sinclair, writing for GamesIndustry.biz, stated that the events of the Gamergate controversy were "reprehensible and saddening" and "this industry has some profound issues in the way it treats women". Many commentators have said that the harassment associated with Gamergate springs from this existing well of deep-seated misogyny, and that it was merely brought to the fore by the anonymity of the Internet. Regarding the false allegations against Quinn, Amanda Marcotte in an article for The Daily Beast accused the video game world of being "thick with misogynists who are aching to swarm" with hate on any "random woman held up for them to hate, no matter what the pretext". She related these attacks to harassment sent to a woman who criticized a Teen Titans cover and to a community manager of the Mighty No. 9 game because she drew a feminine Mega Man, and virtual rapes committed against women's player avatars in Grand Theft Auto V and DayZ. In an interview with the BBC, Quinn stated that "Before Gamergate had a name, it was nothing but trying to get me to kill myself, trying to get people to hurt me, going after my family. There is no mention of ethics in journalism at all outside of making the same accusation everybody makes towards any successful woman; that clearly she got to where she is because she had sex with someone." Danielle Citron of the University of Maryland wrote that the intent of this type of harassment is to demean the victim, make them doubt their own integrity, and to redefine the victim's identity in order to "fundamentally distort who she is". Targets of Gamergate supporters have overwhelmingly been women, even when men were responsible for the supposed wrongdoings. Writing in The New Yorker, Simon Parkin observed that Quinn was attacked while the male journalist who was falsely accused of reviewing her work favorably largely escaped, revealing the campaign as "a pretense to make further harassment of women in the industry permissible". In The New York Times, Chris Suellentrop noted that a petition sought to have a female colleague fired for criticizing the portrayal of women in Grand Theft Auto V, while he and many other male critics raised similar concerns but did not face similar reprisals. Most commentators have described Gamergate as consisting largely of white males, though some supporters have said that the movement includes a notable percentage of women, minorities and LGBT members. Writing in The Week, Ryan Cooper called the harassment campaign "an online form of terrorism" intended to reverse a trend in gaming culture toward increasing acceptance of women, and stated that social media platforms need to tighten their policies and protections against threats and abuse. Speaking on Iowa Public Radio, academic Cindy Tekobbe said the harassment campaign was intended to drive women from public spaces and intimidate them into silence. Prof. Joanne St. Lewis of the University of Ottawa stated that Gamergate's harassment and threats should be considered acts of terrorism as the perpetrators seek to harm women and to prevent them from speaking back or defending others. \