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Revision as of 18:17, 21 April 2019

Gamergate is an online hashtag movement in the gaming community that began as a movement addressing a lack of ethics in game journalism, the gamer identity, and gaming culture. At its foundation, Gamergate is focused on identities in the gaming community. However, since the movement took off, it eventually evolved into a movement of harassment focused on women, minorities, and their allies.^[1] As video game culture grows and issues continue to arise in the gaming community, events like Gamergate are inevitable.

Start of Gamergate

Gamergate started in August 2014 with attacks on female game developer Zoë Quinn. Quinn had just released a new game called Depression Quest earlier that year.^[2] During this time, Quinn’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, wrote a blog post accusing Quinn of cheating on him with multiple game journalists. The post claimed that Quinn had traded sex for positive reviews of her game. This was denied by both Quinn and the journalists. The #Gamergate movement began when people attacked, threatened, and doxxed Quinn’s address and other personal information, eventually causing Quinn to leave her home out of fear for her safety. Similar events occurred to other women in the gaming community, including Jessica Price, who took to Twitter to explicitly voice her annoyances with online harassment and disrespect.^[3]

Gamergaters claim that they were targeting issues within the game journalism sector and not just women in the gaming community, even though issues with game journalism have never been addressed.^[4] The issue with game journalism as a whole started long before Gamergate. They stem from the belief that people in the game community have the ability to influence journalism on games. Game journalism also came under fire when articles were released with claims about gamers’ identities, now known as “Gamers are dead" articles. The articles, which were meant to be inclusive and change how we view gamers, ended up igniting an identity crisis within the gaming community and the Gamergate movement.

Anita Sarkeesian

Media critic Anita Sarkeesian quickly became another target of the Gamergate harassers. Sarkeesian caused controversy through her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games video-series, a series of video essays examining how many video games appeal to their presumed audiences of straight, white men. This is accomplished in many ways, such as by making most playable characters male, oversexualizing female characters, and using female characters as motivations for male characters' actions.

Gamergate harassers voiced their disagreement with Sarkeesian's critiques by doxxing her and creating vulgar games which allowed the player to simulate sexually assaulting her. False bomb threats were called into venues to prevent her from speaking there. The harassment eventually caused Sarkeesian to leave her home and contact the police, although she did not stop making critical YouTube videos. To this day, any content made Sarkeesian's name brings several thousand trolls out of the woodwork.

Identity

The Gamergate outcry turned into a movement that did not pertain to a lack of ethics, but has become a cultural war over who is “mainstream” or belongs within the gaming community. Gamergate largely represented the stigma of traditional, patriarchal, male-dominated gaming culture.^[5] Many of the victims of Gamergate and their defenders tried to break tradition, which can be difficult when identity is involved. Being a gamer is not only an identity to many, but the identity that most people associate with gamers can be very stereotypical of a young white male. People place a lot of feelings and beliefs in their identities and when that gets puts under question people can get very defensive. This was the original cause of the tension that allowed Gamergate to explode in the first place.

Ethics

Harassment

The original harassment of the Gamergate controversy came from Eron Gjoni but soon online personalities from around the world joined in to voice their support for Gjoni's claims.^[6] Sarkessian's entrance and the subsequent "gamers are dead" articles fueled the flames of hate messages sent out. Various studies have tried to pinpoint the number of accounts involved in the online harassment of Gamergate, with estimates ranging from 9-10 thousand, to upwards of 150,000.^[6] Thousands of individuals flocked around the allegations with vulgar and offensive messages aimed at Quinn, Sarkessian, and anyone defending the two women. While it can be assumed many of these individuals were self-identified gamers who were personally invested in the controversy, Adrienne Massanari points out that during events such as #GG, people use them as a cover to engage in harassment.^[1] These individuals either desire the opportunity to say offensive things as part of their personal political agenda, or do so to attract negative publicity around one side of the strife.

Privacy

In the case of Zoë Quinn, many aspects of her life were shared to the world in the Gamergate movement. This began in Gjoni's manifesto about his relationship with Quinn, where he posted several screenshots of their purported conversations.^[7] Dean Cocking, author of Plural Selves and Relational Identity, writes that privacy relates to a user's control over their self-presentation^[8]. Quinn had no control over Gjoni's initial posts or the subsequent onset of doxing revealing her personal information. In addition, the shared information was used to attack aspects of her identity and her as a member of the gaming community. According to philosophers Luciano Floridi ^[9] and David Shoemaker^[10], one framework for privacy is protecting that which individuals hold as part of their self-identity. Clearly, Gamergate resulted in breaches of Zoë Quinn's privacy on many levels.

Doxxing

Main Article: Doxxing

This breach of privacy was also an example of doxing, as it was an attempt by Gjoni to silence Quinn.^[11] Quinn and other targets of the Gamergate movement were doxed by having private information about them released online leading to threats of death and rape ^[1] Those involved hoped that by threatening them and releasing their personal information online they would become afraid and leave the gaming community. Their intention was to remove these women from the gamer community, correcting what they thought was the problem within the community. Posting people's personal information on the internet without their consent is extremely unethical and can have major consequences on their lives.

Accusational Damages

Zoë Quinn and the men she was accused of sleeping with denied all reports, yet Quinn was costantly stalked, hacked, and threatened for years.^[12] This forced Quinn to change her address often, consistently move between different living situations, and battle in court and public about her personal and provisional life. Her work, such as Depression Quest, was also barraged with many negative reviews that indicate bias due to often only playing the game for a few short minutes.

Bias Against Women

The fact that Zoë Quinn is an attractive woman made her a target of harassment because it made it more realistic for the gaming community (composed of primarily males) to believe that she would use her looks and identity to gain an unfair advantage, despite unfound grounds.

This harassment also points to a larger issue of bias against women in the technology and entertainment industry. During the recruiting sessions for technology firms, female representatives are usually tasked to set up the event while their male counterparts gave more technical overviews. The presentations can also be filled with sexist jokes and other comments that make it a hostile environment for aspiring female programmers.^[13] In other forms of popular media such as cinematic pictures, there also exists a sense of antagonism toward females. During the release period for the movie Captain Marvel, popular movie review sites such as Rotten Tomatoes experienced an insurgence amount of negative reviews, predominantly from men, due to lead actress Brie Larson's comment that advocates for greater diversity in the demographics of movie critics. ^[14]

Game Journalism Bias

Regardless of whether or Quinn's physical appearance may have impacted her career, Gamergate snowballed because people believed that game makers were getting positive game reviews for sexual favors. In fact, even with more established game review websites such as IGN, there have been accusations toward the site for being biased in its review scores because of the website's Public Relations or Marketing ties with certain game developers or publishers.^[15] Despite claiming as independent entities, websites such as IGN depend on advertisements to finance its operations, and being able to obtain an early review copy of an upcoming video game so that the site can be the first to post a review can be a major factor to drawing user traffic to the website.

In these kinds of collusion, it would be unethical since the report would be biased to favor a game that may not be deserving of high ratings. Close ties on their own are common within smaller communities and would not be cause for concern. However, fabricated inaccurate reports would be false and unethical, especially since those that don't give out favors have games that aren't reviewed as well.

Deindividuation and Online Mediums

Deindividuation is characterized by a loss of self-awareness in groups, and this phenomenon is used to explain antinormative crowd behavior like mob violence or genocide ^[16] The tendency for users to experience deindividuation online is enhanced when the online medium allows users to portray fractured representations of who they are and when users are allowed to interact anonymously. When users interact anonymously or with incomplete representations of who they actually are, they are effectively hiding part of their "self" from others. This is an explicit departure from who they are, and this deception is enforced by the design of the online platforms. This further raises questions about the design of the mediums through which the radicalized male gaming community were able to target and harass. In his book titled, "On Truth, Lies, and Bullshit", Harry Frankfurt wrote that "both in lying and in telling the truth, people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are"^[17], and this shines keen insight into the behavior of the online "mob", in which they ignore their own identity and choose instead to behave in accordance with the anonymous, unaccountable mob.

Ethics in Online Identity

Online identities can be very different than what people might portray in real life. In the situation of the gaming community Floridi’s take on identity “At the roots of such transformations, there seems to be a deep philosophical change in our views about our ‘special’ place and role in the universe” ^[18] fits. This concept captures the image of Gamergate because identity within Gamergate deals with the supporter's ideologies about who belongs in the gaming environment and who does not belong. The reason gamergate developed into a controversy is because certain members of the community felt that they belonged and that this community was their “special” place. When the controversy broke out, this belief shifted and in turn, the identity of gamers themselves transformed.

References

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2} Massanari, A. (2017). #Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. New Media & Society, 19(3), 329–346. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815608807
2. ↑ Mortensen, T., Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate, 2018, 789.
3. ↑ Ennis, Tricia. “Female Game Developers Report New Wave of Harassment Following ArenaNet Firings.” SYFY WIRE, SYFY WIRE, 12 July 2018, www.syfy.com/syfywire/female-game-developers-report-new-wave-of-harassment-following-arenanet-firings.
4. ↑ Hathaway, J., What is Gamergate, and Why? An Explainer for Non-Geeks, October 10, 2014
5. ↑ Dewey, C., The Only Guide to Gamergate you will ever need to read, October 14, 2014
6. ↑ ^{6.0 6.1} Mackay, Finn. “Raising Children without Gender Stereotypes.” Let Toys Be Toys, Let Toys Be Toys, 22 Sept. 2018, lettoysbetoys.org.uk/raising-children-without-gender-stereotypes/. Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the West of England Dr. Finn Mackay Article “Raising children without gender stereotypes”, published on September 21, 2018, by Let Toys Be Toys, addresses the topic of raising children without gender stereotypes and argues that children should be free to be whoever they want to be. He supports this claim by being very informative and addressing what types of stereotypes, then he explains that children should be whoever they want to be. Mackay’s purpose is to inform parents how, what why gender stereotypes are bad. He adopts an informative tone for his audience, the readers of Toys Be Toys and others interested in the topic of gender stereotypes.
7. ↑ thezoepost. “Why Does This Exist?” Thezoepost, 16 Aug. 2014. https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/
8. ↑ Cocking, Dean. "Intimacy and Privacy Online", Plural Selves and Relational Identity, Cambridge University Press, 2008, 123-140.
9. ↑ Floridi, Luciano. Four challenges for a theory of informational privacy, Ethics and Information Technology, 2006, 109–119.
10. ↑ Shoemaker, David. Self-exposure and exposure of the self: informational privacy and the presentation of identity, 2009.
11. ↑ Douglas, D., Doxing: a conceptual analysis, June 28, 2016, 206
12. ↑ Peterson, Latoya. “In 'Crash Override,' Zoe Quinn Shares Her Boss Battle Against Online Harassment.” NPR, 8 Sept. 2017. https://www.npr.org/2017/09/08/548661962/in-crash-override-zoe-quinn-shares-her-boss-battle-against-online-harassment
13. ↑ Hempel, Jessi. “Why Are There Few Women In Tech? Watch A Recruiting Session.” WIRED, 1 Mar. 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/why-are-there-few-women-in-tech-watch-a-recruiting-session/
14. ↑ Raftery, Brian. “Trolls Are Tanking Captain Marvel's Rotten Tomatoes Reviews. But They Can't Stop Its Box Office Haul.” Fortune, 9 Mar. 2019. http://fortune.com/2019/03/08/captain-marvel-rotten-tomatoes-review/
15. ↑ NRumphol-Janc, Nathanial. “Former IGN Employee Admits Review Scores Are Skewed Due To Public Relations And The Almighty Dollar.” Zelda Dungeon, 10 Oct. 2012. https://www.zeldadungeon.net/former-ign-employee-admits-review-scores-are-skewed-due-to-public-relations/
16. ↑ "Deindividuation" Douglas, Karen M. Jan 04. 2019, Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/deindividuation
17. ↑ "On Truth, Lies, and Bullshit" Frankfurt, Harry 2009, pp 37. https://philpapers.org/rec/FRAOTL
18. ↑ Floridi, L., The 4th Revolution How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality, 2014, 86.