Gamergate

Gamergate is an online hashtag movement focused in the gaming community, that began as a movement addressing a lack of ethics in game journalism, the gamer identity, and gaming culture. At the foundation of Gamergate is a movement 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. As video game culture grows and issues continue to arise in the gaming community, an event like Gamergate that sheds light on the community's issues is inevitable.

Start of Gamergate

Gamergate started in August 2014 with Zoe Quinn. Quinn was a female game developer who had just released a new game called Depression Quest earlier that year. During this time, Quinn’s ex boyfriend 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 begun when people attacked, threatened, and doxed Quinn’s address and other personal information, eventually causing Quinn to leave her home out of fear for her safety.

Quinn was not the only person who was personally attacked from Gamergate, the movement also attacked other women to a point where their personal safety was threatened. However, Gamergaters claim that they are 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. The issue with game journalism as a whole started before Gamergate. The problem with game journalism is the belief that people in the game community 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.

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 wanted to get rid of the stigma around traditional, patriarchal, male-dominated gaming culture. The supporters of Gamergate are trying to break tradition, which can be difficult when identity is involved. Being a gamer not only is an identity to so 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 identity 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

Privacy

Whether a person cheats or not, there is an implied sense of trust of privacy with messages over the internet and text messages. In Gjoni's manifesto about his relationship with Quinn, he posted several screenshots of their purported conversations.

Personal Facebook messages between Quinn and Gjoni.

This releasing private sensitive information to the internet, or doxing, because of rumors and other issues within the community violates virtual trust by sharing information not meant to be shared. "Doxing attempts to silence the subject and prevent her from participating in activities."Quinn and other gamergate targeted people were doxed in this targeted manner. Hoping that by threatening and releasing their personal information online they would become afraid and leave the gaming community; in a sense getting rid of what these doxers thought was wrong with the community. Posting people's personal information on the internet without their consent is extremely unethical and can have major consequences in their lives.

Accusational Damages

Zoe Quinn and the men she was accused of sleeping with all denied the reports, yet Quinn got continuously stalked, hacked, and threatened for years. 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.

Negative reviews around the time of the accusation with few minutes logged and few details about the game experience of Depression Quest

Bias Against Women

The fact that Zoe 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.

Game Journalism Bias

Whether true or not, Gamergate snowballed because people believed that game makers were getting positive game reviews for sexual favors. In the case of this 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 <ref? "Deindividuation" Douglas, Karen M. Jan 04. 2019, Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/deindividuation </ref> 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 thier "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", and this shes 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

The other unethical thing that stands out has to deal with identity. Online identities can be very different than what people might portray in real life. In the situation for 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” 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 became a thing is because people felt that they belonged and that this community was there “special” place and when the controversy broke out this belief shifted and in turn, the identity of gamers themselves transformed.

In Conclusion

Everything about Gamergate relates back to identity. When it comes to things that are still relevant today on the concept of identity or the internet people have to understand that the identity is different than it was 10 years ago and will continue to shift and change as time goes on. Communities need to become more accepting.