We must dissent: Intel bows to GamerGate campaign to silence feminist video game critics

A snippet from an IRC chat that helped organise some of the harassment and campaigning of GamerGate. The channel itself was dubbed “Burgers and Fries,” a lewd joke in reference to the “scandal” that launched GamerGate, an accusation that a female indie developer cheated on her boyfriend with “five guys.”

The #GamerGate movement, which might be explained best to outsiders as the Tea Party of video gaming, was born in a fire of harassment against one woman in August. The crowdsourced terroristic harassment campaigns that have historically been directed at individuals—by now a dreary feature of everyday life online—have now, with the advent of GamerGate, collectivised. Instead of attacking one woman deemed to be too loud and too disagreeable, these characteristics have now been projected on any person in the orbit of games journalism who has had a positive word to say about equality. GamerGate called them all “social justice warriors” or SJWs, giving new life to the old pejorative, and set about attempting to purge them from gaming journalism.

They style themselves as a movement that fights against “corruption in journalism” and for “ethics” but have effectively (and perhaps deliberately) conflated “feminism” with “corruption.”

And the endgame of this strategy was revealed spectacularly last week when the game developer’s news and opinion site Gamasutra confirmed publicly that Intel had withdrawn its advertising from them in response to complaints from GamerGate about an essay by veteran game journalist and critic Leigh Alexander. 

Alexander’s editorial had condemned the ritual of harassment directed at outspoken women and called on game developers to recognise that gaming has become so mainstream that the audience for video games no longer includes a microminority of hyper-enthusiasts. The primacy of the compulsively consumptive “gamer” beloved of old marketing departments was, she said, over.

Alexander said nothing prejudicial in her editorial, caused no material harm, and did not use her power as an author irresponsibly. But saying that the gamer marketing demographic was over was, to GamerGate, an outrageous slur and Alexander had to be punished for her crime of minimising the importance of GamerGate’s core activists, who largely draw on that community of perpetually outraged, hyper-sensitive enthusiasts. They no longer characterise the majority of gamers, and projected their existential anxiety about being reminded of this fact onto Alexander and nearly every other progressively minded journalist or critic in the world of video gaming. Indeed, the men who have been targeted by GamerGate for opprobrium and harassment are those who spoke up in defence of feminist criticism, specific women like Zoe Quinn, or equity in gaming more generally.

Threats like these appear regularly for Leigh Alexander, in part because she’s a woman who “insulted” them and in part because the perceived insult has been conflated with “corruption” and “unethical journalism.”

GamerGate’s ballyhooed success with Intel reveals them to be a movement for “journalistic integrity” that is willing to use major corporate sponsors to dictate the editorial content of a website for no reason other than the fact that they disagree with it. As a “consumer revolt,” it has shown itself to be a neoliberal nightmare wherein large corporations are the heroes and plucky independent journalists are the “elite” villains who need to be toppled. Theirs is a movement calling for “respect” for gamers that both defines “gamers” in the narrowest terms possible (they cannot accept that actual gamers enjoy the feminist criticism they wish to excise), and that organises mobs to harass and pressure critics, with sometimes terrible consequences (see right).

Your Identity Was Sold To You

The gamers who revolted and joined GamerGate’s organised ad-targeting campaign, dubbed Operation Disrespectful Nod, claimed a great many things about Alexander: that she was a racist (on the basis of two old, de-contextualised tweets, including her recitation of Nicki Minaj lyrics being mistaken for a threat), that she was a bully, and that she was sexist against men. But this was little more than retroactive justificatory garnish. The real fire came from the “Gamers are Over” piece, which GamerGate claimed “erased our identity” as gamers and was “insulting,” “alienating,” and generally an “attack on consumers.” In fact, GamerGate had it in for Alexander from the start because of her article: amusingly, in an IRC chat where some GamerGaters organised, Leigh Alexander was referred to as the “final boss” of the “social justice warrior” journalism they wanted to eliminate. In a perverse way, this is just another video game to some of these folks.

The rhetoric of consumption is the star motif in GamerGate’s celebration of Intel’s ad-pull. They treat games journalism as just another product they buy, which must be pleasing, built according to spec, and exists solely for their comfort and pleasure. If it does not, they feel they have been cheated and violated. “I’m a paying customer,” they seem to say, “how dare you treat me like this!”

Some gamers criticised Alexander and others for seeming to diminish the importance of video games by saying they’re not worth getting so upset about. They see this as a high insult to their pasttime, but these tweets illustrate why perspective matters. No matter how much you love your hobby, if you don’t keep things in proportion you start seeing everything as a “war.” Vietnam, to be precise. (“SJW” stands for “social justice warrior” and is the chief bete noire of GamerGaters).

Yet this is an absolutely terrible way to treat journalism or criticism of any kind. The whole point of it is to inform and sometimes provoke; journalism is not a jukebox that plays what you want to hear for only a few cents.

“There are new audiences and new creators alike,” Alexander wrote, “Traditional ‘gaming’ is sloughing off, culturally and economically, like the carapace of a bug. This is hard for people who’ve drank the kool aid about how their identity depends on the aging cultural signposts of a rapidly-evolving, increasingly broad and complex medium. It’s hard for them to hear they don’t own anything, anymore, that they aren’t the world’s most special-est consumer demographic, that they have to share.”

This was the thesis of her article, and for this, GamerGate convinced Intel to pull ads from Gamasutra. It is, perhaps, most reasonable to say that Intel had no idea what it was getting itself into and took the volume of GamerGate complaints at face value rather than conducting a full investigation of their claims. But what is clear is that, whatever their intentions, they have sent a chilling message to women writers and gaming trade publications alike: any effort to speak truth to the power of mobs, or to write/publish something discomfiting, will be met with corporate pressure.

The movement has acted exactly as Alexander both catalogued and predicted.

Much of GamerGate’s propaganda is a celebration of the idea that they represent all gamers and only they should be catered to and pandered to by dint of their consumption patterns. When Kate Edwards, the chairwoman of the International Game Developers Association, posted a tweet calling for “solidarity” in the face of “disparaging treatment of women in the industry” and called on Intel to reverse its decision, one GamerGater tweeted in reply: “didn’t they say Gamers are over? who are you creating Games for?” as if it were a QED case closer. This smug reasoning is repeated in nearly every discussion on the topic, and it reveals a complete and utter failure to engage with what Leigh Alexander actually wrote. Her whole point was that developers should be, and indeed are, making games for a larger audience.

Another towering example of this point-missing can be found in this screencap of a Facebook thread where game developer Raph Koster attempted to broker a good faith discussion between GamerGate proponents and game designers. Note what happens when Leigh Alexander enters the discussion and how quickly the GamerGate fellow’s tone changes. It is especially remarkable in light of the fact that a male developer, Greg Costikyan, was considerably more antagonistic towards the GamerGater, and yet Leigh Alexander’s measured tone, defending and explaining her own writing, got her called “You stupid, goddamned motherfucking bitch!” as the thesis statement to several pages worth of ranting, calling her GamerGate’s “antichrist.”

For many of us in the world of games writing, criticism, or development, this has been a month of harassment and terror that has hit everyone where they live, sometimes literally. GamerGate itself, meanwhile, claims in its propaganda to be against harassment but puts more energy into interrogating women who say they’ve been harassed than in dealing with the toxicity of their own movement. Indeed, they’ve built intricate castles of plausible deniability around themselves that obviate any and all accountability, and they never openly ask why so many harassers seem drawn to a movement that makes feminism and equality its enemies.

The price of being an outspoken and provocative woman was already extortionary, and this withdrawal of advertising over a woman’s controversial words takes that to new levels.

Intel and others might do well to pay heed to Alexander’s advice from her “Gamers are Over” essay:

“When you decline to create or to curate a culture in your spaces, you’re responsible for what spawns in the vacuum. That’s what’s been happening to games.”

Edit: Some spot edits were made post-publication. Of primary importance, I clarified the relationship of GamerGate to the treatment of its targets on the basis of their views and framed it in terms other than censorship; I did not wish to imply all boycotts were acts of censorship.

Katherine Cross is Feministing’s Unofficial Nerd Correspondent and is also a gamer.