#Gamergate will poison nerd-dom

Being a nerd can be a wonderful experience. After all, one of the hallmarks of nerd-dom is enthusiastic enjoyment of a particular thing, and I am always in favor of both supporting others who enthusiastically enjoy things as well as enthusiastically enjoying things myself. I enjoy the sharing culture nerds develop, the “oh jeez you have to see this!” sentiment, over other subcultures’ tendency to judge an individual for not having seen or heard or otherwise experienced a particular subcultural touchstone.

I came from punk rock, the adherents of which tend to fall into two camps: the hipsters and the nerds. The hipsters are there to judge you for not having heard a band, for wearing the “wrong” band shirt, for listening to — or worse, liking — the “wrong” album in a given band’s discography, for not having encyclopedic knowledge of, say, 1985-era Japanese Hardcore. The nerds will sit you down in a room with a decent-to-great sound system and gently force you to experience these things with them, goofy, shit-eating grins on their faces the whole time. The hipster-to-nerd ratio in punk rock, unfortunately, is like 16 to 1.

So for me, gradually being introduced to the general nerd ecosystem over the past two years (developing a love for anime and western comic books; rekindling my pre-teen appreciation for manga; finding others who are just as enthusiastic about webcomics as I am, and so on) has been a delightful experience. Finding so many people out in the world and among my pre-existing circle of friends who enjoy these things, enjoy making these things and sharing them and looking out for new and interesting things to enjoy — this has been like walking into Twin Peaks, finding out what a Douglas Fir is, having a damn fine cup of coffee and meeting the best people you’ve ever met before finding out that there’s been a murder, and half the town is involved in drug smuggling and other bad shit and oh god the Owls.

It’s hard to look at nerd-dom with rose-colored glasses these days. The creators and the lovers-of-things and the people who want to share everything with you are still there, but there is a cancerous mass of people within the broader nerd subculture who want to do everything in their power to keep outsiders out; these people jealously hoard their favorite things, lash out at those who wish to remix them or who have criticisms of them that they don’t like, and scream bloody murder when others try to hold them accountable for their behavior. Gamergate is emblematic of this cancerous mass.

For those of you who may just be tuning in, here is the story so far behind Gamergate; the names have been redacted because this shit is already tedious enough to write about as it is.

About two months ago, a game designer took to the internet to basically shit on his ex, an indie game developer, for allegedly cheating on him with several other individuals over the course of this relationship. One of the people he named-in-the-ostensible-hope-of-shaming was a journalist who has written at two major games media outlets. The way he made it sound, his ex had slept with this reporter to get a better review for her text-based game. This fell apart under further scrutiny, but it got the ball rolling for a horde of people to take to various social media sites to harass the developer, including posting death threats, trying to find her personal address, and more.

This coincided with an incident involving the developer, her fans and a semi-rival development firm, the details of which are confusing as hell, but the end result was adding fuel to the fire of accusations that the developer and her friends, fans and lovers were actually a cabal of “social justice warriors” who were trying to irrevocably alter video games in ways that made the people doing the witch-hunting sad. And then Adam Baldwin, who somehow manages to be more embarrassingly awful in public than his brother, Alex, christened the “movement” we now know as Gamergate.

Over the past two months, Gamergate has tried to brand itself as a movement critical of corruption within games media, but you would be hard-pressed to find discussions of media ethics among the adherents of said movement. Instead, individuals find game developers and freelance journalists — the majority of whom suspiciously seem to be female/female-identifying — and and try to run them off the internet. Ditto to anyone who tries to interfere in their harassment. In September I wrote an article at the Center for a Stateless Society that took Gamergate at its word that it was trying to force a conversation about media ethics, and I was told straight up that I was “missing the point.”

Since then, Gamergate has ignored actual media ethics scandals, such as Plaid Social, a PR firm working for Warner Brothers Games, actively trying to force reviewers and YouTube lets players to say only positive things about Shadows of Mordor by holding pre-release copies of the game hostage. Noted “social justice warrior” and Escapist Magazine Reviews Editor Jim Sterling blew the whistle on that in an episode of his series, “Jimquisition,” but there is no coordinated movement to harass Plaid Social off the internet. Instead, recent campaigns have included preventing Anita Sarkeesian, producer of Feminist Frequency and the webseries “Tropes Vs. Women In Video Games,” from speaking at various college campuses by any means necessary (including this most recent instance, a threat from someone who promised a Utah college campus that they’d “recreate the Montreal Massacre” if she spoke), and trying to get Nintendo to block Polygon from obtaining advance review copies of their games this holiday season because a reviewer there said that Bayonetta was “oversexualized.”

The alchemy of how a harassment campaign against an indie developer turned into an attempted mass purge of anyone who has sensibilities favorable to feminism, advocacy for the LGBTQIA community, or anything else that might be considered in the realm of “social justice,” from video games will likely be something I’m baffled by for many years down the line. But I do know this: Gamergate is antithetical to the principles of nerd-dom that I, personally, and many others hold dear. Their reactionary attempts to preserve the status quo in favor of more Call of Duty games (just to use an example) forever and ever Amen; to eliminate anyone who wants to use game design as a way to explain to their friends and families how depression feels, or the struggles of being closeted, or how they experience gender dysphoria, or any number of experiences and feelings that your average first person shooter, survival horror, or sports games is necessarily ill-equipped to express; to demonize those who aim to treat video games as seriously as movies, books, and other media are treated and offer similar critiques of them in the effort to make them better — this is against the spirit of radical sharing that I love so much about nerd-dom.

Going back to punk rock for a second: 2014 was the year that Against Me! released their latest album, Transgender Dysphoria Blues. It’s their best album in years, and it is the first album that lead singer Laura Jane Grace was able to appear as the person she has wanted to be since, by her reckoning, she was five years old. The songs are honest, and raw, and powerful, and more blues-tinged rock n roll than punk, and they specifically address the struggles of being transgender in a society that fears and loathes the trans identity.

There is not currently a campaign going on among punk rock musicians to force Laura Jane Grace out of their scene. When she came out in the pages of Rolling Stone in 2012, punk rock embraced her and eagerly anticipated the new album. If a subculture which is famous for turning individuals into pariahs for “selling out,” even if no such selling-out occurred, can welcome a musician they were criticizing for releasing a shitty album not even two years prior with open arms and a warm embrace, then surely people whose primary defining hobby is playing video games can find it within themselves to open up to new possibilities and ways of thinking about their favorite things.

Nerd-dom can do better. It has a responsibility to do better.