#GamerGate VS #FootballGate: how the media dictates the story
Disclaimer: in this post I will talk about something Americans refer to as “football”, yet it involves an object not shaped like an actual ball nor a lot of actual kicking the ball with your foot. Apologies for the rest of the human race
Dear #everyone,
NFL veteran and longtime Gamer Chris Kluwe posted a long rant on how people who support #GamerGate really piss him off. He makes some interesting claims, but I won’t go into argument many of them (I actually already covered some of points here).
There is just one important point I would like to bring up here:
Bad game journalism is the reason mainstream media blames gamers as a whole
Chris claims that GamerGaters are doing a disservice to gamers at large because mainstream media doesn’t distinguish the majority of gamers from this small group of vocal people, portraying the entire industry and game community in bad light.
Well, guess what Chris? GamerGaters are just as angry about this as you are, because the same media doesn’t distinguish the vast majority of GamerGaters from a few anonymous harassers — ones that were never identified to be an actual part of the movement. This is a classic fallacy of guilt by association. The threat aimed at Anita Sarkeesian in Utah state university for example didn’t claim any relation to GamerGate or videogames, yet for some reason the game media itself pinned it on GamerGate.
Mainstream media in turn marked the entire gamer population as their target simply because they don’t give a damn: gamers always were and still are an excuse for sensationalist headlines in mainstream media.
You want to blame someone for the bad portrayal of gamers in this whole thing? Go ahead and ask yourself why not a single gaming website gave any coverage to The Fine Young Capitalists IndieGoGo campaign? A campaign sending a positive message and created to encourage more women to join game development.
The campaign didn’t get any coverage when the creators and participants were harassed and received death threats, when their website was hacked and taken down, and when the campaign was practically saved by donations from 4chan — of all the people on the net. Since then some other successful campaigns were ran by GamerGate members (anti bullying, suicidal prevention, and an Extra Life campaign taking place right now) — with no mention whatsoever in the game media.
Why? Because it didn’t play to their black-and-white narrative painting people rallying behind GamerGate as the source of all evil. If there’s any possible reason for the lack of coverage then I am yet to have heard about it.
#FootballGate: An analogy
Lets put GamerGate aside and talk Football for a moment. The NFL had some scandals this year, with league player involved in child abuse and domestic violence. That is real life violence we’re talking about here, not just virtual threats on twitter.
Now try to imagine a hypothetical scenario where one morning all major sports papers publish editorials with variations on the “Football is dead” headline and describing how the image of football, the NFL, or their fan are beyond redemption now.
Imagine these editorials telling their enthusiastic readers that serious football fans are now dead. That they don’t matter anymore because recent statistics show how them — the fans that actually buy season tickets and go the stadium every week — are only a minority in a much bigger audience occasionally watching football game at home.
Just how would you think football fans will react in this unreasonable situation? Will they settle for a mere hashtag on twitter?
FIND A DIFFERENT HASHTAG!!!
Back to GamerGate, we now hear opposing parties calling gamers to drop the hashtag altogether because otherwise you are being associated with a minority that harms your goals and therefore no debate can be made .
This makes for quite a ridiculous argument: #GamerGate was initially set in motion after many gamers (who didn’t want to associate themselves with earlier dirt digging) decided to raise their voice when they witnessed False DMCA takedowns in Youtube and the media bias surrounding TFYC campaign. Yes, trolls jumped on board too — but these trolls will do the exact same thing if the hashtag is dropped in favor of something else.
Asking GamerGaters to drop the hashtag first and only then form a discussion? This is like asking Vikings and Ravens fans to root for other teams before you agree to listen to them. Claiming that otherwise they become forever associated with some real world violence someone else carried… that is not a reasonable request to make.
A smart man once said that we can’t assume all NFL players are knuckle-dragging troglodytes only because it’s the bad players who make the news. Considering that, how can we make a similar wrong assumption about GamerGaters and gamers in general?
You want to blame someone for the negative image of gamers or football players? Address the media.
You want to have a discussion with #GamerGaters and tell them how some of their conspiracies are utterly ridiculous? No one is stopping you — join the discusssion.
You want to tell other people how they should define themselves? Behind what cause they should rally? Sorry, but that’s a no.
