Reading 09: Ashley Johnson Doesn’t Fully Relate to This Week’s Readings but I Still Love Her
Reading about GamerGate and playing Depression Quest was really interesting this week. I don’t think I necessarily like Depression Quest, especially since it made it so easy to pick the correct answers and figure out how to healthily live with depression. Although it did (in an over-simplified way) show me how certain negative or seemingly self-indulgent actions I take in real life might negatively impact myself or others in the long run, I don’t necessarily think it was a good game. And yet, I feel no excessive need to complain about it getting a good review, nor do I feel the need to slut shame Zoe Quinn.
Weird how that works, isn’t it?
The Dean essay did a really good job of providing an unbiased explanation for GamerGate and how it came to happen, but honestly if anything it made me understand the pro-GamerGate even less. Between reading an unbiased take on the whole thing and playing the game that supposedly spared the whole controversy, I still don’t get why the whole thing exploded into slut shaming and death threats. It’s even hard to get behind the whole “ethics of gaming journalism” argument when, as Dean pointed out, “it’s not indie developers who are the greatest threat but the big AAA publishers, their engorged PR budgets, their international all-expenses flights to exclusive preview events and gifts (often booze) that are of greatest concern.” If there were arguments to be made, I wish that they had been made in an articulate, logical way, because even if there is some merit to the frustrations exposed by GamerGate, all the toxic anger that came out of it completely destroyed any desire I have to understand the whole thing.
I tried to tie this week’s readings back into my game, but when I googled “last of us gamergate” most of what came up were unpleasant reddit threads and one article that used Ellie’s status as a main character in The Last of Us to argue both for and against the need for more female representation in video games. Overall… not great.
