Gamergate: Much Ado About Nothing, or a Serious Question of Criticism and Semantics?
At first glance, it may appear that “Gamergate” is a lot of noise and static about an issue that, for the vast majority of people out there, has no relevance nor even holds the slightest bit of interest. And this is true. The video game subculture has always been a very niche sector, and like any other subculture, suffers from rampant fanaticism and nepotism. Fanaticism and nepotism are part and parcel of any subcultural movement and market, so one must either accept such factors in order to participate or simply choose not to join the crowd — and that is what a subculture is, a collective, or more precisely, a social marketplace of like-minded individuals intensely and zealously involved in some shared interest or pursuit.
And in this case, of course, Gamergate revolves around hardcore gamers — not just people who really love to play games, but those who are fanatical about certain genres of videogames. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was arcade games like Space Invaders, *Pac-Man, Defender*, and *Galaga*. In the 1990s, games like *Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Doom, Quake*, and the like. For the last couple of decades, ultraviolent and often politically incorrect first-person shooters and open world action-adventures have dominated the gaming landscape. This is the world of the hardcore gamer, and it goes without saying that it is a very male-oriented and male-dominated subculture. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of perspective.
Which brings us to another side of this whole thing that is more of general interest to the average person, particularly to those in the technology sector, and it’s all about communication and semantics, and the nature of working with and selling to niche consumer markets.
What Gamergate is all about is alleged cronyism and nepotism in video and computer game journalism. Now, this is a given. In point of fact, “gaming journalism” has always, with a few exceptions here and there over the years, been something of a misnomer when you consider that most publications focused on games are effectively glorified outlets for press releases and flagrantly uncritical promotion pieces, all disguised as “journalism.”
Let’s not kid ourselves. There is very little real “journalism” going on in the world of interactive entertainment (which includes, but is definitely not limited to traditional videogames.) There is nothing new or remarkable about this fact. This will likely change as academics and professional journalists become more interested in all manner of interactive entertainment. We have to keep in mind that it’s only been in recent years that sociologists and media scholars have begun to approach the interactive arts as a serious academic topic of study, and we’re still a long way away from widespread acceptance of games as constituting a bona fide form of art.
Anita Sarkeesian’s video series entitled *Tropes vs. Women in Video Games* has quickly become the most prominent example of media criticism applied to video games, and constitutes the first serious attempt to deconstruct common themes in games as they relate to gender for a popular audience. Previous efforts in this area were strictly in the form of academic papers and not easily accessible to laypersons. The intense and irrational backlash against Sarkeesian is thus not surprising and was to be expected given that she is critically analyzing games and the gaming subculture from a feminist perspective in YouTube videos produced for a general audience. That she has been attacked and harassed as much as she has means that her videos have been more than successful in getting their intended message across and are being clearly understood by the average viewer.
What is somewhat surprising and also ironic is that many of those promoting Gamergate are vehemently against Sarkeesian, considering the fact that she did not spark the reasons for why Gamergate began in the first place, and the campaign of harassment against her began long, long before Gamergate. Taking a stand against Sarkeesian and conflating her with the problems facing gaming “journalism” is totally senseless and irrational. It is actually individuals like Anita Sarkeesian who help develop the critical framework necessary to foster legitimate journalism in the first place. Whether you agree with her feminist outlook or not, she is one of the very few individuals out there who takes video games seriously enough to devote considerable time and energy to critically analyzing them. And given that video games are increasingly having as much on effect on people as other forms of entertainment, such as movies and sports, there is no denying that a critical analysis of gender in games is not only warranted, but also a necessary contribution to the wider field of media scholarship.
What seems to have gotten lost throughout all of this is that Gamergate was originally sparked by a game that isn’t actually a “video” game, but a type of Web-based interactive fiction. Most contemporary interactive fiction (IF) isn’t what we would call pure interactive fiction (“text adventures” that feature an actual text command parser) like the old games of Infocom and Scott Adams, for example, or the many, many various games developed using IF development languages like TADS and Inform. Most of the IF one finds on the Web are more akin to “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, where an essentially linear narrative is presented in non-linear form, typically with more than one ending. They are interactive to the extent that the story progresses based on a menu of options presented at various points, but typically do not involve solving any actual puzzles or obstacles. The games of Infocom, and the many IF games developed using TADS and Inform, for instance, are highly interactive open world simulations, requiring text commands inputted via keyboard, and almost always include numerous puzzles and obstacles that need to be solved — they are not interactive novels.
So, this particular game that sparked Gamergate, that appeared to be talked about as a “video” game rather than as a Web-based interactive fiction, was given an admittedly large amount of praise and attention by gaming “journalists” who typically write articles on vastly different types of games for an audience that isn’t generally interested in this kind of interactive fiction, or interactive fiction at all. In all honesty, we’ve never seen any contemporary IF given any attention at all by gaming “journalists.” This was never surprising since most IF is strictly text-based with no graphics or sound and produced by hobbyists who distribute them free of charge.
In effect, the backlash appeared to result from confusion as to why so much attention and praise was being given to something that holds little to no interest for most of the people who are the target audience of such articles. Whether the allegations of cronyism and nepotism are warranted in this particular case, and whether or not any of it is true, does not interest us for the purpose of this post. That situation unfortunately quickly devolved into an ugly, convoluted morass of sexist personal attacks and innuendo and has been analyzed to death elsewhere.
What does interest us are semantics — what constitutes a video game, as opposed to a computer game, as opposed to a console game, as opposed to a mobile game, and so on. For example, according to the Wikipedia definition of “video game,” any type of game on an electronic platform of any kind is a video game. According to this definition, a work of interactive fiction is as much a video game as *Pac-Man* or *Grand Theft Auto*. To suggest that this is absurd is an understatement, but indicates that defining what exactly is a video game isn’t so cut and true, so much so that Wikipedia editors for the most part gave up and lumped all electronic games as being “video games,” just as they lumped all computer games as being “PC games,” no matter the platform.
It’s not a stretch to say that when you’re communicating to a niche market, it’s important to know the people that make up that market, what they’re interested in, and what doesn’t interest them. Semantics factor heavily in this. Most gaming publications have never taken such factors very seriously, otherwise we’d have seen far, far more bad reviews than positive ones. Like their counterparts in Hollywood, the gaming industry has mostly been churning out the same hopelessly mediocre, derivative games for years now, under different titles and using slightly different graphics and sound each time, like the movies of Michael Bay: loud, ultraviolent, and stupid as hell enough that it all basically comes down to shooting everything and anything that moves. And like Hollywood, there’s still a huge market for much of this garbage, and if polls are to be believed, there are almost just as many girls and women who are into playing these “masculine and macho” type of games as there are boys and men. Make no mistake, like the average woman in general, the average female gamer is by no means a feminist or even remotely interested in feminism.
There is indeed a serious problem at the root of our culture today, what with the rampant and excessive objectification and sexualization of human beings of both genders, as well as children, and the increasing mainstreaming of pornography and ultraviolence. As a civilization, we are not progressing culturally and socially the way we are advancing technologically and scientifically. As humans, we are more disconnected than we ever have been in history. We are more and more living under a pervasive surveillance regime enabled by the likes of Google, Facebook and Instagram that is only going to get worse, and if the authoritarians running our so-called “democracies” have their way, there will be no more personal privacy or individual liberty in our near future.
If those supporting Gamergate truly want to see changes and reforms take place, they have to acknowledge that the problems all begin with the games themselves and the people developing them, but even more so, with the wider culture and society that we have all become conditioned by, most of us involuntarily by way of the education system and mass media.
All subcultures are a direct result of the surface culture that dominates society. When our governments and mass media are hopelessly corrupt and morally bankrupt, is it really surprising to anyone that video games have degenerated into senselessness and absurdity, and that the “journalists” promoting such crap are doing so because they’re getting paid to do so?
