Must Read: To Fair-Minded Proponents of #GamerGate

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

If you're tuned into either side of the "GamerGate" fiasco, this weekend you should do yourself a tremendous favour and read this article on Medium. It's all about addressing the concerns of many of the GamerGate movement's supporters, and it is one of the most levelheaded pieces that's been written about it to date. Writer L. Rhodes took the time to ask GamerGate's proponents what they saw as the key issues, and how they wanted them to be resolved. Their answers varied widely, and Rhodes' own responses are informed and comprehensive. This section in particular struck me:

Growth will mean insisting upon the distinction between serious investigative journalism and the sort of enthusiast reporting that has traditionally passed for gaming news. If you’re promoting #GamerGate because you like the way the gaming press covered games before writers starting investigating topics like labor exploitation and the gender divide, then you may want to stop insisting on higher journalistic standards. If those standards are important to you, then you’ll have to tolerate those sorts of articles, even when you don’t like the light they case on gaming. As William Randolph Hearst famously said, “News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising.”

I'm sure that some readers have been waiting for me to weigh in a bit more directly about GamerGate, but the fact is that I just don't have the energy or the inclination anymore. While on the one hand I do feel an obligation to participate, that's heavily tempered by the fact that I would rather quietly weather the storm than be a target like my friends who spoke up, even tepidly, have become. They receive pictures of corpses for pointing out the flaws in the arguments being made, while my idol Jenn Frank is being run out of the industry because no one (including Al Jazeera) is willing to do five minutes of research. This movement overwhelmingly favors the harassment of women and other marginalized groups, and acts as if corruption and nepotism in the gaming press has more to do with people living below the poverty line and writing about freeware than big developers paying to fly journalists to Europe to sit in an F1 car.

As Rhodes writes, if you're participating in GamerGate and that doesn't represent what you stand for then you need seriously appraise the other people in your corner, compare your own goals to theirs, and perhaps found your own cause away from them. 

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Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Leo]

A little off-topic: I should have said this a long time ago about your article on "you can like games, but you're not a gamer". Here's my opinion Iris: if you play games you love games, you're a gamer. Where i live (in South East Asia)gamer is just a general term for people who play video games and love them. It doesn't come with much baggage except some calling you immature by people who doesn't understand/play games but never ever associated with sexism or other worst things. The amount of articles from Kotaku and Gamasutra disowning the term "gamer" is just eyerolling feeling more like clickbait for trolls to make the situation bigger than it is. Boogie explains it well in his video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVEDRh9UaxA , be proud to be gamer and peace.v ;)