Gamergate Hasn't Hurt Academic Interest in Gaming, Say Leading Scholars -- If Anything, It's Increased Interest

Gamergate target Brianna Wu speaking at UC Irvine (video below)

Gamergate has hurt academic interest in the study of games, according to an anonymous academic who recently posted this to the consternation of Gamergates' leading detractors on Reddit. Sample:

We have been working for years to make games a legitimate tool for education and for study, and we were making progress. People were starting to take games seriously. And then came GamerGate. I have seen the careful progress of a decade come crashing down, and now, when I go to talk about games to industry groups or fellow academics, GamerGate always comes up as an example of how terrible and immature people who play games are. It will take years and years to repair the damage, and it is absolutely devastating to the serious study and application of the power of games to real problems.

I put that point to three leading academics in game studies, however, and they had a very different story. If anything, their replies suggest, Gamergate has increased interest in gaming as an academic focus. Take Tom Boellstorff, Professor and Graduate Director at UC Irvine's Anthropology department and a staffer at the university's Institute for Virtual Environments and Computer Games:

"We just had Brianna Wu at Irvine and she gave an amazing talk that ended with a standing ovation," Tom tells me (video below). "There's a balance here: (1) Gamergate has caused problems, but (2) we don't want to blow that out of proportion to the extent that it reinforces a focus on only one type of gamer and also (3) there are other factors at play with all this including hype cycles and such.

"But," he goes on, "something else that Gamergate shows, indirectly, is that games and gaming are important. They are important to all human cultures throughout history (there is no society that does not have some form of play and games), and they are extremely important now. They are going to play a key role in shaping our new digital age. We clearly do not yet understand all the forms of that influence and their possible implications, but we can’t give up working together to gain better understandings and strive for better, more inclusive and just futures!"

In this, Tom was reflecting on comments from Mia Consalvo, Canada Research Chair In Game Studies & Design at Concordia University:

"I just had a book come out (Players and their Pets) about adult women who played a casual MMOG -- many of them for dozens of hours a week, spending hundreds of dollars while doing so. They would never (that I know of!) be a part of the Gamergate crowd," says Mia, "or think in that particular way, in part because they did not consider themselves 'core' gamers and didn't participate in that ecosystem of review sites. I think that Gamergate is definitely topical right now, but that topicality also makes us forget how many (other types of) people play games, across genres, platforms, etc, and who don't participate in those circles. If we focus on Gamergate to the exclusion of other groups, we're re-invoking the primacy of one subset of players over others - kind of like the industry used to do with 'core' gamers."

The anonymous scholar claimed "thanks to GamerGate, video game archiving as a professional practice is all but dead," and Consalvo has a reaction to that, too: "Henry Lowood continues to archive games, as does Judd Ruggill and his group in Arizona. Likewise, Jason Scott gave an excellent talk at GDC about the Internet Archive and its efforts to preserve games as well as the documentation surrounding them. So I think the claim that 'game archiving is dead' is inaccurate."

Henry Lowood, by the way, is Curator for Film & Media Collections at Stanford University, and he had the most succinct statement on the impact Gamergate has had on gaming in academia:

"If anything, Gamergate is giving us another event to figure out how to document for future study." (Emphasis mine, because it bears emphasizing.) If so, academics should start with Jay Allen's "How imageboard culture shaped Gamergate".

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Comments

[Kitty Revolver]

And this is why I want to work for Dr. Boellstorff. Game theory is not my field, the digital medium is and does work on HIV so he is such a good fit for me.

[James]

And who cares what feminist academia thinks???

Even the gaming media is admitting defeat to gamergate. Feminists have lost this one, and in the process turned a whole generation of male gamers into anti-feminists. Which is a great thing by the way.

[Yesplease]

It's not just male gamers that have been turned into anti-feminists James. I have to agree feminism really kicked itself in the ass though last year with manspreading, dam-selling for dollars, HeForShe, bathing in male tears etc.

I predict an even bigger decline in it's popularity for 2015.

[Scott Malcomson]

I have yet, after several months of looking, found any material showing anyone in GamerGate has "targeted" Brianna Wu for anything more than online criticism.

Her own testimony on the subject, to date, has dramatically changed from interview (MSNBC) to interview (David Pakman Show), to where the differing versions require time-travel to be in sync with one another.

Example: on MSNBC, Wu claimed that she tossed off half a dozen meme pictures at a GamerGate forum. She described her memes as "funny jokes, like lolcats", that she got some responses back in kind on the same level, and thought nothing of it before leaving the house to run some errands. Minutes before she returned, seven horrific tweets from an anonymous account had arrived.

This story changed dramatically in her appearance on the David Pakman show. Suddenly the responses to her memes were horrible (on MSNBC they were shown, but not on the Pakman Show), she was completely engaged with the GamerGate forum for "hours and hours and hours", and IMMEDIATELY after terminating the memewar she got the tweets.

The tweets themselves (also not shown on the Pakman Show) make no references to the memewar, to GamerGate, or any other motive for their sending. They barely mention, in passing, that Wu was developing a game. There is nothing to differentiate the sender from any troll on the Internet whatsoever --- except that Wu claims they came from GamerGate.

Wu's story relies on tying the memewar, itself a nothingburger according to the MSNBC coverage, to the tweets --- but in her original tale, there is no direct tie-in. They are assumed to be from GamerGate by inference and her own insistence, nothing more.

Her second version of the story is clearly aimed at making that connection seem more valid by eliminating her own original claim to have left the house and having the tweets show up immediately after the memes ended. She also re-characterized that exchange to make it sound like it wasn't in jest at all, thus providing an apparent "shots fired in anger" motive for the tweets themselves.

Frankly, Ms. Wu is simply not credible... but I suppose that wouldn't sell as much soap on TV ads. Has anyone contacted the Rolling Stone to carry her story?

[Yesplease]

Your desires for consistency, credibility and factual reporting are not welcome here Scott!

Woo woo ju ju has PTSD from tweets and internet slurs as well you know and you are just victim blaming. The next thing you will be pointing out is that she is earning $3,470 a month and suggesting she gets it for doing nothing but collating anonymous insults she gets over the inter webs, and that she just wishes she could truly rake it in, like her great cultist leader, 'Listen and Believe' Sarkesian.

She's a god damned prophet! Is why she's died her hair red. That's how you bring progress, progress, progress in this ghastly patriarchy where women live longer than men because they have to suffer more!

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Yesplease, Scott. This is an SL centric blog, you might want to peddle the MRA/gamergate/mens-are-oppressed dialog somewhere else, because SL is as I say "a women-centric world"

You want to know why women live longer than men. They don't engage in risky and/or thrill-seeking behavior as much as men, they actually go to doctors when they don't feel well rather than try to macho/tough it out, and they have enhanced immune systems because they bear children.

If men want to live longer, they might want to stop binge drinking at the frat, driving too fast with their bro's and go to the doctor. In other words, Men don't live as long BECAUSE of macho/dudebro behavior. And just because women do live longer doesn't mean there isn't a patriarchy in certain ways. Is congress 51% female yet? What about CEO's of the fortune 500, they 51% female?

And it's "Sarkeesian", you'd think if you were all about accuracy in reporting...gamergaters would be able to spell her name correctly.

[Wagner James Au]

"Her own testimony on the subject, to date, has dramatically changed from interview (MSNBC) to interview (David Pakman Show)"

Have actual time-coded citations for each? Also, this hardly covers all incidences of threats she's experienced -- which are still ongoing and reported to the FBI and her Congresswoman.

[A.J.]

To Yesplease:

Please copy your posts and show them to a doctor.

It's time.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Gamergate got itself banned from 4chan. Think about that phrase for a second. Banned from 4chan. The founder of 4chan walked away from his own site in disgust. Everything else he could handle; this was too much.

If the gaters want to put that on their resumes, that's about the only lasting effect. Oh, they did garner a handful of hits as a bona fide hate group. That's cred in certain circles.

Beyond that, they had the same lasting significance as peeing in the ocean.

[sirhc deSantis]

Oh I dunno ser Codesmith, its certainly helped me as I mull over the cash that I am contemplating shifting around in terms of my entertainment budget. By keeping an eye on these (insert phrase here as i would probably be too rude) and what they like to play I know which companies to remove from my 'possibles' list. Ok, a few hundred bucks annually might also be a drop in the ocean but...