After Gamergate: video game industry and the misogyny malaise

The Gamergate scandal has inspired two Melbourne-based writers to detail video gaming’s dirty little secret.

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For a long time, the stereotype surrounding video game culture saw its players identified as uniformly male, probably socially inept and pale, and likely a little overweight. This is no longer true and has not been for some time, yet the sheer maleness of this industry and its initial consumer base meant that some unhealthy attitudes toward the opposite sex were allowed to fester unchecked for decades.

An undercurrent of misogyny among gamers broke from the shadows into sunlight in October 2014 when a story on the front page of The New York Times reported that a prominent feminist media critic, Anita Sarkeesian, had to cancel an appearance at a Utah university after being threatened with “the deadliest school shooting in American history” if she went ahead with her planned talk. Per Utah law, the university could not assure its guest speaker that campus police would stop people entering the hall with guns.

This unsavoury chapter was among the most high-profile events in a rolling campaign of organised online harassment against women who work in the video game industry or openly criticise aspects of it. Named “Gamergate” and often accompanied by a hashtag, for ease of context on social media, that front-page story offered a window into an ugly world that had been making outspoken women feel unsafe — online and off — for far too long. The Times story led to Sarkeesian appearing on The Colbert Report, where she spoke intelligently and rationally about the hate speech and threats she and her peers experienced on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

Gamergate was an important moment because it gave the many millions of people around the world who regularly play video games pause to reflect on the culture in which the hobby was enmeshed. It offered a binary choice: one could support the movement that had allowed entrenched sexism and misogyny to metastasise, or reject its ethos by proclaiming the hobby should evolve into an inclusive environment where players and developers could feel safe enough to contribute and reflect on this creative pursuit, regardless of their sex.

Game Changers is the debut book by co-authors Dan Golding and Leena van Deventer, and its focus is largely on examining the poisoned culture that allowed Gamergate to flourish, and how such unevolved attitudes from a noisy and occasionally criminal minority led to a global flashpoint. That latter adjective is used with purpose: as the authors explain, it is illegal in Australia to use a carriage service — including Twitter or Facebook — to threaten another person, so anyone who has stated their intentions to harm or kill someone else online has broken a law that holds a penalty of up to 10 years’ imprisonment.

The inclusion of Minecraft — a popular world-building video game — in the book’s extended title is purely a marketing decision, as there is much more discussion of misogyny than mining or crafting in these pages. This sly approach is admirable, though, because Game Changers is the sort of book that can be recommended to gamers of all stripes. If unsuspecting readers end up learning a thing or two about social inclusion and tolerance towards others, then the authors will no doubt share a smile. It is written with great passion, wit and insight, as much aimed at the “uninitiated, the curious and the confused as [much as] for the weary and the experienced”. As a gamer and occasional journalist within the field, I knew the broad strokes of the Gamergate saga, but I learned many new things here.

Golding is a critic, academic and director of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival; van Deventer is a game developer, writer, teacher and director of a not-for-profit organisation supporting women in IT. Both are based in Melbourne and well-respected within the gaming community. Here, they have combined their significant knowledge and experience to produce an accessible and worthy overview of what they accurately describe as the fight for the future of this important medium.

It is towards the end of the book that the material becomes most heartfelt and affecting. The authors draw a straight line between words uttered by this year’s Australian of the Year, David Morrison, and the global community’s sluggish response to condemning the actions of the Gamergate minority.

“This period in video game history, for many people, will be remembered as the time when so many people walked right on past at the very moment when their input would have been most useful,” they note.

If this all sounds a bit melodramatic, van Deventer underscores the point by reflecting on how Gamergate hit while she was teaching games writing at a university. One of her students was so appalled by the online vitriol surrounding women working in this industry that she asked her teacher, “Why make games when I can make something else for people that won’t threaten my life?” Van Deventer laments the “bankruptcy” of her response, and how she still feels she had failed her student, who soon decided to change her degree.

Game Changers is an essential read for anyone who engages with video games. It is a strong indictment of a poisonous, misogynistic culture that has no place in the modern world. “The industry should take this as seriously as it takes piracy because abuse, harassment and bigotry shouldn’t be considered less important than attacks against intellectual property or capital,” the authors write near the end, perfectly summarising this unfortunate series of events.

Andrew McMillen is a Brisbane-based freelance journalist. His second book for UQP will be published in August.

Game Changers: From Minecraft to Misogyny, the Fight for the Future of Videogames

By Dan Golding and Leena van Deventer

Affirm, 250pp, $29.99