My one and only post on #GamerGate

Considering the general focus that this site plays in my life, this post seems misplaced. I wasn’t entirely sure where to write it, because it doesn’t really fit anywhere and I certainly wasn’t going to create a new site for the sole purpose of hosting a single post.

Right now, I am only updating two sites, and it certainly doesn’t belong on my legal site, so it goes here.

This post is about #GamerGate.

For the uninitiated, #GamerGate is hashtag activism directed at “corruption” in the game industry, centered around gaming journalism. It all began when a jilted ex of indie game developer Zoe Quinn wrote a lengthy diatribe about how she may have cheated on him with various and sundry people in the game biz, including a writer at Kotaku, Gawker’s game site. Vox has posted a mostly neutral piece about the debacle.

Frankly, that was dirty. Move on with your life. You live, you learn, etc etc etc.

A small part of The Zoe Post — very small, by comparison — concerned the connections between developer, reporter, and others in the business. Quinn had developed an elegant and affecting game called Depression Quest, a text game about daily living with depression (I assure you, as someone with longterm clinical depression, it is accurate in the utmost). One of her alleged sex partners was a Kotaku writer who contributed to the crowdfunding for the game; another was a judge at a competition of independent games where Depression Quest was honored.

The game press didn’t report on the alleged collusion, which led to cries of “censorship” of the truth.

Having been “silenced” by left-leaning journalists hiding the truth and Social Justice Warriors (which somehow, the gamers behind GamerGate see as an insult?), a vocal and aggressive minority took matters into its own hands.

What happened next was sadly predictable. Quinn was slut-shamed, capable only of sleeping her way to success. Also caught up in the wake was Anita Sarkeesian, a game critic who chronicles in a fairly matter of fact way the manner in which women are depicted in games. She is a frequent target of gamers who feel threatened by her criticism, and was recently forced into hiding because of some very specific death and rape threats. (And Cory Doctorow isn’t having any of that nonsense.)

While Sarkessian may have fled her home, Quinn isn’t shutting up.

.@Blackwind121 I’m not going anywhere or shutting up or vanishing. I’m a terribly inconvenient woman, I know.

— Zoë ʻTom-Kunʼ Quinn (@TheQuinnspiracy) September 7, 2014

The vitriol behind the assaults led to a number of “death of gamers” type trendpieces in both the gaming and mainstream presses.

• http://kotaku.com/we-might-be-witnessing-the-death-of-an-identity-1628203079
• http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/08/the-death-of-the-gamers-and-the-women-who-killed-them/
• http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/03/gamergate-corruption-games-anita-sarkeesian-zoe-quinn
• http://dangolding.tumblr.com/post/95985875943/the-end-of-gamers

The official narrative is that the gamer community is sick and tired of being assailed as misogynistic white men, and these self-identified gamers want the press to report about gamers and gaming differently. The #GamerGate hashtag (and it’s sister hashtag, #NotYourShield) were therefore created to confront this journalistic imbalance, and to represent gamers in a more positive light. This has nothing to do with sexism or misogyny; it has nothing to do sex; and it doesn’t even have anything to do with Zoe Quinn — it is all about integrity.

That, in as few words as I could state it, is the official line.

Of course, the official line is utter bullshit.

Beginning at the beginning, the #GamerGate tag first appeared on August 27, in a tweet by actor and right-wing activist Adam Baldwin — one day before any “end of gamers” articles appeared. Therefore we can conclude that #GamerGate is not a reaction to the “death of gamers” pieces.

Moreover, Zoe Quinn herself has been lurking in IRC chats, tracking the #GamerGate strategy sessions — it’s all manufactured, specifically designed to harass her, complete with the jilted ex coaching them. She storified it complete with screencaps, and has also been tweeting videos of the chats in real time.

oh wait what? logs aren’t enough? ok cool I have video too. http://t.co/BsMvnVFqRB

— Zoë ʻTom-Kunʼ Quinn (@TheQuinnspiracy) September 6, 2014

So if #GamerGate isn’t about journalistic integrity, what is it about?

#GamerGate is overwhelmingly a reaction to the idea that games are serious works of art, worthy of deep cultural criticism. This position is bizarre — video games will soon be a $100 billion industry. By comparison, Hollywood brought in $88.3 billion in 2013. Something that big is not only worthy of serious criticism, it demands it — games exist within the larger culture, and the content of games say something about society.

For a certain kind of core gamer, these critics, these reporters, these indie developers, and all these new people claiming the mantle “gamer” are pissing in their sandbox. What was once a pejorative tag — gamer — has become bigger, more inclusive.

And that scares some people.

Others, like the 4Chan jerkoffs, are simply Agents of Chaos manipulating those who may legitimately care about what it means to be a gamer.

And that is ultimately what this is all about — what it means to be a gamer. I remember watching the XBox One launch, with its emphasis on interactive television and sports gaming, and watching gamers explode on Twitter over having been abandoned.

Well, sports gamers are gamers too. As are people who use their consoles only with Kinect games. As are tabletop gamers, mobile device gamers, and even people who use their consoles to watch Netflix more than they actually play games on them.

Two final thoughts — I cannot imagine why anyone would think “Social Justice Warrior” is an insult. I am an activist, and also a lawyer, and I use my position and privilege to fight for social justice everyday. If you are not a Social Justice Warrior, you are on the side of injustice.

Lastly, many of the people involved in #GamerGate are anonymous accounts specifically created for the limited purpose of promoting the hashtag. Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, even someone as insignificant in this debate as I am, are all out there by name. Anonymity lends the #GamerGate people no credibility, no history. It is hard to know precisely how many people are actually doing it. It is hard to take the arguments credibly, when so few people making it have no investment in promoting their own credibility.

And that is all I have to say about that….

A letter from my father

I haven’t been posting lately. I have written before about my depression, and it is in full attack mode at present. It was suggested that I go for a walk to get the blood flowing and the endorphins pumping, so I did. All I got out of it was cold and a picture of some cool looking lichens.

 

Lichens

I posted the pic to Facebook, noting that I took it on my depression walk. I opened up on the thread about where my head has been, and I posted this:

September 19, 2005. My Dad was a cancer patient, and the cancer was winning. My Mom (with whom I have a whole host of other issues, but that’s a different story) fearing that the doc was going to say it’s time to stop treatment, asked me to take him, to convince the docs to keep fighting.

The doc did say the cancer was winning, and he did say that my father wouldn’t get any better, and he did say that if he wanted to stop treatment, now might be the time to do it. My dad, not dumb, but uneducated and clouded by pain killers didn’t quite understand, so I translated doc speak for him. I told him that it was okay to be done.

“I could never do that, your mother would kill me.” (Seriously, we all have issues with her.)

I said, “It’s not her call.”

And he decided he was done, and 10 days later he was gone.

My asshole brain has since spent the better part of the last nine years convincing me that I’m a killer.

I know this is not true. I didn’t kill him, the cancer did. I know that what I did was right, I know that if I had to do it again I would tell him the same thing.

And I know that it was the singular moment that broke me. I was not the same after, it’s the thing I can’t get past.

That’s what has been going on inside me for the last few months. When I am down, the guilt and shame and rageful self-loathing come back as the cherry on the sundae. When it comes back, not only do I get stuck, I don’t want to get unstuck — convinced I am a killer, I don’t think I deserve to be happy.

My therapist finds me fascinating (I think), because I am remarkably self-aware of my psychology, and can’t seem to do anything about it. I’ll tell you, it’s tremendous weight on my shoulders and a terrible burden on my chest, thinking that you killed your father. All those times I “joked” about how when I come to sit on death’s door, shoot me full of chemicals and plug me in to every respirator, aspirator, pump, tube, DVR, and electric can opener you have I absolutely meant, because I decided long ago that no one would ever have to go through what I did.

So there it is. The crux of the thing that made me what I am today, and I feel utterly powerless over it. Sorry if that was an uncomfortable overshare, but that is where I am today, and for the past week, and the past six-months, and off and on for the past nine years. Simultaneously heartbreaking and ridiculous, cognitive distortion at its destructive finest. I’ve been trying so hard to to reprogram the way I think about that day, and so far nothing has worked.

One of my dearest friends immediately replied, “Charlie, flip the script. I want you to sit down and write this from your Dad’s perspective.”

So here goes:

Dear Charlie,

I want to thank you. You did me a favor. Something I couldn’t do for myself. You let me make my own decision.

If I’m completely honest, I knew I was dying. It was my second go with cancer in a three years, and it always comes back harder the second time around. Your mother’s a basket case, always has been, you know that. The mere mention of my passing sent her over the edge.

It wasn’t fair to make you come with me, knowing what we all knew, and telling you to to “fight” for me. I’m sorry we didn’t get together and talk it all out before. I’m sorry that you had to do all that on the fly. I’m sorry that it fell to you to tell me it was okay to be done.

I’m sorry that I needed someone else’s permission to make the call I wanted to make.

Son, let me make one thing clear — I died from cancer. Nobody killed me. Cancer killed me. It’s a funny disease, cancer is. A guy has a heart attack, it’s because his arteries are so clogged with bacon grease that his heart stops working. It’s like an engine with a gunked up carb. There’s a broken part, so you fix the broken part.

Not cancer. The cancer cells aren’t broken, they’re doing exactly what cells are supposed to do. Divide, reproduce, spread. Only it’s out of control, it can’t stop, it won’t stop. All the best treatments, chemo and radiation, they kill the cancer because they kill all the cells.

That’s what makes cancer such a pain in the balls — the disease isn’t really the sickness. A tumor, in its own weird way, is perfectly healthy. And the when the tumor is healthy, the patient suffers.

So let’s just say my cancer was very healthy, and I suffered.

There was nothing, nothing at all, you could have done that would have changed that, and by that point, I wouldn’t have wanted you to. I’m sorry you got left holding the bag.

I was proud to be your father, and I miss you.

I miss you too, Dad.

My Secret Encourager

In early December at a particularly low period, I got a card in the mail — a real card, on real paper, in my real mail.

Then I got another card, this one with a small gift to spend on something to make my “soul shine.”

Then in January, I got another card, celebrating my Facebook project to express my gratitude every day, #YearOfGratitude.

Just today, I got another card — a Valentine’s card, celebrating my post from last week, Do A Thing.

My mailbox fills up with bills and coupons and the weekly grocery store flyer, bad news or capitalism. Rarely do we receive cards and letters from people, simply for the sake of showing appreciation. These cards mean more to me than the sender can ever suspect. I fundamentally want to believe the worst about myself — these cards remind me that I am none of the horrible things I think I am.

Thank you, whoever you are, for showing me a radical kindness I have a hard time showing myself.

To the Guys Who Threw Eggs at Me Tonight

To the Guys Who Threw Eggs at Me Tonight.

via To the Guys Who Threw Eggs at Me Tonight.