A Gamergate Conference Experiences Controversy
A missed opportunity and how I got involved-but-not-involved.
In 2014, the gaming community was roiled by the Gamergate controversy, a mixture of concerns about ethics in games journalism and harassment of women in games that left no one satisfied. Trying to give a detailed timeline of what happened that everyone would agree upon as accurate is an impossible task. Suffice to say, some games journalists probably did behave badly, some women definitely did get harassed, although it was never clear that gamers as opposed to some random nuts, online bots and trolls were responsible, and people kind of fell for a conflict-of-interest narrative by games journalists shifting the story from one issue to the other. I initially was sympathetic to the harassment narrative, but I’ve now come to view Gamergate as more complicated, with no one on either side coming out looking great.
There remains a core and, I suspect, largely paranoid and maybe mentally ill group of very online folks who believe that Gamergate was the origin point of so many of today’s troubles. Whether the election of Trump, the backlash against trans medicine for kids, or any other supposedly fascist bugaboo, there’s a sense that “If only we’d paid more attention to Gamergate” (I’d say, in reflection, we paid too much attention to it), then we’d be living in some kind of modern, and very politically left, utopia.
This view is very much on display with an upcoming conference, the Alt-F4 conference hosted by Lawrence Technological University, which focuses on how Gamergate “…(was) used as a weapon deployed against women in the video game industry”. This is, of course, one very specific interpretation of Gamergate, and one that is controversial with many gamers themselves. As the conference’s landing page goes “…GamerGate would become a precursor to subsequent social media mass mobilizations, including disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and online grievance culture.” If only we’d done more to fix Gamergate in 2014!
My name has somehow, rather unintentionally on my part, gotten pulled into debates regarding this conference. A few years ago, I published some data on Gamergate supporters which suggested both that they were a bit more diverse than the “white male” stereotype1, and tended to lean toward the political left, not right, which definitely violated the 2014 narrative. Back some months ago, I got a pretty generic email from the organizers to submit a paper. It seemed the sort of thing that gets sent out to many academics, nothing personalized. I don’t have a lot of travel money, so I inquired if they’d be able to cover travel. They said no, I said no thanx, and that seemed to be the end of it.
Only the conference came under the ire of Tachyon Blue, a gamer streamer who found the gist of the conference to be biased. To be honest, I think that read is pretty fair, given the dialogue on the conference’s landing page. Any verbiage that includes “…heteronormative, hegemonic discourses…” is likely to get eyerolls from me, and the keynote speakers are mainly folks on the very lefty side of these debates, including Anita Sarkeesian, a key figure in this controversy.
It's also the case that games studies as an academic discipline is probably now overrepresented of people with pretty far left views, obsessed with narratives of oppression, queering, qualitative research, and activism. There’s nothing wrong with having some folks with those views, of course, but it’s come to feel…well…hegemonic, and at least some of those folks mix an unpleasant combination of neuroticism and nastiness in defending their turf. Granted, it’s true that any community has awful people, but in academia broadly, they’ve become curiously dominant in recent years2.
So, do I think the Alt-F4 is a well-balanced, objective conference? At least from their webpage, I’d say clearly not. Maybe there’ll be a good balance of people who show up and present, but who knows. But when you advertise a conference for foxes who like to eat chickens, usually not many chickens show up to give a talk.
But, to their credit, the organizers of the conference sat down for an interview with Tachyon Blue. I thought it was great…everyone was cordial, and the exchange of views was frank. I don’t agree with the organizers on a lot of points, but they came across as nice guys and pretty thoughtful (albeit, by their own admission, not terribly knowledgeable about Gamergate). I outright blanched at Stephen Mallory’s description of Gamergate (which he ascribed to Nintendo, though that became one issue of dispute if that was accurate) as “an online hate campaign” as that definitely seemed a biased description of a complicated issue.
Part of the conversation focused on me (!) because of my generic quasi-invite3 and I’d spoken with Tachyon several times on his podcast. I think the gist of how my name came up involved Tachyon inquiring why more folks hadn’t been invited who were skeptical (as I have become) of the 2014 narrative on Gamergate. I think that’s a very fair point by Tachyon and an “own goal” by the conference organizers. They suggested that this was because they wanted to keep the conference academic, but I didn’t find this convincing. They could easily have invited at least one academic keynote who was skeptical of the 2014 narrative (it didn’t have to be me), and including Anita Sarkeesian who, I’m sorry, I wouldn’t rank as an academic (which isn’t exactly an insult, by the way4), whatever her other accomplishments might be, removed the all-academic veneer.
Nonetheless, I thought it was a good conversation all around. Everyone kept their cool, there were good points on both sides. I may disagree with how the organizers set up their conference, but they came across as good guys. And, of course, they have the right to set up their conference however they wanted, and this would hardly be the first one-sided moral advocacy conference taking place at a university.
My main thought, hearing them interact with Tachyon is what an opportunity had been missed to use the conference to bring people together with varying opinions on Gamergate and give them a chance to debate cordially. Instead, if feels like yet another one-sided festival of academic moral self-congratulation. Most of the past 10 years have been screeching moralism and irrational anger on both sides. Obviously, no single conference was going to make that magically go away. But perhaps it could have been a start.
As with so many stereotypes, there was some truth to this…89% of Gamergate supporters were male, after all, but the stereotype tended to flatten complexities. 11% of supporters were female (which isn’t too far off of percentages of individuals who describe themselves as hardcore gamers), and ethnic and sexual representation was more diverse than one might expect.
Most academics are cool folks, to be clear. But lack of backbone among the rest has allowed influence to concentrate in the shrillest, most emotional cadre of academics.
They describe the short history of our interactions during the interview and I’d say their description was accurate by my recollection.
Proclaiming “Hah, you’re not even an academic!” is hardly the zinger these days maybe it was some years ago when academics were respected.