CHARLES PRITCHARD
Special to The Leader
Oh, what tangled webs we weave. What started out as general outrage over a female developer admitting to having sexual relations with five members of the gaming and journalism industries, one of them being her married boss who published her game, has turned into a full-on revolt with the discovery of collusion, racketeering and mass censorship to keep it all under wraps.
In my previous article, I talked about how 4chan funded The Fine Young Capitalists and their general feelings on what many call the “Quinnspiracy,” named after the female developer in question. On the imageboard website, these people talked about what was happening in the games industry, how it all fit together and what they were going to do about it. They also organized on a public IRC chatroom, where I sat down with them and asked for an interview.
Contrary to many opinions about 4chan and its users being the “internet hate machine,” I was welcomed with open arms. The channel was quickly muted so I could ask my questions. I had hoped to get the opinion of each person in the chat, but one user by the name of “fotts” stepped forward and became the voice for the people.
“I’m just a jackass of the internet,” he said when I asked him just who he was. “That is, [I’m] pissed off that my life’s hobby … is being paraded around as a shit fest”.
With that in mind, I asked my first question – something many outsiders would like to know: “What is GamerGate, and how did it start?”
I had expected this to go like any normal interview, but instead fotts simply replied with a link to the exact information that I requested. This is the bane and boon of the internet, where information can be traded instantly but can feel impersonal at times.
“#GamerGate as an issue, not a tag,” the blog declares, “… started originally as a post on WordPress from a former boyfriend of independent developer Zoe Quinn.”
The IRC chat livened up with one user urging me to mention the three confirmed connections to Zoe Quinn: Nathan Grayson, a writer for Kotaku.com; Robin Arnott, a developer and writer; and Joshua Boggs, her boss. Supporters see conflicts of interest between Quinn and these three individuals in the sense that Boggs has published Quinn’s game, and Arnott and Grayson have written articles about her.
Moving the interview away from its origins, I asked what 4chan had to say about #GamerGate being considered a call for the end of corruption in gaming journalism. Fotts wasted no time and jumped onto this question.
“GamerGate is a consumer revolt in action but not in name,” he said. “It is imperative to remind people that this is what it is. We are against the industry from f***ing the consumer, and the media being in bed with the industry, and making the situation worse for the consumers.”
At the time I asked this question, not much solid evidence about this “f***ing the consumer” had come to light, besides the release of ten plus articles in a day declaring that “Gamers are dead,” “Gamers are over” and “Gamers don’t have to be your demographic.” The opinion of the crowd was that there had to be something going on behind the scenes, since so many sites released the same kind of article, with the same kind of wording, and even provided links to one another within an hour of said articles being released, in some cases. That was all before Milo Yiannopoulos, writer for breitbart.com, released a list of all gaming journalists who were part of a Google group titled, “GameJournPro,” who emailed each other regularly and decided just what they were going to report about and what they were going to ignore.
Kyle Orland, senior editor for Ars Technica, calls “JournoList” an inspiration for this group. To gamers, it has never been clearer that gaming media has become corrupted with people from the Associated Press, CNet, CNBC, VICE, PCWorld, IGN, Kotaku, Polygon, Game Informer and journalists from self-proclaimed bloggers like Gamastura to mainstream press like USA Today controlling the message.
Still, the most shocking thing is what Andy Eddy, author of “Game Over Press Start to Continue,” said in an email leaked on breitbart: “I don’t think we, as [gamer] press, should support furthering the story by commenting, editorializing or even allowing others to ruminate on [it].”
Greg Tito, editor and chief of The Escapist who was also on “GameJournoPro,” received pressure from many members to crack down on the forum conversations that took place on The Escapist, in which members discussed GamerGate. In short, they want everyone to be quiet about it, which is happening on Reddit’s r/gaming subreddit where any discussion about GamerGate, the corruption of journalists, the roles they play and any cries for action are quickly deleted, the users banned and all discussion stopped. Members were even banned for discussing the censorship.
That left 4chan, where free speech was considered to be one of the site’s greatest features, according to Christopher Poole, admin of the site. However, this did not last for long. The people who funded The Fine Young Capitalists, the ones encouraging people to email the sponsors of the websites that declared them “dead” and the ones taking action by spreading the news over Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or any website that would let them, were silenced. Moderators started cracking down on users, deleting anything related to GamerGate and banning any users who wouldn’t learn their lessons. Users wouldn’t relent, and kept trying to get the word out, but then went quiet when Poole finally spoke out and gave an answer no one liked.
“Regarding a perceived lack of free speech/censorship — many seem to misinterpret my advocating for anonymous communication and highlighting that it allows people to share things they otherwise wouldn’t be comfortable with on other platforms as ‘you can say and do anything on 4chan,’ which simply isn’t the case,” said Poole. “We’ve had rules and moderators since the site was founded *11 years ago*, and I’ve only reinforced this statement over the years, a la archive.moe/q/thread/580080/#580135.” The post he linked was one made a year ago and three years after his TED talk in which he touted 4chan as a place “that’s completely raw, completely unfiltered.”
Feeling betrayed and not giving up easily, members of 4chan, some of whom were there for the site’s founding, simply left for greener pastures. Ever since 4chan’s birth, imageboard websites like it have popped up, so it was easy for users to find a new place to call home. There, the discussions about GamerGate continued unfiltered and completely raw. The consumers were in full revolt and they are not going to go quietly.
I felt like I only had one more real question I wanted to ask, and that was what everyone was hoping to see come out of GamerGate. Fotts was succinct in his answer.
“The best case is an internal and external review of the industry, a revival of journalistic standards being fair, thoughtful, and researched instead of sensationalism,” Fotts said.
The people know exactly what they want and are not being quiet, with the GamerGate hashtag reaching one million tweets in only one month. But besides the collusion and corruption, why else do they fight? Developers are stepping up to the plate, claiming that their games are being slandered and reviewed unfairly, with games like “Kingdom Come: Deliverance” and “Divinity: Original Sin” being called sexist, misogynistic and racist. At the same time, games like “Depression Quest” are equated to “Schindler’s List” in terms of quality and “Fez” gets contests and competitions rigged in order to win every award before being released.
In my next article, I tackle how “Fez,” an independent game developed by one Philippe Poisson, a.k.a. “Phil Fish,” received a number of loans for its creation and how the people financially invested in the game were involved in its entry into the Independent Gaming Festival and Indiecad.