Off and on for the past six months or so I’ve been trying to figure out gamergate in general, and its influence on specific trends in the US. It’s been challenging, to say the least, because gamergate is so polarized that I’m never sure if I’m reading an unbiased reporting. So it’s possible I have some false ideas about it all. I’m posting this in the expectation that at least a few posters here have looked into this as well and can help me out.
At this point, I am leaning towards this article:
https://mic.com/articles/180888/erik-wo ... .JG6NrmKd8
Today, most people probably aren’t familiar with Old Man Murray, a gaming and humor website that ran from 1997 to 2002. Its writers and founders may ring a bell, though, as the creative minds behind some of the industry's most critically acclaimed games. Erik Wolpaw was a writer for Psychonauts, Portal 1, and Portal 2. Chet Faliszek was a writer on Left 4 Dead and Portal 1-2. Together, they “invented the internet,” as Scott Pilgrimauthor Bryan Lee O’Malley put it.
Old Man Murray popularized the anything-goes nihilism of internet culture, as several in the Rock, Paper, Shotgun piece attest. Search the site's archives, which are still live, and you’ll find a sea of “ironic” Nazi humor (“this way to the gas chamber, retardeds!”), porn, wild-eyed anarchism, disability jokes (like creating a flashing webpage for “the little epileptic Japanese boy or girl inside us all”), racial slurs “I’m Chet and this is my partner and 4-life nigga erik”) and cracks about child abuse. None of this even scratches the surface. Look for yourself, if you're curious.
Wolpaw and Faliszek were idolized by SomethingAwful, 4chan and the other dark reaches of the web. As Joel Johnson of Kotaku put it in 2011, the duo's “willful, ironic troglodytism was aped by internet idiots for years, but without the brilliance.” (Where or what the brilliance was remains a mystery.)
Through OMM and its notorious offshoot shock site Portal of Evil (which Faliszek managed until 2011, and which can be seen as the template for later ridicule boards like /r/fatpeoplehate), the pair pioneered internet shock-jockery, reveling in and spreading the most disgusting, heinous content possible. Under the guise of irony, they built an online culture that would later, without any involvement from them, produce the Raymond comic at SomethingAwful — an echo of OMM’s own “satirical” abuse of Stevie Case and others.
In Twitter's plague of frog-avatar trolls, and even in popular YouTube bigotry artists like JonTron, we can see this culture continuing today. The goal has always been offense. Those offended are simply “too sensitive,” and any attempt made to improve the discourse is “censorship.”
The site’s core appeal was its populism. Earlier game journalism, particularly in America, “tended to take a slightly clinical, Consumer Reports approach to reviews,” as writer Shamus Young once put it. This fit uneasily with the informal, aggressive culture slowly beginning to form around more violent games like Quake (1996). Young, echoing many in the Rock, Paper, Shotgun feature, argued that Old Man Murray “more closely reflected how players actually felt” than the so-called professional reviewers had managed.
We have the benefit of hindsight: we know how populism ends. If Walker and the rest are Old Man Murray’s respectable descendants, Gamergate is more akin to the site’s acid reflux. The misanthropic 15-year-olds who devoured Grand Theft Auto III when it launched — that game being an artifact of Old Man Murray (and British lad) culture — are 31 now. The angry, entitled “Chocolate Milk Kids” of the early 2000s are grown adults in 2017.
Such people have spent their lives in a gamer culture rallied and given shape by Old Man Murray, and it contains only two rules: anything goes and nothing matters.
In the ’80s and early ’90s, one of the best-known and best-loved game designers was Roberta Williams, creator of King's Quest. The undisputed top critic in gaming was a woman writing under the pseudonym Scorpia. In Britain, Anita Sinclair's company Magnetic Scrolls was a household name; in France, Muriel Tramis rewrote the book on what games could be.
Countless examples exist of women's enormous involvement during this period. Williams and Scorpia and others, many years later, said they’d never faced any kind of discrimination back then: jobs weren't denied to them. There were no pornographic comics about them in circulation. There was no equivalent to Old Man Murray or Gamergate. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better.
At that time, the biggest computer games weren't Call of Duty sequels and other first-person-shooters. They were flight simulators, adventures, strategy titles, roleplaying games and management games. Doritos-and-Dew misogynists — such a familiar sight for us — were unknown to the game industry. Even as violent shooters like Quake and Doom (1993) and their many transgressive offspring began to attract a new crowd, “edgy” titles were vastly outsold by games like Microsoft Flight Simulator and classic adventure puzzle game Myst. Four years after its release in 1993, Myst still beat Quake’s 1997 sales by more than three to one in the United States.
Old Man Murray hated this old order, and the site’s biggest target was (famously) Roberta Williams herself.
In a post that took just 70 words to cross the line from irony into abject cruelty, Wolpaw once called Williams a “pompous damned bitch” and “the woman who invented human suffering.” He then speculated that she was mentally ill and openly hoped she'd commit suicide. The site gave voice and power to the Quake crowd, at the time labeled “casual gamers” by many in the old guard. Williams made a similar point in a 1999 interview, and it enraged OMM.
Looping back to the beginning of the article:
Jade Raymond was, in some sense, the first casualty.
As producer of Ubisoft's Assassin’s Creed, Raymond seemed omnipresent in 2007. Creed marked the beginning of an exciting new gaming franchise with a woman in its driver’s seat, and the industry became obsessed with both. Then a comic circulated on the infamous forum SomethingAwful, a haven of internet and gamer culture at the time, that depicted Raymond in a series of degrading, pornographic situations.
A dream, or maybe just a delusion, died in that moment. Looking back, you can see it happen in MTV's 2007 interview with designer Brenda Romero (formerly Brathwaite), during which she learns mid-conversation about the Raymond comic. Up to that point, she's upbeat about the treatment of women in the industry, which she calls “a fairly liberal, hip place” wherein gender is mostly irrelevant.
After hearing Raymond's story, Romero is clearly shaken. She starts to recall the many, smaller instances of gamer culture's mistreatment of women. She starts to watch her words, self-conscious that her comments could spark “some sort of horrible comic.” Romero has been active in games longer than most other women in the public eye (she started on Wizardry in 1981), but here she encounters something new. Later, she pauses to add, “I'm still really shocked by that comic. That's still just amazing.”
That December, Wired’s Earnest Cavalli verbalized the feelings of many in the industry. “I’d like to think the internet isn’t comprised almost entirely of 14-year-old misanthropes,” he wrote, “but based on the unmentionable events surrounding [Assassin’s Creed], I could be wrong.”
I know from my own children that gamers often have their sense of personal identity enmeshed with their gaming and specific games. It reminds me a little of religion in that sense. If you attack their games, they feel personally attacked.
So if this article is accurate, and the “old guard” in the gaming community was dismissive of the new wave of gaming, which was more violence-male oriented, then it makes sense that those new wave gamers felt personally attacked and responded back in a very personal and degrading manner. And having been influenced by the nihilistic, shock jock Old Man Murray, it also makes sense that they follow that tone.
This has helped me understand some elements of current internet culture. I’m 60 years old. I grew up without the internet, and spent a couple of adult decades without it as well. I never liked video games with some exceptions (word games). That’s why I’ve had to study this like an outsider. I am alien to this culture, which is why I admit I may have some elements wrong.
I think that many video games are usually geared towards appealing to young teenage boys. I think that’s particularly true of the more violent ones. So it makes sense that the reaction of that crowd towards women can be reactionary. Young teenage boys are just realizing the full power that women have in their lives, and sometimes it makes them mad as hell.
Steve Bannon got interested in this subculture through a money-making scheme.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/tal ... 489713001/
In 2005, Bannon secured $60 million in funding from Goldman Sachs and other investors for Internet Gaming Entertainment, a Hong Kong-based company. IGE did not make games, but instead employed "low-wage Chinese workers" to play online multiplayer game World of Warcraft and earn in-game gold that could be traded for virtual goods, which in turn could be resold to players of the hugely popular PC game for real money, Green writes. At the time, the game published by Blizzard Entertainment, had about 10 million subscribers.
Eventually, that was shut down, but Bannon was still interested in the community or another reason.
Even though the business plan was a flop, Bannon became intrigued by the game's online community dynamics. In describing gamers, Bannon said, "These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power. ... It was the pre-reddit. It's the same guys on (one of a trio of online message boards owned by IGE) Thottbot who were [later] on reddit" and other online message boards where the alt-right flourished, Bannon said.
Green postulates that Bannon's time at IGE was "one that introduced him to a hidden world, burrowed deep into his psyche, and provided a kind of conceptual framework that he would later draw on to build up the audience for Breitbart News, and then to help marshal the online armies of trolls and activists that overran national politicians and helped give rise to Donald Trump," Green writes.
After taking over in 2012 at the Breitbart News Network — it was founded five years earlier by Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012 — Bannon recruited Milo Yiannopoulos to handle technology coverage.
Like Andrew Breitbart, Yiannopoulos "just had that 'it' factor," Bannon says in the book. "The difference was, Andrew had a very strong moral universe, and Milo is an amoral nihilist."
Yiannopoulos devoted much of Bretibart's tech coverage to cultural issues, particularly Gamergate, a long-running online argument over gaming culture that peaked in 2014. And that helped fuel an online alt-right movement sparked by Breitbart News.
"I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away," Bannon told Green. "You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump."
Trump, being a natural bully, was ready to bring these tactics to his presidential campaign. He attacked women, the disabled, Muslims, Mexicans, etc. The Republican party was largely ineffectual in standing up to him out of fear of alienating his base. Now obviously most of Trump’s base was not the OMM gamergate crowd, but those that Milo was martialed to appeal to were. And his margin of victory was so slight it may have been an important component.
But aside from helping him get elected, I wonder if this subculture is having a much larger impact on the host culture via Trumpism. In particular, this:
Anything goes, and nothing matters.
Part of the reason I link this to the (possible, hopefully not) end of democracy is that the “anything goes” includes fake news, which Bannon helped feed this crowd in the first place. “Nothing matters” includes a world leader saying anything that pops into his mind without forethought, and that sometimes includes insinuating threats of nuclear annihilation of another country or dismantling the free press.
I think that this trend towards nihilism/shock jockery in a segment of our population is being used and manipulated by people who don’t really care about liberal democracies in the end. They have a vision of the world, and the threats therein, and they want the power to deal with it according to their vision, and the values of liberal democracies are less important and can be discarded. That’s what I think Bannon is doing.
And Trump is just being used by Bannon (and Mercer). Trump is just a clumsy kleptocratic. I don’t think he adheres to some underlying philosophy like Bannon and Mercer. But Trump was effective in appealing to this crowd. After all:
Anything goes and nothing matters.
