RE: Moviebob, GameOverthinker RE: #GamerGate

In response to Game Overthinker episode Gamer's Gate: http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.ru/2014/10/episode-96-gamers-gate_7.html
Copy of this tweet - 11:36am · 8 Oct 2014

You (addressing to Bob Chipman, author of the Game Overthinker) are saying these things: 

1) Gamer as a label didn't exist until 2005 

2) The need for gamer identity was felt by the industry but was not really strong until J. Thompson put it into overdrive 

3) That #GamerGate amounts to backlash against Sarkeesian et al 

And then you make a stance that "gaming doesn't deserve to be saved". 

Context

I'm not an American. I am Russian. I by an large don't know or care about your US-political goings-on except as a curiousity. "The war" that you talk about was little more than a distant blip on my inforadar. 

Replies 

1) Back when i was in high school (which was in the late 90s) i have already played games for close to a decade. However, i didn't call myself "gamer" until somewhere around 1997 a then-new video game magazine "Navigator of the Game World" came out, which put a person who dressed really funny (even by my high school standards, which were not high let me tell you that :D) and called himself "Gamer" as a mascot. The magazine was mostly run-of-the-mill game-review fare, but it did some really fun weird stuff in op-ed sections and published text adventures that tested people's knowledge of games from 80s and early 90s. 

The magazine didn't survive for very long because the people who really appreciated it weren't many and had not much disposable income. When the magazine announced its final issue, i was quite genuinely sad. It was also a lesson of how one should remember that commerce is not necessarily a friend of gamers and cannot be relied upon to maintain gamer identity. 

However, by the time this final issue rolled out, the gamer identity itself has already been formulated and embraced by me and more than a few others. 

2) I can agree with that sentiment, with one caveat. In the event of external threat, you can only solidify and respond as anything more or less united if the prerequisites for this solidification already exist. If there was no shared love of games (materialized in shared financial interests of institutions serving people with love of games), there would be no backlash to begin with. 

J. Thompson didn't create gamer identity. He was a test of whether it actually exists. Gamers passed. 

3) Fast forward to more recent events... I see a lot of people likening what is going on now to Thompson. Someone is being on our case for ethics, we respond in the same way we did before yadda yadda.

Only this time, this part is just the first step. 

The second step was to condemn us for not having learned to deal with these issues in any other way, call us various disgusting names, say that "there will be no dialogue" and "gamers are over". 

Now, i cared about Sarkeesian about as much as i cared about Thompson. That is, not much at all. Some eyebrows were raised when she raised $150k on Kickstarter and got a GDC award, but when she ultimately failed to deliver (3 or 4 vids of very questionable quality and value over a year so far), everything about what Sarkeesian is became quite crystal clear. 

She is not a critic. And if she is an artist, then it is of a con variety. Because real critics and artists would do a lot more with $150k of goodwill that she got. 

I cared about how various people respond to Sarkeesian a bit more. I really hated the bomb threat she received, for example. The bomb threat was by some apparently american guy, whose grandfather did something in WW2 therefore he feels himself in the right to threaten women. 

Where i live, you don't get any special treatment for your grandfather being a WW2 hero, because practically everyone's grandfather or great-grandfather was a WW2 hero. With the understanding, that among the people this hero was protecting, were indeed our grandmothers, mothers and us. So using that as an excuse to bomb-threat a woman just goes to show how little the bomb-threating person knows about actual war heroes. 

However, this still caused little reaction out of me, because ultimately i share an understanding that people who make these threats have both little ability to deliver on these and little connection to actual gaming. And while i do my part to make sure ladies get treated properly around my person, i also get some lip from ladies who feel that me insisting on said proper treatment somehow objectifies them. So i don't exactly go all in on it. And also i understand that this is not a problem unique to gaming and that fixing that would require fixing the entire Internet culture. Maybe someday, but not now. And not by gamers alone. 

However, then was Leigh Alexander's article. In which she said the above mentioned things. 

That we as a gamers are somehow responsible for all the harassment on Internet, did little to fix this over time and should now be discarded as an identity as the world of games moves to things that we apparently can't love or comprehend. 

Now, i understand that she probably thought she was speaking about a very limited, small subsection of people that play games that her audience universally despises. And i understand that maybe she felt that she could gather more attention by using such provocative language. And if it was just she who did that, this also would have been fine. I mean, she is ultimately just another blogger and if she had any worth as a journalist - this article nuked it all to high heaven. 

However, she was joined in this by 13 other people, who all wrote on pretty much the same day. Some of them citing references to actual studies that apparently objectively prove how me and those like me are bad people. 

So tell me, how does a person that "knows how not to be at war", responds when told that he is no longer relevant and that there is no dialogue to be had and that he is just to fade away? 

Because this feels to me like a kind of thing that would make a person learn how to be at war again. 

Hence #GamerGate 

You said that "Gaming doesn't deserve to be saved". Two responses to that 

1) gaming is saving itself just fine on its own and by hands of those that value it 

2) I'm looking forward to next episode where you elaborate on your position that gaming doesn't deserve to be saved