After months of gamers and bloggers incessantly discussing the complex issues of journalistic ethics and misogyny in the video game world, it appears the debate around the Gamergate controversy might finally be on its way out. But it has not disappeared entirely.
There are still additions being made to the debate. A new just-released documentary takes a careful look at discrimination and sexism in the gaming world. An American lawmaker is working to prosecute those who responded to the controversy by making threats to women online. And weird stories, like allegedly sociopathic comedians pretending to be schizophrenic gamers, are still emerging.
The core of Gamergate is this: traditional gamers – young and once-young white males – were annoyed at the influx of outsiders, primarily women and minorities, into their world. Many of these men (and a few women too) raised concerns about journalistic ethics in the gaming world, arguing that feminist writers often breach ethical lines when writing about indie video game makers. But much of this criticism emerged in the form of vicious, often violently misogynistic, attacks on female writers and game developers.
Digital Colonialism
In an essay on Offworld, critic Gita Jackson suggested a new way of looking at the entire controversy: colonialism. Specifically, Jackson suggested that the original video gamers, those white males, have reacted to the influx of women and minorities because they are feeling displaced. Their land has been taken away from them.
Jackson, whose own grandfather was born under British rule, and whose parents were physically displaced by colonialism, writes that the reaction from traditional gamers tends to echo this feeling of having lost what was once theirs.
As flagged by Vox, Jackson pointed in particular to an advertisement by Sony, a video game console manufacturer. The ad is not for any game in particular. Instead, it attempts to sell the Sony Playstation console as being the home territory of the prototypical gamer – Michael, a heroic young, white man who fights valiantly in defence of all the videogame characters in the ad.
Imagined Communities
As a result, in this case, the young white men are no longer the colonisers of old. They are the ones being colonised, displaced off their land by new diverse people, with different tastes.
“Ads like this are designed to make Sony’s customers feel like a chosen, special people, to generate a fiction of belonging that trumps everything else,” Jackson wrote. “In his book Imagined Communities, professor and author Benedict Anderson described this kind of broad, horizontal camaraderie as the source of nationalistic fervor, the sort of thing that makes people want to ‘die for such limited imaginings’.”
Jackson herself argued that the analogy is misperceived because of one huge difference between the real world and the digital: there is no limit to territory. Colonisers took over lands. Feminist and indie video gamers are creating new ones. In doing so, they might be changing the overall flavour of gaming as a subculture, making it more diverse, and so taking away the feeling of camaraderie that all those young, white males might have once cherished.
Seat at the table
But they are not muscling out traditional gamers from their spaces. They are simply creating new ones. In a sense the analogy might be better made if reversed. The reaction is less like colonialism effects on the displaced than like Western Europe and Anglo-Saxon America’s reaction to the influx of people from other cultures, like Hispanics in the United States or Muslims in Europe. The lands and values are not being completely altered overnight, but the residents who think of themselves as the original inhabitants have the feeling of losing something that was just theirs. And so they are lashing out.
“The historical precedent of colonialism feels like a good metaphor,” Jackson wrote, “but colonialism’s lasting effects on society at large mean more than just, ‘The thing I like no longer feels like it is mine.’ It was always yours. It was always everyone’s. It’s just that now more of the ‘everyones’ are claiming their seat at the table.”
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There are still additions being made to the debate. A new just-released documentary takes a careful look at discrimination and sexism in the gaming world. An American lawmaker is working to prosecute those who responded to the controversy by making threats to women online. And weird stories, like allegedly sociopathic comedians pretending to be schizophrenic gamers, are still emerging.
The core of Gamergate is this: traditional gamers – young and once-young white males – were annoyed at the influx of outsiders, primarily women and minorities, into their world. Many of these men (and a few women too) raised concerns about journalistic ethics in the gaming world, arguing that feminist writers often breach ethical lines when writing about indie video game makers. But much of this criticism emerged in the form of vicious, often violently misogynistic, attacks on female writers and game developers.
Digital Colonialism
In an essay on Offworld, critic Gita Jackson suggested a new way of looking at the entire controversy: colonialism. Specifically, Jackson suggested that the original video gamers, those white males, have reacted to the influx of women and minorities because they are feeling displaced. Their land has been taken away from them.
"For many of the people policing the imagined community of games, the influx of new voices is misperceived as sort of 'digital colonialism', where some people are 'natives' of the internet and gaming culture, while others are invaders, unwelcome interlopers and newbies. Now that marginalized people are more present and visible in spaces like eSports, journalism or online discussion, many of the Michaels of gaming culture believe that they're witnessing a seizure of resources, or an attempt by outsiders to co-opt their culture or hold it captive," Jackson writes in her essay.
Jackson, whose own grandfather was born under British rule, and whose parents were physically displaced by colonialism, writes that the reaction from traditional gamers tends to echo this feeling of having lost what was once theirs.
As flagged by Vox, Jackson pointed in particular to an advertisement by Sony, a video game console manufacturer. The ad is not for any game in particular. Instead, it attempts to sell the Sony Playstation console as being the home territory of the prototypical gamer – Michael, a heroic young, white man who fights valiantly in defence of all the videogame characters in the ad.
Imagined Communities
As a result, in this case, the young white men are no longer the colonisers of old. They are the ones being colonised, displaced off their land by new diverse people, with different tastes.
“Ads like this are designed to make Sony’s customers feel like a chosen, special people, to generate a fiction of belonging that trumps everything else,” Jackson wrote. “In his book Imagined Communities, professor and author Benedict Anderson described this kind of broad, horizontal camaraderie as the source of nationalistic fervor, the sort of thing that makes people want to ‘die for such limited imaginings’.”
Jackson herself argued that the analogy is misperceived because of one huge difference between the real world and the digital: there is no limit to territory. Colonisers took over lands. Feminist and indie video gamers are creating new ones. In doing so, they might be changing the overall flavour of gaming as a subculture, making it more diverse, and so taking away the feeling of camaraderie that all those young, white males might have once cherished.
Seat at the table
But they are not muscling out traditional gamers from their spaces. They are simply creating new ones. In a sense the analogy might be better made if reversed. The reaction is less like colonialism effects on the displaced than like Western Europe and Anglo-Saxon America’s reaction to the influx of people from other cultures, like Hispanics in the United States or Muslims in Europe. The lands and values are not being completely altered overnight, but the residents who think of themselves as the original inhabitants have the feeling of losing something that was just theirs. And so they are lashing out.
“The historical precedent of colonialism feels like a good metaphor,” Jackson wrote, “but colonialism’s lasting effects on society at large mean more than just, ‘The thing I like no longer feels like it is mine.’ It was always yours. It was always everyone’s. It’s just that now more of the ‘everyones’ are claiming their seat at the table.”