Qrowdy

So I wasn't going post about this because as Jeff pointed out it would largely be an exercise in futility and at heart, the reason I want to write my opinions down is as a form of catharsis. But after reading through the thread I couldn't help myself.

When I first heard of GamerGate I did a deep dive into various corners of the internet to get all sides of the argument and to generally figure out what was going on. That was a mistake. When I came up for air I decided to pretend GamerGate didn't exist because I felt there was real risk of it tainting my enjoyment of gaming. Surely it would blow over in a couple weeks right?

I've never heard of something like this happening in other forms of media and I think that's because a lot of people out there have a real passion for games. I've generally thought of that as something positive, but GamerGate has twisted and weaponized that passion to serve a political movement that spews misogyny and hate. That's pretty evil.

At first I disagreed with the notion that now isn't the time to be having a discussion about ethics in games journalism. One argument against doing so is that at the heart of the issue is real people's personal lives, those people are in distress, and that having the discussion now is insensitive and cruel. That line of reasoning echoes Fox New's response to debating gun control after Sandy Hook happened. You've got to have these discussions when the issue is topical and everybody cares if anything is going to get done.

Ironically GamerGate is making that discussion impossible by making people choose sides and drawing lines in the sand. By being so polarizing and inflammatory, they're drowning out all the reasonable people who could have an actual discussion and making sure only the loudest, angriest voices get heard. At best this moronic and self-defeating, at worst its as Jeff said, a thin facade for harassment.

Also I worry that GamerGate is putting the people they are attacking on a pedestal. How can anyone safely criticize someone like Zoe Quinn now or in the future without just being decried as a misogynist, even if the criticism is warranted. People have rallied around Zoe Quinn because she's largely a victim in all this, but now she's become the face of the opposition to GamerGate which identifies with feminism. Considering that the start of all this was Zoe Quinn being implicated in some pretty dubious stuff, is it really okay if she becomes the face of feminism in games?

In the end, even though I tried to stay away from it, its affecting how I consume games journalism. I used to read a lot of op-ed pieces on Polygon, but I've shied away from that site for the last few weeks. Do I really want to thinking of how a game is inclusive or discriminatory instead of having fun with it? When Polygon game Bayonetta 2 a 7.5 because of how hyper sexualized Bayonetta is, I caught myself rolling my eyes and thinking 'Of course.'

That's it I'm done thinking about this. I'm going to go back to pretending this whole thing doesn't exist and just enjoying playing some damn video games.