Gaming/Identity (Populism and Video Games)
Video games shared a loud and vicious public dance with populism at the end of 2014. This event, one that functioned as both cultural online battle and omni-directional bridge between video games, online culture and politics, is of course none other than #Gamergate. Invoking again the aesthetics of populism as put forward by Voelz and elucidated through history by Kazin, #Gamergate was an event defined not by harassment or ethics in gaming journalism, but by identity, envy, indignation, and one group’s relationship to power within their industry. It is through this lens of populism, coupled with careful research into both the media coverage and community response to #Gamergate, that perhaps the clearest image of the event to date can be formed. Although the Gamergate hashtag had no unified leader (a few, like Milo Yiannopolous, had tried) under which a true online populist movement could form, the online battle still functions as a miniature populist uprising in its own right. Just as the aesthetics of populism have been shown to center around the same key expectation as the aesthetics of video games—that of the promise of power—populism eventually manifested within video game culture. It is helpful here, then, to map out how this happened, and to determine if the video game community was necessarily susceptible to such a movement.
Like many journalists and academics have attempted before, a very brief ‘mainstream’ synopsis of #Gamergate will be undertaken here, but it will in no way be definitive. As Cathy Young states in her article “(Almost) Everything You Know About GamerGate is Wrong,” “[Gamergate] has been blamed for everything from the normalization of internet hate to the Donald Trump presidency. Or, as the title of the New York Times’ recent anniversary op-ed package proclaimed, ‘GamerGate Is Everything’” (Arc Digital). The synopsis here, then, will only attempt to cover the most basic timeline. This is not in order to confirm nor correct particular accounts, but to establish a foundation upon which a populist interpretation can be built.
The story goes like this: the ex-boyfriend of an indie-game developer named Zoe Quinn published a public account of his ex-girlfriend’s infidelities. Upon investigating these infidelities, some internet users found that one such name, Nathan Grayson, belonged to a prominent gaming website, and in fact had published an article mentioning the game that Quinn had made. Massive backlash ensued, and harassment followed. At the same time, a feminist media critic by the name of Anita Sarkeesian, who had been garnering more backlash and harassment of her own since shifting her attention to video games, weighed in on the harassment of Quinn, suggesting this was exactly the type of misogyny inherent in gaming culture. As both Sarkeesian and Quinn were receiving immense amounts of hate, the gaming press, including Kotaku, Polygon, and Gamasutra, published a series of articles proclaiming that ‘gamers are dead,’ which led to television actor Adam Baldwin to establish the Gamergate hashtag on twitter, in defense of gamers. From here, the picture gets murkier as time goes on, but harassment continued, while denials of such harassment defined those most attached to the movement. Gamers boycotted various journalistic outlets and just about every online cultural political actor weighed in on the controversy. Some say the movement was about ethics in gaming journalism. Others say it was about keeping women out of gaming via harassment, while still others say it was simply a denial of social-justice warriors, absent such harassment.
This summary leaves open many questions, but it must be mentioned that not all ground can be covered in this investigation of #Gamergate as a populist movement. For, as a hashtag movement spanning months, it is impossible to get any one clear image of the cultural event. However, by delving deeper into some of its aspects, a more coherent story can be revealed.
Gaming Identity. From within the gaming community, many heard of the spat between lovers and the drama that ensued, but were essentially uninvolved until the articles by the gaming press were published. By many accounts, it was the publishing of these articles, and the creation of the hashtag that followed, that was the true nexus of #Gamergate—the event that brought in hundreds of thousands of onlookers and participants that were heretofore uninformed or uninterested. Joe Vargas, known as Angry Joe on YouTube, where he uploads game reviews for millions of subscribers, proclaimed that “where it turned into Gamergate is when these publications, or these gaming media outlets, banded together and decided that the term ‘gamer’ was dead. And that’s where they fucked up … Gamergate wouldn’t exist if Kotaku and a bunch of these other outlets didn’t band together and declare gamers dead” (qtd. in Sargon of Akkad 19:44-20:34). Of course, with one central hashtag, it was much easier to then contribute an opinion on the matter. Still, the creation of a hashtag does not guarantee its use. And by the end of September 2014, one month after the publication of those various articles, over one million tweets with the hashtag had been sent (Waugh). Clearly, a nerve was struck. However, one question that was not asked during the controversy by either the media or the gaming community online was: why gamers? What nerve was struck exactly?
Phrased differently, one might ask: could a movement like #Gamergate have happened to consumers of any medium? The answer, in this case, is no. This is not because there is some inherent flaw or hatred in gamers, but because of the aesthetics of populism as they apply to the history of gamers as a cultural group and identity. It has been established that populism inherently contains an aesthetics of catering (pandering or targeting are also appropriate here), and therefore must have a particular group in mind. What was not elaborated previously, though, are exactly what types of groups populism targets. Tracing populism and polarization in connection with democracy, Voelz and Freischläger write that “populism […] can be reconstructed, with Tocqueville, as a ramification of the affective consequences of democratic nominal equality” (268). The authors make the point here that when under the assumption that all are potentially, or are supposed to be, equal, envy and resentment emerge when that equality is not reached, or is perceived to be in danger. They continue:
The more successful the leveling efforts, the smaller the differences become; yet as equality increases, so does the sensitivity to remaining (or newly emerging) inequalities, however minute they may be. … Ancient demagoguery and modern populism both rely on exploiting the violation of the norm of equality, which is to say that both rely on the exploitation of envy and resentment. (Voelz and Freischläger, 270)
As individuals or groups perceive themselves to exist within a culture or society that promises them equality, any minute lack of such equality is cause for resentment or envy. Populism exploits this resentment or envy by promising power to the ‘common’ or ‘ordinary’ citizens which are deemed righteous in modern democracy. Indeed, Kazin writes that populism is the “supposed discourse of ordinary, apolitical Americans” (272).
The fear of losing power that has already been attained helps explain why right-wing populism tends to target the white middle class in the United States: they have enough power to actually help elect a leader, can be convinced to view themselves as the ‘common’ or ‘normal’ Americans, and can be convinced that the power they have is not enough, or is in jeopardy of being destroyed. Francis Fukuyama, in his book, Identity: Contemporary Politics and the Struggle for Recognition, touches on this very point. He writes that the “perceived threat to middle-class status may then explain the rise of populist nationalism in many parts of the world in the second decade of the twenty-first century” (87). So then, how does this apply to #Gamergate and the gamers that participated in it?
As with populism as a political movement, populism in the online sphere can only attach itself to defined groups who are capable of being convinced that they either lack power they deserve, or are under threat of being deprived of such power. There must be a cultural hierarchy and they must not be at the very bottom nor the very top, or even believe themselves to be. It is in this last sense, that of the belief of inferiority, that two fanbases come to mind: comic books and video games. These are subcultures that are already so mainstream and integrated into popular culture that they require no defending in terms of their cultural capital. The issue instead lies in how old perceptions of these groups (whether they were ever true or not is irrelevant here) continue to be fought against despite the fight ostensibly having been won some time ago. In this regard, the differences between political power and cultural power show themselves. Cultural power relies on notions of acceptance, wherein stereotypes can be true obstacles to overcome. Mainstream media and popular culture artifacts that reinforce these stereotypes can be considered products of the cultural elite. It is in this framework that both video games and comic books are revealed to be the newcomers to cultural power, and therefore can be said to be hyper defensive and wary of anything that may take this power away.
Adrienne Shaw, who was potentially a catalyst for #Gamergate itself through her article, “Do You Identify as a Gamer? Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Gamer Identity,” writes about this fight against the gamer stereotype, despite its evident death, in another article called “What is Video Game Culture? Cultural Studies and Game Studies”. Regarding how the gaming stereotype is addressed in the press and academia, she states:
There is a tendency for the newspaper articles to point out that video gamers are not necessarily who we think they are. As one article asserts, ‘‘the stereotype of the gamer as a glazed, incoherent teenage boy is wrong’’ (Copeland, 2000). One article even emphasizes that gamers are more charitable than is often presumed (Freire, 2006) … Even as the game audience is described as more diverse than typically presumed, however, there is still the underlying assertion that there is a truth-based stereotype of gamer identity that is being changed, not challenged … When articles point out that not all gamers are young U.S. males, it is generally done in a way that reasserts the expectation. (What is Video Game Culture? 407)
What Shaw makes clear here is that the gamer stereotype seems to endure by virtue of its not being true. Namely, people cannot seem to stop arguing against its truthfulness, even as defenders of its validity cease to exist. In this way, one can see how gaming communities could eventually take issue with newspapers, journals and academics continuously bringing up what is supposed to be dead. One can be reminded of the ‘I would never say [terrible thing] about you’ insult tactic, wherein simply putting the terrible thing into words is the insult itself. In a way, by focusing on how this problem circulates through the press and academia, this investigation inadvertently participates in this harmful practice. However, it is exactly this phenomenon which works to clarify the gamer reaction within #Gamergate.
Over and over again, journalists and academics alike have argued against the gamer stereotype, citing studies and statistics that prove these old assumptions false. This is seen in recent articles such as “Women Gamers” by Sofie Bauwel and “What is a True Gamer? The Male Gamer Stereotype and the Marginalization of Women in Video Game Culture” by Paaßen et al., as well as in numerous articles published on mainstream news and entertainment sites like The Guardian, Medium, and PBS. Yet, nowhere other than these studies and articles is the idea of this old stereotype being propagated. Like middle class whites being targeted by right wing populism, gamers can see the real power they possess. Through old visions of old stereotypes that at one time pushed them to the fringe, however, gamers fear losing the power they have now. In other words, they fear being viewed as they used to be viewed, and at a certain point, one wonders when these arguments against the old stereotype become more harmful in pushing that image forward. This fear, the fear of losing cultural ground through such a stereotype, seems to be a much stronger force and explanation for the massive online populist revolt of #Gamergate than either ethics in gaming journalism or harassment and sexism, although each of those things certainly played a part. For gamers, the enemy—their old stereotype and all the connotations that come with it—is ever-present, always lurking in the shadows. In 2020, this is essentially a boogeyman. In 2014, however, the boogeyman came to life in the mainstream one final time.
The article that arguably started it all was Leigh Alexander’s, on the website Gamasutra. This website publishes content for both consumers and developers of video games, which may also help explain some of the sting caused by Alexander’s words. As a games writer on a platform meant to appeal to players and creators alike, she speaks for a class that is, from the average gamer’s perspective, supposed to hold gamers in high esteem. Yet, in her article entitled “‘Gamers’ Don’t Have to be Your Audience. ‘Gamers’ are Over,” she writes:
‘Game culture’ as we know it is kind of embarrassing — it’s not even culture. It’s buying things, spackling over memes and in-jokes repeatedly, and it’s getting mad on the internet. … It’s young men queuing with plush mushroom hats and backpacks and jutting promo poster rolls. Queuing passionately for hours, at events around the world, to see the things that marketers want them to see. To find out whether they should buy things or not. They don’t know how to dress or behave. Television cameras pan across these listless queues, and often catch the expressions of people who don’t quite know why they themselves are standing there. … ‘Games culture’ is a petri dish of people who know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online ‘wars’ about social justice or ‘game journalism ethics,’ straight-faced, and cause genuine human consequences. Because of video games. (pars.1-3)
One can’t help but find the language Alexander uses here rather jolting and vitriolic. Although there is a fundamental misunderstanding contained within all of the ‘Gamers are dead’ articles, and yet another misunderstanding in how each side of the #Gamergate controversy discussed the misunderstanding in the articles with each other (both soon to be explained), one does not feel that he or she can misunderstand Alexander’s words as relayed above. She does not say explicitly that she is talking about a subset of gaming culture that is problematic. She problematizes all of gaming culture.
The misunderstanding, however, comes in that she does not actually believe that all of gaming culture is “embarrassing.” She would just rather not call the good parts “gaming culture” at all. This is the game of semantics that all of the ‘Gamers are dead’ articles were guilty of. One can trace these article’s line of thought to a personal blog post written by academic Dan Golding called “The End of Gamers,” which in turn was attempting to base its research on the work of Adrienne Shaw, as mentioned above. Golding writes:
This is the gamer, an identity based on difference and separateness. When playing games was an unusual activity, this identity was constructed in order to define and unite the group (and to help demarcate it as a targetable demographic for business). It became deeply bound up in assumptions and performances of gender and sexuality. To be a gamer was to signal a great many things, not all of which are about the actual playing of videogames. Research like this, by Adrienne Shaw, proves this point clearly. (“The End of Gamers”)
The implication here is that Adrienne Shaw reinforces Golding’s claim that the ‘gamer’ identity is one that relies on “performances of gender and sexuality.” However, whether accidental or purposely misleading, it is in fact only Golding’s final sentence that Shaw’s work applies to. In the cited article, Shaw writes, “… researchers must be more attentive to the fact that playing games does not define one as a gamer. Like any identity, being a gamer intersects with other identities and is experienced in relation to different social contexts” (Do You Identify as a Gamer? 29). Shaw’s argument, as she puts it here, seems to be the opposite of Golding’s. She claims that ‘gamers’ are not those who only play games, that those who identify as ‘gamers’ share that identity with many others. Golding uses this quote to bolster a claim that ‘gamers’ are those who play games, and necessarily must fit a specific masculine identity. This directly contradicts what Shaw says next, however. She writes, “Many studies disprove the dominant White, heterosexual, male, teen gamer image (e.g. Williams et al., 2008). Indeed, this stereotype is consistently discredited, both popularly and academically (Shaw, 2010)” (Do You Identify as a Gamer? 29). Returning to the misunderstanding mentioned above, Golding knows that this stereotype is discredited. What he refuses to do, though, is separate it from the word ‘gamer’. Many outlets followed suit.
The word ‘gamer’ in these articles was explicitly and precisely defined by its old stereotype. The press blamed these ‘gamers’ for the harassment they saw happening, and aimed to establish a world in which the term ‘gamer’ was a relic of the past, along with its clearly dead stereotype. Carl Benjamin, otherwise known as Sargon of Akkad on YouTube became rather famous in the online gaming sphere for his coverage of #Gamergate, and makes precisely this point. His is also the video from which many quotes from Angry Joe have been taken, as the video is Benjamin’s reaction to an Angry Joe statement. In this reaction video, Benjamin states:
For [the gaming press], they’re looking at [Shaw’s research], thinking, ‘well, anyone could therefore be a gamer. Our stereotype of what a gamer is, is obsolete. Therefore, the industry stereotype of a ‘gamer’ is dead.’ And the industry stereotype of a gamer is dead. But the identity of a gamer—the people who play games a lot—obviously is not dead. … This is the problem. This was the fundamental, I guess, misunderstanding that they had. (Sargon of Akkad, 21:44-24:21)
All of this is to say that the gaming community and gaming press actually agreed: the stereotype is dead or dying. The press, however, wished to do away with the word itself as well, which many, many gamers either misunderstood or disagreed with. This can be seen no more clearly than in the comments section of Alexander’s article, where a user by the name of Dylan Morrison writes:
I have not been following this whole meltdown … because I’ve been too busy playing and enjoying games in a healthy family of 5 other people who play and enjoy games. We call ourselves gamers because that’s what we are, we’re people for whom games are our passion. I’m 26, I come from an era where “Gamer” meant sitting down in front of the TV blowing into SNES cartridges so we could make Yoshi swallow Shy Guys and “produce” eggs. … The point is, we consider ourselves gamers. And I feel insulted by this article. I feel insulted by the very title of the article and the fact that not three sentences in you’re insulting the kind of person I am. Yes, I’ve been there, holding posters and queueing at PAX. But I wasn’t listless and not knowing why I was there. I was there because I was having fun. Because that’s what it’s about.
This is when #Gamergate was born. People who were not paying attention to all the ruckus were now tuned in, and many believed that the old stereotype was coming back to define them, and to push them back down in the eyes of popular culture—to deplete their cultural power. With this framing, the #Gamergate movement was ripe to be overtaken by right-wing populism.
Populism Goes Online. One can see exactly how, with the publication of the ‘gamers are dead’ articles, the gaming press, in the eyes of many gamers, became the very boogeyman they were meant to defend against. Having no recourse, the hashtag was inevitably spawned. The interesting twist, as mentioned above, was that it was coined by none other than conservative cultural interloper Adam Baldwin, a fact that serves to illustrate why #Gamergate was, above all else, an online populist movement. Those seeking a banner for right wing populist messages found one: normal people being taken advantage of and abused by elites, with women now able to be seen as scapegoats within the community itself who wish to destroy the gamer identity. Of course, there were those within the #Gamergate community who wanted no such thing and who were confused that it was happening at all. Angry Joe serves as a prime example in this respect when he says:
… a bunch of people latch[ed] onto the #Gamergate movement early who are staunch right-winger conservatives, it was really weird to see. And many of them not even gamers, and admit that they’re not gamers. I think there was a guy named Milo who made it a point to try to debate people with it, it made no fucking sense to me. (qtd. in Sargon of Akkad, 27:21-27:44)
Still, history shows us that many did accept these new allies, and plenty of allies were to be had. Ezra Klein, in his Vox article titled “Gamergate and the Politicization of Absolutely Everything,” puts it like this: “though there are liberals within Gamergate and conservatives opposing it, the broad coalitions that have emerged around Gamergate are very clear” (par. 11).
As mentioned previously, political actors like Milo Yiannopoulos used this occasion to both boost their own careers as well as their political agendas. Young writes that Yiannopoulos “championed GamerGate on Twitter; with his flashy bad-boy persona, he quickly became a hero to many in the movement, even those who otherwise had no affection for Breitbart’s politics,” and that “there is strong evidence that as the alt-right began to gather steam in late 2015, Yiannopoulos tried to channel GamerGate — which he often tried to treat as his private army — in its direction” ((Almost) Everything You Know About GamerGate is Wrong). It can be mentioned here that at that particular time, the alt-right was still developing its cultural identity, and was not yet exclusively defined by those relying on a white-nationalist agenda. Although it is largely only a matter of degree, Milo would now be considered (if his career were still active) to be a part of what is called the ‘alt-light’. Angela Nagle, in her book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right outlines the alt-light’s roll in the evolution of online culture, including #Gamergate. She writes, “today, the movement that has been most remarkably successful at changing the culture rather than the formal politics is the alt-light. They were the youthful bridge between the alt-right and mainstream Trumpism” (41).
When the controversy erupted, and newcomers read the articles which spread wide and far across the internet, those who felt compelled to participate saw two opposing forces driving two completely different narratives. On the one hand, Klein points out that “if you’re reading about Gamergate on the left, virtually all you’re reading about is the intense, horrifying harassment against women that’s happening under Gamergate’s banner,” and on the other hand, “if you’re reading about Gamergate from inside Gamergate, virtually all you’re reading about is how the media is smearing Gamergate by equating it with harassers who don’t represent the movement’s real tactics or goals” (par. 15). A simple YouTube search bears this out. If one types “Gamergate” into the search bar and sorts the results by view count, the two videos from the mainstream media that make an appearance in the top ten both have interviews with Anita Sarkeesian and contain language suggesting that #Gamergate is the harassment. In the number one most viewed video under the search term “Gamergate,” Sarkeesian appears with Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report. She states, “we’re saying gaming can no longer be this little boy’s club anymore, that there are many of us women who have been playing games our whole lives. They’re lashing out because we’re challenging the status quo of gaming as a male-dominated space” (Comedy Central, 03:00-03:33). Sarkeesian may very well have been correct that this was the motivation for much of the serious harassment. The issue, though, is that many gamers (remember the millions of tweets with the Gamergate hashtag) did not identify with such harassment.
In comparison, Yiannopoulos, who appears in the fifth most watched video, is prepared to eloquently articulate exactly what it is that the ‘common’ gamer is upset about. “Ordinary gamers,” he states, “have put up for 10 years or more with their own press calling them man-babies and misogynist, beating up on them basically because it’s the trendy thing to do” (The Rubin Report, 04:34-04:44). Yiannopoulos also makes it clear, beyond the established media class, who the cultural enemies in this fight are, saying, “there is a sort of insurgent move in video games from a couple of wacky left-wing feminists—and these are sort of far-left, Israel-hating, socialist weirdos. Far-left feminists who say that every video game is problematic” (The Rubin Report, 01:55-02:10). Of course, there is no such feminist who believes every video game is problematic, which is to say harmful. In fact, one does not even need to be “far-left” to care about representation or feminism in video games. This is where Yiannopoulos, like any populist worth their salt, crafts a scapegoat: anyone who champions feminism in gaming (most likely women, in his conception) must want to fundamentally change video games. Under this framing, the “ordinary” gamer who tunes into Yiannopoulos’ discussion undergoes a potential shift: what began as a defensive posture against old gamer stereotypes (which include sexist males) can now be turned into a disdain for those who wish to see any changes at all within the gaming industry. Change itself becomes the new threat to power. Ironically, however, changes that would allow more people to feel welcome in gaming would serve to improve its cultural capital, not deplete it. Still, Yiannopoulos pushes forward. After crafting this image of the “ordinary” gamer as positioned against an elite media class and feminists within and without, Yiannopoulos makes the jump to politics proper. He says, without taking a moment’s pause, that “all of this stuff comes from, I think, something we’ve all known for 10 or 20 years. It’s increasing dissatisfaction. Alienation from the political and media elites that a lot of ordinary voters feel” (09:48-10:00). Many participants in #Gamergate sought out nuanced arguments that cut against the two dominating narratives. But given the choice, after having read the ‘Gamers are dead’ articles, between what was said on The Colbert Report and what was said on The Rubin Report, many gamers chose the latter.
In the end, gamers and the mainstream media never had a reconciliatory moment. Some in the gaming press still do not use the term gamer, but many do. The power that #Gamergate promised to its followers did not materialize, but the cultural capital they were defending was never really in jeopardy anyway. Gamers now seem happy as long as the games keep coming and the articles in the press are about said games. The only significant change to come about from #Gamergate, like its two dominant narratives, has had nothing to do with video games. What has changed is online culture. More specifically, there has been a notable and well-documented shift in speech and tenor online, one that leans to the right. This culture war is traced extensively in Angela Nagle’s book, Kill All Normies, as well as Fukuyama’s book, Identity. Toward the end of a discussion of #Gamergate within Kill All Normies, Nagle writes, “the most recent rise of the online right is evidence of the triumph of the identity politics of the right and of the co-opting (but nevertheless the triumph) of 60s left styles of transgression and counterculture” (57). “Transgression” is the key word here. Sometime around the happenings of #Gamergate that cannot be precisely defined, a nascent form of online discourse became mainstream, and seeped into everything we know. This of course, is troll culture. And although this development has nothing to do with video games per se, it has led to a new type of interactive fiction that shares its central characteristic with video games. This new interactive fiction is the political troll.
Trolling Politically (Video Games in Populism) (Sort of)
Nick Denardi 