GamerGate And Why It Matters To Conservatives

Posted on | September 10, 2014 | 103 Comments

“Politics is downstream from culture.”
-Andrew Breitbart

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that with regard to entertainment, conservatives and libertarians find science fiction and videogaming to be the most attractive options offered by pop culture these days, mainly because there’s a lot of SF that doesn’t try and stuff political correctness and half-baked socialist egalitarianism up our snouts. The same goes for videogames, which are mostly about killing bad guys and/or solving puzzles.

This is, of course, intolerable to the Social Justice Warriors who insist that everything has to have a “teachable moment” or six about how horrible straight white males are and how heroic GLBTWTFBBQ persons are and what a utopia we could have if those wreckers and kulaks would quit trying to undermine kindly old Uncle Joe…oh wait, that was the 1930s pravda. Well, it hasn’t changed much over the last eighty years, as we can see in the pages of DKos and other online asylums for those afflicted with Hopeychangium overdoses. So it’s not too surprising that the SJWs have wound up running most of the legacy publishing houses and turning thumbs down on authors who don’t toe the line of correct thought and correct characterizations; as I have previously remarked in various book columns, the main holdout against this sort of tripe is Baen Books, whose interest has always been in telling a good story and only incidentally in whether the protagonist is gay, straight, or involved in a long-standing passionate affair with her slide rule, IYKWIMAITYD.

Unfortunately for gamers, there is no publisher comparable to Baen, but for the most part companies like EA, Bungie and Ubisoft are still more interested in the bottom line: what are gamers buying, and how can we sell them more of it? Questions of binary gender and other nonessential BS just don’t have much of an impact on the bottom line, and so while the publishers may pay lip service to the SJWs in the industry press, they don’t actually DO anything. Which just stokes the anger of the SJWs, who have been increasingly filling the pages of the gaming press with rants about what a misogynistic bunch of violent bigots the gaming community is made up of. Unfortunately, they’re messing with the wrong guys. For the most part, these are people who don’t take smack talk and harassment lying down – they’ll serve it right back with a side order of butthurt and rage, and they will move mountains to stick it to people who are getting up their noses. Which is how we arrive at GamerGate, the sad tale of how hypocritical “feminist” game developer Zoe Quinn literally slept her way into getting a crappy game nobody wanted to play featured on Steam, and further, got lots of positive reviews and supportive essays from game site reviewers who she also happened to be boning. Which is unfortunately a matter of public record, since her now ex-boyfriend went public with her faithlessness and hypocrisy; even more unfortunately, the game sites which should have been covering this doubled down and censored all discussion of the flap.

Much of this is going to sound familiar to conservatives and libertarians; discussion of political topics hostile to the liberal narrative has been verboten on places like Digg, Reddit, and other supposedly “neutral” online fora for quite some time, which is why there’s a thriving blog culture on the Right even without the bucks poured into the lefty blogs by people like George Soros and various foundations.I suspect that part of the fallout from GamerGate is going to be a bunch of new game review sites that have nothing to do with Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, and all the other sites that have taken to telling gamers what horrible people they are instead of telling them about games and mods and related topics of interest. Gamers may even start casting a jaundiced eye on the rest of the media; as culture critic Maddox remarked, game media are now suffering a high-speed version of the credibility collapse that the mainstream media took decades to suffer through. Or, as the eponymous boss of TheMittani.com said in a recent column, people will blow this off since the idea of “objective” game journalism is nonsense anyway.

I don’t agree; the rage of gamers at being called a bunch of racist sexist bigots for being upset with this is precisely why Ed Morrissey and Breitbart ran pieces on GamerGate. (Ace linked to Cranky T-Rex.) One of the worst features about the contemporary left is their conviction that the personal is political, and everything is personal with them. Everything, be it football, basketball, science fiction, videogames, movies or whatever, has to be relentlessly politicized and examples made of people who say Bad Things. Offensive Things That Make Somebody Feel Bad. Most conservatives don’t give a damn about any of that, and we resent the hell out of some dipshit like Bob Costas giving us a lecture on gun control when we’re trying to watch a damn football game. Conservatives and libertarians may not agree on a lot, but we can all agree that obnoxious leftist actors, authors and singers need to shut up and sing, and quit trying to force their half-baked political notions up our snouts, because that’s not what we’re paying them for.

This is also why Larry Correia, Sarah Hoyt, Vox Day and John C. Wright (to name but a few) have been up in arms against John Scalzi and the wretched Stockholm Syndrome crew at the SFWA. Scalzi, the academic leftists who have come to dominate SFWA, and their SJW allies on Tumblr are quick to take offense at any SF or fantasy that doesn’t meet their politically correct templates, and have not scrupled to lie or misquote authors who don’t toe the line. So far the Glittery Hoo-Has are “winning” in the sense that they and their allies still dominate Hugo voting – but in a time when DragonCon and GenCon attendance exceeds Worldcon’s by an order of magnitude, what worth does a Hugo actually have? In times past, when geek culture and science fiction fandom were the same thing, the Hugo was worth serious money, but that was decades ago. Geek culture now includes anime fans, gamers, podcasters, webcomic creators, bloggers, cosplayers, comic book fans, and endless combinations of the preceding, and I’d bet money that if you went to DragonCon and asked people if they knew anything about Worldcon or the Hugos, most of the people would have (at best) a vague idea of what you were talking about.

This is not the tempest in a teapot some Hot Air commenters think it is. This is a battle for the last pieces of pop culture still friendly to conservatives and libertarians, a battle to keep some parts of society free of the Social Justice Warriors and their craziness. It’s a battle we can win. All we have to do is pitch in with a little mockery, some pointing and laughing, and buying the occasional book or videogame to support the authors and creators we like and respect. Capitalism, what a concept!

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Category: Culture, Ed Morrissey, Journalism, Progressivism, Scandal

Comments

103 Responses to “GamerGate And Why It Matters To Conservatives”

Finrod Felagund
September 11th, 2014 @ 1:10 pm

There’s another Offspring song that’s equally appropriate, called Spare Me The Details:
Barack in Iraq | Regular Right Guy
September 11th, 2014 @ 2:22 pm

[…] GamerGate And Why It Matters To Conservatives […]
K-Bob
September 11th, 2014 @ 6:01 pm

Thanks, Stacy, for evidently being the first to write about this topic in a way that follows the journalistic practice of explaining the damn thing up front.

I tried to read the threads at HotAir. I tried following Wombat’s links to sites discussing it. I tried following links from those links, and I swear it took eight thousand words before anyone ever bothered to explain what “gamer gate” was. i almost missed it buried so far into one article that I was close to giving up on it.

And the only reason I read that far is because Captain Ed did a podcast featuring Adam Baldwin on the topic. So I assumed there would be a “there” there, eventually.

I think it would have been far more evident what the issue was if people started out by underscoring the moves in the world of Comics. A new female Thor, “gay” superheroes, former superheroes going bad (a la Hal Jordan’s Green Lantern). Apparently there’s nothing so good and decent in our world that it doesn’t require some leftist to come take a dump on it.

This is the one reason I still support what Glenn Beck is trying to do, even though I can no longer listen to the guy or many of his people on the network. Beck is unwatchable, but his backing of new efforts in cinema and programming is still worthwhile.

And just by the way, whoever just had to put a “gate” in naming this topic ought to commit seppuku, and take full responsibility.
K-Bob
September 11th, 2014 @ 6:09 pm

Pournelle is mostly busy getting his old works out on Amazon, which has been very good to him lately. I think he’s been staying away from publishing houses for a while, just on principle of not wanting to get involved in the fray.

But I doubt he’s happy with any of it.
K-Bob
September 11th, 2014 @ 6:11 pm

Exactly. But gamers are used to having to “grind” to open the good levels.
Quartermaster
September 11th, 2014 @ 6:40 pm

I doubt he cares for what is happening with SFWA. He was President years back.

He also went over to Baen many years ago. I think it’s Baen that’s working with him to get his stuff in “electronic” format.
Wombat_socho
September 11th, 2014 @ 9:20 pm

I’m sure they’ll edit out the Reign of Terror and other such doubleplusungood badspeak incidents. Because it reflects badly on those heroes Robespierre, Danton, Fouche and the rest, you know.
Wombat_socho
September 11th, 2014 @ 9:24 pm

Not me. Lou Reed and I are going there.
NeoWayland
September 11th, 2014 @ 11:52 pm

Okay, that was good enough to drag me back!
Mr. Saturn
September 12th, 2014 @ 12:43 am

Yeah this has been hogging my twitter feed the last week or so. More so the SJWs than the gamergate people. Honestly I think both sides have acted in bad faith but it amuses me that my SJW friend who laments the extremely compromised state of game “journalism” is not at all a little put off that she seems to have slept around for good press on her crummy game.

Unfortunately as a feminist he jumps when his masters tell him to.
Daniel Freeman
September 12th, 2014 @ 4:04 am

That’s a shame about the self-loathing males. Approval beggars locked in a Skinner box. So sad.
K-Bob
September 12th, 2014 @ 5:28 am

Hah! One site I saw claims Adam Baldwin coined the name #GamerGate.

Dagnabbit, man! With all of the scandals of this administration to pick from, why did you have to saddle us with another ‘gate’?
Wombat_socho
September 12th, 2014 @ 10:37 am

I for one am not going to argue with the guy who played Animal Mother and Jayne.
Garym
September 12th, 2014 @ 10:47 am

The other guy Ed had on his podcast “Internet Aristocrat” has a good roundup on his youtube videos. You just need to ignore all the f-bombs the guy throws out there.
K-Bob
September 12th, 2014 @ 4:46 pm

Plus, he fed people to the dogs when he guested on Castle.

I have avoided watching that new show about the One Ship to Rule Them All or whatever. He’s actually the one reason I thought the show had a chance, being that the premise was so awful.
K-Bob
September 12th, 2014 @ 4:49 pm

The entire affair is like going to your first Con, without having it explained beforehand.
Jake_Was_Here
September 12th, 2014 @ 5:54 pm

Scalzi’s books aren’t nearly as outright bad as his essays (I could almost believe his blog and his books are written by two different people) — but if you want to read them, you’re better off going to a used-book store or to the library.
Jake_Was_Here
September 12th, 2014 @ 5:58 pm

“The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political [and other] journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between [journalists and their subjects] — in Washington or anywhere else where they meet on a day-to-day basis. When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in… especially not for ‘minor infractions’ of rules that neither side takes seriously; and on the rare occasions when Minor infractions suddenly become Major, there is panic on both ends.” –Hunter S. Thompson
Geosystem
September 12th, 2014 @ 10:25 pm

Breitbart writers have been covering it pretty well. It’s fun to read some of the comments, self-identified leftist gamers who were practically crying out “THANK YOU! FINALLY some honest reporting on #GamerGate!” Hopefully it’s made them sneer at Breitbart’s reporting a little less. (There was one leftist doofus who apparently is more leftist than gamer, but there’s always at least one useful idiot)

Still. I am absolutely stoked to read about it here: it pretty much sums up a lot of what Stacy has been saying for years about feminists. Quinn is only a drop in the bucket as far as GamerGate is concerned, but it’s pretty clear she fits every last one of Stacy’s observations about feminists. Quite frankly, she’s insane.
FMJRA 2.0: Not Now John : The Other McCain
September 13th, 2014 @ 7:36 pm

[…] GamerGate And Why It Matters To Conservatives […]
Matt_SE
September 14th, 2014 @ 12:20 am

“License they mean when they cry, Liberty!
For who loves that, must first be wise and good.”
— John Milton
This is the extension of anti-western injustice into the realm of gender. First, it was turning racism on its head so that no Black man could be guilty. Now, it’s being applied to women.
Leftists taught Zoe Quinn to be an amoral whore when getting what she wanted. When caught, she wrapped herself in the flag of patriarchal oppression. The left defends her, and in so doing, defends itself.
At this point, it should be obvious that leftism is morally bankrupt and willing to use any excuse to absolve itself of responsibility. It is a criminal conspiracy masquerading as politics.
Wombat_socho
September 14th, 2014 @ 12:35 am

Fixed, finally. Sorry about the delay.
merri
September 14th, 2014 @ 8:28 pm

Ubisoft’s studios of devs are great. The company, and its higher-ups, are fncking garbage.
merri
September 14th, 2014 @ 8:29 pm

Her sex life, generally, is unimportant, but when it acts as the catalyst revealing cronyism, corruption, egregious conflicts of interest and unprofessional behavior in a beloved industry, then these things need to be public.

Aside from the obvious gaming of gaming press/media/journalism, there are now allegations of racketeering within certain, fairly large game-related organizations that rack in quite a lot of money.

This lady hasn’t really been relevant since after the first week of all these scandals being dragged into the daylight, but she and a few other particular figures keep cropping up because they’re constantly stirring the pot.
merri
September 14th, 2014 @ 8:32 pm

“self-identified leftist gamers who were practically crying out “THANK
YOU! FINALLY some honest reporting on #GamerGate!” Hopefully it’s made
them sneer at Breitbart’s reporting a little less.”

You’ll notice, especially on twitter and such, that even many far-leaning right, and far-leaning leftists are putting their differences aside and fighting these petulant journos and industry cronies.
Anagram
September 14th, 2014 @ 8:38 pm

As a long-time liberal, I’d never thought I’d see the day a strong conservative voice would have a far better grasp on equality and freedom of speech than the capital-L Liberals did. A plea, though. Gamers fought back against corrupt journalism not just because they were corrupt, but trying to push a social and political agenda. Gamers did not like being tarred with false accusations. While we may often have serious differences in opinion about policy, not all liberals have gone off the deep end and abandoned objectivity and reality. The personal is NOT political.
Dean Esmay
September 14th, 2014 @ 8:48 pm

I can’t call myself in good conscience either a conservative or liberal, but one of those pesky centrists, but still: my whole life it was the LIBERALS who were supposed to be about defending free speech and free thought and differing ideas. I knew it was starting to get bad back in the 1990s but I figured it’d be self-correcting eventually, not getting worse and worse!
Wombat_socho
September 14th, 2014 @ 9:21 pm

She’s apparently unaware of the Streisand Effect.
Wombat_socho
September 14th, 2014 @ 9:23 pm

All in good time.
Wombat_socho
September 14th, 2014 @ 9:25 pm

“Supposed to” being the operative phrase there. I came of age in the late 1970s, and for all my life liberals have been telling people like me to shut up and sit down because we’re allegedly racist/misogynist/bigoted/homophobic. Well, fuck that shit.
merri
September 14th, 2014 @ 9:30 pm

They’re well aware of it. They feed off of it. She and a couple others are trying to make the issue about them, even though they were just a small component that’s largely irrelevant now.

Not only does it benefit them, but it also distracts from the real issues.
Dean Esmay
September 14th, 2014 @ 9:36 pm

Something happened. I am inclined to blame the takeover of the university system by the radicals in the 1970s. It was starting before that but my God.
flight2q
September 14th, 2014 @ 10:37 pm

The memory hole never fills up. “Clark Kent is gay. Clark Kent has always been gay.”
A look at the left and it’s efforts to criminalize dissent… | Chockblock's blog
September 14th, 2014 @ 10:52 pm

[…] McCain has more at his blog. And how sadly most Gaming websites all fell in lockstep, censoring discussion of their ading and […]
Nan
September 14th, 2014 @ 11:31 pm

Poor Lois. Does she know?
Nan
September 14th, 2014 @ 11:37 pm

I used to describe a local con as “Where Star Trek meets the Renaissance Festival.” Tragically, they fractioned into three groups, the hotel remodeled and no longer had a poolside easter brunch; my siblings went to the con so my family would go to Easter brunch and laugh at the brunch crowd that had no idea about the con.
beerhammer
September 15th, 2014 @ 3:39 am

On a side note, dont forget that conservatives had a different name back then before it was hijacked…they were called classic liberals. Libertarians were just liberals. To go left is to have more government intrusion, with the end all being total government. This never results in more freedom…ever. The further right you go, the more freedom you yet, go to the very end of the spectrum and you have the opposite of total government…which is anarchy.

Conservatives and libertarians ideologically are the most classic liberal and freedom loving group out there, but those with the power to create narratives have smeared the names and the meaning so that it connotes something else.
iDon'tEven
September 15th, 2014 @ 5:47 am

Clarification: Quinn’s unethical relations with games media isn’t (directly) what pushed her game through Steam Greenlight.
But it did get them to run articles on her being ‘harassed’ (a thread on an anonymous board with only the opening post and one other containing anything remotely like it) , launching a ‘counter’-harassment crusade against the board and pushing Depression Quest through Greenlight with ‘spitevotes’ (along with sympathy money to ZQ’s Paypal & Patreon).

The clincher? The community they victimized was for depressed men who just wanted to be left alone.
To this day, the Escapistmagazine is the sole gaming media site that has acknowledged (and apologized) for the negligeent reporting.

Up until last week, Depression Quest continued to proudly promote how part of it’s profits went to iFred and National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The charities in question were wholly unaware of their supposed involvement during this time.
Vinzenz Stemberg
September 15th, 2014 @ 7:34 am

The ridiculous thing is that they broke into some transwoman’s account and threw photos she kept of her transition and surgery onto /b/ because she dared such a horrifying crime as calling for neutrality and wanting cooler heads to prevail. That seems a fuck of a lot more private than some Playboy-tame paysite news. They are so damn quick to eat their own even Beria gapes in astonishment. Luckily we recovered that fumble.
Vinzenz Stemberg
September 15th, 2014 @ 7:40 am

So fucking glad those nincompoops fought for her so hard. It would have been easy to throw her and Grayson under the bus and cover it up. Instead they made 12 articles in one day calling for the literal death of their consumer base. What in the hell even? Well, thanks gals for giving us all those names to research! Their fanatical devotion to ‘the sisterhood’ did them no favours in this case.
Vinzenz Stemberg
September 15th, 2014 @ 7:48 am

It seems to ebb and flow based upon how many chuckleheads in management think “gaming needs to be more like Hollywood”
The time immediately after the gaming crash, and the time immediately before FMV games took flight are golden ages for a reason. There was another mini-golden age for PCgamers when Indie first appeared on the scene, and harkened back to those days in 2003-2005, with the likes of Cave Story, Iji, Elona, Jets n’ Guns, and with big PC companies temporarily turning their backs on Hollywood mentality in spite because those people raced to embrace console so much, so they continued to cater to PC-only genres like wargames and simulations.
Vinzenz Stemberg
September 15th, 2014 @ 8:04 am

Not to mention we’re the roosting point for many of those driven OUT of all the other entertainment media prior. Tabletop gamers, sci-fi fans, fantasy fans, anime fans. Those of us in gaming from the beginning took way more licks than any other fandom, because games are more expensive by nature, so naturally companies would like to push them more than any other to make money. The jockos and the sneering pretentious leftist elite both barraged us due to company media blitzes making us the most notable, so by the time we were the last one left, we were tired and worn, but angry, itching for this fight and we let them charge at us like Wallace to the English in Braveheart.
Ano
September 15th, 2014 @ 8:04 am

“I suspect that part of the fallout from GamerGate is going to be a bunch of new game review sites that have nothing to do with Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, and all the other sites that have taken to telling gamers what horrible people they are instead of telling them about games and mods and related topics of interest.” – this part. That’s what most of us gamers wanted, but it was too much to ask for I guess, from this pseudo-intellectual “journalists!”
TroubleAtTheMine
September 15th, 2014 @ 8:14 am

Go get ’em Tiger. I’m not a gamer but I’m rooting for you.
Vinzenz Stemberg
September 15th, 2014 @ 8:39 am

They’ve already begun to pop up. GoodGamer.us, TechRaptor, NicheGamer (that one focuses a bit more towards the Japanese side though), GamerHeadlines (Slightly clickbaity but owner is an honest chap, and engages with commenters), and earlier established sites that got left behind by Gawker media and GDC and their social media push (the two companies in charge of all these little review ones on the offensive as well as the fraudulent game awards) are beginning to bounce up in traffic, such as siliconera and gamezebo.
I’ll take outdated unintuitive or amateurish website design over being punched in the face for being born white or in the wrong state any day.
Vinzenz Stemberg
September 15th, 2014 @ 8:45 am

haha thanks, no probs. I thought when this started it was doomed to fail btw, because twitter is horrible for communication, but it turned out to be great for rallying and sloganising, and we have waaaay more to choose from than just “neckbearded misogynistic pigs!”
also because messages are so short and fast, you have people who are dropping out from being tired for fighting for a month now, but they’re replaced by 3 or 4 more within seconds because the spread of visibility is so great.

Also I just gave myself the mental image of Adam Baldwin replacing Mel Gibson. Pretty sweet.
beerhammer
September 15th, 2014 @ 10:59 am

Just a heads up, you have the link wrong for good gamers. Its GoodGamers.us
Phoboskibbity M'Goo
September 15th, 2014 @ 12:18 pm

not a conservative or libertarian ( i am more of an Anarchist really ) but i totally agree here, art CAN have a political/ideological message or it can be a discussion of these issues, but that is the art, the work its self, nothing wrong with this. but the gaming press is not really the forum to have these wider sociological discussions, the Gaming press reports on GAMES and the industry. if the gaming press is pushing a political message its by definition propaganda, every bit as much as FOX NEWS… SJW are not in anyway interested in creating content. its not even about making games women would like better, there are plenty of games very popular with women and this has been the case for over a decade, SJW just do not understand that a woman can enjoy the same games men do, this is more often than not the case, for instance LOTS of women play CoD and other FPS titles, lots of women play GTA titles… a game is a story like a book or a movie, it has its own narrative and context. and must be seen in said context. games can been researched/ discussed academically too as can the wider game culture, but this has no place in the actual gaming market…

these people are propagandists led by rad fem scholars, and “pop culture critics” its not at all about games. its about groupthink and NewSpeak… Orwell would be proud ( not really he would be pretty depressed that these people did not understand the message of his work )
Gina
September 15th, 2014 @ 8:10 pm

Because it’s not to your taste, or you don’t understand it, or both, it’s downstream from the “real” culture? Why can’t it be on the other bank? No one’s asking you to take up a controller.
Gina
September 15th, 2014 @ 8:12 pm

Any good authors who are not on this train?