Dear Jef Rouner,
Yes, there are some real shitty people in the games playing audience. I’ve been writing about them for the past two years in particular, and beyond. I’ve been policing them in the games I built (MMOs) for even longer.
They are not the norm, as your article would suggest. They are aberrations and accidents. Many – even most – gamers are good, standup, quality people. Some are trolls. Some are awful trolls. Some of these trolls become celebrities amongst those trolls, despite the fact that they rarely, if ever game.
The truth is, it only takes a handful of trolls to make things seem poisonous. As I’ve written before, people used to think that 10% of the population of UO was griefers. It was closer to 0.1%. Assholish behavior just rises in consciousness, and we tend to ignore people who are decent human beings.
So don’t call these people you refer to as ‘gamers’. That’s a term for good people. Go with ‘fuckwads’.
Nah, gamers aren’t the new religious right. They’re libertarians, which is worse, and especially of the atheistic variety, which is worst of all.
I’ve just spent 40k words on my blog dissecting — among other things — the whole Bokhari survey after which Gaters (because this is clearly the group Rouner had in mind) started calling themselves “cultural libertarians” standing up against “authoritarians”. Which is bullshit, considering their disdain for freedom of speech exercised in ways they don’t approve of. The Bohkari survey just pointed out what we suspected all along: Gaters aren’t their parents; they don’t care for the kind of military adventurism of the Dubya years (which doesn’t prevent their favorite games from being infected with it, which makes me suspect that their objection is mostly that to die in battle would be too much of a personal inconvenience to their playing video games), they don’t deny the reality of climate change, they’re not the Christian Right.
They are, however, scientistic to the point of the ridiculous, where everything that can’t be quantified becomes irrelevant. (Can you picture people like them even bothering to consider something as fuzzy as “ethics in journalism”?) They, and their belief in universal logic, and reason, where everything that doesn’t fit in this just Does Not Compute. It’s also why they tend to take everything literally, from “gamers are dead” to talking of “corrupt” journalists not as we normally would, but “corrupt” as a computer file would be, to be replaced by a properly functioning copy that doesn’t deviate from the rigid Gamer Consensus.
And where did they pick that kind of mentality up? From video games. The glorious world of the Skinner box where minmaxing yields tangible results, and where some choices are Empirically Superior to others, and where all that matters is to get ahead by any means necessary. And because video games are self-centered, solipsism becomes a universally applicable model – hence the result where GamerGate is always insisted upon as having no leaders, while every Gater’s personal goals are made the movement’s, regardless of who’s winning the tug of war.
The cause of GamerGate is video games themselves.
“Nah, gamers aren’t the new religious right. They’re libertarians, which is worse, and especially of the atheistic variety, which is worst of all.”
What?
Have you ever tried even a casual glance at a gaming site like MMO-Champion? They have off-topic forums where all kinds of philosophies and political views get espoused and defending and attacked. Sure there are some libertarians in there, as well as religious right, as well as die-hard republicans and die-hard democrats and plenty of independents, etc, etc.
To blanket call gamers atheist Libertarians isn’t just wrong, it is simply ignorant ranting from someone who clearly hasn’t spent even one minute trying to see what is really going on out in the gaming worlds. What bubble do you live in?
In the same bubble as Brandon Morse, evidently: http://thefederalist.com/2016/01/13/how-video-games-mainstream-conservatism/
So many strawmans.
Perhaps, but since he’s been given a platform at The Escapist, I have to pay attention to him.
Gamers are determinists. Push this, get that. Most are used to suspending expectation of immediate gratification, but all have a flip-table point. That lends itself to assholism, which as Damion said is what passes for libertarian politics these days. That’s not to say that everyone who has ever liked playing a game is inevitably going to be tied to this sort of mindset, or that it will always affect their behavior. Some of us listen to our better angels.
“Gamers” are too many things to be anything besides “people who play games.”
But that’s exactly the problem with video games: it’s producing an entire generation of people who grew up thinking like that.
The pathology of Gaterism involves a great many people who declare themselves “meritocrats” and “egalitarians”, which clearly indicates that what they have in mind isn’t equality of outcome, but strictly of opportunity, an opportunity they feel they have been denied, leading to the present situation where they pursue two goals that cease to be contradictory only in relation to stopping their own advancement:
1) Their complaint about crony capitalism, a reality which flies in the face of their entire system according to which what is inefficient falls by the wayside, while the cream *must* rise to the top. Consequently, since crony capitalism contradicts the purely theoretical framework of meritocratic advancement which would be validated by Gaters’ own rise to the top of the hierarchy, it must be an affront to Logic and Reason.
2) Their complaining about “Social Justice Warriors”, who advocate giving certain categories of people preferential treatment regardless of their worth, and who therefore are also getting in the way of efficient systems because of their promotion of Unworthies (since true Worthies wouldn’t require the help and rise by themselves). Never mind that racism, etc., might exist. They deny the validity of racism, *unless* they think there exists a scientific rationale for it (which is why I can picture them obsessing over “human biodiversity”, a.k.a. “scientific racism”, because it’s like picking stats in the character creation screen), ergo racism does not exist because it Does Not Compute — and this as white nationalists, etc., hover close to GG because of common interests.
Gaters don the mantle of left-wing politics, economically at least, because it is in their interest to do so. They take positions that serve them, and realign the entire political spectrum accordingly; but they would drop those positions as soon as they stopped serving them. Currently, Gaters would rather portray themselves as the sans-culottes of our era. To believe them would be a mistake. They have nothing but contempt for the sans-culottes.
I prefer to call Gaters the sans-bottes. They believe very much in pulling themselves by the bootstraps, but that whining you hear is because they became convinced, collectively, that their boots were stolen. Because they treat everything as a video game, they don’t want to play the current game because it’s too far gone for them to ever make it into the Top Scores; so they demand a New Game, a flick of the Reset button — regardless of the terrible costs to society that this might entail. This is what Katherine Cross probably had in mind by talking of GamerGate’s revolutionary fervor in 2014.
I’m not disputing that, given the state of upward mobility these days, it’s probably true that their boots were stolen, but if they were ever allowed to rise to the top, they would be just as predatory and sociopathic (if not more) as the current elites they seek to replace. At least previous elites did leave something behind them in the way of patronizing the arts and so on, a certain patrician sense of noblesse oblige that has now already eroded. That’s the key word: obligation.
The GamerGate meritocrats don’t recognize the word; at best, they probably remember that line from Spider-Man about great power and great responsibility. Gaters are self-indulgent; they know nothing of obligations, of limitations, of asceticism, of what it means to rule. They aspire to aristocratic status without understanding at all what it means to be an aristocrat, and the obligations this carries, especially, and it’s worth noting, towards the past, a past they don’t care for, that they seek to obliterate under the inevitable march of modernity. (This is where the comparison to fascism comes in: they’re both reactionary, yet modernist.)
As meritocrats, they consider they’re not beholden to anything or anyone. (It’s worth pointing out that the word “meritocracy” was coined by the British sociologist Michael Young, who was afraid of this.) It’s also where atheism fits in — not even to any god, or at least not any god which would not be of their own creation (which is why I think the Singularity/Roko’s Basilisk angle is especially important). Add to this the fact that Gaters not only think this but also seek to optimize everything according to how it’s done in a video game, with no regard for decency, sentiment, or morality, and you get an entire generation rising that could prove to be one of the ugliest in history — neoreaction’s little minions, as it were.
I’ll stop before I reach 40,000 words here too, but I think you get the idea.
Also, I encourage you to read Whittaker Chambers’ disparaging 1957 review of Ayn Rand at the National Review, still relevant 60 years later. It’s a fine introduction to how it’s possible for a conservative to find all that stuff utterly repulsive: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/213298/big-sister-watching-you-whittaker-chambers
I remember once, when I was a child, I had become so heavily vested in video games that I had lost touch with reality just as you say. Something didn’t go my way and me, being a kid, didn’t take well to it at all. I forget what the situation was, but I flipped out and had a tantrum. I remember, though, my mother sitting me down and basically saying “Hey, life is not a video game, life isn’t just black and white where everything is scripted and happens exactly as you expect it to.” Your comment brought that memory back to the surface as that sounds like exactly what you’re inferring. Play too many games, especially during formative years, and you do start seeing the world in more black and white, instead of the grey that it really is.
Regarding your second paragraph, I don’t think gaters fundamentally different from climate contrarians, at least the libertarians sort. Both groups fancies themselves as the hard nosed scientists that defy the mainstream consensus. More importantly, any casual poking at those claims and proofs reveals that this is a flimsy facade and further examination shows that the objectives of those movements aren’t even on the same spectrum of the subjects they claim they talk about. When pressed, AGW contrarians shows that they aren’t interested by climate change, they are interested in making us shut up. Same thing with gaters.
I think what you describe as being ridiculously scientific is the gater equivalent og claiming that AGW ain’t happening because is it cold tonight or, if they have more sophistication, claim that climate change had stooped since 1998, the year that MUST be the beginning of their graph and a typical year. Using 1998 that way while using one of those arguments is a serious red flag for dishonesty or ignorance, using them both is pretty much a dead giveaway that someone is more concerned at winning than doing something related to science. Gaters aren’t that different, they are prone to say many ridiculous, unproved (or at very most seriously debatable) and contradictory claims while pretending they care about ethics. The only major difference I notice is a lack of support from hack philosophers ans unethical lawyers common among AGW contrarians…or libertarians.
I think gaters believes themselves sufficiently minded, I just think they have no clue how to do anything beside, thankfully crude, rhetoric. They are interested by the explanatory power of science, twitted into justifications, yet hate both the humility and the work science requires. They aren’t that different from expert for hire that bought their diploma from a diploma mill.
As for the “gamer are dead” not computing, I think the answer is more complicated. GG, as a group of self centered pseudo-intellectual bullies, simply can’t take any criticism, and those articles contain two criticism that hits the gaters hard. The first one is about the broadening audience that makes the traditional gamer stereotype obsolete, something that challenges the “hardcore” gamer who think the market is about them. The complains about casuals are pretty old but became loud in the 7th generation. The conflict with this point can be seen whining generic complains about dirty casuals. The second point is an denunciation of serious harassers, something that Damion would call “fuckward” The second denunciation could fly over the head of most readers but not those who were the subjects of those articles. They were not amused and understood someone was taking about them. The second group is the one who is likely to claim they fight for “free speech”, against “censorship”, “feminist agenda” or “cultural Marxism”. This group was the one at the core of GG.
I don’t think that many people didn’t comprehend those articles. Gaters knew those articles denounced them. Gaters simply used the gamer culture as a shield.
“They are interested by the explanatory power of science, twitted into justifications, yet hate both the humility and the work science requires.”
Very true.
I would argue that Gaters are less interested in hard science, in scientific discovery, in the science of trial-and-error, than they are in the science that wins arguments through data, while everything else is too fuzzy and consequently irrelevant.
One of my latest specimens of Gaterism involves a guy who went through the sources cited by Rouner’s article and posted tweets that read: “Do no cite Communications Studies. They are unscientific and pseudo nonsense” / “Social sciences are not fucking sciences. There’s nothing remotely empirical about MOST of their work.” / “In order for social science studies to have CONSISTENT and GOOD results, they need to do longitudinal studies.” You imagine a guy like that doing literary criticism? You imagine a guy like that deciding what constitutes ethics in journalism?
And let me tell you, he’s not alone. Here is something from another Gater, which I’ve translated from the French: “There is a difference between stating that misogynistic culture exists and that it constitutes a problem. If misogynistic culture constitutes a problem, what measurement are we using to determine that it becomes a problem? Lack of empirical analysis.” And would you believe me if I told you that this Gater wrote this, not to just anyone, but to the ombudsman of a news organization to complain about the accuracy of a piece of reporting?
You might just say it’s just “sealioning”, as they call it. But I’m sure Gaters really think it’s all that matters; the dishonesty is that they know it can’t be quantified, or that the threshold at which you declare something to be a problem will never be met because the threshold itself will be, by necessity, arbitrary – ergo back to absolutes. Either misogynistic culture is a problem or it isn’t; but since he differentiates its existence from its being a problem, we can see that he’s fine with it, and that any empirical evidence would fall on deaf ears.
On the question of global warming, however, I could see a way in which Gaters could be sincere about it. Global warming is the result of the old economy, the economy of Wall Street, of their parents’ generation. Gaters are of the new economy: of Silicon Valley, of solar/wind power. It’s just more evidence of Gater modernism. Their exemplar would be someone like Justine Tunney, the Google engineer who went from Occupy activism to bordering on neoreaction advocating for a tech elite with live-in servants. Her case illuminates the entire paradigm.
French is my native language. Do you means this?
http://www.ombudsman.cbc.radio-canada.ca/fr/revision-des-plaintes/2015/jeux-video-la-marginalisation-des-femmes-est-un-fait-ici-explora/
Bingo. Amusez-vous bien!
The same guy, incidentally, also made a 40-minute speech on GG at a gaming convention. Most of which was spent talking about the inaccuracies in the media reporting on the Zoe Post.
Oh, I should have specified that the same Gater filed various complaints, and the exact one including the bit I translated comes from a different one you cited: http://www.ombudsman.cbc.radio-canada.ca/fr/revision-des-plaintes/2015/ici-artv-pour-en-finir-avec-le-gamergate-ici-artv-ca/
There’s also a YouTube video of his GG talk (October 2015), which he was set to repeat it at another gaming convention, except that in the meantime, the gaming convention where he had appeared dissuaded the other convention from hosting his talk, saying the speaker had misled them.
Result? The Gater, in true Gater form, called for an op (called Operation Tequila Sunrise, if you want to look it up) against both gaming conventions, plus against someone working at a games studio for no other reason that the person in question had congratulated someone who had warned one of the conventions about that GG talk using his Twitter account while it was uncertain (according to that Gater anyway) whether that Twitter account in question also reflected the views of his employer.
Wow, you’re a BLOGGER??! Dude, you are totally an expert on this. Blogging is only for informed, educated people with no political bias whatsoever.
Who the fuck says that bloggers can’t have political biases? Freedom of speech is designed specifically to allow people to discuss their political biases.
Eh, my first comment is probably stuck in moderation because of the link, so I’ll post a new version without it.
I’m just guessing he thinks my appropriate place would be on Tumblr.
Oh, by the way, there was another magnificent example of what I was talking about, which I saw floating on Kotaku in Action, under the title: “Sam Biddle. Study: More Useless Liberal Arts Majors Could Destroy ISIS”
Yeah, Gaters couldn’t resist talking about it, because it’s (1) written by Gawker’s Sam Biddle, (2) relies on an article by The Guardian, and (3) ties in with the whole “worse than ISIS” hyperbole that Gaters love to laugh at.
The responses are full of the usual STEMsplaining. Where Biddle writes (regarding how ISIS recruits appear to be in a majority from STEM backgrounds) “students with a technical background might tend to see the world as a fundamentally rational machine that can be repaired like any non-abstract mechanism and exists in an array of binary states, like “on or off””, a Gater responds “Ahahaha, this person has never dealt with concurrency or crypto bugs. Or the laws of physics for that matter.” Then: “I’m ready to put out the tl;dr: In this essay, Sam Biddle will pontificate about engineering and science without knowing how it actually works, most likely because he has a useless liberal arts degree.”
It reminds me of when the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen responded to Jill Lepore’s damning article on disruption in The New Yorker with tweets (now deleted) like: “What does Jill Lepore, Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale, think about quantum entanglement?”
Another poster on the KiA page first quotes one of the comments on Biddle’s piece that calls the “engineering mindset”: “Arrogant, sexist, sociopathic, rules and “codes” based, obsessed with being right, willing to argue to extremes over technical minutiae.” The poster responds: “Of course they seem “arrogant” to you. They’re smarter and understand how facts work. Also, they aren’t “rules and codes based.” They are truth based. It’s progressives and conservatives who push for more rules and codes of conduct.”
I stand by my statements, and I will add that any society run by such people will be a technocratic nightmare.
“Assholish behavior just rises in consciousness, and we tend to ignore people who are decent human beings.”
This.
There is also a need for balance. An understanding of balance. With balance comes true selflessness. And a better understanding of self. Too often the assholes only mirror the inner-, imbalanced-, potential- asshole in decent people by provoking counter-asshole responses. Fuel for the fire.
Reminds me of how many neoBuddhist really misrepresent Buddha. He never proposed we end suffering — far from it — his main mantra: Only in Death will you be free of suffering; for Life is suffering. Only in balance will you find peace. will living.
EDIT: While living.
The article’s use of the word ‘Gamer’ is a little vague and all encompassing.
An umbrella term similar to ‘Humans’ that doesn’t really hint at the vast diversity of opinions, desires and preferences that lie within a population.
The article seems to miss the point that as games become integrated more thoroughly through society and seen as an acceptable leisure activity for any age range those that could carry the ‘Gamer’ moniker become just as diverse.
Surely it should be of no surprise that some people that play games are arseholes. I know plenty of opinionated bigots that don’t play games.
Yes. “Game” is applied just as generally to things that don’t have much at all to do with each other, except that they’re interactive in some way, and have audio and/or video elements.
Vhaegrant, you made me think of another problem (in all modern communities): Many people have acquired such a low tolerance for behavior that isn’t remotely ass-kissy or self-reassuring. Go back in time and tell our ancestors that your life was ruined by [words] and [textual attitude] on an electric box. That should be a riot.
When you say ‘Modern communities’ are you meaning online interaction such as message boards?
I’m not sure the basic skills of critical appraisal are taught well at school, instead the next generation are exposed to horrendous talent shows that entertain by way of how insulting the judges can be towards potential contestants. It’s cool to be cruel and negative.
Also, many that would not speak up in a real world environment don’t feel the same pressure when it comes to anonymous comments on the internet. However this newfound boldness does not come with an increase in tolerance to others views and criticism.
If you can’t stand some criticism and just need respondents to be ‘Yes People’ then all you create is a ego tripping echo chamber.
If you actively encourage dissent you engage in a race to the bottom as contributors try to one up each other with their negativity.
I think anonymity and inexperience with dealing with criticism exacerbate the issue.
@Vhaegrant
“When you say ‘Modern communities’ are you meaning online interaction such as message boards?”
Nope. I mean any community not born 100 years ago. We, as a species, have been mismanaging our Internal Dialog (read: Emotions) long before The Internet. I see some of these victims of abuse and I fear not for the continued abuse but instead for the continued lack of emotional preparedness moving forward.
@Vhaegrant
“I’m not sure the basic skills of critical appraisal are taught well at school, instead the next generation are exposed to horrendous talent shows that entertain by way of how insulting the judges can be towards potential contestants. It’s cool to be cruel and negative.”
Is critical appraisal something like critical thinking? Going on my, perhaps ignorant definition, all appraisal *is* critical. Otherwise it’s just admiration. It’s not cool to be cruel and negative… it’s just that 6 billion people have varying opinions on what *is* cruel and what *is* negative. You cannot control what someone else thinks; and we’re back to Emotional Preparedness–something you can control.
@Vhaegrant
“Also, many that would not speak up in a real world environment don’t feel the same pressure when it comes to anonymous comments on the internet.”
Perhaps because over a million people on this planet do not agree that comments on the Internet are dangerous. Same way over a million people on this planet do not agree that Refugees are dangerous.
@Vhaegrant
“However this newfound boldness does not come with an increase in tolerance to others views and criticism.
If you can’t stand some criticism and just need respondents to be ‘Yes People’ then all you create is a ego tripping echo chamber.
If you actively encourage dissent you engage in a race to the bottom as contributors try to one up each other with their negativity.
I think anonymity and inexperience with dealing with criticism exacerbate the issue.”
Is this dangerous thinking? Such that anything you deem negative *is* negative and has zero upside? Isn’t it dangerous to continue to teach our children that many things surrounding their lives have zero upside? When you foster this image of zero upside, you build an entire world-view that only focuses on stomping out any negatives… Any toxicity… Any competition (which is, by definition, ripe with negatives(losing)).
‘Critical Appraisal’ is more a particular standard for appraisal. I don’t remember being taught anything about it in my highschool years but only when I got to University with regards to research papers (granted that’s some time ago *cough25yearscough* I really hope these skills are taught earlier these days).
Part of it is having a clear process the other is knowing that the feedback is not personal but a commentary on where your work could do with improvement.
This is the twofold error, without a good education in delivering Critical Appraisal it is very easy to fall into personal attacks or placing your own values on someone else. Just because someone does something differently than you doesn’t make them wrong and inferior, it just means they do things differently.
The second part is that without exposure to structured criticism people tend to be thin-skinned and emotional when they put their thoughts out there. Their ideas are valuable to them and leads to the reaction of ‘no one should tell me how to think and if you’re going to attack me I’ll attack you right back and get my friends in on the act as well’
I think most mature friends I have place internet discussion on the same level as drunk barroom philosophy. Can be interesting as a bystander but nothing you really want to get involved in.
I think the greater issue with the article is that its a ‘thing or position I don’t like is like this extra bad thing’ article. Which yes, a long standing rhetorical tactic but it’s also a terrible long standing rhetorical tactic. Its the exact sort of red meat people are going to eat up out of a sense of personal superiority rather than anything essential strength to its arguments.
It’s positioning your consumption of a particular type of media as moral choice, which is frankly part of one of the mor disturbing shifts in writing about and discussing pop culture over the past few years and I kind of distrust the sort of person who’s okay with that as an argument because that’s gone down some ugly, stupid path in the past.
@Vhaegrant
That makes sense (critical appraisal). An unbiased and fair appraisal. I’m 41, and the feature-creep in regards to language is fascinating. Organic even; working as intended. I wish everyone just took a little longer to process all this wonderful data (The Internet). Not asking anyone to do any heavy lifting… Or stop shit-posting altogether… just some air in the conversation would be nice. It isn’t always exactly as your mind perceives. In fact, it’s getting easier and easier to trick people, en masse.