Gamergate Never Ended

Ten years later, the hate factory continues.

"When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror."
– Karl Marx, 1849

"We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category"
– Christopher Rufo, 2021

“I realized Milo [Yiannopoulous] could connect with these kids right away. You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”
– Steve Bannon, 2017

"I think it’s important to recognize that “we” already won. Game journos don’t have to be your audience. Game journos are dead."
– Mark Kern, 2024

What's the most important issue facing game development right now? I dunno, I would pick literally every game company destroying themselves in an orgiastic frenzy of completely unnecessary layoffs, personally. But what do I know, it's actually that a few people got a job contracting as narrative designers who had Bad Opinions About Things, according to noted cultural commentators KiwiFarms, which lead to a Steam group dedicated to ferreting out any game that these awful, awful people might have touched and perverted with their Woke Cooties. Kotaku has a write-up on the actual facts behind all this, if you care. You shouldn't, because absolutely no one involved on the Angry Internet Warrior side does, it's just an excuse to complain about how Woke Angry People are keeping gamers from seeing pretty girls.

Why are these people are so insistent on literally every woman they come across being scantily clad, vaguely Asian, and improbably voluptuous? Has no one told them that they can find scantily clad women virtually anywhere they care to look? Are they not aware that AI technology has advanced to the point that these women can literally be manufactured upon command?

The answer of course, is that they don't care. There is no actual argument. The argument exists to perpetuate itself, and to draw a widening circle of people into that argument. I, in writing this, am guilty of the same thing. I am engaging with an argument that is not only intentionally made in bad faith, it comes from a movement where bad faith arguing is the entire point.

That movement is, of course, the now ten-year-old Gamergate. The Early Access Alpha for the constant, wearying, nonsensical bad faith arguments that make up the entire rationale for one of America's two major parties. It started there, then. It hasn't stopped. It won't ever stop, because it works.

I mean, Mark Kern, in the abominable quoted tweet leading off this newsletter, is right. Game journalism is dead. Because venture capitalist jackals shot it in the head along with journalism in general, and then people like Kern showed up at the scene of the crime, snickered at the corpse, and took credit. Now what passes for game journalism is the odd listicle at zombie web sites that still exist in people's bookmarks, and the random worker-owned collective trying to survive in today's post-apocalyptic media hellscape. There is no "tyranny of game journalism" because actual tyrants destroyed it.

And game development is following closely behind, for much the same reason, and the reaction of the reactionary Gamergate jackals is laughter. Those woke scolds, getting what they deserve for banning me from their message boards! It's not that they don't realize that game development is dying; they simply don't care. Nihilism does not ask where the next meal is coming from, it merely assumes you will continue to feed it.

I wish I had a call to action to close this out with, some noble thing you can do about this, hell, even Five Tiktok Dances You Can Do To Make Right-Wing Assholes Suck Less. But I don't dance, and there's nothing noble about any of this, and the world in general is sinking into the mire of hate and hopelessness, the undertow is taking one of the few escapes we have left to us with it, and as we sink into the almost pleasant oblivion, someone with a Twitter anime avatar is looking down and laughing uproariously, because they think they've won, and they haven't yet found out what living in the world they've created will entail.

They will.