Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Art of #GamerGate

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Oct. 30, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

24:27

The Art of #GamerGate

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	So on August, the 28th 2014, the video game press decided to collectively print 10 articles on the same day declaring that they wanted to erase the concept of a gaming enthusiast, and they did it with such childish and warlike rhetoric, as gamers are over.
	That's why they're so mad and publishing a guide to ending gamers with entries like, we have to stop upholding fun as the universal ultimate criterion for a game's relevance, because fun is a neurological trick.
	Apparently, as you'd expect, this came as quite an affront to gamers, as this was clearly a collective response by the press to a scandal about alleged corruption in video games journalism itself and further allegations of collusion within the industry that were later proven to be true.
	Almost all of the video game press from multiple different, theoretically competing sites under multiple different, theoretically competing corporations, all closed ranks and collectively seemed to declare war on their very readership to defend the people implicated in this affair, and this was the first that most gamers had heard of it.
	It was absurd.
	It would be like golf magazines refusing to fire a reporter for sleeping with Tiger Woods for coverage and instead the entire golfing press declares that nobody is a golfing enthusiast anymore.
	It seems to have been done by many people in the video game press and several prominent indie developers, as well as extremely ideological public relations and consultancy firms, many of which seem to operate in and around the San Francisco area.
	There seems to be some kind of strange Bay Area culture there that's heavily influenced by the ideals of radical academic feminism.
	I know it sounds crazy, but this culture's become a bit of a trope, and the people who perpetuate it are called social justice warriors, because they're basically a bunch of ultra-sensitive crybabies who come in and suck the fun out of things, presumably because fun like love, compassion and understanding are just neurological tricks.
	They've used this kind of extreme feminist rhetoric as a way of both whining and browbeating their way into positions of power within the multi-billion dollar games industry.
	Uh, specifically as advisors.
	Your game hates women.
	Pay me to advise you or i'll declare that your next game hates women too.
	That kind of thing put simply, um, it's a dirty tactic but it works because they're loud and they're they're an activism oriented culture and can raise a number of prominent voices through the tacit implication, if not outright declaration, that if you don't agree, then you hate women too.
	The chances were that they were all in it for the money, or so we thought, uh, don't get me wrong, there are bound to be a bunch of them that are just in it for the money.
	But it turns out that a lot of these people are quite rich white, upper class kids, and they seem to be led by an absolute bunch of crazy people.
	And the thing is they're all weird, infantile and quite immoral people.
	They seem incapable of empathizing with another person.
	They can only give you their subjective experiences.
	They're willing to cherry-pick a narrative that makes them feel good and they seem to idolize women to the point where they seem to believe that criticism of an individual woman is tantamount to hatred of all women.
	It's almost like a veneration and an obsession.
	They they can't not talk about gender.
	They say some of the zaniest stuff you've ever heard, such as, the video games industry is decadent and depraved.
	Mass shootings are one tragic consequence of a culture that perpetuates toxic ideas of masculinity.
	This is how patriarchy can harm men too.
	It's some really crazy stuff and they really, really like religious fundamentalists about it.
	I'm not kidding, it's some kind of strange, extreme progressive feminism.
	And the thing is, the culture seems to be based on the openly Marxist, radical feminist culture that has sprung from academia.
	Gender zealots who have to bring gender into every subject because they spend their whole lives studying gender as professors and pumping out various inconsistent rationalizations for the overwhelmingly white people who are part of this bay culture to use them as ways of advancing this culture through aggressive activism.
	This culture has been an issue within the gaming industry for a few years now and in wider society at large in the West in general, but I don't think anyone really knew just how bad it was until recently.
	You can imagine the surprise of many people when it turns out that linked through these articles was an academic paper from a radical Marxist feminist called Adrian Shaw, who'd written a paper that basically said that gamers are white straight teenage men, I don't like men, therefore gamer is an identity which holds back the progress of feminism in gaming.
	Yeah, seriously, they all linked to the same Tumblr blog post of all things that had based its entire reason for existing on Shaw's paper saying that gamer was an identity that was no use to her and her goals and needed to be discarded.
	Not only that, but Dan Golding, the guy who wrote this Tumblr post, was actually a member of the same feminist academic gaming organisation called Digra, which Adrian Shaw, the woman who wrote this paper, is also a member of and hosts roundtable discussions with other academic feminists specifically about how to push feminism into gaming using the same PR companies who are advising all the media.
	I swear to God, I did the research myself with a team of concerned gamers who had experience of this personally, many from academia.
	The evidence is in the description, and I would really, really encourage you to investigate it for yourself.
	I know how this sounds, and I really, really wish it wasn't the case.
	But it's some seriously crazy shit we're dealing with here.
	You know, sort of anti-free market, anti-capitalist, anti-free choice.
	That sort of thing.
	It's really, really, really uncomfortable to think about.
	Especially because it really does have wider implications for the rest of academia.
	But gamers were told that they could no longer consider themselves game enthusiasts, because this bay culture had moved into the video game press, didn't like anything white and male because of all that privilege men have and all the oppression that women have.
	And therefore those white male gamers were over and that's why they were so mad.
	And it's weird because everything they say is like an inverse of reality.
	In reality they are the rich white people with privilege, commanding the public dialogue with slander and hate against gamers and Gamergate.
	Obviously plenty of female gamers, non-white gamers, gay gamers, non-gamers and even feminists who are not part of this bay culture are against this, which is why the press and prominent members like Anita Sarkisian of Feminist Frequency and Leia Alexander, the editor of Ghana Sutra, have said that this bay culture is more like a movement and a new culture has moved in.
	I'm not kidding.
	I feel compelled to point out that this isn't really anything unusual from a historical point of view.
	You get new cultures springing up all the time.
	I mean just think about the Luddites, the Levellers, the Cathars, the Amish.
	It's really not anything unusual.
	And I think that people should be free to pursue the cultures that they like, but I don't think that they should be free to declare a cultural war on anyone outside of their culture.
	And declaring gamers dead was a declaration of a propaganda war.
	Again, I'm not even exaggerating.
	One of them even wrote an article titled A Guide to Ending Gamers, with 14 bullet points on how to end gamers.
	And remember, one of them was about fun not being the most important thing in a game because fun is a neurological trick.
	So gamers rallied around a hashtag created by Firefly actor Adam Baldwin called hashtag Gamergate, which he had coined because of the scandal involving corruption in this Bay Area culture gaming press.
	And this has been going on for two months now.
	And they have used the most underhanded, brutal PR tactics imaginable.
	They are fucking shameless.
	Every time a new piece of evidence comes out damning anyone from this Bay culture, everyone in their culture just closes ranks around them and supports them, regardless of what they did.
	Often they support them financially as a public statement by just directly giving each other money.
	They control the media, so until now they've been controlling the public discourse and attempting to shame and bully gamers and Gamergate into silence.
	They do it by claiming harassment at every turn, although all I ever see is a few tweets or an email from a random person saying shit occasionally and then the police saying this was not a credible threat.
	But even then, gamers roundly denounce it and tag the FBI in the conversations to alert them to the problem, as well as reporting accounts where possible.
	These threats really seem to be sent by individuals working against gamers, because if anything it just gives the Bay Area people a reason to keep spouting propaganda.
	And these people are very good at propaganda.
	And they're able to get on mainstream press and TV quite easily.
	They've appeared in the papers and on major US television networks and they've gone on to tell everyone how hateful and evil gamers are, constantly saying that they hate women and how they send death threats to quote women in games.
	They're literally saying it over the whole gamer culture because that's how this Bay Area culture attacks others and takes over.
	They claim it's not safe and that they must be given control to make it safe.
	This is basically how they colonize different cultural power structures.
	And it's almost two months into Gamergate now, and it's getting about 70,000 tweets a day, coming up on 2 million tweets now.
	There are loads of normal people in this, and I have personally spoken to AAA developers about this.
	People who've developed games you'd recognize and who are themselves gamers, but feel they can't come out in favour of Gamergate, because these people are the press, and not only will they slam their games when they come out, hurting their sales, but they will publicly and roundly shame them in the most harsh and castigating terms because they seem to be absolutists.
	They seem to be unwilling to allow anyone to remain neutral or focus just on concerns of journalistic ethics, which is really all Gamergate wants to talk about anyway.
	Everyone is kind of caught in this empire of fear that this Bay Area culture has created, where the big names are cowed and the average gamer is in open revolt, and they're desperately trying anything they can to silence that revolt.
	They do it by focusing excessively on the narrative, which is something they've picked up in their communication studies courses in university, I have no doubt over.
	I've only got cursory evidence to suggest it, but I think they're teaching Edward Bernay's tricks in universities now.
	He coined the term public relations because propaganda had become a dirty word.
	In my opinion, actions speak louder than words, and if you look at the actions of these people, you'll see that they are publicly and brazenly biased.
	And they willfully collude.
	The whole culture is corrupt, and they declare that they are better than everyone else while they use the lowest tactics to win every battle.
	Because they never have that one silver bullet on their side, which is the truth.
	And when the lies have been spun into a narrative, they all go along with whatever the party line is, just like Soviet apparatchniks, because it benefits all of them through nepotism and cronyism.
	And they just say, this is just how the industry works.
	These social justice warriors have got this pseudo-academic language, and they employ it at every turn, but clearly not all of them know what it means, because they frequently contradict one another or make absurd statements like, you can be a misogynist feminist.
	And they seem to have all been doing it for so long that it effectively becomes irrelevant what any of them actually say.
	When one of them says something and it's incorrect, all that needs to happen is for another to ignore it and it becomes as if it never happened.
	They change the narrative and they move on.
	Facts be damned.
	Seriously, they use the word narrative all the time.
	It's weird as fuck.
	And they bragged on MSNBC that one of them had a job purely to go through other people's Twitter feeds and cherry-pick statements out of context to try and discredit people.
	And one of the examples he tried to use was, you can't rape someone if they are willing.
	Of course you can't rape someone who's willing.
	And that was meant to make someone look bad.
	Because it had the word rape in it and it was apparently a rape tweet.
	So they form their biased vitriolic narrative and broadcast it from major media outlets now, telling everyone that gamers are a hate group.
	And everyone in this Bay Area culture goes along with this.
	It's creepy as shit and they are so confident.
	The editor at large for Garma Sutra recently said at one of their cult-like teleseminars, I declared gamers are over and I still have my job.
	How the hell does she still have a job?
	It's because she's a prominent voice in this Bay Area culture and none of them will get rid of her.
	Even though big advertisers like Intel are pulling their ads off Garma Sutra because of what she has personally written.
	Seriously, these people are like real deal, honest to God, cultists.
	I've seen them flatly deny reality and their latest propaganda trick was to try and say that they didn't actually declare gamers to be over at all.
	Unfortunately for them it's in black and white and still on their websites because they're so absurdly arrogant.
	So that narrative has failed to stand.
	But they're flailing wildly to construct a new narrative because gamers aren't what they say and they never have been.
	So you must think this is all some kind of joke, right?
	Honestly, there can't really be a small cabal of radical anti-free market feminists in academia that has brainwashed university students and set them out into the world to colonize it with this cult-like, immoral, parasitic, Bay Area culture.
	Is there?
	Well, we didn't think so either.
	But it turns out that the game enthusiasts like numbers.
	We like targets and we like measurable results.
	We like them because they are the ultimate equalizer.
	Anyone can step into a game at level 1 and be just like everyone else.
	Assuming you don't cheat, you've got the same rules as everyone else to play by.
	And you can play however you want.
	You can play on your own, you can play cooperatively, you can be aggressively against other people.
	You can play how you like, with who you like, on whatever device you like.
	And if you don't like something, you can play something else.
	It's a huge industry with games for everyone.
	There are very few demographics that don't have games targeted specifically at them.
	And this sort of space attracts a really inclusive, left-leaning, libertarian mindset most of the time, which sets the tone of the community.
	Hate speech is never permitted, and very few subjects are out of bound for the public discourse.
	It's a really healthy community.
	And frankly, most people try to be adults.
	They really do.
	Most do.
	But like with anything, a few bad apples.
	But most people do, and I think it's really unfair to judge the majority based on the actions of a tiny amount that we don't even know are actually connected to Gamergate.
	This makes gaming a very egalitarian place to spend your social time, and it's very merit-based.
	Good arguments are always welcome, and discourse is actually had.
	Albeit sometimes in the crudest of ways, but many different people consider themselves gamers, and they're supporting Gamergate due to the principle of the thing now.
	Yeah, it's still about corruption, of course, but there's a much bigger problem than first expected.
	It's the whole modus operandi.
	It's the way they operate.
	They're bad people, and they're doing bad things to people who simply don't deserve it.
	This Bay Area culture is toxic.
	Gamers, by contrast, have not only stuck it out under the slings and arrows of outrageous assaults on common sense, decency, and logic for two months, but Gamergate has more than doubled in size.
	And gamers have attempted a dialogue with them numerous times, and they've always been fruitless or simply flat refused.
	Gamers have raised tens of thousands of dollars for charity.
	They've kick-started the careers of women game developers by crowdfunding a game made by a feminist development studio, which the Bay Area culture tried to tank.
	They've written many polite emails to the companies who advertise on these websites to let them know that the journalists they are funding are directly attacking their audience.
	It's been a leaderless consumer revolt the whole time.
	And the thing is, giving gamers a common cause to fight for under Gamergate has really been the final step in sealing a new kind of community that actively polices itself and prides itself on good works and fine deeds.
	I see it all the time.
	Gaming is a market that's open to all, and anyone can go where they choose, join a game and be the equal of anyone else.
	All they have to do is play and level up.
	This breeds a really healthy mentality amongst gamers.
	It makes them proactive, sociable and it introduces them to new technology and experiences in the safest environment possible.
	One that is all just numbers travelling through the air.
	It's an environment that essentially doesn't exist.
	But when you drop into a game, it doesn't matter what age, sex, race, or any other of your physical attributes are like.
	What matters is your skill at the game.
	Everything else is irrelevant.
	And it's superfluous, which is why most games allow you to choose any kind of character you like, with no difference on gameplay, no effect on gameplay.
	Physical attributes make such little difference to gamers, which is why there are gamers of every ethnicity, gender or ideology.
	Gaming culture is about individual expression and freedom of choice, and it's so wonderfully close to these ideals.
	It's not perfect, of course, but it's a damn sight better than most.
	And it's practically the antithesis of this Bay Area culture that's come out and so directly assaulted it.
	We, the gamers, know we have a superior culture to them.
	Because gaming has become the world's biggest entertainment industry by being welcoming and inclusive.
	And these Bay Area people are spiteful and venomous ideologues, and they use propaganda to co-opt institutions to further their agenda.
	An agenda they're surprisingly open about.
	I tell you all this, because I'd like to show you the first piece of art that I have really seen from the gamer culture.
	Not to downplay any of the other artists, but this is the first piece of art that I've really seen that captures the zeitgeist.
	It isn't a picture of a cultural artifact.
	I can only give you my subjective opinion on it.
	But as someone who's been involved in Gamergate from the beginning, this piece of art really speaks to me.
	It's full of depth and really captures perfectly what I as a gamer see from my perspective in Gamergate.
	I'm no art critic, but I do want to give you an overview of it from my perspective.
	And I just want to stress that this concept came to me virtually fully formed.
	The pencil sketch was emailed to me by someone who'd like to be known only as the elusive Swede, a man from Sweden, as far as I'm aware, who sent me regular updates.
	The concept came fully formed, and he asked for my opinion along the way, and I would say things like perhaps change this colour or that colour, but I really had very little impact on the tone and message of the piece.
	The first thing that's most prominent to me is the giant purple monster that dominates the right hand side.
	This monster is the Bay Area culture, as far as I can tell.
	Its octopus head and cyclopic eye represents Digra, and springing up from behind this grotesque skull are the ivory towers of academia from whence it came, and still has firm grip over.
	Springing from the monster's mouth are the armour-plated heads of a hydra.
	These are the snapping and biting heads of their ideology that have corrupted all areas of the gaming industry and seek to destroy the holy citadel of gaming itself, a magnificent structure located on the left, which I can only assume represents the fun and purity of gaming itself.
	The only thing that prevents this beast from utterly ravaging this sacred place is a ragtag army of individuals engaged in a desperate pitched battle to stave off the destruction of the thing they love.
	These individuals are extremely diverse, from all walks of life and united in common cause for the same goal.
	They've all been attacked by this monster and they've seen it devour others until there's nothing left for its rapacious appetite is never sated.
	These individuals are all caricatures of the personalities and avatars of the most prominent individuals in Gamergate.
	All of different backgrounds, different skills, different political and sexual leanings.
	The one thing in common is that they've all shown the content of their character.
	And I think most, even if only subconsciously, understand that there is a higher principle at stake here.
	They know that if this great beast can, it's going to raise this holy city of gaming so utterly that there will not be a place for a bird to perch above the ground.
	This is a last stand.
	This is how I think a lot of the gamers see themselves.
	The gaming industry is the great capitalist success story of the modern era.
	A new frontier opened up in entertainment, sparsely populated but rich in potential, and gamers have exploited it in the most fair and meritocratic way possible to do in the real world.
	From the gamers themselves to the avant-garde indie developers to the AAA powerhouse industry that pushes technological progress forwards, gaming is literally a place for anyone and everyone.
	The gamers want to protect gaming, this democratic, international public institution, from the inevitable corruption of this cronyistic Bay Area culture and its weird, hegemonic ideological leanings.

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