In a world populated by people like me, the best Hollywood actors would pull in about the same salary as the principal oboe chair at the LA Philharmonic and would be about as widely recognized.
However, the world is not populated by people like me. We live in a world where large numbers of people obsess over Hollywood actors. We live in a world where hackers actively target well-compensated and well-known Hollywood actresses to steal their intimate photographs. We live in a world where ordinary people can become as famous and equally scrutinized by the public, at least for 15 minutes, simply by catching the attention of a few garage-dwelling virgins with a love for gaming and a hatred for broad swaths of the sunlit world.
Such is the fate of Zoe Quinn, an otherwise unremarkable woman in her late 20’s who became temporarily famous after her supposed ex-boyfriend published a diatribe claiming she slept with a Kotaku (a commercial game-review site) writer.
I will not waste time rehashing the series of events that started with a supposed ex-boyfriend airing Zoe’s alleged “dirty laundry” on the internet to a worldwide movement that pledges allegiance to a cause by the hashtag of #gamergate. Others have done a much more thorough job of that. Follow the links below if you want to know the history of the movement. This post is about me and my thoughts on the subject.
I should give the reader some background on myself. I enjoy playing video games. I have since my grandfather gifted me my first Nintendo Entertainment System back in the late 1980s. In the halcyon days of the late 1990’s, when I was a sophomore in High School, I even coded my own video game. It was a simple affair similar to the classical game asteroids. One moved a ship around a static screen avoiding lasers and destroying UFOs. The 16-bit graphics available in DOS and on the Macintosh meant that visually, it was a lot more impressive than those early vector-graphics games, but not at the level of the 2-D games of the era, which had been raised to a nearly perfect art form on systems like the Super Nintendo and Play Station. Compared to professional 2D games and the nascent 3D games such as Quake and Golden Eye, my game seemed positively antediluvian.
Still, I was rather proud of it, as was my high school programming teacher. It was only about a decade or so behind the bleeding edge and, unlike the newest games that had budgets of millions of dollars and a staff often numbering in the hundreds, I had banged it out in a few dozen hours of free time I had between projects while sitting in a dreary high school computer lab. I gave copies to all my friends (full of Easter Eggs) and even put it on the web for others to download (I am unsure how many people ever did). That was the first and last game I ever coded. Every few years, I fire up a Windows 98 OS in VMware and enjoy the nostalgia.
Zoe Quinn and I could easily share similar stories. She released upon Steam an innocuous, simple little game called Depression Quest that she had created in her spare time, probably hoping that at least a few people would download it and extract a scintilla of joy from it. Instead, Zoe’s story is the one of her fifteen minutes of fame (or some may claim, infamy) after becoming the focus of attention of what hordes of self-described gamers claim is a major scandal in the claim industry.
It is interesting that given the cozy relationship between game publishers, their developers, and the game journalism industry that a movement ostensibly about ethics in the industry would choose to focus on a rather innocuous person who was distributing her game gratis. It is telling that these self-described crusaders for gaming ethics did not initially cast their focus upon the real property, money, and favors flowing between publishers, developers, journalists, and retailers. Every movement has its pawns and its nobility, its publicized agenda and its private ones. No doubt, many people claiming to belong to the movement are unapologetic misogynists fanning the flames while others are genuinely decent people who truly believe in promoting ethics.
In the grand scheme of human culture, the ultimate social relevance of the gamergate movement is neither about misogyny nor about ethics. It is about the rise of the peculiar creature known as the internet troll. Anonymous trolls, of course, have existed nearly as long as the internet. They predate the creation of the World Wide Web by CERN. But as someone who was there for the birth of the web and grew up with it (I first started using it in elementary school), I think I have some insight to offer.
During the early days of the web, there was a lot of people who were trying to build online communities, from early social media sites to the long-standing protocols such as USENET, LISTSERV, and IRC. When successful, these communities had a real sense of meaning and belonging, similar to any real community. Trolls were usually single individuals or occasionally small groups. The idea that hundreds of anonymous trolls might gather together beneath a bridge constructed of HTML and work together to attack a single individual was largely unheard of.
On the contemporary internet, virtual communities of real value seem to be on the decline. They are still around, but attempts to build new ones have been stymied by anonymous trolling (as evidenced by the rarely insightful and usually regrettable attempts by news sites, YouTube, and others to build communities of commentators on articles and videos) . While people with controversial ideas have always been the target of threatened or real violence, the rise of ad-hoc communities designed to attack the enemy du jour has raised the attacks from a few anonymous letters or phonecalls directed at newsworthy individuals to a constant, sustained, and organized barrage of harassment, often directed at an otherwise obscure and unnewsworthy individual responsible for seemingly benign actions such as rebalancing a popular online game such as Call of Duty or landing a short review of an otherwise obscure game about depression.
Perhaps in the future, I might offer my insights into algorithms and legislative action that might be useful in creating a virtual Helm’s Deep genuinely good communities (such as gamers and people with genuinely insightful comments on news articles) from trolls. For now, I only offer my insight into what the real problem is. The substantially pernicious nature of gamergate is not the gamers themselves who identify with it, but a small number of ad hoc trolls behind the worst aspects of the community. These pernicious individuals exists not just among the gaming community, but among every segment of human society.
Ultimately, the underlying issues of importance are neither misogyny, feminism, nor even individual trolls. Rather, the are the decline of meaningful communities on the internet and the lack of legal options when dealing with real-life harassment which has enabled the rise of the trolling hordes, the cretins who band together from the DSL line in their parents’ garages to rain misery and grief down upon whatever poor soul happened to set foot upon their bridge.
SOURCES:
1. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/zoe-quinns-depression-quest
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