Everything About Gamergate Needs to Die.

I’m fucking fed up.

I’m fed up with the fact that I can’t go  a week without a female gaming icon getting harassed to the point where she has to leave her house. I’m pissed off that rational discourse broke down so quickly that all anyone talks about now is the hate. I hate the fact that I, as your stereotypical male gamer, feel like I’m responsible for all this shit despite the fact that I treat every female gamer like any other gamer. I’m fucking tired of feeling like all I can do is stay silent and try to be a good member of the community so I can lead by example, just like the countless others I play games with on a daily basis. So fuck it, I’ll paint a target on my back by calling out both sides of the argument for the shit they’ve flung in the wrong directions and hopefully I’ll convince someone that everything about this whole controversy needs to die a fucking swift death.

The one thing I’m going to abstain from doing is going over what sparked this (every recount of what happened to get us to this point is so charged with bullshit swinging one way or the other) and if you’re reading this you likely have your own idea of what the fuck is going on. So instead of getting off on the wrong foot here, although I’ve already likely done that with the first paragraph, I’ll just dive into the meat of what I think needs to happen here and then you can all feel free to flame/dox/death threat me in the comments.

If you’re one of the cadre who backs the idea that Gamergate is about ethics in games journalism then there’s really one thing, and only one thing, you need to do: stop fucking using the Gamergate term. No matter how good you think you are at dodging all the hate, bullshit and utterly atrocious actions of a minority of people you’re never going to rise above the rabble that they’ve managed to generate. There’s a larger debate in there that could have some wide reaching ramifications for how games sites handle their relationships with publishers and developers and it’s one I think still needs to be had. However should you go charging in brandishing the Gamergate tag as your source of inspiration all you’re doing is giving credance to those assholes who use the same platform as a place to spread their hate.

In fact I have no fucking idea why anyone who’s actually interested in having a rational debate about these matters even hold onto the tag at this point. I mean it’s not like we can’t create a new one #fuckingEthics or something like that and use it instead, what’s the point of holding onto a term that only gets press when it runs someone from their home? We may not be responsible for the people who are peddling this bullshit but fuck me, we can decry the label as one that’s been mutilated in only perpetrating hate and continue the conversation that needs to be had somewhere else.

The anti-Gamergate crew isn’t entirely blameless in this whole shitpile though as they’ve often lumped the wider gaming community in with hatemongers. Look a minority of people causing a shitstorm in the larger group is nothing new to the world and it is not fair to anyone in that group if you tar them all with the same brush. If we’re going to ascribe that kind of thinking to everything we might as well just assume all Muslims are terrorists and start treating them all as if they were. The hard and fast fact here is that whilst yes, the hate peddlers of Gamergate identify themselves as gamers, they are not representative of the whole and it does us all a great injustice to think that.

I know anecdotes don’t mean much in the larger scale of things but I’ve always tried to be inclusive of women in the games I play with them along with supporting titles that feature strong female characters as leads. I had a look through my reviews of this year and whilst, yes, they’re primarily filled with lead male protagonists a good half of them allowed you to choose your gender with half a dozen or so featuring what I’d consider a well written female lead. However if you formed your opinion of me based on the fact that I’m an (almost) 30 year old white male who spends an inordinate amount of time playing games and all you had was the Gamergate controversy to go on you’d figure I’m just another fucking misogynist hellbent on ensuring the female race stays out of my games.

Just…fucking no, that’s not me at all.

I want to do my part to stop this kind of shit from happening but there are some larger conversations I want to continue in spite of the hate. Hell I don’t think it’s too much to ask, I consulted with my journo friends when I first started getting offered game copies for reviewing and got great lessons on full disclosure, but it seems like maybe now isn’t the right time. What needs to happen now is for everyone to put a bullet in the Gamergate tag and then anyone who brandishes afterwards can be rightly labelled the peddler of hate that they are. Then, once it’s dead and buried, we can resurrect the conversation about journalistic ethics without the bullshit. I have no fucking idea if that will work or not, it probably won’t, but one thing is clear, everything about Gamergate needs to die right fucking now.