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Earlier this week, the Supernatural actress Felicia Day posted a thoughtful piece about how her love of video games was being affected by GamerGate, and her fear of being “doxxed” - having her personal information released online – for speaking up. And yes, shortly afterwards, what was claimed to be her home and personal email addresses were posted in a comment on her blog.
If you don’t play games, you’re in a minority. According to a study for the Internet Advertising Bureau, there are now 33.5 million gamers in Britain, equivalent to 69 per cent of people who use the internet. New platforms like mobile and tablet, not to mention vast advertising budgets, have all led to a sharp increase in people playing games, including significant numbers of women. But mention games at the moment, especially online, and you’ll get caught up in the fringes of an almightily unpleasant maelstrom.
More than half of all British players are now female – 52 per cent compared to 49 per cent three years ago. They aren’t just playing games on their phones either: 56 per cent of women polled have played on a console such as Xbox or PlayStation, and 47 per cent had played a disc-based game in the last six months.
Games commentators are reappraising the identity of people playing games, and the representation of women in big-name titles. As a consequence, things are evolving. The incredibly popular Call of Duty franchise now allows you to customise your soldier character as female, while in 2013’s reboot of Tomb Raider, the famously chest-heavy Lara Croft was reimagined with a more realistic outline.
This has led a section of male players who identify as “core gamers” in the classic sense – own next-generation consoles, play online multiplayer shoot-’em-ups, wouldn’t touch brightly-coloured mobile games like Candy Crush with a barge pole – to feel like their club is being picked on.
On the one hand, they really shouldn’t be. Blockbuster games with huge budgets are still going great guns. On the other, as a more diverse audience embraces gaming, the industry is hearing more of those annoying questions about why male characters do so much fighting, and women don’t get to do much at all.
Games developer Zoe Quinn tried something new with her award-winning 2013 title Depression Quest. It’s a text-only choose your own adventure game which represents a twist on traditional gameplay. For one, it’s not fun – that’s its point. The character you play has untreated, severe depression, and the game leads you through what that feels like. The game has proved helpful both to sufferers and to those who want to find out more about the condition. Over one million people have played it since its launch.
In August this year, Quinn’s ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni published a revenge blog listing men she had allegedly cheated on him with, including games journalists and industry insiders. It was alleged that an affair with Nathan Grayson, a journalist at the website Kotaku, had led to favourable critical treatment of her game. In was later established that Grayson had only written about Quinn once, before they started a relationship, and had never reviewed Depression Quest.
This did nothing to faze Quinn’s detractors, who took it as evidence of a conspiracy. Users from the messageboards Reddit – a sprawling series of communities – and 4chan – largely the trolls in the internet’s basement – hurled false accusations that Quinn exchanged sex for reviews. They proceeded to dox Quinn (which they later said she had done herself, by artificially creating screengrabs, and using “sockpuppets”(fake social media profiles used by an individual to tweet or post about their message). If you asked a GamerGate supporter what was happening, they would tell you it was about ethics in journalism. Instead, it became a war against Zoe Quinn.
GamerGate has since swelled into an unwieldy movement with no apparent leaders, mission statement, or aims beyond calling out “social justice warriors” – a term for those who want to see more diversity in gaming, as the GamerGaters see it, at the expense of quality. As New York magazine's Jesse Singal said this week, “If your movement requires journalists to carefully parse [website threads] to understand it, it gets an F- in the PR department.”
A protest focused on examining relationships between games publishers and the press might have had merit, but GamerGate was soon overwhelmed by anti-female sentiment. Doxxing attacks on Quinn increased, as well as trolling and abuse, which extended to Quinn’s family.
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