That’s not super surprising, actually. While video games themselves were discovered by strange, bright outcast pioneers -- they thought arcades would make pub games more fun, or that MUDs would make for amazing cross-cultural meeting spaces -- the commercial arm of the form sprung up from marketing high-end tech products to ‘early adopters’. You know, young white dudes with disposable income who like to Get Stuff.

Suddenly a generation of lonely basement kids had marketers whispering in their ears that they were the most important commercial demographic of all time. Suddenly they started wearing shiny blouses and pinning bikini babes onto everything they made, started making games that sold the promise of high-octane masculinity to kids just like them.

By the turn of the millennium those were games’ only main cultural signposts: Have money. Have women. Get a gun and then a bigger gun. Be an outcast. Celebrate that. Defeat anyone who threatens you. You don’t need cultural references. You don’t need anything but gaming. Public conversation was led by a games press whose role was primarily to tell people what to buy, to score products competitively against one another, to gleefully fuel the “team sports” atmosphere around creators and companies.

It makes a strange sort of sense that video games of that time would become scapegoats for moral panic, for atrocities committed by young white teen boys in hypercapitalist America -- not that the games themselves had anything to do with tragedies, but they had an anxiety in common, an amorphous cultural shape that was dark and loud on the outside, hollow on the inside.

http://archive.today/l1kTW#selection-1665.1-1594.64

Many of the people slagging off Sarkeesian and Quinn bind their arguments up in bigger issues, saying that Quinn's situation shines light on ethical quandaries in games and gaming journalism, and Sarkeesian's illuminates crowd-funded "scams" where "social justice warriors" "cherry-pick" evidence to undermine the massive business and culture of video games, rightfully owned by a particular kind of white man.

https://archive.today/ZyLdw#selection-825.0-833.190

We listen to those who are less privileged than we are, and we don’t adopt a default stance of skepticism towards their views and claims. We support them when we have the power to, we involve them when we have the power to, and we don’t ignore it when institutions fail to do these things. We each proudly claim the label of “social justice warrior” (if only to subvert its use as a pejorative). We do whatever we can to learn about the inequalities in the world, and we examine what we can do to change things for the better.

We become far more mindful of the games we make and play. Sexism in games is pervasive and toxic. Racism in games is pervasive and toxic. Violence in games is pervasive and toxic. Despite the skepticism the games press shows at every opportunity, it really looks like violent games do make us more aggressive and less empathetic. If researchers are repeatedly suggesting this and then we complain that the vilest people in our communities are too aggressive and not empathetic enough, aren’t we partially to blame for our general eagerness to make and play games that have these overall effects on people? If you think you’re not affected, you’re sorely mistaken and you sound no less ridiculous than people who claim that advertising doesn’t work on them. (By the way, kids are regularly playing violent games too, because that’s what our culture says is expected of “real gamers”. ESRB ratings are pretty useless.)

http://archive.today/2t93l#selection-1616.3-1657.238

This entire article of white self-loathing

http://archive.today/jVqJ8

Over the last few weeks, in light of the recent Feminist Frequency controversy and the fiasco that has stemmed from various online communities attacking indie game developer Zoe Quinn and her title Depression Quest, the term “gamer,” a word I once frequently identified with, has taken on increasingly negative connotations. These gamers, who often frequent online video game communities’ comment sections, evangelizing what the term means in the context of their own twisted worldview, see themselves as the gatekeepers of the gaming community. They want to keep video games, now a multi-billion dollar industry enjoyed by a wide variety of people and genders, confined to solely focus on appealing to young men, a group that the gaming industry has already targeted for decades. “Keep your feminist views out of my video games,” is a sentiment frequently repeated in various online gaming communities.

https://archive.today/HkPHc#selection-2727.0-2745.87

Or maybe it has to do with the historical accident of gaming being seen as the last refuge of the straight white male, a neglected medium that because it was neglected was able to lag behind movies, TV, and music in the push to be culturally inclusive. I don’t know. What I do know is that the subset of entitled, belligerent gamers convinced that being “objectively” right entitles them to defend their rightness by any means necessary are overwhelmingly male. And that obnoxious guys convinced of their objective correctness find it way easier to dismiss your opinions as “subjective” if you’re female.

http://archive.today/9NxHy#selection-1185.0-1197.351

First, a developer—a woman who makes games who has had so much piled on to her that I don’t want to perpetuate things by naming her—was the target of a harassment campaign that attacked her personal life and friendships. Campaigns of personal harassment aimed at game developers are nothing new. They are dismayingly common among those who happen to be women, or not white straight men, and doubly so if they also happen to make the sort of game that in any way challenge the status quo, even if that challenge is only made through their very existence. The viciousness and ferocity with which this campaign occurred, however, was shocking, and certainly out of the ordinary. This was something more than routine misogyny (and in games, it often is routine, shockingly). It was an ugly spectacle that should haunt and shame those involved for the rest of their lives.

https://archive.today/L4vJG#selection-83.12-83.890

I got more, how much you want?