0. Introduction

Wagons are circling now around the narrative of misogyny in gaming. The narrative must survive at all costs. I want to take a survey of some of the articles that have been written since this all started. What are they saying, and what aren’t they saying?

I will always endeavor in this blog to not put words in other people’s mouths, except for humor. But I won’t try very hard. The point of this blog is to try to get you and me to ask questions that show issues to be larger, smaller, or different than the narratives that surround us. I write these in one sitting, as a sort of heavily-edited stream-of-consciousness. Let’s flex our inner child who asks stupid questions because we’re not steeped in the narrative.

Also I’m sure it’s clear I think misogyny in gaming is bullshit, but I hope I never come off that I’m demanding you agree. Wittgenstein noted in On Certainty: “‘I know’ seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression ‘I thought I knew’.” I try very hard not to forget it.

1. Ars Technica

So this happened: The death of the “gamers” and the women who “killed” them. I don’t read a lot of Ars Technica, so I don’t know if they regularly discuss video games, but I have never had the impression of them as a political site nor yet a video game site, more of a techie site, so I was really surprised to see this.  The article leads with the recent “threat” on Anita of Feminist Frequency (some tweets blasted her way) in order to give the reader the impression that “ugly (yet familiar) attitudes and prejudices that remain deeply ingrained in the gaming culture.” Is the author well-versed in “gaming culture”?

The article goes over a little of the Zoe Quinn debacle, highlighting the verbal abuse she’s received, and makes this remark with respect to her alleged actual affair with a journalist at Kotaku: “There is no evidence to support this [quid pro quo] assertion, and the only fact that it’s based on—that Quinn began a relationship with Grayson some time after he quoted her in an article and never published anything about her again—disproves it.” At least we know that the narrative is still out of control. No one is quite sure what the status quo is: is gaming misogynistic, or has gaming culture slipped into the hands of social justice? So we’re at a funny point here where the status quo is assumed to be misogyny, pump that narrative, but the status quo is also assumed to be social justice, and the other side just needs a calm view of these facts to see so. Just root out these last few naysayers. Who are also so numerous as to cause widespread abuse. How does that work? But let’s talk about this “disproof”, which I glossed over the last post.

The allegation is that Zoe more or less slept her way into favorable coverage. The counter is that the sex happened after the article. This disproves quid pro quo? How? I pay for a hotel room after I sleep in it, but I pay for my food at the grocer before I eat it. Nevermind. Because the question you should probably ask isn’t about any specific exchange, but what this relationship implies to people who aren’t Nathan Grayson and Zoe Quinn. The question is: what articles didn’t get written? In “What is Seen and What is Unseen,” the notion of opportunity cost was laid bare and, well, Bastiat said it best: “There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen….

“Suppose that it will cost six francs to repair the damage [of a broken window]. If you mean that the accident gives six francs’ worth of encouragement to the aforesaid industry, I agree. I do not contest it in any way; your reasoning is correct. The glazier will come, do his job, receive six francs, congratulate himself, and bless in his heart the careless child. That is what is seen….

“It is not seen that, since our citizen has spent six francs for one thing, he will not be able to spend them for another.” Opportunity cost is annoying the in the first person because of the immediacy of what happened, versus the dull negative space of what didn’t. But opportunity cost in the third person (we analyze others’ behavior) is really super annoying, because we really can’t know what didn’t happen. Suppose Nathan and Zoe weren’t days away from fucking; what might he have written about?

This is why the quid pro quo doesn’t matter. Those who seek to point it out are confused; those who seek to discredit it are confused. What matters is the next best article that didn’t get written. Which indie gamer missed their chance because they didn’t have a personal connection with him? Unless you suppose that Zoe and Nathan didn’t know each other at all until one of them tripped and their genitals touched (and we know for a fact this didn’t happen from vine video clips and such), then you’ve got to ask yourself not whether this was a quid pro quo, but whether Zoe raised the stakes for Nathan. Did Nathan perceive a benefit to writing about his cohort? Obviously we can’t know it, the soul is a black box. But we can ask the question anyway. Don’t be afraid to ask questions you can’t answer.

If you were an indie dev and you heard about this, would you wonder, “Did I get passed over because she was building up to sex with him?” I would. This is poisonous to the scene. Transparency and independence in journalism is needed exactly because of this. We can’t prove whether there was another article in the works, but we don’t have to: if Zoe Quinn wasn’t there, something else would have been written about. What would it be?

The author of the piece then goes into other allegations, bringing up the actual alleged hacking nonsense (and it is interesting to look at which things the author expects evidence of and which not), conveniently skipping over the alleged hacking nonsense that happened to TFYC (who were “attacked” by Zoe and a twitter army), and launching back into the twitter threats Anita received. Now this timeline is extremely compressed and only selects exactly those things that support the “misogyny” narrative and misses exactly every thing which doesn’t. If you have been following this affair then you know of which I speak; if not, the questions are, “What about the TFYC attacks and hack? What about the internet censorship? What about the DMCA attack?” Good questions, but these all miss the point. It’s a narrative war, not a factual war. The foundations are in question. So when the author makes a dismissive remark about “stereotypical gamers” you have to just click on the name in the byline to see… nothing about gaming.

Let’s not poison the well. Don’t go there. Just ask the question: whose stereotype?

2. Vice

Vice is definitely not a video game website. So it’s neat to see that they picked up on the scandal, with not one but two articles blog posts independent investigations into the scandal.

2.1 The Anti-Feminist Internet Targets ‘Depression Quest’ Game Creator Zoe Quinn

Link.

Well if the title left any doubt, the lead-in makes it clear what the status quo is supposed to be: “Hordes of angry gamers attacking a woman on the Internet, just like any other day in cyberspace, yeah?” The author doesn’t want you to answer that question, by the way.

Most of the article is standard fare for pushing a narrative: 1) assume your side is the status quo 2) use facts to show the other side cannot possibly be right. The trick is to not even make it seem like you did (1) in the first place. The author isn’t very good at it.

One interesting bit in this article is that the author took the absolute bare minimum of effort to point out that there might be another side to the story, unlike our previous article. “Gamers have been complaining about corruption in video game journalism for years now (googling ‘video game journalism corruption’ yields 870,000 results, to give you an idea) and the Quinn/ Kotaku writer connection was seen as more proof of just how bad video game journalism has gotten.” 870,000 thousand results, eh? As much as this kind of statistics is used and is really bad because we’ve all used search engines and know what this implies, it’s fascinating to see how it is dismissed. Propagandists take note, this is textbook stuff: “Yes, the angry digital horde has taken to calling the lack of news coverage over Quinn’s involvement in the degradation of the video game journalism industry a ‘feminist conspiracy.’ Can you even believe it?” The author doesn’t want you to answer that question, by the way.

Bring up an almost meaningless statistic and then dismiss it by assuming your audience already agrees with your narrative. Part strawman, part appeal to incredulity. You really can’t beat this kind of rhetoric, it’s great. To read this article for content the consumer has to adopt a frame of reference where the narrative is real. Marvelous trick, though it works better in speech because there’s a time factor involved. In text, ehhh, you can take the time to say, “Wait, what?” because the next sentence is waiting on you to get to it, not coming at the cadence of the speaker. Even so, it ups the cognitive work required to read it unless you just give in to the author’s mindset.

How many articles do you think the author wrote about video games? The author doesn’t want you to ask that question, by the way.

2.2 Meet the Female Gamer Mascot Born of Anti-Feminist Internet Drama

Link. She’s adorable.

So, what does the author want us to believe first? “Gamers on 4chan are pouring time and energy into backing a project that sponsors female-created video games. Did they have a crisis of conscience? Not exactly. Their charitable efforts are part of a plan to spite Zoe Quinn, creator of the game Depression Quest.” What a cunning plan they have to crush women in gaming by… oh, hmm.

So, it’s a narrative. Please support women in gaming, but only do it the right way or it doesn’t count. This trick is being tried by Democrats in the US right now against their political opponents. As slatestarcodex put it, “Republicans push for over-the-counter birth control, are informed that their attempts to help women are an evil plot to disguise the fact that they never try to help women.” The article linked to says it so, “Democrats have not embraced the overtures, calling them a confused ploy…” Oh, that party line. (Full disclosure: I vote democrat/libertarian.)

Maybe 4chan members are doing this out of spite. But is there any other reason it may be going on? Maybe they’re also doing it because they don’t mind the way TFYC are going about it, compared to the author of this article pushing the narrative. Maybe something else. Don’t let the author tell you what other people are thinking. How many articles on video games did this author write, by the way?

The author cherry picks some comments and then posts a great, totally unrelated tweet to the entire paragraph about the avatar Vivian James. Bazinga! Almost thought this was reporting for a minute, didn’t you? It was dangerously close to objectivity.

There’s an interesting addendum to this article that’s worth noting: “Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article stated, ‘Gjoni alleged that Quinn traded sex with Grayson in exchange for a positive review of her game.’ This has been changed to convey a more nuanced version of events. Gjoni himself has relayed to VICE that such allegations were never his intent.” Ahh, nuance, the sidearm of propaganda. A great man once said, “What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” I disagree with the second part. I think you can make a lot of really useful noise by just asking questions. (He may have agreed by the time he worked on Philosophical Investigations.)

Here’s a question: does it make you more objective or less objective when you an article about feminism and video game culture if you are interested in feminism but not in video games? Should you listen to a chef review a movie because they sell chicken fingers at the movie theater?

3. The Terrible Misogyny in the Games Industry

Link. Watch out, you’re about to be rused.

When arguing with social justice types, one of the oldest tricks in the book is to substitute symbols. If you’re talking about race, swap ‘white’ for ‘black.’ If you’re talking about sexism, swap ‘male’ for ‘female.’ This is a knockdown argument if you disagree with the social justice aims, and totally ridiculous if you are for it. But buddy I love to see it in action. What can be said at all can be said clearly, and when people get hammered with this watch them hedge and squirm and suddenly the nuances fly.

This article takes a slightly different approach because instead of hypotheticals, it substitutes actual comments made about two actual people. That carries a bit more weight than syntactic substitution.

Unfortunately the article makes the tragic error inherent in the syntactic substitution ruse: it still accepts the underlying existence of a problem. Note, “Or could it be true that men also get a great deal of abuse…? And further they may suffer emotional distress over such abuse?” So the feminists are right, they’re just not inclusive enough? What about the men?

The world is not particularly nice place. I sympathize, living in the world, too. And boy do I agree that it would be a nicer place if we could all just get along. The problem is that everyone I know who is right always agrees with me. I don’t really care about “men’s problems,” I think that’s made up. Inequality under the law is real, but that doesn’t make the problems inherently male, it makes them accidentally male. And most of the shit that happens is like this, accidentally about “us,” whatever group we are identifying with, which is why identity politics is so goddamn poisonous. At best it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, where one perceives oneself to be under attack, and so shacks up with others who feel the same. Next thing you know twitter is a tower defense game. And I’m supposed to believe that there’s a problem in gaming because people get upset when they’re attacked? That’s not a problem in gaming. People are attacked all the time. Is it a problem in politics that political views are attacked? Do we just need gene therapy and eugenics to weed out this terrible aspect of our nature?

When the problem you’re resting your argument on is something like human nature or laws of physics then your solution can only be a dystopia. You buy a car, and you want to make sure you won’t be busted if you get in an accident, so you buy insurance; how much are you willing to pay to protect this interest? —could you beggar yourself in this quest if you didn’t think first? You want to help poor people in need so you start a welfare program, but now there are abusers; how much money do you want to spend (taking away from the people you want to help) in order to root out these abusers? —could you reduce welfare to nothing at all by rooting out every little problem? You don’t like school shootings so you want to ban guns; how much poverty will you create by spending tax dollars to enforce this? Will the state with this power conceivably abuse it in some other way?

What will it take to stop people being mean to each other? What are you willing to give up for this?

The social justice warriors we’ve looked at so far aren’t willing to give up anything. They don’t play games, except maybe Bejeweled on their phone or something now that Tetris isn’t popular anymore. They’re not in “gaming culture” whatever that’s supposed to be. They’re not paying any price at all. They have no interest in video games whatsoever. And don’t let Anita fool you, she jumped onto video games but she’s not actually a gamer, there’s video of her saying so before she became internet famous. They’re gambling with your hobby and expect you to pay all the cost, and they’re leveraging universal human shittiness as an excuse to not have fantasy “misogyny.”

However, with that out of the way, the rest of the post tries to do something really fantastic, like put some numbers to things to give us a sense of scale. Estimation is probably the number one least-used skill in the human brain and the author of this post is a goddamn saint for trying. The number ends up somewhere around 100 people needed to explain this horrible abuse of Anita. I’d guess this is off by an order of magnitude when you count twitter, youtube, insults about her in forums but not directed to her, and so on, but not much more. What are the chances that these same people troll SJWs all over the place, not just Anita? I don’t know about you, but people I know don’t dislike just Boehner, they don’t attack just his opinion, they attack whatever group they put him in—all of them.

Unfortunately it’s back to the syntactic switch trick afterwards, why doesn’t Anita stand up for Call of Duty developers and so on. Well why would she? She doesn’t like video games, why would she care about developers? Anita hasn’t come out and said “I’m a feminist and I believe X, Y, Z about men and women.” There’s not even nuanced hypocrisy here, it’s totally fabricated hypocrisy. She’s under no obligation to address women and men equally.

I don’t like the syntactic switch.

The author later says, “Am I saying that Anita makes no valid points, or highlights no legitimate causes for concern? Not at all, there are a few games that go too far, and there are many ways we could improve things.” I’ll say it: Anita makes no valid points and highlights no legitimate causes for concern. She has a sequence of platitudes, images, and narratives, and nothing else.

Here’s a question: how did gaming become misogynistic? Let’s assume for the sake of argument that there’s a dangerously worrying trend of misogyny in gaming. Ok. What issue do you want addressed: 1) here’s another example of slut-corpses; 2) here’s where it came from and why. Space Invaders wasn’t misogyny, right? Oh, Ms Pac-Man…

You see, it’s really hard to make this case without exposing what you consider misogyny. When you put corpses on a screen, it’s easy to sidestep people’s brains because dead things are already bad. When you discuss a trope of men rescuing women, it’s not too hard to make the case that this is lazy storytelling. But we’re talking about misogyny now. It’s a bit harder to say that lazy storytelling comes at the expense of women. Are people looking to Donkey Kong for lessons in interpersonal relationships, is that your claim?

Media in a market economy reflects popular culture, and it creates a space where we are given impressions of what it’s ok to talk about. It can inform our impressions of others. Which is socially dangerous: 1) saying gamers are misogynists 2) rescuing Peach from Bowser? Because when you use (2) to say (1) but ignore the fact that you are saying (1) you’re being deceitful with yourself and your audience. You’re saying it’s ok to smear millions of people because of a hypothesis that (2) is itself some kind of smear. Maybe (2) is some kind of smear. How can you say it without saying (1)? I’m not saying it can’t be done. But how would it be done? Anita isn’t doing it. Even if Anita never made such smears herself (though she does), the articles above show loud and clear what message is being heard.

4. In Closing

There is no conclusion. Just don’t let others tell you what to think. Your brain is the last “safe space” you have.