Observations on Gamergate’s Belated Response to #DIGRA2015
Last week I was in Germany for the 2015 DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) Conference. It was a really good conference! Challenging in all the right ways. I’ve already put up the transcript of my presentation here, and I’ll be writing more about the conference at some point in the coming weeks.
Like every contemporary academic conference, DiGRA had a hashtag on twitter, #digra2015. Hashtags are great for conferences. For personal notetaking, for a back-channel of conversations, for figuring out what pub people are meeting up in, and for an imperfect and partial account of what is going on for people who are not in attendance. It also provides a way for non-attendees to mute all the tweets spamming up their timeline from attendees, which is great.
DiGRA has been part of Gamergate’s great big conspiracy web of how decent progressive people are taking over gaming in order to destroy it since the early days. They found some connection between particular researchers who have presented at DiGRA who have affiliations with DARPA and ran with that. It was one of those moments where Gamergate got *so close* to actually touching on one of the many ethical quandaries in videogame culture that critics, journalists, academics, and developers alike have been aware of and discussing for years, but instead of figuring it out it became another part in the great big umbrella web of Institutions Killing Videogames With Feminism.
So it was inevitable that Gamergate was going to find and attempt to damage the hashtag at some point of the conference. The main surprise for everyone was how long it took them. The dates of the conference have been publicly available since late last year, but it wasn’t until the third of a four-day conference that the first gaters started spamming things up. Then they died back down and it wasn’t until a day after the conference ended they started up proper. Torill Elvira Mortensen has already written a blogpost about this which is more in-depth than this one.
Out of morbid curiosity I’ve kept half an eye on it, and it’s amusing seeing them mob around like rabid dogs, seemingly oblivious to the reality that they are hanging out on an already depleted hashtag. But it’s also been vaguely insightful as to some of Gamergate’s internal contradictions that allow them to function at all and I thought I might roughly jot some of those down here based on the tweets I’ve seen. None of these will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Gamergate’s activities, but anyway.
1. Confirmation Before Context
Once GG finally discovered the #digra2015 hashtag, several of them trawled the previous three days of the conference to find photos people had shared of particular slides. As anyone who has seen a presentation knows, what is on the slides is only part of the story, and is there to complement what the speaker is saying. From these individual slides, GG decided what entire talks were about (incorrectly). These tweets were then screenshotted and RT’ed without the context of all the other tweets around them that explained what, exactly, that talk was about.
Here is an example. I posted the original tweet during a great presentation on Youtubers who create glitch videos (like HelixSnake’s terrific Skate 3 glitch videos). The presentation was about how these glitch videos function as a genre of comedy. The slide in question has some points about how glitches can be funny. Gaters popularly misinterpreted this slide as some kind of doublespeak propaganda, as though it was trying to find a way to excuse glitchy games to customers. I saw one tweet share it and question whether the presentation was sponsored by Ubisoft. As you can see in the example, someone replied defensively to me with “This isn’t an excuse to make shit games!”, demonstrating they clearly did not know what the talk was actually about. When I explained, they thanked me for ‘finally’ explaining, as though I am obliged to explained to a mob that rocks up days late what a particular talk is about even though the entire context is there in my other tweets!
If they wanted to know what was actually happening at DiGRA, they could easily read the tweets and find out. They are not interested in what actually happened, but in selectively finding those tweets that, out of context, will reinforce their conspiratorial narratives.
2. Contradictory Opinions on The Humanities
Many of the gater tweets on the hashtag are trying to slanderously persuade those academics who attended DiGRA 2015 that they don’t matter. That ‘we the gamers’ who actually buy games are the ones the industry listens to and no one cares about you academics lol. This was amusing insofar as I don’t know many humanities scholars who think they have some kind of industrial influence (or want it, for that matter).
This was counterbalanced by this anxiety that DiGRA attendees have too much power. I saw a tweet urging #gamedev to listen to gamers and not to academics, as though anyone who uses #gamedev is going to change their game design ideas because of direct influence of some humanities academics.
So at once we have a fear that DiGRA has too much power, and a hatred of this pointless and useless discipline.
You can also connect this to broader anxieties of the humanities as a pointless project of rich lefties who don’t want to go get ‘real jobs’, of course.
It ultimately boils down to the same misunderstanding of the humanities as what undermines the initial conspiracy theories. A misunderstanding of humanity scholars as trying to exert some kind of power over the industry, rather than these scholars off to the side more interested in understanding and documenting culture than changing it in any direct fashion. You don’t write about glitches to excuse them, you write about glitches because people find them funny and that is worth understanding. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
3. All Bandwagon, No Horse.
Eventually, gamergate bigwig Grummz got in on the hashtag. He turned up even later than the other gaters and proceeded to just repeat the same gripes as those other gaters have already said. It’s like he swaggered into an empty lecture theatre and started reciting some stolen jokes to the empty chairs.
Gamergate largely depends on amplification. Noise over substance. Say something loudly so other people here it and say it as well. The truth of it doesn’t really matter. This is how those few tweets with convenient slides get RT’ed so much without the context that explains them. People like Grumz are the megaphones of gamergate and are objectified by their followers as such. Some gaters would have tweeted at Grummz about digra, telling him about these evil feminist academics destroying videogames. They told him what to say, and pointed him to the silly papers (I was one of the first presenters to make my paper publicly available, and as I already have some reputation with the gaters, several read it and passed it around early on. Unsurprisingly, then, one of the first things Grummz complained about was my paper and its silly made up words (that have been used since 1989) and its conceptualisation of the hacker as dominant. He almost requires this secondary definition of sockpuppet, because that is all people like Grummz are. They are not leaders so much as tools used by a mob who just spew out what is shoved in at a slightly louder volume.
You also see the bandwagon jumping if you go and look at the hashtag even now and see gaters jumping in who clearly think the conference is still going! They saw some gaters tweet so they are there tweeting as well while clearly not actually entirely sure what they are angry about.
4. Selective Historicisng
Over a week before DiGRA started, I recommended to attendees to install the ggautoblocker before GG inevitable try to ruin the hashtag. This is an imperfect solution as most twitter apps, when you use the search function, don’t hide blocked accounts. But it is better than nothing.
Then, during the conference, when the first few gater accounts started popping up, I made this recommendation again. This time, some gaters saw this tweet and shared it on KotakuInAction. This was a primer for more gaters that digra2015 existed and that they were censoring gaters by making their own Mentions tab not full of bile. Then the spamming of the hashtag started in earnest (as the conference was winding down).
I saw several gaters respond to the “lol finally” amusement of attendees in the vein of “oh, we’re only here because Brendan suggested the autoblocker”. This is amusing since, a) it is just trying to cover up their own tardiness, and b) it implies that they were happy with not being heard until people made it clear they didn’t want to hear them, so then, like a bunch of toddlers, they made themselves heard.
But it is interesting moreso, I think, as an example of GG’s actually impressive ability to constantly choose where to start history in a way that makes them look like the victims. Here, my recommending of the autoblocker in response to spammers is argued to be the thing that started the spamming, conveniently ignoring that the spamming had already started. The author of the KotakuInAction post blamed me for ‘aggravating’ GG, despite me never using the GG hashtag or saying anything to any member of GG. But hey, it’s my fault because I didn’t act how they want people to act.
You see this selective historicising going all the way back to the early days of GG, such as when they say the ‘Death of the Gamer’ articles are what started GG, despite those articles themselves being a response to the first two weeks of GG’s revoltingness. All their conspiracy theories also depend on this selectivity, of course.
So there are some rough observations on Gamergate’s use of Twitter based on their pretty ineffective trolling of a conference hashtag.
