Ok, well, quick and dirty. I'm Nick. I'm 26 and a straight white male, progressive-leaning when it comes to politics in general. I have a degree in English, which as you can tell is making all my words extremely valuable. Annnnd I dunno. I'm gonna be a lawyer, actually takin the LSAT here in a couple days. I've been reading up on the whole GG thing during study breaks, actually. Oh, and I've been playing games since I was in the single digits. I don't remember when it started, but I distinctly remember delaying the entire family leaving for vacation because I'd just gotten to Casino Zone on Sonic 2. It's been constant ever since then. Have both PS3 and 360, prefer 360 for games and PS3 for just about everything else. And I'm new here, because I've been a lone gamer (prefer single-player anythings) and nowhere has really felt comfortable other than the Escapist. After this whole thing, I'm sticking with them.
My take on GamerGate has been basically to go the academic route, break it down into pieces and examine both sides, and I've come down (mostly) on the pro-GamersGate side.
You almost HAVE to take an academic view on this, because only by being critically objective are you gonna find anything of use in this whole discussion. My reasons:
Anita: Great points, awful delivery and argument, awful dealing with critique (one of the hallmarks of true academic work). Thus, I see her point but disagree with her overall approach. It's abrasive and dishonest. I'm talking specifically about the Hitman-stripper thing here. No one in the argument seems to understand that it would break any game to make it all-inclusive. That's all that needs to be said. "Yes, Anita, good point. You do realize that games work via mechanics? It's not like strippers are the only NPCs you can kill." End of that discussion. But female tropes? Of course they exist; they exist in all genres, and for both genders. I think a lot of people misunderstood Magic Mike. I took it as objectifying males in the same way that females are usually objectified, and I was kind of offended that I would be compared to Channing Tatum. It made me think about my male privilege. So yes, the points have veracity. She needs to learn how to present an argument though. There are rules.
Zoe: I find it awful that her personal life was used to start this. That said, movements change focus all the time. As far as I can tell, it hasn't been about JUST her for a long time. She's just the match that lit the pile of flammable gasoline-covered things that populate gaming. I just wrote here earlier today that I noticed awhile ago that Official XBOX mag only gave out low scores to really awful games. The average was at least 7 or higher, and I noticed this on my own, just from reading more than one mag. When I first heard about the Zoe thing (3-4 weeks ago), I started looking into it, and yes, the blog post is dirty laundry. Everybody has fucked up relationships, man. But the point of the Kotaku guy kind of got to me. Do I know for sure anything happened? I'll admit, I don't know. But there is evidence (K&L firing) that this kind of stuff is a bigger deal than the industry is making it out to be.
Nepotism: I kind of already covered this, but I wanted to discuss it bigger than just the Zoe thing (because it is bigger, so bringing her back into the convo is kind of pointless at this point). There seemed to be a pretty big circling of the wagons after this stuff came out. I know Reddit didn't look good, but given how the internet gaming community sometimes reacts to women, I can understand that PERHAPS they might have just been censoring vitriol. Understand I'm going into law: "beyond a reasonable doubt" literally means you have to be 90% sure that the truth is exactly what the person arguing says it is (the prosecutor, in court; the accusers, in GamerGate). I do not believe the explanations for censoring are "beyond a reasonable doubt" solid, but I'm willing to let bygones be bygones in the name of more civil discussion.
"Death of the Gamer": Stupid bullshit. I read approximately half of one article, got the point, and moved on. It was no different for me than reading about the new Madden game I don't care about whatsoever. Wah. Stick up for yourselves, gamers! To address the thread, a lot of you start out with stuff like "I don't know, I'm just a regular guy/girl" and then immediately tell us why you're NOT a regular, boring guy or girl. That archery comment was awesome. Gamers don't need approval from the press any more than movies need critics to be good. That said, I can also see how it would be taken as a dick move. I don't think it was intended to be, but hey, authorial intent vs audience interpretation has been a thing since people first started telling stories. To use another analogy, Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange after his wife got raped. The man has written a great deal of novels, but all anyone wants to talk about is Clockwork Orange, so much so that he stopped giving out interviews unless they promised not to mention it. He intended it to be his own inner demons dealing with the rapists (Alex, the main character, is not portrayed with much sympathy even towards the end). And here people kept bringing it up to him over and over again, his wife's rape. We don't get to pick which stories of ours people like or dislike, nor do we get to dictate their reaction after we release it. Because you can't, and that fuels the hoards. They should've just apologized and not fed the trolls. (Actually, I could probably say that about both sides, really).
The movement as a whole: One thing that really irks me about the anti-GG side is that they refuse to move on from things. I don't care about Zoe at all, and I take Anita at face value. Unless you go talk to eggs on Twitter, that seems to be the general consensus. Notice no one here firebombing anyone. Disagreeing is healthy. Harassment, death threats, all that, it's ridiculous, ridiculously out of proportion, and should be condemned. Likewise, the people in power need to realize that there ARE some legitimate arguments here. Painting us all with the broad brush (looking at you, Breitbart-includer, I hate that I've been forced to be on their side, and I don't claim they represent me) hurts the discussion. You incense the intelligent and raise up the rabble. Either way, a hug is much better than a middle finger as we're walking away from each other.
I am pro-GG because I noticed the nepotism before and, as a writer and an intelligent person, I'm in favor of the time of journalism we used to have. Go google "Mencken on the Scopes trial." He basically insults every Christian believer, and yet the way he does it is so eloquent that I'd be hard-pressed (tho I'm not a believer in anything really) to defend against him. In one article, he and another journalist sneak out to a prayer meeting in the woods, and subsequently describe it as an orgy. Because it is.
You know what else is an orgy? Making 7 an average. It's an orgy of goodwill. Mencken goes out of his way to say he doesn't hate these people, just the fact that they're railroading Scopes (he always refers to him as "the infidel Scopes"). You can still be friends with people (Mencken wasn't lynched) and disagree on a great many things. We're all people though, and at the end of the day, we all have to live with ourselves. Everything we do is just an attempt to justify our existence. This got a bit existential rather quick, but that's the thing: if people choose to be gamers, let them. It's how they get through their existence. Some people want to make games. Same: more power to them. Journalists have an obligation to not be objective, as Mencken shows, but at least accurately report what's going on. Look at Yahtzee. I've never heard him ream a game for things that it didn't justly deserve. There's a reason he's so popular. If you're being paid to say things about games that your friends made, you have to keep your objectivity right up in front there. And your friends need to understand that.
There's so much more to this (the influence of big money in gaming, the way ad revenue works, the way the game systems work, the outside influence from the mainstream into gaming), but I've said enough. I don't apologize for the novel, nor for either side, but I think I've explained how I feel about things. But I do regret that women feel unsafe. Again, not sure how much of this is real and how much is biased, but I'm willing to take their word for it. I feel the same way about gamers. Everybody just needs to relax.
Oh, and the best way to deal with trolls is not to feed them. So no, we shouldn't address them. When a child is acting out because you aren't paying attention to him/her at THIS VERY SECOND, do you capitulate to them? No, because you're the adult. This goes for both sides, because both sides are guilty of taking this crap (and it is crap) and blowing it way out of proportion. Harassment should be publicly condemned (this is why I want proof of it - not so I'll believe the women, but so I can know who's responsible for making me and others like me look bad). Trolls should be ignored. This is a college-level discussion, believe it or not. There is no place for only-140-characters critique here. It HAS to be long, because it's complicated.
Side note, as a culture, I really think we need to stop focusing on twitter. Reading off tweets as news? Come on. Like letters in a magazine, except they only pick ones that have little to no subtlety in them, or add next to nothing. Women: if men are harassing you there, please report it, either to twitter or back to us. Letting it stay hidden is what ANONs want. I want to stop the abuse, but we can't stop it if we don't know where it's coming from.