What happened was that gamers collectively came to understand that games have a political dimension. Many gamers previously thought and were proud of understanding that games were apolitical - you could sit down with George W. Bush and play a game of Minecraft just as easily as you could with your twin. Games were viewed as an escape from politics, as enabling a glimpse into a better, purer, world than our own. It was like two enemy soldiers entering a cathedral together for sanctuary from the war.
GamerGate wasn't a cause of this understanding but an outcome of it. The rage of GamerGate is not derived from the "artsy" developers who make games they aren't interested in nor the rising threat of progressivism with Anita Sarkeesian as figurehead, but the fact that the cumulative weight of these forces broke through the belief in games as an apolitical force that could make the world a more innocent place.
It is something that has changed inside GamerGaters themselves that is causing their rage. They believe they've lost that missionary zeal, that belief IN games as a force for good, and find progressivism to blame for changing them. When they read "Gamers are dead", they worry that they have died as the zealous believers IN games that they used to be. They've lost their religion and thus much of the will to post about games.
There's a song lyric written by Stephen Stills - "Nobody's right, if everybody's wrong". When gamers believed games were apolitical, there was nothing to be wrong about. We "shut up and gamed", as it were, no matter our background, our politics, our religion.
But then we decided we didn't want to shut up, and between game sessions we wanted to grow games into something more, more mature and meaningful and also more political. We wanted to understand the role of games in the world, their meaning. We wanted to converge games WITH the real world instead of them being a refuge from it. And so we lost not our goodness or innocence, but our willingness for games to transform the world *from the outside*. It wasn't so much games that went mainstream as gamers that went mainstream. The Outsider Nerd shunned by society was dead.
But *this* process, this understanding of the role of games in the world, this convergence of the virtual and real worlds, means we need to squabble and debate about games just as people do every other meaningful topic in the world. Games are no longer special. Games are a political entity. Games are real.
GamerGate wasn't a cause of this understanding but an outcome of it. The rage of GamerGate is not derived from the "artsy" developers who make games they aren't interested in nor the rising threat of progressivism with Anita Sarkeesian as figurehead, but the fact that the cumulative weight of these forces broke through the belief in games as an apolitical force that could make the world a more innocent place.
It is something that has changed inside GamerGaters themselves that is causing their rage. They believe they've lost that missionary zeal, that belief IN games as a force for good, and find progressivism to blame for changing them. When they read "Gamers are dead", they worry that they have died as the zealous believers IN games that they used to be. They've lost their religion and thus much of the will to post about games.
There's a song lyric written by Stephen Stills - "Nobody's right, if everybody's wrong". When gamers believed games were apolitical, there was nothing to be wrong about. We "shut up and gamed", as it were, no matter our background, our politics, our religion.
But then we decided we didn't want to shut up, and between game sessions we wanted to grow games into something more, more mature and meaningful and also more political. We wanted to understand the role of games in the world, their meaning. We wanted to converge games WITH the real world instead of them being a refuge from it. And so we lost not our goodness or innocence, but our willingness for games to transform the world *from the outside*. It wasn't so much games that went mainstream as gamers that went mainstream. The Outsider Nerd shunned by society was dead.
But *this* process, this understanding of the role of games in the world, this convergence of the virtual and real worlds, means we need to squabble and debate about games just as people do every other meaningful topic in the world. Games are no longer special. Games are a political entity. Games are real.
