Okay, somebody's got to take the long view, and since I've been around for a while, I guess it's going to be me.
Back around 1996 or so, Jessica Mulligan started writing a column titled Biting the Hand, which was an industry insider column. Jessica was a rather interesting fellow, and I mean that in the most literal sense possible - she had started as a he and undergone a sex change. So, she had seen the boy's club from the inside, and then from the outside.
A lot of what she wrote about involved gender issues, and she did it at a time when game developers saw nothing wrong with a group trip to a strip club to talk business after a day at GDC. And, the outrage at what she was saying was...well...pretty much non-existent, from what I recall.
Flash forward to about 2000-2002, and I'm writing Garwulf's Corner, which was a computer games issues column. I didn't touch on feminist issues often, but I did touch on them, and once again, the outrage was...non-existent. And I can vouch for that personally. Over the course of the entire run of the column and thousands of letters received (both agreeing and disagreeing with me), I can count on one hand the number of people who became abusive or threatening - and none of them were about anything I had said about sexism.
(And Bolo, if you're talking about the case I THINK you're talking about, I remember and took part in that fight - that was a good one.)
Today, we have internet mobs. Something has changed. The discourse has definitely become more polarized and toxic.
Let me provide an example - we had a bunch of articles about gamers as an identity. Most of them made it clear that they weren't talking about the community as a whole, but instead about a group who were setting themselves above the rest, making value judgements about who or what a "real gamer" was, launching attacks on people who say things they don't like, etc., and pointing out that yes, that is probably on its way out. This was taken as an attack against the entire community, when most of the articles clearly were not and were specific on that count. I've seen this before - it happened in the video game violence debate a few years back (just before and around the time Jack Thompson was disbarred), where any moderate opinion got relegated to one extreme or the other (I got accused at least twice of trying to say that video games cause school shootings, when I was actually specifically debunking the idea).
I'd almost think this is a generational thing. If you haven't guessed, I'm a late Gen-Xer, born in the mid-1970s. We gamers did have a sense of isolation back then (well, in the 1990s - I was too young in 1978 to be a gamer) since everybody had yet to join us, as they would throughout the first decade of the 21st century. But our outlook was very inclusive - we didn't care who you were, how you played, what you played, or why you played - we only cared THAT you played (with exceptions made for fans of Custer's Revenge). When everybody else started playing electronic games, that isolation disappeared, and with it the gamer identity that I had became obsolete (because it was based in part on the isolation). I became just another player (if you ask me, that's actually better, and new gamer identities emerged like the professional gamers, etc.).
So, what's changed? How did we go from "I respectfully disagree" to "ONLINE LYNCH MOB!"?
Well, for one thing, it could be both an attempt to adapt the legacy of the identity that we had while reacting against us at the same time. The "real gamer" today is in many ways the polar opposite of the gamer from the 1990s. The "real gamer" today cares a great deal about who you are, what you play, why you play, etc., and has a very defensive "us vs. them" mentality (and, it does seem a bit weird to me that in the absence of an "us vs. them" in the greater community, they basically created one of their own). So, a criticism of the game gets taken as a criticism of the gamer, even when it is carefully worded not to be.
I also wonder if there's a cultural thing involving high school at play. In Canada, we did have cliques in high school, but there wasn't really any competition involved. Nobody cared what clique you were in, and none of the cliques cared about what any of the others were doing. So, it's easy for somebody like me to take a "live and let live" approach, since that's what I've known all my life. From what I've heard about the United States (particularly after the Columbine shootings), cliques in the U.S. are so important and competition between them is so fierce that if you're in an unpopular clique, you go through HELL. If people are recently out of that, it's easy to hold onto that when you should instead be letting go and enjoying the bigger world.
But, there's also something else. I don't know if it's a generational thing, but back when I went through university in the late '90s, we were proud of the fact that we were very hostile to misogyny, and were chipping away at sexism. If somebody had said around us back then some of the things that were said about Sarkeesian and Quinn now, they would have gotten their ass kicked by everybody in the room. Sometime in the last 15 years, a rape culture emerged with a lot of misogyny (and yes, I know the difference between sexism and misogyny), and I don't have a clue of where it came from. What I do know is that the primary "SJW" targets were the ones dealing with sexism in games and calling it out.
Frankly, the way things have changed disturb the hell out of me. Back when I was writing, it was a civil conversation, regardless of the topic. You could speak and write freely. Hell, I could safely put my email address at the bottom of every single column, so that my readers could write to me directly. Even back during the Jack Thompson violence in video games thing, people flying off the handle seemed to be the exception, rather than the rule. Today there are online lynch mobs. Where the hell did that come from?
I REALLY hope that this particular phase doesn't last very long. I want the freedom of speech without fear, and any topic open for discussion, back. How did it come to pass that this seems unreachable right now?
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