Around 2014 there was a big kerfuffle in the gaming industry. As was revealed, a cabal of journalists were getting together to promote certain games while ignoring or outright blaming others. This lead to a massive outcry within the gaming community that the media within their sector was actively working against them. Not only that, but they were working towards a sinister agenda; a “politically correct” culture where things deemed too risque were outright ostracized and banned. As this problem began to expand outside of gaming, a few well known, pro-free speech figures at the time allied itself with this fledgling game community in order to expand their own voice. This movement became known as the “Alt-Right”.
Of course, the alt-right ended up taking on quite a few more political positions rather than simply “free speech”; however, when I wrote about it back in 2014, it seemed like the so-called “SJW Agenda” was a real, genuine threat. And so, to my high-school sophomore 2smart4you mind, this all seemed to make a lot of sense.
Now that both the world and I have changed a lot, I wanted to go back to some of the points I made in these old pieces to see if I do still believe in what I said.
The first article I made on this was on August 20th, 2014; right around where this movement all began… ironically, coming out of a simple piece of internet drama. Before it was the Alt-Right, it was Gamergate; and before it was Gamergate, it was the “Quinnspiracy”, centering around a very specific case of a game developer by the name of Zoe Quinn who released a (truthfully) awful game by the name of Depression Quest, only to have an ex-boyfriend reveal on launch day that she had been cheating on him with several men, some of whom were in the games journalism industry (quite the launch day, I’d say).
I’d actually say the writing on this article is quite rational and objective. At this point in the story I didn’t really have any bias either way, and so I pretty much just dumped a shit-load of evidence (which unfortunately most of is now deadlinked) that seemed to point out that Quinn was in fact having multiple relationships and was in fact using her contacts to censor any discussion on the topic. To this day I don’t believe anyone involved in this catalyst event really disagrees with the fact that Zoe Quinn was in fact utilizing her power to discredit people who were speaking negatively of her.
And then we get to Part II written about a month later on September 19th. By this point the Quinnspiracy has graduated formally into GamerGate, and things have gotten a bit… involved. Firstly, in the article I praise Milo Yiannopoulos and Breitbart for “brilliant journalism”, which I wouldn’t be caught dead doing today. From there, we get more (mostly deadlinked) evidence… though this time around things feel a lot more fickle. While to this day I find the images from GameJournoPros to be pretty fishy, most of the bad apples here were people no one really liked in the first place, and the majority of the content appeared to just be general discussion of the game journalism industry. The 4chan infographic I post in the article also isn’t quite the most stellar proof of anything suspicious going on.
When it comes down to the argument that Gamergate was inherently misogynistic, I really don’t believe that to be true; especially in the early days. Perhaps after the movement got co-opted by Breitbart and Co. things could have spiraled downhill, but I know that I personally (as well as many others who were involved in the movement around this time) didn’t have any hate against women or other minorities within gaming and simply believed that a wider censorship was going on (which had already been proven with the Quinnspiracy).
This point comes to a head in my Part III, where I end up recognizing that the movement has spiraled out of control, and thus I excuse myself from talking about it further. In the article I describe how the movement became a catfight (it really was), which was probably how it was able to be co-opted into the wider Alt-Right movement. Of course, while this was my last article for Gamergate, it was not my last article that delved upon Gamergate’s critical touchpoints. Five months after I wrote the final Gamergate article, I wrote “On Equality” Part 1 and Part 2, which stray away from censorship this time to instead face the wider issue of social justice.
In “On Equality”, I’m mostly complaining about the shoving of diversity into entertainment as well as a little bit of affirmative action put in for good measure. This is a bit of a tricky subject, cause there’s nothing really wrong with what the article says; in fact, it really doesn’t say that much at all. It’s very diplomatically written, but at the same time I don’t think there’s been any sophisticated evidence that affirmative action or diversity in entertainment have a negative effect or is otherwise creating more social conflict.
I also mention the term “Radical Feminism” for the first time (a word I use to diplomatically address SJWs), which I bring back in my next social-justice-related piece called Opposing Fronts. This is probably the worst piece of the bunch. First of all, it’s written in a very condescending tone, yet the point it’s getting across is very basic: “there are communication issues among what counts as feminism”. To be honest, I don’t even think I knew what feminism was at this point. Second of all, the article is very clearly an “attack on the SJWs” and rather just throws in the Men’s Rights section at the very end to keep things balanced. The simple fact is that this article is disingenuous and really didn’t need to be made. Yes, there are crazies out there in the world, but as I write in the article, they’re a very small minority. Did this even need to be written?
At this point, I don’t write about these subjects for another year, until the Hollywood Reporter Ghostbusters remake article comes out. To be fair, this HWR article was real fuckin’ dumb, and I don’t think anyone really disagreed with me on this point. This article by myself was much of an improvement from Opposing Fronts; here, I called out the argument directly, and didn’t shy away from my opinion with some other diplomatic garbage (although some of the article lacked evidence to the points it was trying to make). It’s also worth noting that by this point in time, the Gamergate movement was fully absorbed into the Alt-Right; so I do take some time in this article to address this and bash their new anti-minority slants (which were now truly defined and obvious).
My last article taking the side of the “intellectual dark web” was actually written only two years ago, back when I was still doing Monday Chats. The article was in response to Google’s Ideological Echo, the big pastebin that caused all this to become quite a stir yet again (ironic that I called the example of the diversity problem in my On Equality series “The Google Dilemma”). I’m not really sure why I felt the need to make a response to all these things, but I suppose I did it anyway. I’m surprised this is the most recent one of the bunch, since this is actually the one I least agree with. While my writing here is god, I go way easier on Damore than I would have now. While there are obviously biological differences between the sexes, all the ones that Damore brings up a pure pseudo-science. And while certainly there is issues with subverting honest debate (as we’ve mentioned before), the overall pastebin seems to be more orientated towards purposely starting drama and giving some fire for the Alt-Right.
So, in conclusion, I can still back up most of what I said about censorship and debate but not much about the post-gamergate alt-right ideologies. A lot of these posts were very much wishy-washy as well, which is another thing I would rather avoid in newer posts.
