It was going to happen eventually, I suppose. While debate over whether the ‘Quinngate’ scandal is about misogynistic gamers or a breach of ethics continues to tally up casualties across the internet, Anita Sarkeesian, a self-proclaimed expert on feminism in video games, has released a new video in her highly controversial ‘Tropes vs Women in Video Games’ series which was funded through Kickstarter. Naturally the response has been a firestorm on its own, fed by the flames of the bigger fire burning down the internet, with many sites simply reporting the story (such as our own Erwin Murillo), or blindly rushing to her defence against the thousands of fat slobbish gamers who all apparently hate her because of what she is rather than what she says. Now don’t get me wrong. Death threats, threats of rape, and all the other abuse that has forced Anita out of her home is utterly disgusting and the individuals responsible should be punished to the full extent of the law. The problem with all of this is how poorly it’s been reported. Examples of abuse from a minority of terrible people are being cherry picked, and blown out of proportion to represent the majority of gamers at fault, by the only people who profit directly from all of this- websites like Kotaku, Polygon, Huff Post, Motherboard, and so on. People are misreporting on the foul actions of a few as the majority, fanning more flames. Another big problem I have, is that much of what Anita says is the same sort of things that those same journalists been attacking for years as harmful to the industry, with the exact same amount of vitriol and hatred as the abusive minority. It seems that hypocrisy is a sacrifice that professional journalists are willing to bite in the name of revenue.
What am I talking about? How about this blast from the past. In 1997, a Floridian lawyer named Jack Thompson entered into the videogame industry. From Doom to Grand Theft Auto IV, Thompson has been vocal against violence in games, often misrepresenting gameplay segments, or going out of his way to link games to crimes committed in real life. This cost him his career, and he was officially permanently thrown out of the courts in 2008 for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants. During his infamy, he was attacked by gaming press and gamers alike, who had no problems with attacking his personality or his personal life. Never did they stop trying to put an end to his career, a wish they eventually got.
Which brings us to Anita Sarkeesian. Like Jack Thompson, Anita makes a career out of heavily criticising the hobby, mimicking Jack Thompson’s tried and tested tactic of misrepresenting games to attract attention to her argument. Famous targets include Hitman Absolution and Watch_Dogs, criticised for featuring segments in the game where you infiltrate a strip club and slave auction respectively, despite the fact you’re there to put a stop to the villainous ownership. It isn’t difficult to see where the similarities between the two critics start to surface. Sarkeesian has also flaunted with more controversy in the past, after she was discovered to have been lying about her industry experience in interviews and on her kickstarter page, and suffered claims that she’s thrown out the regular show schedule promised on her page in favour producing only three episodes a year to fund a lavish lifestyle of luxury. To top it off, there’s even claims that the footage she uses in videos was stolen from various long players with permission. There’s a very real discussion to be had about Anita and the quality of her work, but it’s getting buried in the mud being thrown both ways, just like the overnight sensation Zoe Quinn.
Where am I going with all of this? I suppose it irritates me that none of this information is widespread, or well known, scrubbed even from Anita’s Wikipedia page. Ask anyone why Anita Sarkeesian is not liked by gamers, and they’d be more than happy to tell you that it’s because she’s a woman, and there’s nothing else to it. The blame for such misinformation lies solely on the heads of the mainstream publications, who bred such an overly defensive and hateful culture during the rise and fall of Jack Thompson to start with, only to throw in 100% support of a similar figure while demonising any criticism, no matter how level headed. This has effectively created a new generation of readers that are directly opposed to those who grew up encouraged to hate figures like these, leading to the firestorm tearing the medium apart that you see today. In recent years major publications have been accused of turning their backs on the community that they used to interact with, and I can find no better example of such turn-face hypocrisy than this. Witch hunts on both sides of the spectrum need to cool their jets and come to a middle ground, but as events unfold and continue to degrade it becomes more apparent who the real villain in all of this is.
Here’s a hint, it’s the people reporting it.
