Yes, GamerGate Is Still Happening

I sometimes hear people talk about how the online movement known as GamerGate has long since run its course, but these claims always confuse me. While I’ve been focusing more on my own projects as of late, I still hear about GamerGate happenings on occasion through the grapevine, and the group would seem to still be fairly active. The latest thing I heard from them was that the creator of a type of VR headsets was getting a several hit pieces written on him because he was dating a Vivian James cosplayer.

So while GamerGate is far from the chaotic fun house that it was in August of 2014, it’s still alive and kicking. KotakuInAction posts still get hundreds, sometimes thousands of upvoats, and posting to Twitter about GamerGate is still a great way of acquiring a large base of followers who RT much of what one says. So long as Twitter users continue to include the #GamerGate hashtag in their tweets, then GamerGate will continue to live on.

I would even go as far as to say that GamerGate will never die, that it will live on as long as Twitter and Reddit continue to exist. And there is a very specific reason why the group will continue on forever, which I will get to a little later. But first I must explain how we came to the current situation in regards to GamerGate.

The first step was to brand anyone who dared discuss the GamerGate controversy in anything beyond mockery as a GamerGator; these ‘Gators’ were then banned from most popular video game discussion platforms. It wasn’t just those who wished to destroy all the gaming blogs and blacklist the SJWs from the industry who were forbidden from posting; even the most vanilla of moderate voices was also cast out. Just look at when Boogie2988 got banned from NeoGaf, when all he really wanted was for everyone to get along with each other again.

The second step was to outgroup those who actually wanted to start a revolution, those who wanted all the corrupt gaming sites out of business, those who wanted an industry-wide practice of refusing to hire SJWs. This was done by tightening the rules for discussion communities on Reddit and 8chan, branding all discussion communities that didn’t follow suit as Not GG™, and making lists of supposed Bad Actors who are to be shunned as Turncoats. This left the True GamerGate Movement™ with only those moderate and neutral observers who had the GG label unwillingly thrust upon them and people who were just in it for the fake internet points.

The third and final step is to force the GamerGate label on any dissenters within the larger gaming community, like when Beamdog blamed GG for “launching a negative review campaign” against Siege of Dragonspear. That way, a gaming company can censor any harsh criticism of their product simply by branding their angry customers as “GamerGate Harassers.” This has the effect of discouraging users from criticising their false narratives, or else they will be forever branded as GamerGators, with all the negative baggage that comes with that label.

The narrative among SJWs is that GamerGate is a harassment group, a new name for one that has always existed since the dawn of gaming, the last dying screeches from the “Traditional Gamer.” There is no way of convincing SJWs otherwise, short of GamerGate discussion platforms censoring all criticism directed at anyone who is not a straight white male, no matter how minor. The only option is to continue mocking and ridiculing SJWs until everyone else can no longer take their rhetoric seriously.

Beyond that, however, the general public will still be shy about being lumped in with GamerGate. We just wanted to play video games, so how can we expect anyone else to feel otherwise? No one wants to shunned from their current gaming communities just to join some stupid “movement.”

Next month, when Watch_Dogs 2 comes out, I’m predicting that criticism against the game will be labeled as GamerGate racism. Anyone who does not like the game will have the GamerGate label thrust upon them and thrown out of their discussion communities. This will be used not only to censor criticism of their game, but also to drive sales of the game from people who follow SJWs.

So you can see why GamerGate will go on forever and ever, like an autistic phoenix that’s reborn every other week. The label is too useful as a deterrent from certain behaviors that video game publishers do not want their customers engaging in. And so long as Twitter lives on, GamerGate will continue to be the whip the gaming industry uses to keep Gamers in line.

The Amazon Kindle Is Not Your Savior

When Amazon opened up their Kindle Direct Publishing platform, they opened the door to millions of writers to finally sell their books on the open market. No longer would they be at the mercy of the Big 5 New York publishers. Now they could write whatever they wished, with no genre or subject matter off limits.

At the moment, Amazon is in a position where they allow pretty much any book to be sold on their service, with the possible exception of those breaking US law. But the problem is, this will likely change the moment that it no longer becomes the most viable business model for them. All it will take is for a group of SJWs bloggers to start a witch hunt against Amazon for being complicit in the sale of books with “problematic” content that is “harmful” to whatever minority group they're championing that day of the week.

That’s not to say that I think we should return to the impossible task of trying to get published by one of the Big 5 New York publishers. The research we’ve done into their staff has shown that they’re fairly incompetent at their jobs, and primarily interested in publishing memoirs by famous people you’ve never heard of. But we need to have a plan for how we’re still going to stay in the business of writing books when Amazon turns against us.

This is one reason why I still really appreciate print books. Even ignoring simple aesthetic appreciation for printed words on a page, or the rumors of NSA spyware on e-reader devices, physical books have one advantage that digital ones do not. No one can take away your physical books, short of breaking into your home, stealing them, and setting them on fire in the street. Also, the burning of printed literature has been stigmatized in ways which the destruction of digital words has not. If Amazon were to deny the sale of certain books on their platform, there would still be many who insist that such an act is not censorship, that Amazon has every right to refuse certain authors from selling on their platform.

While I wouldn’t agree with the decision to deny the sale of certain books, I wouldn’t want them, as a business, to be forced to sell books which they don’t want to, just like how I also wouldn’t want bakers to be forced to sell cakes which they didn’t want to sell. The issue is that Amazon has, intentionally or not, gotten a big monopoly on the book publishing world. So while one could argue that Amazon deciding not to sell a particular book is not censorship, the negative sales impact of being denied entry onto their platform would still have as strong of an effect.

Besides, I do not want to live in a world in which Amazon deciding not to sell a book can be called censorship in the first place.