As an event that now defines gender relations in the video gaming community, and in turn serves as a requisite backdrop for related research, 2014âs #GamerGate controversy will be familiar to many readers of this book. However, to briefly recapitulate: the scandal began when Eron Gjoni, the dejected ex-boyfriend of female âindieâ game designer, Zoe Quinn, posted a defamatory blog about the messy end of their relationship. Quinn, Gjoni claimed, had slept with Kotaku video gaming website journalist, Nathan Grayson, who subsequently published a favourable review of Quinnâs video game, Depression Quest. Minimalist and affecting, and not really intended to âentertainâ as such, Depression Quest is representative of a movement in game design towards more philosophical, and less hypermasculine, gaming experiences. The game had indeed garnered some favourable reviews (e.g. Smith 2013; Hernandez 2013), along with considerable backlash from a vocal contingent of mostly male gamers who felt that it represented a âsocial justice warriorâ politicisation of their hobby (Parkin 2014).
Via an updated blog, Gjoni slyly revised his sexist accusation of improprietyâGrayson had not written a review of Depression Questâbut not before the original âZoe Blogâ had been reposted on 4chan, an online forum notorious for being an unmoderated safe-haven for hackers, trolls and general purveyors of hate speech. While the reposting of the blog was done so under the guise of concerns around âjournalistic ethicsâ, it provoked an online âswarmâ of protest, hate and gendered harassment towards Quinn. Furthermore, Quinn did not remain the sole focus of the gendered vitriol: another prominent female member of the gaming community, the feminist YouTube gaming critic, Anita Sarkeesian, also came under fire, along with anyone else who sought to highlight the discriminatory nature of Quinnâs treatment. Quinn and Sarkeesian appeared to represent a threat to the gaming communityâs established masculine order, and both women remain to this day in the crosshairs of those who aggressively oppose video gamingâs changing sociocultural landscape. This core story of backlash to gendered disruption is a familiar one, and part of the wider social tensions and polarisation currently facing Western societies. Indeed, to quote Muriel and Crawford (2018: 2), âwe can certainly shed new light on important aspects of contemporary society through the study of video game cultureâ.
This latter point is an important one with which to start this discussion of gender, masculinity and video games: as a defining event within the gaming community, #GamerGate must also be understood as an expression of broader social relations in English-speaking countries, and how they are presently in flux. Indeed, seeking to understand the scandal as something that occurred âover thereâ in the gaming community, with âthoseâ gamers as victims and culprits, is myopic at best. To be sure, there are unique characteristics to the gaming community, and to forms of communication mediated by new media technologies, that helped shape #GamerGate, but the core tensions underpinning this âteaching momentâ (Mortensen 2018: 790) follow broader patterns. In this sense, the scandal should be understood as evidence of not just how gender inequalities persist into the twenty-first century, but also how these inequalities are being increasingly highlighted and contested. Put simply, the #GamerGate controversy evidences both social continuity and social change, despite a preponderant focus on the former.
Like so much social phenomena, there were also complexities to #GamerGate that, in the justifiable name of maintaining focus on the issue of harassment, remain under-acknowledged in both journalism and scholarship. First, the defamatory blog about Quinn came on the back of longstanding and legitimate concerns over the increasingly cosy relationship between gaming journalism outlets and studios/publishers. This concern for ethics in gaming journalism had reached another apex some years earlier, in a somewhat reverse manner, when journalist for Gamespot, the highly respected Jeff Gerstmann, was fired from his position soon after giving an unfavourable review to Kane and Lynch: a game widely acknowledged as mediocre and for which Gamespot had received considerable amounts of money to promote (Plunkett 2012). Following this line of questionable gaming journalism ethics, some good faith actors found themselves drawn in to the side of those who were wronglyâand in many cases, disingenuouslyâframing the Quinn and Grayson case in similar terms (Singal 2014; Young 2015; Mortensen 2018). This occurred despite the claims of impropriety being both false and, in any case, retracted by Grayson. There had also for some time been a growing âpowder kegâ divide in the community between, on the one hand, socially progressive industry professionals, and the gamers who shared their views; and, on the other, that abovementioned contingent of mostly male gamers who felt threatened by the many ways in which their once-niche hobby was becoming more mainstream.1 This divide between a self-styled âhardcoreâ and an allegedly out-of-touch âeliteâ remains apparent in this communityâa divide which, again, follows broader social patterns.
One thing is for certain: as a leisure pursuit and subculture, video gaming has long been a masculinised social space. Indeed, while increasing numbers of girls and women now engage in gaming, boys and men remain the predominant social actors in shaping discourseâboth in virtual gaming spaces and on related social media. Mirroring other historically masculinised cultural spaces, such as those associated with various sporting codes, the gaming community has been identified in numerous studies as âan unpleasant or openly hostile space for femalesâ (Ratan et al. 2015: 440) in which general and sexual harassment is highly prevalent. Indeed, due in part to the breadth of media attention that #GamerGate elicited, this new media community has come to be viewed as a prime case study in broader concerns around gendered forms of harassment across the internet. However, there is also underexamined evidence of a growing movement in the community towards the promotion of more socially progressive values and attitudes (e.g. Nugent 2015; Thomsen 2015).
In this book, we draw on data from Redditâs subreddit, r/gaming, in 2016â2017âthe aftermath of #GamerGateâin order to examine the extent to which the gaming community is an increasingly âcontestedâ space: one in which the gendered marginalisation highlighted by an emerging body of research finds itself confronted by under-researched and under-theorised shifts towards greater inclusivity. The purpose here is not to minimise the significance of the former; on the contrary, we believe that, by highlighting evidence of sociopositive counter forcesâand ideological diversity, more generallyâthe hegemonic normative assumptions that encourage gendered marginalisation/harassment will be further undermined. Put simply, if we seek to instigate social change in this space (or anywhere), it helps to have a clear-eyed sense of where it is already occurring, in what ways, and then how it might be harnessed. Much has been written about #GamerGate as an exemplification of the toxicity that is seen to plague the gaming community. What ultimately distinguishes this book is its focus on #GamerGateâs ongoing aftermath, and how, in very real and substantial ways, the scandal may have inadvertently marked a sociopositive turning point.
Idle Hands, (Folk) Devilâs Playthings
Before proceeding, there is a broader and, again, under-acknowledged sociohistorical context to our topic that is important to outline. Ever since its popular uptake in the 1980s, video gaming, and the boys and men who engage in the hobby, have been the focus of an arguably free-floating societal anxiety that has attached itself to a range of distinct issues. First, there were the 1970s and 1980sâ concerns around delinquency in the video arcadesâan extension of preceding concerns around pinball arcadesâthat were grounded in longstanding and discriminatory fears over the leisure activities of working-class male youth (Karlsen 2015). Before home computers and consoles were able to match the technological capabilities of the video game arcade cabinet, the hobby frequently played out in these public spaces and, like the dance halls of the early 1900s, they were widely imagined by greater society in gendered moral panic terms, as proverbial âdens of sinâ (Pierson 2011: 24).
With the technological advances of both home computers and gaming consoles in the 1990s, gaming moved chiefly and irrevocably from the public sphere to the private, and the focus of anxiety in turn became more individual-psychologicalâon the âeffectsâ of the hobby. Here, male violence emerged as the central issue: specifically, the extent to which violence in games elicits violent inclinations and actions in male gamersâ real-world engagements. While the link has always seemed âcommon senseâ to some, decades of research have led to no definitive conclusions (see e.g. Dill and Dill (1998) for an overview research in the 1990s). Yet, clear echoes remain here of other âeffectsâ-based moral panics focused on a procession of earlier new media forms: for example, comic books and rockânâroll in the 1950sâ1960s (Cohen 2002), and heavy metal music (Gay 2000) and Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970sâ1980s (Laycock 2015). Alongside the concerns over gender relations we examine in this book, video game addiction represents the other contemporary cause cĂŠlèbre (e.g. Rettner 2019). Beyond the scope of our study, this issue remains open to debate but, as sociologists, we would argue that the historical context we outline should be an integral part of any understanding of it.
In the case of gendered marginalisation and harassment, the evidence is undoubtedly much clearer than that which has ever been offered for the claims made about video gaming and delinquency, violence or addiction. In other words, there is no question that gender inequality remains a significant issue in this historically male-dominated space, and that overt expressions of sexism and gendered harassment do occur with regularity (Massanari 2015; Salter and Blodgett 2017). However, as an intersecting factor, it is imperative to reflect on the genealogy of broader societal anxiety that has long shaped characterisations of this new media for...