I like Oliver Campbell. As far as #GamerGaters go, he’s a moderate, reasonable guy, and he comes at the topic of ethics in games journalism with relative experience and logic for a consumer movement that frequently has no idea what ethical journalism looks like. That being said, every now and then, he says something extremely silly.
Once this situation rolls into the holidays, and OTHER businesses start getting affected? Heads will metaphorically roll.
— Oliver Campbell (@oliverbcampbell) October 28, 2014
Killing Christmas is kind of a favorite fever dream for the far end of GamerGate, with some treating it as some sort of End Boss like event (GamerGaters like game analogies, unsurprisingly). A similar sentiment was echoed by the short-lived Operation Krampus, a cause they abandoned around the time that they realized they’d declared so many media outlets boycotted that Krampus would effectively mean that Game Publishers could only give review copies to Return of Kings.
Anyway, this is just me talking here, but I find Oliver’s future pretty far-fetched. Why?
1) GamerGate is actually small. How small? We don’t know, really, but we have clue. This study is very useful: in three days of tweeting, 38K unique users tweeted something to the hashtag, with more than half of them being retweets, and a huge number of those are from opponents. The upper end of estimates may be the size of TotalBiscuit’s audience, although I’d be shocked if even half of his population cared very deeply about the topic one way or the other – I’d guess probably 10-20K hardcore and the low 6 figures at best. As in, if #GamerGate were a game genre, no major company would touch it, and it would be stuck in Steam Greenlight hell. Keep in mind, it’s so small that the games press can and has been ignoring them nearly altogether unless the MSM shames them into doing otherwise.
By comparison, there are about 22 million next-gen consoles out there. There are 6.7M Steam users online at this very second. Candy Crush had 93M average daily active users last December. Grand Theft Auto V sold 33 million copies — as of last June. Even if you say that hardcore followers are closer to TB’s audience than to the twitter core, GamerGate is still a rounding error in terms of size and scale of what gaming is today.
2) GamerGate is not mad at game developers. Arguably, even in instances where they probably should be, most of the ire is directed at press, not at developers. Also, gamers are historically not very good at staying away from games on principle.
3) Gamers are starving for new games, especially for their next-gen consoles. There are about 22 million next-gen consoles out there, but as always the case for year one, there have not been a lot of games to play. One year out is historically when the good games start to come, and that’s good because every gamer wants to justify their $300-$500 doorstop purchase. And this winter looks like it’s going to provide some fantastic games to choose from for all platforms: Shadows of Mordor, Bayonetta 2, Evil Within, and Civilization: Beyond Earth is already a hell of a good start to filling that hunger.
4) Christmas sales are not driven by hardcore gamers. They are driven by Grandma buying presents to put under the tree. Christmas is a thing in the games industry because we make completely awesome things to shove in a stocking. Is it POSSIBLE that Grandma might choose to not buy games because she saw Brianna Wu describe the industry as flawed on MSNBC? Maaaybe? Enough to make a dent? I doubt it.
5) Even if I’m wrong and he’s right about everything above, he may NOT be right about the lesson that publishers take away. Let’s imagine a reality where Oliver is right, GamerGate destroys Christmas, and all the little kids with XBones get lumps of coal in their stockings this Christmas. Now, imagine you’re a stockholder for a major games company. Now imagine that the hardcore gamer games all underperformed expectations. Then imagine that the more casual divisions (facebook, mobile, girl games) matched expectations. What do you think is really going to happen?
I think what happens is that publishers slide money away from gamer games and towards these other, more casual games. In other words, you might want to be careful what you wish for.
At any rate, the other part of the equation that is somewhat odd is the idea that ‘heads will roll’. The people with money in the relationship – the publishers – could, I suppose, force games journalists to change how they run businesses or cover their games. That being said, they are going to be loathe to do so. There are… wait for it… pretty severe ethics problems with an enthusiast industry effectively forcing the press to reshape themselves to that publisher’s liking. Doing it under the covers with background pressure even moreso.
A games publisher could, in theory, call out a website PUBLICLY, I suppose. But the reputation of #Gamergate is now wed to the concept of harassment, and has been decried by every major media outlet in the country. Activision, EA and others are not going to be eager to set themselves up as officially embracing such a cause. In fact, if a major company ever has to align themselves with #GamerGate on anything, expect them to do so with a very Adobe-like disavowal of GamerGate’s history of abusive behavior even if that behavior is, by then, ancient history.
So, no, I don’t think #GamerGate is going to have a huge impact on the Holidays this year. It might result in another topic, much like religion and politics, to avoid over Thanksgiving turkey. But early signs that I’ve seen is that both consoles look like they’re going to have great Christmases. And that’s all because the games this Christmas look fantastic. And at the end of the day, that’s the one thing that both sides of this debate care deeply and passionately about – spending Christmas in our pajamas stabbing orcs in the face.
And to be honest, the sooner that everyone gets off Twitter and gets back to doing that, the better off we’ll all be.
How do you think Gamergate will end?
Also, I posted some questions at the end of last post, let me repeat them(because I am an insufferable asshole)
1- What do you think of TYTTalk constantly kissing GG ass?
2- Eron Gjoni says he’s a feminist and SJW. How? Really, like how? And what about the other “feminists” like GGfeminist? How?
Btw, I just saw this post of yours( http://www.zenofdesign.com/is-gamergate-anti-feminism-well-duh/ ), it was very good, but of course the comment section is tainted with GG douchebaggery.
Eventually some new political flare up will happen in gaming, and the “anti-SJW”/”anti-PC” side will say “Don’t compare us to GamerGate! We aren’t like them!”, and at that point GG will be officially over.
You do realize that there will be trolls claiming to be gg for a long time to come? Even if most us abandoned the tag? The quantity of incidents will decrease as there will be less visible targets and less angry people.
If we get run over by the continous media blitz any objection to the views and pratices we objected will inheret all the stigmas we got and likely be overun. The Media is just creating a big shield for them to hide under.
I do fear what migth happen If we keep going and what will happen if we stop it too.
IF you oppose me you oppose all women is a farse that should not be encouraged.
“The quantity of incidents will decrease as there will be less visible targets and less angry people.”
I think that’s right, and that’s why I don’t think the trolls will bother with the tag once everyone else gets tired of it. Trolls will still exist after GG as they did before GG, of course.
I’m not making any normative arguments, only predictions. And next time around, I think the anti-SJW side will distance themselves from GG. This distancing will not just mean saying “we aren’t GamerGate”, they will also try to convince people that they don’t resemble GamerGate.
GamerGate will eventually peter out. I actually think it’s on a downtrend now, and would have died already if it hadn’t been for the UTU shooting threat on Anita reigniting it. At some point, something else will come along for people to be angry about. Whether that happens in a month or 3, I don’t know. I doubt it would go to 6.
I don’t really have an opinion of TYTTalk. I’m not familiar with their show and have not heard much of their leanings before this comment.
Eron’s attempting to do jujitsu to make Zoe look more evil. If you read his post, it’s full of ‘Zoe says she cares about this, but she’s a hypocrite’. Keep in mind, I think that Eron is probably the worst agent in this whole fucking thing (even if you assume the worst and that Zoe was a terrible girlfriend, his response is the atom bomb of abusive, harassing asshole acts), so I assume only the worst.
Humorously, I was among the first to point out the relatively hidden strain of antifeminism in GamerGate. Nowadays, its a relatively open secret, with Jesse Singal’s article being one of the best explorations of the topic.
Just for the record TYTTalk actually has no affiliation with TYT they just run some sort of chat service for “fans”. Just to clarify so that we don’t conflate the views of this TYTTalk with the actual TYT folk.
Well, that’s good to hear, I guess. Even though Cenk sometimes has his moments, I didn’t think they would be supporting #Gamergate so openly.
Hobbyist conversations get so full of jargon – in every hobby, really. To my ears, even though I’m a life-long gamer, there’s no chance of “TYT” getting “smeared” with the reputation of “TYTTalk” because of a falsely assumed affiliation in my mind… Because I have zero idea what “TYT” is. If people would type out the whole name of whatever-it-is instead of abbreviating it to three letters, I guess then I would know. I’m guessing maybe it’s some specific game. But maybe it’s a game reviews site. Or something else gaming related. Anyway I also don’t know what TYTTalk is either so I guess if I did assume they were related it’d do little harm.
TYT is “The Young Turks”, a left-leaning news and opinions show. TYTTalk is apparently “brogressive” rather than truly left though.
I don’t know… Do you really think that people who believe they are fighting a war to save the Western world from the evil feminists will just go away with a fizzle?
http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/10/30/the-top-22-most-ridiculous-things-said-by-8channers-about-anita-sarkeesians-appearance-on-the-colbert-report/
Btw, thank you for your answers.
Let me put it this way: the #Gamergate ‘mass’ is already working hard to make them (and their point of view) invisible. If Gamergate actually became about journalistic ethics, you’d find most antis give few shits about it.
I disagree, regarding the #Gamergate mass working hard to make their point of view invisible. Not everyone who is suporting their antifeminist agenda is as open and in sight as Milo and Christina Sommers.
You previously said that maybe %20 of the people in it were about purging feminists and SJWs out. Do you really think the rest are concerned about ethical journalism? Sure, it just so happens the SJWs have been the one being unethical, what luck!
Think of it like this. Not every righwing libertarian will say that blacks are leeching off whites with welfare. But they will all fight against welfare. Not all of them will join OpenCarryTexas, but they all will fight against gun control legislation. Something like that. Just because they won’t come out and say it, doesn’t mean their actions aren’t the same in essence.
I have to say, with a whimper rather than a bang. People will drop in and out, there will be a minor flare-up each time Sarkeesian releases a new video or Quinn makes a speaking appearance. Each time this happens, it will make it clearer to the, for lack of a better term, “good faith” GGers, who really do feel hurt by the press and think it is “corrupt” for the wrong reasons, that their “leaders” don’t really care about that as much as they do about their rage-on against feminists. A lot of “big name” GG people have also been the “background radiation” for Feminist Frequency for some time now. The Breitbart guy is very transparently only “in it” to smack down feminists, ditto for CHS, Aurini, Tf00t… They aren’t going to stop (unfortunately), she’s not going to stop (I *hope*), but eventually the only people left will be the ones with the die-vendetta, who will be mostly pitied and ignored by the rest of the, um, “adults” in the room.
Or so I truly hope.
I think he meant the websites more than anything But i could ask him.
Our numbers fluctuate highly on twitter since we our time spent on it varies highly. But keep in mind that a lot of us dont go to twitter at all. Or rarely. Twitter is the picket line so to speak. I dont know how many we are. Your numbers migth be accurate I have no idea.
Someone one told me the following if customer is happy he will tell one or two if he is angry he will tell a lot more and why. This a bad PR mess anyway you look at it.
I do not think we will greatly affect games sales unless its a very specifc thing. And I hope we can find a positive solution for the situation before it.
I think you’re right, though i’m not as sure about the impact part as you are. The marketing/sales guys who set the goals for this year could have simply miscalculated sales, which they might happily blame on some reason outside of their influence later on.
But again i think you’re otherwise quite right in your musings.
It isn’t going to move sales.
If it doesn’t move sales, the large publishers will not care.
And, as Damion said, on the off chance it *does* move sales, the lesson drawn will be “this demographic isn’t as profitable right now, let’s move more development into the market sections that are doing well”.
My Christmas will be much like any other. Everyone on my list gets a digital game — these days, more likely an indie than a conventional retail one. And almost everyone gets a tabletop game of one kind or another.
Youngest kid’s birthday tomorrow; she’s getting Costume Quest 2 and Camel Up.
Can’t imagine why intolerant scumbags would affect my behavior one way or the other.
Not spending money on big AAA titles when those titles are under the most pressure from spiraling dev costs? Not a great plan if you want more AAA titles.
Which is not to say that people should buy crappy games, but deliberate boycotts seem unlikely to produce positive results.
Motherfucking Colbert Report action.
http://www.themarysue.com/watch-anita-sarkeesian-colbert-segment/
Fucking wow.
While I agree with all 5 points, I think 1) the actual size of Gamergate underestimates the virtual megaphone the internet hands individuals.
As an aside, the first main use of ‘Gamergate’ in the news (well this side of the pond that I’m aware of 😉 ), from the BBC no less.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29821050