GamerGate's Lasting Effects & How To Fight Back

As the widespread use of the Internet took off in the late '90s and early 2000s, gamers started to form communities. With those communities were norms and rules both written and unwritten than began to coalesce with what those communities did and did not find acceptable. These were mostly-male dominated spaces, with the norms and rules functioning as gate-keeping tactics-- first to keep out those that might have reminded the gate-keepers of bullies, but expanded to be anyone that could be treated as an outsider or an other. This was especially true for women and other minorities. Trash talking was sen as "part of the game", even when it led to rape jokes and threats, for example.

Harassment of women and the marginalized in gaming communities in specific and online in general didn't beging with GamerGate. GamerGate just gave a collective name to what had been lurking under the surface of gaming culture for a long time. It just was now too big to willfully ignore. As I wrote last year, the more virulent influence of GamerGaters seemed prime to make hardcore gamers the new conservative reactionaries-- and this was before Trump was elected on a wave of dank 4chan memes, racism, and twitter rants.

Writing for Bitch Media, Sam Riedel reflects on the 3rd anniversary of the beginning of the GamerGate movement. She also talks about the effect it's had on her as a gamer, and the frustration that many companies that pride themselves on building gaming communities still stand by and don't seem to do much in her essay "No Girls Allowed: The Lasting Rules of GamerGate and Toxic Misogyny":

[Many of the PAX East] show’s panels that touched on harassment and abuse did so in a way that was only marginally helpful.. The Diverse Gaming Coalition held a panel on stopping online bullying, and concluded that “fixing” people who want to cause harm “is our goal” but is “not realistic,” ending 20 minutes early after focusing primarily on hawking T-shirts and signing up new partners. 

The It Gets Better Project’s panel immediately followed and was even more frustrating... When asked what should be done to fight this abuse, panelist Leslie Pirritano recommended that victims reach out to the Online SOS Network—but when it came to reducing instances of harassment, the It Gets Better panel could only spout platitudes; Huertas referenced Game of Thrones’ Tyrian Lannister, saying victims should “wear [their abuse] like armor.” 

Most disappointingly, it doesn’t seem like community managers... seem that concerned with ending the problem. At a panel entitled “Community Management 101”... Devin Connors of game studio Psyonix said CMs can try to “remold their behavior” but should try not to engage. That sort of corporate non-answer, which prioritizes companies over lives, is especially distressing when you consider that Connors is in charge of maintaining the Rocket League community as Corsair Media’s Global Social Media and Community Manager.

As Riedel points out, women play games just as much as men, but cis men hold the majority of jobs in gaming.

Take a look at the numbers: Even though Pew Research Center finds that women play games just as much as men, and "There are no differences by race or ethnicity in who plays video games," the International Game Developers Association reports that over 75% of those working in the games industry are straight, white cisgender men... gaming culture as a whole is still nightmarishly toxic for people who aren't cisgender men, and even for some who are.

This circles back to my earlier posts on diversity in the tech sector. Those in positions of power need to prioritize marginalized voices, and that means hiring more women and people of color and LGBT+ people-- not just as token hires but with real responsibility, As for those not in hiring positions, but positions of societal power, we need to prioritize amplify marginalized voices instead of talking over them, and when they talk, we NEED to listen.

Tech Sector's Diversity Problem: White People Still Aren't Listening

Description: A bar graph shows a demographic breakdown of employees at tech companies. Apple is 80% men, Microsoft and Google are 83% men,  Facebook is 84% men and Twitter is 90% men. Continuing the demographic breakdown, Apple employees are 54% white, 21 percent are Asian, 6 percent are Hispanic, and 3 percent are black and 165 are other.

The above graph from a Mother Jones article about diversity in the technology industry in general and the Rev. Jesse Jackson's outreach work in Silicon Valley in particular last year showed that for all the publicized diversity initiatives, tech has a LONG way to go before achieving any sort of equality or parity. So, a little over a year later, what's changed?

Not much.

Twitter has historically been the worst of the high-profile tech companies, with an employee workforce that's 90% male, and majority white, with Black employees making up just 1 percent of the workforce.  Janet Van Huysse, who was the Vice President of Diversity for Twitter spoke in 2014 about working to improve diversity. In 2015,  with Twitter no further along aside from very vague plans to increase hiring “marginalized groups” in their US offices, Van Huysse resigned after Twitter's numbers didn't even budge after 2 diversity initiatives and the traditional university graduate application rush.

Van Huysse-- a white woman-- was replaced by Jeffrey Simonoff as Vice President of Diversity. Simonoff is a middle-aged white dude.

Whoops.

It gets worse.

Leslie Miley wrote about his departure from Twitter due in no small part to the racism that went on behind closed doors even as the company benefitted from use by citizens and activists in Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement . An excerpt :

Twitter’s issues with growth and engagement and the issues with internal diversity are somewhat related. The over-reliance on a limited number of schools and workplaces for talent has caused a type of group think to dominate. Any change would be approved by people who all think alike. There was very little diversity in thought and almost no diversity in action. To quote Mark S. Luckie “Without a variety of voices contributing ideas, the workplace becomes a homogenized environment where potential brilliance may never be achieved. Diversity should rightly be seen as a benefit to growth, not an obstruction to avoid.” For some at Twitter, diversity is an obstruction to avoid.

 Once Miley left, Twitter management was left without any directors or vice presidents of color in any of the product management or engineering divisions.

While Twitter may have the most egregious examples, as evidenced by the graph at this article's beginning, it's not the only big-name tech company to have a serious diversity problem. Instead of listening to people of color, though, many tech companies have been hiring teams like "Paradigm"-- a company that “uses social science to increase diversity”... run by three white women and a white man. After some bad PR, they hired one woman of color as a partner, and two women of color as consultants.

This glaring blind spot extends to some of the largest tech events, too-- even in places where ou'd least expect. The annual "Grace Hopper Celebration Of Women In Tech" didn't have any black women speaking or conducting talks. In fact, it was ZERO women of color and a few dozen white men spoke at least year's event! In fact, as this storify link points out:

500 speakers were req'd to buy tickets to conf they're speaking at for a conference heavily targeting students, & of 12,000 people who belong to a demographic that's systematically underpaid.
There are >900 confs for professionals in coding. I know of ~3 that charge speakers for tickets. GHX is one. Pay gap makes that esp uncool. Black women are paid 64% of white men. Hispanic&Latina women are paid 54% of white men. Charging to speak ENSURES under-representation.

...which is what prompted last year's NOTGHC counter-conference, organized by disaffected women engineers of color. Yeah, that's right, the whiny baby attitude of "oh, if you want diverse things, go make your own" has extended to engineering conferences, and once again when people of color DO make their own thing, they get the backlash of everything from being "not organized enough" to "being too exclusive"! GHC still charges speakers to pay, by the way.

Fellow white people, if you think that this lack of diversity only matters in boardrooms and doesn't affect people's real lives, think again. Last year at Dragon*Con, which is a sprawling nerd convention that lasts for days and temporarily takes over most of city downtown, automatic soap dispensers wouldn't detect black peoples' hands. The CEO of the soap dispenser's parent company had to admit that they never really thought to adjust the infrared sensors beyond a certain range. And if you just found out about this now, from me, a white dude? That's part of the problem!

The effects on health runs deeper than un-soaped hands. Erica Joy wrote about the effects tech culture's isolation and alienation of her as a black women impacted her health:

“The stress and isolation I mentioned have really taken their toll on me. Long term stress is known to cause health issues. Not long after I started working in New York, I developed heart problems (PVC’s). About 3 years ago I started to get acne, something I’ve never had in my life. I always thought it was hormonal but now recognize that it happens when I’m stressed. The isolation and resultant loneliness have exacerbated the stress, leaving me in constant fight or flight mode… I know this: I am not my job. I am not my industry or its stereotypes. I am a black woman who happens to work in the tech industry. I don’t need to change to fit within my industry. My industry needs to change to make everyone feel included and accepted.” 

She's right, of course. Cameron Glover said it best:

Without consequences and more nuanced understanding of different perspectives and cultures, we’re left with a tech culture something akin to a leech: the best parts of marginalized workers are taken, and we are left feeling like victims and stripped of our power.

Tainted Love: How Game Companies Exploit Employees' Passion

It's a familiar homily to those looking at a satisfying career: "Do what you love, and work won't seem like work." It sounds all well and good, doesn't it? Imagine, a job that not only give you a paycheck to fill your wallet, but satisfaction to fill your soul. Creative industries abound where workers are not just happy to be there, they are passionate about the work they do, or want to find a place where they feel like they belong.

Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind the 300-pound gorilla of MMOs, World of Warcraft, looks to tap into that very feeling, that yearning for a sense of belonging. And in the company's latest recruitment video, they leap right past the Army's "It not just a job, it's an adventure" type of pitch and goes straight into "We a family of people, just like you". Take a look:




In just six minutes, the video has tons of variation on passion, family, fulfillment and even love.he message is hammered home that this is not a job, it’s a new family. One part in particular that caught my ear was a  few employees emphasizing that all of the departments in Blizzard, even the purely creative ones, are considered part of the company's success. There is one part of the video that also confused me. One talking head says that the first thing you see when you start a Blizzard game is "... 'Designed by Blizzard'. And it's very true."

Um... I sure hope so. I mean, it seems obvious that a Blizzard game made in-house by Blizzard is designed by Blizzard. This statement seems like it was written by one of the Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As Ian Williams and Austin Walker outline in their anaylasis "Working For the Love of the Game: The Problem With Blizzard's Recruitment Video", peel back a layer and you see it reflects nearly everything wrong with video game companies as employers:

It is telling of the ideological and material conditions of the games industry that the simple act of giving a full group of workers credit on their production seems like an accomplishment. The irony, of course, is that those employees, beaming with pride, aren't themselves named or credited in the recruitment video.

But the video makes no mention of the concrete benefits that working at Blizzard provides. There’s no mention of benefits or wages; nothing about crunch time, that specter haunting the industry; nothing about the sort of material, tangible things that make a difference in how one is employed, rather than how one feels during employment. There are perfectly acceptable, subtle ways to talk about these things without veering into the gauche. Employees could talk about their own financial security, or about being able to plan for the future while simultaneously being fulfilled with their work today... But your recruitment will be based in love, not on wages. The mentions come rapid fire, culminating in the grand pronouncement from one employee: Blizzard employees are “just a bunch of geeks,” just like you. 

This is a window into how the industry as a whole views employment... this is [also] an industry with a layoff rate twice the national rate across all industries and a culture of crunch where 68% of respondents work more than 50 hours a week for months at a time in order to get a product out the door. It’s a bad tradeoff: In exchange for being quiet about wages, hours, benefits and the like, you’ll get to hang out with like-minded people you’ll love to be with. The Blizzard video is the distillation of this pitch in a very blunt form....Blizzard’s video is just one more artifact of a culture that preempts demands for fair remuneration with a prodding reminder that, after all, if you love what you do, then the pay shouldn’t matter. This is the same story told by Twitch executives who say that its streamers “aren’t interested” in being paid. It’s the same story that crops up any time someone wonders if modder labor is exploitative. It’s the same story that is so often leveraged to blur the line between fandom and promotional labor. It’s a story told so well and so often that it doubles in on itself: Exploited fans become exploited modders. Exploited modders become exploited developers. 

You might wonder, though, in a pitch that aims to capture a creative's sense of fulfillment, or a fan's love of playing games, what's wrong with focusing so much on passion?

All this talk of passion sets a very real paradigm, limiting the acceptable actions of those in poor labor conditions. Why is the industry so insistent that game development is “more than just a job?” Because if it’s just a job, just a 9 to 5 workday in a cubicle pounding out code or testing content, then the crunch time is something you can object to. In fact, you would (or should) be expected to object to a 60 hour week. If, instead, protesting crunch time means letting down a grand artistic vision (one which Blizzard reminds the viewer all employees contribute to) or, even worse, letting down your new family, that’s a very different proposition. None of us wants to let down our family and friends, but we can probably get away with letting down management. That social pressure is what keeps crunch time and other bad practices in place as a normal part of the industry. 

The mythology of crunch and a culture of layoffs have naturalized them, erasing their histories. Instead of being able to identify key shifts in industry labor practices, we’re told that we’ve always been at war with the 60 hour work week. There’s a sheepish air when people at leading companies bring up issues such as crunch, as if it’s unavoidable, like a downpour or an unbidden burp. This is nonsense. Crunch is certainly a disaster, but it is not an act of God. There is nothing that says that crunch and layoffs are unavoidable. The laws we write about how we work are products of men and women, not natural forces imposed upon us by an unseen hand.

And that's the heart of the issue, isn't it? The video seems directed at super fans but it really just hides the reality of  grueling work conditions and preys upon people's need to belong and sense of pride. Honestly, for all of the rah-rah about being a part of Blizzard, it all sort of comes off a little defensive.

Luckily, Paste Magazine bucks the comments section trend by both being not awful and having relevant and insightful commentary. Here what one former video game worker of 20 years had to say:

After over 20 years in the industry I finally had to pull back. They'd squeezed every last drop of passion out of me. Games haven't really been "design driven" for a long time anyway, and with F2P gaming gaining dominance the impact of the bottom line is only growing stronger Yes, they're beautiful, but all the innovation is happening in the back end. As for all the extracurricular stuff, that won't mean much when they hand you your walking papers, and you suddenly realize that for all the hours of your life they took may help you get your next job, but is meaningless for the job after that. Meals, games, entertainment are all about one thing... keeping you on campus for as many hours as possible.

So just because things have been this way, and are this way now doesn't mean they have to stay this way. But what will it take for that to happen?