This is videogames.

There remains no doubt that the anti-gamer narrative peddled by gaming journalists and echoed by the gaming media uses fear as its fuel. People have long ago cast the social justice advocates in gaming as new moralists, and their actions and words in regards to Gamergate only reinforced the notion. Dubbing it fascists, sociopathic, “a culture of terror“, the Tea Party of videogames, “ISIS with Steam accounts” and a million other delirious insults. Even allowing for the obvious hyperbole, the fearmongering is the clear goal: these people will stalk you, hack you and potentially explode vans near you.

But a post from Kazerad has brought to my attention to just how much the fearmongering really does work into bringing people to oppose Gamergate. People with little experience in the games market or the internet are absolutely terrified not of what Gamergate is, but what Gamergate is said to represent by distorted media accounts. Here’s the post, with the operative part highlighted.

Chan board posts are more insightful and honest than gaming journalism. What a world.

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In light of some Australian store chains taking Grand Theft Auto 5 out of their shelves, and now from Hatred being removed from Steam Greenlight, there has been a depressing trend among gaming journalists and self-proclaimed cultural critics to excuse these events in all manner of ways, from arguing that “it’s not real censorship” to “yes it’s censorship but it’s good censorship”, always with thinly disguised celebration, for the sake of plausible deniability should public opinion turn on them.

“I wasn’t celebrating burning comic books, I was just pointing out how they make for great tinder. It’s a shame you couldn’t capture the subtlety of my critique.”

That spectrum of “not censorship” to “yes censorship but good” is enough to feed many posts (maybe I’ll do a series on the various fallacies), but this one is dedicated to one particular fallacy in that spectrum: that it’s not censorship because it wasn’t a governmental body that acted on it.

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It has struck me that I have been too partial in this whole debacle involving crooked journalists. Surely the self-elected gatekeepers of videogames, deserve a bigger voice. I mean, it’s not like they’re the overwhelming majority of gaming journalism as it is.

With that in mind, I now present to you my own gaming journalism outlet.

0HP is now live, composed of a small but renowned team of gaming journalists. They’re eager to explain to you how censoring games they don’t like isn’t real censorship, or why fiction misogyny is the biggest threat against civilization since rap music.

Many others have noticed that Gamergate has become just another battle in the everlasting American culture war, and as such it’s forcibly divided into easily digested liberal- or conservative-flavored chunks. And within that culture war, it has also been painfully obvious for months that almost all articles or even passing mentions of Gamergate in the liberal side of the mainstream media frames it in the exact same way: as a campaign of harassment aimed straight at women in videogames in order to keep them out of videogames.

This has led the rightwingers in the pro-GG side (which, much to my chagrin, are numerous) to occasionally bring up attempts to get the conservative side of mainstream media up to par, and blame the media collusion as a solely liberal phenomenon. Time and again, I have explained on forums and boards and such: it won’t work. Even if you skip the sensationalist outlets like Fox News and go straight to reputable ones, they won’t care. And to explain why that is, I have to establish a very simple reason: moral panics.

Right on the money.

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I’ll be honest: I think that store chains removing GTA5 from their shelves is a non-issue. If there was a government ban then yeah it would be serious, but as it is, it doesn’t much matter. No, what really matters is how the videogames press acted around it. As it has been the case throughout GG, they can’t go a week without demonstrating just how much, despite its sins, GG still has the moral high ground.

I don’t have any appropriate good pics for this part above the cut but I guarantee a great one near the end of the post. Trust me.

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Despite its origin in internet dramedy and gamers’ disdain for their trade press, it’s pretty clear by now that Gamergate has become another battle in the American culture war. This has been part of the anti-GG rhetoric from the start, as their unwavering collective effort to paint GG as a reactionary movement founded on misogyny, and almost all of the mainstream media outlets that reported on the subject reinforced that exact narrative. The pro-GG response has been much more varied and not focused solely on the culture war angle. However, it too has its own share of eager culture warriors, largely in the form of actual reactionaries peddling their own narratives and fallacies, and the one I’m concerned with here is cultural Marxism.

I can’t argue with this. Because it’s nonsensical rambling.

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Old man Jaffe is a veteran videogame developer, and has been targeted by the clickbait clique way before Gamergate existed, and he provided a perfect example why, even tho he agrees with the main points of GG, he was driven away. I make his words mine because he explained them much better than I could.

Read bottom-to-top because Twitter.

I know I’m a Fascist. I’m a misogynist who is pathologically afraid of female sexuality and takes it out on the world at large, and thus wants to put women back into their place, and out not only of videogames but of the public life altogether. I would have donned a blackshirt uniform by now already if only it didn’t clash with my fedora and neckbeard, and I can’t be bothered to march on Rome because no airline would let me chek my anime body pillow as hand luggage. And “marching” sounds like too much physical exertion anyway.

I know all of this because the media told me so.

For all their talk of master race, Nazis favored the peasantry.

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Well then, yet another new site born from the mess of Gamergate. Since you care enough to read this, let me explain what made this humble and random gamer to bother making this site then, yes?

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