Worth remembering that while Sarkeesian was one of the principal targets of Gamer Gate, it initially got started when an woman NB made a text adventure that got good reviews and people freaked and assumed she slept with a reviewer for them.

I ended up watching one of Anita's videos. I thought some of them were well-made, and she clearly had an audience. I don't understand what all the outrage was about. It was straight up McCarthyism. Her videos were relatively inoffensive and can easily be moved on from.

I took a couple game design classes when I was in college and they basically all made it clear that the line between vidya and other art forms was basically zilch. One of them may as well have been an art class about the Dadaist moment tbqh

2 more years it'll be the 10th anniversary. They managed to get Anita to guest on The Colbert Report to give an idea how long ago it was now.

Fuckin' hell I continually forget then remember that this shit actually happened and that a huge swath of gamers got grifted by a bunch of reactionaries into having a temper tantrum over critical art analysis

I remember when the first Tropes Vs Women In Video Games came out. Someone on one of the gaming forums shared it as a cool new media analysis thing, and I thought "Wait, so it's just extremely introductory-level feminist theory with exhaustive examples? Nobody needs this, right?"

And clearly I was wrong lol.

Sarkeesian got the publicity and the hate because she was the first one to make gamers aware that what used to be their insular little boys club was now something enjoyed by many people, and that it would need to change to accommodate them accordingly. I think a lot of gamergate and the hate she got preceding gamergate, was false consciousness in which the gamer masses responded to things that were natural to be upset about (a cottage industry hobby being shredded apart, commodified, reduced into lowest common denominator bait products, and stripped of the things that used to bring them joy) by transference onto a much easier target for a group of atomized dipshits raised without any critique of capitalism: evil women complaining too much. There was a legitimate amount of hatred towards gaming journalism before gamergate because it was a joke industry that existed purely to do advertising for big gaming companies, but since these gamers were legitimately unable to critique the causes of that, they latched onto an invented effect.

One funny thing about Sarkeesian that I like for the same reason I love Armond White, is that she's not particularly insightful and often misses the point of the object of her critique, which is hilarious because it absolutely infuriates the gamer horde. You can see this happening now with her Letterboxd account, which is legitimately fucking hilarious. There's this banger for example. Her review of Elf is just "I’d never seen this movie. My reaction to it is likely what you would expect." Her discussion of Robocop as being copraganda is also an all timer lmao (although props to her because if I recall correctly, she pushes back when one of the libs in the discussion complains that the film is "redirecting" critiques of the police onto "corporations" hahaha)

The fact that thousands of people decided they were willing to do everything in their power to ruin someone's life for the crime of extremely basic and obvious media analysis will never stop feeling absurd to me.

They targeted gamers. Gamers.

We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did. We'll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it's fun. We'll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second. Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded. Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights? These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We're already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren't shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We've been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they've threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can't is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex. Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You're not special, you're not original, you're not the first; this is just another boss fight.

This feels like a strawman ngl