Does Someone Have to Die Before Gamergate Calms Down?

Brianna Wu is a developer and writer who’s penned pieces on the gender imbalance in modern video games and the harassment women in the industry continue to receive as part of their daily business. She heads up the small studio Giant Spacekat, makers of Revolution 60, a mobile game received as both “a most triumphant and excellent adventure” by RPGfan.com and “a bland, uninteresting, feminism circle-jerk” by Metacritic user Realgamer101. I’m guessing that’s not his real name, but there’s no guesswork required as to the poster’s sex.

On the 11th of October, Wu tweeted the below screenshot – a series of threatening messages she’d received from another Twitter account that’s since been suspended.

Before we go any further, it’s important to judge whether or not you want to read anything more on GamerGate. Simply by you being on this page, chances are you’re aware of the sides that have come out fighting, as well as the problem with giving GamerGate any further coverage: that these words represent further fuel for a fire that needs to die down before anyone can properly discuss the more pertinent points raised by a still-evolving debate.

If that means nothing to you, here’s a summary. A (once) low-profile indie developer named Zoe Quinn created and released a game called Depression Quest. Some people argued that it wasn’t a game at all – but that’s not the controversy. An ex of Quinn’s published information in August of 2014 implying that she had slept around to secure positive review coverage for Depression Quest.

There’s no evidence connecting any promiscuity – which is nobody’s business apart from those doing the screwing, anyway – with the reception for Depression Quest, but the conversation quickly turned to ethics: as in, some games journalists were seen to be favourable about particular projects that they were incredibly tenuously linked to. That could be chipping into a Kickstarter pot, or having long ago worked on a collaborative venture together. You get the idea: Person A once spoke to Person B, and for that reason Person A’s recommendation of Person B’s new Game C is clearly completely corrupt.

It goes on, encompassing advertising campaign pulls and C-list actors involving themselves as self-elected standard-bearers. Regarding ethics, every journalist worth the measly fee they’re taking home to write about video games is completely in support of fairness in reporting.

Every journalist who covers games – or music, or film, or television, or football, or property, or gardening – for a living knows better than to risk their livelihood by taking backhanders. But if they do, they’re soon exposed by their peers (Dorito-gate wasn’t that long ago). You don’t need a formal qualification in journalism to know where ethical lines are drawn – it should be instinctive once you’ve been on the job for two minutes.

But the ugliness of GamerGate has absolutely nothing to do with ethics. On that front, debate is always welcomed, ideally in a forum beyond Twitter; online, a cavalcade of contrasting voices quickly becomes a cacophony from which no reasonable progress can be made. It’s the ripples – sorry, the tidal waves – of outright misogyny that have tarnished the GamerGate situation.

Which brings us back to Brianna Wu. Nobody should ever have to face death threats, however hollow they might be, because they make video games that not everybody enjoys. Or – as Wu did, prior to receiving these offensive messages – because they’ve poked a little meme fun at those making the most noise about the slightest little things.

Sadly, Wu isn’t the first to have been targeted in such a worrying way. Quinn received a barrage of both death and rape threats – she spoke to VICE about the ordeal here – and prominent voice for greater gender equality in gaming, Feminist Frequency founder Anita Sarkeesian, was rightly concerned by comparably grotesque correspondence (which she later tweeted, below). The FBI has since become involved, and is currently investigating her harassment and further cases.