Final thoughts on #gamergate

I feel the need to clear my head and get down some of these thoughts as soon as I can muster them, because I don’t really feel like this that often. There’s always the chance of me growing more numb to the events as they pass, and sinking deeper into an apathy I’ve been fighting to escape from all this time.

I want to believe people are better.

I want to believe people are great. I want to believe that we can accomplish incredible things and look upon the work we have done and call it good. I want to not doubt the people around me and I want to view the world not with cynicism but with cheerful optimism. I want to believe the best of the people around me.

I have to try.

Because not to try would mean giving in to despair.

GamerGate PR Showdown: Zoe Quinn/GameJournoPros VS the Internet

I’ve already said nearly all I want to about #gamergate in an overly sentimental and entirely too earnest plea for sanity on both sides. What I am going to talk about is something else that became readily apparent as the entire fiasco developed and matured into the royal rabbit clusterfuck warren that it is today. And I am going to do it while doing my best to remove my own moral judgment on the situation. I am not judging the actions of the people involved or what happens behind closed doors. What goes on behind those doors is for their ears only, and the only way we have of knowing what goes on behind those doors, realistically, is if someone on the inside opens it a crack.

What I am judging is the absolutely piss-poor ways individuals in the industry have conducted themselves publicly in the wake of these allegations. These public displays of self-humiliation have been so widely documented that there is an actual tumblr dedicated to recording harassment received from proponents of #gamergate, and prominent figures in both the indie games development scene and games journalism have come out and basically thrown themselves on their own swords live and on Twitter Technicolor. When you’re losing a PR war against goddamn 4chan of all people – the site that has a rather-well-deserved reputation as the “internet hate machine”, you have to be fucking up in so many ways that even people who only found out the internet existed sometime last Thursday would call you on your bullshit if they knew. So as an interesting little thought experiment in public relations, I am going to illustrate how I would have handled this if I personally was responsible for PR in the wake of the Five Guys scandal.

While my current title is Creative Editor, I have some modicum of experience in branding, marketing and advertising, and as someone who at least pretends to be professional from time to time I want to see how this could have been turned into a net positive for, if not everyone involved, at least some of the people who have painted targets on themselves while waving flags proclaiming their stand against internet misogyny.

We shall then compare this to how Zoe Quinn and her loosely-defined social cadre of indies and game journalists (“gamejournopros“) have actually handled events. Let’s give this a go.