It’s About Ethics in Games Journalism? Gamergaters and Geek Masculinity

Abstract

#Gamergate is an online movement ostensibly dedicated to reforming ethics in video games journalism. In practice, it is characterized by viciously sexual and sexist attacks on women in and around gaming communities. #Gamergate is also a site for articulating “Gamergater” as a form of geek masculinity. #Gamergate discussions across social media platforms illustrate how Gamergaters produce and reproduce this gendered identity. Gamergaters perceive themselves as crusaders, under siege from critics they pejoratively refer to as SJWs (social justice warriors). By leveraging social media for concern-trolling about gaming as an innocuous masculine pastime, Gamergaters situate the heterosexual White male as both the typical gamer and the real victim of #Gamergate. #Gamergate is a specific and virulent online node in broader discussions of privilege, difference, and identity politics. Gamergaters are an instructive example of how social media operate as vectors for public discourses about gender, sexual identity, and equality, as well as safe spaces for aggressive and violent misogyny.

Laboring Artists: Art Streaming on the Videogame Platform Twitch

“…Finally, some streamers are forcibly engaged in the labor of mitigating or managing toxicity, mainly due to being a woman, person of color, or recognizably LGBTQ+. It should come as no surprise in the post-Gamergate world [7,19,33] that this type of harassment and discrimination would be present, and it is consistent with more generalized work on streaming in general [8,38,41]. At first pass, the streams observed in this study seemed to have a lower incidence of such behavior than larger more gamefocused streams, and there was often a very open, supportive, and inclusive operational practice (as is common amongst the creative community on Twitch).…”

“The Entrepreneurial Gamer”: Regendering the Order of Play

“…This public “war,” which at the time of writing in 2017 has somewhat lost its momentum, is referred to widely as Gamergate. Its histories and stories have been well rehearsed by academics and the mainstream press ( Braithwaite, 2016 ; Chess & Shaw, 2015 ; Cross, 2016 ; Gray, 2016 ), covering the victims of cyberattacks, online bullying and harassment, and real-world everyday harm directed at, principally, people who identify as women (cf. Collins, 2014 ; Edidin, 2014 ; Farokhmanesh, 2014 ).…”

Reddit’s Veil of Anonymity: Predictors of engagement and participation in media environments with hostile reputations

“…Massanari's (2017) ethnography of Reddit shows that the site serves as a "nexus for toxic technocultures to thrive" and a breeding ground for misogyny and anti-feminism (p. 333). This is illustrated by the case of the dissemination of nude pictures of famous female actors on Reddit and other platforms, coined The Fappening (Massanari, 2017), as well as the #Gamergate controversy (Perreault & Vos, 2016), wherein women working in the gaming industry were harassed on platforms, such as Reddit, 4chan, Tumblr, or Twitter (Braithwaite, 2016;Massanari, 2017). Massanari (2015Massanari ( , 2017 acknowledges the prevalence of racism on Reddit and the frequent aberration that irony and lack of intent to be racist renders the act acceptable.…”