A veteran game developer, Brad Wardell, who unlike Zoe Quinn actually has a fair amount of game development experience, weighs in on #GamerGate:
In my mind, the balance of wrongdoing is heavily weighted on the opponents of #gamergate. Mainly, because its opponents have had a long head start of character assassination and harassment. I know some of my friends in the media will be appalled by that but that’s mainly because they haven’t seen the shit storm directed at anyone who dares not support the “social justice” narrative for the past few years.
Without the August 28th mass “gamers are dead” article series on multiple sites, none of this would have happened. Let’s remember that. It was a tempest in a teapot before that.
Every major escalation I’ve seen in this industry conflict has begun with one side mass misrepresenting others with a very broad brush.
The anti #gamergate people are the ones who brought me in
One thing to make clear here: The pro-#gamergate people didn’t ask me to stand up for them. They made no demands on me. All I did was, as game developer, was tweet that I like gamers and don’t like seeing gamers misrepresented. For that, the anti-#gamergate people started smearing me. (SJW logic: Make up allegations, use allegations as evidence, repeat).
In other words, I was not/am not trying to use #gamergate to get a pound of flesh. You want me to quit throwing in the misdeeds of the SJW crowd in SJW faces? Then tell them to quit character assassinating me. Because, let’s face it, I have a large, heavy, blunt instrument in the form of having been falsely accused of sexual harassment and having won that case so thoroughly that the plaintiff had to publicly apologize. You don’t get more clear cut than that in the legal world. I’d be delighted to just talk about games, tech, etc. But if you’re going to suggest I’m some sort of misogynist or rapist or sexual harasser then yea, I’m going to use the 800 pound mace that SJWs carelessly crafted for me.
And for those truly concerned in the gaming media: If you want to do “the right thing” (even if it’s two years late): Feel free to have the articles and threads that smear me set to just not be indexed by search engines. Is that really asking for a lot? No censorship. No retractions. No apologies. Just make it so that new harassers aren’t born every time someone looks at the first page of Google results on us. I’ve been doing stuff 20 years, I’ve helped invent a number of the technologies you guys use on your PCs every day. But it’s all crowded out because the media chose to use me as a cartoon villain to push forward an agenda. Thanks for that. I just love having to discuss the Kotaku article every few weeks with some investment banker or enterprise customer. I really enjoy having to answer awkward questions by extended family. And the occasional random “You fucking shit lord, I hope you die in a fire!” emails I get are just..well they’re just so heart warming. Thank you for that.
The double standards
When I see a Ben Kuchera arguing for the deletion of threads because they might encourage harassment of game developers, I ask, where was he when I was taking a beating on nearly every gaming forum for something I didn’t even do? Oh that’s right, he was helping spread it! Yea, thanks for using an image that shows a claim that I asked my female employees if they enjoyed tasting semen. And you know what? I didn’t hold any of this against anyone. I didn’t send PR people to demand threads removed. No DMCA messages. But it’s pretty infuriating to see calls to censor discussion based on “harassment” when they had no problem when I was the target.
Except, of course, in my case, I hadn’t actually done any of the things I was alleged to have done. No, I’ve gotten to fry for the past couple years in countless threads across the net. I also want to point out that even though we won, and we got a public apology, some don’t consider that enough because apparently we were supposed to demand the plaintiff admit in writing to committing perjury. So even mercy is frowned upon by these people….
Let me preface this: NO ONE can survive detailed scrutiny. This is doubly true if the person doing the scrutiny is not giving you the benefit of the doubt.
Historically, the activist columnists in other industries have gotten away with trashing their opponents. It’s easy to lampoon the Tea Party people, for instance because their core base aren’t very technical and have no real means to strike back. Same was true of the Occupy movement which got overrun by SJWs and was easily dismissed soon after.
But gamers are technical. They do have the means to fight back. I’m sure it never occurred to the columnists who wrote “gamers are dead” that their targets would be able to effectively return the favor. Those who have had great success cherry picking and editing quotes/emails/tweets to create a false narrative of their opponents never dreamed that doing so would come back to haunt them.
I am very loosely acquainted with Brad, having spoken to him a few times when he was at Stardock. He’s a smart guy and he’s perceptive too. However, I think he’s making one mistake here, the same mistake that most people in the SF/F community have made over time, which is thinking that being reasonable and moderate and fair to the other side is an option. It is not. There is absolutely no evidence supporting that belief… one can’t even call it a conclusion. Fantasy would perhaps be the better term.
We’re not dealing with reasonable people here, we are dealing with psychologically damaged people who want to utterly trash and destroy the things we love due to their envy, their mental instability and their evil, twisted ideology. They’re not going to stop simply because they’ve been shot down once or twice. Failure doesn’t demoralize them because it is their natural state. They’re simply never going to stop until you have submitted to them and they have destroyed yet another predominantly male bastion.
Understand that I’m not considered an extremist because I’m a hot-tempered angry person given to historically unusual positions, but because the Social Justice Whores all realize that I am immune to their influence and I am therefore a threat to them by demonstrating that their victory is not inevitable Progress and one need to cower before them. Unlike most of their targets, I can take every accusation of sexism and racism and homophobism and religionism and inequalism and bigotism, laugh at it, and refuse to be swayed by it. What they call an extremist is nothing more than an individual who will not submit to them and dutifully confess that black is white and gay is good and two plus two is five on command.
As Instapundit says, we have to punch back twice as hard. Trash back twice as hard. They’re not used to it. They can’t take it. They freak out when we simply point out the observable fact that Zoe Quinn aka Chelsea Van Valkenburg is a slut, and, allegedly, a whore. They go ballistic when we observe that Anita Sarkeesian is a complete fraud who knows virtually nothing about games. They are furious when we note that very few people read most of their award-winning works and that there is little science in their “science fiction”. We don’t have to assassinate their characters because they don’t have any. And they can’t handle the truth, which makes it our most potent weapon.
But only for those with the courage to stand up for it and wield it. So stop temporizing and thinking you’re going to somehow straddle the fence. Stop thinking that perhaps you can keep your head down and escape notice. You’re not. That’s the first step towards ultimate submission. Choose consciously and courageously, don’t let your fear of rejection make up your mind for you.
After all, being rejected by this collection of delusional neurotics is an absolute badge of distinction and good sense.
UPDATE: The SJW are now launching attacks on The Escapist due to its refusal to fall in line:
This is an attack by the Anti-Gamergate side. Kuchera was unable to browbeat Greg Tito into censoring the discussion, now that the corrupt journalists are losing this debate rapidly, the Anti-GG side is desperate to shut down the discussion.
They’ve already begun censoring on 4chan. They’ve turned it into a SJW hugbox, to the point where being politically incorrect in /b/ (the bloody POLITICALLY INCORRECT FORUM) is a ban worthy offense.
If you wonder why the Anti-GG side is doing this, the answer is simple:
They’re bloody terrified of losing their power.
For about 3 years now, they’ve had the privilege to attack, patronize, and demean others. They could insult people sarcastically, insinuate that all attempts to disagree with them were based on “racism” or “misogyny” rather than logic. Now with Gamergate being more popular and them being shown for who they are, they are absolutely desperate to end the discussion.
They’ve been painting us as the harassers, us as the doxxers and the “hackers”. You can all see now, that this is a lie. They’re a group founded on hatred, a clique desperate to retain their power and trying to censor the opposing side’s discussion.
Say what you will of us, but we haven’t been attempting to bring down sites for allowing the opposing side to speak.
So the next time someone says “We aren’t trying to silence you” or “we aren’t trying to take your games or websites away!” just know that it is a lie. It happened to 4chan. It’s attempting to happen here. We wont let them silence us.