I thought juxtaposing this pair of posts from Re|Action was both informative and more than a little amusing:
This is an open letter to Steve Butts (IGN), Stephen Totilo (Kotaku), Justin Calvert (Gamespot), Chris Grant (Polygon), Dale North (Destructoid), Ludwig Kietzmann (Joystiq), and all other Editors-in-Chief of gaming websites:
1) Publish a highly visible reference statement explaining your site’s stance on sexism, racism, classism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia.
2) Hire (more) people to moderate your forums and comments sections.
In February, I wrote a guest editorial for Kotaku. I enjoyed writing for a mass audience and I would sincerely love to write for Kotaku again. I’ve seen Stephen Totilo dive into the fray when a blogger on N4G produced an elaborate conspiracy theory that Kotaku was seeking to generate revenue through feminist articles. I appreciated seeing Stephen Totilo articulate his strong stance off site and I wish he would do so in a perma-linked resource at the top of Kotaku. All this being said, my one experience with Kotaku commenters was brutal.
3) “Take the risk.”
You will anger readers by taking a stand. Some of them will leave. Some of their threats to leave forever are not, in fact, empty. You’ll get flak from NeoGaf and Reddit. 4Chan will make the same ugly threads about you as they do about me and my friends.
Do it. Piss them off. Take the risk. Make a decision now that they are not worth your time and that the ad revenue they provide is not worth the toxic atmosphere they bring to your sites. They’re not worth continuing to bear the reputation of being an unsafe place for people who are not straight men.
“An Open Letter to Games Media” was published on June 19, 2013. It was followed, not too terribly long afterwards, by this:
[re/Action] is closed
We tried something new, but the market has spoken. We published three issues
In other words, no one is buying what they are selling. So take their advice at your peril. In a similarly astute manner, another SJW trans-something or other, John Scalzi, is repeatedly insisting that he totally doesn’t care, not even a little bit, that many gamers continue to announce that they will no longer buy his books due to his anti-GamerGate position. He had yet another tweet on the subject yesterday:
It genuinely flummoxes some folks that I don’t care if they stop buying me because of my GamerGate opinions.
Assuming that he is telling the truth, which is always a risky proposition, his stated position does surprise some people considering that Intel and Mercedes obviously don’t share it. Unlike John Scalzi, both corporations value the opinions of gamers enough to have stopped advertising on Gamasutra and Gawker Media, two sites that have taken explicit anti-GamerGate positions. So, perhaps #GamerGaters also need to let @torbooks and @pnh know that they will no longer be buying books from Tor Books as a result of John Scalzi’s oft-professed antipathy for genuine gamers concerned about the politicization and corruption of the games media. Perhaps Tor Books cares about their customers, even if John Scalzi does not. The fact that Tor still publishes Orson Scott Card, the Great Satan in the eyes of the pinkshirts, suggests they do.
The observable reality is, as @AngryHarrysPage noted: “#GamerGate actually poses a genuine threat to the progressive establishment. They’re causing economic harm.”
On a side note, it’s telling how many of these “women in games” are actually men wearing dresses, men who aren’t fit to wear Dani Bunton’s shoes. It is also informative to note that most of the actual women involved in anti-GamerGate don’t play games, don’t design or develop games, and observably don’t know much about them.