A la rencontre du GamerGate, le mouvement libertarien qui veut défendre « ses » jeux vidéo
Le Monde
William Audureau
Meet GamerGate, the libertarian movement to defend “men’s” video games. Protean,
sometimes violent and a strange nothing, the movement of video game
players met Saturday, July 11 in Paris without interposed screens.
Paris, Gare de Lyon, at the stroke of 10 PM. Drinks in hand, forty
patrons mingle calmly on the sidewalk in front of a nondescript bar.
Three men stand facing them. In a black jacket over a black T-shirt,
the writer known as “Vox Day” speaks to the crowd. “We
are the first in decades to successfully oppose the Social Justice Warriors
[derogatory term describing feminist and LGBT activists]. I’m right, you
may be left, but we fight together. You are not alone,” he declares. In
the audience, some lift their glasses, slightly ill at ease.
“I’m
against reconfiguring this movement for political purposes,” says a
young programmer with a psychobilly look– 50s pompadour and an easy
familiarity. “I’m 200% anti-racist, I’ve supported the French
antifascist action since the age of fourteen,” he adds as if to further
distance himself from one of the organizers of the event, Vox Day, a
video game programmer and science fiction writer known for his
supremacist writings and for having called a black female colleague a
“half-savage”– a remark he repeated Saturday to Le Monde. And yet, the
two men were participating in the same rally.
From antifascists
to supremacists to ecologists, libertarians, socialists and the
apolitical, all political sides were present, even the most extreme,
this Saturday, July 11 in this Parisian brasserie, during the first
“official” meeting of GamerGate in France…
In many respects,
GamerGate comes from the same culture as Anonymous. It springs from the
same forums, takes on the same form of hackitivism, tinted with grinning
anarchism and harassment; its horizontalist and conservative values are
close, but with a more pronounced libertarian hue and a new masculinist
core.
“We are revolutionaries of freedom” believes Vox Day, who presents himself in a provocative manner as an “extreme libertarian” and cites Voltaire in a triumphant tone. But all do not put as much political motives behind their support of GamerGate. “I like just to play the perfect woman with large breasts,” says an amused Elodie, 25, a software developer. “Let them not change my games.”
I find it vaguely amusing that even in a clear attempt to do a hit piece on #GamerGate, the mere fact that Mr. Audureau actually covered the GGinParis event, and spoke directly with us, caused him to present a much more balanced piece than we’ve seen everywhere from NPR to Popular Science.
That’s why the media tries so hard to avoid talking to us and prefers to instead talk about us. Because every time we speak, we punch holes in their SJW narrative.