Epics In Gaming Journalism

The wages of woke is broke

Tribalism from a tribalist website: when the show sucks, you don’t blame the bad storytelling or the crappy directing. You blame the -isms and -phobias

I am not a video gamer. Video game culture was never interesting to me at all until the #Gamergate hashtag trended on Twitter in 2014, and even then it held little interest for me. I was therefore unable to interpret the phenomenon until the venture capital funding inevitably ran out and market forces made the truth plain.

A decade later, many things make sense that seemed incomprehensible at the time, while a new body of academic literature treats the phenomenon as an episode of right wing extremism. This model of understanding Gamergate is flawed at conception. It is a political inversion of what was really happening to the websites that cover all sorts of games. Their ‘journalism’ was turning into ideological, hyperpartisan hash.

Anita Sarkeesian, whose experience of ‘online harassment’ made her a prominent martyr of Gamergate, had to shut down her FeministCurrent website in 2023 because nobody visited anymore. Polygon, one of the most prominent websites involved in waving the proverbial bloody shirt over Sarkeesian, has just been sold by Vox Media to a click farmer, and the entire staff apparently laid off. Nature is healing.