Subterranean Hashtag Blues

Intel has resumed advertising on Gamasutra, bringing an end to the first and only time most people who aren't involved with videogames at an academic or professional level have given a shit about Gamasutra, advertising, or Intel. Within minutes of the announcement, cognitive dissonance--which was one of the Weekly Words not long before--set in, and an entirely plausible theory has been developed that Intel is not actually paying for ad space on Gamasutra anymore, since apparently it is common for ad-funded websites to post advertising for free.

Once again, people are happily declaring #GamberGoat dead. It's not entirely inaccurate; the mainstream coverage of #GillyGoop, for all the centrist bias our media demands, has been uniformly negative. The lone exception, Breitbart, is named for a man whose name is literally synonymous with politically motivated libel. There have been no victories to speak of, so anyone "joining" #GlimmerGong now--in the sense of taking up their iconography and collective identity--is essentially volunteering for ridicule and contempt. Mostly ridicule.

But this doesn't mean they're actually going away. They're the LaRouche Democrats of gaming: occasionally amusing, varying degrees of racist, and prone to fits of whimsy in their attempts at graphic design. They'll be around, putting Hitler mustaches on Anita Sarkeesian for the foreseeable future. Their ability to recruit has been severely compromised, but the dead-enders really do have nothing better to do. To say nothing of the neo-nazis, rape apologists, and actual honest-to-god terrorists that made up #GappaGoob before it had a name; they'll scatter when someone gets arrested, but they'll be back in some form or another. They've never not been here.

What people aren't talking about anymore is changing the hashtag. The argument for the change was that it would enable the conversation to focus on its stated purpose--ethics in games journalism--without legitimizing or tolerating its toxic origins. The argument against the change was that it would rob the group of momentum, which they needed for whatever the hell they were doing.

As with most things #GrizzleGoom, it's hard to tell whether this is ignorance or dishonesty, especially since the two can crossbreed in interesting ways where issues of identity politics are involved. The actual reason there can be no new hashtag, no separation from the hate campaign, is that the "legitimate" face of the movement is wholly dependent on the hate campaign. It's not just that the latter created the former; the former is built on a foundation laid down by the latter.

Back when it was still called the Quinnspiracy, it wasn't all doxxing and death threats and stalking and slut-shaming. It was a crowdsourced disinformation campaign, and the "legitimate" movement is predicated on uncritically accepting those lies. The scandal for which #GombaGum was named--and it's frankly bizarre that so many people seem to think they can just gloss over this part--simply never happened. It's bullshit, it's obvious bullshit, and the press said as much once they'd realized it wasn't going to blow over and they had to address it. The accusations of censorship began with several websites deciding they didn't want to provide a platform for an obviously unstable individual's transparent attempts to ruin a woman's life, and continued with other websites' decisions not to publish the ensuing cover story for the entirely unfair reason that it was obviously, demonstrably untrue. The specific journalistic question raised by #GlammaGrrl concerned whether or not gaming websites were obligated to publish slander based on hearsay. (They are not.)

But it's not about that anymore, right? The ensuing accusations followed the same pattern: unadulterated horseshit, easily disproven, and widely distributed. #GanderGibb's rhetorical strategy has been to tell so many lies that people will uncritically accept at least a few of them. Jenn Frank's malfeasance? Lies. The attacks on TFYC? Lies. "Gamers are dead?" Well...

I'm not sure quite how to characterize this argument. Leaving aside the claim that a dozen articles on the same subject constitutes a conspiracy--see also the thousands of news sites who all started talking about the 2014 election results at the same time--and leaving aside that only one of those actually contained the phrase "gamers are dead," and it wasn't the famous one, you'd still have to laughably misread them to come up with anything like the preposterous, genocidal screeds #GuppyGatt claim to have been offended by. You'd have to not know that "gamer" has been a contentious term for years specifically because it denotes a large, varied, fun-loving audience but connotes a hostile, exclusionary hive of anxious masculinity. You'd have to ignore that Leigh Alexander spent much of the iconic "gamers are dead" post lamenting how embarrassing this shit is, and how the assorted anti-feminists and crypto-fascists who kicked off this "consumer revolt" are representative of a wider problem of arrested development and toxic masculinity, a pissed-off, chronically insecure clique who don't realize that Chuck Palahniuk is making fun of them. You'd have to imagine that it contained the phrase "gamers are dead," and read it as...I don't even fucking know.

Reading it literally would seem to be out of the question, because being dead is not, traditionally, a morally loaded thing. Short of a relapse of Cotard delusion, it's hard to imagine how this could be applied literally, yet the gators assert their physical alive-ness with seemingly no awareness of how ridiculous they sound. Some people seem to have read it as a threat, an interpretation it's difficult to believe is being offered in good faith. But the weirdest part isn't so explicit. The canonical #GabbaGone response to discussion of cultural conflicts within gaming culture was to act as if they were being attacked from outside, from people with contempt for a rather important part of this particular techno-cultural moment. You'd have to believe that the people who've devoted their lives to videogames--building them, experiencing them, taking them apart, putting them back together, and sharing their experiences with the world--hate the technology and culture they've helped build. You'd have to believe that Alexander, who commemorated a successful no-kill run in Metal Gear Solid 3 by permanently inscribing the Pigeon icon onto her goddamn body, hates videogames and wished everyone would just give up and get really into puppet theater or something.

You'd have to believe a lot of really stupid shit. And so they do. So do lots of people; sooner or later, I'll run into the LaRouche Democrats in Harvard Square again. Sooner or later, there'll be another manufactured scandal. Sooner or later, we'll have to do all this bullshit again.

But the conventional wisdom on this particular outburst has been set down, and it's not changing. They lost. They'll probably lose next time, too.

Screengrab courtesy of @SJWIlluminati

Gamers are alive.

Kill the gamers.

oh god oh god the page is blank so white and so blank

Young men fight on sheer emotion and passion. But you get some grey and you find that people keep schedules for a reason, that attaining and maintaining are two different things. People don't talk to me about potential anymore. They talk to me about management.

-- Ta-Nehisi Coates, continuing the inexplicable Bane theme in my life

Lately I have been trying, with middling success, to find my passion. I've written, in this little space of mine, of feeling disconnected: from my family, from my friends, from my craft. This is to be expected, for the usual reasons. Depression has a way of alienating you from yourself, but I've been in this game for over half my life now, and at some point I'd be remiss not to consider the possibility that I'm less in touch with my passion because there just isn't as much of it anymore.

Which brings us to Breathing Machine.

the launch event for BREATHING MACHINE: A memoir of computers = everyone drinks whiskey at their computer til midnight
— Leigh Alexander (@leighalexander) January 20, 2014

Having established that my plan to get drunk on the internet was, in fact, an officially endorsed launch event, I did, in fact, spend the night of the 21st, and a portion of the morning of the 22nd, reading Leigh Alexander's new ebook. I can save you some time by swiping from Zoe Quinn's Gone Home review: "I'm not sure how else to say it, but it made my heart hurt in the best way."

Gone Home was an anatomy, an index, little pieces of all the smart, weird, queer chicks who so shaped my late adolescence. It's a personal story, but it's not mine. Alexander's story, while obviously also not mine, was a lot more familiar than I'd have expected.

My early adolescence seems a little unreal to me, an early object lesson in the importance of mistrusting one's memory. A decade and a half down the road, a therapist shared his take with me. He said that I'd been so consumed with my own fear, and the fears of how I'd react under that kind of pressure, that I'd built a cage of logic and ethics: to protect myself from the world, and to protect the world from me. (Somewhat pleased, I informed him that, in my corner of the social imaginary, we have a term for this behavior, and that term is "Batman.")

So I hunkered down and built a tiny life for myself. I read and watched and played, and wrote and wrote and wrote. I built a map of the world, word by word, in poetry and blood. It was a shitty map, mind you. I was a kid. But then, as is so often the case in this life of ours, there were unknown unknowns.

I’d be crouched by the modem in the dark. It’d be late. It’s not that I wasn’t supposed to be awake. I was 13 years old, and no one could really tell me when to go to bed. I’d started nurturing the spark of an idea in my casing that no one, really, ought to tell me anything, anymore.

The internet hit me hard. I had marginally more computer literacy than the kids I'd left behind at school, but that wasn't saying a lot; I knew my way around MS-DOS and Win 3.1, but from my perspective, the PC was pretty much a word processor and game console. The introduction of a modem into my awkward, angry biosphere brought a couple of epiphanies: first Prodigy, then Doom. Now that they share a sentence, I can see the commonality. You pushed a game, and it pushed back; that much I'd known since Centipede. What bulletin boards and deathmatches offered was fundamentally the same. All that had changed was an understanding of what was pushing back, but oh, dear reader, in that understanding is space for all of heaven and earth.

The world was out there. A little at a time, and slowly. Community. Hostility. A future. A way to play house with adulthood, with the slightest edge of transgression. Expressing myself verbally had always been part of my identity, and moving to text, either real-time or turn-based, only made it easier. Nobody was going to assume I was 13 if I didn't tell them.

As an adult, with a much-improved map and the awareness that I've never been more lost, I read of Alexander's probing, trial-and-error approach to text-based systems, her solitary pride in a cursory (but fundamental) secret knowledge that hadn't yet been deemed Important, her weird online relationships, her self-conscious construction of a verbal identity, and her first forays into the politics and trends that would develop the net into the excitingly depressing place it is today, I felt...

...

There isn't more to that sentence. Nothing solid, anyway. I just felt. I think I was smiling. Mostly I just sat, and sipped, and beheld. In a dark room in an apartment I can't afford, surrounded by the props of a life that had somehow outgrown me, I wondered if this might have been a ubiquitous experience for our generation: if we had all grown up alone, together, with the entire world.

@Wordbeast erase all friends who don't like your drinking, they don't know what's best
— Leigh Alexander (@leighalexander) January 25, 2014

The world, as they say, ends with you.

O, Death

When I woke up yesterday, I remembered that I had plans. As such, I ate first one, then a second meal. I showered. Shaved off my beard, and hacked off most of my hair. Put down my filthy eyeglasses and put in my contacts for the first time in months. And I ventured out into the night.

WiG Boston was meeting at Tommy Doyle's, and while I rarely turn down the opportunity for beer these days, I was more interested in that night's presentation, by one Zoe Quinn, developer of the recently released "commercial-ish" Depression Quest. I ran through it a couple of times in preparation, and I urge all of you to do the same, after a quick perusal of the trigger warnings.

The design is inspired, and I'll not detract from your depressing experience by describing it in too much detail. Suffice to say it captures very well the most game-like aspect of depression: the persistent sense, no matter where you are, that it's Too Late.  My experience with the game, in particular, was very positive: I am in way better shape than our unnamed second-person protagonist. My actual situation, perhaps, is a lot trickier--Depression Quest with a side of Silent Hill 2--but as far as coping mechanisms, motivation, and willingness to ask for help, I'm pretty good at this shit. Then again, it's new to our protagonist. I've been in the field since I was nine years old. "You merely adopted the dark," I wanted to tell him, unintelligibly. "I was born in it."

I'm grateful for the experience. There aren't many things that make me feel a sense of competence these days, let along mastery. And I do call my family when I can't bear to talk to them. I do go out when I don't feel like it, and half the time it goes quite badly, but I keep at it. I slog forward, maintaining the faith in what I can rationally discern, the command to treat the self like an other and the other like the self; I hope in the absence of hope. I plan for tomorrow, ignoring the visceral certainty that I've ruined my life.

So apparently I'm still good at something. Perhaps MITCO can help me find a strong verb to put it on the resume.

Absent from DQ, for reasons entirely sensible, is the impetus that follows, the empty altar in the church of Too Late. I've had a good deal of time on my hands, these past few years, and the philosophical wand'rings have proceeded apace. When someone you love is sick for months at a time, and the doctors can't tell you why, you get pretty familiar with death. You learn a lot about death, but you learn even more about fear.

And this, dear reader, is what I've learned in that time: the fears of death, rational and not, are perhaps too easily confused. The irrational, pre-verbal fear of death is, in practice, inferred from fear of pain. It is overwhelming, at times. It's stronger than almost anything else we can feel, but it's not deep, and in focused bursts, it can even be brought to heel. The rational fear of death is a trickier one; as has been noted by the talented and famous, nobody has anything bad to report about the stretch of time before their birth. Why should we be concerned about going back?

Because we experience death, over and over, during life. We experience it as loss, and loneliness. And the idea of death sticks to us, blinding us to the fact that the only person at the funeral who's guaranteed not to feel lonely is the one in the box. There only two people in the entire universe, after all: you and everyone else. Morality begins with the acceptance that you are always and forever outnumbered. Written in that fear is a social contract, perhaps the first of its kind; a promise issued daily to everyone we love, everyone we know, everyone we meet. I will keep your fiction, we promise, that tomorrow will be the same as today. Turn away from me if you like. I will continue to exist. I will maintain your reality.

I will be.