Sympathy for the devils

Part 1: Gamers

Gustave Doré, engraving for Dante’s Inferno (1890)

At the start of these expatiations upon the culture war, I cited some remarks from Marshall McLuhan’s 1977 appearance on the Mike McManus Show. I’d like to look at what he says after his remarks about the global village. Where they occur, emphases are mine:

McLuhan: His tolerance is tested in those narrow circumstances very much. Village people are not that much in love with each other. The global village is a place of a very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

McManus: Do you see any pattern of this in, for example the desires of Quebec to separate?

McLuhan: I should think that they are feeling very abrasive about the English community and about the way the American south felt about the Yankee north a hundred years ago.

McManus: Is this going to be a pattern right around the world?

McLuhan: Apparently, separatisms are very frequent all over the globe at the present time. Every country in the world is loaded with regionalistic and nationalistic little groups.

McManus: But in Quebec for example, like do you define it as the quest for identity?

McLuhan: Yes, all forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You are a nobody. Therefore, you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody. So you become very violent. Identity is always accompanied by violence. This seems paradoxical to you? Ordinary people find the need for violence as they lose their identities. It is only the threat to people’s identity that makes them violent.

A little later, McLuhan replies to McManus’ observation about the invasion of privacy in the electric age:

McLuhan: Yes, in fact, just ignoring [privacy]. Everybody has become porous. The light and the the message go right through us. At this moment, we are on the air. We do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone or on radio or on T.V., you don’t have a physical body—you’re just an image on the air. When you don’t have a physical body, you’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. I think this has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people really of their identity.

What I’d like to do here is examine a few groups—let’s follow Benedict Anderson in calling them “imagined communities”— that have attained some degree of prominence in the United States’ culture wars over the last few years. All of them raise the hackles of educated urban liberals (in other words, most of the people I know and speak to), but we’re going to try and understand them a little better. McLuhan gave us the common denominator: reactionary abrasiveness and a separatist impulse provoked by a perceived siege upon one’s sense of identity or one’s imagined community (although in most cases this is redundant).

EXHIBIT A: Gamers

This is the most trivial of our three subjects, and, as such, it’s the one of which I’m most qualified to speak—mostly by way of reminiscence. I’m also aware that it isn’t terribly relevant—Leigh Alexander announced “gamers are over” back in 2014, and time has proved her right—but I’m still fascinated by the way it played out. It was like a light-show simulation of warring tribes. I’m not saying nobody was harmed and no lives were ruined, but the spectacle of the thing was the thing. It was a hyperreal abstraction of culture war, and a precursor of the format which prevails today.

I remember there was a time when video games were not cool. Nor were the people who played them, especially if they’d already passed through puberty. When I was in middle and high school through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, I was playing a lot of video games. I was also something of an outcast who was slow in figuring how to talk to girls (and to boys, for that matter), sucked at sports, and went to school dances without a date and stood against the wall, staring into the crowd and wondering what I was getting wrong. Most of my social equals were the other boys who spent their nights and weekends playing video games by themselves and surfing the internet.

I don’t think we were calling ourselves “gamers” just yet—that came about during the early aughts—but the culture was in the process of concrescence. The early internet did for people who played video games what print matter in a consolidated vernacular did for the nations of Europe: it expanded and intensified our awareness of ourselves as an aggregate. People who’d have otherwise never known about each other gathered and gabbed on message boards and IRC channels, made and/or browsed fan sites dedicated to particular game series, read Penny Arcade and Bob and George, read and/or composed strategy guides on GameFAQs, etc. The social hologram of the gaming community was of a diffuse but multitudinous fraternity with its own lingo, in-jokes, cultural touchstones, and the shared experience of being something of a “beta.” I don’t mean to entertain any taxonomies of masculinity here—but it’s fair to say that if in the early 2000s you had a strong opinion about the Sega Dreamcast, you were never in the running for prom king or quarterback, and were more likely to have only ever had an “online” girlfriend than somebody who’d never played EverQuest.

Concerning the gamer identity, I’d like to draw your attention to a couple of panels from a 2001 Penny Arcade strip:

If this strip was never once pulled up from the archives and posted to Twitter or Facebook by somebody who was, shall we say, deeply concerned about ethics in gaming journalism, I’d be astonished.

The Penny Arcade fan who never missed an update wouldn’t be reading this and wondering if Holkins and Krahulik’s use of word heritage wasn’t a mite overwrought. “Gamer” was quietly on its way towards becoming a cultic social identity. Even if the users of a gaming message board got into impassioned, drawn-out arguments about whether Symphony of the Night ruined the Castlevania series or called each other names while debating the merits of Western computer RPGs over Japanese console RPGs, everyone involved understood that there weren’t a hell of a lot of people in the world with whom they could have these conversations. There was a collegiality to these affairs, notwithstanding the barrages of invective.

Though Holkins and Krahulik rather assume that their readers can relate to being bullied misfits, we can’t fault the creators of one of the most successful and influential webcomics in the short history of the medium with not knowing their audience. Because it was true: at the turn of the century, the people who played video games and spent a lot of time on the internet reading about games and confabulating about games with other people who played games were apt to fit the “dweeb” stereotype. “Gamers are an oppressed and misunderstood people” was a long way off from becoming a sardonic meme, but the narrative was already there—and a lot of us bonded over it. It wasn’t discussed as often as our collective memories of being turned into eggplants or watching Aeris die or getting chased around Raccoon City by the Nemesis, but it was a cord in the ligature of the virtual community’s common experience. (Not that everyone had been pushed around in high school or was terminally single, but etiquette prescribed that one oughtn’t to be judgmental of those for whom that was the case.)

As video games became more sophisticated, progressing from Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros. to Myst and Half-Life, it was only natural that the people who made and sold them would endeavor to expand their market share beyond the dweeb demographic. And it was equally understandable that guys who hadn’t given a crap about Sonic the Hedgehog or Earthworm Jim when they were in the fourth grade might have taken a look at Halo some ten years later and saw something they could get into.

I remember watching actual frat boys throwing Halo 2 LAN parties and being unable to decide whether I was impressed or felt vaguely threatened. And I distinctly recall the ice-breaking session during the first day of my freshman-year public speaking course because it occasioned a female classmate standing up and introducing herself as a gamer. Such a gamer, she said.

That got my attention.

I feel like I remember her being blonde. She wasn’t at all unattractive, and judging from her clothes and comportment, she’d never had anything like a goth phase as a reaction against her dismal position in the primary school pecking order. To all appearances, she was what one might call a “normie,” and here she was declaring herself a “gamer” on the basis that she routinely stayed up past midnight playing The Sims—a basic bitch game predating that descriptor by like fifteen years. At the time I would have very much liked to jump up and cut her off. “No, I’m sorry, but you are not a gamer.”

Yes, I know, I was being judgmental, and I definitely had a gatekeeper’s attitude. But, well, I felt how I felt. Where did she get off saying she was one of us when she’d never even heard of Emerald and Ruby Weapon, let alone beat them? Could she perform a Dragon Punch motion on a joystick? What was the farthest she’d gotten in Battletoads? Could she speak of overcoming the Water Temple? Had she ever considered paying a hundred bucks for an imported copy of Akumajō Dracula X: Chi no Rondo? Definitely not.

It wasn’t that she was a woman. I knew there were woman who played video games—although almost all of them were from the internet.

Even though the pre-Web 2.0 virtual community of gamers skewed heavily male, none of the message boards nor IRC channels I was involved with were ever exclusively so. There were female users who’d never have discovered and come into these spaces to begin with if they weren’t seriously into games. Metaphorically speaking, they’d been turned into eggplants too, and nobody could say they didn’t belong. Oftentimes they flew beneath the radar. Since everyone was using aliases and it was considered gauche to use a personal photograph as an avatar pic, it wasn’t altogether uncommon to be caught off guard by a veteran user casually mentioning she was female.¹

I can only speak in retrospect and make conjecture—but I can guess that it wasn’t always comfortable being a woman or girl in a virtual community dominated by men and boys. In a space where there was probably one or two women to every ten males, a user who was known to be female could expect some unwanted attention, and probably received at least a few regrettable DMs. I’d guess they sometimes found themselves allowing a round of misogynistic jokes to slide because they didn’t want to start any drama. But nevertheless—these weren’t spaces where open, vicious woman-hating was the norm.

But it did depend on the space. Before the arrival of the centralized social media platforms (which obsolesced and collapsed message board culture) all of these nodes of activity were siloed off from one another. I can remember a message board attached to a site whose webmaster very explicitly wished for women to shut the fuck up and stop pretending they knew anything about video games. For what it’s worth, he was mostly regarded as a psycho outside his own domain—but he had a domain.

…I seem to have fallen into the trap of getting stuck on the issue of gender politics because so much of the “gamers” discourse of the mid-2010s revolved around the image of the gamer as a reactionary, basement-dwelling misogynist. While that sort of person did and does exist, and while male resentment towards self-declared “gamer girls” was a thing, its manifestations were often inseparable from the angst aroused by a palpable vibe shift that began in the late 2000s.

The video game industry was busily diversifying its customer base. The “geek” aesthetic and lifestyle were finally coming into vogue.² The exchange rate between internet clout and real clout was fast approaching parity, and the parts of the internet dedicated to gaming offered a fertile field where social capital could be cultivated and reaped by people who, fifteen years earlier, would have regarded writing for something like GamePro magazine as an unsexy professional cul-de-sac. For an adolescent or adult male who understood himself as part of an elective community of social misfits, it was disturbing to witness a surging ingression of non-misfits, hipsters, and careerists—many of whom happened to be women, and who—I must be cautious here—were perceived by some as emphasizing the “girl” in “gamer girl” in service of a cynical ladder-climbing strategy, or because they simply craved attention, followers, and upvotes.³

I guess this is as good a time as any to bring up Gamergate.

I don’t want to talk about its cast of characters or the issues it was ostensibly about. While it was happening, I didn’t have a gaming PC, a console, or even a television. I played games on an emulator every now and again, but no longer thought of myself as a “gamer.” I was moving on. I was out of the loop.

Even so, I couldn’t but be aware of it. The controversy’s reach was astonishing.

As I’ve come to understand it, the “ethics in journalism” mantra was a smokescreen. The actual basis of the whole imbroglio was that an imagined community whose (mostly male) members took a kind of ornery pride in existing outside of the mainstream and being beneath its notice were reacting against the new status quo. All of a sudden the guys who disappeared into Guild Wars and made variations of the “I Herd U Liek Mudkips” meme when they were eighteen years old were coming to grips with the fact that the things which once set them apart from “the herd,” and which gave their virtual community its veneer of exclusivity, no longer “belonged” to them. Their real concern about gaming journalism was that the industry’s ascendant chattering class no longer spoke to nor represented them, and was in fact declaring to the rest of the world that they were a problem.

From the gamergator’s viewpoint (I realize the typo and am not changing it), the situation was like the suburbanization of a small rural or exurban town, driven by private equity and a massive influx of work-from-home professionals drawn in by inexpensive houses in a bucolic setting. Higher-status outsiders who didn’t look or act like the old locals were moving in, changing the landscape and the economy, and dictating to the original residents what the culture of the place was going to be like from there on out.

I feel compelled to copy/paste an infamous pro-Gamergate screed from the subreddit KotakuInAction, posted in 2015(?). Once again, there’s a line I’ve boldfaced for emphasis. (See if you can find it!)

They targeted gamers.

Gamers.

We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.

We'll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it's fun.

We'll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.

Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.

Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?

These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We're already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren't shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We've been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they've threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can't is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.

Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You're not special, you're not original, you're not the first; this is just another boss fight.

You can see why this became a copypasta. It’s ridiculous. Our epistolarian writes as though he imagines himself delivering a rousing address to a war council in the Iliad when he’s actually in the battle of frogs and mice.⁴ And in spite of the self-deprecation, the whole thing is sincere, a celebration of the things which he believes define him and the members of the group to which he [imagines he] belongs. One can only hope he was a teenager when he wrote this.

The thing is: his ability to keep on living as a guy with an intense video game hobby was never imperiled for a moment. By that point, the video game industry was invincible; there would always be more games, new games, forever. And it wasn’t as though Steam and GameStop were about to implement a social credit system banning purchases by anyone who’d made too many casual rape jokes or complained once too often about SJWs politicizing everything. Nobody was telling him he couldn’t play video games anymore.

But playing video games was only half of what made one a gamer. Involvement in the social hologram of gamer culture was the other part of it. Possibly it was the more important of the two, because it was how the self-declared gamer knew himself. The hologram imbued the long solitary hours spent playing Dark Souls 2 between his shifts at Target or the call center and his time in bed with a social significance that would not otherwise be apparent, and which helped to compensate for everything else—the low-wage and even lower-prestige job, the lack of romantic prospects, the isolation, the ambient sense of rudderlessness and powerlessness, the awareness that so many people had it better than him, and maybe didn’t deserve to.⁵ Now the hologram was changing into something antagonistic to him. He didn’t like what the voices from out of the light had begun to tell him about himself and people like him. And try as he might, he couldn’t oust them from his screen or shut them up.⁶

People who feel their identity is under assault from without—even if it’s an absurd consumer-cultist identity—they typically don’t genuflect, apologize, and promise to do better. They close ranks and regroup. They get mean. If some smaller or greater percentage of the gamergate crowd who fit the profile sketched above fell into the embrace of the alt-right, it was because they’d been pushed.

It’s tempting to say that the real story here is constituted by footnotes 3 and 5, and that their extensions into the hologram concealed what was actually happening behind the light show—but when an aspect of a slow, silent, and complex social phenomenon manifests within the noise and spectacle of the light show, attempting to perceive the real event under the holographic content can be like trying to discover the noumenal object beneath the impressions it makes upon the senses.

Something else to bear in mind, and which the Gamergate debacle demonstrated: our collective perception and reaction to the hologram tends to aggravate those elements of the process it has yet to disclose.

1. Moreover: anybody who frequented these spaces came to understand that a female avatar indicated nothing whatsoever about the sex of the user. Unless they out and said otherwise, it was usually safe to assume the user with a Sailor Moon or Alys Brangwin avatar was a dude.

2. It wasn’t that video games and the internet were longer just for dweebs. Laptops, smartphones, social media, etc. made everyone, on average, dweebier than they were before. Rewatch the Simpsons episode “Homer Goes to College” and pay attention to the tropes it uses to establish Homer’s undergrad tutors as hopeless nerds. Their social ineptitude notwithstanding, Benjamin, Doug, and Gary seem kind of ahead of the curve, don’t they?

3. Of course, occurrences of the latter case were (are?) manifestations of the identity crises endemic to the electronic media epoch. Let’s look again at something McLuhan said and swap out some words:

When you live out on the frontier as a fractional person in an atomized society whose old cultural bonds only continue to disintegrate, you have no identity. You are a nobody. Therefore, you get very tough post sexy photos of yourself touching a PlayStation controller to your lips. You have to prove that you are somebody. So you become very violent a Gamer Girl.

4. I wasn’t about to paste in “Batrachomyomachia” as though I can spell, pronounce, or remember it off the top of my head.

5. The recent wave of attention to the so-called masculinity crisis broke a decade too late. At least.

6. Ignore them? Oh, please. How many times this week did you click on something you knew was going to piss you off?