Adrian Chmielarz 🧙♀️🔥 · @adrianchm
30th Apr 2015 from TwitLonger
Are "video games more important than one woman's life"?
It's my quick take on this: https://twitter.com/KachoArinoDesu/status/593778734957764609
First, Michael Dorn is at least partially right. Yes, it's another case of an outside world celeb having a strong opinion after reading an extremely biased article, but he is not entirely wrong.
There is no smoke without the fire. I do think video games definitely had something to do with the harassment that Quinn received (she did, let's not deny basic facts, shall we?) as a result of the pathetic Zoe Post. Even if every single bad thing said about her was true, the attack was disproportionate. It was a death by a thousand cuts of the online katana. Unless you are a mass murderer, I am not sure anyone deserves that.
And at least some of that hate came from gamers.
What a lot of people do not understand is how to be on the receiving end of the endless stream of harsh or simply hateful replies, messages and e-mails. Everyone thinks of themselves as a single voice that "has the right to critique", and they cannot put themselves in the receiver's shoes.
Let me give you an example. Imagine you are a bad person and you slapped a good person just because. If the good person's friend slapped you back, but then also every person from the whole town, for every day of every year, spat at your feet, would you call that sane and proper justice?
To this day, the only thing I said about Zoe Quinn, indirectly, was that "the beginnings of #GamerGate were extremely ugly". After reading a lot on the subject (and still not being an expert, it's all one big muddy clusterfuck), I would remove "extremely" but "ugly" stays. And it stays simply because, again, of the disproportionate reaction to whatever she has done.
By "reaction" I don't mean critique, even a harsh one. No one should be excluded from the public critique (excluding one for non-criminal private affairs). I mean "thousands of shitty words sent personally, directly to Zoe Quinn".
And that is why I try to avoid anything Zoe Quinn. Even the reason why I am so disgusted by the Boston Magazine piece is not because of Quinn herself, but because of the author, who has written a smear piece, using loaded words and phrases, omitting important facts, and inventing new ones. It's one of the worst (or best, depends how you look at it) examples of "journalism" I have ever seen. And this is from the guy who just called Gjani's post "pathetic"!
Second, with all that in mind, I can now address the statement that "Video games are more important than one woman's life though. Games are bigger than movies in world economy".
I know that most people's reaction is "what in the actual fuck". And they are right. If the everlasting stream of hatred -- do not confuse with critique -- towards Quinn stopped or never existed, how would that endanger video games? It would not.
I understand there is no malice intended in the statement. Sometimes, it's simply a harsh truth. For example, we could easily avoid deaths of thousands of humans daily if we stopped using cars. But cars are "more important" than these particular lives in the grander scheme of things. Obviously we all prefer no life is ever lost in a car accident. But we also know that abandoning cars would results in a worse world, not a better one. So in that meaning, indeed, "cars are more important than lives of thousands", however ridiculous that sounds at first.
But it's not the case here. The fight for ethics in game journalism did not need the harassment of Zoe Quinn. On the contrary, it would be better and more effective if that harassment never happened.
Note this post is only on a certain narrow issue. Of course, the while thing is way more complicated than this. I don't need you to tell me how the press conflated harassment and legitimate critique into one "sexist" attack on apparently all women in gaming -- I know that, and about a thousand other things you feel like telling me right now. But this post is only about two simple things. One, online lynches usually suck. Two, no, in the context of everything that has happened and this here case discussed above, video games are not more important than one woman's life.