Scott Malcomson · @RoyCalbeck
22nd Dec 2015 from TwitLonger
Myths and Realities about the Digital Games Research Association #GamerGate
DiGRA is a research group specializing in video games, as the full name above should make clear. What do they have to do, if anything, with #GamerGate?
When numerous gaming-news websites ran articles generally declaring the incipient death of "toxic gamer culture" back in August 2014 (five of which came out within an hour of one another), it was aimed at not just the general gaming community, but also the #GamerGate consumer movement, which had only just been coined the name after actor Adam Baldwin learned of corruption between independent game developers and the games press themselves. The movement was brought fully under fire, named as a core part of the problems these articles alleged.
A fairly good summary of the matter was written up by 4P Games:
http://www.4pgames.net/6755/features/soapbox/gamergate-or-how-the-death-of-gamers-has-been-greatly-exaggerated
WHERE'S THE BEEF?
The thing was, there was nothing to these articles except a load of accusations and allegations, most of which were self-referential or ignored inconvenient facts at whim. Except for the repeated citation of a single scholarly work, which supposedly provided academic confirmation of the gaming community's toxicity towards women.
Dan Golding's "The End of Gamers" (https://archive.is/rA6er).
The angry journalists dovetailed Golding's piece directly into each others' more incendiary material, such as Leigh Alexander's "Gamers Don't Have to be Your Audience" (https://archive.is/38ofL). And Golding himself had produced a work as tailor-made to the narrative as it was non-academic:
"Campaigns of personal harassment aimed at game developers are nothing new. They are dismayingly common among those who happen to be women, or not white straight men, and doubly so if they also happen to make the sort of game that in any way challenge the status quo, even if that challenge is only made through their very existence."
Golding doesn't bother to source any of this. He presents it as an article of faith, and it was accepted as one. His work is purely an opinion piece --- but it was presented by the gaming press as more of an authentic "academic" work, because he himself states at the very top of his article that he is an academic.
In fact, he was simply a graduate student at the time. He didn't use the site from which his opinion was pulled for any academic work at all, instead providing a link to Academia.Edu where that sort of material COULD be found. He was not a professor, not an expert on the gaming community or its history, and did not claim to be. While he had in fact published a few papers related to video games, none were about the social aspects in any way.
In short, Daniel Golding was held up by news outlets hostile to gamers as a form of fig leaf behind which they could attempt to disguise their own irrationality, claiming to be the "adults" minding "whiny children". The aforementioned "children", quite understandably, wanted to find and debunk Golding's work in order to discredit the fig leaf and thereby defuse some of the attacks being made on them by the press.
MISSING LINK? NOPE. JUST DAN GOLDING.
But the research into Golding pulled up a link (http://digraa.org/) suggesting that he had at some point been Chairman of DiGRA for Australia. Golding says all he did was chair a half-hour panel at a convention and was never a member of the organization.
And in fact, that's entirely accurate. "5:00 5:30 Game Studies’ Australian Fringe: Communities, Critics and Conversation Round Table Chair – Dan Golding" is the sole entry for him. I've run small conventions myself, and even though they were fannish in nature, we abided by basic convention protocols --- in which every panel has its own chairman to manage the proceedings. That's ALL it means. You don't even have to be a member of the hosting organization to chair a panel at most conventions. I even went and checked to see who'd been the Board Members for DiGRA Australia, and Golding wasn't on it...
...but to my surprise, Brendan Keogh WAS. In Seat 3 for the 2015-2016 Board.
THE LOONY BIRD
Keogh himself is a... shall we say, "interesting study".
In 2012, he was already writing impassioned and half-baked screeds like "Stop Pretending There Isn't a Videogame Rape Culture" (http://critdamage.blogspot.com/2012/05/quit-pretending-there-isnt-videogame.html). Several extremely interesting tidbits came from this: first, that Keogh seemed genuinely frightened to speak his own mind on issues pertaining to feminism, even though he simultaneously expressed seething fury for his fellow gamers on the subject.
"[Trigger Warning: This post is going to talk about rape culture and violence against women, and will probably involve a few expletives because I'm pretty fucking angry. I want to note, too, that I am talking as a privileged (and ignorant) cis, straight, white, male...]"
If we are to believe Keogh's own writing, he's a man at war with himself. He is waving flags all over the place, whose sole function is to beg his audience (and perhaps fellow professional writers) not to be angry at him for daring to speak. Not because he cares about angering gamers --- as we'll soon see --- but because he expects to anger feminists.
"I wasn't going to comment on the Hitman: Absolution trailer. Well, I was, but then I wasn't. For one, Mark Serrels at Kotaku Australia has already noted everything that is vile and disgusting and pathetic about it (to which Michelle Starr added some more excellent thoughts, as did Sarah Ditum which the above quote is from, as will many others before I post this in the morning, I'm sure). Then I got furious about it on Twitter, and Leigh Alexander rightfully noted that, even more than the videogame medium's typically poor treatment of women, this trailer is so contrived, so vile, so pathetic, that it should not even be worth commenting on. It's like (and this is my analogy, not Leigh's) getting angry at Westboro Baptist Church for being homophobic."
Keogh runs back and forth between feminists who've spoken on the subject, and one who insists this bit of game-relevant news should be quashed altogether. He and Leigh Alexander were game journalists, but here they are flatly discussing denial of coverage, hoping the game will suffer for lack of publicity.
"So I was going to ignore it. Then I saw people on Twitter comment that they didn't really see the problem with it. Or that it was a single case and it was wrong to make broad accusations at the whole medium... This blew my mind. My problem with this trailer is precisely its sexuality, more specifically its conflation of sexuality with violence. My problem with this whole fucking medium is that this isn't a single case. It's an extreme case, yes. But it isn't a single case. I was happy to not give this trailer the attention it is rolling in the digital filth trying to receive, but that so many people don't seem to understand what is so fucking wrong with it suggests that staying quiet isn't really a feasible option. Apparently the videogame rape culture is so ingrained that this actually needs to be spelled out."
No rape takes place, or is even suggested, in the Hitman: Absolution trailer. It's a bunch of assassin nuns who try to kill the protagonist, and who are instead killed by him. It's the conflation of "sexy" and "violent" which to Keogh and people of his circle at the time meant "rape". It makes him so angry, that he reacts as though he is personally moving to save a real-life woman from an actual rape.
Nor is that a presumption on my part. Because his definition of rape is:
"Rape isn't just forced sex. It's an act of exerting power. Of keeping woman (and other groups of people) subservient to hetereosexual male dominance. It is often used explicitly as such in wars. It's "We won and now we are in charge and this is what we can do to you." Make no mistake, it's as prolific in our 'peaceful' society as any other. It's an act on an individual by one or more individuals and its repeated over and over again across the world every single day so to keep one group of people subservient to another. It is a culture of individual, prolific crimes."
Keogh's definition of "rape" becomes so broad as to encompass ANY act of power or dominance, whether or not sex is involved in any way. This worldview interprets the most mechanical functions of society as a series of ongoing, and yet entirely unconscious, acts of rape, in a strange sort of... literalized sense. It's not actually literal. But Keogh speaks and acts as though it is.
"That is rape culture: the means by which our society keeps women subservient to men by constantly reminding them that if they step out of line, if they for a moment think that they have as much freedom or power as men, men will rape them and put them back in their place."
In videogames, that can be as simple as sniping an enemy soldier from across a virtual battlefield, IF that soldier happens to be female. To Keogh, the assassin nuns of the game trailer represent real damsels in distress, who need saving from their developer, their publisher, and their players, all of whom are the lowest scum in his eyes.
THIS is the only real DiGRA connection to #GamerGate.
Wait, so he's in DiGRA, but what's that to do with #GamerGate?
PRESS SELECT AND STOP RAPING
Keogh co-owns an outfit called "Press Select" with Dan Golding. It's a platform for game critiques. (https://archive.is/OfGAS) The narrative embraced by Keogh more than two years before #GamerGate's existence was largely mirrored in Golding's "End of Gamers" --- women are under attack in gaming, because they're under attack just by existing, but gamers are somehow a particularly pernicious problem and no one needs to show any of this is true because well it just is. According to them.
I can't think of a worse way to poison #GamerGate against DiGRA as a whole, short of total and open endorsement of Keogh's views. The associative appearance is horrible from a strictly PR point of view.
It doesn't get any better when you spot some of the other people Keogh namedropped back in 2012 and with Press Select, identifying them as fellow-travelers towards his ideals of feminist-oriented games criticism. Several would later author anti-#GamerGate pieces during 2014, giving an even stronger appearance of a cabal.
SO WHAT'S DIGRA GOT TO DO? GOT TO DO WITH IT?
Despite appearances, and despite some recent statements by DiGRA's President Mia Consalvo indicating a leaning in the direction of Keogh's radicalism, there is nothing here that shows any functional action taken by DiGRA against #GamerGate.
At the same time, it is also understandable why members of the movement would be wary about DiGRA, given the apparent connections to persons who are --- individually or in concert with one another OUTSIDE its purview --- deeply hostile.
I would recommend, to DiGRA members, that they take a step back and dispassionately examine these (and possibly other) links to toxic personalities who have involved themselves in the #GamerGate controversy. To those in #GamerGate itself, I suggest a strong and immediate reversion to what used to be a watchphrase for the movement:
"Trust... but VERIFY." And wipe that spaghetti sauce off your face.