The Gamer is a Lie: #GamerGate and the Loss of Gamer Identity

Room # Traditional Presentations

In the mid-1990s, the video game industry created a representative consumer for their product: a nameless young, white, heterosexual male who became the mold for the gamer identity. It persisted. The video game industry used the identity to sell games, favoring their constructed gamer with determined hailing, calling them to play the latest release and buy the newest console. The hailed demographic wore their gamer identity like a badge of honor – and protected it if they felt it was threatened. Ultimately, a community was constructed by the industry that privileged the young, white, heterosexual male as the target demographic. Games, they were told by the industry, were made for them. In August 2014, the illusion propagated by the video game industry shattered. #GamerGate began when Eron Gjoni, a journalist, claimed his ex-girlfriend, Zoe Quinn, an indie-game developer who created Depression Quest, was participating in unethical romantic relationships with other journalists in exchange for favorable reviews. Gamergaters, a group predominantly made up of the industry’s constructed gamer identity, organized on anonymous message boards like 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit, as well as social media site Twitter. They planned a misogynistic harassment campaign against Quinn that included rape and death threats. It spread to other women in the games industry, including Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu. Those who supported Quinn and the other victims of harassment were labelled social justice warriors, or SJWs, and were targeted, as well. The stated goal: put an end to unethical video games journalism. The true goal became clear to those who observed #GamerGate: reduce what was seen as an increase in progressivism and diversity in games. Described as a culture war between the normative and the marginalized, #GamerGate became a battleground for the rights to the gamer identity. Gamergaters found themselves losing the identity and community the industry had given them; they saw intrusion on their identity by marginalized groups, particularly women. #GamerGate was not about ethics in video games journalism – it was about loss of ownership over gamer identity. This presentation seeks to reframe #GamerGate in a new light, focusing on the industry’s constructed representation of gamer by conducting a rhetorical analysis on media used to sell games, as well as on those who resist interpolations of the young, white, heterosexual male.