CONVERGINGMEDIACase StudyAnita Sarkeesian, #GamerGate, and Convergence

Anita Sarkeesian has a well-documented love of playing video games, from Mario Kart and Rock Band to Plants vs. Zombies and Half-Life 2. But that hasn’t stopped her from becoming one of the most outspoken, and targeted, critics of how video games depict and treat women. In 2012, a successful Kickstarter campaign helped her launch her Tropes vs Women in Video Games video series. As Sarkeesian explains, she was moved to examine video games because she saw, as a girl growing up and playing the games, that so many of the troubling stereotypes about women were enmeshed in games and gaming culture.

“The games often reinforce a similar message, overwhelmingly casting men as heroes and relegating women to the roles of damsels, victims or hypersexualized playthings,” Sarkeesian explains in a 2014 New York Times op-ed. “The notion that gaming was not for women rippled out into society, until we heard it not just from the games industry, but from our families, teachers and friends. As a consequence, I, like many women, had a complicated, love-hate relationship with gaming culture.”¹

“Love-hate” is probably also a good way to describe the reaction to Sarkeesian’s critique of games. On the one hand, she has gained critical acclaim and visibility for her videos and writing, appearing in the New York Times, Businessweek, and Rolling Stone, as well as on The Colbert Report. On the other hand, since she began releasing her videos on digital games, she has been the target of incredibly graphic and violent threats of rape, torture, and murder on social media. This ongoing online harassment reached a new low in the fall of 2014, when another of her Feminist Frequency video releases coincided with the #GamerGate controversy.

The story surrounding the event that ostensibly touched off the #GamerGate firestorm started when a computer programmer, Eron Gjoni, had a bad breakup with game designer Zoe Quinn. Gjoni then went online with their breakup, claiming that Quinn had had an affair with a writer at Kotaku, an influential gamers’ Web site that features information about a variety of games. #GamerGate supporters pointed to this as indicative of a larger trend of shady journalistic ethics in the gaming press, and also complained that more inclusive indie games were getting too much good press (see also “Case Study: Writing about Games” on pages 352–353). Very quickly, however, the attacks on journalistic ethics were overshadowed by those focused on “slut-shaming” Quinn, as well as anonymous threats of rape, torture, and death. Soon the #GamerGate controversy became the name for some of the worst elements of the gaming community.²

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It was at this point that Sarkeesian (and other critics) spoke up and pointed out that the deeply disturbing threats that Quinn, Sarkeesian, and many other female gamers and critics were experiencing proved her point about a deeper problem in the gaming culture, which in turn reflected broader cultural misogyny. In response to this criticism, many supporters of #GamerGate started behaving even worse.

Soon Sarkeesian and others weren’t just receiving anonymous and graphic threats in places like Twitter, disturbing enough on its own, but found themselves victims of doxing and SWATing. To dox someone means to steal private or personal information (from addresses and personal phone numbers to social security and credit card information in some cases) and make it public. To SWAT someone means to call in an anonymous tip to a police department where a victim lives in an attempt to provoke a raid—particularly by an armed SWAT team—on the person’s home. In one such incident, approximately twenty Portland police officers were dispatched to the scene of a supposed armed-hostage situation when the target of the hoax saw someone bragging about it on a message board and called the police before the situation could escalate.³

In another case, before a scheduled speech by Sarkeesian at Utah State University, an anonymous person threatened to carry out the biggest school shooting ever if the video game critic spoke. Sar­keesian canceled her speech after campus police said Utah’s gun laws prohibited them from turn­ing away any audience member who showed up with a gun. Sarkeesian went into hiding for a time, afraid to return to her home because of the various threats. Her Wikipedia page has been vandalized from time to time with pornographic pictures, and her Feminist Frequency Web site has been the target of denial of service (DoS) attacks.

But Sarkeesian is far from giving up. In an ironic twist, the hatred leveled at the critic has brought many supporters her way as well. For example, in the first quarter of 2014, her crowd-funded Feminist Frequency Web site received $1,500 in donations. In the last quarter of 2014 (after #GamerGate really started heating up), donors sent almost $400,000 to Feminist Frequency, which is now officially a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing commercial-free videos critiquing the portrayal of women in video games and mass media. Sarkeesian also quadrupled Feminist Frequency’s followers on Twitter to a quarter of a million by the end of 2014.⁴

For a student of mass media, one of the interesting things about the #GamerGate controversy and protests is that they couldn’t exist without digital media convergence. Digital game players learn of criticism by reading it from any number of print or online sources or through social media links, or they watch it on YouTube, then they discuss and coalesce as a community (and build anger) on Reddit or in 4chan or 8chan discussion boards, then they lash out again on social media, and then the targets of that harassment take their story back to their followers via social media as well as traditional media outlets. Some gamers take it even further, making death threats and using various computer hacking techniques to attack the targets of their anger (see also the discussion of hacktivism in the previous chapter). Meanwhile, as mainstream journalists began noticing the controversy over #GamerGate, the conversation spread beyond discussion boards to newspaper op-ed pages, cable news and comedy shows, and college classrooms. And as with every other form of media we’ve discussed in this book, being able to navigate that convergence is essential.