Why #Gamergaters Piss Me The F*** Off
I played in the NFL for eight years, but I’ve been a gamer for 26 — I’m sick and tired of the misogynistic culture in today’s gaming community.
By Chris Kluwe
Dear #Gamergaters,
Do you know why you piss me the fuck off?
Because you’re lazy. You’re ignorant. You are a blithering collection of wannabe Wikipedia philosophers, drunk on your own buzzwords, incapable of forming an original thought. You display a lack of knowledge stunning in its scope, a fundamental disregard of history and human nature so pronounced that makes me wonder if lead paint is a key component of your diet. You think you’re making piercing arguments when, in actuality, you’re throwing a temper tantrum that would embarrass a three-year-old.
(#Gamergate, for those unaware, is what happened a bit over a month ago, where an angry neckbeard posted demonstrably false allegations about his ex-girlfriend, claiming she slept with video game site reviewers for better scores for her games (again, demonstrably false), and then a whole bunch of other angry neckbeards on the Internet went full Denis Dyack and spitfrothed themselves into national attention by making an array of threats on numerous female game developers, including ones about their death, tried to hide behind a shield of “it’s about journalistic ethics because they said gamers are dead,” and generally proved why the Internet needs to be burned to the ground and the ashes salted. If you’re curious about the details, here’s a good background link.)
There’s this herd of people, mainly angsty teenage caucasian men (based on an informal survey of 99 percent of the people who feel the need to defend this nonsense to me on Twitter), who feel that somehow, their identity as “gamers” is being taken away. Like they’re all little Anne Franks, hiding in their basements from the PC Nazis and Social Justice Warrior brigades, desperately protecting the last shreds of “core gaming” in their unironically horrible Liveblog journals filled with patently obvious white privilege and poorly disguised misogyny. “First they came for our Halo 2’s, and I said nothing.”
These paint-huffing shitgoblins think they’re “gamers,” and it pisses me the fuck off.
I grew up playing games. When I was six years old, back in 1987 (so long ago!), I got an NES, and there was no looking back. I played Battletoads, and learned that “faster computer reactions” is a cheap substitute for “harder difficulty.” I played Final Fantasy VI on the SNES, and watched an opera play out through a video game. I played Metal Gear Solid on PS1, and thought my game was freaking the fuck out. I logged on to Ultima Online the day the shards went up, and got pk’ed, and tried to figure out what this giant sandbox could actually do. I played just about every MMO after that as well, and first person shooter, and JRPG, and on and on (except for sports games; I hate sports games).
I am a gamer. I’ve had 24-hour LAN parties, fragging people in Duke Nukem and Quake, pounding Mountain Dew to stay awake, WinAMP playlist blasting my favorite songs at high volume. I’ve traded Nintendo Power facts and tips with my friends on the playground, and tried to figure out where the next boss was, or the best strategy to use (complete with horseshit stories from that one friend who just loved making things up and —NO! — you cannot save Aeris, goddammit). I’ve been made fun of by the jocks, even when I was on the football team.
Gaming is part of who I am, I can promise you that.
Thus, when I see an article titled “Gamers are dead,” referring to the death of the popular trope of a pasty young man in a dimly lit room, it fills me with joy, because it means WE FUCKING WON. So many people are playing games now that they are popular culture. They are not going away. All sorts of cool things, that I like, are now things that a whole bunch of other people like! There’s enough space now for people to make games that are strange and disturbing and maybe highlight a different perspective of the world, because gaming is no longer a niche activity, it’s something that everybody does. There is room for art in video games. That’s awesome!
You slopebrowed weaseldicks with zero reading comprehension and even less critical thinking skills who think an article claiming “Gamers are dead” is something bad? Fuck me sideways with a sandblaster.
It’s like all you can do is look at this collection of words, scratch yourself uneasily, and then run off to look for grubs. Your reaction (and I am not making this up, because it’s been widely documented literally everywhere) to various articles proclaiming the death of the basement-dwelling, cheetos-huffing, poopsock-sniffing douchepistol, because games are so good now that they are common entertainment and thus everyone plays them, was to COMPLETELY MISS THE POINT by either:
a) Making misogynistic threats against a wide variety of female game developers and critics because somehow they’re going to keep games you enjoy from ever being made again
or
b) Being stupid enough to get sucked in by people busy making misogynistic threats against a wide variety of female game developers and critics, and supporting their idiotic crusade for the dumbing down of everyone everywhere ever.
Every time I see one of you slackjawed pickletits link me something like “I’m a moderate #Gamergate’r,” or “#Gamergate in sixty seconds YOUTUBE CLIP,” or “Here’s an anecdotal story from this one woman we found that completely negates an entire history of misogyny and abuse of women, not just in videogaming but in the entirety of human existence so support the REAL GAMERS,” it pisses me the fuck off because you are ruining something I enjoy. When people — everyday people who watch the coverage on CNN of Anita Sarkeesian having to cancel a speaking engagement due to death threats — think of “gamers,” they are going to think of you, and that irritates me. It enrages me. I want to punch down a wall, and I like my walls. They’re nicely painted.
When people think of “gamers,” I want them to think of Child’s Play, and athletes who play competitive League of Legends, and all the normalization we’ve accomplished over the years. I want them to think of feminism, and games as an art form — something more than mass entertainment. I want them to think of all the amazing things that video games have done, and can do, because that means we get to keep playing more games. But as long as you hemorrhoidal gunt stains continue this asininity, they won’t, and it makes me want to pick you all up collectively and shake you until your rectum leaks out what little brains you possess because YOU’RE SO FUCKING DUMB.
We are winning the culture war. There are multiple TV shows about nerds as role models. For fuck’s sake, in House of Cards, Kevin Spacey plays a goddamn U.S. Representative who relaxes by playing first-person shooters! The only danger to the things “gamers” enjoy doing (i.e. playing new games), is the threat YOU YOURSELF have created, because for some reason you think sharing your toys with others is going to make the world explode.
You, #Gamergaters, with your bilious Internet rage, you think you’re speaking for some core demographic, some historic legacy, but you’re not. You’re speaking for a lie trapped inside your mind; a lie that one somehow has to be “hardcore” in order to appreciate games; a lie formed by social ineptitude and too much time spent picturing yourself as the only creature that matters in the universe. A lie about male power and privilege, and how dare those women try to ruin your fun? (No matter whose expense you’re having it at). The lie you tell yourselves is one completely incapable of recognizing just how far society has come — that equality is important, and that the tech industry has been misogynistic for a very long time, and that we need to change that, and we’re in the process of doing so, despite the mouthvomits you like to pretend are logical trains of thought.
All the real gamers? They’re the developers now, the reviewers, the writers and the players who remember a time when you couldn’t download a virtual copy of your game, but instead had to go to a Toys“R”Us and hope they had it in stock. The real gamers, both men and women, look at your frantic rantings about “ethics in videogame journalism,” and they shake their heads sadly, wondering how you could get sucked in by some script-kiddie /b/tards and conspiracy-nut celebrities gleefully using you as a smokescreen for misogynistic hate. They look at the rich diversity of games that exist now, and they are THRILLED, because no one ever thought we’d get this far, and real gamers like PLAYING GAMES.
I know game developers, personally. I know game reviewers, personally. You know what else I know? That both developers and reviewers know each other quite well, because this industry used to be very small. One where you had to be a gamer to want to make a game, or to write reviews, because the money certainly wasn’t NFL money. It absolutely wasn’t the billion-dollar industry it is now, with games pulling in just as much as blockbuster movies. It was a group of people, doing what they loved, making games, and playing games, and a lot of them are still there, and they’re friends!
Does this mean occasionally there will be a review you don’t agree with somewhere? You better believe it. First off, a review, BY DEFINITION, is subjective. It’s one person’s take on a moment in time from their own perspective. If you don’t like it, look at some other reviews. There’s plenty out there! Second, when you spend a lot of time with other people, you tend to become friends, which means you help each other out. Like donating to a friend’s Kickstarter or Patreon campaign because you like what they do and want to see them do more of it. This isn’t some ethics-blighting stain on the video game industry. This is basic human nature, but apparently you pestilent little toads can’t imagine the concept of friendship. Perhaps you should go watch some Care Bears?
This fallacy that you hide behind — the idea of wanting to make video game journalism some pristine bastion of unbreakable ethics, where no one ever gives a game a 5 instead of a 4 because they’ve known the developer for over two decades and one of their kids is the other’s goddaughter? Yeah. Good luck. Might as well develop cold fusion while you’re at it. You don’t even see the complete idiocy of this idea because you’re too busy wargleblargling your face into your keyboard.
(Oh, and feel free to direct some of that naivete at the actual media, whose job is to cover things that actually matter. Every game reviewer I know is actually highly concerned with the ethics of their situation, because they’ve gone to school for it. They know that acting unethically is a very quick way to drive away consumers.)
You know what else acting unethically does (like, say, for example, supporting misogynistic mouthbreathers who get off on making rape threats against women as part of your “movement”)? It drives away supporters. It makes them question your basic humanity and intelligence.
In fact, #Gamergaters, if your concern really was ethics, the very first thing you would be saying about this whole mess is, “Holy shit, get these fucking misogynistic creeps away from us. Let’s find a different hashtag to assemble under RIGHT FUCKING NOW.” You’d be doing everything in your power to make sure the legitimate cause you’re concerned about wasn’t hijacked or used as a shield by those with no other agenda than to make women and minorities afraid, simply because they can. You wouldn’t defend the oppression of someone simply based on their gender (because let’s be real honest here, I haven’t seen a single #Gamergater go after Activision, or Ubisoft, or Rockstar), and you definitely wouldn’t concoct ever-more wild conspiracy theories to support your increasingly flawed view of reality.
(My personal favorite is that a combination of a secret cabal of power-mad journalists are working with the world-threatening feminist agenda in order to remove the purity of video games, because Obama and Jews. That’s a good look, people. Very convincing. I’m surprised you couldn’t work chemtrails in there somehow.)
Unfortunately, all you #Gamergaters keep defending this puerile filth, and so the only conclusion to draw is the logical one: That you support those misogynistic cretins in all their mouthbreathing glory. That you support the harassment of women in the video game industry (and in general). That you support the idiotic stereotype of the “gamer” as a basement-dwelling sweatbeast that so many people have worked so hard to try and get rid of.
And you know what? That pisses me the fuck off. I’ve spent too long as a gamer, seen too much progress made, to let you tarnish that name.
I hope you all, every #Gamergater, picks up a debilitating case of genital warts.
The rest of you — find a different hashtag.
Sincerely,
Chris Kluwe
Eight-year NFL player
26-year Gamer
Note: Several of you pointed out a glaring factual inconsistency in my piece. The original text said Kevin Spacey was a U.S. Senator, rather than a Representative, in the TV show House of Cards. Many apologies.
