Where the Anger Tipped Over

The past few weeks have been a hell of a time for gamers. From the original Zoe Quinn incident to the ensuing defamation of gamers by alleged journalists it has been a literal nightmare for the community; and I don't mean the gaming community. Shit has been flung at gamers, blaming them for everything wrong in the industry without so much a forethought as to what that ironically means and says about the individuals making such claims; people who require gamers to pay their bills and are, themselves, gamers. A term so broad almost anyone can identify with it. It's hard to believe they can be serious behind these words. They are, and we don't know whether we should laugh or cry. Perhaps their family and friends are gamers too and... oh.

For those not in the know, this all began as a conspiracy surrounding Chelsea "Zoe Quinn" Van Valkenburg. Claims that she had slept with prominent and terrible individuals in order to boost the coverage of her game, Depression Quest, and status were explosive. Quickly were any and all discussions surrounding this controversy silenced. People desiring to discuss it were unable to do so on sites such as Kotaku, despite the same circus running an article on the alleged sexual harassment of an employee at Stardock by Brad Wardell. Kotaku gleefully reported on it, but apparently talking about Chelsea's allegations is where their arbitrary line of moral standing actually begins. This is the same story across almost every other major gaming and "geek" related site. Chelsea enjoyed antagonizing Brad about it on Twitter, a thing she seriously did with no shame and no apology as of this writing, because she simply "felt" he was evil based on articles written by sites that love posting content just to get people riled up, and all while feeling she doesn't deserve the same treatment in return over this entire ordeal, because apparently then it would be sexist.

What's more pathetic is she can't take non harassment. Criticism and even questions for what she has done are viewed as too stressful to deal with and quickly written off and lumped in with real harassment, sexism, racism, misogyny. This does nothing but make people with actual sense become all too wary of anything her and her friends have to say. Some people are even saying she isn't being harassed, but of course she is. Everyone in the spotlight gets harassed, it's just that most people don't whine, bitch, and moan about it as much as her and nearly everyone else involved. But being unable to take the actual criticism--non harassment--from the crowd is cowardly.

There were even claims of Chelsea being the center of a huge conspiracy to silence all her dissenters around the time sites began shutting down all discussions of her. This is a stupid, albeit not impossible, claim. The more likely scenario being that it's a bunch of sympathizers clinging to the ideology that it's wrong to talk about women in a negative contrast where it's perfectly okay to paint men in that very way. There's no known logical explanation for this mass double standard sexism coming from her, her supporters, and the larger population, it's apparently just the way things are.

Some of them may be friends or acquaintances of hers, others may simply be part of the belief stated above, or they may just be a large group of assholes. Connected or not, Chelsea clearly does not condemn their actions. Someone in her position who does so would have spoken out publicly against these people for censoring everyone in her name. She has full tolerance of their actions and doesn't care about right or wrong. Suddenly her speeches about equality and fairness go out the window when it comes to herself. Sort of like her moral standards in gen..... oh, right.

Before leaving her behind, lets just point out how she unapologetically watched and laughed as a charity[thefineyoungcapitalists.com] was literally dismantled. Even if her and her friends aren't directly responsible they thought it was funny and appropriate, regardless of it being a charity to help women who want to make video games. Yeah, fucking hilarious. Watching these people is like being in high school all over again. I don't want to be in high school again. High school is boring and full of idiots. None of her friends and apologists care how shitty her actions are, you don't unequivocally support someone who knowingly pulls all this horseshit unless you're every bit as messed up as they are. Ignorance isn't a valid excuse, everyone around her knows what happened at this point.

These events involving Chelsea were just the beginning to unleashing the shitstorm gamers built up over the years; aimed at a large and prominent group of game journalists, developers, and personalities who think it's okay to shame gamers by telling them the games they play and enjoy are damaging to women and need to change despite the incomprehensible number of women yelling right back at them to shut the fuck up, and all while the whining and bitching from so called journalists being more damaging to everyone's sanity than any game ever could be. They push it to their front pages, repeatedly, knowing exactly how people are going to react, then cry when people react the way they already knew people would react in the first place. It is clickbait rhetoric. It does nothing but rile people up all while achieving a circle jerk level of agreement from those who already agreed to begin with. Because it couldn't possibly be that they're just a bunch of insufferable pricks. Roundabout with no true end goal but to prove to themselves what they already falsely believed: gamers are nothing but a bunch of sexist and misogynistic neck bearded basement dwelling racist assholes; similar to a self fulfilling prophecy, based on nothing more than the reactions of obviously manufactured outrage at the snarky articles, headlines, and ego-flashing self-righteous moral police all because there happens to be a subset of assholes in every walk of life.

Enter yet more fuel being added to the fire: "journalistic" sites began labeling gamers as a dying group--A stupid thing to do considering gamers are your target audience--all coming en masse from sites such as Rock Paper Shotgun, Ars Technica, Gamasutra, Vice, Destructoid, Kotaku, BuzzFeed, and others, all within a short timespan of each other. Obviously you should never insult the only group of people willing to help pay your bills and keeping you in the industry you claim to love while ironically spewing hate aimed at the entire thing. Nice job, dipshits.

The fire spread when even more vile and despicable attacks continued from writers at these larger sites, as well as game developers and a few well known personalities, calling all gamers, once again, a bunch of "racist neckbearded cis white sexist homophobic asshole pieces of shit terrorists." Holy crap. Love, acceptance, and equality are contorted concepts to these types of people. If they don't like it, then it's bad and needs to be shamed and stomped out along with everyone involved. A person should not have a demographic placed upon them for playing certain types of games and no one should have to be "taught" that they should question themselves for doing such. Telling gamers what they should and shouldn't be ashamed to enjoy, at the end of the day, wins you nothing but a pat on the head from those who already agreed with you in the first place, wow, congratulations. Evil things happen in this world, actual, real, physical, and mental. Enjoying a game with high sexual overtones, undertones, or tits all over the place isn't even close to bad, let alone evil. If someone feels upset or insulted by a game like that existing it's their problem to deal with, not everyone else's; man up or woman up, because most people don't want to deal with your shit. If everyone's feelings were always catered to we would have a paradox.

Lumping an entire group into a hate spewing campaign because your feelings were hurt makes you an ass. Doing it to the only people capable of allowing you to have your job makes you an incredible dumb ass. Gone Home deserves to be enjoyed just as much as any macho-white-male-buff-lead-star-shooting-everything-dead-and-big-titted-jiggly-women-everywhere game. We here enjoy both of these, our interests in games are very, very broad, almost as broad as the entire gaming "community" as a whole, but not everyone is that way. Some people only like one or the other, and that's okay. Some people are dumb assholes, that's not okay. The major gaming press sites and several large personalities have displayed disgusting behavior towards gamers, not just these past couple of weeks, but for many years past.

Want to do something positive? Support a charity. They're good causes and require little to no bitching. In fact, you don't even have to tell people they're wrong or act like a passive aggressive dick. You donate money or share a link to the cause and you have done a good thing, simple. If, failing the above, you can't resist acting like any of the aforementioned individuals just take a deep breath and step away from your computer, then set yourself on fire. Because doing something nice and worthy doesn't consist of yelling at people and telling them their choice of digital entertainment makes them white, male, terrorists, the devil. You're trivializing evil by saying a virtual environment can be compared to the real thing you ironically bigoted and sexist idiots.