(this post was written for blood donated by EA games and a trip to the Mountain of Hell at the duress of Activision. this blog post was written with the help of my good friend https://twitter.com/REALMANNGAMMER)

at the beginning of this month
sorry
let's go back

in the last two weeks of september i'd started a project i had been looking forward to for a long time right now, going so far as quitting the other place i worked for (http://dccomicsnews.com) temporarily so i'd have time to write it
this was in due terms a little while after gamergate had already started recieving traction
i wasn't invovled at the time even though a couple of my wonderful friends had already started recieving harassment. with reason i was kind of following it at arms length.
right around the beginning of october the last place i actually worked for to pay my bills decided to kind of screw me over on my paycheck

don't ever work for a resort company

anyway

the start of october was right about the time that gamergate became personal for me
and unfortunately when you have friends that are being harassed and you're trying to give support to people who really need it it gets hard to keep writing large format posts about videogamees.

a lot of the discussion i've had with gamergaters usually pertain to

ATTACKS ON "GAMER" AS AN IDENTITY

http://kotaku.com/we-might-be-witnessing-the-death-of-an-identity-1628203079

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224400/Gamers_dont_have_to_be_your_audience_Gamers_are_over.php

these are posts (opinion pieces) by two writers for two different websites
that clarify an insistence that as a cultural identity, 'gamer' is dead
i don't disagree with them

what they did though was divide a group of people that read these writers every day into a camp taht agrees and a camp that didn't agree. the camp that didn't agree of course is mostly comprised of people that identify themselves as gamers. they feel that journalists went out of their way to characterize 'gamers' as aggressively unwashed neckbearded white dudes

the people that disagreed are everything FROM aggressively unwashed neckbearded white dudes to transmen and transwomen of every caliber, genderqueer folks and many people of color that embody the movement of #gamergate feel like this is a slight against them

it isn't, but i wont call them out for reading too far into something meant to start a surface level discussion about something important. what they are is primarily a call of notice AGAINST people that embody the identity as outlined in those articles. other "gamers are dead" articles have even gone to point out that it's a huge cultural identity but that it shouldn't be used to only represent a white boy majority.

a lot of #gamergate manifestos that list what they mean by "journalistic ethics" are yelling for an apology from all the writers that penned "gamers are dead" pieces and some manifestos are even calling for those writers to be removed from the industry.
gamer is an identity that is shared by a lot of people, but instead of being mad at the people that have co opted that identity and taken it to a dangerous place by supporting an industry that repeatedly shovels out lowest common denominator software that is sometimes really racist and often times misogynistic - those people have turned their ire towards writers (not journalists) like anita sarkeesian that would see those things criticized

wow that's weird it's almost like a subset of people with important opinions they want to vocalize have been spun against the people they should be vocalizing with, and not against

anyway the answer to this: gamer is still dead as a cultural identity and you're probably only killing it more

STOP POLITICIZING GAMES

the second item on this list is another one of the things #gamergators repeatedly bring up: that a cabal (that word is actually used frequently) of "sjw" leaning journalists has for the last few years attempted to inject their own moral hangups into the things they write about. writers like leigh alexander are repeatedly made reference to when they bring these sorts of articles up

for starters: that's dumb as hell. criticism of an art form (which gamers want videogames to be considered as) has to entail significantly more than just surface level criticisms that dictate what you should buy and how much fun something is.
criticism is scrutiny, and that scrutiny is now starting to extend not just to a mechanical brief of how enjoyable the game may be, but also all of the content represented therein. for all of a the yelling about "journalistic integrity" there seems to be a huge call for shutting down actual works of journalism. 
what people mean when they say "stop politicizing games" is the same thing bigoted people tell anyone who does not represent as straight or cis that brings themselves + their identity into a public space which is: Stop Making Me Uncomfortable.

that's all it is, because a call to remove politics from games journalism (if such a thing were even possible) is a call for actual censorship because it would mean silencing tons of voices that only now can receive compensation for taking time out to research and report on all of the terrible stuff ingrained into the videogame industry.

so "stop putting politics in my videogame journalism!!" is more of a call for the status quo to remain safe and friendly to an apparent majority of people that are reading games journalism right now.

INDUSTRY COLLUSION 

there's a lot more about this then i feel like writing that has been covered by other writers
the short version i'll list here is that "industry collusion" is a buzzword that a group of #gamergators coined as it pertains to games journalism because it turns out it's particularly hard to get a story signalboosted by yourself so games journalists have been helping each other do it

this is
not a bad thing
here's another writer that mentions it:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/gamergate-is-an-attack-on-ethical-journalism/

WE DON'T SUPPORT HARASSMENT 

a conversation I had with some #ggators went as follows: i brought up that harassment was more than just directed namecalling. a bunch of dudes proceeded to tell me i was trying to claim that anything (including criticism) was harassment. i joked that that would be absurd because i myself am a critic

if you mention that gamergate is misogynistic or harasses people with the hashtag attached on twitter
Well expect to be interrupted by a great deluge of people telling you that no, you're wrong. gamergate condemns harassment and harassers and goes through great lengths to report harassers

people from this camp are coming from reddit. understanding gamergate entails knowing that there's decidedly two camps of the movement right now: the reddit camp, and the 4chan camp. for all efforts intended, the reddit camp is trying to steal the direction of conversation away from the more violent side while still being just as despicable and naive in its own right

gators don't generally support harassment might be a true statement. however they still want to reap the rewards that come from harassing individuals (especially individuals that want to speak up against them) like silencing/censoring opinions and fear-mongering to control the tide of discussion.

i say this because it's an apallingly common brief to read that "#GAMERGATE DOESN'T SUPPORT HARASSMENT" in many of their manifestos while still claiming Erin Jabroni's blog post as the center tentpole that raised the movement.

i don't need to say anything more about that because what i'm getting at there is self evident

#NOTYOURSHIELD 
tho this ties directly into what i mention above about the "death of the gamer identity" what initially started as a shade for the 4chan camp to stem the discussion by having people create fake "sjw" or poc/queer/trans twitter profiles and proceed to rally behind the gamergate actually became The Real when those real communities started doing it

#NOTYOURSHIELD works because I see a lot of anti-gg writers still assuming that gamergate is one collusive mass of people that share the same identity. this is not true and is an incredibly dangerous thing to assume and part of why the hashtag is so effective.

people speaking out anti-gg expecting their own self confirmed notion of gamergate being the same kind of individual are caught off guard and frequently have no ammunition to stay in the debate with someone that does this. i know: it happened to me one single time before i had to get my head out of the game for a day and think about what this meant

the answer to that is pretty simple: my concept of social justice doesn't match a lot of other people's concepts of social justice. just because that is true doesn't mean it's impossible to make these people see a different side of things then they may be used to or even better help them recognize what they should actually be talking about and who they should be talking about it with.

FIN
anyway

i'm hoping the devil may cry stuff can continue later this month/ next month because i really want to write about DMC: Dumpy Man Comboer as it pertains to the rest of the series.