September 16, 2024 • 30 mins
A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times reported on young white men who feel "left behind" by society and are being courted by Donald Trump. Today, Woke AF Daily producer Andrew Marshello joins Danielle Moodie for part 1 of a continuing conversation about how a fringe online harassment campaign led to this point in our national politics.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to ok F Daily with
Meet your Girl Danielle Moody. Recording from the home bunker. Folks,
I am very excited to bring to you the first
part of a two part conversation with my producer extraordinaire
at wok F Daily, Andrew Marcello. And if you all remember,
a couple of weeks ago, we had a conversation with
(00:33):
our friend or in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel about
Generation Z men and how they are aligning with Donald
Trump and MAGA and the reasons for that, feeling left out,
the rise in misogyny, what is their role in place
in a modernizing society, And what Andrew had brought to
(00:55):
my attention is that, like these things did not happen
over night or transpire out of thin air, that these
young men have been reached through the gaming industry, and
how the right wing has utilized gaming culture and capitalized
(01:17):
off of it for their own means and political end,
and so in order for us to get to where
we are in present day, Andrew brings us through kind
of this extraordinary journey into gaming and where it was
like in the nineties and the early two thousands and
then how we get to where we are right now.
(01:40):
So this is part one of a two part conversation
with Andrew Marshello, folks, I am super excited. I don't
actually remember the last time that we did this, but
I feel like it was a couple of years ago.
But I am super excited to welcome from behind find
(02:00):
the production table, video and microphone, my producer here at
wok at Daily, Andrew Marcello, to talk about an issue
that we started in conversation with doctor Jonathan Metzel about
kind of gen Z's male gen Z turned to the
(02:24):
right and their like desire to connect with Donald Trump
and kind of what I refer to as toxic masculinity
and this push to the right by this younger generation.
And Andrew, you brought to my attention after Jonathan and
I were discussing this New York Times article that this
(02:47):
is not new and that it actually began as something
called gamer gate. And I say something called because for
those of us that exist outside of the gaming world
in industry, you may not have heard of this. And
so I want to give you, Andrew an opportunity one
to kind of explain that, explain game or gate, and
(03:09):
like just the title what it is, and then we
can get into a larger conversation about what's being fueled
inside of this community and how it's spilling over into politics. Right.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Absolutely, Well, first of all, thank you so much for
bringing me back on This is, like you said, a
bit of a different context than I've been on to
discuss in the past, But I appreciate you inviting me
on to talk about this because also, as you said,
this wasn't something that I don't think this is something
that a lot of people outside of the gaming and
(03:43):
tech worlds really know about. It's not something that received
a lot of mainstream media coverage. And like maybe if
you're in something like this, like what we're talking about
right now, in the political world, you may know about
this and may have heard about it, and may have
at least heard like game or Gate, and possibly heard
of Miley Yanopolis and definitely heard of Steve Bannon, who
(04:04):
will get to But and that's sort of the lynchpin
for all this. So let's go back. Let's go way
back to nineteen ninety three, because this matters. In December
nineteen ninety three and going into nineteen ninety four, the
United States Senate Committees on Governmental Affairs and the Judiciary
held congressional hearings with executives for several video game companies,
(04:24):
including Nintendo and Sega, who were leading the industry back then.
If you remember the nineties, the Super Nintendo and the
Second Genesis were the hottest things at the time, at
least in America, and so executives from Nintendo and Sega
and some other big video game companies were called to
Congress for hearings about video game violence. And these were
(04:44):
sparked by Senator Joe Lieberman.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
You yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah wow. The late Joe
Liuba okay.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Mm hmm, a staffer for Joe Lieberman, had a family
member who had gotten Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, which
is a game about teenage girls being haunted by like
vampiric monsters. It's very b movie, but just seeing like
full motion video of like I don't even want to say,
scantily clad, like girls in like pajamas, like dancing around
(05:13):
for the camera. Somehow this sparked his moral outrage, and
especially Moral Kombat sparked this moral outrage so much that
they held congressional hearings on it. This is important and
relevant because it sets the stage for people who play
video games video gamers to have a cultural identity, a
subcultural identity where they see themselves as persecuted and countercultural.
(05:38):
They have a hobby that is being attacked by outsiders
who don't fully understand what they're attacking. So this is important. Now,
going ahead about ten years, we have a Florida attorney
named Jack Thompson who you may not have heard of,
but if you're listening and happen to be in the
(05:59):
sort of online video game culture worlds twenty years ago.
Jack Thompson was someone who got a lot of attention
because he was there's no polite way to call someone
an ambulance chaser. He was disbarred in two thousand and eight,
and he basically anytime there was a violent crime that
he could sort of take advantage of. I'm characterizing this,
(06:22):
but the way that it came off was that he
would see these violent crimes in the news and attribute
them to video game violence, particularly the Grand Theft Auto series.
So he was something of a moral crusader against violent
video games. And this again reinforced the idea amongst people
who play video games, and especially people who play video
games and then go on the Internet to talk about
(06:45):
the video games they play. That video gaming is this
thing that isn't understood by the mainstream and is also
seen as violent and harmful even when it's being misconstrued.
So these two things really helped to set the stage
for what would then happen another decade later, when at
(07:06):
the same time as stuff is happening with video games
on the Internet, there's also a broader change happening on
online social media platforms such as Tumblr that are embracing
feminism and feminist social justice and feminist critical analysis of
pop culture media. So a woman named Anita Sarkisian had
(07:32):
a YouTube channel called Feminist Frequency and she released a
video series.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
You've heard of this, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
And it was called Tropes Versus Women in Video Games
and it basically took off. There are a few popular
videos in there. There was a two part series on
Damsels in Distress that really broke through, but the Tropes
Versus Women in Video Game series was something that really
broke out. You've heard of it. So, with this stage
having been set by the things I mentioned prior, the
reaction to Tropes verse as Women in Video Games played
(08:02):
into the gamer identity of we are persecuted by outsiders
who don't understand us.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Her point was like, here is this culture that when
you look at the videos that are including women in them,
they're playing out these stereotypes, and they're playing out these
caricatures that can be harmful and be dangerous. And she
wanted to lift up the fact that while society on
the outside in four to D may be moving forward,
(08:35):
that what is happening in the gaming industry doesn't seem
to have evolved in that same way. Tell us what
would happen just Herakeysian, because this, I mean this to
me is like is wild right?
Speaker 2 (08:51):
We're actually really just setting the stage now. And like
you said, the world was starting to move on even
outside the online space, even outside Tumblr, like there was
a greater recognition of like women or people. I hate
to say it that way, but like the end tail
of third wave feminism and whatever it started to evolve
(09:12):
in in the late two thousands and early twenty tens
was something that really did break through in the mainstream,
even in such a casual way of like, we should
be showing women in things more because they make up
fifty percent of the population. And at the same time
as this, the demographics around video gaming were changing. The
SIMS was a really big breakout title. There were breakout
(09:32):
titles online that people could play on their web browsers
on Facebook without having to have a video game console
or a high powered PC. So at the time, video
gaming was already approaching or maybe even at this statistic
where not only do women make up fifty percent of
the outside world population, but hello, gamers, women actually make
(09:55):
up close to or literally fifty percent of the population
of people who play video games. And then you get
into gamers trying to claim what is and isn't a
game for gamers. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. So
what happened to Anita is a sort of microcosm of
what would happen more broadly, because you get this backlash
(10:18):
from capital g gamers who have been conditioned by these
social events to see themselves as social outcasts, and like,
let's be real in real life. You know, in the
nineties and two thousands, if you were a person who
played video games and made that a part of your
cultural identity, you weren't necessarily a popular person unless you
(10:39):
played Madden or Call of Duty or the sims. You
were discussing something that a lot of people didn't understand
and quite frankly didn't want to engage with, and so
that contributes to the type of person who then goes
online to discuss this with people like them online and
get into this bubble and all this. Now we've set
the stage ten minutes later for the explosion of gamer
(11:03):
gate in twenty thirteen into twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
So let me say this because as a complete and
total outsider, I do think that to some extent, there
is a caricature of gamers that has been created that
raw I can totally picture it, and I think that
in some ways it has been like the gamer identity.
(11:28):
And I want you to talk about the gamer identity
because a question that I had was like, do you
consider yourself a gamer? And what does that mean for
those that identify as gamers Given the equation to the
parallels to in sell and right wing and toxic masculinity,
(11:50):
that is like, oh, the young white guy in a
basement of his parents' apartment that hasn't seen daylight in,
you know, in a week, and just plays video games
for ten twelve hours a day. That's like a caricature
and a stereotype that has been created. But there is
also something too what the right wing and the white supremacist,
(12:14):
toxic masculinity and misogynist movement has been able to do
to infiltrate this community. So I guess the first question
is do you identify as a gamer? And if not,
or if so, like, what does that identity actually mean.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
To you listening right now? We are actually going to
get to what gamer gate is and how it happened
and how it ties in. But all this stage setting
really does matter. And so to get to the gamer
identity of it all. It's sad because I would love
to sit here and be like, I'm a gamer and
I'm proud, but that's hard to say amidst all of this.
And this is relevant to the anti social harassment movement
(12:56):
that was gamer gait, that became the thing that you're
talking about. The gamer identity became a lynchpin. And there
was an article published by Lee Alexander, who became targeted
by mile Unanapolis and became targeted by Breitbart by name
in the headline of articles that they published on their
hate blog. She wrote an article called Gamers are Dead,
(13:18):
which was the focal point of the article, was saying,
the gamer identity is dead. There's no longer basically what
you're describing, gaming is no longer an enthusiast hobby that
targets a minority of people who approach it one specific
way and like one specific type of design. If you
(13:39):
like games where you shoot things in space, or you
like things where boys with swords fight monsters, you're into
video games. Video gaming, as we discussed, moved away from
that already by that point, and so at the same time,
the gamer identity, whether pejorative or positive, of you know,
(14:00):
someone by themselves in a room, sort of shut out
from society or at odds with society in some way,
was no longer useful, and gamers people who identified that
way hated it. They hated this idea that, like your
identity could be dead, which I understand, or even changing,
(14:23):
even evolving. Even if Lee Alexander had said gamer is
evolving as opposed to gamers are dead, I don't think
there would have been a different response because the response
wasn't to the statement gamers are dead. It was a
response to the sentiment of, like you said, things are
changing the world around you. Is changing, get with the times.
(14:44):
So to come back around, I don't self identify as
a gamer. Like I said, it kind of makes me
sad not to, but I'm a person who plays video games.
I am. I would consider myself a video gaming enthusiast.
I actually am someone who engages with video game stuff
online and I use it to late to people in
my real life. But I don't consider myself a capital
(15:05):
G gamer. I wouldn't really use that word in conversation,
and sadly, a lot of people I know if you
use that word in conversation, if you said, like you're
a gamer or I'm a gamer, the people I know
would cringe at that because of all this. And so
that's another Now we've sort of set the stage from
forward because the well around gamer became so poisoned because
(15:29):
of people like this, because of the type of person
who evolved into a very short amount of time, which
we will get too soon in two or three years,
into tiki torches in Charlottesville. So I think we're ready.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Now, So Andrew, this has been wonderful. The table is set,
the candles are lit, the china is out, and the
meal is on it, like, let's eat now tell us
how we get from gamer Gate tutiki torches in Charlottesville
(16:04):
to a population of young men Generation Z that is
finding their identity more aligned with MAGA and Trump than
they are with Democrats.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
We've set this stage and still I find myself at
where to begin. So there is an independent game developer
named Zoe Quinn who in twenty thirteen, amidst other transformative
games releasing games that aren't about shooting things or slashing swords,
they released a game called Depression Quest, which was a
text based adventure game. I don't know if you remember,
(16:43):
but they used to make games on like the Apple
to or the Macintosh where the whole game was text
and you would type like go forward, go backwards, pick
up the candle. So it was a sort of old
school throwback game, but it was about mental health and
encountering the world through the lens of dealing with mental
health struggles. Already, the Capitol G gamers do not like
(17:05):
Depression Quest. They do not like the amount of attention
Depression Quest gets on websites. And then the day in
twenty fourteen that Depression Quest released on Steam, which is
a PC platform. It's probably the most popular PC platform
to play video games, millions upon millions upon millions of
people you Steam. The same day that it released, Zoe
(17:28):
Quinn's X released a manifesto online that accused them of
infidelity and also implied that.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
That they got there by sleeping their way to the top.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Exactly, they got that coverage by sleeping with members of
the gaming press. That was the allegation, and even even
implicitly because this person tried to go back and say, well,
it was my wording, like act like they didn't they
this one single thing, a jilted X making accusations which
(17:59):
in the whole grand scheme of things doesn't matter whether
they were true or not. This is what caused the
entire thing. So gamers latched onto this, said, Zoe Quinn
is getting coverage because of outdated sexist tropes that are
being fed into It became a harassment campaign very quickly,
and it was called quinnspiracy. And so they would be
(18:22):
in places the people who were involved in this because
they have nothing better to do with their lives, like
actually go play video games. They have nothing better to
do with their lives, then go online coordinate harassment against
a person. It's almost like they treated it like a game.
But when you harass someone and you're going online and
posting about quinspiracy and all this stuff, you're kind of
telling on yourselves.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
So this is the irony for me because I'm just like, so,
you're pissed off that your identity is being called out
and your community is being called out, and then you
engage in the very activities that your community is being
held accountable for. So, oh, we're not all sexist, we're
(19:04):
not all misogynists, we're not all these in cell types.
But then all of the harassment and rhetoric is around
raping and killing and torturing women.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Yeah, it's very please excuse my language, but it's very like,
how dare these bitches say I'm misogynists?
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Yeah? It's wild.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, and I didn't even think about that angle, the
angle of like at the same time, literally the same
time that tropes versus women, which we will get back to,
is running. They're doing all this. So to make this
part short, they rebranded conspiracy as gamer gait. They had
started calling Zoe Quinn LW, which stood for literally who
(19:45):
is to act like they weren't talking about harassing Zoe Quinn,
and then they started harassing other women and fem presenting
people who criticized video games and video gamer culture. So
Anita Sarkisian was a target. Lee Alexander, who gamers are Dead,
was a target. Brianna Wu who manages to still be
around and get headlines, it was a target. And when
(20:09):
I want to be clear to anyone who's listening, when
we're talking about harassment, this is bad in and of itself,
but we're not just talking about like sending someone posts
and being like I'm gonna do violent act to you.
It went beyond online threats, which again are bad enough
and need to be taken seriously, but it went into
finding members of their family, getting in contact with members
(20:31):
of their family, leaking their addresses, sending the police to houses.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yeah, doxing and all of.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
That, doxing and swatting, which are techniques that have been
talked about on this program before, but essentially, yes, use
it weaponizing the police, which if you're a listener to this,
you're aware of how the police can get weaponized. I
imagine a weaponizing the police against people, against against women
and people perceived as women for the act of being
(20:59):
a woman, and saying that men shouldn't be doing the
things that men do, or just you know, happening to
exist as a woman and have some sort of perceived
moral failing that you as an individual and individuals coming
together as a little hate group have you know, hate
for I don't think it's coincidental that like, oh, this
(21:23):
attractive mid twenties woman who cheated on her partner and
is in tech. So it's like, as a gamer, I
do want to sort of set the stage of you know,
it's embarrassing, but I've been in circles like this, Like
when there's a woman in your circle, she is like
the center of everything because it's like, oh my god,
a girl's in our boys club. A girl has chosen
(21:44):
to be in our boys club, A girl wants to
hang around us. And so it's like the worst thing
that could happen happened. The gamer girl betrayed them, their
imaginary gamer GF. Like this could be your girlfriend, This
could be your gamer girlfriend a cheating on you and
then getting famous.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
This is where I see the relationship and I want,
with like the couple of minutes that we have left
for you to get to Steve Bannon and like how
this now presents itself outside of or still withinside of
the gaming community, but now has presented itself in politics
(22:20):
in a very real way where this kind of again
i'm gonna say in cell type thinking, this kind of
deep misogyny and hatred for women. How you see it
present itself inside of Project twenty twenty five, inside of MAGA,
inside of trump Ism, and how it's turning what has
(22:44):
been this online world into real, live votes and issues.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
It's funny that you bring up in cell and someone
more qualified than me can talk about because I didn't
even think about this. The intersection between the rise of
gamer gait and the rise of in cell culture. There's
definitely intersection there, but there's also sort of like, these
are two individual communities that have crossover. That's unfortunately to
(23:14):
be stereotypical. If you're spending twelve hours a day spent
playing video games, that leaves twelve hours a day that
you're not socializing with your preferred potential sex partners. But anyway,
there was definitely a simultaneous rise of like young men
who are sexually frustrated and feel they have no options,
which again I can't really speak to. And then also
(23:35):
the gamer gait type culture. But anyway, enter Steve Bannon.
We've gotten here, so enter Steve Bannon and enter Breitbart.
Some people may remember the name Milo Yanopolis because for
a little bit he was trying to crossover as a
legitimate media person and no one would have him. He
got hired by Steve Bannon to Breitbart as their tech
(23:58):
massive air quotes journalist. And you can actually still go
on Breitbart, and you can go on breitbart dot com
slash tag slash gamergate and see the type of posts
that Milenopolis and some other people at Breitbart were making.
But it was a lot of even in the headlines,
(24:19):
it encourages harassing women. It celebrates when their targets leave
gaming and leave gaming journalism, their career is over, they
have given up and decided they're no longer going to
fight this, and Breitbart basically goes, hooray, yep, bee, we won.
We got another one. And there's one specific headline that
I wrote down. It was about quote, why so many
angry women have blue hair? So if you ever hear
(24:43):
the whole blue haired liberal or like liberals have blue
hair and pronouns, that literally comes from Breitbart and Gamergate
twenty fifteen, and Steve Bannon had a quote in a
book by Joshua Green called Devil's Bargain where he was
asked about Milo and asked about Gamergate, and this is
Steve Banner quote quote, I realized Milo could connect with
(25:03):
these kids right away. And this is now ten years ago.
You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate
or whatever, in sell whatever, that's my editorial. Go back
to the quote, they come in through Gamergate or whatever,
and then get turned onto politics and Trump, and you're
(25:26):
there on Breitbart. If you're on Reddit, say, if you're
on the Kotaku in Action subreddit, which is where these
people met up, you would see headlines for Breitbart, and
then you click through the headlines to Breitbart, and then
on the side you see articles about Trump and articles
about whatever other heinous stuff that Breitbart is promoting. And
(25:47):
then on the flip side, if you're a conservative person
who's in the bright bart world, if you're in the
burgeoning alt right, because that's what that became, then you're
gonna see articles that say, why do so many angry
women have blue hair? And you, as an alt writer
or whatever they were called before the term alt right
became a thing. You're gonna then get into gamer gate.
(26:09):
So Steve Bannon was feeding all these different types of people,
people who are already hardwired to be hardcore conservatives, capital
g gamers who dislike women and in cells and whatever
other groups all through the same funnel. That funnel all
takes these all these people, swirls them through and leads
(26:29):
them to Donald Trump, And in August twenty sixteen, Steve
Bannon was hired as the chief executive of Trump's presidential campaign.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
This is wild as fuck, Like it is so like
I have to say, this was really startling to me.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
And this isn't like conspiratory. I just want to mention it,
Like you can go online now and see and see
all the stuff I'm talking about.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
But it's like the fact that these things were happening,
this organization and this formation of essentially this hub of
toxic masculinity turning against women and progress and like all
of these things, and they found like this great fertile
(27:18):
watering hole to go to and began that work twenty
years ago. And now you're seeing the literally the fruits
of that come to bear. And the fact that there
has been no disruption. There has been no alternative, and
if there has, then that will be a conversation for
another day. But I think that I'm so grateful for
(27:41):
you bringing this to my attention, because again, if you
don't exist in these worlds, you're like, how does this
shit happen? Like how did this spill over into politics?
And you literally walked us through this handling Gretel breadcrumb
place to kind of get to where we are right now.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
There's one more thing I want to point out as
someone who was in that world at the time, not
like as a gamer gator, but like seeing it happen,
because I was online and in gamer world seeing the
Trump campaign rise. It was the same social techniques. When
you would I mentioned literally who before, you would say
gamer gates about Zoe Quinn, gamer gates about harassing Zoe Quinn,
(28:21):
and they would say literally who. They would make up
these lies that were not remotely based in reality and
just insist on them, and insist on them, and insist
on them. They would use sardonic memes to further their
agenda and just act like, well, the memes says it,
so it must be true. All of these techniques very
quickly became weapons of the Trump campaign that propelled him
(28:43):
to popularity amongst the same type of people who were
already drawn in by these propagandist techniques.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
I mean, this is extraordinary, it really is. It's extraordinary.
It's illuminating. It's readily disturbing because I don't see where
it is going to be disrupted.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
You have to recognize it before you can disrupt it.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Exactly on the other side, And that was the point
of this conversation today because it was something that you
brought to my attention that the New York Times article
that I discussed with Jonathan brought to my attention about
Generation Z. And there is just like so much more
that is here.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
That's why Trump picked jd Vance. I wanted to get
to that. We didn't get all the way from twenty
seventeen to jd Vance, But that's the culmination of it.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Well, I mean, we can do a part too, because
there's so much more here. So we will leave it
there today Andrew and pick up and do a part
two of the question that I think a lot of
people have been asking, which is why JD. Vance of
all people? And I think that that would be a
good place to pick back up. As always, I just
(29:53):
want to thank you, appreciate you one for the work
that you do and have done for years on WOKF.
But for this particular conversation, this is part one, folks.
We will come back with part two because there is
just so much here and in order to disrupt something,
to Andrew's point, you actually need to understand it, and
(30:14):
that is the point of this conversation. So Andrew, appreciate you, thank.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
You so much. Here's my teas for part two. Gamergate
is but a small subsect of what the pro Trump,
altright white nationalist movement became in twenty seventeen. So that's
for next time. Brilliant.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
That is it for me today, dear friends on WOKEF.
As always, power to the people and to all the people. Power,
get woke and stay woke as fuck.
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to ok F Daily with
Meet your Girl Danielle Moody. Recording from the home bunker. Folks,
I am very excited to bring to you the first
part of a two part conversation with my producer extraordinaire
at wok F Daily, Andrew Marcello. And if you all remember,
a couple of weeks ago, we had a conversation with
(00:33):
our friend or in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel about
Generation Z men and how they are aligning with Donald
Trump and MAGA and the reasons for that, feeling left out,
the rise in misogyny, what is their role in place
in a modernizing society, And what Andrew had brought to
(00:55):
my attention is that, like these things did not happen
over night or transpire out of thin air, that these
young men have been reached through the gaming industry, and
how the right wing has utilized gaming culture and capitalized
(01:17):
off of it for their own means and political end,
and so in order for us to get to where
we are in present day, Andrew brings us through kind
of this extraordinary journey into gaming and where it was
like in the nineties and the early two thousands and
then how we get to where we are right now.
(01:40):
So this is part one of a two part conversation
with Andrew Marshello, folks, I am super excited. I don't
actually remember the last time that we did this, but
I feel like it was a couple of years ago.
But I am super excited to welcome from behind find
(02:00):
the production table, video and microphone, my producer here at
wok at Daily, Andrew Marcello, to talk about an issue
that we started in conversation with doctor Jonathan Metzel about
kind of gen Z's male gen Z turned to the
(02:24):
right and their like desire to connect with Donald Trump
and kind of what I refer to as toxic masculinity
and this push to the right by this younger generation.
And Andrew, you brought to my attention after Jonathan and
I were discussing this New York Times article that this
(02:47):
is not new and that it actually began as something
called gamer gate. And I say something called because for
those of us that exist outside of the gaming world
in industry, you may not have heard of this. And
so I want to give you, Andrew an opportunity one
to kind of explain that, explain game or gate, and
(03:09):
like just the title what it is, and then we
can get into a larger conversation about what's being fueled
inside of this community and how it's spilling over into politics. Right.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Absolutely, Well, first of all, thank you so much for
bringing me back on This is, like you said, a
bit of a different context than I've been on to
discuss in the past, But I appreciate you inviting me
on to talk about this because also, as you said,
this wasn't something that I don't think this is something
that a lot of people outside of the gaming and
(03:43):
tech worlds really know about. It's not something that received
a lot of mainstream media coverage. And like maybe if
you're in something like this, like what we're talking about
right now, in the political world, you may know about
this and may have heard about it, and may have
at least heard like game or Gate, and possibly heard
of Miley Yanopolis and definitely heard of Steve Bannon, who
(04:04):
will get to But and that's sort of the lynchpin
for all this. So let's go back. Let's go way
back to nineteen ninety three, because this matters. In December
nineteen ninety three and going into nineteen ninety four, the
United States Senate Committees on Governmental Affairs and the Judiciary
held congressional hearings with executives for several video game companies,
(04:24):
including Nintendo and Sega, who were leading the industry back then.
If you remember the nineties, the Super Nintendo and the
Second Genesis were the hottest things at the time, at
least in America, and so executives from Nintendo and Sega
and some other big video game companies were called to
Congress for hearings about video game violence. And these were
(04:44):
sparked by Senator Joe Lieberman.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
You yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah wow. The late Joe
Liuba okay.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Mm hmm, a staffer for Joe Lieberman, had a family
member who had gotten Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, which
is a game about teenage girls being haunted by like
vampiric monsters. It's very b movie, but just seeing like
full motion video of like I don't even want to say,
scantily clad, like girls in like pajamas, like dancing around
(05:13):
for the camera. Somehow this sparked his moral outrage, and
especially Moral Kombat sparked this moral outrage so much that
they held congressional hearings on it. This is important and
relevant because it sets the stage for people who play
video games video gamers to have a cultural identity, a
subcultural identity where they see themselves as persecuted and countercultural.
(05:38):
They have a hobby that is being attacked by outsiders
who don't fully understand what they're attacking. So this is important. Now,
going ahead about ten years, we have a Florida attorney
named Jack Thompson who you may not have heard of,
but if you're listening and happen to be in the
(05:59):
sort of online video game culture worlds twenty years ago.
Jack Thompson was someone who got a lot of attention
because he was there's no polite way to call someone
an ambulance chaser. He was disbarred in two thousand and eight,
and he basically anytime there was a violent crime that
he could sort of take advantage of. I'm characterizing this,
(06:22):
but the way that it came off was that he
would see these violent crimes in the news and attribute
them to video game violence, particularly the Grand Theft Auto series.
So he was something of a moral crusader against violent
video games. And this again reinforced the idea amongst people
who play video games, and especially people who play video
games and then go on the Internet to talk about
(06:45):
the video games they play. That video gaming is this
thing that isn't understood by the mainstream and is also
seen as violent and harmful even when it's being misconstrued.
So these two things really helped to set the stage
for what would then happen another decade later, when at
(07:06):
the same time as stuff is happening with video games
on the Internet, there's also a broader change happening on
online social media platforms such as Tumblr that are embracing
feminism and feminist social justice and feminist critical analysis of
pop culture media. So a woman named Anita Sarkisian had
(07:32):
a YouTube channel called Feminist Frequency and she released a
video series.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
You've heard of this, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
And it was called Tropes Versus Women in Video Games
and it basically took off. There are a few popular
videos in there. There was a two part series on
Damsels in Distress that really broke through, but the Tropes
Versus Women in Video Game series was something that really
broke out. You've heard of it. So, with this stage
having been set by the things I mentioned prior, the
reaction to Tropes verse as Women in Video Games played
(08:02):
into the gamer identity of we are persecuted by outsiders
who don't understand us.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Her point was like, here is this culture that when
you look at the videos that are including women in them,
they're playing out these stereotypes, and they're playing out these
caricatures that can be harmful and be dangerous. And she
wanted to lift up the fact that while society on
the outside in four to D may be moving forward,
(08:35):
that what is happening in the gaming industry doesn't seem
to have evolved in that same way. Tell us what
would happen just Herakeysian, because this, I mean this to
me is like is wild right?
Speaker 2 (08:51):
We're actually really just setting the stage now. And like
you said, the world was starting to move on even
outside the online space, even outside Tumblr, like there was
a greater recognition of like women or people. I hate
to say it that way, but like the end tail
of third wave feminism and whatever it started to evolve
(09:12):
in in the late two thousands and early twenty tens
was something that really did break through in the mainstream,
even in such a casual way of like, we should
be showing women in things more because they make up
fifty percent of the population. And at the same time
as this, the demographics around video gaming were changing. The
SIMS was a really big breakout title. There were breakout
(09:32):
titles online that people could play on their web browsers
on Facebook without having to have a video game console
or a high powered PC. So at the time, video
gaming was already approaching or maybe even at this statistic
where not only do women make up fifty percent of
the outside world population, but hello, gamers, women actually make
(09:55):
up close to or literally fifty percent of the population
of people who play video games. And then you get
into gamers trying to claim what is and isn't a
game for gamers. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. So
what happened to Anita is a sort of microcosm of
what would happen more broadly, because you get this backlash
(10:18):
from capital g gamers who have been conditioned by these
social events to see themselves as social outcasts, and like,
let's be real in real life. You know, in the
nineties and two thousands, if you were a person who
played video games and made that a part of your
cultural identity, you weren't necessarily a popular person unless you
(10:39):
played Madden or Call of Duty or the sims. You
were discussing something that a lot of people didn't understand
and quite frankly didn't want to engage with, and so
that contributes to the type of person who then goes
online to discuss this with people like them online and
get into this bubble and all this. Now we've set
the stage ten minutes later for the explosion of gamer
(11:03):
gate in twenty thirteen into twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
So let me say this because as a complete and
total outsider, I do think that to some extent, there
is a caricature of gamers that has been created that
raw I can totally picture it, and I think that
in some ways it has been like the gamer identity.
(11:28):
And I want you to talk about the gamer identity
because a question that I had was like, do you
consider yourself a gamer? And what does that mean for
those that identify as gamers Given the equation to the
parallels to in sell and right wing and toxic masculinity,
(11:50):
that is like, oh, the young white guy in a
basement of his parents' apartment that hasn't seen daylight in,
you know, in a week, and just plays video games
for ten twelve hours a day. That's like a caricature
and a stereotype that has been created. But there is
also something too what the right wing and the white supremacist,
(12:14):
toxic masculinity and misogynist movement has been able to do
to infiltrate this community. So I guess the first question
is do you identify as a gamer? And if not,
or if so, like, what does that identity actually mean.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
To you listening right now? We are actually going to
get to what gamer gate is and how it happened
and how it ties in. But all this stage setting
really does matter. And so to get to the gamer
identity of it all. It's sad because I would love
to sit here and be like, I'm a gamer and
I'm proud, but that's hard to say amidst all of this.
And this is relevant to the anti social harassment movement
(12:56):
that was gamer gait, that became the thing that you're
talking about. The gamer identity became a lynchpin. And there
was an article published by Lee Alexander, who became targeted
by mile Unanapolis and became targeted by Breitbart by name
in the headline of articles that they published on their
hate blog. She wrote an article called Gamers are Dead,
(13:18):
which was the focal point of the article, was saying,
the gamer identity is dead. There's no longer basically what
you're describing, gaming is no longer an enthusiast hobby that
targets a minority of people who approach it one specific
way and like one specific type of design. If you
(13:39):
like games where you shoot things in space, or you
like things where boys with swords fight monsters, you're into
video games. Video gaming, as we discussed, moved away from
that already by that point, and so at the same time,
the gamer identity, whether pejorative or positive, of you know,
(14:00):
someone by themselves in a room, sort of shut out
from society or at odds with society in some way,
was no longer useful, and gamers people who identified that
way hated it. They hated this idea that, like your
identity could be dead, which I understand, or even changing,
(14:23):
even evolving. Even if Lee Alexander had said gamer is
evolving as opposed to gamers are dead, I don't think
there would have been a different response because the response
wasn't to the statement gamers are dead. It was a
response to the sentiment of, like you said, things are
changing the world around you. Is changing, get with the times.
(14:44):
So to come back around, I don't self identify as
a gamer. Like I said, it kind of makes me
sad not to, but I'm a person who plays video games.
I am. I would consider myself a video gaming enthusiast.
I actually am someone who engages with video game stuff
online and I use it to late to people in
my real life. But I don't consider myself a capital
(15:05):
G gamer. I wouldn't really use that word in conversation,
and sadly, a lot of people I know if you
use that word in conversation, if you said, like you're
a gamer or I'm a gamer, the people I know
would cringe at that because of all this. And so
that's another Now we've sort of set the stage from
forward because the well around gamer became so poisoned because
(15:29):
of people like this, because of the type of person
who evolved into a very short amount of time, which
we will get too soon in two or three years,
into tiki torches in Charlottesville. So I think we're ready.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Now, So Andrew, this has been wonderful. The table is set,
the candles are lit, the china is out, and the
meal is on it, like, let's eat now tell us
how we get from gamer Gate tutiki torches in Charlottesville
(16:04):
to a population of young men Generation Z that is
finding their identity more aligned with MAGA and Trump than
they are with Democrats.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
We've set this stage and still I find myself at
where to begin. So there is an independent game developer
named Zoe Quinn who in twenty thirteen, amidst other transformative
games releasing games that aren't about shooting things or slashing swords,
they released a game called Depression Quest, which was a
text based adventure game. I don't know if you remember,
(16:43):
but they used to make games on like the Apple
to or the Macintosh where the whole game was text
and you would type like go forward, go backwards, pick
up the candle. So it was a sort of old
school throwback game, but it was about mental health and
encountering the world through the lens of dealing with mental
health struggles. Already, the Capitol G gamers do not like
(17:05):
Depression Quest. They do not like the amount of attention
Depression Quest gets on websites. And then the day in
twenty fourteen that Depression Quest released on Steam, which is
a PC platform. It's probably the most popular PC platform
to play video games, millions upon millions upon millions of
people you Steam. The same day that it released, Zoe
(17:28):
Quinn's X released a manifesto online that accused them of
infidelity and also implied that.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
That they got there by sleeping their way to the top.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Exactly, they got that coverage by sleeping with members of
the gaming press. That was the allegation, and even even
implicitly because this person tried to go back and say, well,
it was my wording, like act like they didn't they
this one single thing, a jilted X making accusations which
(17:59):
in the whole grand scheme of things doesn't matter whether
they were true or not. This is what caused the
entire thing. So gamers latched onto this, said, Zoe Quinn
is getting coverage because of outdated sexist tropes that are
being fed into It became a harassment campaign very quickly,
and it was called quinnspiracy. And so they would be
(18:22):
in places the people who were involved in this because
they have nothing better to do with their lives, like
actually go play video games. They have nothing better to
do with their lives, then go online coordinate harassment against
a person. It's almost like they treated it like a game.
But when you harass someone and you're going online and
posting about quinspiracy and all this stuff, you're kind of
telling on yourselves.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
So this is the irony for me because I'm just like, so,
you're pissed off that your identity is being called out
and your community is being called out, and then you
engage in the very activities that your community is being
held accountable for. So, oh, we're not all sexist, we're
(19:04):
not all misogynists, we're not all these in cell types.
But then all of the harassment and rhetoric is around
raping and killing and torturing women.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Yeah, it's very please excuse my language, but it's very like,
how dare these bitches say I'm misogynists?
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Yeah? It's wild.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, and I didn't even think about that angle, the
angle of like at the same time, literally the same
time that tropes versus women, which we will get back to,
is running. They're doing all this. So to make this
part short, they rebranded conspiracy as gamer gait. They had
started calling Zoe Quinn LW, which stood for literally who
(19:45):
is to act like they weren't talking about harassing Zoe Quinn,
and then they started harassing other women and fem presenting
people who criticized video games and video gamer culture. So
Anita Sarkisian was a target. Lee Alexander, who gamers are Dead,
was a target. Brianna Wu who manages to still be
around and get headlines, it was a target. And when
(20:09):
I want to be clear to anyone who's listening, when
we're talking about harassment, this is bad in and of itself,
but we're not just talking about like sending someone posts
and being like I'm gonna do violent act to you.
It went beyond online threats, which again are bad enough
and need to be taken seriously, but it went into
finding members of their family, getting in contact with members
(20:31):
of their family, leaking their addresses, sending the police to houses.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yeah, doxing and all of.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
That, doxing and swatting, which are techniques that have been
talked about on this program before, but essentially, yes, use
it weaponizing the police, which if you're a listener to this,
you're aware of how the police can get weaponized. I
imagine a weaponizing the police against people, against against women
and people perceived as women for the act of being
(20:59):
a woman, and saying that men shouldn't be doing the
things that men do, or just you know, happening to
exist as a woman and have some sort of perceived
moral failing that you as an individual and individuals coming
together as a little hate group have you know, hate
for I don't think it's coincidental that like, oh, this
(21:23):
attractive mid twenties woman who cheated on her partner and
is in tech. So it's like, as a gamer, I
do want to sort of set the stage of you know,
it's embarrassing, but I've been in circles like this, Like
when there's a woman in your circle, she is like
the center of everything because it's like, oh my god,
a girl's in our boys club. A girl has chosen
(21:44):
to be in our boys club, A girl wants to
hang around us. And so it's like the worst thing
that could happen happened. The gamer girl betrayed them, their
imaginary gamer GF. Like this could be your girlfriend, This
could be your gamer girlfriend a cheating on you and
then getting famous.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
This is where I see the relationship and I want,
with like the couple of minutes that we have left
for you to get to Steve Bannon and like how
this now presents itself outside of or still withinside of
the gaming community, but now has presented itself in politics
(22:20):
in a very real way where this kind of again
i'm gonna say in cell type thinking, this kind of
deep misogyny and hatred for women. How you see it
present itself inside of Project twenty twenty five, inside of MAGA,
inside of trump Ism, and how it's turning what has
(22:44):
been this online world into real, live votes and issues.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
It's funny that you bring up in cell and someone
more qualified than me can talk about because I didn't
even think about this. The intersection between the rise of
gamer gait and the rise of in cell culture. There's
definitely intersection there, but there's also sort of like, these
are two individual communities that have crossover. That's unfortunately to
(23:14):
be stereotypical. If you're spending twelve hours a day spent
playing video games, that leaves twelve hours a day that
you're not socializing with your preferred potential sex partners. But anyway,
there was definitely a simultaneous rise of like young men
who are sexually frustrated and feel they have no options,
which again I can't really speak to. And then also
(23:35):
the gamer gait type culture. But anyway, enter Steve Bannon.
We've gotten here, so enter Steve Bannon and enter Breitbart.
Some people may remember the name Milo Yanopolis because for
a little bit he was trying to crossover as a
legitimate media person and no one would have him. He
got hired by Steve Bannon to Breitbart as their tech
(23:58):
massive air quotes journalist. And you can actually still go
on Breitbart, and you can go on breitbart dot com
slash tag slash gamergate and see the type of posts
that Milenopolis and some other people at Breitbart were making.
But it was a lot of even in the headlines,
(24:19):
it encourages harassing women. It celebrates when their targets leave
gaming and leave gaming journalism, their career is over, they
have given up and decided they're no longer going to
fight this, and Breitbart basically goes, hooray, yep, bee, we won.
We got another one. And there's one specific headline that
I wrote down. It was about quote, why so many
angry women have blue hair? So if you ever hear
(24:43):
the whole blue haired liberal or like liberals have blue
hair and pronouns, that literally comes from Breitbart and Gamergate
twenty fifteen, and Steve Bannon had a quote in a
book by Joshua Green called Devil's Bargain where he was
asked about Milo and asked about Gamergate, and this is
Steve Banner quote quote, I realized Milo could connect with
(25:03):
these kids right away. And this is now ten years ago.
You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate
or whatever, in sell whatever, that's my editorial. Go back
to the quote, they come in through Gamergate or whatever,
and then get turned onto politics and Trump, and you're
(25:26):
there on Breitbart. If you're on Reddit, say, if you're
on the Kotaku in Action subreddit, which is where these
people met up, you would see headlines for Breitbart, and
then you click through the headlines to Breitbart, and then
on the side you see articles about Trump and articles
about whatever other heinous stuff that Breitbart is promoting. And
(25:47):
then on the flip side, if you're a conservative person
who's in the bright bart world, if you're in the
burgeoning alt right, because that's what that became, then you're
gonna see articles that say, why do so many angry
women have blue hair? And you, as an alt writer
or whatever they were called before the term alt right
became a thing. You're gonna then get into gamer gate.
(26:09):
So Steve Bannon was feeding all these different types of people,
people who are already hardwired to be hardcore conservatives, capital
g gamers who dislike women and in cells and whatever
other groups all through the same funnel. That funnel all
takes these all these people, swirls them through and leads
(26:29):
them to Donald Trump, And in August twenty sixteen, Steve
Bannon was hired as the chief executive of Trump's presidential campaign.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
This is wild as fuck, Like it is so like
I have to say, this was really startling to me.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
And this isn't like conspiratory. I just want to mention it,
Like you can go online now and see and see
all the stuff I'm talking about.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
But it's like the fact that these things were happening,
this organization and this formation of essentially this hub of
toxic masculinity turning against women and progress and like all
of these things, and they found like this great fertile
(27:18):
watering hole to go to and began that work twenty
years ago. And now you're seeing the literally the fruits
of that come to bear. And the fact that there
has been no disruption. There has been no alternative, and
if there has, then that will be a conversation for
another day. But I think that I'm so grateful for
(27:41):
you bringing this to my attention, because again, if you
don't exist in these worlds, you're like, how does this
shit happen? Like how did this spill over into politics?
And you literally walked us through this handling Gretel breadcrumb
place to kind of get to where we are right now.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
There's one more thing I want to point out as
someone who was in that world at the time, not
like as a gamer gator, but like seeing it happen,
because I was online and in gamer world seeing the
Trump campaign rise. It was the same social techniques. When
you would I mentioned literally who before, you would say
gamer gates about Zoe Quinn, gamer gates about harassing Zoe Quinn,
(28:21):
and they would say literally who. They would make up
these lies that were not remotely based in reality and
just insist on them, and insist on them, and insist
on them. They would use sardonic memes to further their
agenda and just act like, well, the memes says it,
so it must be true. All of these techniques very
quickly became weapons of the Trump campaign that propelled him
(28:43):
to popularity amongst the same type of people who were
already drawn in by these propagandist techniques.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
I mean, this is extraordinary, it really is. It's extraordinary.
It's illuminating. It's readily disturbing because I don't see where
it is going to be disrupted.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
You have to recognize it before you can disrupt it.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Exactly on the other side, And that was the point
of this conversation today because it was something that you
brought to my attention that the New York Times article
that I discussed with Jonathan brought to my attention about
Generation Z. And there is just like so much more
that is here.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
That's why Trump picked jd Vance. I wanted to get
to that. We didn't get all the way from twenty
seventeen to jd Vance, But that's the culmination of it.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Well, I mean, we can do a part too, because
there's so much more here. So we will leave it
there today Andrew and pick up and do a part
two of the question that I think a lot of
people have been asking, which is why JD. Vance of
all people? And I think that that would be a
good place to pick back up. As always, I just
(29:53):
want to thank you, appreciate you one for the work
that you do and have done for years on WOKF.
But for this particular conversation, this is part one, folks.
We will come back with part two because there is
just so much here and in order to disrupt something,
to Andrew's point, you actually need to understand it, and
(30:14):
that is the point of this conversation. So Andrew, appreciate you, thank.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
You so much. Here's my teas for part two. Gamergate
is but a small subsect of what the pro Trump,
altright white nationalist movement became in twenty seventeen. So that's
for next time. Brilliant.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
That is it for me today, dear friends on WOKEF.
As always, power to the people and to all the people. Power,
get woke and stay woke as fuck.
Host
Danielle Moodie
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