GamerGate, Please Stop Trying to Ruin Games

GamerGate consumes more of my time, lately, than PLAYING GAMES does, and I find that notion almost as offensive as the movement itself. All I want is to enjoy my games in peace. But I can’t, because GamerGate insists on butting in. It’s spread across the sites I frequent, it harasses the developers making the games I love, and it’s trying to silence the critics and analysts that I trust.

I’d rather be playing games.

I want to enjoy my games. I want my games to be good. I want my games to be fun and sad and hilarious and scary. I want my games to be dark and edgy and violent and bloody. I want my games to be innovative and thoughtful and meaningful and beautiful. I want games to be sexy and racy and hot and explicit. I want games to be tense and touching and heartwarming and heartbreaking.

I want games to grow as a medium. I want independent development to get bigger and easier. I want the industry and get stronger and better and appeal to larger audiences. I want games to bring in new people and new ideas and always keep moving forward.

I want games that give me something I’ve never experienced before. That let me experience things I could never get from my life. Things I can’t get from film or text or music or sculpture. I want to know what it’s like to be someone I’m not, to deal with things that I don’t.

Nothing GamerGate does ever seems to line up with what I want. GamerGate harasses and shouts and distracts from games, distracts from the making of games and the analysis of games. They attack independents making unique games; attack critics voicing dissenting opinion. Whatever their professed goals, all I see them enact is hatred, bigotry, and ignorance – and a constant drive for the status quo. For repetition, homogeneity, exclusion and stagnation.

GamerGate won’t get out of my life. It won’t stop threatening and attacking my hobby. It won’t just fuck off, leave games alone, and let me enjoy them – because, of course, it was there first. Not GamerGate, mind you, but hatred; sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, and harassment.

It’s the status quo in games, in culture, in society, and in my life in general. And it’s poison. Stalling progress, creating losses and opportunity costs for every living person, and corrupting any pathetic pretense to morality that ever might have been.