In fall 2014, the ever-present harassment of women in tech and gaming culture took a new and unprecedented turn with the Gamergate controversy. In reaction to a wave of new and progressive game criticism, the online hordes of so-called Gamergate made it their mission to silence their detractors. They claimed the identity of the gamer was being bullied by corrupt journalists in conspiracy with feminist critics. They were under threat, and this movement named for its Twitter hashtag #gamergate was a way to strike back. The strikes, however, had all the hallmarks of a reactionary movement—the Tea Party of the gaming world—and seemed more interested in harassment than anything else. In his take on Gamergate, Dan Golding presents a gamer identity that does not deny being threatened, but instead confirms and welcomes its imminent death as part of a narrow-minded, male-dominated subculture that has run its course.
What makes a gamer? For a long time, this has been one of the most important questions, if not the key question, for understanding video game culture. Who is a gamer, and what makes it official? Is it an identity adopted by the individual, or imposed from the outside? Is the gamer a semi-autonomous, community identity, or a target demographic cultivated by multinational corporations? After the events of late 2014, the importance of these questions has multiplied. For all its intangibility—and for all its visible hate and utter lack of accountability—the social media event that was Gamergate was waged under the banner of the gamer. To be a gamer now is to be, at least in part, marked by the color of Gamergate. What makes a gamer, indeed.
Gamergate was a semi-autonomous campaign that appeared online at the end of August 2014, giving a name and a brand to the ongoing harassment of women in games that has been growing louder in visibility and intensity for years. Ostensibly, it arose in reaction to a number of events that aren’t worth going into; in reality, it is an extension of the kind of semi-organized harassment and misogynistic hate of the kind that fellow contributors to this volume, Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn, have been receiving for years. But what is particularly interesting about its guise under Gamergate is that it is in part imagined as a defense of both video games themselves and the gamer—both of whom are imagined as under attack from “feminist bullies,” as one partisan journalist wrote. The gamer, according to this mentality, is at risk and needs defending.
In many ways, it makes complete sense that the gamer should be such a closely policed and defended identity. For decades, it has been a shield to hide behind and a banner to unite under. The gamer was, for many, the recognized enthusiast who was given a legitimacy of sorts through the depths of their passion and intensity of their fanaticism. Though video games themselves were often disregarded and belittled by the mainstream press, the gamer identity was a way of taking that denigration and re-routing it into a positive, almost belligerent enthusiasm. Putting on the gamer identity was how an individual was allowed to like video games. It was a recognizable role to play and a way of reclaiming the clichéd signs of the video game fan that were stigmatized—the darkened room, the hypnotic glow of the screen, the junk food, the late obsessive hours. For each pejorative claim of the uselessness of video games, the gamer could present a flip side. Through this lens, the cliché of the gamer’s social awkwardness became the myth of the elite gamer’s spectacular playing skill. The stereotype of obsessiveness became the way a gamer gained status within the community through their very particular knowledge. The way the gamer served as a stand-in for the troubles of our times, at least for the tabloid press—as slackers and time-wasters—became for the video game community a way of responding to a world that doesn’t care to look beneath the surface. The myth of ridicule from the mainstream—the “outside”—fed the burning need for gamers to stick together.
I remember being called a gamer by others long before I ever called myself one. This was during high school in a rural Australian town—already a context full-to-overflowing with tensions of outsider versus insider culture—and it was often by those who were uninterested in games, but who wanted to understand who I was. Small towns in Australia are, I imagine, much like small towns anywhere in the world, where most residents will recognize you at least by sight, if not by name. At the time, I was a nerd of the highest order—not just interested in games, but also the emerging Internet (which, let’s not forget, was deeply uncool in its early years), books, and, most damning of all, big band jazz. I played the clarinet, and I played video games. Carrying a game cartridge from the only video store in town over the ten-minute walk home made me visible. My strange interests painted an unsatisfactory picture at the time of what a boy should be like. Acquaintances could not understand me. But they could understand a gamer. And so to them, I became one.
On a personal level, the term itself was never satisfactory. Later, at university, I developed a deep love of film—in many ways deeper than my appreciation of video games, even—and yet I never felt the urge to call myself a cinephile, let alone a film buff. “Gamer,” to me, even high school me, fed into too many associations and preconceptions that I didn’t like. I liked to think of myself as more than just the sum of my media interests.
The irony of this is, of course, that there were few reasons to exclude myself from the identity on a demographic basis. Nothing about my gender, sexuality, race, or class excludes me from the stereotypical gamer identity. As a straight, cis, white, middle class man, I had unencumbered access to the gamer identity when—though I did not realize it at the time—others did not. Maleness in particular is the invisible trait of the gamer that has been cultivated for decades.
The gamer identity is not the community-led, organic label that romanticized visions of video game culture would have you believe. Though it has served as a standard to bear against mainstream culture, it is in fact more of a fabrication of marketing departments than one of everyday people. The gamer did not emerge slowly to help give voice to disempowered communities. It was created.
Taken in its simplest, most basic form, a video game is a creative application of computer technology. This is something that not many people think about. Other media have a material basis that sets them apart (film, for example, is named after the celluloid material that underpins the form), but video games are simply made from computers, a medium that also powers scientific calculations, word processing, and the Internet. So the video game began its life as part of computer culture, as creative experiments with new technologies. A number of these early experiments were in the masculine context of university computing labs, such as the MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club, who in February 1962 created Spacewar!, one of the first ever video games. The Model Railroad Club’s image fulfilled the stereotype of the male nerd with an overwhelming interest in the technical world, boasting members with nicknames like “Slug” and “Shag.” Women have always been there for the creation of computing technology—and yes, video game technology, too—but their contributions have often been deliberately made invisible. Jean Jennings was one of five women who programmed ENIAC, the first general purpose computer, and although she was invited—required, even—to give a demonstration to the national press for its launch, neither she nor the four other women programmers involved were invited to the reception afterward. “We felt as if we had been playing parts in a fascinating movie that suddenly took a bad turn,” Jennings wrote in her autobiography. “We had worked like dogs for two weeks to produce something really spectacular and then were written out of the script.” Other women were early pioneers of the video game: Carol Shaw worked at Atari and then Activision throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, creating River Raid for the Atari 2600 in 1982, while Dona Bailey worked with Ed Logg to program the amazing arcade game Centipede in 1981. In 1979, Roberta Williams, with her husband Ken, founded a company that would become Sierra On-Line, one of the most influential video game developers of the ’80s. Women have always played video games, too. Carol Shaw told Polygon in 2013 that when working for Atari, no one spoke about the gender of their players, and it was never assumed, either. “We never really discussed who our target demographic was,” said Shaw. “We didn’t discuss gender or age.”
Yet throughout these early years of video games, something else was going on. Video game culture developed a limited, inward-looking perception of the world that marked game enthusiasts as different from everyone else. Game culture began to separate itself out from technology culture. The product was “the gamer,” an identity based on difference and separateness. The gamer was partly related to the geek and the nerd, stereotypes that suggest a monomaniacal interest in the esoteric and the technical. These are potent—and deeply inconsistent—stereotypes that have been wielded with bluntness over the years, both by the media and by technology enthusiasts themselves. The gamer has proven to be just as vague and indistinct a character, with a sense of otherness tied up in video game appreciation as perhaps the only consistent trait. To be a gamer is not just to be interested in video games—it is also to feel separate and to stand apart in one way or another. The gamer identity is therefore at least in part negatively defined. What the gamer is not is almost as important as what the gamer is.
In his book Computer Games and the Social Imaginary, Graeme Kirkpatrick argues that the gamer identity became fully realized with the invention or discovery of the concept of “gameplay.” Gameplay is a somewhat ineffable term for describing the gameliness of a game; it is a quality that only the most experienced player, the true gamer, is best placed to identify. A gamer’s game possesses good gameplay above all else, as distinct from and sometimes in opposition to a game’s narrative, representational, or technical elements. This noticeable transformation occurred at some point in the ’80s. Kirkpatrick identifies March 1985 as the moment the term gameplay entered the lexicon of British video game magazines in particular. With the discovery of gameplay, the gamer identity was more codified. The development of taste led to the development of identity. Again, this was partly a question of what the gamer was not, and it is reflected in Kirkpatrick’s analysis of what seems to be the imagined readership of these British magazines. The gamer was not interested in technology for technology’s sake. The gamer was not a parent looking to research educational video games for their children to play. And according to the picture painted by game magazines and their advertisers, the gamer was usually not a woman.
It was only five years earlier that a video game had been created specifically for women for what was likely the first time. Toru Iwatani, a designer working for Namco, thought the video game arcades of the era were offputtingly masculine. If the advertisements for Atari’s first arcade machine, Computer Space, are anything to go by, he was on to something: the adverts, a paean to 1970s chic, feature a Farrah Fawcett blow-waved woman with her underwear visible through a sheer white dress, leaning seductively against the machine. In an attempt to break down this male-dominated culture, Iwatani created a game called Pac-Man. It was a game that he thought might attract women and couples to the arcade. Iwatani’s reasoning? “When I imagined what women enjoy, the image of them eating cakes and desserts came to mind, so I used ‘eating’ as a keyword,” he told Eurogamer in 2010. “When I did research with this keyword I came across the image of a pizza with a slice taken out of it and had that eureka moment.” Condescending as they were, Iwatani’s actions reveal the invisible masculinity inherent in popular games of the era.
There’s a naïve optimism to video game advertising of the early 1980s that contains a kind of universalism not yet divided by gender. Women—particularly girls—feature in advertisements for Millipede and the Atari 2600. In an advertisement for Bandits by Sirius in the September 1983 issue of Electronic Games Magazine, a cartoon girl defiantly tells a military man, “Girls like to play video games too!” She then defeats an invading alien force before telling “Captain Star” to “eat your heart out!”
Beyond the mid-’80s things shift dramatically. In 1998, an ad for the original PlayStation places a couple in a movie theatre. She’s bothering him, trying to get his attention from the film. Crash Bandicoot as the usher appears to berate the man, mocking him for being “totally whipped.” Then Lara Croft suddenly appears next to the man. “Would you rather be at home shooting a bazooka, or watching a chick flick?” asks Crash. Cut to the next scene and the man and Lara Croft are playing their PlayStation together at home while the man’s partner cries to be let in at the front door. Another ad, this time for the 2005 racing game Juiced, sees two men playing the game in their car. They realize their controllers are altering not just the video game, but also the clothes of a woman on the pavement outside. The men giggle as they use their controllers to strip the clearly horrified woman naked. The industry’s imagined target demographic for the video game is by this point utterly clear, not just in advertising, but in the branding of video game consoles themselves—GameBoy, anyone? This became a self-fulfilling prophesy. Who plays video games? Young men and boys, such marketing claims. So who are video games made for and aimed at? Young men and boys. As a result, by the late 2000s, efforts to deliberately target women players seemed only to be possible through absurdly demeaning flourishes of the color pink, or with the “girls only” branding of Ubisoft’s Imagine series (2007–2013). The gendered gamer identity helped demarcate the gamer as a targetable demographic for business. People always exist in multiple forms of identity simultaneously. I can be a man and a musician and a writer and a scholar all at once, for example. One could very easily be a woman and a gamer simultaneously, or queer and a gamer, or African and a gamer. Yet for the marketers, journalists, and developers who helped shape the world of video games in the ’80s and ’90s, only a few traits defined the gamer. The most immovable of these was that he was a man.
Unsurprisingly, shaped by the weight of decades of gendered and sexualized design and marketing, the gamer identity is deeply bound up in assumptions and performances of gender and sexuality. To be a gamer is to signal a great many things, not all of which are about the actual playing of video games. For her essay, “Do You Identify As A Gamer? Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Gamer Identity,” Adrienne Shaw interviewed a selection of non-heterosexual, non-male, and not solely White or Anglo people who played video games. On the basis of her interviews, Shaw concluded there was “a definite correlation between gender and gamer identity.” Put simply: men were much more likely to identify as gamers, regardless of the actual quantity of video game playing in their lives. Other studies have also suggested that women tend to underestimate the amount of time they spend playing video games—and like Shaw’s study, Simeon Yates and Karen Littleton’s 1999 investigation, “Understanding Computer Game Cultures: A Situated Approach,” concludes that women are also less likely to adopt the gamer identity. This is not to say that no woman ever has identified as a gamer—this is patently untrue—but rather that through decades of built-up pressure from marketing, branding, culture, and even the games themselves, women are less likely to take on the gamer moniker.
Despite all this, a substantial demographic variety has always been present in the range of people who play video games. Time and time again, each study has proven that not only a substantial number of women play video games, but that they play video games just as seriously and with the same dedication as their male counterparts. In late 2014, a small stir was created when the ESA released its latest survey of American gaming habits and announced that adult women represent a much bigger proportion of the game-playing population than teenage boys. Yet this has been the trend in video game demographic surveys for years for anyone who has been paying attention. The predictable response—“What kind of games do they really play, though—are they really gamers?”—says all you need to know about this ongoing demographic shift. The insinuated criteria of “real” video games is wholly contingent on identity (i.e. a real gamer shouldn’t play Candy Crush). In a way, what we are seeing with these kinds of insinuations is the replaying of gendered debates that have been going on for centuries.
The gamer identity has also stagnated. Perhaps the biggest shift for the industry since the end of the arcade era occurred when Nintendo released the Wii in 2006. Almost overnight, the mimetic and accessible nature of the Wii seemed to open up video games to mainstream audiences. This is the narrative we hear about, anyway—the actual story is a bit more complex, given that people who are not straight white men have clearly been playing and making video games since their inception. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that after years of ignoring them, the video game industry could now allow itself to make games that acknowledged the existence of a wide variety of gamers. We suddenly saw Nintendo ads featuring women, the elderly, and the non-white. This was not the discovery of video games by a new demographic, but the video game industry authorizing new stories to be told about its players. The image of gaming was changing—and in the case of the Nintendo Wii ads, it was changing quite literally. This change has only been amplified in the years since, with the social gaming boon on Facebook and smartphones that is stereotypically associated with women and other nontraditional gamer groups.
The gamer—an identity still tied up in ideas of otherness, outsider status, and masculinity—quite quickly started to become an irrelevant concept in the late 2000s. There was nothing exclusive about the Nintendo Wii. There was nothing about Candy Crush that signified a special insider culture. The gamer identity was not required to explain a player’s enthusiasm; this was self-explanatory—video games were now in the mainstream eye.
When the playing of video games moved beyond the niche the industry had always targeted, the gamer identity did not adapt. It remained uniformly stagnant and immobile. As a defensive, negatively defined concept, it was simply not fluid enough to apply to a new broad spectrum of people. It could not meaningfully contain Candy Crush players, Proteus players, and Call of Duty players simultaneously. When video games changed, the gamer identity failed to stretch, and so it has been broken.
We have also seen a video game press—so long allowed to court a male audience—undergo a number of shifts. There has been an increase in the visibility of traditionally marginalized groups—such as women—among game journalists. Just as women have always made and played video games, women have always written about them, too, like Joyce Worley, one of the co-founders of Electronic Games, the first video game magazine. Today, the boys club of the 1990s magazine era has become a different online criticism sphere populated by writers like Leigh Alexander, Patricia Hernandez, Cara Ellison, Lana Polansky, Maddy Myers, Jenn Frank, and Keza McDonald. Now more than ever, video game journalists are more interested in issues of representation, equality, and feminism, too. The stratospheric rise of a critic like Anita Sarkeesian is hugely significant, but must also be seen in context as merely the brightest star in an array of critics more vocally attacking sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism in video games than ever before. Video game criticism has shifted in a noticeably progressive direction, even if the games themselves have been slow to keep up.
In this context, what are we to make of Gamergate? On the evidence of its sustained and ferocious attack on women in games, what we are seeing is the end of the gamer and the viciousness that accompanies the death of an identity. The gamer identity has been broken. It no longer has a niche to call home, and so it reaches out inarticulately at invented and easy targets instead. That the supposed raison d’être of Gamergate was corruption and bias in the video game media makes complete sense; this is just another way of expressing confusion about why games the traditional gamer does not understand are successful, like Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest, a video game about an emotional topic, made by a woman. That the game is made in Twine is yet another point of confusion for the traditional gamer, since Twine, being a text-based platform, does not stimulate the traditional taste for gameplay.
The gamer identity is under assault, and so it should be. It is also tied up in complex notions of consumption and capitalism: the gamer is someone who purchases video games, above anything else. The cries of Gamergate that claim consumers have been needlessly and wantonly attacked illustrate this nakedly. The gamer is, among other things, an identity that has for decades been framed at the financial heart of an entire creative industry. The gamer community has been told the consumer is always right—and that the consumer is mostly male. The “consumer king” gamer, as developer and writer Matthew Burns puts it, will continue to be targeted and exploited while their profitability as a demographic outweighs their toxicity, but the traditional gamer identity is now culturally irrelevant. The battles to make safe spaces for different video game cultures are long and they are resisted tempestuously. Given the extremes to which this conflict has been taken, I don’t use the word “battle” lightly; with now-numerous women run out of their homes and threatened with rape and death, perhaps “war” is more appropriate. Through the pain and suffering of people who have their friendships, personal lives, and professions on the line, things continue to improve. The myth of the male gamer, once at the center of an entire industry, has been destabilized and replaced with a more complex picture. The result has been a palpable progressive shift.
This shift is precisely the root of the increasingly violent hostility of Gamergate. The hysterical fits of those inculcated at the heart of male gamer culture might on the surface be claimed as crusades for journalistic integrity, or a defense against falsehoods, but—along with a mix of the hatred of women and an expansive bigotry thrown in for good measure—what is actually going on is an attempt to retain hegemony. Make no mistake: the death threats, the bomb threats, and all the words of violence on social media are manifestations of the exertion of power in the name of male-gamer orthodoxy. It is an orthodoxy that has already begun to disappear.
Gamergate represented the moment that gamers realized their own irrelevance. This was a cold wind a long time coming. For decades, the gamer was told by advertising, branding, and, most importantly, by gamers themselves, that they were the lords of their domain. The outside world may have contempt for us, the gamer imagined, but in here we rule. We may continue to ask what makes a gamer into the future, but what we have seen so clearly in late 2014 is what unmakes a gamer.
Video games are for everyone today. I mean this in a destructive way. To read the other side of the same statement—especially if you align yourself with the old-school gamer identity—video games are no longer for you. You do not get to own them. No single group gets to own them anymore. On some level, the grim individuals who are self-centered and myopic enough to be upset at the prospect of having to share their medium are absolutely right. They have astutely and correctly identified what is going on here. Their toys are being taken away, their treehouses are being boarded up. Video games now live in the world and there is no going back.
I am convinced this marks the end. We are finished here. From now on, there are no more gamers, only players.
Dan Golding is a video game, music, and film critic and academic based in Melbourne, Australia.