It’s a GamerGate World: Toxicity in Digital Spaces

While intersectional feminist and queer game scholars (Kishonna Gray, Elizabeth Losh, Bo Ruberg, Adrienne Shaw, and T. L. Taylor, to name only a few) have pushed against the homogeny of the discipline in some cases even before Aarseth’s declared “year one,” the failure of both the games industry and the field of game studies to confront its own misogyny and racism reached a visible peak in 2014, with the start of GamerGate. This multiplatform harassment campaign started with personal attacks on game designer Zoe Quinn and escalated rapidly to include attacks on both designers and scholars seen as threatening the centrality of white, straight, cisgender men in the industry. The fallout of this culture war has given rise to questions in game studies that are existential in nature and overwhelming in scale: How do we address the misogyny, racism, and other exclusionary practices present not only in our objects of study, but also in our academic communities? How do we talk about something, or push for reasoned discourse, when—much like the villain Voldemort of Harry Potter—even naming GamerGate draws the attention of trolls to conference hashtags or encourages mobs to attack scholars on Twitter? These problems are not unique to game studies, as there have been flare-ups around other cultural products such as films and comics. DH writ large relies on the same platforms that power fan communities and thus cannot avoid similar confrontations.

After all, GamerGate not only prompted soul searching about what academia had missed in gaming culture, but it also provided an example of the world outside academia taking note of digital scholarship. One illustrative flashpoint was a session at the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference in 2014. GamerGaters found a set of notes from this session in which feminist game scholars discussed their work and approaches—made public in a spirit of openness and collaboration—and started investigating the participants. Because the frameworks of academia were opaque to them, they concocted a conspiracy theory about the government controlling and destroying video games out of the combination of the fact that some scholars had received funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), perceived parallels between calls for inclusion in academia and industry, and the unfamiliar scholarly language in which the ideas were presented. As Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw, the organizers of the session, wrote in their piece reflecting on this incident: “It has become apparent how quickly academia can be misunderstood, and more specifically how feminist academic research can be misappropriated for non-feminist purposes” (217). Notably, this event changed some academics’ practices: Warnings against live tweeting became common before controversial subjects were discussed at conference panels in the field, and some scholars removed themselves from public platforms entirely. These events raise a broader issue about how we communicate—or don’t—outside our scholarly audiences. Digital scholars must continually confront this challenge, as the work of social media scholar Whitney Phillips reminds us that “until the conversation is directed toward those who engage in behaviors similar or identical to those of trolls, until sensationalist, exploitative media practices are no longer rewarded with page views and ad revenue—in short, until the mainstream is willing to step in front of the funhouse mirror and consider the contours of its own distorted reflection—the most aggressive forms of trolling will always have an outlet, and an audience” (159). The expertise of digital games studies scholars in topics such as the role of affective ties in online communities, the ways platforms affect how information travels and changes, and the semiotic analysis of memes is increasingly vital to understanding contemporary culture writ large.

Moreover, game studies has served as a warning because it has needed to clean its own house. For example, a keynote at the Foundations of Digital Games conference in 2017 both equated marginalized populations to nonhumans and included troubling images of physical devices designed for transference of physical affection such as kissing, demonstrated on student participants. When audience members challenged the speaker on the misogyny, racism, and homophobia expressed in his talk, he dismissed their concerns, as feminist games scholar T. L. Taylor noted.2 When another feminist scholar offered a concerned critique on Twitter, she became the target of a mob incited by the speaker. The conference organization team and the organization board of directors later issued a half-hearted condemnation of the keynote, focusing not on its dehumanizing content but instead condemning the “ad hominem” attacks on the tenure-track faculty member targeted for her critique. In 2018, the same keynote speaker would go on to chair the Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE) conference and invite white supremacist leader Stephen K. Bannon as a keynote speaker, demonstrating that visible misogyny and racism is still embraced in parts of the game studies community. As the work of games scholar Kishonna Gray reminds us, this centering of whiteness and masculinity continues to threaten the essential work that marginalized members of gaming culture, and particularly Black gamers, are doing to push back against toxicity.

Nevertheless, post-GamerGate, there have been some productive moves both in theory and in praxis. The coalitions formed in response to the GamerGate attacks have brought increased intensity to intersectional feminist and queer critiques in the field. These in turn have brought critical attention to pedagogy in the field as well as to the issue of gatekeeping, with a corresponding push for more inclusionary practices and active responses to toxicity. Bo Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw’s landmark volume Queer Game Studies offers a transformative vision of the field while other scholars directly challenge the centering of gamer masculinity (Condis) and the illusion of “meritocracy” in gaming culture (Paul). Conference themes, such as the Foundations of Digital Games 2021 conference on Inclusivity, reflect the field’s continual reckoning with the challenges of public games scholarship (Salter and Blodgett) and the need to support marginalized scholars. As conflicts of this type continue to play out beyond the field, the interpretive apparatus built to make sense of GamerGate has become useful across a variety of online environments. For example, Adrienne Massanari coined the term “toxic technoculture” to articulate the combination of platform affordances and culture on GamerGate’s hub, Reddit, and in doing so provided a way of understanding a wider range of social media spaces that shape popular discourse. Examples of this toxicity are increasingly urgent: Conspiracy forums drive QAnon, which alleges that Donald Trump is fighting Satan-worshipping pedophiles, and assisted in the election of two members of Congress in 2020. Similarly, the “red pill” sites of the misogynist manosphere unite men in hatred of women, with affiliated groups often claiming credit for doxing (releasing private information such as real names and addresses) and revenge porn. As DH scholars study and in turn confront the consequences of these movements, the lessons of GamerGate about toxic online behavior, though acquired at a steep cost, have helped move all of digital studies forward.

Playbour and the Portfolio Self: Taking Labor Seriously

Additionally, confronting exploitative practices in game development work, and the pleasures of the work that supports that exploitation, sheds light on many kinds of contemporary digital labor. Both games studies and the games industry benefit from popular narratives that center work as “fun,” a model that industry activists have pointed out enables intense and exploitative working conditions in game production. These “crunch” working conditions have been exposed thanks to the work of games journalists such as Jason Schreier. His 2018 exposé on Rockstar Games and the making of Red Dead Redemption 2 featured accounts of unpaid overtime, evening and weekend work, and imbalance that came at the cost of “friendships, family time, and mental health.” However, there are even contradictions in the accounts of employees, with some noting the satisfaction they took in their work despite a lack of compensation. This is consistent with what digital labor scholar Melissa Gregg has observed about white-collar work more generally. As work can be a source of enjoyment, “these pleasures and intimacies underwrite professional workers’ willingness to engage in work outside paid hours” (Gregg, 5–6). The underlying rhetoric of playful labor, or what games scholar Julian Kücklich has termed “playbour,” encourages not only outside observers but also those embedded in the culture of the games industry to dismiss these working conditions.

These patterns of industry exploitation of unpaid or undercompensated yet apparently willing labor extend beyond games to adjacent creative spaces—including games journalism and digital culture more broadly. Labor scholar Eran Fisher argues that this potential for exploitation is inherent to non-alienated work—that is, work that does not prevent the “possibility to express oneself, to control one’s production process, to objectify one’s essence and connect and communicate with others” (173). When we ourselves do not perceive our labor as work, it is easier to dismiss that it has economic value. Studies of modders echo this trend: the participants only acknowledged their labor when the work of making at-home game modifications became drudgery (Banks and Humphreys).

Games are also a key site of what communication scholars Kathleen Kuehn and Thomas Corrigan call “hope labor.” Game programmers are expected to train themselves—paying for undergraduate and graduate degrees, paying for expensive software, or even just learning on their own by making unwaged modifications for commercial games until they have a sufficient portfolio. The historical model of companies taking on the responsibility of training their workers on the job has disappeared from all industries, but its absence is particularly visible in game development. Would-be employees willingly take on significant unpaid tasks like game modding, with the belief that it will inaugurate or further their careers as professional, paid workers. Asking questions about labor, and in particular about the enormous costs that must be taken on to have even an opportunity for a paid job, encourages us to take a hard look at the poverty imposed by graduate school, adjuncting, and other insecure contract work. Importantly, these kinds of hope labor are unevenly possible—those with generational wealth and without student loans (disproportionately white) and those without caregiving responsibilities (disproportionately men) are much more able to take such risks, perpetuating such people’s overrepresentation in DH. Though games labor is particularly spectacular in its exploitation, the same broader issues of precarity and extreme work conditions can be found in academia and across the platforms of our digital work.

The recognition that people who love their jobs are especially susceptible to accepting excessive and escalating demands should give us pause in an era of adjunctification, exploding class sizes, and other austerities. In the DH, this trend is often experienced through the labor model of DH projects, which frequently rely on unequally credited and underpaid collaborators. As Rachel Mann’s work reminds us, such labor often falls to graduate students, who in turn are often left out of the “thinking” and publishing aspects of a project. The increasingly urgent conversations in the games industry echo the calls to action from labor scholars examining internet culture more broadly. As Tiziana Terranova notes in an examination of invisible internet labor, such work is “pleasurably embraced and at the same time shamelessly exploited,” and it fundamentally cannot be understood without acknowledging both of these facts (37). This framework has been documented among game workers and particularly noted for creating cultural norms where it is “difficult for workers to resist their own extreme working conditions” (Peticca-Harris, Weststar, and McKenna, 570). It should also sound familiar from things like scholarly publishing’s entire free labor edifice, which relies on the framework of service to the field in spite of the increasing precarity of the field’s workers and the diminishing numbers of tenured and tenure-track faculty.

The project-based, hire-and-fire cycles of games work also tell us much about other digital media labor. Looking at the whole of capitalism across space and time, Fordism and its stable, career-long employment is the exception rather than the rule (de Peuter). Yet formerly it was mostly marginalized people like the working poor, (disproportionately) people of color, and people in the Global South who needed to cobble together enough work to live on from various sources. After World War II, skilled, white, primarily male middle-class workers had decades of relative security that has only recently eroded—perhaps predictably producing white male resentment (Rodino-Colocino). This trend is echoed in the gig economy, which business scholar Jeremias Prassl says works to “make labor less visible” while rebranding people as a service (6). The digital economy’s invisible labor is unevenly distributed, and, as anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri warn us, has already begun to create a new “global underclass” of unacknowledged workers. This broader labor context puts the decline of tenure-line jobs into a new perspective, emphasizing our kinship to those who design and code the technologies we use and research and asking us to reflect on whose invisible labor we in turn take for granted in the systems we rely on for our work. In particular, scholars using digital methods that employ humans as service (e.g., researchers using Amazon’s “Mechanical Turks” or indeed DH scholars employing students for the tedious work of text coding) must consider our role in these cycles of exploitation. Turning a labor framework on game development and game studies makes possible key questions about the distribution of benefits and costs that we should ask about all of our work, within and outside the academy, as well as the work we ask of others.

Instead of stable, permanent jobs, temporary and contract work without benefits has progressively become the new norm for workers in almost all industries and only threatens to grow as a consequence of the economic disruptions resulting since 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic. These disruptions disproportionately affect people of color and women, which provides an important reminder of the interrelatedness of racism, misogyny, and labor precarity. Framing a temporary and precarious job not as a radical weakening of the position of the worker but as an opportunity to grow one’s portfolio and increase mobility, such that workers are increasingly understood as entrepreneurs of the self, has diminished resistance to such shifts. In addition to interrogating other costs of precarity, we must acknowledge how the ability to be flexible is unevenly distributed—particularly since the global pandemic has drawn attention to the continued inequities in parental labor expectations. It is useful to attend to how “always on” connectivity colonizes leisure hours with work and with play that is hard to distinguish from work, adds a second shift of playbour to ever-expanding groups of people, and either adds a third shift for the women already doing what sociologist Arlie Hochschild has termed a “second shift” as caretakers or excludes them from participation altogether in the rapidly developing new norm. These labor inequities (and their costs to people of color and white women) must be centered not only in games but in every field, particularly in the wake of the ongoing Covid-19 crisis.

Playing (for) the Planet: Interrogating Environmental Impact

Finally, as climate change draws worldwide attention but seems only to spur local inaction, we turn to games for insights into our collective environmental challenges. In 2019, a number of game companies (including Sony, Ubisoft, and Microsoft) gained positive press coverage for their announcement of the “Playing for the Planet” initiative, which included “pledges ranging from reducing supply chain emissions by 30 percent by 2030 to, a little less impressively, ‘putting green nudges’ into games’ plots” (D’Anastasio). The pledge, unsurprisingly, does not hold up to scrutiny and does not address the reliance of the industry on conflict minerals and other materials sourced with no concern for human rights violations or environmental impact. Cloud gaming and cloud and server-based services more widely amplify power usage thanks to demands on both data centers and networks, as well as using large amounts of water for cooling in the arid U.S. Southwest, where many data centers are located.

Games studies coexists in many academic spaces with game design programs and thus is not only complicit in but fundamentally dependent on these games industry practices. It is therefore incumbent on us to recognize that educational and “serious” game design that might seek to intervene in climate change also contributes to the same system. These serious games are in dialogue with industry representations of climate change and impending environmental disaster.

Acknowledging these growing concerns, game studies has taken a much-needed environmentally conscious turn. Games scholar Alenda Y. Chang’s Playing Nature suggests that an ecocritical approach to games and game design can be a valuable part of rethinking our relationships with the world, inviting players to rethink their agency within the complex chains of environmental impact in which they participate. Importantly, Chang’s work points us toward a move in game studies that is emerging across digital spaces, and in reflections on the infrastructural usage of “big data” projects in DH, but must eventually become pervasive: the need to reconcile games design intentions with environmental impact realities.

An ecocritical turn in DH has been raised by Posthumus and Sinclair’s work on “digital environmental humanities,” which suggests the value of DH methods to bring “the non-human world into the foreground where it was before in the background” (269). However, the need to foreground this critical turn itself is long overdue. Safiya Noble notes that centering Black studies can remind us of environmental challenges and the role they play in inequality: “The extraction of minerals needed for digital computing technologies, the impact of conflicts over rare minerals, and the exploitive nature of the flow of global capital in and out of the regions where they are sourced have a serious impact on human rights and the environment” (31). Such an approach is needed because institutional interventions, such as NEH Infrastructure Grants, encourage overhauling computer labs and creating power-consuming, energy-inefficient, single-purpose devices, from virtual reality headsets to makerspaces. DH workshops and practices encourage the integration of more such technology throughout the university, with the demands of a constant cycle of upgrade and discard. While professors argue over whether smartphones belong in the classroom, the discussion of how these same smartphones contribute to global emissions is far less frequent. Similarly, critics such as Jonathan Wolff have drawn attention to the hypocrisy of academics perpetuating existing models of conference travel while participating in ecocritical discourse. While such commentary frequently ignores the realities of disciplinary isolation and academics’ need for communal discourse and support, Covid-related shifts to digital conferences suggest that mediated modalities are more feasible than has previously been acknowledged for sustaining some types of interaction. Thus, even as we critique the data center, the networks that sustain our fields are also suspect and must be confronted.

Digital humanist Bethany Nowviskie’s keynote address on “Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene” offers a powerful reminder of the costs of inaction and the need for more attention to this area: “We must attend to the environmental and human costs of DH—from our complicity with device manufacturers and social media manipulators, to the carbon footprint and price tag of conferences like this—and ask ourselves seriously what we might change, or grow to be” (Nowviskie, i13). Other exemplars, such as the fully online and free-of-charge Electronic Literature Organization conference and the Foundations of Digital Games conference and other virtual events in 2020, suggest what some of these compromises might look like at the intersection of games and DH communities. However, these too demand computing power and cloud services. Jentery Sayers advocates for a DH reflection that rejects this bulk, noting that minimal computing might offer a solution by reducing reliance on scale and thus “also a reliance on middleware, databases, peripherals, and substantial pieces of hardware.” Through this lens, we are reminded that the “must-haves” of today’s world of online education and conferences, such as Zoom, were unnecessary to online community and exchange in the past—and can perhaps be eliminated again in favor of sustainable approaches to DH computing.

Play It Forward

Academia is in crisis as Covid-19 brings with it closures of departments and universities, the halting of PhD program admissions, and the loss of staff and faculty jobs. This trend compounds the existing crisis in the humanities, where the decline in tenure-track job listings and external threats targeting critical race theory and gender studies point toward increasing precarity. If DH is to rise to the occasion as a meta-discipline, we must confront the fact that many of the challenges facing academia as a whole—an increasing atmosphere of divisiveness and outright hostility to intellectualism and even attacks on faculty, the mounting inequities of academic labor, and the need to rethink our practices and limit our impact on a rapidly changing climate—are amplified, not minimized, by the digital technologies that power our practice. The tense relationships of games studies and industry, and the ongoing conflicts examined here, illustrate the important role games discourse can play in foreshadowing our collective challenges.

Pandemic education is the latest in a series of existential threats to humanist education, which has declined in the face of tech-driven initiatives that reduce education to passive consumerism and witnessed the shuttering of humanist departments in the face of college “rightsizing” initiatives. The ranks of humanist academics with dedicated time for research are shrinking. The Modern Language Association conference, once attended by over 10,000 members in 2002, has dwindled to fewer than half as many participants. Even those who are still able to convene at such meetings are confronted by the reality of a changing profession. The conference’s 2020 Presidential Theme, “Being Human,” asked participants to consider questions of technology and labor, including these pressing questions: “How can we imagine more humane spaces of working and teaching? Is a pedagogy of care possible in late industrial society?” (Gikandi). No answer is easily forthcoming, but when tweets from the conference appeared at the same time as tweets from graduate students at the University of California Santa Cruz protesting unlivable wages, the collective challenges remained clear. These questions still resonate alongside the escalating challenges of Covid, where labor practices in universities have been particularly dehumanizing, as Ian Bogost observed in his essay “College Leaders Have the Wrong Incentives,” calling out poor leadership in a time of crisis. If, among digital studies, games studies has been early to see these struggles, the renewed commitment to doing better, as exemplified by the labor-organizing actions of Game Workers Unite, suggests paths forward. In the present moment, the problems that beset us are many, but so too are people with deep awareness of these problems and the dedication to work toward solutions.

Notes

1. Voltron is a giant robot composed of smaller robots working together to protect the universe. It is part of the franchise of the same name (1983 to present).

   Return to note reference.

2. The comment was in a since-deleted Facebook post, summarized in Lawley’s blog post.

   Return to note reference.

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