The Jig is Up

Brianna Wu & Zoe Quinn were interviewed by MTV’s Shaunna Murphy recently, a year after the GamerGate bullshit kicked off:

Wu: When I got dragged into Gamergate it felt like there were people that actually believed, “It’s about ethics in game journalism.” What I [later] saw was people stopped believing that. They understood it was about harassment of women. When you go over to Gamergate headquarters, you can look at what they’re saying, and now I think they’re a lot more honest that this is about harassing feminists. I think they know the jig is up. And I certainly think the press knows the jig is up.

The bullshit cover story about ethics is, thankfully, gone, now we’re just left with the shamelessly hateful who still think that women shouldn’t be treated equally and have equal representation in games and games press. No critique of the status-quo will ever be acceptable. 

The most personally disappointing part of GamerGate for me has been the people I used to respect who bought into GG or have even just been emboldened by the backwards thinking that it represents. Over the past year die-hard racists, misogynists, and homophobes who were once only privately terrible have been publicly hateful and will do whatever they can to defend their attitudes because there is no question in their mind about the inferiority of anyone who commits the crime of being different from birth or by choice. To the hateful, compassion is censorship, feelings are lies, opinions have no place in journalism, and any hint that they should stop being terrible is cause to throw a tantrum or leave when it doesn’t work and they don’t get their way.