SINCE August, so-called #Gamergate has been rumbling along and to the idiot, mostly white men, holding the world view in the quote at the top it’s a campaign to restore decency to the world.
To everyone else it’s thuggish gangs of online lynch mobs denigrating specific women for perceived failings that, out in the real world, not two craps would be given about.
It all began with a jilted boyfriend making claims to the Kotaku nerd news website about the sex life of his former partner for no reason beyond a desire to hurt her.
One of the claims was that she’d slept with a game reviewer to elicit a favourable review for a game she’d made.
In a sane world that would be a matter for the journalist, his editor and, to a grossly lesser extent, the small number of people who played the game based on the favourable review and found the review wanting.
But no, the righteous fury of every insecure nerd desperately wishing any woman would ever love them has been unleashed and the spectacle to those watching on has been disgusting.
From the other side, the feminist industry has piled in blaming the patriarchy with some justification because threats to rape and kill people are not okay, ever.
Nerd/gamer culture is thus characterised as vicious, bigoted, furious, awful men. And at this point I throw my hands in the air and shout: “THIS IS NOT MY CULTURE”.
I’ve been a nerd since I started reading “Lord of the Rings” at age seven. I’ve watched the movies, played the games, read the books, and copped the schoolyard beatings for being weird and not into the same things as all the other kids.
And because we’re all a bit weird, and have the lumps to show for it, nerd culture, in my experience, has always been one of inclusion and acceptance.
Casting my mind back, it has never been all men. It was certainly male dominated back in the ‘80s, but there were always large numbers of women around.
They weren’t around at the edges either, they were the beating heart and soul of those groups. In recent years women have flocked into the culture and it’s hard to imagine that’s due to misogyny.
Part of where nerd/gamer culture has let itself down has been through over-acceptance and inclusion. In the late 1990s there were big problems at network parties (large numbers of nerds joining their computers up on local area networks to games with each other, largely replaced by fast internet) with enthusiasts of child exploitation material coming in to swap their pictures.
They were oppressed due to the nature of their interests so, at first glance, looked and felt a bit like nerds one can imagine. Here in Canberra the organisers of these parties (that I knew of) very bravely set about rooting these people out of their groups and the police were most definitely involved.
Similarly, my fear is that the women-hating idiots of today have been overly accommodated at the fringes of nerd culture not due to nerds being exclusionary, but for being too forbearing of the eccentricities of others.
We stood up to the child abusers and cast them out. We can, should, and will stand up to the misogynists.
Because a nerd convention for the 30 years I’ve been involved with them would be nothing without proud, beautiful young women prancing around in chain-mail bikinis. Because they want to.
But as a white man, seriously guys, we need to work at our game. The world is changing, we had a stunningly good run and, for our own good, it’s past time we stopped making everyone else hate our guts.
John Griffiths is the online editor for citynews.com.au
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