James Desborough - Inside Gamergate: A Social History of the Gamer Revolt

Written by: James 'Grim' Desborough

Layout by: James Desborough & Michael Garcia

Ebook Conversion by: Michael Garcia

'Inside Gamergate' Postmortem Studios (James Desborough) 2017

It's the night of the sixteenth of October 2014, and I am sitting in a bathtub with a razor blade retrieved from a carefully smashed 'safety razor'. I'm cutting into my arm over and over, trying to build the courage up for those two, vertical death slices to my wrists.

Why am I doing this? Why is blood running down my arm from cuts to my shoulder, bicep and forearm? Why am I in such a state of despair?

Because of Gamergate.

No, I'm not a woman in tech, 'cruelly bullied' and 'marginalised' because of my ovaries.

I'm not a brave 'white knight' standing up for some cyberpunkish damsel in distress.

I'm not an 'entirely innocent' games' journalist under assault from legions of paranoid, anonymous, online trolls.

No. I'm not a victim of Gamergate - which is already being painted as an online misogynist hate mob.

I'm part of Gamergate.

I want to kill myself mostly because I suffer from severe clinical depression and bouts of suicidal ideation, but this particular incident has been triggered - not by Gamergate - but by its opposition. It has been set off by the crushing weight of disappointment that comes from a whole community of creative people letting me down; personally and professionally.

I want to kill myself because hobbies I consider myself a maker and fan of games, fiction, comics, geek media in general - have betrayed their audience and their right to creative freedom.

I want to kill myself because people I once respected and trusted are uncritically buying into bullshit and letting corruption and censorship slide. They're ending friendships and blacklisting writers, artists and developers because they tacitly support censorship, corruption and debunked sob stories. Meanwhile, I stand for free expression, ethical media and scepticism.

I want to die because this community, one I saw come together in the 80s and 90s to fight The Satanic Panic and Jack Thompson's crusade, is now the one prosecuting a new moral panic. They're calling everything and everyone sexist, racist, misogynistic, bigoted and a host of other damaging buzzwords. They're trying to censor the very creativity that they once defended. The self-same creativity that I depend on to make a living, that they depend on to make a living. It's a masochistic act of self-destruction, and they're threatening to take a lot of other people down with them.

For someone whose life has been games since before their age reached double digits, who has made it their career, who has fought to defend games against this kind of nonsense for three decades. For me, this revelation and their capitulation is utterly soul destroying.

The people coming after me, the group that was already coming after me since before Gamergate, are not an anonymous mob of ignorable internet trolls. They're people with names and faces. They're 'social critics'. They're 'journalists'. They're fellow authors and game designers, they're writers with columns in papers I used to read. The hate they unleash, the nonsense they spout, the doxxing, harassment, lies and slander that they engage in is passing and will pass, largely, without the criticism or attention heaped on harmless, meaningless trolls.

It's the people in Gamergate who end up coming together to make sure that I'm alright. The same fans who are getting lied about and called monsters. It's Gamergate who contact my wife and the emergency services to ensure I don't succeed in killing myself. These people who, we're going to be told, are heartless abusers, even terrorists. They go out of their way to save my life.

Two weeks or so after my attempt, medicated up to the eyeballs and therapied within an inch of my life, I get a razor blade sent to me anonymously in the post. I don't know who sent it, but I'm reasonably sure it's not someone from Gamergate. I burn it, in the envelope, bury it and try to forget about it, but these events have bought Gamergate an ally for life and its opponents a steadfast enemy.

For over two years, the same people who came together to help preserve my existence and protect our hobbies are going to be monstered and have lies told about them. Lied about because they objected to corruption in games media. Monstered because they took a stand against censorship from a new moral panic. Their story goes largely ignored. The threats, the doxxing, the razor blades and worse sent to them, the bomb threats at their events and meetings, the disgusting behaviour of their opponents. It's all ignored.

Their story threatens, now, to be ignored forever as Gamergate slips into history. Ignored, or worse, lied about as the 'victims' of Gamergate put out their slanted narratives. The hopes of getting the mainstream media to examine the events honestly slips out of the realm of possibility as its no longer news. Gamergate is now just a bogeyman to invoke when talking about the Internet. In a peculiar twist of fate and a reversal of the standard state of affairs, it's not the victors who are going to write the history; it's the people who lost.

That's why this book exists, to record what happened from within Gamergate. It's here to set the record straight, to give my point of view. The perspective from Gamergate that is being systematically erased, rewritten and ignored.

I don't tell any of this to you for sympathy or to paint myself as a victim. I do it to show you that what you've been told about what happened wasn't accurate. That Gamergate wasn't a misogynistic hate movement or 'alt-right' and that there's plenty of bad behaviour to go around on the 'other side' of the argument.

You just never got to hear about it.

My name is James 'Grim' Desborough. The 'Grim' comes from a college nickname, due to a propensity for making sick, twisted jokes, and being a miserable goth (my parents were divorcing at the time, which didn't help). I took the name as my own to give the middle finger to the people picking on me, and it has stuck ever since. That probably tells you a lot about my attitude.

I'm an author and a game designer. Mostly I write genre fiction and work in tabletop games - role-playing games to be precise. I've done some work on card games and board games, as well as a couple of social media oriented games but mostly I work in analogue rather than digital. I'd like to work more in computer games, but if you can't code the opportunities are scarce.

The Munchkin phenomenon was half my fault. My writing partner and I wrote the comedy book that kicked off the whole franchise.

I've been working professionally as a game designer and writer since 1999, as an amateur since around 1992 and have been a gamer of one kind or another since I was eight or nine. I was part of Gamergate from before it was even named Gamergate and stayed engaged with it until it petered out in 2016, though it has flared up again while I've been working on this book.

To long; didn't read: I'm well placed to talk about Gamergate from a professional, historical, political and personal perspective. There are few people even self-proclaimed experts that have the perspective and historical understanding that I think I bring to this discussion. You don't have to believe me though, use this book as a prompt and do your own, independent investigation. I am certain you'll be surprised.

This book exists to record, for posterity, the events of Gamergate from the perspective of someone within Gamergate.

There is a real danger that, what with the media bias against Gamergate and the biased accounts of people like Zoe Quinn being the ones to be archived, that the other side the right side will not get recorded. In the future, anyone looking back is likely to encounter an entirely one-sided version of events from people who have been acting very shadily indeed.