Mile
Zero

I have started, and then failed to finish, three posts on the #GamerGate nonsense, in which a gang of misogynists led by 4Chan have attempted to hound Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn off the Internet for daring to be women with opinions about video games. There's very little insightful you can say about this, because they don't have any real arguments for someone to engage, and also because they're dumb as toast. At some point, however, someone decided that they'd use "ethics in journalism" as a catchphrase for their trolling.

What they mean by that is anyone's guess. This Vox explainer does its best to extract an explanation, but other than some noise about "objectivity," there aren't any concrete demands, and the links to various arguments are hilariously silly. One claims that there's a difference between "journalist" and "blogger" based on some vague measure of competence (read: the degree to which you agree with it), which veterans of the "blogger ethics panel" meme circa 2005 will enjoy. Frankly, the #GameGate movement's concept of journalism is itself pretty fuzzy, and tough to debate. As a journalist with actual newsroom experience, I think there are a few things that we should clear up.

Game journalism, isn't

Real journalists make phone calls. They dig into stories, find other viewpoints, and perform fact-checking. It's not glamorous work, which may be why reporters are so prone to self-mythologizing (a tendency I'm not immune to), but it is hard and often tedious. It's also, in its best moments, confrontational. There's an old saying: journalism is publishing what someone doesn't want to be published — everything else is just public relations. Some of that is just more myth-making, but it's also true.

When's the last time you read "gaming news" that had multiple sources? That actively investigated wrongdoing in the industry? That had something critical to say about more than how a single game played? You can probably think of exceptions, but that's what they are: exceptions. The vast majority of what gamers call "journalism" isn't anything like real reporting.

This isn't unusual, or even wrong. It's pretty typical for trade press, particularly in the entertainment industry. After all, there's only so combatative you can be when you're dependent on cooperation with game studios and publishers in order to have anything to write about. I don't expect hard-hitting investigations from Bass Player or The A.V. Club either. It's not journalism, but it still has value.

#GamerGate doesn't understand the difference

Unfortunately, as far as anyone can tell, the cries of "ethics in journalism" actually translate to a desire for more press releases and PR, like in the halcyon days of Nintendo Power. That's probably comforting for a lot of people, because PR is inherently more comforting than critical thought, but it means what they want and what they claim they want are very different things.

There's a kind of irony of calling for "objectivity" in gaming press, where the dominant mode of writing is through previews and reviews. People making this call aren't asking for actual objectivity, because that wouldn't make sense — what's an "objective" review? One that can definitively state that yes, the game exists? It's a code word for "tell me about the graphics, and the genre, and leave any pesky context out of it."

That isn't much of a review, frankly. It's the kind of thinking that gives four stars to Triumph of the Will because the cinematography is groundbreaking, no matter what the content might have been. Incidentally, the author of the definitive — if satirical — Objective Game Reviews site has a really nice post about this.

We have met the enemy, and he is us

Here's what's funny about #GamerGate and its muddled, incoherent demands for journalism: by all accounts, the person who actually meets a lot of their criteria is none other than Anita Sarkeesian, the person they loathe the most. I mean, think about it:

• About half of her videos are just unaltered clips from games — that's what makes them so powerful, since they speak for themselves. And what's more objective than plain footage?
• She states her biases right out of the gate. The YouTube channel is called "Feminist Frequency," so people know what they're getting into.
• She's funded by people who paid for her kickstarter, not gaming companies or PR firms. There's no corporate influence.

It's exactly what they're asking for! And they hate it! It's almost as though, protests to the contrary, this isn't about journalism at all. As if there's actually an agenda being pushed that's more about forcing women and alternative viewpoints out. Imagine that.