Andy Warhol once famously said, "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes."
The Scottish musician, writer and former blogger Momus less famously (appropriately enough) said, "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people."
One of the almost-legitimate criticisms raised by GamerGate is a dissatisfaction that the apparatus of games journalism is out of touch with popular opinion. But is that really true, or is "popular opinion" something that, for all we take it for granted, isn't a real thing? This bears examination.
Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris is, sadly, GamerGate's latest target. In addition to the heartfelt sympathy I extend to anyone who is targeted for harassment, it just so happens that her game, Redshirt, is a great example to pry this question open. This is a satirical game about working on a space station and using social media to improve your relationships with your co-workers. In her response to the GamerGate conspiracy theories, Mitu notes that reaction to the game was very divided. She humbly attributes this to it being her first game, and an ambitious one. I disagree. I think it's great, and I think the reason for the division in the response to it is not because it's imperfect (which, if we're honest, would more likely have led to a consistently lukewarm response), but because it's simply Not For Everyone. It is good at what it does, but not everyone is going to care about what it does.
This is one of the articles of faith of a GamerGater. Since they are gamers, games must be for them. They refuse to believe that this assumption is nonsense, and anyone challenging this assumption is immediately painted as an 'invader'. GamerGate questions how people can like "walking simulators", but rejects the only legitimate answer: "Because they are not you." "Well, that must mean they are not real gamers, because I am a gamer, right?" Because GamerGate believes in the cultural homogeneity of the gamer identity, they feel justified in projecting their own values and perspectives as "popular opinion".
A lot of people opposed to GamerGate have said that gaming is mainstream now and that we won. They're wrong: gaming has in fact become post-mainstream. The explosion of gaming is getting closer to the "elective affinities" Momus wrote about in music. Gaming is still about identity, as is any cultural affinity, but where GamerGate is wrong is that our identities are shaped by and reflected in what kinds of games we like, not whether or not we like games.
Arthur Chu wrote convincingly about parallels between GamerGate and the violent reaction of 'white' rock to 'black' disco in the 70s. While it's politically on point, where gaming as a medium is now is parallel to a rather more recent phenomenon in music. The 70s were just the start of the idea of 'choice' being present in the music industry, a more extreme - and racialised - rehash of mods vs. rockers. Over time this binary choice has given way to an array of genres, which have then had to be split up into sub-genres (I don't like Metallica but I like Dimmu Borgir: How can metal be a genre I identify with?). The democratisation of music production using computers and music distribution using the internet has broken that up even further. Things like the Music Genome Project are, essentially, an attempt to use computing power to keep track of a musical taxonomy that has become too complex to be modelised within the human brain.
And gaming is in the same place. It's easier than ever to make and distribute a game, now. Notwithstanding the "just because you can doesn't mean you should" effect that gave us thousands of godawful Myspace bands, that democratisation is necessarily going to lead to a broadening and diversification of games. It's inevitable. Of course it starts with indies, because that's the nature of democratisation.
When Michael Jackson died, Momus wrote - in keeping with what he had written nearly two decades previously - that he was not only the King of Pop, but the Last King of Pop. Not only was the man dead; so was the paradigm of artificial universality ("it don't matter if you're black or white!") on which he built his career. Call of Duty is gaming's Michael Jackson. Modern Warfare may have been the title that brought gaming fully into the mainstream, but there is no place for "the mainstream" in the internet age, and Modern Warfare 3 was the last flagging vestige of the main stream giving way to a network of rivulets. It's ok to like Call of Duty, though the fact that I have to grit my teeth to say that, or a casual inspection of any gaming-oriented internet forum, will reveal that it, too, is Not For Everyone. Not any more.
So when we say that "gamers are over", what's really over is this "synthetic unity" of gaming. When we say that "videogames are for everybody", what we mean is exactly the opposite of "every game is for everyone" (which is why nobody is trying to force anything down your throat). When we say that "I need diverse games", we mean that we want to be able to exercise elective affinities rather than merely taking whatever a bunch of rich guys in suits have decided we ought to like.
It's also worth noting that GamerGate's "Not Your Shield" campaign is, even ignoring everything else wrong with it, entirely about retrenching the synthetic unity of homogenised defaultism, of asserting 'normal' on something that cannot adequately be captured by a single label. For all that it is used by Gamergate to make high-minded claims about diversity, its core statement is that diversity doesn't have any material meaning, that "it don't matter if you're black or white". This "colour-blindness" that is so often touted as virtuous is about being swallowed up by the prevailing, 'default' culture, not about celebrating multiculturalism.
This is something the industry has to adapt to. The overcapitalisation of AAA titles cannot weather the fragmentation of the mass market into the archipelago of elective affinity. Games that expect five million sales (and even more so those that need that number just to break even) are insane in a climate where it's increasingly easy for a customer to simply choose a different game, to elect a different affinity.
Journalists and critics, on the other hand, have already adapted to this (with much celebration, I might add). Momus predicted this, too: He said that what Melody Maker considered "the best new band in Britain" would be quite different from what Soul Underground considered "the best new band in Britain". The same doubtless goes for Metal Hammer, Mixmag, Jazzwise... Journalists - particularly cultural criticism journalists - should not have to apologise for writing from a certain perspective and for a certain audience. In the GamerGate lexicon, 'clickbait' is a codeword for "things other people want to read," but when Leigh Alexander addressed game developers to say that stereotype 'gamers' don't need to be their audience, she could just as easily have been addressing game journalists.
There are, of course, many worse aspects to GamerGate than the assumption that games should be for them, but their entire veneer of legitimacy (or what remains of it) rests on this faulty premise. Take that veneer away, and we can start dealing with the real problems, because any real gamer knows you don't shoot at the boss' core while the shield is up.
