From Mortal Kombat to Charlottesville: The Disgruntled Relationship Between Gamers and the Media
Similar to the shocking amount of money that surrounds the art industry, video gaming has become a massive moneymaking machine that to this day still struggles to develop the proper persona for Americans to understand. The language is different, the culture is unique, and the passion behind gaming remains underrated. Gamers don’t just play, they love and embellish themselves behind the console and games that represent them. It has been this way since the fourth generation deathbattle between the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo. But unlike the art industry, lots of cash and barely any understanding, the persona behind the gaming industry skewers towards the negative from the mainstream media for a few reasons, from shock to profit. And this has led to a complete separation between gamers and the media that continuously portrays them in a negative light.
Back in the 1990s, the gaming industry experienced its first major censorship backlash similar to what became the Hays Code back in cinema’s olden days when the medium started expanding in scope. Games like Mortal Kombat, Doom, Wolfenstein, and Night Trap led to a giant government investigation into the content of games. This would lead to the creation of the ESRB, which became the definitive rating system for all video games. And that fanned the flames until Columbine in 1999, which was (at the time) extremely shocking and took the entire country by surprise. Two teenagers meticulously planned a vicious attack and killed a dozen people while trying to kill many others with nearly 100 explosive devices. Music and video games (Doom once again being put in the spotlight) were immediately in the crosshairs, and video games have remained in the crosshairs ever since, from Grand Theft Auto 3 to Manhunt to Grand Theft Auto 5 (Yea, it’s mostly Rockstar angering the masses).
The latest fiasco involving the perception of gamers comes from an absolutely disgusting NBC News piece on the “connections” between gamers and the Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists that marched in Charlottesville and killed a protester. Getting ripped apart by the YouTube and internet culture crowd (AlphaOmegaSin deserves attention for truly setting this piece on fire), this 4-minute video discussed how a video game platform known as Discord was being used to create a community that would ultimately lead to the unfortunate march—as if Twitter and Facebook don’t also exist to create similar hateful communities. And then they backed up their propaganda by creating fake hashtags under poisonous tweets that were done by one lone account. Using just one account to prove the persistence of Gamergate and the “Evil Gamers” is the equivalent of using the actions of Castro to denounce all Cubans; that’s how ridiculous it was. And yet again, once again, Gamergate and gamers has been misrepresented by the mainstream.
Backtracking a little, the bitter war against the popular media is nothing new and wasn’t started by Trump and his cronies, it was actually started by the frustrated gaming community years before the rise of the current president, Breitbart, Info Wars, and the White Nationalists that have become public with their hate. Already during early 90s when gaming was being linked to violent acts, there was a disconnect, but it didn’t boil to unspeakable levels until this decade. 2014 was the beginning of GamerGate, but two major events occurred around the same time and used the same hashtag and title of their “movement.”
On one side, we have a legion of gamers that had been fighting gaming and overall journalism over a variety of different missteps that had angered the community. If you think Rotten Tomatoes is a mess in terms of critics and how they critique movies, you haven’t met the gaming critics. There was a collusion between certain companies and certain publications to guarantee high scores in exchange for increased advertising and maybe other under-the-table incentives. We were seeing great games get weaker scores and certain AAA titles that were mediocre (and sometimes downright incomplete) getting great marks. Nintendo, which is a company that normally doesn’t rely on advertising from gaming websites, was usually docked much more often than a Call of Duty title. This was starting to create some tension between the writers and the readers. One of their games infamously lost points because the game had “too much water.”
There was another collusion occurring amongst journalists to try to push the agenda that the gaming community was becoming sexist, racist, and overall poisonous in order to protect a few of their own, which had become the victims of the other major event in the GamerGate umbrella. A variety of female journalists and gamers were under vicious attack from the ugly underbelly side of gaming, as several gamers were upset in the midst of their ridiculous masculinity and began harassing and threatening multiple women to a point that law enforcement had to be involved.
Now, once again I must reiterate: these attacks on these women DID indeed happen, and continue to happen. But, the GamerGate name was stickered on to the incidents in question and completely muddled the original movement. Similar to how Bernie Sanders’ ideas are getting docked because of the inaccurate “socialist” tag, the gaming community entirely was under attack from the media because Zoe Quinn’s GamerGate. And to this day, the movement and the history behind it remains a hostile and controversial topic.
So then we have NBC News fabricating Gamergate tweets to continue to muddle and taint the movement, which in turn is once again sending the gaming community in a frenzy. Loosely linking the KKK with gamers because of the use of the same social networking platform is arguably the most irresponsible crap done by any news media since the e-mail/Clinton disaster. This is where the Trump/Gamers connection mostly exists; they both have this disdain for the media and the inaccurate representation of certain elements.
The difference is: the gaming community has a point.
There are approximately 100 million gamers in the United States. This community, separated into different fandoms, and relatively tight-knit and very diverse. Painting one-third of the country under the same stroke as the KKK (most of them in the 12-32 age crowd) is irresponsible and downright irreversible. Sounds familiar, right? Sounds exactly like the backlash involving “Basket of Deplorables,” which painted the entire pro-Trump crowd in the same picture. The gaming community and the Trump community do not see eye to eye on nearly every topic (Net Neutrality anyone?), but speak the same language in terms of the visual perception and the misrepresentation that offends both major groups. So NBC News probably sees this and attempts to link them closer together. And if you want to see why they would be okay with pissing off 100 million gamers (again, because this is definitely not the first time), follow the money.
NBC News is run by NBC, which is run by Comcast, the psychotically evil cable company with an awful reputation, and the advantage of participating in a profit-creating oligopoly with the competitors. Of course, Comcast would love to take down the gaming industry since the consoles have become multi-purpose machines with Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and other networks and apps that remove purpose from getting cable. XBox One is tightly connected with the NFL, one of the biggest markets in cable. Playstation has the Vue, which offers a variety of networks at a reasonable price. Nintendo might still be lacking in the multi-media department (even though if they had their own style of Netflix it would make a killing, something I have of course discussed before), but their gamers tend to focus less on television and more on the games themselves. Nintendo remains among the top dogs in multi-player and online gaming thanks to Splatoon, Smash Bros., Mario Kart, and the Mario Maker community.
So of course if there’s a chance to link a profit-killing community to Nazis, Comcast would love to relish in the opportunity. And Comcast’s subscription numbers have notoriously been dropping. And so we have this piece, trying to bring up the demons of GamerGate, and trying to link Trump, KKK, Neo-Nazis, and unhinged violence to a gaming community that was never seeking such a thing. This could scare parents, could scare off potential gamers, and of course bring up bad memories for the female gaming core. It is extremely simple: some gamers are indeed racist and sexist, but that doesn’t mean everyone that plays games whether harmless or extremely violent endorses the notion or nudges closer to going to the deep end.
We don’t see the NFL being considered racist despite the fans turning on the players for the police brutality protests. We don’t see Hollywood overall being deemed sexist despite the dozens of accusations popping up left and right. So why would NBC News dare to connect millions of innocent people to the disgusting few just because they share a similar means of online communication? It could be for ratings, it could be for profit, it could be because the gaming community remains extremely underrepresented in the media. Bad news is good new$ for the CNNs and MSNBCs of the world.
At the end of the day however, gamers remain disappointed in their mainstream profile, and its fluff garbage like NBC News’ Discord/KKK story that keeps the legion of video game players distrusting the media—-just like the community that won the election. That is the connection that actually exists.