With the recent #GamerGate media hullabaloo, it's important to keep our perspective as we tackle the hooligans who poison the gaming well

PSFK Labs 14 may 2015

14 may 2015 Technology

This year at Kill Screen . It is not easy to examine the cultural aspects of gaming, and with over one billion people worldwide playing games nowadays, it’s impossible to do so for the aggregate. Though like so many other groups and movements, there is an angry and envious minority that can often come to define the entity as a whole—thus we have the corrupting element within #GamerGate. This year at PSFK 2015 we saw the return of Jamin Warren, founder of videogame arts and culture company. It is not easy to examine the cultural aspects of gaming, and with over one billion people worldwide playing games nowadays, it’s impossible to do so for the aggregate. Though like so many other groups and movements, there is an angry and envious minority that can often come to define the entity as a whole—thus we have the corrupting element within #GamerGate.

For those of you lucky enough to have avoided this Twitter debacle, #GamerGate is a hashtag that was started to raise awareness of ethical issues in games journalism. As Jamin says, the catalyst was a “lover’s quarrel” that led, in a very chaotic, ugly, and at-times shameful way, to a highly disorganized movement with a myriad of outliers. And with no organizing body or formal representatives, it is easy and possible to label the whole as a group of women-loathing basement-dwellers—exactly like For those of you lucky enough to have avoided this Twitter debacle, #GamerGate is a hashtag that was started to raise awareness of ethical issues in games journalism. As Jamin says, the catalyst was a “lover’s quarrel” that led, in a very chaotic, ugly, and at-times shameful way, to a highly disorganized movement with a myriad of outliers. And with no organizing body or formal representatives, it is easy and possible to label the whole as a group of women-loathing basement-dwellers—exactly like Law and Order ’s episode covering the topic did.

So how to un-poison the well? According to Jamin, the first step is the stratification, not the balkanization, of its members.

“For a long time in the early history of games we had one category for how we understood them, it was basically teenage boys, and then Angry Birds happened, and now this industry of millions of people had two categories: casual and hardcore.”

Though as Warren is keenly aware, two segments is hardly enough to categorize such a large population. And so he brings up an interesting analogue—that of soccer and its hooligans. With the World Cup just under a year passed, people tend to forget that hooliganism represents a very small part of soccer culture, and yet it does. The ruling bodies don’t abide by it, they seek to quash it as it rears its ugly head, but it persists and will likely never entirely go away, though there are ways to tackle it, just like there are ways to tackle gaming hooliganism.

Jamin’s thesis—that games should be society’s technological and cultural R&D department—is demonstrated by Jeffrey Lin of Riot Games, the studio behind the hugely popular League of Legends . As the lead social systems designer for a game with a notoriously “hardcore” user base, one that doesn’t look favorably on “noobs” as this author can testify, Jeff’s job is to design social systems to encourage people to be better and make the game more accessible. An example of this is the implementation of “restricted chat,” a feature that limits the chat of players who grief the broader community. First Amendment concerns aside, we’ve all faced instances where we wish this feature existed outside of League .

So, in the same way that soccer hooligans don’t represent the sport or griefers don’t represent League, neither does the #GamerGate media fiasco represent the ecosystem of gaming:

“When we think of #GamerGate and negative gamer behavior, we should understand it as part of a growing rift in terms of how we think about who the people are who play games.”

Take a look at Jamin’s full talk up above for his impassioned take on the past year in gaming culture.