There are definitely a lot of bad eggs in the #GG group, there's no denying that. There are possibly more bad than good.. but the good ones are the ones we're trying to protect.
To this point, and to basically everything Boogie's been saying...
Gamers don't need to be defended, or protected, or anything. Gamers were never under attack. The identity was never under attack.
The traditional Gamer demographic was always the most desirable marketing section imaginable. Young white men with disposable income. For a long time that was what Gamer meant. Maybe not to you or anyone you know, but that's what it meant to society and to business and to politics. And yes, that is where all the negative gamer stereotypes come in. That's not what the authors think, duh. Most of them are lifelong gamers. That is what got tied up in with that identity, that and now the worst kinds of people, who are hurling all the abuse.
The truth is all the scary stuff with Mortal Kombat and Hot Coffee when I was fucking 8 or something just could never happen any more. Games are too profitable, too ubiquitous. The President has a Wii.
The whole point of those articles wasn't that the "Gamer" identity was totally over, it's that the traditional business and wider cultural idea of what that meant, and which has been held onto for far too long, with destructive effects, isn't applicable any more, that Gamers can be and are almost anyone and everyone now. That should not be a message anyone feels they have to defend against, it should be celebrated.
Some people simply misread the article. Some let others tell them what it said without thinking critically. Some people genuinely hate the idea of the Gamer identity being diluted. Some people just didn't read beyond the title, or let their snap judgement of it colour their reading of the whole article, which never once ascribes misogyny or stereotypes to everyone who plays games, or even to Gamergate. And some people hate that it was an opinionated woman saying it.
Gamergate does not need to be defended. They are the status quo. Even if you're just defending the nice parts, or whatever. Their only proscribed crime is being misinformed, misguided or wilfully ignorant about what they are taking part in. That's why there have been cries for two goddamn months of "Abandon this ship of stinking decay and find something else." Because nobody denies that the industry isn't perfect. They know there are at some level some people with genuine aims they're trying to get out of this, but they're misguidedly riding along on a monster to try and achieve them, and nobody is going to engage with you when you can't even recognise that.
And after two months I've stopped having any sympathy for those people. The amount of effort it has to have taken to avoid all the perfectly reasoned deconstructions of the situation is staggering at this point.
You say many people are starting to wake up to what they inadvertently became a part of, which is wonderful. Hopefully nobody holds a grudge against those people. But its happening too slowly, and every day that it continues on means the potential for more lives to be ruined. That's why many people want more prominent gaming sites to break this shit down. Not just to add their voice to the "harassment is gross" pile of near-uselessness, but to try and snap those people awake and out of their stubborn support of a movement they can't even see for what it really is.
