I’ve been a gamer all my life. Blue book Dungeons and Dragons. One of the few women who would bother tackling those Avalon Hill games with hex maps. I could play QBert for a couple hours on a single quarter. I was very glad when huge convoluted strategy games moved to computers. I was an early adapter as far as MMOs, starting with Sims Online and then spending several blissful years addicted to Star Wars Galaxies before finally moving to WoW, which I was playing when GamerGate happened.
But wait, there’s more. I’ve also been a writer all my life. Or at least since second grade, when my teacher – I think it was Mrs. Watanabe – told me that if I didn’t write down the weird stuff in my head I would just eventually die with it still stuck in there. In fifth grade I started writing long improbable science fiction novels in composition books. When I was a teenager I ran across my first actual science fiction writers, in a loose clique of historical recreationists and creatives centered around Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of Mists of Avalon. And, as was later revealed, a nasty abusive pedo.
The writers in that scene told me that my dream of writing science fiction was an attainable one, as long as I did the right quid pro quo, jumped through the proper hoops, paid the piper, all that. My solution was to flip them the bird and move into alternative journalism. I got in through an audition, because I occasionally write well. I was doing assorted features as well as a weekly astrology column, when they changed editors on me. And suddenly I was dealing with more quid pro quo harassment, and I did a rather unprofessional table-flipping tantrum in response. Decided that writing could go screw itself, I was going to be a video game addict instead.
As long as I can remember, people had been telling me to go find my people, my crowd, my subculture. So I’m an old hand at investigating subcultures. I’m kind of a tourist socially – I bounce from one group to another, usually staying politely on the fringes. I’ve gone through phases of checking out fringe religions, fandoms for obscure media, and Mensa special interest groups (I’ve thrown a 163 a couple times and a 165 a couple times). I have an unusual mind and growing up, my socialization was possibly weirder than the norm, so I don’t really fit anywhere, but I’m curious, as well as locked in a perpetual search for the new and interesting.
And I’m a gamer. Have spent many blissful hours on Asteroids, Link, Castlevania, Prince of Persia, Heroes of Might and Magic, and the like. My first MMO was Sims Online, and there I met other gamers who steered me to Star Wars Galaxies. After that folded I headed over to World of Warcraft, where I’ve maintained a presence for nearly two decades, with brief excursions into other games, as well as long breaks.
There has been tension between the two social cliques I’m roughly familiar with as “writers” and “gamers” for as long as I can remember. The writers were part of a network of San Francisco Bay Area liberals that included the rapidly evolving and expanding community of people who are not straight, academics, environmentalists, feminists, Grateful Dead fans, and other sympathetic people interested in changing the world. There was a popular book lumping all this together as the Aquarian Conspiracy.
The gamers, meanwhile were the kids who were nerding out in math class while the writers dominated English and social studies. Geeks, nerds, Star Trek afficionados, military history enthusiasts, inventers, programmers, nascent techies, synth musicians, futurists. Yes, it is sort of a boys’ club, and yes, they would tolerate my presence, because I could hold my own on a hexmap or dungeon crawl, and because I wasn’t that interested in invoking culture wars discussions over the casually retro values that occasionally surfaced in their art. I was there to play games, dammit, and win them.
By the time I found Star Wars Galaxies, the culture war had arisen, and we were fighting it in proxy. In a weird cartoonish world based on the Star Wars universe, with several interesting reversals. For one thing, more people wanted to play the heroic rebels than the villainous imperials. This resulted in huge crowds of obnoxious gamers wearing the rebel flag bullying tiny beleaguered packs of imperials – the reverse of the situation in the movies.
I’m going to give you a snapshot of one of them: a disabled wheelchair-using teenage boy, who ended up being featured in some kind of gamer spotlight feature with me, back when the gaming community wasn’t suspicious of saluting gamers for being disabled and/or female. In that context, we were polite, civilized, articulate enough to answer questions. In the game, he was one of the most verbally abusive pigs you’ve ever encountered, with whole subcategories of insults that fell into the category of what would later emerge as hate crimes. His in-game persona was this angry ball of rage who would suddenly descend on other players and deluge them with verbal abuse. After I got his number I macroed the Samuel L. Jackson speech from Pulp Fiction and I’d spam it back at him until the dialogue box was full of our demented nonsense. I did ask him about it once, and he gave me some weird reply about how he was helping other people to refine themselves, plus I got an idea that he’d spent most of his life being the recipient of that kind of verbal abuse and regarded it as normal everyday conversation. Possibly he was autistic too.
I have no idea whether I’m autistic, and have no interest in finding out. I did go through a period of identification with the label, but that was merely my own layperson speculation combined with earlier versions of the science. As far as the current state of neuropsychology, I do know that my IQ puts me in the realm of neurodivergent as far as a lot of professionals are concerned, and whether I have other comorbidities is really only relevant in my life if I want to get prescription Adderall. Which I do not, because chemicals tend to kick my ass and I’m better off sticking with weed for situations like stress occasioned by a verbally abusive, potentially neurodiverse teenager with bigger issues than I’ll ever face. And yeah, I was on the opposing side so I could occasionally have the satisfaction of virtually smacking him around with a lightsaber.
Gaming was where I finally found my people, in a neurodivergent sense. I felt like an anthropologist, wandering around a strange planet interacting with my fellow aliens. I spent the George W. Bush presidency in Star Wars Galaxies, hiding from reality and discussing politics in a removed way, through the rebel-imperial lens of Star Wars. Where we could get frank about subjects like war crimes, because we were cartoons in sciencefictionland, as opposed to being humans in meat space.
After Galaxies evaporated I moved over to WoW, because it seemed like a big stable game that wouldn’t be discontinued anytime soon, and I still play it. These days I’m a mean little Vulpera mage that runs around in battlegrounds turning people into hogs. I’m strictly casual though, having gone through an addiction phase where I did 25-person raids with a huge international horde progression guild every night for a couple years. Until Cataclysm arrived, and our guild broke up, and I was just grinding solo achievements and doing random raid groups until I figured out my next move.
That was when GamerGate happened.
I first heard about it on Reddit. My understanding was that a messy break-up had occurred and the girl got dogpiled – one of the euphemisms we used for “being targeted for harassment by a group that coordinates over the internet.” It was no secret that some gamers were antisocial to the bone, while others, like the boy I mentioned, were only situationally antisocial. I’d heard of things like “swatting” – where some malicious prankster calls the cops and deceives them into believing their target is holding hostages or some other activity that requires an immediate armed response.
The bad guys on the writers’ side involve people like the aforementioned Marian Zimmer Bradley, and Neil Gaiman. You can read about their misdeeds. The bad guys on the gamers’ side are mostly low profile computer users who operate under handles, and during the time period a lot of tactics were being born, such as “catfishing” – where you use someone else’s photo to construct a persona designed to make someone else fall in love and make unwise financial choices.
Some of those tactics come straight out of the punk rock era left, such as flooding people with negative feedback, because the antisocial elements on the writers side were evolving too (Google “helicopter story” or “requireshate” for some lurid tales). Maybe that’ll happen to me too for writing this centrist take on GamerGate, who knows. Getting both packs of antisocials aggro seems to be a spectacularly foolish decision, but I feel like speaking my truth, now that we’re up shit creek from a political standpoint partially thanks to the polarization that crystallized around GamerGate.
So I’m on Reddit, and I read about a girl getting dogpiled, and threads getting locked. I heard rumors both were professionally involved with games in some capacity, which was why it was even registering on my radar.
The next day, I learned we were dead. “Gamers Are Dead” – that was the specific lede. Apparently a bunch of alternative journalists had found out about the dogpiling and discussed it on one of those whisper networks that writers have. Their hivemind had eventually assumed gamers were also a hivemind, and collective blame was assigned, and everyone who played videogames was now responsible for the dogpiling. Because gamers are all bad people. End of discussion. This “Gamers Are Dead” headline was showing up on every single lefty newsblog I was aware of, apparently intended to be a show of force – “shut up dogpilers, we outnumber you, don’t make us fire the secret weapon: media attention.”
I felt a little bit like a kid whose parents just announced they were splitting up as I watched the aftermath unfold. Opportunists of all stripes sprang into the fray, trying to frame the conflict in a way that would capture all those passionate mouse clicking gamers and transform them into a mighty personal army.
On the writers’ side, people like Anita Sarkeesian sprang up. She did a series of videos with cherry picked moments, sort of like sexist gaming’s greatest hits spread out over a long period of time, trying to make the case that games = patriarchy = bad. On the gamers side, people like Milo Yiannopoulos jumped in to transform all those gay patriarchal gamers into new social conservatives. They recategorized the writers side as Social Justice Warriors. SJWs for short.
On my side, as a gamer who mostly hung out with other neurodiverse people and reclusive weirdos, teaming up for idle chitchat and dragon slaying, all of this culture war stuff was horrific because it was driving people out of gaming, most particularly the crew I hung around with. If you were a gamer who happened to be female or gay or extremely liberal, it was like wearing a target on your head, and if either your real-life SJW friends or your virtual gamer friends saw it, you could expect to draw fire.
I quit gaming around then, or actually, just took a long break. I was concerned about gamer slang creeping into my everyday vocabulary, offending someone on the SJW side whose only familiarity with gaming was that it was patriarchal and bad.
I made a few other drastic decisions, like deciding to become a self-published novelist. I have writing skills, obviously. I’ve tried my hand at journalism and it did occur to me that I could have selected a GamerGate faction and made my name regaling them with propaganda. After spending most of my life trying to figure out what my debut novel should be about, I finally settled on writing exciting young adult fiction which gave SJW values a nod without really opposing the other side or doing a lot of obnoxious moralizing. To help encourage literacy.
People opposed to the obnoxious liberal moralizing of the last few years tend to define it as “woke.” I don’t get along with those people, so I’ll just refer to it as obnoxious moralizing. The kind that intends to be in-your-face in a righteous way but is received as in-your-face in a backlash-inspiring way. For instance, I’m seeing a lot of it currently in my social media among the people who refused to vote for Harris because of Palestine.
I tend to get more than my share of obnoxious liberal moralizing. I used to get all angsty about why, and I went through a crisis about it back in my Star Wars Galaxies days, at which point I decided that my loyalties were more about things like environmentalism and universal healthcare than either traditional values or cultural change. And that means I’m a liberal, although I don’t socialize with liberals very much. Because of the obnoxious moralizing.
I learned long ago that it doesn’t matter to those types whether I work hard at a liberal job all day, go home and write empowering liberal fiction at night, and wear nonbinary clothes during my green commute between the two – I’m still an evil fascist, because they say so and that’s their truth, which entitles them to rage at me. Something about my bearing, my being socialized in the South Pacific, my neurodivergent IQ, or maybe it’s just that I’m a tourist. Who hops from one subculture to the next, without fully engaging.
Once I finished my first science fiction novel, which turned out to be a bloated trilogy, the Rabid Puppies scandal happened. I had retreated from gaming due to the culture wars, focusing on writing science fiction. Now the culture war had followed me, as a bunch of angry right-wing dissidents attempted to game the Hugo Awards. GamerGate was mentioned again, as said aforementioned angry right-wingers attempted to recruit shock troops from the crowd that had amassed in reaction to the Gamers Are Dead articles.
I kept tabs on GamerGate and its opponents all the time I was writing, because I didn’t want to inadvertently push any buttons. I was still laboring under the delusion that I could write something both sides enjoyed – sort of like Harry Potter, before the author enlisted in the culture wars. I came up with a nice bland inoffensive hero called Sonny Knight, whose story was verbose and circuitous, but it was also the first story I was able to finish, after a lifetime of writing half-completed novels and getting silenced by my own inner critic.
I was going to start out as self-pubbed and see if I could develop a name, and whether I liked doing PR. My plan was to spend my retirement traveling around to science fiction conventions, trading self-published novels with a small circle of likeminded friends. I already know I’m too fringey to be the kind of author that makes piles of money, but maybe I could do a cult following startup.
So I traveled to Worldcon, in Spokane that year, to gauge the climate for myself and see whether science fiction had also turned into a culture war battleground. Because that’s not really fertile soil for an artist like me, who would rather amuse the world than transform or restore it.
I wound up on the same plane with the editor who had inspired my table-flip and retreat from journalism, by trying to hand me over to a Neil Gaiman type. This was back when nobody realized Neil Gaiman was a Neil Gaiman type. We didn’t speak. This person went on to internet stardom writing about science fiction from an SJW angle, and has a few titles out; I see no reason to read them.
Once I got to Spokane, it was on fire, from some nearby forest blazes that turned the sky orange and made the whole town smell like a barbecue. I attended some panels, made some friends, went to some meet-ups and decided yes, I was in. I wanted to engage with this subculture. I was going to write another novel!
The next one involved a co-author, Sally. We were hanging out one day talking about a potential story: Jurassic Park without the sexism. A girl-power story, about dinosaurs. With a heroic girl, rescuing others. Her boyfriend? No, how about a whole boy band, including the teen idol she’s crushing on!
That was how Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler was born. I started writing it in 2019 and was halfway done when the pandemic hit. I had a lot of spare time in 2019, because I got maneuvered of my job by Tony the Embezzler, who stole over a million dollars before they caught him. Tony probably assumed I’d use my neurodivergent brain to detect that sort of thing, so he started with a bullying campaign, and when I refused to budge, a nice severance package. So I took a year off to relax and let my cortisol levels subside. Then I went to a new job which is much calmer, working sporadically on RWRW until lockdown happened and I was able to focus on it. And finish it. But not promote it.
During this time, the culture war grew to Grand Canyon proportions. RWRW was fairly bland when it came out. There’s a gay character, but he’s married. There are no sex scenes, although there’s a dumb miscommunication that leads to platonic bonding. The Rhonda character is more about nurturing baby dinos and mooning over her crush than asserting herself as an action girl, although she does rise to great heights. And there are all kinds of dinosaurs. Four years after I wrote it, due to controversy creep, it now exists in a world where teachers get fired for having books with gay characters in their classrooms (let alone dinosaurs, which are apparently offensive to science deniers).
I tried shifting to adult horror novels, aimed at the SJW side since apparently there’s no longer any point in writing for a general audience. My heart wasn’t completely there, and I’ve taken most of my horror out of print.
The culture war is at the point where California is ready to split off from the rest of the country. I’m approaching the one-year anniversary of my neck surgery, in which a trapped nerve that had been giving me chronic pain for years was repaired, and then I had to deal with physical therapy and the kind of pain associated with bone grafts and muscular reconfiguration. I’m at an impasse regarding what to write, or whether to even bother, although RWRW is about to be excerpted in a forthcoming anthology.
I feel like my head is finally clear for the first time in
years … and now everyone else has gone mad, and Elon Musk is deconstructing the
federal government.
One of the things I did in the process of writing RWRW was research boy bands. Being in a boy band is one of the most thankless jobs out there. They get plenty of that negative dogpile energy, plus they get bombarded with adolescent sexual energy, and the only constant thread among them is financial exploitation. Like a lot of girls, I grew up crushing on boys in bands, without really appreciating the work they do swimming against the current as female-gaze-centric entertainers. So I made a point of learning about them, reading their bios, and then I did a deep dive into K-Pop fandom to investigate what modern boy bands are like.
Recently I was reading an article about actors who get trapped in their roles and take a while to decompress. Apparently Johnny Depp had trouble getting out of his Hunter S. Thompson character after the movie wrapped, and the dude who played Elvis in the recent biopic reported the same trouble. I had an authorial version of the same thing.
Early in the pandemic I kept getting stuck to my point of view characters when I wasn't actively writing about them. When I was the musician, I’d play guitar and work on my busking skills. When I was the bodyguard, I’d practice kicking and ducking. When I was the fangirl running a massive online fanclub, I created a bunch of specialized handles and threw myself into real life fandom – and met some cool people. While being trapped in all these fictional headspaces like some kind of multiple personality disorder patient.
Over time, as I came back to earth, some of those people were still in my life, and the idol who brought us together decided to do the world tour we had been dreaming about. So I decided to follow it, both because I like the performer and because I want to do a little traveling. See my happy places, like Times Square, and Disneyland, one more time. Just in case things … change. I’m not going to write about the idol specifically, because this blog is about me and my opinions, and it might get a little raw, so I’m not going to contaminate anybody else’s SEO.
I’m just one of those people who has to write. Whether it’s novels, social media updates, this blog, whatever. And I still hear about GamerGate. Just yesterday I saw people blaming it for the current state of the nation.
I’ve refused to even mention it for years, typing out “G*merG*te” to evade search engines. I actually ran a “gender and games” blog right here on this account, DarthBunnywabbit, which I shut down and deleted months before GamerGate happened, having concluded that writing about games and gender would bring me nothing but headaches because the gap I experienced was a lot different than the one critical theorists were presenting. I have all kinds of opinions about it but the main one is that GamerGate was where the backlash against the Aquarian Conspiracy began, and that embracing a dualist worldview in the dubious name of dialectic was a colossal strategic failure. And so was drawing a culture war boundary that forced all the strategically-minded nerds to the opposite side.
I might elaborate on that and other things, but right now I think I’m just going to blog about my travels and the situations I encounter. Maybe also write about breakfast and stuff like that. The fake bubbly YA writer persona is gone, by the way. From here on it’s just unfiltered me.
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