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.
At the same time, the other side doesn't appeal to me. They
hate books, and they don’t want women to live independently. My life revolves
around books, and independence. I briefly dated a guy who swung hard to the
right and decided it wasn’t my path, although I do agree with them in a few
areas. Most notably, I’m not opposed to religion, even though I don’t choose to
belong to one. The SJW faction is needlessly critical of Christianity, despite
its relevance to liberation from tyranny. Plus there’s the Sokal Hoax, and all
I’m going to do is mention it.
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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