Gamergate’s fickle hero: The dark opportunism of Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos
Gamergate is full of men who have no real interest in the video game community. Their only cause is anti-feminism
Topics: anita sarkeesian, Breitbart, gamergate, Gaming, Milo Yiannopoulos, Misogyny, Video Games, Life News
A recurring theme of the Gamergate movement is that it’s not about harassment or misogyny, and that the harassers are a minor fringe in the movement, or even false flag conspiracies by anti-Gamergate trolls.
As I wrote last month, there is a serious ethics problem in video game journalism and the industry does need reforms. The latest example of this is the paid branding for the popular “Lord of the Rings” game “Shadow of Mordor,” where the publisher only allowed YouTubers who offered praise for the game to receive early review copies. Giving small-ball independent reviewers free copies of a $60 game if they offered it praise seems like a very clear and serious case of corruption.
But there were no organized boycotts or campaigns against the game’s producers, Monolith Productions and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. The scandal came and went. One YouTube gamer made a satirical video trying to highlight the issue. As of this writing, it has 79 views.
Which highlights a core problem with the movement: When a legitimate corruption scandal not involving women, or feminism, or any real misogynist angle arises, it’s more or less ignored. It seems to be deemed not exciting enough to raise Gamergate’s hackles.
It’s hardly a surprise, then, that the movement has anointed some highly suspect heroes: far-right anti-feminist writers like the American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers and Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos. Neither has any real history with video games or deep understanding of the issues that the industry and its journalists face, but both have a very real history of taking the side against wherever the feminist movement happens to be.
Yiannopoulos is a particularly interesting case. Last year, he wrote a column titled “Am I Too Old for Video Games?” In it, he engaged in the sort of ad hominem attacks on gamers that feminist critics like Anita Sarkeesian have never made. Here’s a snippet:
I understand why young people might get the odd thrill from beating up a bad guy, or catching a glimpse of a nipple or two. But there’s something a bit tragic, isn’t there, about men in their thirties hunched over a controller whacking a helmeted extraterrestrial? I’m in my late twenties, and even I find it sad. And yet there are so many of them – enough to support a multi-billion dollar video games industry. That’s an awful lot of unemployed saddos living in their parents’ basements.
He doesn’t exactly seem like a guy who would be standing up for gamers’ consumer rights or ethics in video game journalism, does he? But that was hardly his only offense. Here he is in May of this year saying that video games “attract damaged people.” He made a link between the Isla Vista, California, sexist killer Elliot Rodger and violent video games (an anti-feminist writer would want to blame toys over violent sexist ideology for that one). Last February, he tweeted that there are “few things … more embarrassing than grown men getting over-excited about video games.” He appeared on Voice of Russia to talk about the dangers of video game addiction, as well as BBC’s “Have Your Say” to talk about violent video games.
By any consideration, Milo Yiannopoulos is exactly the kind of man you’d expect Gamergate to be against: someone who thinks gamers are losers and that video games make you violent sociopathic killers.