A Harassment Campaign Against Kallie Plagge Shows Us GamerGate Is Still Undefeated
By: A. Khaled
Tags: Gaming, Harassment, YouTube, GamerGate, Social Media

Attacking journalists to prove a point doesn’t only contribute to a larger overarching weakened sense of job security, but it also reinforces the very stereotypes gaming provocateurs try to paint as being of broad applicability when it pertains to journalists. There’s this narrative where the provocateur is an unmistakable saint fighting to the masses’ benefit against the unjust hands of a plotting gaming media, except when looked at more closely, we see the illusion of self-righteousness being reduced to ash as the audience realizes they’re being sold a fraudulent story where they can only play hero, and the punishment they inflict upon their victims is wholly justified behind layers of erroneous self-rationalization as their leaders are praised for upholding uttermost moral integrity.

I’ve discussed this with a few of Kallie’s dissenters, and the argument brought up often was that she imbued too much of her own political self into the review that it overshadowed the rest of the propos she was trying to communicate about the game. Moreover, the slights made to her own integrity as a journalist, were reduced down to criticism even though watching the very first minute of the video victimizing her shows otherwise.

Those two main contention points don’t exactly compute for me, and it’s for a few notable reasons.

The first is that I tend to think quantitative proportional analysis of things being said in a story are not linear indication of the importance such an aspect occupies within it. This is something I’ve learned to grow a more complex understanding of in my two years of regular writing, but what this basically means, is just because you talked about something however many times less than another, doesn’t mean that you think it’s any less important. Rather, what this tends to inform more than anything, is the framing. I had thought from all the criticism she’s been getting that she explicitly mentioned the race of zombies in the review as a negative, but I learned later on that it was a tweet of a few things that didn’t make it into the review. Usually, things get removed from the final story for a reason, but I can’t exactly trust GamerGaters to know them since they indulged a movement predicated on ignorance in the first place.

So it wasn’t only that the criticism made was extra-textual, but it was also just wrong. If you read the Twitter feeds of many journalists, it’s not all that uncommon to see tweets occupy the space of a live notebook, or just a public forum for ideas to be thrown around to gauge reactions. Even if the tweet was not made in jest, it still had no right to account for what intentions we couldn’t possibly know. There’s no telling what Kallie had insinuated through that tweet, and any extrapolation made further is pure speculation.

The second is that the Quartering and his fans kept repeatedly referring to Kallie as “biased” and unprofessional in voicing her own opinion about the game’s lackluster proposition, and honestly? I find it incredibly disingenuous, if not intentionally malicious.

Tucker Carlson posing for a FOX News photo-op at Thursday, March 2, 2107. Courtesy of the Associated Press, by Richard Drew.

Take Tucker Carlson for example. He’s a FOX News anchor, and has been recently weathering a wave of criticism after his hateful remarks towards minorities have come under fire. He’s constantly calling out reporters on the “liberal” side as being part of the intangible “elite” — a gang of unnamed borders and parameters only Tucker Carlson can deliberately expand and contract whenever he so wishes. He infamously invited Lauren Duca to the show, who wrote at the time for Teen Vogue, and criticized her political positions by telling her to “stick to the thigh-high boots.”

In that way, Tucker Carlson mobilized a plethora of his own followers to go make Lauren Duca’s life a living hell — and indeed they did. She’s since emerged victorious and is now regularly writing serious political commentary for the Atlantic, but it wasn’t without its own pains and trepidations. The order for making it alive out of a hitjob can be so tall that it’s insurmountable, but Lauren Duca did it — that withstanding, not all female reporters are afforded the softest cushions to land smoothly on their backs as they’re smacked head on. Sometimes the going is so tough, that the only way out, is to truly be out.

The Quartering in a way, is an opinion-shaper, and what he says is taken by his many thousands of subscribers as gospel. So when he issues a call of action to the collective betterment of the gaming community at the detriment of a reporter who found herself in the thick of a controversy just by doing what she does, it raises some questions about the ethical pedestal some commentators and provocateurs try to put themselves on when they can’t hold a candle to the slightest amount of journalistic scrutiny.

To write a review isn’t simply to fill out a checklist of the most technical terms you could come up with and blast through dozens of pages of documentation on Unreal Engine just to command a respectable amount of jargon for a review that would ultimately become bland as water as a result — you simply can’t subjugate video game journalism to something that the nature of video games challenges in the first place. It isn’t either to make an objective statement about an artform that is so inherently subjective. Nor is it the vapid pursuit of an unknowable scheme of arbitrarily-set metrics by which aspect X versus aspect Y should be talked about in proportions pre-determined.

When I write my own reviews, I have absolutely no conception of what’ll come out on the other end of an empty Microsoft Word document. It can be beautiful, possessing a life of its own, and brimming lush with so much detail that I’d have to cut from it just by sheer bloat, or it can conversely be something that I’ve seen a million dozen times and other websites and would have to settle by then that not everything I write would have to be original. The struggle of coming up with the perfect narrative to tell when writing a review can be hard to resolve, but also, no reputation of a product being reviewed is worth protecting over one of a reviewer’s.

It was then that the pieces all started to align and the motivation for attacking Kallie was starting to make itself clearer.

The hate directed towards Kallie might not consciously misogynistic, but it is functionally very much rooted in misogyny. From the Quartering’s videos’ thumbnails alone, one can see a disproportionate number of women being depicted in standoffish, or an elsewise condescending manner. The message here essentially is “These women are out to get your hobby, and I, righteous protector of your hobby, shall guide you on how to claim it back.”. You might be told otherwise, but that’s just yet another apparent bias used to hide a subconscious one. It very much errs on the side of self-ascribed virtue, and it tells me more than anything, that whoever wills it, is looking for momentary glory rather than the worthwhile pursuit of a strengthened sense of ethical integrity when reporting on video games.

It is often said that the greatest success of the modern far-right movement, is that they managed to veil their hatred in broad proclamations of moral virtue around the ideals of freedom, prosperity, and equity. What I find it so incredibly similar when examining GamerGate’s latest spur of attacks on a game journalist who’s been doing great work for quite some time now, is that showing any kind of dissent to the statements made, will yield you a debate upon which grounds you cannot win: Call them misogynistic and they’ll say you’re a white knight. Call them disingenuous and they’ll claim you’re taking sides. Call them hateful, and they’ll say it’s deserved retribution. Say that they don’t understand journalism, and they’ll refer you to a definition of journalism only their lauded commentators have signed off on.

Brood “shot caller” David Bartol (middle) poses in a prison yard with Kyle Brewster (left) and Kenneth Mieske, former leaders of the neo-Nazi skinhead group East Side White Pride, who were convicted of beating to death Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw in 1988.

And here’s the thing: Even if you disagree, it’s entirely possible to make that disagreement known without playing into the dicey politics of online vigilantism. The criticism made about the zombies’ model even outside the realm of the review is fairly potent — for anyone who knows even slightly about Oregon’s white supremacism problem and biker gangs’ likening to the idea of racism, inadvertently reinforcing the notion that those only who’re affected by a virus outbreak could only have possibly been white is dangerous. The only sliver of dormant life of a times past is melanin-deficient, and that — whether intentional or not — ends up telling a very skewed story that plays into the very narrative of Oregon’s biker gangs the game is trying to so conveniently erase.

The criticism made by Kallie Plagge — or so I’ve gathered — is not that the zombies aren’t diverse enough, it’s that the implied subtext of them being exclusively white means the societal construct pre-zombie outbreak has been fairly homogenized. This is a trend game-designers have been trying to fight off in the last little while, and pointing out is not lousy journalism — if anything, it’s remarkably poignant, and well-deserving of praise as someone who might’ve never deeply contemplated the race of walking corpses before.

Another factor to consider is the pre-existing bias some gamers have over bad video game review scores — to have that review posted without a review score would have made things significantly different. It would’ve stripped anyone the ability to look at how the reviewer quantified either their affection, or disdain for the experience they’ve been through. But since that score is denoted very clearly at the bottom, its sight is inescapable from anyone who tries to make a point of showing why said writer might be biased — even though that’s a non-criticism — or otherwise swayed one direction or the other through an arbitrary judgement of what role each of their biases has determined in setting the score.

Ever since scores have been eliminated from a few of the websites I’ve so frequented, I’ve seen nothing but benefits for writers who are trying to distance their stories from as much an objective metric as possible, and while it could be a short-term solution for a culturally-pervasive problem, it certainly will not change the fact that gaming provocateurs will sift through the web just to find a vulnerable target to prey upon. Doing anything to remedy the situation but to address it directly is merely putting bandages on a a massive wound bleeding its host out.

Even if all Kallie Plagge’s criticism was valid and well-constructed — it is still not worth the effort to consciously seek out her Twitter page, and post passive-aggressive comments about her review that will become news of the past in but a mere two weeks. But my fear is that this wave of harassment will not cease until either Kallie Plagge is out of a job, or GameSpot comes out with a public apology about their reporter’s behavior — neither of, are an ideal solution. What GameSpot should rather do, is double-down and defend their reporter through thick and thin — give the loud message that dissent against any of their writers’ opinions, will not force them to bail out of a review. I’m still waiting on it, but I’m not holding my breath either way.