When I see gaming reporters talk about GamerGate, many of them make a point to state that GamerGate has no clear goal it wants. Which I admit confuses me, since you can talk to absolutely any GamerGate person and they will describe a goal to you.

Like, take me for example. I’m not a huge GamerGate supporter; my claim to allegiance is pretty much that I tried to hear out both sides, got attacked and slandered by GamerGate’s opponents for doing so, and now am desperately begging them to give me some reason to be neutral again. The conditions under which I would personally cease any positive advocacy for GamerGate can be summed up in three bulletpoints:

• I would like implicated journalists to give some response to the accusation that their coverage of the Zoe Post engaged in victim-blaming. This isn’t something I’m just going to forget about if they don’t cover it, because the very fact that mass media is able to shame an abuse victim for speaking out makes abusers everywhere more dangerous.
• I would like to see some public response to NotYourShield and other minorities who feel they are being misrepresented, erased or generalized by gaming media. A lot of people have been uniting under the shared perception that they will be treated as invisible unless they fit a certain mold, and something has to be done to dispel (or at the very least, confirm) that.
• At this point, I would also like to see some defense from gaming journalists that they are bringing something positive to the industry. As I’ve mentioned before, I currently have a hard time seeing their institutions as anything other than a liability to both consumers and creators, and I would like to be convinced otherwise.

These are relatively simple and, I believe, reasonable desires. If fulfilled, I would be satisfied and wipe my hands of the whole thing. I think the part that confuses sub-par journalists, though, is that these are only my desires, and a different person might want something entirely different.

But, like… in the normal world, this is not a weird thing. This is called diversity. When you are dealing with a large group of people, they are going to have many different opinions and preferences, and it will take many complicated moves to respond to all of them. Some of the positions may even be contradictory, and you will have to give up on appeasing certain people. When you are opposed by a large group of people, your goal is to identify and appease the most powerful ideas, after which the crowd will weaken and disperse. This isn’t rocket science; it is literally how creating for an audience works. 

The response journalists have been showing toward this is almost shockingly awful, though. Like, I keep seeing them make this demand for GamerGate to agree on some single, cohesive and agreeable list of changes they want to see, after which the journalists will “maybe take it seriously”. And like, that request might seem reasonable at a glance, but these are the implicit messages I get from it:

• We do not care about your interests unless you can form a sizable group that fully agrees with you. 
• It is your responsibility to discern and report on what your group wants, not the journalist’s.
• You cannot ally with people against a common enemy unless you agree with them completely.

Maybe these are not the messages they are trying to send, but they are what I am getting, which is why I am begging them to show me counterevidence. The above bulletpoints are policies that unambiguously favor a majority: the first emphasizes that they can silence minorities, the second shifts the journalist’s job to people who have less experience doing it, and the third cuts off less-connected parties from any support they might be able to receive. These are time-tested silencing/derailment tactics, and they aren’t even being subtle about it. This is the sort of stuff social justice culture should oppose on principle, yet a whole bunch of them end up getting manipulated into endorsing it. 

I guess I have this slight fear that over the last few years manipulative and exploitative people have been turning social justice into an anti-diversity movement. Social justice has always been a little hostile, but I feel like there has been this recent shift where the emphasis has changed away from targeting straight/white/male people who speak for minorities and toward targeting minorities who speak against “dominant social justice”, which seems to be predominantly held in place by straight white men. I mean, just speaking as someone who semi-follows GamerGate, the majority of GamerGate supporters are probably white men, but the vast majority of the ones who receive the most vicious attacks and and harassment seem to be women and minorities. It’s scary, because this is the sort of thing social justice should be standing against, not enabling or praising. 

I apologize for all the GamerGate posts lately; I’ve just been seeing increasingly vicious attacks coming from the GamerGate opposition, mostly with what seems to be the goal of scaring minorities into keeping quiet. Again, I do want to be proven wrong on this. If you are a gaming journalist or GamerGate supporter reading this, I want you to police your friends and respond to accusations to the point where I can be neutral again. In fact, I’m begging you: don’t be evil. All you have to do is convince me that you and the people you are defending are not evil, and I will be satisfied. You don’t even have to be good.  

But, no, the response will probably just involve attacking GG for being too diverse. I don’t even get it anymore.