In Defense of Gone Home

I was recently at a symposium where the speaker briefly talked about a relatively new indie game Gone Home. Among the various points she made, the one that stuck out to me the most was the claim that the amorphous mass of “gamers hate this game”. I have to disagree.

Unlike most video games, Gone Home does not focus on action or skill. At the core, it is a point-and-click puzzle game where the player, after returning from the airport, explores their unexpectedly empty house, finds leftover notes, and pieces together the story of why exactly their younger sister left. This format may be off-putting to some gamers, but for no other reason than they just don’t like that genre of game, just like how they might not like first person shooters, sidescrollers, or mmorpgs. Everyone has their preferred genre. It doesn't make it less of a game. And Gone Home didn’t exactly do anything new with the basic mechanics. There are plenty of other games that have similar gameplay and mysterious plot, like Myst, Year Walk, The Stanley Parable, and the multitude of Nancy Drew games. All of these have generally positive responses. So what sets Gone Home apart?

Gone Home had the misfortune of getting popular right when the gamergate conspiracy started gaining traction in 2014. It immediately drew attention by the movement, because of some shakey claims of nepotism. But it also came under fire because the plot twist at the end (spoiler alert!) revealed that the sister ran away because she is a lesbian and wanted to pursue a relationship with another woman without judgement.

Gamergate exploded because of some gamers’ hatred of the feminist critique that some games were garnering. It’s no secret that the majority of games contain sexist portrayals of women, and some gamers desperately want to keep gaming communities a “boys only” club. They claim that gamergate is really about “ethics in video game journalism”. But the majority of the anger seems to stem from critiques that point the prominent one-dimensional portrayal of women in games, the skimpy outfits, the lack of diversity in characters, and the rampant misogyny, homophobia, and racism in gaming communities that make them such hostile environments. Many of the original critics that unintentionally became the ignition point of the controversy came under very targeted attacks and harassment. There were multiple accounts of rape threats, death threats, doxing, and even a threat for mass shooting when Anita Sarkeesian planned to give a guest lecture at Utah State University.

Gone Home got stuck in the crossfire of all this unrest. Since the game features a prominent multidimensional lesbian character who is not fetishized for the fans, the game became the perfect example for how feminists and SJWs were supposedly ruining games and don’t know how to make a proper video game.

“The problem people have isn't the fact that Gone Home isn't a game but that it is about subject matter that makes people uncomfortable.”

All of the intense hatred from a vocal minority has drowned out the majority of the reviews. Aggregated reviews from well-known game critique sites generally score the game in the mid-80s/100, a definitely positive score. It has gained critical acclaim and won multiple awards, including a BAFTA. Even general users on the popular gaming platform Steam give the game generally positive reviews. It is not has hated as some users would like people to believe.

Gamers don’t hate Gone Home any more than most other video games. Gamergate hates Gone Home.

Theoryofficgate Clarification and Follow-Up

It's been over a month since fanfic writers, specifically user waldorph, discovered that a UC Berkeley class had required students to write reviews as part of a course on fanfiction. I initially wrote a bit to explore some of the issues being raised as tensions still ran high. Since then, tempers have simmered down and most of the problems have been resolved.

Now that most of the details have come out, I wanted to clarify some points from my previous post as well as add on to some of the discussion regarding fan aggression.

The class, "The Theory of Fanfiction", is not taught by professors. In case it was unclear, the course is student designed and run. By undergraduates for undergraduates. So, it's basically a glorified reading group with the added benefit of college credit. And as later uncovered profiles revealed, these undergrads had a personal interest in fandom and even participated in it. One of the teachers was found to go by the pseudonym of FiveMinutesTilBedtime on many sites, including ao3 and tumblr.

Unfortunately, fandoms tend to get rather prickly when disturbed. There were reports of targeted harassment and malicious posting on top of the general drama the course caused. It got so bad that the fan-turned-instructor has since deleted or deactivated these accounts, but traces can still be found on the wayback machine or through tumblr correspondences. Sure, they made a mistake, what young adult doesn't, but the responses were excessive and cruel.

Such behavior truly highlights the ugly and destructive sides of both fandom and internet culture in general. BNF copperbadge, for example, allegedly posted a spiteful response (that has since been deleted) to theoryofficgate:

If you’d like to share your thoughts with the “teachers” of the “Let’s go be dicks to fan authors” class, their emails are listed in this cached document.
You know, if you wanted to. Unsolicited criticism seems to be the order of the day, after all. 

And since the original poster has a large presence in online communities, the post gained a lot of views and traction. It revealed personal information about the instructors and called for further harassment. Such behavior cultivates a very negative space in fandom and encourages cruelty. At least one fan was run off as a result and felt pressured enough to destroy their fandom identity completely. After all, it can be easy to forget, but FiveMinutesTilBedtime was first and foremost a fan and content creator.

A few anonymous commenters weighed in on this incident while criticizing the phenomenon of BNFdom:

Original thread here.

The class has since edited the syllabus and stopped the reviews in favor of revising the assignments. Now aware of the close scrutiny, the teachers and students have been much more closed off about the course. But discussions like the above still continue.

The attempt to bridge fandom and academia was overly eager and ill-conceived, but it was still genuine. They are all fans. Both teachers and students are trying to respectfully study, analyze, and document a culture they love. This particular experiment may have failed horribly, but perhaps the lessons from their follies may create space for future success.

Hateful Confessions or Venting?

A few weeks ago I gave a general introduction to confession blogs and how people used them, but I talked about them in a mostly positive light, which makes sense. I didn’t want to scare people off from them by highlighting the negatives. That’s more of a second post deal.

The example that I gave last time was of a Dragon Age confession blog, which the owners carefully moderate. The blog contains a clearly visible set of rules that the owners actively enforce for submissions and behavior in order to keep a safe and welcoming environment. But not all confession blogs are structured in the same way. Some advocate for much looser community behavior and standards. They don’t bother with including any submissions guidelines, and the culture they cultivate looks a lot more different as a result.

This time, I’ll be using a blog dedicated to Flight Rising, a virtual petsite similar to neopets but with dragons. It goes by the tongue-in-cheek moniker "Drama Rising".

It’s not solely a confession blog, but it operates in pretty much the same way. Users submit confessions, rants, complaints, observations, or drama anonymously. A lot of the posts are similar to those I outlined in the previous discussion on confession blogs, so I won’t rehash an old subject. Instead, I’ll be focusing on some of the differences, mainly that there are no rules or apparent moderation on Drama Rising, which allows for completely different types of posts.

Since the posts are mostly unmoderated, a lot of them single out or attack users.

“can N please stop being a fucking little bitch…? so people don’t find your dragons ‘names’ (if the pile of garbage you create by slammingyour ape hands against your laptop’s keyboard can be considered namies) funny.big deal. please continue to cry some more, darling.”

A least they tried to keep the target somewhat anonymous?

As a result, other posters might in turn retaliate against an anonymous rant on the same blog. There is no room for vague phrases like “some users” or “the fandom” that you might find on confession blogs with strict rules. These are targeted messages.

“Alright you filthy pieces of shit targeting Snap you are all disgusting human beings and you all make me sick stop abusing her over messages she has no right to be attacked by some low life asshole’s who are greedy and only want to take advantage of her kindness

Deities help you if I find out who you are.”

Any policing of the behavior on this blog are completely community driven. Anonymous users will try to attack or shame other posters to keep others in line.

“about 90% of this blog is downright rude. i mean, if you have a problem with a user, why don’t you keep it to yourself instead of sending it here where that user may end up seeing it and getting hurt, or you can tell a friend about it just to get it off your chest. Or you can use here to rant, but why not leave out their username? that just causes so much shit for them and makes other users get pissed at them as well and its not cool. I love FR and it makes me so sick to see how RUDE the community can get when they aren’t on the site itself.”

Such tactics make work to some degree and possibly change behavior. But it also creates a lot of hostility that may result in fewer users wanting to participate (especially by those who are specifically named in posts) or even stronger retaliations from others. No one likes being told what to do or how to behave, after all. Not to mention, with no explicit rules, the unspoken expectations for behavior become inconsistent at best. It just makes people squabble more about what should be considered unacceptable or unnecessary content. Yes, the setup allows for more variety of posts, but the tradeoff comes with a more vitriolic community.  

Internet Hate Machine

CW: Vulgar language and verbal threats

For all the venues of communication that anonymity affords, there are considerable perils as well. Anyone who has been online long enough knows what I’m talking about. Anonymous hate. It can be fun to leave, but it’s never fun to receive.

The anonymous function at its core separates people from their words, which can be incredibly freeing for most. This fact alone makes many people rally behind the cause of protecting anonymous posting capabilities. They ultimately consider it worth protecting despite all of the consequences that come with it, both the positives and the negatives. And at times, those are almost inseparable. After all, and perhaps most importantly, anon divests the poster from the consequences of their actions. The words appear, but without an apparent author to claim ownership. There’s no easy way to track down the original poster or even identify them. In a large group of anon posts, the confusion easily increases. One person can play the role of multiple anons. They can create a whole thread of different personas having a “conversation” in order to prove a point or purposely create drama.

Of course, sometimes anon hate is isolated and so vague that it’s almost ridiculous. Such messages are easy to dismiss and delete, or even ridicule.

But sometimes anon hate can be unfunny and even destructive. The behavior extends into and escalates in private messages, which often serve as the venue for pointed attacks. Vicious attacks may be mounted against one user through anonymous messaging. Sometimes the attackers really are a number of different users who, for some reason, feel the need to heckle a particular individual. Much more commonly, however, the anon hate all stems from one user sending multiple messages that claim to originate from different people. This tactic purposely ramps up the magnitude of the attack in a way that non-anonymous messaging simply cannot hope to replicate. It breeds paranoia and suspicion and creates a very hostile and unsafe environment for the victim. They have no way of knowing who or how many people are singling them out. And they can’t just block them and move on since it’s all anonymous.

Again, they have no idea who is really attacking them.

It could be anyone. A follower? A fan? A random visitor? A close friend? The last possibility in particular erodes confidence and trust at an individual level, and consequently detracts from community interaction as a whole. Fandom is no exception. Once stung, it is incredibly common and completely understandable that a user would not want to continue participating in that fandom. At worse, the fan might delete their account or leave the community completely.

With sites that enable users to turn anonymous commenting or messages on or off, however, the recipient of anonymous hate frequently just disables those possibilities. It’s a simple enough response, but the restriction leaves some subtle consequences. It closes the user off from more general interaction with fans and shuts down a whole venue of communication. People can no longer, for example, send anonymous confessions or personal messages to that user without outing themselves. As such, they are more likely to just avoid any attempts at communication with that user in general.

Anon can be a great tool. But like any tool, it can be misused. And the consequences can affect everyone.