sanctuary

I shouldn't have started my day by reading about current developments in the Zoe Quinn fallout. Didn't mean to, but there it was, and the odd bit of post-article Googling led me further down a dark rabbit hole.

One of the usual comment-section anonymice posted a response to one of the articles, that the "goal"--and I get the feeling these goalposts have shifted somewhat, if they are not in fact actually mobile, like they're glue-gunned to the backs of turtles--was to expose the incestuous connections between games industry professionals and the people who are there to write about them.

Which it isn't. That's a discussion that's worth having, but it's not this one.

This particular conversation is far too mixed up in Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian's perceived, imaginary transgressions for it to be worthwhile; it's about scared boys trying to punish grown-ass women for things that aren't crimes, because they're nerds, gamer culture is their sanctuary, and anything that endangers that sanctuary is something to be taken down with all the tools they can bring to hand; and they're young men, burning with the need to be angry about something, and there's an entire culture built around the generation of acceptable targets.

(If some of these assholes would target white-collar criminals or corrupt politicians, they'd be on the verge of solving actual problems. I've half-written the screenplay already: a couple of hundred script kiddies, driven beyond madness by their balls not being regularly emptied in the manner in which they'd prefer, deliberately targeting someone like Eric Cantor, a man whose entire sense of style seems to be built around imitating the preppy frat assholes from PCU. Where's a Fagin when you need him?)

This urge towards sanctuary is inherently toxic, and it's one of a few ways in which it's manifesting all throughout nerd culture as a whole: the movies are remakes, the books are retreads, the comics are all stuck on sixty-year-old mined-out characters, and the people who want to move forward--including the women who have the temerity to want to participate--get shouted down for whatever reasons can be manufactured.

In point of fact, I wonder if the nostalgia/sanctuary wave isn't why the culture feels vaguely as if it's moving backward. Sarkeesian made a decent point in one of her videos, that the indie games that deliberately ape past titles are also imitating certain unfortunate story trends thereof, like how Super Meat Boy and, more recently, Shovel Knight both deal with a rescue-the-princess plot that was hackneyed even back in the day. We've gone from the female action-hero trend that "Buffy" started in the '90s to a surfeit of square-jawed white manly-ass protagonists and it appears to be entirely on the basis of what marketing would prefer to deal with.

I get sanctuary, and I certainly understand recreational anger. Both of them were pretty much my jam when I was in my 20s. Sooner or later, though, you either need to break out from those or they bury you, and I still haven't quite managed to get away. Once you start using either of them to invent reasons for personal attacks--not even attacking somebody like Sarkeesian's arguments, but her--you've gone around the twist.

You're a nerd; you should intuitively understand when someone has to be stopped, even when it's you. Especially when it's you.