* Sorry about the inordinately long time since my last post. From being sick for a month, searching for a job after graduation and preparing for the Midwest Popular Culture Association Conference, I haven’t had much time to write. I hope to begin writing after the Conference.
I leu of a short usually critical article I thought I would share with you all the paper I wrote for the Midwest Popular Culture Association Conference. I have written about trolling and doxxing (the public sharing of private information) within the video game community, and how people believe that it is okay to act this way because the Internet acts similarly to Michail Bakhtin’s Carnival.
I would love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to message me.
Introduction
Crusades across the vastness of space. Raids through Medieval villages. As a mage, a dwarf, a Spartan, a king or a teenage girl. Like their predecessors, video games and the Internet have afforded its users extended freedom and the ability to escape their own reality. A user can be anyone at anytime in any place real or imaginary through virtual spaces. It would seem to be a haven, yet for some it has become a source of discomfort and fear. Trolling, doxxing, rape jokes, race jokes, limited character choices and general representation are just a few of the ways that video game players, makers and critics have faced backlash.
How could anyone act so cruelly? What would give them the right to blatantly disregard common decency towards another human being? How do trolls get away with using demeaning language and sharing of private information? This paper will argue that video game fans are capable of and do use the Internet to troll because it plays out like Mikhail Bakhtin’s Carnival. The following pages will define Bakhtin’s Carnival, explain the video game environment and #Gamergate, and compare and contrast video game fans use of the Internet to Bakhtin’s Carnival.
The Video Game Environment
Video games are not inherently hostile. Yet imagine a gamer or a gamer designer. The person you envisioned was probably white, male, heterosexual and between the ages of thirteen and thirty. In reality, the game industry is still skewed predominantly and favorably for the white, heterosexual male (Kafai, et.al., Part II).
According to Kafai et.al., this means “almost no increase in the number of women working within the game industry” (pg. 13). For those women who hope to enter the game industry or are in the game industry, working conditions remain hostile. As for female gamers conditions appear to be just as bleak. Kafai et.al. described the game industry as “still designing games primarily for men, with women seen as – at best – a secondary market and more often as an afterthought” (pg. 14). Except we now live in a participatory culture, where consumers can produce their own content. Enabling women to create their own games when the game industry will not make games with them in mind (Kafai, et.al., pg. 13). These types of spaces should allow female gamers more freedom to explore and build communities where it has the potential to be safer for them to go beyond the virtual spaces (Kafai, et.al., pg. 48).
Those safe spaces are important because they have the potential to grow beyond the stereotypes of female characters. In her article, Adrienne Shaw explains that the choice of some male gamers to pick female avatars is one based on “the structural misogyny of the online game space in which female avatars [are] often sexually harassed” (pg. 137). By choosing a female avatar through this frame means that ultimately the male gamer is “creating objects of desire” (Shaw, pg. 138). Who would want to be seen this way or have to curve their game play in order to blend in “the structural misogyny?” Under such an environment, it is understandable why many female gamers decide to play with a closeted gamer identity, which is primarily as a non-female avatar or character. As a result, it is not inconceivable to see outspoken players and critics bashed for being “too critical” of the game industry, especially if the complaints are about gender, race, sexuality, etc.
#Gamergate
Gamers form relationships with games and their avatars or characters, and that relationship can be so powerful that communities form which go beyond the game (Shaw, pg. 113). When someone then attacks that beloved game or critics the game industry as a whole, how can those gamers not take that as an insult?
#Gamergate became a thing in August 2014 when a guy, seeking revenge, wrote a very detailed post about his ex-girlfriend, Zoe Quinn. He explained that she had cheated on him, and implied that she had traded favors for favorable reviews on her game Depression Quest (Day, pg. 235). What followed was hackers gathering private information about Zoe Quinn, an act referred to as doxxing (“where someone hacks personal information like phone number, address, credit cards, social security number, and post it online for the whole world to see and misuse…) (Day, pgs. 236 & 241). She then received rape and death threats forcing her to leave her own home.
#Gamergate expanded it vitriol to include people, predominantly women, who were according to Felicia Day, “trying to add dialogue about feminism and diversity in gaming (pg. 240). They referred to these feminist and critics as “Social Justice Warriors.” Online hate is not an unusual occurrence specifically for women (Hurley, pg. 189). In her book The Geek Feminist Revolution, Kameron Hurley clarified online hate as:
There are men everywhere who feel that being rejected by women entitles them to murder those women. There are men who will single out you, as a public figure, for embodying everything they feel is wrong with women…One of the things Gamergate taught us is just how far men are willing to go to shame and threaten the women who hurt their feelings, and how many other men think that all right (pg. 258).
Beyond trying to scare these women into no longer criticizing video games, #Gamergate ignored the impact it would have on them. Anita Sarkeesian, who received a great deal of hate before and after creating the vlog series Tropes vs. Women, tried not to engage her haters (Yamoto, paragraphs 15-18). That was until her speech at Utah State University was anonymously threatened with a bomb (Yamoto, paragraphs 15-18). Anita Sarkeesian described the hate and threats she received, as exactly what it was for her and the other women, “trauma” (Yamoto, paragraphs 15-18). Felicia Day wrote an analogy in an attempt to describe what it was like to be attacked by #Gamergate. She wrote, “The only real-life analogy I can think of is if a random person were allowed to walk into your home, punch you in the face while you’re eating your oatmeal, then walk out again with no fear of consequence” (pg. 233).
The trolls using #Gamergate were terrifying. The over extended period of time that #Gamergate terrorized the Internet was nearly unheard of. The trolls gained steam the longer they were trolling the women and critics of video games (Day, pg. 235). All of which came with a sense of justice, as if they themselves were victims of the critiques being made of video games (Day, pg. 235). Beyond of sense of justice, these trolls experience a type of delight. Kameron Hurley explains that:
What I’ve found is that many people delight in skewering and misreading you because they don’t see you as a real person. You have become The Man. By bringing you down a peg they feel that they can claims a victory over everything you represent…You also become a focus for folks who are unhappy, or feel powerless. You become this symbol of all the reasons they feel powerless and unhappy. Feminists in particular get this a lot from men who are generally but certainly not exclusively young and white (pg. 188).
The right combination of platform, users, and rules created the perfect storm for #Gamergate to invade with its hate and complete disregard for people’s privacy. What was it about these variables that enabled #Gamergate to happen? Michail Bakhtin wrote Rabaelais and His World in 1965, and explored the idea and importance of Carnival depicted throughout Rabaelais’ works. Bakhtin’s ideas of Carnival may help explain how #Gamergate came to be.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s Carnival
Carnival is the great equalizer. The only law that exists is the law of freedom (Kolodziej-Smith, pg. 86). The article, Bakhtin and the Carnivalesque: Calling for a Balanced Analysis within Organizational Communication Studies, defined Carnival as:
…a theatrics of rants and madness seeking to repair felt separation and alienation. It is a call for release from corporate power, a cry of distress and repression, mixed with laughter and humorous exhibition meant to jolt state and corporate power into awareness of the psychic cage or work and consumptive life (Kolodziej-Smith, pg. 87).
Moments like Carnival happen when “an oppressive system begins to crack and the ‘decentralization of culture has undermined authority of social establishments’” (Aschkenasy, pg. 5).
What characterizes Carnival from other times is its sublimation or temporary destruction of authority. It is a time of death and rebirth (Karimova, pg. 38). There is an overabundance of laughter and mockery. The normal socially structured language is replaced with billingsgate language – “abusive language, insulting words or expressions, some of them quite lengthy and complex” (Karimova, pg. 39). These types of language focus chiefly on the lower body (Karimova, pg. 38).
The language used, the attacks on perceived authority, the greater freedom as well as other characteristics are elements of Carnival that are mirrored in #Gamergate and the general video game environment. The following pages will delve further into how Carnival and the Video Game Community are similar.
The New Carnival: the Internet
The Mask
How does the authority and the poor become one in the same community? The time and space of Carnival begins to peel away the individuality of each person until they become part of the collective (Koloziej-Smith, pg. 86) At this moment, they dress up. They wear masks. During Carnival, as Gulnara Karimova clarifies: “everyone participates and lives a second life that is beyond hierarchy, religious dogmas, official norms, and prohibitions” (pg. 38). In the second like and during the application of dress and mask, one becomes the “other”(Karimova, pgs. 40-41). For the times of Carnival, each individual can be anyone.
Speaking more clearly of the mask, Bakhtin writes:
The mask is connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay relativity and with merry negation of uniformity, and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself. The mask is related to transition, metamorphoses, the violation of natural boundaries, to mockery and familiar nicknames (pgs. 39-40).
Behind the mask each individual is still the same person they are when there is no carnival, but in that time and space a mask can transform one into nearly anyone else.
Video games and the Internet work similarly. Unless otherwise required, an individual can create any avatar, username, etc. they choose. This comes from the opportunity to take part in participatory culture, which is done with ease because of technology. Adrienne Shaw explains that: “Players do not just consume, or act as passive audience members of the game but instead are active co-creators in producing it as a meaningful experience and artifact” (pg. 104).
Within the virtual spaces, a user can create any type of character they choose. This is what makes playing a video game over and over again or throughout several years possible. The only limits are either the ones that the designers set or in other cases the limits are one’s own imagination. The only responsibility that an avatar has is to be “the visual, digital embodiment of the player in the game world” (Shaw, pg. 102).
How does someone choose whom to become? Perhaps there is a particular fantasy for the Carnival goer, like going from shy lord becoming a Lothario. In a video game, it might be a choice of strategy. Yet, when it does not have to be or there is not difference, a player may prefer a character or choose traits for an avatar that they can connect or represent a part of their personality (Shaw, pg. 134). It is the choices that are key for both a Carnival goers and gamers and Internet users. Adrienne Shaw describes that: “When it comes to playing a game, the motives of the player and the motives of the in-game character are neither wholly distinct nor wholly the same” (pg. 109). There is always a plan or desire when deciding on the mask or creating an avatar, even if the decisions were made half-hazardly.
Earlier in this paper it was explored that a female player may choose to play wit a closeted gamer identity. They may play as a male character or any other character that would not scream that they are a “Gamer Girl,” which is held is deep contempt (Day, pg. 237). It would not be impossible to believe that a male gamer may do the same. Of course, it may be a decision not to shout that you are a gay male or a player of color, but it’s a choice to make your username and similar character traits unidentifiable or untraceable.
4chan is the root of the #Gamergate incident (Day, pg. 236). It is an anonymous website associated with the manufacturing and spreading of hate speech. Because of the existence of 4chan and the extremely lax responsiveness on the part of Twitter and other sites, seeming unidentifiable people are able to troll mercilessly.
Twitter and the Law
According to Nehama Aschkenasy, “[the] marketplace was center of all that is unofficial; it enjoyed a certain extraterritoriality in a world of official order and official ideology, it always remained ‘with the people’” (pg. 9). Based off of this description, the marketplace was the ideal place and source for Carnival. Language broke during Carnival. The laws of language during the time, which were censored by grammar and semantics, were broken by the discourse of Carnival (Aschkenasy, pg. 20). Included in the breaking of language was the use of abusive language. Gulnara Karimova clarified that: “abusive language liberates the speaker from social orders and conventional rules through expressions which are broken in syntax, illogical and, by many accounts senseless” (pg. 42).
Replace Carnival with the Internet, and there would be little difference. The Internet is essentially a market place, except the market place has the ability to spread over the entire world. If the Internet is the marketplace, then each website used to share and spread ideas and opinions is like each shop, stage, and group of people during Carnival. Even more like Carnival is the Internet’s push to protect Freedom of Speech enabling all types of language and opinions, including abusive language. Beyond anonymous sites like 4chan, Twitter is a key example of a website using Freedom of Speech as the foundation of the company, whether or not that worked to their benefit or created more problems.
Twitter, one of the largest social media websites, proved itself to be a great source for information and organization during the Iranian elections in 2009 and during the Arab Spring (Warzel, paragraphs 11 & 12). Yet, at the same time Twitter was and still is having a monstrous issue with trolls, and their use of hate speech and abusive language. As a former senior engineer, who Charlie Warzel interviewed, justified: “You have this opposition between defending the user’s experience and not shutting down speech all while there’s this big, toxic mass of people that are abusing” (paragraph 15).
Harassment of women, people of color and religious minorities became rampant, especially for celebrities and others who found themselves in the spotlight (Warzel, paragraph 23). Famous people like Lily James and Zelda Williams left Twitter because of the abuse they were receiving (Warzel, paragraphs 22 & 23). Twitter tried to take steps in protecting their user by creating a reporting system and adding a flagging tool (Warzel, paragraph 24). However, these tools were meant for reaction and not prevention, which arguably could make them either useless or backfire and hurt the victims. Charlie Warzel expounds that:
One month later [after several celebrities left Twitter], Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist writer and video game critic, took to her Tumblr page and posted 157 of examples of misogyny, gendered insults, victim blaming, incitement to suicide, and rape and death threats she’d received in a recent six-day stretch on Twitter. Despite the overtures from Twitter, the trolls were winning (paragraph 24).
Unlike Carnival, which takes place in the times when “oppressive systems [begin] to crack,” the Internet is constant, and in many instances everlasting (Aschkenasy, pg. 5). The chance that trolling could be an everlasting is something that frightens many. Felicia Day worries that the Internet will no longer be the utopia she thought is was, where you could be who you are and do what you love (pg. 249).
Conclusion
There are several more similarities between Bahktin’s Carnival and Trolling on the Internet. For example, much of the humor used in Carnival focuses on the lower body and the orifices. This parallels the rape threats, and the considerable usage of the words “cunt” and “whore” in the Tweets, comments and blog posts that the trolls have made (Walzer, paragraphs 2 & 24).
All of these similarities were not the point of this paper. The point of this paper was in attempt to explain how people could use the Internet to spread and create so much hate towards other people. The simple answer is that the Internet gives a user two freedoms. One freedom being the freedom to become someone else or to create a new online identity that can afford the user a modicum of anonymity. The other freedom being the right to Freedom of Speech, which has been the crux of why websites are having such a terrible time managing hate speech.
The moral is that trolling and doxxing suck. In the last year alone, trolls have forced Leslie Jones off of Twitter, and illegally hacked and shared her private information and photos. #Gamergate and other video game trolls used their powers of hacking and spreading hate to get a Nintendo PR employee fired. So ignoring trolling is not an option, the only option is to support one another. When you see trolling, report it, write a comment of support, and create discourse. Disabling comments, like Anita Sarkeesian has done, should not be the new norm. The Internet is still fairly new and is continually evolving. In 20 years, hate speech and online abuse will either get worse or websites will find a way to manage it. Until then all Internet users can do is support one and other, and work towards find a solution to a 21st century problem.
Bibliography
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