Why are gaming nerds so terrible?

I’m apparently spending a lot of time wondering about the psychology of terrible people.

I am late to this and only catching up but the misogynistic storm raging in the gaming world about indie game dev Zoe Quinn is insane and terrifying. It’s not the first time this has happened and it certainly won’t be the last. It’s always depressing to remember that something you love so much can have such a disgusting and toxic culture.

But why the hell is gaming so uniquely ugly in this regard? The world of entertainment is a misogynistic place. In competitive fields where individuals are vying for attention (such as film or electronic music), women are generally paid much less or consistently overlooked. It’s quiet, effective and nasty. Video games, apparently, are a different bag of oranges. Why can’t they just quietly drown women’s dreams like everyone else? Why does it have to be so incredibly explosive and violent?

I have a guess, and it ties into what is basically the unraveling of traditional nerd culture.

So what’s different about gaming from other media? A few things:

1. Gaming is young. Not only is it young (the first mass market system, the Atari 2600, is still less than 40 years old), but it’s in the middle of a dramatic reinvention, as the traditional top-down system of production to consumption is being upended into something that is both larger and smaller. Which leads to the second point.
2. Gaming is DIY. In terms of overhead and barrier to entry, gaming is only slightly more difficult to get into than writing words or drawing on paper. It requires competence in multiple fields (coding, writing, art (maybe)) to make something competent, but it’s easily within the grasp of a single person to make a ridiculously successful game.
3. Gaming is entirely online, and the vast majority of the interaction and culture is based on the internet.

Now, let’s say you’re interested in preventing a class of person from finding success in your medium. In traditional top-down worlds, like film, it’s relatively easy: you just don’t pick up their projects, you pass them over for positions, and you pay them less. And if you’re not in a position to do that, you can rely on someone else to do it for you. Even in a more dispersed medium like hip hop or electronic music, which is constantly in flux and is made up of individuals, rather than groups, you still have the people who book venues and run record labels and other promotional services to serve as gatekeepers.

The difference for modern gaming is that it’s in the process of decentralizing. In a world without publishers (or at least one where they’re not necessary), word of mouth fills the void. An ocean of blogs replaces the need for traditional marketing, and, since those blogs are also DIY and decentralized, people can pick and choose the critics they listen to, cutting out the old tastemakers and creating independent communities beyond the influence of the industry as a whole.

If you’re the aforementioned person who’s invested in keeping someone out, suddenly your tools are gone. You can’t single handedly prevent someone from succeeding in your industry anymore, because not only can they just as easily go around you, they probably wouldn’t even notice you were there.

It’s difficult to overstate the cultural consequences of this.

Obviously, the culture in question is nerd culture, and the blacklisted group is women. Despite its somewhat marginal place in mainstream society, nerd culture is and always has been a boys’ club. Women have generally been allowed in, but under strict conditions. There are a small number of stereotypical (generally submissive) roles women are allowed to play, and wandering out of those roles has always been met with hostility.

All of this is being completely upended. As women have become culturally more liberated in general, more and more of them are entering traditionally male spaces, and all of these major technical changes in gaming have left it culturally defenseless. Women are making games for other women, and those games are being promoted by blogs that are run by women for women. And these games are meeting critical and financial success to the point where they’re now frequently included on Steam (whose egalitarianism is both politically admirable and extremely profitable).

In short, they’re in your space and they don’t need you, and you have one tool left, which is to be the most incredibly awful neighbor you can possibly be and hope they move. Which is why the fact that everything is online is so important: in addition to everyone, everywhere being your neighbor, it’s no secret that anonymity makes people substantially nastier than they would otherwise be, both because of a lack of repercussions and reduced empathy from not being able to see who one is interacting with.

I think this adequately sets the stage what we’ve been seeing in the Zoe Quinn saga. Would the average nerd on the street otherwise know who she is? Nope. Would they have played Depression Quest, if it weren’t for this hullabaloo? Nope. Would they have known or even cared that it was on Steam? Nope. Is there any reason at all to believe that any of them are actually invested in this on the merits? Not even a bit.

The easiest action, by far, would be to ignore it. If she’s as bad as they say, her badness would become evident despite her manipulations and she’d fade away. And if not, who cares? It would just be one of the god knows how many trash games on Steam they’ll never even see, and they don’t have to support it or even pay attention to it. And if she is bad but people seem to like her anyway, let the idiots have their party over there. You don’t have to see it. You don’t have to hear about it. None of it has anything to do with you, unless you want it to.

The fact that this isn’t the reaction puts the lie to the whole thing.

What is actually being fought over is the role women are allowed to play in nerd culture. It’s about trying to set the rules and bright lines of the gaming world, to control what women are and aren’t allowed to do, even when it doesn’t concern you. It’s about doing literally anything you can to get rid of your neighbors, and, failing that, showing off what a monster you can be when you don’t get your way.

But as disgusting and one sided as this war on Quinn seems to have been, the nerds don’t seem to appreciate something: they’ve already lost. They’ve lost on a scale they don’t comprehend, and they lost years ago.

Everything they’re upset about is the new norm. Women are in gaming, and even if you can scare some away with thug tactics, you can’t scare all of them away. And they’re going to make it their home. They’re going to set up shop, they’re going to make the games they want to see in the world, and they’re going to have relationships within the industry and settle down and have disgusting nerd babies if that’s what they feel like. And these communities, outside the reach or control of the old culture, will bring in more women, until the world of gaming starts to look more like the world around it.

All the death threats and doxxing in the world aren’t going to change this. If the nerds end up culturally homeless, it’s only because they were so close minded in what a home was allowed to be. Hopefully they, too, will realize that they can set up camp wherever they want in this incredible and expansive new world of gaming, and hopefully it will be in a place where nobody will have to see them. The sooner the better.