The Wii, GamerGate, and the recent Election

Ever started into an essay and then realized what it was actually about? This essay has taken me weeks because I suddenly realized it will end my study on videogame culture and politics. There is so much to still explain, and I will spend a lot of time putting essays in between subjects, or things I forgot to write about. But then, its over.

Oddly enough, as the election moved in, I saw things working out the same way as Gamergate. Not only that, Trump was using some of Nintendo’s methods. It was sort of awesome to watch as things moved forward. The election was a shock to me, but not a surprise.

Now we have something pretty amazing. I studied intercultural history, and worked to show how it applied to videogame culture. Gamergate had all sorts of stuff from my other studies. But what makes it amazing is that we can now predict how people will respond, because there have been enough examples to base things off of.

Videogame culture is now influencing, and showing how other cultures will work.

The first thing we have to understand is how we got here. There are some very intelligent people who are not doing some basic work. They aren’t doing it, because the narrative doesn’t allow them to do this. This story has been told several times, but the use of protest and information is new.

When I lived in Hawaii, there were people who seemed to work really hard, but skip the easy stuff. I joked that they were Hard Workers. If there was hard work, they did it. If it was easy, then they would wait until it was hard. So I am referring to people who are constantly working, but not doing something simple to help it move along more quickly.

In this case it looks like some very smart people are stuck with looking at a website, or reading a book. That sounds pretty impossible, yet when I read articles and commentary it becomes obvious. For example, when Nintendo Announced the Wii, they mentioned 2 books to read on the matter. Donald Trump was actually using one of those books, and his own to run for president.

Nintendo then PR head Reggie Fils-Aime and President talked about The Blue Ocean Strategy, and Disruptive Innovation. By coincidence the books worked together to make a great idea. The Blue Ocean Strategy Website lists the Wii, and how it worked within marketing a creation. When talking about Disruption, a Wiimote was raised. All of these major business analysts had shown what would happen with the Wii.

Oddly enough, when the subject came up for journalists within the videogame world, the Wii was not part of the subject. The PS3 and Xbox 360 were the major players, and the Wii should be ignored.

Donald Trump used the same strategy to win the election. He went after the lesser market to win more states. He talked to people that were not part of the conversation. It was really obvious he had a lot of supporters, yet somehow we had journalists arguing about how much he would lose. No really, here is an article showing Nate Silver and Huffington Post arguing about Trump getting 35% or 2%.

What also wasn’t read was The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump himself. Had they have read it, they would have read how businessmen go into deal making. They may also not reveal what they really want, to make the person negotiating with them give up the needed compromises.

Don’t believe me? Based on Trump’s actions he doesn’t seem to hate immigrants. What is a big problem for businesses is trying to get the Visas for technical skills jobs. The illegal immigrant discussion always gets in the way of the wanted discussion. If he hammers out a deal where more vetting happens, and an easier legal status can be found, then the wanted visas will open easier.

It isn’t hard to figure out, yet somehow very smart people are not realizing it. I know people that will go around the world to do a study, and spend years doing hard things. When I bring up reading the books and checking out the average businessman’s problems, it is ignored. The predictions are being made without doing the simple work.

It goes a bit further than that, during Gamergate there were articles constantly being written about how GG believed a specific thing. No one was willing to go to a website and check it out. This isn’t even a book, its a website with comments. All that was needed involved looking it up, and reading a few things.

If you really didn’t feel like reading an entire book on Disruption or Blue Ocean strategy, the wikipedia pages gave amazing synopsis. If you wanted to know what was in Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails, they were on wikileaks the entire time. There is a search bar for going through those emails. Wikileaks is even writing articles using their sources. That’s all it took.

But Videogame Culture also shows how all of these bad things were beaten. Between Brexit, Gamergate, the new Ghostbusters movie, and now the election, the pattern has been pretty much the same. I might have some parts off here, but after a certain point we can just repeat it all without thinking.

First off, the opposing group will make terms for themselves, and their competition. Then people within the culture will buy or promote the product, even if they themselves have no desire to actually use it.

The way Microsoft and Sony were able to get  people buying their consoles was by making new terms. The first was that whoever played the Wii, or online Facebook games was a casual gamer. They lacked the education and sophistication to enjoy something as deep and personal as the games being promoted now. This casual vs hardcore terminology also allowed large companies to say their games were above the grade by calling them AAA. They spent years and hundreds of millions, with a staff of hundreds making it.

Oddly enough, many of these games would be bought, but its unknown how many of them were played. I know I fell for that trap. Hundreds of great games on sale, and then Humble Bundle and others have created a giant list of games that are now owned, and unplayed. People are crowing about how great it is, but I don’t have time to play it. In other words, many of these games are bought, but the majority go unplayed. The owner views it as a way to show how sophisticated they are by owning them.

Within the last year we have been treated to something called Virtue Signalling. This is someone specifically doing something to show they are good people and thus supporting the right causes. They may not care, understand, or even actually support the subject. But they make sure to let you know about it.

The term Casual player was viewed as something of an odd thing. I knew people that played games way more than someone else, but the game itself was called casual based on how it looked or felt. Likewise, the Hardcore gamer was someone who viewed their games and attitude toward it with something like a sophistication.

By coincidence, Brexit, Ghostbusters, GamerGate, and the Election had this as well. Instead of casual, we have some combination of racists, misogynistic privileged person who is obviously white and a redneck. Even when it was pointed out there were people in poor areas, and minorities who were against something it was ignored to continue the subject.

Obviously if the other was a racist redneck, the true voters, moviegoers, gamers, and so forth were hip urbane good people who accepted the world and all of its colors. They were better educated, and knew economic factors.

For the Wii, Nintendo actually fell to the pressure and began to make more hardcore games. You could get several of these great games, but it was also the tipping point for game sales. Wii Fit, Wii Sports, and New Super Mario Wii went on to be some of the best selling games of all time. Pandora’s Tower, Metroid other M, and others did not. The people who bought the Wii, continue to play it even today with friends and family.

Microsoft and Sony made their own Wii type add ons for their consoles, but it did not sell well. I actually liked the tech for the XBox, and own two of them for video editing purposes. They have yet to work. But the newer version was released with the XBox One console. Sony’s wiimote was gone within months. The attempt to reach out to the audience was either a dumbed down game, or a good idea without a lot of good thought for the graphics. It didn’t feel like Wii games, and the addons were soon forgotten.

To be honest, before GamerGate, most companies and groups fell to the pressure of the Hip Urbane types. There were constant articles, and posts about how important it was to remember the owner of Mozilla once donated money to a group, or such and such said something bad.

This pattern has been pointed out for a long time. In John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, we read about a people in the midwest who are forced out of their homes. The technology and ideas of people in New York and California dominate them. The businessmen hide, because there is nothing they can do, the bankers do nothing because they believe the same. When the people from the midwest are forced to move for new jobs, they are treated poorly. And right now, it is happening again.

Steinbeck also wrote about how this cycle happened for centuries. In East of Eden, he wrote about how people applied the title good to someone if an idea worked. If it didn’t work, they applied it bad. The person was sometimes the same, but the people stereotyped and built a narrative. He talked about how the responses to the Civil War were the same was the ones for the Great War. Then he asks who was evil and who was good? It was a fascinating book.

For my own research in intercultural history, I saw the same happen in several countries. In China and Russia the enemy was called Bourgeois, and anyone seen that was punished. It became so bad that scientists were arrested for showing that the leadership was wrong on certain things. The countries said they were promoting true science. Then the government would tell the people to report anyone acting in bourgeois ways. It led to horrible things.

Japan during It’s imperial phase was just the same. People were so caught up with doing what was right, they nearly destroyed the country. The promotion by the generals was that they would fight to the last man. They praised the suicides of people in cities taken over by Americans.

England in the Industrial Revolution went through the same change. An entire country side moved to the city because they were no longer needed for farming.

The divides created by people like Joseph Stalin made all sorts of rivalries. The narratives in the  minds of many people was how dangerous and difficult the other side was.

Why were journalists so caught up? From my experience, they were seeing only the highlights of what was happening. They saw the common narratives they knew, and simply worked from that. If you have to explain everything in 30 seconds, the narrative will have problems. They had to explain the bad guys, the good guys, and what was happening between them. It was just like any sport, only the teams were gamers, or movie goers, or voters.

GamerGate had people respond to the accusations in the one way gamers know how.

When Sony said they were selling Playstation 3s like hotcakes, Penny Arcade called them out on it. The webcomic went out into the Seattle area, and found several PS3s for sale. It’s still a good question on if there was more lying, but gamers worked to correct things as best they could.

When gaming websites began declaring the term Gamer was over, it caught gamers off guard. They responded with evidence that it was not. Then, they began to protest the weird and accelerating actions of news sites on how things were working. Gamer Gaters were obviously evil, straight, white, misogynistic and other such things.

Gamer Gaters responded by letting supporters of their movement speak. Many of them showed themselves to be women, minorities, lesbian and others. They created a hashtag to go against the push. They did questionnaires, and then showed most of them were liberal. Even today, the Kotaku in Action reddit group talks about Bernie Sanders with praise.

But then they did something even bigger. They documented every single thing done to show hate towards the Gamer Gate movement. People comparing a videogame fan push to terrorism, Nazis, and other things by celebrities. Conversations with journalists. Random chats on 4Chan. As someone who read as many of these as I could, it became a very daunting task.

If someone said this mythical game about a guy running around europe was racist because their was no one of color, they were in for a shock. The creators of the game came out and talked about how it was based on their Polish background. In fact, it was entirely made by Polish for the Polish in Poland. In other words, the people making the accusations were being very racist.

Then the leaks arrived. There were chats between various journalists on how the narrative should be controlled. If someone disagreed, they were publicly mocked. Showing the collusion and control of the narrative was the final straw. The journalists only saw the story as what they wanted, not what was happening.

The GG supporters began contacting companies putting advertising into some of the websites, and the adverts were removed. Several companies began to distance themselves from videogame websites, and thus revenue began to drop. At the same time things like Let’s Plays and Vloggers on youtube were ushering in a new form of journalism.

And then it all happened again and again and again. Gamergate predicted the responses, and movements of journalists, and how things would be explained. Even weirder, it showed how to take those things on. Donald Trump won because he used marketing techniques he had read about, but his supporters were using techniques from GG.

When Nintendo realized the gaming press would continue to push the idea that they were doomed, or that somehow they were not part of the subject, it began to ignore them. Nintendo put out Nintendo Directs, or big news stories filled with videos and interviews about games coming out. The president of Nintendo personally interviewed people at his company in amazing articles. He challenged even the views of his greatest game creator.

At the big videogame celebration known as E3, Nintendo continued doing interviews with journalists. They also got a production team, and began to show off games at the show without the need for other journalists. The live events covered Nintendo exclusively, and felt sort of like the old Nintendo Power magazines. There wasn’t a big stage show like the other companies would do. Instead, it was a Nintendo Direct, and then the live show. It made the need for a stand between -a medium or media if you will- unimportant.

In the same vein, Gamergate began to open their own news sites. They also promoted sites that covered more than just the given narrative. Many of the major gaming websites have been suffering ever since.

This brings us to the election. The president elect knows how the media works. He knows how much he needs them. He also knows how much he doesn’t. The media at the moment is having difficulties stopping their own narrative. They are caught within it. Wouldn’t it be simple for President Trump to simply go around them? Youtube exists, as do websites and other things. He knows how to use Twitter, we’ve definitely seen that.

And suddenly, like that, the weirdness takes hold. When I began to study gamergate, I recognized how it worked within intercultural history. The divides, and treatment like some kind of sport is common. Journalists get caught up in it, and forget the narrative they are writing may not be the truth. Then, when we looked at how Nintendo, and Gamergate responded to it, we see a perfect -and most likely- response for president elect Trump.

It took me several weeks to put my emotions and thoughts into such a concise article. When I first wrote it, there was tons of historical timelines, and then comparison. Then I tried to keep it short, but it didn’t work out because I kept having thoughts. If you imagined a 6 year old telling you about their day in first grade, plus TV shows, and then a videogame all at once, that was my mind.

W An entire study’s worth of information happened right in front of us, and I got to watch it knowing each step. It went from looking at videogame culture as a tribal system, to something that can help better the world. It’s a lot to take in. Then I realize it is the perfect spot to end the study. I need to fill in details, but what was needed has been done. I will continue to write about it, and work on studying it more, but what was needed to explain Gamer Culture and how Gamergate worked with it is finished.