As a publishing house founded to counteract the baleful influence of the cultural Marxists who successfully invaded and took over the science fiction and fantasy publishing industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Castalia House has followed the developments of #GamerGate with more than a little interest. It is clear to us, as it may not be clear to many of the participants on either side, that the intrepid gamers of #GamerGate are now engaged in the same struggle that the science fiction writers of America lost before they’d even realized it was upon them. Clark at PopeHat describes the process, which he describes as entryism:
The entryism is of the usual type: people with blue/pink ideals join red / gray groups and try to achieve social status with in those groups, then use that social status to push for the admission of – and promotion of – more blue/pink members. Once the blue/pink members achieve a majority they then change the rules of admission to create a lock on their new conquest (in the case of academia, for example, even blue researchers in the Netherlands of all places, were shocked by how blatant the process was).
The status shaming is also of the usual type: high status blue / pinks follow Alinksy’s battle plan.
First, they pick a low-status target (rule 12). This target is usually a pale, bespectacled Aspergers-ish nerd) for a transgression against the norms they wish to universalize. The high social status pinks paint themselves as victims of a power imbalance, then they use their superior popularity to out-speak the target and push their version of the narrative. Pink allies in the media join in to keep the pressure on (rule 8). This is easy to do, because the act of social shaming is not only fun, but it’s click-bait, so everyone involved not only has lolz, they has cheeseburger (rule 6). The toxic nature of the allegations is usually sufficient to make sure that the target of the attack does not get much, if any, sympathetic press (rule 12, again: “Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions”.)
In computer gaming the attempt at entry came by first establishing a few pinks inside the community (not a problem, because the world of gamer development did not think of itself as politicized), and then using these pink resources to promote, give good reviews to, and bestow awards on pink developers and pink games, even when the games in question are not “games” by the normal definition.
We are very pleased to see that the gaming community, players and professionals, men and women, young and middle-aged, Left and Right, has banded together to reject this latest entryist offensive by the cultural Marxists. One of our authors, the brilliant American military theorist William S. Lind, has observed that “the greatest threat to freedom in America is the left’s ideology of cultural Marxism.” What #GamerGate is doing, whether its members realize it or not, is fighting for freedom.
#GamerGate is not fundamentally about promiscuity, betrayal, misogyny, sexual harassment, online threats, journalistic corruption, doxxing, bullying, hatred, or anything that most of its opponents and even some of its supporters say it is about. It is about men and women across the ideological spectrum retaining their freedom to design, develop, and play the games they wish to design, develop, and play without being subject to a hyper-politicized Game Police or being forced to answer to anyone for anything.
What #GamerGate is fighting in the game world is exactly what Castalia House was founded to oppose in the SF/F publishing world: an extreme subset of the political Left attempting to dictate and control content. And that is precisely why we support it.
UPDATE: Since there has been some debate about our usage of the term “cultural Marxists”, it may be useful for those involved in the debate to reference this post, which cites the relevant portions of an essay by Castalia House author William S. Lind. Lind clarifies the matter by tracing the historic roots of political correctness to the works of two 20th-century Marxist theoreticians, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary.
Sargon of Akkad shows a step-by-step example of social marxists subverting DIGRA an academic institution to study gaming.
Corporate culture, as exemplified by Harvard Business School alumni, has long since capitulated.
And now the President of the PGA has been impeached for tweeting that someone “whined like a little girl”. Because sexist.
It is refreshing to see the tactics so long employed by the Left used to fight back against their conformist statism.
Keep up the good work CH
Help is win the War. It may be too late for others but we still resist.
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Although #GamerGate is primarily crusading to remove unethical journalists and collusion from the video games industry, and these “cultural marxists” were not initially our “enemy”, once they decided to throw their full weight against us, it was imperative that we pushed back.
They want to sanitise, over-protect and coddle anything and everything from the media to those consuming it, and I for one stand against that. I don’t accept thought police, nor “political correctness”. I may agree with some of these people on certain subjects, or not. But that gives them no right to cry oppression and then do the actual oppressing of diversity of thought.
Amen. Well said.
These Social Justice Warriors and their pinkshirting groupies have finally done it. Taking on the one group of people who are used to grinding it till it’s won, then rinse, repeat again and again.
It’s growing beyond #GamerGate too. Hello… advertisers? Coming to your neighborhood HR departments soon.
It turns out that unlike other cultural products, video games have a natural immunity to the SocJus Cult. Historically, this probably has a lot to do with the video game crash of ‘83 followed by decades of Japanese cultural dominance in gaming. Besides this, video games are an international product, and with a lot of games, language is not much of a barrier to enjoyment even if they are not localized. (Eastern European game companies can create great games using available tools and can spot apparatchiks at 100 yards.) Besides that, the modding community means that commoners can create influential cultural products using tools created by wealthy companies with a lot of resources. It’s hard to control all aspects of videogame culture. Remember we had our version of the Kefauver Hearings (the hearings that destroyed the American comic book industry in the 50’s) with the Lieberman hearings, and minor chilling effects aside all those accomplished was increasing the political savvy of gamers old enough to remember them.
Video game journalism though? Well, there is money in it for _publishers_ of videogame review Websites (not as much as in the videogames themselves, it mainly acts as a destructive parasite on the industry these days) and they basically considered that barely competent hack writers would be fine for the text. This was a fertile breeding ground for the SocJus disease. People who thought the would graduate to be important writers ended up stuck writing about nerd stuff for nerds, and the SocJus Cult told them they could be important political figures, if only they could destroy the video gamers. A Devil’s bargain many were happy to jump on.
Ultimately, though, the fact that they are dominating only the “journalism” and not the videogame companies themselves (which they can’t because if they turn one company into a sad propaganda mill, there’s a Ruritanian start up ready to eat their lunch with artistically superior fun video games) means they can’t actually win without government intervention on their behalf. They’ll work on making things as unpleasant as possible for as long as they can.