Ok, I can't let this slide. You can't seriously buy into this moral panic 'gamers are white supremacist sexist!' crap.
I'm probably going to regret even replying to this, but I will anyway.
I'm not making any blanket statement about all gamers being racist, sexist, white supremacist, or whatever. It's a large and diverse community. And any large community and subculture is going to have problematic elements to it. You can't define a community by the extremes.
But you CAN make conclusions based on the scale and severity of problematic issues, on what the community in general is willing to tolerate, and what it doesn't. And the event in question, while it still encompassed a minority of the gaming community, was still quite large in scale - and was triggered by things that represent bigger issues underneath.
For the record, no, I didn't learn about it from reading a Kotaku article, but by being present for the whole thing. That includes multiple times watching my Twitter replies get flooded for hours by and endless stream for simply including a single word in a tweet. And from watching friends of mine undergo much worse than that - such as lies being deliberately spread far and wide, having employers contacted, or ridiculous conspiracy theories about who was secretly paying them. (As far as the comment about drawing a line from the gaming community event in question through to the rise of white supremacy, I will simply mention that there's a key individual that was recently featured in an in-depth Buzzfeed article. And yes, in-depth Buzzfeed articles does seem to be an oxymoron, but there it is.)
Games, like any form of media, can not only tolerate criticism and critique, but
deserve such things, as it makes them better. That critique can address the whole gamut, from technical issues, business practices, or quality concerns, to analysis of the stories being told and the characters represented in them. To try and claim such critiques are inappropriate - or even worse, to harass and threaten those who make them because of disagreement with the critiques - is a level of toxicity that undermines the entire community and form of media. Critique is not censorship. And it is up to game developers and publishers to determine how they wish to take such critiques.
I feel the gaming community is still a community very much divided - which is probably appropriate, given the political state of the US now, and many areas of the world. I hope someday things can change, and concerns can be listened to and respected. That maybe we can reach a point where all of us can enjoy games together.
