source here if you want to read it in the original site

So I was googling about autism and gamergate, as I do often these days and among the blogs linked I found a statement by a certain lizzie who was escaping gamergate because what the aGG does, and then in the comment section, I found this gold, this the simplest, purest, description of the originator of our rage and the truest to the causes of this all that I can find.

For context, the essay below was written in reaction to Leigh Alexander's remarks, “They don’t know how to dress or behave….. ‘Games culture’ is a petri dish of people who know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online ‘wars’ about social justice or ‘game journalism ethics……”

So without further ado here's what Mr. Bones (twitter handle @wellplayd_ggate) had to say about it.

I do not think gaming is toxic to women, misogynistic, or otherwise anti-female. There are absolutely many women who are disgusted, scared, or disapprove of gaming, and some of those women are disgusted by the overtly sexualised characters, or scared by the gender-based insults and casual slang use of ‘rape’ they encounter in gaming. But gaming is not toxic to women, misogynistic, or anti-female. It is simply a certain culture of interaction, a specific set of rules on how to interact, a shared cluster of social norms.

This cluster diverges (sharply) from what we might consider ‘normal society’. Who is important and who is not, who’s high-status and who isn’t – this is implicit, hidden, obscured in normal society. Figuring out who is ‘cool’ (and therefore social suicide to disagree with) or ‘uncool’ (and therefore socially rewarding to mock) is a task requiring well-developed social skills. Knowing where you stand in this social hierarchy (and therefore how to climb in it – who to be friends with, who to dump) requires a finely-honed social intuition.

In gaming, one look at the scoreboard tells you all of that. Who is to be respected? The player with a 4:1 k:d ratio on 350 ping. Who is to be mocked? The player on the bottom of the DPS chart. Simple. These evaluations require no social skills to make, and more importantly, no social skills to achieve. How pretty or funny you are, how much of a social butterfly you are, has no bearing on your in-game results. If you perform better than the other person, the game puts your name above them.

Contrast this with normal society. Don’t be a show-off. Stop bragging. Don’t outshine your boss. Don’t outdo your colleagues too much, you’ll make them look bad. For someone without great social skills, it very often seems that outperforming someone will get you knocked to the bottom of the social hierarchy. Doing better than someone makes you worse than them!?

The appeal of gaming to a certain type of person might be clearer now.

The gender skew of gaming is evidence that there are more men than women who really take to this environment. That is not misogynistic or sexist; we know an actual gender difference is that there is greater variance in the male brain and psychology – “more geniuses and more idiots”, as it was once put. A greater variance in the social skills of men means the bottom 10% of people will be mostly men. Gaming eschews the need for social skills in order to be respected, everyone wants respect, the least socially skilled will obviously find gaming very attractive, the least socially skilled are mostly men because of a quirk of our biological gender differences, gaming is therefore mostly men. (Analogously, competitive sport rewards physical capability, the most physically capable are mostly men due to a quirk of our biological gender differences, sports careers are therefore mostly men.)

Now, those insults and slurs that get thrown around. When you feel a moment of dislike for a person, this could be expressed as an insult. In normal society, you can only get away with insulting someone waaay down at the bottom of the social standing. (Think about who ‘mean girl’ cliques at high school mocked.) The closer they are to an average social standing, the more you have to modulate your insult into a criticism. The higher in social standing they are, the more you have to further modulate that – into silence. (“Oh my god, you can’t just tell the boss he’s wrong!”)

In gaming, you just insult the person. You know and they know it’s just a momentary expression of dislike, neither of you thinks the other is on the lowest rungs of the gaming respect hierarchy, and the actual question of where you both stand will be answered by the scoreboard at the end of the round. It’s just trash talk.

People low in social status are used to being insulted, because they are acceptable targets for insults. If someone not low in social status decides to join the community, they are expected to play by the rules of the gaming community. If instead they try to play by normal society’s rules, and take offence at being insulted when they ‘clearly aren’t a loser’, of course they won’t be welcomed by gamers.

“Get a life, loser” is the slogan of the person who can’t handle the banter, who wants to be respected in the gaming community just because they are respected in normal society.

“Who gives a shit about your stupid score. You keep playing your silly games, I’m going to go [sleep with attractive people/have fun at a party/etc] because society respects me and it doesn’t respect you” is that person retreating from the gamer hierarchy and trying to appeal to the normal social hierarchy. But gamers retreated from the social hierarchy to the gaming hierarchy precisely because they didn’t like being stuck at the bottom of the social hierarchy!

An analogy: a burly blue-collar construction worker walks into a swanky cocktail party and starts acting like he owns the place. Anyone who tells him he’s being disrespectful, he challenges them to a fistfight (which he would obviously win). This person has come into their community, demanded respect while refusing to play by their rules of how respect works, and when challenged uses his better standing in another hierarchy (capacity for physical violence) – one that the community has deliberately avoided – to reinforce his unfair demand for unearned respect. Pretty much everyone everywhere thinks this dude is in the wrong. Likewise if a swanky cocktail-party guy tried to pull this shit in a pub full of construction workers. This is exactly the kind of shit that our “screw your games, I can get laid, can you?” person is trying to pull in the gaming community, and that person is every bit as wrong for doing it.

Now look at what games journalism is doing with those ‘gamers are dead’ articles. “You are low on the social hierarchy. You need to respect people higher on the social hierarchy than you. Stop behaving like the gaming community and start behaving like the social hierarchy dictates. You need to live up to the social hierarchy’s standards, because gaming is for everyone now.” Etc.

In the same way that the world of the game is an escape from reality (despite the fact that both you and the game exist within reality), the gaming community is a respite from the usual rules of society (despite taking place within society). One of the rules of society is that you have to be nice to women. That rule used to be expressed as “it’s chivalrous not to swear in front of women”; now the rule is expressed as “it’s sexist/misogynistic to use a woman’s gender to insult her”.

Well, you come to our community, you play by our rules. And those rules are “everyone insults everyone, nobody gives a shit, and what matters is the score on the board at the end of the round.” Nowhere in our rule book does it say a women’s gender is off-limits. That’s in society’s rule book. Stop trying to make us live by your rules just because you want to join our community but aren’t willing to behave by our rules.

So you see what Leigh Alexander and all the others are doing? They don’t have any respect in the gaming hierarchy, they’ve been a joke to us for decades. They do have respect the social hierarchy, though. Quite a lot of respect, seeing as they’re journalists. They are trying to tear down our community, declare it over, because they like living in the social hierarchy. They take the side of women who were ‘scared off’ from gaming – yet the constant refrain from women actually in gaming is “if a few mean words scares you off, if you aren’t willing to prove yourself by putting up a good score, you don’t want to be a gamer, you wouldn’t enjoy it at all”. Games journalists want us to give these women the respect that society says they are due, but they haven’t earned any respect!

But much, much more importantly, these journalists want to take away the respect that gamers have earned – with hours of practice and years of dedication – because society says we don’t deserve it.

We’re not an immature boys’ club, refusing to let any girls in. We are losers, misfits who’ve banded together to give each other a loving, supportive community – a tropical paradise island in the ocean of uncaring disdain that is society-as-experienced-by-the-outcasts.

Journalists like Leigh aren’t “breaking into the boys’ club”, they’re breaking into our homes.

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu describes several types of ground that wars may be fought on, and advises tactics and strategies for each on how to do battle, plus whether and when to retreat. One of the grounds he describes is the last resort, grounds which you cannot retreat from. He calls these places ‘death grounds’. Here he eschews his usual pragmatic advice and simply says:

“On death ground, fight.”

To my knowledge, there have been two members of GamerGate who’ve tried to commit suicide in the last six months. There are undoubtedly more. On both attempts, the community as one threw itself into the challenge of getting that person to safety. A person whose anguish society couldn’t care less about, who was in that situation in part because of society.

I’ve gone to work exhausted and bleary-eyed because I and fellow guildmembers stayed up all night running 5-man dungeons and shooting the shit on Vent. Not for the loot, but because one of those guys had just gotten expelled from school for retaliating against a bully, and was preparing to kill himself. I don’t know where he is now, whether he got help or not, whether he’s even still alive, but I do know that we saved his life that night.

Since we’re coming clean…

If I hadn’t found games when I did, I would not be writing this today. I would be dead. From overdose or stepping in front of a train, I would be dead. Gaming gave me a community when society kicked me out. Gaming gave me respect when society spat on me, kicked me, mocked my pain.

Gaming – no, gamers – saved my fucking life.

For a small part of GamerGate, Sun Tzu is right in a very literal sense: gaming is our death ground. We cannot retreat from this community, we cannot let society take this from us. It’s just about all some of us have left.

Felicia Day, in her now-infamous blog post, wrote about how she hated socialising and felt awkward about it (and I feel for her) but when she saw a gamer, she knew she could immediately get along with them (which is awesome!). They had a shared interest, they could skip right past the awkwardness to being friendly. That’s really great. Imagine someone with Felicia Day’s social anxiety, but none of her charm, wit, beauty, or sex appeal. Girls like that, they don’t just face awkwardness, but outright hostility when they socialise (think of high school cliques, yet again). But they still have that hotline to friendship with other gamers, no matter what. So it’s no surprise that women in NotYourShield feel so strongly that gaming is one of the most welcoming places ever for them. Now think about what journalists are trying to do – they are trying to make gaming accept women in the same way that the rest of society already accepts women. You know, the society that isn’t accepting of women who don’t behave like the fragile snowflakes they are supposed to be?

We had a good thing going. As Felicia points out, though, now she crosses the street out of fear of gamers hating women. Journalists lay the blame on ‘hardcore gamers’ and GamerGate. But if we are clinging to the way we have always been, if we are lashing out because we like things the way they are, and journalists are the ones bringing change with their ‘gamers are dead’ articles, then Felicia Day should have always been terrified of gamers, all her life, and the 28th of August should have been the day she stopped crossing the street, because she was no longer afraid.

Instead, this is when her fear began. What does that say about the “change” journalists are bringing? And what does that say about the culture in gaming, the one that journalists claim has been “left alone for years” and “allowed to fester for too long”? Who’s really the bad guy here? Who’s really responsible for the recent wave of hate that’s terrorising women? It can’t be gamers, because we’re stuck in our rut, unwilling to change, remember? We’ve been like this forever. So where oh where could the hate be coming from? Could it be that, by trying to open up gaming to the rest of society, journalists have opened up gaming to to the very people who mock and ridicule and hate those loser gamers? Who mocked and ridiculed and hated these socially awkward misfits so much that they ended up finding solace in a culture where taunts are so commonplace as to be meaningless, where most insults are known to have no hate behind them? Where the few occasions of actual malice were resolved by putting a better score in the board?

Could it be that a woman in gaming is now ‘living in fear’ because journalists are trying to bring in all the people she came to gaming to escape from?

Games journalists are out to tear this community down and replace it with one that respects them by default, because they are scrubs who want to be respected but are too fucking lazy to git gud.

They want to trample our version of equality – “behind the keyboard, everyone is equal” (thank you, based Hotwheels) – and import their ‘women are fragile snowflakes’ brand of feminism. They want to trample our codes of conduct, our cultural context for words, and declare wider society the arbiter of how this subculture should behave.

We built our little outpost, our safe space away from society, and now our journalists – who treated us with contempt and thought they could get away with rampant favouritism because hey, it’s not like society respects their audience, so why should they? – now, our journalists are trying to demolish our safe haven so they can pave over it with yet more society. If they want things to be like the rest of society so bad, well, the rest of society is right there, go get a job in it you dishonest hacks and leave us gamers alone.

We aren’t worried that you’re coming to steal our games.

We’re scared to fucking death that you’re coming to destroy our community.

On death ground, fight.