By this point you probably know the stitch, but just in case, once more with gusto. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to interview someone who’s a notorious figure in the whole GamerGate debacle. Today, though, more than GamerGate, I’d like to focus on its sister tag #NotYourShield. This side of the story is one of the ugliest, and to talk about it I invited a fellow Tokusatsu fan and all around awesome person: Ashton Liu.
Disclaimer: Me and Ashton knew each other long before this interview but not before the summer of 2014. We’ve interacted with each other on Twitter and we’re on good terms, but we’ve never met face to face.
Some people may have not noticed you on the tags. Somehow, considering your tweets have a tendency to go viral. Mind introducing yourself?
My name is Ashton Liu, I’m a longtime gamer (over 25 years now), huge fan of tokusatsu and Asian culture, hobbyist cosplayer, and a medical professional.
A medical professional and a tokusatsu fan/cosplayer/gamer? Aren’t those things mutually exclusive according to most people?
Well, we used to think gaming culture and perpetually offended moral troglodytes were mutually exclusive but here we are.
Speaking of politically correct outrage culture and their assault on gaming, I guess you’ve heard of #GamerGate. How did you first come in contact with the vicenda?
I was ambivalent to the original scandal – I had always known game journalists were a corrupt, ethically challenged group. They crossed a line, though, when they started running hit pieces on people based on little more than hearsay and incited mass harassment of a community of suicidally depressed individuals. Before they were only really writing poor pieces on why one should buy game A because of reason B, which honestly affected nothing other than their own reputation. Now, they were actively targeting people’s personal lives in order to signal boost their nonsense, and the rest of the industry was cheering them on. It was one of the most unethical, immoral things I’d ever seen from any industry at large.
What exactly do you refer to when you say ‘Incited mass harassment of a community of suicidally depressed individuals’?
A female indie game developer, the darling of bloggers at sites like Kotaku and Polygon, accused a community of suicidally depressed individuals (the name of which I will refrain from mentioning due to their express wishes) of harassing her. She offered no proof of this harassment other than two posts on the forums of said community that – while incendiary to be sure – did not come close to harassment. In fact, there is question whether the posters on the forum actually posted these things since it was all anonymous. Instead of verifying her claims of harassment, the game journalism industry took them at face value and went on to print these allegations without an ounce of evidence, inciting many of their readers to harass and attack them. The words “witch hunt” and “mob lynching” come to mind.
That sounds positively disgusting. Are these the same people who declared all gamers dead and a bunch of woman-hating overweight white cisgendered basement dwellers to ‘protect minorities’?
I don’t believe the exact same people were involved in both, but most of them were involved with each other personally, whether it be on a friendly or romantic level.
Let’s segue into #Notyourshield. What can you tell us about it? How did it start?
#NotYourShield was created in reaction to game journalists (and some indie developers) accusing us of all being “straight white men.” It was first created by Toshi_TNE and JMiller, with many of us, such as Logical Minority (now LewdLogic) and I joining the hashtag in its infancy in order to give legitimacy to its claims that the gamer subculture is not culturally or racially homogeneous, that people of many creeds, races, and cultures have found their home in the subculture, and that just because game journalists don’t understand the subculture doesn’t mean they should be denouncing it.
By comparison, the demographics within the game journalism industry is fairly homogeneous – mostly white, straight men with a small number of women and minorities, and most (of not all) of them subscribe to radical leftist western culture. The irony of a homogenized group such as their accusing ours of being racially and culturally insensitive speaks for itself.
I heard the GamerGate and Notyourshield detractors throw the word ‘sockpuppet’ around a lot when referring to the latter. What does that mean?
They use the term sockpuppet to describe people in NotYourShield because they believe we are all fake accounts secretly being run by white people in order to give the appearance of diversity. They can’t fathom that any minorities or women could ever support NotYourShield or GamerGate so they create absurd conspiracy theories as to how there could possibly be minorities and women supporting the GamerGate and NotYourShield hashtags. I personally have been called a sockpuppet on multiple occasions with at least one detractor declaring that the photo I had of myself in my display photo was a “stock photo” I found off Google search.
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