it's hard to look at the recent Battlefront 2 debacle with EA and not be
a little awestruck. With the release of Star Wars Episode 8 just around the
corner and an exclusive contract with Disney to create all their triple A
Star Wars games EA should have had a license to print money with this game
cut to Black Friday however and the shelves were lined with unsold copies of
Battlefront 2, EA had lost over three billion dollars in stock value, and they
were being investigated by a number of state and world governments what could
have caused this? Was God punishing EA for decades of shady business practices
no not God just a couple hundred thousand pissed-off gamers fed up with
EA's microtransaction bullshit
this incredible show of force by the gaming community has got me thinking
about a book I read recently called Devil's Bargain by Joshua Green.
Devil's Bargain details the rise of Steve Bannon and the 2016 election, and there's a
great story in there about a time when Bannon fell afoul of a gaming community
with many parallels to the current battlefront controversy. Bannon's had a
very strange career path throughout his life he went from being a navy officer
to an investment banker to a Hollywood producer and then in 2005 he decided to
go to Hong Kong to work for a company called Internet Gaming Entertainment, or IGE
IGE's business was gold farming in World of Warcraft these were the days
before gaming companies figured out they could just directly sell in-game assets
to players through micro transactions so third-party companies like IGE
started cropping up to occupy that niche themselves what they'd do is hire hundreds
of low-paid Chinese workers to play World of Warcraft all day every day in
order to generate in-game gold which they could then sell to Warcraft players
for real world money the whole thing seemed to be a lucrative if not entirely
legal business venture and Bannon even convinced his old firm Goldman Sachs to
invest the better part of sixty million dollars in IGE. Blizzard frowned on the
practice of real money trading but they were willing to turn a blind eye so
things looked pretty good for Bannon and his company
Blizzard turned a blind eye; the players didn't. Serious anger start to build in
Warcraft communities towards IGE the Chinese gold farmers and the crooked
WoW players who bought themselves an unfair advantage over everyone else
players started to gather on forums such as wowhead thottbot and Alakazam
all sites eventually owned by IGE ironically enough. From there, players
organized campaigns to shut down illegal real world trading sites and the kicked
blizzard into gear pressuring them to come down harder on gold farmers there
was even a multi-million dollar class-action lawsuit filed against IgE
by a Warcraft player. The whole episode forced IGE to dump its toxic assets and
reform into a new company, Affinity Media, with Bannon as its CEO.
Affinity maintained its control over its gaming sites but it had lost millions of
dollars and its gold farming operations were completely disbanded.
Bannon never forgot about those gamers who did him in, however. He looked at what happened to IGE
as a testament of the sheer power these online gaming communities have to
mobilize and make real changes in issues their passionate about.
Bannon saw in gaming a collection of young relatively educated relatively affluent
people who are extremely savvy in using new technology to coordinate with each other
and he saw that this could be very powerful in the world of politics
the only drawback was that these gamers didn't really want to get together and
change the world, they just wanted to game
the very thing that drew gamers together into these potential political juggernauts also
made them by and large disinterested in real world politics as Bannon got deeper
invested in Breitbart though he would start to wonder how he could get these
guys over on his side.
"Welcome to our multipart video series exploring the roles and representations of women in video games."
Bannon got his golden opportunity in 2014 with the gamergate controversy building off the growing
backlash against feminists like Anita Sarkeesian, gamergate, while nominally
about ethics in games journalism quickly became colored by the discontent
some gamers felt having their favorite games criticized. Bannen editor-in-chief
of Breitbart News by now realized he could draft off this discontent and use
it to tap some of the political capital latent in gaming. He just needed to find
the right pivot point a hinge to swing all that energy building up against
Anita sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn into his right-wing nationalist agenda.
Bannon found this pivot point; it's name Milo Yiannopoulos
"Gamergate takes you in these crazy directions because in a way it's sort of the most"
"all-encompassing war and the most all-encompassing event that's ever"
"happened on the internet because it brought in everybody"
Yiannopoulos took a somewhat condescending attitude towards gamers when he started covering
Gamergate but this condescension came mixed with sycophantic admiration as he
courted the movement for Breitbart. In his articles he painted a very
contradictory picture of who gamers are, both a marginalized group of pathetic
shut-ins as well as powerful individualists heroically stemming corruption in their
midst, both simple enthusiasts who just wanted a functional consumer press and
natural libertarians forming the last stand against cultural Marxism totally
corrupting the West you can clearly hear the ideas of Steve Bannon in these
articles as Milo reframed the central gripes of Gamergate in the language of
cultural libertarianism and economic nationalism. What started on Twitter as
'it's about ethics in game journalism' transformed into 'Gamergaters should
concentrate on the very real concerns they have and have had for a decade with
a press that swamped with discredited far-left ideology and unintelligent
poorly trained writers refuses to tell basic truths' Anita Sarkeesian is annoying
became industry after industry is toppled over publishing journalism TV
all lie supine beneath the crowing cackling and censorious battle axes of the
third wave feminist and social justice causes
Breitbart's traffic exploded after Gamergate and Bannon was able to use
those numbers of tech-savvy new readers to help him bombard social media and
plant his ideas into the mainstream he used them to shape the narrative around
the election the same way he used Milo Yiannopoulos to shape the narrative around Gamergate.
There were a myriad of factors that went into Trump's winning in 2016
but one that must be counted is how Bannon was able to harness the political
capital lying dormant in gaming communities and transform it into
Trump's personal online vanguard aka the alt-right who knows to what extent
gaming culture ultimately ended up influencing the politics of 2016 again
"we're gonna win so much we're gonna win at every level we're gonna win"
"economically we're gonna win with the economy"
Looking back at Yiannopoulos' Gamergate articles, I kept noticing how he repeatedly emphasized that gamergate
is inherently non-political he promised his readers not to be like those nasty
SJWs he promised he wouldn't try to stamp gaming with his personal politics
even though that was his and Bannon's intention all along this makes sense as
a strategy I guess. Gamergate was started largely by people who were sick of
having feminist critiques put to their favorite games people who just want to
gaming to be unmarred by the real-world muck of politics I don't think this was
ever possible on a theoretical level, politics touches everything in some way
but if there's anything this story shows us it's that it's no longer possible on
a practical level either. Video games are a huge industry, its consumers are a
young and growing demographic and when this community flexes its muscles it can
cause billions of dollars to evaporate. People are taking notes and even if
gamers don't want to see themselves as part of a political bloc, they can't help
outside observers like Bannon thinking of ways to exploit their growing power
gamers are a part of the political landscape now whether they like it or
not and the only choice they really have to make is whether they want to enter
that world consciously and as active participants
or else unconsciously in the service of someone else's agenda
You're in the game now suckers it's either play
or be played