Artgames after GamerGate

Videogame culture is obsessed with development. But gaming as a hobby is still widely associated with wasted time, squandered potential and backwards attitudes. Even as the average gamer grows older, gaming culture remains dogged by the same old question: when will videogames grow up? This question took on renewed relevance with the emergence of Gamergate in 2014. The movement’s attacks on feminists and “social justice warriors” came to be seen as a catalyst for the broader rightward turn that produced the alt-right and the Trump presidency. This introductory chapter begins the book’s investigation of how artgame creators of the 2010s responded to Gamergate, and how their games linked gaming’s growing pains to a broader sense of disorientation, disillusionment and decline within 2010s US culture. Defining some key terms, it also outlines three traits that the book’s main case studies share: their appropriation of materials and mechanics from canonical videogames; their ambivalent stance on games and gaming culture; and their interest in auto/biography. The chapter ends with a synopsis of the subsequent chapters.

An irreverent exercise in alternate history, Sonic Dreams Collection claims to comprise leaked prototypes of four cancelled Sonic the Hedgehog games. The minigames that make up the collection mimic the look of titles like Sonic Adventure (Sonic Team, Sega, 1998) to portray gaming culture as fundamentally melancholic—a culture apparently incapable of accepting that the past has passed and moving on. Tracing some of the histories the collection alludes to, this chapter argues that gaming culture’s melancholy streak helps to explain the violent passions that surfaced during Gamergate, while showing how it has inspired more critical engagements with gaming’s past—engagements like Dreams Collection itself.

Cassie McQuater has described her browser game Black Room as ‘very autobiographical’, detailing its basis in her episodes of insomnia and anxiety and her memories of childhood sleepovers spent watching her grandmother (also an insomniac) playing Nintendo games. Rather than representing these experiences directly, Black Room makes them the point of departure for an oneiric interactive collage, distributing assets borrowed from a wide array of retro videogames across a labyrinthine patchwork of pixel art. Drawing on theories of life-writing and auto/biography, this chapter shows how McQuater enlists characters from classic games to reframe her own past, pose questions about subjectivity, agency and play, and confront gaming culture’s toxic legacy of sexism and misogyny.

Videogames have long embodied fantasies of technological progress. But in the context of the climate emergency critics have begun to ask how games can address ecological frailty and the foreclosure of the future. David Kanaga’s Oikospiel: Book I offers one answer to this question. Using second-hand models and assets—some bought from ‘asset stores’, others poached from canonical classics like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo EAD, 1998)—the game draws links between ecological devastation, the exploitation of gameworkers, the vicissitudes of intellectual property law, and the rapacity of contemporary capitalism. For Kanaga, the rise of movements like Gamergate and the alt-right must be understood in relation to mounting levels of inequality and exploitation under neoliberal capitalism, the failure of the emancipatory promise of the internet, and the increasingly inescapable reality of climate breakdown.

What was Gamergate? How should we understand its relationship with other reactionary movements of the 2010s? Are gamers peculiarly amenable to far-right ideas, and if so why? And do videogames as a medium still have a shot at shedding their stigma and maturing into a credible, widely popular medium of expression? This concluding chapter reviews the book’s attempts to derive answers to these questions from its five main case studies. In doing so, it also considers other efforts to make sense of Gamergate, paying particular attention to two post-Gamergate novels: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Zevin, Chatto and Windus, 2022) and We are the End (Garcia, Galley Beggar Press, 2017). In one, Gamergate is a spur to realise videogames’ artistic potential; in the other it confirms that it is time to give up on games. Refusing this dichotomy, my case studies show that it was precisely because videogames had already failed to fulfil the promises made for them in the 1990s that they were able to speak so convincingly to a collective loss of faith in neoliberal dreams of prosperity, peace and progress.