How #GamerGate Made Me Red Pill

I have a confession to make.  Before GamerGate, I didn’t know what the red pill was.

It was August of last year.  I was blissfully unaware, basking in the ignorance of a world where games were just games.  They were either fun or they weren’t, and judged only on that merit.  Sure, the reviewers at Polygon and Kotaku could get a bit preachy, but whatever, they’re probably getting paid by the word and needed filler content.  Meanwhile, I had (and still have) a lengthy back catalog of games on Steam to get through and was looking forward to the inevitable bundles and price drops so I could pick up a PS4.  Life was nice and uncomplicated.

Then Zoe Quinn got outed as a corrupt slut and my perception of the gaming world was turned upside down.

I was in Reddit Gaming when threads started being deleted en masse, and I knew something was wrong—this never happened on Reddit!  Couple that with the report of Phil Fish’s company Polytron being “doxxed” and then suddenly for sale, nearly simultaneously, and I became more suspicious.  Somewhere in there was an article by Return Of Kings author Runsonmagic which made a damn compelling argument that Anita Sarkeesian faked the death threats against herself, and I became convinced that something was wrong with this picture.  That led me to Reddit’s The Red Pill and reading Michael’s Story from the sidebar.

I remember reading that and looking back at my past and remembering the things women said to me as well—things like “You’re such a nice guy, never change.”  I remembered my frustration at a system where women use the good boys and fuck the bad boys.  Mostly I remember being in a rage for weeks after I discovered the truth.

Since then, I’ve done some reading.  I’ve read The 48 Laws of Power (a couple of times, actually) and Mastery. I’ve devoted myself more to the gym and less to the games, which were hard to play for a while there.  I have no doubt improved my mind and body more in the last four months than in the last thirty years of life.  Even better, I have become a better father to my sons, whom society taught me to repress and punish for the instincts which come to them naturally.

Life turns on a dime.  None of this would have happened without #GamerGate, and I am grateful.  After all, Newton was right—objects at rest tend to stay at rest.  So here are my (less personal) reasons for why I am glad the feminists fucked up and gave me some Newtonian force.

1. GamerGate neatly exposes third wave feminism for what it is

Once upon a time, I thought feminism was fighting for actual equality.  That always made me curious on the outset, because the real equality that the suffragettes were fighting for—the vote, the right to work, etc.—had already been accomplished.  But I didn’t give it any thought because I had been taught by the public school system not to question such things.

My post-GamerGate view is much different.  Now I see that when they say “equality,” what they mean is “superiority.” This is why rape claims and child support courts work in a way that no other criminal or civil proceeding work—by assuming that the accused (male, always male) is guilty until proven innocent.  Remember, we used to think that 1 in 5 college women had been raped.  That statistic has now been shown for what it was—a farce.  The real number is 1 in 167, and a slightly higher incidence rate for women NOT in college.

Now that we know that men aren’t lurking and waiting to rape anything attached to a vagina, have the feminists reverted on their claims? Nope.  If anything, they’re doubling down.  And nowhere is this more apparent than in GamerGate.

2. The enemy has exposed themselves, and taken damage as a result

Even shortly after GamerGate started, it wasn’t hard to see who was on one side of the issue and who was on the other—the social justice warriors showed their solidarity in pushing out their simultaneous “Gamers Are Dead” articles.  They have since taken punishment as a result, and learned a hard lesson—that more than anything, gamers want to win.  It’s in their makeup.  This natural competitiveness makes games fun and interesting to gamers, which is why the feminists (who don’t actually play games) completely missed the indicator that upsetting this apple cart was a bad idea.

Gawker Media, owners of Kotaku, reportedly took a “seven figure loss” as a direct result of GamerGate, and Sam Biddle was demoted shortly before Nick Denton was forced to restructure the leadership of his company.  Gamasutra has plummeted in the Alexa Ratings from in the 8,000’s to nearer 12,000.  Now that the FTC is enforcing compliance with their rules by making these websites label their paid-for advertising articles, we’re finding that as much as 80% of the articles on sites like Kotaku are actually “native advertising” (their fancy term for a paid advertisement that looks the same as a regular article).  Meanwhile, some advertisers are pulling their support for these sites completely.

Some of these sites, like Kotaku, are taking pains to win you back (if you were wondering why YOU were voted Gamer of the Year on a site that declared gamers “dead,” this is surely the reason).  Others, like Polygon, are continuing the mantra, with Ben Kuchera writing yet another hit piece on GamerGate after being called out on Twitter for declaring Tetris to be Soviet propaganda.  None of these sites deserve mercy, though.  Like a forest during the dry season, some things need to burn down before they can be rejuvenated.

3. GamerGate gives red pill men a pulpit from which to evangelize

In a recent satire article I wrote on the anti-GamerGate playbook, commentor Chris Jackson said the following:

I thought Gamergate was about gaming as the last safe space for the increasingly marginalized and repressed Western male. About gaming as a place to escape the overbearing schoolmarms and finger-wagging girlfriends – either into a world of heroic fantasy, or into predominantly male groups with a male oriented culture. A place to be men, among men in a society that has outlawed every other male-exclusive group. I thought it was about one glorious stand against the endless crusade of political correctness that has sanitized and sucked the life out of every other facet of our lives.

If Gamergate really is about advertisers and journalism outfits blah blah blah (no one seems to care about this in auto journalism), then I officially don’t give a shit about it.

He was right to question why red pill men should care about GamerGate at all, if it is only about ethics in journalism.  There are obvious parallels to feminism’s encroachment in society, and we should be taking a stand everywhere it happens, lest we suffer the fate of science fiction.  But there is a much more important reason to raise the flag over GamerGate, and it has to do with game.

A fundamental of game is the approach—in fact, this is where game begins and ends for most of us.  Your first words and actions in speaking to women largely determine the success you will have, and any insight you gain to aid you is worthwhile, because it increases your odds of success.  Better the approach that says something that appeals to her than the approach she doesn’t care about.

Enter GamerGate.

The great thing about GamerGate is that it isn’t only gamers or men which are affected—a large number of women have also taken a stand to support GamerGate, and now we have common ground.  GamerGate has also stirred a number of largely complacent beta males into action, men who would normally have tuned out the world playing video games and are now active in the social conversation surrounding GamerGate.  And here is our opportunity.  A place to show them a more truthful philosophy, a place to show them that the feminists and SJW’s who are ruining gaming are ALSO ruining other aspects of their life.  Maybe, like me, they didn’t understand the system they found themselves the victim of.  Maybe that was why they turned to video games in the first place.

This is our moment.  The red pill and the manosphere are still growing, but they are niche.  Gaming, on the other hand, makes more money than movies and music COMBINED.  It is very mainstream.  And using GamerGate as the gateway to more red pill knowledge, like I (and maybe many of you) did, would help more men.

So if you have a friend who is blue pill, help them out.  Tell them your story, and if you have a story like mine, leave it in the comments below.  It’s a painful transition, to be sure—finding out you’ve been lied to and manipulated by a culture of hatred against men is never fun, but the enlightenment afterward is worth all the pain.

Read More:  The Fantasy Of Women Being Equal To Men