Stephen Colbert Talks To Anita Sarkeesian About #GamerGate

It has been spanning mainstream media for a while now and this past week Stephen Colbert picked up #GamerGate for his own show, The Colbert Report.

Now as a political satirist, Colbert is all about making jokes and having a few shots at his guests but sometimes he can really dig into them about whatever he feels is necessary; naturally, they would have to agree to appear on the show so they are typically expectant of some shot-taking anyway. However this week when Colbert spoke about #GamerGate, most shots were fired directly at gamers of the world, with a happy audience to laugh along.

I have to say that even though it was satire, I winced whenever the audience reacted with resounding applause and cheers every time Colbert accused gamers of being cave trolls who live virgin lives with a controller in their hands, and so on. I can take a joke, but damn that cut a bit. More so the thought that all the gamers of the world were men, and all the pro-#GamerGate tweeters were men. Wrong on both accounts. But hey, satire.

I thought the world’s opinion of gamers had improved. Unmistakeably though, the recent opinion of gamers since #GamerGate has undoubtedly dropped. We’re ‘weird’ again. Worse, we’re now actively harmful.

And once again we got to watch something that was fundamentally an argument of harassment versus harassment as Colbert spoke to Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian about her stand in the entire #GamerGate ordeal, having endured the likes of death and bomb threats from “male gamers” who were unhappy with her work and wished to silence her. In the past I’ve praised her recent videos because I think they’re excellent works (regardless of whom it’s claimed actually writes them) but again it felt so framing to see BioWare’s name dragged through the mud with Dragon Age: Origins, a game that allowed homosexual relationships and fully customisable (black, white, male, female) characters but got called out because it was trying to be thematic to a certain time in our own human history. But I digress.

For her part, Sarkeesian spoke well and did her best to keep the topic to harassment of women. I guess you can’t really fault her for that, she is after all trying to do a job and while I’ll certainly agree that she milked this entire fiasco to its absolute limit, it is gamers who respond to her who are the problem because after all, someone making loud noises is nobody without a crowd to hear them, and the more abuse she gets (which by the way is just not cool, guys) the more ammo she gets to use against her abusers. So stop, okay?

Check out the video above — I made sure to find a full video that doesn’t cut out Colbert’s satirising of videogames for everyone — and see what the world thinks of us gamers, then tell us how you feel in the comments below.

Name: Caveshen Rajman
Location: Durban
Position: Former Managing Editor

Caveshen has published 2177 posts. Read all of Caveshen's posts.

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