Ace highlights Anita Sarkeesian's freakout over the trailer for the new Doom game. Guess what, guys: It's violent! And the leftwing scolds are very sad about this. As Ace notes, this is all immensely ironic and slightly troubling:
Many #GamerGaters have been stunned by the acceptance this Quivering Censor has gotten from the left wing video game (ahem) "journalism" claque.
Because they all remember that when a rightwing scold, Jack Thompson, made pretty much the same censorious demands on the videogame industry, the entire gamer-culture cohort rose up against him, to call him an idiot, poltroon, etc.
And yet, when Anita Sarkesian makes pretty much the same whiny, bitchy ankle-bites, but this time casting them as arguments from the left, rather than the right, the whole Kotaku Klaque praises her as a serious scholar and Voice of a New Censorious Generation.
It's not just the hypocrisy: it's the underlying attitude represented by Sarkeesian's assault on those who don't mind seeing hellspawn ripped in half. As Ace notes, "That's not a criticism of a violent game—that's a demand that people change that which they derive pleasure and fun from." A quickly deleted tweet by Jonathan McIntosh screenshotted by Robert Shimshock drives this point home even more explicitly. "This shit is sick," McIntosh wrote. "There is something deeply deeply seriously wrong with anyone cheering for this #DOOM4 trailer."
As Scott Shackford notes over at Reason, a movement that was sold to people as a fight for greater choice in gaming is, it seems, more interested in limiting the marketplace:
These tweets indicate exactly why there’s such a backlash against her. This is culture war as a zero-sum game. These tweets present the idea that either we have violent games or non-violent games, not both (or some gradiation of "acceptable" violence). These are not tweets that present video game culture as a marketplace where consumers call for games that they enjoy and the market responds with a selection of choices to meet everybody’s entertainment desires. This is specifically a call for Sarkeesian’s game demands to be met, while the demands of other gamers are to be ignored or rejected and their desires attacked.
You can see something similar at work in this story, about a college student—a college student—who wants a whole slew of comic books removed from classrooms because they offend her delicate sensibilities.
Tara Shultz, a Crafton Hills College student majoring in English and American Sign Language, is upset about the syllabus for an English 250 course, which requires students to read Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home," Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll’s House," Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" and Brian Vaughan's "Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1: Unmanned."
"I didn’t expect to open the book and see that graphic material within," Shultz told the newspaper. "I expected Batman and Robin, not pornography."
What does Shultz want?
"At most I would like the books eradicated from the system," Shultz said. "I don’t want them taught anymore. I don’t want anyone else to have to read this garbage."
Emphasis mine, because wow! She basically wants those graphic novels to be made unbooks, to be disappeared down the memory hole. Schultz, like Sarkeesian, isn't interested in choice. She's interested in controlling what others see. In controlling what they learn. In controlling what they enjoy. It's a fascinating variety of light totalitarianism.