Worknets assignment essay
Lauren Wallace
Derek Mueller
ENGL 5004
April 10, 2019
GamerGate, Social Media, and Anti-Feminist Sentiment
In the article “Building Dark Patterns into Platforms: How GamerGate Perturbed Twitter’s User Experience” Michael Trice and Liza Potts explain the phenomenon of GamerGate and how it serves as a prime example of the user manipulation that can occur on social media. GamerGate was a social media movement that began in 2014 and targeted individuals within the gaming community who were viewed as liberal, including feminists and others seen as politically correct (Trice and Potts 4). Trice and Potts detail the ways in which members of the movement worked together to create an online community with divergent, purposely unattainable goals, resulting in continuous invention with no reasonable means of achieving resolution (8). Individual users who chose to participate in the movement and who found themselves as targets were manipulated through the use of dark patterns, which “are defined as a user experience crafted to trick the user into performing actions not in the user’s own interest” (Trice and Potts 4).
As someone who watched the GamerGate crisis unfold and as the sister of a video game design major, this topic is particularly intriguing to me. Women working within the video game industry and female gamers are often subjects of harassment by the mostly male gaming community, and the concept of feminism is also maligned and misunderstood among that user-base. As a result, much of my early knowledge of GamerGate was skewed against women like Anita Sarkeesian, who was one of the many women targeted by the movement, because my information was coming from my brother who identified with the movement’s members and its stated goals. Doing my own research led to a much richer and more accurate understanding that is akin to the description Trice and Potts provide.
Just as I had to do my own research to better understand the rhetorical situation behind GamerGate, in this essay I will examine the many layers behind the construction of Trice and Potts’ article. Using worknets, I will detail the semantic, bibliographic, affinity-based, and choric facets of the article.
Semantic Phase
Trice and Potts use specialized vocabulary regarding media platforms and GamerGate as a movement. GamerGate, which is unsurprisingly used 92 times within the article, is significant in terms of how Trice and Potts define it. Whereas members of GamerGate described themselves as activists who were advocating for the rights of game designers to create unrestricted content (5), Trice and Potts argue that GamerGate was a campaign of “harassment” characterized by “endless rants” by those involved (6). Their use of the term activism is similarly nuanced. Whereas “productive activism” would involve specified, achievable goals, the activism undertaken by users affiliated with GamerGate was characterized by a lack of unified goals and targets (Trice and Potts 7).
Trice and Potts use the term media platforms to “refer to participatory media sites … including social media, message boards, and other collaborative spaces” (2). By choosing this term instead of one like social media Trice and Potts are able to broaden the scope of their argument to include the variety of platforms that GamerGate members used to spread their message. Supraplatforms specifically are defined as “a system of interconnected platforms where the higher level platform reshapes the rhetorical purpose and context of the component parts”; Trice and Potts use this term to refer to GamerGate, which was an “activist supraplatform” (Trice and Potts).
Bibliographic Phase
Trice and Potts draw Richard Lanham’s The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information; their decision to use his work makes sense given that the book is about how people and organizations on the internet compete with one and other for attention from other users. The was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006 and is available physically at the Newman Library. There are also multiple reviews of it that can be accessed through the library databases.
“#GamerGate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures” by Adrienne Massanari was published in 2017 in New Media and Society, a scholarly journal. Although the journal in which it appeared is available through one of the databases that the Virginia Tech library subscribes to, Communication Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection, that database only has articles in full-text that were published from 2003-2009; however, the article can be requested through interlibrary loan. Trice and Potts appear to be using the source to legitimize their arguments about GamerGate’s nature and the choice that members made to use online attacks that were “deeply personal and aggressive” as well as “mob-like” (1, 4). Given that Trice has written on GamerGate before, the decision to use a different source to back the aforementioned assertions demonstrates a concern toward appearing legitimate when making what some might consider controversial claims.
Trice and Potts took the concept of dark patterns from Harry Brignull’s website, darkpatterns.org. Although their works cited entry lists the access date as June 18, 2017, Brignull originated the term and the accompanying website in 2010 (Grauer). On the website he describes dark patterns as “tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you didn't mean to,” which relates closely to how users were drawn into participating in GamerGate without being fully aware of what they were doing and how they were being controlled (Brignull).
Affinity-Based Phase
Both Trice and Potts are knowledgeable about the digital humanities and technical communication and are currently active in the field of rhetoric and composition. Trice is currently a lecturer at MIT and has taught technical communication and composition courses there for the last six years. His experience in the tech and entertainment industries from working for companies like Apple and South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) likely informed his understanding of how companies like Twitter function (“Michael Trice”). Before publishing “Building Dark Patterns into Platforms: How GamerGate Perturbed Twitter’s User Experience” with Potts, Trice also delivered a presentation titled “Putting GamerGate in Context: How Group Documentation Informs Social Media Activity” at the 2015 International Conference on the Design of Communication.
Potts is an Associate Professor at Michigan State University whose research focuses on online user experiences and social media platforms. Although Trice is listed as the article’s first author, Potts is the senior scholar based on the multiple books and articles listed on her department profile; her selected list of publications includes “We Are the Network: Creating Gravity in the Digital Humanities,” Participatory Memory: Fandom Experiences across Time and Space, and Social Media in Disaster Response: How Experience Architects Can Build for Participation (“Liza Potts”). Her work on social media and twitter specifically would have been valuable in terms of explaining how users on that platform responded to the digital disaster that was GamerGate.
Choric Phase
During the time at which this article was being researched and written a number of events occurred that were related to human rights issues. The authors would have begun this project by June 2017 at the latest based on the access date in the works cited page for darkpatterns.org, which is where they drew the titular concept of dark patterns from. Between 2017 and January 2018 when the article was published, Donald Trump was elected president, laws protecting immigrants under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program were challenged, and the #MeToo movement became viral on twitter and across the internet.
Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and his ascendancy to the presidency in January 2017 have been linked to increases in negative attitudes toward marginalized groups and even to GamerGate itself. In the CNET article “GamerGate to Trump: How Video Game Culture Blew Everything Up” Ian Sherr and Erin Carson claim that the hatred that users of the #GamerGate hashtag displayed towards feminists became part of a shared identity. Users were able to find one and other and develop a mob mentality against “outsiders” that was first mobilized to target women in the field of video games and later applied to Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in the 2016 election (Sherr and Carson).
In September 2017 the Trump administration called for the removal of the DACA program, putting those who had come to the United States as children but who had not been granted U.S. citizenship at risk of being deported (Shoichet et. al.). These individuals, generally referred to as Dreamers, had previously been granted the ability to apply for and later renew two year permits to remain in the United States. Although the program is still in operation due to the Supreme Court’s decision to enact the Trump administration’s policy change (Alvarez and de Vogue), this issue has placed a strain on the Dreamers as a marginalized part of the population and on their families and supporters.
#GamerGate is also part of the backlash against the #MeToo movement, whose proponents are often negatively described as “social justice warriors” by those on the internet who are against feminist thought (Sherr and Carson). The Me Too movement was started by Tarana Burke in 2006 and was later popularlized via the twitter hashtag #MeToo in 2017 (Johnson and Hawbaker). Those within the movement advocate for women who are “survivors of sexual violence, particularly Black women and girls, and other young women of color from low wealth communities” (“About”). By using the hashtag #MeToo women hoped to show how widespread abuse against women is. In contrast, those involved with #GamerGate worked against inclusivity for women (Sherr and Carson).
Conclusion
Overall Trice and Potts make a convincing argument for how the organizers of GamerGate were able to convince twitter users to mobilize and fight against an increasingly vague set of targets, many of whom identified as feminists within the gaming industry. Through their definitions of key terms related to the movement and its use of social media, research on GamerGate and social media, and combined expertise within the digital humanities, Trice and Potts are able to effectively support their claims. The article also sprung from the climate of hatred towards marginalized groups that GamerGate was a part of.
Works Cited
“About.” Me too, 2018. https://metoomvmt.org/about/ Accessed 8 Apr. 2019.
Brignull, Harry. Darkpatterns.org. Accessed 8 Apr. 2019.
Grauer, Yael. “Dark Patterns are designed to trick you (and they’re all over the Web).” Ars Technica, 28 Jul. 2016. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/dark-patterns-are-designed-to-trick-you-and-theyre-all-over-the-web/ Accessed 8 Apr. 2019.
Johnson, Christen A., and KT Hawbaker. “#MeToo: A Timeline of Events.” Chicago Tribune, 7 Mar. 2019. https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-me-too-timeline-20171208-htmlstory.html Accessed 8 Apr. 2019.
“Liza Potts.” Michigan State University, n.d. http://wrac.msu.edu/people/faculty/liza-potts/ Accessed 2 Apr. 2019.
“Michael Trice.” Comparative Media Studies, n.d. https://cmsw.mit.edu/profile/michael-trice/ Accessed 2 Apr. 2019.
Sherr, Ian, and Erin Carson. “GamerGate to Trump: How Video Game Culture Blew Everything Up.” CNET, 27 Nov. 2017. https://www.cnet.com/news/gamergate-donald-trump-american-nazis-how-video-game-culture-blew-everything-up/ Accessed 8 Apr. 2019.
Shoichet, Catherine E., Susannah Cullinane, and Tal Kopan. “US Immigration: DACA and Dreamers Explained.” CNN, 26 Oct. 2017. https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/04/politics/daca-dreamers-immigration-program/index.html Accessed 8 Apr. 2019.
Trice, Michael, and Liza Potts. “Building Dark Patterns into Platforms: How GamerGate Perturbed Twitter's User Experience” Present Tense, vol. 6, no. 3. http://www.presenttensejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Trice_Potts.pdf Accessed 31 Mar. 2019.