#GamerGate Victory Conditions, and an Update on #TheSarkeesianEffect

It’s been two months since Adam Baldwin came up with the #GamerGate hashtag, and in that time a great deal of corruption has been uncovered, and the movement is still going strong.  However, we have yet to achieve mainstream penetration, and the media is still denouncing us as misogynist basement dwellers, and refusing to report fairly on our complaints.  The documentary I’m working on with Jordan Owen, The Sarkeesian Effect is coming together, despite the fact that we’re still woefully under-budget.  We’ve been weathering numerous personal attacks, but we’re still going strong.

I wanted to get my thoughts out there as to what’s been happening, as well as to address some concerns supporters and potential supporters have of the project.  The easiest way to organize these thoughts is by topic:

1. Victory Conditions for #GamerGate
2. My Personal Motivations3. Structure of the Documentary
4. My Approach to Film Making
5. Budgetary Breakdown

You can scroll down to the appropriate section, if any of the above don’t interest you.

1. Victory Conditions for #GamerGate

#GamerGate’s not going anywhere – that much is clear – and a large consensus is growing as to what the facts underlying it are.  By its very nature it’s a leaderless movement, thus denying easy targets for its enemies; but even a leaderless movement still needs a strategy.

Hadley Bennet penned a piece today on precisely this topic.  Like it or not, the outage will eventually die; minor concessions will erode the passion.  Without victory conditions – without goals – we will ultimately die with a whimper.  Bennet proposes the following:

“We want to capture or secure commitments from 3/4ths (or whatever number deemed feasible) of gaming journalist sites that they’ll be apolitical in their coverage and reviews of video games. We want them to sign a statement on ethics in game journalism and to immediately remove journalists who demonstrably violate these terms. Owing to violations of journalism ethics, we want retroactive removal of violators X, Y, Z, etc. from your gaming sites.”

This is proffered to the hive-mind for consideration.  Leaderless doesn’t mean disorganized, after all.

In conjunction with this, I’d like to tell you our goals for the documentary; what it is, and how it fits in with the overall goals of #GamerGate.  Put simply, we want to expose the methodology of #GamerGate’s enemies.

The methodology of the Social Justice Warrior is that of the parasite.  They are the embodiment of Ellsworth Toohey from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, the leader of the Council of American Builders, Writers, and Artists:

Lois Cook was chairman of the Council of American Writers… The rest included a woman who never used capitals in her books, and a man who never used commas; a youth who had written a thousand-page novel without a single letter o, and another who wrote poems that neither rhymed nor scanned; a man with a beard who was sophisticated and proved it by using every unprintable four-letter word in every ten pages of his manuscript; a woman who imitated Lois Cook, except that her style was less clear; when asked for explanations she stated that this was the way life sounded to her, when broken by the prism of her subconscious–“You know what a prism does to a ray of light, don’t you?”

They’re jealous of the power wielded by artists and game developers, but lack the finer sensibilities needed to appreciate the art itself.  Thus they create mockeries of gaming like Depression Quest and Gone Home.  Illiterate in the language of art, they speak only the language of power; they claim false piety and subservience to the proletariat – which they now call the under-privileged and the victim groups – while cynically seeking power for its own sake.  Envy is at the core of their being, and they wield their victimology like a cudgel, seeking the destruction of those who know how to create so that they can claim the throne for themselves – even if they destroy the kingdom in the process.

Despite all the talk about empowering women, minorities, et cetera, the only people they empower are themselves.  They are destructive and completely unethical; they have no limits to what they’ll do so long as it benefits them.

The intent of The Sarkeesian Effect is to expose this methodology; to put it on display for the public, to subject them to the light of day.  Anita Sarkeesian’s rise to power will be used as the archetypal example of this, and through her we indict the many others who do the same, exposing the mendacity of their actions.

Victimology only works when it’s kept to the shadows; when screams of “misogyny!” and “racism!” are used to cow the opposition into silence.  Shining the spotlight on them will utterly destroy their ability to cast their dark spiels.

2. My Personal Motivations

I am a Gamer, so of course I care about this movement for its own sake – but to be perfectly frank, this is just one aspect of our declining culture.  We’re currently looking at a probable plague in the near future (if not Ebola, then something else – for crying out loud, we couldn’t even stop AIDS), hyperinflation, WWIII, a breakdown into a police state, and the silencing of freedom of speech.

In the grand scheme of things, games aren’t that big of a deal.  And yet…

There are dishonest ideologues behind all of these issues plaguing us.  Media manipulators, marketers, and cynical scam artists who tell people what they want to hear, while doing whatever they want.  This is the real “culture war” – not the nonsense about gay marriage and access to birth control, which is nothing but a distraction – but a group of irresponsible and unaccountable media elites whose only motivation is power, who support whatever cause is popular, who demonize their opposition, and who undermine reasonable discourse and freedom of speech.

This have been going on for a long time – and Gaming is the point where we can finally push back.

I want genuine arguments, I want open discourse, I want to live in a society which finds practical ways to improve itself and deal with new technologies, while also paying due attention to the customs of the past.  I want the cynical manipulators out of the door like the bums that they are.

I believe that #GamerGate is the turning point.  We win this battle – the battle for integrity within Gaming journalism, and in defence of artistic freedom – and we start to turn the tide against the self-righteous sadists who are currently in power.

This isn’t about Democrat versus Republican; this is about honesty versus manipulation.

3. Structure of the Documentary

Documentaries are rhetorical storytelling.  They should always be based upon truth, but a hour and a half long film needs to be a narrative, not a spreadsheet.  As such, it will be following the standard structure of most stories.

A) Instigating Incident: Introduce the Audience to Feminist Frequency
B) Tension: Demonstrate inconsistencies in Sarkeesian’s arguments, and #NotYourShield – IE: that she doesn’t not represent the groups she claims to represent.
C) Rising Tension: in addition to being a cynical faux-representative of women, Sarkeesian and her fellow travellers infiltrate and destroy the movements they attach themselves to (this is where we introduce Justine Tunney and Occupy Wallstreet).D) Twist: the actions of these SJWs are so insanely destructive and self-defeating that it’s hard to believe that they exist… that’s because they are insane.  When you’re motivated by envy, destructiveness is all you know.
E) Climax: they’ve gone Full McIntosh.
F) Denouement: now that we know they’re crazy, what do we do?  How do we keep these people away from the reins of power?

You can see some of these elements in the Teaser Video we released.  The video is a ‘proof of concept’; despite having different politics and backgrounds, all of these people have seen the exact same thing with these Social Justice Warriors; we are going to expose that to the nation.

4. My Approach to Film Making

My philosophy of film making is the same as my philosophy in life; when your gut tells you it’s the right time to start doing something, you do it – and figure out what it is that you’re doing, exactly, once it’s already underway.  Have you ever heard the saying “Nobody’s ever ready to have kids – you just have them”?  It’s the same thing.

This is the exact opposite of the approach they teach you in film school, but when it comes to low-budget productions it’s the only way you can make something out of nothing.  Film school teaches over-preparedness; it demands that everything be ticked off and planned prior to shooting, which is an assumption that only works when you have a large and established budget going into things.  Film school is great for turning somebody into a reliable cameraman, able to film a television commercial in a predictable and reliable manner, but when it comes to small budget and counter-cultural productions, fluidity is key.

Take my short Lust in the Time of Heartache for instance; it was an extremely ambitious project, assembling a large number of actors, staging an extended fight scene, and doing all of this over a 3 day period – and all of it was filmed in public locations, we had to film around the joggers.  A number of details changed in the process of filming (we decided it was too burdensome on the actors to try and film at night), and a great deal of it had to be figured out ‘on the fly’ – we didn’t have the budget to organize all the martial artists and plan the choreography until the day of the shoot.  My art director was extremely frustrated by the lack of story-boarding, and yet – it all came together extremely nicely.

(There was some criticism from the typical wags, but it was one of the better films that Storyhive funded this year.)

In regard to The Sarkeesian Effect, our goal was to get this out the door and running as soon as it was possible.  Our October production was drastically under budget and our equipment wasn’t at the level that I wanted it to be at, but it was sufficient to get the first part filmed.  The difference between good equipment and mediocre equipment is margin for error; there was no room to screw anything up, and I’m happy to report that we didn’t.  The footage will require extensive ‘massaging’ in the editing process (as many have noted the audio I included in the teaser was subpar), but it is no means bad footage; it is all usable for the documentary proper.

Furthermore, it allowed us to allay concerns about the direction we were taking this film – many people were cautious that this would be a conservative co-opting of the #GamerGate movement (something I’ve repeatedly stated that I’m opposed to), and we’ve demonstrated that it is no such thing.  A number of detractors were saying that nobody would interview with us, that we didn’t have the capacity to pull things together into a film; the Teaser demonstrates that claim to be false as well.  It’s nothing but a 5-hour quick-edit job, and yet it’s a ‘mini documentary’ in its own right, with a coherent thread going through it, and with visual/audio elements that are adequate.

We’ve got this out there and we’re building momentum; we’re still under-budget, but this engine is warming up fast.

5. Budgetary Breakdown

The wags have been attacking our project since day one.  They started off trying to inflame #GamerGate hostility against us, with their typical accusations of racism/sexism/et cetera, and that didn’t work.  Then they made fun of us as a go-nowhere project – and that didn’t work.  Then they started complaining about the audio – and that didn’t work.  Now, they’re attacking us on the budget – as if $15,000/month is some sort of princely sum when it comes to film-making!

That said, it is a valid question from our backers; where does this budget go?  Here is a rough breakdown of where the budget went in October.

Flights: $1700 (including baggage handling fees)
Hotels: $700
Cab fare in NYC: $300
Car Rental: $300 (including gas)
Living Expenses: $1500 each (rent and bills)
Travelling incidentals: $1000 (being on the road is expensive – even fast food adds up quickly)

All of this comes to $7000, and our budget (after Patreon collected their share and taxes) was ~$6500.  The difference was made up with our own money that we put into the project.

Myself, I wound up selling my car and giving notice at my apartment (over the next few months I’ll technically be living with my folks while I’m on the road); I gave up an $18/hour job to do this, and I haven’t been back home since we started this project (at the present I’m sleeping on Owen’s couch).  For his part, Owen kept me in coffee and cigarettes during the New York leg, until the money from my car sale – and then my income from YouTube and books sales – came in.

The $15k goal was one with ‘breathing room’ – because as any entrepreneur can tell you, things always go over budget.  But there are also a number of financial commitments we need to make, to truly pull this all together; interviewing people is the easy part of documentary film making.

Crew: at least one other person to hold the camera
Equipment: we need a second HFG30 & tripods.
Vehicle: the next leg will be on the west coast, and we’ll need more storage space than flights allow for equipment (thankfully I’m a genius at automotive mechanics, so I should be able to pick up something on the cheap).
Animators: this film will require some animated sequences.

And that’s not even getting into the financing we’ll need to promote this and secure a wider distribution.

All of this is priming the pump.  $15k is what we need to do an A+ job, and get the ball rolling on this, without having to worry about starvation in the process.  Jordan and I can take all the mud that they’re going to sling at us – it isn’t nice, but we can do it – and I hope this piece has clarified what sort of argument we’ll be putting together, and how it will fit in with #GamerGate in a wider sense.  The more this comes together, the more interest we’ll be able to get from monied quarters, and the further the final project will go.

So I humbly ask that – if you’ve been on the fence – that you decide to support us with a monthly donation that is affordable to you.

We are both fans of Ayn Rand, and neither of us are going to apologize for enjoying the fruits of our labour – but at the same time, this isn’t some sort of “Get-Rich-Quick” scheme.  This is a gamble that we’ve both staked our reputations and sacred honour on, and our only goals over the next few months are survival and film making.  I believe this is something worth doing.  I believe that this is a film that can change the landscape of politics, and just not gaming.  I believe this is the right thing to do.

Please help us in this endeavour.  Support The Sarkeesian Effect on Patreon.