As someone who was born in the mid 1980s, it's pretty safe to say I've lived through (almost) every major controversy in the history of video games. Back in the 90s, when Mortal Kombat, Doom and lots of other violent stuff were all the rage, parents and public officials did everything they could to get it pulled off the shelves. We all know how well that went, but it did lead to the creation of the ESRB.
Developers back then certainly didn't lose any profits because of that. In fact, in some ways, the controversies led to games like Mortal Kombat becoming quite huge for the time. With the release of Mortal Kombat 2 came the Friendships and Babalities poking fun at the controversies. Arcades were up to their elbows in quarters and toy stores were moving home units faster than their back-room stock could handle.
At around this time we also saw the emergence of the internet. And since it was still a very new thing, online gaming was a thing of fantasy we often heard about in movies like The Cable Guy. There was at least one attempt I know of to bring games online called X-BAND. It was a cartridge that was used with the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis that had a modem. Not many games were playable, but nevertheless it was a precursor to the services we have today.
I don't really participate too much in online gaming myself because idiot teenagers and 20-somethings who don't know anything about respect for one's opponents or just in general often ruin it for everyone else just looking to play a few matches and have a good time. And these same kinds of people also tend to take a giant crap on the internet in general.
We've seen just that with what happened with Anita Sarkeesian, a woman whose only crime was making a series of Youtube videos that stated the obvious when it came to video games and development of said games. Right after the first video she received death threats, rape threats and other forms of abusive communications in the guise of criticism just because she said something about some teenagers' and 20-somethings' favorite roided-up spank fests. And they called it #Gamergate. Yeah, because god forbid someone from saying something about ridiculous character design and predictable plot points we've all seen a thousand times before.
Many personalities on the internet were very quick to take advantage of this and manipulate the situation in order to pump up their Patreon and Paypal accounts. A whole laundry list of people on youtube and many other sites, many of whom had probably thought gamers were just pizza scarfing basement dwellers, jumped on board because they saw it as another opportunity to attack women on the internet.
After well over a year of this shit from the likes of internet celebrities like Thunderfoot, The Amazing Atheist, Sargon of Akkad and even a flop of a documentary called the Sarkeesian Effect, things finally came to a head when Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn, the main targets of Gamergate's campaign of shit flinging 'journalism', were asked to speak at the UN regarding cyber-violence reports.
Once again the angry, young, mostly white male gaming masses got pissed off because they thought they were going to lose their 'first amendment rights' and that Anita was going to wave her magic wand and turn all video games into 'hugboxes' (I'm sure Temple Grandin would have a few words to say on that kind of crap). The whole thing was a huge flop and failed to produce anything meaningful.
That didn't stop folks like The Almighty Rabbit from looking for a new chew toy, as he tried to argue with Kristi Winters about womens' issues using his botched logic regarding sexual dimorphism, which relates more to animals than humans, but being the demagogue he is, he knows his followers wouldn't know a thing about that.
But then Laughing Witch admitted she wrote a letter to his employer and the shit officially hit the fan. Granted, that happened close to a year ago (And he was never in any danger of being fired), but hey, at this point the ol' Rabbit's running out of ideas for content to keep his Patreon up. So he made a video outing her family's business on Yelp and his followers went to town posting thousands of fake one-star reviews in order to shut down the business in retaliation. She apologized (because he said the attacks would stop if she did), but neither Phil Mason, nor his rabid fan base have let up. This is not the first time he's done something like this, and it won't be the last.
The incident has made the local news and she has reported this to the FBI and is working with other officials to put a stop to these kinds of attacks. She is also trying to work with Google and Youtube to amend their Terms of Service to end the kind of cyber bullying and trolling that have become the norm.
I find this all very ironic, because all those people who cry about losing their free speech have done the very things that have effectively ruined freedom of speech for the rest of us, as they do everything else they've ever touched online. If these folks thought they were going to lose their free speech before, they could be in for a rude awakening.
See you around,
Homer