The Hilarious Failure of Bully Hunters - Why SJWS and Political Correctness Don't Work In Gaming.
This only just popped up on my feed and I had a read through it, suffice it to say I cracked up the entire time, people who have followed my blog know my positions on the gaming industry very well and something like this is the complete antithesis of what I support in gaming, but funnily enough it wasn't just a random group of people spouting this, they had serious commercial and market advertisers backing them, this entire thing fell a part almost instantly and some pretty big names looked completely stupid in this and hurt their brand names more than they could know, but one thing did stand out, this went under the radar for a lot of people, myself included so I decided to do some research about this and learned some pretty hilarious and terrifying things about the entire bully hunters fiasco so i'm going to lay it out for you guys and discuss why things like this have never worked and will never work in the gaming world.
So lets jump straight into it.
What is Bully Hunters?
Bully Hunters was the insipid spawn of the GamerGate fiasco, it started out as an female team of "gamers" who would regularly hunt down bullies in the gaming world and take them out whether by killing them repeatedly or by ironically, harassing them til they left the servers, their goal was to "raise awareness about female bullying" in the gaming world something that has been happening since the dawn of gaming, so essentially they were a virtual "hit" squad of females who would actively seek out trolls and try to get them to leave the servers.
Just from the outset you can see how stupid this is, a group of females with the sole goal of harassing people who are harassing other people in a hope to stop them, over the internet, right there there should of been someone go "Hey guys somehow I don't think this is going to work" anyone who has been a victim of bullying online knows what happens next, either you ignore them or you leave the server so on the flip side if someone is harassing the bully they're either going to ignore them or leave the server, from the outset this project was doomed to fail but it wasn't that which was their downfall their downfall turned out to be themselves which i'll get into later, but as usual "gaming" sites and advertisers like SteelSeries the Diverse Gaming Coalition, CyberpowerPC and many others decided to immediately jump on the bandwagon and basically throw support and resources at them for this "amazing" project.
So to sum it up this was Bully Hunters a group of female "Gamers" that would actively hunt down people harassing women in games and try their best to get them to stop, just from the basic idea it seems really really stupid like if you're a gamer and you're trying to eliminate trolls from the gaming world you know that unless you have direct control over servers or accounts it's going to go no where but no one could foresee just how badly this would fail in under 72 hours and how hilariously wrong their supporters and companies were about this as a project, so lets get into it, what exactly happened?
Destroying themselves before they start.
So i've been very critical about leftist culture in general, speaking outside gaming basically none of it makes any real world sense so for Bully Hunters the idea that they were going to destroy trolls by being bigger trolls online was just fucking stupid from the start, if you've ever engaged a troll online you would know that feeding them is literally the worst thing you could do, actually the second worse, what bully hunters did was the worst it gave trolls a fucking live stream to do this on with a massive audience, I mean you couldn't of given a troll a better staging point than this, you have an audience, you have a target and you have numerous people trying to attack you on a live stream which means if you start throwing out racial slurs you're going to get them banned rather than yourself.
Likewise their "anti troll" techniques were literally grade school insults and the "Science" behind it was the biggest jumble of word salad you could imagine, but this is where it gets interesting, you see people like bully hunters were receiving support from very left leaning sponsors and websites, so of course when this made the news they were coming out people went digging, their main host was found to of used all sorts of homophobic slurs to piss other people off as well as being a sexist herself, this was immediately dragged into the spotlight before the stream even went to air so already they've managed to anger their fanbase who are very gay friendly such as the aforementioned Diverse Gaming Coalition, likewise their statistics on the mental health of people who were bullied where actually pretty offensive to people who had been bullied, almost insinuating that most men will abuse women online.
But another thing came up as well during one of their first streams, the game play was staged and passed off as real, this is a marketing technique pre internet, making people think the problem is huge since there's no way to verify it, almost immediately people realized the game play was staged and when they were asked about it Bully Hunters apparently became extremely hostile towards the organizers and sponsors asking these questions, for those reasons and more numerous people pulled out of the event and severed all ties with the company leaving them with basically only one company supporting them which would later come back to bite them in the ass as they hilariously tried to save their own skin.
So essentially Bully Hunters was already dead before it even hit it's first live stream, and the companies attached to it looked like idiots, likewise the people actually involved in Bully Hunters have effectively black listed themselves from being taken seriously as the only thing it took to take down their main host was her saying faggot(in the heat of the moment) but it goes to show the lengths of how quickly this broke apart as a terrible idea that was essentially based on nothing but virtue signalling, i'll get to that in a moment but first lets talk about the one company that went down with Bully Hunters.
Steel Series CLAIMS it was just an auxiliary of the stream and that they never really endorsed them publicly and instead continued to sell the lie that they were just giving them support in their defense of women gamers, however the steel series headsets they used were the charity event headsets that are usually shipped directly from steel series for a charity event meaning there was very little doubt that SteelSeries was active in the planning phase for Bully Hunters or at the very least just signed over a bunch of headsets with doing little to no research about the project, either way they released a pretty terrible statement about their affiliation with Bully Hunters which was basically to the effect of "Yes we partnered with them, but after we saw some things we decided not to anymore, but we still believe their main concept is important" which effectively means they jumped on a bandwagon on political correctness in hopes of generating sales.
So that's ultimately the tale of bully hunters and numerous companies falling for a terrible terrible idea in the pursuit of muh feelings matter in gaming, everyone involved in this situation is now tarnished and the companies involved with them just look stupid because someone yelled Female Gamers and rushed in to support them with little to no knowledge of what was actually going to happen, which leads me to my final point.
Identity politics has no place in gaming.
This, for the largest part was nothing more than identity politics, companies heard there was defenseless women that needed to be saved and only this crack team of nobody female gamers could save them, now look I wasn't involved in any way and have no idea what decisions were made by these companies, but come the fuck on, iv'e played with women my entire life, iv'e dated female gamers and regularly interact with them, female gamers don't need to be fucking coddled and shielded from the online gaming world, most female gamers I know would talk shit right back to trolls or just ignore them, this is really the problem i'm having with this is that it treats women in gaming like dainty princesses that need to be saved when the vast vast majority don't give a shit or never receive even a fraction of what Bully Hunters say happens on a daily basis.
This is nothing more than Identity politics, I know this word gets throw around a lot today, but people like Bully Hunters can easily make gaming a divisive subject, the same way GamerGate did and spawned an entire generation of terrible developers and writers being hired because they're [Insert Buzz Word], obviously it doesn't happen all that much but things like Bully Hunters wouldn't of shown up without the advent of GamerGate making women into victims, like I said i'm completely against anyone being painted a victim because of their skin color or their race, hell iv'e played really competitive games with a openly gay female and never once saw any bit of harassment in the year or so we were playing together, the problem here is that when a woman get talked down to or harassed it's immediately a gender issue according to people like Bully Hunters and the companies that support them prop this shit up to make a quick buck and even quicker run away as soon as there's criticism that hurts their sales.
Look ultimately I can't speak for women since i'm not one, but every woman iv'e ever played with over 2 decades has never said harassment made them suicidal(like the bully hunters "statistics" claim happens often) and iv'e never ever seen a woman get harassed by someone in a public area and people haven't told them to fuck right off, it paints an incredibly dark image of gamers to have idiots like Bully Hunters getting recognition or being sponsored by big name companies, all though there is an upside, now that this has failed it will probably be a long time before something like this rears it's head again only to be smacked down and ultimately I hope that this idea of gaming as a boys only club disappears soon.
I have to admit, I didn't ever hear about this initiative. It sounds like a bad idea that was founded to fight a terrible collective. So there are no winners there.
I feel that, in gaming, as soon as something pops up that doesn't adhere to some sort of unwritten rule of what games are allowed to be like, up pops the leftie boogieman ideal. The same as when anyone tries to open up dialogue critiquing games, first response is outrage and a hysterical drive to shut down conversation (fun points when you also find said people tend to parrot standard lines of devs creative vision and the freedom of speech get out of jail card). When I see that audience being the one that initiatives like this are (misguidedly) being created to
combat, I pretty much boil it down: here is one group whose general motivation is the betterment of a pastime for all versus one whose general motivation is to shit on other people who they value less. My finger then starts to point less at one than the other.
What was a recent incident. I believe a developer added in a "preferred pronoun" to a game's character creator. This created an absolute SHIT STORM on Steam. Floods of just sub 2 hour reviews negative wah-fests, all decrying some mythical SJW monster. Because of a picklist.
It's because of that community that I started to refer to myself less and less as a gamer, just so happening to be someone who plays games. There is a choice, and it has been presented many times, to shed the image that gamers are adolescent, overgrown man babies who have nothing better to do than throw tantrums on the internet, and it has been rejected. So I had to reject the association.
Since the beginning, games have been popcorn entertainment, they have been political, they have been whatever they have wanted to be. Despite an absolutely dire patch around the first half of the 360/PS3 generation--where all games started to basically become third person shooters from the same mould featuring the same mid-20s rough cut white dude as protag--but that was a blip. Increasingly, games have been moving back towards the time when they were kaleidoscopically diverse and less template demographic driven. Yeah, sometimes missteps happen, but I'd rather that than an attempt to adhere to a strictly narrow spectrum of experiences. Not all games will be for me or about me, but that's ok, there are plenty for all.
RE: women in gaming. I don't have enough experience here. Where I do have that experience is in music, where producers and DJs are regularly decried as requiring ghost producers, advancing up the ladder through sexual favours, through being someone's girlfriend, or some sort of media bias. Questioned and scrutinised because of who they are in a way that a man isn't. The stories are too numerous to dismiss. I don't believe that it is a stretch to apply it the gaming community either. I do remember seeing a gaming reviewer decried for having tackled "a big game" when she awarded it an (apparently terrible) 7/10. How was she allowed to review this, is she even a proper gamer, doesn't she just like joke games instead? It was pretty bizarre to see those are the points of criticism rather than the actual content of the review. Of course nothing is going to get resolved. More energy is put into trying to combat a phantom menace that is going to harm gaming because... somehow trying to make things more positive makes gaming worse. I have no idea.
On the whole, it doesn't seem like big devs give a shit what the rabble are doing. They are continuing the paths they on as they see fit. So hopefully they continue to do so without getting dragged into the mire.