GAMERGATE LIFE REVIEW

Background

“The Zoepost was published the 16 of august. Vivian James was born the 22th. The 27th Adam Baldwin created the hashtag, and the 28th the gamers are dead articles finally stablished GG as a thing.” – Kukuruyo, on the 25 August, 2015 anniversary strip.

Unless you’re lucky enough to have been living under a very large rock for the past year, then odds are you’ve heard of GamerGate. Alternatively referred to as a ‘movement’, a ‘hate mob’, ‘harassment campaign’, ‘consumer revolt’, or ‘a load of bullshit’ by supporters, neutrals, the apathetic, and detractors, GamerGate has undoubtedly been a divisive occurrence in the community of online gaming. The timeline above is actually rather accurate: GamerGate (though not initially known as such) originated on 16 August, 2015 with a nine-thousand word blog post regarding the alleged cheating, abusive behavior, and the trading of sex for positive reviews of an independent game developer Zoe Quinn, written by her ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni.

The post was quickly picked up by users of 4chan, the armpit of the internet, who spun the unproven (and in at least one case, disproven) allegations into a series of escalating personal attack on Quinn. Multiple websites shut down threads created do discuss the topic, creating the impression that game journalists were attempting to cover up the issue. Television actor Adam Baldwin, catching wind of the supposed cover up, retweeted a video covering the topic with the hashtag GamerGate, thus giving the movement and this comic its name.

During these events, 4chan users created a character for a game being developed by a group called The Fine Young Capitalists (or TFYC). This character, named Vivian James, was designed to be a ‘regular girl’, an obsessive hardcore gamer and not sexualized or idealized, as an effort to deflect criticism asserting that misogyny was the primary motivator of the attacks on Quinn. I bring this up because this character, Vivian James, is the main character of today’s webcomic.

Writing Review

It should be noted that the writer-artist of this comic who goes by Kukuruyo, is Spanish, which is sometimes reflected in the English version of the comic having grammatical errors. This is just a minor thing, and I’m only pointing that out now so that readers don’t think I’ve simply missed glaring grammatical issues.
No, the real problem with this comic and its defining flaw is that it combines the format of a gag-a-day gamer comic in the vein of Penny Arcade with the didacticism of a political comic, creating something that’s not quite the worst of both worlds, but an often-esoteric blend of the two that is seldom funny even if you agree with the point it’s making—much like the anti-GamerGate comic Diesel Sweeties.

The first strip opens without any sort of in-comic introduction to the characters. We’re expected to know who Vivian James is. Of course anyone reading this comic probably already does; the other main character on the other hand, is apparently Vivian’s cousin, a pallet swap called Lilliam Woods.

 Two friends of Vivian’s amorphous grey blobs meant to represent ‘Gamers’ and ‘notyourshield’ show up to play games, segueing into the ‘punchline’ of this and many other strips: Lilliam’s crazy!  That’s the joke. Seriously, that’s it. To be more precise, she’s a strawman of GamerGate’s detractors and critics, calling Vivian’s friends racists and misogynists for no apparent reason, which is apparently what Kukuruyo believes all critics of GamerGate do.

This conceit will be hammered into the ground, making GamerGate Life essentially a long form Strawman Theatre in which Vivian represents GamerGate (and thus rightness) and Lilliam represents ‘Social Justice Warriors’ and other critics of GamerGate. But Lilliam is not just wrong, she’s completely irrational. Attributing her loss at Street Fighter in the second strip to the game’s actual balance being sexist in favor of Vivian’s male fighter—an argument nobody has ever made. Other strips, such as this one, forgo a joke entirely to make a tortured equivalene between being falsely reported on twitter and being falsely accused of child abuse.

The later strips indicate there’s some improvement: there is an absurdist piss-take, worth at least a chuckle, on the Law and Order: SVU episode that tackled GamerGate (an episode ridiculed by GG supporters and detractors alike in which a psychotic pack of gamers unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality kidnap and rape an obvious Anita Sarkeesian analog), but the strip immediately after it returns the comic to its regularly scheduled Strawman Theatre.

Make no mistake: there’s plenty of humor that could have been mined from this subject, and not just at the expense of GamerGate. While my own thoughts on the controversy are decidedly against GamerGate, It’s also true that some of their opponents are assholes and deserve to be ribbed as much as any asshole on the internet. But moments in which the comic does this are scarce, instead making jokes the expense of imaginary boogeymen, or illustrating a rhetorical point in a way that fails to include a joke.

It arguably, too, does a rather poor job at its apologetics: for a strip that argues that GamerGate is not actually a harassment campaign and that ‘SJWs’ are just as bad as those threatening women in the industry, the comic is worrisomely okay with repeating false accusations and, in the anniversary strip, making a joke of Vivian sexually humiliating her cousin by making her strip naked.

Story and Plot
Being a heavily-didactic gag-a-day strip, there’s no actual plot or story structure to this comic.

Art review

The art is the best aspect of this comic, which is perhaps damning it with faint praise. Kukuruyo is certainly a talented artist when it comes to human figures—his deviantArt page advertises an apparently quite-popular commission business drawing cheesecake and porn. There’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but webcomic artists who draw porn on commission all too often let habits from that side business seep into their comic work in scenes and contexts where it doesn’t belong. Other than the anniversary strip, that’s generally not the case with GamerGate Life.

Unfortunately backgrounds aren’t his strong suit, with Vivian’s house consisting of nondescript grey polygons most of the time, while other backgrounds are simplistic shapes or generic clutter. Occasionally the artist fills empty space with miniature versions of game characters that largely ignore the human characters… including one strip that has Sonic stabbing Mario to death and pulling off his overalls for… some reason. Given some of the artistic atrocities on this wiki it’s hard to complain too much.
Conclusion

There’s little to recommend about GamerGate Life. The art is passable but not amazing, the primary joke is repeated straw-manning, and the strip’s occasional ventures outside that formula range from moderately-amusing silliness to kind-of-creepy cheesecake.
I’m not going to pretend I’m unbiased or neutral on the issue. I don’t think that GamerGate has ever been an endeavor honest about its goals. And I don’t think its actual goals are worthy ones. If you disagree, take this review with however many cups of salt you deem necessary—and, hell, check the comic out yourself, it’s not very long. But like the equally didactic anti-Gamergate comic Diesel Sweeties, a comic needs more than ‘making good points’ to be good. Even if I agreed with Kukuruyo’s take on the happening known as GamerGate, this comic would embarrass me.

Unless you love political comics that preach to the already-converted, my recommendation is to pass this up. It’s a bore: not trainwreck-bad, but not good enough to be worth your time.