The DiGRA connection that never was

The connection to DiGRA as some sort of cultist scholar group that is manipulating Silverstring Media was... not very tangible. I mean you really have to grasp at straws in order to create this connection. It was mostly born out of paranoia when gamers were bombarded with the chain of Gamers Are Over articles on August 28th. Here goes:

During the confusion and paranoia of being overwhelmingly smeared, many of us started digging through the connections among all the people we kept our eyes on. And connections were found, we traced the PR woman Maya "legobutts" Kramer back to her place of employment - Silverstring Media, which is consulted by the 2 figures of Feminist Frequency: Anita Sarkeesian & Jonathan McIntosh.

Last snapshot with the whole team presented: https://archive.today/YlBLh

This reinforced our belief that this agenda to end gamers was being pushed by feminist ideology. A blog post on September 1st confirmed Silverstring's agenda to us: http://silverstringmedia.com/blog/2014/9/1/intent-and-ideology

Up until this point, the connection still seems plausible. However, it started getting shaky from that point on. This Pastebin post was made and spreaded around earlier on September 1st: http://pastebin.com/APWMaZvh

One disturbing paragraph reads:

"This PR group Sarkeesian is tied to is fairly creepy. Heavily ideological, they hold retreat workshops for SJW concepts, with a sharply activist tone. Reminds us of Jesus Camp. They do workshops for game devs where they discuss "dismantling hegemonic masculinity in the gaming industry", and do weird training activities like "State Torture Jenga". "Hegemonic masculinity" -- it's like they're quoting Gramsci's prison notebooks. Creepy."

The source for this can be seen by scrolling down several blog post on Silverstring site: one particular blog post caught our eyes: http://silverstringmedia.com/blog/2014/8/20/a-to-z-a-digra-letter-series-part-4

Which led to the theory that Silverstring is part of DiGRA and that they are creating creepy games together, which led to the creation of this: http://www.funnyjunk.com/Silverstring+media/funny-pictures/5280596/

The paranoia was perpetuated among us fast, especially to the ones who just read that pic and didn't doublecheck the full context. The fact is Silverstring has no official affiliation with DiGRA. Silverstring CCO Andrew Grant Wilson went to a DiGRA conference on August 5th for the first time, making this the first and only contact between Silverstring and DiGRA (if you can even count that as a contact): http://silverstringmedia.com/blog/2014/8/5/a-to-z-a-digra-letter-series

Through our Lenses of Paranoia at that moment, the DiGRA conference must have looked like Jesus Camp indeed, especially when Andrew created a game about torture. It's unclear how it plays from 3 still images, but Andrew had bad taste, I can say that much. But that's Andrew's own creation, we must have imagined the entire DiGRA conference were full of people having similar creations, which is highly implausible. It's a far cry from actual Jesus camp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LACyLTsH4ac

I still think this kind of game academia conferences are more like a huge circlejerk for liberal art hipsters to show off their power level than anything else. But that's just me.

The above Pastebin also contains a link to a DiGRA shared document in which members had discussions together: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q5kX3LeX1pEz9kn-QPE0YJkNP5rLtBWZozZlTpqRMJg/edit?pli=1

The document was closed off from public access soon after the Pastebin was posted. This, I think, was the moment DiGRA members started noticing outsider access to their document from GamerGaters and closed off access from this document out of annoyance. We inadvertently brought the fight to DiGRA's door first without knowing it, basically.

Unfortunately, all this has done was fueling the paranoia even further by creating the illusion that DiGRA was covering the tracks of their dirty dealings. And with paranoia came conspiracies, the conspiracy theorists among us (especially the ones from /pol/) started creating this theory that went deeper and deeper into the implausibility that DiGRA was slowly indoctrinating the audiences of video games with the backing from DARPA, that their members were the one pulling the string behind Silverstring to push feminist agenda into video games and they were trying to bypass peer review system to publish their papers.

The reality? Going by Jenni's confirmation: Peer review is a contested subject among DiGRA members, and among other scholars as well. DiGRA members disagree on many things. Many of their publications have nothing to do with feminism. DARPA's funding goes into organizing conferences. DiGRA members probably barely made contact with Andrew Grant Wilson, the person that represented Silverstring at the August DiGRA conference. And finally, the feminism agenda being pushed into video games has more connection to a particular man named Zoya Street than any DiGRA members. After all, Zoya pretty much shared the whole adventure in Utah with Andrew during that conference, and check out how he disparaged TotalBiscuit too: http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=11941

He has this to say about himself: http://zoyastreet.com/about/

Did I see the name "Critical Proximity"? This Critical Proximity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWw7LwIYHbA?

I'll leave it to you to dig more on that from here on. But think about this whole deal for a moment. The whole connection to DiGRA had its origin from a blog post of a 1-time attendance of Andrew Grant Wilson to a DiGRA conference, which spawned a severely inaccurate, paranoia-inducing infographic, which got spreaded around and planted the seed of doubt about DiGRA among many GamerGaters. The lack of communication with DiGRA prior to Sargon's stream did not help clearing up this misunderstanding either.

I really don't want any needless adversary from DiGRA just because of a misunderstanding. I really wished Sargon didn't have the seed of doubt planted that deep in him and escalated the debate to that level of heat. He had his own agenda to pursue, which I guess was why he focused so much on feminism, which is a pattern that can be observed from his previous videos. He was looking at all the wrong places, is all I can say.

I also hope that somebody will send this post to Jenni Goodchild (PixieJenni), because this is intended for her as well. I don't want to make an enemy out of you, and I doubt many GamerGaters would either. You and your colleagues weren't supposed to be in this fight had we not knocked on your door and peeked into your internal document in the first place. Let's not fight, shall we? GamerGaters are more interested in making allies than enemies. This has been how they rolled since day 1: GamerGaters don't make enemies out of other people. Rather, other people make enemies out of GamerGaters. If you still decide to make enemies out of GamerGaters after reading... well, you could have created much more positivity to the world

Oh, and feel free to correct any mistake I made about how DiGRA works as well.

- aqua