{"id":5014,"date":"2014-11-05T11:00:28","date_gmt":"2014-11-05T16:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=5014"},"modified":"2014-10-31T08:58:48","modified_gmt":"2014-10-31T12:58:48","slug":"gamergate-the-great-cat-massacre-and-future-special-collections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=5014","title":{"rendered":"#GamerGate, The Great Cat Massacre, and Future Special Collections"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a famous study of The Great Cat Massacre<\/a>, historian Robert Darnton tries to figure out why a group of apprentice printers living and working on Rue Saint-S\u00e9verin in Paris \u201cmassacred\u201d cats in the late 1730s. Read the following quote from his writing on the subject<\/a>, but think about #gamergate in the back of your mind while you do so.<\/p>\n

anthropologists have found that the best points of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be most opaque. When you realise that you are not getting something \u2013 a joke, a proverb, a ceremony that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it. By getting the joke of the great cat massacre, it may be possible to ‘get’ a basic ingredient of artisanal culture under the Old Regime.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On its face, so little of #gamergate<\/a> makes any sense. As a result, I think it has a good chance of being of considerable interest to historians down the road. When historians turn to write the history of contemporary American culture #gamergate will provide a similarly opaque point of entry.<\/p>\n

\"(Image<\/a>
An example of the \u201cActually it\u2019s about ethics<\/a>” meme.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

They can ask something like \u201cHow could a spurned boyfriend of a game developer\u2019s blog posts result in a crusade ostensibly about ethics in games journalism that in practice involves an extensive campaign of death threats and harassment of women. And further, how could that become a running major news story?\u201d I think it may be similarly possible to \u2018get\u2019 some of the basic ingredients of American culture around technology in the early 21st century by unpacking the logic and the contradictions at play in #gamergate. To that end, I think there is a clear need for collecting and preserving the records of this exchange.<\/p>\n

The need for #GamerGate special collections<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to get into recapping the details of #GamerGate here. To that end, I can point to some exploration;<\/p>\n