Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

Like Vivian James, it is the negation of any sort of desire. It is a vision of video gaming reduced to passively accepting the products of big-name developers on the terms that are offered, without any sort of opinion or personal identity involved. That this reduces video gaming—a medium that has, since the heyday of the NES, in point of fact included countless women and minorities in its tens of millions of players, and currently shows a clear majority of women among console gamers—to a monoculture is irrelevant. They don’t care about the history of the medium, to the point that they targeted an academic focusing on video game archiving for harassment because he publicly stated that anxiety about Gamergate was making it harder to get funding, whose work they then declared was unimportant anyway. Not even a monoculture then—an anticulture, with Vivian James ironically its perfect representation. It’s a desire to befit their worldview, its adamance dwarfed only by its fundamental emptiness. There’s nothing there. There’s never been anything there. Except, of course, the trail of devastation left behind. The utter sludge of human misery brought down upon victim after victim over the course of this ghastly farce. Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, Sarah Nyberg, Randi Harper, Phil Fish, Alison Rapp, Veerender Jubbal, and so many more, an immeasurably vast ledger of people subjected to its brutality, every one of their stories with more weight and substance and meaning th...