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A review by justabean_reads
The Hivemind Swarmed: Conversations on Gamergate, the Aftermath, and the Quest for a Safer Internet by David Wolinsky
2.5
This is meant to be an oral history of Gamergate, which doesn't interview anyone who participated in harassment, or any of the three primary targets. It also doesn't spend a hell of a lot of time on Gamergate itself, which felt odd to me. I guess maybe it's coming from the point of view that we all saw it, and there's not much to say past, "Well, that was horrible." However, it doesn't really live up to what I was expecting from this book.
Instead, it was about the culture inside the industry, and to a lesser extent fandom, how outside perception affects that, and how much all of that's been built in from the word go. Wolinsky did a great job of putting voices next to each other that added context or pushback without having to interject himself, and this also highlighted how much conflict there is within the community. I really appreciated that he didn't set up some halcyon past Internet age where everyone was nice, though he did talk about how social media has accelerated bullying. It's overall a good look at video game culture, and the conversations in the industry, even if those tend to be somewhat circular, and it's unclear if anything's getting better. Without feeling pinned to the moment of Gamergate happening, or discussing what happened in detail, it ended up feeling unmoored.
(I also want to put out there that the reason that gaming is different culturally than movies, TV, books, sports and their fandoms is in no small part set up cost, time and skill levels required. Like my shitty old laptop won't play any of the good games. Yes, I know Baba Is You and that poker thing everyone is into are also good games, but you know what I mean. And I don't want to spend either the time or the money to get into Dragon Age, or anything more complicated than Zen Koi, or Civilisation IV with the difficulty settings turned off. And it felt weird to me that so many people in the book were genuinely baffled about why games got treated differently than Marvel movies, or whatever.)
At some point, it felt like it was both a little too inside baseball, and not inside baseball enough?
Instead, it was about the culture inside the industry, and to a lesser extent fandom, how outside perception affects that, and how much all of that's been built in from the word go. Wolinsky did a great job of putting voices next to each other that added context or pushback without having to interject himself, and this also highlighted how much conflict there is within the community. I really appreciated that he didn't set up some halcyon past Internet age where everyone was nice, though he did talk about how social media has accelerated bullying. It's overall a good look at video game culture, and the conversations in the industry, even if those tend to be somewhat circular, and it's unclear if anything's getting better. Without feeling pinned to the moment of Gamergate happening, or discussing what happened in detail, it ended up feeling unmoored.
(I also want to put out there that the reason that gaming is different culturally than movies, TV, books, sports and their fandoms is in no small part set up cost, time and skill levels required. Like my shitty old laptop won't play any of the good games. Yes, I know Baba Is You and that poker thing everyone is into are also good games, but you know what I mean. And I don't want to spend either the time or the money to get into Dragon Age, or anything more complicated than Zen Koi, or Civilisation IV with the difficulty settings turned off. And it felt weird to me that so many people in the book were genuinely baffled about why games got treated differently than Marvel movies, or whatever.)
At some point, it felt like it was both a little too inside baseball, and not inside baseball enough?