Lester Francois sat at a small wooden desk in a 15-Euro-a-night apartment on the 8th floor of a Berlin hotel. His co-producer, Anna Brady, was nearby. It was 6pm and they were both on edge. For the past three years, Francois and Brady had been making a documentary about independent video game developers, and for the past two months they’d been touring it through the US and Europe. GameLoading: Rise of the Indies was launching during a flashpoint for indie games. Since Francois and Brady had interviewed them, several subjects of the film - and their community in general - had been systematically targeted by a nebulous group called GamerGate. GamerGate had become so notorious it was covered by mainstream publications in the same pages as stories about ISIS hostages and Hurricane Sandy. The film makers were aware they’d made a film which encapsulated everything GamerGate hated: close relationships between indie game developers, critically-acclaimed women, and video games which, given the narrow definition of most mainstream video games, didn’t seem much like video games at all - but were that much more thrilling for it.
Francois and Brady watched their laptop, the film went up online, and the torrent of abuse began. Nine hours later they crawled into bed, deflated.
Indie gaming is going through a rough puberty and those on the other side of the playground don’t quite know what to make of it. The medium has weathered scrutiny for decades, from the satanic panic surrounding Dungeons & Dragons to Jack Thompson-alikes pegging first-person shooters as training camps for real life mass murderers. Over the past nine months, the phone calls have come from inside the house. Whatever idea there was of a ‘gaming community’ has been torn apart by the same people who, for most of gaming history, were considered its core constituents.
Since taking shape in August last year, GamerGate has risen and receded from the public imagination, but although it’s no longer a mainstream concern, it’s still just as threatening. And while its ostensible goal of promoting transparency and ethical conduct in video games journalism is valid, it’s manifested as widespread character assassination and harassment – not just targeted towards people who’ve allegedly violated GamerGate’s erroneous standard of ethics, but anyone involved with those people as well.
Francois believes that’s why it’s been so hard to get any press for the film in America. “We had teams of PR people working on it and they couldn’t get through to any of these [US] publications. Europe went a lot better,” he says.
GameLoading features 34 interviews, mostly with developers, but also including teachers and journalists. Veterans like id Software’s Tom Hall and John Romero are there for context, but mostly a crop of developers more recent to the community are allowed to speak for themselves. After an hour and a half, you come away wanting to make your own games, to join this community of people combining art and sound and programming. Filmed before GamerGate began, some of the developers in the film, including Zoe Quinn, briefly address the online harassment particular to being a woman in video games. Mostly, though, GameLoading brings out the best in video games. In the film’s perspective, gaming excites people from diverse backgrounds, for its unexplored potential and holistic possibilities. It says wherever you’re from, whatever you know, video games will let you express the range of your imagination.
Zoe QuinnBefore filming, Francois and Brady had a list of developers in mind for the film, but for various reasons most of them didn’t work out. Instead, they found their subjects through circumstance; While couch surfing, they were introduced to Cart Life developer Richard Hofmeier, who introduced them to The Stanley Parable’s Davey Wreden, and many followed on from there. “It was like going on tour with Lollapalooza,” Francois says. “And meeting all these bands on a similar journey.” That tour took place through conferences like PAX East, PAX Prime, and Fantastic Arcade. “You see the same faces and new faces and that’s how we ended up casting the film.” GamerGate have referred to this as a clique, but Francois and Brady prefer to think of it as a community. In one scene, Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail talks about some of the other subjects of the film as being his best friends in the world, but he only gets to see them for two weeks a year – while they’re all coming together at these conferences all over the globe. Unlike a clique, there are no barriers for entry except a love for the medium and the desire to participate to broaden its scope.
Looking at the most popular reviews online, you’d think GameLoading had done all but advocate for the return of the Third Reich. Francois and Brady credit organised downvote brigades from GamerGate, coordinating to vote down positive reviews and vote negative reviews up to the front of every site. In total, most reviews are positive, but the most visible ones are negative. There’s a vivid disconnect between these surface reviews online and the reception the film gets in real life. At screenings, audiences walk out of the theatre charged and inspired. “There were really positive people coming up to us afterwards,” Francois says, “saying they were feeling like they needed to give up on indie game development ‘cos they weren’t getting anywhere, but the film had invigorated them.” At GDC in San Francisco, people tweeting about the film during the first session got it trending on Twitter, bringing a buzzing horde of hundreds of people into the foyer for the second session, as well as distributors, publishers and publicists hoping to jump on board.
What was truly disappointing were the impressionable readers who saw the negative reviews without understanding where they were coming from, and therefore turned away from the film. Some of the prominent negative reviewers clearly haven’t seen the film – the most distinct criticism is that the film features pink-haired devs – and repetitiously quote the few who have, like one poster who wrote a bio for each of the interviewees listing their perceived violations. Some positive reviewers were even harassed and then encouraged by others to take down their review, because “it isn’t worth it.” GameLoading’s biggest platform is Steam; this review bombing had a direct impact on the film’s sales.
Rami IsmailBut Francois and Brady are forced to contend with it. “As indie film makers, we don’t have the money behind us to be in cinemas, the only way we can sell the film is on the internet, and we have to deal with all this crap by selling it on the internet,” Brady says. “There’s no way to avoid all the hate.” And because it’s an internet phenomenon, they can’t find much solace in their real life supporters. “No one could understand what we’re talking about. I was explaining it to a friend and he said, ‘Ah well, everyone gets negative reviews,’ and they didn’t understand the toxic nature of the situation.”
“We made this film to show how gaming’s maturing,” Francois says, “but GamerGate just proved us wrong. We felt a bit silly. We’d spent three years making this point that games were mature now, but they slapped us in the face with how immature a lot of these gamers are.”
Francois is fond of comparing GamerGate to ISIS, which seems extreme but isn’t entirely absurd. GamerGate, after all, are militant fundamentalists, ideologues who use guerilla tactics to make their minority force seem as loud and dangerous as possible. By coordinating via IRC and the various chans – particularly 8chan – and using tools like Thunderclap to bomb social media with pro-GamerGate propaganda, ‘gators’ can disrupt any discussion online. Meanwhile, US Senators are drafting legislation on how to battle the “fancy memes” used by ISIS to spread their propaganda and the Russian government is building troll farms to flood online discourse with pro-Putin messages.
For those parallels, there are obvious, significant differences here: GamerGate isn’t beheading journalists nor throwing them in Siberian prison camps. But social media is the battleground now, and when people like Lester Francois and Anna Brady are bold enough to stick their heads out of the trenches with the hope of spreading something positive, they’re quickly shot down. It’s worth remembering, though, that despite GamerGate’s attempts to cripple the film commercially, Francois and Brady are still getting through to people. Even if it isn’t seen by as wide an audience as the filmmakers and their backers hoped, it’s already inspiring a new wave of developers.
In a particularly touching moment of the film, the game developers offer their definitions of success. For Brady, “Success, in some ways, is having the courage to try something new and put it on the line and follow it through. We did want to make an inspiring film that makes people want to make games and having people write to us and tell us that they started making a game as soon as they finished watching the film has been pretty amazing.”
“Did we achieve what we set out to make? I think we did,” Francois says. “The reactions we get at screenings and the emails we get from people who’re really moved by the film… all the positive messages we get from people, to me, is the success.” While GamerGate might last another month or another year, the impact GameLoading: Rise of the Indies has had on its audience could last a lifetime.