Of Blocklists, Groupthink and (tangentially) the Gamergate Thing

Preface: It's been a bit of a horrible time of it in the world of games and games dev for the past few weeks with the whole #gamergate business. I guess it's sadly necessary for me to open this post by stating that I find the various forms of threats, doxing, hacking and general harassment that have gone on abhorrent. As far as the theories that have been thrown around go, I'm unconvinced by the claims of some Machiavellian conspiracy. I think games dev and journalism has issues with cliques and "in-crowds" that I won't go into here but the strings that most people can pull aren't that long or strong.

However, I've also been disappointed with the responses from commentators who have chosen to join in with the name-calling and tribalist us-vs.-them rhetoric by constructing a straw-man "gamer" definition to rail against. I dislike polarised argument and poor argument and there's been a lot of that on both sides. As usual most useful conversation got lost in the shouting. That's unsurprising, considering the poisonous start to the whole affair, but I can still mourn for the lack of better communication.

Anyway, that said, my involvement in the whole thing has been mostly shaking my head and frowning. That was until today when I discovered that my Twitter account had been placed on a block list that was publicly shared by Chris Grant, the editor-in-chief of Polygon.

The list as linked is now unavailable but it was obviously quickly copied and can be found around the web. Here's a pastebin that will probably expire at some point: http://pastebin.com/zrcXiTdL . I'm not hosting it so if that's gone you'll have to take my word for who's on there.

Okay, so Twitter is a free-for-all and you can imagine that those with larger followings might have a good use for the block button. Although I think I'm generally a benign sort of presence on Twitter I have no problem with the idea that some might prefer not to interact with me. The problem here is not being blocked, it's the who and why and context of the whole thing.

Firstly, why was I on the list? Fortunately, because my Twitter interactions are quite rare, I knew exactly why I was on the list when I read that it was a merged list with Ben Kuchera. I had a Twitter conversation with Kuchera earlier this year that ended with him blocking me. Here it is:

That was it. I sent that last tweet and then later discovered I was no longer following Kuchera and was told that I was blocked when I tried to re-follow. You can judge for yourself if you think that was a block-worthy interaction but he's free to block me from his feed and it's ultimately no big deal. However, half a year later and now I'm on this list. A list that is propagated to other editors at Polygon, an editor at IGN and posted publicly as effectively a shitlist in the context of #gamergate harassment.

That's a bit of a bigger deal.

I am, at least in theory, a developer of games software. I may well at some point wish to interact with any number of people in the games space. Twitter is an extremely common path to opening contact or continuing contact in that space. Being on that list directly bars my use of Twitter to contact those using the list and it also casts a shadow on the indirect/serendipitous networking that occurs.

Now Chris Grant has gone back and unblocked everyone, so problem solved, right? No, not at all. The list is out there and being used. As of time of writing I'm still blocked by Chris Plante, another Polygon editor and Bennett Foddy, well-known indie dev of QWOP and GIRP. I've seen at least one example of the list being rolled into an even bigger shitlist and re-posted for general use -- again supposedly under the banner of "these people are harassers".

I'm not alone here. The list contains other devs who weren't involved in gamergate (that I'm aware of) like @Worthless_Bums (dev of Steam Marines) and people solidly on the social justice side of things like @TRONMAXIMUM. I'm sure there are some genuinely nasty Twitter accounts on there but a significant part just looks like a list of people who have at some point irritated one person enough for them to hit the block button.

This is why shared block-lists are a terrible idea in general and a dangerous idea when applied to an industry space. Everyone who subscribes to such a list is willingly limiting their communication based on the most hair-trigger sensibilities of the group. I and many others are now marked to be avoided or treated with suspicion by games devs and writers for possibly little more than tweeting Ben Kuchera while he was having a bad day.

That's a shitty thing to do to people and I hope Chris Grant and the others involved think hard about the implications of what they've done here.




Addendum: I'm just going to add the non-Polygon users of this list that I discover to demonstrate how potentially damaging this is. I'll only ever know those that I find I'm blocked from following or that others on the list notice, so this is likely just the tip of the iceberg:

Evan Lahti - Editor in Chief at PC Gamer
Matt Lees - Games YouTuber and podcaster
Bennett Foddy - Indie games dev