I wonder if they played too early because they were forced too by the Zoe Quinn affair?
I don't know. Adrian Shaw had a 2011 academic paper that stated, effectively, the following:
- Gamers do not identify with their avatars, and do not find diversity to be a virtue
- Gamers are strong believers in meritocracy
- Meritocracy and a refusal of identity politics is a sin against Social Justice
- Therefore: The gamer identity must be destroyed and replaced with a new gamer identity that will accept Social Justice
Sargon has an expose on Shaw
here. The hilarious thing is like all good Marxists, Shaw did two papers about the same research and
came to the exact opposite conclusion in each. This primed the Identity Marxists that were infesting gaming -- they now had an enemy to destroy, and a cause to crusade for -- those evil Gamers had to be replaced with properly controlled "Soy Gamers."
Zoe Quinn was just a useful idiot to them, and them to her -- like most SA goons she figured out if you pretend to be a feminist no one is allowed to call you out on your shit. Quinn being outed as a rapist by her male feminist rape victim helped spark GG, but it really just showed that GameJournoPros was setting narratives. The Gamers Are Dead thing came from the Identity Marxist / Cultural Marxist true believers in Gaming Journalism, and would have happened even without Quinn's little stupidity... But when, exactly would they have made that play?
Did the Quinn backlash cause them to jump the gun? Maybe. Quinn was heavily connected with a lot of those Cultural Marxist true believers, and a lot of the GameJournoPros members (hell, she fucked half of them), but was using both for her own ends. But I don't know if the Gamers are Dead articles were connected directly to Quinn, and I don't know if the GJP mailing list organized the Gamers are Dead articles, or if that was a separate SocJus organization effort.
If the true believers had waited another year or more to make their play, 4chan / Reddit would have been completely subverted, TB would have been too busy dying of cancer to get involved, MundaneMatt would have probably given up on YT instead of covering and being DMCA'd over it, Milo would have moved on to greener pastures, et cetera. We would have seen a situation like comics, where if you don't espouse the virtues of Social Justice you just don't get work, period.
Thankfully for us, as GG, CG, ThotGate, and the Weeb Wars have shown, you have the alpha SJWs (Anita, Zoe, etc) who set the narrative et all, and the beta SJWs (Rial, Marchi, Wu, etc) who don't understand the finer points of all this but know how to join in a lynch mob when one forms. And the latter cause so, so much more harm to the SocJus priesthood than almost anything else.