In past weeknotes, I discussed both the ethics of farming in Minecraft, as well as the role played by the “larger Minecraft community” in shaping culture.

I broke down some of the ideological assumptions behind Big Fried Chicken Company, addressing specifically consumerism, fast food consumption, and industrialization. I wrote that we cannot blindly create industrial structures on Minecraft servers, ignoring the way in which we treat, even pixelated, helpless creatures, because that further obfuscates our own real-world relationship with our food.

Speaking of the real world, PETA just came out with its “Animal Utopia Server“. An interesting idea in theory, PETA has created a Minecraft world in which animals come first. It plans to use the server as a platform to teach about the history of animal abuse at the hands of humanity.

As a writer interested in the ethics of food in Minecraft, this move by PETA attracted my attention immediately when Saeed shared the article with me. This tactic, creating an educational Minecraft server where animals live harmoniously outside the rhythms of human consumptions, seemed rather different than their usual tactics.

PETA has a dark history of co-opting tragedies and painful histories of oppression for their shock value. Members of PETA have dressed up as the KKK to pass out flyers at rallies, as well as appropriated stories of lynching and slavery to sell advertisements. Their blazen, thoughtless appropriation of racist oppression is not the only thing PETA is known for: one of their favoured techniques is using the naked female body in order to emphasize their ideology:

PETA’s history of walking all over women is well documented – the above images were sourced from Business Insider.

Compared to the above gallery, a Minecraft server seems like a reasonable, thoughtful approach. Upon further research, I came across this article by Brian Crecente quoting PETA’s Joel Bartlett, director of marketing innovation for the group:

If this rhetoric sounds familiar to those following Gamergate these past few months, that’s because it is.

Some gamers would like it both ways: they want everyone to take their medium seriously, but they don’t want anyone to challenge their political assumptions or call into question the way games treat people who don’t look and think like them. They hate and fear a world where games are truly made by and for everyone, where women make up a majority of the gaming audience, where a trans woman dominates one of the world’s great eSports. (Source)

 

There are plenty of excellent resources available discussing the right-wing, reactionary rhetoric of Gamergate. Arthur Chu at the Daily Beast wrote an excellent overview of the precedent for Culture Wars in the United States titled Of Gamers, Gates, and Disco Demolition: The Roots of Reactionary Rage.

One of my favourite such posts is by Carolyn Jong, titled GamerGate and The Right, which discusses in detail the methodology behind the ideological warfare of Gamergate. Jong’s breakdown of the history behind the tactics used by Gamergate is excellent, drawing the movement’s roots back not only to the likes of Eliot Rodger but even closer to home here in Montréal, and beyond. The following quote steals some of Jong’s thunder, so I highly recommend reading her entire post:

Elliot Rodger blamed women for his suffering, and for his inability to live up to the impossible standards of patriarchy, before killing 6 people and himself. Marc Lépine claimed he was “fighting feminism” when he murdered 14 people and committed suicide at École Polytechnique.

These might seem like isolated cases, but they all fall back on the same old myths about women and minoritized groups that are perpetuated by the mainstream media and supported by structural oppression. Every time we use a sexist slur, or dismiss the experiences of women and minorities, or make a crack about “feminazis,” or dehumanize someone who is struggling with poverty, or blame unemployment on immigrants, we contribute to a toxic culture that serves as a breeding ground for hate groups and right-wing extremism. People on both sides are suffering, but it is ultimately the people who are already disempowered, who are already vulnerable, that will bear the brunt of it, regardless of which side they identify with.

In using that particular wording, PETA has essentially co-opted the abuse that Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and countless others have suffered in the name of Gamergate. PETA has criticised videogames before, as well as used videogames to create messages in the past, but this Minecraft server has little to do with Minecraft and more to do with jumping into the Gamergate fray. On the surface, it may seem that they are using anti-Gamergate rhetoric in order to further animal rights – but under the surface they are exploiting the abuse of women in order to further their own ideological marketing.