Alexander is editor-at-large for Gamasutra. She also writes for VICE, Edge, Kotaku, Polygon, Boing Boing and regularly contributes to many other publications. In other words, she’s a relatively big deal. Over the past five years or so, she has spearheaded a wave of journalists who have tried to refocus games journalism. These newcomers, predominantly female, share a common ideology: men are a problem to be solved. But it is in the work of Leigh Alexander that their dogma has been most clearly and repeatedly articulated, so it's worth looking at her life and works a bit more closely.
Followers of the scandal now known as #GamerGate will note that Alexander has had her professional ethics called into question. This is liable to happen if you run a public relations consulting firm and sell your services to the same people you write about as a journalist. (Yes, you read that right.) But as bad as the ethical failings of many games journalists have been, they were largely acts of stupidity and greed. Leigh Alexander’s agenda however, is rooted in something far uglier: she actually hates gamers, despite being a journalist principally concerned with video games.
In other words, she hates her own audience.
Take a look at that "Gamers are over" article: "Games culture is a petri dish of people who know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online 'wars' about social justice or 'game journalism ethics,' straight-faced.."
She laughs about the stereotype of shy and reserved gamers, but how funny is it to mock people who play games by calling them names? Sure, some gamers enjoy gaming because because it provides a space where refined social skills aren’t necessary, but that doesn’t make their complaints about crusading journalists any less valid. In her world, the reticence of gamers to swallow her Weltanschauung can only be caused by a neural development disorder.
Alexander also thinks that the current target audience for games developers needs to change. She asserts that this presumed group of disabled cavemen have been pandered to for too long and they need to have their toys taken away: "This is hard for people who’ve drank the kool aid about how their identity depends on the ageing cultural signposts of a rapidly-evolving, increasingly broad and complex medium. It's hard for them to hear they don't own anything, anymore, that they aren’t the world’s most special-est consumer demographic, that they have to share."
Using "nerd" as a pejorative term for gamer is a favourite pastime for Alexander and she is happy to expand on her hatred for those she associates with the term. On her own website she answers the question, "Why do you sometimes mock 'nerds' and 'gamers' so virulently?" with remarkable candour: "A lot of 'proud nerds' are people who used the fact they were picked on for their interests as children to maintain, as adults and and fathers (they are most often privileged men, now) a 'secret clubhouse' that lets them victimize and oppress other participants.
"Self-identified nerds are often so obsessed with their identity as cultural outcasts that they are willfully [sic] blind to their privilege, and for the sake of relatively-absurd fandoms — space marines, dragons, zombies, endless war simulations — take their myopic and insular attitudes to 'art' and 'culture' with tunnel-visioned, inflexible, embarrassing seriousness that often leads to homogeneity, racism, sexism and bullying."
This is her central philosophical belief: men with troubled childhoods found something they liked doing and because they don’t want to do something else, they are evil monsters. She also accuses them of being bullies, another topic on which Alexander has personal expertise.
It's not unheard of for journalists to be prone to rash and angry outbursts on Twitter, but the venom spewed from Alexander's account is unparalleled for someone writing for mainstream publications. For instance, she once threatened to kill the dreams of aspiring games journalists with whom she disagreed. She brags how she has the power to make an example out of others. "Be careful with me, I am a megaphone," she warns.
You don't need to cherry pick from her account: the swaggering bluster is there for all to see. From gleefully stamping on other young women's careers to doxxing those who try to debate her. Is there any other genre of journalism in which this behaviour would be allowed to continue unchecked?
The "Gamers are over" article didn't come out of nowhere. The impunity with which she throws her weight around isn't happening in a vacuum. Alexander and her fellow travellers have been laying the groundwork for years. But before we come to that, there are some clues as to what may have initially sparked this angry lifelong crusade.
In response to a hashtag that encouraged people to tweet their favourite moments from video gaming, Alexander tweeted the following: "Twelve years old, in a room of hostile nerdmen, the slow dawning horror that they didn't want me to play too #gamingmoments".
Is it too fanciful to suppose that this youthful rejection, whatever its motivation, could have driven a twelve-year-old girl to embark on a lifelong mission of revenge against her oppressors? Whatever the truth, jihad has been declared and the long march to convince gamers that their industry will stagnate out of existence unless they embrace diversity, is well under way.
It may seem unkind to single out Leigh Alexander, but her writing has been central to the diversity movement. While pseudo-academics such as Mia Consalvo, the president of DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association), a group that provides much of the theoretical heft for gaming journalists, preach the same message as Leigh, they defer to her when it comes to finding solutions to their perceived problems.
Alexander's chosen method for pushing her gospel is to conflate dystopia with reality. Without evidence, she repeatedly claims that the feminist indie scene is the most important thing happening in gaming. She doesn't need proof; AAA games are made for a niche audience, apparently, whereas indie feminist games are for everyone. In Alexander world, it’s just too obvious to need any further explanation. Never mind the sales figures.
However, away from the gaming sites, when she addresses the true believers, the veil slips. Speaking at the TIFF Nexus Women in Film, Games & New Media Conference in 2011, Alexander made clear what her regular calls to penetrate a "wider social consciousness" and to embrace "diversity" were really all about. And they have very little to do with the reality of video games.
"For me, I'm not a young dude, obviously, and none of my friends are. If my wish is to see an evolving landscape of games that people from all walks of life can enjoy, this homogenous model of creation is not going to get me there… in game development is absolutely essential to the future health of the medium.. Because when I talk about homogeny in the space that I work I don’t just mean, one's working background, or their hobbyist experience or their education.
"The issue that I’m getting at is that there's not enough, racial, cultural, or gender diversity in game development to create this really lush palette of voices that we need to help move the medium forward."
Revolution and overthrow drip from her lips as Alexander decries the homogeneity of gaming culture. And by homogeneity, she means white guys. In her world it doesn't matter how diverse the the backgrounds, experiences and philosophies of those creating games are; games developers who didn't grow up as black trans* orphans have no place in her new utopia.
It speaks volumes about the the openness and all-around general kindness of the gaming community that it has taken this long for these absurd views to be challenged so openly. But even the willingness of gamers to tolerate new and wacky ideas can't explain how Leigh, who once described herself as an evangelist without disciples, has become the ringmistress of games journalism. Just how did a small group of vivacious young women find themselves promoted by socially reserved male editors to upper echelons of gaming journalism so quickly? Gamers want to know.