As someone who used to frequent The Escapist for years, I’d like to drop some words on the community there, and the big change that drove me away.
So when I first showed up there, it was a relatively high quality gaming community, as from the perspective from someone who came from GameFAQs (which is about as much of a hole as it’s always been). I believe the reason for this was the draconian moderation team, which kept a tight leash on what kinds of posts you could make. There was always a lot of criticism directed at the mods, which made the place look a lot worse than it was, especially in hindsight, where moderation has become significantly more lax, yet gets the same complaints to this day. Let it be a lesson that the existence of criticism means absolutely nothing, and that the important thing is the quality of the criticisms.
Which brings me to the main problem with the moderation: people who acted against the spirit of the rules without breaking them. There was always a few people who would be utter shithogs, yet not quite break the rules. What this ended up being was that there was a few people that everyone hated but couldn’t get rid of, but well-liked people who turned a little too toxic or accidentally made a too low-quality post and would get punished, and this created a lot of animosity against the mods for legitimate reasons, in addition to the rightfully-punished people whining.
The reason I bring this up is that it’s very important to understand what was wrong with The Escapist’s community before GamerGate happened, as a contrast to what it’s ended up being today.
So, GamerGate. The Escapist decided not to gag order the topic, unlike every other gaming website or equivalent. This not only brought the under fire from the emerging anti-GG crowd, but drew in a lot of new users who were only there to discuss (or try to stop the discussion of) GG. This was a really bad move for the community, because, at least in my eyes, the community was heavily split by the two sides of GG. The community was very well aware of the general shittiness of both games journalists and bad gamers, and The Escapist was sort of a haven for this community. GG asked them to pick which side they hated more, because, as we all know, having a nuanced middle position is unthinkable.
This broke the community apart. The Mass Effect 3 controversy was a very similar situation, but on a much smaller scale. Paid off journalists VS entitles gamers was quite the shitstorm on the site, and now we have that, plus politics! It was the defining moment of The Escapist’s history, and the community could have truly died. But, somehow, The Escapist community did not disintegrate, and I believe the reason why is a mix of people who wanted to save the community, and people who felt the desire to continue the GG discussion in the only place they could.
But now we get to the main point, the main reason why The Escapist’s community really died: the shithogs who didn’t break rules. These people were always there, but everyone hated them enough that the good in the community outshone them. GG changed that. By drawing a party line, you had shithogs that half the community supported, because they were on their side. And the toxicity from the shithogs started to affect everyone.
But there was something else. People who turned toxic would be much worse at ban evasion and would get filtered out. But the moderation team lowered their stranglehold on the community, and this is was a big factor in ruining the community. People could act much worse and get away with it, and the good people who got turned by them would have a better chance of dodging the banhammer. And eventually, like any community, this will drive the good people away. And we have the situation we face today.
The new Escapist wants to try and bring about the golden age once again, and are blaming the politics from GG for The Escapist’s downfall. But the real problem is poor moderation. Applying the rules in a consistent fashion does have the problem of lacking nuance in who actually deserves to be punished, but it’s necessary to filter out toxic individuals and keep the community angry at the moderation team, not each other. The fact that despite the moderators being more lax than ever in the website’s history, people are still mad at them for the exact same things as when you would be banned for posting a one sentence post shows this too well.
Regardless of all this, banning political discussions is a big loss. Not only because I don’t think politics is the main reason the site soured, but also because it was the goal of anti-GG all along. The goal was not to win the discussion, but to prevent the discussion from happening in the first place. After all, despite anti-GG’s insistence, nobody who actually matters really supports keeping non-straight white males out of gaming, right? It was always a smokescreen to distract, and thanks to The Escapist, it didn’t work.
I suppose that I was more bitter about this than I thought, considering I typed all that. I guess I should finish up by saying that The Escapist’s fall was attributed to politics when, in reality, it was a minor player at best. And a lot of “political” issues are just like this, like the wage gap, for example. People are all too eager to blame politics for causing something that has other, bigger factors affecting it.
