There seems a strange aversion to letting people do what is entirely their legal right to do.

I try to cast a pretty wide reading net but no one can keep up with everything. A few months ago I read a couple of articles that seemed to indicate that there was some sort of disturbance in the force over in the science fiction and fantasy writing world. It had to do with Social Justice Warriors (SJW) and advocacy for positions based on gender or ethnicity. It sounded like a handful of community institutions had been taken over by SJWs and that writers, fans, and readers were up in arms. Also seemed like there was some sort of issue related to self-publishing and publishing by the major houses. Intriguing but just not high on my list of priorities to know more about.

But then in the past couple of weeks I have seen similar posts and articles arising out of the gaming community. The most recent one I have seen is this piece, Gamergate: Journalism as a Social Justice War game by Hannah Wallen. Again, the issues are a little unclear, the players unknown to me, the emotion high and my interest low.

But what is going on? One of the commenters links this further to the hounding of IT companies that is going on for not having representative workforces.

Rob Crawford

Interesting insight. I'd noticed that this year has seen assaults from the Social Justice Warriors on important aspects of my (extremely nerdy) life: the software industry has been declared "too white and too male", science fiction has been declared "too white and too male", role-playing games are "too white and too male" and now video games are -- you guessed it -- "too white and too male".

Is there some sort of concerted effort going on here? Coincidence? Last gasp of discredited ideological advocates? I don't know. Perhaps it is much ado about nothing but there does seem something odd here and vaguely sinister. There seems a strange aversion to letting people do what is entirely their legal right to do.