The World of Warcraft to Incel Pipeline
It's 2013. During the holiday season, Blizzard released the fifth and highly anticipated Warlords of Draenor expansion. Fast-forward a couple months later and in 2014, World of Warcraft's player count is at its lowest since TBC.
(World of Warcraft Player Count Chart)
Like millions of others, I lost myself in the mystery and adventure of Azeroth. Sprinting home from school just to have an extra 5 minutes playing on the family computer before my dad would get home from work. It was a world that rewarded an unnatural amount of time investment. You couldn’t really balance WoW with real life. In many ways, it was your life.
World of Warcraft fosters a prominent sense of competition and progression by rewarding effort and dedication (PvP, PvE, Gold-farming, etc.). With a lack of in-game content in the latest expansion, WoW players' purpose, outlet, and identity were built atop a house of cards that was now on the precipice of collapse. MMOs are constantly on borrowed time. They can only exist as long as their players and communities do (...unless it's Runescape lol). Which implicates that for WoW streamers like Asmongold, whose content primarily surrounded World of Warcraft, the newest expansions' flop surely meant impending doom... right?
Almost poetically however, around the same time, a new raid was dropping. Instead of on Azeroth, the newest battlefield was a war against progressivism fuelled by the gaming community's misogyny and disillusioned sense of male identity. Gamergate was born in the vacuum left by World of Warcraft’s decline, with former WoW streamers now desperate to pivot and retain their viewership, leading the charge.
The insecure and sexually frustrated supporters of Gamergate followed the premise that wokeism and the role of feminism in video games undermined the meritocratic and masculine power fantasy that games like World of Warcraft provided them. However the flames of Gamergate were fanned during the metaphorical assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 2013 when Zoë Quinn released her game Depression Quest to critical acclaim. 4chan users spread false accusations of Quinn's supposed sexual relationship with a game journalist, which spiralled into a fury of misogynistic discourse online. Gamergate culminated in a crusade of harassment against prominent women in the gaming community, supported by gamers and streamers alike with too much time on their hands...
Much like the world before Ferdinand's assassination, the gaming industry was already teeming with tension and misogynistic attitudes (with CS:GO chief among the officers). In part, stemming from selection bias, whereby people attracted to competitive, hypermasculine environments tend to reproduce those traits. However online spaces give people a sense of detachment. Behind a screen, the usual social consequences disappear. The voices and attitudes of sexually frustrated men are amplified by the echo chambers of online subcultures and camaraderie of internet degenerates. Coinciding with the inception of Gamergate, came the rise of the concept, Social Justice Warrior who by definition advocate for fairness and equality. Somewhat concerningly, their Anti-SJW counterparts also gained prevalence during this time.
During this era, I was a young, impressionable teenager. My YouTube algorithm fed me "SJW gets destroyed" and "Feminist gets OWNED" compilations for seemingly no reason at the time, which is an interesting point of discussion for a later date. With the context of today, it would not be egregious to reason that the decline of WoW gave way to the supply and demand of the Anti-SJW content that permeated 2014-2017 YouTube. As a teenager, it didn't take much coercion to fall victim to being disillusioned by the society portrayed in these videos, much like propaganda.
To be indoctrinated by these videos however requires their viewers to not perceive reality as it is. A daunting task for those who feel powerless, invisible, or rejected (especially socially or romantically) and use video games as a form of escapism. For those who feel threatened by the existence and equality of women, immersion and acceptance into Anti-SJW echo chambers serves as a gateway to being highly influenced by far-right ideology, normalizing the ultranationalistic attitudes exemplified by leaders like Donald Trump and commentators such as Charlie Kirk.
We live in a era where political figureheads like Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk may not have any direct correlation to a now-niche video game like World of Warcraft, but it is interesting to examine impact of Gamergate on their supporters and the relationship WoW has with Gamergate itself. Gamergate is a commentary on identity and how fragile the nature of community is in the interconnected world we all belong to. The butterfly effect as Ray Bradbury explains in A Sound of Thunder describes perfectly how the birth of the modern-day incel can be attributed to the downfall of a video game.