In a recent Playstation television ad, we see some of Sony's most popular heroes—Solid Snake, Nathan Drake and Kratos—gathered at a bar, telling war stories about a man they call only Michael. They name him the hero and savior of their greatest battles, and raise their glasses to his portrait: an image of a young white man, holding a Playstation controller.

The camera hangs reverently on Michael's face, before panning out to reveal a sea of other gamer portraits. But Michael is presented to us as the prototypical "gamer," the accepted idea of what a person who plays video games looks like, at least in the world of mainstream games. "You belong," this ad is saying, to people who look like Michael. "This community is yours. Here, you make the rules."

For decades now, companies have been selling the idea that playing video games places you in a special fraternity of people with similar interests, goals and values, even if those values are as small as "enjoys video games." Ads like this are designed to make Sony's customers feel like a chosen, special people, to generate a fiction of belonging that trumps everything else. In his book Imagined Communities, professor and author Benedict Anderson described this kind of broad, horizontal camaraderie as the source of nationalistic fervor, the sort of thing that makes people want to "die for such limited imaginings."

Gatekeeping is not a new trend in games, and much of it revolves around this imagined community of players—what we think a someone who plays video games does or does not look like, and whose pictures belong on the wall. When Anna Anthropy released Dys4ia in 2013, the conversation centered around whether or not it was really "a game" at all. Maddy Myers, the assistant games editor for Paste, had a colleague refer to her work as "gender stuff". Less than a month ago, the Hearthstone community was wrapped up in an "investigation" of whether or not the player MagicAmy has a man play for her.

For many of the people policing the imagined community of games, the influx of new voices is misperceived as sort of "digital colonialism," where some people are "natives" of the internet and gaming culture, while others are invaders, unwelcome interlopers and newbies. Now that marginalized people are more present and visible in spaces like eSports, journalism or online discussion, many of the Michaels of gaming culture believe that they're witnessing a seizure of resources, or an attempt by outsiders to co-opt their culture or hold it captive.

I spoke with a professor of postcolonial literature—my mother—about the definition of colonialism, which is very particular and specific: It means the seizure of land, then its resources, and then the co-opting of those resources to the captive market of the colonizer.

It may be tempting to make a metaphor about this process when one sees one's subculture changing. It's easy to imagine a newfound influx of women, people of color, and queer people in a space that has been narrativized as belonging to the straight white male as a "seizure of land."

On the phone, though, my mom was fascinated by what I'd asked her: Are there "natives" to non-physical spaces? Are there natives to fandoms, and is there a cultural space at stake when those niche cultures expand? Firstly, she told me, physical space is finite. The British quest for empire involved claiming land and either eliminating or subjugating their native peoples.

On the internet, of course, people in fandoms can literally just go somewhere else. The internet is infinite, as are the communities that spring up around gaming; there's enough for everyone, and as games diversify, it's easy to imagine that soon there will be a game for everyone, too. From a purely capitalist perspective, creating a product that appeals to as many markets as possible has a good thing. The market isn't shrinking, changing focus or expelling anyone—it's growing.

My mother also told me that that the most significant difference between colonialism in history and colonialism as it's described here is race. My mother and father were both bodily displaced by colonialism, my grandfather born under British rule. Is anyone, least of all white men, actively being displaced in fandom or in online communities? Is there a white male diaspora of gaming culture on the internet, are they creating actual microcultures in foreign lands as their own is taken away from them?

Obviously not—the historical precedent of colonialism feels like a good metaphor, but colonialism's lasting effects on society at large mean more than just, "The thing I like no longer feels like it is mine." It was always yours. It was always everyone's. It's just that now more of the 'everyones' are claiming their seat at the table.

Colonialism historically removed power from minority groups, stripping them of their homes and cultures. But no matter how many thinkpieces on gender and race and sexuality in games get written, there will be a new Call of Duty every year. For every Twine game, there are thousands of bros who will buy the next hot AAA release without reading a single review.

This is all true of broader media as well. Black Cinema in the '90s didn't kill Hollywood, and if it had, this Oscars season might have looked significantly different, and Spike Lee wouldn't have to fund his films through Kickstarter. In the '90s renaissance of black sitcoms, did Friends or Seinfeld go away?

Way back in 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne described the growing number of female authors as "a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public is occupied with their trash… Generally, women write like emasculated men, and are only to be distinguished from male authors by greater feebleness and folly."

Despite Hawthorne's opinions, women continued to write. The novel as an artform didn't die—and we all still read his work, too. When marginalized voices come to take their seat at the table, there will always be an outcry that they are invaders, colonists, inferior versions of their straight, white male counterparts. But rather than killing artforms, the addition of marginalized voices often helps ensure that they stay alive.

Journals like the Arcade Review, writers like Austin Walker, game developers like Alpha Six Productions are not asking to displace the games communities that exist, but to converse with them and to keep them from stagnating. If minority voices do not participate in an artform, where, exactly will that artform go? How will it be challenged and provoked if there are no workers to do the challenging and provoking?

Where would avant-garde cinema be without Maya Deren, whose authorship of her own work was challenged—as women's authorship is almost always challenged? If the current Fine Arts climate can support both Kara Walker and Ryder Ripps, I am sure gaming can handle both Merrit Kopas's Hugpunx and EA's Battlefield: Hardline. The same corporations that sell us the idea of gamers as an imagined nation are experiencing a wave of diminishing returns on their franchises. What we see in gaming right now is not colonialism, but evolution: the changes that need to take place for the art form to survive and thrive. Rather than imagining games as a community of chosen people whose integrity must be protected, everyone must take a broader view of the form and the multitudes it already contains.

Before I start, let me get some things straight: I’m a queer feminist. I think society is pretty damn sexist, and that video gaming is one area where it’s particularly obvious. I think the treatment of Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian and a bunch of other people these last few weeks is despicable. I think being angry and defensive when you’re being harassed for your gender or for how much sex you’ve had is a totally valid thing to be.

But I’m so sick and tired of how some people I otherwise respect and agree with keep responding to those who disagree with them.

This isn’t tone policing, this is asking you to stop using words and concepts that exclude people.

You can’t build an inclusive, friendly place on exclusionary, insulting language.

There’s a bunch of things that have been bothering me – not just in the recent “GamerGate” things, but in the “Women Against Feminism” debates before that, and a whole bunch of stuff before that too. So here’s a few things we need to stop doing if we want to build the inclusive society we claim to.

‘You just can’t get laid’ – ‘Hah, they’re all virgins’  – (See also: my earlier blog on this).
I’ve written about this in more detail at the link above, but basically: not having had sex is not a bad thing. It should not be used as an insult. A feminist calling someone misogynistic a virgin as an insult is upholding the societal standard of compulsory sexuality just as much (if not more, since people may think feminists have more ‘progressive’ views on sex!) as anyone else. Plenty of people don’t have sex – I’m asexual, and many asexual people don’t. Referring to a lack of sex as a negative thing just shows me that you don’t care about people like me in your supposedly inclusive end-state.

‘I’m sick of these lunatics’ – ‘These deranged people’ – ‘These people are crazy’
Seriously, just stop with this. Mental illness is stigmatised enough. People who are sexist (or racist, or homophobic) are not crazy, or mad, or deranged, or nutcases or any of these numerous phrases I’ve seen thrown around this week. Just because you disagree with someone, find their morals reprehensible, or because they’re harassing you does not mean that you should call them anything referring to mental illness. I mean, way to show those who are on your side that you just don’t care about excluding them, right?

On another note, this kind of discourse is actively harmful to reducing sexism (and racism, and homophobia, and so on). Treating people who hold these kind of opinions as separate – as the other, as an almost monster-type figure (and don’t even get me started on how equating mad to monster-like is terrible!) stops us discussing how normal these views are. And by normal, I don’t mean acceptable, I mean common. Almost everyone has at some point held views like this, no matter how inclusive you think you are now. I know I did. Teenage me used to think femininity meant weakness. I have relatives who still think the Jennifer Lawerance nude photo thing was a little bit her fault – despite also thinking the people sharing them are awful and sexist. If we start to view the people with these opinions as extremes, as the other, we stop being able to see it in our friends, family and co-workers. How can you challenge something that you can’t even recognise in yourself and others because you’ve othered it so much?

‘Pink curly handwriting hurts my brain’
So this one is from a response to the women against feminism campaign, but it’s relevant to other things. Stop devaluing femininity in your responses to people! What does it matter if someone writes their opinion down in a pink curly font? Stop assuming that women who wear make-up are somehow less feminist than you are – stop assuming that wearing dresses or actually conciously choosing for your own reasons, not those of society, to be a housewife makes you less valid as a woman. The whole point of feminism is choice. Other ways people are guilty of this are calling men who disagree with them ‘whiny girls’ or implying ‘I’m more of a man than you are’, or suggesting that complaining is a feminine trait. Just think about what you’re implying when you choose to devalue things like pink, or emphasise masculinity as something you have and then men you’re arguing don’t.

Also, don’t patronise women who differ in opinion from you. Let’s look at that some more, shall we?

‘Women against feminism are…’ – (See also: this twitter feed)
The response to the women against feminism campaign has almost always been one I can’t get behind. As the above account – which I’ve seen retweeted by many women I otherwise respect and agree with – shows, the response is to call women who disagree stupid, ill-informed or ridiculous. Even if we ignore the fact that there are good reasons some people might not agree with feminism or choose not to call themselves feminists – there’s a reason womanism is a thing, after all, this response is exclusionary and unhelpful.

Women who don’t necessarily agree with or identify as feminists aren’t stupid. Sometimes they might misunderstand what feminism is, sometimes they might be actively rejecting it because the feminism they’ve encountered is anti-femme, anti-trans or otherwise holds views they reject. My mother, for instance, avoided the term feminist because all she’d encountered of it were people telling her she was wrong for giving up a career for her children. She’s not stupid, or ridiculous. She had a valid complaint, and chose to avoid the movement. Since then, she’s seen that was just one face of feminism, and there are others she agrees with. How? Through showing her those, instead of insulting her choice. When did feminism become about insulting the intellect of women whose opinions differ? When did it become about being patronising, positioning ourselves as an authority and intellectual superior who is willing to graciously offer “a place at our table for you whenever you’re ready. You can even bring your pink pens.”

Another thing about the whole intellectual superiority thing? It’s incredibly elitist. Yes, maybe you’re up to date on the latest academic feminist theory, and you know all about the definitions of words like intersectionality, privilege and the nuances that you might find in discussions of sex-positivity. That doesn’t make you better than people who don’t. Not everyone has the time, money or even ability to entrench themselves in academia in the same way. That doesn’t make them less than you or make their opinions intrinsically less valid. There’s a huge difference between willful ignorance and a simple lack of knowledge about a subject. Being up to date on the latest theories isn’t everything. Intelligence comes in many different ways, and being aware of a hundred years of feminist history isn’t the only one.

And a couple more minor ones…

‘You’re just a fat, ugly neckbeard’
I really shouldn’t need to explain why emphasising looks as a response to people is bad, right? But in case I do: stop using fat as an insult. People far better at explaining it than I have discussed this. It’s the same with ugly. How can we say we want a world where people are judged on their looks or weight when we’re doing the exact same thing? There are far worse things in the world than being fat or ugly. People are cruel, spiteful or mean. Hell, people are arseholes, shitheads – there’s a whole world of profanity out there that’s insulting without relying on equating fat or ugliness with bad. (Note: I’m not commenting on whether I think insulting people is appropriate as that’s a whole other topic).

I’ve been gaming longer than you
For all we like to talk about how it doesn’t matter how new to being a geek someone is – how it doesn’t matter if they only got into Marvel originally because Iron Man was hot or how not knowing the backstory of all your favourite characters doesn’t invalidate you, we sure like to use it to defend ourselves. You can’t tell people not to call us fake geek girls, to say that knowledge/backstory/time in a fandom is irrelevant and then respond by saying ‘I’m a better geek than you’. Seriously. That just validates the whole damn idea of geekdom being something that you have to fulfil certain qualifications for!

There’s almost certainly more that I’ve missed because I’ve either not seen them or thought about them. If you’ve got something to add, please do add it below!

But we can’t get to our ideal end-state of a society that is inclusive and caring and safe for everyone by using language that excludes and divides like this. I know I’ve held opinions and used terms I now know better about. I probably still do. I’d like to get better at that, because I know it’s against my ultimate goal.

We need to be better than this.

“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.”

I work as a therapist. I work as a consultant. I work as an executive coach. And I have heard this question hundreds, if not thousands of times over the course of my career. "Can people really change?" And behind that question is actually the statement, "I mean, he’s always going to be that way right? I mean, there’s no point in even getting him help, if he can’t change.”

The psychologist Gordon Allport once said that the definition of personality was essentially that you know who you are when you wake up tomorrow. So yes, there is something enduring about each of us. Some thread that runs through all of our years and make each of us who we are—so there is something in us that feels unchangeable. And indeed when those things do change—typically because of brain injury or memory loss—then we know longer feel like ourselves and people feel like they lost ‘us.’

So what do we mean when we talk about change?  We don’t question whether babies and children can change. We pray that our teenagers will change. But somehow when we get to adulthood we believe in a fixed notion of a person.  That they will essentially be who they are. So why bother with change—either my own or supporting someone else.

One of the problems is that change is a big topic. I can change my behavior: I can stop smoking or start exercising. I can shift my mindset and way of making meaning in the world: I can start taking another person’s perspective in a new way, or see a situation from multiple viewpoints—which I might call growth, but growth is change. I might use a behavior change to trigger growth: I might use behavioral change to stop interrupting people so that I am a better listener and with this change I can better understand other people’s perspectives.

Neuroscience, as I wrote about in the Norman Doidge book review, states unequivocally that our brains can, and do, change. Brains are designed with neuroplasticity—and our brains will change based on what we do: they will shift to match their use. So at the neural level the answer is OF COURSE PEOPLE CAN CHANGE.

But all of us, every single one of us also knows that, it can be really difficult to make change. It is difficult to  shift something, to learn something new. This is why we find ourselves doing that same, frustrating thing, over and over again.

The question about whether people can change does make you want to take out the old joke about the light bulb. You know the one: How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Just one, but the light bulb has to really want to change. And our motivation for change, our readiness for change and how change is connected to what matters to us most all impacts our capacity for change.

But today I want to highlight the way we support ourselves and the way we think about change at all.

When I think about change I always start with the gurus of change: children. Why? Because in the right environment children grow beautifully, on their own trajectory. Even kids who have some big struggles, if you get any of the obstacles even slightly out of their way, they shoot forward, back on track. I have to say that the human brain and spirit loves to grow. I have witnessed it over and over and it has made me a devout believer in growth. Thich Nhat Hanh described it perfectly. We don’t blame the lettuce for not growing. We much look at the conditions we are asking the lettuce to grow in.

And this is where I think we are terrible about growth in adulthood. In the best of circumstances children live in a world where they can safely lean on the adults around them—where the ‘soil’ of their lives is safe enough that they can spend their energy growing. The ‘dependence’ and security of their lives doesn’t make them helpless, it provides a safe platform from which to launch.

In psychological terms we call this safe platform a ‘secure base’ and it provides external stability and an internal sturdiness to weather the turmoil of growth and change. This is what change requires. A secure base—something that feels solid enough to lean on and leap from.

And my observations is that adults get all confused about needing support or stability. Either they get fixated on the idea of stability and security as the goal itself, and forget to let go and trust the internal sturdiness. Or, they are so frightened of leaning on anyone or anything else that they never feel safe enough to let go and try something new because they have to use all of their energy staying put and holding themselves together.

So much of the work I do isn’t getting people to change or making people change: it is getting them to create an environment that would allow them to grow or heal or change. My experience is that adults want to grow too. That just like the kids I have worked with, when you can clear obstacles they often shoot forward on their own power. So in many ways change is complicated for adults because they are both the creators of the soil of their garden, and the seeds they would plant.

For children, change is the constant. They are used to feeling off balance a lot, which explains a lot of the meltdowns we help them through. They use up a lot of energy managing the ups and downs of change and growth—and they often long for something familiar and stable. Which is why they always want to hear the same story over and over, or watch the same movie over and over.

Adults often notice that they go through big changes when life throws them a curve ball: when there is a death, or divorce, or a birth, or a change of job. It seems that adults often have to be thrown overboard from life in order to get back into the ocean of growth. So it seems so important to help people understand that the goal of stability in adulthood isn’t stillness or "having arrived." The purpose of stability is to create a springboard. If we thought of our ability to use our relationships, and supports and strengths less as a “safe house to live in” and more like ‘fixed ropes’ to climb with—we would have a different experience of adulthood and growth. Growth is the very definition of disequilibrium. And when we think of adulthood as this ‘solid, stable platform’ then when we feel off-balance, we think we are doing something wrong. But if we thought of adulthood as ‘great climbing gear’ then we would know that the experience of feeling off balance here and there was simply the experience of moving forward.

So this week—rather than thinking about what you want to change. Ask yourself what you can do to create better conditions in your life for growth and change. What can you do to make the ‘soil’ of your life better for your own growth? And ask yourself what your attitude about change is. How do you understand the days you are off balance? When your foot is on one ledge and your hand is reaching up toward a handhold? How can you help yourself enjoy the feeling of shifting from one spot to another?

© 2015 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

One thousand years ago, superstition and the sword ruled.
It was a time of darkness. It was a world of fear.
It was the age of gargoyles.
Stone by day, warriors by night,
we were betrayed by the humans we had sworn to protect,
frozen in stone by a magic spell for a thousand years.
Now, here in Manhattan, the spell is broken, and we live again!
We are defenders of the night!
We are GARGOYLES.

Look, I'm not here to explain the appeal of a decades-old children's series about living architectural flourishes to you. Either you saw it, and you understand the unique blend of Shakespeare, European folklore, the pain of centuries of isolation and the ultimate problem of mortality, redemption arcs, and pretty solid action scenes that made Gargoyles stand out during an already-rich era for cartoon-based storytelling, or you think I'm trafficking in reflexive nostalgia and all you see is this:

Read more Dream-Casting The Live-Action Gargoyles Movie That Does Not Exist at The Toast.

[Content Note: Misogynist terrorism; rape culture; harassment.]

Like Joss Whedon, Wil Wheaton is a straight, white, cis male celebrity and hero among geekdom who has a reputation for being a feminist ally, despite the fact he has written things like "Hillary Clinton: The Psycho Ex-Girlfriend of the Democratic Party," to critics of which he responded by saying, "Here, let me try this one more time for the humorless and professional victims out there, who seem to have shown up in a flood today: Gender, race, sexual orientation, things that make us different that we don't choose...they just don't matter to me. At all. People are people and identity politics is stupid."

I will also disclose, in the interest of honesty, that I had a personal interaction with Wheaton a long time ago which went much the same way. After reaching out to him in good faith and politely asking he not use a particular misogynist term in his writing, he responded with almost exactly the same misogynist tropes: I was humorless, oversensitive, hysterical, and a "bitch."

Whether you interpret that as evidence that I have a personal axe to grind, or as an example of a woman's lived experience with a man who is purported to be a great ally, is not something I can control. Interpret it as you will. But I will note that there is very little incentive for me to share something, especially under my real name, about a famous man with lots of fans who tend to intensely defend him, except that it matters how men who are positioned to speak on women's issues treat actual women.

Now, no one should be defined exclusively by their worst moment. Or two moments. That was a few years ago, and maybe he's changed. But maybe he's also nonetheless not exactly the perfect person to write something for the Washington Post on the subject of harassment in gaming.

His premise is that the anonymity of the internet empowers harassment, and begins by my asserting: "More venom than ever before is flowing from behind the cloak of anonymity, where people remain entirely unaccountable for their words and deeds."

He then exclusively uses six women as examples of this phenomenon. And while certainly lots of the people harassing Zoë Quinn, Brianna Wu, Anita Sarkeesian et. al. do so from behind the cloak of anonymity, there are also a lot of people who aren't.

I wonder how many women whose professional lives are mostly or entirely online Wheaton has spoken to, because I'm guessing any one of us would tell him that we get plenty of harassment, threats, abuse from men who are utterly brazen—sending this stuff right under their real names, alongside their pictures, from work emails.

I once received a death threat from a man under his real name, from his work email, at a state government office.

As I've previously observed, the internet is not separate from culture, but a reflection of culture. The pretense that the anonymity of the internet creates the urges that underlie bullying is a way of distancing oneself from the real-life harm many marginalized people face, ignores that many people engaging in trolling come at us under their real names and even work emails, and elides that whatever anonymity and/or impunity the internet provides merely empowers bullies to be uglier, meaner, bolder than some of them would be face-to-face. It doesn't make them engage in behaviors that don't exist in the offline world.

I've said many times before: It's not like no random dude ever called me a fat cunt before I started a blog.

The point is that it isn't anonymity, at least not alone, that drives misogynist terrorism. It's a natural outgrowth of a patriarchal system in which women are treated as less than, in every conceivable way, our humanity diminished, our lived experiences questioned, our bodies treated as property of men and the state.

But if you're someone who doesn't give a fuck about "identity politics," then you're probably not interested in discussing that oppression is the real issue, and anonymity only one of many tools of the oppressors.

Wheaton goes on to make his case, however, citing his own experience:

When I started playing video games, we were in arcades, and we had to win and lose with grace, or we'd get our butts beaten (literally) by other players. Or, worse, we'd be kicked out! When we played games next to each other on the couch, we could trash talk and razz each other, but we were still in the same room together, and our behavior out of game was even more important than the way we behaved in the game. Playing games with real, live humans prevented any of the poisonous behavior proliferating online today.

That, ultimately, is the cure for what ails us. It's nearly impossible to enforce actual consequences in video games at the moment, but at a table, sitting face-to-face across a tabletop game, or even playing at a LAN party, sportsmanship matters. We can challenge ourselves and our opponents in nearly every world in nearly every type of game, and because we're literally inches from each other, the way we react to victory and defeat actually matters.

I've seen players fight for every point in tournaments, then graciously congratulate each other, regardless of who won. I've sat down with complete strangers — just like the random person I'd likely encounter online — and had an absolutely wonderful time being obliterated by them, because not only were they more skilled than I was, they were also nice and decent human beings. My TV show "Tabletop," which debuts its third season this week, is full of warm interactions like those.

This is his experience as white, straight, cis man. But of course there are women, myself among them, who can tell stories of being harassed during tabletop gaming. In arcades. While playing video games on a couch next to a man who we believed wouldn't harm us.

Misogyny, homophobia, racism, transphobia, disablism, sexual harassment and assault—these things happen to marginalized people in real life all the time while gaming. In person.

Virtually every woman and gay man I know who has been involved in local, face-to-face RPG groups has had to leave at least one group because of harassment or assault. I've gotten dozens of emails over the years soliciting advice for how to deal with a man in a gaming group who is harassing, or has assaulted, one or more of the players, and the other men in the group won't believe it. Or simply defend him.

The idea that lack of anonymity ensures safety for women is absurd, if you've really listened to women about their experiences with gaming, instead of just assuming that everyone has the same experiences as your own.

Wheaton probably hasn't considered that there exist men who would create a fun and safe gaming environment for him, but would be totally different with women.

Resistance to that idea—that lots of straight, white, cis men who are "cool" with other straight, white, cis men behave differently around women, genderqueer folks, and/or marginalized men—is what leads to the "small but vocal minority" argument. And that is, naturally, right where Wheaton goes:

The loudest, most obnoxious, most toxic voices are able to drown out the rest of us—a spectacle that has nearly pushed me to quit the video-game world entirely in recent months.

"The rest of us." #NotAllMen.

Wheaton concludes by acknowledging there are places where anonymity online in important, because of government and corporate info mining, and to support whistleblowers and investigative journalists.

In the age of total-information awareness, citizens need certain protections.

But in the gaming community, those protections aren't necessary, and they aren't helping.

Those protections aren't necessary, he argues, thinking only of male harassers who are making gaming look bad for guys like him. But there is, of course, another side to anonymity—which is that it protects women and others from the harassers who want to harm us.

Arguing for the end to anonymity in gaming is necessarily arguing for taking away a crucial tool from the very people who are most vulnerable to harassment.

That's the problem with calls for lack of anonymity rooted in the erroneous belief that harassment is facilitated exclusively or primarily by anonymity. It won't stop harassment. It will only more fully expose targets of harassment.

The result is that it won't drive the abusers out of gaming; it will drive the abused out of gaming.

And maybe that's the point. Not hearing anyone complain because we're all gone would probably look a lot like success to people who aren't really listening, anyway.

[H/T to Aphra_Behn.]