Stalking & harassment in the classic arcade gaming community

December 5, 2016 7:58 AM

"I am now his designated excuse for every failure he’s ever had, past or present. I will become his everlasting excuse for the next four years. When he fails to obtain respect from the classic gaming community he desperately seeks adoration from, I am his reason for why that is so. When he fails to convince others to buy into his ludicrous delusions that playing the NES professionally is a skill worthy of being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for, I am the reason why that is not so. And when he fails to make national headlines for taking a world record on an NES game title, like Home Alone, Jaws or Duck Tales, his delusions of grandeur are never to blame. I am." -- When Harassment Becomes a Game
posted by Theta States (25 comments total)

I was reading The Golden Notebook this past week, a rough ride and badly dated, but still relevant in many of its analyses. One of Doris Lessing's sentences, in particular, leapt out at me: What has happened to men that they can talk like this to women?
posted by Countess Elena at 8:05 AM on December 5, 2016 [23 favorites]

Countess Elena: Sexual entitlement. Men feel that women's bodies belong to them, and that they are entitled to access. In a lot of ways the backlash to modern feminism is because it is now "harder" for men to the sex they deserve because of all this stuff about "consent" and the like. (And as a man, hearing men talk about women like this, and complain about "consent culture" and feminism makes me want to either smash my head against the wall or smash theirs, depending.)
posted by SansPoint at 8:10 AM on December 5, 2016 [11 favorites]

People like Ferretti are what makes it impossible for me to affiliate myself with or enjoy anything.

And my surprise that Ferretti is a Trump supporter is so close to absolute zero it could bring about the heat death of the universe.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:33 AM on December 5, 2016 [47 favorites]

There's a group photo, a dozen or so people, a ways into the post captioned "The author with Twin Galaxies and The Kong Off Competition, Denver, Colorado." You can tell exactly who the author is not because she is central in the photo, not because she is circled or indicated in the text, but because she is the only obviously female person in the photo. It gives quite the impression of how hard she must have to fight in that world even without a crazy guy.
posted by maryr at 8:37 AM on December 5, 2016 [19 favorites]

Lily Allen wrote a song about this (the concept not the incident) on Sheezus called URL Badman.
posted by Talez at 8:49 AM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Not just entitlement of women's bodies, but whatever else that they want and feel they are being denied. That includes not only access to their desired targets but also control over them -- the ability to draw a line around industries, relationships, events, media, respect and recognition and say these belong to us, and only us. You cannot cross this line. You cannot participate because we get to decide who is worthy and who is not.

You might wonder why their anger is so great and so uncompromising. Of course, you could also wonder why some people were so infuriated by efforts to desegregate schools, or to allow same-sex marriage, or to put religious symbols other than Christian ones in public places, or to acknowledge that trans people have to pee and poop too, or to ask aloud why police seem to be summarily executing people of color. Or why it's such an affront even to say we don't want to ban what you enjoy, we don't want to outlaw your doing your own thing, we just want representation and to be able to do OUR own thing.

You might also wonder why the response, far too often, is not rational argument but is screaming, howling, name-calling, threats of violence, threats of rape, wild accusations and slander. These days I'm more surprised when it is not.
posted by delfin at 8:58 AM on December 5, 2016 [17 favorites]

Look at the memes. They can't even use memes correctly. Those little third-rate pissants would get laughed at by /v/.
posted by Talez at 8:58 AM on December 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

Note well the true villain of the piece, lurking in the shadows. Not Ferretti but the other men in the story who not only didn't shut him down but actively aided and abetted him, out of moral cowardice.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:04 AM on December 5, 2016 [67 favorites]

Talez - I was thinking more "It's Hard Out Here", but yeah.
posted by maryr at 9:07 AM on December 5, 2016

delfin: Oh, absolutely, all of that, yes. It's even more toxic when you consider that all of these spaces had been built on exclusion from the start, and now that there's been even the slightest bit of progress in breaking down those barriers, the pushback has become more violent. Diverse spaces are not a threat to white men, god damn it.
posted by SansPoint at 9:09 AM on December 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

It just occurred to me that the first big-screen movie about Nintendo gaming featured a main gamer-girl character who screamed a false accusation about child molestation to get herself out of trouble. Now I'm not concluding that The Wizard was responsible for the toxic mindset of the gamer community, but it is a very, very bad movie.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:32 AM on December 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

Was this guy anywhere near the King of Kong documentary? I seem to remember some really aggressive character that made some appearances in the DVD extras, but I don't remember what his deal was.
posted by Think_Long at 10:23 AM on December 5, 2016

Uh, restraining order?

I always wonder how someone like this has so much spare time. He must live in his Mother's basement, and not work.
posted by LilithSilver at 10:49 AM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

He must live in his Mother's basement, and not work.

He wants to be a professional NES player.
posted by Theta States at 10:55 AM on December 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

Ferretti is seriously, dangerously, profoundly mentally ill. But what excuse do the man-boys who support him have? JFC, that poor woman. Reading this made me physically ill. Unbelievable what she has been through.
posted by pjsky at 11:05 AM on December 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

I think the author nailed why people support him: they are scared of him and don't want him to focus on them. It's cowardly. Yes, gamergate and similar have taught us that those that were bullied (gamers, back in the day) can become the (worst) bullies, but bullies require cowards, too, who want to appear to be on their side and 'go with the flow'. That's their pitiful army.
posted by destructive cactus at 11:08 AM on December 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

Ferretti is seriously, dangerously, profoundly mentally ill.

You
might
be
right
posted by Theta States at 11:15 AM on December 5, 2016

This fellow is another (albeit extreme) example of a dude who has abdicated any responsibility for managing his own emotions and directs negativity at anyone who evokes unpleasant feelings in him.

What I discover is terrifying to me because I understand the psychology behind what I’m seeing and hearing: I see a man transitioning through various states of emotion without pauses; one second he’s raging in uncontrollable anger at me, and the next he flips into a calm state, smiling and leaning back in his chair nonchalantly as if he has no memory of the moment of rage before. This is a man who’s not in control of his reactive emotions at all.

#notallmen and whatevs, but in another thread, we've been talking about guys like this one. It's seriously frightening how refusing to do a piece on this guy has lead to years of harassment of multiple people because he either can't or won't sit with feelings he doesn't like.
posted by Excommunicated Cardinal at 11:23 AM on December 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

How kind of her colleagues to force her into the emotional labor involved with handling the day to day whims of a clearly ill and dangerous person. I've known people like her stalker throughout my life, and they're always left alone to be the (typically female) victim's problem.
posted by theraflu at 12:14 PM on December 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

I think, upon reflection, that the potential mental illness of this man matters less than his clearly visible abusive behavior. If the abusive behavior and the effects of that behavior are the dangerous thing, why are people rushing to mitigate that abusiveness by framing this guy as having a mental illness? Perhaps he's perfectly sane and has simply realized that these tactics work to get him things he wants. Would he have nearly the notoriety he now enjoys if he wasn't so abusive within his enabling community?

I often think about this framing and wonder whether people would rush to make excuses for men like these if we labeled them for their behavior and not their imagined mental state.
posted by sciatrix at 1:51 PM on December 5, 2016 [19 favorites]

sciatrix: You're 100% right. Mental illness may be a reason, but it's not an excuse. If this man cannot take care of his own emotions, it is the responsibility of those around him to both get him help, and to protect his potential victims from his abuse. So many people have dropped the ball, and none of them are Cat DeSpira.
posted by SansPoint at 1:56 PM on December 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

There should be some kind of lifehack that lets you delete people the same way you can delete pirated movies you no longer need. It doesn't remove them from the whole world, just from yours.
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:02 PM on December 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Hats off to her for not retreating away from the thing she loves.

From her twitter, I see she's into classic metal too. Would love to hear a compare-and-contrast from her about the relative toxicity of retrogaming and metal.
posted by Sauce Trough at 2:17 PM on December 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

It's worth thinking about what would have happened if only one or two people, even, in the community, stood up and defended her. Sure, they would have invited abuse, but they could have sent the signal that THIS BEHAVIOR IS NOT APPROPRIATE AND YOU'LL GET CALLED OUT ON IT. Ugh.
posted by destructive cactus at 2:27 PM on December 5, 2016 [12 favorites]

I think the author nailed why people support him: they are scared of him and don't want him to focus on them.

Some of that, absolutely, yes. The web site implying she had been paid and then punted the article. The community writing about him to make him go away. Including him in the documentary, even. (And it seems a bit after the fact, but at least that one podcast or whatever did apologize to her/condemn him. What that did, who knows, but they get a little credit.)

But there's no excuse for those guys egging him on in chat. They had every chance to not engage with him outside of absolute necessity and they chose to be not just on but by his side. To see how far he would go. They aren't just enabling him. They aren't just ignoring the flames. They are actively fueling the fire. It's disgusting. They should be ashamed of their behavior.
posted by maryr at 2:37 PM on December 6, 2016 [2 favorites]