I posted in another thread about Gamergate talking about my experiences with a group of guys that were hoping for a career in the video games industry.

First off I need to declare that there are aspects of Gamergate that raise important ethical questions about how the Media and industry interact with each other.

I actually think the people that have raised the issue have had a large degree of success as many of the publications and developers have been forced to clean up their relationships.

Anyway my own experiences with groups of gamers/wannabe programmers was at university.

My university fed a lot of Computer Science graduates into the games industry. I never really understood why it was seen as a such a prestigious area, by so many guys. Because as employers the big game developers aren't particularly great, their pay and conditions tend to lag behind companies in other sectors, and some of them can treat their programmers pretty badly.

As I put it to one guy, if you're getting paid 30% less than what you could earn in an equivalent job with a a different employer, then essentially you're paying for the privilege of working there.

They're also pretty poor employers generally, some of them forcing people into declaring themselves self employed, taking advantage of interns (which is fairly unusual in other areas of the tech industry) and laying people off at the drop of a hat.

Still though a lot of guys wanted to work there, and they were all guys. When I started my course my Maths wasn't up to a high standard so I ended up needing extra tuition.

The university ran a sort of remedial maths course (it wasn't actually called that).I was the only one from my course on it, everyone else was from the computer science department, and every single one of them wanted to work in that games industry.A lot of people that start computer science courses don't realise that there's a huge element of Maths involved so it takes them by surprise. I was also incidentally the only girl on the course.

So I got a kind of insight into the types of personality that are drawn to gaming as a profession. They were mostly nice guys, they were pretty intensely focused on what was happening in the gaming industry almost to the exclusion of all else.

I think because they had ended up in an environment with other like minded people their attitudes and personalities had kind of been amplified.

The most fascinating thing about them, however was their attitude to having to take the extra maths classes.I'd fought to get on the maths course, after I realised I was struggling with my course. It was primarily laid on for the computer science students, and was geared towards them.

Initially when we started the majority of them were fairly accepting of having to do it, for the simple fact that they were not going to be able to complete their degree without it.

A few didn't though and from the beginning were vocal about how unjust and inappropriate they felt it was. The people that held that view started to push it on everyone else, so that by the second week it was almost uniformly held.

For a strong minority, it drove them mad that anyone in the course, might believe that it was right that they should be there. One guy in particular used to go around the class questioning people constantly to make sure they shared his view. He tended to ignore me for some reason.

I was pretty much ignored in general, the PHD students that was teaching us were ignored, or faced disruption. Which was bad news for everyone as nobody wanted to teach the class by the second week, and the university was starting to take a negative view of what was happening.

The guys were nice individually but in a group they were a fucking nightmare. It was just a horrible example of cutting your nose off to spite your face. They somehow felt that by their protesting, the university were going to change the requirements for their degree.

When I pointed out to them once, that computer science degrees had to comply to set standards, and it was unlikely the University could change it even if they wanted to, the reaction I got wasn't good.

Every time Gamergate gets mentioned, I think of them. A pissed off group getting themselves worked up about something and completely missing the real problem.

I mean the fact that they didn't realise the Maths content of their course before starting was the real issue. Their course like mine was under subscribed so they lowered entry requirement while maintaining overall standards which resulted in a massive amount of drop outs. Also the Universities attempt to give a basic maths grounding was pretty half hearted.

So they were actually being fucked over by the University, however in a different way than they thought.

In that sense I feel it's very similar to Gamergate.