Batman Arkham Knight has a dig at #GamerGate

Those lucky enough to have a working copy of Batman Arkham Knight may well stumble across a not-so-subtle dig at social media hate campaign #GamerGate during their playthrough.

An in-game info snippet entitled ‘Social Outcast’ contains the following text:

Y do u attack B@tman? He is BASED! U r a fa-

Riddler deleted the email, and all the others like it, as prickly hot anger and shame squired through his insides. No point denying it: #CrusaderGate had been a disastrous social media campaign.

He couldn’t understand it. It seemed the internet’s idiotic and easily roused rabble could froth itself into a full-fat cappuccino of frenzy over ‘white knights’. But offer it up a Dark one – on a plate! – and you get a soy latte’s worth of indignation at best! Didn’t they understand what Batman had done?

For those not swept up in the storm’s eye of online games chatter, #GamerGate may seem like a distant nightmare, but sadly the movement still stumbles on – especially for the unlucky few who continue to be targeted.

During E3 last week posters cropped up around the LA Convention Centre carrying the face of Anita Sarkeesian and the words Fem Freak”. They also carried the slogan All your tropes are belong to us honey” referencing both Sarkessian’s successful Tropes vs Women series and cult Zero Wing meme ‘all your base are belong to us’.

More recently Canadian PhD student Natalie Walschots has become #GamerGate’s latest harassment target after she revealed that the organisers of a Canadian Games Studies Association event asked speakers to refrain form using the hashtag when discussing the event online.