SXSW festival pulls pro- and anti-Gamergate panels after 'threats'

Two panels about Gamergate have been removed from the agenda of the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference following “numerous threats of on-site violence”, according to the festival’s organisers.

Gamergate, a movement opposed to the increasing prominence of feminist critics and designers in gaming, has been a flash point for misogyny in the video games industry.

The panels “SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community” and “Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games” were from opposing view points.

The former, organised by a little known group called the Open Gaming Society, featured a number of central supporters of the Gamergate movement. The panel was to focus on three topics: “The current social-political climate within the gaming community, the importance of journalistic integrity in video game’s media, and the future of both the gaming community and the games industry.”

The latter panel was to involve three women who had been targeted to varying extents by Gamergate, including Randi Lee Harper, a developer who founded the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative following her own harassment over the course of the past year. Its stated aim was to discuss “online harassment in gaming and geek culture, how to combat it, how to design against it, and how to create online communities that are moving away from harassment”.

Hugh Forrest, the director of SXSW Interactive, said in a statement: “We had hoped that hosting these two discussions in March 2016 in Austin would lead to a valuable exchange of ideas on this very important topic.

“However, preserving the sanctity of the big tent at SXSW Interactive necessitates that we keep the dialogue civil and respectful. If people can not agree, disagree and embrace new ways of thinking in a safe and secure place that is free of online and offline harassment, then this marketplace of ideas is inevitably compromised.”

The conference has received criticism for drawing a false equivalence between the two panels and the groups behind them. Matt Lees, a gaming critic and YouTuber, said the cancellation and subsequent statement was “massively poor form from SXSW”.

“Way too many people don’t understand the significance of Gamergate,” he added. “For a long time, too few publications were brave enough to outline Gamergate for exactly what it was – which led a huge number of people on the fringe to believe that the ‘movement’ represented some sort of two-sided debate.”

Media organisation BuzzFeed has said it will pull out of the festival entirely unless both the panels are reinstated. In a letter sent to Forrest by Ze Frank, the president of Buzzfeed Motion Pictures, the organisation said that: “BuzzFeed has participated deeply in SXSW for years, and our staffers are scheduled to speak on or moderate a half-dozen panels at SXSW 2016.

“We will feel compelled to withdraw them if the conference can’t find a way to do what those other targets of harassment do every day — to carry on important conversations in the face of harassment. We hope you can support the principle of free speech and engage a vital issue facing us and other constituents on the event.”

The SXSW festival will go head on 11-20 March in Austin, Texas, without the panels.