What was GamerGate all about?

matrixislife · 2022-05-31T17:47:57+00:00

I'll give you a slightly more accurate summary:
Woman makes game. Game gets good press. Ex boyfriend complains that woman two timed him with journalists [journos] giving the good press. Gamers get pissed that journos are not declaring the conflict of interest. Journos collaberate with their response. [see "gamers are dead"]. Journos also falsely state that the whole point of gamergate was to harrass women and minorities. [see "not my shield"] Journos then continue to blame everything under the sun on gamergate, while refusing to admit that they collude with each other, misinform their readers, and generally don't do their jobs. Yes, it really was and is about ethics in journalism.

It doesn't really have much to do with men's rights, apart from the way gamers have been treated is similar to the way men in general are treated by the press.

ED: added links above and also to comment that in at least one case, one of the people claiming harrassment from GG replied to it so quickly it would have been impossible for them to read it organically. In other words, it's likely they posted it themselves on a separate account.
Also, the FBI investigated GG and found that none of the serious harrassment was coming from them. These are both matters of record.

mewacketergi2 · 2022-05-31T22:15:45+00:00

The original events were relatable to men's issues. Later on, everyone projected their culture war topics on GamerGate so, so much, and in such an ugly way that I personally wouldn't touch it anymore.

EDIT: I shouldn't have opened that Wikipedia article. It was so badly written, so partisan and biased, that it made my head hurt.

Dear OP, read this for a summary: https://medium.com/arc-digital/almost-everything-you-know-about-gamergate-is-wrong-c4a50a3515fb

cuddlebuns287 · 2022-05-31T21:54:09+00:00

Ultimately, it was about journalists reviewing games working in the interests of whatever benefits themselves rather than the interests of the consumers. Its beginnings come from a conflict of interest that arose from a journalist giving a positive review of a game developed by a woman he engaged in sexual activities with. This raised a lot of suspicions of other game reviews, whether they were actually decent games or they only received positive press because they received some kind of gain under the table.

Like many issues raised in the past decades, the journalists thought that if they made this an issue about women and minorities, they could derail the conversation away from valid criticism. And so, you get GamerGate's evolution into what it became in its later years: out of touch critics and journalists crapping on their audiences, labelling them sexist and what have you, so they don't have to take responsibility for their actions.

Sydnaktik · 2022-05-31T23:12:55+00:00

This article looks like a pretty good description.

https://medium.com/arc-digital/almost-everything-you-know-about-gamergate-is-wrong-c4a50a3515fb

Note, I just reread my post 1 hour later: this may be the most shit post shitpost I've ever shitposted. I apologize to anyone that has had the misfortune of reading it. Why is it getting upvoted. I'll come back to it in the next couple of days are re-say the same stuff but more coherently.

Here's my interpretation (not entirely unbiased and even contains some ill informed assumptions):

I wasn't really paying attention to this culture war when it happened. But I remember the general vibe.

Back then, gamer culture was still very much a counter culture. It was majority men who engaged in it. And it was something that was only starting to gain acceptance among women. Meaning that 5-10 years earlier, admitting to being a gamer would pretty much guarantee you weren't going to get laid.

Another thing to point out is how influential 4chan was back then. Internet culture tended to follow a pretty clear pipeline 4chan feeds into digg/reddit, reddit feeds into tumblr and it all feeds into facebook.

Things usually get sanitised / improved along the way.

So you'd see new meems popup on 4chan, then show up on reddit a week later and eventually find its way on facebook a few weeks later.

I was never much into 4chan, but my understanding is that they were much more trolls back then than even today. They lived to create chaos. Trolling was an art form for them.

The second thing is the gender/culture war. It's still going on today and it seems to have gotten started around that time. Cancel culture was getting it's footing I just found this gem where you have a forum with people complaining that Total Biscuit (pro gamer gate) got a favorable article written about him and the author ended up getting harassed and chased out of twitter.

You can take the Depp/Heard trial and apply it to Gamer Gate. It's very similar, except back then the anti-feminism movement was a lot less influential and "gamers" weren't a respected group like Depp is. "gamers" accusing women of lying and inventing fake harassement, and the media accusing "gamers" of being misogynists for making these accusations.

At the time, atheist / anti-theist youtubers had turned anti-feminist. But as the woke/feminist movement had started using a higher level of sophistry to support their misandry, the youtubers failed to keep up (I personally have only been able to start understanding it and unraveling the sophistry in the past year. It's taken 5 years!). So they turned to the alt-right and started peddling decades old tradcon and xenophobic nonsense.

Games at the time were the last refuge of the socially inept. Socially inept men gravitated to gamers and just being a gamer on its own was considered shameful. Basically, if you were a gamer in 2010 and you went on a date. You wouldn't admit to it, because it would wreck your chances. By the time gamer gate came around, 2014, things were slowly changing.

So those are the 3 main environmental factors:

The internet back then was in some sense fueled by 4chan and they were a bunch of troll who lived for the lulz.

Feminist gaslighting in the media was at its peak and had no effective countermeasures.

Gamers were overwhelmingly male and social outcasts (they would be called "incel"s today).

Some guy wrote a manifesto about his cheating girlfriend and what he considered her unethical behavior. From what I recently read, he was part of the woke movement, but hadn't figured out that policing of improper behavior was only supposed to be targeted at men, not women. So when he tried to publicly shame his ex for improper, unethical behavior it went terribly wrong in a couple of ways.

First, his "woke" allies didn't give him the support he expected. So he took his manifesto down.

Second, 4chan got their grubby hands on it. They posted it all over their boards and painted the guy's ex (now infamous Zoe Quinn) as this terrible person. It turns out this Zoe Quinn had created what should have been an objectively horrible game that got a really great review from a professional reviewer in a gaming publication. Said professional reviewer was one of the people that Zoe had cheated on her boyfriend with.

My belief is that at the time, gaming publications were part of the "mainstream media" that was getting taken over by feminist perspective. And as gamers were overwhelmingly male, they were beginning to treat their own readers with contempt.

And that's how things blew up. All these gamers had an ax to grind with those gaming website, but they never had the tools to do it until then. Now they had a clear ethical violation that they could levy against gaming media.

And on the back of that you had all the vultures. Tradcons, alt-rights, anti-feminists and actual misogynists now finally had a "legitimate" venue to express their frustration. And they did.

This, in turn, empowered the misandrists within the gaming media to practically take their masks off and openly treat male gamers with contempt. Male gamers were essentially characterized as misogynists, practically subhuman.

I wonder if this was the start of cancel culture. As anyone even marginally supportive of gamergate by any degree of separation was vilified and canceled.

In the end, nothing was resolved. Arguably, public reaction to the Depp/Heard trial is just a continuation of what started with gamergate. Men are fighting for their right to have a voice, to be heard, to be treated with respect, to be believed. And the media is doing its best to rewrite the narrative.

Except today people who support Depp are not getting canceled. Amber Heard isn't going to be invited to the UN to speak about her experiences (Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, both of whom practically made a career out of playing the victim did exactly that).

A lack of respect for the interests of gamers in the gaming media opened the door for a pretty big feminist infiltration. Revelations of an affair within the gaming media showed evidence of a complete disregard for ethical considerations within the gaming media. The gaming media double down on their disrespect and contempt towards their readers by accusing them of being misogynists (which in many cases wasn't entirely wrong). And that enflamed the brewing culture war that is still going on today.

OopsiPoopsi75 · 2022-06-01T19:14:32+00:00

Like every internet age movement, it started with legit reasons. Then in quickly devolved into general insanity.

TisIChenoir · 2022-06-02T06:54:19+00:00

It all started at a time where feminism was really starting to try and get its claws inside video gaming too. It was the start of the "gamers are misogynists and gaming is sexist" era, and not only in the US.

In France we had a journalist who wrote an article about the Tomb Raider reboot. Granted, his article was written like an edgy teenager review of a snuff movie. But still...

At one point, this journalist was excited to see Lara Croft being so thoroughly put down during the demo. Meaning that(and he explicited that) it allowed us to see a Lara Croft before she became the unbeatable dinosaur-endangering archeological agent of chaos that we knew. We would get to see her being beaten, and rise up back. And yeah, it's a pretty good premise for a game.

Yet a feminist who I won't name because I don't want to attract her watchful and vengeful eye latched unto that and proclaimed violence against women and rape culture were portrayed in that game and it was all sexist, because gaming is sexist and that article was proof of that.

She also alleged that if you see something and tell yourself "that woman won't like that" then you identified sexism, which is an absolutely presomptuous thing to say but nevermind.

And it started a wave of feminists dissecting gaming and the gaming world as a whole in search of any trace of "deviant behaviors" symptomatic to the global oppression of women. With all the bias we know.

And it all started at the global same time as in america, like clockwork.

And don't get me wrong. There are subjects to discuss here about women in gaming. I don't play online so I won't know anything about the abuse women face, but there is a lot of shit going on for female devs (like the Activision and Ubisoft stories that are horrendous and need some heavy structural change). But then again, devs as a whole get treated like shit by megacorporations that are only interested in making the next quarter more profitable than the last, leading to some horrible work conditions.

So gaming development as a whole needs to evolve to protect employees from the avaricious gluttony of the employers.

And, to get back to feminism, it always makes me lauhh when I see headlines like "why have we lost gamers to the far-right?". Because, for one, you didn't, gamers are not a monolith. And second, you come in a space that is mainly a refuge for men, many of them socially inept (and I say this as a socially inept dude, nothing pejorative here), who have been mocked for years for liking video games. And then, with an absolute lack of subtlety, you assert the idea that gaming is sexist, that gamers are sexist, and that the games they like are pieces of trash for dubious reasons. And never listen to what gamers have to say about any of it. And you expect them to roll over and accept that? You pushed those far-right gamers into the hand of the far-right, because the far-right told them "we get you fams, we listen to you".

Langland88 · 2022-06-01T01:11:56+00:00

I didn't understand it for a long time but from what I understand it was pretty much the first time where a community final pushed back from the media's narrative. So video games have been blamed for the mass shootings and school shootings and we ignored it mostly. But then in 2014 they moved into saying video games are sexist because the female characters are sexualized since the majority of the community is male and likes sexualized female characters.

Anita Sarkessian, Brianna Wu, and Zoe Quinn were the three who at the forefront of Gamergate. They led the media in attack the video game community and finally we Gamers had enough, we pushed back on social media and called the media out. Even though the controversy was short lived, it was the reaction that's continued to be discussed. In fact back in February, there has been discussions of the controversy being revived when Froskurrin took to G4's revival to have a rant on calling the video game community sexist once again and thus facing backlash.

Needless to say, we're now seeing a larger scale with people finally calling out the media on controlling the narrative especially with The Depp V. Heard trial. But this phenomenon began in a lot of ways with Gamer Gate. So it's kind of a controversy that sort of predicted how the social and political climate was about to be 8 years later especially on social media.

TheHoff779 · 2022-06-06T08:07:04+00:00

I offer you the masterpost, to give you some idea of what Gamergate was all about;

Hoo boy, this is gonna be quite a wall of text, but it's a pretty complex issue so bear with me...the hardest thing about explaining GamerGate is that GamerGate wasn't the start of GamerGate.

If you wanna know how GamerGate started, you have to look a few years back before the big blowup. There's two main factors that lead up to it:

1: A large and growing disconnect between the gamer audience and the games press, essentially gamers felt that our enthusiast press was no longer made up of enthusiasts, that they didn't share our priorities or have our backs, often lecturing and finger-wagging at gamers for enjoying things they didn't enjoy, taking the side of game publishers over us and complaining that gamers were too demanding an audience.

2: The rise of a very humorless, very scolding form of feminism, which had, for about two years prior to GG, set its sights on gaming and become the fun police. The most obvious example is the work of a woman named Anita Sarkeesian, you can look up her youtube channel, feminist frequency, to see what I mean. She complains constantly about female characters in games who don't wear much being "sexually objectified", reads all sorts of misogynist implications into basic "save the princess" storylines, etc, while cherrypicking 10 second clips of violence and nudity together out of context to create highlight reels that make gaming look bad. People rightly compared her to Jack Thompson, Tipper Gore, and other famous media-scolders, but the games press was on her side and when people predictably called her a bitch, told her to get back in the kitchen, and the like, acted as though that somehow made her right.

Essentially, these two factors had turned gaming into a powder keg, eventually something was gonna happen that would cause a significant backlash by gamers against these things. Well, GamerGate was that incident.

A woman who was both a darling of the games press (and had something of an existing bad reputation among gamers) and a vocal adherent of this brand of anti-sex feminism, cheated on her boyfriend, and he made a blog post dragging her for being a ho-bag. This generated a lot of drama and gossip, but some people also noticed that one of the men she'd cheated with was a kotaku journalist who'd also given favorable coverage to a game she'd made without disclosing that they knew each other. It didn't look good, and when it prompted more digging, people began to find that the games press was rife with journalists covering their friends, their lovers, their roommates, etc etc, without ever acknowledging knowing these people.

It was quite a scandal but it probably would have petered out after a few weeks if left alone, the internet tends to have a short attention span. But the same incestuous games/press/tech clique that had been uncovered went positively NUCLEAR trying to stop people from talking about the subject, with virtually unprecedented censorship on sites like reddit and 4chan and a very unified narrative that the entire outrage was the result of misogyny, everything else was an excuse to pillory Zoe Quinn for cheating, being carried out by white male neckbeards who wanted to drive all women out of video games. There was even a series of articles across about a dozen major gaming websites, most published within a 24 hour period, all arguing an eerily similar refrain commonly summarized as "gamers are dead", that all the outrage of the at that point past two weeks was the death rattle of the gamer identity, which was becoming irrelevant in a world where games were mainstream. That amounted to trying to put out a fire by throwing rocket fuel on it, and GamerGate, the lasting consumer movement we know today, was born.

The primary goal of GamerGate was to break the hold that this San Fran based clique of journos and influencers seemed to have over the hobby, to prove that gamers were still very much alive and that these people didn't speak for us. This consisted of a few steps:

1: Prove that the clique we were complaining about actually existed, and wasn't some sort of conspiracy theory. Of particular interest was proving that the "gamers are dead" articles were coordinated, were the result of journalists from different publications colluding to try to collectively influence public opinion. This was hit or miss, GGers found enough "everybody seems to know everybody else" connections, and a shady looking secret mailing list called gamejournopros that few people besides dedicated anti-GGers still argue that there was no clique, but smoking gun proof of a pre-workshopped anti-gamer narrative was never found.

2: Prevent this culture of nepotism from continuing by pressuring the games press into adopting proper ethics and disclosure policies, and get the journos who had attacked gamers to apologize. The first part was overwhelmingly successful very quickly, the second was hit or miss, but some of the leading anti-gamer journos quickly saw their revenue dry up as a result of turning on their own audience, and at this point no longer work in games journalism.

3: Punish the sites that ran "gamers are dead" articles or similar smear pieces by convincing advertisers to pull ads from their sites. This was largely successful (an editor for Gawker would later estimate GamerGate's attacks on their sites did somewhere in the 7 figures worth of damage), but highly controversial, with many people arguing it was hypocritical for GamerGate to do this while also complaining about censorship and attacks on our free speech. I could be here all afternoon trying to outline the arguments for and against this.

4: Get our voices out there so that game developers would realize that the games press did not speak for most gamers, that people like Sarkeesian did not speak for most gamers, and that there was still a market demand for sex, violence, and saving princesses, and that getting called racist and sexist and problematic by social justice hipsters wouldn't actually have a negative impact on the sales of their game...because most of those people were outsiders complaining about the alleged harmful effects of media they didn't buy in the first place. This was the most long-term aspect of GamerGate, and the part I personally was most invested in. I'd say we made enough noise over the years that things seem to be trending in the right direction. Sarkeesian's 15 minutes definitely seem like they're up, but that might have happened naturally no matter what.

As for the other side, the harassment, the complaints about GamerGate...well, 99% of it WAS just mean tweets and name calling, the thing is, there were so many angry people involved that anyone who got dragged into this mess could expect thousands of angry messages, which is unfortunate, but harassment requires more than sheer NUMBER of angry people. Some people took it further, there were threats sent, some of which occasioned law enforcement action, some people's names and locations were found and publicly released, resulting in internet toxicity following them into real life. In a couple instances, people got fired or fled their homes briefly.

Who did what to whom, however, was quite difficult to sort out. All of this bad behavior happened on both sides, GamerGaters got called names, GamerGaters got doxxed, GamerGaters got threatened, the works, just as much as the people GamerGate didn't like did. There were also trolls who played both sides, trying to fan the flames just to see how big a clusterfuck they could create, and opportunists who pretended to be victims of harassment that never happened (or that they sent to themselves using dummy accounts), or exaggerated their reaction to real misbehavior to ludicrous proportions for sympathy or sometimes while soliciting monetary donations. In the entire duration of GG, not one single threat has ever been definitively proven to have come from a person with known ties to GamerGate, and GamerGate has denounced harassment and threats very publicly many times. It's plausible, even likely, that some GamerGate supporters stepped over the line and sent messages like that. Tens of thousands of people were involved, a few nuts are virtually inevitable. But weigh the lack of even one solidly proven instance against years of media narrative claiming a "harassment campaign", that should give you some idea of how much spin was involved on the part of the press, especially when you consider that the same sorts of behavior were happening on both sides, and only one side gets blamed for it.

The more legitimate problem with GamerGate was just how open it was for infiltration and recruitment by conservative activists, who took advantage of the fact that gamers were fighting ideologues on the far left, to try to suck us all into the far right. Feeling like there was nobody else willing to tell their side of the story, many GGers buddied up with right-wing journalists who were often just as unethical and ideologically fanatical as the left-wing journalists they were yelling at. GamerGate started out trying very hard to be non-partisan, with most GGers identifying as left-leaning themselves, just not nearly as FAR left as the social justice crowd, but at this point it's hard to argue that GG hasn't drifted considerably to the right as a whole.

Visual___Education · 2022-05-31T17:38:27+00:00

There are entire Youtube videos deconstructing it. But I'll give you my summary:

Woman (name Anita Sarkissian) makes negative gaming review > Negative gaming review gains traction > people find out Anita did bad thing in her past > gamers are offended by Anita, and use bad thing to justify hating her > she gets threatened with rape, death, and everything under the book because of this.

That's essentially it.

redgarnetamaranth · 2022-06-01T03:41:50+00:00

This is a good article by Paula Wright:

https://porlawright.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/gamergate-the-players-and-the-played/

ChiefIceCold · 2022-06-04T10:06:59+00:00

a misogynist hate mob threatening games journalists that committed harassment, death/sexual assault threats , and doxxing

skllyskullstyle · 2022-06-06T07:04:39+00:00

My view (even though i never cared or was aware of gamergate during when it became huge), gamer gate became big because a famous and yet condescending feminist anita sarkeesian was making videos about games. Bad false statements. Statements saying that games were mysogonistic and racist even though they were not. Thats mostly ik.

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