Elon Joni just wanted to expose his ex-girlfriend, game developer Zoe Quinn, as a serial cheater.
Zoe Posta gossipy accusation he posted on August 16, 2014, did just that. It also suggested that Quinn used his sexual relationship with a gaming journalist to advance his career. This foolish speculation quickly spread into a widespread consumer revolt/online harassment campaign, which soon received its own hashtag, #GamerGate.
Gamergate's rebuttal to left-wing policies may have been little more than “I don't care,” but for many on the left, it was enough to suggest a fascist insurrection.
Ten years later, long after the initial controversy has faded, GamerGate continues to shape the Internet in ways no one expected.
“Ethics in Video Game Journalism”
of
series of events The case, which unfolded between August and November 2014, is complex, multifaceted and difficult to plot. Dozens of retrospectives, documentaries, books, and even episodes of “Law & Order: SVU” have been published that address this issue, but their content is clearly biased to one side or the other.
“Ethics in Video Game Journalism” was the movement's rallying cry. This is believed to have targeted the progressive ideological views of industry publications and manifested itself in preferential treatment given to some of the game developers journalists covered. #GamerGate tweeted within 2 months
2 million times on Twitter.
Game developers, journalists, and commentators quickly split into two camps. One side ridiculed Joni's claims:
intangible This is due to the time axis discrepancy. The woman involved may have committed misconduct, but she argued that her personal relationship with the journalists occurred after the journalists reported on her and did not constitute journalistic misconduct.
Opponents, many of them gamers, have organized a massive online campaign accusing their opponents of corruption. In some cases, this led to harassment. Several key figures in the anti-Gamergate movement were exposed and visited by Canadian federal authorities after one of its journalists was falsely accused of distributing child pornography.
“Gamer is dead”
Within two weeks, the gossipy bedroom drama escalated, with dozens of publications allegedly working together to publish a series of posts known as the “gamers are dead” articles. They argued that the gaming industry should appease the demographic leading the rebellion: bitter white men angry about losing power and attention.
as
Gamasutra's lee alexander “Gamer isn't just an outdated demographic label that most people increasingly don't want to use. Gamers are over. That's why they're so angry. These insensitive scammers, These whining hyper-consumers, these childish internet commentators – they're not my audience. They don't need to be yours.”
Some of GamerGate's self-proclaimed leaders abandoned it after a few months, but others continued to argue into 2015 with new accusations of corruption and collusion.
Lasting impact?
Ten years later, all of the key players who profited from GamerGate have moved on to new projects or focused on fighting the cultural wars. But the incident is still regularly cited to this day by culture warriors who see it as a watershed of sorts. A simple search for “GamerGate” on Twitter is enough to find dozens of hours or days old posts by progressives continually complaining about its lasting effects. People won't stop talking about it.
It's pretty easy to enumerate GamerGate's surface-level impacts. This caused severe damage to the reputation of the video game industry and accelerated the decline of online journalism. Some online publications have adjusted their ethics policies. This caused a split in the online atheist community, resulting in a significant portion of the community shifting from anti-creationist advocacy to anti-feminist advocacy. It destroyed dozens of careers while launching conservative activists such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Vox Day, Mike Cernovich, and Ian Miles Chong, as well as hundreds of pseudonymous YouTubers.
Additionally, GamerGate is widely seen as a model for online right-wing political activism over the past decade. Edgy memes, irreverent trolling, culture jamming — and support from anti-establishment sections of the internet.
burrito bart, wikileaksand infowars — took GamerGate to new heights. Since then, online conservatives have called Comicsgate, Fandom Menace, the Manosphere, the alt-right, the Bud Light boycott, gamergate 2.
GamerGate's initial success was met with intense backlash from mainstream media.
CNN, MSNBC, washington post, new york times, new yorker, guardian, buzzfeed, daily beast, ABC's “Nightline”“”colbert report,” and gawker. of Southern Poverty Law Center He declared Gamergate a hate group. Former President Jimmy Carter also mentioned Gamergate. Examples of violence against women.
blame game
As a result, progressives came to view Gamergate as the source of everything that followed.
Distributed counterprogressive reaction. From the election of Donald Trump, the so-called “Battle of Charlottesville,” and the rise of QAnon, incels, and the men's rights movement, to coronavirus skepticism, the January 6th “riot,” and anti-trans backlash. All sorts of causes have been blamed on this crime. , Nancy Pelosi's assault on her husband, Elon Musk's Twitter takeover, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and even Johnny Depp's successful defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard.
The far right uses social media attacks to achieve real-world political gains in ways that many key institutions, from Gamergate and other online movements to journalism to government to technology, still struggle to understand. I learned how to. …Steve Bannon saw the power of Gamergate firsthand when he ran Breitbart News. Mr. Bannon took notes not only from the gaming controversy but also from left-wing movements like Occupy to develop strategies to apply to mainstream politics in the 2016 Trump campaign and the White House.
wired He celebrated the 10th anniversary of The Zoe Post, arguing that its spirit lives on in modern Republican politics. “This same kind of anger and resistance is currently being seen in figures like J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, who broadly denounce 'wokeism' in politics and culture,” Musk said in an interview. He said his motive for acquiring Company X (formerly Twitter) was to combat the “wake-mind virus,'' which he claims is occurring.
“The core of hatred”
The day after the January 6th riot,
vox It directly traced the Capitol riot to Gamergate and indirectly advocated a preemptive crackdown on free speech.
It's tempting to think that it might have been stopped before it happened, years ago, before GamerGate was integrated into an organized movement. Perhaps we should better manage our forums, pay more serious attention to the issue of misogynistic harassment, and rely less on the age-old internet wisdom of “prioritizing free speech” and “starving the trolls.” Perhaps we could have eliminated this core of hatred.
Even as the specific events of 2014 fade from memory, GamerGate continues to live on in many people's minds for free. As a pseudonym
Youtuber short fat nerd Gamergate claims to be the first time a primarily progressive online culture faced a serious culture war and was partially defeated. The incident traumatized a generation of online progressives, who have spent the past decade spinning conspiracy theories about how the incident was the beginning of a violent reactionary rebellion that continues to spread to this day. I made up for it. This trauma response continues to haunt the progressive left, unable to let it go.
In reality, GamerGate was just the latest in a decade of internal troubles and ideological differences that erupted in a relatively small online gaming community of tens of thousands of people. How much of an impact GamerGate had on real life is debatable, given the limited cultural spillover between the terminal online millennial gamers and the baby boomers who drove Trump's success. There is. Speaking for myself, I was a sophomore in college at the time and had no idea about this incident until many years later.
'I don't care'
Karl Benjamin, a key figure in GamerGate, known online as Sargon of Akkad; Looking back at the beginning of this year. Revisiting the conflict after 10 years start a media companyafter starting a family, losing weight, and getting a degree in philosophy, he revealed that he thinks Gamergate had little effect. Attacks on malignant identity politics may have been well-intentioned, but their disorganization, lack of ideas, and overall lack of vision are dooming them to failure. Just as any movement modeled after Gamergate is doomed to failure.
Still, the demonstration that progressives could push back was enough to traumatize a significant portion of the left. GamerGate's rebuttal to the left's agenda may have been nothing more than “.”i don't careBut for many on the left, that was enough to suggest a fascist revolt. Moreover, the new postliberal movement seemed to have learned from the failure of Gamergate, whether they acknowledged its influence or not.
Those were the days
After all, GamerGate may have been the right scandal at the right time. The economic and demographic forces that gave Donald Trump a victory over Hillary Clinton were being built long before Zoe Post went viral.
Perhaps this attachment to ancient contretemps, both online and offline, is just nostalgia for a simpler time. Anyone who visits our world from 2014 will be faced with a completely disorienting political landscape of warmongering Democrats and Kennedy-backed Republicans, but neither side is capable of understanding the basic issues of reality. Unable to reach agreement.
A hotly contested issue on GamerGate now seems oddly off-limits. “Ethics in game journalism”? What is dividing us in 2024 is far more significant and far more intractable.
