Current Events > Gamergate was almost a decade ago.

(+) Yeah! (+)

I remember the SVU episode based on it.

Thing is the most aggressive party tends to stand out more.

As for the plot, IRC chats revealed that the guy who started it all was just mad that his ex cheated on him, and as revenge leaked personal details about her to help 4channers develop a conspiracy theory about her sleeping her way to the top of indie gaming. The channers cooperated because they already had a grudge against his ex over prior gaming disputes. Together they discussed how to propagandize the "movement" en masse. When questioned about his support of blatant lies, he basically just said, "well it's the type of thing she would do."

So yeah I don't deny that the core premise of GG was fradulent, ill-intentioned, and not about gaming journalism. At best, the original GG supporters were too quick to grow outraged over unverified rumors. The media was right on that end.

Unfortunately though the IRC logs released over a week after the 14 article dump against gamers, so people were too offended by that point to account for the fact that GG was indeed originally a smear campaign. Newer GGers had jumped onboard over behavior they saw with their own eyes (tons of journos from different publications coordinating in their own private chats about how to shape the narratives of the gaming community). It's just a bad case of miscommunication.

There was a subset of gamers attacking people out of sexist paranoia and/or opposition to calls for diversification/cultural progressivism in gaming. But there was another subset that denounced the prior groups, but still felt they didn't represent vocal gamers as a whole and that their presence didn't justify calling out the whole gaming community.

Yet people lumped the latter in with the former simply for standing up for "gamers" in general, despite them not actually spreading any hate themselves. And to some gamers that felt like people genuinely throwing their "livelihoods" under the bus to make a social statement, and/or simply looking for an excuse to start bullying gamers as a group again.

A better method would've been cooperating with the good gamers to alienate the bad gamers. Focusing specifically on the toxic gamers allows others to feel like they're not being attacked.

There's no real way to know. I'd guess a minority, naturally. I don't mean to claim most GGers were good, just that some portion probably was and took an excessive amount of heat.

Gamergate was the first real outlet for the gamers who were angry about 'feminism and politics' invading their space. That's all it ever was.

No, that's not "all it ever was".

I remember the SVU episode based on it. The ringleader of the group harassing the female game designer was played by Logan Paul.

It really was. It was all the sorts of people who got angry about Anita Sarkeesian and Kotaku who finally had a hashtag to rally behind.

Every single controversy they focused on was politically driven and their big targets were feminist women and left leaning websites.

Right, so it simply being about "politics and feminists in gaming" wasn't all that it was about

It was though.

Which Gamergate controversy didn't have either of those two things involved? It was supposed to be about ethics in video game journalism. But it was about politics and feminism in video game journalism.

I think you mean ethnics in gaming journalism lol

LOL what have I unleashed on these forums by invoking Gamergate?

I still don't even know what any of it was

I disagree strongly with some of this but fair enough. However, this is all very different from saying gamers were leftist until those mean ole journalists turned them into Nazi-wazis.

Then, for whatever reason, gamers, instead of blaming the journalist himself, blamed the girl (well, they blamed both but most heat went towards the girl). Even though she did not breach any ethics, but the guy did. But she got more blame. So fucking dumb. Like, she didn't do anything wrong there.

LOL what have I unleashed on these forums by invoking Gamergate?

No it wasn't. Plenty of gamers legitimately only jumped in because they didn't like the articles claiming hardcore "gamers are over", seperate gaming media outlets colluding behind the scenes, or criticism of these actions being censored. Some were under a genuine false impression that devs were sleeping with reviewers for higher scores, not deliberately spreading fake propaganda themselves. Lumping them in with the 4chan sexists making stuff up to harass female devs and the Twitter/Breitbart anti-SJW grift when they were just trying to defend the integrity of their hobby generated a lot of spite that could've been avoided.

Yeah that was a sensationalist exaggeration I admit. Thinking it out I doubt any leftists flipped to the right. More likely some politically neutral gamers embraced the right, while some left gamers ended up feeling politically homeless.

That was probably because the journalist was a nobody while the dev had already been aggressive against perceived misogyny in gamer spaces.

Most controversially she publicly shamed "Wizardchan", a forum for depressed virgins over 30, for harassment. But IP address logs revealed that the people who posted the offensive messages about her there had never actually used the site before, making it a false flag attack that shouldn't have been blamed on the community at-large. Yet despite some media outlets withdrawing their articles the damage was already done, and online life for some already sad, lonely, socially challenged individuals had degraded even further.

So when her ex and his boys launched their conspiracy theory about her gamers felt they had found a smoking gun against an established enemy of the community.

There's some still here on GameFAQs. As in they never changed and never left.

The entire response to things like biased/bribed reviews, DLC, micro-transactions, pre-orders, crunch periods, console exlusives, programmers being underpaid and having no job security, gambling aimed at children etc was all transformed into "Stop whining you woman hater!"

This is all completely made up.

I first became involved in Wizardchan when I saw it linked from 4chon.net in December of 2012. I was a regular poster until the original administrator of the site, mr_pacific, wanted to sell it. He was tired of the site and needed money. The community was very small then but I decided to buy it from him and I was the administrator from March 2013 to September 2013. I resigned from the site because the main rule of the site is that only male virgins are allowed to post, and I lost this status.

I was friends with the subsequent admin of Wizardchan, Glaive, who was in charge during the Zo drama. The way it was described in the media is not the way that it happened at all. Many Wizardchan users are very depressed and have trouble even ordering pizza over the telephone, muchless calling someone they don't know and making threats. The threatening posts made on Wizardchan were made by Zo herself for attention and by trolls from other websites, as was confirmed by IP checks. Some media outlets recanted their story, but by then the damage was already done.

Now I remember why I had you tagged.

Yes I "made up" an account of the issue that was actually just paraphrased what one of the site administrators said himself:

https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/interviews/qa-with-fredrick-brennan-of-8chan

Now you can claim he himself is lying, but I don't recall anyone ever debunking his assertions.

What's relevant is that this is probably the account gamers bought into, and thus a reason they had more of a grudge with Quinn than Grayson, which was all my post was trying to explain.

Nobody cares, troll. I'm having a civil discussion here without any shit slinging whatsoever and you're making it personal. Some of you are insufferable.

What single example of this did Gamergate rally behind in protest again?

I don't know if there was one single point but if there was it was unethical game reviews and what amounts to bribes from major sites.

Which already you're trying to deflect from. IGN and Kotaku have the integrity of Mr Burns and this is still true to this day largely because criticism of gaming media is not accepted due to fanboyism.

I don't know if there was one single point

Alt-Right incels sending death/rape threats to a female game reviewer because reasons

We have had actual controversies in the past. Gerstmann being fired from GameSpot because he gave Kane and Lynch a bad review. Doritosgate covered the issue far better than anything from Gamergate.

Gamergate had nothing. There is no 'but'

I mean you just disproved your own point.

"Look at all these issues! Gamergate had nothing!"

The Donald Trump solution to deflecting criticism, The sheer amount of issues means none count

Like you don't have people going "i'm a hardcore Movier"

Gamergate was all in on defending corporate corruption and attacking anyone and everyone who didn't tow the company marketing line

Most of the gamergate I saw were people bitching that IGN and metacritic scores were too high and about how major outlets are too scared to call out companies for risk of getting blacklisted

Which is still true today

They were right.