The One About GamerGate
In the year 2014, gamers rose up and rebelled against the progressive encroachment on their hobby. It marked the beginning of the culture wars.
Part of the reason why I chose this subject as my next Substack post is because Rolling Stone decided to resurrect the topic of GamerGate for the millionth time.
At the end of August this year, it will be nine years since GamerGate officially began. The world as we know it was a completely different place. It's hard to put into words how. But the fact that we've gone through a few different US presidents in the meantime says more than enough. Political landscapes and careers have risen and fallen in the last decade. We've seen the complicated development of a society of censorship and taboos.
The discussion of GamerGate is still worth having, though. Somehow. The movement ushered in this era of turmoil and change. I can assure you that nobody had any notion of it at the time. We were all just active observers of the moment.
What you read is actually a refined take on things. This must be the fourth or fifth iteration of a GamerGate summary I’ve made over the years.
What follows is the Twitter thread I had originally made on my crabcrawler1 account, before it was wrongly suspended by Ella Irwin’s regime.
Please make noise on Twitter to free crabcrawler1.
NOTE: As an experiment, I changed up the formatting. This includes a one-by-one approach to presenting pictures/stuff to talk about + making the images themselves larger. PLEASE TELL ME IF YOU LIKE THIS METHOD BETTER.
These are all basically highlights from the first year of GamerGate. Roughly. Sometimes as necessary, we go beyond that point in time. However there really isn't any chronological order to events. It's a jumbling of thoughts that loosely goes through the significant moments.
DISCLAIMER: I (still) disavow the harassment or even tagging of anyone mentioned in this story for reasons that GamerGate is still a touchy subject for some. Hopefully my thread can clear up some of the myths that have cropped up over 8 9 years.
The following video is not mine. Someone else made it in 2014. I feel the need to go out of my way to say this, as people in 2023 lost their senses of humor.
People called GamerGate a harassment campaign against women because it started when Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend Eron Gonji wrote a long blog post describing his relationship with her, and the falling out.
The pair met on OKCupid. Eron thought at first that he'd have a completely innocent relationship with this Zoe girl. He learned about her troubled background, but Eron was largely caught up having fun in the honeymoon phase of the relationship. But then it turned into an on-again/off-again relationship. Then Eron found out that Zoe Quinn cheated on her with a boss, who himself was married. Then he found out there were upwards of five guys. Thus the "burgers and fries" meme.
What caught people's attention was the relationship Zoe Quinn had with Kotaku's Nathan Grayson. Murmurs in the gaming community began about the conflict of interest that it entailed. Quinn was (loosely speaking) a game developer. Nathan Grayson wrote about games for a living.
The Grayson/Quinn relationship happened around the same time the pair were in an ill-fated Game Jam contest. Grayson wrote about that after it happened. There were inconsistent statements about if the romance started before or after the event. But none of that mattered to Grayson. He and Quinn deflected by downplaying the writing Grayson did about Quinn's Depression Quest game.
A lot of GamerGate’s earliest detractors claimed it was all a harassment campaign against Quinn for her relationship.
Ironically years later, Quinn would be involved in getting "The Last Night" video game developer hounded on social media, as well as with the death of Alec Holowka.
"Last Night" developer Tim Soret made several tweets in September 2014 supporting GamerGate. Several years later he publicly apologized for it during the 2017 PC Gaming Show, after Quinn unleashed a twitter tirade on the guy.
In late August 2019, Quinn laid out allegations of abuse that she alleged to have suffered when with Holowka. The development team behind "Night in the Woods" booted him the very next day. A short time after, Alec killed himself. Anna Slatz dissected Quinn's allegations in a piece on The Post Millennial. Quinn and Holowka collaborated on a project called "It's Not Okay, Cupid." She painted Alec as manipulative and controlling of the project, yet publicly it seemed as if it was an equal partnership.
A follow-up piece revealed a time when Holowka told a colleague that he was actually afraid of Zoe Quinn.
Zoe Quinn tried taking Eron Gonji to court on harassment charges. It included a temporary gag order against Gonji. He reportedly wouldn't have been allowed to talk about the Zoe Quinn situation even if what he said was 100 percent true. But she eventually dropped the case. A pair of free speech professors caught wind of the situation and thought it was egregious. They filed amicus briefs to support Eron's side, and it led Quinn to essentially forfeit her position.
Zoe Quinn's description of Eron makes it seem like guy had glowing red eyes and a maniacal laugh. She tried painting herself as the ultimate victim in this self-inflicted legal situation where they were hypocritically dragging out fuel for GamerGate discourse all the meanwhile.
In reality, a friend of Gonji had since admitted to their involvement in helping him process the Quinn situation in the first place. The guy had no idea what to do with this bizarre relationship he got into.
Read this friend’s observances:
"Eron talked about going public. He talked about panic, about awareness, about making sure that people knew what they were getting into, about taking a hit – there’d be a hit, for speaking publicly against a woman in any field, but especially against a woman with Zoe’s position and friends in progressive indie gaming – for the good of all, eventually."
Eron’s friend even said he was considerate in trying to minimize harm against Zoe Quinn as well.
“He talked about evaluating the risk to his current job, his future jobs, his family, himself. You know, whether he’d get stalked or murdered for this. He talked about the danger to Zoe, about how he could minimize personal harm toward her, whether he could effectively defray harassment towards her.”
Two sides to every story.
On August 27th, actor Adam Baldwin shared two of Internet Aristocrat's videos discussing the Zoe Quinn scandal. He used the #GamerGate hashtag. The label stuck. For eternity. As in: we call GamerGate now, as of now. With that label comes every emotion and feeling it represents.
People don’t even bring up Adam Baldwin’s involvement that much anymore. But he was there in the trenches.
On the one-year anniversary of GamerGate he wrote his thoughts:
“Politics are downstream of culture, and we are witnessing a change. A cultural shift, if you will, in American politics. Political correctness is evil because it stifles varying viewpoints through fear and intimidation. It has been running rampant on our college campuses, in our entertainment, and even in our one-on-one conversations.”
He held the line.
Below we have an example of a serious GamerGate discussion livestream. TotalBiscuit is gathered together with a bunch of community members to discuss how YouTubers were the future of the industry. He explains to them how personalities like PewDiePie had much more of an effective advertisement draw than the traditional games media could ever hope to achieve.
Then there were not serious streams where people came together to shoot the shit. In this case, InternetAristocrat/Mister Metkour was having sex with a girl while a livestream was going on. I know this is odd to include. But some people in GamerGate reacted poorly at the time to that. It led Metokur to officially quit the movement because he thought things got too serious and wasn't fun anymore.
At least he ended up marrying the chick he was banging.
The Quinn storyline came together with another. When Anita Sarkeesian said she had to flee her home because of threats, video games media sites all collectively decided gamers are "dead" as an identity. A cavalcade of hit pieces from: Ars Technica, BuzzFeed, Daily Beast (more than once), Financial Post, Gamasutra (more than once), Jezebel, Kotaku, Observer, Polygon, The Mary Sue, and The Stranger.
What these publications all said was largely the same. Every time Anita Sarkeesian opened her mouth to talk about feminism and video games, the oppressive gamer misogynists all mobbed her. Emotions ran wild, and the criticism towards Zoe Quinn was a sign that the “problem” with gamers was getting worse. Phil Fish's website got hacked. A livestreamer got swatted.
Somehow everything remotely gaming related was all connected now.
Gaming as a medium was evolving and that meant it was time for a debate about sexism, according to the games press. They had even previously attempted to change the word “gamer” to “player” as the standard lingo.
Suspicions of collusion in the narrative would be proven a short time later on.
EVEN SO: Kotaku and Polygon acknowledged the writers supporting Patreons of indie devs was a conflict of interest. Kotaku largely barred the practice, Polygon did not. Both welcomed disclosure.
"Kotaku. Are you kidding me right now? Like, really, is this a prank?" complained one former industry journalist.
In response, Quinn described the games media press as "bloggers, not journalists." That sentiment stuck. At the time, everyone in the community thought that was accurate. Even though from Zoe's perspective it was likely completely unintentional that she wanted to author such a revealing tweet.
Axios eventually hired Stephen Totilo. Elsewhere, Jason Schreier picked up a gig at Bloomberg. I'm happy to argue that these career moves from Totilo and Schreier are actually good things. I can say that now, after the fact, because both of these individuals have had a chance to prove themselves in their new positions. It's safe to say both Stephen and Jason have improved.
Basically they'd be doing what they were in their previous games journalism circuits. But now they had a higher standard of calling in delivering their work to a mainstream media audience. Something far less niche.
Gone were the days of Sonic the Hedgehog beds and Dragon’s Crown boobs.
The underlying sentiment at GamerGate's beginning was that places like Polygon wrote clickbait that sometimes got political + outlets gave incredibly high scores to an indie game like Gone Home. The glowing praise they gave came down to the story nearly entirely. When it came to describing actual gameplay, it's made clear that the experience is a walking simulator.
Whoever wrote that review admitted that they liked it because it unearthed old memories. Flowery statements.
(That’s why the only reliable source for me was Internet Historian’s walkthrough.)
Wikipedia calls "Cultural Marxism" (CM) a conspiracy theory. But in reflection between 2014 to today: a culture war and the politicization of the media arts has been ongoing.
The Southern Poverty Law Center labeled CM anti-Semitic in the early 2000s. Why? Largely because Jewish philosophers at Columbia University in the 1930s put out the following theory in the 1930s:
“The so-called "Frankfurt School" of philosophers — planned to try to convince mainstream Americans that white ethnic pride is bad, that sexual liberation is good, and that supposedly traditional American values — Christianity, "family values," and so on — are reactionary and bigoted. With their core values thus subverted, the theory goes, Americans would be quick to sign on to the ideas of the far left.”
Professor Alexander Riley rebuked the SPLC (and therefore Wikipedia’s spin on CM) in a recent article you can find here. He says it was as recent as the 1990s in which “cultural Marxism” was used in academic textbooks and that there were people who openly called themselves cultural Marxists as a badge of honor.
It was right around the time of GamerGate that leftists entered a period of burying that history.
What originally inspired this GamerGate retrospective: Ben Kuchera was a huge GamerGate critic years ago but he expressed a change of heart during his public meltdown back in August 2022.
On the way Ben spoke on Twitter I could tell he seemed like a grouchy person. Archive.is is the only way any record of his remarks survived, as he routinely purged all tweets from his account.
If they were anything like Polygon articles, Kuchera published his fair share of questionable takes.
But when he finally reached his limit we learned it was because of the backroom deals he had to put up with at Polygon. Kuchera said he was pressured to change review scores and barred from publicly complaining about it. The way the company dealt with issues in Ben's family life didn't help things either.
It wasn’t the first employer that Ben Kuchera publicly blasted. He did the same previously when talking about his time at Penny Arcade. It was there that Ben Kuchera screwed over Brad Wardell and reported on salacious sexual harassment charges that were dismissed in Brad’s favor by the courts.
Kuchera wasn’t the only one with regrets about GamerGate. Fellow game journalist Patrick Klepek said something to that effect years ago.
“Every day, it's clearer GamerGate was ground zero for our current hellscape. Too many of us failed to do the right thing. We were cowards.”
Fact check: true!
The factor that sparked interest in GamerGate most of all was the censorship of the subject. The suppression of discussing the original Quinn story accelerated public interest ("Streisand effect").
It seemed incredibly bizarre that there was this one subject that the moderators of the internet all seemed to agree was taboo.
A YouTuber named MundaneMatt made a video discussing the Zoe Quinn controversy and it got DMCA'ed by either Quinn or someone who used her name. Internet censorship is highly normalized in today's day and age. But back in 2014, the usage of a DMCA takedown in this fashion was unheard of.
YouTube commentators like TotalBiscuit were thrown into the mix. He weighed the significance of possible games journalism corruption and DMCA censorship vs. the taint of websites like 4chan being involved. He made sure not to assign immediate blame to anyone. At least not immediately.
But he fully explored the issues.
“If these allegations are true I'm certainly disappointed in the outlets responsible. Depression Quest is not a good videogame, but I tweeted about it because even though it wasn't a good game it did a good job of conveying a message about depression which is a very real thing that's touched those around me. It's a horrible condition that is misunderstood and any effort to raise awareness and understanding about it is positive in my opinion. Doesn't make DQ a good game, it's basically a choose your own adventure novel and should be treated as such. Whether it should have been greenlit is something that's not really worth discussing at this point. A ton of absolute horseshit has been greenlit, the process is clearly busted in every way, might I remind you that the 1st ever wave of Greenlit titles which contained many worthwhile games (whereas these days good luck finding a game you can even recognize in a list), also contained Yogventures, a game that didnt exist at the time and doesn't exist now either, purely on the basis that Yogscast were popular.”
To this very day you won't find a TotalBiscuit imitator that comes close to the respectful stature he presented as a personality. TB was an idealist when it came to maintaining morality and responsibility in the New Media landscape.
An r/gaming mod took it upon themselves to censor discussion about TotalBiscuit's Twitlonger, deleting thousands of comments. The more comments got deleted, the more it caused a stir of attention where people came into the thread asking what was going on, and then those comments were deleted in repeating cycles.
NeoGAF only really allowed GG "discussions" to take place within the confines of their echo chamber. Eventually the forum's users migrated somewhere else, after misconduct claims against the site's owner.
It was always a cesspool. Many moons ago, I wrote a series of articles exploring the topic of NeoGAF. What’s at of most interest to this Substack piece are the times that the site brigaded to get YouTube personality JonTron removed from a video game over politics, and how the forums caused Boogie2988 to have a mental breakdown over the social pressures they forced onto the guy during GamerGate’s first few months.
But I went further. There was a level of influence that NeoGAF had on the games industry, and decisions made by the site’s moderators were oftentimes questionable.
TotalBiscuit's Twitter popped off during 2014 and onwards. He began with the mere mention of GamerGate related events and people accused him of legitimizing the “harassment campaign.” This sort of drama happened on a regular basis despite his battle with colon cancer. TB decided to be pro-GamerGate (for a time) after an executive at the Dell computer company tweeted remarks that compared gamers to ISIS.
“I am very much fucking done with pretending that Brianna Wu has anything worthwhile to say and is not a colossal attention-seeking hypocrite,” TB said during one of these Twitter drama occasions.
It eventually spiraled to the point where some people had genuine FREAK OUTS over him retweeting a charity livestream event.
During another episode, a livestreamer who wanted to support the AbleGamers charity had a meltdown because Totalbiscuit signal boosted the event. The fact that TB had such a large following and that an apparent villain narrative had be attached to him in the eyes of anti-GamerGaters, led to TB having to address the situation and calm people down who freaked out over nothing.
Then there was the time James Portnow of Extra Credits slandered TB at a MAGfest Q&A panel session. He called him a “leader” of GamerGate and falsely claimed he made $20,000 from a brand deal.
One of TB's big victories was helping expose how preview copies of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor came with a catch: you could only describe the game positively, and disclosures were buried. You couldn't "show bugs or glitches that may exist" either.
This later caught the attention of the FTC. The settlement agreement reached with Warner Bros. forced the company to fix any buried disclosures for Shadow of Mordor content, and required the company to better comply with transparency policies regarding ad deals going forward.
GamerGate helped TB win the "Trending Gamer" at the 2014 Video Game Awards. By that I mean we all rallied together and voted for him.
The games industry snobs still insulted Totalbiscuit among themselves, despite the fact he won an award that was based around good standing and popularity. It continued for ages. Kotaku UK had to appease the anti-GamerGate crowd after their site interviewed TB on the issue of harassment in gaming communities, and what mod tools are out there as resources for users.
Even after TotalBiscuit died he was the subject of hit piece articles. This one from Forbes (published mere weeks after his death) claimed that TB’s legacy was the gaming community’s mob mentality. The author tried to soften their blows by listing some of TB’s achievements. But they also took an overt stance against the guy.
It was thanks to Totalbiscuit that Kotaku's then editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo made a meaningful attempt to debate about ethics in games journalism. TB asked the tough questions. But he also acknowledged the fact that it was harder to run an entire site in terms of the demands for content, compared to the job load of being a single YouTuber. Stephen Totilo saw Kotaku as being a site for gamers, rather than just a site for gaming news. It's that frame of mind that guided what they published.
TB asked the hard questions about Grayson's lack of disclosure regarding Quinn. Stephen said he took things seriously fro the get-go regardless of the social media noise. He argued that it's hard to draw the line when you qualify being friends with someone. Grayson wouldn't be doing his job if he wasn't active in the community and stayed in his house all day.
Totilo concluded the Grayson Quinn relationship wasn't "compromised," being whatever it was.
The Kotaku chief didn't shy away from the conversation, though. He acknowledged it's a bad situation to begin with, if a reporter is caught in a position where people are doubting. But it wasn't just limited to Grayson. Totilo admitted that there were conflicts of interest involving Patricia Hernandez that needs disclosing, and he said it was swiftly addressed.
He tried to argue the nuance from the difficult position of being the Kotaku guy. His stance was that if games media was relegated to nothing but press releases all day, the job would be too boring.
Totilo always knew there was a problem with the industry even before GG came around. It was an essay breaking down classic example of games journalism scruntiny. There was the 2007 incident with Jeff Gerstmann where he gave a game a negative review while working at an outlet who themselves were advertising said game, leading to Gerstmann's firing. Then there was the time that Geoff Keighley sat around in front of Mountain Dew and Doritos, shilling the product while talking about Halo 4.
Stephen comes off as very familiar on the subject of ethics:
“A games reporter who doesn't have a story to tell about the guy who showed up at the press junket wearing a swag t-shirt for the game he's covering—or who doesn't have an anecdote about some dumb trinket that a game publisher sent in the mail—just might be that guy in the shirt or might be currently too busy opening their mail."
He hits at the underlying theme that games media have to carefully cultivate their relationships with publishers for the sake of access.
ALAS. Sadly, Totilo also once fell victim to a fake story from someone claiming to be a black woman who learned to drive thanks to GTA 4. The intrigue of the fake story came down to someone claiming that Grand Theft Auto had a positive influence on their life. Usually GTA was seen as the villain of video games when it comes to critics of violence. The prankster who sent the email said they appreciated GTA IV's vehicle physics as something realistic, enough to be good practice for safe driving habits.
I added this meme in my Twitter thread as a way of preserving the mood of GamerGate way back when. I don’t want to remove it, either.
GamerGate completed their ultimate goal of pointing out bias in the games press via the "Deep Freeze" project. deepfreeze.it gathered and assessed different members of the industry, pointing out their flaws. If you were to look at the pages for folks like Ben Kuchera, Leigh Alexander, or Patricia Hernandez, you're greeted with a track record of their slip-ups.
Fanning the flames of a moral panic, writing about roommates and not disclosing it, being a bully to other members of the industry. Stuff like that. It was a natural evolution of the surface-level Twitter banter. GamerGate put this site together to show in a meaningful format that they were serious about the discussions surrounding journalism ethics.
The community raised $2000 for an ad campaign to help raise awareness for the site’s launch.
The site was built by someone named BoneGolem. DeepFreeze faced a lot of mockery from the anti-GamerGate crowd, but that didn't stop BG from seeking out constructive feedback.
Why did he make it in the first place? According to an interview, BG had dabbled in creating infographs of specific instances of failures in games journalism ethics. His carefully crafted images caught on. Not just in the passing interest sense either. GamerGate was a community of researchers who regularly discovered new leads to share around. This collaborative feedback loop was enough of a springboard for BG to embark on making a full-blown website.
BG eventually explained why the site stopped updating after September 2017. It became a nearly impossible task to maintain on his own. There were standards on what could be counted for as entries. Beyond that, there was the fact that existing entries would need updating over time whenever a particular person changed their employment and/or got involved in another scandal.
Plus there were limits to keeping it focused on the games journalism space. A successor to Deep Freeze would analyze people in the mainstream media, but that would magnify the previously stated problems regarding updates and maintenance.
GamerGate's "Operation Disrespectful Nod" was an organized boycott of Gawker's advertisers. It worked to great effect as it cost "seven figures" of revenue. Hulk Hogan later finished off Gawker completely.
Nobody at the time could’ve predicted that GG would be capable of such economic damage. For many, emailing advertisers to complain about Gawker was largely something to do. It was a task that they could commit to, that just kept on going and going. The Hulk Hogan sex tape lawsuit was a stroke of luck.
The technique of pressuring advertisers was adopted in the political realm years later. A far-left activist group called the Sleeping Giants coordinated a boycott campaign against Breitbart, leading to upwards of 4000 companies to stop advertising on the site.
GamerGate also successfully pushed the FTC to action in terms of updating disclosure guidelines. It took months to both send complaints and for the agency to take notice and update their guidelines. But it was one of the movement's most important successes.
It was confirmed that GamerGate’s efforts contributed. One person was in touch with someone at the FTC. Here’s what the staffer there said:
“Although we were already planning on updating our Endorsement Guide FAQs to address various issues that have arisen with respect to endorsement-related practices, the fact that we recently received many complaints about undisclosed affiliate links has made it clear that the FAQs need to address that specific practice. In terms of the best way to bring practices of concern to the FTC’s attention, filing separate complaints, as what happened here, is one way. If the consumers you work with want to join together to file a petition, that would be another way. A single email to me, as you did, is another way. Although the pure number of complaints won’t necessarily affect our analysis of whether the FTC Act has been violated, we do strive to be responsive when we see a pattern of complaints in our database, and certainly we saw a pattern here.”
The practice of pointing out sponsored "#ad" content became widely adopted. Gawker’s presentation of sponsored content became clearly marked from the rest of their articles. An FOIA request to the FTC revealed the agency’s encouragement that the former media giant disclose ads.
Other notorious sites like Machinima were also brought to heel by the FTC when it came to labeling things that were paid promotions.
The Escapist was of one of the few old guard video game outlets to openly allow GamerGate discussions. Some company leadership even acknowledged past shortcomings and the outlet later did an interview series.
Instead of censorship, Escapist went for the more difficult path of allowing an open dialogue. Something they faced a ton of blowback for.
It’s nearly impossible to look up any of this now given the fact Escapist went through multiple turnovers of ownership in the years since GamerGate first began. I’m grateful that for a while I had the privilege of working there. Long enough that I can say for sure that the company was serious about their ethical values.
It'd be much easier for me to simply say I know for a fact that Alexander Macris (Archon) tried his best with the situation presented to him. Thankfully since GamerGate he never died or fell off the wagon and went crazy. I continue to chat with him to this very day.
GamerGate wasn't the first time Zoe Quinn claimed there was a harassment campaign against her online. Before GG, there was the WizardChan episode.
In December 2013, Zoe Quinn alleged that Wizardchan (a 4chan offshoot dedicated to lonely older gents) was responsible for some kind of "raid" on her Depression Quest page online. People on the Wizardchan site were unenthused by the whole thing. They didn't care about her at all.
However, Zoe Quinn claimed that people from Wizardchan called her phone and masturbated. She said that the forum got mad at her because they believed “women can’t be depressed.”
It was the first time that Quinn alleged “sexism in games is real.” It can be seen as a GamerGate foreshadowing. Zoe considered herself part of the club, offering a community manager so-called “solidarity” about the internet getting crazy. Anita Sarkeesian told her followers to upvote Depression Quest on Steam Greenlight. All the attention from the Wizardchan episode had already garnered DQ votes of 98 to 99 percent approval.
GamerGate also helped resurrect a crowdfunding campaign by The Fine Young Capitalists group. Months earlier, Quinn and others sabotaged this game dev project that had a female team.
By that meaning the attention Zoe brought to the TFYC’s site caused it to crash briefly. "oops we DDOS'ed something on accident" Zoe gloated to her friend.
Quinn later tried downplaying her Twitter war against TFYC. She claimed she only sent four tweets about the group and claimed they were specifically about their transgender policies.
She called it an “exploitative startup.” Zoe Quinn wanted a paycheck immediately. Speaking as a self-proclaimed gatekeeper for all female devs, she questioned why TFYC needed to be the middleman. Zoe then asked people to donate to her Patreon so that she could profit off the Twitter flame war she herself started.
Since 4chan raised the most money (over $25,000) for the Indiegogo campaign, the TFYC people allowed them to create their own character for it. That's how Vivian James became GamerGate's mascot.
It was before the movement even had a name! 4channers wanted to do something for irony sake. By "irony," we mean a kind and charitable act for a good cause. It was a common goal that brought a group of random people together, and it was that kind of inspiration that helped spark GamerGate into being.
VICE at the time tried calling the act into question. They argued it was all an effort to make Zoe Quinn look bad. The author of the article alluded to political undertones about how 4chan hates social justice warriors (SJWs), and that nothing the forums do could ever be trusted as authentic.
TFYC ended up making their game. Afterlife Empire. The premise is you build a haunted house style of property, luring people in to get the best spooks and scares out of them. GamerGate's Vivian mascot was added in as one of the characters who could show up for the freight fest.
True to their word, profits from the game went to a colon cancer charity and paid for scholarships for aspiring game developers.
"The people who did the art and programming used it as [a] portfolio piece to get more jobs. It's actually shown by the Colombian government as a success for their trade ministry."
The TFYC accomplished in practice the exact thing that Zoe Quinn claimed to champion. But Quinn was too selfish to ever look beyond herself. You might look at “Afterlife Empire” and think it’s not the best thing on the Steam store. Yet, I’d argue it’s an actual game. Unlike Quinn’s “Depression Quest” clickity-click product that required the most utmost basic levels of effort and understanding to put together.
Afterlife Empire exists in defiance of the efforts by Zoe Quinn to stop it from happening. The fact that the anonymous people of 4chan came together to help make it happen stands as a testament of faith in humanity.
Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart was the only one willing to reach out and hear what the 4chan gaming community was saying at the time. He saw an opportunity. He took it.
This seems like an insignificant moment to passers by reading. But it was a turning point in the trajectory of Milo's career. As after he was done with GamerGate, Milo led a branch of the Breitbart news outlet (for a time) and became a full-blown personality who helped usher in the Trump-era of US politics.
But there he was. Right there on the 4chan boards, talking to the gaming community. At the end of the day this was the basic communication with the media that GamerGaters had wanted to open.
Milo's boss Steve Bannon took credit for helping to "harness" the passion of gamers for politics in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election cycle.
Is any of it true? Sort of. I read the book talked about (“Devil’s Bargain”) in this article piece that previewed it. GamerGate doesn’t get talked about enough to make a drawn connection between GG → Bannon → Trump in any way justified. The book actually more focuses on Bannon’s past in the military and the career path that made him the ruthlessly savvy talent who added an edge to Trump’s 2016 campaign.
But there was no visible presence of Bannon as a person whatsoever during GG.
What I imagine ended up happening is Bannon guided Milo on how to best fan the flames of GamerGate in a way that'd end up being advantageous to the right-wing down the line.
Was former President Trump ever involved in GamerGate? Technically, if you count this one tweet that crossed things over. People otherwise believe the "link" between GG and Trump was because of Bannon as discussed earlier.
But if I put on my rosy-tinted glasses for a moment, it was really fascinating that GamerGate actually crossed paths with Trump whatsoever. Back in the day this was because ol' Donald responded pretty much to anyone, before taking the presidency.
Alas, Trump wasn't a perfect "GamerGate guy" even if we were to grasp at those straws. In August 2019, after a pair of mass shootings happened in Texas and Ohio, Trump made a statement blaming video games for the glorification of violence. It earned him an earned fact-check from the likes of NBC News and the New York Times.
Milo's biggest contribution to GamerGate was exposing that game journalists indeed discussed and communicated how to respond to the Zoe Quinn story, via the "GameJournoPros" mailing list.
Everyone suspected collusion before the story came out. But now, GamerGate was legitimized as a full-blown movement seeing these fears realized. One GameJournoPros member suggested they all get together and write a letter of support for Zoe Quinn. They had openly taken a particular side.
My personal favorite quote from a GJP group member:
“Who here hasn’t slept with a PR person or game developer? #AMIRITE”
Milo was the perfect guy to publish the leaks, as he wasn't caught in the social lockstep of the clique. He brought Kyle Orland of Ars Technica (who created GJP) to his knees and got him to write an apology piece.
The GameJournoPros group was a copycat of a “Journolist” politics circlejerk created by Ezra Klein in the last 2000s. Notorious figures like Jeffrey Toobin admitted that they recycled ideas from Journolist conversations, turning them into published articles.
One of the written rules of Journolist was that things were off the record. The same could be said about GameJournoPros even if it was left largely unspoken.
I was fortunate enough to obtain access to over a year’s worth of GameJournoPro chat logs. From February 2013 to September 2014. It’s more than enough to counter claims that Milo’s original exposes were out of context. Efforts to control discussion on the Zoe Quinn issue was actually more of a culmination of the clique mentality that had years to develop and fester.
But I’ll let Kyle Orland describe the group, in fairness:
"The death of print media was a frequent topic of discussion. So was the rise of popular video content, various media monetization methods, how to handle tricky embargoes, how to handle tricky interviews, how to handle anonymous sources, comment moderation approaches, layoffs and hires at game journalism outlets, job opportunities, the rise of Kickstarter, the rise of Polygon, what to do with swag donated by publishers (Ars gives it away), links to quality examples of writing around the Web, efforts to organize multiplayer sessions for pre-release game builds, and—much to my chagrin—pro wrestling. (Game journalists who are not me seem to love pro wrestling.)"
GJP was a place where game journalists gathered to talk about themselves, gossip about each other, and vent on the state of the industry. They were worried about the rise of new media even before GamerGate came about.
Many of these discussions came out through the years thanks to a former journalist named William Usher. He was a member of the gamejournopros but defected to GamerGate when the movement first formed.
In listing off all the group members, Milo presented a legitimate question about ethical overlaps as people working for AAA game studios were present in the GJP. It’s not uncommon for game journalists to switch sides of the profession and join marketing staff.
The problem was the GJP got too relaxed and forgot about that. Breitbart stepped in to remind them.
While the progressives were striving for a monolith, these bloggers needed rage clicks in the immediate. This was the cycle people began collectively falling into. Political ideals were mostly just the smokescreen to excuse the fact that conflict drew clicks. The GJP chat logs act like a snapshot of that daily grind.
The groupthink.
I checked to see if Kotaku was still up to their old tricks. Yup. Some rabble-rabble about Star Wars Outlaws and female protagonists. But audiences by now have long grown accustomed to the clickbait.
It’s all in all a pattern of behavior that was memorialized by pundits recounting the legacy of BuzzFeed earlier this year after the outlet announced significant layoffs. (I’ll hyperlink that article again to specifically call it out as a good history piece.)
It’s the doom of social justice warriors that in both victory and defeat their only option was to make themselves obsolete. They either “win” and become unnecessary as activists. But here in 2023 we’re seeing them begin to lose as average Americans are beginning to economically revolt at an impactful size against ESG and such things. See the Bud Light backlash.
The point here being turmoil happens the moment politics and money clash. All good stories are about things reaching limits.
4chan culture will always be impossible to nail down exactly. By Internet Historian’s video on the Habbo Hotel raids is a good refresher course.
Fast forward to GamerGate. Quote from some poor 4chan mod who did it for free.
"Some woman who none of you gave a fuck about last week is sleeping around. That's what's important to you. You're contributing to the fall of civilization."
Back in the day, by the time folks online noticed GamerGate in the first place, it was too late. The stream of consciousness event had its momentum to hurl itself towards smashing the internet's surface like a meteor. Or meteors, plural, depending on how you looked at it all.
GamerGate was a watershed moment because user rebellions can’t really spontaneously happen among a heavily moderated and perpetually demoralized populace. The 2023 Reddit Blackout was a protest attempt aiming to fight back against the platform’s decision to charge for API usage.
But at the time of writing this Substack, the demonstration is fizzling out. Reddit management has managed to force compliance by threatening to replace mods of prominent subreddits.
What could all of these pictures of that dog from Arthur have anything to do about sports? Nothing. They were posted to waste time for the moderators who had to clean that mess up.
In late September 2014, Chris "Moot" Poole made a blanket ban on GamerGate threads because he didn't want a repeat of "Project Chanology." It was extremely rare to have an announcement like this about moderation towards a particular subject.
Was it a repeat of Chanology? Not exactly. Chanology had a more definitive start-to-finish timeline. It'd be more accurate to say that lingerers from Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous groups both wanted their next slice of purpose and entertainment.
Moot ended up stepping down and selling 4chan. The stress caused by GamerGate is what led 4chan's creator to finally step away. GG started around the same as “The Fappening” leaks of celebrity nudes hit the internet. So Poole had his hands full.
He came a long way from starting 4chan at age 15.
In September 2015 it was announced Poole sold 4chan to the guy who inspired the site's creation, Japan's 2channel founder Hiroyuki Nishimura. Poole said someone with this background was the most logical choice to sell the site to.
4channers fled to 8chan. GamerGate supporters quickly got together to celebrate with 8chan's owner. They took the wheelchair-bound guy to a strip club and boozed up. An embedded journalist who documented the event recalled how GamerGaters were surprised that the movement lasted more than a few months, thus far.
It also happened to be 8chan's first birthday. Brennan was also set to move to the Philippines to expand his business via a partnership. “I’m not much of a gamer, but it’s really amazing how they’ve used the platform to really go after these fuckers,” was the stance of the 8chan founder back then when it came to GamerGate.
Serious discussions about GamerGate as a cause accompanied the alluring tones of the strip club.
A 2015 Ars Technica interview with Brennan revealed he was someone that more heavily believed in the spirit of anonymity. He saw people posting dox as something that inevitable. Posters could make proxies after they were banned. If crimes were later committed, then Brennan saw it as out of his hands at that point.
This quote in particular reveals a mindset that would later change:
“Just because bad people use a service doesn’t mean the service should go away for everyone. I realize there are sometimes people who commit crimes—it’s very rare, less than .01 percent of posts.”
AS EVENTUALLY Fredrick Brennan ended up selling the site and even went as far as actively campaigning against his own creation because of later connections to the New Zealand/El Paso shootings. Manifestos and other pictures from these mass shootings were posted on the 8chan platform. Brennan expressed guilt about whatever contributions to real-world harm were inspired by what online discussions were allowed to happen in the first place.
Despite Brennan’s current stances, he had a completely different approach back in the heyday of GamerGate’s 2014. Mainly 8chan’s premise that allowed for (pretty close to) anyone to make their own boards. Brennan was fine with free speech absolutism when it was just GamerGate. He even participated in interviews to uphold that idea. Questions about political radicalization and site moderation weren’t any concern during these earliest days.
It’s safe to say that the 8chan inventor embodied the free spirit lifestyle he sold as a 4chan alternative product. Watch as Fred dropped a devastating burn on Brianna Wu during the conclusion of a HuffPost interview.
Despite the intensity that exchange emitted at the time, Brennan would probably say Brianna Wu had more of a point nowadays. By that I mean even the fact Brianna Wu called 8chan "too extreme" for 4chan, given the circumstances of how GamerGate was banished as a discussion topic from Poole's site.
Wu painted Frederick's creation as a "hate group" who dug into her and her husband's personal lives. From Brianna's point of view the whole interview was about harassment and online bullying. But 8chan's Brennan countered with arguments about platform responsibilities vs. blaming individual users. While the concept of platform liability was still more nebulous back in 2014, Brennan said 8chan was actually beholden to very little when it came to moderation responsibilities.
But it was a very heated interview between Brennan and Wu. The whole time, Ricky Camilleri had to sit there and ponder what life choices led him to where he was.
SPEAKING OF LIFE CHOICES….
When Anita Sarkeesian had to cancel a talk at Utah State University over a shooting threat, she landed on the Colbert Show. Below is the interview segment. At the time of writing it has 15,000 likes vs. 55,000 dislikes.
What went wrong? It was a softball game. Colbert went full hyperbolic in mocking the “culture war” angle, while Sarkeesian was left to appear as if they were the serious party.
This pushed GamerGate to the mainstream, no matter how ugly that narrative of it was. I regularly watched Colbert's Comedy Central show back when I was in grade school. He and Jon Stewart were some of the first political commentators I experienced. It was when I began to understand the concept that people regularly had personal takes on the news. When Sarkeesian went on to Colbert's show, my perceptions of the host were finally shattered. I knew GamerGate up-and-down by then. I had to see Colbert butcher the subject.
The GamerGate era also saw the rise of YouTubers like Sargon of Akkad, who led the pushback against the politics pushed by Sarkeesian and other activists. He was good at finding old videos of Anita like that one where she enrolled in a Teleseminar program. Sargon doesn't give any commentary for that upload, but it's clear to the viewer the connection between the teleseminar program and the feminist media circus Anita Sarkeesian would soon embark on.
Years later, Anita made it clear that she knew who Sargon was. When he attended a Vidcon 2017 discussion where she was one of the panelists, Anita called him a "garbage human."
Polygon's version of events make it sound like Carl Benjamin ran a radical cell of gamer extremists, hellbent on taking over Sarkeesian's panel and demolishing it in the name of the Cathedral of Misogyny.
The narrative at the time was: Sarkeesian is the feminist "messiah" who suffered for the sake of progressives, as Saint Anita was crucified by the internet under years of totally suffocating harassment.
Could people have been actual dicks towards Anita over the years? Yes. But the above exaggeration of her being some kind of feminist martyr was the actual story sold by games media bloggers.
Regardless, Vidcon was an ugly moment for Anita. It’s much easier to simply watch what happened for yourselves.
This outburst is tempting to analyze from a million different angles. For me, personally, I'm left with one thought: this was the best Sarkeesian could muster. She had five years of build-up to prep for this occasion. Critics and supporters alike demanded it. But when the universe provided Anita the moment to face her detractors, all she could think of doing is shouting "GARBAGE HUMAN" at Sargon. That was it. It was a death rattle moment for anyone clinging on to hopes of meaningful dialogue with the feminist sect. If there were any left, who hadn't already abandoned all hope beforehand.
Here's another meme from the start of GamerGate. It's a riff on the movie "Network" with the voiceover talking about relevant public feelings that were swirling at the time. Why did someone make this meme? They did it to creatively express themselves, in a way that enhanced their personal involvement in community discussions. The person who made this meme was obviously proud of their contribution. This in turn helps further the uploader's commitment to the things they care about and pay attention to.
That little meme video is free speech. On the opposite side of the aisle were the censors.
Sarkeesian and Quinn went to the United Nations in September 2015. Zoe called her now-defunct Crash Override group credible enough to be giving the U.N. advice about online harassment. She demanded punishment for people who spoke out against the likes of her online.
Anita was a better public speaker than Zoe. But the complaining about negative feedback was the same. She complained that hate videos created a community of people pitted against her. Sarkeesian demanded that social media moderation needed a systemic level of change.
"Women are being forced to build a fortress around themselves," Anita told the U.N.
There was a so-called cyberviolence report released by the United Nations around the time of the presentation. GamerGate had a chance to laugh at how embarrassing it was: blank citations, duplicate links, and sources that don’t exist. To top it all off, one of the citations was to an actual file path on somebody’s hard drive.
Jesse Singal labeled the report as a public embarrassment that didn’t the topic any justice whatsoever.
Zoe Quinn had a so-called anti-abuse network group called Crash Override. Twitter even made it a "Trusted Partner" for a while. The implications of that mean Twitter management took Zoe Quinn seriously enough to support her organization by giving it the platform's official seal of approval.
IRONIC THEN that it went defunct and eventually people involved said Quinn lied to them. Volunteers, who thought GamerGaters were a serious threat, devoted their time and energy into Quinn's Crash Override project. They did it on the promises of one day being compensated with a share of the enormous amount of dollar donations people threw at Zoe Quinn. She was described as being emotionally manipulative and pulled the plug on her whole project she got too bored keeping up with it.
Even though Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian were once personally invited to Twitter to give a talk, Quinn would later rant about how Jack Dorsey didn't do enough and (sarcastically) wished him ill.
Jack Dorsey, back in Twitter's early days, was heistant to entertain the ideas of feminist critics demanding censorship. It must've taken months if not years to get his company to warm up to the idea.
The start of GamerGate ushered in a crueler age of Twitter censorship, over time. It used to be a complicated story to explain when it was still ongoing. But now we can sum it up in a sentence: it doesn't matter as much anymore since Elon Musk took over.
The fact that Elon Musk disbanded the oh-so-sacred Trust and Safety council at Twitter, showed me enough on its own to have faith in the guy to (eventually) see the light on reality.
After their personal info was posted on 8chan, Brianna Wu fled their home and blamed GamerGate for it in interviews with CNN and MSNBC. The timing of the 8chan post, followed by Brianna Wu's quick response time tweeting about it, led some to believe she herself was behind it.
The doxing of Brianna Wu was a milestone for GamerGate’s recognition on the world stage, as now the incident was officially discussed in the mainstream media. Beyond the bubble of games media and their blogging gatekeepers.
The weirdest thing that happened to Brianna Wu was a guy named Jace Connors declared war against her and crashed his car. It turned out he was a comedian acting out an elaborate prank. The car crash was real. But the guy behind the Jace Connors persona improvised it to be a situation where he claimed to be on his way to confront Brianna Wu for a street racing battle.
Brianna Wu might've taken the whole situation completely seriously. Yet the mastermind behind Jace Connors saw himself as just trolling. It was a common dilemma that sprung up during GamerGate.
Then there was that Tim Schaffer made a cringe display on stage at GDC 2015 with a sockpuppet, it was meant to try and mock the idea that GamerGate wasn't diverse and just a bunch of white basement dwellers.
(Spoilers: they weren't. GamerGate's #NotYourShield awareness effort had minority members of the movement taking pictures of themselves/their passports to show how widespread GG really became.)
In fact, Milo organized a GamerGate meet-up in May 2015 at a bar in Washington DC. A couple hundred people showed up and had a great time meeting one another in person. The bar owner even stood up to anti-GG backlash for hosting. Arthur Chu had described GG as an "internet hate speech movement" in a tweet to the place. "Would never keep any group out. This is America," the bar owner responded.
Milo gave a speech to the crowd at some point, however I was never able to find (surviving) footage of what he said.
Later in the night, a bomb threat called into the building forced the police to briefly evacuate everyone out onto the street. But it was only a temporary disruption. I'm not sure if the disruption lasted long enough to derail the meet-up for the rest of the night. Attendees likely went back inside to continue drinking and partying into the wee morning hours.
As an aside: GamerGate had amazing art. Creations like some of these were essential in inspiring people within the movement to keep going along with it all. (I wasn’t too great at photoshop at the time. But GG inspired me to try improving my skills at image composition.)
The SPJ arranged for a formal GamerGate debate conference in August 2015. Anti-GamerGaters didn't want to participate, but those who did represent either side of the discussion were carefully chosen to make it enough of a fair fight anyway.
At moments you got things like a proper dissection of the Max Temkin rape accusations. They were tenuous at best but the media circlejerk ran with it anyway. While the debate panels laughed at Gawker's ethical standards, they also acknowledged the reality at the time was that their sites used to get a boatload of traffic. At another times, people like Milo and Christina Sommers tackled the fact that they were examples of good reporters who fairly covered the subject matters at hand.
The SPJAirplay event (also) faced bomb threats that cut the conference short. All the outlets had their own takes reporting the news. Over at Forbes, Erik Kain mentioned how he was invited as a panelist and that he’d continue to discuss GG events. Cathy Young did attend the SPJ debate and gave her observances in a write-up for the Reason site. Her take on the story was that even though a bomb threat was absolutely expected -- and it happened anyway -- attempting to wrestle attention away from the occasion, GamerGaters were determined to make the best of it all regardless.
You can watch the moment the bomb threat was announced.
In a commentary on GamerGate, Law and Order SVU had an episode where Logan Paul played a terrorist cult leader. His followers physically kidnap and torture a female game developer.
It was a fever dream filled with cliches: there was a Call of Duty knock-off game, Toby Turner guest started in the episode for five seconds, a guy screamed "GO HOME GAMER GIRL," there was a fake "Brave New World" expansion pack, stuff like that. Let's not forget the fake social media website that combined Reddit and 4chan into a single name.
The people who write this show are high on meth.
The reactions were mixed given the over-the-top approach taken. Others actually applauded it because the episode brought to life their extreme anti-GamerGate worldviews.
Leigh Alexander found the exaggerations in the show absolutely painful. In her write-up about it she wished the episode could’ve furthered the conversation about harassment in the games industry. Polygon posted the most delusional take, saying that the SVU gamer terrorists depicted were “based on horrible things that have actually happened.”
SVU showrunner Warren Leight retweeted someone who jokingly said that a fake game shown on the show still had better production value than Brianna Wu's Revolution 60.
What did GamerGate gravitate towards the most? It had to be the end credits sequence where Logan Paul confronted Ice-T on a rooftop. The scene is done in a first-person perspective meant to imitate as if the moment was part of a video game.
Who needed TV when GamerGate had eccentric figures like Phil Fish? The Fez developer even cancelled the sequel to his game after a games media personality called him a "tosspot."
Eurogamer interviewed Phil Fish in 2022 to commemorate the 10-year anniversary since Fez was first released. The article doesn’t share whatever the developer ended up doing after quitting the internet in late 2014.
There was an alternate timeline where Phil Fish by 2023 had a meaningful career in game development. One that we’ll never see because the guy gave into the emotional impulses of social media.
Someone made a video trying to explain why Phil Fish turned out the way he did. His central thesis is that it was because his prototype for Fez caught the right combination of viral attention at a time when indie games were first finding an audience of footing. The fame came too fast and caused an imbalance of his Phil’s ego.
GamerGate donated to many different charities in various fundraising drives to try and show that the movement wasn't full of bad people. But Zoe Quinn's former partner Alex Lifschitz claimed that was "weaponized charity." It was a remarkably bold response. I know for a fact that GG people just wanted to make the best of moments and spread positivity. The lightning rod of attention that the movement ended up being, helped raise tens of thousands of dollarydoos for various (worthy!) causes.
It's such a bizarre claim to make, somehow asserting that good deeds could be "tainted" if they came from the "wrong" kind of people. Mostly what bothers me about it is how such a mindset can manifest itself into demotivating people from doing good deeds altogether.
But then again. Alex Lifschitz apparently had his own demons in the closet. These came out years later.
Lifschitz, the alleged 4chan moderator responsible for shutting down GG threads, was later accused of sexual misconduct by an ex-girlfriend. Zoe Quinn then totally threw him under the bus.
He claimed to be a full-blown video game producer, that was questionable. At a talk he gave, he tried snapping a Grand Theft Auto game disc in half. Lifschitz ranted that it was impossible to be impossible and that Depression Quest was an innovation for gaming as a genre.
Quinn said that Alex had only been dating her for a week prior to GamerGate starting. She also said his involvement made him unemployable in the games industry.
Alex Lifschitz said his own cousin was a misogynist who joined GamerGate after it started. In an interview with Ars Technica, he accused his own family member of being among those who were egging on harassment.
Someone claiming to be Alex’s cousin responded to the accusations:
“Alex didn't tell my parents anything. He ran to his brother/daddy and asked them to write my parents something. Yes, irreverent tough guy Alex Lifschitz ran to his daddy, who composed an email to my parents. They don't know what the hell gamergate is, and their response was "this is really stupid and annoying, just do whatever his dad's asking for so he'll leave us alone". And then his Dad threatened to sue me or take me to moon court or something.
So I'd like to formally go on record and say that the rumors are true: my cousin Alex is a huge asshole, and is fully deserving of any criticism that has come his way over the past year. Just don't go too far or he'll tell his daddy on you and threaten to sue you/take you to moon court. Anyone who's got any other questions about Alex can email me. Happy to answer questions!”
As for strong GamerGate supportive female personalities? ShoeOnHead's YouTube career gained a lot of traction around the start of GamerGate. June was a young girl with a sarcastic attitude. It caught 4chan's attention for the obvious reasons like that. She was obviously a better role model than someone like Anita Sarkeesian, that's for sure. For one thing: June was more entertaining and fun. She actually played video games and didn’t have to lie about it.
The fact that Shoe supported GamerGate was an added bonus. She caught onto the bullshit of the progressives in the culture wars. June even mentioned some of these things in her most recent video uploaded a month ago.
Elsewhere there was Christina "Based Mom" Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute. She released a series of videos that countered the likes of the third-wave feminist talking points of Anita Sarkeesian. Sommers is an older lady. But GamerGate needed someone like that. A woman with experience being an actual classical feminist from an era before everyone went social media crazy.
Christina came along to tell the world that video games weren’t sexist and that the critics of GamerGate got things wrong.
She pissed off feminists like Lindy West. Backlash to Sommers was strong enough that she needed security escorts whenever she did a talk on college campuses. Based Mom wasn’t afraid to call out sites like Wikipedia for being too soft on people like Sarah Jeong.
Brad Glasgow conducted a survey of GamerGate supporters that (among other things) established GG was not a bunch of right-wingers. It was later formally published as a paper in the American Psychological Association. The publishing alone is a motion of showing legitimacy about GamerGate as a movement being more than a bunch of amateurs.
Glasgow’s survey of political leanings was unfortunately necessary because places like The Verge threw out these labels in the first place.
Leigh Alexander was one of those people who would lazily cast off GamerGate as a bunch of right-wing basement dwelling nerds. She wasn't one for thorough research. By the time GG rolled around, Alexander had the self-described label of being a "megaphone." That being the positive spin on a description that many outsiders would describe as "aggressive narcissist bully" instead.
As the former editor-at-large of Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander was at ground zero for GamerGate related activities. She had written one of the “Gamers are Dead” articles that caused a ruckus in the first place.
Years later, Alexander admitted that she might’ve been intentionally provocative towards the gaming community.
“I think to some extent I deliberately antagonized them, but I was genuinely disgusted with the low point in our community that the whole thing represented. The very idea that they were concerned about "ethics" was laughable to me; it was an excuse to bully Zoe. So I figured if they wanted to supposedly have a conversation with the media, about the media, I would step in.”
I wonder if the “excuse to bully” line is something that Leigh Alexander would have a consistent response for, if she were asked about what happened to Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.
Anti-GamerGate sites decided talking about Palmer Luckey's sex life was ok because his girlfriend (now wife) was a GamerGater. Their excuse? Some story about a 2016 elections billboard about Hillary Clinton.
It only took two years for the espoused standards set in 2014 with Zoe Quinn. The progressive games press clique wanted people to believe sex lives were off-limits.
When I worked at The Post Millennial I wrote a story about how Luckey won in a lawsuit over a so-called “contract” someone claimed he had entered into, in the timeframe shortly before early Oculus technology took off.
After leaving Oculus, Palmer Luckey formed a defense contractor company called Anduril. This multibillion dollar company provided drones and sensor technologies for the US - Mexico border. His business boomed even further since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year.
The company’s products have a presence in several US government sectors. This all happened because a desperate media apparatus launched their smear campaign against Luckey: a guy passionate about virtual reality, and doing the occasional cosplay gig.
This wasn't the only media double-standard. People like John Walker at Rock Paper Shotgun thought the Zoe Quinn story was off-limits, while previously RPS discussing a rape accusation against Max Temkin of "Cards Against Humanity" was allowed. The outlet panned the product and named off better alternatives. They mentioned people were boycotting CAH in response to the allegation. They even criticized Max Temkin's response that dared called into question possible difficulties around perspectives on consent.
It was somehow fine for RPS to write that story. But they took a radically different stance to what Eron Gonji said about Zoe Quinn.
The IGDA endorsed a "GG autoblocker" that punished thousands of Twitter accounts and added them to a group blocklist. Their crime? Each of these accounts had been following two or more prominent GamerGate voices. Even KFC. I think what happened in that case was KFC’s company account had followed their own followers back.
It all felt like a bad joke. it was magnified by the fact that Randi Harper labeled my old Twitter account as one of the apparent “leaders” of GamerGate. In terms of how the autoblocker worked, Harper scraped my followers list and punished folks for the act of following me.
Unfortunately, it swept up some of IGDA's own members like Roberto Rosario of IGDA Puerto Rico. He was hounded for being upset about being added on the blocklist.
Months later, Rosario told someone:
“Most the hate came from people opposed to #Gamergate and tech people who didn't knew me and thought I was a misogynist.”
That misery was thanks to Randi Harper's few basic lines of code. It gave ammo for anti-GamerGate to deflect from the bad apples in their ranks.
A Twitter user named @mombot published a collection of stories where various anti-GamerGate people eventually ended up being accused of misconduct/fired/arrested.
Some highlights:
Christopher Goldberg: a former NeoGAF moderator. The site took a widespread stance to censor any positive GamerGate related discussions. Police arrested him for downloading child pornography.
Juan Thompson: used to work for The Intercept. While there he once asserted GamerGate as a sexist movement not dissimilar to racist remarks black writers faced online.. Authorities later nabbed Mr. Thompson for making bomb threats against Jewish museums, schools, and community centers.
Matt Hickey: former tech news freelancer who once said GamerGate was "#GamerGate is a bunch of women-hating future rapists!" He eventually faced multiple rape charges plus charges for deceptive business practices.
That isn’t to say it was all perfect on the pro-GamerGate side of things, though,
One of the few cases of someone getting "too far" obsessed with GamerGate topics/politics was Lane Davis. also known as "Seattle4Truth," was a conspiracy theorist initially interested in GamerGate from the angle of the academic think tanks involved in trying to transform the industry. But he quickly fell down into rabbit holes looking into things like DARPA programs, pedophile rings, stuff like that. Regardless, Ralph Retort was willing to let the guy write for his blog site for a little while.
Lane’s paranoia grew to the point where he murdered his father. Ralph’s associates tried to warn him that Lane Davis was crazy, but he didn’t listen until it was too late.
One of the major GamerGate battles was over the Wikipedia page. Editors battled over the language of the article because, ultimately, Wikipedia set the tone for the mainstream. The site is nearly always one of the first things that comes up in Google's results when you look up general search terms. In fact, Wikipedia has had a longstanding partnership with the search engine giant.
What became readily apparent as the Wikipedia page on GamerGate was being written is that editors had a left-wing bias. This round-up from AllSides lists several reputable studies that have since proven this claim. It has also been shown that left-wing news outlets were more often cited on American politician pages and that conservative editors are “6 times more likely to be sanctioned in Wikipedia policy enforcement.”
During GamerGate, the ideological pipeline of how media narratives are manufactured made itself known.
It ended in the permanent banning of anti-GamerGate editor Ryulong after an official Wikipedia tribunal. Jimmy Wales had to get involved.
A guy named TD Adler is an expert on the Wikipedia world. In an extremely lengthy blog post he covered these issues. Passages within these tomes explore how Wikipedia admins seemingly control the direction of editing debates. How people like Ryulong carefully crafted their preferred GamerGate narrative. At one point it's explained that he removed a section about how female GamerGate supporters were also being harassed. Ryulong also included diatribes about "copyright infringement" because GamerGate began using the site archive.is to avoid giving certain outlets click metrics.
Before getting booted from Wikipedia proper, Ryulong’s antics escalated into conflicts of interest and making demands that whole lists of editors be banned amid claims of them pushing “GamerGate propaganda.”
But after being banned: Ryulong ended up getting into fights over edits on the RationalWiki site. They got tried of him too.
The FBI investigated "GamerGate" threats. This included discovering that the October 2014 Utah State University bomb threat against Sarkeesian was signed under YouTuber Repzion's name.
In the video, the YouTube personality is shoched that the FBI came to his house to interview him over the matter. He vehemently denied it, and denounced the fact that everyone's time was being wasted. The scandal was that it was extremely likely that Anita Sarkeesian knew Repzion's channel beforehand. Therefore, she'd also know that this threat was likely not valid in the first place.
Eventually, a guy named Wildgoose took credit for doxing both sides of the GamerGate debate (and getting FBI attention).
It seemed as if if the "Bill Waggoner Crew" troll who fanned the flames in GamerGate's first few months had a change of heart. He confessed to shaking things up by doxing people. "This was a textbook false flag campaign," he wrote.
Apparently, BWC had done other stunts in the past going after feminist groups. But when it came to GamerGate it was allegedly a game where the BWC group pitted people against each other. Their targets were both pro and anti-GamerGate.
One of the bigger mysteries was how GamerGate caught the attention of Wikileaks. In several tweets, the group endorsed GGs criticism of establishment media and politics.
Back when it happened? Wikileaks involvement was simply mysterious. Now in 2023 given my better understanding of the political landscape, I ask myself what in the actual fuck was Wikileaks doing being interested in GamerGate? Honestly. It's incredibly unusual.
If you have no frame of reference, all you need to know is the basic premise that Julian Assange is an eternal enemy of the US national security state.
Yeah. Those people. They were interested in GamerGate for a hot second. Why? If anyone was looking for "deeper" answers regarding GamerGate, I'd recommend they start here with this whole clue of a situation.
It all happened as the Wikileaks founder was hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy. UK authorities eventually arrested Assange in 2019. At the time of writing, he has lost the latest appeal challenging his planned extraction to the USA.
Tyler Wilde of PC Gamer once wrote an article denouncing a term about the platform's superiority for gaming. He described the joke as aging poorly. Wilde claimed that it was time to abandon the term for the sake of modern sensibilities, given how "master race" is still an allusion to Nazi ideology despite the intended hyperbole behind the joke's origin in the first place.
But bluntly speaking to the mindset at the time: the article was bloody clickbait. We all knew it. PC Gamer knew it. It was meant to stir the politics piss pot.
GamerGate discovered that he was dating a Ubisoft communications specialist and didn't disclose it. PC Gamer management had to address it. Management surprisingly admitted to faults in how they previously handled disclosure beyond when it came to things like former employees taking game development jobs, and then writing about these particular products. Tyler Wilde himself admitted it was a mistake to write about Ubisoft games while his girlfriend worked for the company. Wilde says he thought his relationship was publicly known as-it-was. But he also acknowledged that further efforts needed to be made on disclosure when it came to his work output.
As someone who was in games journalism for a hot second, I can opine on this situation. Yes it was absolutely wrong. Even privately when these two canoodled, there's no doubt that the aspect of work was center to many of the pair's conversations in their relationship. You can't just box something like that away.
However, PC Gamer and Tyler Wilde handled things perfectly despite the difficult circumstances.
Conclusion
What I said in my original Twitter thread still holds up nearly a year later.
“I'll end by saying: "Does GamerGate exist now?" No. It largely accomplished their main goals for better media transparency and taking down Gawker media within the first year. People still use GamerGate as a catch-all term today, when referring to widespread online backlash.”
I take it as a sign that there are some lessons that the elitist echelons of society will never learn.
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