Where can I find a comprehensive but accessible explanation of gamer gate?

[ArriettyJones]

Just that.

Thanks.

Nobody?

The Guardian had a fairly good overview at the time - www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump

But comprehensive and accessible and not totally biased would be a challenge...

I wondered this a while back and had a look. Unfortunately I found that the written accounts were so incredibly polarised and the whole thing a mountain of misinformation that I gave up. Far too many people piled in according to their political beliefs and what actually went on became a sideshow.

However, if someone has located a non-polarised, non-politicised account I'd be interested to read it too.

Me too.

@nauticant

I wondered this a while back and had a look. Unfortunately I found that the written accounts were so incredibly polarised and the whole thing a mountain of misinformation that I gave up. Far too many people piled in according to their political beliefs and what actually went on became a sideshow.

However, if someone has located a non-polarised, non-politicised account I'd be interested to read it too.

Exactly. I think I’ve made three attempts over the past couple of years and given up each time.

Thanks @turkeyboots I’ll have a look for it.

Part of my sceptism comes from the fact that when I see a trans activist being particularly aggressive towards women on twitter, there's a high chance (really there is) that the word "gamer" will be in their bio.

I know not all gamers are like, I don't mind a video game myself, that but mentally I put activist gamers into the same broad grouping as activists who are into anime or who are furries.

And me.

And Glinner:
"During Gamergate, I followed several 'trans' people including @ secretgamergirl. If I'd known what he fucking looked like i'd have started asking 'hang on, what exactly does trans mean again?' a lot sooner.

It does make me wonder what else I got wrong during that period. I always thought GG was clear-cut: alt-right arseholes manipulating kids to harm women in the gaming industry. I also thought it was only gamergaters who were pretending to be women to spread confusion. (My much screenshotted comment "You're a man pretending to be a woman" was a conversation with a gamergater.)

But now I see this guy, whose dysphoria is so bad he has a beard that's almost meeting up with his ass hair, and I wonder how many other aspects of it were hidden from me, and how many chancers there were on 'my' side."

glindr.org/@Glinner/posts/103313423311183920

... are like that ...

I've just reread the Guardian article now. It's made me miss when the Guardian was good.

Yes, ThePurported I semi followed it at the time but now I’m not sure what I thought was happening was what was really happening.

Will read that article later.

It's made me miss when the Guardian was good

I’ve never been as disappointed in a non-human entity as I am with the Grauniad in the last few years.

I didn't follow what was going on at the time. If I had to guess now I'd say it maybe was a prelude of what is happening on a wider scale now.

My (admittedly under informed) interpretation is that bog standard gamer type blokes were objecting to what they view as forced diversity in their favourite game franchises. The other side were arguing that gaming should be more accessible to women and minorities (and presumably anyone who identifies as such).

I feel like both sides probably had a point, gaming industries and game playing is male dominated and can be hostile but since all this blew up we've also seen that not all agendas being pushed in the mainstream are benign or really about social justice and the greater good.

Happy to be corrected if I've missed the point of what GG was about.

My impression from the time is:

The female journalist at the centre of it was accused of some unethical behaviour in promoting a particular game which seemed to be true. It seemed fairly clear that her initial version of events was untrue.

Some ex boyfriend had slagged her off for cheating on him and it was pointed out this meant she'd given a very positive review to the other fella's supposedly shitty game when claiming to not have known him until after that review.

Her response seemed like an attempt to weaponise (quite correct) concerns about sexism in gaming to deflect the criticism.

The resulting pile on included a lot of alt-right types and was replete with misogyny. It snowballed into abuse of both her and a number of women in the industry.

It was so long ago that I can remember little detail, so take the above with a pinch of salt. Gaming seems to have both Alt-right and Identitarian nutters.

The initial gamergate campaign had a very valid point about the conflicts of interest from some gaming journalist but after that it got taken over by incels who didn't like political correctness.

In one sentence - an attempt to introduce wokeness into games.

I’ve been a female and a gamer my whole life and I was firmly supporting the male nerds.

One big problem with Gamergate in terms of understanding it and discussing it is that once the preceding events had turned into Gamergate it was actually about a number of different things. By the time it had become Gamergate it was a full on Internet flamewar between Gamergaters and Social Justice Warriors with each side needing to buy wholesale into the full manifesto of their side.

This means that even now if you try to critically examine either of the sides, unless you're able to completely commit to that side, or to the opposite one, you'll be perceived as some kind of horrible traitor. That said though, the Gamergater side seems to be the one most consumed by hatred and prone to making violent and misogynistic threats.

I went looking again and found this academic article. It's not too bad, although it's long and very light on the details of events:

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305116672484

(But it does tend to assume that progressive forces are good and reactionary forces are bad.)

It fits into what I wrote earlier. The problem isn't that gamers are bad people, it's that when a strong identity that requires compliance becomes part of being a gamer you might end up with a problem. Gamergate at its heart was an identity war.

047Worfs said .......
"In one sentence - an attempt to introduce wokeness into games.
I’ve been a female and a gamer my whole life and I was firmly supporting the male nerds."

This x10

The Wikipedia page on Gamergate is actually pretty good.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy

Essentially it started when Eron Gjoni made a post in multiple places accusing his ex-girlfriend, indie game developer Zoe Quinn, of a bunch of stuff including cheating on him with game journalist Nathan Grayson. I think the gist of it is that most of Gjoni's accusations were true, but Gamergate was founded on the false accusation that Grayson had given Quinn's game a good review while they were having the affair.

It then blew up on social media and became an online culture war between the proto-alt-right and woke SJWs. There were some people who did have genuine concerns about games journalism, but they were drowned out by the harassers and the "debate" was completely polarised at that point, anyway.

If I recall correctly Zoe Quinn's game was a virtual story and was free to play.

Try Ars Technica, Chat logs show how 4chan users created #GamerGate controversy :

"A set of IRC logs released Saturday appear to show that a handful of 4chan users were ultimately behind #GamerGate, the supposedly grass-roots movement aimed at exposing ethical lapses in gaming journalism. The logs show a small group of users orchestrating a "hashtag campaign" to perpetuate misogynistic attacks by wrapping them in a debate about ethics in gaming journalism."

On the ZOMG-how-dare-she-sleep-around stuff invented by the ex-boyfriend:

"The saga grew from a single blog post written by an ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn, a game developer who designed Depression Quest. The post was a lengthy diatribe filled with details about Quinn's alleged relationships with men, including a tryst with a gaming journalist who works for Kotaku. Anonymous users on reddit and 4chan spun this material into a story about how Quinn allegedly slept with multiple gaming journalists in return for coverage, though the allegations did not support such a claim. The journalist in question had quoted Quinn, once, months before they dated; he never wrote about her or her development efforts again."

It's been a free-for-all of misogyny since the outset. So much so that "Oh, but it's really about ethics in journalism" has become a sarcastic way to point out hate speech.

Just for context - the women playing games who just log on to actually play are usually well respected and their sex is not something even mentioned (or even known). I have made many many friends like that. Most of my guilds were quite even split 50:50 male to female ratio too.

What male nerds don’t like and some actively reject is the attention seeking “Gamer girl coming through, teehee don’t hit on me silly boys!”

Don’t bother telling me I’ve internalised misogyny if you haven’t been part of gaming communities in those days. You can’t possibly know what it was like. For many gamers (usually deeply introverted) gaming communities were as important as anything real-life related.

Honestly I think "ethics in journalism" is about as convincing as "states rights".

Whatever your opinions about diversity in games, once women are in hiding, frightened for their lives, you are on the wrong side if you're not on theirs.

It’s the same here on MN if a man starts their post with “As a man...”.
Just keep your sex to yourself, no one cares you are a girl gamer!

Anita is not a gamer.