re: #5 Roger S

Can you clarify what you mean or post links on how Gamergate is not about what I read it was about? I’ll try to find out through Google for now. Thanks.

Your best bet to get started would be right over here:
wiki.gamergate.me

But here’s the problem.

Gamergate itself is about ethics in journalism. Video game journalism has been bad for a very, very long time — not just pay for play, but nepotism, blacklisting, you name it. Everyone has suspected this for a very very long time. Last August a particularly bad gaming website, Kotaku, decided to let one of it’s writers, Nathan Greyson, do a PR Blitz about his girlfriend’s projects. (It’s important to note that they made no disclosure about Mr. Greyson’s personal relationship with the subject of his writing, this would become a distressingly common problem going forward.)

When his girlfriend’s ex boyfriend came forward with evidence of this and other ethical and behavior problems, instead of doing the ethical thing and asking him to step down or even having a mea culpa moment for the conflict of interest and lack of transparency, they circled the wagons. About 15-20 websites all posted the same basic article in the same week, claiming that “Gamers are Dead.” Then it was discovered that those websites were all part of a mailing list that was intentionally fixing review scores, violating NDAs, and blacklisting stories, games, and developers.

That sparked Gamergate, a consumer revolt against all this.

The problem is that Nathan Greyson’s girlfriend at the time was Zoe Quinn, a professional victim and faux “Third Wave” feminist. She’s a real piece of work — she’s been caught blackmailing people, SWATting people, sabotaging feminist organizations, et cetera. She’s not a real feminist (in that she intentionally doxed and sabotaged several feminist groups and set up a fake feminist group in order to steal donations from them) but she does have quite the following on Twitter. So when she started intentionally raising a ruckus on Twitter about all this, the echo chamber exploded and a bunch of single issue wonk faux feminists (The “Social Justice Warriors”) came out of the woodwork trying to make it about a nonexistent problem with sexism in the gaming industry.

The gaming journalists, who were being caught red handed with all kinds of ethics violations thanks to that mailing list being discovered, decided to push a narrative to cover their own arses.

That’s why when people talk about Gamergate you see two entirely different realities — its a form of politics. This article by a political historian explains it far better than I can:
techcrunch.com

There’s the actual GamerGaters, who are consumers who are royally pissed off about ethics violations in the gaming media, and there are the other side (“Anti-GG” or GamerGhazi) who see GamerGate as a bunch of entitled straight white men who are just so pissed off that women are invading their hobby.

Both sides have trolls, and there’s a few third party groups of trolls (The GNAA / SomethingAwful / Baphomet) intentionally riling up both sides. Both sides have had and done bad things, but you won’t hear about harassment of Pro-GamerGaters out there — it doesn’t fit the narrative. For example, a free speech lawyer in California had Zoe Quinn and her friend attempt to SWAT him; a gay journalist in London who was sympathetic to GamerGate had a syringe and a dead animal sent to his house. Recently some nutjob threatened to release poison gas at PAX, this is a few weeks after one of these nutjobs “accidentally” set off a canister of mace in a college’s ventilation system when she discovered there were gamers meeting in the cafeteria.

In short, it’s a pretty stupid situation that will eventually die down when these really crappy gaming news sites like Kotaku and Polygon eventually run out of inertia and die. Until then, I get to enjoy being called everything but a human because I like to play Minecraft and Monster Hunter after work. Joy.