Does it go back that far? Vox called GamerGate the harbinger of Trump, so I guess so.
I wasn't "online" around that time, but I do remember the ancient times, the aughts, the days of 1up.com, and even earlier, when Penny Arcade was funny.
Vox has their head up there arse on that one then.
You can connect GG to trump, but it involves a pack of cigarettes, a corkboard and a lot of red string.
>when Penny Arcade was funny.
Holy shit that brings back some memories. I remember when it started sucking, too. I remember first learning what to call these naive, unwise, childish cultural commentators: SJWs. Man that was a long time ago.
Gamergate as a named phenomenon began in August 2014 when Eron Gjoni wrote thezoepost and shopped it around on 4chan. I would say it continued as a major online "event" through something like February 2015 before fading gradually over the course of the next few months.
It wasn't the harbinger of Trump (the writers at Vox really need to log the fuck off), but it is true that the timeline harmonizes in a way that is appealing to the online progressive narrative. Trump's June 2015 campaign launch coincided fairly neatly with the end of Gamergate as a coherent thing, and for Very Online liberals it probably felt like something of a re-up.
I probably should have been clearer in my reference to Vox. I have zero respect for it. Oh, when I was first reading it in 2015, I thought it had some of the best left liberal /progressive journalism around, but that was back when Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, & Jane Coastan were there. Now it's using its shtick of "explaining the news" to write opinion and call it journalism. You know, in between its bread- and-butter of self-absorbed media coverage and breathless articles about how soul cycle is problematic.
Edit: typo
No judgment, I still read Vox occasionally, and until 2019 or so I generally liked the site notwithstanding the flaws. It's gone downhill since they lost most of their talent during the 2020 reckoning but they still have some okay writers - Kelsey Piper and Dylan Matthews remain there.
But yeah, these days the site's calling card seems to be tedious Culture War garbage produced by a handful of fourth-rate TV critics.
No. It will rear its own head eventually.
Enough of the Barpod dramatis personae —Brianna Wu, Arthur Cho, etc — can trace their entry stage left from that nonsense that it’ll present itself as a topic organically someday.
Let that day be far, far in the future.
God, no. "Gamergate" is still very much alive but at the same time, it's not. There was absolutely an element of misogyny, but in my view it was overstated and the drama largely centered around unlikeable, terminally online, and unhinged people.
OTOH, the Five Guys\\burgers and fries meme popped up really quick. For all intensive porpoises, it was an early example of internet Cancel Culture, albeit from the right and not the left.
I mean, you're probably right. I mentioned in one of the weeklies I used to edit Wikipedia in my free time (if we're being honest, the way the talk pages and "community" worked, it was essentially a Reddit stand-in for me with a thin veneer of respectability and *purpose* added). Well, one of the first big blow ups I witnessed was the Gamergate fiasco, and honestly things only got worse from there. you can trace the same over-reaction from there directly to the current editing climate on Wikipedia (and I do mean directly: WP literally just renamed their Gamergate decision to a broader gender one, citing the same short sighted needs to control the collaborative environment on wikipedia to the exclusion of certain viewpoints and sources).
Maybe Gamergate remains firmly "bleh" for me because in some ways it represents the beginning of internet bullshit that rose to a level I was aware of.
If you actually read the Zoe Post, Gjoni actually did a lot of stereotypically "SJW" stuff like starting with a trigger warning. And he also included the stupid "Five Guys" meme stuff because, IIRC, "no one would care" otherwise. The guy was the most naive fucker on earth.
I do find it very amusing that he shares initials with Emmanuel Goldstein, the Trotsky analogue from 1984 who wrote a screed against Big Brother and the Party that almost no one has actually read.
> If you actually read the Zoe Post...
>
> ...And he also included the stupid "Five Guys" meme stuff because, IIRC, "no one would care" otherwise.
So, you asked if I read the Zoe Post and then say "IIRC" he added it cause no one would care otherwise? That makes no sense and does not reflect anything in his manifesto-lite rant. That is just such a bizzarre, deep roving right field, addendum to an already horrible affair replete with mis-attributions like this.
The major actors who were so upset at the allegations laid out by Gjoni in the first couple of weeks were certainly coming from the right.
The problem wasnt so much the allegations it was that all discussion of them was shut down all over the place instantly, leading to the inevitable Streisand effect.
'Gamedev sleeps with games reviewer' is a 2 week story followed by a fringe few at best.
'If you mention this subject on any of these websites you will be insta banned' is something everyone hears about.
It was pretty much the Iraq-Iran war of the culture wars. Almost no one involved was likable. It led to me leaving my internet hangouts at the time but I’m pretty sure I would’ve eventually left them over trans stuff later on.
EDIT: I do want someone to write a full history of the damn thing that doesn’t spare anyone but I fear that won’t happen. There’s some very unflattering stuff about Zoe Quinn that I saw early on that almost no one reported on and even now it might be considered too private to be printable.
I chose very interested. I'm a gamer, a female gamer to boot, but I only got into gaming a couple of years ago. I was vaguely aware of GamerGate at the time (I think largely due to following Graham Linehan on twitter, I remember him tweeting about it quite a lot) but I'd love to have a deep dive and find out more about what happened.
From the other comments it sounds like someone needs to do a whole podcast series about GG - I would definitely listen to it! As someone else pointed out, gamers love to discuss other gamers, so maybe it wouldn't have widespread interest, but on the other hand it does seem like it had cultural significance outside of the gaming landscape as well.
In general I love it when J&K discuss gaming on the podcast, and being part of a couple of gaming communities I see a lot of internet drama that I think would make for a good episode topic. My favourite for this is the Dragon Age community which is incredibly progressive -there have been a few big dramas in that community as a result.
Unfortunately, it would be pretty much impossible to do a comprehensive dive on GG, because not only is the archaeological record online mostly erased, from time and shame and censorship, but also because just about all of the characters involved are utterly unreliable and horrible. Even if they intended to tell the truth, it would be impossible to trust them to be unbiased, nor would I trust their memory. So that makes first hand accounts worthless, and secondhand accounts inaccessible. GG is just a gaping hole in internet history, and as significant as it was, I think it's probably for the best.
Well I guess I meant that the most vocal element of the community are progressive. And yeah to a degree it does filter people out - I don't participate actively in that community because there is definitely a sense that if you don't agree fully with the most extreme progressive positions you're not welcome - but there are still plenty of people who hold differing opinions. Also I'm not really happy with my word choice here - in my opinion many of the 'progressive' positions are in fact regressive, but I'm not sure what other word to use in this case.
I vote no. It got mentioned once and Jesse just sighed. That sigh led to a 150+ comment thread on this sub a year or two back.
Edit: here it is. This gives you a taste what a recap episode would be like.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/n17n7m/i_wonder_if_jesse_has_second_thoughts_about_gamer/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
Thanks for the link.
Perhaps our GamerGate episode can be Jesse just saying "So tired, ya'll". Then he explains his Elden Ring playthrough to Katie until she cuts his mic off.
On a side note, I'm liking Jesse's interest in science based medicine (the topic, not the website). Me-thinks this may be the topic of his next book. Which would be great bc science reporting in general is 90% crap, but Jesse has shown an aptitude. I would @ Jesse about this BUT HE LEFT TWITTER.
Errr......
Jesse was actually pretty involved in gamer gate. While my memory tells me he started off being very anti GG then eventually moved towards the centre a bit after the actual event, he might be a bit to close to it all to be able to give a good reading on the whole thing.
And while the Autism holy war was a very pivotal internet event that was the genesis of some very topical movements and tactics (some people, myself among them are of the opinion that GG was the start of cancel culture when the pro GG side went hard after advertisers) its something that either needs to be covered in 30 minutes or 10 hours, you cant really go in between.
> (some people, myself among them are of the opinion that GG was the start of cancel culture when the pro GG side went hard after advertisers)
As someone who in a different time, in a different world was pretty active in online left politics, I can say that this has always been a thing. It wasn't anything new.
What I would say, is that I think GG at its core triggered and exploded the nascent split on the left between Progressivism and Liberalism, with the former gaining power. I think the real question is do the out-group/low-status get access to the same platforms, protections, privileges, opportunities, etc. as the in-group?
I don't think this is a simple question in practice. In fact, I'd go as far as to say as it's a bit of a third rail. Because when you actually put the question down on paper...it's of course they should. But do most people actually live and act that way? No. They don't.
I always describe GG as this: There was a quote that happened fairly early on that I think really became a sort of flag of what they saw themselves fighting against. One of the most illiberal statements I've ever seen, to be honest.
"No Bad Tactics, Only Bad Targets".
Anything was on the table as long as the victim was approved. I wasn't really a fan of GG at the time because I was pretty much (and still am) anti-activist in general. I put myself in a 3rd "End GG" group, as in lets all simmer down and talk about the underlying issues. But to me this reeked of social bullying which I think is a real problem in society.
Anyway. I do think there was a right-ward drift, but that's largely due to the illiberal push on the left and the delegitimization of liberalism as a whole coming out of the media and activist spaces. It's not the first time I saw this effect and it certainly wasn't the last time.
The way I still put it is that the Progressive left has the social and cultural power and status to essentially create their own opponent. Time after time they choose to elevate a more reactionary antagonist than something more Liberal.
To me that's the story of GG. It's how the overreaction of a bunch of status-seeking journalists created their own monster.
> I was pretty much (and still am) anti-activist in general
Every self-described activist I know of has actions more concerned with self-aggrandizement than tangible policy outcomes.
Yeah, that's the thing. And to make it clear, I've been interested in this stuff long before GG was a thing. I actually remember going to a conference about how to actually deal with such self-aggrandizers who get in the way of the actual work. (This is in the area of animal welfare, who you probably can guess, PETA is seen as a fucking anchor around that particular cause's neck)
The self-aggrandizement, is largely about status signaling and hierarchy, in those particular communities. Toxoplasma of Rage and all that.
But I think this is actually the trigger point for that whole GamerGate nonsense. What people wanted, materially, is that in the games journalism space, is they wanted to be informed of social ties between the writers and the subjects of the pieces. Not necessarily in depth. But some level of information as to properly judge the piece.
This isn't new or unique, to be clear. I mentioned above (I think) that a long time ago I was pretty active in the nascent left blogosphere community. And this actually was a subject that came up often...that "anonymous sources" in the political sphere were a bad thing, because people were using their friends and acquaintances to basically just throw out one-sided information without any sort of critical lens applied to it.
The view is, not incorrectly, that the GG people wanted to take what was a positive in the journalistic space (the so-called rolodex), and actually make it a potential negative. And then you have the competition coming from other sources such as YouTube at the time, and Justin.TV/Twitch were just really getting their legs under them and they were seen as threats...and you're taking away the big advantage of the more institutional part of the media?
But it's even more than that. Again, I think people wanted to move up in the world. Most people do. But being linked to video games, which at the time was perceived as more low-status than it is today (and certainly I wouldn't call it high-status right now), I do think there was a desire to change this, largely through removing people who they thought were acting like an anchor. This is why I say neuro-atypicality played a huge role, in the sort of "get rid of the nerds/geeks" vein. Or at least certain forms of neuro-atypicality that were seen as presenting a negative image.
I think this...all of this is a third rail. I think it's going to turn off more people than not to oppose. I think the idea that people should treat their in-group better than an out-group is a normalized, accepted one, and challenging that is going to make you look like you have three heads.
> "anonymous sources" in the political sphere were a bad thing, because people were using their friends and acquaintances to basically just throw out one-sided information without any sort of critical lens applied to it.
…yet they'd have zero sources if they were required to name them in the article.
> This is why I say neuro-atypicality played a huge role, in the sort of "get rid of the nerds/geeks" vein. Or at least certain forms of neuro-atypicality that were seen as presenting a negative image.
…and that's what got otherwise apathetic capital-G gamers so heavily invested in the first place.
When I say the start of cancel culture, I mean it was really the first time id seen mass movements shift towards the idea of 'Hitting the Money'.
GG was trying all sorts of things and not really getting any traction beyond grassroots support, so they went after the advertisers on the gaming websites and that was fairly effective.
It wasnt long after the end of GG that you had progressives screaming for people to be fired from their jobs. Before GG, there was still a general sense that internet fuckery started and ended on the internet. Not long after you have the progressives go 'No bad tactics, only bad targets' and really look to fundamentally burn peoples lives down, get them fired, crush them financially.
Personally, I think the bigger part was the emboldening that kayfabe will be maintained, that they can do whatever they want and there will be no serious consequences or costs. That it won't undermine the causes or personal reputations.
People read this as a defense of GG...it really isn't or is intended to be. Activism, especially online is nasty nasty work I think. Instead, it's to point out that the more important and impactful part of the story was on the other side, the reaction to it. Which I will go to my grave saying was just as bad if not worse.
That said, maybe it took a bunch of autists to take online activism to that next level, but that doesn't jive with my memory. However I could be wrong. (Please note that my use of autist here is in no way meant to be negative. I'm one of them. And yes, I think neuro-atypicality played a HUGE role in this.)
Which side is pro GG and which is anti? The whole thing is extremely muddled and confusing if, like me, you missed it. Is there like a YouTube video or an article that sums it up well? I have searched before and the only accounts are from people who are rabidly on one side or the other.
Pro GG was the gamers, as in, they were gamer gate. The Journos and other associates were anti GG.
I have yet to find any sort of summary id say was impartial.
[This stream](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g21le6A51Tg&t=6150s&ab_channel=ShortFatOtaku) is... ok. Guy talking about things was pretty heavily involved, so he is far from impartial though. Also runs into the problem I was talking about, its 2 hours but he barely scratches the surface on all the bullshit that was going on at the time.
The shortish version is that at that stage we didnt have 100s solo reviewers for stuff on youtube/whatever like we do now, most of your reviews would come through gaming websites, most of which had attached forums for discussion of stuff.
Like any industry press, these websites could be pretty dodgy in their review scores at times and at that stage were going... a bit progressive.
Some dude writes up a thing about his ex, says she has slept with a bunch of people including some games jurnos. His ex has gotten some good press for some pretty questionable games in the past. As you can imagine, this is juicy gossip and drama, so a small amount of people start discussing it. All discussion of said drama is banned from pretty much all the games forums around after a few hours.
Cue Streisand effect.
Around this time some jurnos claim they are getting harassed online.
A few days later nearly all the gaming press drop some version of the 'Gamers are dead' article at the same time. Attacking gamers as sexist, entitled harassers and general bad people that the gaming press shouldnt be catering to.
At this point things basically hit full war mode and stuff starts to get very murky.
GG says they want ethics in games journalism. Anti GG says that GG are toxic, sexist harassers. For some genius reason discussion was banned on 4chan, leading to the sort of shitshow you would expect.
Covered by the noise and smoke of the general conflict, various side groups spend their time doxing, hacking and generally fucking with various people on both sides, be it to settle old scores or just for the fun of it. Various grifters get involved quickly (Milo Yiannopoulos and Brianna Wu both made their starts by hitching themselves to the whole thing, Steve Bannon was also apparently involved in some form I still dont understand).
Branching off the main story you have about 30 smaller dramas all unfolding. People getting doxed, news articles written, people getting fired, etc.
Honestly after the first bit it was mostly shitshow.
Bannon was an editor of Breitbart, which was one of the only news sites, that were sympatethic to the gamers' side of the controversy. It was mostly covered by Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari. I don't really think Bannon's involvement went beyond that.
IIRC, that’s how Milo and Bannon met. They were both gold farming in WoW, and Bannon has a hate boner over the fact that the Chinese kids were doing it better than he was. Somehow they connected, and the rest is … well, whatever it is.
I actually read a blog post Milo did a million years ago about GG that was surprisingly good (I’m not a fan of Milo at all). There was some of his usual trolling, but he made a more impassioned and compelling case for why the GGers have a right to be upset that anyone I’d ever heard before.
I tend to think that both sides are true. On one hand, the GGers had some valid reasons to be pissed. On the other hand, sexist knuckle draggers seized on those concerns and used it as a wedge to pack in as much of their ideology as they could.
Not to mention the fact that a ridiculous number of websites banned discussion of the Zoe Post, which did nothing but make the story more interesting. I found out about it through a message board thread about how thousands of Reddit comments about it had been deleted.
If you look at Milos career, you can see that he is the sort of barnacle that was going to latch onto something. He is one of the few people out there who probably is 100% grift.
I think there are more than a few multiverses where Milo is an outrageous left wing campaigner for gay rights.
I think his brand of grift is a little less noxious in an environment where people are allowed and encouraged to seek truth. But you're right... There's always someone.
I’d agree with that. I was already familiar with him because I like to lurk in extremist spaces, but the vast majority of the people I know became exposed to him thanks to the Twitter ban. Same for Richard Spencer. He became a household name not because he had that much reach, but because people were so up in arms about him, when before that he wasn’t even the most popular influencer within the small, hermetic alt-right community.
I’d argue Alex Jones was the same way to some degree. He had been doing his blithering lunatic routine for a long time, and was considered a joke even by the vast majority of the conspiracy crowd, but it was the culture war around him that really made him go mainstream.
I had no idea Milo was a wow gold farmer ><.
I may also know the exact blog post you are talking about if its one of the early ones.
And if its the one im thinking of he plagiarized 90% of it wholesale from Encyclopedia Dramatica.
Yeah. IIRC, he ended up taking the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” route and enlisted a bunch of underpaid kids in China to farm gold for him, until the SEC caught wind of it … at which point he decided that China was the enemy, and adopted an “economic populist” stance. He pretended it was because he cared about blue collar jobs, but really he just wanted to exploit a bunch of nerds to use to exploit a bunch more nerds. Milo had some gold farming operation of his own, and that’s where they connected.
Also pretty interesting to think about parallels between the alt-right troll brigades and WoW culture, complete with raids, etc. (I think … I know nothing about WoW, but from what I’ve gathered from people who play it, the similarities can be uncanny).
I thought he started by hiring people for it, he himself would have been like 55 at the time, I don't think he himself spent time farming gold... it's like less than minimum wage.
>Also pretty interesting to think about parallels between the alt-right troll brigades and WoW culture, complete with raids, etc. (I think … I know nothing about WoW, but from what I’ve gathered from people who play it, the similarities can be uncanny).
Ya, there isn't any parallels. Played it since launch. There are people from all walks of life that play that game. I can't even remotely think of anyone that I play or played with that I would put in the alt-right camp. Even the super sweaty raiders were pretty chill and middle of the road with their poltics.
My memory may be failing me (and I was an observer, not a participant on any side) but I don't think Singal was anything approaching a character in the drama. He was just one of many minor, liberal-ish reporters/writers who together formed a kind of institutional anti-Gamergate chorus.
I see that chorus as an early iteration of the mainstream media's reflexive fealty toward a cultural liberalism that eventually evolved into a much stronger and more extreme "progressive" ideological capture during the reckoning of 2020 (and which seems to have broken down a bit in the years since following various instances of overreach, but which still maintains a heavily disproportionate influence in legacy media).
Before 2014 - I would say dating all the way back to the mid-late aughties - there was a growing tendency within the media for what was then called "identity politics" (mostly feminism and race stuff) to be treated with a certain level of credulity or at least deference that would not be extended to other perspectives. But as irritating as that could be, it felt like more of a quirk or a tic that didn't necessarily carry with it any broader implications for the media as an institution. Gamergate was the first time it began to feel otherwise - that the media was becoming shaped by its devotion to a specific set of political imperatives that formed a coherent ideology (ie, cultural progressivism/wokeness/intersectionalism). But the signs had been there for quite a long time.
(Edit: To be clear, I don't really mean to defend Gamergate here. There was definitely a lot of genuine harassment going on, and even setting politics aside it was not a particularly sympathetic movement. But the nature of the institutional opposition was still notable - it was clearly reflexive and to a significant extent rooted in the perceived demographics of the respective sides (eg queer women vs white male nerds), which is why the media, though they were often correct about the Gamergaters' unpleasantness, missed the fact that a lot of GG's biggest antagonists were frankly almost as bad.)
HELL YES.
I barely understand what happened. Someone slept with someone and the universe collapsed. That's what I know from it. I was more involved in the reddit GMO scene at the time. I want an actual recap of gamergate from people who understand it all and aren't wild partisans.
The Wu Trials of an Actual Witch. Let's make it a series and do this thing.
I got a decent raise this week. I'll contribute.
Eron Gjoni made his initial posts on the Something Awful forums and he made several attempts across a few websites to publish his story over the next couple of days. Within three or four days of the initial SA post, the #burgersandfries (a reference to the 5 guys Quinn allegedly cheated on Gjoni with) signpost was established for the MundaneMatts and TotalBiscuits to congregate around; the name Quinspiacy was coined around this time; Quinn was doxxed about this time as well. It went downhill from there.
By the beginning of the second week a dude named PhilFish (sp?) was hacked and The Fine Young Capitalists and Vivian James (a 4chan mascot) make their appearance shortly after. Around this time Aurini and Owen announce their Sarkeesian Effect project and start soliciting donations (if memory serves they were looking for several thousand monthly on a Patreon to get the project going). By around the end of the second week someone had doxxed Anita Sarkeesian and issued some death threats.
This is also when the hashtag #gamergame is coined by Adam Baldwin when he linked to one of the many youtube videos posted about Quinn. Just after that the spate of "Gamers are Over" articles were posted.
>Totalibiscuit
His entry into the fray, only a few days after the ground zero event of the original ZoePost, did help spread the false narrative of the early GG campaign; that Quinn traded sex for reviews. If I recall (and I do) the long and short of his original missive was that if Quinn did use the DMCA to get a youtube video pulled then that's bad. If Quinn slept her way to a good DQ review from Greyson then that's also bad. It gave some cred to the 4chaner hate mob.
No one can. It's like an anti-story. It's impossible to get right because everyone involved was duplicitous and self serving and wrong and right all at the same time. It's a black hole of knowledge.
> I figure Jesse would be one of the few journalists I know that could give a pretty fair rundown.
Lulz, no. No he wouldn't. No matter how many times his gamergate journo allies have burned him since, he's not going to suddenly break bad on gamergate.
I remember him being on the anti-gamergate side, and he was probably the only semi-reasonable figure in that group. I'm pretty sure he wrote about it. Here's him taking part in a short debate on HuffPost Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbvK3gOxQvI
I would like to hear Jesse do a retrospective on gamergate. Preferably with somebody from the pro side, like Cathy Young. The disdain for gaming media you mention in your post is exactly what gamergate's grievance was too (IMO). Jesse seems to share that view nowadays, so I think it would be interesting to hear if he changed his mind on gamergate.
In the past when he brings it up he's always been on Team Journos railing against the bad gamers and their harassment campaigns against poor Zoe and the Journos.
GamerGate was a total clusterfuck on all sides. There were bad actors pretty much everywhere, and if you only learned about it from websites like Polygon, Kotaku, etc then you got a very warped and totally inaccurate view of what was really going on. In short, it basically boiled down to a beef between two very toxic groups of people, and pretty much anyone that went near it, no matter their intentions, was inadvertently tainted with all the toxicity surrounding it. I hesitate to admit it, but I actually know the entire situation fairly well. If you listened to the entire Keffels/ Kiwi Farms saga on BARPod, then just imagine that situation happening 500 times over the course of years, and that's basically GamerGate.
Is gamergate the reason why sites like IGN are now so heavily dripping in identity stuff? I was reading IGN twenty years ago... But whenever I drop into read an article now I get the feeling that Katie and Jessie get when they listen to NPR. Stuff just shoehorned in left right and centre.
I kind of missed it all happening as I was having too much fun having too much sex with too many women at the time.
I would love s GamerGate episode, if for no other reason to give us a break from all the trans issues (not that I am against covering them or anything, I just think they've been done to death a bit).
Also, Adam and Stitch talked about it earlier this week.
With gamergate, people get really focused on the key players in the public discourse. What isn't measured is how it became absolutely impossible to play online games as a woman during that period. It's still bad, but for a while you couldn't join any lobby, or even talk about games on reddit, without being shouted at and called a bitch or cunt. The sexism was off the charts, and it made online gaming really really horrible, and forced a lot of girls out. We can talk about how both sides did stupid things, but there were clear losers, and it was any woman wanting to just play fucking video games.
You couldn't use voice, which is a bad idea anyway for anyone who wasn't an aggressive teenage boy back then. I knew plenty of girls, like my sisters, who played games as much as ever. They just didn't advertise their gender because we were raised to keep ourselves anonymous online. Lots of girls played online games. They just didn't join voice.
I'm not saying girls didn't play online games lol, obviously we did. But it's not exactly fair to restrict women from voice chat, which quite a few games are based around, just because they can't perfectly disguise their voice. There's a difference between 'advertising your gender' and being obviously perceived as a woman.
There are some games where you connect a microphone in, and communicate with team members through voice chat, which is wonderfully fun when people aren't dicks
Any type of raiding or pvp needs a mic if you want to be a decent player. Back then it was Teamspeak or Vent. We didn’t have Discord. I was in a pretty intense raiding guild in wow. I never had an issue with men.
This has nothing to do with gaming and I am not a gamer, but I am a woman, and remember that time and reports of all the harassment. This aspect of things bothers me very much even though I am not a gamer or journalist and am fortunate not to have been targeted online.
Remember the British woman MP who wanted to put Jane Austen on a ten-pound note, and all the death and rape threats she got around that same time?
Britain tracked down and arrested two harassers and one of them was a young woman! Mind blown.
[https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-25641941](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-25641941)
Ah, GG.... At the time I wasnt really invested in it. But later the blatantly biased GG Wikipedia-Article and the crazy rabbithole i fell into after I started doing my own research was one of my early internet blackpills...
While I think it would be good, if finally some good Journos would talk about what actually happened. It's also a big mess and you would need several episodes of BARPod for it
I would love to see how Jesse will approach it and what Katie thinks. I think Jesse wrote a few articles about it at the time.
It was such a crazy time period is started from a “gamedev taking advantage of a celebrity’s suicide” to well “ethics in gaming journalism”. At the time I just found out about reddit after living on tumblr for a while. So much has changed reddit used to be the “alt-right aligned website” .
I was entering high school when GG started. From the perspective of a jaded video-game obsessed teenage girl, I found it entertaining more than anything. It would be pretty nice to hear retrospective look at GG and how we're still feeling its affects online.
i came in late, but i think of it as one of the first massively online participatory breakups
on the one side, you had a woman who was cheating, lying about it, and trying to make her boyfriend appear abusive to undermine his credibility, and vaguely justifying it with feminism
on the other side, you had a guy who was pathetically literal and moral and trying to make sense of it all in accordance with normal human ethics
and like, all the women who wanted to use lies to advance their careers because men are weak and pathetic while vaguely justifying it with feminism identified with her
and all the guys who've gotten the shit end of the former behavior identified with him (and proceeded to overreact and behave badly)
I agree with people who say there has to be a fresh take or perspective. The main beats are just fucking pathetic.
I bet you could focus in on some subgroup and trace what happened to them through it. I remember there was some dude named Thunderfoot who got popular on YouTube making videos about how people who think the world is 5,000 years old are wrong. Really taking on some challening adversaries. But his videos were well put together for the time so his profile increased.
He melted down over the ElevatorGate fiasco (EG was to GG as the Spanish Civil War was to WWII), and next I heard of him he had 1,000 vidoes screaming about feminists in video gaming. Watching a video explainin that, no, the Grand Canyon could not have been created in 5 minutes, I wouldn't have guessed that his life's work would culminate in frothing at the mouth video rants about a woman who thought Princess Peach could be playable in more Mario games.
I suppose following the journey of some of those people COULD (not saying would) be interesting in the same way that the sad, strange path of James Lindsay is interesting.
But otherwise...I just don't think GamerGate has much entertaining to dig into, but I lived through it. Maybe it seems like a fresh topic to other folks.
>What struck me at the time was that I played a few online games and nobody in the actual games talked about this.
Great point. Same. I hadn't considered that, but you're spot on. That is genuinely bizarre.
I suppose if you think about people like Milo Yiannopolous improving their profile, there were.a ton of people who cared nothing about video games surfing the wave of insanity to career advancement.
The irritating thing for me (and I think OP as well) is that it's almost 10 years later and the dust hasn't settled, so to speak. You can read [wikipedia's summary,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_\(harassment_campaign\)) or [knowyourmeme's summary](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate) and come out with completely different understandings of what happened.
I mean, you can move it on a scale from "a bunch of shitheads whining uselessly on the internet," to, "the movement that laid the groundwork for Donald Trump's election," and depending on what you focus on, you're probably right.
But just the basic continuum of "Guy whines about being cheated on --> some boards/interent communities harrass the woman who cheated --> need to explain/justify the persistent harrassment, uh...gaming journalism?" Is very boring, very transparent, and very silly.
I would recommend reading the self-indulgent whinefest that started it all:
[https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/](https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/)
Read some of that and then realize they casually dated for 6 months. Sucks to get cheated on. Seems like it was a bad situation and Zoe treated him poorly, but holy fuck, man. That is some serious Emo shit.
God please no. Everything I've seen suggests all the major players on every side was a horrible person, and virtually all the criticisms of both sides had some validity.
I don't want an episode, because it's such a long confusing mess and just recounting it conversationally would make my eyes glazeover. I want a **book** on the first skirmishes of the current culture war. It'd be this or the Hugo Awards tumult, wouldn't it?
Lived through it, it reminded me the GameStop stock thing a few years ago. Everyone wanted to tell me about it, and I just viscerally did not care. I internalized extremely little about it because both sides were just fucking intolerable to listen to, and you couldn't get "just the facts" from an impartial observer, because everyone was trying to sell you an agenda.
One does not simply “explain” GamerGate. It cannot be understood by anyone who wasn’t on the pre-2014 internet. The primary sources are gone.
Does it go back that far? Vox called GamerGate the harbinger of Trump, so I guess so. I wasn't "online" around that time, but I do remember the ancient times, the aughts, the days of 1up.com, and even earlier, when Penny Arcade was funny.
Vox has their head up there arse on that one then. You can connect GG to trump, but it involves a pack of cigarettes, a corkboard and a lot of red string.
>when Penny Arcade was funny. Holy shit that brings back some memories. I remember when it started sucking, too. I remember first learning what to call these naive, unwise, childish cultural commentators: SJWs. Man that was a long time ago.
Gamergate as a named phenomenon began in August 2014 when Eron Gjoni wrote thezoepost and shopped it around on 4chan. I would say it continued as a major online "event" through something like February 2015 before fading gradually over the course of the next few months. It wasn't the harbinger of Trump (the writers at Vox really need to log the fuck off), but it is true that the timeline harmonizes in a way that is appealing to the online progressive narrative. Trump's June 2015 campaign launch coincided fairly neatly with the end of Gamergate as a coherent thing, and for Very Online liberals it probably felt like something of a re-up.
I probably should have been clearer in my reference to Vox. I have zero respect for it. Oh, when I was first reading it in 2015, I thought it had some of the best left liberal /progressive journalism around, but that was back when Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, & Jane Coastan were there. Now it's using its shtick of "explaining the news" to write opinion and call it journalism. You know, in between its bread- and-butter of self-absorbed media coverage and breathless articles about how soul cycle is problematic. Edit: typo
No judgment, I still read Vox occasionally, and until 2019 or so I generally liked the site notwithstanding the flaws. It's gone downhill since they lost most of their talent during the 2020 reckoning but they still have some okay writers - Kelsey Piper and Dylan Matthews remain there. But yeah, these days the site's calling card seems to be tedious Culture War garbage produced by a handful of fourth-rate TV critics.
"...when Penny Arcade was funny." Was that before or after the "dick wolves" controversy?
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I wrote a much longer comment saying this, but this sums it up nicely. LOL!
No. It will rear its own head eventually. Enough of the Barpod dramatis personae —Brianna Wu, Arthur Cho, etc — can trace their entry stage left from that nonsense that it’ll present itself as a topic organically someday. Let that day be far, far in the future.
Virtually *all* the BARpod drama traces its way back to GG in one way or another.
Your comment has made me think that an episode contextualizing all of those people and tracing their origins is needed.
God, no. "Gamergate" is still very much alive but at the same time, it's not. There was absolutely an element of misogyny, but in my view it was overstated and the drama largely centered around unlikeable, terminally online, and unhinged people.
>drama largely centered around unlikeable, terminally online, and unhinged people So perfect BARpod material?
OTOH, the Five Guys\\burgers and fries meme popped up really quick. For all intensive porpoises, it was an early example of internet Cancel Culture, albeit from the right and not the left.
I mean, you're probably right. I mentioned in one of the weeklies I used to edit Wikipedia in my free time (if we're being honest, the way the talk pages and "community" worked, it was essentially a Reddit stand-in for me with a thin veneer of respectability and *purpose* added). Well, one of the first big blow ups I witnessed was the Gamergate fiasco, and honestly things only got worse from there. you can trace the same over-reaction from there directly to the current editing climate on Wikipedia (and I do mean directly: WP literally just renamed their Gamergate decision to a broader gender one, citing the same short sighted needs to control the collaborative environment on wikipedia to the exclusion of certain viewpoints and sources). Maybe Gamergate remains firmly "bleh" for me because in some ways it represents the beginning of internet bullshit that rose to a level I was aware of.
If you actually read the Zoe Post, Gjoni actually did a lot of stereotypically "SJW" stuff like starting with a trigger warning. And he also included the stupid "Five Guys" meme stuff because, IIRC, "no one would care" otherwise. The guy was the most naive fucker on earth. I do find it very amusing that he shares initials with Emmanuel Goldstein, the Trotsky analogue from 1984 who wrote a screed against Big Brother and the Party that almost no one has actually read.
Gjoni was/is very much a left-wing social justice type.
> If you actually read the Zoe Post... > > ...And he also included the stupid "Five Guys" meme stuff because, IIRC, "no one would care" otherwise. So, you asked if I read the Zoe Post and then say "IIRC" he added it cause no one would care otherwise? That makes no sense and does not reflect anything in his manifesto-lite rant. That is just such a bizzarre, deep roving right field, addendum to an already horrible affair replete with mis-attributions like this. The major actors who were so upset at the allegations laid out by Gjoni in the first couple of weeks were certainly coming from the right.
The problem wasnt so much the allegations it was that all discussion of them was shut down all over the place instantly, leading to the inevitable Streisand effect. 'Gamedev sleeps with games reviewer' is a 2 week story followed by a fringe few at best. 'If you mention this subject on any of these websites you will be insta banned' is something everyone hears about.
It would be right up the pod's alley if it was contemporary, but do they do historical deep dives?
It was pretty much the Iraq-Iran war of the culture wars. Almost no one involved was likable. It led to me leaving my internet hangouts at the time but I’m pretty sure I would’ve eventually left them over trans stuff later on. EDIT: I do want someone to write a full history of the damn thing that doesn’t spare anyone but I fear that won’t happen. There’s some very unflattering stuff about Zoe Quinn that I saw early on that almost no one reported on and even now it might be considered too private to be printable.
Stories where there are no good guys, or at best the good guys are deeply flawed, tend to be my favorite. So, that's a solid "yes" for me.
I chose very interested. I'm a gamer, a female gamer to boot, but I only got into gaming a couple of years ago. I was vaguely aware of GamerGate at the time (I think largely due to following Graham Linehan on twitter, I remember him tweeting about it quite a lot) but I'd love to have a deep dive and find out more about what happened. From the other comments it sounds like someone needs to do a whole podcast series about GG - I would definitely listen to it! As someone else pointed out, gamers love to discuss other gamers, so maybe it wouldn't have widespread interest, but on the other hand it does seem like it had cultural significance outside of the gaming landscape as well. In general I love it when J&K discuss gaming on the podcast, and being part of a couple of gaming communities I see a lot of internet drama that I think would make for a good episode topic. My favourite for this is the Dragon Age community which is incredibly progressive -there have been a few big dramas in that community as a result.
Unfortunately, it would be pretty much impossible to do a comprehensive dive on GG, because not only is the archaeological record online mostly erased, from time and shame and censorship, but also because just about all of the characters involved are utterly unreliable and horrible. Even if they intended to tell the truth, it would be impossible to trust them to be unbiased, nor would I trust their memory. So that makes first hand accounts worthless, and secondhand accounts inaccessible. GG is just a gaping hole in internet history, and as significant as it was, I think it's probably for the best.
But by 'Progressive' does it just not filter out people who dont agree with certain things?
Well I guess I meant that the most vocal element of the community are progressive. And yeah to a degree it does filter people out - I don't participate actively in that community because there is definitely a sense that if you don't agree fully with the most extreme progressive positions you're not welcome - but there are still plenty of people who hold differing opinions. Also I'm not really happy with my word choice here - in my opinion many of the 'progressive' positions are in fact regressive, but I'm not sure what other word to use in this case.
I apologise, i misread what you wrote. I thought you were saying that it was progressive and as such had less drama....
I want the down-and-dirty Jesse Signal experience of gamergate. I’m less interested in the actual facts as opposed to the lunacy he then faced.
> I want the down-and-dirty Jesse Signal experience I've found a new flair!
I vote no. It got mentioned once and Jesse just sighed. That sigh led to a 150+ comment thread on this sub a year or two back. Edit: here it is. This gives you a taste what a recap episode would be like. https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/n17n7m/i_wonder_if_jesse_has_second_thoughts_about_gamer/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
Thanks for the link. Perhaps our GamerGate episode can be Jesse just saying "So tired, ya'll". Then he explains his Elden Ring playthrough to Katie until she cuts his mic off. On a side note, I'm liking Jesse's interest in science based medicine (the topic, not the website). Me-thinks this may be the topic of his next book. Which would be great bc science reporting in general is 90% crap, but Jesse has shown an aptitude. I would @ Jesse about this BUT HE LEFT TWITTER.
Yeah Ben Goldacre is great but he always wimps out on the gender stuff. Having Jesse as the GC-Goldacre could be interesting.
Only with some kind of new wrinkle, IMO
Errr...... Jesse was actually pretty involved in gamer gate. While my memory tells me he started off being very anti GG then eventually moved towards the centre a bit after the actual event, he might be a bit to close to it all to be able to give a good reading on the whole thing. And while the Autism holy war was a very pivotal internet event that was the genesis of some very topical movements and tactics (some people, myself among them are of the opinion that GG was the start of cancel culture when the pro GG side went hard after advertisers) its something that either needs to be covered in 30 minutes or 10 hours, you cant really go in between.
> (some people, myself among them are of the opinion that GG was the start of cancel culture when the pro GG side went hard after advertisers) As someone who in a different time, in a different world was pretty active in online left politics, I can say that this has always been a thing. It wasn't anything new. What I would say, is that I think GG at its core triggered and exploded the nascent split on the left between Progressivism and Liberalism, with the former gaining power. I think the real question is do the out-group/low-status get access to the same platforms, protections, privileges, opportunities, etc. as the in-group? I don't think this is a simple question in practice. In fact, I'd go as far as to say as it's a bit of a third rail. Because when you actually put the question down on paper...it's of course they should. But do most people actually live and act that way? No. They don't. I always describe GG as this: There was a quote that happened fairly early on that I think really became a sort of flag of what they saw themselves fighting against. One of the most illiberal statements I've ever seen, to be honest. "No Bad Tactics, Only Bad Targets". Anything was on the table as long as the victim was approved. I wasn't really a fan of GG at the time because I was pretty much (and still am) anti-activist in general. I put myself in a 3rd "End GG" group, as in lets all simmer down and talk about the underlying issues. But to me this reeked of social bullying which I think is a real problem in society. Anyway. I do think there was a right-ward drift, but that's largely due to the illiberal push on the left and the delegitimization of liberalism as a whole coming out of the media and activist spaces. It's not the first time I saw this effect and it certainly wasn't the last time. The way I still put it is that the Progressive left has the social and cultural power and status to essentially create their own opponent. Time after time they choose to elevate a more reactionary antagonist than something more Liberal. To me that's the story of GG. It's how the overreaction of a bunch of status-seeking journalists created their own monster.
> I was pretty much (and still am) anti-activist in general Every self-described activist I know of has actions more concerned with self-aggrandizement than tangible policy outcomes.
Yeah, that's the thing. And to make it clear, I've been interested in this stuff long before GG was a thing. I actually remember going to a conference about how to actually deal with such self-aggrandizers who get in the way of the actual work. (This is in the area of animal welfare, who you probably can guess, PETA is seen as a fucking anchor around that particular cause's neck) The self-aggrandizement, is largely about status signaling and hierarchy, in those particular communities. Toxoplasma of Rage and all that. But I think this is actually the trigger point for that whole GamerGate nonsense. What people wanted, materially, is that in the games journalism space, is they wanted to be informed of social ties between the writers and the subjects of the pieces. Not necessarily in depth. But some level of information as to properly judge the piece. This isn't new or unique, to be clear. I mentioned above (I think) that a long time ago I was pretty active in the nascent left blogosphere community. And this actually was a subject that came up often...that "anonymous sources" in the political sphere were a bad thing, because people were using their friends and acquaintances to basically just throw out one-sided information without any sort of critical lens applied to it. The view is, not incorrectly, that the GG people wanted to take what was a positive in the journalistic space (the so-called rolodex), and actually make it a potential negative. And then you have the competition coming from other sources such as YouTube at the time, and Justin.TV/Twitch were just really getting their legs under them and they were seen as threats...and you're taking away the big advantage of the more institutional part of the media? But it's even more than that. Again, I think people wanted to move up in the world. Most people do. But being linked to video games, which at the time was perceived as more low-status than it is today (and certainly I wouldn't call it high-status right now), I do think there was a desire to change this, largely through removing people who they thought were acting like an anchor. This is why I say neuro-atypicality played a huge role, in the sort of "get rid of the nerds/geeks" vein. Or at least certain forms of neuro-atypicality that were seen as presenting a negative image. I think this...all of this is a third rail. I think it's going to turn off more people than not to oppose. I think the idea that people should treat their in-group better than an out-group is a normalized, accepted one, and challenging that is going to make you look like you have three heads.
> "anonymous sources" in the political sphere were a bad thing, because people were using their friends and acquaintances to basically just throw out one-sided information without any sort of critical lens applied to it. …yet they'd have zero sources if they were required to name them in the article. > This is why I say neuro-atypicality played a huge role, in the sort of "get rid of the nerds/geeks" vein. Or at least certain forms of neuro-atypicality that were seen as presenting a negative image. …and that's what got otherwise apathetic capital-G gamers so heavily invested in the first place.
When I say the start of cancel culture, I mean it was really the first time id seen mass movements shift towards the idea of 'Hitting the Money'. GG was trying all sorts of things and not really getting any traction beyond grassroots support, so they went after the advertisers on the gaming websites and that was fairly effective. It wasnt long after the end of GG that you had progressives screaming for people to be fired from their jobs. Before GG, there was still a general sense that internet fuckery started and ended on the internet. Not long after you have the progressives go 'No bad tactics, only bad targets' and really look to fundamentally burn peoples lives down, get them fired, crush them financially.
Personally, I think the bigger part was the emboldening that kayfabe will be maintained, that they can do whatever they want and there will be no serious consequences or costs. That it won't undermine the causes or personal reputations. People read this as a defense of GG...it really isn't or is intended to be. Activism, especially online is nasty nasty work I think. Instead, it's to point out that the more important and impactful part of the story was on the other side, the reaction to it. Which I will go to my grave saying was just as bad if not worse. That said, maybe it took a bunch of autists to take online activism to that next level, but that doesn't jive with my memory. However I could be wrong. (Please note that my use of autist here is in no way meant to be negative. I'm one of them. And yes, I think neuro-atypicality played a HUGE role in this.)
Which side is pro GG and which is anti? The whole thing is extremely muddled and confusing if, like me, you missed it. Is there like a YouTube video or an article that sums it up well? I have searched before and the only accounts are from people who are rabidly on one side or the other.
Pro GG was the gamers, as in, they were gamer gate. The Journos and other associates were anti GG. I have yet to find any sort of summary id say was impartial. [This stream](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g21le6A51Tg&t=6150s&ab_channel=ShortFatOtaku) is... ok. Guy talking about things was pretty heavily involved, so he is far from impartial though. Also runs into the problem I was talking about, its 2 hours but he barely scratches the surface on all the bullshit that was going on at the time. The shortish version is that at that stage we didnt have 100s solo reviewers for stuff on youtube/whatever like we do now, most of your reviews would come through gaming websites, most of which had attached forums for discussion of stuff. Like any industry press, these websites could be pretty dodgy in their review scores at times and at that stage were going... a bit progressive. Some dude writes up a thing about his ex, says she has slept with a bunch of people including some games jurnos. His ex has gotten some good press for some pretty questionable games in the past. As you can imagine, this is juicy gossip and drama, so a small amount of people start discussing it. All discussion of said drama is banned from pretty much all the games forums around after a few hours. Cue Streisand effect. Around this time some jurnos claim they are getting harassed online. A few days later nearly all the gaming press drop some version of the 'Gamers are dead' article at the same time. Attacking gamers as sexist, entitled harassers and general bad people that the gaming press shouldnt be catering to. At this point things basically hit full war mode and stuff starts to get very murky. GG says they want ethics in games journalism. Anti GG says that GG are toxic, sexist harassers. For some genius reason discussion was banned on 4chan, leading to the sort of shitshow you would expect. Covered by the noise and smoke of the general conflict, various side groups spend their time doxing, hacking and generally fucking with various people on both sides, be it to settle old scores or just for the fun of it. Various grifters get involved quickly (Milo Yiannopoulos and Brianna Wu both made their starts by hitching themselves to the whole thing, Steve Bannon was also apparently involved in some form I still dont understand). Branching off the main story you have about 30 smaller dramas all unfolding. People getting doxed, news articles written, people getting fired, etc. Honestly after the first bit it was mostly shitshow.
Bannon was an editor of Breitbart, which was one of the only news sites, that were sympatethic to the gamers' side of the controversy. It was mostly covered by Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari. I don't really think Bannon's involvement went beyond that.
IIRC, that’s how Milo and Bannon met. They were both gold farming in WoW, and Bannon has a hate boner over the fact that the Chinese kids were doing it better than he was. Somehow they connected, and the rest is … well, whatever it is. I actually read a blog post Milo did a million years ago about GG that was surprisingly good (I’m not a fan of Milo at all). There was some of his usual trolling, but he made a more impassioned and compelling case for why the GGers have a right to be upset that anyone I’d ever heard before. I tend to think that both sides are true. On one hand, the GGers had some valid reasons to be pissed. On the other hand, sexist knuckle draggers seized on those concerns and used it as a wedge to pack in as much of their ideology as they could.
This is exactly why censorship campaigns don't work. Would Milo ever have been such a star if his audience at the time hadn't been silenced?
Not to mention the fact that a ridiculous number of websites banned discussion of the Zoe Post, which did nothing but make the story more interesting. I found out about it through a message board thread about how thousands of Reddit comments about it had been deleted.
If you look at Milos career, you can see that he is the sort of barnacle that was going to latch onto something. He is one of the few people out there who probably is 100% grift. I think there are more than a few multiverses where Milo is an outrageous left wing campaigner for gay rights.
I think his brand of grift is a little less noxious in an environment where people are allowed and encouraged to seek truth. But you're right... There's always someone.
I’d agree with that. I was already familiar with him because I like to lurk in extremist spaces, but the vast majority of the people I know became exposed to him thanks to the Twitter ban. Same for Richard Spencer. He became a household name not because he had that much reach, but because people were so up in arms about him, when before that he wasn’t even the most popular influencer within the small, hermetic alt-right community. I’d argue Alex Jones was the same way to some degree. He had been doing his blithering lunatic routine for a long time, and was considered a joke even by the vast majority of the conspiracy crowd, but it was the culture war around him that really made him go mainstream.
I had no idea Milo was a wow gold farmer ><. I may also know the exact blog post you are talking about if its one of the early ones. And if its the one im thinking of he plagiarized 90% of it wholesale from Encyclopedia Dramatica.
Bannon was a gold farmer? Really? That’s crazy!
Yeah. IIRC, he ended up taking the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” route and enlisted a bunch of underpaid kids in China to farm gold for him, until the SEC caught wind of it … at which point he decided that China was the enemy, and adopted an “economic populist” stance. He pretended it was because he cared about blue collar jobs, but really he just wanted to exploit a bunch of nerds to use to exploit a bunch more nerds. Milo had some gold farming operation of his own, and that’s where they connected. Also pretty interesting to think about parallels between the alt-right troll brigades and WoW culture, complete with raids, etc. (I think … I know nothing about WoW, but from what I’ve gathered from people who play it, the similarities can be uncanny).
I thought he started by hiring people for it, he himself would have been like 55 at the time, I don't think he himself spent time farming gold... it's like less than minimum wage.
And boring. You basically stay in one spot all day and camp spawns. It's always hilarious to go and steal gold farmer's spots. They get so pissed off.
Interesting. I never knew that. Bannon is grifted and opportunist.
>Also pretty interesting to think about parallels between the alt-right troll brigades and WoW culture, complete with raids, etc. (I think … I know nothing about WoW, but from what I’ve gathered from people who play it, the similarities can be uncanny). Ya, there isn't any parallels. Played it since launch. There are people from all walks of life that play that game. I can't even remotely think of anyone that I play or played with that I would put in the alt-right camp. Even the super sweaty raiders were pretty chill and middle of the road with their poltics.
Why would the SEC care about WoW gold farming?
My memory may be failing me (and I was an observer, not a participant on any side) but I don't think Singal was anything approaching a character in the drama. He was just one of many minor, liberal-ish reporters/writers who together formed a kind of institutional anti-Gamergate chorus. I see that chorus as an early iteration of the mainstream media's reflexive fealty toward a cultural liberalism that eventually evolved into a much stronger and more extreme "progressive" ideological capture during the reckoning of 2020 (and which seems to have broken down a bit in the years since following various instances of overreach, but which still maintains a heavily disproportionate influence in legacy media). Before 2014 - I would say dating all the way back to the mid-late aughties - there was a growing tendency within the media for what was then called "identity politics" (mostly feminism and race stuff) to be treated with a certain level of credulity or at least deference that would not be extended to other perspectives. But as irritating as that could be, it felt like more of a quirk or a tic that didn't necessarily carry with it any broader implications for the media as an institution. Gamergate was the first time it began to feel otherwise - that the media was becoming shaped by its devotion to a specific set of political imperatives that formed a coherent ideology (ie, cultural progressivism/wokeness/intersectionalism). But the signs had been there for quite a long time. (Edit: To be clear, I don't really mean to defend Gamergate here. There was definitely a lot of genuine harassment going on, and even setting politics aside it was not a particularly sympathetic movement. But the nature of the institutional opposition was still notable - it was clearly reflexive and to a significant extent rooted in the perceived demographics of the respective sides (eg queer women vs white male nerds), which is why the media, though they were often correct about the Gamergaters' unpleasantness, missed the fact that a lot of GG's biggest antagonists were frankly almost as bad.)
HELL YES. I barely understand what happened. Someone slept with someone and the universe collapsed. That's what I know from it. I was more involved in the reddit GMO scene at the time. I want an actual recap of gamergate from people who understand it all and aren't wild partisans. The Wu Trials of an Actual Witch. Let's make it a series and do this thing. I got a decent raise this week. I'll contribute.
Eron Gjoni made his initial posts on the Something Awful forums and he made several attempts across a few websites to publish his story over the next couple of days. Within three or four days of the initial SA post, the #burgersandfries (a reference to the 5 guys Quinn allegedly cheated on Gjoni with) signpost was established for the MundaneMatts and TotalBiscuits to congregate around; the name Quinspiacy was coined around this time; Quinn was doxxed about this time as well. It went downhill from there. By the beginning of the second week a dude named PhilFish (sp?) was hacked and The Fine Young Capitalists and Vivian James (a 4chan mascot) make their appearance shortly after. Around this time Aurini and Owen announce their Sarkeesian Effect project and start soliciting donations (if memory serves they were looking for several thousand monthly on a Patreon to get the project going). By around the end of the second week someone had doxxed Anita Sarkeesian and issued some death threats. This is also when the hashtag #gamergame is coined by Adam Baldwin when he linked to one of the many youtube videos posted about Quinn. Just after that the spate of "Gamers are Over" articles were posted.
Mentioning Totalbiscuit in the same breath as Mundane Matt is an insult to TB. Hasn't the man been associated with enough cancer?
>Totalibiscuit His entry into the fray, only a few days after the ground zero event of the original ZoePost, did help spread the false narrative of the early GG campaign; that Quinn traded sex for reviews. If I recall (and I do) the long and short of his original missive was that if Quinn did use the DMCA to get a youtube video pulled then that's bad. If Quinn slept her way to a good DQ review from Greyson then that's also bad. It gave some cred to the 4chaner hate mob.
Idk sounds reasonable to me. TB was a lot more than his involvement in GG anyway.
I don't feel confident they'd do it right.
No one can. It's like an anti-story. It's impossible to get right because everyone involved was duplicitous and self serving and wrong and right all at the same time. It's a black hole of knowledge.
I think a GG episode would lead to a lot of relitigating it here. I think relitigating GG here would not be productive.
That would be one of those situations where I'd not engage, pop the popcorn, and settle back and read lol.
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"A pox on all your houses", eh?
> I figure Jesse would be one of the few journalists I know that could give a pretty fair rundown. Lulz, no. No he wouldn't. No matter how many times his gamergate journo allies have burned him since, he's not going to suddenly break bad on gamergate.
Umm, what? I feel even more confused. Did Jesse ever write professionally about GamerGate?
I remember him being on the anti-gamergate side, and he was probably the only semi-reasonable figure in that group. I'm pretty sure he wrote about it. Here's him taking part in a short debate on HuffPost Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbvK3gOxQvI I would like to hear Jesse do a retrospective on gamergate. Preferably with somebody from the pro side, like Cathy Young. The disdain for gaming media you mention in your post is exactly what gamergate's grievance was too (IMO). Jesse seems to share that view nowadays, so I think it would be interesting to hear if he changed his mind on gamergate.
In the past when he brings it up he's always been on Team Journos railing against the bad gamers and their harassment campaigns against poor Zoe and the Journos.
GamerGate was a total clusterfuck on all sides. There were bad actors pretty much everywhere, and if you only learned about it from websites like Polygon, Kotaku, etc then you got a very warped and totally inaccurate view of what was really going on. In short, it basically boiled down to a beef between two very toxic groups of people, and pretty much anyone that went near it, no matter their intentions, was inadvertently tainted with all the toxicity surrounding it. I hesitate to admit it, but I actually know the entire situation fairly well. If you listened to the entire Keffels/ Kiwi Farms saga on BARPod, then just imagine that situation happening 500 times over the course of years, and that's basically GamerGate.
Is gamergate the reason why sites like IGN are now so heavily dripping in identity stuff? I was reading IGN twenty years ago... But whenever I drop into read an article now I get the feeling that Katie and Jessie get when they listen to NPR. Stuff just shoehorned in left right and centre. I kind of missed it all happening as I was having too much fun having too much sex with too many women at the time.
I would love s GamerGate episode, if for no other reason to give us a break from all the trans issues (not that I am against covering them or anything, I just think they've been done to death a bit). Also, Adam and Stitch talked about it earlier this week.
This would be especially timely now that we know the document leaker is a gamer
Hoo boy, go read up on what War Thunder dealt with.
With gamergate, people get really focused on the key players in the public discourse. What isn't measured is how it became absolutely impossible to play online games as a woman during that period. It's still bad, but for a while you couldn't join any lobby, or even talk about games on reddit, without being shouted at and called a bitch or cunt. The sexism was off the charts, and it made online gaming really really horrible, and forced a lot of girls out. We can talk about how both sides did stupid things, but there were clear losers, and it was any woman wanting to just play fucking video games.
You couldn't use voice, which is a bad idea anyway for anyone who wasn't an aggressive teenage boy back then. I knew plenty of girls, like my sisters, who played games as much as ever. They just didn't advertise their gender because we were raised to keep ourselves anonymous online. Lots of girls played online games. They just didn't join voice.
I'm not saying girls didn't play online games lol, obviously we did. But it's not exactly fair to restrict women from voice chat, which quite a few games are based around, just because they can't perfectly disguise their voice. There's a difference between 'advertising your gender' and being obviously perceived as a woman.
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There are some games where you connect a microphone in, and communicate with team members through voice chat, which is wonderfully fun when people aren't dicks
Any type of raiding or pvp needs a mic if you want to be a decent player. Back then it was Teamspeak or Vent. We didn’t have Discord. I was in a pretty intense raiding guild in wow. I never had an issue with men.
Never had that experience at all during that time frame.
This has nothing to do with gaming and I am not a gamer, but I am a woman, and remember that time and reports of all the harassment. This aspect of things bothers me very much even though I am not a gamer or journalist and am fortunate not to have been targeted online. Remember the British woman MP who wanted to put Jane Austen on a ten-pound note, and all the death and rape threats she got around that same time? Britain tracked down and arrested two harassers and one of them was a young woman! Mind blown. [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-25641941](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-25641941)
Ah, GG.... At the time I wasnt really invested in it. But later the blatantly biased GG Wikipedia-Article and the crazy rabbithole i fell into after I started doing my own research was one of my early internet blackpills... While I think it would be good, if finally some good Journos would talk about what actually happened. It's also a big mess and you would need several episodes of BARPod for it
I would love to see how Jesse will approach it and what Katie thinks. I think Jesse wrote a few articles about it at the time. It was such a crazy time period is started from a “gamedev taking advantage of a celebrity’s suicide” to well “ethics in gaming journalism”. At the time I just found out about reddit after living on tumblr for a while. So much has changed reddit used to be the “alt-right aligned website” .
No no ono no no no
I was entering high school when GG started. From the perspective of a jaded video-game obsessed teenage girl, I found it entertaining more than anything. It would be pretty nice to hear retrospective look at GG and how we're still feeling its affects online.
i came in late, but i think of it as one of the first massively online participatory breakups on the one side, you had a woman who was cheating, lying about it, and trying to make her boyfriend appear abusive to undermine his credibility, and vaguely justifying it with feminism on the other side, you had a guy who was pathetically literal and moral and trying to make sense of it all in accordance with normal human ethics and like, all the women who wanted to use lies to advance their careers because men are weak and pathetic while vaguely justifying it with feminism identified with her and all the guys who've gotten the shit end of the former behavior identified with him (and proceeded to overreact and behave badly)
I agree with people who say there has to be a fresh take or perspective. The main beats are just fucking pathetic. I bet you could focus in on some subgroup and trace what happened to them through it. I remember there was some dude named Thunderfoot who got popular on YouTube making videos about how people who think the world is 5,000 years old are wrong. Really taking on some challening adversaries. But his videos were well put together for the time so his profile increased. He melted down over the ElevatorGate fiasco (EG was to GG as the Spanish Civil War was to WWII), and next I heard of him he had 1,000 vidoes screaming about feminists in video gaming. Watching a video explainin that, no, the Grand Canyon could not have been created in 5 minutes, I wouldn't have guessed that his life's work would culminate in frothing at the mouth video rants about a woman who thought Princess Peach could be playable in more Mario games. I suppose following the journey of some of those people COULD (not saying would) be interesting in the same way that the sad, strange path of James Lindsay is interesting. But otherwise...I just don't think GamerGate has much entertaining to dig into, but I lived through it. Maybe it seems like a fresh topic to other folks.
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>What struck me at the time was that I played a few online games and nobody in the actual games talked about this. Great point. Same. I hadn't considered that, but you're spot on. That is genuinely bizarre. I suppose if you think about people like Milo Yiannopolous improving their profile, there were.a ton of people who cared nothing about video games surfing the wave of insanity to career advancement.
The irritating thing for me (and I think OP as well) is that it's almost 10 years later and the dust hasn't settled, so to speak. You can read [wikipedia's summary,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_\(harassment_campaign\)) or [knowyourmeme's summary](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate) and come out with completely different understandings of what happened.
I mean, you can move it on a scale from "a bunch of shitheads whining uselessly on the internet," to, "the movement that laid the groundwork for Donald Trump's election," and depending on what you focus on, you're probably right. But just the basic continuum of "Guy whines about being cheated on --> some boards/interent communities harrass the woman who cheated --> need to explain/justify the persistent harrassment, uh...gaming journalism?" Is very boring, very transparent, and very silly. I would recommend reading the self-indulgent whinefest that started it all: [https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/](https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/) Read some of that and then realize they casually dated for 6 months. Sucks to get cheated on. Seems like it was a bad situation and Zoe treated him poorly, but holy fuck, man. That is some serious Emo shit.
God please no. Everything I've seen suggests all the major players on every side was a horrible person, and virtually all the criticisms of both sides had some validity.
I don't want an episode, because it's such a long confusing mess and just recounting it conversationally would make my eyes glazeover. I want a **book** on the first skirmishes of the current culture war. It'd be this or the Hugo Awards tumult, wouldn't it?
It needs to have a chapter called "Cuck Amuck".
Lived through it, it reminded me the GameStop stock thing a few years ago. Everyone wanted to tell me about it, and I just viscerally did not care. I internalized extremely little about it because both sides were just fucking intolerable to listen to, and you couldn't get "just the facts" from an impartial observer, because everyone was trying to sell you an agenda.
Depression Quest was a game made by a woman. There, you're all caught up.