Video gaming since I got a Game Boy Color for my birthday. As for whether I identify with the "gamer" label...I'm not really sure, probably not. I do a lot of other things that I think are pretty significant to my identity besides video games: I'd really prefer people know me as a graduate student, a multi-instrumentalist (violin, cello, clarinet, flute, pipe organ, piano), a lab technician, a math and science enthusiast, an epee fencer, a computer nerd, and a fine art afficionado (HUGE fan of the orchestra) as well as someone who plays video games. I really enjoy video games, but if you were to (to paraphrase Stephen Colbert) "slap me awake in the middle of the night and ask me to define my identity in one word" it would probably not be "gamer".
My position on #gamergate is one of annoyed indifference. I've certainly got an opinion on it, but much like your hypothetical racist uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner table, my immediate is response is "god dammit not THIS again".
The quality and standards of video game journalism have always had some problems, and likely always will. For instance, priority press passes to journalists at trade shows and AAA developers showering big name reviewers with special edition packages, expensive gifts, VIP passes at events, etc. In a way, journalism is like that in a lot of ways in many industries. I've been to technical conferences and research expos where there was a lot of the same behavior: people want to promote their businesses, of course. And of course, if you want journalists to cover your event you're going to have to pay for them to travel, attend, etc. If you're sending an entire news team to cover something, then that's going to take a huge bite out of the amount of money the journalists are going to be able to make on the reporting. Plus, at the end of the day, journalism is all about talking to people and building relationships.
So all told, we're being a little unrealistic if we're saying that we expect journalists to be thoroughly disconnected from the industry they're reporting on. That's impossible. But it's also impossible to deny that ALL journalists in all fields walk a line as thin as a razor's edge between ethical and corrupt reporting. A few extra favors, a bit more pressure to publish, and the fact that your job not only doesn't pay that much but that at any given time there are people lining up to take it from you, and you can end up compromising yourself without even realizing it. That's why ethics are such a huge deal, and it's why we need to be talking about it.
Ultimately, #GG's complaint in and of itself is sound. However, I have to say that I am more against it than for. At the end of the day, it's still inseparable from the gender issue that kicked it off. There have been numerous high-profile incidents in the last few years that anyone passionate about the ethics of reporting could easily have based their movement on. Example, when Jeff Gertsmann lost his job at Gamespot for a negative review of Kane and Lynch, a game which, frankly, sucked, at the behest of EA. If there is a more clear-cut case of corruption in video gaming journalism out there, I'd love to see it.
Instead, #GG caught on after allegations that Zoe Quinn exchanged sex for a positive review of Depression Quest. Sex which occurred months after the only time the game was actually mentioned, which wasn't a review or even chiefly about Depression Quest, and that sex apparently therefore being for a review that never came to exist. And the only source for all of this was an 8000-word manifesto spammed up and down the Internet by a pissed off ex-boyfriend (which you should all read at least some of to get a bit of the context in which this whole shitstorm started. Read: borderline delusional ex), with everyone reputable saying that events did not take place at all like the GG narrative.
Depression Quest is not a high profile game, Zoe Quinn is not a high profile individual in the industry, nor was the journalist who mentioned her game, and a little bit of common sense should make very clear that anything she does with her vagina is utterly inconsequential where video gaming on the whole is concerned. Even though #GG claims to be about the quality of journalism, it's still littered with anti-feminist sentiment. So, the reason I am anti-GG is that, regardless of what the proponents of its stated objectives say, it has not done anything to distance itself from some extremely toxic and deeply misogynistic voices, which makes the whole "ethics" thing feel like a really lame excuse.
To you, it may feel like it's about journalism, but to me, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck.
Some criticism of my own side, I have to apologize for some of the toxic behavior that's come out of the anti-GG side as well. I disagree, in some ways rather strongly, from some proponents of the GG movement. However, mailing loaded syringes to people is criminal and absolutely unacceptable. The term "Social Justice Warrior" originated to describe some of the more aggressive (read: crazy) people on tumblr and occasionally in the LGBTQ acceptance movement (though they have much better PR organization so the crazy ones normally don't stay in the spotlight long), the people who say things like "Check your god damn cishet privilege, you don't know what it's like being a transethnic Japanese girl with social anxiety!" if you forget to use their preferred pronouns or this one lady who made a blog about "smart privilege" (it's inactive now, but if you Google search it you can find a cached clone of it if you're up for a laugh) advocating that everyone who is "smart" should be forced to become "transneuroregressive" by being force-fed marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol until they're no longer "smart privileged", and saying things like "grammar is oppression" and accusing you of "social rape and murder" if you correct her (or whatever the preferred pronoun was) flagrant spelling and grammar mistakes. There's crazy and violence on both sides of this particular fence, and until people can choose to be civil, it's not going to be anything but another flash in the pan internet meme and any hope for cleaning up game journalism a little will be fruitless.