UNBIASED EXPLANATION HOOOOOOOOO
So there's this lady Zoe Quinn who made a kind of interactive story game about depression called Depression Quest. And she had a boyfriend who was a bit nuts, and when she broke up with him, he distributed a list of her known, presumed, and imagined sexual partners. One of these dudes was a writer at Kotaku. A minor buzz erupted over whether she banged a dude for good reviews (they are, or were, together, but as it turned out he never reviewed her game).
The following expanded universe developed around this chain of events:
- The vocal minority of extreme right-wing folk on the internet inflated the issue with campaigns of threats, slut shaming, and general rabble-rousing to the effect that lefto feminists wanted to ruin video gaming. A lot of these provocateurs don't come from the gaming community but from other existing crypto-fascist movements. For instance, the dudes with a Patreon account to fund their "documentary" about feminism destroying gaming have had previous videos dropped from Youtube for blatant racism. For this crowd, gamergate became a venue to ***** about women and the elusive nature of their vaginas, with female game designers, critics, and journalists coming under the gun as either scapegoats or on-our-side supporters (see below). This debate kind of conflated gamergate with Anita Sarkeesian, who is otherwise pretty much not involved.
- Another vocal minority of angry lady bloggers and dudes who want to fuck angry lady bloggers launched kind of a counteroffensive, again scapegoating people who weren't really involved (mostly gamers themselves) as examples of larger cultural problems that need solved, such as acceptance of rape, sexism, pay inequality- generally stuff over which gamers have more or less no control. IN MY OPINION these folks aren't so bad since their platform is less overtly one of hate, but they lose points for approaching gamers, a group widely considered marginalized, and very defensive of their hobby, and telling them "you deserve marginalization and your hobby sucks" as a response to other assholes WHO ALSO AREN'T GAMERS. I guess when you believe in a cause really strongly you just gotta walk into Hobbesian trap sometimes. OTHER feminists, wanting to distinguish themselves from THESE feminists, went on big "I'm not with them" screeds that just make them seem kind of pathetic.
- A bunch of assholes started sending all sorts of people death threats, because there are lots of people who just lay in wait on the internet waiting for excuses to send out death threats. A bunch of other assholes who really weren't following the situation made videos and wrote articles about it anyway to seem important.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, the more rational people involved remembered that the whole thing started with the issue of whether a developer was trading sex for reviews (an issue that the Escapist itself brought up). These folks, let's call them not-idiots, attempted to steer gamergate into a more productive dialog about journalistic ethics in gaming. Lest that sound unimportant to you, keep in mind that gaming as an industry commands greater revenue, more employees, and FAR more trade-able market presence than feature film. The not-idiots have had some problems with this because:
- A bunch of assholes would still prefer gamergate to be about death threats and a freshman poli-sci argument about gender.
- Actual corruption in gaming journalism is widely encouraged by almost every major publisher and is stupidly hard to root out.
- Gamergate is so tainted by the specter of its initial nature that it's hard for lots of people, myself included, to switch to viewing it as a straight ethics debate.
Ultimately, like all internet outrages, gamergate is destined to be forgotten by observers, abandoned by participants, and to have little to no impact on the gaming industry, because if there is anything the internet is better at than outrage, it's apathy.
