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The Gamergate controversy began in August 2014 and concerns misogyny and harassment in video game culture. Some supporters of the self-described Gamergate movement (sometimes referred to as the hashtag #gamergate) state that they are concerned about ethical issues in video game journalism. Commentators and critics have stated that the movement is rooted in a culture war against women and the diversification of gaming culture.

The controversy began after indie game developer Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend alleged that Quinn had a romantic relationship with a journalist for the video game news site Kotaku. This led to harassment of Quinn, including false accusations that the relationship had led to positive coverage of Quinn's game. The conflict escalated when a number of gaming industry employees supportive of Quinn were subjected to harassment, threats of violence, and doxxing, leading some to flee their homes. The targets were mostly women, and included Quinn, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, and indie game developer Brianna Wu. The harassment came from social media users, particularly those from 4chan and Reddit using the #gamergate hashtag. It was condemned by international media sources as anti-feminist, and heightened discussion of sexism and misogyny in the gaming community.

Some involved with the Gamergate hashtag have stated that they are concerned with ethics in video game journalism, and identified themselves as participating in what they call a consumer revolt, with members requesting that ad providers pull support from sites critical of Gamergate. This decision and others have been widely criticized in the media as evidence that the ethics concerns are only a front for a culture war against people working to diversify the video game demographic. The Gamergate group's origins in the false allegations and harassment of Quinn, its failure to identify significant ethical issues in games media, and its frequent criticism of game critics who discuss issues of gender, class, and politics in their reviews have also been cited as evidence for this position. The unorganized, leaderless movement has hitherto been unwilling or unable to distance itself from continued harassment.

The events of Gamergate are attributed to perceived changes or threats to the "gamer" identity as a result of the ongoing diversification and maturation of the gaming industry. As video games have become recognized as a popular art form, they have been subjected to social criticism and treated directly as a vehicle for such commentary. This move to recognize games as art is thought to have prompted opposition from traditional "hardcore" gamers who view games primarily as a form of entertainment. The resulting culture war, tied with the anonymous and male-dominated nature of the Internet, led to the subsequent harassment and conflict.

History

As video game production developed into a burgeoning industry, games became an increasingly consumer-oriented product focused on appealing to gamers with satisfying solitary experiences. People who had grown up playing these games developed a "gamer" identity that was associated with these early experiences. As early gamers were predominantly male this is also seen as having contributed to gendered interpretations of the identity. The emergence of the industry also gave rise to numerous publications specializing in the coverage of video games and catering for the interests of gaming enthusiasts; some, such as Nintendo Power, were even owned by manufacturers themselves. Such outlets were seen by industry leaders as a means of promotion for their products rather than sources for honest critical discussion and there was recurring criticism of the close relationship between gaming journalists and the major gaming companies. The growing popularity of games among casual consumers, due to more accessible technologies such as the Nintendo Wii and smartphones, expanded the audience for the industry to include many who did not fit the mold of the traditional hardcore gamer. As games also came to be seen as an art form rather than a product, games centering on social issues grew in popularity. This increasing perception of games as art prompted gaming outlets to move towards cultural criticism of the games. Independent video game development, which allows developers to release titles without publisher interference, has made these games more common.

The growth of the gaming audience also brought in many women gamers whose primary gaming interests did not conform to those of the male-oriented gamer identity, and who began to question some assumptions and tropes that were historically used by game developers. In light of the growing female audience for games, and growing female representation in the gaming industry, outlets became increasingly interested in detailing issues of gender representation in video games. One prominent feminist critic of the representation of women in gaming is Anita Sarkeesian, whose Tropes vs. Women in Video Games project is devoted to criticism of female stereotypes in games. Her initial Kickstarter to raise funds for the series and her subsequent videos have all been met with hostile commentary and harassment from hardcore gamers. Further incidents, such as those concerning Jennifer Hepler raised concerns about sexual harassment in video gaming. Prior to August 2014, concerns about escalating harassment prompted the International Game Developers Association to provide support groups for harassed developers, and to begin discussions with the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation to help investigate online harassment of game developers.

One such incident of harassment occurred when independent video game developer Zoe Quinn developed and released her interactive fiction title Depression Quest in early 2013, as a means to represent her own bout with depression. Some video gamer reviewers considered the game an important expression of significant personal themes not previously addressed in mainstream gaming — "'game' as communication, comfort and tool of understanding", in the words of Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Adam Smith. Some members of the gaming community expressed dislike towards Quinn and the title. They expressed concern that using a video game to present a "dark" theme was inappropriate, whilst others felt that the critical attention it received was disproportionate to the quality of the game, and that the game presented the solution to depression in a manner that was too simplistic. In an interview with The New Yorker, Quinn stated that she began to receive hate mail over the game upon its release, and the harassment surrounding Depression Quest, which by the time of its release had been going on for eighteen months, had created "an ambient hum of menace in her life, albeit one that she has mostly been able to ignore."

False allegations against Quinn and subsequent harassment

Depression Quest was released through Steam in August 2014, which coincided with the announcement of the apparent suicide of actor Robin Williams. Quinn, who had received the notification of the release from Steam shortly after the news about Williams' death, decided to release the game for free as a service to those who may themselves be suffering from depression, so the only revenue the game receives is "pay what you want" proceeds, part of which are donated to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. She said she did not want to be seen as capitalizing on the public tragedy, and decided that instead she would promote the game some time later out of respect for Williams; her statements did not stop people from criticizing the timing despite the donation based pay model.

Shortly after the release, Quinn's former boyfriend Eron Gjoni wrote a blog post containing a series of allegations, among which was that Quinn had an affair with Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson. This post, which The New York Times described as a "strange, rambling attack," led to false allegations from Quinn's detractors in the gaming community that the relationship had resulted in Grayson publishing a positive review of Quinn's game, Depression Quest. Kotaku's editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo affirmed the two had been involved in a relationship, but clarified that Grayson had not written anything about Quinn after the relationship had commenced and that he had never reviewed her games. While Grayson had written an article about the failed GAME_JAM web reality show that Quinn participated in and Kotaku had also mentioned her game, both occurred before the relationship began. Gjoni later clarified that in relationship to any conflict of interest between Quinn and Grayson, he has "no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature". Although the accusations of favorable coverage were refuted, the incident led to broader allegations on social media that game developers and the gaming press are too often closely connected and that cultural criticism of video games has led to an increasing focus on social representation and cultural meaning in games by some video games writers. A number of commentators in and outside the gaming industry denounced the attack on Quinn as misogynistic and unfounded.

As a result of these allegations, Quinn and her family were subsequently subjected to what The Washington Post called a "virulent" harassment campaign including doxxing (the public release of private information such as home address, phone numbers, and credit card details), threats of rape, hacking attempts, and at least one death threat. She began staying with friends out of fear that she would be tracked to her home. According to Quinn, "the Internet spent the last month spreading my personal information around, sending me threats, hacking anyone suspected of being friends with me, calling my dad and telling him I'm a whore, sending nude photos of me to colleagues, and basically giving me the 'burn the witch' treatment". The New Yorker reported an example of the threats: "Next time she shows up at a conference we ... give her a crippling injury that's never going to fully heal ... a good solid injury to the knees. I'd say a brain damage, but we don't want to make it so she ends up too retarded to fear us." Quinn told The New Yorker that she feels sympathy for her attackers; "People don't viciously attack anyone without having some deep-seeded loathing in themselves," she said. In her first television interview, from an undisclosed location in late October on MSNBC's Ronan Farrow Daily, she said she regards her GamerGate detractors as becoming increasingly irrelevant in the industry due to the democratization of game-making tools, but nonetheless noted later in an interview with the BBC after speaking at GameCity in Nottingham that, "I used to go to games events and feel like I was going home... Now it's just like... are any of the people I'm currently in the room with ones that said they wanted to beat me to death?"

The harassment expanded to include renewed threats against Anita Sarkeesian after a new episode in her series ("Women as Background, Pt. 2") was released shortly after Gjoni's blog entry. She reported that she had received death threats that compelled her to temporarily leave her home. Shortly thereafter at the XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon, she said, in regard to the accusations that high-profile women were making up the threats against them, that "One of the most radical things you can do is to actually believe women when they talk about their experiences," and that "The perpetrators do not see themselves as perpetrators at all... They see themselves as noble warriors."

Others were targeted by similar harassment, doxxing, and death threats under the GamerGate umbrella. Those who came to Quinn's defense were targeted and labeled by their opponents with the "insulting" phrase "social justice warriors" or "SJW" for short, which The Washington Post described as "a derogatory term for people in the video-game industry who use the medium to talk about political issues," though the term has much broader, often negative implications. Among those so described was fellow video game developer Phil Fish, who had been a focus of controversy on social media in 2013. Fish, reportedly known for his combative hostility on social media, was doxxed after speaking in support of Quinn, which included numerous denigrating tweets he made about her opponents. Many of his personal details were released and documents relating to his company Polytron exposed in a hack that led him to sell Polytron and leave the gaming industry.

The online harassment of Quinn and the death threats against Sarkeesian prompted an open letter to the gaming community by independent game developer Andreas Zecher, who called upon the community to take a public stand against the attacks. The letter attracted the signatures of more than two thousand professionals within the gaming industry. The large and varied response to the letter was considered by many in the industry to be a sign that the people involved in the harassment attacks were not representative and comprised a "vocal minority" of the overall industry population. Michael Condrey, the lead developer for Sledgehammer Games, agreed, stating that from his experience with gamers, "The community as a whole is very healthy, engaged and thoughtful and probably like anything anywhere well outside of gaming. In the fringes of a lot of areas of society there are examples of people behaving poorly."

Further harassment and threats

In mid-October, indie game developer Brianna Wu shared an image macro on Twitter that a fan had shown to her mocking GamerGate supporters, only to discover versions of the macro mocking her instead. When she objected and promised not to back down, she soon observed her home address posted on 8chan. Wu then received violent threats from an account on Twitter, prompting her and her husband to contact the police and flee their home, although she stated she would remain active otherwise and attributed the threats to GamerGate. Wu later offered a personal reward for any information leading to a conviction for those involved in her harassment, and set up a legal fund to help any other game developers that have been harassed online.

Soon afterwards, Sarkeesian canceled a speaking appearance at Utah State University after the school received several anonymous threats, at least one of which claimed affiliation with Gamergate. The threats included allusions to the École Polytechnique massacre, a 1989 mass shooting motivated by anti-feminism. Though Sarkeesian had spoken before at other events in the wake of Gamergate which had received similar threats, she opted to cancel when the school could not assure her safety under existing Utah state weapons laws. The New York Times referred to the threat as "the most noxious example of a weekslong campaign to discredit or intimidate outspoken critics of the male-dominated gaming industry and its culture." Some GamerGate supporters have alleged that Wu and Sarkeesian made up the threats themselves as a so-called "false flag," which led The Verge to describe the hashtag as "completely devoid of empathy."

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) issued a statement in response to these developments condemning the series of harassment, stating "There is no place in the video game community—or our society—for personal attacks and threats." After actress and gamer Felicia Day made a blog post noting her concerns over GamerGate and how she has avoided discussing it due to fear of the backlash, her address was posted in the comments section. Actor Wil Wheaton and former NFL player Chris Kluwe also posted criticisms of GamerGate, with Kluwe's being noted for its use of "creative insults", but both apparently escaped harassment. This contrast between targeting a woman over two men was cited by some commentators as evidence of there being misogynistic intent behind the harassment.

In an interview with NPR's Marketplace, voice actress Jennifer Hale called on the gaming community to improve the self-policing of its "small" and "vicious" fringe, and said there are still race and gender barriers within the industry. Writing for Vox, Todd VanDerWerff wrote that the hashtags's "actually interesting concerns" were being "warped and drowned out by an army of trolls spewing bile, often at women." A portion of Gamergate supporters, called the "Gamergate moderate" by David Auerbach, have been working to identify and report those that have engaged in harassment under the Gamergate banner, and to better present the concerns of the Gamergate hashtag to the public at large. One concern is that Internet trolls are responsible for many of the threats solely out of a desire to stir up conflict. One Gamergate supporter, in an interview with BBC, said that "he issue is quickly descending into a quagmire attracting trolls, extremists, and opportunists needlessly stirring the pot of controversy."

Various supporters, some who requested to remain anonymous, said that they had been harassed for supporting GamerGate, and one said after he reported threats to police he was instructed to leave his home. Breitbart's Milo Yiannopoulos tweeted that he had received a syringe in the mail, but he was not concerned, and YouTube personality Steven "boogie2988" Williams also remarked that a comment on one of his videos included his address and a threat to his wife's life.

Twitter itself has come under some complaints due its inability to respond quickly and prevent harassment over the service. Brianna Wu, shortly after becoming an harassment target, stated that Twitter "makes it very easy to create an account—and then create another account—to harass people with", and challenged the service to improve the speed which it can respond to abusive account requests. Supporters of Gamergate that have been trying to police users that engage in harassment have also found Twitter's tools for reporting abuse to be insufficient. Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic said Gamergate is an "identity crisis" for Twitter, as by not engaging in a means of filtering content as has been done on Facebook, they fail not only to protect others from online harassment but also may lose readers that do not want to be engaged in such controversies.

Debate over legitimacy of ethics concerns

Some Gamergate supporters contend that the movement is concerned with ethical issues in video games journalism. However, many of those outside the movement contend that its true motives are simply a culture war against diversifying social norms in video games — and women in particular. Evidence which is said to justify this belief is the movement's origination in false accusations and 4chan trolling involving a female indie developer's sex life, frequent harassment targeting female figures in the gaming industry rather than journalists, disinterest in engaging or criticizing major game publishers with a history of proven ethical violations and virulent opposition to social criticism and analysis of video games.

Blogger Kelly Maxwell, a GamerGate supporter, penned a "Gamer Bill of Rights" to publicly present GamerGate's positions, which has been cited as one of the movement's few attempts at defining concrete goals. In it, Maxwell denies that GamerGate is about harassment, states that "GamerGate is a scandal" and that the movement is opposed to "journalists pushing dogmatic fringe ethics." Maxwell says that the movement favors "freedom of expression, artistic vision and a free market," while criticizing negative reviews of video games and asserting that a given video game should be reviewed only by its fans. Mic.com writers Jared Keller and Tom McKay analyzed the manifesto, finding little connection between its stated goals and journalism ethics. Instead, they found the demands to amount to blanket opposition of cultural criticism of video games, concluding that "the grandiose missive ended up being emblematic of many of the movement's excesses and miscalculations."

Examining the controversy, Columbia Journalism Review writer Chris Ip said "many criticisms of press coverage by people who identify with Gamergate—about alleged collusion in video games between journalists and developers or among reporters—have been debunked" and concluded that "at core, the movement is a classic culture war."

Writing in Vox, Todd VanDerWerff said "Every single question of journalistic ethics GamerGate has brought up has either been debunked or dealt with (as when Kotaku and Polygon clarified their policies for writers contributing to individual developers' Patreon donation accounts). At this point, GamerGate seems to keep raging simply to do two things: harass women and endlessly perpetuate itself so it can keep harassing women. There is absolutely no center to it — save for the harassment of women." In Wired, Laura Hudson wrote that "it’s telling that the hashtag remains laser-focused not on the ethically shady behavior of the multimillion-dollar gaming studios making the mainstream games they enjoy, but small, often impoverished independent creators and critics—and even within that subset, the targets are nearly exclusively women." Newsweek/Brandwatch performed an analysis of about 25% of two million Twitter messages with the Gamergate tag from September 1, 2014 onward, analyzing the data for mention of specific participants of the controversy, and the tone of the messages (positive, negative, or neutral) using automatic word detection routines. The study found in general female figures central to the debate, like Quinn, Sarkeesian, and Wu, were mentioned more frequent than their male counterparts like Grayson or Tolito, and while they received a smaller proportion of negative tweets compared to the males, they received many more net negative tweets overall. Newsweek suggested from this data that "contrary to its stated goal, GamerGate spends more time tweeting negatively at game developers than at game journalists". Auerbach criticized this as being "defective quantitative analysis" aimed at stopping GamerGate. The Verge's Chris Plante wrote that under the guise of ethics concerns, GamerGate supporters repeatedly criticized him for writing reviews that discussed social criticisms of mainstream video games

In The Week, Marc Ambinder said that "Gamergate really can't claim to have exposed anything but their own visceral meanness, which borders on fascism," because while healthy, open debate about video games journalism is needed, the hashtag was rooted in "a vocal minority (using) the tools of internet shaming" against outspoken women. He concluded that through the widely-publicized harassment incidents, gamers "have given substance to the stereotypes they hate."

Video game journalists have acknowledged that there are conflicts of interest and other ethical problems within the video game industry, with some news sites adopting new policies in response to the GamerGate controversy. Polygon now requires its writers to disclose contributions via Patreon, while Kotaku prohibits its staff from supporting any game developers through the website, except where it is required in order to access materials for review. Defy Media adopted a new and stricter journalistic and ethical standards policies for all of their subsidiaries, such as The Escapist and GameFront, and Destructoid updated their ethics policies after Gearbox Software developer Anthony Burch pointed out his personal connections with the Destructoid staff over Twitter. Oliver Campbell, a supporter of GamerGate, told The Washington Post that he believes GamerGate could declare victory and move on if games journalism outlets adopted certain ethics policies, as outlets such as The Escapist have done, claiming that in such a situation, "Gamergate could be over in a week." Vox writer Todd VanDerWerff highlighted an essay written by game developer David Hill which explained that he believed GamerGate made good points, but targeted the wrong people. Hill stated that gaming journalists hated both the nepotism and how the industry, particularly AAA publishers, treated video game journalism simply as marketing. He wrote, "We want to approach these works of art as works of art, and not just as the next success or flop. But that can't happen on any large scale, because of that corruption, because of the commercialism of it all." He further added that the GamerGate hashtag should not have focused on independent developers like Quinn, particularly attacking her sex life, and Fish to try to enact a change in games journalism, describing them as "frankly powerless in the games industry", but rather that it should have targeted advertising by AAA companies.

Writing in Time, Leigh Alexander, editor-at-large of Gamasutra, described the campaign's ethics concerns as "deeply sincere" but based on "bizarre conspiracy theories," saying that there is nothing unethical or improper about journalists being friends and acquaintances of those they cover and that "meaningful reporting" requires that journalists develop professional relationships with sources. Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post' said that some of GamerGate's ostensible "ethics" concerns about video game reviews are not really ethical questions at all. Rather, she said, they are rooted in GamerGate supporters' belief that video games are "appliances" rather than "art" and should be reviewed based on feature checklists rather than "the same sort of analysis of aesthetics and ideas that have been applied to every other medium for decades, if not centuries." She said that what the hashtag appears to want is game reviews "looking a lot more like Consumer Reports and a lot less like the Style section."

Liana Kerzner, writing for MetalEater.com, criticized some gaming journalists for making generalizations about those who supported GamerGate, and that it had been unfair to paint all of its supporters as motivated by ill will rather than legitimate concern for the state of games journalism. She also urged the gaming community to challenge and reject the "small subgroups of gamers" whose actions had stigmatized the community saying that the problems of bigotry in the community were real.

GameJournoPros

In mid-September 2014, Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart published leaked discussions from a mailing list for gaming journalists called Game Journalism Professionals or GameJournoPros, which included discussion of events surrounding the Gamergate hashtag, and accused the gaming media of colluding against the hashtag. Supporters of GamerGate also saw the mailing list as evidence of collusion between journalists. Kyle Orland of Ars Technica, the founder of the group, said that the accusations of collusion were misplaced, and that the mailing list only existed to discuss issues in the industry. He apologized for suggesting that group members write a letter of solidarity to Zoe Quinn after the accusations and harassment against her began, and stated that the group's largely-negative reaction to his idea had helped him "realize that this would be overstepping our primary role as reporters and observers." Erik Kain at Forbes, while seeing the conversations as largely professional, did note two discussions he said "ought to raise eyebrows". One was a member inquiring on when it is appropriate to report on the private lives of subjects, only for him to be shut down quickly. Another was primarily between Polygon writer Ben Kuchera and The Escapist's editor-in-chief Greg Tito on how to handle a discussion on The Escapist's forums about Zoe Quinn; Kuchera and others urged Tito to close the discussion, but Tito refused, saying a civil discussion should be allowed. James Fudge, editor of GamePolitics.com, said he had joined Kuchera in suggesting that the discussion be closed because "allowing a thread about Zoe Quinn's sex life and repeating an accusation that wasn't true wasn't fostering discussion — it was throwing gasoline on an already untamable inferno."

GamerGate movement

Within social media, the Twitter GamerGate hashtag was first used by actor Adam Baldwin in a tweet with links to two videos critical of Quinn, shortly after he retweeted a statement from a feminist blogger who had readjusted her stance to be critical of Quinn. The tag was then used to discuss the allegations against Quinn and Grayson and other concerns about corruption in gaming journalism, and began coordinated discussions on forums like 4chan and Reddit. Because these discussions often featured verbal attacks, misogynistic harassment of Quinn and others, and releasing of private information (doxxing), some websites blocked users and removed posts relating to the controversy, and at least one YouTube commentator had a video critical of Quinn removed following a DMCA request. Such incidents led some gamers to complain about censorship, which columnist Erik Kain said led to a Streisand effect that brought more attention to Gjoni's accusations. By September 24, 2014, over 1 million Twitter messages incorporating the GamerGate hashtag had been sent, while a Newsweek and Brandwatch study found more than 2 million Twitter messages between September and October 2014 with many coming from newly created accounts. It is estimated that as of October 2014, there are at least 10,000 users that support GamerGate based on readership numbers on a dedicated GamerGate subforum at Reddit.

Nature and organization

Following the initial charges against Quinn, proponents of Gamergate began to use dedicated forums at the "KotakuInAction" Reddit sub-forum and on 8chan to discuss and organize the hashtag's activism. Because of the hashtag's lack of organization, anonymous membership, and leaderless nature, sources widely differ as to the goals or mission of GamerGate. With no single person or group able to speak for the hashtag, defining them has been difficult. Upon additional threats towards Sarkeesian, Wu, and Day, the international media focused on GamerGate's predilection for violent, misogynistic threats and its inability to present any coherent message for positive change. Writing in The Daily Telegraph in the wake of those incidents, Bob Stuart summed up the hashtag's troubles, saying "GamerGate has since swelled into an unwieldy movement with no apparent leaders, mission statement, or aims beyond calling out 'social justice warriors'. ... When members of the games industry are being driven from their houses and jobs, threatened, or abused, it makes GamerGate’s claim that it is engaged in an ethical campaign appear laughable." Christopher Grant, editor-in-chief of Polygon, said that Gamergate has remained an amorphous and leaderless movement consisting solely of the hashtag so that the harassment can be conducted without any culpability.

Grant said that meant that "ultimately Gamergate will be defined—I think has been defined—by some of its basest elements." Jesse Singal, writing for New York based on a post he made to Reddit, stated that he had spoken to several people that supported the GamerGate cause to try to understand their concerns, including on the primary Reddit board, but could not determine what the ultimate goal of GamerGate was due to the lack of cohesion in their message and conflicting ideals. Singal observed the constant presence of threads attacking the women who had been targeted previously despite being told to look beyond the claims of misogyny. In his Reddit post, he criticized the hashtag's response to its detractors by referring to the No true Scotsman logical fallacy, and urged GamerGate supporters to simply state their actual feelings and not hide behind claims of biased coverage or media conspiracies. The Columbia Journalism Review's Chris Ip said that much of any legitimate message from Gamergate supporters regarding ethics in journalism was being lost in the noise created by the issues surrounding harassment, sexism, and misogyny, and as long as earnest supporters did not separate themselves from these latter actions, the media would be challenged to report on GamerGate in a fair manner. With anyone able to tweet under the hashtag and no single person willing or able to represent the hashtag and take responsibility for its actions, Ip said it is not possible for journalists to neatly separate abusers from those seeking reasonable debate. Ryan Cooper of The Week highlighted an analysis written by writer Jon Stone, citing: "While various patterns of behavior coalesce around the hashtag, gamergate's protean nature resists attempts toward summary and narrative. It readjusts and reinvents itself in response to attempts to disarm and disperse its noxiousness, subsuming disaffected voices in an act of continual regeneration, cycling through targets, pretexts, manifestoes and moralisms..."

Quinn released a series of logs from chat rooms and discussion boards on 4chan, which she said showed that GamerGate was manufactured by 4chan and pushed by sockpuppets. Members of 4chan have stated that some information has been taken out of context or misrepresented.

Diversity and the debate over #NotYourShield

Some supporters the GamerGate hashtag took issue with the widespread description of their movement as misogynistic, saying that the press's focus on misogyny served mainly to "deflect criticism" of games reflecting a different political orientation. A second Twitter hashtag, "#NotYourShield", began to be used with the intention of showing that women and other minorities in the gaming community were also seeking changes in the ethical guidelines of the video game industry and press, whilst denying that the core issues behind GamerGate were driven by sexism. William Usher on Cinemablend argued that the accusations of misogyny use women as a "shield to be silently used in order for gaming media — and those that gaming media represents — to push an agenda". Allum Bokhari, writing on TechCrunch, said that media coverage has unfairly treated GamerGate as being about white men resisting diversity in gaming and that many women and minorities support the movement.

Following Quinn's release of chat and discussion logs she got from 4chan, Ars Technica and The Daily Dot suggested the #NotYourShield hashtag was manufactured on 4chan and that many of those posting under #NotYourShield were sockpuppet accounts impersonating women and minorities. Quinn said that in light of GamerGate's exclusive targeting of women or those who stood up for women, "#notyourshield was solely designed to, ironically, be a shield for this campaign once people started calling it misogynistic." According to Cathy Young, some women supporting GamerGate have been greeted with skepticism..

Political views

GamerGate supporters include some men and women who identify as feminist and support greater diversity in gaming, though it is acknowledged that there are also misogynistic voices within GamerGate. Cathy Young, writing for Reason, described GamerGate supporters as leaning left-libertarian, even as right-wing and right-leaning libertarians support the hashtag as resisting feminist criticism. Young argues that supporters of GamerGate who are critical of feminist critiques of gaming are not necessarily opposed to greater diversity in the medium, but are upset over the approach of prominent feminist critics and a lack of tolerance for dissenting views. She characterizes GamerGate as being "an anti-authoritarian rebellion, not an anti-woman backlash."

In The Guardian, Jon Stone compared GamerGate to a right-wing hashtag, saying it included known neo-nazis, it almost exclusively attacked "others" and those it sees as "biased", it has hit lists of undesirable journalists, and used military-style hyperbole. He also said that any attempts to engage with GamerGate was seen as an act of provocation while silence on the matter was seen as hostility. He also said that when The Escapist tried to get a balanced piece from people on both sides of the argument, the male Gamergate interviewees were "eager to provide and flesh out a mythology that rationalises hatred towards the feminist/progressive element in games", leading Stone to compare them to Rush Limbaugh and Richard Littlejohn, while any female participants sought anonymity. He also compared them to the men's rights movement in that they sidelined any discussion on sexism for which they may hold a form of responsibility, and instead make themselves out to be victims.

Liana Kerzner writing in Metaleater.com said that the various issues that were plaguing the Gamergate debates were pressured by external forces. She stated that after she had an argument with Milo Yiannopoulos where she was critical of his coverage of the controversy, she was harassed by Gamergate supporters on Twitter and anonymous message boards. Kerzner remarked that Yiannopoulos was one of many external voices to the debate who she felt was using gamergate in a proxy war and asked why gamers were so angry and concerned about the opinions of Leigh Alexander, Anita Sarkeesian, Milo Yiannopoulos, other writers, and even herself. While saying gamers were just "opposed to change for the sake of change", she added that external forces with other agendas were changing the discussion and keeping moderate voices silent. Ryan Cooper of The Week criticized Yiannopoulos' involvement in the hashtag, alleging Yiannopoulos "had little but sneering contempt for gamers" beforehand.

Zaid Jilani in Salon wrote that the GamerGate hashtag had drawn in many anti-feminists who have no interest in the ethics in video game journalism, saying that both Christina Hoff Sommers and Milo Yiannopoulos were "anointed" as heroes of the hashtag, despite neither having had any history of knowledge of video games or video games journalists. He wrote that there was no GamerGate-related reaction to the controversy over Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, where YouTubers who wished to have a review copy of the game had to sign a contract that assured that their reviews would only be positive. Jilani attributed the lack of response to the fact that women and feminism were not involved. He also brought up Yiannopoulos's prior writings maligning video games and gamers, as well as his many media appearances to the same effect, and his quick turn around with the advent of GamerGate. He also said that while he disagreed with the various "gamers are over/dead" articles that had arisen in response to GamerGate, he said that if GamerGate instead allowed these far-right activists, anti-feminists, and misogynist creeps—such as those he identified in the Gamergate sub-Reddit moderation team and in the production of an anti-Anita Sarkeesian documentary—that GamerGate itself was instead dead, as its proponents do not seem to adhere to the tenets they claimed they had.

Support for The Fine Young Capitalists

A self-described radical feminist group known as The Fine Young Capitalists began receiving financial backing for their game jam from supporters of the gamergate hashtag, particularly those from 4chan's board /v/, after it was discovered that the group had a prior dispute with Zoe Quinn concerning their planned competition's rules. The backers raised over US$17,000 for the campaign, a point after which they were allowed to produce an original character to be featured in the winning video game proposal, resulting in the creation of the character "Vivian James" (meant to sound like "video games"). In Forbes, Erik Kain described the character as an "every-girl of sorts, and maybe not what you'd expect from 4chan". Tom Mendelsohn of The Independent wrote that 4chan had created Vivian as an emblem for their campaign to demonstrate their lack of sexism, and described the character as "a sardonic dream woman who games in slouchy hoodies, has long, lascivious tresses of red hair and doesn't ever want to hurt them". Allegra Ringo of Vice criticized the character as anti-feminist, saying that Vivian James was created out of spite. Steven Melendez in Fast Company later raised the issue that the character's green and purple color scheme had been chosen to reference an old meme on 4chan where a gif animation of the Dragon Ball character Piccolo sodomizing Vegeta was posted excessively to where the image itself was banned but Piccolo's green and purple color scheme was posted instead, which still elicited the response and had become known as the "daily dose". TFYC's Matthew Rappard, as well as many GamerGate supporters, have denied the connection to the old meme, insisting that green and purple were simply colors representative of 4chan, despite Melendez and Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing both observing implicit acknowledgement of the meme in the 4chan forum discussions that led to the creation of Vivian James.

On August 24, 2014, The Fine Young Capitalists reported that their Indiegogo account had been compromised by an unknown party (later confirmed by Indiegogo staff), and had been replaced by a message claiming Indiegogo staff had shut down the campaign and specifically called out 4chan's video games board /v/ as being "abhorrent" for their participation in the harassment against Zoe Quinn. Some GamerGate supporters have also backed charitable causes, such as a charity of suicide prevention and anti-bullying causes.

End of Gamer Identity articles and "Operation Disrespectful Nod"

In August 2014, shortly following the initial accusations towards Quinn, a number of writers published opinion columns which argued for the "end of the gamer identity", citing the growing diversity of gaming and the mainstreaming of the medium, while those associated with GamerGate were stated to be a reactionary force against these changes. Some of these articles and essays were, as described by The New York Times, "critical of gamer culture and rampant sexism in it". One such piece that has received attention was a column by Leigh Alexander for Gamasutra titled "'Gamers' don't have to be your audience. 'Gamers' are over" which criticized what she believes is the shallow nature of white- and male-dominated video game demographic and which was described by The Verge as "an acknowledgement of video gaming's depth and breadth in 2014." As a result of articles and essays like Gamasutra's piece, there were concerns that the divide between gaming journalists and the gaming community was deepening, with games writers seen as attacking their own audience. David Auerbach of Slate argued that gaming culture is changing, with the ordinary video-game journalist being phased out in favor of video game enthusiasts and amateur Let's Play commentators who use YouTube and Twitch.

Some of the gamer community objected to Leigh Alexander's articles written on this topic, calling them "offensive" and "racist", and viewed similar articles as further evidence of corruption in journalism. An email campaign dubbed "Operation Disrespectful Nod" was organized which implored concerned gamers to contact the advertisers that were promoted on the sites that published these articles, and ask them to pull their advertising. In early October 2014 Intel pulled its advertising from Gamasutra, citing feedback from its consumers on controversial pieces published on that site; media such as The Verge and The New York Times believed it was in response to this campaign, specifically on the aforementioned article by Alexander. Eric Johnson of Re/code and Nick Wingfield of The New York Times said that it was a "victory" of protesters against the website. Rich McCormick of The Verge disagreed with Intel's decision to cave to what he called "co-ordinated strikes" to silence voices calling for diversity in gaming, writing, "By giving in to its demands and pulling its advertising from Gamasutra, Intel has legitimized a movement that has shown itself to be anti-feminist, violently protectionist, and totally unwilling to share what it sees as its divine right to video games."

Several game developers also expressed opposition, sending open letters to Intel about the legitimacy of their actions, warning the company and the public about the potential "chilling effect" that the Gamergate supporters could evoke on other media sites in reporting on certain facets of the industry by similar actions as they did with Intel. Intel shortly offered an apology, stating that "we recognize that our action inadvertently created a perception that we are somehow taking sides", and that "while we respect the right of individuals to have their personal beliefs and values, Intel does not support any organization or movement that discriminates against women. We apologize and we are deeply sorry if we offended anyone." Forbes' Erik Kain, while stating Gamasutra should not be punished for opinions of its writers, described Intel's decision as a reaction to "a consumer movement, not an anti-women movement." Kwame Opam of The Verge wrote that "given how much of the movement is devoted to harassing female gamers," Intel's statement rang "a little hollow", although it could be assumed to be "snowed by the issue's complexity", as GamerGate's scope has "ballooned" into the "murky realm of corruption in the industry". According to Ryan Cooper of The Week, "Intel is trying to have it both ways, appeasing the misogynist mob out of one side of its mouth while asserting high-status anti-sexist and pro-diversity values out of the other." he continued by saying that by their financial decisions they had "placed itself on the side of the misogynists." as well as accusing them of "cowardice and political incompetence".

Gawker Media and "Operation Baby Seal"

In mid-October 2014, Sam Biddle, an editor for the Gawker affiliate Valleywag, made a series of tweets that concluded with a call for a return to bullying of nerds. This led to Mercedes-Benz temporarily pulling advertising from Gawker (it was later reinstated) and Adobe Systems requesting that Gawker remove their logo from a portion of the Gawker website. Adobe later clarified its position, noting they had never been a Gawker advertiser and stating "we are not and have never been aligned with Gamergate." Biddle's tweets, in context, were intended to be a tongue-in-cheek commentary on GamerGate and he later defended himself by saying they were jokes, but ultimately apologized for their content.

Gawker Media sites have been a center of the Gamergate controversy previously. Their affiliate Kotaku was at the center of the initial allegations that started Gamergate, and the Reddit board "KotakuInAction" was named to poke fun at Kotaku's previous efforts to discuss the political nature of games. As a result of these incidents, a new push was started by the Gamergate hashtag in late October called "Operation Baby Seal", aimed at Google's AdSense and Amazon.com's Amazon Associates advertising services used by Gawker. The goal of this effort is to have Gawker's ad sources pulled by mass-reporting apparent violations in the ad agencies' terms of service in regards to inappropriate content served by these sites. Vox's VanDerWerff identified that while past efforts of Gamergate to convince advertisers to pull ads has been something done through the history of journalism, this new tactic of targeting the ad providers is on "a whole other scale" and has the potential, if successful, to financially harm Gawker.

Other actions by GamerGate supporters have been the practice of using archive sites that remove advertisements to "attempt to divert advertising revenue" from specific video game journalism sites while still using these sites for information. Jason Koebler writing on Vice's Motherboard imprint was critical of this, arguing that the archival of thousands of such articles doesn't comply with the fair use doctrine of American copyright law, and noted that multiple articles on Motherboard and several other video gaming sites had nothing to do with GamerGate were archived.

WikiLeaks' Twitter campaign

In mid-September 2014, WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange hosted an AMA on Reddit, and during the session a user fielded a question on censorship in Internet communities over GamerGate, to which he remarked that the censorship was "pathetic". This was followed by a Tweet from the official WikiLeaks Twitter account regarding censorship in the media obstensibly in support of GamerGate. A month later, a new series of tweets by the official WikiLeaks account were made that referenced the GamerGate hashtag and media coverage of death threats. The operator of the WikiLeaks Twitter account stated that WikiLeaks felt that GamerGate particularly was "not interesting" but wanted to encourage questioning of the media. The Verge, which described the tweets as "confusing", reported that while some supporters of GamerGate on Reddit were enthusiastic for WikiLeaks' endorsement of their campaign, others questioned how the various links to news articles and YouTube videos they contained could even be related to GamerGate at all.

Role of misogyny and antifeminism

A number of commentators have argued that the GamerGate hashtag had the potential to raise important issues in gaming journalism, but that the wave of misogynistic harassment and abuse associated with the hashtag had poisoned the well, making it impossible to separate honest criticism from sexist trolling. The hashtag has also been associated with criticism of feminism and so called "Social Justice Warriors." According to Sarah Kaplan of The Washington Post, "sexism in gaming is a long-documented, much-debated but seemingly intractable problem," and became the crux of the GamerGate controversy. Writing in The Week, Ryan Cooper called the harassment campaign "an online form of terrorism" intended to reverse a trend in gaming culture toward increasing acceptance of women, and stated that social media platforms need to tighten their policies and protections against threats and abuse. Speaking on Iowa Public Radio, academic Cindy Tekobbe said the harassment campaign was intended to "drive women out of public spaces" and intimidate them into silence. The feminist journalist and author Laurie Penny characterized the reasons for the ferocity of the reaction against the shift in gaming culture thus: "The problem is that women are creating culture, changing culture, redefining culture, and those cunts, those poisonous cunts, those disgusting, uppity cunts must be stopped."

Issues like sexism and misogyny had been identified as problems in the video game industry and community prior to the events of Gamergate. In March 2014, game designer Cliff Bleszinski wrote a blog post commenting on the "latent racism, homophobia and misogyny" that existed within the online gaming community. It is believed this itself is tied to the anonymous, male-dominated nature of the Internet; Astra Taylor of Mother Jones documented a series of harassment against women from online communities in April 2014, in which the harassment was played off by the male posters as if it was just "harmless locker room talk".

Attacks on women

Quinn said the campaign had "roped well-meaning people who cared about ethics and transparency into a pre-existing hate mob", and urged industry publishers and developers to condemn the hashtag. She further asked those Gamergate supporters that had any earnest discussion about ethics should move away from the "Gamergate" tag Writing for The Guardian, Jenn Frank described the tactics used in the harassment campaign, and of the climate of fear it generated through its attacks on women and their allies. Frank concluded that this alienating abusive environment would harm not only women, but the industry as a whole. Frank subsequently received harassment alleging that she had concealed her Patreon support of Quinn; Frank had included a disclosure, but it was removed by editors at The Guardian who did not deem their relationship a "significant connection". Following the harassment, Frank left games journalism. In Paste magazine, Garrett Martin suggested that any concerns about ethics in journalism were merely a cover for attacking women, even if some sincerely believed otherwise. Amanda Marcotte in an article for The Daily Beast described the controversy as arising from the comments of a "vindictive ex-boyfriend", stated it was "pure misogyny to use online harassment troops" against Quinn, and that the ethics violation discussion is merely a "desperate attempt to justify" their harassment. Marcotte noted that the allegation of Quinn having sex for a favorable review of her game was wrong, and accused the video game world of being, "thick with misogynists who are aching to swarm on any random woman held up for them to hate, no matter what the pretext." She also made comparisons to the initial outrage against Sarkeesian's video series, harassment sent to a woman who made a negative review of a Teen Titans cover and to a community manager for the Mighty No. 9 video game because she drew a feminine Mega Man, and virtual "rapes" committed against women's player avatars in Grand Theft Auto V and DayZ. In an interview on The Colbert Report, Sarkeesian said she believes women are being targeted because they are "challenging the status quo of gaming as a male-dominated space."

Writing in The New Yorker, Simon Parkin said, "In Quinn's case, the fact that she was the subject of the attacks rather than the friend who wrote about her game reveals the true nature of much of the criticism: a pretense to make further harassment of women in the industry permissible." T.C. Sottek, a news editor of The Verge, wrote an editorial urging people to stop supporting Gamergate, detailing various issues he perceived in the hashtag, including using the search for ethics as a justification for the harassment campaign, little credibility in their claims, convincing apolitical gamers that a problem existed, and its embrace of anti-feminist conservative journalists and commentators. He described the hashtag as a "boggling witch hunt that continues to raise more questions than it answers because it didn't have any useful questions to ask in the first place", saying that its origin was attacks on Zoe Quinn concerning her personal life.

Alex Goldman from On the Media wrote that he recognized legitimate complaints in GamerGate concerning the relationship between the video game industry and journalists, and that there is diversity within the gamer community, but said that the hashtag's decision to focus on female indie developers and its involvement in harassment had caused it to lose mainstream credibility. "If you see yourself as a bloc of people who call themselves "gamers," to outsiders you are only as good as your worst representatives, and the past month have shown those representatives to be racist, homophobic, misogynist, and threatening," Goldman said. "If you want to be seen as a monolith, publicly shame the bad actors in your cohort. If you want to be seen as individuals, well, stop calling yourself gamers. Come up with some other means of self-identification. Because as of right now, the worst people standing behind the mantle of gamer have spoiled it for all of you." The Washington Post described a supporter of the hashtag as saying that they and others in the hashtag are making efforts to reject harassment and "quickly" report threatening or hateful comments to help keep the conversation "respectful".

In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Chris Suellentrop spoke of his issues with the hashtag such as its attacks on women, but also brought up the desire of GamerGate to shift focus away from innovative uses of the medium. He criticized the hashtags's apparent belief that increased coverage and praise of artistic games like Gone Home would negatively affect big mainstream games such as Grand Theft Auto V. He also said that a colleague was the centre of a petition to have her fired for criticizing the portrayal of women in GTAV, despite many male critics (including himself) raising similar concerns.

In Salon, Elias Isquith disagreed with David Auerbach's "Gamergate moderates" piece on Slate, saying that unlike political candidates or a bill, there was no way to compromise or vote down what is essentially a social movement. Isquith also disagreed with Auerbach's actions in making himself a neutral party, as he wrote that Auerbach put blame on both parties in the dispute for the larger problems, criticizing his insistence that women harassed and threatened and men attacking those who challenged their privilege should both be held responsible for what Gamergate had become.

Social criticism

According to Erik Kain, writing at Forbes.com, the GamerGate hashtag is driven by a backlash against social criticism of video games "because many readers don’t want to be told what’s good or bad about a game’s social politics, they just want to hear about the game itself". He also said that many people are upset "that the video game space has been so heavily politicized with a left-leaning, feminist-driven slant." Kain said gamers should be "distrustful of ... rightwing non-gamers suddenly swooping into the scene with inflammatory anti-feminist headlines". Writing in Overland, Brendan Keogh described the rise of social criticism in video gaming as part of the maturation of the art form and a natural consequence of video games becoming accepted as a force in mainstream culture. Kyle Moody, professor of communications media at Fitchburg State University, said the increasing cultural criticism of video games has helped the industry to reach a "higher artistic discussion," and that those opposed to discussions of class, sexuality, and race instead want their games to remain "toys". Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post considers GamerGate to be part of a larger culture war that has been occurring for the last decade, spurred by the ease of interaction between creators and consumers, and which begs the question of "whether culture is changing fast enough, and whether change means chucking out old ideas, storytelling tropes and character types". Political consultant Allum Bokhari said that Gamergate was the reaction of non-political gamers to an increasingly politicized pastime that had been overtaken by "moral crusaders." He said that the gamers involved in Gamergate are not exclusionary but merely opposed to ideology and cultural hegemony, and that journalists' own biases explained the lack of pro-Gamergate coverage. Philip Tan, a research scientist and instructor at MIT associated with Game Lab, has remarked of GamerGate that, "I would say that it's made it harder, as a teacher, to get through the day... It's extremely demoralizing to see people who claim they are passionate about games and work so hard to prevent women from voicing their opinions about games. It goes against everything we stand for as educators. It's our job to make it easier for a larger range of people to contribute to the growth of this medium."

Presence of misogyny and inclusiveness

Author and scholar Christina Hoff Sommers disagreed with the criticism leveled at gamers, in a video she released through the American Enterprise Institute. She said that "ll the data we have suggests that millennial males—these are people born and raised in 'Video Game Nation'—are far less prone to these prejudices than previous generations ... My suggestion to their critics: stand down." William Audureau in Le Monde said that "the question is not whether video games 'make' gamers sexist, but whether they express and maintain a negative portrayal of women, already present and unconsciously accepted."

Writing in the Pacific Standard, Noah Berlatsky said that the misogynistic harassment targeting Quinn and Sarkeesian should be viewed not as an issue specific to the gaming community, but as evidence that misogyny is pervasive in American culture.

See also

• Internet
• Video games
• Journalism
• Feminism

Notes

References

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• 2014 controversies
• 2014 in video gaming
• Conflict of interest
• Criticism of journalism
• Gender and video games
• Hashtags
• Journalism ethics
• Social justice
• Video game controversies
• Video game journalism
• Internet vigilantism
• Internet trolling
• Internet activism
• Cyberbullying
• Conspiracy theories in the United States